Posted on 11/09/2015 1:53:36 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
It's been less than two weeks since CNBC's train wreck of a debate exposed just how much of a double standard the mainstream media can have against GOP presidential candidates.
Now a new example comes in the attack on Ben Carson for saying in his autobiography that he was offered a full scholarship to West Point. In a news conference on Friday, Carson said the offer from Army officials was informal and he never in fact applied to the military academy, which is how he described it in his book Gifted Hands, first published in 1990:
I was offered a full scholarship to West Point. I didn't refuse the scholarship outright, but I let them know a military career wasn't where I saw myself going. . . . As overjoyed as I felt to be offered such a scholarship, I wasn't really tempted. . . . I wanted to be a doctor. . . . Each college required a ten-dollar non-returnable entrance fee sent with the application. I had exactly ten, so I could apply to only one.
Carson has also been questioned by CNN about why several people who knew him growing up don't recall that he had exhibited anger or violence. Carson noted that most of the people the media has talked to knew him in high school, and that his last "violent episode" occurred in the ninth grade, before he had a religious conversion. Carson said that he did try to stab someone, "a relative who does not want to be subjected to the media."
But Carson's news conference was most memorable for his willingness to push back against the media:
I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama when he was running. In fact I remember just the opposite. I remember people saying, 'Oh, we won't really talk about that. We won't talk about that relationship. Well, Frank Marshall Davis, well, we don't want to talk about that. Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, well he don't really know him. All the things that Jeremiah Wright was saying, oh, not a big problem.
A reporter responded to Carson's complaint that there was a "desperation on behalf of some" to find some kind of scandal surrounding him by saying, "Our job is to ask questions." Carson paused and said: "There is a fair way to do this and a very unfair way to do this. . . . My job is to call you out when you are unfair." At another point he said: "You are not going to find with me, somebody who will sit back and let you be completely unfair without letting the American people know what is going on. The American people are waking up to these games."
Carson's comments about the media, and his complaints about Barack Obama, were - no surprise - barely reported. But they deserve an airing.
By those standards, Barack Obama was clearly the beneficiary of enormous media forbearance while he ran for president.
When Bob Schieffer retired as host of CBS's Face the Nation last June, he admitted to Howard Kurtz of Fox News: "Maybe we were not skeptical enough. It was a campaign." He added that in his view it is the role of the opponents to "make the campaign" question the records of candidates. I wouldn't want to tell that to Woodward and Bernstein about their coverage of Watergate during the 1972 election.
Just before the 2008 election, Mark Halperin, co-author of the best-selling campaign book Game Change and now a Bloomberg TV host, was asked at a conference if the media had been too soft on Obama. He answered yes and went on to say that through the subtle choice of which stories to cover and where to deploy investigative resources, the national media had handed Obama "hundreds of millions in free publicity."
As I described in 2011:
Halperin attributed the positive coverage in part to the historic nature of Obama's candidacy. But he also noted that only a few hands had gone up in the crowded room when the audience had been asked how many had voted for George W. Bush. "I find it curious that far more time and media energy has been spent on Sarah Palin's time in Wasilla, Alaska's, city government in the last eight weeks than in looking at Barack Obama's dozen years in Chicago politics and government over the last 18 months of his candidacy," he noted dryly. And Ms. Palin was only running for vice president. . . . He called on reporters to look at their 2008 coverage of candidates after the election, in hopes that in the future they will "do a better job treating people equally."
As Ben Carson might say: fat chance of that happening.
It's worth revisiting just how much the media gave Obama a pass in 2008. Take the infamous videos of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's Chicago pastor. Brian Ross's ABC News report on Wright didn't air until March 13, 2008, after more than 40 states had voted in the Democratic nomination contest and Obama needed only 225 delegates to wrap up the race against Hillary Clinton. Ironically, the videos of Wright's speeches had been hiding in plain sight, easily obtainable in the gift store of Wright's church. "After the videos hit, Obama narrowly limped home to the nomination as Hillary outperformed him badly, 302 to 171 in delegates in the final three months," noted media critic Dan Curry earlier this year on his blog, Reverse Spin. If the Wright videos had hit prior to the Iowa caucuses, he says they "would undoubtedly have been devastating and fatal to a largely undefined Barack Obama."
