What you are about to witness is either awkward or simply military protocol.  Either way it’s media bias on display.

There were a few things that jumped out to me immediately when I watched this video originally aside from the obvious fact that no one applauded until instructed to.

My first thought was, “perhaps this is simply how it’s done.”  After all, they were playing “Hail to the Chief,” which, for all I know, informs them to stand at attention.  But then I noticed that people seemed to be moving about, and a few were even holding up camera phones and filming the event.  It made me wonder if the audience was even comprised entirely of military, which would of course raise further questions as to why there were no unprompted cheers.

I have to imagine the silence was deafening.  Perhaps no one wanted to be the first one to applaud a man who seems intent on cutting the funding that many in attendance probably fashion their lives around.  Perhaps they saw the people on stage not applauding and assumed that they weren’t supposed to either.  Who knows? Maybe this same guy got on stage moments ahead of the cameras rolling and instructed the audience to stay quiet until he informed them otherwise.

I’ll leave those questions for people in the military or those in attendance at this speech.

Why this stuck with me since I first saw it was that I’d heard nothing of this moment in the national media even though this speech had taken place a month ago.

I guess I just assumed that a President walking in to a room without applause would be newsworthy, especially when someone finally has to step in and instruct the audience to applaud.

Why would I think this? I’m just following the precedent set by the media during George W. Bush’s presidency.

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Signs depicting an American politician with an Adolph Hitler mustache are prominently displayed at a political protest and the organizers and participants continue with their demonstration making no attempt to remove the signs or disavow the message.

This exact scenario was the dominant news story for weeks in the main stream media and was a prominent part of the NAACP’s infamous condemnation of the Tea Party movement and the launch of TeaPartyTracker.org designed to stalk individuals at Tea Party rallies trying to catch them in embarrassing or offensive positions.

However, the latest incident described above has not made headlines anywhere but in the under media blogosphere.  And, the fact that the target of the Hitler sign was Sarah Palin can’t just be a coincidence.

It has been four days since the first reports of this political rally in Joliet, Ill., that included the offensive signs that also showed talk show host Glenn Beck with the same moustache.  Blogs were buzzing all weekend with the story but no traditional media outlets have touched it.  As Newsbusters points out, even the local Joliet paper has yet to mention the story. (more…)

Remember when Florida Congressman Mark Foley was outed for sexual misconduct with male pages in the House of Representatives in 2006? You’ll recall that the Democrats and the Old Media and the left were in some high dudgeon over the claim that Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert knew all about it before the scandal erupted and played the story endlessly for months on end.

Well, with Congressman Eric Massa from New York we have a Democrat also accused of sexual misconduct with a male staffer and we similarly find out that the Democratic leadership knew all about it. Will the Old Media make as much about Dem. Majority Leader Stenny Hoyer’s knowledge of Massa’s sexual misconduct as it did about the Republican leadership’s supposed knowledge of Foley’s?

Here is a small sampling of the treatment of the story by the New York Times as an example: (more…)