In the days following Kirsten Power’s “Come to Jesus” column calling out the mainstream media for its failure I pointed out to a shocked Mollie Hemingway of GetReligion.org on Twitter that the Big 3 media criticism sites: Poynter, CJR and Jim Romenesko had all maintained radio silence on the issue. It reinforced the criticism of many on the right that even the self-appointed media watchdogs are too cozy with the journalists they cover.

Today, when the news broke that the Obama Justice Department had named Fox News Channel James Rosen a co-conspirator in a plot to violate the Espionage Act by doing something called reporting, I checked the usual suspects. Romenesko had a brief post with links.  Poynter had a more extensive brief with lots of good quotes and links. And CJR responded with absolutely zero commentary on the site. The top three “Must-Reads From Around the Web” are all about the Rosen case, but no original reporting. Or did they?

Columbia Journalism Review

The article that picture links to is here. It refers to the Benghazi, IRS and Associated Press phone records scandals, but not today’s Rosen revelations. I realize one shouldn’t impute malice when mere incompetence can explain it, but what the heck is going on at CJR? What are they suggesting?

Does anybody know what’s going on around here?

This clip is the exchange that should have Miller doing community service cleaning rest stop toilets with a toothbrush for the rest of his life.

Ryan: You said in your answer that you were “aware that some 200 501(c)4 applications fell into this category, we did group these organizations together to ensure consistency, to ensure quality. We continue to work those cases.” You didn’t mention targeting based on ideology. You didn’t mention targeting based upon buzzwords like “tea party” or “patriots” or “9/12.” You knew that, but didn’t mention that to this committee. Do you not think that that’s a very incomplete answer?

Miller: I answered truthfully.

You think that kind of answer would fly if given to an IRS auditor?

And the news out of the hearing got worse.

Seriously? Some IRS agent thought they had the authority to ask a pro-life group about the content of their prayers? The proper response would’ve been:

I think we should all send the IRS the content of our prayers right now. Mine include the words “smite,” “whore of Babylon,” and “flat tax.”

— Anthony Sacramone (@strangeherring) May 18, 2013

If you were dealing with any less powerful bureaucracy.

The congressman in the above video missed the proper follow-on question to Miller’s ridiculous response: Can you imagine any context where requesting the contents of the prayers of an American taxpayer is valid IRS business?

We’ll be talking about the IRS for awhile longer. The “fine public servant” who was in charge of the office that was targeting conservative groups, but didn’t know anything about it, received more than $100,000 in bonuses over the last four years and is now in charge of the IRS’ Obamacare implementation.

There’s also the question of whether President Obama or one of his higher-ups directed the IRS to do this. In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Kimberly Strassel eloquently pointed out that he did, merely by the way he’s conducted himself over the past four years.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an “independent” agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that’s not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn’t need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Speaking of VanderSloot, here’s what happened to him.

And Obama got reports back that his order was successfully received. People complained to Congress. Congress held hearings and people like Mr. Miller above lied.

The political higher-ups at the Treasury Department knew about this in 2012—before the election—and never passed that information onto the White House. There are even reports that the White House counsel knew of this scandal three weeks ago, yet failed to tell President Obama, who claims that he first learned of it when it was reported in the press a week ago. If that is true, the White House counsel needs to be sacked.

It’s been 40 years since the IRS was politicized in this fashion. It didn’t take a phone call to get the dirty tricks started. All it took was Obama identifying the “bad guys” and his acolytes at the IRS dutifully rode into action. People need to be fired, not just asked to leave their jobs two weeks early. Some people probably need to spend some time in a federal prison as well.

How zealously Obama takes on the IRS will say a lot about how this will affect the rest of his presidency.

I saw a brief report on the news today that the IRS has a $92 million “bonus” budget and the average IRS worker gets about $5,500 in bonuses every year. Zeroing out that practice would be a good first step for Congress reining in an out out-of-control bureaucracy.

