In December a Federal District Judge, Marco Hernandez, ruled against blogger Crystal Cox who was being sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick, whom Cox accused of corruption on her blog. The ruling declared that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news. I happen to agree with his decision, but the case raises the question about what actually defines a journalist. Considering what the mainstream media represents today, the line between genuine reportage and political advocacy has been completely blurred.

In the past, many famous and well-respected journalists had no formal training but honed their craft on the job, in many cases beginning their careers as copy boys/copy girls. Walter Cronkite, once cited as the most trusted man in America, was a college dropout who had a series of newspaper jobs reporting news and sports. Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley started their careers as broadcast journalists but never had journalism degrees. Dan Rather did receive a degree in journalism, and we can see how well that turned out once he decided to switch to advocacy journalism instead of the traditional who, what, when, where and how protocol of traditional journalism.

Advocacy journalism intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint for either a political or social agenda and has morphed today into nothing less than media bias and propaganda. Today the mainstream media is predominantly composed of liberal democrats, and this bias has been quite evident since the 2008 presidential race. There is also a marked difference between opinion and reportage journalism.

I have a hard time claiming to be a member of the fourth estate, although I have been writing for newspapers since 1998 as an op-ed columnist. During that time, however, I have covered news events and press conferences and submitted non-opinion articles. I never attended Journalism College, nor have I even taken one writing course. I had to drop out of college to support my mother who had had a stroke. Mark Steyn, who is a brilliant writer, never attended college at all but can write reams around many inhabiting the elitist realm of the New York Times. (more…)

It’s no surprise to me when the MSM pontificates about the Hispanic vote when it tries to explain the immigration policies of this administration. But I was expecting more clarity in conservative publications. A couple of recent  articles continue the myth of the “Hispanic vote.”

First, Jim Meyers wrote in “Arizona’s Illegals War Roils Country”(Newsmax)  that “Rep. Luis Guitierrez, D-Ill alluded to the fact that 68 percent of Hispanic voters backed Obama in 2008.” The article also showed pie charts detailing the percentages of the Hispanic vote in previous presidential elections. I’m always puzzled by the way the media can determine who votes for whom when we still supposedly have a secret ballot. What are they basing those percentages on- exit polling; addresses? How about voter fraud?

Immigrants from any country cannot vote unless they are naturalized although some Democrats want to do away with that provision here in NYC. Former City Councilman Bill Perkins tried to pass a resolution allowing legal immigrants the right to vote. He insisted that since they paid taxes they should have a right to choose their representatives. I pointed out in my 2005 New York Sun column (Only Citizens Have the Right To Vote ) that these individuals get benefits for their taxes, e.g. police, sanitation, etc. (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…)

When I learned of Helen Thomas’ retirement I was tempted to head my column with, “ Ding, Dong, the **^ is Dead …..” but then I remembered that I’m not a liberal journalist who resorts to personal attacks instead of hardcore facts. I can’t even said I’m overjoyed that Margaret Hamilton’s doppelganger has been removed as a White House correspondent.

It would have been so much better to see her go out because of her ridiculous remarks about President Bush calling him the worst president in history. She often repeats the canard that Bush waged war on a country that did nothing to us. I wonder how she explains why we went to war with Germany after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor? Sponsors of terrorism– and Iraq was certainly one –were warned after 9/11 that they would be targets Did she think Bush was joking?

I’ve been reading the post-mortems of Thomas’ leaving and snort at the description of her as a trail-blazing correspondent. The fact is that the uber-partisan Thomas never blazed anything except a scorching dislike of any Republican president. (more…)

In a recent column I wrote for Irish Examiner USA, I mentioned an email I received that was politically correct but that I thought was very funny. I debated including it in the column but decided against it for the sake of my publisher.

Apparently we’re no longer allowed to laugh at anything remotely unflattering to ourselves or certain minorities, and that’s not only a shame, it’s downright dangerous.

Joan Rivers used to tell jokes about Italians; Don Rickles insulted everybody, and Jackie Mason still tells jokes about Jews. Now it seems as if some Hispanics are now being encouraged to be as testy over slights as are certain Muslims over perceived disses of the prophet Mohammed.

