Re Massa, New York Times Cheers, Obscures Administration's Brass-Knuckle Tactics

As everyone knows – everyone, that is, excepting those sophisticates who revere The New York Times – the former “paper of record” routinely plays fast and loose with news that bears on its ideological agenda, both by how (and whether) such stories are reported and, more subtly, by the emphasis they’re given (or not given) by their placement in the paper. Thus it was, for instance, most infamously, that Abu Grahaib was on the paper’s front page for an astonishing 32 straight days; while The Times somehow managed to report on Barack Obama’s dropping a certain Reverend Jeremiah Wright from the ceremony announcing his candidacy for the presidency without getting into the ugly details of precisely what it was that made his self-identified mentor so embarrassing. And, by the way, even then, burying the story on page 19. The Wright story was there for the taking – he’d already been quoted in all his inflammatory viciousness by Rolling Stone – but, given The Times‘s outsized influence with the lemmings of the mainstream media, the practical effect of its indulgent coverage was to bury for a full year the story that would have surely derailed the freshman senator’s candidacy before it got started.

Then, again, sometimes ideologically difficult stories never get run at all. Which brings us to the curious case of Eric Massa, the upstate New York Democratic congressman who’s just resigned in the face of an ethics investigation for having allegedly harassed an aide. Last Thursday, the Times covered the story the same way as everyone else – okay, they stuck it on page 28, and they didn’t specify the aide was male, (except via a single reference to the aide as “him”), the same way males and females are interchangeable in their wedding announcements, but that sort of lunatic p.c. is pro forma. So, for that matter, was that Massa’s resignation seemed as much a concern for Timesmen David Halbfinger and Raymond Hernandez as for “blindsided Democratic leaders in Washington, who are already facing a brutal political climate as they try to defend the party’s majority in the midterm elections in November.”

Nor was the paper’s Saturday follow-up story on Massa’s mea culpa – “there is no doubt that this ethics issue is my fault and mine alone” – problematic. Indeed, for Times readers that seemed the end of the story. As usual, they dwell in smug ignorance.

For Eric Massa may be a screwup, but he wasn’t done talking. As Politico and Roll Call, among others, have reported, he subsequently gave an interview to an upstate New York radio station in which he claims, as Politico‘s Tim Grieve reported, “that he’s the victim of a power play by Democratic leaders who want him out of Congress because he’s a ‘no’ vote on health care reform. ‘Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill,’ Massa, who on Friday announced his intention to resign, said during a long monologue on radio station WKPQ:

‘And this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me, and it will pass. You connect the dots.’

Needless to say, such a charge, bearing as it does on the extraordinary lengths to which this administration will go to secure a win on health care, is explosive stuff – as who can doubt it would be for the Times if the alleged perpetrators were Republicans. We’re talking tactics far beyond the usual – indeed, an implicit threat to any Democratic congressman weighing a ‘no’ vote that if there is any dirt in his past, Democrat bully boys stand ready to go public with it.

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This is the huge story at hand: the no-hold-bars thuggery of Chicago politics writ large. It “might take a novelist to do justice to the ObamaCare-induced paranoia that now engulfs Congress,” as The Wall Street Journal editorializes, of the ugly politics the administration is so promiscuously practicing as a means of “…building its cradle-to-grave entitlement citadel.” The attitude has become “the right bill is any bill, by any political means necessary…Spooked Democrats shouldn’t be surprised if they wind up being double-crossed for the ostensibly greater good of Mr. Obama’s legacy.”

But, then, while reporting such a story would make for excellent journalism, at this crucial juncture it would also be the worst kind of public relations for Obamacare – and the New York Times has long since forgotten which business it is in.