Mary Frances Berry, the former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,  writing in Politico:

Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.

Prominent black conservatives have denounced the remarks, and yet the MSM meme remains — based on no evidence — that the Tea Party is a racist organization.That’s because it fits the narrative. (more…)

Eugene Robinson, the name-calling scourge of all critics of Obama who writes one of the anti-conservative columns at the Washington Post and serves the same function on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” has just provided another example of what post- — or in this case, Post- — partisanship looks like in Obama’s Washington.

According to the Post-partisan Robinson, Arizona’s embattled S.B. 1070 “amounts to a prescription for racial profiling on a scale not seen in this country since the days of Jim Crow laws in the South.”  It is “anti-Latino” and “patently unconstitutional.” Those who support it are “xenophobes” and “demagogues … who delight in turning truth, justice and the American way into political liabilities.”

It appears as though the vituperative Mr. Robinson hasn’t gotten the message — stated by pre-presidential Obama on the Rick Warren show in 2008, repeated (with increasing shrillness, as it has turned out) ad nauseum during the campaign, and just recycled on “The View” this week — that “we can disagree without being disagreeable.”

As one can clearly see, there is never any shortage of political invective in Eugene Robinson columns, but there frequently is a severe fact shortage. In the column under review (“Immigration Helps Dems Long Term,” July 30), for example, he asserted that: (more…)

James Taranto in his “Best of the Web Today” column in The Wall Street Journal:

Shirley Sherrod says she plans to sue conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, the Associated Press reports from San Diego: “Speaking Thursday at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, Sherrod said she would definitely sue over the video that took her remarks out of context”:

Sherrod said she had not received an apology from Breitbart and no longer wanted one. “He had to know that he was targeting me,” she said.

Does she have a winning case? Probably not.

For one thing, the alleged defamation (or, to be precise, the defamation that she would allege if she filed suit) took place while she was a public official and involved claims about the performance of her public duties. Thus she would have to meet the rigorous standard, set forth by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), of proving not only that Breitbart published a damaging falsehood about her but that he did so “with ‘actual malice’–that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Even if she proves that Breitbart published false and defamatory statements about her, he wins the case if he did so only negligently. (more…)

In the early stages of the Shirley Sherrod controversy, the media began to craft the narrative Shirley Sherrod was the embodiment of the term “post-racial.”  Then on July 22nd on Anderson Cooper 360, this happened:

SHIRLEY SHERROD: I think he [BREITBART] would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he would like to see all black people end up again. And that’s why…

COOPER: You think — you think he’s racist?

SHERROD: … I think he’s so vicious. Yes, I do.

Cooper, dumbfounded by Sherrod’s comments, did not muster any type of a challenge to Sherrod.

Flash forward to yesterday, and AC360 went on record to admit that he had erred by allowing Sherrod to deliver such provocative remarks unchecked, and said that he’d handle the situation differently if he had the opportunity again.  Still, a good-faith Nexis search indicates that Cooper has not adequately alerted his viewership that Andrew Breitbart had in fact granted Shirley Sherrod her redemption in both the originally released footage of her speech to the NAACP audience and in his write-up that accompanied the video.  We would appreciate it if he would broaden the contextual frame of the story to include that bit of information that has not been adequately conveyed by the media up until this point. (more…)

Big Sites publisher Andrew Breitbart to Newsweek’s Daniel Stone today:

In the aftermath of the saga that thrust Shirley Sherrod into the news cycle and spurred a national discussion about race, the former USDA employee has said she’ll “definitely will sue” Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger at BigGovernment.com who posted the original edited video taken widely out of context. Breitbart talked with Newsweek’s Daniel Stone about the whole episode, a potential lawsuit and whether he has any regrets.

Shirley Sherrod has said she will sue you. What’s your response?
I’m not going to respond to the lawsuit. She mentioned it last week, when it fueled 36 hours of coverage, and then again this week, when it fueled another round of coverage. Until there’s a lawsuit, unless there’s something to answer to, there’s nothing I can comment on.

If it came to pass, would you settle or fight it?
If there’s a lawsuit, there will be a legal team.

She said she simply wanted an apology? Why not just do it?
All I can say is that this is a person on national television who said I wanted to put blacks back into slavery. This thing has gotten to a place that’s far beyond where it should be. I’d be more than happy to meet with her in private and have a discussion with her.

