by Daniel Greenfield
How the media lies about its parade of pro-Clinton national security experts.
The media widely covered General Allen’s attack on Trump at the DNC and treated him as an apolitical national security expert. It neglected to mention that he works at Brookings or that the president of the Brookings Institution is Strobe Talbott.
Talbott is an old friend of the Clintons. He got into government through them and worked for them as Deputy Secretary of State. He owes his current prominence largely to his Clinton connections.
When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, Talbott was one of the few to have close access to her. He is not only a political ally, but also a personal friend. And Brookings and the Clinton Foundation are entangled in a number of ways. One of those ways was Brookings’ extremely controversial sponsorship by Qatar which included a sizable payment to Bill Clinton to appear at the US Islamic World Forum.
General Allen was also in attendance at the US Islamic World Forum.
The media did not see fit to inform its viewers, listeners and readers that General Allen wasn’t an apolitical national security expert, but was in the vest pocket of the Clintons.
When former CIA boss Mike Morell offered a splashy endorsement of Hillary Clinton combined with an attack on Trump, it made headlines. It made fewer headlines when the New York Times’ Public Editor mentioned several days later that the paper really ought to have noted that Morell was working at Beacon Global Strategies whose co-founders include two key Hillary people, Philippe Reines and Leon Panetta. It inevitably made no mention of Morell’s role in editing the Benghazi talking points.
Instead the media pretended that a story about a Hillary loyalist endorsing her was some sort of major development when it was really as predictable and meaningless as rain in Seattle.
Or lack of rain in Los Angeles.
Despite the finger wagging from its own public editor, the New York Times still refuses to mention that Morell had any economic or political ties to Hillary’s people. The only reason for this obstinacy is that it would expose a lie that the newspaper of false record insists on telling as often as it can.
This unethical behavior is typical of the media’s onslaught of endorsements by national security professionals and former Republicans for Hillary and/or condemnations of Trump. These items run as editorials in major papers while lacking significant biographical information that would provide context.
Instead the media has manufactured a narrative in which national security experts have decided that Trump is too dangerous to be trusted near nuclear weapons while one of the architects of the Arab Spring and its wave of Jihadist terror is the perfect choice to oversee our national security.
The notion that Hillary Clinton is a trusted national security choice is absurd on the face of it. Not only is she inexperienced, but her experience consisted of fostering the ISIS takeover of entire countries.
In reality, the Clinton campaign has recruited a number of people with impressive sounding titles and is rolling out endorsements and attacks by them in short order using major media outlets. Instead of reporting on the fact that this is a campaign tactic, the media not only provides a forum and free advertising for the Clinton campaign in its op-ed sections, but also maintains the illusion that this is an independent phenomenon rather than a fake viral campaign by their favored candidate.
And the missing information isn’t just limited to outright Hillary Clinton endorsements.
One of the latest high profile attacks on Trump is a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, "I was a Minuteman III nuclear launch officer. Take it from me: We can't let Trump become president.” It’s quite a title. It also makes the ahistorical claim that the “very point of nuclear weapons is that they are never used.”
That would have come as news to Harry Truman and the city of Hiroshima.
Its author, John Noonan, is identified only as “a Republican national security expert and former Minuteman III nuclear launch officer”. It neglects to mention his more current role as “a principal defense writer for The Weekly Standard” or his time with the Foreign Policy Institute. Both are closely linked to Bill Kristol who has actively sought to recruit a third party challenger to Trump.
It should be a matter of elementary media ethics for the Los Angeles Times to have disclosed that their splashy op-ed is coming from the employee of a man who is focused on defeating Trump.
But as with Hillary’s people, the media instead offers up what it claims are apolitical national security experts while refusing to mention their political alliances and allegiances.
The viral headlines touting Republicans who have switched to Hillary are equally likely to leave out pertinent details. Former Bush staffer Lezlee Westine is not “the latest Republican to cross party lines to back Clinton over Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump”. She did that back when she donated to Obama during his original campaign. Likewise Meg Whitman was left-wing on core issues and had served on Friends of Boxer.
There is real journalism to be done here. A close look at the Chertoff Group and the Scowcroft Group might be far more illuminating when it comes to the motives of Hillary Clinton’s national security backers. But the media is not interested in shining a light on the issue, but throwing a dark curtain across it. Instead of engaging in anything even faintly resembling journalism, it has become a press release outlet for the Clinton campaign.
This should come as a surprise to no one who remembers the pervasive media bias of the last two elections and yet the public does deserve to know the truth. By carefully censoring the biographical information that their readers receive, major newspapers are making their bad faith overt and clear.
There is nothing natural or grass roots about the rush of attacks on Trump and the endorsements of Hillary. None of them have anything to do with some supposedly shocking thing that Trump said.
The Clintons have spent decades building a vast network of political interests using the non-profit sector as a seed for their influence project. This has enabled the Clinton campaign to put on the kind of show we’ve been seeing this week. This show has been combined with media speculation about Trump’s implosion to construct a false narrative about national security experts fleeing to Hillary Clinton.
Once again the media has become the communications arm of a Democratic political campaign.
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