In an unprecedented move, lawyers for NBC News have demanded that the Romney camp remove the ad.  In a statement, Brokaw himself writes:

“I am extremely uncomfortable with the extended use of my personal image in this political ad. I do not want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign.”

Really, Tom?  Big concerns over your “role as a journalist compromised for political gain”?  Take another look at that video and listen to the condescending, judgmental way the Gingrich story was framed by Brokaw back in 1997.  He and his teleprompter feeders went out of their way at the time to make Gingrich appear to be the biggest hypocrite and crook in American political history.  Check out the way the ethics committee’s wrist slap was framed: 

“Newt Gingrich, who came to power, after all, preaching a higher standard in American politics, a man who brought down another Speaker on ethics accusations, tonight he has on his own record the judgment of his peers, Democrat and Republican alike.”

If snark smelled like apple pie, you’d be sure you were at grandma’s house on Thanksgiving after watching this example of Brokaw’s “role as a journalist.”

It’s the height of hypocrisy for NBC News and Brokaw to be concerned about Brokaw’s utterances being used for political purposes, considering his long history of biased reporting over his long career.   Perhaps NBC’s lawyers should have shown concern over these statements made by Brokaw as compiled by our friends at Media Research Center:

• “I thought from the outset that his supply-side theory was just a disaster. I knew of no one who felt it was going to work.” (Mother Jones interview, April 1983 issue)

• “We wanted everything but the pain of paying for it….In a decade [the] deficit more than tripled. How? Ronald Reagan ran for President promising Americans more while asking for less: the Reagan Revolution.” (October 5, 1990)

• “Reagan, as commander-in-chief, was the military’s best friend. He gave the Pentagon almost everything it wanted. That spending, combined with a broad tax cut, contributed to a trillion-dollar deficit….Social programs? They suffered under Reagan. But he refused to see the cause and effect.” (Over video of homeless people on December 27, 1989 NBC News special The Eighties)

• “You’re opposed to abortion in any form. You also have opposed the E.R.A., and you’re opposed to increasing the minimum wage, which is important to a lot of women out there. Aren’t you going to have a hard time selling Dan Quayle to the women of this country?” (To Quayle, August 17, 1988 convention coverage)

• “A lot of people said, ’Just too much red meat there [in the speech].’ You gave the impression that if you’re not a white, heterosexual, Christian, anti-abortion, anti-environment, you’re somehow not welcome in the Republican Party.” (To Pat Buchanan, August 18, 1992 convention coverage)

• “There are many people in the Republican Party who believe that the Republican National Convention in Houston, at which you were a prominent part, was simply too extreme, too strident in its positions, and they cite your speech and Pat Buchanan’s speech as well.” (To Pat Robertson on election night, November 4, 1992)

• “Is the Republican Party held hostage, in your judgment, Christie Whitman, by its views on abortion? So that people like you, who believe that there ought to be some choice, can never be considered for Vice President?” (To Whitman during MSNBC’s convention coverage, August 2, 2000)

• “Colin Powell, the most influential African-American in the Republican Party, will be talking to these delegates, reminding them that they have to think about minorities every day, not just every four years.” (Convention coverage July 31, 2000)

• “Medicare, the health care program that has been a godsend to the elderly in this country, even with all its financial difficulties. Tonight, the President wants to dramatically expand its coverage to millions more.” (January 6, 1998)

• “And when the public phase of those hearings ended today with the testimony of Secretary Weinberger, we were left with an astonishing record of deceit, ignorance, naivete, good or bad intentions, failed policies, and discredited public servants, and this story is not yet complete.” (On Iran-Contra hearings, August 3, 1987)

• “Still ahead tonight. Investigating the President. A growing backlash against independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Is he out of bounds or just tone deaf?” (February 16, 1998)

• “We begin tonight with U.S. Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, a man who championed women’s rights on the floor of the Senate and sexually terrorized members of his own staff.” (September 7, 1995)

