Instead of going with the statement above a number of people would 'quote' it by referring to Twitter. These people, not surprisingly, were ones who usually attacked GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. And "F**k Romney" was the chorus of the song the media wanted to sing last week -- non-stop as Ruth discovered when she streamed KERA's Think only to discover the host and her two guests sharing the same hymnal as they sang the same tune.
If you missed the media blitz, lucky you, Glenn Kessler (Washington Post) does the best job of explaining the order of events. The basic storyline is a film/video that had been online for months suddenly attracted attention in the Middle East. Protests began taking place. The film was thought to be tied to the United States and this led to the US becoming the source of protest. We haven't seen the film. It is said to mock the Muslim faith. The US Embassy in Cairo issued the above statement on Tuesday. They would go on to Tweet the statement on their Twitter feed several more times during the day, a day that would see that embassy protested as well as the US Embassy in Libya. At the second embassy, four Americans would be killed -- and that may have been a pre-planned attack that used the protest as cover -- Glen A. Doherty, Sean Smith, Chris Stevens and Tyrone S. Woods were the four Americans killed.
Late Tuesday -- almost midnight EST -- the media began reporting on Mitt Romney's criticism of the statement. Tuesday was 9-11 and Romney and US President Barack Obama had agreed not to criticize each other in the press on that day. Romney asked that his statement be held until midnight and it was held to close to midnight. Mike covered the issue and noted the statement Tuesday night:
I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.
And they were off, the feral cats hunched their backs and bared their claws, hissing, screaming and attacking. None more so than the lunatic and child-molester-look-alike Greg Sargent (blogger for The Washington Post). Romney's statements about his statement were "incoherent," Sargent insisted on Wednesday and the rhetoric and rage continued all week possibly culminating when the always conflicted Ruth Marcus took to The NewsHour (PBS) to pronounce Romney "disgraceful."
Words like "lie" were used by journalists and applied to Romney. It was a sign of just how out of control the media has gotten, of just how low the standards have gotten. The official media is supposed to operate within certain guidelines. There were no guidelines at all as The New York Times' David E. Sanger made clear on Washington Week (PBS) when he wrongly declared, "[. . .] and of course by the time Governor Romney spoke that night, or issued a statement a few hours that night, it was just a few hours later that the killings happened in Libya."
What was said?
"I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi." Is that a controversial statement for Americans? We don't think most of the electorate will be outraged by that statement. It may be controversial for David E. Sanger who went on TV and pretended to be familiar with the statement but clearly wasn't or he wouldn't have wrongly stated that "the killings happened" "a few hours later" after Romney issued his statement. "It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."
The US Embassy in Cairo issued a statement (noted at the top) before the attacks. President Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk that read: "The BUCK STOPS here!" As Keith Koffler (White House Dossier) reported in July, Barack declared of presidents, "Harry Truman said the buck stops with you." The president is over the federal government.
The Embassy statement reflects on Barack. That's a given. If the White House had issued their own statement, it wouldn't have been that way. But they didn't. You may not like that Barack's been held accountable for the statement, but Mitt Romney is not off in the weeds when he makes that call.
As it turns out, the White House didn't order the statement to be taken down after they were aware of it. Josh Rogin (Foreign Policy) reports that they were e-mailed a copy and they said not to post it, the Embassy then e-mailed them that it was already up. The appropriate response is, "Take it down."
The order to take it down shouldn't have been a difficult one Tuesday, after all, the Embassy vanished the statement by Friday. But the White House, having just e-mailed the Embassy not to post the statement, should have immediately e-mailed them back, "Take it down."
There are serious leadership issues here.
Having addressed the "Obama Administration's first response" aspect of that sentence, let's move over to "was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions." 'Ha!' the Greg Sargents want to insist. 'That statement was before the attacks!' That statement was Tweeted even after the attacks. And, pay attention here, if you can Tweet during and after the attacks, you can damn well put up another statement which the Embassy should have immediately done. They should have known that people would check the site and they should have had something up other than the less than 100 word statement.
