By Steven Silvers
Real or not, the The Great Media Bias of 2008 will live on as a seminal political controversy in our nation's history.
The agendas, influences and impact of the overwhelming amount of positive news coverage generated for Sen. Obama versus Sen. McCain -- a fact established but not fully explained by the Pew Research Center -- will be researched and analyzed, confirmed and disputed for many decades to come. There will be books.
One chapter people will chew on: The agreement by the Los Angeles Times not to let anyone else see a 2003 video of a banquet where then-state Sen. Obama offered glowing words to his friend Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar and activist who allegedly spoke for the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was a designated terrorist group in the 1970s and '80s. The event also included a young Palestinian-American reciting a poem warning that the U.S. would be punished for supporting Israeli terrorism. Another speaker compared Jewish settlers on the West Bank to Osama bin Laden. And 60's radical bomber Bill Ayers spoke as well.
The LA Times watched the tape and published a story in April 2008 headlined, "Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Barack Obama.... They consider him receptive despite his clear support of Israel."
But instead of uploading the video to their web site, they locked it away. And they've refused every effort by media, citizens and other candidates who want to see it for themselves.
"The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it," the newspaper said. "The Times keeps its promises to sources."
You have to assume that the videotape is damaging to Sen. Obama, who has minimized his relationships with extremists and convicted influence peddler Tony Rezco.
So it seems that somebody negotiated an exclusive story with one of the nation's most liberal newspapers in exchange for a promise to put a lid on it.
Does this make the LA Times a strategic partner in containing information about the candidate they endorse? Did the paper make a calculated decision to help Sen. Obama by ignoring its ethics policy of "informing readers as completely as possible"?
Consider that the same newspaper agreed to no such conditions when it was given -- and quickly made public -- an audio recording of conversations from Gov. Schwarzenegger's office. In fact, the LA Times has won 15 Pulitzer prizes since 2000 in part because of its bull-doggedness in exposing information that politicians and government officials don't want people to see.
The LA Time's ethics policy begins with a warning that "The ways a newspaper can discredit itself are beyond calculation."
Whether or not the nation's second-largest metro newspaper did just that to help Sen. Obama seems like a very fair question. Very fair.
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