Hugh
Hewitt
Examiner Columnist
Information of at least some and possibly great importance to the public was suppressed.
An elite selected who would be privy to that information and when the sharing would take place. As a result, decisions that people regret were made and cannot now be reversed.
A reason for outrage?
Apparently yes, if the situation is profit projections for Facebook, which were provided to key investors but withheld from most buyers of the now famously disappointing IPO.
But definitely not with regards to the facts about the shameful private life of John Edwards. Some journalists had key facts about the Edwards for months and perhaps more than a year before disclosing them to the public.
Many people supported Edwards, donated to him, or didn't support Hillary in a crucial stretch of 2007-2008 because the truth about Edwards wasn't known to the public. Do we know when journalists actually came to believe the truth but didn't run it?
Where, to quote Bob Dole, is the outrage? Shouldn't there be at least as much outrage as is showing up in the aftermath of the Facebook face plant?
When the book "Game Change" debuted in February, 2010, I and thousands of others were riveted by the book's disclosures about Edwards and many other key players in the 2008 election. I waited for someone to press co-authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann on the issue of what did they know and when did they know it, but journalists covering the book generally shrugged their shoulders and passed over the issue of keeping crucial information from the public while a book can be readied for publication.
The same questions arise whenever Bob Woodward puts out another super-duper exclusive based on access that he denies the subscribers of the Washington Post (and the shareholders of the Washington Post Company) until he can bank his advance and royalties.
Now the Post's David Maraniss arrives with a blockbuster on the life of Barack Obama. Many people are surprised by many aspects of the president's early life --a long-stretch of stoner lifestyle and composite girlfriends and made-up history-- I am wondering how hard was it to find the president's high school yearbook in which he salutes his pusher, or his real New York girlfriend who didn't break-up with him after a play they didn't see.
As you read this, the Los Angeles Times continues its suppression of a videotape of the president toasting radical academic Khalid Rashidi, even as the paper accepts grants from the Ford Foundation to "expand its coverage of key beats." Why does Ford trust the Times when the Times doesn't trust the public?
The list goes on and on. Manhattan-Beltway media elites are free to make up their own rules about what they wish to disclose and what they wish to withhold, and what they can share among themselves or keep locked in the basement in order to protect their favorite politicians and causes.
And they can certainly engage in the most hilarious of sanctimonious handwringing about non-disclosue of Facebook profit projections. They can find, as the Los Angeles Times did, disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer to intone about Facebook that "you can't false and misleading material information to people, when you know it is false and you correct it to some and not to others."
They can do all those things, but they cannot expect the public to keep a straight face.
So when you next read any story on the Facebook fallout, substitute "the behavior of Edwards" or "Obama's biography" for "Facebook profit projections," and "journalists" for "investment bankers," and see if you can recall anything approaching the high dudgeon aimed at Wall Street sharpies being directed at elite media poobahs who manipulate the information flows for their own benefit.
No comments:
Post a Comment