Big Journalism

Chris Matthews strayed from the liberal talking points today. But don’t worry, it only happened for a little while. Two hours, in fact, before he was back to his old self, lashing out irrationally at conservatives. We’re not sure where Matthews’ original bout of intellectual honesty came from, but we’re pretty sure that some sort of JournoListy Intervention occurred to get him back on message.

For those of you who don’t know (and according to the latest ratings, that’s most of you), Matthews does a 5pm “Hardball” on MSNBC that repeats at 7pm. Today, during the 5pm hour, Matthews had as his guests hardcore leftists Joan Walsh of Salon.com and former Governor Howard Dean. The issue at hand was Shirley Sherrod’s promise to sue Andrew Breitbart. Well, that wasn’t the real issue at hand. The idea was to beat holy hell out of Breitbart, but things didn’t exactly go according to the JournoListy Playbook.

Believe it or not, Matthews defended Breitbart.

In the early part of the 5pm segment with Walsh and Dean, there appears to be some confusion over whether or not Matthews was aware of the fact that Breitbart posted two excerpts of Sherrod’s speech as opposed to the whole 35-plus minutes. But later in the segment — and this is important — after this discrepancy is cleared up and the full excerpt in question has been aired for Matthews and the “Hardball” audience (this, according to Newsbusters), a fully informed Matthews still defends Breitbart making the crucial and oft-ignored point that…

Well, there you go. [Quoting Ms. Sherrod] “I opened my eyes. I realized it wasn’t about black and white. It was, but it was about other things, about poverty.” So, Joan, that part, that part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape.

Watch this part of the exchange below, and remember that this occurs after Matthews has seen the full excerpt in question. Whatever confusion there might have been earlier, is completely cleared up by this time:

—–

Well, obviously this couldn’t have sat well with the left-wing Journolistas who are now in full Destroy Breitbart mode and therefore in no mood for independent thinkers not fully on board with today’s talking points.

So rather than accept the fact that a fully informed Matthews was still intellectually honest enough to make the point that the rest of the MSM is willfully ignoring — that Ms. Sherrod’s redemptive revelation was not cut from the excerpted video — something inexplicable happened between the 5pm and 7pm broadcast, and it’s not crazy to speculate that this something was probably a whole lot of angry phone calls, a flood of scathing emails, and a producer meeting or two that included any and all variations of the word apostate.

An international story that’s grabbed thousands of headlines over the last week, and Matthews did a 180… between shows? Someone got to him. The MSNBC Thought Police? The JournoList Thought Police? (Did I just repeat myself?)

What else could it have been? Something happened. Something so effectively transforming that it spun Matthews completely around enough that sometime before the 7pm “Hardball” rerun was set to air, he magically decided he wanted a redo. And so for what might have been the first time in the show’s history, Matthews re-taped an entirely new program for the 7pm hour — a program that would allow him to make up for his short but near fatal bout of intellectual honesty and put him safely back in line and on the record with his left-wing pals. See for yourself…

Remember, the video above represents Matthews’ 5pm opinion of the Sherrod excerpt Breitbart posted. The video below represents Matthews’ 7pm opinion of that very same excerpt:

—–

What a difference a couple of hours makes! And oh, yes, Joan Walsh was much, much happier with this Chris Matthews. And so was Mediaite. I’m sure a big teddy bear bouquet from Media Matters is already on the way.

As you can see from the 7pm clip, Governor Dean wasn’t able to return for the magic redo, so another hardcore left-winger, Politico “reporter” Ken Vogel, was brought in to complete the left-wing echo chamber.

My favorite part of Vogel’s reportering analysis is his having to finally face the unhappy fact that Ms. Sherrod’s redemptive moment was indeed included in the Breitbart excerpt. Grief-stricken that this fact is now out there for the world to see, Mr. Vogel enters the first stage of grief — denial — and writes this inconvenient fact off as a mistake, as though Breitbart would’ve removed the moment of redemption if only he had seen it.

Well, the one person who removed that moment of redemption was Vogel himself when he declined to mention its existence in this Politico piece (co-authored with Keach Hagey) from the 22nd:

[Breitbart posted] a video misleadingly edited to make it appear that a black Agriculture Department employee named Shirley Sherrod was boasting of discriminating against a white farmer.

Big Government’s Mike Flynn addressed this wildly incorrect statement later that very same day:

At the very end of one of the video excerpt’s, Ms. Sherrod begins to explain how she later realized her initial discrimination of the white farmer was wrong. In Andrew’s article about the speech he noted

Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help.

If we were trying to show that Ms. Sherrod was “boasting” of discrimination and were prone to editing the tape as evidence, wouldn’t we have cut that part out?

And yet this “journalist” has yet to correct the record.

Or should I call him a “JournoListo“?

