The Shipwrecked Los Angeles Times
Hugh Hewitt:
Which brings us to the Khalidi-Obama tape and the decision of the Los Angeles Times to suppress it. This is an astonishing moment in the history of journalism. In the last presidential campaign, an arm of MSM attempted to influence the race by inventing a major story. This time, a different arm is influencing the race by censoring the news. Times' owner Sam Zell and every single editor and reporter at the paper are thus now complicit in a decision to manage the news so that voters are not informed of all that might influence their choice of president. The videotape might be as bland as skim milk, or as incendiary as even the most inflammatory Jeremiah Wright sermon, but the content doesn't matter. The paper is suppressing the news and using Orwellian language to claim otherwise. The silence from other MSMers tells us all we need to know about their commitment to the mission of getting important facts before the public. Imagine that the tape is of the sort as to tilt the election to McCain, but because of its suppression by the Times, Obama is elected. The paper then "owns" everything that follows on Obama's watch. This is of course true for the author of every partisan action that yields a decisive influence on an election, but it is an unprecedented position for an alleged newspaper to be in. Newspapers thump their chests when state secrets are revealed, claiming the need of the public to know even at the risk of damaging national security. What a turnaround to be wholly and irrefutably exposed as a mere agent in a presidential campaign rather than the guardian of the public's interest in truth. When the Times published stories on the SWIFT program used to track terrorist financing, I interviewed the Times' D.C. bureau chief, Doyle McManus. Here's the core of that interview. The Times was willing to run the risk of informing terrorists about efforts to capture them, but is refusing to inform the American people about relevant, indeed, potentially decisive facts on the eve of an election.