Spinning Into Orbit

Spinning Into Orbit


By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, October 06, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Media Bias: It's worth noting when someone as distinguished as actor Jon Voight directly warned media Saturday to quit lying in this election, if only for the sake of democracy. But lying is exactly what's been stepped up.

The latest manifestation of media bias was a bizarre Associated Press "analysis" claiming racism in Sarah Palin's warning over the weekend about Barack Obama's long association with Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground terror organization.

AP reporter Douglass K. Daniels claimed that Palin's questioning of Obama's association with the white radical child of privilege was "racially tinged." The verbal stink bomb keyed off Palin's statement that Obama "is not a man who sees America like you and I see America. We see it as a force of good in this world." To Daniels, this was the same as saying Obama is "not like us."

It was the latest instance of increasingly undisguised media efforts to act as an unofficial branch of the Obama campaign.

Actor Jon Voight, who was at the Palin rally in Southern California Saturday, pointed this out as the media clamored to interview him ahead of the event.

"What I would like to see is the press put partisanship aside," Voight said. "This is crucial, because it otherwise does not allow people to make informed voting decisions. Somebody's got to be able to report things properly. Every slander and every rumor ever produced, they report like news!"

Palin, of course, knows all about this. Obama-linked blogs like the Daily Kos invent charges out of whole cloth, like the time one claimed Palin wasn't the mother of her own baby. The media reported that as news.

Meanwhile, ad agency personnel linked to the Obama campaign faked charges in videos that Palin belonged to an Alaska secessionist group. The media picked that up too.

How did the AP's "racial" analysis come up? It may have been based on the event itself. Palin noted the "diversity" in the crowd of about 15,000, and we did too — even if media reports didn't.

We noticed thousands of Mexican-American, Asian-American, and, yes, African-Americans waving Palin signs and cheering. This could be seen as a threat to the Obama campaign, which claims to have a hammerlock on these votes.

Was the "racial tinge" given to Palin's remarks a warning to the new Republican voters to get back to the Democratic fold? Or was it a way to silence discussion about Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist whose reemergence in the news is panicking the Obama camp?

In contrast to the cheering at Saturday's event, reporters in the two press sections grumbled about hating Palin and assured one another they were only there only by assignment. Just being professional, some may argue, but we saw plenty of cheering from the press at the Democratic Convention in Denver.

Voight told them to quit spreading rumors and go back to reporting facts. "Nobody's vetting Obama's past, this fellow of strange associations," the actor said. "Nobody's talking about his effort to radicalize Chicago schools."

Though the media got the face time they wanted with the Academy Award-winner, not many put Voight's pointed warnings to them about their coverage on the nightly news.

But there's no sign of it going away, even in small ways. The San Francisco Chronicle claimed Palin spent more time fundraising in well-heeled Costa Mesa than addressing the crowd of well wishers at the Home Depot Center in working-class Carson.

It's a small thing, we suppose. But Palin spent much more time signing autographs in Carson than the 15 minutes the Chronicle reported. We were there, and saw Palin smiling and shaking hands for at least a half hour, long enough to get lots of camera-angle photos, until her aides hustled her out shortly before 5 p.m.

The more we observe media bias in action, the more we're amazed by its new ways of distorting and concealing news. When it takes a Hollywood actor to call them on it, we know there's a problem.