We are now in a countdown to November 6, 2012, Election Day, and the mainstream press will shift more intensely into coverage of the campaigns; first for the Republican nomination of the candidate to oppose Barack Obama, and then through the interminable ups and downs of the campaign for the presidency.
We got a taste of it with Politico.com, an arm of The Washington Post that permits its liberal bias to be reported with a more barehanded approach. It was Politico.com that broke the Herman Cain story of sexual harassment allegations in the 1990s and issued some seventy “stories” about it in the space of three or four days. The women who filed the complaints and who financially benefited from the National Restaurant Association’s settlements have wisely recused themselves from going public.
About the only thing we have actually learned is that Herman Cain, who had a ten-day heads-up on the story, handled it poorly. As someone who has earned his bread in public relations, watching him stumble around with several different versions of what he remembered and what he knew was painful. That said, the story is likely to go away because such allegations by unnamed women are (a) commonplace in the business world and (b) most decent people don’t like that kind of “gotcha” journalism.
As U.S. troops are finally withdrawn from Iraq, news coverage of that nation is going to disappear from the front pages unless the bombings occurring with increasingly regularity there continue. Don’t expect the media to connect the dots to ask or even identify who’s setting off those bombs or why.
Both the existential and actual threats to Israel are also likely to get short shrift despite the fact that mere days after Israel released more than a thousand Palestinian terrorists to gain the return of a single soldier, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Sderot in southern Israel were under missile attacks from Gaza. No longer being attributed to Hamas, a group calling itself Islamic Jihad is getting the credit for the forty rockets and mortars fired over a two-day period in late October.
As Dore Gold, an Israeli statesman noted, “The real explanations for the decision of Islamic Jihad to attack at this time, however, are not to be found in the Gaza Strip, but rather in Tehran.” Islamic Jihad, Gold pointed out, “is a very different organization than Hamas.” Yet another effort by the Israelis, the 2005 forced evacuation of the Gaza Strip’s Jewish population to placate the Palestinians, has not accomplished anything more than a launch site for endless rocketing.
The media will continue to monitor the events in Europe as its Eurozone monetary system continues to collapse, likely taking the European Union with it. It is one of those ideas by the continent’s elitists and intelligentsia that ignored hundreds of years of history behind the sovereign states there or the economic disparities between them. It is doubtful such coverage will provide anything more than the daily he-said, she-said accounts as the individual nations go their own way. The site of many U.S. exports and investments, it will further harm our tenuous economy as well.
The campaign here at home will be page one news, but may serve to mask the incipient scandals of the Obama administration such as Solyandra and other failing green energy companies that received huge loan guarantees. Nor will the administration’s efforts to keep the southern border open to the flow of illegal aliens get much attention as it continues to sue states like Alabama and Arizona for trying to deal with the consequences.
The Great Depression 2.0
In the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, it is likely that the Obama administration will exploit the distraction offered by the election campaign to continue its destruction of the nation’s energy sector; the one sector responsible for actually adding new jobs since 2003. The Environmental Protection Agency is desperate to impose new regulations to further its agenda of killing jobs and exercising total control over every aspect of our lives. Don’t expect much coverage.
There are some early indications that the media have grown disenchanted with Obama. They put him in office with their crazed propagandistic coverage in 2008, but he has proven to be a very big disappointment. This portends that their coverage of his reelection campaign will be treated like kryptonite, the substance that weakened Superman.
It is not putting it too strongly to say that, with notable exceptions, the mainstream media has failed and even deceived Americans for too long now, from the bogus global warming hoax to the installation of Barack Obama in the Oval Office. They think they know what is best for us, but they often have only the slimmest grasp of what is actually occurring at home and around the world.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
American approval ratings of the media are hovering just above those of Congress ... go figure.
ReplyDeleteBut, will the American people be clever enough this time to vote for someone who is half-decent?
ReplyDeleteVery impressive current news analysis by the "Master Of Them That Know" at Warning Signs!
ReplyDeleteOn the surface this all looks pretty bad for America - and the standard of living will most certainly not be what most Americans have experienced in their lifetimes for at least the next five years -
HOWEVER, it is always darkest and coldest just before the dawn - the American middle class majority has become radicalized as a result of the attempted overthrow of the Republic by the neo-Communist regime of Obama and his willing stooges on the Left, in particular, the Lamestream Leftist Media that has degenerated into nothing more than Big Brother's Ministry of Truth.
The axiom of physics is "For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction." The holds true for politics. The Tea Party Movement (TPM) has not yet begun to fight. The mass TPM demonstrations of 2010 in Washington, D.C. and the Congressional landslide elections in favor of Republican candidates last November were just the opening salvo in a massive counter attack designed to return control of the USA to We The People.
Of course, everyone on our side of
already drawn civil war battlefield hopes and prays that change back to the guidelines of the U.S. Constitution is by peaceful and lawful means...
HOWEVER, based on the rhetoric and the actions of the Left over the last few years, many TPM members fear an insurrection with mass violence sweeping the nation that will dwarf what the OWS has been doing.
Once again the nation stands at Gettysburg in a Second U.S. Civil War.
Thank you, Ronbo, but I must disagree that the nation is on the brink of civil unrest or insurrection. It is on the brink of the next election and will likely patiently wait to get to the polls and vote.
ReplyDeleteNot only do I feel Ronbo is right but I think the point of no return has already been crossed. There will be blood shed on our streets. Elections are meaningless when you have over half the electorate touting "poor me, someone owes me more!" .....patient? I hope not. Conservatives should stop being patient and tolerant and demand the current Congress get on the right track now. Preaching to the choir is only a temporary soothing.
ReplyDeleteJ Johnston:
ReplyDeleteWe had a similar situation in the Great Depression. Yet people kept re-electing the man who was making the situation worse. The Republic survived..
The Republic can survive the current situation. We survived war with the superpower at the time in 1812, we survived a civil war, we survived Wilson and FDR (though their legacies still haunt us).
Could we go the way of late 5th Century Rome? Yes.. but I will remain cautiously optimistic that something along the lines of this article, might be the actual outcome:
http://www.american.com/archive/2009/april-2009/the-coming-of-the-fourth-american-republic