Posted on 10/30/2007 6:09:13 PM PDT by jimboster
So I was down in DC this past weekend and happened to run into a well-connected media person, who told me flatly, unequivocally that “everyone knows” The LA Times was sitting on a story, all wrapped up and ready to go about what is a potentially devastating sexual scandal involving a leading Presidential candidate. “Everyone knows” meaning everyone in the DC mainstream media political reporting world. “Sitting on it” because the paper couldn’t decide the complex ethics of whether and when to run it. The way I heard it they’d had it for a while but don’t know what to do. The person who told me )not an LAT person) knows I write and didn’t say “don’t write about this”.
If it’s true, I don’t envy the LAT. I respect their hesitation, their dilemma, deciding to run or not to run it raises a lot of difficult journalism ethics questions and they’re likely to be attacked, when it comes out—the story or their suppression of the story—whatever they do.
I’ve been sensing hints that something’s going on, something’s going unspoken in certain insider coverage of the campaign (and by the way this rumor the LA Times is supposedly sitting on is one I never heard in this specific form before. By the way, t’s not the Edwards rumor, it’s something else.
And when my source said “everyone in Washington”, knows about it he means everyone in the elite Mainstream media, not just the LA Times, but everyone regularly writing about the Presdidential campaign knows about it and doesn’t know what to do with it. And I must admit it really is was juicy if true. But I don’t know if it’s true and I can’t decide if I think it’s relevant. But the fact that “everyone” in the elite media knew about it and was keeping silent about it, is, itself, news. But you can’t report the “news” without reporting the thing itself. Troubling!
It raises all sorts of ethical questions. What about private sexual behavior is relevant? What about a marriage belongs in the coverage of a presidential campaign? Does it go to the judgment of the candidate in question? Didn’t we all have a national nervous breakdown over these questions nearly a decade ago?
Now, as I say it’s a rumor; I haven’t seen the supporting evidence. But the person who told me said it offhandedly as if everyone in his world knew about it. And if you look close enough you can find hints of something impending, something potentially derailing to this candidate in the reporting of the campaign. Which could mean that something unspoken, unwritten about is influencing what is written, what we read.
Why are well wired media elite keeping silent about it? Because they think we can’t handle the truth? Because they think it’s substantively irrelevant? What standards of judgment are they using? Are they afraid that to print it will bring on opprobrium. Are they afraid not printing it will bring on opprobrium? Or both?
But alas if it leaks out from less “responsible” sources. then all their contextual protectiveness of us will have been wasted.
And what about timing? They, meaning the DC elite media, must know if it comes out before the parties select their primary winners and eventual nominees, voters would have the ability to decide how important they felt it to the narrative of the candidate in question. Aren’t they, in delaying and not letting the pieces fall where they potentially may, not refusing to act but acting in a different way—taking it upon themselves to decide the Presidential election by their silence?
If they waited until the nominees were chosen wouldn’t that be unfair because, arguably, it could sink the candidacy of one of the potential nominees after the nomination was finalized? And doesn’t the fact that they “all” know something’s there but can’t say affect their campaign coverage in a subterranean, subconscious way that their readers are excluded from?
I just don’t know the answer. I’m glad in a situation like this, if there is in fact truth to it, that I wouldn’t have to be the “decider”. I wouldn’t want to be in a position of having to make that choice. But it’s a choice that may well decide a crucial turning point in history. Or maybe not: Maybe voters will decide they don’t think it’s important, however juicy. But should it be their choice or the choice of the media elites? It illustrates the fact that there are still two cultures at war within our political culture, insiders and outsiders. As a relative outsider I have to admit I was shocked not just by this but by several other things “everyone” down there knows.
There seem to be two conflicting imperatives here. The new media, Web 2.0 anti-elitist preference for transparency and immediacy and the traditional elitist preference for reflection, judgment and standards—their reflection, their small-group judgment and standards. Their civic duty to “protect” us from knowing too much.
I feel a little uneasy reporting this. No matter how well “nailed” they think they have it, it may turn out to be untrue. What I’m really reporting on is the unreported persistence of a schism between the DC media elites and their inside knowlede and the public that is kept in the dark. For their own good? Maybe they’d dismiss it as irrelevant, but shouldn’t they know?
I don’t know.
