Friday, October 17, 2008

The Press and Joe the Plumber   [Byron York]

Yesterday on the Corner, I posted this:

I don't know anything about Joe Wurzelbacher, but I just have one bit of advice.  If you have anything in your past that you're not proud of — a messy divorce, a DUI, an unpaid bill, an indiscreet comment, whatever — be prepared for it to become public knowledge.  The lefty blogosphere, along with allies in the press, will see to that.

I got a number of emails calling me a hypocrite and asking whether the name Graeme Frost rang a bell.  "What comes around, goes around," one emailer wrote. Frost was the Maryland 12 year-old picked by Democrats last year to respond to a Bush radio address on the S-CHIP insurance program.  Some conservative bloggers started asking a lot of questions about whether the Frost family qualified for the insurance.  Therefore, my emailers told me, any scrutiny of Joe the Plumber is fair.

So today, we have the New York Times, not liberal bloggers, publishing "Real Deal on 'Joe the Plumber' Reveals New Slant."  According to the Times, Wurzelbacher "may work in the plumbing business, but he is not a licensed plumber…never held a plumber's license…does not belong to the plumbers' union…and he owes back taxes, too…"

OK, that's fine.  Now go back and look at the Times' coverage of the Frost matter.  When Democrats chose Frost to give the radio address, the Times reported,

Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points….Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own. In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers…They scrutinized the family's income and assets…declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits…what on the surface appears to be yet another partisan feud [is] all the nastier because a child is at the center of it…

Rather different tone.  That's why I put in the part about "allies in the press."

10/17 12:07 PMShare