The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has ranked Yale University as among the worst violators of free speech on U.S. campuses.

Alum Michael Rubin, writing at Commentary, provides examples:

In 2009, Yale College Dean Mary Miller censored the Freshman Class Council’s traditional t-shirt before the Yale-Harvard game because it sported an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote containing the oh-so-incendiary word – sissies.”

Yale also garnered international headlines when a chief administrator pressured the allegedly autonomous Yale University Press to censor a scholarly view of the Danish cartoon controversy. And, oh, the intervention happened to coincide with Yale President Richard Levin’s courting of Persian Gulf donors.

Also, when Levin was on the trail of Chinese money, he restricted protests outside the campus venue in which Chinese President Hu Jintao, the university’s guest of honor, would hold forth.

Such trampling of free speech is par for the course on campuses throughout the nation. But what magnifies the usual hypocrisy and arrogance in Yale’s case is the high-level responsibility of journalists in rubber-stamping the transgressions.

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Jose Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, grasps how free people should respond to the revolt in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East: On the one hand, they must do all within their power to “support those seeking to establish democracy and freedom in their countries, where men and women will have equal rights and dignity, leading to prosperity and stability.” And they must also “be equally vigilant about the possibility of these autocracies being replaced by theocratic regimes that will be hostile, dangerous, and even more oppressive.”

Specifically, autocracies in the region have too long “sown the seeds for the infiltration of radical Islamism as a false solution to society’s problems.”

From the outset of the anti-government protests in Egypt, many in the media hearkened effervescently, albeit shallowly, to the first part of this mandate. The narrative? Protestors were a jubilation composed of people from different walks of life, all united in their hunger for political and economic freedom.

The second part of Aznar’s formula, vigilance regarding the possible infiltration of inglorious evildoers in Glorious Revolutions, pointedly did not figure in the MSM’s reportage.

Most mainstream media outlets bent over backwards to ignore evidence that the country’s best-organized opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, is anything but a pacified, benign force deserving of respectful inclusion in any transition government and projected elections.

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A recent event at New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute is a prime example of politicized, dumbed down, parodic “education” geared to desensitizing students to the seeking of truth based on evidence and historical facts.

More exactly, this occasion – an opportunity for forty or so students to meet and speak with the radical cartoon journalist Joe Sacco after a discussion of his work with NYU’s Middle East professor Zachary Lockman – degenerated into a crude and perverse forum for smashing the very ideal of journalistic objectivity.

According to Alan Jacobs, a student of Middle Eastern Studies the interchange dealt chiefly with Sacco’s new graphic novel, Footnotes in Gaza, which uses comic strips to expose alleged Israeli abuses in Gaza in 1956.

Both cartoonist and historian, reports Jacobs, frequently repudiated objectivity, and their radical bias resulted directly in the reviling of Israel.

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The New York Post reports that President Obama’s purpose in including more than 250 business executives in his vast entourage in Mumbai is to promote job-hatching, cross-continental business deals.

Another story, from the New York Times, adds that this export-promoting (and, as others opine, excessively costly, luxurious, even “imperial”) sojourn in Asia is also “an attempt to ease tensions with America’s chief executives, many of whom spent the recent campaign accusing the White House of being antibusiness.”

Donald Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, explains why we should take the president’s lavish, “pro-business” pageantry with a grain of salt.

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Andrew Bostom, whose trenchant scholarly work on Islam deserves more attention, rightly compares Anne Barnard’s sanitized profile in the New York Times of the Ground Zero Mosque’s originator, Imam Feisal Rauf, to Communist agitprop.

For Bostom, Barnard’s “Balancing Act for Imam In Muslim Center Furor” recalls Arthur Koestler’s account in The God That Failed of mastering, after due indoctrination, how to turn out Soviet propaganda. How cheerily oblivious, wrote Koestler:

… to distrust my mechanistic pre-occupation with facts and to regard the world around me the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper color and fell into their proper place.

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Obama’s Con-Man-in-Chief, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, has told a reporter, to say the least implausibly, that he has not “paid any attention” to former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams’s shocking (and corroborated) revelations that the president’s appointees at DOJ…

• abandoned a slam-dunk voter intimidation case for racial reasons against the New Black Panther Party, a virulent hate group whose members have long been known for anti-white rants, death threats, and even praise of Osama Bin Laden;

• instructed lawyers in its civil rights division to disregard cases that involve black defendants and white victims;

• directed Voter Section employees not to ensure, as required by law, that no ineligible voters were on the rolls, even though there is evidence that illegal aliens and immigrants with green cards are committing rampant voter fraud in the U.S.; and

• is now considering a submission by Ike Brown, a Democratic Party Chairman in Mississippi, to run elections in Mississippi, even though a federal court already stripped him of that authority after he victimized minority white voters and otherwise prevented people from voting based on their party loyalties.

