You’ve probably read already how the teatard candidate for AK-Sen had his hired security guards handcuff and detain — at a public event — a local blogger who wanted ask Miller about some questionable bits about his employment with the Fairbanks North Star Borough. But if you look around the intertubes today, you can see some discussion about this but not the wholesale outrage that would have accompanied such an event if this had been a Democratic candidate illegally detaining a member of the Fourth Estate. Why do I say this? Steve Benen reminds us about what happened when candidate Obama:
[…] mentioned the idea of having a civilian reserve corps that could handle postwar reconstruction efforts such as rebuilding infrastructure. A Republican member of Congress, Georgia’s Paul Broun, said the idea, which had been endorsed by the Bush administration, is the equivalent of “what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.” Glenn Beck and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) still talk about this to make the case that the president is some kind of fascist.
But today, we see a media — and Democratic — landscape where bad behavior by Republicans is SOP. It is SOP enough that the Fourth Estate finds itself still stuck in its View From Nowhere and not even standing up for itself.
Locally, WHYY did a report this AM called Political candidates remain cautious of recording devices on campaign trail . Go take a close look at that article. The people who are being extra “cautious” here — and trying to control who gets to report on what they do are the Republican ones. So much so, that WHYY reports on Jim Gerlach making sure that WHYY could not record a debate. WTF? This behavior is apparently so one-sided locally that they couldn’t even come up with the obligatory false equivalency. Even though this piece probably wasn’t meant to be blowback for that decision, it sure should have been. That would not have aligned with the media’s fake objectivity, but it sure would have aligned with the business of making the comfortable uncomfortable. If this had been the behavior of lots of Democrats locally, this story would have been filled with local GOP’ers getting their outrage on PLUS a bunch of commentaries by station editors on the threat to people’s right to know and the threat to all of our constitutional freedoms when journalists are treated this way. But apparently restricting the freedom of the press IOKIYAR.