***UPDATE:  “Hardball” Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed

***

Today, on MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews acknowledged (and appears to be the first member of the mainstream media to acknowledge) that the video Andrew Breitbart posted in his July 19th Big Government article about an NAACP audience’s reaction to a particular moment in Shirley Sherrod’s speech, does in fact include Ms. Sherrod discussing her redemptive revelation (transcript from Newsbusters):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, there you go. [Quoting Ms. Sherrod] “I opened my eyes. I realized it wasn’t about black and white. It was, but it was about other things, about poverty.” So … that part, that part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape.

This then prompts Mr. Matthews to ask his guests, Governor Howard Dean and Joan Walsh, a question that answers itself:

Yeah, but why do you think if this was a complete slime job, why do you think Breitbart kept that in there, Governor? Why did he keep in that part – let me let the Governor in here. Why did he put the redemptive part in here at all?

Dean admits he has never even viewed that 2:36 video in its entirety! Nor has he even read Andrew Breitbart’s original article, which states:

Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.

Of course that has not stopped Dean from appearing on multiple networks and ripping Fox News as being racist for having played the video of Shirley Sherrod released on BigGovernment.com (yes, the same 2:36 video he has not watched all — any? — of).

It’s reasonable to assume Dean isn’t the only member of the media or punditry guilty of this negligence. While the Democrat Media Complex rushes to condemn Breitbart for not offering adequate context in his multimedia presentation, how many actually stopped to read and watch the context that was given in the first place. (Hint: The over/under is Chris Matthews.)

Will the rest of the MSM follow Matthews’ lead, take a breather from their feeding frenzy, and follow suit? Or will they continue to mischaracterize and misinform?

Explosive if true:

I imagine that the journalism profession has always attracted more than its fair share of people who are left of center.   So in a way,  the Journolist does not come as any great surprise.  But what does stand out about it is the glaring in-your-face nature of the whole thing.

You see, the old school liberals in journalism,  even though they were left-of-center,  wanted to be journalists first and ideologues second.  There was a code of professionalism, admittedly not always followed,  that called on them to put the pursuit of truth first.  (How one defines the truth is always the question.)  Many of them would not even register to vote, or at least not register to vote with a party affiliation,  because of they wanted to somehow conform to this code.

JournoList stands out because of the hubris of this new batch of liberal journalists.  Forget old school;  they are quite content to pass along emails and concoct plans to label people as “racist” who happen to raise questions about Jeremiah Wright.

The old timers were journalists first,  liberals second.  The new crop is clearly made up of those who are liberals first and journalists second.  Indeed,  their journalism is not an end in itself but a means to achieving their liberal ends.   When the New Left began its Long March Through the Institutions in the sixties,  it began with the universities and other centers of power.  It is culminating in the media world.

And what a choice they have made.

Theodore H. White warned in The Making of the President 1972:

The power of the press in America is a primordial one.  It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law.  It determines what people will talk and think about—an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties, and mandarins.”

The Making of the President 1972 (New York:  Antheneum, 1973)  p 245

Oscar Wilde offered,  “In America the President reigns for four years and journalism governs forever and ever.”

But there is good news in all of this.  Absent the alternative media on the Internet—these guys would never have been caught.  They would have been able to maintain the charade that they are “working journalists” and quietly continued with their plots and schemes.  They are no doubt continuing to communicate with each other in the same manner that they did on JournoList.

But the veil has been torn from their faces.   And their “analysis” has been revealed for what it is:  political hackery.

There’s a lot of buzz on the Internet about what has been called the JournoList. This was a private e-mail list maintained by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein of about 400 journalists, bloggers, and academics who may have colluded in aiding the election of Mr. Obama. Mr. Breitbart is the king of the alternative media and created his “Big” sites to report what was being unreported by the mainstream media. Big Journalism and Big Government are two Breitbart sites that have uncovered scoops that took weeks for the mainstream media to report. The Acorn scandal would never have come to light without this exposure. On May 10, Brad Thor posted on Big Government the capture of Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Pakistan, yet to date we haven’t heard a ripple in the mainstream media.

Mr. Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide the complete Journolist e-mail sessions and while no one has claimed that reward yet, Tucker Carlson, the editor of the DailyCaller.com, has released copies of some of the e-mail correspondence. These have been reported on the “Big” sites and Fox News. What they reveal is very disturbing to those who still naively believe that the Fourth Estate is incorruptible. Uncovered is an egregious conspiracy to slant the news for an ideological motive rather than journalistic integrity.

The mostly white, liberal, leftist group correspondence suggested ways to cover the 2008 presidential campaign that would benefit Mr. Obama and vilify the McCain/Palin team. Of course, this media bias is not news to anyone on the right, but for the first time there is concrete proof that Mr. Obama was the choice of the mainstream media, which aided and abetted his campaign.

