by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the war unwinnible. Dan Rather\u2019s career imploded when he knowingly promulgated a forged document that impugned the service record of George W. Bush. We\u2019ve known for a long time \u2014 from various polling, and records of political donations of journalists themselves, as well as surveys of public perceptions \u2014 that the vast majority of journalists identify themselves as Democratic, and liberal in particular.<\/p>\n Yet we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama, and its collective desire not to raise key issues of concern to the American people. Here were four areas of national interest that were largely ignored.<\/p>\n Campaign Financing<\/strong><\/p>\n For years an axiom of the liberal establishment was the need for public campaign financing \u2014 and the corrosive role of private money in poisoning the election process. The most prominent Republican who crossed party lines to ensure the passage of national public campaign financing was John McCain \u2014 a maverick stance that cost him dearly among conservatives who resented bitterly federal interference in political expression.<\/p>\n In contrast, Barack Obama, remember, promised that he would accept both public funding and the limitations that went along with it, and would \u201caggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.\u201d Then in June 2008, Obama abruptly reneged, bowing out entirely from government financing, the first presidential nominee in the general election to do that since the system was created in 1976.<\/p>\n Obama has now raised over $600 million, by far the largest campaign chest in American political history. In many states he enjoys a four-to-one advantage in campaign funding \u2014 most telling in his scheduled eleventh-hour, 30-minute specials that will not be answered by the publicly financed and poorer McCain campaign.<\/p>\n The story that the media chose to ignore was not merely the Obama about-face on public financing, or even the enormous amounts of money that he has raised \u2014 some of it under dubious circumstances involving foreign donors, prepaid credit cards, and false names. Instead, they were absolutely quiet about a historic end to liberal support for public financing.<\/p>\n For all practical purposes, public financing of the presidential general election is now\u00a0dead<\/em>. No Republican will ever agree to it again. No Democrat can ever again dare to defend a system destroyed by Obama. All future worries about the dangers of big money and big politics will fall on deaf ears.<\/p>\n Surely, there will come a time when the Democratic Party, whether for ethical or practical reasons, will sorely regret dismantling the very safeguards that for over three decades it had insisted were critical for the survival of the republic.<\/p>\n Imagine the reaction of the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times\u00a0or the\u00a0<\/em>Washington Post\u00a0had John McCain renounced his promise to participate in public campaign financing, proceeded instead to amass $600 million and outraise the publicly financed Barack Obama four-to-one, and begun airing special 30-minute unanswered infomercials during the last week of the campaign. We know now almost all the details of Sarah Palin\u2019s pregnancies, whether the trooper who tasered her nephew went to stun or half stun, the cost of her clothes, and her personal expenses \u2014 indeed, almost everything except how a mother of so many children gets elected councilwoman, mayor, and governor, routs an entrenched old-boy cadre, while maintaining near record levels of public support.<\/p>\n Yet the American public knows almost nothing of what it should about the extraordinary career of Joe Biden, the 36-year veteran of the Senate. In unprecedented fashion, Biden has simply avoided the press for most of the last two months, confident that the media instead would deconstruct almost every word of \u201cgood looking\u201d Sarah Palin\u2019s numerous interviews with mostly hostile interrogators.<\/p>\n By accepted standards of behavior, Biden has sadly proven wanting. He has committed almost every classical sin of character \u2014 plagiarism, false biography, racial insensitivity, and serial fabrication. And because of media silence, we don\u2019t know whether he was kidding when he said America would not need to burn coal, or that Hezbollah was out of Lebanon, or that FDR addressed the nation on television as president in 1929 (surely a record for historical fictions in a single thought), or that the public would turn sour on Obama once he was challenged by our enemies abroad. In response, the media reported that the very public Sarah Palin was avoiding the press while the very private Joe Biden shunned interviews and was chained to the teleprompter.<\/p>\n For two months now, the media reaction to Biden\u2019s inanity has been simply \u201cthat\u2019s just ol\u2019 Joe, now let\u2019s turn to Palin,\u201d who, in the space of two months, has been reduced from a popular successful governor to a backwoods creationist, who will ban books and champion white secessionist causes. The respective coverage of the two candidates is ironic in a variety of ways, but in one especially \u2014 almost every charge against Palin (that she is under wraps, untruthful, and inept) was applicable only to Biden.