The Things Many Of Us Didn’t Know

You can’t change history, and ‘what if’s’ are somewhat useless, but on February 4th, Larry Elder posted a very interesting article in the Toronto Sun. The article reveals one way the media bias in America has impacted our nation.

The article is titled, “Had the ‘news’ media done its job, Obama would not have become president.” That is a very interesting thought. I somewhat disagree in that I believe the media considered it their job to discredit anyone who said anything negative about then Senator Obama and acted accordingly–so in their minds they were doing their job.

The article reports the first obvious example of the media omitting something that might have been relevant:

A photojournalist withheld publication of a 2005 photograph of a smiling then-Sen. Barack Obama with a beaming Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic, anti-white leader of the Nation of Islam.

The occasion was a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus. The photographer, Askia Muhammad, said that almost immediately after he took the picture a CBC staffer called and said, “We have to have the picture back.”

Muhammad later surrendered the disk with the photo to Farrakhan’s chief of staff. “I gave the picture up at the time and basically swore secrecy,” Muhammad said in an interview with the Trice Edney News Wire. “But after the (presidential) nomination was secured and all the way up until the inauguration; then for eight years after he was President, it was kept under cover.”

Harvard Law School professor emeritus and lifelong liberal Alan Dershowitz says he would not have campaigned for Obama had he been aware of this photograph. Dershowitz says: “Louis Farrakhan is a virulent anti-Semite. He’s called Judaism a ‘gutter religion.’ He’s anti-American. He is a horrible, horrible human being.

Example number two:

Obama’s longtime association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ would likely have derailed his candidacy had media pounced on this as they did the Trump “Access Hollywood” tape. But for Fox News’ coverage of Wright and the videotapes of his fiery sermons, the other major media would have avoided or downplayed Obama’s 20-year association with a pastor who gave fiery sermons critical of America and who had a longtime friendship with Farrakhan.

Ezra Klein, then with The Washington Post, set up a private internet forum he called JournoList, which served as an online gathering place for several hundred like-minded (aka liberal) reporters. When the Jeremiah Wright scandal broke, several reporters on the “J-List” literally schemed of ways to deflect attention from the scandal.

Not an encouraging picture of a supposedly unbiased media.

The third example:

Then there’s the Los Angeles Times, which, to this day, has not and will not publish even a transcript of the “Khalidi tapes.” Rashid Khalidi, an Obama friend and a University of Chicago Palestinian-American professor of Middle East studies, had a going-away party to celebrate his new post at Columbia University. Someone gave the Los Angeles Times a videotape of this 2003 event that Obama attended, where he reminisced about their friendship in a tribute to the professor.

Khalidi was an outspoken supporter of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. But what he said and what others said at this farewell party, we will never know. Were attendees bashing Israel? Did Obama bash Israel? The Times says it promised the unnamed source who provided the videotape not to air or reproduce the tape. The paper, whose editorial board endorsed Obama, claims it simply kept its promise to a source. If a tape could have ended Trump’s 2016 campaign, would the LA Times, whose editorial board twice endorsed Obama and considered Trump a danger to the world, have sat on it?

Whether or not this information would have mattered to the voters is not clear. What is clear is that each one of these events was an indication of the policies Senator Obama would embrace as President. Under President Obama we had eight years of very strained relationships with a number of our allies–the Churchill bust that was sent back to England, and the horrific treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during one of his visits when he was ignored then asked to leave by the back door of the White House are just two examples.

Under President Trump our relationship with Israel and Britain have improved. We are regaining the respect that our country lost under President Obama. We are no longer ‘leading from behind’ (which makes no sense anyway), but taking our place in the family of nations as a supporter of freedom and a voice for the exploited.