Old News is No News in Latest Bombshell
Gage Skidmore
On the eve of the first Presidential debate, Tucker Carlson released the tape that’s going to change the election. Too bad for Carlson it’s the 2008 election.
On Tuesday night Carlson’s website, The Daily Caller, released footage from a 2007 speech that then-candidate Obama gave to an audience of African-American ministers on the campus of Hampton University in Virginia. The video shows Obama warmly greeting his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and harshly criticizing the Bush regime’s response to Hurricane Katrina. According to Carlson, “Obama’s other Race Speech,” brims with “all-but-explicit appeals to racial solidarity.”
Fox News jumped on the story immediately. Sean Hannity invited Carlson onto his show to discuss the far-reaching implications of what Hannity referred to as a “bombshell.”
“This is further proof that the mainstream media has been in the pocket of Barack Obama since the day that he arrived on the national stage,” Hannity said.
The problem is that this video is old news, or rather, no news.
On Hannity’s program, Carlson (accurately) predicted that he would be criticized for re-reporting this “story.” He responded emphatically. “It hasn’t been reported,” said Carlson, “and I know, because I reported on it the first time.”
That clears things up…
Old clips haunted candidates the last few weeks of the campaign. Critics castigated Obama last month for his highly-qualified use of the word “redistribution” in 1998. Romney opponents similarly lampooned him for his remarks regarding “harvesting” companies for Bain Capitol in 1985. Romney’s “47 percent” controversy is at least timely.
Can something be breaking news if it happened when Growing Pains and MacGyver dominated the ratings? Is recycling or cropping decades-old video or audio footage newsworthy?
It seems like lazy journalism to go through dated material looking for cherry-picked keywords to use against a candidate. Certainly, this kind of article is more popular than rigorous investigations of a figure’s governmental record or detailed analysis of proposed policy.
And unfortunately, the revelation that this of this kind of journalism exists is no bombshell.
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