• “Do you think the press has been too fascinated with other ancillary issues…like Whitewater and Paula Jones?” (To Tim Russert after a Clinton press conference, November 9, 1994)

• “Beyond the tedium of the day to day campaigning, there’s another much more alarming development this year — money. Huge amounts of money pouring into both parties, raising very serious questions about influence and conflict of interest.” (October 29, 1996)

• “For all the rhetoric and the outrage about what happened in the ‘96 campaign, a bill that would overhaul the system was all but killed off today in a partisan battle.” (October 7, 1997)

• “The Republicans were outraged by the fundraising practices of the President and the Democratic National Committee — but not so outraged that they felt the need for campaign finance reform.” (In a New York Times column, February 7, 1998)

The Romney campaign, to their credit, has responded to the NBC intimidation tactic  by maintaining that the footage in the advertisement falls under “fair use” provisions in federal copyright laws and they will not be acquiescing to the network’s demand.

When President Obama called for an end to congressional insider trading during his State of the Union Address last night, there may have been some colorful Greek expletives muttered by a multi-millionaire publisher we all know and love.

When Breitbart News began our coverage of Peter Schweizer’s best-selling book Throw Them All Out, AOL/Huffington Post was quick to proclaim the story dead on arrival.  Their full-page headline proudly proclaimed “Hit Job Falls Flat,” which displayed lousy journalism on multiple levels. AOL/HuffPo characterized the diligently investigated report as a “hit job,” they prematurely proclaimed the story a failure and as we revealed at the time, they allowed Arianna Huffington’s cozy relationship with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to falsely inform their readers that there was no validity to the congressional insider trading scandal.

Here we are, only ten weeks after AOL/Huffpo called our story a dud, there have been multiple congressional and senate hearings, three different laws drafted and now, using his ultimate bully pulpit, President Obama said this:

What a humiliating moment for the smart-set over at AOL/HuffPo when their candidate lends this level of importance to a story they tried hard to spike. There was a time when AOL/HuffPo tried to sell themselves to the public as a new brand of aggressive and independent journalism fighting against the old guard media who no longer resonate with the American public. Now, AOL/HuffPo is the old guard, running interference for political cronies and using their $300 million megaphone to try to shout-down others who don’t fall in line.

The old-guard media versus new media conflict has less to do with the method of delivery of the news (newsprint versus kilobytes) as much as it has to do with the stale, predictable establishment philosophy that permeates the newsrooms of these organizations.  Take a liberal political reporter from the old-guard like Howard Fineman out of the Newsweek office and put him in the high-tech environment of AOL/HuffPo and you still have the same old repetitive and destructive mindset you had before.

This phenomenon, and what sets true citizen journalism apart from the cronies in the establishment media, was best revealed on my show last night by the journalist who got all this started in the first place, Peter Schweizer, author of Throw Them All Out:

According to the exclusive report, ABC News’ Brian Ross had a revealing interview with Ms. Gingrich earlier this week and the contents of the report are so explosive that ABC News executives at first ordered the story to be kept under wraps until this Monday, 48 hours after the South Carolina primary, then they changed their minds to Friday. At the time of this writing they changed the air date to Thursday.

The idea that corporate executives determine what information can and cannot be released by a news outlet lest the news effect voters behavior raises serious ethical issues that need to be explored.

According to Drudge:

ABCNEWS suits determined it would be “unethical” to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates.

Assuming the report is accurate, one has to ask “how close is ‘too close’ to voting day for a story to break?”  Is it three days?  Four?  How about seven?  Who makes this determination?  Is this just a rule for a primary, or for a general election as well?  Will the network be this introspective and reserved when they receive the inevitable October Surprise from Team Axelrod?

News is news is news is news.

When we receive information that is relevant to Americans making an informed decision is not the business of an unnamed executive who likes to play God with the news of the day.  The networks and newspapers of the old media are so obsessed with being the “gate-keepers” and having the all-important job of protecting the American public from having too much information that our delicate sensibilities can’t handle that we end up with squashed stories about blue dresses, ex-wives and Islamist terrorist sympathizers partying with an unknown State Senator from Illinois.

