Untouchable. Unaskable. Unpublishable.

In a media environment dominated by leftist thought, some subjects are untouchable, some questions are unaskable, and some narratives are unpublishable. The media is no longer about reporting the news, it's far more likely about suppressing or spinning to the news to fit a specific narrative. Three recent cases come to mind:

The first instance comes from entertainment. Bill Maher, a left-leaning social commentator who has a show on HBO, shocked the progressive establishment by calling out liberals who are all too ready to crucify anyone who denigrates a gay person verbally (e.g., Jonah Hill's anti-gay comments) or brutalizes a woman (e.g., the current NFL scandal), but look the other way when Islam actively and aggressively promotes both. In what has become a cause celeb, Maher spoke the truth about Islam and the left's reaction to its atrocities, and temporarily jolted his fellow liberals into reality. The consequences were interesting and hilarious. Mahar was vilified as "Islamophobic" or "racist" for questioning the narrative that only a "tiny percentage" of Muslims support Jihad (as exemplified by any of the many, many Islamist groups, e.g., ISIS or Hamas). Another guest on the same program, Sam Harris was demonized for stating, "Islam is the motherload of bad ideas." Rather than objectively exploring Maher's and Harris' arguments, the media piled on, telling us all about the 'debate,' but never examining the questions that rose out of the debate.

The second instance begins in West Africa. It appears that the Obama administration is doing everything possible not to impose a necessary travel ban for anyone who has been in a West African country. There's an underlying notion that a travel ban would (1) somehow be racist and (2) would  reflect poorly on this administration's push to change the nation's approach to (illegal) immigration. So, instead of aggressive actions to reduce the likelihood of other Ebola infected visitors by stopping them before they get on a plane to the USA, we create fever checks when they land—an approach that is both ridiculous and ineffective at the same time. The hesitancy to impose a travel ban smacks of political correctness—in this case PC can get us killed. The media avoids this issue, afraid that discussion of it might precipitate public pressure to put the ban into effect.

The third instance has to do with the rather frightening outbreak of Enterovirus EV-D68, a polio-like illness that has already killed five young children across the country. The media is reporting the story, but they are not asking key questions because they are, I suspect, afraid that the answers might energize the public again the Obama administration's immigration efforts. Sharyl Attkisson, one of the very fewer modern left-leaning journalists who deserve to be called a professional, has not been afraid to ask the questions. She writes:

Enteroviruses commonly circulate in the U.S. during summer and fall. EV-D68 was first identified in California in 1962. Over the past thirty years, only small numbers were reported in the U.S.

The CDC hasn’t suggested reasons for the current uptick or its origin. Without that answer, some question whether the disease is being spread by the presence of tens of thousands of illegal immigrant children from Central America admitted to the U.S. in the past year.

The origin could be entirely unrelated.

However, a study published in Virology Journal, found EV-D68 among some of the 3,375 young, ill people tested in eight Latin American countries, including the Central American nations of El Salvador and Nicaragua, in 2013. (See Fig. 3)

Though the U.S. government is keeping secret the locations of the illegal immigrant children, there are significant numbers of them in both cities in which the current outbreak was first identified, Kansas City, Missouri and Chicago, Illinois, according to local advocates and press reports.

You'd think that other media outlets would actively investigate the potential link. You'd be wrong. There has been almost no reporting on the possibility of a link between immigrant children and EV-D68. Silence.

If, in fact, a link does exist, if immigrant children brought EV-D68 in the country, and if the Obama administration distributed those immigrant children throughout the country without proper quarantine and health checks, they have inadvertently helped the disease to spread. That's a very big story that demonstrates one of many unintended consequences of an open borders policy championed by this president. It could be used to inform upcoming immigration decisions, and that's something that the trained hamsters in the media must silence.

Untouchable. Unaskable. Unpublishable. That's the montra for a discredited media that over the past six years has failed miserably in doing its job.