Who Buried the Boehner Story before Friday?

I'm not excited about back-to-back stories being in regard to John Boehner, so let's decide in advance that yesterday's was about Boehner, but today's is really, really not - even though he's central to the topic.

I was musing a little bit on Friday right after the news came out about the Speaker's announcement of his upcoming resignation.  The more that came out, trickle by drip, the more it appeared that the reason he was resigning was because he faced some form of no-confidence vote, or re-election battle, that he was going to lose.  In other words, he was quitting before the rank-and-file in Congress fired him.

By the latter part of the afternoon, as this background information started to surface, the "wait a minute" part of my brain started to kick in.  That's the part that often says, "Hold on there; this doesn't smell quite right."

Here's what smelled fishy: If there was an imminent fight over a no-confidence vote or an impending ouster of the Speaker, then why the heck was it not front-page news in every paper in the USA a week earlier?  Why was it not leading the evening news?  Why did even any word of the revolt trickle out a bit only after the announcement of the resignation?

Doesn't that occur to you as well?  I mean, I follow the news as much or more than most people.  Not a lot more, but I certainly stay attuned.  And while I certainly recall grumbling by the presidential candidates about perceived impotence on the part of Republican leadership in Congress, there was nothing out there saying that Boehner was in any imminent danger of being replaced.  If you heard something like that, well, there's a big ol' Comments section below for you to quote it.

No, the media were amazingly silent.

Here's the thing -- they had to know!  I mean, come on, these guys live on their sources, right?  Congressmen talk, and they certainly talk to reporters.  So the networks, or at least their press corps, knew of an impending revolt, but it didn't get on TV or printed.  There can be only two reasons for that:
(1) They didn't think it was newsworthy, or
(2) They didn't want to report it.

Reporters and the media are famous for not wanting to report things, whether it be John Kennedy running women in and out of the White House, or Barack Obama's college transcripts, or anything good that a conservative ever does or says.  We know the congressional revolt was newsworthy, since Boehner's tanned, tobacco-rotted face has been plastered all over the news since Friday, once the resignation was a fait accompli.

So it must be that the press did not want to give publicity or credence to a story which you would think would tickle their little leftist chipmunk heads.  "Fighting, controversy engulfs the Republicans in Congress" -- that would be a logical headline.

But we never saw it!

This is a scandal of journalistic abdication.  And so I can only conclude that the press did not want John Boehner to resign.  They did not want to give air time and ink to the opponents of his inactive leadership, lest there be an actual public debate, a forum in which the public -- which loudly rejected the left in 2014 -- might very well decide that the Planned Parenthood scandal was indeed important; that endless borrowing from China is indeed a hideous way to run a government; that the people who swept in a Republican Congress in 2014 indeed expected repudiation and rejection of Barack Obama's dictatorial executive orders from it.

No; the press wanted good old Boehner to stay in office, to capitulate to the White House on demand, to roll over and let Obama have his way.  And to shun the spotlight and not try to make his case to the people.  How else to explain how, when last the government was shut down, it was Republicans allegedly obstructing a Democratic Senate who were blamed, but when this time it is Democrats filibustering the Senate to shut down government, it is still the Republicans who are blamed?

I don't know how the story of the revolt against Boehner stayed buried before the resignation, but there should be some networks asking themselves why their Capitol Hill reporters aren't writing stories they were clearly privy to.  And if they didn't write the stories they were privy to, then what the heck are they being paid for?

Unless, of course, the networks killed the story, in which case the problem is much, much bigger.

 Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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