Media Amnesia
The campaign here at home will be page one news, but may serve to mask the incipient scandals of the Obama administration such as Solyndra 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.
By Alan Caruba
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As U.S. troops are finally withdrawn from Iraq, news coverage of that nation is going to disappear from the front pages unless the bombings occurring with increasingly regularity there continue.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 Solyndra 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
The one story the media cannot suppress is unemployment. Last week the 
media trumpeted the announcement that the “official” rate of 9.1% decreased to 9%. These government-generated statistics are a farce. It is likely closer to 22% because those who have given up looking for work and other factors are conveniently ignored. Unemployment is as bad as it was during the Great Depression, but don’t expect the media to report that.
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 fictional 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
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