One of the most striking examples of media dishonesty and political motivation occured in the 2008 presidential elections. News and views that did not favor candidate Obama were supressed and few if any opposing voices were allowed. This is a microcosm of the media in general anywhere in the world. A media outlet can easily act in unison with a politican or group with a radical agenda and usually favors left wing causes.
One can find clear parallels in the behavior of the Austrian media presently. I often read various Austrian news. One finds constantly stories promoting mass immigration. On besides stories promoting mass immigration we find stories attacking deceased politician Jorg Haider ? There are not views critical of mass immigration presented ?. This points to deception on the part of the Austrian media. I hope the Austrians shall be wise this time and not gullible like we Americans were.
'Call Them Racists' How "journolists" tried to suppress the news.
By JAMES TARANTO - Wall Street Journal
(We'll be away on assignment tomorrow, returning Thursday.)
The "Journolist" scandal has deepened with new revelations that participants in the now-defunct email list for ideologically approved journalists--no conservatives allowed--engaged in efforts to suppress news damaging to then-candidate Barack Obama.
The Daily Caller reports ABC News's "tough questioning" of Obama at a 2008 debate with Hillary Clinton "left many of [the Journolist participants] outraged":
"George [Stephanopoulos]," fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is "being a disgusting little rat snake."
Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.
Most damning is a long quote from a Spencer Ackerman, who worked for something called the Washington Independent:
I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It's not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright's defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them--Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares--and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.
Smashing somebody's [sic] through a plate-glass window seems like an odd way to thread a needle, but atrocious prose is the least of the problems here. The problem here isn't bias, either. Assuming Ackerman was an opinion writer rather than a straight-news reporter, he was entitled not only to hold his opinions but to express them.
But Ackerman was not engaging in a public debate; he was privately strategizing about how to suppress the news. And his fellow journolists, while disagreeing with him, did so "only on strategic grounds":
"Spencer, you're wrong," wrote Mark Schmitt, now an editor at the American Prospect. "Calling Fred Barnes a racist doesn't further the argument, and not just because Juan Williams is his new black friend, but because that makes it all about character. The goal is to get to the point where you can contrast some _thing_--Obama's substantive agenda--with this crap." . . .
Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman's strategy. "I think it's worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he's trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he's not going [to] change the way politics works?"
But it was Ackerman who had the last word. "Kevin, I'm not saying OBAMA should do this. I'm saying WE should do this
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703724104575379200412040286.html?mod=WSJ_article_related
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