<\/p>\n So we are about to elect a vice president about whom we know only that he has been around a long time, but little else \u2014 and nothing at all\u00a0why<\/em>\u00a0exactly Joe Biden says the most astounding and often lunatic things.<\/p>\n Imagine the reaction of\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek\u00a0or\u00a0<\/em>Time\u00a0had moose-hunting mom Sarah Palin claimed FDR went on television to address the nation as President in 1929, or warned America that our enemies abroad would test John McCain and that his response would result in a radical loss of his popularity at home.<\/p>\n <\/em>The Past as Present<\/strong><\/p>\n In 2004, few Americans knew Barack Obama. In 2008, they may elect him. Surely his past was of more interest than his present serial denials of it. Whatever the media\u2019s feelings about the current Barack Obama, there should have been some story that the Obama of 2008 is radically different from the Obama who was largely consistent and predictable for the prior 30 years.<\/p>\n Each Obama metamorphosis in itself might be attributed to the normal evolution to the middle, as a candidate shifts from the primary to the general election. But in the case of Obama, we witnessed not a shift, but a complete transformation to an entirely new persona \u2014 in almost every imaginable sense of the word. Name an issue \u2014 FISA, NAFTA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, coal, nuclear power, drilling, Iran, Jerusalem, the surge \u2014 and Obama\u2019s position today is not that of just a year ago.<\/p>\n Until 2005, Obama was in communication with Bill Ayers by e-mail and phone, despite Ayers reprehensible braggadocio in 2001 that he remained an unrepentant terrorist. Rev. Wright was an invaluable spiritual advisor \u2014 until spring of 2008. Father Pfleger was praised as an intimate friend in 2004 \u2014 and vanished off the radar in 2008. The media might have asked not just why these rather dubious figures were once so close to, and then so distant from, Obama; but\u00a0why<\/em>\u00a0were there so many people like Rashid Khalidi and Tony Rezko in Obama\u2019s past in the first place?<\/p>\n Behind the Olympian calm of Obama, there was always a rather disturbing record of extra-electoral politics completely ignored by the media. If one were disturbed by the present shenanigans of ACORN or the bizarre national call for Americans simply to skip work on election day to help elect Obama (who would pay for that?), one would only have to remember that in 1996 Obama took the extraordinary step of suing to eliminate all his primary rivals by challenging their petition signatures of mostly African-American voters.<\/p>\n In 2004, there was an even more remarkable chain of events in which the sealed divorce records of both his principle primary rival Blair Hull and general election foe, Jack Ryan, were mysteriously leaked, effectively ensuring Obama a Senate seat without serious opposition. These were not artifacts of a typical political career, but extraordinary events in themselves that might well have shed light on present campaign tactics \u2014 and yet largely remain unknown to the American people.<\/p>\n Imagine the reaction of CNN or NBC had John McCain\u2019s pastor and spiritual advisor of 20 years been revealed as a white supremacist who damned a multiracial United States, or had he been a close acquaintance until 2005 of an unrepentant terrorist bomber of abortion clinics, or had McCain himself sued to eliminate congressional opponents by challenging the validity of African-American voters who signed petitions, or had both his primary and general election senatorial rivals imploded once their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked.<\/p>\n <\/em>Socialism<\/strong><\/p>\n The eleventh-hour McCain allegations of Obama\u2019s advocacy for a share-the-wealth socialism were\u00a0generally ignored by the media, or if covered, written off as neo-McCarthyism. But there were two legitimate, but again neglected, issues.<\/p>\n The first was the nature of the Obama tax plan. The problem was not merely upping the income tax rates on those who made $250,000 (or was it $200,000, or was it $150,000, or both, or none?), but its aggregate effect in combination with lifting the FICA ceilings on high incomes on top of existing Medicare contributions and often high state income taxes.<\/p>\n In other words, Americans who live in high-tax, expensive states like a New York or California could in theory face collective confiscatory tax rates of 65 percent or so on much of their income. And, depending on the nature of Obama\u2019s proposed tax exemptions, on the other end of the spectrum we might well see almost half the nation\u2019s wage earners pay no federal income tax at all.<\/p>\n Questions arise, but were again not explored: How wise is it to exempt one out of every two income earners from any worry over how the nation gathers its federal income tax revenue? And when credits are added to the plan, are we now essentially not cutting or raising taxes, but simply diverting wealth from those who pay into the system to those who do not?<\/p>\n A practical effect of socialism is often defined as curbing productive incentives by ensuring the poorer need not endanger their exemptions and credits by seeking greater income; and discouraging the wealthy from seeking greater income, given that nearly two-thirds of additional wealth would be lost to taxes. Surely that discussion might have been of interest to the American people.