Both Old Media and Old Medea were at it again yesterday.
Old Medea is Medea Benjamin, the head of the leftist group Code Pink, who led the disruption of a Senate hearing on ISIS and was eventually hauled away. Old Media demonstrated its double standards by giving Ms. Benjamin's temper tantrum little attention. That treatment sharply contrasts with that seen in September 2002, when, with a Republican in the White House, a similarly petulant Code Pink display received front-page photo coverage in three major U.S. newspapers.
The Media Research Center's Brent Baker had the details on September 20, 2002:
And you thought only TV news put a premium on visuals. The two left-wing protestors, who managed to sneak a banner into the House hearing on Wednesday with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then cause a disruption, may not have been important enough for newspapers to examine their claims but, as FNC's Brit Hume pointed out on Thursday night, three major newspapers plastered a photo of them on their front pages.
... During the "Grapevine" segment on the September 19 Special Report with Brit Hume, Hume reported: "That brief outburst during Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's testimony in the House yesterday may not have amounted to much. The New York Times story on the hearings summed up the incident in two sentences inside the paper. But on the front page, there the protestors were in living color. And the Washington Post did not mention them in its news story, but on that front page, a color picture as well. The Los Angeles Times even made the outburst the lead photograph in the paper. And MSNBC invited the women on as prime time guests."
... on her September 18 show Banfield challenged the two women, MRC analyst Brad Wilmouth observed. The two appeared from MSNBC's Washington studio with the Capitol in the background while Banfield anchored from New York.
After noting that "a lot of people consider" their methodology "to be pretty darn rude," Banfield suggested to them that they are out of touch: "Let me ask you about how many people you actually get a chance to talk to because, as you say, everybody you talk to is against this but, 70 percent of Americans say they believe that if we don't take military action against Saddam, we're going to end up just like those 3,000 people who I happened to witness a year ago down at Ground Zero."
This time around, the New York Times hasn't given the group front-page photo treatment, or any treatment at all. Searches on "Code Pink" and "Medea Benjamin" (each in quotes) returned no results relating to the group's antics yesterday. Similar searches at the Associated Press's national web site (not in quotes) returned nothing relevant and nothing, respectively.
Ms. Benjamin and Code Pink did not make the front page of today's Washington Post, in words or pictures. Craig Whitlock's lengthy coverage of the hearing does not mention its brief disruption.
Searches at the Los Angeles Times indicate that its last mention of Ms. Benjamin's name occurred on August 14. "Code Pink" did get a mention at the paper's coverage of yesterday's hearing — over 20 paragraphs in.
There are available photos of Ms. Benjamin's protest yesterday from Getty Images and even the AP itself. This time, the news outlets in question, instead of giving them front-page exposure, chose not to use them.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
PS: NPR used the AP image on its website (and for a time, on its home page.)
