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“Proof: Obama Refused to Call Benghazi ‘Terror,’ CBS Covered Up”

Breitbart:

In an astonishing display of media malpractice, CBS News quietly released proof–two days before the election, far too late to reach the media and the public–that President Barack Obama lied to the public about the Benghazi attack, as well as about his later claim to have called the attack “terrorism” from the beginning.

CBS unveiled additional footage from its 60 Minutes interview with President Obama, conducted on Sep. 12 immediately after Obama had made his statement about the attacks in the Rose Garden, in which Obama quite clearly refuses to call the Benghazi an act of terror when asked a direct question by reporter Steve Kroft:

KROFT: Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya Attack, do you believe that this was a terrorism attack?

OBAMA: Well it’s too early to tell exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.  And we are going to be working with the Libyan government to make sure that we bring these folks to justice, one way or the other.

CBS News held onto this footage for more than six weeks, failing to release it even when questions were raised during the Second Presidential Debate as to whether Obama had, in fact, referred to the Benghazi attack as an act of terror before blaming it falsely on demonstrations against an anti-Islamic video. The moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley, intervened on Obama’s behalf, falsely declaring he had indeed called the attack an act of terror in his Rose Garden statement, and creating the impression that Romney was wrong.

[…]

Fox News’ Bret Baier, who has been following the timeline of events closely, noted in his analysis this morning:

These are two crucial answers in the big picture.  Right after getting out of the Rose Garden, where, according to the second debate and other accounts he definitively called the attack terrorism, Obama is asked point blank about not calling it terrorism. He blinks and does not push back.

Understand that this interview is just hours after he gets out of the Rose Garden.

How after this exchange and the CIA explanation of what was being put up the chain in the intel channels does the Ambassador to the United Nations go on the Sunday shows and say what she says about a spontaneous demonstration sparked by that anti-Islam video? And how does the president deliver a speech to the United Nations 13 days later where he references that anti-Islam video six times when referring to the attack in Benghazi? 

[…]

Why did CBS release a clip that appeared to back up Obama’s claim in the second debate on Oct. 19, a few days before the foreign policy debate, and not release the rest of that interview at the beginning?  

Why on the Sunday before the election, almost six weeks after the attack, at 6 p.m. does an obscure online timeline posted on CBS.com contain the additional “60 Minutes” interview material from Sept. 12?  

Why wasn’t it news after the president said what he said in the second debate, knowing what they had in that “60 Minutes” tape — why didn’t they use it then? And why is it taking Fox News to spur other media organizations to take the Benghazi story seriously?  

Whatever your politics, there are a lot of loose ends here, a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of strange political maneuvers that don’t add up.

Actually, the conclusion to be drawn is quite simple: CBS News, in an effort to assist President Obama’s re-election campaign, corruptly concealed information about two critical issues–namely, a terror attack and the president’s dishonesty about it. When the players in the Libya scandal face investigation, so, too, should CBS News and those in the mainstream media who have wantonly assisted the administration’s shameless lies.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating:  we cannot take back our country until we take back the language, and one application of that assertion is that we need either to reclaim a free and fair press, or else work to do away with the lie that the legacy media is operating under a paradigm of objectivity or neutrality.

It seems to me the easiest path is the latter, given that it also blunts the motivation by journalism schools to turn out a host of newly-minted propagandists dedicated to creating and then nurturing narratives and narrative arcs rather than reporting or investigating with an eye and ear toward allowing a story to take them wherever it actually takes them. That is, it blunts the motivation to produce those well-versed in spin and manipulation, and actually provides a market for those who are willing to learn to report and try to maintain their objectivity.

Maybe Cheryl Attkisson could chair the journalism dept at Columbia.  That’d be a start.

(h/t nr)

11 Replies to ““Proof: Obama Refused to Call Benghazi ‘Terror,’ CBS Covered Up””

  1. leigh says:

    Sharyl is a treasure.

  2. BigBangHunter says:

    – I could be wrong, but I see no evidence that you can generally refurbish an ideolog. It seems to be a one way track from which they cannot return. There are numerous examples, but Dan Rather would seem a prime czse in point.

    – This brand of adept to the port side of politics seems incapible of shame, or self aware remorse. Being caight in duplicitous activities just seems to spur them on to even greater bald-faced lies. It at least mimics a borderline mentality, and at times they simply seem to be short in the native intelligence department, as well as self survival instinct.

    – What to do about this sort of behavior is as puzzling as the behavior itself, since there seems to be no obvious incentive that closely matches what they have to lose. Maybe they’re, as a rule, simply asocial and its no more complicated than that.

  3. palaeomerus says:

    So how can we effectively penalize the press for being a PR filter? They seem to feel pretty immune to criticism from any hostile angle at the moment. Are we back to forming and promoting parallel cultural institutions again and hoping that they naturally eclipse the current dogshit press? Hell, we can’t even get the president to enforce laws he doesn’t like or get our Chief Justice to read what is actually there as written. Bullshit is tolerated and truth is flogged and cursed. Is cultural mitosis and competition with our opposite number our only option?

  4. Ernst Schreiber says:

    So how can we effectively penalize the press for being a PR filter?

    I’ve said this before, but I don’t mind saying it again. If Romney is elected tomorrow, I think he ought to yank the WH press passes of the broadcast networks and all the cable networks except for Fox, and also those of the Washington Post and the New York Times. In their stead they should place, front and center “DNC media rep. –broadcast TV,” “DNC media rep. —cable TV” and DNC media rep. –print” chairs and then leave it up to them to sort out the rotation.

    With the room freed up, they should get a PJ Media rep and a Breitbart rep and a few other new media reps.

    Anyone know if a print magazine has a White House correspondent?

  5. Ernst Schreiber says:

    And yeah, I know it will never happen. And that’s a damn shame, because after the last two or three cycles, there is no point in the Republicans helping the media to pretend that they’re not house organs for the Democrat party.

  6. leigh says:

    Paleo, read this and let hope live.

  7. Ernst Schreiber says:

    meet Tucker Carlson the new boss
    same as the old boss

  8. leigh says:

    Acht. You’re such a cynic.

    But, so am I.

  9. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Mitt Romney and Chris Christie are Tucker’s kind of conservatives

    ’nuff said.

  10. CBS = Covering Barack’s Six

  11. […] world. We need to do something about that, regardless of the results of today’s election and I quite like Jeff Goldstein’s idea. What do you […]

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