In Praise of News and Opinion Diversity

Like most of you I'm still trying to comprehend the events of the past week.  Most American's nerves are raw and we're all guilty of saying things or at least thinking things we don't necessarily mean.  Nothing is more rare today than facts, nothing more plentiful than opinions.

As we calm down and as the myriad of media, new and old, do their jobs, we will begin to understand all that happened in a few short, horrific days.

Until the terror in Boston and the horror in West, Texas I was planning to write a follow-up to my previous blog about Sarah Palin and the lack of real dialog between the left and the right in this country.  It is still, I believe, the biggest obstetrical we all face.

But I'm going to leave that blog for another time.

What I want to do here is simply praise the strength, diversity, the efficiency and the depth of the media in light of the new digital age and social media availability to all Americans.

You only need to be on Twitter for a few minutes t understand why despots in countries all around the globe try to regulate it or shut it down.  Today news spreads like wildfire.  Sometimes its not accurate, sometimes it's colored by strong opinions, but it's ALL out there and we all benefit.

Any of my fellow Liberals who deny the immense left wing bias of the major media are simply deluding themselves.  They should be embarrassed.  They should be one hell of a lot smarter than that.

But the right need not fear for one minute.  The views and OFTEN THE FACTS needed by all Americans are out there. And people get the news.... and the facts... and vital opinions.  This system really, really works!

You need look no further than the news about Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the abortion doctor who might just be the biggest MASS MURDERER in American History as proof.  Did the mainstream media ignore the Gosnell story?  Absolutely.  But did the new media get the story out and shame the old media in the process? YES!

And I don't think the Gosnell story is the worst example of main stream media dereliction of responsibility.  But the new media, FOX News, the Conservative pundits, the brilliant bloggers and others fill the gaps, effectively and consistently.

The truth is out there.  Now if we could just calmly discuss our ideas.

Why Did Obama Lie? Why Did Others Lie?

Slowly buy surely the actual facts in the Islamic radical assault on our Consulate in Benghazi, Libya are coming to light. 

We now know that Ambassador Stevens asked for increased security many times before the attack.  We know the State Department turned him down in a dismissive and arrogant manner.  It appears no one at the State Department will pay the price for this gross error in judgment.

We now know that drones overhead witnessed the attack and that officials in the CIA, the State Department and even President Obama himself knew this was a terrorist attack.

We now know that there was no protest of demonstration preceding or during the assault on the Consulate.

And today we know that President Obama was fully aware that the radical group Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility for the attacks.  The White House had emails from this al Qaeda allied group within two hours of the attack.

What we will never know is why President Obama lied continuously and consistently for two solid weeks about the attack.  We will never know why he forced Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary to lie, when Carney knew the truth.

We will never know why the President ordered Susan Rice, the United Nations Secretary to outright lie on four Sunday Morning News Interviews, destroying her credibility forever.

We will never know why in the world Vice President Biden told such an involved fictional account of the information known to the administration, even recounting totally false dates, during the Vice Presidential Debate.  Biden knew from day one.  Why did he destroy any chance he might have had of becoming President? 

Certainly the administration will never explain these lies and the bizarre and unnecessary cover-up of the facts.  It's a mini-Watergate with no logical explanation. 

We can only guess that the President was trying to place the blame elsewhere, on an obscure video maker, to avoid any direct blame that would harm his re-election chances.  It just all seems so odd.

If President Obama wins re-election the Main Stream Media will then investigate and ask these same questions.  If he loses it will fall upon a disgruntled staffer to reveal the truth.  But either way, Mr. PResident, the truth will come out.

The Death of Journalism

Being a journalist was once a proud and noble profession, filled with high ideals and strong ethics. In several great movies of the early to mid 20th Century reporter were real heroes battling against corrupt government and powerful corporations.

We were inspired, even in awe as we watched Orsen Welles' Citizen Kane, spellbound by Humphrey Bogart in Deadline, USA, and mesmerized by Cary Grant and Rosiland Russell in His Girl Friday.

Get the story and get it right!

Those days are now very officially dead.

We were genuinely betrayed by FOX's gross negligence in handling the explosive Shirley Sherrod video. There are many, especially in the left who proclaim we "should have known" FOX would repeat such gross falsehoods without so much as asking for a simple verification of the tape. Regardless, FOX failed to follow the most basic of journalistic standards.

But what is much, much worse in the now revealed cabal of liberal reporters who conspired, successfully, to throw an election. Barack Obama might just have won fair and square, but now we'll never know.

In an EDITORIAL today Investors Business Daily assesses the terrible damage the JournoList cabal did to America. They are dead on-correct in virtually every word they print:

There are so many things wrong with this, we hardly know where to start. Nominally competitors, these supposedly impartial media mavens colluded in a way that would put airline or insurance officials in the dock for anti-competitive practices. They engaged in activism instead of fact-finding and mixed incestuously with activists whom they also should have been covering impartially.

Worst of all, they deprived millions of Americans of the information they needed to size up this new face on the political scene and determine if she really was a candidate who represented their interests.

That still remains to be done — and the country is poorer for it.

I'll leave you with Anderson Cooper's on air discussion of Journalism. While he himself has often failed to live up to the standards, it's till good to hear him recite then to remind us of what we've lost.