Our “news” media are addicted to damaging internal leaks from the Trump White House, especially when the leaks make Team Trump look wildly insensitive. The two most common words in the press today are “sources say.” Now the country is spending a week with the media demanding a public apology from White House aide Kelly Sadler, who reportedly said in bad taste that the administration doesn’t have to care about Sen. John McCain’s dramatic opposition to CIA Director nominee Gina Haspel because “he’s dying anyway.”
We have no idea of the context. We’re not even certain this is exactly what she said. But who cares?
Gail Collins of The New York Times spoke frankly: “The stunning thing to me about that Sadler-McCain thing was that it got leaked. The fact that in private conversation, presidential aides occasionally make deeply offensive wisecracks about the opposition (and McCain at that moment was the opposition) isn’t exactly shocking. But that it immediately got out was sort of amazing.”
Kudos to Collins for acknowledging the probable and rather unexceptional context. But to suggest the leak is stunning is to say one should be shocked to learn Tuesday follows Monday. Rarely a day goes by when some anonymously sourced tidbit of White House gossip isn’t fed to the press in the full knowledge it will be magnified 100 times in importance.
So the offensive behavior isn’t special? The leak is? Sadler privately apologized days ago, but that’s meaningless. The networks will keep playing Bad Manners Bingo until someone apologizes publicly. Liberals actually demanded Sadler be fired. Conservative radio host Larry O’Connor joked on Twitter that if rude private remarks about politicians are the new standard for firing people, he’s “pretty sure every journalist will have to be replaced by a robot.”
Consider what journalists say about President Donald J. Trump in private.
What demonstrates the media’s all-encompassing lack of fairness and balance is that if a White House aide to former President Obama had spilled something uncharitable like this, the media elites would have pretended it never happened.
In fact, Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden could say rude things in public and they would pretend it never happened, or wave it away quickly. There was Biden in 2012 warning a black audience about the Republicans: “They’re gonna put y’all back in chains.” Each network aired just one story, and ABC and NBC stayed vague, playing dumb about just what was offensive in the slavery accusation.
In 2014, Biden bashed moneylenders who deal with veterans as “shylocks who took advantage of these women and men while overseas.” Then-Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman protested, “Shylock represents the medieval stereotype about Jews and remains an offensive characterization to this day.” But the networks were silent.
In 2013, then-“Tonight Show” host Jay Leno asked President Obama about a new global travel alert: “What do you say to those cynics who go, ‘Oh, this is an overreaction to Benghazi’? How do you respond to that?” Obama cavalierly replied, “the odds of people dying in a terrorist attack obviously are still a lot lower than in a car accident, unfortunately.”
The four brave men murdered in Benghazi are not as important as John McCain, apparently. The networks all highlighted the Leno appearance, but CBS and NBC didn’t bother airing that snippet. ABC ran it with a bland introduction from reporter Jon Karl in which he said, “the president sought to downplay the threat.” Even the Washington Post skipped it, but it gushed over the president in a blog titled “Obama’s Top Five Zingers on ‘The Tonight Show.'”
These are the same networks that opportunistically whacked McCain as an obstacle to Obama 10 years ago. Take ABC’s Terry Moran on “Nightline” on Oct. 13, 2008: “attacks from John McCain and Sarah Palin … stoked the anger at Republican rallies, where there have been reports of attendees yelling things like ‘terrorist’ and ‘kill him.'” Moran asked Biden, “Are you at all concerned in this home stretch for Sen. Obama’s safety?”
Perhaps ABC should start demanding that ABC apologize publicly.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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