The Rosetta Stone of Journalism
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Rosetta Stone of Journal

If you ever needed a Rosetta Stone to understand the mentality of the Big Media, the recent flap over Vice President Richard Cheney, who accidentally peppered his friend with birdshot, is for you. Even a cursory examination of the media’s reaction to this story demonstrates that, far from being the professional journalists that they constantly portray themselves to be, they are actually a bunch of chattering knuckleheads without an iota of perspective or common sense.

Check out some of these questions by the White House press corps (supposedly the elite of journalists---God help us!):

“Was it the Vice President's gun?”

“The Vice President did not call the President to tell him he was the shooter?”

“So when did the President definitively know that the Vice President had shot somebody?”

“Do you know whether he's taken a hunting safety course?”

“Is it proper for the Vice President to offer his resignation or has he offered his resignation –“

“Scott, under Texas law, is this kind of accidental shooting a possible criminal offense?”

“Scott, would this be much more serious if the man had died?” [!!!]

“Is it appropriate for the Vice President to have waited 14 hours after the incident before he spoke with local law enforcement officials? And do you think that an average citizen would have been accorded that same amount of time before having to answer questions about a shooting incident?”

“Is the President satisfied that he learned of the details about the shooting through Karl Rove and Andy Card, and not directly from the Vice President?”

“And could you provide cost estimates when the President [sic] takes these hunting trips -- like what it costs the taxpayers…”

These questions are amazing not just for the profound foolishness they exhibit, but for their conspiratorial tone as well! If one knew nothing else about the incident, he would be forced to conclude that the vice president, while illegally hunting quail, attempted to kill his friend while the White House did its best to conceal the resulting malfeasance. Give me a break!

But the mentality behind these questions betrays an even greater deficiency. While the press is going bananas over a non-story, an incident that does not impact the body politic in the least, real issues of newsworthiness are all but being ignored. We have Al Gore uttering treasonous remarks at a Saudi conference (where, apparently, he was awarded a Slinky for some strange reason); revelations of a FEMA financial boondoggle; Iran, in the grips dark fascism, aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction; and, of course, the minor story of the continuing War on Terror. But no, in the mind of the MSM, the big story is the vice president’s misfire….

Of course, what is really going on here is that the ego-driven Washingtonian media is hopping mad at being scooped by a local paper in Texas which was accorded the privilege of breaking this story. How dare the vice president not rush, in Clintonian fashion, to a microphone and assist the Big Media in making a mountain out of a molehill. How dare he focus on the well-being of his friend, and not take into consideration his ability to further the careers of braying jackasses such as David Gregory of NBC news? How dare he?!?

This whole incident is yet more proof of why the mainstream media is losing more and more of its credibility with every passing day. They’re no longer about the news, they’re all about image, ratings, and apparently… idiocy. Or, as the besieged Scott McClellan told the hostile Gregory: “David, now you want to make this about you, and it's not about you, it's about what happened.”

Amen to that!