L.A. Times Suddenly Cares About Video; Won’t Release Khalidi Tape

The Los Angeles Times is in a state of high dudgeon over rumored video tapes from The Apprentice that might embarrass Republican nominee Donald Trump, but which cannot be released.

Since 2008, the Times has refused to release the video of then-State Sen. Barack Obama attending a retirement party for radical Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi in 2003, which featured anti-Israel rhetoric. Now, however, the Times is devoting considerable attention to Trump videos that may not exist.

As the Times‘ Chris Megerian reported on Monday, the show’s apprentice, Mark Burnett, issued a groveling public statement in which he denied that he was suppressing videos; blamed the studio (MGM) and its contracts; and protested that he has been a lifelong Democrat. Separately, the Times published an article acknowledging the fact that the leaked 2005 video of Trump joking about groping women “tested The Times’ language standards and its print production deadlines,” but ran anyway. (For one thing, the Times used the word “fuck” in print for the first time since the Bill Clinton impeachment controversy in 1998.)

Yet no amount of persuasion or pressure — not appeals to journalistic ethics, not the promise of a $100,000 reward — could move the Times, for more than eight years, to release a video that revealed Obama’s deep ties to anti-Israel activism, and that could have revealed whether he shared the anti-Israel hostility of those whose friendship and favor he cultivated in Chicago.

Likewise, in 2012, the Times joined the media frenzy over a surreptitiously recorded video of Republican nominee Gov. Mitt Romney talking about the “47 percent” of people who had no federal income tax liability, and might therefore not vote for him.

But while the Times, like most of the rest of the mainstream media, is in physical possession of video of a Democratic candidate — video that must be damaging, or its source would not want it suppressed — it finds every excuse to hide the truth.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.