Ironically, the Wright videos had in fact emerged earlier, in February 2007, when Rolling Stone ran a piece called "The Radical Roots of Barack Obama" right before Obama announced his bid for the presidency. The story so rattled the Obama team that they pulled Wright from the speaking roster less than 24 hours before the campaign announcement. But as former CBS News reporter Bernie Goldberg noted, the follow-up coverage on the Wright story was scant and notably apologetic. The story should have prompted full explorations of the Obama-Wright connections. Instead, there was media malpractice.
The media malpractice extended to many other areas of Obama's life.
In October 2007, the New York Times ran an article headlined 'Obama's Account of New York Years Often Differs from What Others Say." It reported that Obama resisted any attempts to reconcile his account in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father with the recollections and records of those who knew him. The Times reported:
Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript, or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate, or friend from those years.
A campaign spokesman, Ben LaBolt, had this explanation for the candidate's silence: "He doesn't remember the names of a lot of people in his life."
Obama was also not willing to part with many of the names of people he knew and did remember, even those of whom he would have had records. His campaign declined to release a list of the approximately 30 clients for whom he worked personally while he was a lawyer with a law firm with close ties to the Daley machine in Chicago. His campaign also concealed and obfuscated relevant facts about Obama's ties to the radical group ACORN - in the 1990s, he had served as a top trainer and lawyer for ACORN.
Jack Cashill, the author of Deconstructing Obama, noted this weekend that Carson was right to point out the media's lack of interest in Frank Marshall Davis, a well-known Communist who was Obama's mentor in Hawaii. Davis wasn't someone whose membership in the Communist party was a youthful indiscretion. He was a member of the party during the Stalin era until he was well into his 40s, and in 1956, Davis even took the Fifth Amendment in front of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.
Obama spent 2,500 words in Dreams from My Father describing Davis's influence on his life, but, before the 2008 election, no mainstream media outlet examined the connection.
But Obama was clearly worried that Marshall's past might haunt Obama in the run-up to this presidential campaign. His publisher said he "personally approved" the audio version of his memoir when it was released in 2005. That version removed all 22 of the book's references to his mentor "Frank."
In 2012, David Maraniss of the Washington Post published a biography of Obama that belatedly discussed Davis as well as the many discrepancies in Obama's account of his life. In his review of the Maraniss book, Buzzfeed's Ben Smith wrote, "I counted 38 instances in which the biographer convincingly disputes significant elements of Obama's own story of his life and his family history." But reporters investigated very few of those discrepancies before the 2008 election.
No one is suggesting that Ben Carson be given a pass on statements he made in his autobiography. Those are fair game. Carson has also at times unfairly lashed out at reporters - he criticized NRO's Jim Geraghty for investigating Carson's speeches and appearance for Mannatech. We should call out Carson for these unfair assaults.
But let's stop pretending that there isn't a glaring double standard in how presidential candidates are treated if they depart from the mainstream media's ideological premises.
As Ben Carson put it in his news conference last Friday: "There is a fair way to do this and a very unfair way to do this."
National Review trying to sneak in under the radar as “not part of the GOPe deception machine.”
This article is very enlightening. If you are a person who believes that this country needs truthful reporting without blatant politicization and bias and if you believe that is simply crucial to the freedom of a nation to have fair media, then you have to be seething over the state of today’s press. Just looking at the double standard tells you all you need to know and that bias and double standard is becoming very dangerous to everything American citizens hold dear. Their very lives are at stake. How very depressing!
Why Republican Candidates Must Always Be Better Than Their Democratic Opponent
Author of Ben Carson Hit Piece: 'I Was In Guantanamo for 12 Hours'
Question should be asked over and over by ALL the candidates.
:origin()/pre06/14b4/th/pre/f/2012/320/d/7/d710e2ef2ebbcdb1d54030e0d60122ce-d5l7kzd.png)
Common sense tells me that the “media” is tasked with
taking out any real competition for Hillary and causing
the GOPe candidate to be nominated and easily defeated.