Is that an invitation?
Sure, I’ll go whoever she wants. I’ll go to Albany, Georgia. I’ll go anywhere to have a private discussion with her. (more…)

Before we begin, let us pause for a moment to thank our Almighty for the small pleasures of life, such as almost a full week passing without having to suffer through yet another high cry and desperate whine from JournoList founder and Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, as he dishonestly complains about his online cabal of left-wing “journalists” being taken out of context by the Daily Caller’s damning and ongoing drip-drip-drip of an expose’.

JournoList founder Ezra Klein

Yes, thank you Ezra, for finally realizing that you were embarrassing yourself with these complaints as those of us watching this story wondered why you didn’t just go ahead and prove the Daily Caller a liar with a fully contextual response of your own, using that unique WaPo perch combined with the magic of the Internet and your very own personal copy of the full JournoList archives.

While I never took seriously my challenge to Mr. Klein to go right on ahead and clear up all his contextual concerns, he might want to consider doing so now. On June 29th, weeks before the Daily Caller announced the glorious fact that they were in possession of all or part of the JournoList archives, Klein wrote the following:

What if I told you I ran a secret e-mail list that connected progressive writers with staffers for Democratic politicians so that those staffers could tell the progressives what, exactly, their bosses wanted them writing about that day?

Sadly, I don’t run such a list.

You have to love that last sentence. The use of the word ”sadly” is soooo sly. Especially when it appears, that at times, that’s exactly the type of list Klein was running. (more…)

In a widely read and discussed piece at the Daily Beast, Reihan Salan asks:

Has a shadowy gang of left-wing journalists and intellectuals been plotting to manipulate the news cycle…

His answer is, yes, perhaps so, but they’d be doing it with or without JournoList. Salan is more right than he probably knows.

The list of those identified as former members of the group is now up to more than 150 names, out of 400 in all. Nearly a quarter of those individuals were connected with another media organization called the Media Consortium. The Consortium is an organization of progressive media outlets formed in 2005, a full two years before JournoList. Its dues paying member organizations include The Nation, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect, Ms., Democracy Now! and many more (a complete list is here). The purpose of the group was explicit and can be found on their website:

Our mission is to amplify independent media’s voice, increase our collective clout, leverage our current audience and reach new ones. We believe it is possible and necessary to seize the current moment and change the debate in this country. We will accomplish this mission by fulfilling our five strategic principles: (more…)

As you probably know, the new TV season begins in the middle of September. That’s when all the TV networks spruce themselves up and reveal the new programming lineups for the next twelve months. MSNBC has planned a major overall to its lineup.

Faced with years of disaster-level ratings, MSNBC has announced it will change its name to MPTV, Microsoft Progressive Television (the Microsoft name was kept because, well you don’t want to upset Microsoft).  Along with the name change is a more family friendly TV lineup.

For example in the late morning there will be a block of game shows, the most promising of which is based on the health care bill and called Take the Money or Let Granny Die. Contestants will be offered the chance to guarantee the funds of their social security retirement plans if they agree to withhold expensive medical treatment from an aging grandparent or other elderly relative.

Another daytime show is designed to compete with programs like The People’s Court; it’s called Arrest President Bush, every day a regular person gets to charge former President Bush or someone from his administration with a crime.  The first episode deals with something that progressives have been mourning about for ten years.  The episode’s called, “He Stole the 2000 Election.” (more…)

ROBERT GIBBS:  The MSM are still holding the line, Mr. President, but the whole MSNBC crew has revolted.

DAVID AXELROD:  Schultz, Olbermann, Maddow, Matthews–tonight they begin their on-air nude marathon hunger strike, sir.  They’ll nibble on Brie and drink nothing but Perrier until you acknowledge your debt to them and restore the public option.

OBAMA:  Man!  Eighteen months ago those people thought I walked on water.  Now they crucify me because I can’t transmogrify private coverage into single payer.  Uh, Bob, who’s that sittin’ over there in the corner?

GIBBS:  His name’s Ezra Klein, sir, founder of the now defunct JournoList web clique I told you about.

OBAMA: What’s he doing here?

GIBBS:  You wanted our Latino media on the same page in the months before midterms, sir.  He’s reconstituted JournoList, only this time with 400 Hispanic journalists and bloggers.  They’ll communicate in coded Spanish–Ezra’s minor– to reduce the chance of exposure. Sort of like Codetalkers en Espanol.

OBAMA: Si, se puede!

AXELROD: We figured it would be helpful to have him attend our strategy sessions and hear firsthand the spin he’ll be disseminating.  He’s been instructed not to look you in the eye or speak unless he’s spoken to, sir. After all, he’s only 14… (more…)

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… (more…)

***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). (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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: (more…)

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. (more…)