TONY'S FURY

Posted at 6:58 a.m. ET

Readers of Urgent Agenda know that I respect the work of Washington columnist Tony Blankley.  He is thoughtful, informed, and measured.  He is rarely angry.

Today he's angry, and for good reason.  Like so many of us, he's had it with the press coverage of this campaign.  All you need to do is look at the coverage of Sarah Palin as opposed to Joe Biden to see the extent of the bias.  Sarah conducts herself with dignity and class.  Joe can't open his mouth without making a fool of himself.  And Biden is considered by the media the "qualified" candidate.

Blankley lays out the indictment:

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.

While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)

The consequences of this can be catastrophic.

And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs -- the press. The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.

Compare please with the sending of battalions of "journalists" to Alaska to detail every day in the life of Sarah Palin.

The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Web sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. You don't see Obama's ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the U.N. Nor his whining and puerile "come on" when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples, not Cronkite's.

Well, I guess Tony won't get that VIP tour of The New York Times.

But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama's life that are not reported at all. The major media simply have not reported on Obama's two years at New York's Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. Later, they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Ayers.

Oh, the red-baiting.  Tony, join the sophisticates and stop asking penetrating questions.  Be more establishment, Tony.

Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Obama's rise in Chicago politics. How did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley?

He must have licked envelopes and run doorbells very well.  Can't you give the man credit, Tony?

The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.

Perhaps that is why the National Journal's respected correspondent Stuart Taylor wrote, "The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis."

Taylor also was one of the few to expose the Duke University lacrosse case hoax.  Dangerous man, that Taylor.  No VIP tour for him, either.

The public will be voting based on the idealized image of the man who never was. If he wins, however, we will be governed by the sunken, cynical man Obama really is. One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street's leaders currently are for their failings.

Their response will be to wave the First Amendment flag and "move on," which is the mantra of their age.

Excellent column.       

September 24, 2008.