Do I lie, destroy this Marine's life and bankrupt his family?
or:
Do I tell the truth and let this man be seen as the hero that he is? (knowing full well that I'm not fit to be scraped off the bottom of his boot)
Then pop your main campaign, having fertilized the ground, so that it will have maximum impact, when many people will have been helped into forming a pre-opinion. That way, there will be little initial analysis into the veracity of the main campaign.
It’s right out of Eddie Bernays’ playbook, and is the way lots of advertising (and campaigning) is done when you have time and money.
As for who the target is, I am not speculating.
What fascinates me about these things is not the scandal itself, but the hubris that makes a politician with big skeletons in his/her closet think that s/he can run for president and it will never come out.
“If it were a republican, we’d have heard it by now, splashed everywhere. “
Only if the timing were right. They waited MONTHS for Larry Craig. Bush’s DUI was known for years and splashed at the appropriate time.
This is about advertising and selling a product, not just smearing people.
Ah, same sex attraction disorder.
No, he’d still be in play. Imagine if the LA Times has Bill dead to rights in an affair and a messy one at that. Hillary’s hand would be forced - could she forgive him again? But what about his fund raising prowess? She morphed back into the role of Mrs. Bill Clinton for a while. Now he has a bimbo eruption? It would shock me if he didn’t. I’m sure Hill would play the victim card but she’d be loathe to not have Bill supporting her campaign.
or like Dan Rather and his ‘story’ that was strategically reported and turned out to be crap...
No, she is totally inoculated. Such a story would not even elicit a yawn, because the speculation is decades old.
hey!I’m trying to eat dinner!
Then there's no end to it.
Whatever IT is...it’s hard to imagine the candidate doesn’t realize IT will come out sooner or later..and yet they continue to run..
SSAD = Same-Sex Attraction Disorder.
Wow, I missed this the first time. Hillary is going to have a Moslem at the center of the Oval Office:
The Huma Story (excerpt)
The back story, as it were, begins 32 years ago in Kalamazoo, Mich., where Ms. Abedin, who declined to participate in this article, lived until the age of 2. Her family then relocated to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she lived until returning to the States for college. She attended George Washington University. Her father, who died when she was 17, was an Islamic and Middle Eastern scholar of Indian decent. He founded his own institute devoted to Western-Eastern and interfaith understanding and reconciliation and published a journal focusing on Muslim minorities living in the diaspora. Her mother, a renowned professor in Saudi Arabia, is Pakistani.
Ms. Abedin recently bought an apartment in the vicinity of 12th and U streets in Washington, D.C. When she comes to New York, she stays with her sister, who has an apartment in Manhattan—not, as one popular rumor has it, in Chappaqua with the Clintons. She has no children and has never been married. She’s single.
Ms. Abedin began working for Mrs. Clinton as an intern for the then First Lady in 1996. She was hired as a staff assistant to the First Lady’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams. For several years, she was the backup to Mrs. Clinton’s permanent personal aide, Allison Stein, and she officially took over as Mrs. Clinton’s aide and advisor around the time of the 2000 Senate race.
Her Presidential campaign title is “traveling chief of staff.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1872041/posts
from Cavuto:
“Larry Flynt, editor and publisher of Hustler magazine, just told FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto that he’s “hoping to expose a bombshell” that will stand “Washington and the country on its head.”
Within the next week or two, he says his magazine will expose a sex scandal of huge proportions involving a prominent United States Senator. Flynt refused to comment on the Senator’s political affiliation, but alluded that he or she is a Republican.”
I know nothing about his history.
I’ve heard from someone who knows, that Hillary has a girlfriend in central California.
What a meaningless diatribe, why did he even bother?
Ordinary people have NO choice. The choice will be made by the elite media, i.e., the Democrats, since the MSM are nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Democrat party. The story, if there is a story, will be released after the primaries to aid Hillary. If the Republican nominee is not the individual the story is about, it will be saved in case the person is selected for VP or some cabinet post. Why waste a good juicy story if it isn't going to wipe out some Republican?
I'm sure she's polled divorce over and over again.
Bill has to worry whether she's polled the "grieving widow" role.
It’s OK to undermine national security, but not OK to print salacious details about a candidate, which they do all the time (because it doesn’t fit the agenda of the media). I’d think they were all complete idiots if I didn’t know it is because they are plain evil.
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