One point to keep in mind: sometimes no organizational boss has to explicitly say that there’s a great incentive to target a particular political foe. Sometimes these sorts of illegal and unjust incentives simply resonate throughout the culture of an organization. If everyone within a particular office culture (i.e., Internal Revenue Service employees) believes that a particular group is particularly bad (conservatives) and another group is good (liberals), there will be enormous psychological incentives to pursue the “bad” groups, both out of personal beliefs and out of reinforcing groupthink.

There’s a simple, direct method for changing the culture, of course: fire anybody involved.

This is the same way media bias works in the vast majority of newsrooms across the country. It’s not that they conspire with one another or get orders from on high. They all just think the same way.

The Los Angeles Times  and The New York Times have each provided excellent case studies of this over the past couple of days.

As Mark Steyn noted in a weekend column regarding how the media has assiduously avoided covering Benghazi:

The dying Los Angeles Times reported this story on its home page (as a sidebar to “Thirteen Great Tacos In Southern California”) under the headline: “Partisan Politics Dominates House Benghazi Hearing.” In fact, everyone in this story is a Democrat or a career civil servant. Chris Stevens was the poster boy for Obama’s view of the Arab Spring; he agreed with the president on everything that mattered.

The Los Angeles Times isn’t alone in this attitude toward the Benghazi story, but most news outlets do a little better in hiding their disdain.

Earlier today, Abortion “doctor” Kermit Gosnell became convicted child murderer Kermit Gosnell as he was convicted on 3 counts of killing newborns by cutting their spinal cords with scissors. The story from the so-called Paper of Record is a case study in how pro-abortion (not pro-choice) reporters must torture language to hide obvious truths.

The verdict came after a five-week trial in which the prosecution and the defense battled over whether the fetuses Dr. Gosnell was charged with killing were alive when they were removed from their mothers.

The English language has a multitude of words for just about everything–and if it doesn’t, it will make one up at a ginormous rate. The word for “fetuses … removed from their mothers” is “baby.” Not only is it more accurate. It saves a lot of typing.

If you were counting on the Big 3 broadcast networks and the establishment press to tell you what this was all about, you’d have had a tough time. Nothing illustrates this situation better than CBS News’ web page late this afternoon. At about 2 p.m. PDT (my late, brief lunch break), this was the Most Popular search on the CBS News homepage:

This was the most discussed story:

Here is a complete screenshot of the CBS News page at that same time. See if you can locate the subject of those two stories.

You’ll need to click on it to see it full size, but for those having difficulty finding Waldo, it’s at the bottom under the “Politics” header.

So much for the idea of giving your customers what they want.

Journalism. Wound. Self-inflicted.

Which brings me to the most recent media freak-out: The possibility that the Koch Brothers may buy the Tribune Company that owns The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and others. Even if they don’t end up buying the papers with money they could find in their couch cushions, the entertainment value has been well worth it. Shortly after the aforelinked The New York Times story came out, media blogger Jim Romenesko sought input from current Tribune Company employees on the possibility, and to anyone who knows that journalists are largely liberal, the responses were predictable.

Is this really the society we want to live in? Where the hyper-rich control the politicians and the press?

Our leaders should ask themselves that question and then realize that this decision may go a long way in determining that society.

Self-important much? I also suspect this writer wouldn’t have expressed this opinion had the potential suitor been named Bloomberg, Buffett or Soros.

And from the Newspaper Guild:

We call on Tribune to make a pledge that they’ll only sell to a buyer that will protect the objectivity of the news product by making a public commitment to doing so.

Objectivity? Down in the comments I especially liked this gem by J Kingston Pierce so much that I responded to it:

The problem here isn’t merely that the Koch brothers hew to the ultraconservative edge of politics. It’s that the Kochs are ardent ideologues, who see no problem in using their wealth to aggressively push right-wing causes and support right-wing falsehoods. You don’t usually see experienced newspaper people pushing their causes so blatantly. Journalism should strive for fairness and accuracy, not political or religious advocacy.

