The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Unsurprising Media Consensus: ‘Shut Up About Benghazi, You Stupid Republicans’

Posted on | May 8, 2013 | 30 Comments

Even before the six hours of congressional hearings began, CNN telegraphed its disinterest in the Benghazi “whistleblower” testimony by cutting away to Cleveland, Ohio, for what Wolf Blitzer falsely promised would be the first public statement by kidnapping victim Amanda Berry. What actually happened in Cleveland was a ginormous media scrum for a statement by the victim’s sister Beth Serrano (who has been interviewed by every news organization on the planet already) asking that reporters “please respect our privacy.”

That particular goose-chase blunder — pre-empting the start of the House Oversight Committee hearing to hype coverage of what proved to be a non-story —  was a clumsy signal: Nobody important at CNN thinks the Obama administration did anything wrong in the Benghazi affair, and therefore the congressional investigation is a trivial exercise of no genuine public interest.

The fix was in, and the Piers Morgan Network might as well change its slogan to, “CNN: What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?” 

No matter what the witnesses said, under no circumstance were the major news organizations that have spent the past five years as de facto members of the Obama campaign committee going to treat this hearing as actual news. In fact, the only TV reporter not employed by Fox News who has treated the Benghazi cover-up as a legitimate story — Sharyl Attkisson of CBS — is being treated like an unprofessional pariah by her own network, while Chuck Todd of NBC News quite literally laughs off criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks.

Really, they out-did themselves on this one. Check out the “Don’t Bother to Read This Dull Story” headline from the New York Times:

Official Offers Account From Libya of Benghazi Attack

Here’s another way you might headline the story, if you actually wanted to get readers to, y’know, read the story:

VIDEO: Benghazi Whistleblower Gregory Hicks Describes
‘Saddest Phone Call’ That Ambassador Stevens Died

Unless you saw that testimony — which was just one highlight of a six-hour hearing that the major networks did their best to ignore or dismiss as mere politics —  you would have no reason to suspect how riveting it was, if all you saw was that bland New York Times headline.

Ace describes the methodology of suppression:

[T]he media can never be embarrassed by its liberal bias and deliberate suppression of the news for political purposes if no one in the media ever breaches the wall of silence and clues the public in to what it’s hiding.

This is journalism as a partisan team sport, and the guys who call the shots at NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN don’t care how dishonest their bias is, they only care about winning — i.e., electing Democrats, and helping Democrats enact their policy agenda — so that as long as a Democrat is in the White House and opposition to the Democrat agenda can be effectively marginalized, the truth doesn’t matter.

You can read the Benghazi hearing liveblog we did at ViralRead, but what difference, at this point, does it make?

 

 


Category: Libya, Media Bias

Comments

30 Responses to “Unsurprising Media Consensus: ‘Shut Up About Benghazi, You Stupid Republicans’”

  1. Thoughts on the #Benghazi Hearing | hogewash
    May 8th, 2013 @ 11:51 pm

    […] 2—The Other McCain notices that the main stream media didn’t give the hearings much emphasis and wonders, […]

  2. WJJ Hoge
    May 8th, 2013 @ 11:52 pm

    If CNN had covered the hearings, several dozen more people would have learned from Elijah Cummings that death is just a part of life.

  3. wjjhoge
    May 8th, 2013 @ 11:54 pm

    RT @smitty_one_each: TOM Unsurprising Media Consensus: ‘Shut Up About Benghazi, You Stupid Republicans’ http://t.co/F9fFagjGcw #TCOT

  4. Rose
    May 8th, 2013 @ 11:59 pm

    It was so long ago, after all.

  5. Wombat_socho
    May 9th, 2013 @ 12:08 am

    That’s what they want us to think. The hell with that.

  6. Kevin Trainor Jr.
    May 9th, 2013 @ 12:27 am

    Kevin Trainor Jr. liked this on Facebook.

