Sure didn’t take long for the dust to settle after the New York Times’ May 10 feature about Hillary Clinton’s gusto for UFOs. The ensuing media blowup – which culminated two weeks ago in the previously unthinkable scenario of the White House press corps actually putting questions to a presidential mouthpiece in the West Wing – was intense but short-lived. Negating the conspiracy crowd’s contention than a sinister unseen hand imposes a gag order on the Fourth Estate when it comes to The Great Taboo, last month’s events tell us a couple of other things too: 1) When it comes to the gorilla in the room, the media still looks to the Times for cover, and 2) beyond that, newsies have no idea how to follow up.
“The truth is out there, and now The X-Files are a campaign issue,” began an ABC World News Tonight report, introduced with the hit show’s classic melody/montage but shedding no light on the real controversy. Hey, remember those presidential debate watch-parties where you take a shot of something heinous every time a candidate mentioned “Goldman Sachs” or “terrorism”? Imagine how wasted you’d get if we applied the same rules whenever the MSM includes “the truth is out there” or “out of this world” to its UFO reporting. You’d get smashed to smithereens reading Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page bloviations: “If ‘the truth is out there,’ as they say on ‘The X-Files’ TV show, Hillary Clinton says she’s eager to expose it.” Taking his cue from equally uninformed White House press secretary Josh Earnest’s non-answers to vague questions, Page went on to conclude that humans would probably invent space aliens if they couldn’t be confirmed because we humans are afraid of being alone in the universe: “As we have seen with various other conspiracy theories, people will believe what they want to believe, especially when the truth is far enough ‘out there.’”
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