Did anyone even know that Fox News journalist Steve Centanni and his cameraman Olaf Wiig had been taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists on August 14^th? If you relied on the Leftist media, you would be hard pressed to find anything about this story at all. Perhaps you could find a short blurb on the opposite side of a JC Penny advertisement on page 18 of any major newspaper. Only today after a video of the two was released by the terrorists did the mainstream media even address the event.

This is remarkable considering that the kidnapping was committed against a colleague, a fellow journalist, albeit one that works for the more conservative Fox News. The Leftist media either did not come to their aid at all or gave them short shrift; their silence was deafening.

What makes this story even more striking is that Centanni and Wiig were kidnapped in Gaza where they were covering the “Palestinian side” of the story during the recent war in Lebanon. Most other reporters left Gaza in order to cover the more dramatic events in northern Israel and southern Lebanon. Centanni and Wiig remained in Gaza to give the Palestinians a fair chance to express their point of view to Western audiences. In other words, they remained to help the very people who ended up kidnapping them and holding them hostage!

So why the silence from the media? I think that the media is embarrassed and shocked by this turn of events. It seems that their perception of moral equivalence has been damaged --there is no more “two sides to every story”-- evil really does exist, and it will attack the media too! The Left’s illusion that if only they are “nice” and “fair” to evil people, they will be let about to go on their merry way has been shattered. The coverage of this troubling event has been virtually non-existent though, because for the Left, facing evil and the truth are the hardest things to do.

Update: Once an attention-getting video was released, the mainstream media finally took notice of the plight of these two journalists. One has to wonder what kind of coverage they would have received had no tape been released.