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    May 9th, 2013 @ 12:55 am

    An inconvenient truth?

  8. Josh_Painter
    May 9th, 2013 @ 12:56 am

    RT @smitty_one_each: TOM Unsurprising Media Consensus: ‘Shut Up About Benghazi, You Stupid Republicans’ http://t.co/F9fFagjGcw #TCOT

  9. eeyrehead
    May 9th, 2013 @ 1:15 am

    RT @smitty_one_each: TOM Unsurprising Media Consensus: ‘Shut Up About Benghazi, You Stupid Republicans’ http://t.co/F9fFagjGcw #TCOT

  10. mamawagsx2
    May 9th, 2013 @ 1:24 am

    RT @smitty_one_each: TOM Unsurprising Media Consensus: ‘Shut Up About Benghazi, You Stupid Republicans’ http://t.co/F9fFagjGcw #TCOT

  11. Adjoran
    May 9th, 2013 @ 1:45 am

    It is as if Journ-O-List disbanded the email list and just took over the editorial boards of every major media outlet except Fox.

    They believe in Ace’s theory: as long as they can control the way a story is presented everywhere but Fox, they can dismiss Fox as Fox and cover up anything Obama and the Democrats do, from now on.

    Of course, in the longer run, as John Maynard Keynes might have said, they are all dead. Dwindling revenues and circulation/ratings mean more cuts, and the newsroom is a diminishing resource at best.

    WaPo, for instance, had a $34 million operating loss in the newspaper division for the 1st Quarter, revenue declined 4% and daily circulation fell 7.2% (up from a 7.8% loss Q1 last year!). Sooner or later some fresh-faced MBA is going to point out to his boss, “You know, we’d be making X if we just shut the news division down.”

  12. Adjoran
    May 9th, 2013 @ 1:47 am

    Maybe we should send him and Hank Johnson to Guam, tip the darn island over, and find out.

  13. Adjoran
    May 9th, 2013 @ 1:48 am

    You gotta love the logic, though: “No comment, must wait for investigations to conclude,” followed by stonewalling investigations, and when they can no longer be stonewalled, “Old news, move along!”

    If they only used their powers for good instead of evil . . .

  14. AnonymousDrivel
    May 9th, 2013 @ 3:30 am

    “CNN: What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?”

    Methinks CNN/Hillary doth protest too much. The spectacle of the act will hurt them in the long run. There’s a reason the profession of mainstream “journolist” is in the basement of desired/respected careers and why the industry’s bottom lines get redder and redder. They think they’re escaping scrutiny and consequences. Joke’s on them. They’re not. It’ll take generations for the public’s cynicism to reverse if it even can. Plus, the MFM is actually striving to be worse, so the odds of getting better, sooner than later… take the over.

  15. AnonymousDrivel
    May 9th, 2013 @ 3:45 am

    The Journ-O-List is exactly now as it was before the attempted consolidation tank: distributed and loosely formalized via educational/professional indoctrination. The List was just a way for an even more select few to try and capitalize on the social media explosion at the ground floor, but their lines of communication and coordination have only been reengaged just as before. It’s just less “official”.

    The existence of the Journ-O-List remains just the smoking gun of explicit media collusion validating all the anecdotal evidence from critics that had been accumulating for decades. It served a much bigger purpose, ironically, for the critics as it remains both a stone cold truth proving media corruption and an epitaph for their graves.

  16. K-Bob
    May 9th, 2013 @ 4:43 am

    If anything, the anger and resentment that builds up over those deaths becomes even bigger.

  17. ReaganiteRepublican
    May 9th, 2013 @ 7:14 am

    Good one, linked:

    Ugly Truth of Benghazi Testimony to Test Even Obammunists’ Considerable Lying and Traducement Capabilities

  18. Sirius U. Guise
    May 9th, 2013 @ 7:51 am

    Well, Hicks got desked for challenging the narrative, and Sharyl Attkisson is being marginalized for reporting, which is, after all, tantamount to advocacy.

