Democratic Party Media Run Interference for Hillary

Sarah Palin vs. Hillary Clinton: whom do you think the Democratic Party media prefers? Don’t worry, that isn’t a trick question. Still, no matter how reporters and editors may feel about the two women, it is obvious which one is more newsworthy. Sarah Palin served one-half of one term as Governor of Alaska. While she was, of course, the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2008, she is not now, and most likely will not be in the future, a candidate for public office. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is not only a former First Lady, Senator from New York and Secretary of State, she is said to be the odds-on favorite to be the next president of the United States.

So by any normal journalistic standard, it is far more important to inform the public about Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, especially as to matters that may bear on Clinton’s fitness for the nation’s highest office. That being the case, the Democratic Party media’s frenzy over a supposed brawl in Wasilla, Alaska, that involved the Palin family is revealing. Even though, as John Nolte points out, the source of information about the altercation was a left-wing blogger who is viciously hostile to Palin and who freely acknowledged that she hadn’t tried to “track down the details of the brawl,” supposedly mainstream news outlets couldn’t get enough of the Palin story. This screen shot shows that the search “Palin brawl” generates almost 86,000 results:

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OK, that’s unseemly, but maybe it was just a slow news day, right? Just kidding. Meanwhile, another story has emerged: an eyewitness report by a former high-ranking State Department official who said that he observed Hillary Clinton’s representatives removing damaging documents from the supposedly comprehensive materials they provided to the Benghazi Accountability Review Board. This story would seem to be the ultimate bombshell: it involves the person who, according to conventional wisdom, will likely be the next president; it relates to the biggest scandal of her public career, in which four Americans, including an ambassador, died; and it reflects directly on her honesty and fitness for office. By rights, this story should receive roughly one million times the coverage of the Palin brawl in Wasilla.

So far, though, that hasn’t happened. The Democratic Party media, desperate to protect their party’s presumed nominee, have tried to bury the story. The Google News search “Clinton state department benghazi documents” returns a mere 2,060 results, about one forty-third the number of articles devoted to the Palin altercation:

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And note what outlets have reported on the Benghazi document scandal: not the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Associated Press, but Fox News, Human Events, Daily Caller, Paul’s Power Line post earlier today, and–somewhat ironically–London’s Daily Mail. This may be another instance where we have to read the British papers to get American news. Here, the exception proves the rule: Media Matters is the only Democratic Party organization to talk about the Clinton document allegations, and it tries to debunk them.

Maybe the liberal press hasn’t had time yet to pick up on Sharyl Attkisson’s report on former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell’s allegations, which appeared early this morning. Of course, it didn’t take them that long to jump on the Palin story. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. We will be watching the Democratic Party press over the next few days to see whether its appetite for first-hand, eyewitness accounts of dishonesty by Hillary Clinton and her agents equals its thirst for rumors about Alaska’s former governor.

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