Gwen Ifill And Mainstream Media Corruption

Has the term “journalistic ethics” become oxymoronic? When I read Wednesday that Gwen Ifill was to serve as moderator for Thursday’s vice presidential debate, I decided that it had. Ms Ifill has a book due to arrive in bookstores on January 20, 2009, not coincidentally the date when a new president will be inaugurated. The book’s title is “Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” Aside from the glaring political bias conveyed by the book’s title, how’s that book going to sell if John McCain is sworn in on that date?

Gwen Ifill doesn’t just have a political interest in the outcome of the election, but a fiduciary interest. Although she and her colleagues are doing all that they can to prevent it, it remains possible that January 20th will usher in the age of McCain and Palin. Does it matter that she has quite a chunk of change riding on the outcome? Former National Basketball Association referee Tim Donaghy is in prison for profiting from the outcome of games he officiated. Baseball’s all-time hits leader, Pete Rose is banned from baseball and the Hall of Fame because he placed bets on the Cincinnati Reds when he was the manager. Gwen Ifill has a large bet riding on the outcome of the election. And she has placed her bet on Obama. If only we could take choosing the leader of the world’s only superpower as seriously as we take sports.

Gwen Ifill isn’t unique. It’s old news that George Stephanopolous and the late Tim Russert moved directly from partisan Democratic Party politics to journalism. Move along, move along. No conflict there. And NBC’s Andrea Mitchell’s marriage to Alan Greenspan has not prevented her from reporting on the financial crisis, even though her husband bears a considerable share of the blame. The same goes for NBC’s David Gregory, who is married to Beth Wilkinson. Until very recently, Beth Wilkinson was the general counsel, executive vice president and corporate secretary for Fannie Mae. You don’t suppose that colors his reporting do you? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to come home and find his key no longer fits the locks. Going back to sports, this is like trusting East German and Soviet figure skating judges. Unfortunately, we can’t toss out the highest and lowest scores.

This is why the mainstream media are doomed. They have become thoroughly corrupted by their monopoly. In the evolving world of the new media, they must earn trust, and yet they flagrantly violate that trust. Like Dan Rather, they think that they can still win our trust with a grave expression and a rich timbre. While the media swarm all over Wasilla and Juneau, Alaska looking for every speck of dirt on Sarah Palin, only one, Stanley Kurtz of National Review, has bothered to travel to the University of Illinois, Chicago library to peruse the records of Barack Obama’s only significant executive experience, as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Even if the press were incurious before Stanley Kurtz’s investigation, they should have been drawn to the flashing red lights when the university denied access to those records. What were they trying to hide? Who were they protecting? Inquiring minds want to know. But there were no inquiring minds at NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or anywhere else.

Once he finally gained access to the files, Kurtz tried to discuss his discoveries on a Chicago radio program. The Obama campaign instructed its drones to overwhelm the station’s telephone lines and e-mail. David Freddoso had a similar experience when he was invited to appear on the same Chicago radio program to discuss his book, “The Case Against Barack Obama.” Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.

In Missouri, Barack Obama encouraged the friendly prosecutors and sheriffs to prosecute his critics. Unless you happened to be in Saint Louis watching KMOW, you didn’t hear about that from the mainstream media.

This is why the mainstream, or fossil, media are doomed. You cannot learn what Stanley Kurtz found in those records by reading or listening to the mainstream media. Obama’s thuggery was scarcely covered by local media in Chicago and Missouri and ignored by the national mainstream media. The Gwen Ifill book story only dribbled into the mainstream media after it was widely disseminated in the new media. They tell us what they want us to know and still believe that they can keep us from learning what we need to know.