Instapundit I think it was who formulated a very helpful rule: In trying to make sense of what gets or doesn’t get reported in the U.S. mainstream media, and how is reported what does see the light of day, if you simply proceed from the notion that the reporter and the organization are Democrat Party operatives then you won’t go far wrong.
Notwithstanding we see the wisdom of that rule confirmed time and again, we are forever assured that there is no lamestream media bias in favor of the left. Oh noes! You can, of course, regularly and with depressing uniformity of result play “Name that Party,” in which reports of egregious wrong-doing by prominent Democrats either never mention party affiliation, or bury it in the third-from-last paragraph of a 25-paragraph story, over on page B-15 of the Saturday morning paper, while Republicans will have their affiliation mentioned in the lead sentence of the first paragraph, if not the headline as well. You can read the whole sordid history of Journolist, the conspiracy hatched and run from The Washington Post’s offices by Ezra Klein during the 2008 presidential campaign, and the intent and effect of which was to coordinate among roughly 400 reporters and Democrat operatives what and how they were going to report in connection with that campaign. You can go back and watch Candy Crowley (I think it was) jump into Mitt Romney’s shellacking of Dear Leader during their debate, to buttress a fraudulent claim by Dear Leader that he had correctly identified the Benghazi attacks as being of terroristic origin, when in fact he did no such thing for weeks afterward. And so forth and so on.
Or you can follow the story of George Stephanopoulos, the Clinton operative who now masquerades as a “journalist” on ABC, and who interviewed the author who has described in detail the patterns of cash flowing from various unsavory foreign governments and operations to the Clinton family’s slush fund, while Hillary Clinton was U.S. Secretary of State, and which — coincidentally, we’re assured — achieved favorable results in the discussions they just happened to be having with the U.S. government and its agencies at the time. Ol’ Georgie-boy kept asserting during his interview that the author had “no evidence” of any quid pro quo arrangements. No “smoking gun.” No evidence. No evidence. No evidence. Well, of course not: Hillary destroyed any evidence that might have existed after cherry-picking what e-mails to surrender to the U.S. government. [N.b. When the images of her private server’s hard drive are finally leaked, however, then we’ll see the evidence. I am perfectly comfortable that those images exist in the hands of multiple parties hostile to the U.S. . . . and that their existence has been made known to Hillary, very quietly of course.]
The problem for George is that at no time before or after that interview did Stephanopoulos disclose that over three years — 2012, 2013, and 2014 — he had made annual $25,000 contributions to the Clinton Foundation or that he was an active participant in several of its functions. When confronted, he first dismissed annually giving over half the annual median income of a household of four as chump change, and nothing we ought to worry about. Moreover, it was just part of his larger charitable giving program, dontcha know, and he’s just such charitable guy and all that stuff.
There’s only one problem: At the end of 2010, the Clinton Foundation spun off the vast bulk of its charitable activities and since then has concentrated on activities more properly characterized as Clinton campaign networking. By 2013 the foundation spent less than 15% of its revenue on charitable grants; in contrast, over 60% of its expenses are characterized as just “other.” So whatever else George Stephanopoulos’s $75,000 in chump change was paying for, it sure as hell wasn’t much charity at all.
ABC has already doubled down, vigorously defending their standard-bearer and declining to do anything more than promise he won’t “moderate” a GOP presidential debate.
If the GOP has a lick of sense about it, they’ll categorically refuse to permit this hack to come anywhere near a 2016 presidential debate. Which means he’ll do ’em all, of course.