It's an internet truism to distrust any pronouncement made with the caps lock key engaged, so maybe I'm not supposed to take the headlines on The Blaze, Glenn Beck's contribution to the growing field of self-identified conservative news aggregators, seriously. Certainly, the story that topped the homepage Thursday seemed to come less from current events and more from the Right-Wing Outrage Generator. You know, the one built by Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh in a Palo Alto, California garage in the 90s. "DID AN IMAM REALLY USE ARABIC PRAYER TO COVERTLY DAMN FALLEN SEAL TEAM 6 MEMBERS TO HELL DURING THEIR FUNERAL?"

I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that the answer to that question is "no". Although there was an imam at the funeral of the fallen Navy Seals, he said a prayer in Arabic. The parents of three of them did hold a press conference, but The Blaze story veers widely into gossamer web accusations and paranoia that centers on the kind of claim that would normally be where the reporting process starts rather than ends: "If this translation is valid…"

With that single phrase, The Blaze leaps over the journalism crucible intended to burn away stories that don't actually inform anyone of anything, but rather wrap around the grit of previously held beliefs. You roll your mind around enough in that stuff and gossamer becomes shellac, and your worldview hardens to the point of impermeability. Truth can't find a purchase. In the wake of last November's election, conservatives experienced an unusually public spasm of self-awareness and examination. Much of that soul-searching focused not on the flaws of their candidate but on the flaws of the media sect itself, which refused to see the flaws of their candidate and instead spoke almost exclusively to existing true believers. During the 2012 election, the world of Fox News/Rush Limbaugh/Brietbart/Blaze was a hermetically sealed terrarium that tended to a monoculture of OBAMA = BAD.

"I just don't know that America cared," Riehl now says of this story genre. "The guy had already been elected, and our message was that Barack Obama's a socialist that wants to control your life. I'm not arguing that he isn't, but is that a message people want to hear?"



You would think that six months afterwards, there would be some changes to reflect that analysis, some engagement with an America whose primary concerns lie outside the secret-Muslim-Benghazi-cover-up-mandatory-abortion-coming-to-take-your-guns-away nexus the conservative media so compulsively maintained prior to the election. But no: "DID AN IMAM REALLY USE ARABIC PRAYER TO COVERTLY DAMN FALLEN SEAL TEAM 6 MEMBERS TO HELL DURING THEIR FUNERAL?" is the right-wing media equivalent of a subtweet propping up the "secret Muslim" tent pole. Even worse, the SEAL parents' presser was described as "an effort … to corroborate the notion that the US government is 'as much responsible for the deaths of their sons as is the Taliban.'" If you're having trouble making the connection between administration malfeasance and the post-tragedy prayers of a civilian imam, well, SECRET MUSLIM MUCH? A quick trip around the conservative mediasphere of the moment suggests collective amnesia (fueled by frustration) about the resolution last winter to stay relevant to the audience outside its own Beltway. Their myopia is especially startling in light of their recent successes in doing exactly what the original mission of conservative alternative media seemed to be: to draw attention to stories that the "mainstream media" would otherwise ignore. Pro-lifers goaded non-partisan outlets into covering the trial of Philadelphia "abortion doctor" Kermit Gosnell, though there's a strong case that the right-wing media was as blind to that monstrous crime as the MSM. Indeed, progressive outlets led early coverage of the case.

Then the right-wing insists on calling it "the Benghazi cover-up," portraying it as the scandal to end all Obama scandals, the one that will lead to his impeachment (according to political theorists and amateur bassist Mike Huckabee). First of all, that cover-up is not going so well, what with the leaders of the administration's foreign policy and intelligence teams admitting that there were serious mistakes made. What are they covering up, exactly?

The ancillary "cover-up" is, of course, the "collective yawn" of the MSM in response to Benghazi (or, as Salon's Alex Pareene delightfully distinguishes the right-wing frenzy from the actual events that occurred, #BENGHAZI). True that, if by "yawn" you mean "gaping chasm into which they have thrown dozens of stories". The hearings were on page one of the Washington Post and New York Times and led all three evening news broadcasts on Wednesday, and there's no reason to believe that the coverage will stop until the hearings do – which is to say, when they stop being news.

Several observers have pointed out that the conservative media's real complaint about #BENGHAZI is that the coverage in the MSM hasn't taken their side, and, even more to the point, the American public at large (i.e., those outside the Fox News demographic) has not responded to the coverage with outrage and alarm to match their own. The Week's Mark Ambinder has teased out why that is; they aren't on board with the guiding principle of today's right-wing journalists: Obama is evil.



The event is a series of tragedies in search of a unifying explanation, and one that "Obama is evil" doesn't cover. Because really, to suggest that the Pentagon or the White House would deliberately — and yes, this is EXACTLY what Republicans are suggesting — prevent special operations forces from rescuing American diplomats BECAUSE they worried about the potential political blowback because they KNEW exactly who was behind it (al Qaida) is — well, it is to suggest that Barack Obama is simply and utterly evil.



See, if you start with the premise that Obama evil and look for evidence of it, all the stories you see on Brietbart.com and hear from Rush and "ARABIC PRAYER" make sense. If you think Obama is anything but evil -- you don't like his health care policy, you think he should be doing more about jobs, you'd rather he didn't wield the power to execute American citizens without a trial, well, very little of what's being offered by that segment of the Internet seems either relevant or plausible.

I don't want to get too carried away. There are a lot of good conservative journalists, ones who approach their stories from a perspective I don't necessarily agree with, but who adhere to the same set of high standards the best of the MSM aspires to (there are lots of sloppy reporters in the MSM, too). These conservative journalists are often not very popular, or are ignored by their brethern. Tucker Carlson was famously booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference for suggesting that conservatives might emulate the journalistic practices New York Times.

Perhaps more tellingly, my friend Jim Garghety wrote a column this week in which he laid out a suggestion that is staggering in its obviousness, that he felt it needed to be said: "Let the facts of this [Benghazi] investigation lead us to the conclusion, not the other way around."