The "fellow travelers" will, as always, continue to ignore any stories that emanate from the right, however, it's the moderate and independent voters that will take much more notice of what's being said...and more importantly, what's not being said in papers like the Washington Post (whose reporters originated the list) and the NY Times, LA Times as well as the the sagging ratings of the ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN whose viewship is hemorraging off to Fox News at a suprising rate.
The anology of the Blatant Beast is an apt one.
In the 16th-century epic poem The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser writes of a monster called the Blatant Beast. which had “a thousand tongues of every kind and quality”, which “poured forth abuse, not caring where or when… speaking hateful things of good and bad alike, of high and low, not even sparing kings or kaisers, but either blotting them with infamy or biting them with baneful teeth.”...The mainstream media is the modern incarnation of the Blatant Beast, and its defeat calls for the same strategy by conservatives: tell it a story it can’t ignore, then hit it with a punchline it can’t help repeating. Like the Blatant Beast, the media does have a certain capacity for shame… because nothing bothers professional “journalists” more than amateurs besting them at the sacred ritual of reporting news.And therein is the rub. Major media outlets have been ignoring stories for most of this decade. In the last election cycle, it was the National Enquirer who took down John Edwards for his marital infidelities, just as they took down Gary Hart in 1988. It wasn't until photographs had been published by the NE that ANY of the other major media outlets even began to cover that story.
The media’s power to influence the public is not limitless, as we saw during the 2004 election. The wounds of Rathergate run deeper than many journalists like to admit. The 2004 media strove mightily to drag John Kerry across the finish line, but they couldn’t quite pull it off. Kerry’s thudding lack of charisma, and the transparent cynicism of his war-hero routine, were part of the reason, but it was fascinating to watch the media try to work around them. They seemed perplexed over their inability to discredit the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth by repeatedly calling them “the discredited Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” Dan Rather still doesn’t understand what happened to him.
Yet, they came close to suceeding. In 2008, they did succeed in changing the narrative of the favoured candidate, Barack Obama, by painting first Bill Clinton, then anyone who opposed Obama as a potential racist. Especially after the Reverend Wright story broke...the back pedalling and attempts to change the narrative were very sucessful.
The Daily Caller has treated conservatives to the unique sensation of being shocked by revelations that don’t surprise us a bit. We’ve known this stuff was going on for years. The Reverend Wright story is one of many examples where media bias is easily detected by simply reversing the political alignment of the principles, and asking what the media coverage would be like...The discussion of false racism charges is an outrage. The American public is growing very tired of being pummeled with the racism club. The cynical plan to pick a random conservative – “who cares?” – and slander them as racists will mix with disgust at the NAACP for trying the same wretched tactic on the Tea Party movement. The once-feared Race Card is looking rather tattered around the edges. The Left has been putting a lot of effort into shuffling those cards into the deck for the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. The nitwits at JournoList just made them much more difficult to play...All's that necessary to see how outrageous that was in 2008 is to flip the narrative around and think about if this had been the case:
It doesn’t take much effort to imagine the reaction to the discovery of John McCain’s twenty-year association with a chapter of the Klan, followed by a major speech in which McCain described the Kleagle as “an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy,” whom he could “no more disown than he could disown the white community.” If that wasn’t enough to fill newsrooms with stroke victims, the craven decision to throw the Kleagle under the bus a few days later, after one more outrageous statement, would have done the trick.But the most damning indictment on the media is that...
A sizable segment of the “journalist” population stands revealed as sputtering extremists, who talk about killing stories and destroying people’s lives to protect their favored political candidate. Yes, these people are self-professed liberals – they’re not pretending to be “objective” reporters or news anchors – but the cross-pollination between “liberal” and “objective” journalists is a blindingly obvious matter of public knowledge, and the things they’re talking about doing are vile, underhanded, and conspiratorial.These men and women were and are ever ready to attempt to change and coordinate what they write and broadcast both nationally, and locally in order to protect their favoured candidate and now President. America doesn't particularly like it when they feel they're being propagandized. After all, many people have begun to feel "voter's remorse" for their votes in 2008.
The public is looking for ways to forget it voted for Obama. A narrative of fraud and deception is building around the 2008 election, as the polls for this disastrous presidency plummet. People who don’t want to admit they voted for Obama have an appetite for believing they were tricked into doing so. Laying blame at the feet of a media they increasingly distrust will be very attractive.A majority of independents now say they would not vote for Mr. Obama again. But we have to seriously worry that the media will fight an ugly battle in order to re-elect they President they help put in office.
The media effort to secure the re-election of the Nobel Prize-winning First Black President will be ferocious. The MSM’s control over the popular culture is still formidable – just look at what happened to Rush Limbaugh this week, as media outlets ran with ridiculous fake quotes posted by a few leftist bloggers, and hammered the man’s reputation hard enough to eliminate his position in the group seeking to buy the St. Louis Rams.This influence shouldn't be overlooked. They will wage fierce battles in their campaign to rehabilitate his sagging poll numbers...especially if the GOP secures control of both the House (expected) and the Senate (merely a possibility at this time).
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