Beating the Drum for Obama

After every election there is always some group on the losing side who complains that their man would have won if the news media had just gotten out their message. I always shake my head at this. The MSM is not there to carry water for either side. It is up to the candidate to get out his own message. This year is different. The MSM seems to be going out of their way to help Obama and hurt McCain. I have examples.

ACORN. The press has covered the massive number of fraudulent registrations that ACORN presented. In a normal election, they would also be going into detail about ACORN's long association with Obama. Not this year. Instead I have seen several articles on ACORN. They always seek to sooth the reader. They point out that ACORN practices voter registration fraud, not vote fraud. The two are separate crimes and the one that ACORN has committed thousands of times in multiple states is only a misdemenor. We are also assured that ACORN is itself a victim of unscrupulous workers and that the odds of actual voter fraud happening are less than of being struck by lightening. The fact that specific phrases like the one about lightening are in multiple articles makes me believe that these are being copied from a talking points memo from ACORN or Obama.

Joe the Plumber. The story here was that a regular working guy confronted Obama about having his taxes raised and Obama said that spreading around the wealth was the "right" thing to do. That got buried in stories about Joe himself. Reporters are falling all over themselves in an effort to discredit Joe and bury the real story which was Obama's response.

Violence at McCain rallies. It was widely reported that someone yelled "Kill Obama" at a Palin rally. The Secret Service later said that they had been monitoring the rally and that no one shouted that. This is one of the under-reported stories of the month. If the MSM picked up the story they buried it so deep that no one will actually see it. Where is the zeal that reporters showed in digging up Joe the Plumber's tax records? Keith Olbermann is still insisting it happened.

This is a troubling double-standard. Stories that hurt Obama are being discredited, even when they are true. Stories that hurt McCain are allowed to stand, even when they are false.