The other day, DB posted about the BBC’s dutiful promotion of White House propaganda about Mitt Romney’s earnings from investment in Bain Capital. They put up the President’s campaign video, and helpfully explained how awful Romney was for earning money off of a failed company and sending poor innocent workers to the unemployment line. The campaign meant to attack Romney’s business record, attempting to tarnish his track record of successfully turning businesses around, and hoping to undermine the growing mood of trusting him more than the President on fixing the economy. In short, it was an attack ad. And, as DB pointed out, it was misleading. The BBC still reported on it without question, and only belatedly (after someone called them on it, presumably) added a mere link to a Romney video hosted elsewhere.
This isn’t the first negative campaign piece from the President, who was supposed to be above it all. There was the attempt to hurt Romney with that silly dog story, which of course backfired. There was the charge against Romney and the Republicans for supposedly waging a “War on Women”. The President tried to frighten everyone by telling them that the Republican budget would be “radical”, and harm the middle class, the elderly, and ruin everything while helping only the wealthy. And of course there’s all the class war rhetoric, culminating in the ill-fated “Buffet Rule”. Most recently, we had the relentless coverage of what turned out to be a less than truthful account of Romney as a homophobic bully.
Now that the President is trailing Romney in voter trust on five different issues, the BBC, perhaps inspired by a piece in the New York Times last week, worrying about attack ads from Romney while at the same time encouraging the President to “push Romney’s face down in the dirt”, is rushing to His defense.
Obama campaign and Democrats raise $43.6m in April
Pity the poor President, they tell you, because He’s the financial underdog in this race. Sure, He’s raised more money than last month, but the awful Republicans are making these nasty attack ads. Worse, the poor President doesn’t have the same wealthy Super PAC to help Him.
Making the announcement, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said large sums were being spent by special interest groups against the president.
So you’re already prepared not to raise an eyebrow when reading this:
At the end of March, the Democratic Party reported about $124m of cash reserves, while Republicans had about $43m in the bank.
Correspondents say the Obama campaign could see a further burst of donations after his recent endorsement of same-sex marriage.
I bet “correspondents” aren’t even remotely cynical in that analysis, or suspicious of any motives for that endorsement other than sheer honesty and integrity, either.
Although Mr Romney’s direct campaign funding has lagged behind the Obama campaign, Republican super political action committees (super PACs) are spending millions of dollars backing his candidacy.
In a sign of the gathering super PAC offensive, one group, Crossroads GPS, backed by Karl Rove, former adviser to President George W Bush, said it would spend $25m on anti-Obama ads.
He’s the underdog, a victim, I tell you!
About $57m has been spent on negative advertising against the president since October, Mr Messina said in the Obama campaign video.
Are you pitying Him yet? Ire raised enough against the vicious Republican machine? No? Maybe the closing line will help.
Meanwhile, a super PAC supporting the president, Priorities USA, has struggled to match that level of funding, raising just $10m by the end of March.
And that’s it. Not a single mention of the attack ads His own PAC has been making. Like the one they released Tuesday, showing the poor former workers of that plant Bain closed, the same one with which the campaign and the BBC have tried to tar Romney by indirect association the other day. The workers likened it to being attacked by “a vampire”. Oh, and apparently Romney’s opponents used this exact same tactic against him in his failed 1994 campaign for Senate. The BBC won’t bother to tell you that, unless they can find a way to praise Him for the brilliant strategy.
Ads from the President’s Super-PAC are also going to be aired in several states over the next few days. Vice President Biden is out there now doing the class war thing as well, telling the people in swing-state Ohio that Romney is bad because he was a venture capitalist. But He’s the underdog, and only it’s all the Republican’s fault for going negative, right?
The thing is, campaign cash is only half the story. The other half – and perhaps the more important one – is the media being in the tank for Him. Again. Think it’s sour grapes from one of His enemies who imagines bias in every report, and finds conspiracies under every media hack’s bed? Think again:
Déjà vu: ABC’s Robin Roberts Admits She Got “Chills Again” When Interviewing Obama
Not so subtle Obama-rooting in the media
CBS’s Rose Fishes For ‘High Marks’ For Obama From Robert Gates
Then there’s that Newsweek cover. Plus, Hollywood is in the tank for Him again as well. Tom Hanks has narrated a 17-minute propaganda campaign film, all of Hollywood is re-energized for Him on the heels of His half-assed endorsement of homosexual marriage, and there will be a film about His heroic killing of Osama Bin Laden coming out in October. Even the BBC thought you should know about that one.
Despite the White House campaign’s attempt to portray Him as the underdog, and no matter how many times the BBC worries about all those negative Republican ads, no amount of money from any Super-PAC or the evil Koch brothers or Fox News can compete with the full power of the entire mainstream media, from the New York Times and the Washington Post to CNN and MSNBC and ABC and NBC and the LA Times and Time and so many local papers, plus all of Hollywood and much of daytime television.
Yet the BBC dutifully pushes that Narrative anyway, like a foreign branch of the White House press office.