Here at Big Journalism, however, the mission should be to write about things too edgy for the MSM so here it is and if you’re black or Hispanic and get offended, you need to check your humor level. You may be a few quarts low. (more…)

Whenever I’d watch old WWII movies and saw the occupying Nazi soldiers demand papers from French citizens I’d think how lucky we are that here in America we don’t have to be subjected to this treatment. Since the Arizona governor signed an immigration law, Democrats and their fellow alarmists in the MSM are desperately trying to equate it with Nazism and the civil rights abuse of Hispanics. President Obama hinted that the federal government may have to circumvent the law.

As a Hispanic I recognize this ploy for what it is- a desperate attempt to incite militant Hispanic groups into protesting Arizona and liberals into boycotting the state. Why, you may ask? Because if what Arizona did spreads to the entire country, the Democrats are toast. And their media pals know this.

Ironically even some Republicans like Karl Rove and Lindsey Graham are worried that the law allowing police to ask potential illegal immigrants for papers will lead to abuses. Michael Gerson explained the potential civil rights violation in his Townhall column: (more…)

Once upon a time, the New York Times was a credible source of information, and many educators demanded that their students use it for this purpose. I recall my senior year in a parochial high school being instructed how to fold the newspaper along the seams so as to read it without having to spread it out wide. That was a very long time ago. Now that once-esteemed broadsheet is agenda-driven, rather than journalistically driven, and one of the many sources to take with a large grain of salt.

Under the stewardship of Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, the Old Gray Lady is now known for printing all the news that fits his liberal Baby Boomer agenda, even in the most innocuous sections. The gardening column will somehow toss global warming into the article and let’s forget any objectivity in its science reporting. Needless to say, the Obama administration has this paper solidly in its pocket.

So I’ve learned to decipher Times articles for any legitimate documented facts instead of innuendo and this was particularly essential when the Times, for reasons know only to itself, decided to tarnish the Pope during this Easter season. The paper tried to imply that while the Pope was cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in Germany, he did not take steps to defrock a serial predator priest in Wisconsin. (more…)

Judging by the happy grin on a young Barack Obama growing up in Indonesia, it’s not surprising that he would be sympathetic to Muslim culture but as president of the United States which is still over 80% Christian, he should be demonstrating some balance in that sympathy. This, however, is not much in evidence because the increasing persecution of Christians around the world by Muslim jihadists is being given short shrift by this administration and their lackeys in the press

Obama made sure to swiftly appoint Rashad Hussain as an ambassador to the Organization of the Islamic Conference in March. The OIC is not only a religious body but a highly discriminatory one, which espouses only “causes close to the hearts of over 1.5 billion Muslims” and safeguards “the true values of Islam and the Muslims.” Why should the United States feel compelled to have a representative there while we did not send one to the Conference on Religious Persecution of Christian Minorities held in the same month?

I am not aware of Muslims being subjected to the same persecution as shown in these pictures of a Nigerian massacre of women and children. (WARNING: graphic photos of dead children at the link.)

These Christians in three villages in a Nigerian community were shot and butchered in cold blood in the early hours of Sunday March 7, 2010 — simply because they were Christians. (more…)

In my column this week for the Irish Examiner USA, I wrote, “When it comes to Hate Speech and Violence, Liberals Rule.”

For some strange reason liberals are identifying all contrary opinions as hateful regardless of the words actually used. I’m always surprised when I hear from my Democrat sister in California that she thinks I should tone down the anger in my columns. I’ve reread my pieces and see only the explanations of my viewpoint. I do not name-call or use derogatory language yet she reacts as if I do. Is it possible to erroneously read emotions that simply aren’t there if the reader is expecting them to be?

I found this same phenomenon when I received an e-mail from a New York literary agent commenting that he found my book proposal “a manifesto of innuendo, belief and hate for those you do not agree with.” He then added, “There is the Rush way and then there is the George Will way.”

After searching in vain for evidence of hate speech in my book proposal, I came to realize that the agent was projecting his own disdain for the “right wing” and assuming that I was therefore a Rush Limbaugh devotee.

(more…)

If there was some way to check the eligibility of every voter showing up at the polls on Election Day, would the Democrats be in power today? Every attempt to legislate safeguards against voter fraud has been stymied by them with charges of racism being hurled.

On the same day that the House of Representatives was voting for the evil health care reform bill, there was a rally calling for immigration reform and the call for amnesty was heard over and over.

