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PrintJune 28, 2010
Finding Democrats in News Stories
Kwame Kilpatrick, Mayor of Detroit for most of this decade, was indicted on June 23 for fraud and tax crimes. This news story was picked up by all the leftist establishment media and all these media outlets left out one crucial fact: Kwame Kilpatrick is a Democrat. The New York Times ran a twelve paragraph piece about Kilpatrick on May 25, 2010 which never mentioned Kilpatrick's political party. The same day, the Los Angeles Time had a six paragraph online story which failed to mention Kilpatrick's party affiliation. On June 23 or June 24, USA Today, ABC News, CNN, CBS News, and MSNBC all ran their own stories about the indictment of Kilpatrick. None of these said anything about him being a Democrat.
Was Kilpatrick's political affiliation unimportant? No. Kilpatrick's mother is a very leftist seven term congresswoman who belongs to the Progressive Congressional Caucus. Kwame Kilpatrick got his first break in politics when fellow Democrats in the Michigan House of Representative chose him as their floor leaders. At one point, before the avalanche of corruption came to light, Kilpatrick was considered a rising star in the Democratic Party, rather like Barack Obama. Kilpatrick was emphatically a Democrat, and a leftist Democrat as well.
The same sort of eerie Stalinist purging of critical facts appears in the trial of Rod Blagojevich. ABC News has a story on June 18, 2010 which never mentions once that Blagojevich is a Democrat. The New York Times on June 21 had a sixteen paragraph article about the corruption trial without once mentioning that Blagojevich was a Democrat. CBS News on June 10 ran a story ran a twenty-one paragraph story about the trial, again without mentioning his political affiliation once. The Los Angeles Times on June 19 also had a long story about Blagojevich, who apparently has no party affiliation. The MSNBC story on June 21 also omitted to mention that Blagojevich was a Democrat.
Is that because the leftist establishment media believes that the political party of a public figure caught in scandal is unimportant? No: one year ago almost to the day, Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina was discovered in an affair with an Argentine woman. CNN on June 24, 2009 mentioned twice in a short post that Sanford was a Republican. CBS News the same day noted Sanford's political party four times as did MSNBC. The New York Times in a long story discussed on Sanford touched on his Republican affiliation five times. The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and ABC News also each mentioned Sanford's party affiliation in their stories on his scandalous affair.
What makes this stranger is that all of these stories were all independently written. Sometimes a news service story will have an error or omission, and that will be picked up and replicated because of the rush of news. Not here, though. Except for the scrubbing of "Democrat" from the news story, The New York Times story is different than the ABC News story. The common characteristic is that all the writers of the stories in the establishment leftist media were following some overarching, unwritten rule: creeps who are Republican are "REPUBLICAN!!!!" and those creeps who are Democrats are simply "Kwame" or "Rod."
It is more evidence (if anyone needed it) that the establishment leftist media is conspiratorially working against the public interest in a way far greater than ever suggested in the "Seven Sisters" of the oil industry years ago or in any other trust of big corporations in America. CBS News will not really compete with CNN or with MSNBC or ABC News and they will not compete with CBS. Any huge news corporation actually interested in "scooping" news competitors would report that all its competitors were leaving out crucially important facts from stories. (Actually, of course, this is the key to the success of Fox News -- it is not conservative, but rather it is not drunk with leftism.)
Sometimes the effort to conceal the "D" in front of a corrupt politician can get almost other worldly, as I noted in an article seven years ago. In 2003, a CNN local affiliate posted a story in which Governor Patton of Kentucky, embroiled in a steamy, nasty scandal, was identified as a Democrat campaigning for other Democrats. Two hours later national CNN political correspondence scrubbed the "Democrat" from Governor Patton and an in its "Inside Politics" commentary omitted any mention of his party affiliation. (Wouldn't his party affiliation be particularly important for the Inside Politics section? One would suppose.)
Rush Limbaugh, when former Congressman William Jefferson was found to have fistfuls of "cold" cash in his freezer, began deliberately to call him "Congressman William Jefferson, Democrat Louisiana." Rush, again, was doing work that the establishment leftist media would not. Editing of news stories is the prerogative of a free press. When the editing is lockstep and biased, then we should see that the giants of the news media are not really free at all. These big corporations are simply organs of the Democratic Party, big monopolistic groups whose machinations against our interests never trouble Democrats at all.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
