The liberal media blandly accept the White House’s totally unbelievable Joe Sestak story

In today’s New York Times is an article on Rahm Emanuel’s past relationship with Rep. Joe Sestak and how Emanuel helped launch Sestak’s political career in 2006, with an assist from former president Clinton. The information helps fill in the background of the beyond-weird Sestak saga. But the piece, by Peter Baker, simply takes for granted the White House’s official story that the only thing offered to Sestak in exchange for his dropping out of the U.S. Senate race was an unpaid seat on some government advisory board. Baker doesn’t even acknowledge how unlikely, not to say how unbelievable, the story is. This is the mark of a Soviet-like mindset and manipulation of opinion, in which the media collude with the government in treating palpable falsehoods—or, as in this case, what strongly appears to be a palpable falsehood—as simply the truth.

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Along the same lines, see the Washington Post’s editorial, “White House transparency could have ended Sestak ‘scandal’.” The only wrong the Post sees in the affair is the weeks-long White House refusal to answer questions, which made it seem like a scandal, which, of course, it wasn’t. Apart from that little wrist slapping, the Post accepts the White House’s story and does not even hint at how questionable it is. The commenters at the Post are overwhelmingly contemptuous of the editorial.

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Rick Darby writes:

The state-controlled print media (NY Times and Washington Post) have spoken. Obama’s other print media spaniel, USA Today, will surely fall in line on Monday. Every news broadcast network, with the possible exception of Fox News, will write it off as a tempest in a teacup and consign it to oblivion. Soon anyone who refers to it will be classed with the “lunatic fringe.”

Sestak’s “clarification” is prima facie suspicious. If the truth was this trivial, why didn’t he set the record straight for months as the controversy heated up? Just as this was beginning to draw comparisons to Watergate, Sestak crumpled. He must have received a message he couldn’t ignore.

But even that is not as alarming as the sickening spectacle of a leftist, compliant media establishment.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 29, 2010 07:44 AM | Send