Although the crowd at the rally appears to be mostly minority protesters, it might surprise many to learn that there are many Hispanics who are against illegal immigration and amnesty. They are however invisible to the mainstream media.

The president of NY ICE ((New Yorkers for Immigration Control and Enforcement) is a Hispanic woman, Joanna Marzullo, known to us as Progress Rose. She picked up the following Spanish language voter registration form in Manhattan and you will note the highlighted question translated : Were you born in North America? (more…)

A few years ago, the Human Life Foundation’s Defender of Life annual award was given to Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, and in the brochure noting his accomplishments I learned that the congressman is co-chairman of the bipartisan pro-life caucus. Bipartisan? In amazement, I asked him if there really are pro-life Democrats in Congress. “Oh yes,” he assured me, “about 30.” He went on to name one, but I promised Smith I would not mention the congressman’s name in my column.

I probably have it my notes somewhere and for all I know it might have been Bart Stupak — who has announced tonight he will vote in favor of “health-care reform,” relying on an Obama “signing statement” to allay his concerns over government funding for abortion — but what Rep. Smith’s conversation revealed to me is that the pro-life Democrats do not wear their convictions overtly.

Well, they all had to come out of the closet tonight to vote for their belief in the sanctity of human life but instead they gave their obeisance to the One and his minions from hell. In this video we learn that the so-called pro-life Democrat Stupak never intended to vote NO.

At that same HLF dinner, National Review senior editor, Ramesh Ponnuru, introduced Mr. Smith. In his book, The Party of Death, Mr. Ponnuru makes no bones about which political party deserves that description. (more…)

According to many web pundits, Dutch M.P. Geert Wilder is a hater, an Islamaphobe, a supremacist. He is on trial in his own country for trying to shut down the immigration of Muslims. Here is a typical screed from the politically correct police:

Geert Wilders is among Europe’s more despicable human specimens. He is a hater. That’s his specialty. He’s also a celebrity, a sort of Paris Hilton of bile, but with the added cachet of being a member of the Dutch parliament and weird darling of the Dutch press, which voted him the 2007 politician of the year because he gives great quotes. (Good quotes are, to bad journalists, more valuable than the late Linda Lovelace’s old specialty).

Wilders appeals to voters’ basest common denominators: nativism, racism, tribalism. He compares the Koran, which he wants banned, to Mein Kampf, he has no problem including “terrorism” on his list of synonyms for Muslims, and he wants Muslim immigration to the Netherlands severely restricted. In 2008 he released a 17-minute film that does what high school sophomores do best: superimpose quotes with images for rancid irony. The quotes were from the Koran. The images were whatever gruesome images Wilders could get his hands on as long as the events portrayed were committed by the more fanatical of the sixth of the world’s population that calls itself, however slanderously in the fanatics’ case, Muslim. It was a 17-minute slander not dissimilar to the kind the Taliban would release about the decadent West, but demagogues are not known for recognizing what they see in the mirror for what it is.

With the recent collapse of the Dutch government, his Freedom Party also is gaining rapidly on its more established rivals: (more…)

Last year I had written a piece for the American Thinker and I went to that site to read the comments posted. Next to the article was an ad that showed a video of Sen. Chuck Schumer saying that “the American people don’t care,” about what he called those little “porky amendments.”

Something flew all over me and I felt it was time to become more activist than simply writing a column that preached to the choir but did not reach the average New Yorker who continued to vote in parasitic corrupt politicians.

I bought a domain calling it ChangeNYin2010.com and posted that Schumer video, as well as another one featuring Charlie Rangel cursing out a reporter asking him about his ethics violations: (more…)

Juan Williams is the titular liberal on Fox News and he tries very hard to maintain the impression that the news panels are fair and balanced. To do that he routinely parrots the Democrat mantra du jour on all issues and ofn a recent Fox News Special Report he defended President Obama’s call for new energy policies and cited the need for the government to explore alternative means to reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

I’m a decade older than Williams so maybe he doesn’t recall the Carter administration as well as I do but the Department of Energy was established for that very same purpose and it has produced absolutely nothing towards that aim in over 32 years.

The energy crisis of 1973 was the impetus for President Carter to propose creation of the DOE and the enabling legislation was passed and signed into law on August 4, 1977. The DOE began operations on October 1, 1977.

