Beacon Street Journal

As some commentators have noted, 2008 will go down as the year American journalism died. For, there has been an astounding disinterestedness on the part of the mainstream media in performing the traditional role of journalism in a presidential election: informing the public about the respective candidates. When it comes to the candidacy of Barack Obama, there has been a remarkable insouciance about Obama’s past associations, as well as those aspects of his experience and his record — limited as it is — that are wholly inconsistent with the carefully crafted image or mythologizing created by his campaign.

When asked about his association with William Ayers in one of the primary debates over six months ago, Obama responded that he was just a “guy in the neighborhood.” Yet, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary indicating his involvement with Ayers was much more involved and substantial than he disclosed, Obama’s answer at the debate was, for most journalists, complete and sufficient to preclude any further inquiry.

The same conspiracy of silence surrounds Obama’s long history of involvement with ACORN, the community organizing group that has been currently engaged in fraudulent voter registration drives around the country, and whose previous mission was agitating against banks to force them to give mortgages to low-income people who were bad credit risks. You would think that given the role of these organizations in helping to create the sub-prime mortgage crisis that is now engulfing the nation, it would raise the eyebrows of inquiring journalists, whose supposed stock in trade is a stubborn probing for the truth. Alas, like the Ayers story, the nefarious activities of ACORN has induced a collective yawn on the part of the media. Any interest on the part of the press in investigating reports that Obama, in 1996, was a member of the Chicago “New Party”, a socialist organization?

All of this journalistic malpractice that has been reflected in the disparate coverage and reporting between the two candidates can be explained best if one views the role of most journalists in this election cycle as that of narrators instead of reporters. Reporting of facts, however unpleasant or potentially harmful to Obama matter in one role; these same facts will seldom — if ever — be disclosed to the public in the other.

The adopted narrative for Obama is as follows: The multicultural, biracial Barack Obama overcomes great adversity and discrimination (unsubstantiated), graduates from Harvard Law School, bestows his great gifts as a “unifier” on the South Side of Chicago as a “community organizer” (ACORN anyone?) and is perfectly positioned, given his skills of bringing people together (unsubstantiated), of being the country’s first (long overdue) black president. His election will be a resounding benefit to the nation, as it will have a healing, ameliorative effect, and it will forever erase the stain of the country’s racist past. Obama represents a “new kind of politics” and he is a “new kind of politician.”

Consistent with this narrative, in this election, most print and broadcast journalists repeat the same drivel in unison, and with mind-numbing regularity: despite his recent statement that he wished he had done more in the way of bombings, William Ayers is a “former” terrorist. Despite his hanging out for twenty years with a virulently racist, anti-American pastor, who doesn’t have a lot of nice things to say about white people, Barack Obama is the “post-racial” candidate. Despite throwing under the bus with ruthless expediency, his pastor, the grandmother who raised him, and Father Pfleger, Obama is somehow the practitioner of the “new politics.”

Impervious to reality, the mendicant chants of the press corps — all members of the Order of Obama — go on and on. Every talking point from Obama headquarters is passed on, unfiltered and unexamined, as if it were gospel, to the masses, who may not know it, but whose solemn duty it is to elect Barack Obama as penance for the nation’s past racial sins. As such, for the media, facts can never be allowed to get in the way with the sheer nobility of such an enterprise.

The narrative is replete with all of the sacred icons of liberalism: it’s love of multiculturalism, its unabashed belief in the virtues of affirmative action, and, that at bottom, America is an irredeemably racist country. If inconvenient and incompatible facts don’t fit the narrative, they simply aren’t reported; if anyone raises these unpleasantries, he is accused of racism. Thus, since the narrative is inviolate, any genuine and informative political conversation concerning Obama is terminated, and the story, or Obama myth, remains intact.

The fervent and ubiquitous cries of “racism” that have permeated the presidential campaign from Obama surrogates, in response to any criticism of the New Messiah, to objective minds, have a sort of boy-who-cried-wolf quality about them, yet to true believers in the press, such incendiary and absurd comments are perfectly consistent with the adopted narrative. Thus, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid informs us that to tie Obama with former Fannie Mae president, Franklin Raines is racist, because both are black. So too, was the farce played out on cable TV recently, listening to some commentators breathlessly searching for a racist sub-text to McCain’s addressing Obama at the debate as “That One.”

Since members of the press overwhelmingly are cut from the same ideological cloth of Democratic Party liberalism, there is no critical examination of the assumptions that form the basis of the narrative. Indeed, many members of the press see the election of Barack Obama as a moral imperative and they overlook or justify their glaring bias by comforting themselves that they are being good soldiers in the Holy Crusade. Be that as it may, in the process, they have debased their standing as journalists and have become nothing more than unabashed Obama advocates.

Election 2008 has demonstrated what the public already knows: the media has been in the tank for Barack Obama. The price for this abrogation of journalistic standards is that the credibility of the media will erode— if such a thing is possible — even further than it has already plummeted.