My response:

Like Michael Bloomberg.

As of this writing, my comment has 5 Facebook likes to Mr. Pierce’s 3—not that I’m suggesting that anyone go there and pad my numbers.

I saved the best part for last. Today the Huffington Post reported that half the Los Angeles Times newsroom would quit if the Koch Brothers bought the paper. Half the newsroom is so unbiased and objective that they won’t even wait until the Kochs hand down some diktat that offends their journalistic sensibilities before they’ll walk out.

If the Kochs do buy the paper, this is good news. It saves them having to sack their most recalcitrant employees and pay severance and the employees won’t be eligible for unemployment. Win-win!

I don’t know the Kochs, I’ve never received any money from them (though I will accept checks or money orders and entertain high-paying job offers) even though one of the first slurs hurled by the left is that they’re financing everything on the right. But I suspect that the Kochs couldn’t do what these journalists imagine they would do in their worst nightmares even if the Kochs wanted to. There simply aren’t enough conservative-libertarian journalists in the country to replace all the hacks that have promised to quit at just the Los Angeles Times, let alone if that model was followed at other Tribune properties. So all of the sudden the editorial page turns from knee-jerk liberal to libertarian. It’s not like Barbra Streisand can cancel her subscription again.

I’d also remind the Times newsroom to be careful what they wish for, they might just get it.

“I … know that the work that you do isn’t easy, especially right now during these times.  I know that budget cuts mean that you all are juggling even more responsibilities with fewer resources.  And I know that many of you are stretched thinner than ever before,” said the first lady.

“So that’s one of the reasons why it’s just as important for me to be here at the start of this term as it was to be here four years ago, because I want you to know how much Barack and I truly appreciate everything that you do.  And I know you don’t hear that.  People don’t even know you exist.  (Laughter.)  It’s so true.  I mean, federal workers are this invisible face.  No one knows what they do, what it means, how much they benefit us.

“So on behalf of myself and the President and the first family, I want to say thank you.  Thank you, thank you.  I want you know how proud we are of all that you do.  We want you to know how grateful we are to your families, for the sacrifices that you make oftentimes to do what you do.”

Unfortunately, they didn’t use this photo to illustrate it.

That’s Paul Prouty who spent 39 years in the General Services Administration before being fired for questionable and excessive expenditures of taxpayer money, including paying for his nice bath there in Las Vegas.

I mentioned he was fired for this, right?

And then he was hired back with 11 months of back pay.

For the record, I think most federal workers should strive to be an invisible face. If the American public does have to see you, it shouldn’t be this way.

Wondering: Did Dr. Kermit Gosnell ever deliver a baby and let it live? #Gosnell

— jdmullane (@jdmullane) April 18, 2013

This is an interesting question, because less than a year ago, some audio from Illinois’ debate over the state version of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act was uncovered that has then-State Senator Barack Obama expressing an opinion on this very situation. I encourage you to listen to the audio or read the entire transcript, but this is the part that is on point:

I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births. Because if these children are being born alive, I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure that they’re looked after.

Senator Obama had a lot of faith that a doctor can do a 180 in record time from doing a procedure designed to kill a fetus—viable or not—to attempting to save the very life he was trying to destroy mere moments before.

President Obama, no longer expresses that degree of faith in the medical profession. At least when it comes to tonsils.

Asked a rather benign question about the Gosnell case by a member of his fan club the mainstream media, Obama refused to comment on the case itself because “it’s an active trial.” (Breaking! George Zimmerman would like Obama to be consistent.) This is a noble position for the president to take, but when the trial ends, the press should revisit the issue. Here’s the questions President Obama should be asked:

• Knowing what we know now about Dr. Kermit Gosnell, do you still feel that doctors doing abortions can be trusted to render aid to babies that survive the procedure?
• Gosnell was charged with 7 counts of first degree murder because he allegedly delivered babies alive and then “snipped” their spinal cords. If he’d done the same thing while the baby’s toe was still in the birth canal, it would’ve been legal. In your view, is that the only thing Gosnell did wrong? Should he have faced a trial because of that technicality?
• If a woman goes to a doctor for an abortion, should they be guaranteed a “successful” outcome? That is, a dead baby?
• You’ve said abortions should be safe, legal and rare. Do you support efforts by state governments like those in Virginia to require abortion providers to meet the same standards as other outpatient medical facilities?

