EMAIL DETAILS

Ben Carson rants at media, and it seems to be serving him well - The
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/08/ben-carson-rants-at-media-and-it-seems-to-be-serving-him-well/?postshare=3001447031591058

Ben Carson rants at media, and it seems to be serving him well

Whatever happens to the presidential candidacy of former neurosurgeon Ben
Carson, the news conference he held in South Florida this weekend will live
on. It was as if the sleepy-eyed motivational speaker known to millions of
people had been swapped out for a ringer – a flame-breathing,
uncompromising scourge of media bias.

"There is a desperation on behalf of some to try to find a way to tarnish
me," he said. "My prediction is that all of you guys trying to pile on is
going to help me. When I go out to these book signings and meet these
thousands of people, they say, 'Don't let the media get you down.'"

Pushed and pushed, Carson channeled the conservative id. Why, he asked, was
he being subjected to the kind of scrutiny the current president never was?

"I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama
when he was running," Carson said. "In fact, I remember just the opposite.
I remember people saying, oh, we won't really talk about that relationship.
Frank Marshall Davis? We don't want to talk about that. Bernardine Dohrn,
Bill Ayers? He didn't really know him. All the things that Jeremiah Wright
was saying. Goes to Occidental College, doesn't do all that well, somehow
ends up at Columbia University. Oh, I don't know. His records are sealed.
Why are you guys not interested in whether his records are sealed?"

On Twitter, liberal critics of Carson thought they saw a man in full
meltdown, like Lonesome Rhodes after the public caught him on a live mike.
The Carson campaign saw something else: dollar signs. According to Carson
spokesman Doug Watts, the campaign raised $3.5 million during its toughest
week of coverage. Tellingly, a full $500,000 of that came from
telemarketing on Friday, the day of the news conference, when CNN,
Politico and Wall Street Journal all carried stories about claims made by
Carson relating to his life story.

Also, tellingly, the only Republican rival to join in the pile-on has been
Donald Trump, who appears constitutionally incapable of doing otherwise.
Jeb Bush, who has fallen far beyond Carson in poll numbers, told Fox News
<http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeb-bush-ben-carson-west-point> that
he trusts him. To say otherwise would be to anger the conservative base,
which had been waiting for a rant such as Carson's.

The fury of party activists shouldn't overwhelm investigative journalism.
Like Columbia Journalism Review’s David Uberti
<http://www.cjr.org/criticism/ben_carson_exposed_not_really.php>, I
thought Politico’s Kyle Cheney had the grist of a good story, deeply
reported, muddied by the Web site's initial headline. It was not news that
Carson had never applied to West Point. Yet during the weekend,
conservative readers wrote in to ask me how a reporter could be so unfair
to Carson. A sample:

The statement may be correct in a very technical way, but most people who
hear that a student gets a full ride with all tuition, room and board paid
for would call that a scholarship.

-

Your readers will recall the lack of serious scrutiny by the Post of
President Obama's claims in his book and his extreme equivocation on
multiple contradictory statements made relative to his relationship with
Jeremiah Wright. Why should readers be urged to consider the President's
statements in their "context" but the same accommodation not be extended to
Dr. Carson?

-

I do think it rich to see the press suddenly so interested in the academic
records of potential presidential candidates. Especially subtle recollected
details of events 35+ years ago. I'm sure I've never misremembered anything
in my past. After all, as another candidate so eloquently put it, "What
difference does it make?"

The last two e-mails were representative, because, on the right, it is
accepted as truth that the media failed to vet Obama and smoothed his path
to the White House. It doesn't matter that ABC News broke the Jeremiah
Wright story or that Politico broke the Bill Ayers story. Because those
stories were not piled on Obama — or because he was able to break free of
them — they are proof that the media went easy and allowed him to become
president.

This take on the press is basically immutable. In 2012, Breitbart News
published a series on a young Obama titled “The Vetting,”
<http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2012/05/17/the-vetting-barack-obama-literary-agent-1991-born-in-kenya-raised-indonesia-hawaii/>
predicated on the idea that "the complicit mainstream media had refused to
examine President Obama’s ideological past." When the stories failed to
blow up the president's reelection, a process called
<http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2013/02/16/the-new-york-times-writes-of-ben-smith-and-bensmithing/>
"BenSmithing" was blamed, named for the editor of Buzzfeed. BenSmithing,
according to the New York Times, meant "writing an article that supposedly
tackles a Democratic Party scandal, but is actually intended to dismiss the
issue." Why was Smith a fitting namesake? Well, before Buzzfeed, he was the
Politico reporter who first wrote about Obama's political debts to Ayers.
The assumption that the media vets Democrats only as a way to clear them
runs as deep as the assumption that it vets Republicans to destroy them.

Carson, more than almost any Republican politician, is suited to make this
argument. He is not really comparable to Herman Cain, a popular but minor
tea party figure who become a primary phenom and blamed bias for the
scrutiny that ended his campaign. Carson is an icon whose memoir has passed
through the hands of home-schoolers and even public school students for
decades.

More people have read "Gifted Hands" than perhaps will ever read "Dreams
from My Father,"Obama's memoir. Obama was known to Democratic voters
roughly 2½ years before he started running for president. Carson and his
biography have been known since the late 1980s. Cover a Carson mega-rally,
and you'll find people who know a young person who benefited from a
Carson-endowed scholarship, or were even operated on by the man himself.

The reporters now vetting Carson may know this, but it hasn't stopped them
from falling into a trap. In Florida, after Carson asked why reporters had
demanded his records but not those of Obama, one reporter could be heard
quizzically asking why Obama's biography would ever be questioned. He had
never tried to hide his mediocre early school tales.

"He wrote them in the book," the reporter said.

That was exactly Carson's point. One candidate's book was a shield; another
candidate's, a Republican one, had suddenly become an oppo file. If that's
his defense, millions of conservatives are ready to endorse it.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

Sent from my iPhon