For the most part the progressive media, in step with Gibbs, have brushed off Adams’s momentous testimony – momentous because it suggests Obama’s DOJ to be infected with a monstrous black nationalist ideology not unlike that of Obama’s longtime mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. (more…)

The Obama administration’s now-habitual restrictions on the media and press freedom on vital but politically touchy issues are the most severe, extreme and orchestrated ever witnessed in this nation.

Reporters were shut out, for example, during Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent parley in the White House and again when when Obama signed an executive order on abortion. Those who should have been protesting the loudest, the mainstream media, typically and meekly acquiesced in these restraints on freedom.

But, after journalists’ near airtight exclusion from the president’s recent Nuclear Security Summit, at least some of them have been showing signs of having finally had enough.

Seasoned White House reporters complained to both the president and White House Correspondents’ Association. More strikingly, the Washington Post, not known for holding Obama rigorously to account, also published Dana Milbank’s hard-hitting expose of this shameful and embarrassing episode in presidential and media annals.

Milbank went so far as to opine that, in face of the repressive and militaristic environment in the Capitol at the time of the summit, world leaders could well have thought themselves “transported to Soviet-era Moscow.” The oft-invoked “this session is closed press” mantra, he said, “would have pleased China’s Central Committee.” In addition, he had the temerity to remark, here was the “’leader of the free world – putting on a clinic for some of the world’s greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press.” (more…)

With its unprecedented decision to sanitize the basic document defining U.S. national security strategy – cleanse from it terms that connect Islam to terror, jihad, extremism and the like – President Obama is once again propagating Orwellian babble.

And there’s little doubt but that the MSM are primed to parrot far and wide, as opposed to critically assess, the president’s now squeaky clean, official vocabulary of defense. Even after the carnage of 9/11, for example, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews could only bring himself vaguely to identify the attacks as “criminal acts of terror” – selecting out the unpalatable fact that all the terrorists were Islamic radicals.

The administration’s latest rhetorical sleight of hand is just the latest evidence of its zeal for obfuscating the true nature of the terrorist threat. Recall the bizarre memo, originating from Obama’s Office of Management and Budget that instructed Defense Department staffers to use the term “Overseas Contingency Operation” in place of “Long War” or “Global War on Terror.” (more…)

Liberal pundits are racing to heap praise on the Obama Administration’s award of hundreds of millions of dollars in education grants to Delaware and Tennessee – the result of the first round of the Race to the Top competition among states.

The $4.35 billion grant program, enthusiastically acclaimed by David Brooks and others, invites states to submit blueprints for reforming their education system to the feds. The states whose proposals the Administration likes best get a pile of money with which to carry out the reforms.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein proclaims the process by which Delaware and Tennessee were selected “rigorous” and the competition “actually forcing states to run.” He mentions, approvingly and without delving into devilish details, that Tennessee hurried to pass a law lifting the cap on charter schools (public schools relatively free of the establishment’s ruinous shackles) and received endorsements from 93 percent pf the state’s unions.

The Wall Street Journal bothered to dig deeper, noting that the two winning states have some of the nation’s more anemic charter laws and that Education Secretary Arne Duncan didn’t even mention charters in his announcement of the awards. (more…)

The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner remarks that President Obama’s efforts to force his health-care bill on a very skittish Congress are beginning to look like an arm-twisting scene from “The Sopranos.”

Those who back his proposal receive special favors whereas, as Tanner says, “those who oppose the president can expect the political equivalent of a horse head between their sheets.” Members of Congress are being threatened with ostracism, primary challenges, and the loss of union support. Then, among other examples, there is the orchestrated assault on the ethics of Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who has been opposing the bill’s endorsement of abortion funding.

The progressive media are ganging up with the president against the bill’s opponents. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently cast suspicion on the low rent that a conservative Christian organization charges Stupak for his D. C. apartment. She even mentioned suggestively that scandal-marked South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford stayed at the same building. The Daily Kos has also been hammering away at Stupak, for instance, urging pro-abortion women to “roar back” by sending him a “money bomb” (that is, by donating money to the campaign of Connie Saltonstall, who is challenging him in a primary).