The good news for Obama is that the media won’t ask him any of those questions.

One of the strongest practical arguments in favor of the Roe regime is that abortion has been around since time immemorial and outlawing it only drove it underground, leading women to endanger themselves by seeking out the services of back-alley quacks. The Philadelphia grand jurors recounted a powerful example from their own city’s history.

It was called the Mother’s Day Massacre. A young Philadelphia doctor "offered to perform abortions on 15 poor women who were bused to his clinic from Chicago on Mother’s Day 1972, in their second trimester of pregnancy." The women didn’t know that the doctor "planned to use an experimental device called a ‘super coil’ developed by a California man named Harvey Karman."

A colleague of Karman’s Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption as "basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. . . . They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, . . . the gel would melt and these . . . things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus."

Nine of the 15 Chicago women suffered serious complications. One of them needed a hysterectomy. The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried out the Mother’s Day Massacre would go out of business. His name is Kermit Gosnell.

That’s some pretty damning background information that would give some context to what type of human being monster Kermit Gosnell is. But that’s another story the mainstream media don’t seem interested in dredging up. I encourage you to read the entire (long) article because it’s a powerful argument for overturning the Roe abortion-on-demand legal regime and allowing some sensible rules and regulations crafted by democratic compromise.

It took mere hours for Chris “Tingles” Matthews to start speculating on MSNBC that because it was Tax Day that right-wing types might be to blame and that domestic terrorism is typically committed by those on the political right.

Of course, Tingles may want to talk with Robert Redford about that. Or maybe just read a recent newspaper.

Less than 24 hours since the bombs went off, very few people know anything about who planted them or what their motives are.

I encourage all the talking heads to think deeply about keeping their baseless speculation to themselves.

It’s 2013 and  they’ve decided that the whole “safe” formulation is probably something we need to progress past as well. Which explains how a series of regulations in Virginia aimed at making abortion clinics adhere to rules similar to those of other outpatient medical facilities evoke cries of “attacking women’s health” or trying to shut the abortion providers down.

It was exactly this sort of attitude that any regulation is an infringement on the “right” to abortion that allowed Dr. Kermit Gosnell to operate his house of horrors in Philadelphia for 17 years without an inspection from the Pennsylvania government. Former GOP Gov. Tom Ridge, who is pro-abortion, is particularly responsible for Gosnell being able to perpetrate his crimes for so long.

What are we left with? Legal. That’s the only thing the pro-abortion left is really concerned with. Keep abortion legal because it saves women’s lives. It prevents back-alley abortions that killed so many women.

It’s not really about saving lives or women’s health for the Planned Parenthood and their allies. They’re not angels in white doing the Lord’s work. They’re a profit-hungry company in a multimillion-dollar-a-year business. If it was anything but abortion, the left—and the media—would cast a skeptical eye at claims of purity and benevolence in such a money-making endeavor.

This is where the media should come in.

But it doesn’t.

You see, until Friday, the mainstream media had been curiously uninterested in the Gosnell case where harrowing testimony included phrases such as “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place,” and “it sounded like a little alien. It really freaked me out.”

Sure, this story was covered respectably in the Philadelphia-area media, but before Friday CNN had mentioned the trial once, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC had uttered nary a peep.

Why?

Well, a certain amount of the blame can be placed on the New York-D.C. bubble. While Gosnell and his horrors have received quite a bit of ink/pixels in the conservative and pro-life online media outlets, the people that make up the beltway media elite never read these sources.

