Whether it was Jerry Brown or a close aide who called Meg Whitman a “whore” on a leaked tape, the impact of the recording on the campaign to be California’s next governor is certain to be significant.
Here are the “facts” as put forward by the Los Angeles Times Cathleen Decker in Sunday’s edition:
“Someone was heard suggesting that Whitman’s actions could be used to cast her as a ‘whore.’ It was not immediately clear who uttered the comment; the Brown campaign said it was not the candidate. The candidate was not heard disabusing the speaker, in any case.”
Watching old media in California struggle to find a way to protect Brown from the impact of the tape has been amusing.
On my radio show Friday, hours after the tape was posted at Breitbart.com, I asked the audience what would have been the media reaction had any male GOP candidate in any race in the country been heard on a similar tape containing exactly the same words about a Democratic woman candidate?
The callers knew the answer. Readers of this column know the answer. Everyone in gasping, dying old media knows the answer: It would have led every broadcast, would have been front-page news and grist for every political columnist, and a horde of lefty MSMers would have been chasing the offending candidate from venue to venue demanding apologies and explanations.
But the story of Brown’s dance with the “w” word was buried in Saturday’s Times on the third page of the second section, and remained entombed in Sunday’s paper –with the explanatory paragraph above appearing in the second section on page A39, the “jump” page from a story appearing in the second section on page A33 under the headline “Fiddling while the state burns.”
The real front page of the Times does have a major political story –“Some Democrats hold off the political tide”– which is so pathetically an example of desperate liberal boosterism by the remnants of MSM elites that it causes amusement rather than annoyance.
A three week set of trips to broadcast markets that has included San Antonio, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Atlanta and Minneapolis and which will continue this week and next has been interesting in many ways but one is that the old complaint of listeners about the mainstream media just isn’t heard much anymore.
Because the mainstream media doesn’t matter.
Everyone in California knows, for example, that either Jerry Brown or a senior aide with whom he was in conversation called Meg Whitman a whore and that a tape of the exchange is available. It has been played and discussed on dozens of talk shows and will continue to be throughout the weeks ahead.
Whatever its impact, the old guard — really, more like the mummified guard — of the state’s once powerful journalist gatekeepers is powerless to stop or spin the story.
All the Times has done over these three days is provide yet another example of why the paper’s ownership is bankrupt, why its circulation is shattered, and its once enormous influence squandered. The Los Angeles Times is the Newsweek of the big newspapers, the first to fall completely to the floor, to become a joke rather than a player.
Ten years into the media revolution and still there are gloriously self-absorbed editors and reporters who allow their politics to shape their coverage with the expectation that no one will notice. When, you have to wonder, will they hear the readers’ laughter?
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
