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January 22, 2006

Time-Gate? The Media is Learning the Wrong Lesson

Time Magazine apparently has an exclusive that there exists pictures with President Bush and Jack Abramoff together. Skipping past the irrelevancy of what these pictures are supposed to present, there is one immediate thing that comes to mind.

TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed. While TIME's source refused to provide the pictures for publication…

Rathergate of fond memory provided what should have been a valuable lesson to the media to make sure they don’t use forged documents to try to prove a partisan point. However, the lesson they have learned is to provide less visibility and accountability, not more. If the pictures never make it to the public, then they can’t be refuted. This comes from an industry supposedly trying to expose truth, and instead they are concealing it.

There is one important question that any hack journalist would have asked when a resource showed but refused to disclose pictures such as these: why? That question goes unaddressed in the piece. There is no mention of how the source got them, even in general terms, why the source is hiding them, or why the reporters think they are legitimate. Apparently the public is supposed to just “trust” them. The media has become so afraid of bloggers and the public that they are afraid to give them any information which could be used to refute them. The only reason not to provide the pictures from Time’s perspective is because they can be easily refuted, despite the fact they are irrelevant anyway (the President is in thousands of pictures every year, that doesn’t mean that every photo-op is with his closest friends).

Cases of media bias are clear cut, such as the AP Style Guide clearly suggesting using anti-abortion instead of pro-life in order to push “abortion rights” and use pro-choice approved propaganda terms. In this case, the Democrats are trying to push the point that Republicans and only Republicans have corruption problems.

They are desperately trying to stick Abramoff to Bush to use as a template in the 2008 elections conveniently forgetting record-breaking corruption of a certain previous Democrat administration. In short, the Democrat party platform has become, ”We can’t beat them so let’s try to indict them”.

And it appears that Time Magazine is playing along.

Posted by John Bambenek at January 22, 2006 7:26 PM

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Posted by: prying1 at January 23, 2006 12:12 AM

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