And by the way, if the ABC News executives were trying to “protect’ Gingrich from this story they’ve done a miserable job.  If they squash it until after the voting Newt is in a horrible position.  The story has leaked (as these stories always do) and now little trickles have seeped out onto the Internet, talk radio and eventually cable news.  By the time CNN holds tomorrow night’s debate in Charleston everyone will have already formed an opinion about a story that none of us have really been able to see. Poor Newt Gingrich will be unable to address any single, specific part of the story because, like the rest of us, he doesn’t really have any idea what, specifically is in the story.  So instead, our imaginations will run away with us and assume the worst and Newt can’t do a thing about it.

Airing it on Thursday, two days before the primary, implies a deliberate attempt to influence the outcome.

Yeah, real ethical way of handling this one, ABC News.  After all, voters in South Carolina can’t be allowed to know the things you know when you know them.  And Gingrich can’t possibly be allowed to face this story with all the facts at his disposal, because that would distract from the campaign.  Except it already has.  Gingrich has cancelled a press conference that was scheduled for later this evening so he could try to handle this situation … which can’t be handled because no one knows what the situation is.

Well handled, ABC News.  This is almost as well thought out as that Christanne Amanpour hire.

Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes reveal on MSNBC that they were invited to a private, “off the record” briefing during the payroll tax cut debate a two weeks ago. According to Hayes, the White House let the liberal journalists know that the President was prepared to let the tax cut expire and blame Republicans. This threat ultimately led to what was seen as a Republican capitulation on the issue.

The question Hayes and Klein refuse to address is whether they were merely used by the administration to advance their position so the media could apply extra pressure to GOP led House. The question never comes up, of course, because Klein and Hayes are not objective journalists, but advocates for the White House.

Huffington Post's wishful thinking headline a few hours after a "60 Minutes" report on congressional insider trading.

As liberal news outlets like CBS News, Daily Beast/Newsweek and even MSNBC saw fit to report the fact that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in a sweetheart IPO for VISA, while at the same time ensuring that tough regulations that would have stifled VISA’s profits stayed bottled up in the Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives, AOL/HuffPo opted to re-print Pelosi’s talking points and obfuscations in lieu of doing actual reporting.

With the awkward and ham-handed headline “Hit Job Falls Flat,” you can almost see Arianna herself hammering out bullet points on her blackberry, firing them off to reporter Ryan Grim in an effort to put her elegant fingers in the metaphorical dyke to stop the gushing in the most serious corruption story to hit Pelosi’s long career.  The banner headline, full of wishful thinking, ran just hours after the “60 Minutes” story.  First thing on a Monday morning at the beginning of a news cycle is a curious time to declare that a story “fell flat.”

In fact, the story was talked about on cable news and in the halls of congress all day.  It inspired new legislation to finally make the corrupt practice of congressional insider trading illegal.  Presidential candidate Rick Perry produced a 30-second ad featuring the story and calling for jail-time for any politician who profited from insider information.  If this is “falling flat” I would like to see AOL/HuffPo’s idea of a successful investigative report.

Seriously, I’d really like to see one.  Do they even do anything like that, or do they just sit back and let the rest of us do all of the real reporting?

In his defense of Pelosi, Grim cherry-picks facts from the CBS News story and then spends paragraphs allowing the former Speaker’s spokesperson to distract and deflect without ever providing his readers with the fundamental facts:

• Pelosi and her husband had a rare and exclusive (elite, one might say) opportunity to participate in a VISA IPO.
• Pelosi was deeply involved with legislation affecting the credit card industry at the time
• The original legislation included regulations allowing companies to negotiate the onerous transaction fees that make up a significant profit center for credit card companies
• The legislation languished in that form on the Speaker’s desk
• When the legislation finally became law, the rules pertaining to the transaction fees were stripped out
• The credit card companies’ stocks skyrocketed after the law was passed (how tough could it have been on them)
• Pelosi’s investment paid-ff over 200%

The story really is as simple as that, yet none of this made its way into AOL/HuffPo’s “Falls Flat” narrative.

