Via the Washington Free Beacon. Question: Why is the White House only now, on January 15, responding to Morsi’s 2010 comments about confronting the “bloodsuckers” and “warmongers” in Israel? The video of those comments appeared fully 12 days ago and made a stir online. How come it took nearly two weeks for Carney to formulate a pro forma denunciation?

The answer: Because he and O were hoping American media would black this story out for them so that they wouldn’t have to address it publicly. Here’s Forbes’s Richard Behar writing on January 11:

I studied the Pigs-and-Apes story’s journey and trajectory through America over the past week with Sue Radlauer, the Director of Research Services here at Forbes. We gave it seven days to see if any of the so-called “mainstream media” — a pejorative phrase that too-often obscures more than it reveals — bestowed the hate speech even a few sentences of back-page ink. Nothing.

Of course, the demonization of Jews is commonplace and de rigueur in the Arab media (although most Americans wouldn’t know that because they are not being made aware of it). But what makes this omission in Big Media especially egregious is that Morsi–sometimes spelled Morsy or Mursi– went even further than genetically pairing Jews with lower beasts. As you can see and hear for yourself in the Morsi Tapes, he called for an end to any and all negotiations for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians – droning on that all the land belongs to the latter. He called for a boycott of American goods because of its support for Israel…

The New York Times rarely touches this stuff. In fact, a harshly critical mega-report about the newspaper’s Middle East coverage was recently released by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). The Times can’t be too happy about it. “The failure of the New York Times to cover the hate indoctrination leads the pack, in a way,” CAMERA’s head Andrea Levin told me yesterday. “The fact that they deem it to be so unimportant helps to lay down that news decision for others as well. And, to us, it’s one of the greatest derelictions in current news coverage of the conflict.”

When the new caretaker of the Camp David accords is caught on tape mumbling about confronting the “criminal plundering entity” across the border and creating a state for Palestinians “on the entire land of Palestine,” that’s capital-N News. But not for U.S. media — until yesterday, when the Times broke its embargo of the story and let the rest of the world know that our new partner in peace is precisely the sort of shrieking Islamist cretin you thought he was. That’s the only reason Carney’s talking about this at all. Presumably Behar’s post got enough attention this weekend that the Times was finally shamed into covering it, but that raises the question — why wouldn’t the world’s most famous newspaper leap to tackle a story about the insane belligerence of the new, democratically elected, post-revolutionary president of the most important Arab country in the Middle East? Via Behar, MEMRI President Yigal Carmon has a theory:

“This is déjà vu,” he says about the lack of major press coverage of his Morsi material. “Well-meaning journalists have told me that exposing this kind of stuff is serving the enemies of peace. I think quite the contrary. You don’t serve peace by cover-ups. Only by exposure.”

Think about that. We’re not talking here about a reporter omitting classified details of troop movements from a story. We’re talking about trying to black out a video that’s freely available online of a new world leader talking directly into a camera about his hatred for a neighbor with whom his country’s fought multiple wars. The story writes itself, but they didn’t write it because in this case the facts conflicted with their political judgment of how to achieve peace in the Middle East. (In particular, I’d bet that the upcoming Israeli election and the risk that exposing the video could benefit Naftali Bennett’s party figured heavily into the decision to suppress it.) Imagine the stories you’re not hearing about that the Times can’t be shamed into exposing because there’s no smoking-gun video circulating in new media to force their hand.