Watching the way in which the mainstream media treats issues is a source of endless fascination. To say that the established media are biased to the Left falls far short of the truth. It is more accurate to say that the Weltanschauung, the worldview or mindset, of the establishment media is so deeply leftist that it literally cannot register anything that doesn’t fit that mold. A recent case illustrates this bias anew.
It has to do with the John Cochran VA Medical Center in St. Louis, which mailed letters to over 1,800 past patients, giving them the fascinating news that they may have been exposed to HIV and hepatitis. It had to send out the warning notice after discovering that staff members had cleaned dental instruments improperly.
Now, this is amazing: many hundreds of people made to fear exposure to life-threatening diseases because of sanitary ineptitude — yet hardly any comment appeared in the mainstream media. Compare this to the ObamaCare debate, in which even one case of private healthcare screwing up could make the news. Whole stories were built around one person who claimed that she was driven to bankruptcy because of high medical bills, or a young man with tears in his eyes because his mother couldn’t get health insurance.
This sort of journalism — the endless critique of private healthcare providers for minor or supposed failures — drove
the healthcare debate that allowed the Democrats to ram home ObamaCare. But when government healthcare had colossal failures, they never entered the debate.
Here’s another story. Consider the curious case of J. Christian Adams. To understand it, take yourself back to the 2008 election. At a polling place in North Philly, members of the New Black Panther Party evidently harassed and intimidated voters. The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division charged three members of the group with violating the federal Voting Rights Act. But after Eric Holder was installed as the nation’s attorney general, the case was largely dropped.
This led Mr. Adams, a DOJ prosecutor, to resign and blow the whistle. He has claimed in interviews that the policy in Holder’s DOJ is one of not pursuing complaints about violations of civil rights unless the alleged victims are minorities and the alleged perpetrators are whites.
From within the DOJ emerged a story that Adams was a disgruntled conservative ideologue unhappy with (and unpopular among) his colleagues. Adams has heatedly denied the charge, pointing to the fact that he was recently promoted.
Little of this has gotten play in the media. A story about a whistleblower who resigns and openly makes a serious charge about a controversial decision by the organization he was employed by, members of which then attack him personally, would be puffed up mightily if that organization were a business. But if it is a DOJ under the neosocialist rule, no comment is made.
