If a group of corporations got together to decide what to tell the public about  a product in order to engage in price fixing and create an economic monopoly through collusion, the liberal media would call for arrests and indictments. When the liberal media engages in the same behavior to decide how to frame a foreign policy story as a Romney failure in order to get Obama elected, it’s considered due diligence.

We call it ‘information fixing.’

On Tuesday night, Romney issued a strongly worded statement denouncing apologetic tweets to Muslim extremists from the American embassy in Egypt that correlated with the brutal attacks on American embassies in Eqypt and Libya. Rather than seeking further information on how a Romney administration would handle a similar crisis, thus providing some insight for voters still figuring out who to elect as their next president, the liberal media engaged in journalistic collusion against Romney and framed the issue as a question of Romney’s tone and sensitivity.

According to the blog Right Scoop:

Before Romney issued his statement today, an open mic captured the press coordinating questions to ask Romney, with one saying “no matter who he calls on we’re covered on the one question.”

The following is the overheard conversation: 

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: …pointing out that the Republicans… *unintelligible* …Obama….

CBS REPORTER: That’s the question.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: *unintelligible*

CBS REPORTER: Yeah that’s the question. I would just say do you regret your question.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Your question? Your statement?

CBS REPORTER: I mean your statement. Not even the tone, because then he can go off on…

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: And then if he does, if we can just follow up and say ‘but this morning your answer is continuing to sound…’ – *becomes unintelligible*

CBS REPORTER: You can’t say that..

**Later**

CBS REPORTER: I’m just trying to make sure that we’re just talking about, no matter who he calls on we’re covered on the one question.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Do you stand by your statement or regret your statement?

To those who remember the secret liberal Journolist club from a couple years back, none of this is surprising. It’s simply a reminder.

Since deliberate collusion wasn’t enough, the liberal media chose to be deliberately inane as well, taking an important moment and transforming it into questions like this (H/T NR):

1.  Reporter brings up that Romney had a “toughly worded statement last night,” and asks, “Do you regret the tone at all given what we know now?”

2. “Do you think, though, coming so soon after the events really had unfolded over night was appropriate, to be weighing in on this as this crisis was unfolding in real time?” Follow-up: “What did the White House do wrong then, Gov. Romney, if they put out a statement saying they disagreed with it?”

3. “The world is watching. Isn’t this itself a mixed signal when you criticize the administration at a time that Americans are being killed? Shouldn’t politics stop for this?”

4. “Some people have said that you jumped the gun a little bit in putting that statement out last night and that you should have waited until more details were available. Do you regret having that statement come out so early before we learned about all of the things that were happening?”

5. “If you had known last night that the ambassador had died, and obviously, I’m gathering you did not know . . . if you had known that the ambassador had died, would you have issued such a strongly-issued statement?”

For American citizens looking for useful information on how a President Romney would address similar situations to the brutal attacks in Egypt and Libya, this line of questioning is not only useless; it is utterly bizarre. Democrats, and the media itself, spent five years using the Iraq War, and the thousands of soldiers who died in it, as political weapons against George W. Bush. This makes question #3 particularly cloying.

This media assault was not limited to the local press conference covered above. We’ve previously discussed the Associated Press as an Obama SuperPAC here, and they dutifully did their part in piling on Romney. Other outlets have participated as well.

This is also not the first time the liberal media has allowed itself to be used as a partisan attack dog rather than as a reliable portal of information. They recently framed Romney’s foreign trip through England, Poland, and Israel as a mistake ridden catastrophe, focusing on one supposed faux pas from each stop rather than discussing the substance of his speeches or the major endorsements he received, such as the one from legendary Cold Warrior Lech Walesa.

If Romney had waited to issue a statement on the Mideast riots, he would have been accused of being a political coward for checking the polls firsts, just as he was accused of being a coward during the debt ceiling crisis. Romney will never have a right answer or a right time in the eyes of his enemies. They will never give him a fair shake, no matter what he does, because they want him to lose. This is one reason why Romney was right when he didn’t release his tax returns. If the media can turn Obama’s foreign policy mess into a Romney mistake, what would they do with a listing of charities and companies with secondary or tertiary connections to some former low-level manager who fired a janitor whose wife died of cancer ten years later?

The liberal political blogs and pundits have free license to be this inane and irrelevant, and those engaged in “friendly fire” against Romney are free to do so as well (though it’s hard to qualify current MSNBC contributor and Sarah Palin trasher Steve Schmidt as friendly). However, frontline reporting is supposed to be about gathering information to keep the population informed.  Journalists are the self ascribed “watchdogs of democracy,” noble and objective guardians that protect pertinent information and the distribution of that information. Too bad they’re all protecting the Democrat Party instead.

When you are in and of the Beltway, your worldview shrinks to a myopic lens of cheap partisan hackery, and you no longer possess the perspective to step outside your prism and understand how absurd your myopia has become. The greatest lamenters of the de-evolution in our political discourse are its primary drivers.

Instead of this conversation being about alternative foreign policy visions, the liberal media is trying to turn the conversation into a storyline about how mean and insensitive Romney is. Obama unilaterally decided to help a regime get overthrown, led the rebels “from behind”, and the very country where he just did that attacked our embassy and murdered four Americans, including the ambassador. Yet the issue is that Romney got angry about it too quick?

The four murdered Americans might disagree.