It was the same in 1992, when the media was enthralled with Bill Clinton. I well remember watching a satellite feed that picked up CNN’s Larry King giving pointers to the young governor of Arkansas on what to say during his interview. As his poll numbers started to climb, Pres. George H.W. Bush appeared on Mr. King’s show the Friday before the election. That day there was an indictment of Caspar Weinberger in the Iran/Contra case that hadn’t received much notice yet. Mr. King then took calls from the public for the president to answer and, lo and behold, somehow, fantastically, and how conveniently, the caller was George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Clinton’s campaign manager who brought up Iran/contra. Mr. Bush called it a setup but Mr. King just shrugged it off. Since then, it’s been a given that the mainstream media is just an annex of the Democratic National Committee.

Members of the exclusive JournoList were employees of news organizations such as Time, Politico, the Baltimore Sun, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon and The New Republic. Whenever it appeared that there would be negative press about Mr. Obama, the e-mails from contributors would chime in on how to handle it. During the campaign, videos of Mr. Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, surfaced showing him angrily denouncing whites, the government and saying, “God damn America.”

Oprah Winfrey had the good sense to leave his church but apparently Mr. Obama sat through his vitriolic racist sermons for 20 years. These videos threatened to blow up the Obama campaign.

JournoLister Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to distract the public from the Rev. Wright scandal by accusing conservatives such as Fred Barnes and Karl Rove of being “racists.” This technique is still being utilized to this day.

Chris Hayes of the left-wing publication The Nation was a little more restrained in writing, “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable.”

The Journolist e-mail comments were especially vitriolic against V.P. candidate Sarah Palin and were later reflected in the published columns and articles by the members of the group. If you ever wondered why this woman was so viciously attacked, you can blame the influence of this rat pack of pseudo-journalists.

The Dailycaller.com is leaking the e-mails as they come in and I urge everyone to take a peek at this site to view the machinations of the intellectual elite who think we’re too stupid to think for ourselves.

The site recently released the names and photographs of the JournoList participants and it was dismaying to me to see one of my former colleagues among them. I knew the young man was not as conservative as I was but I thought he was a good reporter. He left the paper for a better paying opportunity and perhaps abandoned his scruples as well. He garnered a lot of attention and made his name after reporting an off-the-cuff remark made by a senatorial candidate during a flight that made the front pages. Like the Rolling Stone article that sank General McChrystal, the headlines unfairly sank the senate candidate as well.

I lost a lot of respect for that young man and I am not surprised that he felt comfortable being among other back-stabbers.

Unfortunately, no matter how many smoking guns expose the corruption in the Fourth Estate, there are still too many people who hear only one side of the news. Even though the mainstream media numbers keep declining they still control the major outlets. It’s no surprise that the administration will continue to turn every incident into a race issue. That’s because it works.

Reprinted courtesy of the Irish Examiner

Two stories have recently appeared reporting NBC Political Director Chuck Todd’s reaction to the revelations of the JournoList, that website were avowed left-wing journalists congregated to talk about their profession and plot to foster a left-wing agenda in their work in the media.

Todd was reported to have found the JournoList revelations to be “very depressing” and said that the story had “kept him up nights” because of the overt leftist bias evinced by the list member’s emails released by Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller website.

Journolist was pretty offensive. Those of us who are mainstream journalists got mixed in with journalists with an agenda. Those folks who thought they were improving journalism are destroying the credibility of journalism.

Chuck Todd, non-JournoList member

But later that day another story claiming that Todd was taken out of context emerged that told a slightly different tale. In the afternoon JouronLista Greg Sargent wrote in the Washington Post that Todd was more upset that conservatives that were using the JournoList controversy to push their agenda and was much less upset that the story revealed a left-wing media conspiracy.

So, once again, it appears that the Old Media’s leftist guard is spinning to try and make these revelations all the fault of the conservatives that merely made the list public knowledge. Like the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar and blaming his brother for telling him to get some cookies, JournoListas are doing everything they can to shift blame.

So, maybe Todd was misquoted by Politico in the earlier report and maybe he was more outraged by the right’s treatment of this story than he was over his agenda-spinning comrades of the JournoList. But is the Post’s Sargent right when he praised Chuck Todd’s latest position on the JournoList? “But it appears Todd has the balance right here…,” Sargent said of Todd’s second public reaction. Can we trust Chuck Todd’s assessment? Is this whole thing really a mess blown out of proportion by conservatives?

Now, in the two Todd JournoList stories he is portrayed as one of those unbiased, middle-of-the-road professional types, the kind we can trust. As noted above, Todd is allegedly outraged that journalists like him were “mixed in with journalists with an agenda.” He clearly wants to foster the image that he is unbiased.

But recently I did a top ten list of the most left-biased journalists working in America today and our friend Chuck Todd came in at number four on that list. (See the full list HERE)

First of all Todd was not always a journalist. He began his professional career by working for Democrat election campaigns, the last of which was Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin’s 1992 failed run for the White House. Todd then went into journalism from there. So we know that he comes to journalism from a left-wing background in the first place. In my story from last week I have instance after instance of Chuck Todd’s own left-wing biased reporting.

