Note: After JournoList, and years of experiencing the obvious bias of the leftist press masquerading as trustworthy reports, I just can’t call “the Media” anything so dignified as mainstream anymore. So, I’m going with a new term to refer to the cabal of leftist press operatives who daily coordinate their liberal talking points: the “Make-Believe Media.”
As in all matters Obama, the Make-Believe Media of JournoList infamy again appears inexplicably incurious in its reporting of the Wikileaks publication of the Afghanistan Papers. Wikileaks’ Julian Assange claims that, via the New York Times, he asked the White House for help in reviewing the secret documents, a charge confirmed by the Times but denied by the White House.
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However, the White House gives conflicting versions of what happened. On Monday, Robert Gibbs admitted that the White House made no request to Wikileaks not to publish but did ask the group’s founder, Julian Assange, through reporters at the New York Times “to redact information that could … harm personnel or threaten operations or security.”
So, talking out of both sides of its press orifice, the White House denies it was asked in advance for help redacting the documents, while admitting it asked Wikileaks in advance to redact the documents on its own. Well, gee, which is it?
These may or may not be consistent positions on an issue of substantial importance. Alas, the Make-Believe Media seems unconcerned. Instead, the Make-Believe Media accepts apparently without skepticism the Administration’s version that it “asked” Wikileaks to edit sensitive information.
With national security potentially at stake, with American lives potentially at stake, the MBM seems similarly uninterested why the Obama Administration did not demand that the Times withhold publication of the documents; did not demand the opportunity to review and redact the documents before their disclosure, and did not promptly go to court to preemptively block the Times from publishing the secrets, a la the Pentagon Papers.
The Obama Administration’s story is that it invoked The Honor System toward a newspaper that has repeatedly shown no hesitation about disclosing highly sensitive national secrets and a website owner who has candidly expressed his hostility toward the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. (Assange praising the source of recent helicopter video as a “hero” for exposing US military wrong-doing). Does this really make sense to anyone, I mean, other than the Make-Believe Media?
I can’t decide which is worse: the Administration’s appalling apathy toward national security affecting American lives, or the Make-Believe Media’s deplorable lack of curiosity over the White House’s apathy.
Juxtapose this Media with the 1970s Media aggressively inquiring into the Pentagon Papers leak, which, by various twists turns, eventually led to the Watergate scandal and Woodward and Bernstein. As well, juxtapose Nixon’s aggressive efforts to preserve military secrets by opposing publication of the Pentagon Papers with Obama’s apathy over publication of the Afghanistan Papers.
Ironically, Watergate concerned purely political maneuvering and never placed Americans or America’s allies in harm’s way. Wikileaks concerns political maneuvering in a military theater over release of information that frustrates future intelligence gathering and may get people killed.
At the very least, before the Make-Believe Media officiously proclaims “there’s nothing to see here folks, move along,” you’d hope they would at least turn around to see whether there really was nothing to see here.
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