Corruption is, oh, so easy! Give a bit here, take a bit there, and before you know it you're up to your nostrils in liquid shit and the Devil's about to roar past on his motorboat. On both sides of the Atlantic the media, that essential pillar of democracy, is grievously, perhaps mortally, wounded. The only difference is that 'over here' it is the vile, scurvy politicians who are inflicting the wounds but 'over there' they are entirely self-inflicted. There could not be a better ilustration of the moral corruption in the American media than a story from that bastion of, er, libral democracy, the New York Times.
All politicians are liars and I don't condemn them all for that fault, not least because, sometimes it is an absolutely essential part of the job description. But when a politician lies not once, not twice, not even thrice but twenty nine times using more or less the exact same words, then that is bordering on the criminal. Thus spake President Obama: 'If you want to keep your healthcare plan then you can'. Needless to say, you can't! Had President George W. Bush uttered those words even once! and then been caught out the MSM would have been screeching from the highest hill. If he had repeated it 29 times they would have been howling for his impeachment. But when Obama says it and it is proven to be an outright lie, here is what the NYT manages to squeeze between its clenched teeth:
Congressional Republicans have stoked consumer fears and confusion with
charges that the health care reform law is causing insurers to cancel existing
policies and will force many people to pay substantially higher premiums next
year for coverage they don’t want. That, they say, violates President Obama’s
pledge that if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it. Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that. [My emphasis]
Following the veritable shit storm that arose over that rank piece of mealy-mouthed pap, the matter was taken up by the NYT's own so-called 'Public Editor' whose job it is to represent readers' views, so:
On Monday, I asked the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, about the wording.
“We have a high threshold for whether someone lied,” he told me. The phrase
that The Times used “means that he said something that wasn’t true.” Saying the
president lied would have meant something different, Mr. Rosenthal said — that
he knew it was false and intended to express the falsehood. “We don’t know
that,” he said. [My emphasis]
Well, Mr. Rosenthal might not have known that, after all he's so busy editing the NYT he probably hasn't had the time to read anyone else's paper, but the rest of us knew it was a lie almost from his first utterence, let alone the twenty-ninth! The report ends thus:
Wouldn’t it have been better, I asked Mr. Rosenthal, if the editorial had
said that Mr. Obama’s statements “clearly weren’t true,” or that the president
“was clearly wrong” when he repeatedly made those statements?
He responded that the editorial’s language was fine, but he also allowed, “We
could have done that.”
If Mr. Rosenthal had a ounce of honor and honesty in his entire body he would just jack it in and go take the sinecure in the White House that has probably been offered to him.