Plus ça change. Media lefties have from the get-go shilled for ObamaCare. For example, as Pamela Geller has noted, last summer ABC gave the president free prime-time to promote his health-care reforms without the nuisance of any opposing views. In addition to staging this “glorified infomercial,” as Geller called it, the network rejected advertisements that offered a free market alternative to Obama’s statist health-care vision. (more…)

The religiously pro-abortion New York Times recently gave needed, though less than straightforward coverage to the pro-life outreach, only recently successful, to black women regarding abortion. The issue, long neglected by the MSM, is significant: Although blacks make up only 13 percent of the population, black women undergo nearly 40 percent of all the nation’s abortions.

What is now rousing black audiences, according to Times writer Shaila Dewan, is the pro-lifers’ ramped-up message, which links abortion to slavery, lynching, genocide, Nazi-style eugenics, and birth control. As she describes the pitch of one of the newly effective pro-life groups, Georgia Right to Life, abortion is “a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.”

Perhaps, but Dewan and her article sources do not prove the charge historically. Nor do they specifically identify who these conspirators are. The reader is left possibly to infer that they lurk in the ranks of the very pro-abortion forces cited by Dewan, those forces that advocate, fund and perform abortions – to wit, abortion-providing organizations such as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (highlighted as under “sustained attack by black abortion opponents”); the U.S. government itself (duly noted as providing about $350 million a year to Planned Parenthood for “education and medical services”); pro-abortion politicians (who are let off the hook entirely); doctors who abort black children (black physicians who provided illegal abortions, Dewan points out, were praised as “community heroes”); and abortion-driving feminists (unmentioned, except for Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, whom Dewan portrays with unseemly ambivalence: Sanger’s guilt for having allied herself with eugenics is mitigated, the writer suggests, because “at the time [it was] a mainstream movement.”). (more…)

Despite repeated, uxorious, absurdly one-sided endorsements from the liberal media, the February 4 vote on President Obama’s year-old nomination of “darling of the left” Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has mercifully been postponed. The OLC, whose main duty is to defend the president’s authority in wartime, also advises intelligence and counterterrorism agencies.

Johnsen endeared herself to Obama and his followers by fervently urging during the presidential campaign, at Slate, that we “restore our nation’s honor” by condemning the U.S.’s “past transgressions” and rejecting “Bush’s corruption of American ideals.”

This – in particular, Johnsen’s zealous stand against the Bush Administration’s counterterror policies on matters such as interrogation methods as well as against its alleged excessive secrecy – resonated powerfully with anti- anti-terror progressives.

Slate contributor Glenn Greenwald, for example, effusively hailed Johnsen’s call for national breast-beating and purification, praising her nomination as “Obama’s best yet, perhaps by far.” When the Democrats first began to lag in mustering the votes to approve the nomination, Greenwald took umbrage: (more…)

The mainstream media’s headlong and heady descent into denigrating George W. Bush over the last decade signaled a dark moment in media history that has surely damaged American consciousness. Caught up in “Bush-bashing,” the MSM reached a critical turning point, and likely one of no return.

At times consciously and even triumphally, the media increasingly abused the traditional journalistic standards of independence and neutrality in favor of functioning as a virtual arm of the liberal Democratic Party. They took on, in effect, a new and disturbing identity.

So consumed by politics, power and status did the MSM become during this period that bashing the former president became standard media fare. This death by a thousand cuts proceeded unabashedly, unabatedly, and largely without challenge by Bush and his staff during his presidencies.

Jim A. Kuypers concluded as much in his study, Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age, in which he meticulously documents how the agenda-driven and “anti-democratic” media not long after the 9/11 terror attacks began pervasively distorting the former president’s statements, failing to report critical parts of his speeches, and even “framing” (manipulating stories) to portray the president as an enemy.

Among countless examples: (more…)

Think press malpractice when, in political matters, you hear prosecutorial malpractice.

Indictments by the Justice Department against five former security guards for Xe, the private-security firm and military contractor formerly known as Blackwater, were recently jettisoned by a D.C. district judge in what seems to be, as the Wall Street Journal observes, “another instance of gross prosecutorial misconduct, as abusive Justice lawyers went after an unsympathetic political target.”

The guards were involved in a shootout in Iraq that killed some Iraqis and generated much anti-American feeling. The government maintains that the men went on an unprovoked murderous rampage, whereas the guards claim they responded in self-defense to a lethal threat. The complex, 90-page opinion of the judge who dismissed the charges compellingly reveals ongoing willful and irresponsible actions on the part of prosecutors. In short, he ruled that the government, in shaping its case, had violated the defendants’ Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination by “recklessly” using statements compelled under the threat of job loss.

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