Written By : John Hawkins

There’s a reason talk radio, Fox, and the blogosphere have taken off in recent years: it’s because the mainstream media in this country is largely comprised of left-wing hacks who view their jobs, first and foremost, as promoting liberalism, not reporting the news.

If you want yet more proof of that, look at this blockbuster story that has been broken by Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. It’s about how the lefties on Journolist, a liberal media listserv, planned to make sure that Obama’s inconvenient 20 year association with a radical, racist, anti-white, anti-Semitic reverend didn’t get in the way of his historic run at the presidency. So, they got together and plotted how to craft the news about Jeremiah Wright,

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

…According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

…In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

“Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on,” Tomasky continued. “We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”

…Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list.

The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, “It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.”

Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. “All this hand wringing about just
how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going.”

“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote.

Know what this is, folks? It’s a peek behind the curtain. You don’t think they bury stories that hurt the candidates they like at CNN? You don’t think Democrats make phony allegations of racism to distract people? That’s pretty much all allegations of racism in politics are these days: an effort to smear their enemies and distract the American people. You think there’s a difference between the way the people at the New York Times feel about America and the way that Chris Hayes from the Nation talked about America?

This is what journalism is to the Left, it’s why newspapers are dying, it’s why the public doesn’t trust the mainstream media, and it’s fantastic that people are finally getting an opportunity to see it in action.

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