Speaking at the Al Smith dinner, which benefits Catholic humanitarian causes, Mitt Romney took on the press in a joking manner that struck many as truthful. “Now I never suggest that the press is biased,” he said. “I recognize that they have their job to do, and I have my job to do. My job is to lay out a positive vision for the future of the country, and their job is to make sure no one else finds out about it.”
He went on, “Let’s just say that some in the media have a certain way of looking at things. When suddenly I pulled ahead in some of the major polls, what was the headline? ‘Polls Show Obama Leading from Behind.’ And I’ve already seen early reports from tonight’s dinner. Headline: ‘Obama Embraced by Catholics. Romney Dines with Rich People.’”
Meanwhile, Professor Paul Kengor was not joking when he told Breitbart News that the job of the major media “is to protect Obama, not expose him.” Kengor has experienced media bias first hand since his blockbuster book, The Communist, came out in July. It exposes Obama’s relationship with Communist Party operative Frank Marshall Davis.
Frank was revealed to be Frank Marshall Davis in 2007, when a Communist Party writer named Gerald Horne made the disclosure. Blogger Trevor Loudon wrote about the connection that same year and AIM confirmed the identification of “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis on February 18, 2008, in a column, “Obama’s Communist Mentor.” Davis’s 600-page FBI file was released in August of that year—before the election.
Asked by Breitbart News if any mainstream media journalists have contacted him about his definitive and exhaustive analysis of Davis and his relationship to Obama, Kengor replied, “Are you kidding? No way. Not a chance. They’ll send a team of a dozen reporters to fact-check Sarah Palin’s memoirs or a Romney speech, but not to investigate the President they’ve committed to coddle and preserve.”
Kengor said of the media, “They aren’t real journalists. They’re political partisans first and journalists second. They’re not honest, or they delude themselves on a grand scale. They’ve sacrificed their noble profession to an ignoble political ideology.”
Except for the jokes at the Al Smith dinner, the Romney campaign has decided not to attack media bias, even though liberal media strategies of distortion and omission can cost a Republican candidate critical voter support and in Romney’s case guarantee an Obama re-election victory on November 6.
Tim Groseclose, author of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, told AIM in an interview with Roger Aronoff that the leftward bias of the media has shifted the political quotient of the average American by about 20 points on a scale of 100, in terms of conditioning the public to accept the Democratic Party, its candidates and policies. This translates potentially into millions of votes. One of the many tactics, Groseclose said, is to cite liberal groups as reliable and reputable sources of information and identity conservative sources by their political leanings, thus reducing their appeal and attraction.
At the AIM “ObamaNation” conference on September 21, pollster Pat Caddell urged Romney to openly run against “two organizations”—the Democratic Party and the “mainstream media.” He said the media have “made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people,” because they hide information that is critical to making informed decisions in a democracy.
However, Romney told CBS News that he had no plans to challenge media bias.
This approach reflects the influence of Romney adviser Ed Gillespie, who has said the campaign has a “no whining rule” about media coverage. “We just deal with the facts,” he said.
GOP strategist and SuperPAC sponsor Karl Rove told a gathering of Republican donors that he has advised Romney and other Republicans not to attack Obama as a socialist or a left-winger because the charges would be met with denials. He urged a “respectful tone” toward the President.
Although the media and the Republican Party establishment do not want to deal with Kengor’s book, The Communist, Frank Marshall Davis is the subject of the Joel Gilbert DVD, Dreams from My Real Father, being mailed to millions of households in the various swing states. The media are starting to take note of this. “Radical Anti-Obama DVD floods Florida mailboxes” is the headline over one story carried by a Florida television station.
While Gilbert’s theory about Davis being Obama’s real father is subject to discussion and debate, his film does cite factual data about Davis’s relationship with Obama and notes the existence of the 600-page FBI file on Davis.
If there is nothing to hide in this relationship, Paul Kengor told Breitbart News, then why did Obama himself delete the references to “Frank” in the audio version of his book, Dreams from My Father? “Obama narrates the audio version,” Kengor notes. “The liberals feted him with a Grammy for his sterling narration. And the back cover of the audio states, ‘This abridgment has been approved by the author.’”
Kengor said, “Frank appears in every section of the memoir, all three parts, starting in Hawaii and then when Obama thinks of him later in Africa, Europe, Chicago. It’s not like Frank appears only on pages, say, 15-22. He appears throughout the text. It’s eerie to be reading the book in hard cover, and listening simultaneously to the audio, and see and hear everything the same, line to line, sentence to sentence, paragraph after paragraph, page upon page, and then suddenly, on a dime, out of the blue, come upon a printed sentence or paragraph that mentions ‘Frank’ and—bam—the audio suddenly skips ahead. It’s chilling. It’s clearly deliberate. No question about it. It’s clear concealment.”
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.