"To sympathize with those who waged the attacks"? The Embassy stated: "The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims -- as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions." "Sympathize" is a judgment call. It's opinion. You can disagree. But if that's how Romney sees it -- and he's made clear in interviews that it is -- then that is his opinion.
The Embassy statement shouldn't have gone up. According to Rogin's reporting, even the White House objected to it and told the Embassy not to post it. It is now vanished. The White House has publicly disagreed with the statement. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a point to disagree with it on Tuesday night.
So how Romney's the asshole or idiot in all of this goes to the press itself and its own desire to control the election, not to report on it. That's why issues about the attack on the embassy didn't get the same kind of coverage.
Realizing just how over the top things had gotten, even Joe Scarborough tried to walk it back a little on Morning Joe (MSNBC) insisting that there were important issues to address but . . . it was Mitt Romney's fault that the media wasn't covering them. "[Y]ou should have talked about the warnings with the embassy," Scarborough declared referring to the media as "you," and they would have "if Mitt Romney had kept his mouth shut."
Really?
Ruth Marcus wasn't going to talk about the warnings. If it hadn't been fuming about "disgrace," she would have found something else to talk about. It would have been anti-Romney because that's the song the press has decided to sing. As New York Times columnist David Brooks observed on All Things Considered (NPR) last, week, the press does have a bias and it's one "in favor of Barack Obama and against Mitt Romney." Ruth Marcus is the best example. She is personalizing everything. In her conversation on The NewsHour (with Brooks), even after Judy Woodruff resets by noting, "But that point about apologizing, that has been a major part of the critique of Romney of the Obama administration." And Ruth Marcus will cut David off less than 20 seconds after Judy notes "of the Obama administration," so that Ruth can insist, "But he never apologized!" Ruth seems a little too close to the bone to pass for objective and that's been true of far too many in the press this election cycle.
This election has been a little too close to the bone for a significant number of the press which is why Hillary Is 44 continues to advise that the Romney campaign needs to take on Big Media. It's hard to argue against that when, week after week, day after day, the media works overtime to rip apart Mitt Romney and to build up Barack Obama. As Ann ("NPR's biased to which party") and Elaine ("Terry's fluff and nonsense") noted, last week saw Terry Gross give hack writer Michael Lewis fifty minutes on September 12th to do an advertorial on behalf of Barack Obama.
Michael Lewis made all the stops last week promoting the soft-core political porn of how he played basketball with Barack and trailed him around the White House. He was on Reuters TV, Fresh Air, NBC's Today Show, PBS' The Charlie Rose Show, NPR's Morning Edition . . . Pretty much everything except TLC's I Found The Gown.
And for what reason? A really bad and really long feature article in Vanity Fair? Usually that won't even get you booked on E! on a slow news day. But surely, great insight into governance and policy was gained by putting this man all over the media landscape, right?
"And on that day, he'd had - you know, it hadn't been an especially heavy day. He'd had meetings with his generals. He had meetings with Hillary Clinton. He'd had lunch with Joe Biden. He had spent - had spent some time with a Make-A-Wish child, some child who was going to die very soon, and their last wish was to spend some time with the president." Those sentences only work as humor and really should be delivered in Alyson Hannigan's "This one time at band camp" sing-song manner.
Or maybe you were attracted to the breathless nature of this gush, "One was his insistence that no one treat him like he was the president. He was - you would - just watching the game, you would never guess which one was the president. " He managed to deliver a variation on that statement on every program -- on two he got it word for word.
It's not hard for us to imagine Terry Gross devoting the same amount of time to Mitt Romney. She did just that August 28th. Of course the difference is that last week was 50 minutes of gushing over Barack with a writer whose article was vetted by the White House but August 28th's guests were actual reporters capable of critical thought who weren't doodling "Mrs. Barack Obama" in their spirals. Michael Kranish and Scott Helman had serious issues to discuss about Mitt Romney which, in an election year, is what public affairs programming should be about. But, as last week demonstrated on TV and radio, serious issues is something the media is no longer equipped for.