Greg Sargent is a Washington Post blogger. He’s also a former member of JournoList and a friend of Ezra Klein. Any or all of that may explain why he’s twice used his platform at the Post to claim that there is a media conspiracy surrounding the Daily Caller’s publication of JournoList archives:

The real media conspiracy here is on the right. It’s a conspiracy to pretend that there’s a story here when there isn’t one.

Yes, you read that right. He’s accusing the right of a media conspiracy. It’s the sort of fabulist, black-is-white inversion of reality we’ve come to expect from Media Matters, not from the Washington Post. So let’s take a look at Sargent’s case for a right-wing media conspiracy and see if it passes the belly laugh test.

In his first stab at this claim, he took issue with the headline for one of the Daily Caller’s pieces:

It has this huge headline: JournoList debates making its coordination with Obama explicit. But way down in the 13th paragraph, the story quotes a post from the very same thread in which J-List founder and Post blogger Ezra Klein explicitly rules out any such coordination…In other words, the headline on this story could have been: “J-List founder ruled out conspiracy.”

If the Daily Caller was part of a right-wing conspiracy, why bother to include the line Sargent just quoted, or the one that came immediately afterwards which also depicts a list member rejecting the idea? Wouldn’t the conspiracy be more successful without any contradictory evidence? What Sargent wants us to blithely ignore is statements like this from Todd Gitlin of Columbia University:

On the question of liberals coordinating, what the hell’s wrong with some critical mass of liberal bloggers & journalists saying the following among themselves: McCain lies about his maverick status. Routinely, cavalierly, cynically. Palin lies about her maverick status. Ditto, ditto, ditto…Again. And again. Vary the details. There are plenty. Somebody on the ‘list posted a strong list of McCain lies earlier today. Hammer it. Philosophize, as Nietzsche said, with a hammer.

It’s not clear whether Gitlin wrote this before or after Klein nixed the idea; either way there’s no denying the idea was being discussed. Therefore there was nothing dishonest about the Caller’s headline.

Todd Gitlin, JournoList member

Sargent sees further evidence of manipulation in the Caller’s choice of story topics based on the list:

The Daily Caller builds stories by cherry-picking from threads about Fox News and Rush Limbaugh — and gets rewarded with pickup on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. It does a story transforming J-List discussion about Sarah Palin into “coordination,” and Palin — who’s fast becoming a media figure in her own right — responds by giving it a big push herself. And on and on.

So let me get this straight. Someone on the progressive J-list envisions giggling while Rush Limbaugh expires. The Caller publishes this with the full and reasonable expectation that Rush might talk about it on his radio show. And because Rush mentions the source we now have a vicious right-wing feedback loop (cue dramatic orchestra hits!).

Now ask yourself, does Greg Sargent apply this standard to any media outlet on the left? Does he apply it to Media Matters? To The Nation? To Mother Jones? They publish material aimed at a liberal readership. If they succeed and are mentioned (linked or otherwise credited) on a blog or radio show, it raises their profile. They make a living doing this. Does that make The Nation, for instance, a left-wing conspiracy? If the answer is yes, then Sargent’s point is a trivial observation; if no, it demolishes his original claim.

And that’s the sum of Sargent’s first effort. He’s proven no conspiracy or even something close to being one. Unfortunately for him, his second attempt is just as slight. He writes:

[NBC News director Chuck] Todd…clarified that his primary concern is that the right is successfully using this to carry out its larger program of tarring the mainstream press as liberal.

As I’ve just pointed out, Sargent hasn’t come close to demonstrating that the criticism of JournoList is unfair. In fact, he admits near the end of his second story that “a few J-Listers probably did screw up by suggesting coordination…” But even if Sargent had proven his case that the treatment was unfair, recall that this comes the same week that everyone from the NAACP, to MSNBC, to an endless list of left-wing bloggers have repeated in ways both subtle and not that Fox News was responsible for the firing of Shirley Sherrod. Howard Dean went so far as to accuse the network of racism on national television.

Mediaite is one of the few outlets that has fought the tide on this story, and proclaimed the idea that Fox is responsible a media “myth.” Did Sargent get the memo? Apparently not. He wrote a post about Sherrod which criticized the “Breitbart-Fox News axis,” (nice!) but so far hasn’t bothered to point out that Fox had no appreciable role in her firing. Physician heal thyself.

The real difference is that Chuck Todd doesn’t give a rip about the reputation of Fox. And why should he? They’re the competition. Todd’s concern, as Sargent implies, is for the liberals on his own MSNBC network. Because of the right’s JournoList coverage, he worries some people might come to believe that Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann are…wait for it…biased. Talk about shutting the door after the horse has left the barn. I think the word is out, Chuck. Go get some sleep.

