ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” article. It is an editorial by the editor.

“I’m looking over a four-leaf clover, I overlooked before
One leaf is sunshine, the second is rain,
Third is the roses that grow in the lane “— Mort Dixon, 1927

Many people likely saw that awful assault Thursday night by Cleveland Browns defensive end Myles Garrett on Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph, but there was something overlooked in this televised melee.

The victim was indeed doing something awful before he got hit, he was acting like a jerk and taunting the opponent. But, of course, that does not excuse Garrett’s assault. With his suspension, he got what he deserved.

It’s just that too often in the public arena we have a media that overlooks things and doesn’t let us in on “the rest of the story.” We may not, at times, get the complete picture that helps us develop proper perspective.

Another good recent example has been all the ballyhoo over President Donald Trump’s perceived threat of withholding weaponry from Urkraine unless it very publicly announces an instigation of Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. I don’t think there’s any question Trump committed an impeachable offense here, but lost in the ozone is the culpability of Hunter Biden.

The former vice president’s son very clearly used the fame of his father’s name to get a cushy ($50,000 a month) job sitting on the board of an energy company in Ukraine. What he and his dad did was not illegal, but it certainly is unethical and calls into question the character of both men. Yet the media rarely discusses it and Republicans make the huge mistake of equating it with Trump’s more serious behavior.

Once again, what the Bidens did was unethical, but not illegal.

The media is imperfect, as the GOP likes to maintain. And in this case, it didn’t tell “the rest of the story.”

Earlier this week Rachel Maddow on MSNBC introduced the 1973 NBC-TV opening coverage of the Watergate hearings with striking and ominous music. She didn’t elaborate. She should have because it was the fourth movement of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, titled “March to the Scaffold,” in which the hero is taken to his beheading for killing his lover.

Somebody could have argued that the music was a bit heavy-handed, but prophetic in suggesting the demise of Richard Nixon.

Another example came with CNN’s reportage of a recent poll on the New Hampshire primary. Bernie Sanders was clearly in the lead, but their headlines were about the tie for second between Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden. Even worse, there was a headline crowing that Pete Buttigieg was fourth in the poll, but “a very strong fourth.”

One of the most puzzling examples of sweeping aside what might be important information occurred in 2004 when CBS newsman Dan Rather lost his job, along with a producer, because a secretary insisted a document about George W. Bush avoiding Vietnam service wasn’t original or authentic, however, she said was accurate.

That last part was overlooked. Rather lost his job and Bush won re-election.

It is difficult for a career community journalist to determine whether these examples of overlooking information were deliberate or just understandable mistakes. But I can’t get over the notion brought up more than a decade ago by comedian George Carlin:

“The game is rigged… but nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.”

COVER PHOTO: An artist’s rendition of Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” for an album cover.