How clueless are members of the mainstream media? If you are looking for a litmus test to gauge the industry’s standard when it comes to fairness and honesty in political reportage, look no further. CBS veteran Bob Schieffer has your test strip, and it is the brightest shade of blue you’ve ever gazed upon.
Schieffer appeared Sunday with Fox News media analyst Howard Kurtz to weigh on, among other things, media bias. Before turning to the specifics of the exchange, it is worth recalling that Schieffer, who turned 78 in February, is very old school. As Bernard Goldberg, himself an old hand, has noted on a number of occasions, members of the “elite media” are so uniformly lockstep liberal in their outlook that they see themselves as disinterested centrists. Schieffer doubtless sees himself that way, despite repeated distortions and selective editing of content to conform to a left-leaning agenda. See here and here, for example.
During the interview with Kurtz, Mediaite’s Josh Feldman notes, Schieffer was asked whether the media gave Barack Obama an “incredibly easy ride” when he first emerged on the national scene. Observing that the “political world was rather struck by how dynamic a figure Obama was,” Schieffer conceded, “Maybe we were not skeptical enough.”
Not skeptical enough? The MSM almost to a man refused to vet candidate Obama, who had sat for two decades in a black nationalist church and whose mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA and propagandist. Davis was so extreme a figure that he was under FBI surveillance for 19 years, during which time the agency compiled a 600-page dossier and placed him in “Security Index A,” meaning he would be arrested in the event of national emergency.
Not only did CBS omit this information from their coverage of Obama, but after his election, Schieffer began playing the race card on his behalf. During the House Oversight Committee investigation of Secret Service lapses, Schieffer went so far as to posit on air the outrageous notion that these failures in security might be driven by the president’s skin color and that “this wouldn’t be the case if he were white.”
The video of Schieffer’s sit-down with Kurtz follows:
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