That’s the sum total of Sargent’s argument thus far. And again, this is in the Washington Post which, I suspect, is the only reason anyone would take such a weak attempt seriously.

I’m on record that the failings of JournoList aren’t the fault of Ezra Klein, who founded the group. The record so far supports his contention that it was founded with good intentions. Nevertheless, it clearly got away from him at times. Indeed, he repeatedly had to step in to cut off discussions that were spinning into troubling territory, including some talk by professional journalists and professors that was ethically lax, conspiratorial, and just plain immature. That’s a story, even if Greg Sargent doesn’t understand why.

You have to give mainstream journalists credit. No matter how high the evidence of liberal bias stacks up, they stick to the notion they don’t play favorites.

Rathergate? An aberration. A Washington Post ombudsman admitting journalists favored Sen. Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election? Nothing but reporters chasing down history in the making.

Press blackouts on the Van Jones controversy? Oops, we missed it.

The New Black Panther case? Not enough reporters to cover it.

Ezra Klein, JournoList founder

Poll after poll after poll revealing journalists vote for Democrats over Republicans by a wide margin? Doesn’t matter, since they don’t bring their political impulses to bear on their work.

Meanwhile, the public’s faith in the media continues to plummet. And the one cable news outlet with enough reporters – and curiosity – to cover subjects like Jones and the New Black Panther Party, Fox News, continues to see its ratings soar.

Just what will it take to make journalists open their eyes to the inequalities within their profession?

Enter the Journolist scandal. Finally, reporters across the country could see how scribes from both liberal and mainstream outlets discussed how to twist the news narrative like a pretzel to help the Democratic party and paint the opposition as racist without a shred of proof.

Not exactly.

The same old “nothing to see here, folks” reportage followed the drip-drip-drip reports by The Daily Caller.

Some MSM outlets simply ignored the scandal. Others rallied to minimize it. Type “journolist” into CNN.com and you’ll get only one link to a video clip on the subject with media critic Howard Kurtz.

The most partisan, incendiary stuff… comes from people in the opinion business, not beat reporters.” Kurtz said before adding Sarah Palin pounced on the leaks for her latest talking point rather than feeling her outrage. Kurtz also used the words of the list’s founder, Ezra Klein, to end his CNN segment and wipe away any fears the public might have regarding the list.

NBC’s Chuck Todd complained about Journolist in a piece written by Politico, making it appear like he was genuinely concerned about bias in his own industry. Far from it. Todd later clarified his comments to a Washington Post blogger, saying the Right’s use of the scandal was more egregious than the scandal itself.

And then there’s faux conservative Kathleen Parker. She used her latest column to defend her new best buddies in the MSM. Better get ready for another Pulitzer in 2011, Kathleen. You’re earning it.

If email lists spelling out the best way to protect a presidential candidate aren’t enough to convince reporters their profession has hit the skids, then not even a “Network” style rant on national television apologizing for years of bias would make them sing a different tune.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

President Ronald Wilson Reagan:

President Barack Hussein Obama:

This time, the stupids are on the other side:

Howard Dean, the Democrat-Media gift that keeps on giving.

Remember –

They’re all liars.

That’s what they do.

That’s who they are.

It would be funny if it weren’t so funny:

So after this whole Shirley Sherrod thing, I’m thinking, Andrew Breitbart has a point.

Let’s review:

1. The Tea Party was born, causing a frightened media to drum up accusations of racism
2. Later, Congressman John Lewis claims Tea Partiers shouted the “N-word” at him. The press runs with it. Breitbart posts a $100K reward for evidence. None comes.
3. The NAACP creates a race-baiting resolution to smear the Tea Party.
4. Breitbart responds with the Sherrod video – becoming the first conservative to use leftist tactics on the left.
5. It works: the White House and the NAACP look stupid.

Moving on, from the Powerline blog, New York Times reporter Matt Bai writes this of the Tea Party movement on July 17th:

There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the [Tea Party] movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.

And then last Sunday, the Times ran this correction:

The Political Times column last Sunday…erroneously linked one example of a racially charged statement to the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party supporters have been connected to a number of such statements, there is no evidence that epithets reportedly directed in March at Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, outside the Capitol, came from Tea Party members.

So while the media goes nuts over Sherrod, they completely ignore the fact that the most racially charged accusation one could ever make, never happened.

What…no apologies?

See, race politics only works one way – as a method to disarm Obama critics. As the former head of the Civil Rights Commission, Mary Frances Berry said, it’s “a means of diverting attention away from other issues.” Dem pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen point out in the Wall Street Journal that while youth unemployment among whites is 23.2%, among blacks it’s nearly 40%.

Guess that’s Breitbart’s fault too. (Racist!)

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist, homophobic bedbug.

