Brrrrrr! Everyone knows things can be nippy in Alaska. Lots of snow and ice, and snowmen.
Be that as it may, none of that should mysteriously be keeping the media from doing a deep dive (so to speak!) on the unfolding ballot scandal in America’s 49th state.
Yet over there at Fox News we find this headline from ace reporters Joseph Wulfsohn and Brian Flood:
Liberal media downplays Alaska ballot scandal while decrying GOP ‘pouncing’.
New York Times report exposed Dems behind recruiting of retired teacher Dan Sullivan to help Mary Peltola defeat Sen Dan Sullivan
The story reports:
The legacy media has been tying itself in knots over the explosive Alaska ballot scandal that has rocked a key Senate race ahead of Tuesday's election.
The New York Times published a bombshell report alleging that Democratic operatives recruited a man named Dan Sullivan to run as a spoiler candidate against incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, in hopes of aiding his Democratic opponent, former Rep. Mary Peltola.
…Honest Elections Project executive director Jason Snead isn’t surprised some in the media are bending over backwards to keep a Democrat from looking scandalous.
'This is a classic thing that we've been seeing with a lot of mainstream outlets, this idea that they're going to be more concerned about the Republican reaction to something seedy that the left is doing rather than the seedy thing itself, right? It's a very classic situation,' Snead told Fox News Digital.
'I'm not surprised at all that we're seeing so many outlets today trying to either downplay the scandal up in Alaska, or to refocus on what Trump is doing or saying about it,' he continued. 'We know the media has double standards when it comes to the left and the right.'
Snead went on, saying to the media:
'Aren't you reporters? Shouldn't you have actually done some investigation, done some digging, or did you simply take the denial at face value and move on? Because that's not really what most people expect from serious investigative reporting outlets,' he added.
Bingo. Exactly right. Here is a scandal involving one of Alaska’s two seats in the United States Senate - which is to say this is no small thing. It certainly should not be swept under the rug and ignored by the so-called “mainstream” media.
The fact that the perception is out there that the “mainstream media” has in fact tried to do exactly that should come as no surprise. The “mainstream media” isn’t mainstream. It’s liberal. And more or less no matter the subject it will be naturally inclined to come down on the Left side of whatever issue is at hand. And there are at least two ways to do this.
First the reporting on whatever issue is at hand is blatantly tilted to the Left.
And second, often enough the reaction is to just not report on the story at all if it is seen to be a boon to this or that conservative candidate or argument.
No one should be surprised at this kind of thing, much less shocked.
To illustrate how long this liberal media bias has been around?
The long-ago Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Theodore H. White wrote a series of behind-the-scenes political books in the 1960’s. The first in the series was The Making of the President 1960.
White covered the behind-the-scenes politics and media of the 1960 presidential race between Democrat nominee Senator John F. Kennedy and Republican nominee Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Along the way White covers the activities of the traveling press corps assigned to each candidate. White wrote this of the friendly interaction between JFK’s staff and the media:
JFK’s…advisers rode the press buses and yielded a constant flow of information; his press staff…gave off a sense of joy when they greeted a correspondent joining or rejoining the circuit, as if they had waited for him and him alone, to arrive-and then whispered to him a little nugget of color or some anecdote that his particular magazine or newspaper would especially want. It was not only that they respected the press, but somehow as if they were part of the press-half hankering to be writing the dispatches and claiming the by-lines themselves.
There is no doubt that this kindliness, respect and cultivation of the press colored all the reporting that came from the Kennedy campaign, and the contrast colored adversely the reporting of the Nixon campaign. By the last weeks of the campaign those forty or fifty national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps-they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers.
Think of that. This was written about reporters covering a presidential campaign a full 66 years ago! And here we are today with the media being accused of tilting Left in its coverage of this Alaska Senate race.
It’s as if nothing has changed with liberal media bias in the 66 years separating that 1960 presidential campaign coverage and “mainstream media” coverage of events today.
As the old saying goes: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
