The Mainstream Media's Temper Tantrum

With the resignation of green czar Van Jones despite their efforts to protect him, the mainstream media have finally been reduced to sputtering incoherence, as they've observed the un-deification of their anointed messiah and experienced firsthand their own diminishing relevance.

The MSM are engaging in a colossal temper tantrum over their lost news monopoly — a monopoly they forfeited through their bias, arrogance and self-imposed insulation. (Consider Rathergate and their shameless effort to "Swift boat" the Swift boaters, to name a few.)

This is an especially hard pill for them to swallow considering that during the past year, they've been stewing in the intoxicating delusion that they were again supreme, as they appeared to be getting away with their conspiratorial enthroning of King Barack Obama. And they're not handling rejection well.

On "Meet the Press'" round-table discussion, retired "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman were protesting the grass roots' and alternative media's unmasking of Van Jones as a radical leftist.

Brokaw said: "A lot of people will repeat back to me and take it as face value something that they read on the Internet. And my line to them is you have to vet information. ... It is across-the-board ... and it's something that we all have to address, and it requires society and political and cultural leaders to stand up and say, 'This is crazy.' We just can't function that way."

As opposed to "functioning" what other way? Perhaps he means the old way of having his beloved mainstream media spoon-feed us ignorant masses only the information and slant they want us to hear. Does Brokaw believe his colleagues properly "vetted" Barack Obama and his mysterious past and dubious associations during the presidential campaign? Do they ask him any penetrating questions today? Have they ever pressed him to explain his voluminous inconsistencies and deceptions on health care alone?

To borrow your terminology, Mr. Brokaw, society — mainstream America, at least — is indeed standing up and saying: "This is crazy. We just can't function with an extremist president trying to turn America into a socialist and insolvent state and installing a cadre of unconstitutionally appointed, immensely powerful and wholly unaccountable Marxist czars at the highest levels of our government. And we're sick and tired of the mainstream media's aiding and abetting this reckless destruction."

But Tom Friedman one-upped Brokaw in the hysteria and righteous indignation departments.

Friedman said, "The Internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information — left, right, center, up, down — and requires that kind of filtering by anyone."

Ah, yes, the horrors of the free-flowing marketplace of ideas. Just think how much better life used to be before the Internet and conservative talk radio — still the liberal elite's main boogeyman — spoiled the MSM's monolithically liberal chokehold on information dissemination.

To these elites, it's less dangerous to society for omniscient liberals of their caliber to be the custodians of the news than for unlimited news sources to compete and be regulated only by the common sense and collective wisdom of the people — just as we'd be better off if a government bureaucracy controlled our health care decisions, the automobile industry, education, our mortgages and pretty much anything else it can inhale. To borrow Friedman's reaction to another question in the interview, "That's flat-out stupid, OK?"

You see, Mr. Friedman and Mr. Brokaw, had your smug MSM been doing their job over the past year, we wouldn't have The Washington Post, for example, making such a "flat-out stupid" statement as, "The resignation of White House environmental adviser Van Jones has revealed a lapse in the administration's vetting procedures that, nearly eight months into his tenure, delivered President Obama with an unwelcome distraction as he begins an important week on behalf of his health-care reform initiative."

It's not Obama who didn't vet Jones, but the MSM who have never vetted Obama. Had they vetted Obama, they would have realized that he is Van Jones and that he didn't need to vet Van Jones because he already knew him and considered him a soul mate. Besides, I thought the MSM complaint on the Jones affair was not that Jones is a radical, but that he got railroaded out by an out-of-control, "unfiltered" alternative media.

Now, which is it, boys? Is Jones an unacceptable radical who was properly exposed by the alternative media doing the job you wouldn't do? Or is he a hapless mainstream guy victimized by a bunch of radical righties? See what I mean by the MSM's sputtering incoherence?

In the meantime, the American people are better off because at least one of Obama's radicals has been exposed and stopped before he could contribute to the damage Obama is doing to this country.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His book "Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party" was released recently in paperback. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his Web site at www.DavidLimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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