My friend and thriller-writing colleague, the great Andrew Klavan, writes in City Journal:

Take the e-mails that the Daily Caller obtained from the now-defunct lefty Web service Journolist. Never mind the personal or psychological implications of a radio producer who lovingly imagines Rush Limbaugh’s death or a law professor who doesn’t know that the FCC has no power to deprive Fox News of a license or a reporter who wants to smear Fred Barnes and other right-wing commentators as racist in order to distract the public from the hateful radicalism of Jeremiah Wright, then Obama’s pastor. The point is not these people’s animus or ignorance or wickedness. The point is that what they desired was not victory in open debate but silence—the silence of censorship, intimidation, or the grave.

When has Rush Limbaugh ever wished a liberal’s mouth closed forever? Really, who can deny that Rush would happily argue a point with absolutely anyone anywhere? When has Fox News ever done anything to its rival cable stations but trounce them in a free competition for ratings? When has Fred Barnes ever tried to bully or intimidate someone into shutting up?

And what about Breitbart? Did he, like many a daily journalist before him, momentarily put speed over full context in releasing an NAACP video? Perhaps. But Breitbart is the grassroots nemesis of vast media conglomerates that continually and purposefully ignore, suppress, and distort information unfriendly to their ideology: release and disclosure are his reasons for being. Breitbart routinely breaks important stories that the mainstream media won’t touch. “I don’t even know about it,” chuckled ABC News’s Charlie Gibson well after Breitbart revealed corruption at the left-wing activist organization Acorn. “I just didn’t know about it,” said Bob Schieffer of CBS after Breitbart and others had been hammering at possible wrongdoing at the Justice Department in a botched case against New Black Panther thugs. And I guess the networks just didn’t know when Breitbart decisively disproved allegations that Tea Partiers hurled racist insults at lawmakers—because they continued to spread the discredited smear.

Old-media pooh-bahs like former ABC anchor Ted Koppel lament the “good old days,” when three government-licensed networks served as gatekeepers to what the public could and couldn’t know. Breitbart, meanwhile, exhorts crowds of citizens to shoot videos and gather information, telling them, “You are the media now!” Breitbart only wants more information, while the left-wing media too often operate through obscurantism and suppression. They bury the word “Islam” when describing terrorists who murder in the name of Allah. They depict police as racist while hiding the racial crime statistics that explain police actions. They actively ignore and spike both political and sex scandals involving prominent liberals, liberal causes, or media bias. They attempt to label speech offensive or racist if it undermines their positions.

They times, they are a’changing…

You say MSM, I say Politico. You say corrupt, I say Politico.

Today, Politico’s Roger Simon was kind enough to almost scold JournoList for its lasting effect on his precious little profession of journalism. At one point, he and the scrupulously non-partisan Chuck “Fire Glenn Beck” Todd hold hands and commiserate over how this unfortunate JounoList thing is tarring “those of us who don’t practice activist journalism.” If Roger Simon wants to rebuild his precious little profession’s reputation, a good start might be asking his very own publisher some tough questions.

Politico might be an online publication, a part of the New Media, but when it comes to corrupted, left-wing arrogance they make the Washington Post look somewhat honest … somewhat. Part of the reason I reserve a special place in my heart to store up a unique resentment for all things Politico is due to the very fact that they practice their dark arts online. Like a toxic virus they spread over to the Internet where the right (by design) and the left (by accident) are trying to forever kill off the very thing Politico is — wolfish left-wing propagandists hidden in the sheeps’ clothing of “journalism.”

And yet these are the same bastards “journalists” who launched a smear attack on a private citizen for asking Their One a perfectly reasonable question, obsessed over Sarah Palin’s wardrobe (and yet ranked Obama being asked about his relationships with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers as a 2008 top-ten ”media blunder“), and though they occasionally find Levi Johnston worthy of note, Department of Justice whistleblower, J. Christian Adams, remained a ghost up until and including Ben Smith’s factually challenged Nothing-To-See-Here gift to his embattled president.

Oh, and did you know that some of Politico’s “journalists” were members of Ezra Klein’s now infamous JournoList, including Mike Allen, Lisa Lerer, and Mr. Ben “I-Got-Yer-Back-Barack” Smith?

And this little juicy nugget of fact raises a troubling question…

What Politico needs to disclose is exactly when their three employees joined JournoList, because now that we know what really was going on there, this Politico article reeks of a cover up.

Written by Michael Calderon in March of 2009 and titled “JournoList: Inside the echo chamber,” even at the time it was written, the thousand-plus worder ranked as another classic example of what Politico does best: write stories about why stories they don’t want covered aren’t worth covering. In other words, like Ben Smith’s Black Panther piece, this is how Politico spikes that which might damage the Leftist narrative.

JournoList member

While reading Calderon’s JournoList expose,’ you can practically hear the staged, self conscious yawn of a man trying to put across the false front that once again those crazy, paranoid right-wing conspiracy mongers have taken him away from oh-so important work to address this nothing-ness.

