The Media Filter Makes Investigating Benghazi a High-Risk, Low-Reward Scenario for Republicans

What do Kermit Gosnell, George Zimmerman and the Benghazi Committee all have in common? Only one thing really but it's an important thing. All three stories were heavily filtered through a progressive-friendly media.

Kermit Gosnell was an abortionist who ran a shoddy clinic in Philadelphia for decades. He had his own method of abortion which involved inducing women to give birth to live babies and then severing their spinal cords with scissors. It's unknown how many live babies he killed over the years. Though he was only convicted of three counts of murder, he is quite possibly America's worst serial killer.

Despite the obvious national implication of his behavior and his trial most of the media didn't display much interest. Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post (not at Vox) famously dismissed it as a "local crime" story. She wasn't alone. The major networks devoted precisely zero minutes to covering the trial during the first three weeks. A local reporter took a photo of the rows of empty seats at the trial all of which had been reserved for the media who never showed up.

Sadly, same scenario played out with Fast & Furious...the low information voter only knows about what they see on SNL or The Colbert Report.

Praying this turns out differently but I am not overly optimistic. Trey Gowdy is determined to find the truth but I fear that he will simply be portrayed the same way that the media portrayed Ken Starr, which invalidated all of his findings in the eyes of most people who had no idea what had really happened.

The bottom line is that even Charles Krauthammer has said this committee is a dangerous move for Republicans. He's right. To return to the circus metaphor, when you're walking a high wire in front of a large audience it's important that every step be placed carefully. That's especially true when you know any Republican misstep will be played up by a sympathetic media while any revelations embarrassing to Democrats will be downplayed.
In other news, water is wet. There is no such thing as a low risk, high reward strategy for a politician except to be a “liberal." The reason for that is simple; there is a notional distinction only, and no difference, between a “liberal” and an “objective” journalist. The reason for that is also simple: The advent of the Associated Press turned American journalism into a monopoly in the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century.
And since journalism is criticism - journalists never are responsible for getting anything done, all they do is report what went wrong when others had authority - journalists are the natural political enemies of the people who actually try to do things. Thus, journalists are the natural allies of anyone else whose forte is criticism - and gives them positive labels such as “moderate,” “progressive,” or “liberal” (labels which are actually descriptive of those whom they malign as “conservative”).

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