Yesterday, I made the mistake of answering the following email, addressed to Big Government editor Mike Flynn, promptly:

Hi Mr. Flynn,

I’m a reporter from the Business Insider working on a short item about the new Big Journalism site launched today. Any chance you’d have Breitbart’s email so I can get in touch with him?

Would appreciate it so much.

Best regards,

Gillian

–

Gillian Reagan

The Business Insider

XXX@businessinsider.com

XXX Fifth Avenue, 7th Fl

New York, NY 10003

646-484-XXXX

twitter: XXXXXXX

I spoke with Ms. Reagan for about ten minutes and gave her a long explanation as to why I started Big Journalism. I awoke to something so far off from what I said that I called her back and asked her specifically about the following quote that is a composite of her question, a hodge-podge of my response and flat out lies.

Let me begin with the biggest deception of all: Business Insider is a front for Gawker, the notorious leftist/media snark site.  If she had been up front with me, like any sane person I never would have responded.  (Go to www.Gawker.com to see why.)  But she came to me under false pretenses.

Next, let me point out that when I told her she’d misquoted me, she told me that she had taped the conversation without my knowledge or my consent!

Here’s how it all went down:

Breitbart helped Arianna Huffington launch Huffington Post as “primary developer.” “My sites offer truth and hers offer leftist sin,” he said. “I’m very happy to be in competition with HuffPost, TPM or Politico,” he said. “I honestly don’t read those sites.”

Asked about only putting out right-wing ideas I stated, in essence, “My Big sites are certainly right of center but I am not afraid of other ideas. And I am proud to have been a part of creating the Huffington Post to show that I strongly believe in the marketplace of the ideas.”

I do not recall Politico being brought up, but the absurdity of stating that I don’t read Politico would never fall out of my mouth even if I were drunk. (I wasn’t.) I also read the Huffington Post. I just tend not to agree with the ideas expressed there, although I do love their pictorial spreads of the gals of the French Open! But Ms. Reagan and I didn’t talk about political philosophy or tennis.

In our talk I did use the term “war.” I believe I clarified with a laugh, “a metaphorical war,” but against the “mainstream media.” While Big Journalism is going to take on journalism, reporters and bloggers alike, the war is against pure hackery and media bias.

Her article has both in spades.

If you want to know what Business Insider’s intent on the piece was, check out the photo that they used to accompany it. One has to go through many frames during television appearances to find the perfect one to make the subject look crazy:

Andrew Breitbart

Now for the real journalistic “sin” of the article. I would never say the following: “My sites offer truth and hers offer leftist sin.” It isn’t my kind of language, and while Ms. Reagan may think that as a right-winger I’m a fire-breathing Evangelical, I am not. When I read that false construct of a sentence my body went numb.

I called Ms. Reagan up immediately upon reading it and blurted out, “I never said that.” She said, “Never said what?” And I proceeded to tell her the offending quote. She replied, “Yes, you did and I have it recorded.” I said, “Good, let’s play it. I want everyone to hear.” She fumbled around hemming and hawing for about 30-seconds and said the recording device “didn’t connect properly, I guess.”

What was she able to do in that 30-seconds (or less) that I called her on the tape recording? In a later call she said she looked to her bag and picked up the recording device and saw that it had no new information on it. I’m not sure how she was able to detect that in such a short time frame, and I didn’t hear any voice recording being played in the background. But, hey, anything’s possible.

In my first conversation with her upon reading the piece, I told her she needed to issue a big fat retraction. I told her I know how to give an interview and how to handle the issue of Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post. It then struck me: Wait, she taped me. “You never told me you were taping me,” I said.  Since I’ve spent the last four months being lectured by “real” journalists about some alleged hard and fast rules about when someone can and cannot tape-record a conversation, I would think that a reporter in a straight interview would state she was turning on her tape recorder.

“That’s what reporters do,” she said, and that “New York is a one-party consent state.”  I’m not sure what the situation is on her taping someone in California without his knowledge, but at this point I found myself wishing that she in fact had taped the call. I’d have evidence that she made stuff up. Weird stuff. And it most certainly reinforces why a site like Big Journalism is necessary.

And now I am made privy to the fact that a the article was republished at Gawker, which is a site to which I no longer give interviews. Gawker is in the business of making people look ridiculous. Most know that and won’t take their calls. But when you get a call from someone from Business Insider, you feel more comfortable to talk because you trust that they’re trying to just get a (business) story out. Well, I most certainly stupidly fell into the Gawker trap.

Ms. Reagan put words in my mouth elsewhere:

He said: “I’m trying to fill a huge market void for original reporting and fact based journalism” for the “silent minority around the world” (that would be the right).

She asked me if Big Journalism was going to report stories no one else would report. I told her that is not Big Journalism’s specific goal, that all the Big sites as a whole (Big Hollywood, Big Journalism, Big Government and pending sites like Big Tolerance, Big Education, Big Jerusalem, Big EU, Big Soros, etc.). The Bigs are ALL set to report what the mainstream media refuses to cover. And we’ve proved that beyond a reasonable doubt.

But, as I also explained, Big Journalism was going to act as a checks and balances against the mainstream media.

She wouldn’t take that for an answer and apparently wanted to be told that Big Journalism is going to be a clearinghouse for stories the mainstream media won’t cover. She tried to put words in my mouth. And I refused to let her. I was very clear.

As to the statement regarding the “silent minority around the world.” Ms. Reagan asked about what audience we were writing for. I said that the media disregards a huge part of the country with its leftist bias, perhaps even the majority (since it’s a center-right nation). But that the expansion of the sites into the EU and the Middle East will show that there are tons of free-market thinking and non-leftists around the world who are not being served.

I think that Gawker is using Business Insider as a front to get interviews with people who long ago stopped taking Gawker calls because Gawker is a hit-job operation. They officially call it a “partnership.” Pretty clever arrangement there, Mr. Denton.

Well, I won’t be taking calls from Business Insider anymore, and I will make sure in the future to research whether other innocuous-sounding journalistic enterprises are being used in the future to smear people they disagree with politically.

As to asking for a retraction, I retracted that request. The news-reading audience is getting pretty savvy in the Internet-Age and I trust that the photo and the accompanying quotes that sound nothing like me will be detected – and the concept that the mainstream media is used as a weapon against those that don’t toe the left/liberal line is yet again reinforced.