Calderon’s idea of “journalism” was to interview JournoList members such as Jeffrey Toobin, Eric Alterman,and Joe Klein, who each assure us in their own wrist-flicking way, Tell those silly right-wingers that no one’s pushing an agenda. In 2009 the piece was hilariously obvious in its biased and preordained objective to smoke-and-mirror away concerns about what Ezra’s little coven of left-wingers was up to. But reading it again in hindsight, it stinks to high heaven.

Deep, deep, deep in the article – long after the dull dutifulness of it all is supposed to kill your interest in clicking over to page two, Calderon finally gets around to admitting Politico’s Smith, Allen, and Lerer are members.

And herein lies Politico’s problem.

Now that it’s become crystal clear that at times JournoList was in fact a hotbed for left-wing ideologues to collude over how to kill stories that might hurt Obama, smear innocent conservatives as racist, coordinate lines of attack against Palin, and work directly with the Obama campaign, the question becomes:

What did Politico know and when did it know it?

Three Politico employees were members of JournoList, and yet in March of 2009, Politico published an article where JournoList members claimed nothing improper was going on there — which we now know wasn’t even close to the truth.

There’s only two explanations: Either Smith, Allen and Lerer weren’t JournoList members when this corrupt activity was taking place, or they were, and not only did they not disclose the improper activity but they allowed their employer to print a misleading story.

What did Politico know and when did it know it?

July 27, 2010

Marcus Brauchli

Executive Editor

The Washington Post

1150 15th Street NW

Washington, DC 20071

Dear Mr. Brauchli:

The JournoList scandal is getting worse every day and the Washington Post is at the center of it. Blogger Ezra Klein ran the operation and at least three other staffers were members. (Blogger Greg Sargent claims he wasn’t a member after he joined the Post.) In addition, at least one member of Slate and two from Newsweek, also owned by Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, were members.

Ezra Klein, JournoList founder

The almost constant revelations of political activism and journalistic conspiracy raise an enormous number of questions about Post policies, professionalism and ethics. As a conservative, and therefore a member of the movement JournoListers sought to demonize, I feel Post readers are owed full disclosure.

Any understanding of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics makes clear this list and the Post’s involvement violate a number of ethical guidelines. In fact, much of the code seems to have been ignored. Here are just a few examples from the code:

Journalists should:

• Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting,
• Recognize a special obligation to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open and that government records are open to inspection,
• Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived,
• Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests [emphasis added] and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.

There is only one way for the Post to move forward from this fiasco – through transparency. You need to be forthright about the Post’s failings and give readers enough information so that we know just how serious this really was and what can be done to restore your paper’s credibility.

Marcus Brauchli, Executive Editor, the Washington Post

As Post Ombudsman Andy Alexander said recently about your “Top Secret Government” series:

Over the years, The Post has revealed classified information when it feels disclosure is in the public interest.

It is time for the Post to live by the expectations it sets for others. Here is a list of 20 questions, we would like the Post, Klein or both to address:

1. How many Washington Post staffers were part of JournoList and, if there are any currently unnamed, who are they?
2. Will the Post be transparent and either release or order its staffers to release their contributions to the list?
3. Will the Post release the names and affiliations of all those on the list or have its staffers do so?
4. Did the Post know about JournoList when Klein was hired and that it was a “center to left” group? If yes, what does that say about the Post’s claims of neutrality?
5. Did actions on JournoList violate the Post’s ethical guidelines?
6. Has the Post revised or added any ethical guidelines as a result of this scandal?
7. Will the Post permit staffers to belong to or operate such lists in the future?
8. Does the Post often embrace “off the record” e-mail conversations with hundreds of people at a time?
9. Was Klein’s supervisor(s) on the list and were they monitoring what went on?
10. Has the Post examined the possibility that JournoList impacted Post news coverage?
11. How much did the Post look into JournoList before hiring Klein?
12. Were Klein and the other Post members of the list using it and posting to it on company time? If not, when were they doing so?
13. Did Klein and the other Post members write to the list using company equipment and offices?
14. Was Klein aware that some were using the list to boost the Obama campaign, such as adviser Jared Bernstein?
15. Did Klein attempt to enforce a rule against campaigning and, if so, how?
16. Did Klein post written guidelines for all members of the list? If so, what were those guidelines?
17. Klein had said on The American Prospect on March 17, 2009: “There are no government or campaign employees on the list.” That has been proven false. How did he try to monitor this issue? Were there other members of the Obama campaign and administration on the list?
18. Did Klein ban anyone from the list?
19. Has Klein or any other Post staffer (other than Dave Weigel) offered to resign because of their contributions to the list?
20. When Klein shut down the list, did he delete the list? If not, will the Post order him to release it so that readers may decide for themselves?

I eagerly await your response.

Sincerely,

L. Brent Bozell III

Founder and President

Media Research Center

Satire: the enemy of pomposity. Somewhere, the ghost of Thomas Nast is smiling:

Isn’t that right, Mr. Nast?

