We Were Sold Out (And It's Time For It To End)

"Many observers believe that the mainstream media could have blown Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign to bits over a single long weekend. A couple of hit pieces featuring Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Edward Said, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, the lost years at Columbia, ... well, you get the picture. Any of the big outlets could've put a stake in the heart of Obama's campaign with a single 20-minute segment of John Stossel presents: Barack Obama's Whackjob Friends.

So why didn't our world-class U.S. journalists explore Barack's background? In fact, the world wonders how our media could be so biased, so in the bag, so incredibly tilted that even the Saturday morning cartoons are mocking 'em. The answer is right in front of our noses.

• Senior Obama adviser Susan Rice (a former Clinton administration official) is married to Ian Cameron, the Canadian-born executive producer of ABC News’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

• NBC's David Gregory is married to Beth Wilkinson, a partner at Latham & Watkins in Washington and a former official in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration.

• ABC's George Stephanopoulos hosts a show bearing his name and earlier served as a senior advisor to the Clinton administration.

• Chris Matthews hosts MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and served as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter.

• David Gergen is a political analyst for CNN and served as a special adviser to President Clinton.

• Paul Begala is a CNN commentator ("[President Bush is] a high-functioning moron") and a former senior adviser to President Clinton.

• Bill Moyers is a journalist employed by PBS and was a press secretary for President Lyndon Baines Johnson. His son is a producer for CNN.

Put simply, there appears to be only a turnstile between a Democratic administration and a cushy media job. Perhaps that explains the disconnect. After all, career and spousal advancement come before integrity."

-- Doug Ross, showing those who were willing to betray America for their choice in this election, on Doug Ross @ Journal.

We need new pundits and journalists in this country - and I want to be one of them - but new voices can't be heard without your support, which should go to:

The Nation's First Affirmative-Action Democratic NewAge Spirituality Kid: Yea, That's The Ticket!

The [debate] uproar is the latest confirmation of the special place Mr. Obama holds in the hearts of a good part of the media, a status ensured by their shared political sympathies and his star power. That status has in turn given rise to a tendency to provide generous explanations, and put the best possible gloss on missteps and utterances seriously embarrassing to Mr. Obama.

The effort and intensity various CNN panelists, for instance, expended on explaining what Mr. Obama really meant by that awkward San Francisco speech about bitter small towners clinging to their guns and religion – it seems he'd been making an important point if one not evident to anyone listening – exceeded that of the Obama campaign itself.

Still, no effort in helpful explanations was more distinguished than that of David Gergen, senior CNN commentator, who weighed in just after the first explosion of reports on Mr. Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright. About this spiritual leader – whose sermons declared the September 11 attacks to be America's just deserts, who instructed his flock that the United States had set forth on a genocidal program to kill black Americans with the AIDS virus, who held forth as gospel every paranoid fantasy espoused by the lunatic fringe about America's crimes – Mr. Gergen said, "Actually, Rev. Wright may love this country more than many of us . . . but we've fallen short."

It was an attempt at exculpation, as regards Rev. Wright, that no one has equalled, though many have come close. Not least Mr. Obama, who spends considerable time arguing that the press has focused on a few "snippets" taken from years of sermons.

Mr. Obama's apparent inability to confront, forthrightly, the pastor's poisonous pronouncements and his own relationship with him is, of course, the cause of all the continuing questions on the subject. It had not been in him, for instance, to say publicly that for a pastor to have preached that the U.S. government had embarked on a project to inject blacks with AIDS was an outrage on truth and decency. He delivered a celebrated speech on race, one generally hailed as a masterwork, that was supposed to have explained it all. It was a work masterly, above all, in its evasiveness. Even its admirers, prepared to swallow his repeated resort to descriptions like "controversial" for the pastor's hate-filled rants, couldn't quite give Sen. Obama a pass when it came to his beloved white grandmother, or to the not so beloved Geraldine Ferraro, both of whom he suggested were racists in their own right.

These issues – the unanswered, the suspect – which outraged press partisans have for days attempted to dismiss as trivia and gossip, largely forgotten by the public, are unlikely to be forgotten, either today or in the general election, nor are they trivial. This, Messrs. Gibson and Stephanopoulos clearly understood when they chose their questions. Mr. Obama's answers told far more than he or his managers wished.

-- Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing for The Wall Street Journal