Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Press Anti-Hillary/Pro-Obama Bias Exposed Again

Remember how Sen. Hillary Clinton was called a liar for saying she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia? It fueled a number of news cycle headlines. CBS ran a two minute prime time news story about it.

Referring to the CBS News video, Clinton aides said Monday, it "was not quite as dramatic as Clinton put it."

"She meant that there was fire on the hillside around the area when we landed, which was the case," said Clinton campaign aide Lissa Muscatine.

Mike Allen of Politico.com said: "Who knows if she misremembered, misspoke, exaggerated, whatever. It makes the case for Sen. Obama that all this experience that she's been talking about is at least partly in her imagination."

Hundreds of thousands have viewed the video online in just the past few days.


Compare that with the media's (and CBS's) non-headline treatment earlier this month of Sen. Joe Biden's excited, dramatic account of being in a helicopter forced down in the midst of Al Qaeda’s Afghanistan.

"If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me," Biden said. "Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are."


It turns out that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with the helicopter being forced down and was nowhere in view. The culprit was snow, and none of the helicopter occupants were in danger.

No one was injured, and the Associated Press reported at the time that "the senators and their delegation returned to Bagram Air Base in a motor convoy, and left for Turkey.

"The weather closed in on us," Kerry told the AP at the time in a phone interview from Turkey. "It went pretty blind, pretty fast and we were around some pretty dangerous ridges. So the pilot exercised his judgment that we were better off putting down there, and we all agreed...We sat up there and traded stories."

Kerry joked, "We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn't have to do it…Other than getting a little cold, it was fine."


But, no one in the media is suggesting that this "makes the case" that Sen. Biden’s claim of experience "is at least partly in [his] imagination.”

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