Tick-tock: Journalism jargon for a story that recounts events in chronological order, as if accompanied by the soundtrack of a ticking clock.
Last summer, at the request of American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., I spent several days trying to get the White House Press Office to answer a simple question:
The President of the United States is not only the most powerful man in the world, but also the most public, his daily life chronicled to the minute by the national press, his every word and action reported and analyzed by journalists and commentators. What the American president says and does is always automatically newsworthy and therefore it is profoundly mysterious that a hushed silence surrounds one of the most disturbing events of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Where was the president? This is a simple question, one to which the American people might reasonably expect an answer, but more than nine months after that deadly night, we still have not gotten a detailed answer and most in the media seem to have lost all interest in the question. . . .
You can read the rest. The point was, and is, that we never got the “tick-tock” version of the White House’s Benghazi story — we don’t have a timeline of where Obama was and what he was doing, during the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2012. Here we are, nearly a year later, and journalists still haven’t gotten the tick-tock. Patterico did some poking around over the weekend:
Here is an interesting tidbit from the White House Visitor Logs for 9/11/12: Obama met with three people, at an unknown time, for “debate prep.” . . .
Obama appears [from the official White House schedule] to have been gone from the White House for much of the early part of the day. He observed a moment of silence on the South Lawn; visited the Pentagon Memorial; visited veterans at Walter Reed in Bethesda; returned to the White House; and met with Leon Panetta at 5 p.m. There are not too many holes in his schedule during the day — increasing the chances that the “debate prep” took place in the evening, after the meeting with Panetta . . . in other words, when the Benghazi attack was unfolding.
Patterico makes clear we don’t know when that happened, because we never got that tick-tock, and thus the question:
“What difference, at this point, does it make?”
It makes a difference because everybody — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the likely 2016 Democrat presidential nominee — spent weeks lying about what happened.
When the truth began to trickle out, the White House press corps was negligent in its duty, and let the Benghazi lies go unexamined during the weeks while President Obama got himself re-elected.
We still don’t have the whole truth, but Democrats are calling for a “boycott” of a congressional investigation trying to get the truth, many in the media are dismissive of the investigation, and thus actively participating in this partisan cover-up!
The questions must be answered, and those who participated in the cover-up — including the media — must be held to account.
