Your Black News: Mass Media Struggles To Link Obama With Blagojevich Scandal
To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation’s leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar.
Whenever reporters think — or want you to think — they’ve uncovered a presidential scandal, they waste little time in comparing it to previous controversies. Yesterday, CNN’s Rick Sanchez tried desperately to get the phrase “Blagogate” to stick — the latest in a long and overwhelmingly annoying post-Watergate pattern of ham-handed efforts to hype a scandal by appending the suffix “-gate” to the end of a word. [...]
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer announced yesterday that “some are calling this Obama’s first presidential scandal.” It isn’t. There is no evidence he has done anything wrong. This is not Obama’s first presidential scandal — but it shows signs of becoming the first media scandal of the Obama presidency. [...]
If that happens — if the media continue to behave as they did in covering Whitewater — they will damage the country. It’s really that simple [...]
Blagojevich has been so successful at making himself and his office look ridiculous that about a million people are now able to remember and maybe even spell his crazy name — that’s sort of like an accomplishment, right?