October 29th 2008
Media Bias #101
WaPo Excuses Obama As It Breaks Bad Donations Story
With the media asleep at the wheel, this election has seen the blogosphere (and some magazines) doing the job of the MSM in investigating Obama. Wright, Ayres, socialist leanings … all have been well reported in the blogs well before the media has turned its attention to them.
Now it’s happened again with Obama’s shameful and dishonest on-line donations system. After batting around the blogosphere for a couple weeks, the Washington Post finally got around to reporting on it this morning – on page 2, not page 1:
Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.
I would have used “admitted,” but WaPo chose the more sterile “confirmed,” but the paper pretty much gets through one paragraph OK. Then objectivity ends:
Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.
The Obama organization said its extensive review has ensured that the campaign has refunded any improper contributions, and noted that Federal Election Commission rules do not require front-end screening of donations.
“Faced with a huge influx of donations” is the Obama excuse, and it takes WaPo just 43 words to give the campaign a pass for its near-criminal behavior. The theme continues hot and heavy throughout the reporting – but it’s a fake. High volume internet sales operations are able to follow correct procedures, and there’s not excuse for the Obama campaign not doing the same. Note also that the aides are “acknowledging;” they’re still not “admitting,” and that the report is piling on the excuses heavy, with later scrutinization and FEC regs.
Even WaPo can’t keep its face straight forever and finally, after the jump, it admits that the Obama excuse is a fraud:
Juan Proaño, whose technology firm handled online contributions for John Edwards’s [sic] presidential primary campaign, and for John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2004, said it is possible to require donors’ names and addresses to match those on their credit card accounts. But, he said, some campaigns are reluctant to impose that extra layer of security.
It takes nine paragraphs for WaPo to reveal how bad the fraud is:
The Obama team’s disclosures came in response to questions from The Washington Post about the case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Mo., who turned up on Obama’s FEC reports as having donated $174,800 to the campaign. Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election.
Biskup, who had scores of Obama contributions attributed to her, said in an interview that she never donated to the candidate. “That’s an error,” she said. Moreover, she added, her credit card was never billed for the donations, meaning someone appropriated her name and made the contributions with another card.
Mary T. Biskup would have been the lead if it was the McCain campaign that was behaving in such a renegade manner.
It takes 17 paragraphs (and a jump) for WaPo to admit that the McCain campaign, unlike Obama’s, has security measures in place – but the scoundrels preface that news with two paragraphs about bad contributions slipping through – without ever comparing the scale!
Do you think for one moment this would have been the tone of the piece were the campaigns reversed?
Media Bias 2008 covers pro-Obama media bias. 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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October 29th, 2008 at 8:07 am
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