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Woodward And Bernstein As O’Keefe And Giles

September 22, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under New Media, Nixon Administration, Richard Nixon 

The scandalous videos depicting ACORN (Association of Community Organizers For Reform Now) employees recently revealed by young undercover journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles hardly struck a cord with the left wing media.

In fact, they unabashedly ignored it. But such is the fractured political landscape of our times. Or possibly the past 40 years.

Just to recap, O’Keefe, 25, acting as a pimp and Giles, 20, as a prostitute solicited ACORN offices for advice on running a brothel — involving among other things the smuggling of children — and tax evasion. O’Keefe said he wanted to use the money to fund a political campaign, the ACORN employees depicted, willingly — and often enthusiastically — offered their services.

Conservative new media ace and Drudge friend, Andrew Breitbart, used his star power to promote the videos, coinciding with the launch of his biggovernment.com, a sequel to his hugely successful Big Hollywood blog.

Fox News, and its conservative commentators Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity used their large audiences to magnify the scope of the story prompting Republicans in the House and the Senate to slip amendments into bills that would defund the embattled grassroots organization.

Byron York of The Washington Examiner put the rapid turn of events this way:

It was an absolutely mind-blowing turn of events, a total collapse of longtime Democratic support for ACORN. Republicans had worked for years to reduce ACORN’s influence, with little success. Now, in the span of a few days, the GOP scored major victories.

At this point, just as in the Van Jones case, the left wing media shifted gears and — rather than investigate the issue further — questioned the partisan motives of the persons who uncovered the story.

Courtesy of PJM’s Ed Driscoll, The Washington Post is the latest:

O’Keefe insists that he and Giles’s work was done independently and rejects liberal suggestions that the videos were bankrolled by conservative organizations. He does, however, acknowledge receiving help and advice from a conservative columnist and Web entrepreneur.

The North Star’s Don Calabrese imagines how rival newspapers may have reacted to the reporting of two certain Washington Post journalists in the early Seventies. That is, if they did the impossible:

Post Reporters Deny Using Questionable Tactics to Entrap Nixon

The proposition seemed outlandish. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would accept information from a secret source who would only be known as “Deep Throat.” This information would be so damaging to president of the United States, it would unleash a scandal that would shake the foundations of the nation’s government to its core.

Woodward and Bernstein deny being beholden to left-wing interests, but admit taking advice in their reporting from left-wing editor Ben Bradlee. They insist that no left-wing organization bankrolled their reporting efforts.

Of course it wouldn’t have been reported this way.

Obama is their man.

RN wasn’t.

Greg Gutfeld, a writer and host of Fox News comedy hour Red Eye, takes the unscrupulous to task for this selective method of whistle-blowing:



Comments

One Response to “Woodward And Bernstein As O’Keefe And Giles”

  1. MK on September 23rd, 2009 3:56 am

    You mention the fractured political landscape. But there’s something else at play, as well. I think you overlook a double edged sword here, one which emerged well after Watergate. The tendency in recent years by both the right and the left to identify media outlets as partisan and biased has created an environment where both sides struggle to reach a broad audience. They have only themselves to blame for that.

    Both the left and the right have focused too much on throwing stones at the other and not enough on establishing a framework where people across the political spectrum will accept their reporting. The time 20 or 25 years ago where CBS’s “60 Minutes” could do stories that caught the attention of a large, bipartisan audience are long behind us. We live in a crybaby age now and both sides have to live with their inability to rise above that. The right cries about leftwing bias, the left cries about rightwing bias. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

    Certainly, in areas with which I’m familiar, I can’t give either conservative or liberal outlets high marks for deep seated commitment to objective investigation. Consider the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), whose Office of Presidential Libraries in recent years saw the theft of high level Clinton-era documents by “Sandy” Berger and the mysterious disappearance at its Reagan Presidential Library of a Reagan-era John Roberts affirmative action file which Bush White House lawyers had examined before confirmation hearings.

    The Washington Post reported both stories but gave more attention to the Berger one than the Roberts one; the Washington Times and Fox only covered the Berger case. (FNC actually produced an interesting and well done special on the one story it covered, “Socks, Scissors, Paper: The Sandy Berger Caper.”) Pajamas Media posted the NARA Inspector General report on the Berger incident, only; The Memory Hole posted the IG report about the disappearance of the Robert file, only. Given its nonpartisan mission, NARA would have benefited from a thoughtful and objective examination of both incidents. No media outlet on the right or the left proved equal to the challenge. So you’ll have to pardon me when I shrug and say, “meh” when I read about bias and “investigative” reporting by pros and amateurs alike.

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