Particularly if you live in California, you have seen repeated coverage of the incredibly despicable corruption and violation of the public trust demonstrated by politicians in Bell, California.
First, the story from Newsbusters:
Eight Dems Arrested in Bell, CA ‘Corruption on Steroids’ – Not a Single Mention of Party Affiliation From Media
By Lachlan Markay (Bio | Archive)
Tue, 09/21/2010 – 15:19 ETToday, eight city council members were arrested in Bell, California for what Los Angeles County District Attorney labeled “corruption on steroids.” Thus far, every major news outlet that has reported on the story has omitted the fact that all eight individuals arrested are Democrats.
These glaring omissions come only weeks after NewsBusters reported that of the 351 stories on the then-brewing controversy, 350 had omitted party affiliations, and one had mentioned they were Democrats only in apologizing for not doing so sooner.
ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported on the arrests today without mentioning party affiliations.
One commenter at CNN’s online story got it spot on: “I notice there is no mention of the party affiliation of the accused. I can find no mention of it in any story on the internet. This must mean they were all Democrats.”
Give the man a cigar.
Together, the eight city officials “misappropriated” $5.5 million in municipal funds. Robert Rizzo, the chief culprit, was arrested on 53 counts of various brands of corruption.
Before the scandal came to light, Rizzo had been making roughly $1.5 million per year, even though the per capita income in Bell is roughly half the national average.
Pedro Carillo, Bell’s interim city manager, released a statement on the arrests today:
Given the sheer volume of charges levied against former Bell Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo and former Assistant CAO Angela Spaccia by the district attorney, it is clear that Rizzo and Spaccia were at the root of the cancer that has afflicted the City of Bell. Also, it is a sad day for Bell that four current and two former members of the council also have been arrested. I am prepared to double down our efforts to continue to restore order, establish good government reforms, and to ensure that Bell is providing needed services to its residents.
Despite arrests in one of the most massive cases of municipal corruption in recent memory, no media outlet could bring itself to mention the officials’ party affiliations, a fact that has been widely reported since the scandal entered the national spotlight.
There was basically ONE acknowledgment that the corrupt politicians who filched MILLIONS of dollars for themselves in the form of insanely lucrative salaries and pensions – all at the courtesy of taxpayers, of course – were all in fact DEMOCRATS. That came from The Orange County Register. And even then, that admission only resulted from the fact that knowledgeable readers complained about the omission:
In the wake of the Bell salary scandal, our readers noticed one part of the story has been left out by virtually all media sources, including our related editorials and columns: the political party affiliations of the five city council members who not only failed to protect city coffers, but participated in what amounts to shameless, if apparently legal, self-dealing.
All five council members are members of the Democratic Party.
Jack Abramoff wasn’t even a Republican official, but by the time the mainstream media got through with the story, there was naught an American who didn’t know that Republicans were evil as a result of their reporting of the 2005-2006 story. And the fact that a number of prominent Democrats were involved, too, somehow got little mention, of course.
This has been going on for so long, and it’s so sickening.
On October 14, 2008 – two years ago this month – I wrote an article about another galling example of media bias and hypocrisy. I reminisced about Mark Foley – whom the Democrats and the mainstream media turned into the poster boy of everything that was wrong with the Republican Party just in time to poison the 2006 elections against Republicans.
Now, the media could have made a similar example out of Democrat Tim Mahoney, who replaced Mark Foley in the very same West Palm Beach, Florida district. In terms of breaking the law and being a slimeball, Mahoney did far worse than anything Foley did – and just in time to be the poster boy for Democrat malfeasance in advance of the 2008 elections. But the same media that turned Mark Foley into a household name were nowhere to be found.
And, as I predicted, two years later and nobody knows who Tim Mahoney was anymore.
Tim Mahoney spent $121,000 of taxpayer money to keep an aide with whom he was sexually involved with from talking after she threatened to sue him. He threatened his tax-dollar-funded mistress and said to her, “You work at my pleasure. Do you understand what that means?”
Mahoney self-righteously claimed he would be better than Mark Foley. He was actually the guy the Democrats tasked to lead the way in the Democrats’ ethics reform package. And yet the mainstream media couldn’t seem to find a hitch to hang a story about the guy.
Journalists couldn’t bring themselves to harm Democrats. Because they are partisan and biased. And they don’t report the facts, they slant them.
There’s always a ton of stories to show how pathologically dishonest, biased and corrupt the mainstream media is. Recently, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was fired by the network after a bizarre rant in which he demonstrated he was profoundly racist and anti-Semitic.
No wonder Obama is so favorable toward CNN; they have the same attitude toward “them Jews” that his reverend and spiritual adviser for 23 years had. Just saying.
That Rick Sanchez racist tirade reminded me of a story I wrote about how that very same CNN anchor falsely attributed racist statements to Rush Limbaugh in a shocking act of media scapegoating:
CNN joined MSNBC in “quoting” Rush Limbaugh to effect that he is a racist. And as a result of these “bigoted remarks,” Rush Limbaugh was thrown out of an ownership package to purchase the St. Louis Rams.
CNN anchor Rick Sanchez did the following:
CNN anchor Rick Sanchez read a disputed racist quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh about antebellum slavery on Monday’s Newsroom: “Limbaugh’s perceived racist diatribes are too many to name. Here’s a sample- he once declared that ‘slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.’”
And that certainly wasn’t all that Rick Sanchez said. Go to the link for more, and for the embedded video of the “reporting.”
You want to talk about the racist calling the kettle “racist”?
Rush Limbaugh never said any of the things that Rick Sanchez claimed. It was a terrible, biased, ideological, serial slandering by someone who professed himself to be an “objective journalist.”
I want you to understand. Clearly, Rick Sanchez didn’t go after Rush Limbaugh because Rush Limbaugh is racist. It’s RICK who is racist, not RUSH. No, Rick Sanchez targeted Rush Limbaugh because, like most of his fellow “journalists,” Rick Sanchez is a partisan, biased, ideologue propagandist.
If the media were to report the facts fairly, accurately and honestly, the Republicans would have dominated the political landscape since FDR nearly destroyed America with the same policies that Obama is using to destroy the country today.
Prior to Obama’s being elected president, the “story” was all about how Republicans had exploded the economy. So it should come as no surprise that 57.4% of Obama voters were unaware of the fact that DEMOCRATS had been in control of Congress for the preceding two years. It didn’t make any sense how the Republicans could be entirely to blame for the economy collapsing if it was actually DEMOCRATS who controlled both the House of Representatives and the US Senate. So we had one of those cases in which “if the facts got in the way of the reporting, so much the worse for the facts.”
In 2006, and again in 2008, Democrats – with the help of the mainstream media – made Republican corruption a primary issue.
Now we’ve got more corrupt Democrats than you can shake a stick at (e.g., Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, John Kerry, all the many Obama officials who failed to pay their taxes – particularly the Treasury Secretary and top tax enforcer Timothy Geithner – and basically the entire Democrat establishment). Not to mention the eight incredibly sleezy Democrat officials from Bell, California, who are robbing poor citizens who earn only half the national average blind.
And those eight Bell, California Democrats are basically using the same “pension enhancement” techniques that their fellow liberal public officials in the public employee unions have relied upon to rack up some $3.35 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities.
Which is to say that Democrats have been accusing Republicans of corruption, even as they were out literally bankrupting America with their own corruption.
Start Thinking Right 