When two-year-old information is a “revelation”

When a damaging fact is being discussed about a Democrat, and it’s been revealed before, even if “before” means the previous Friday afternoon, the media tell us that this is “old news,” and therefore meaningless, and therefore everyone should stop talking about it. The underlying message is that the bad is only bad when it’s brand new.

Yet when a damaging fact is being discussed about a Republican, and it’s been revealed before, even years before, the media tell us that this is a new, shocking “revelation” that will end the Republican’s political career.

I am speaking, of course, about Marianne Gingrich’s upcoming interview with ABC in which she will say that her then husband asked her in 1999 to accept his then five-year-old affair with Callista, and that when she rejected this proposed “open marriage” arrangement, he divorced her.

While it is damning that Gingrich behaved in this way, it is not news, since Marianne told the public about it two years ago. Yet the entire media, reversing their philosophy about the supposed meaninglessness of old news, are treating it as new, and therefore terribly important.

The supposedly conservative Daily Caller brainlessly echoes the liberal media’s treatment of the story, reporting that “a forthcoming ABC News interview with his ex-wife Marianne Ginther promises to add intrigue and confusion in the coming days. Ginther will reportedly reveal [emphasis added] that he asked her to tolerate his infidelity with an “open” marriage.” And Peter Wehner at the Commentary blog speaks of the “revelation [emphasis added] by Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, that he wanted an ‘open marriage.’” Though maybe these conservative sites are not mindlessly following the liberal media, but are simply anti-Gingrich.

I of course believe that Gingrich’s personal history is highly relevant to his suitability for the presidency. That is not the issue here. The issue is that information revealed by the second Mrs. Gingrich in 2010 is being falsely treated as though no one had ever heard it before. And ABC, by coming out with this interview on the eve of the South Carolina primary, is playing a dirty game.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 19, 2012 09:35 PM | Send