Easongate Omerta in the MSM

Rathergate.com has an excellent, insightful, and probing wrapup of the Easongate affair:

It is odd, to say the least, that the mainstream media and its house organs stayed eerily mum on Jordan. Despite a unifying factor of liberal bias, news agencies are fiercely competitive for shrinking customer bases and advertising dollars and love to discredit a rival’s sloppy work – they immediately leaped on “Memogate” when it became blindingly obvious that not only did CBS air fraudulent information, but also apparently coordinated with the Kerry campaign.

Perhaps the mainstream press is fearful after CBS’ fall and did not want to again react to the blogosphere. Maybe they just did not want to give the blogosphere the satisfaction of ending yet another distinguished journalism career. Maybe their attitudes toward the military made the media fall for the same trap that CBS fell into with Bill Burkett’s memos and the Boston Globe fell into with its doctored pictures of U.S. troops raping Muslim women. After all, everyone knows that the military are a bunch of hairy-knuckled brutes (just look at the Abu Ghraib pictures), so what Jordan said is true, regardless of whether he has the evidence to support it, right?

But the media’s silence speaks volumes about their ulterior motives and their agenda. Jordan leveled a charge that, if true, would bring down the President, his Cabinet, and essentially the entire Republican Party. It would make Watergate look like the Scott Peterson trial. Silence. Two Congressmen, both liberal Democrats, expressed outrage at Jordan’s slandering of U.S. troops without evidence. The crickets could still be heard chirping in the newsrooms.

Now suppose for argument’s sake that Jordan was, say, a corporate executive who made controversial comments and refused to release a transcript of the event. The American public would never hear the end of it. The media would pull their hair and gnash their teeth over the veil of secrecy over corporate America and the lack of “transparency.”

But when the comments are from a media bigwig whose incorrect assumptions conveniently match the lockstep groupthink of many a newsroom, down comes the wall of silence.

This is a very interesting point. First, I think competition in the MSM is overrated. Most of the MSM recycles the exact same content from the New York Times, the font of their collective wisdom. Think of White House press briefings and how many times MSM reporters back each other up by asking slight variations of the same question, using their valuable question time to be part of the media herd. Think of the silence on undeniably great stories such as Juanita Broadrick's rape allegations against Bill Clinton, or on the Swift Vets' charges against Kerry. Truly competitive media outlets would have swarmed for interviews, at least to get something on air or in print. They held fire, awaiting the next Kitty Kelly anti-Bush screed or Dan Rather fabrication.

Second, I think the MSM circles the wagons collectively whenever actively threatened. The MSM view of talk radio, for example, is monolithically against. There's no revolving door between talk radio hosts and the MSM the way there is between the MSM and Democratic administration water-carriers. Sure, there's Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly on the radio, and Mara Liasson and Juan Williams on NPR, but I can't think of anyone beyond Fox News allowing such an easy transition. Likewise, I think the MSM view the blogosphere as a growing threat. Thus any story coming from blogs (or at least blogs which aren't wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party) are strictly verboten.

I look forward to reading the rest of the series.