Legal Commentary

MSM covers up both Obama's arrogance and imprecision in interview gaffe during Afghanistan/Iraq trip

By Beldar

Today on CBS's Face the Nation, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in Afghanistan, told the paparazzi-pursued correspondent Lara Logan that "the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years.

"And it's important for me to have a relationship with them early, that I start listening to them now, getting a sense of what their interests and concerns are."

The notion that Obama will be dealing with world leaders for eight-to-ten years, possibly up through July 2018, suggests that either (a) he believes that not only will he be elected and re-elected, but the 22nd amendment will be repealed and he will be elected for a third term, OR (b) he was speaking casually and just meant two terms.

(H/t InstaPundit and Newsbusters; boldface mine.) I have two questions ? one for supporters of Sen. Obama, and the other for Jake Tapper and ABC News, who offered up this information and observation:

1. If Barack Obama is this cocky and this sloppy now, when he's not yet even the official nominee of his party, then just how much more insufferable and how much more reckless will he be if he actually does become president of the world's only remaining superpower?

2. Why does this report appear on ABC News' political blog, "Political Punch" ? where, at best, it will be seen by a few thousand political junkies who get their news from the net ? instead of as a headlined story on ABC News' homepage?

The ABC News homepage's "top story" about Obama today is actually an AP report entitled "Barack Obama Meets Afghan President Hamid Karzai," and it makes no mention of the gaffe ? but it does manage to quote another of Obama's statements from the same CBS News interview in which he made the "eight-to-ten years" remark, so the AP writers must have heard the gaffe. Similarly, MSNBC manages to quote from the CBS News interview, but found neither the Senator's arrogance or imprecision newsworthy. The New York Times also manages to quote other lines from the interview without revealing Obama's blunder. Ditto for the Washington Post.

And as for CBS itself, the Tiffany Network, the network of journalistic standards personified by its long-time anchor Dan Rather? Well, over there it's: "Scoop? What scoop?" CBS News' own website article about the interview includes the gaffe as part of a transcript of Obama's full interview with Logan (as does its ten-minute embedded video clip) but its prefatory news analysis doesn't bother to point out the fact that the would-be next president of the United States either doesn't know how long he might serve (absent a constitutional amendment), or else doesn't care enough to be precise in describing the potential outside limits of his service in that office.

And the CBS Evening News played parts of the interview in an almost six-minute clip, but Obama's gaffe somehow found its way onto the editing room floor rather than onto the air again. Ironically, the last two minutes of the CBS Evening News clip is all about how the media are giving Obama almost twice as much coverage as McCain. It ends with a solemn warning that with this level of intense scrutiny, Obama's slip-ups "could hurt his candidacy and give him the kind of media coverage he doesn't want."

Oh, please. The peals of laughter from the editors who included those lines in the segment ? after cutting out Obama's gaffe ? must have been extremely dangerous, perhaps risking the rupture of several internal organs.

For pete's sake, the gaffe was in response to a question about whether Obama is too inexperienced in foreign affairs ? which would include being too gaffe-prone when speaking without a teleprompter ? to "lead the country at war as commander in chief from day one." Can't he reasonably be expected to answer that question without screwing up? And if he can't, isn't that in itself newsworthy?

I don't think Jake Tapper is the only MSM reporter smart enough to know that presidents can only serve two terms in office. I don't think he's the only one smart enough to figure out that two times four is eight, not "eight to ten."

I know I'm not the only person around who remembers the media hurricane that began immediately after Gerald Ford's remark about Poland in the 1976 presidential debates, and that lasted through (and possibly tipped the outcome of) the 1976 presidential election. That gaffe, however, played directly into the narrative of the leftist elites and the mainstream media, who treated this as Gerald Ford helplessly confirming Chevy Chase's previous SNL impersonations of Ford: Poor man, too many blows to the forehead boarding Air Force One.

Imagine if McCain had been either this cocky or this sloppy in a major interview with a national media outlet on a trip being covered round-the-world like the Second Coming. Is there any chance that a McCain gaffe like this could have failed to be quoted in headlines in every mainstream media news outlet?

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on July 21, 2008 (boomark / email).