Guilty (37 page)

The Emmy Award winner for spinning identical numbers in opposite ways goes to CBS News's Mike Wallace. In a
60 Minutes
segment about Ward Connerly's ballot initiatives to end racial discrimination by state governments, Wallace said Proposition 209 in California, ending race preferences, passed “narrowly.” Describing a similar ballot initiative that lost in Houston, Wallace said that “voters came down heavily in favor of continuing affirmative action in their city.”
¹¹⁸
Here are the numbers: California's Proposition 209 passed by 54 percent to 46 percent.
¹¹⁹
The Houston initiative lost by 55 percent to 45 percent.
¹²⁰
Unless words have no meaning, it is impossible that one of those passed “narrowly” while the other was defeated “heavily.”

The voters in Houston weren't even told what they were voting for,
because the wording of the initiative was altered to say nothing about racial preferences at all, and instead referred to “affirmative action” and “outreach” programs. Of course, Wallace didn't mention that. Also an African American was running for mayor of Houston that year, thus increasing the black turnout. Wallace didn't mention that, either. But the unavoidable fact is: The votes in California and Houston were nearly identical—and Wallace described one as a crushing defeat and the other as a hair's-breadth victory.

If that's what the media do with virtually identical percentages, one can imagine what they do with more amorphous ideological labels. These are actual
New York Times
headlines describing two Supreme Court nominees:

It used to be that the media could manufacture phony scandals out of whole cloth and destroy a presidency, throw an election, or lose a war without breaking a sweat. With Watergate, the media used a minor scandal—something that would have been a slow afternoon around the Clinton White House—to remove President Nixon from office and turn South Vietnam over to the Communists. With McCarthyism, they vilified an American patriot to hide the Democratic Party's shameful collaboration with Soviet spies. With Dan Quayle's spelling of “potato,” they sent a warning shot across the bow to anyone thinking about being a conservative in public.

Today the media can't even falsely report that the Republican vice presidential candidate lied about the birth of her last child without the story falling apart in a day. So naturally, they're upset.

The establishment media can still have a good run with some fake scandals. They can occasionally become so insufferable that a Republican will withdraw from a Senate race (Jack Ryan) or resign from Congress (Mark Foley). They can persuade a few extremely stupid
Americans that their nonsense stories, such as Halliburton and Harken Energy, are major scandals deserving impeachment.

But the media have a much harder row to hoe if they want to throw a presidential election or lose a war these days. CBS's Dan Rather couldn't pawn off his fake Bush National Guard documents on the nation for even a full day. Within hours, conservative blogs had exposed the documents as fakes—as they were later conclusively proved to be by document examiners.

One might think competition would make the dinosaur media better. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, his competitors immediately set to work trying to imitate it. When the TV show
Judge Judy
was a smash hit with viewers, other networks quickly introduced their own courtroom reality shows. When Google swept the Internet and made its founders billionaires, Silicon Valley's best minds went to work to create their own search engines. But when Fox News Channel comes along, presents both sides of the story, and within a few years has the highest ratings on cable news, instead of imitating the wildly successful network, liberals plot to yank Fox News's power.

Talk about the media being victims of the media! The existence of alternative sources of information is even worse than the
Times's
woefully sparse coverage of Halliburton.

Most of the establishment media continue as they always have, apparently oblivious to the existence of alternative sources of information. The
Times
coverage of the Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of gang rape in 2006 is a perfect example. As Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson say in their book about the Duke lacrosse hoax rape case,
Until Proven Innocent,
long after even the originally pro-stripper columnists had come to the conclusion that the lacrosse players were innocent, the
Times
was still hawking the stripper's version of the story. On August 25, 2006, the
Times
ran one of its interminable, Pulitzer-bait articles on the case titled “Files from Duke Rape Case Give Details but No Answers.” Within three hours of the article going up online, Taylor and Johnson report, “blogs deftly tore the piece to shreds, exposing the reporters' factual errors, their omission of critical evidence, and their overall pro-[prosecution] Nifong bias.”
¹²¹

The problem isn't, pace Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, that the mainstream media's headlines don't have enough exclamation points. It's that the establishment media aren't the only ones who write the news anymore. They still write most of the news, but not all of it. And they've never felt so victimized in their entire lives.

Reporters, editors, and columnists at the
New York Times
felt horribly put upon when Americans reacted with spluttering rage at their publication of a top-secret counterterrorist program tracking the terrorists' finances. The program consisted of a consortium of various countries' financial institutions called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, quietly working to follow terrorist money trails. The Treasury Department had voluntarily revealed the basics of the program to various news organizations in the spirit of openness, but with the request that the program not be disclosed to the public.

Two weeks after 9/11, the
Times
had editorialized that “Washington and its allies must also disable the financial networks used by terrorists.” It said that “much more is needed” than what the Bush administration had planned, and lectured Americans, “If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one.”
¹²²

But once liberals calmed down and started going to Anna Wintour parties again, they lost all interest in terrorists. Indeed, they forgot there had ever been a terrorist attack. And so the
Times,
privy to a top-secret counterterrorist program it had once demanded that Bush implement immediately, decided to betray its own country and publish details of the program. It wasn't even a particularly interesting story— unless you were the head of counterintelligence for al Qaeda.

When the
Times
was universally condemned for revealing the secret counterterrorist program, it responded with a series of articles and columns criticizing Americans for daring to question the Newspaper of Record. In two consecutive columns claiming that the
Times
was being bullied, Frank Rich smugly announced that other newspapers, including the
Wall Street Journal,
had published stories on the terrorist-tracking program the exact same day. But no one complained about them.

