Transterrestrial Musings

…of the Mainstream Media:

The big question now is how many of the liberal media will return to form as this process unfolds itself with more whistleblowers emerging, and with documents subpoenaed and witnesses put under oath over the coming months. To be sure some already have reverted to their default position of excuse-making support, floating rationalizations to minimize the damage: Obama is too remote and disconnected (even, it may even be intimated as a fallback concession, a bit lazy what with all that golf and partying) to have actively instigated these shocks.

This would be the face-saving option for both Obama and the journalists who wish to remain invested in his cause, albeit at lower intensity now that they have conceded incompetence and perhaps sloth. He has disappointed them a little, but any overestimation they may have engaged in was out of the best of motives.

But others will take a different tack. Having devoted five plus years to the narrative of Obama the good, they will be ready to follow a new story line now, because it has the ultimate virtue in the news business: it is new. If the special committees which will investigate the scandals do their job, there will many veins to mine in uncovering and telling the stories of wrongdoing. In the 1970s, nobody made a good career move defending the Nixon administration’s use of the IRS against its opponents, after all.

It will be fascinating to see how they respond.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Some in the media have apologized to the Tea Partiers for not taking their concerns seriously:

“One of the guys said, ‘I’m sitting here looking at what you sent me last year and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t cover,’ and I said ‘I understand, this is so surreal, we didn’t know what we were dealing with,’” Zawistowski said.

Well, he should be embarrassed. They all should be. And an apology is the very least they could do after all of the lies and calumny that have been raining down on people who just wanted to see a return to Constitutional government. If they want to apologize, the best way to do it would be to start doing their damned jobs and stop carrying water for these incompetent thugs.

And they should follow the advice of Bob Woodward (and apologize to him, too):

I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed. You look at the hydraulic pressure that was in the system to not tell the truth, and, you know, we use this term and the government uses this term, talking points. Talking points, as we know, are like legal briefs. They’re an argument on one side. What we need to get rid of talking point and they need to put out statements or papers that are truth documents.

Don’t expect that from this gang. The media needs to learn that when it comes to Obama and the Democrats, they should not trust, and and they have verify everything.

He’s not only the best gun salesman in history, but he’s apparently selling conservatism, too:

If these scandals are indeed affecting the ideological landscape, this is bad news for liberals. It’s not just that the opposite ideology is getting some help from government bunglers, but the media is exacerbating the problem. Liberals believe that there is a role for government to play in mediating market failures, and there are plenty of stories of areas where the safety net is thinning as a result of sequestration—from cancer treatments to Head Start to Meals-on-Wheels—where government should step in. But those stories get lost in the scandal coverage of an administration, making it look like conservatives fundamentally understand something that liberals do not.

You don’t say.