<\/p>\n Second, the real story was not John McCain\u2019s characterization of such plans, but both inadvertent, and serial descriptions of them, past and present, by Barack Obama himself. \u201cSpreading the wealth around\u201d gains currency when collated to past interviews in which Obama talked at length about, and in regret at, judicial impracticalities in accomplishing his own desire to redistribute income. \u201cTragedy\u201d is frequent in the Obama vocabulary, but largely confined to two contexts: the tragic history of the United States (e.g., deemed analogous to that of Nazi Germany during World War II), and the tragic unwillingness or inability to use judicial means to correct economic inequality in non-democratic fashion.<\/p>\n In this regard, remember Obama\u2019s revealing comment that he was interested only in \u201cfairness\u201d in increasing capital-gains taxes, despite the bothersome fact that past moderate reductions in rates had, in fact, brought in greater revenue to government. Again, fossilized ideology trumps empiricism.<\/p>\n Imagine the reaction of NPR and PBS had John McCain advocated something like abolishing all capital gains taxes, or repealing incomes taxes in favor of a national retail sales tax.<\/em><\/p>\n The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.<\/p>\n Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief \u2014 but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.<\/p>\n \u00a92008 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 2008, journalism died and advocacy media took its place. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[737],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Qm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9917,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/talk-radio-cable-news-the-mainstream-media-and-the-news-revolution\/","url_meta":{"origin":3246,"position":0},"title":"Talk Radio, Cable News, the Mainstream Media, and the News Revolution","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 8, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The Corner The one and only. by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review In the hubbub over Trump\u2019s attack on the media, we sometimes forget that Barack Obama et al. customarily went after talk-radio and cable-news conservatives \u2014 whose job, after all, was opinion journalism \u2014 as biased, whereas Trump went\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11819,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/journalism-is-dead-long-live-the-media\/","url_meta":{"origin":3246,"position":1},"title":"Journalism is Dead\u2014Long Live the Media!","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 13, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness There still exists a physical media in the sense of airing current events. But it is not journalism as we once understood the disinterested reporting of the news. Journalism is now dead. The media lives on. Reporters today believe that their coverage serves higher\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media"","block_context":{"text":"Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11326,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ancient-war-between-the-press-and-the-president\/","url_meta":{"origin":3246,"position":2},"title":"The Ancient War Between the Press and the President","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 9, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The media are furious that President Trump serially decries \u201cfake news.\u201d He often rants that journalists who traffic in it are \u201cenemies of the people.\u201d Reporters have compared Trump to mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler because of his dislike of the press.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5326,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/embedded-and-elitist-left\/","url_meta":{"origin":3246,"position":3},"title":"Embedded and Elitist Left","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 1, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"The Long March through Schools of Journalism by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers If you want a good example of the \"long march through the institutions\" undertaken by sixties leftists after they left school, look no further than the career of Orville Schell, dean of Berkeley's School of Journalism. Since\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9546,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/9546\/","url_meta":{"origin":3246,"position":4},"title":"Comment from an Angry Reader:\u2026","author":"Megan Ring","date":"October 26, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Comment from an Angry Reader: Dear Sir, \u00a0Maybe if Trump wins, you can be one of his pet intellectuals, whom he will despise and humiliate. \u00a0Sincerely, Kurt Lipschutz \u00a0 Victor Davis Hanson's Reply: Dear Angry Reader Lipschutz, I voted against Trump in the primaries and am on record that he\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9688,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-trump-nail-in-the-media-coffin\/","url_meta":{"origin":3246,"position":5},"title":"The Trump Nail in the Media Coffin","author":"Megan Ring","date":"January 4, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Town Hall | President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. 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\n<\/em>
\nThe VP Candidates<\/strong><\/p>\n