One of the most unfortunate results of the race card being played is the fact that the players seldom have to live with the messes they make. For purely political reasons, blacks and whites have been intentionally polarized, starting way back when David Axelrod led Deval Patrick to the governorship of Massachusetts, and now with the troubled presidency of Barack Obama. The administration has long since deployed the now well-known liberal tactic: opposition is racism.

Behind closed doors, this White House must be laughing their asses off at how easily the liberal media and activists can be manipulated to save their agenda.

White Suckers

Starting with the winning campaign of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick through the victorious campaign of President Barack Obama (both helmed by David Axelrod), the strategy was clear: create an atmosphere where whites who don’t vote for these men will be called one of the most damaging names in America today: racist.

It even got to the point where white liberals were given license to use racial epithets against blacks who weren’t in support of Obama. After all, this was all about their being a part of history. Never mind we heard nary a peep out of them when Republicans Colin Powell was appointed the first black Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice the first black National Security Advisor. How many white liberals celebrated Rice later becoming the first black female to be Secretary of State?

I know few, if any.

The celebration of black appointments to positions of high office was only to be authorizedby the left. By white guilters being able to point to their participation in the election of the first black president, they felt it gave them the street cred to not only dictate who is racist and who is not, but the ability to use racist verbiage with impunity under the guise of parody and/or humor.

It also gave the white left the street cred to define any opposition to an Obama/Democrat policy as racist, thus the action line that the Tea Party is the racist arm of the Republican Party. Leaving out the basic math that roughly five percent of blacks vote Republican and would thus participate in a Tea Party, the white guilt left freely calls the Tea Party racist purely due to the small number of blacks in attendance.

Do white liberals realize they’re being used to perpetuate power they don’t share? Maybe.

Do white liberals realize they’ll later be hurt by many of Obama’s policies, some involving reverse discrimination? Maybe.

But this administration knows their base. They know they’re driven by guilt and their belief that blind loyalty to a black president will forever buy them immunity from the charge of racism: “I’m not a racist, I voted for Obama!” But when his policies come crashing down on them, what will they be saying behind closed doors…?

Black Suckers

Even though he hadn’t even been elected yet, Barack Obama instantly became the most qualified person in America to talk about the issue of race and lectured the nation accordingly.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand — that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle — as we did in the OJ trial — or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina — or as fodder for the nightly news.

— Senator Barack Obama, 3/18/08

It was a year later that his attorney general (Eric Holder) looked down his nose and called America a “nation of cowards.” It’s quite ironic that in the following months (when issues of race would come up) the administration would pick and choose which to comment or take action on, at times prematurely, most definitely intentionally.

Seconds after admitting he knew few details of the case, President Obama sided with belligerent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and accused the Cambridge, Mass., who detained him as “acting stupidly.” It culminated in the taxpayers flying both the professor and the arresting officer more than 400 miles down to the White House to have a couple of beers and a feel-good photo-op.

Obviously the election of Barack Obama didn’t result in the perceived eradication of race in America, and if black America expected “Obama money,” race allegations are best the distraction from an empty wallet (that will ultimately be blamed on whites).

The Tea Party has been called racist because of their opposition to ObamaCare, as well as the Democrats’ other big government, budget-busting policies. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are unreliable loose cannons, and the NAACP has been proven a repeatedly incompetent ally in a verbal race war.

Calling millions of Americans racist couldn’t stick by itself. Obama and the Democrats needed help. Which brings us to the media…

Liberal Media Suckers

We now know, from their own words, that liberal media types have been working in concert to publicly label opposition to Obama as race-driven.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Is it any wonder why America is a nation of cowards? No one knows when they’ll be called a racist, hater, Uncle Tom, or sellout. Now, it seems, we’ll never know why one person can lose a job over the use of a racial slur while others can use them often under the guise of its being a “joke.”

Americans are quite capable of living in a general harmony. Two strangers of different races can sit side-by-side at a ballgame and when a run or touchdown is scored, these two people (rooting for the same team) can give each other high fives and race never entered the mix. But between an administration that picks and chooses whom to racially vilify or defend, a “Just Us” Department that picks and chooses whom to racially vilify or defend, liberal activists who pick and choose whom to racially vilify or defend, and a media that picks and chooses whom to racially vilify or defend, it’s as plain as day why America is knee deep in a race quagmire.

The cowards are the very elites — political and media — who pit one group against the other before retreating to their gated communities. It’s the rest of us that have to live with the hell those elites have raised. “By any means necessary” also involves collateral damage, and as much as liberals point the finger elsewhere, should it all go down, cowards are always the first to be found.

As if Keith Olbermann’s bust of a tweet wasn’t bad enough, the insane asylum known as MSNBC just can’t catch a break.   Take a look for yourself.

Yep, all humor is based in truth.  And in this case, the truth hurts.