The Most Interesting Thing About The Van Jones’ Debacle…

…is not that Obama would hire a man like Jones, who is an ultra Left-Wing wack job.

It’s also not that Obama steered clear of the whole brouhaha while Jones resigned at midnight on a Saturday over Labor Day week-end.

Nor is it the fact that from what I have seen on the Left, very few of them think Jones did anything wrong at all. That rises to the level of noteworthy because of what it says about how fringe the “mainstream” Left has become.

However, the real story is the way the mainstream media handled the whole issue. From Byron York:

Coverage of the Jones controversy was a case study of some of the deep divisions within the media. Fox News’ Glenn Beck devoted program after program to Jones’ past, and a number of conservative blogs were responsible for finding some of Jones’ most inflammatory statements. Yet even as the controversy grew — and even after Jones himself apologized for some of his words — several of the nation’s top media outlets failed to report the story. As late as Friday, as the Jones matter began to boil over, it had not been reported at all in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Although the Post and CBS went on to report the Jones story on Saturday, the Times did not inform its readers about the Jones matter until after Jones resigned.

There was a time when the mainstream media leaned to the Left, but made a sincere effort to at least APPEAR fair. Then, they moved on from there to being strongly biased to the Left and now, they’ve become fully servile to the Democratic Party.

Every story is now reported differently based on whether a Republican or Democrat is involved. Had George Bush had a Van Jones type wacko in his administration, it would have led to weeks of screaming page one headlines and indignant calls for his resignation from the very same papers that were completely silent about Jones until he resigned.

Ponder that, folks. We had a member of the Obama administration ensnared in a controversy so damaging that he had to resign and if you read the New York Times, whose logo is “All The News That’s Fit to Print,” you never heard a word about it until Jones was toast. You could read Right Wing News and find out all about Jones. You could watch Fox. You could listen to talk radio. Heck, Van Jones was even a Twitter “Trending Topic” at one point, but if you got your news from the New York Times, you knew nothing about it.

This is not the first time this has happened either. Remember the media’s Rielle Hunter debacle? This is from RWN in August of last year,

Yesterday, a day when the Olympics began and Russia may have started a war with Georgia, the hot story of the day actually turned out to be John Edwards’ affair with Rielle Hunter:

If you’ve been reading the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, you first heard about the John Edwards affair yesterday. On the other hand, if you read Right Wing News and the rest of the blogosphere, you first heard the name Rielle Hunter back in October of last year and then learned that Edwards had been caught at a hotel with her two weeks ago.

What it comes down to is that you simply cannot read a story in the New York Times or listen to ABC and have confidence that they will actually give you the full story. Next, cut to the media talking heads puzzling over why no one trusts the mainstream media anymore and their market share is declining so precipitously.

On the upside, if the mainstream media actually did their job and gave complete, unbiased coverage of the news, people like me wouldn’t be able to make a living blogging. So, I suppose that I should be grateful.

PS: Since it’s Labor Day and so many people are going to be away from their computer, enjoying that last gasp of summer, I’m only doing one post today.

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