- Hillary’s “inevitable” don’t ya know? God help us!
“......So why is this happening?
Because the left has seen recent polls showing that Ben Carson has not only the highest ratings among current candidates on the question of honesty and trustworthiness but perhaps the highest ratings ever for any presidential candidate. While Carson finds more than 60 percent of voters believing him to be honest, the opposite is true for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, each of whom have about 60 percent saying they are not honest and trustworthy.
That’s why Hillary-loving Politico and Donald Trump - who tweeted out another typical Trump whopper - “WOW, one of many lies by Ben Carson! Big story” - are on the rampage. Actually, it’s no story at all. But you attack a candidate where he is strong, and that’s what Trump and the media - who seem to take their vetting responsibility much more enthusiastically when it comes to Republicans - are doing by questioning Dr. Carson’s honesty.
Carson is on a knife edge here and much depends on his behavior as well as to whether the media can actually prove a lie; Carson insists there is no lie to find and that “lying is a grave sin.” His press conference performance was fairly solid, righteous indignation just reaching the edge of acceptability, the next step beyond which would be politically comparable to Howard Dean’s campaign-ending scream; that would suit the liberal media just as well.
If no actual fabrications are unearthed - Politico’s overreach (and Donald Trump’s typically outrageous and mean-spirited recasting and exaggeration of Dr. Carson’s childhood story) could make Carson the sympathetic victim. Indeed, Carson predicted that very thing on Friday.”.....
http://spectator.org/articles/64592/politico%E2%80%99s-friday-fabrications
Why is Dr. Carson comparing his treatment with that of Obama? We’re all disgusted with everything Obama has gotten away with and saying “I’m being held to a higher standard” is hardly a defense. Does Dr. Carson expect special treatment, just as Obama received? Look where that got us.
National Review was one of the main periodicals that took the high, noble road about Obama and his qualifications, and spewed venom at anyone who questioned Obama’s then published pathetic little birth certification. National Review can’t criticize anyone over Obama’s lack of vetting.
You must still be asleep with your knee-jerk, mindless hatred of Trump. It is, of course, mindless, because that is probably your mental state. This article is about Ben Carson and the antagonistic press.
To this point dear, you are correct. Trump, in my opinion, made a huge mistake by coming out in support of the narrative to paint Carson a liar. The media and the left has to discredit him, because if they were to champion one who started out with nothing but his intellect and a stern mother, that means the entire narrative from the left will be exposed as the lie that we know it is.
On this one issue, I am totally for Carson just as I am totally for Trump on his going after illegal immigration and the political establishment. So, that does not mean I totally support Carson to be the nominee. He still has many political and social issue stances that are being shoved behind the curtain while this kerfuffle is being played out.
I heard Carson on Breitbart Radio on Friday say to Bannon that he was for TPP. Bannon got him to admit he did not know about much of the details of the thing and invited him back so he could be enlightened. There are more . . .
Maybe US citizens no longer hold the original ideals “dear”.
Maybe the country is no longer what it was, the one we grew up in.
Electing Barak Hussein Ovomit may be the most telling sign of where the soul (and befuddled brain) of the nation is and is going...
The population has changed so much that maybe most folks are just ignorant of what we have and cherish?
Not sure but bringing back the draft might be a step in the right direction for all.
but I doubt it.
The media has always been biased. The liberals dominate the tv media. The media needs more competition. But with a very high entry barrier, it is difficult for new competitors to enter the market.
One way conservative consumers can help is to stop feeding the liberal media. Cancel your cable tv and tell the cable companies you want a la carte channels not the package that they currently sell.
Playing the victim doesn’t work for male candidates.
If there had been interest would Carson be saying that it was irrelevant and that the media shouldn't be asking Obama about it and they should be concentrating on the issues? Or is Carson just mad that the media is concentrating on his bogus life story and not Obama's?
I'm with Levin, Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and others over this fiasco and not with Trump/Politico/CBS/CNN/NBC et al
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