United Liberty

Everyone wants to have a bogeyman they can point to and blame all the problems on that. Some say it’s universities. Others say it’s Democrats (while others say Republicans). More than a few lambast unions, whether public or private. There are even some crazies that continually blame Jews (or gays, or immigrants, or…) I generally shy away from these sort of “analyses,” because they are far too simplistic and don’t understand that many things have many causes.

But today, I’m going to do just that, and lay down hard on who I think are truly screwing this country over: our news media.

This year has been utterly disgraceful for them. There has been a litany of failings that I have not witnessed before; perhaps I was too young and didn’t understand, or they really weren’t there. But 2012 seems to be the year that the media has just totally, utterly, dropped the ball across the board, and in doing so they are doing this nation a monumental disservice.

Perhaps the first and most egregious entry was when an NBC news team edited the tape of the 9/11 call of George Zimmerman, in a very deceptive fashion. The editor who made that decision was later fired, but NBC botched their apology by doing it in an email to the Hollywood Reporter and not coming straight on TV to apologize, as it is their medium.

In the wake of the shooting last week in Aurora, Colorado, Tea Party groups are understandably upset that Brian Ross, an investigative reporter at ABC News, injected movement into news as Americans were still trying to figure out what exactly had happened. This only lends justification to the view of many on the right that the media is stacked against them and is, at least in this case, literally looking for any excuse to make them look bad; even if it’s just conjecture.

And keep in mind that it wasn’t just in this particular instance where the Tea Party has been blamed for murder. As the Washington Examiner notes, there are more recent incidences of the media jumping to conclusions before the dust had cleared.

But the Tea Party movement did find an unlikely defender. On Monday, Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, ripped ABC News a new one, equating what Ross did to “I’m feeling ‘lazy’ button” and calling for his suspension: