Media double standards on Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden

Last week, I wrote about Joe Biden’s “Tuzla Moment,” where he falsely claimed that while in Afghanistan back in February his helicopter was “forced down,” implying the ‘copter came under enemy fire. As I pointed out, Jake Tapper did some digging and found out that Biden’s claim wasn’t true. Come to find out, that’s not Biden’s only questionable war zone claim, as Fox News Channel managing editor Bill Sammon writes:

When Hillary Clinton told a tall tale about “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia, she was accused of “inflating her war experience” by rival Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign.

But the campaign has been silent about Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, telling his own questionable story about being “shot at” in Iraq.

“Let’s start telling the truth,” Biden said during a presidential primary debate sponsored by YouTube last year. “Number one, you take all the troops out – you better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone, where I have been seven times and shot at. You better make sure you have protection for them, or let them die.”

But when questioned about the episode afterward by the Hill newspaper, Biden backpedaled from his claim of being “shot at” and instead allowed: “I was near where a shot landed.”

The senior senator from Delaware went on to say that some sort of projectile “landed” outside a building in the Green Zone where he and another senator had spent the night during a visit in December 2005. The lawmakers were shaving in the morning when they felt the building shake, Biden said.

“No one got up and ran from the room-it wasn’t that kind of thing,” he told the Hill. “It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”

The rest of the press ignored the flap at the time because Biden was viewed as having little chance of ending up on the Democratic presidential ticket. But even after Biden was selected to be Obama’s running mate last month, his claim to have been “shot at” drew no scrutiny from the same reporters who had savaged Clinton for making a similar claim that turned out to be false.

FOX News has been asking the Obama campaign for details of the alleged shooting in Iraq ever since Biden was tapped to be vice president. Biden campaign spokesman David Wade promised an answer last week, but failed to provide one.

No surprise there.

The media has engaged in a blatant double standard by by and large not following up on Biden’s Iraq and Afghanistan claims in contrast to how Hillary Clinton was skewered by the press for her false Tuzla claim, but that double standard is far from the only one. Remember how news outlets both on the ‘net and TV reported non-stop for about two or three days back in early January when Hillary Clinton “got emotional” and teared up a bit on the eve of the New Hampshire primary? Compare that with the lack of sustained media interest over several incidents of Joe Biden caught tearing up on the campaign trail. Yeah, several outlets reported on it, but you didn’t see the wall to wall, 24-7 coverage of any of the incidents like we did with Hillary Clinton’s show of her “softer side” while in NH.

The main reason, I suspect, is that Senator Joe Biden is on the side of “The One” – the MSM may not want to show Biden’s tears in an effort to not portray him as weak. Exactly the opposite with HRC. Of course in her case, the media frenzy backfired, as many attributed her New Hampshire win to a couple of things: the so-called “Bradley Effect” and her tears. As a testament to the attempt at portraying her as weak because she cried not working, the media didn’t spend nearly as much time covering her second crying moment in CT a month later.

Just sayin’.

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