Press Coverage …

There is a great line in the movie Princess Bride when the Spaniard Inigo Montoya, played by Mandy Patinkin replies to Vizzini, played by Wallace Shawn, after his umpteenth declaration of “Incontheevable!”

“You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

It used to be that the press in America was regarded as the guardian of liberty.  Judging by the conduct of the press over the past four years, the Fourth Estate has abrogated this role, and decided it knows what’s best covered, and what’s not.

Press coverage has taken on an entirely different meaning.  Press coverage now means systematically spiking stories which might harm the ends sought by those in the liberal media.  The cult of personality around this president has reached unprecedented levels.  “In the tank,” doesn’t begin to describe their culpability.

The most recent example is their adamant refusal to put two and two together.

First it was the inexcusable apologetics in “covering” (for the Obama administration) the events which culminated in the deaths of four American citizens in Benghazi.

Now they refuse to ask the important questions surrounding General Petraeus being investigated by the FBI for an illicit affair with his biographer.

President Obama wasn’t aware of what happened in Libya until after American citizens were dead – even though the situation room in the White House was watching it on video.

President Obama didn’t know that the head of one cabinet level department was being investigated by another.

Put yourself in the role of president and suppose you have two people (cabinet secretaries) working directly under you, one is directly investigating potential security breeches involving the other.   The scandal is putting his agency at risk, and you would not want to know?  This would seem to be very definition of “asleep at the switch.”¹Â Â But it’s not just the president that’s supposedly asleep is it?

We are to believe it’s just a coincidence that the Petraeus scandal came out after the election.

President Bush was a racist monster for his supposed failure to act decisively in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The press is somehow incapable of covering death toll resulting from Hurricane Sandy, the power outages that still persist, and the horrendous situation still faced by many in NY.

Somehow, I think “coverage” does not mean what I thought it meant.

¹ A friend of mine passed me an email he received in which a friend of his, a University Professor, made this point. This is not a direct quote, but close.