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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jonah Goldberg
If you want to understand why conservatives have lost faith in the so-called mainstream media, you need to ponder the question: Where is the Benghazi feeding frenzy?
Unlike some of my colleagues on the right, I don't think there's a conspiracy at work. Rather, I think journalists tend to act on their instincts (some even brag about this; you could look it up). And, collectively, the mainstream media's instincts run liberal, making groupthink inevitable.
In 2000, a Democratic operative orchestrated an "October surprise" attack on George W. Bush, revealing that 24 years earlier, he'd been arrested for drunk driving. The media went into a feeding frenzy. "Is all the 24-hour coverage of Bush's 24-year-old DUI arrest the product of a liberal media almost drunk on the idea of sinking him, or is it a legitimate, indeed unavoidable news story?" asked Howard Kurtz in a segment for his
One could go on and on. In September 2004, former
To be sure, there have been conservative feeding frenzies: about Barack Obama's pastor, John Kerry's embellishments of his war record, etc. But the mainstream media usually has tasked itself with the duty of debunking and dispelling such "hysteria."
If true, the
This isn't an "October surprise" foisted on the media by opposition research; it's news.
This story raises precisely the sort of "big issues" the media routinely claim elections should be about. For instance, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week that the "basic principle is that you don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on, without having some real-time information about what's taking place." If real-time video of the attack and communications with Americans on the ground begging for assistance doesn't constitute "real-time information," what does?
This is not to say that
On Oct. 28, of the five Sunday news shows, only "Fox News Sunday" treated this as a major story. On the other four, the issue came up only when Republicans mentioned it. Tellingly, on
Gregory never did get back to Benghazi. But he saved plenty of time to dive deep into the question of what Indiana U.S.
I am willing to believe that journalists like Gregory are sincere in their desire to play it straight. But among those who don't share his instincts, it's hard to distinguish between conspiracy and groupthink. Indeed, it's hard to think why one should even bother trying to make that distinction at all.
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Benghazi -- No Mere 'October surprise' | Politics
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