MRC’s Dan Gainor on Van Jones: Mainstream Media ‘Kept American Public in the Dark’

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Dan Gainor, the Vice-President of Business and Culture for the MRC, appeared on the September 8 edition of Fox Business Live to discuss the media's failure to report on President Obama's green jobs czar Van Jones, who resigned late Saturday night.

Gainor stated that the mainstream media "absolutely ignored" the Jones stories. He detailed:

If you are a watcher of ABC, NBC or CBS, two of those networks, you didn't even hear about it until Sunday after the White House buried the resignation midnight the night before. If you read The New York Times, the first time you heard about this major controversy was after the guy resigned. The Washington Post chimed in the day before -- the day of the resignation. They wrote a piece and then basically became moot that night. They kept the American public in the dark.

Anchor Stuart Varney called the media's ignoring of the story "a total breakdown in journalistic ethics and standards," a point with which Gainor agreed. "If you were to look at the Society of Professional Journalism ethical guidelines, you're supposed to set aside your bias and actually report kind of both sides of the story."

Gainor credited alternative media for pushing the Jones story. 

This story became popular because some people chimed in, talk radio, Fox did a good job. Beyond that new media helped drive the story. Twitter and Facebook. One of the bloggers I know said that you can tell when Van Jones was a trending topic on twitter, ordinarily that's reserved for people after they pass away, he said. In this case it was only Van Jones' career that was passing away.