Making 'Earthquakes' for Romney

After watching the national media's performance since the party conventions, one can only hope that journalism students are out on summer safari or some Third World Peace Corps mission. Anything to avoid this mess of a profession. Sean Hannity is right. The establishment news media are dead. Whatever remains has only one standard. If it helps Obama, it's "news." If it doesn't, reporters should move on; there's nothing worth covering.

Our media don't just report "news" unfavorable to Romney. They obsess over it, complete with repetitive and thoroughly unnecessary incantations that Romney's campaign is hopeless. On September 17, perhaps not accidentally after Team Obama started to struggle over their handling of the outrageous and deadly attack on the American consulate in Libya, the hard-left Mother Jones magazine leaked a secret tape of Romney talking to donors.

Kaboom.

But what did he say? He told them Obama can count on 47 percent of the voters who will vote for him no matter what, "who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it." He added: "My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Impolitic? In a private campaign briefing with donors, no. Untrue? Again, no.

I will wager a million dollars that Barack Obama has told his major donors in private that strategically he is not concerned with the 47 percent of greedy right-wing rich Republican voters who will never vote for him. Impolitic? No. It's the way politicians talk to donors in private. Untrue? They'd deny it.

The news media know this, which is why they ignore it. That's why their assault on Romney is so disingenuous.

Four years ago, in April of 2008, Obama was caught by The Huffington Post telling donors in San Francisco that small town Americans are "bitter" people who "cling to their guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them." This drew a few negative stories for a couple of days, but it quickly vanished from the media's campaign narrative as Obama secured his party's nomination.

This Romney tape was recorded in May, but the activists who recorded it obviously wanted to delay its release until the fall campaign. Once the radicals at Mother Jones posted it, on cue, the network carnival barkers erupted with the chants of "bombshell" and "earthquake" on a "seismic day" for the Republican campaign. A viewer might imagine the Earth would open up and swallow Romney whole.