Beauchamp, Part Seven: Why the Silence, MSM?

I think it amazing that this Scott Beauchamp story has been met with such stony silence from the mainstream media.  It has only been twelve hours now or so since the story came out that documents and transcripts of phone conversations had been leaked to the web.  Granted, that’s a fairly short period of time , but how is it that the press has not gone into “wall to wall” mode?

Matter of fact, Howard Kurtz ends up being the biggest representative of the mainstream media to show up on my radar commenting on this subject to date.  And, yes, Goldfarb over at The Weekly Standard has been doing superhuman work.  But hardly anybody else has dared to touch the subject, from within the confines of the mainstream media.  Even the supposedly right wing stalwart of Fox news has been silent on this subject.

The question I have, obviously, is why.  Look; it’s not all that difficult a story to write up if a bunch of people in Pajamas can do it.  If every single large player in blogdom has at least caught enough of the gist of this story to comment on it, it’s not all that difficult for the average reader to understand.  So why hasn’t the mainstream press touched this story?

I suspect , though I cannot prove, that the biggest issue the mainstream press has with covering this particular story is that if represents an indictment against the mainstream media as a whole, not just The New Republic, since so many of the MSM jumped on board with this Beauchamp thing at it’s onset. Both the new Republic and the remainder of the mainstream media pride themselves on their fact checking.  We now see the accuracy of that claim. I suppose I can understand keeping silent and hoping the whole thing will go way, but that’s not their mandate.  That’s not their job.  Their job is to disseminate the news, accurately.  Without bias.  Their silence constitutes a failure in that task, of massive proportions.

I found particularly interesting the comments of Marc Steyn in National Review’s The Corner, this morning:

It has now been revealed that (a) Beauchamp declined to stand by his story, and (b) the editors spoke with him and knew this weeks ago. Presumably The New Republic‘s readers are relatively relaxed about the editors colluding in slandering the troops at a time of war: only uptight squares get hung up on that sort of thing. But they ought surely to be concerned at the abuse of trust perpetrated by the magazine against its own readers.

(Emph is mine)

Once again, we see the press jumping in where the story matches the Liberal narrative, and their silence when it does not.

I’m not sure the readers of The New Republic would view the paper’s actions as a mismanagement of trust.  After all, the paper was giving the readers what they wanted; a story which matched the narrative, that they want so very badly to believe in.  The facts, are never the issue to liberals, so long as the lean of the story is correct…. to the left.

Still, Steyn is quite correct here;

The New Republic is currently owned by my old friends and compatriots, the Asper family. Back when I toiled for the company in Canada, David Asper publicly told one of his own newspapers to “put up or shut up”. He should have said the same months ago when The New Republic was bragging about its commitment to rigorous and open investigation of the matter. The magazine is unable to “put up”, so it has shut up, and hopes that its silence will help the story die in the shadows. Beauchamp’s 15 minutes are up. The issue now is the magazine’s conduct, and the Aspers should recognize that and act accordingly.

I think, however, that it goes beyond this.

Given the silence of the mainstream media surrounding this story, it would appear that they are complicit in the silence of The New Republic, with their own silence.  We’ve been hearing from the mainstream media for years and years about how bloggers don’t have the training required to be unbiased. Etc Etc Etc ad nauseum.

Explain to me, please, what, exactly, other than bias drives their silence on the Beauchamp story. I’d really like to know.

Afterthoughts:

I wish I had thought of this, when I was originally writing this piece, but I may as well add it here;

We were told that the press was supposed to be the balance of power that would protect us against abuse.  What happens when the press is the abuser, as in this case?  Clearly, none of the rest of the mainstream media is interested in reporting this as an abuse of trust has Steyn calls it… seemingly for fear of having their own abuses outed.  Ideally, the press was supposed to be objective enough to report on its own abuses.  We see now, that idea is folly.  Perhaps that’s why they were complaining so loudly about online sources, such as this one?