Malcolm Cutchins: Media failed to ‘expose’ their chosen man

In any post mortem of our recent historic election, the failure of the national television news to expose (with their vast journalistic resources) the shortcomings, or even the record, of their “adopted” candidate has to stand at the top of the list.

One of our nation’s most astute writers has written “The Failure of Journalism” (National Review On-line). In the Nov. 1 article, Victor Davis Hanson (a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of multiple books) noted “we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama.”

Hanson describes in detail “four areas of national interest that were largely ignored.”

They are: 1) Campaign Financing: In June 2008, Obama abruptly reneged on his promise to use public funding, “bowing out entirely from government financing, the first presidential nominee in the general election to do that since the system was created in 1976… For all practical purposes, public financing of the presidential general election is now dead.
No Republican will ever (as McCain did) agree to it again. No Democrat can ever again dare to defend a system destroyed by Obama.”

2) The VP Candidates: “The respective coverage of the two candidates is ironic in a variety of ways, but in one especially — almost every charge against (Gov.) Palin (that she is under wraps, untruthful, and inept) was applicable only to Biden.”

3) The Past as Present: “the Obama of 2008 is radically different from the Obama who was largely consistent and predictable for the prior 30 years… in almost every imaginable sense of the word. Name an issue — FISA, NAFTA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, coal, nuclear power, drilling, Iran, Jerusalem, the surge — and Obama’s position today is not that of just a year ago.”

4) Socialism: Obama’s tax plan will most likely result in “discouraging the wealthy from seeking greater income, given that nearly two-thirds of additional wealth would be lost to taxes.”
Concerning the latter, if enacted, this discouragement will hurt job growth and severely limit increases in our nation’s GDP.

In my Oct. 23 column, I mentioned (tongue-in-cheek) a “mini-poll” based on the scarcity of only three political “vehicle signs” observed during a 15-hour round-trip interstate drive through three states. Now that election results are available, how did this poll’s 2-1 McCain edge come out? The sum of the three-state results for McCain was 3,803,042 votes, compared to 2,656,492 votes for Obama.

The biggest joke of the campaign period was Brian Williams of NBC News on national television the Friday before Election Day complaining that they “had not yet been given Sarah Palin’s medical records;” this, compared to more than a half dozen much more serious records that never surfaced about Obama. Other serious “jokes” are coming to light, see http://www.HowObamaGotElected.com.

Dr. Malcolm Cutchins is an emeritus professor of engineering of Auburn University and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.