July 29th 2008
Media Bias #24
The Landsduhl Chronicles
On July 24, Barack Obama went to a Berlin gym to work out his arm and leg muscles instead of visiting soldiers who lost their arms and legs fighting for America and were recuperating at near-by the Landsduhl military hospital. The news immediately lit up the new media - but not the news media. It took until July 28th for the NY Times to finally got around to covering it through its routine coverage of campaign ads. The NYT story was a shameless cover-up for Obama’s actions, which I fisked here.
Bad as it was, the NYT’s story was among the first comprehensive MSM stories on Obama’s Landsduhl disaster. Nearly all the short list of stories I found in a Nexis search similarly focused on the McCain ad, which I think explains why the story got the few dozen Nexis hits it got. Papers that have been routinely covering campaign ads were forced to cover the new ad, and it was usually their only coverage of the Landsduhl story.
A stellar example of the media’s egregious ignoring of this significant news story is a July 27 story by Dan Balz story in WaPo, Embraced overseas but to what effect? The story is full of Obama glory copy like this:
John Weaver, who once was McCain’s top political strategist, said his old boss made a big mistake by virtually daring Obama to go to Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki generally embrace the Democrat’s plan for withdrawing combat forces when he went there.
“McCain lost the week badly, let’s be honest,” Weaver said in a message on Friday. “John [McCain] is still in striking distance, thanks to his own character, biography and memories of the McCain of previous election cycles. But he cannot afford another week like this one.”
That quote and the rest of the story was published, remember, on the 27th, when the Landsduhl story was full-blown in the blogosphere and on talk radio. Weaver probably gave Balz quote a couple days earlier and would have happily re-cast it if given the opportunity.
And how did Balz treat Landsduhl in his big wrap-up story? We skip through 26 paragraphs before the word finally appears in paragraph 27 of the 32-paragraph story.
Today we know that Landsduhl is the take-away memory most Americans have from the Obama the Globetrotter tour. The media, protective as they are of their candidate, haven’t seemed to notice.
Media Bias 2008 will cover pro-Obama media bias all the way up to the election. Items are listed from most recent to oldest; the numbering reflects this and is not a ranking. Send Media Bias 2008 examples via “comments”‘ below, or to email2laer [@] yahoo [dot] com.
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