I&I Editorial

Bloomberg – the news service, not the candidate – made headlines this week when its editor in chief told reporters they were not allowed to investigate Michael Bloomberg, or any other Democrat running for president this year. That ban doesn’t, however, extend to President Donald Trump.

Wait. Isn’t that what journalists at Bloomberg (and every other mainstream news outlet) were going to do anyway?

To be sure, when he joined the presidential race, Bloomberg put his massive eponymous news organization in a bind. How could Bloomberg News credibly cover the candidacy of the guy signing their paychecks?

To deal with that, Editor In Chief John Micklethwait said Bloomberg News would continue “our tradition” of not reporting on Bloomberg’s personal life or business dealings. But then he went on to “extend the same policy to his rivals in the Democratic primaries.” That ban, he told the staff, doesn’t apply to Trump.

Nobody in the journalism world seemed satisfied. The Washington Post ran a story saying Bloomberg “stabbed the heart of his news organization.”

Former Bloomberg Washington news director Kathy Kiely – who resigned in protest when Bloomberg toyed with the idea of running in 2016 – complained that the rules “relegate political writers to stenography journalism.”

While Kelly McBride, senior vice president at Poynter, said that even with that rule in place, “I can’t imagine that (Bloomberg reporters) are not going to have to deal with the temptation of self-censorship.”

What planet are these people living on?

Anyone who has worked in a mainstream news organization, or who follows the news at all, knows that journalists do all those things voluntarily when it comes to covering Democratic candidates.

They willingly play the role of stenographers for Democrats, repeating their talking points as facts, never asking tough questions, and certainly never aggressively investigating Democratic candidates, lest it would damage their chances of getting elected.

And as for self-censorship, the press has proved time and again that it will bury news that could hurt their candidates.

Remember back in 2008, when the Los Angeles Times refused to release a video it had in its possession of Barack Obama at a 2003 event in Chicago in which he praised Rashid Khalidi — an outspoken supporter of Yasser Arafat?

All the Times did was publish “a gentle story about the fete. Reporter Peter Wallsten avoided, for example, any mention of the inconvenient fact that the revelers included Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers’ wife and fellow Weatherman terrorist,” noted Andrew McCarthy in National Review.

The Times still hasn’t released the tape, or even a transcript, claiming it’s honoring a deal with the source of the tape.

Then there was Obama’s longstanding relationship with America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Were it not for Fox News, that story would have never been told.

Just last year we learned that a photojournalist took a picture of Obama with anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan back in 2005. It never saw the light of day until Obama was safely out of the White House.

Larry Elder described what happened:

The photographer, Askia Muhammad, said that almost immediately after he took the picture a CBC staffer called and said, ‘We have to have the picture back.’ Muhammad later surrendered the disk with the photo to Farrakhan’s chief of staff. ‘I gave the picture up at the time and basically swore secrecy,’ Muhammad said in an interview with the Trice Edney News Wire. ‘But after the (presidential) nomination was secured and all the way up until the inauguration; then for eight years after he was president, it was kept under cover.'”

We could go on and on about the other unsavory characters who mentored and befriended Obama before he ran for president. The press investigated none of those troubling relationships. They did, however, have time to get to the bottom of Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy.

Former CBS News reporter Bernie Goldberg summed up the media’s treatment of Obama perfectly in his post-2008-election book, titled “A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.”

Eight years later, the mainstream was at it again. It completely ignored the glaringly obvious pay-to-play scheme that the Clintons were running out of their Clinton Family Foundation. That is until author Peter Schweizer wrote an entire book exposing it. The press attacked him, rather than pursue the story.

And if it weren’t for outside groups such as Judicial Watch, we’d never have known about Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Almost every aspect of that story, in fact, was broken by non-journalists. The mainstream press only grudgingly wrote perfunctory stories as new facts emerged, while endlessly working to play it all down.

The press tried to ignore the highly suspicious tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a fact revealed in internal Justice Department emails that later became public.

Leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald noted how pliant the press was when it came to covering Hillary. “At times,” he wrote, “Clinton’s campaign staff not only internally drafted the stories they wanted published but even specified what should be quoted ‘on background’ and what should be described as ‘on the record.'”

The idea that Bloomberg reporters would be aggressively vetting Democratic candidates short of a memo telling them not to is ludicrous.

— Written by John Merline

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