Media Continues Spinning Its Biased Coverage of Obama and Obamacare, Claiming: We Can't Cover a Story if Republicans Take a Political Interest in the Issue

Remember when the media's main story on Benghazi, before all the bodies had yet been recovered from the burning wreckage of the annex, was not that Obama had failed to anticipate a terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11, but that Mitt Romney attempted to politicize the attack?

The media doesn't mind carrying Democratic water. They don't mind at all when Democrats push a cooked-up #WaronWomen narrative. They media will gladly join the Democrats in pushing such stories.

But they do object to Republicans, specifically, attempting politically profit from their reportage.

And so they offer this excuse for their failure to cover legitimately big stories: Republicans tried to talk about it too, so of course we cannot talk about it ourselves.

This is yet another example of the media attempting to claim some rule that looks politically neutral upon first glance -- "We will not publicize stories if a party is attempting to capitalize politically upon our reportage" -- is exposed as a complete lie upon second glance. For, of course, they don't really mean that they won't dig into a story if any political party is capitalizing on them.

They mean only "Republicans." They may attempt to cast the "rule" so that it doesn't say, straight-up, "We'll be damned if we'll be helping the g**-****ed Republicans on this," but in fact that is precisely how it is applied.

No one in the media seemed to mind very much that Democrats turned the Jack Abramoff scandal into their 2006 meta-narrative (despite Jack Abramoff being a huge donor to the corrupt Harry Reid, of course-- but that part didn't "fit the narrative" of a specifically Republican "culture of corruption").

But the moment a story seems to help Republicans, they're now claiming that some rule of ethics bars them from covering it in anything more than desultory "and then these liars said this bullshit" fashion.

It's interesting that Halperin, especially, is pushing this meme, because he's also claimed that the media should be excused from not investigating the actual law and regulations of Obamacare because Mitt Romney didn't make enough of a deal out of it. He continues to refuse to say why Mitt Romney was required to say anything at all about Obamacare in 2010, and why the press would take its cues from a former governor of Massachusetts as to setting the national investigative-media agenda.

But note that he's now offering two rules to explain away the media's refusal to pursue any story that hurts Obama or the Democrats:

1. If the Republicans talk about it too much, the media should be forgiven for refraining to cover it themselves, as they wouldn't want to be seen as taking their talking points from the Republican Attack Machine.

2. If the Republicans talk about it too little, as Halperin says Romney did in 2012, then the media should be once again excused from covering stories that hurt Obama and the Democrats, because they only take their talking points from the Republican Attack Machine.

Nifty little pair of rules, huh? I'd like to know what Halperin has in mind as the "Goldilocks Scenario" where Republicans don't talk about the issue too much, but also not too little, thus enabling the press to actually do its alleged job.

As Mary Katharine Ham asks:

WHAT IS THE POINT OF YOU, MARK HALPERIN?

posted by Ace at 03:25 PM

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