Who is Barack Obama? I don’t know, the media doesn’t, do you?
October 28, 2008 by PUMA Pundit
Can you say Barack Obama is the Manchurian Candidate? I can… Well, let’s look at the first story coming from the Los Angeles Times
One of the striking ironies is that a man who draws tens of thousands of people to his rallies, whose charisma is likened to that of John F. Kennedy, can be sort of a bore.
Discipline is essential for candidates who want to drive home a consistent message, or avoid the self-sabotage that comes with a careless answer. A steely perseverance helps explain why Obama at this point stands a better than even chance of becoming the 44th president. But when you’re exposed to the guy 18 hours a day, it’s a bit maddening. You want him to loosen up.
I’ve watched Obama demonstrate a soccer kick to his daughter in Chicago; devour a cheesesteak in Philly; navigate a roller rink in Indiana; drive a bumper car; and catapult 125 feet in the air on an amusement-park ride called “Big Ben.” He’s done it all with dogged professionalism, but with little show of spontaneity. After all this time with him, I still can’t say with certainty who he is.
So, the only stuff we do know about Obama is that he is a neo-Marxist (and that’s using the term lightly), we know nothing else, and neither do the people who cover him for the media. Can America truly afford to put such an individual in the White House? Erm, I think not…
Now let’s look at this editorial posted at ABCNEWS by Michael S. Malone:
The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game — with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer,” because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.
and then it gets more interesting:
No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side — or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.
If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.
That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer — when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
and then comes Joe the Plumber
The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.
Middle America, even when they didn’t agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.
but why is all this happening?
Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.
In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.
And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.
With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.
Posted by PUMA Pundit
John F. kennedy sould be trembling in his tomb hearing the stuff this Obama boy is doing to his party. JFK was an ultra anti socialism president. Obama is nothing like Kennedy. Kennedy was a democrat, free market, capitalist, Christian leader, not a closet muslim who wants to bring fascist Marxism to this country.
Well, hats off to the journalist for living up to his name. Although it would be nice to believe that all journalists could examine their ethics, adjust their goals, and adhere to principles, I have little hope. First of all, television is all about ratings, not truth or information. Second, the anchors have been so consumed with their own egos and agendas, that the “message” has been lost in its “messenger.” Third, the anchors one sees on television lately are rude to the guests they interview. The interview is not conducted to “learn” something, but merely to “prove” something, usually that the anchor is right and superior, and that the “guest” is wrong and inferior.
I have turned my television off to the “MSM.” I watch the Weather Channel, when necessary, and “Law and Order” when I wish. Otherwise, I get my news from the internet, where I do not have to hear or see but can always click off the “journalist.”
To the “Third Estate,” I would like to say “Where were you when we needed you?” “How did this election become “all about you, but not about us”? “What do you think your college professors think when they see you abandon every decent precept they taught you about responsibility and duty?” “Do you remember your early idealism to seek objectivity, truth, and justice?” “When did money become more important than being good…really good…as in admired and trusted by your viewers and fellow journalists?” I am old enough to remember Walter Cronkite. You people pale in comparison to him. You are simply empty suits inflated by your own sense of importance. However, in the end, I feel sorry for you, because your lives have been “full of sound and fury/signifying nothing.” (To quote Shakespeare).
First, I just stumbled on your site. Fantastic. My husband and I left the DNC several years ago for many of the same reasons you guys have left this year. We lived in what we expats call the People’s Republic of Vermont. We got an advance look at what the far left wing of the party was up to. We had one Democratic “representative” who didn’t believe people should own property…she was not alone.
I am so dismayed that so many people in our country have accepted Obama; he has no experience, nothing other than a charismatic communication style. So many in the country are acting like star struck teenagers. The man has so many skeletons in the closet and now we’re being told there are more. I doubt the LA Times will ever release the tape, but they should release a transcript.
I am not turning my TV on at all. Can you image Obama talking for 1/2 hour about himself. Yikes.