Constitutional Integrity: Part II - The Media's Role

In late October when I posted stories about this on my blog and facebook pages, a girl I know who works for the New York Times Company as a jounalist asked "if this story had merit don't you think the major news outlets would be reporting it?" Sadly no. And it's STILL sadly, no. This isn't on CNN; ABC, NBC; or in the NYT. FOX was there though.

Have you any of you ever seen the Denzel Washington movie Ricochet? It's really quite good. Denzel Washington plays Nicholas Styles, a cop turned ADA. The film starts out with Denzel as a young cop who goes to lawschool at night. He and his partner are out on patrol and happen to pass by a local carnival as a known mafia hitman, Earl Blake, rushes out, after having just murdered a number of drug runners. Blake tries to use a child as a body shield but to no avail; fast-forward through heroics and Styles and his partner get their man.

The movie then fast-forwards to about seven years later, when Styles is married and a prominet ADA in Los Angeles County, with political ambitions, and a media darling (after all, he's a hero right?). But Blake has thoughts of bloody revenge. Blake orchestrates an incredible complex escape and fakes his own death. Once the media believes he's dead, Blake is free to destroy Style's life. And when Style's cries frame-job, the media is only all too quick to latch onto the gore and fascinating twists and turns of such a tabloid-perfect tale. Even though Styles is an upstanding citizen one second, the media is all for painting him as a child-molesting, phillandering, murdering fiend.

But since this is a good movie, Styles wins in the end of course - and the final scene involves one pretty cool duel-to-the-death on the top of a building between Blake and Styles (facilitated by Style's old friend-turned-drug lord), wherein Blake confesses to everything he's done and ends up electrocuted and impaled on a large spike protuding from the structure. Oh yah, the media was there and got it all on tape.

Suddenly faced with "the truth" as it is instead of the truth as they wanted it to be, reportorters have no choice but to verify Styles' innocence. They do so however, without apology, as if they were always objective, and played no role by way of their failure to investigate et. all, in Styles' fall from grace.

So what I'm wondering is, when will I get my media apology? Better yet, when will AMERICA get it's media apology? Obviously 9 men and women in black robes think it's got merit though - or at least four of them of them do. There's no telling how many of them will if Obama follows his present trend of refusing to present the requested documents. And at the end of the day, it looks like these 9 people's opinions are the only ones who count.