by Tony Lee16 Jun 2014, 12:59 PM PDTOn Sunday evening, mainstream media reporter Glenn Thrush revealed that a former editor of his at Newsday in 2008 delayed and buried his story on Hillary Clinton’s defense of a child rapist because “it might have an impact.”
When Thrush wrote the story on February 24, 2008, Clinton was battling Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
- Amy Chozick@amychozick
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@GlennThrush I remember that story well
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@amychozick my then-editor appended a meaningless intro to the story, delayed and buried it because, in his words, ‘it might have an impact’
~~~Glenn Thrush@GlennThrushFollowHere’s the only link I can find to my original 2008 Newsday story on Hillary’s 1975 defense of child rapist http://sweetness-light.com/archive/hillary-versus-the-allegedly-raped-child#.U55aze29LCQ…
Thrush Tweeted in response to a Free Beacon report on Hillary Clinton’s recordings regarding the case.
As Breitbart News reported, then-President Bill Clinton feared this democratization that the Internet could force three years before Matt Drudge gave birth to the new media age by publishing a story about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Newsweek had killed the story to protect its ally Clinton in the White House.
In the infamous 1995 “conspiracy commerce memo,” which was written to “demonize and discredit alternative media outlets on the right to mainstream media organizations and D.C. establishment figures,” Clinton’s White House noted that the “Internet has become one of the major and most dynamic modes of communication” and “can link people, groups and organizations together instantly.”
“Moreover, it allows an extraordinary amount of unregulated data and information to be located in one area and available to all,” the memo states. “The right wing has seized upon the Internet as a means of communicating its ideas to people. Moreover, evidence exists that Republican staffers surf the Internet, interacting with extremists in order to exchange ideas and information.”
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has pioneered the use of social media to further level the playing field, said, the “new media rose up precisely because the old media failed to tell the truth.”
“That very first new media breakthrough was about 15 years ago when this lowly little store clerk in a lowly little apartment equipped with his computer and a modem broke one of the biggest stories of the decade. His name was Matt Drudge and the rest is history,” Palin said in a 2012 speech. “And oh how that old media cried foul and they howled. They denounced Drudge as irresponsible and unprofessional and even dangerous and anti-everything from motherhood to apple pie. How dare that nobody from nowhere without a degree or a pedigree try to influence the national discourse?”
Palin added that the real reason the legacy press feared Drudge “was because he wasn’t beholden to the old media’s machine and the Thought Police.”
“Unshackled, he was free,” Palin said before recalling Drudge’s speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. in the belly of the beast of the establishment press in which Drudge presciently explained, “We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be….I envision a future where there’ll be 300 million reporters, where anyone from anywhere can report for any reason. It’s freedom of participation absolutely realized.”
Drudge practically writes President Barack Obama’s daily intelligence reports today, as Palin noted, because Obama supposedly finds out about all of his scandals from news reports. And last week, when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was ousted in one of the biggest upsets in history, the mainstream media was nowhere to be found. But Dave Brat’s victory over Cantor was a triumph for new media outlets like Breitbart News, which had been relentlessly covering the race for months.
Even legacy outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times and top editors from the Cook Political Report and National Journal acknowledged that Breitbart News did better reporting than their mainstream media peers on the Cantor race.
As Breitbart News and even the New York Times similarly noted, political reporters still “often only read and talk to fellow scribes cocooned in the D.C. bubble.” That is why when “Brat introduced himself to America and the political class on Fox News after his victory ” and said that amnesty represents the biggest divide between Wall Street elitists and Main Street,” it was the first time that most in the legacy press heard a theme that Brat had been repeating for weeks to propel himself past Cantor:
Brat had been hammering that message, but it was the first time that most mainstream media reporters who were just 95 miles from the epicenter of the most shocking upset in their lifetimes heard it. In that sense, they were no different from Cantor, who was ousted for losing touch with voters in a hometown that is only a two-hour drive from Washington.
Though the legacy press may be a bit less insular than it was before The Drudge Report, incidents like the one Thrush revealed still show how much supposedly “neutral” mainstream media editors and reporters still try to protect their liberal allies.
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Defending a child rapist would be at least distasteful. Bragging about getting one back out on the streets when you KNOW he’s guilty is what… clever? A victory lap? A blow for Justice? Why did she laugh about it?
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