Benghazi, along with scandals such as those surrounding the National Security Agency and the Internal Revenue Service, started out as major issues but have faded away through liberal-leaning journalism, says a media analyst for the Media Research Center.
"Obama is never going to be called a dictator by these people," analyst Tim Graham told Newsmax TV. "That's something that only fruitcakes would call the president. Well, when the president's Republican, we have a fruitcake media."
For example, people looking at network coverage see that most of the year was spent ignoring the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the Benghazi embassy in Libya, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed, Graham said.
"Once Hillary Clinton testified and said what difference does it make, that was sort of the end for the networks," Graham.
"They have all picked this back up with [what]
the New York Times did, but you have to be really uncomfortable about a story that says anonymous eyewitnesses told us it was this YouTube video that caused this. This to me is like a paper coming and saying, anonymous eyewitnesses saw Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."
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The NSA revelations and contractor Edward Snowden's leaks are other examples of stories that went by the wayside.
"Interestingly enough, you have a news media that really sort of wants to root for Edward Snowden," Graham said. "Most Americans think what he did was incredibly selfish and very arrogant, and the word 'traitor' comes easily to most people's lips. The news media sort of see him as a hero. They love people that leak anything."
The media did cover
the IRS' targeting of tea party groups "pretty seriously" in the beginning, Graham said.
"May was a bad month for Obama, and you have to argue that the last three months of the year were pretty bad for Obama, but that was pretty much what they'd like to call the botched rollout," Graham said.
"This was a scandal which was serious pretty much until they came up with the line that, well, OK, 150 tea party groups had their tax exemption withheld, but we found seven groups with the name 'progressive' in the title that were briefly stopped.
"But after the groups got their tax-exempt status, the media said, 'Oh, I see, so then the IRS wasn't partisan,' and went on to ignore the issue as it went into House hearings, where Republicans have the majority."
Graham blamed the lack of coverage on the leanings of the media.
"Let's say that the Bush administration was holding up hundreds of applications for tax-exempt status for groups who were trying to stop his re-election in 2004," Graham said. "What would happen is the networks and the journalists around them would basically describe this as some sort of police state, and President [George W.] Bush would be described as a dictator."
Obama would never be called a dictator, but if a Republican were in office, "they would treat these scandals as deathly serious and do hundreds of stories on them," Graham said.
More liberal issues, such as gay marriage, got heavier coverage, he said.
"They've always seen it as a civil-rights movement," Graham said. "They see it as comparable to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. That's where they are on this. So, the first thing, when you have that mentality, is anyone who opposes you must be the Klan."
Instead, the media have the opinion that such issues are part of the "march of progress" that can't be stopped unless journalists fail "to stick with the revolution," Graham said.
He said the media has had a "dramatic bias in favor of whatever the gay lobby in the United States wants."
Graham also accused the news media of trying to change the polls, and when the polls go against the media's agenda, they "don't like talking" about them.
"So, when [Obama's] approval rating falls to 40 percent, we're not going to talk about that a whole lot," Graham said. "But whenever there's a victory for the gay lobby, they're there, they show 17 pictures of happy lesbians, and there's not a picture in a newspaper of the social conservatives. Those people are just, somehow, they're just too hateful and ugly to be pictured in a newspaper."
The media was critical of the Obamacare rollout, but Graham said that's because "it was just so bad that it was a question of self-respect."
"They know that people out there are still upset, but, yes, what was tough coverage in the last week or 10 days they've tried to turn around," Graham said. "They're trying to do happy news stories about people now who are delighted that they're going to be covered on Jan. 1, and, yeah, they'll cite these numbers."
He predicted that Obamacare would continue to be a top story in 2014, with
enrollments going into March.
"We're going to see now, again, how many of these so-called enrollees are actually enrolled in the weeks to come," Graham said.
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