OPINION:
Rolling Stone finally admitted that its recent story about a vicious rape on the University of Virginia campus was a lie. Adding journalistic insult to injury, the magazine announced that the “reporter” who made it up will face no disciplinary action. In fact, she gets to keep her job at the magazine.
Many in the journalistic community are “outraged.” NBC’s Brian Williams lost his gig, at least temporarily, for fabricating details about his own life. But this “reporter” fabricated a violent criminal assault that ruined some young men’s lives and smeared an entire university, and she’s still picking up her Starbucks and heading to the office every day? Unacceptable.
Before we think that these “journalists” have finally discovered standards, a reality check is in order.
The same folks who are expressing outrage that Rolling Stone has blown off its journalistic responsibility have blown off their own. For seven years, they have been supine as President Obama and his policies have ravaged the Constitution and jeopardized the nation’s security. Worse, they have often made excuses for the unconstitutional and dishonest behavior, and have buried or ignored stories when reporters and even an entire network — Fox News — have attempted to uncover the truth.
While they’re whining about Rolling Stone’s journalistic crimes, this same group of “journalists” has been perfectly fine with:
• Mr. Obama’s multiple lies about Obamacare, from “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” to “it will help reduce the deficit.”
• The Obama administration’s sanctioned and institutionalized targeting of conservatives and religious groups through the Internal Revenue Service. They also bought Mr. Obama’s claim that he learned about the systematic abuse by watching news reports about it on television (even though he has insisted repeatedly that he doesn’t watch the news.)
• Mr. Obama’s and Attorney General Eric Holder’s assertions that they had no idea their administration was running a gun operation across an international border.
• Not showing any journalistic curiosity into what really happened during and after the terror attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador. They did not feel compelled to look into key questions, such as the whereabouts on the night of the attack of the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who came up with the fiction about an obscure YouTube video as the source of the violence, and why the administration failed to respond to those under fire.
• Not investigating what the United States was really doing in Benghazi, and whether or to what extent Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton had authorized an illegal transfer of weapons to Syrian rebels and others who would later become known as the Islamic State.
• Being uninterested in whether Mrs. Clinton was running her own rogue intelligence operation via her old political hitman, Sidney Blumenthal, despite Mr. Obama’s explicit prohibition on his hiring.
• Pushing the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie of Ferguson, Missouri.
• Promoting Sen. Harry Reid’s lie that former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney hadn’t paid his taxes in years without looking into its demonstrable falsity; letting Mr. Reid’s recent unapologetic admission that it was false go largely unreported.
• Not questioning Mr. Obama’s claims that “al Qaeda is on the run” and “being decimated,” that Yemen was a “success” of his counterterrorism approach and that the Islamic State was “jayvee.”
• Not examining the impact of Mr. Obama’s selling out of allies such as Israel, Ukraine, Poland and the Czech Republic and the fawning support of dangerous enemies such as Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood while accommodating other adversaries such as Russia and Cuba.
• Leaving unquestioned Mr. Obama’s gutting of the military and his retreat of U.S. power and their connection to the current violent upheaval across the Middle East.
• Not exploring the political reasons why the administration is allowing a porous southern border and the surge of tens of thousands of illegal aliens into the country.
• Not questioning his constant, misleading use of straw men, such as this Iran deal or war, a $1 trillion stimulus or an imploding economy, and Obamacare or a collapsing health care system.
• Not probing his false promise about hosting the “most transparent administration in history.”
• Refusing to investigate the Department of Justice’s selective prosecutions of politically inconvenient folks such as Sen. Robert Menendez while declining to prosecute allies such as the New Black Panther Party and the Internal Revenue Service’s Lois Lerner.
• Pushing the lie that Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act legalized discrimination.
• Being wholly uninterested in exploring Mr. Obama’s murky background and shadowy associations with communists, domestic terrorists and professional anti-Semites.
• Shrugging off the White House’s deliberate targeting of fellow journalists such as Sharyl Attkisson and James Rosen, and spying on news organizations such as The Associated Press.
The only difference between the Rolling Stone “reporter” and these “journalists” is that the magazine writer got caught. The Rolling Stone debacle is one more example of journalists being more interested in creating a narrative that supports their agenda than reporting objectively.
Their faux outrage over Rolling Stone is really about the exposure of their craft as the lie-generating partisan advocacy enterprise it is. And that reality is the greatest true outrage of all.
• Monica Crowley is online opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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