The
Wall Street Journal,
objecting to being used as the
Times's
wingman, published an editorial explaining what really happened. Yes, the
Journal
and a few other newspapers had the story of the Swift program, not just the
Times.
But it was the
Times
that announced it was running the story—defying requests not to from the Treasury Secretary John Snow, 9/11 commissioners Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, Democratic congressman John Murtha, and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. At that point, the Treasury Department asked the
Wall Street Journal
to go ahead with its story on Swift, so one newspaper would at least have the facts right.
¹²³

Sadly for them, overpaid reporters at the
Times
intentionally harming their own country do not tear at the heartstrings of most Americans. So the treasonous scribblers were forced to adopt other victims' mantles. In one whimpering column, Rich suggested that the attacks on the
Times
for defiantly publishing covert national security information were grounded in anti-Semitism. He cited with approval MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who complained about attacks on the poor, defenseless
Times,
saying, “It's the old trick, go after New York, go after big, ethnic New York.”
¹²⁴

Actually, the reason people were attacking the
Times
was that it was the only newspaper that rebuffed the government's request that the terrorist financial monitoring program not be revealed. Other newspapers had the same information, but apparently at other newspapers, you don't become a hero by betraying your country.
¹²⁵
Even when using the most powerful newspaper in the world to place all Americans in danger, liberals are always the victims.

W
hy do people become liberals? Perhaps it is because they truly believe socialism would be good for America. Perhaps the idea of a kindergartner saying, “God is good, God is great, thank you, God, for my food” enrages them. Little Kayla Broadus tried to pull the “God is great” scam at snack time in her Saratoga Springs, New York, kindergarten class, but—fortunately—a public school teacher was on hand to stop this outrage, thus narrowly averting a theocratic coup in America.

The other reason people might become liberals is that they enjoy being told how pretty they are. And clever and talented. And don't forget brave. Liberals love being praised for their courage. It's hard to fit in being brave between being called beautiful, brilliant, and talented, but that's the advantage of having the entire mainstream media doing
PR for liberals. You never have to actually be victimized to be considered a victim—a brave victim—by the media.

To the contrary, it's the victimizers who are wildly cheered on by media elites. Thus, for example, after Elián González was taken from his Miami relatives' home at gunpoint in the second military action against American citizens by Attorney General Janet Reno,
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a column titled, not sarcastically, “Reno for President.” Friedman said—again, not sarcastically— “Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart. They should put that picture up in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: ‘America is a country where the rule of law rules…. ' ”
¹

Other than liberals' general feeling that Cubans are tacky, Friedman's statement violated every principle of the
Times,
which is normally for children's rights, for illegal aliens, against guns, against the police and against the rule of law. Would a photo of a uniformed American male pointing a gun at any other foreigner warm the heart of a liberal? How about a Mexican drug smuggler or an Islamic terrorist? Would even a gun pointed at Khalid Sheikh Mohammed warm a liberal's heart as much as a gun pointed at a six-year-old Cuban boy?

The number-one rule with liberals is: Whatever they do is courageous, no matter how blatantly power-grabbing, whoring, or publicity-seeking it is.

An extensive study conducted by professors at Smith College and George Washington University confirmed that most liberals exhibit a “narcissistic pathology” marked by “grandiosity, envy, a lack of empathy, illusion of personal perfection, and a sense of entitlement.”
²
Liberals are twice as likely to value being popular as conservatives, whereas conservatives are more likely to value “making my parents proud.”
³

So if you've ever wondered, “Does Barack Obama ever get bored with all those fawning profiles?,” the answer is: No, liberals never tire of being praised for every desirable human attribute known to man, not least of which is their mind-boggling courage in the face of endless praise.

When Obama materialized, the media were seized by a mass psychosis that hadn't been witnessed since Beatlemania.
OK
magazine raved that the Obamas “are such an all-American family that they almost make the Brady Bunch look dysfunctional.” Yes, who can forget the madcap episode when the Bradys' wacky preacher tells them the government created AIDS to kill blacks! Still gushing,
OK
magazine's crack journalists reported, “Mom goes to bake sales, dad balances the checkbook, and the girls love Harry Potter”—and then the whole family goes to a racist huckster bellowing, “God damn America!”
⁴

MONTHS BEFORE NETWORK ANCHORS WERE INTERROGATING vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the intricacies of foreign policy, here is how NBC's Brian Williams mercilessly grilled presidential candidate Barack Obama: “What was it like for you last night, the part we couldn't see, the flight to St. Paul with your wife, knowing what was awaiting?” Twisting the knife he had just plunged into Obama, Williams followed up with what has come to be known as a “gotcha” question: “And you had to be thinking of your mother and your father.” Sarah Palin was memorizing the last six kings of Swaziland for her media interviews, but Obama only needed to say something nice about his parents to be considered presidential material.

The media's fawning over Obama knew no bounds, and yet, in the midst of the most incredible media conspiracy to turn this jug-eared clodhopper into some combination of Winston Churchill and Brad Pitt, you were being a bore if you mentioned the liberal media.
Oh, surely we've exploded that old chestnut…. Look! Look, Obama just lit up another Marlboro! Geez, does smoking make you look cool, or what! Yeah, Obama!…
The claim that there's no such thing as a left-wing press is a patent lie told for the sole purpose of enraging conservatives. American newspapers read like the press under Kim Jung Il, which, outside of a police state, tends to look foolish. The prose is straight out of the
Daily Worker,
full of triumphal rhetoric with implicit exclamation points. Their chanted slogans fill your brain, like one of those bad songs you can't stop humming.