If You Voted for Bush, Journalists Hate You

When you deal with as many pictures and video clips as a modern news network does, it can be a chore labelling them all. Apparently CNN has a new way of keeping it all straight:

Do CNN and Netscape have issues with President Bush and the first lady, or is it a case of political bias?

A photograph of the couple featured in online election coverage by the AOL Time Warner companies uses a graphic slur in the coding of the picture.

The photo originally was slugged "asshole.jpg" as identified when viewers clicked on the "properties" of the picture. Though the original Web address of the photo with the slur has been disabled, readers last night could actually see the photo isolated with the slur by going to the online address.

It's bad enough that news "professionals" talked down to the American public about 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, and covered up for Kerry and the UN, and generally abused the powerful, privileged position they occupy in the world, but give them a month or so to show their true colors and you may wish for those days again. They may well come to believe they have nothing more to lose, having sold their credibility, honor and principles down the river long ago. They may figure that they have to go even further than before, and less scrupulously. There's certainly no disadvantage to being so openly biased, since no one has been fired or even reprimanded for it, and Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair set the bar so high for malfeasance that just being crooked or unprofessional won't even get you noticed. this kind of story, which should be front-page news in any publication that even pretends to journalistic ethical standards, will become a non-story.

The only thing that changes this kind of behavior is when people stop rewarding mediocrity or outright criminality by boycotting those who go too far. Sadly, the big lie of this election season, and the last 20 years really, is that the networks and CNN, and the big 25 or so newspapers and magazines in the country, are impartial observers and not people who work every day to change the world they secretly despise. We must find a way to make them understand there are consequences to abandoning your post in time of crisis.