On its website, this department lists all its awards and achievements but the fact is that hundreds of billions later with a budget of $24.2 billion a year, 16,000 federal employees and approximately 10,000 contract employees, we are no closer to being independent of foreign oil. That’s how a bureaucracy operates — it produces nothing except a mechanism to drain money from taxpayers. Now the banking, healthcare and auto industry are scheduled for the same ‘fix.” Heaven help us! (more…)

The Orlando Sentinel recently reported that President Obama wants to nix NASA’s moon missions and instead intends to spend funding for space ventures beyond earth’s orbit. Perhaps to Avatar’s beautiful planet Pandora?

Now what would make the president stray so far from JFK’s vision of lunar supremacy? Perhaps he wasn’t that thrilled to learn what I just did about what occurred on the first moon landing. My friend Eric Metaxas wrote a great book, Everything You Alwayhs Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid To Ask), and in it he recalled that Buzz Aldrin confirmed to him that he took communion on the Moon.

Nobody knew.  The live broadcast was blacked out at the time.  Here are Aldrin’s own words, as quoted by Metaxas: (more…)

Who knew that George W. Bush had such powers over the natural world? According to some pundits, Hurricane Katrina was Bush’s fault, as was the tsunami in Indonesia and now – if you believe James Ridgeway in Mother Jones – that Bush’s policy is responsible for the devastating effects of the 7.5 earthquake that decimated the poor country of Haiti.

But during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, we could depend on such ridiculous musings as Mr. Ridgeway displayed. I haven’t done enough research to determine if Bush was the most reviled president in our nation’s history – that might well have been Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President — but it’s not that hard to figure out that his coverage by the media was historically the most relentlessly hostile.

I first started writing my op-ed columns during the Clinton administration and while I may have disagreed with most of his policies I never stooped to the insulting, vitriolic language routinely leveled at President Bush. What also amazed me was the lack of outrage by the president and his administration officials. There is always the possibility that I might have missed their fury because the mainstream media was unlikely to report anything other than leftist propaganda. But I was a columnist for the only New York newspaper that covered Bush honestly and without bias from 2002 to 2008, when we died as a print publication. (more…)

James O’Keefe may have come to everyone’s attention when he and Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and a prostitute and videotaped the ACORN workers but his other venture into investigative journalism has been largely ignored by the MSM. His target was Planned Parenthood and we know that abortion and the reproduction rights of women are sacred cows to the majority of journalists. I wonder how many taxpayers know that their dollars are funding black genocide and supporting statutory rape.

That sounds awfully harsh, doesn’t it and yet how can one explain what goes on behind the closed doors of a PP clinic? I guess that’s what O’Keefe wanted to learn when he teamed up with Lila Rose, the editor of a UCLA pro-life publication The Advocate and videotaped undercover operatives at PP clinics pretending to be underage teens with adult boyfriends.

Ms. Rose also had an actor (some reports say it was O’Keefe) place a call pretending to be a potential donor who specifically only wanted his money to go for the abortion of black babies. Was the Planned Parenthood worker shocked? Not at all and said, “whatever.”  An excerpt from the transcript of the call:

Ohio donor: There’s definitely way too many Black people in Ohio, so I am just trying to do my part.

PP Rep: OK, whatever.

Ohio donor: Well, Blacks especially need abortions, so that’s what I’m trying to do.

PP Rep: For whatever reason, we’ll accept the money. (more…)

There are many things on the World Wide Web that are not suitable for public viewing but that should be required viewing for journalists and political figures to alert them to the horrors that exist in some parts of the world. This should not be to incite but rather to rinse away their naïveté in dealing with a hostile culture and our potential enemies.

It is apparent that the mainstream media has no interest in covering stories that shed an unfavorable side of Islam and, frankly, this smacks of cowardice.

The elite will instead claim that the “vast majority” of Muslims are peace-loving and are just as horrified at the acts of a small number of radical terrorists.  That may very well be true but even a fraction of a billion is a very large number and that number is growing and gaining influence around the world thanks to the stupidity and cowardice of what should be called the “lamestream” press and those in our government today.

The Internet bloggers are doing the nasty job of covering the world of Islamic jihadists and it is truly chilling. The video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading could not be shown on the public airwaves but was easily available on the web. Gruesome as it was it cannot compare with this video of children training for Jihad beheading a man all the while praising Allah. (more…)