  19. Matthew W
    May 9th, 2013 @ 8:02 am

    How many years of panty wetting by the democrats over the “Plame” thing, and no interest in PEOPLE DYING !!!

  20. Da Tech Guy On DaRadio Blog » Blog Archive » MSNBC Viewers Discover Benghazi…for the First Time
    May 9th, 2013 @ 8:03 am

    […] This is a story they never heard! As Stacy McCain put it […]

  21. Bob Belvedere
    May 9th, 2013 @ 8:36 am

    Excellent analysis, Adj.

    One quibble: The businessmen involved will ignore those naive MBA’s because what they are seeking with their investments in this area is not monetary. Whether to assuage their guilt at being rich and/or their commitment to Corporatism [aka: Fascism], they see themselves as warriors for the cause of ‘fairness, equality, and a marshmallow world, with unicorns on top’. Their loss-leaders are their charities.

  22. Kerry Dar-Du
    May 9th, 2013 @ 8:57 am

    Kerry Dar-Du liked this on Facebook.

  23. A Confederacy Of Pod People | The Camp Of The Saints
    May 9th, 2013 @ 9:03 am

    […] the Comments section of an excellent analysis of yesterday’s hearing on Benghazi and the MSM’s shattering silence on the event by Stacy McCain, Adjoran made the following […]

  24. Team Obama launches “Smear the Whistle Blowers Campaign” | The Daley Gator
    May 9th, 2013 @ 9:21 am

    […] of Fox and Cheryl Atkins of CBS, televised MSM media all but ignoredyesterday’s SIX HOUR Benghazigate hearing while some milked details of the Cleveland […]

  25. Benghazi roundup | Fausta's Blog
    May 9th, 2013 @ 9:28 am

    […] Spectator, Riehl World News, Hot Air, The Hugh Hewitt Show, Patterico’s Pontifications, The Other McCain, The Week, Daily Kos,The BLT, Doug Ross, Michelle Malkin and The Hill […]

  26. K-Bob
    May 9th, 2013 @ 10:24 am

    I was in the minefield over at Politico for a while today. Their latest attempt to try and distract from Benghazi is with Gabby Giffords (no, I will not link it).

    It’s the battle cry of:

    “OUR VICTIM IS MORE UNASSAILABLE THAN YOURS”

  27. Benghazi Hearing Postscript: Where Do We Go From Here? - LeatherPenguin
    May 9th, 2013 @ 3:19 pm

    […] Well, the first (of what should be many) Benghazi hearing is over, and it was a doozy, if you watched it. Depending on where you tuned in (other than CSPAN), you likely missed it. The Make Believe Media (MBM), the Unicorn King’s Praetorian Guard, threw the Gosnell Blanket? over it: […]

  28. Cube
    May 9th, 2013 @ 7:53 pm

    But a Republican was President then. That makes all the difference. It’s as if truth were determined by the letter after the names, D or R.

    Can’t wait til all the lies jump up and bite them. All the whining from the media and Democrats (redundant, I know) then will make little kids embarrassed for them.

  29. A Short Lesson in Liberal Media Bias: Has Alex Koppelman Forgotten Fitzmas? : The Other McCain
    May 12th, 2013 @ 11:58 pm

    […] May 8: Unsurprising Media Consensus: ‘Shut Up About Benghazi, You Stupid Republicans’ […]

  30. Bettina Kozlowski
    May 13th, 2013 @ 3:27 pm

    Hey wingnuts, Didcha get the chance to vote down universal health care today? Share a Big Gulp with Professor Palin? Luckily, you have Oscar winning media outlet Fox News to tell all y’all how right you are. Most of us- the normal Americans- actually do wish stupid Republicans would shut up about Benghazi.I googled: “Republicans should shut up about Benghazi” sans any irony and found you– another waste of space teabagger website.