A case in point was this ludicrous article by Salon’s Alex Seitz-Ward chastising the conservative media for not covering Gosnell, including the the line that “a search of the National Review’s website shows it’s written little on Gosnell.” Actually, National Review has written quite a lot on Gosnell. Unfortunately, the search function on the site has been broken for quite awhile. If you use Google to search for Gosnell and limit it to “site:nationalreview.com” you get a ton of hits. Now, I give Seitz-Ward a little bit of an excuse because National Review’s search function is broken. He did exactly what I do when I want to see if The Nation or Mother Jones has covered an issue. I’ve got to count on the search functionality because I don’t read that source regularly. If there was a conservative over at Salon, Seitz-Ward could’ve asked him if he’d seen anything about Gosnell on the web sites he frequents and he would’ve gotten a resounding “yes.”

But there aren’t any conservatives at Salon and Seitz-Ward doesn’t have any conservative friends he can ask about things like this, so he ends up looking like a fool.

If it  isn’t the bubble it’s the bias. A case in point is The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff who is the paper’s “Health Policy reporter.” Over the past year, Kliff’s health policy coverage has included a lot about Sandra “Georgetown University should pay for my $8/mo. Birth Control” Fluke, Todd Akin and the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s brief refusal to fund Planned Parenthood. Getreligion.org’s Mollie Hemingway asked her about her failure to cover the health policy implications of Gosnell’s house of horrors and got this response:

@mzhemingway Hi Molly – I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime, hence why I wrote about all the policy issues you mention.

— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) April 11, 2013

The Post and other media outlets nationwide managed to find policy issues in local crimes like the massacres in Newtown, Conn. and Aurora, Colo., but not in an abortion abattoir that made a men’s college dorm bathroom look like a class 100 clean room.

Taking on the role of editor, which I do so well, I offered Ms. Kliff some help.

@mzhemingway @sarahkliff Policy implications: Licensing of abortion facilities, requirements for training of employees… the list goes on.

— Matthew Hoy (@hoystory) April 11, 2013

@mzhemingway @sarahkliff Policy implications cont’d: Periodic inspection of abortion facilities for cleanliness…

— Matthew Hoy (@hoystory) April 11, 2013

@mzhemingway @sarahkliff Policy implications: providing info on # of ‘emergency’ responses to abortion facilities …

— Matthew Hoy (@hoystory) April 11, 2013

On top of that, last week an abortion clinic in Delaware was revealed to have similar “sanitary” issues. It’s not just so-called “rogue” operations like Gosnell; the clinic in Delaware is run by Planned Parenthood.

One is a tragedy. Two is a trend. And maybe there’s a policy story somewhere in there.

The sad fact is that the mainstream media and the abortion-on-demand lobby (but I repeat myself) aren’t interested in keeping women safe. They’re not interested in making abortion rare.

They’re really on interested in it being a legal method of “emergency” birth control for middle- and upper-class suburban white women. One of the interesting facets of the Gosnell trial testimony was that Gosnell would see white women in his relatively clean office, administer the drugs to them himself and offer them better treatment. Minority women weren’t treated with similar concern. (For those of you in the MSM—aka low-information journalists—Gosnell is black. There’s another policy issue for you to investigate.)

The Gosnell trial puts late-term abortions into the public dialogue in a level of detail like never before. When the subject was before the Supreme Court in the form of Congress’ partial-birth abortion ban (often appearing in the mainstream media as “so-called partial-birth abortion”) the media did its best to downplay the frequency and brutality of the procedure.

With the trial testimony, this sort of clinical analysis of what goes on in late term abortions can’t be papered over by even the most ardent pro-choice journalist. So, they ignored it.

If Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., are supposed to spur a national conversation on gun control, then Gosnell should spur a national conversation on late-term abortion.

Even if the Big 3 networks and cable news start covering the trial in coming days, don’t expect the kind of wall-to-wall coverage and zealous crusading that you’ve seen regarding gun control. It won’t happen. They’re not interested. They’re not unbiased. They’re not seeking truth, wherever it may be.

They’re the mainstream media.