HYPOCRISY IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA – AT 9:31 A.M. ET:  As readers know, we love to roast the mainstream media here, and there's plenty of raw meat for a delicious roast.

The leftward march of the media during the past four or five decades has been obvious, except to the media, which always denies what others plainly see.  The media was instrumental in electing Barack Obama in 2008, partly by refusing to examine his background or hold him to the same standard required of other candidates.

The latest offender is the Los Angeles Times, which has made some effort to improve in recent years, but still is nostalgic for the old-time left-wing religion.  It was the Times that published, a few days back, those pictures of American soldiers with dead Afghans.  Even the White House was disturbed, in part because the photos were two years old and not exactly news.  Michael Rubin, in Contentions, looks at the paper's hypocritical explanation for the inflammatory publication:

In explaining their decision to publish photos of American troops posing with the bodies of alleged Taliban terrorists, despite the fact that the photos are two years old and guaranteed to inflame violence, the editors of the Los Angeles Times explained, “At the end of the day, our job is to publish information that our readers need to make informed decisions.”

Perhaps the editors would then like to explain why they continue to sit on a videotape of Barack Obama reportedly toasting former PLO Beirut spokesman and University of Chicago buddy Rashid Khalidi? Isn’t that necessary for readers to make informed decisions? I’m not sure whether the editors could provide a more glaring example of their own hypocrisy.

COMMENT:  That's a bulls-eye.  There have been many requests for the L.A. Times to release the tape, but the paper continues to refuse.  The media is very big on "the people's right to know," except when the people knowing something would hurt the "correct" political stance on some issue.

Thus, even Tom Brokaw, at the time of the 2008 election, lamented that Americans were electing a president about whom they knew so little.  We don't know much more these four years later.  We still have no satisfactory explanation of the president's background; his association with radicals; the fact that no one at Columbia University, his undergraduate school, seems to remember him; the financing of his education, which one respected black leader said was provided by a Saudi prince; the fact that his two published books have different writing styles; possible travel to Pakistan in the 1980s; some strangeness about his Social Security numbers; and the fact that he, a man who had never written an article on Constitutional law, or argued a Con law case, was given a job as a Constitutional law teacher at the University of Chicago Law School. 

And we're not going to know much about these elements because the press, once again, isn't asking too many questions. 

But publish something that may inflame a foreign population and place Americans at risk?  Hey, no problem.

April 19, 2012