April 29, 2008 02:21 pm
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John Edwards was allegedly caught having an affair with a younger woman. Reports surfaced that the woman was pregnant with his child and had been relocated to an undisclosed location in the vicinity of Chapel Hill.
John McCain was rumored to have appeared to have an inappropriate relationship with a young, attractive female lobbyist. It was suspected that he did favors for the business she represented while he was the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Neither story gave many sources for its information. Both used anonymous tips and statements from friends of friends of low level former aides.
Only one found its way to the New York Times. The other hit the supermarket tabloids. Guess which one the New York Times published? I’ll give you two guesses and one of them isn’t the John Edwards story. John McCain got hit by what Rush Limbaugh terms the drive-by media.
One of the tenants of the conservative faith is that the mainstream media has a decidedly liberal bias. I don’t know how long conservatives have known or realized this bias. Most conservatives point to studies which show that over 90 percent of journalists voted for Bill Clinton.
But the liberal media still claims they are objective. They might be liberal personally, but it doesn’t come through their writing. Uh huh.
On Feb. 21 the New York Times ran a front-page above-the-fold story alluding to worries some John McCain aides have had about the appearance that he was too close to Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist for the law firm Alcalde & Fay. The implication was that McCain was having an affair. There was no evidence, though.
McCain supposedly wrote two letters to the Federal Communication Commission on behalf of Iseman’s firm, urging the commission to come to a decision on a stalled bid of Iseman’s client, Paxson Communications, to buy a Pittsburg television station.
Interestingly, the New York Times endorsed McCain for the Republican nomination last fall. This story, ironically, has been a year in the making, and was going to be published in December, but the McCain camp convinced the Times to sit on the story. McCain now has the nomination locked up.
And now the New York Times has decided to try to knock him down after the liberal magazine, The New Republic, began an investigation into the inner workings of the New York Times this month, intending to write a piece on how and why the Times sat on the December story. This, the McCain campaign claims, put pressure on the New York Times to publish the story now.
The Times story mostly relied on anonymous quotes from low level McCain staffers who have left the campaign for various reasons. The piece is unsourced and salacious. Even liberal TV pundits like American University Professor Jane Hall agree The New York Times “didn’t have the goods” (i.e. didn’t prove anything).
McCain denies the account completely, of course. Indeed, none of the exculpatory evidence his campaign provided the Times found its way into the very lengthy piece.
McCain’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, a Democrat, appeared on Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes the night before the story was printed to head off the allegations before they spread too far. Bennett argues that McCain is an honest man, even anathema to lobbyists.
Bennett would know. He investigated McCain as a part of the Keating Five savings and loan scandal in 1989. McCain and Sen. John Glenn were both cleared of wrongdoing in the investigation. Bennett says McCain is one of the most honest men he’s ever met.
I couldn’t tell you whether McCain did anything wrong. Most conservatives are inclined to distrust anything the New York Times says. In fact, this drive-by attack may be just the thing McCain needs to rally conservatives around him.
I’ve learned to be skeptical of what the news media tries to make us believe. In fact, I have no idea if John Edwards really had an affair and fathered a child. A former Edwards campaign worker in Chapel Hill (my anonymous source) refused to comment on the veracity of the Edwards rumors. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
But my question is why did the Times print the McCain story, but not the John Edwards story? Could it be that there are two different journalistic standards, one for Republican scandals and another for Democrat scandals? Could it be that the New York Times has an ideological tinge that affects its editorial and publication decisions?
I submit to you that the radical left-wingers are pushing the mainstream media farther to the left. The far left New Republic forced the Times to print the story or risk losing street credibility with the left for sitting on the story.
As I said, the Edwards’s story was published in the National Enquirer, but anonymous sources, from friends of a cousin of a guy who knows a guy at the National Enquirer indicate to The Tar Heel Dispatch that the Enquirer refused to publish the McCain story because it didn’t meet its journalistic standards.
Tar Heel Dispatch is written by Tyler Younts, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Younts, who grew up in Farmer, has a passion for writing and for politics and for writing about politics. E-mail comments to news@randolphguide.com or directly to Younts at younts@email.unc.edu
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