Media Blackout On A Far-Left Past

Media Blackout On A Far-Left Past


By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, August 28, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Press Bias: Democrats in Denver tried to introduce Barack Obama as a moderate, whitewashing his radical past, and the media are helping them by following the fictional script.


On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, CNN, for one, aired an in-depth profile called "Obama Revealed." In fact, it revealed nothing except for CNN's bias.

The special, hosted by White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, started off by asking, "Who is Barack Obama?" — something not a few voters would like to know. It then let the presumptive Democrat nominee mostly answer the question "in his own words."

We learn he earned the nickname "Barry O'Bomber" on his high school basketball team, and that he was a "top student" at Harvard law school. Omitted from the saintly biography are hard truths about his radical ties. Voters hear nothing of his friendship with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers or the late black Communist poet Frank Marshall Davis.

There's no mention of the radical training he received from groups founded by the late socialist agitator Saul Alinsky, or how Obama later taught Alinsky's tactics as a college professor.

CNN glossed over his late Kenyan father's own radical politics by leaving it up to him to describe his "reputation."

"My father had this reputation as being this larger-than-life figure, charismatic, very smart, very engaging," Obama said, "and all those things were true."

It's also true that as a Nairobi bureaucrat, his father proposed a socialist economic plan for Kenya so radical it got him blackballed from the government. CNN left that part out, while also omitting Obama's recent support of Raila Odinga, a Communist-trained politician in Nairobi.

The one smudge in the network's otherwise glowing portrait — Obama's decades-long relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright — was quickly dispatched by noting he had distanced himself from his radically anti-American preacher. However, Obama's abiding faith in black liberation theology — a Marxist version of Christianity — was never even identified by the network.

CNN's coverage is par for the course. There's been a media blackout on Obama's radical past throughout the presidential campaign.

Take the story about his early mentor Davis, a known member of the Communist Party USA. No mainstream media reported on the relationship until Aug. 2, and that was only after IBD and a handful of conservative blogs weighed in on the controversy.

The Associated Press broke the silence with the article, "Writer offered a young Barack Obama advice on life." But it still does not tell the whole story. AP describes Davis as a "left-leaning black journalist" with "allegedly anti-American views" — when in fact, his Soviet allegiances and hatred for America are well documented in congressional reports and his own poems.

The Washington Post did AP one better. It managed to write an entire story on the controversy without identifying Davis by name. (It did have room to mention "the vast right-wing conspiracy" though.)

The establishment media have also ignored a long-lost article by Obama's father that reveals his communist leanings.

The 1965 paper by Barack Hussein Obama Sr., which called for Soviet-style expropriation and other extreme measures, was cited by Politico.com, a Web-based spin-off of the media elite in Washington. But it failed to quote any of his Marxist prescriptions, and in a shocking whitewash, concludes that "his central aim was moderate and conciliatory."

Many of these radical connections are cataloged in a new book, "The Obama Nation," which remains atop the national bestseller list. But CNN and other major news outlets have spent more time investigating its author than Obama, while parroting the Obama camp's line that the book is a "series of lies."

The Post in its coverage repeated word-for-word some of the talking points contained in a 40-page rebuttal of the book by Obama, essentially farming out the fact-checking to a political campaign.

It also noted that the book was being "pushed by conservative book clubs that buy in bulk to drive up sales," and that its publisher, Simon & Schuster, employs "former GOP strategist Mary Matalin" as an editor.

It's plain the media are protecting Obama from his radical past, insulating him from the kind of scrutiny voters need to make an informed choice in November. He got the same pass from the press running for the Senate. In fact, Obama in his latest autobiography said he couldn't believe his "good fortune."

"I was the beneficiary of unusually — and at times undeservedly — positive press coverage," he confessed in "The Audacity of Hope."

He skated into office then. Absent proper media vetting, he'll also skate into the Oval Office. But then that may be the plan.



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