So why would the publication that bears Arianna Huffington’s name run interference for the most significant corruption story coming out of Washington in decades?  After all, the latest incarnation of Arianna Huffington’s world view (this is number six by my count, right after “Environmental Goddess” and well past “Newt Gingrich Disciple”) has a “Throw Them All Out” kind of ring to it.  Huffington has made great pains in the past few years to place herself above the petty partisan attacks and be the multi-million dollar champion of the little guy who hasn’t a chance in our corrupt, bought and paid for system.

Isn’t this the woman who wrote Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America?  Why would she not be embracing the incredibly thorough investigative research done by Peter Schweizer in exposing both Republicans and Democrats involved in the very legal, yet still corrupt practice of profiting from their positions as public servants?

To answer the question, look no further than this article from last Thursday written without a byline at AOL/HuffPo:  Nancy Pelosi Visits The Huffington Post, Talks Motherhood, Breaking Barriers And Being Yourself.

We were so fortunate this morning to have Representative Nancy Pelosi stop by The Huffington Post office to speak to 30 or so female members of our editorial staff. Pelosi kicked off the round table discussion with the story of the first time she met Arianna Huffington (then Stassinopoulos), when Arianna stopped by Pelosi’s house in California over twenty years ago. While dazzled by her guest, Pelosi said, she couldn’t stop thinking about the bedraggled state of a white duck sofa in her kitchen that her five young children had all but destroyed.

With that very strange “we” in the first sentence, I’m shocked that the writer suppressed the urge to include a few “Dahling’s” in the narrative as well.

If AOL’s Arianna Huffington is to be taken seriously as a journalist, thinker and publisher (and she so desperately wants to be taken seriously), she can’t get a pass for hosting gadfly luncheons with people of power and influence all the while neglecting to seriously report on their obviously news-worthy antics.  The cloyingly sweet aftertaste in one’s mouth after reading Pelosi’s advise “about getting into politics and just being better at life” given to the all-female editorial staff with Arianna perched next to her with an admiring gaze and an all-to obviously enthusiastic laugh at the Speaker’s quips, quickly turns to outrage when you read HuffPo’s ineffective and denial-ridden coverage of Pelosi’s growing scandal.  The scandal that even Tina Brown green-lighted at Newsweek for an extensive expose’.

The quick assumption to make is Arianna remains a lefty and, therefore, AOL will continue to feed its readers (24 million at last count) love-letters from the political left and hefty criticisms — bordering on diatribes targeted at the political right.  No doubt there is truth to that, and we see it played out on a daily basis.  But, the sad rest of the story runs much shallower, unfortunately.

The fact is, Arianna Huffington’s history and track record proves that she is a lefty second and a desperate sycophant first.  Her political writers will apologize for Pelosi because she’s on their side, but more importantly, because she came and giggled with Arianna and the staff for an afternoon.  Her writers will attack Newt Gingrich not because they can come close to disputing his brilliant thoughts and ideas, but because he doesn’t come and pay homage to Arianna like he used to.  Her site will continue to feature the destructive, hateful and bigoted Van Jones, not because he has any original or viable ideas, but because he looks so good on Arianna’s arm at black-tie events.  That’s not just Arianna’s arm Van Jones is clinging to, it’s the collective arm of AOL and their stockholders.

It’s the politics of sycophancy, and it gets a hell of a lot of page views.

Liberal columnist Byron Williams of the Oakland Tribune said that MSNBC’s hiring of Al Sharpton for its 6PM slot was “more about ratings than journalism.” Now that the first month of ratings are in, the hire might end up damaging MSNBC in BOTH categories.

The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer at 6 pm topped MSNBC’s Politics Nation with Al Sharpton in the key demo 25-54 (163k vs. 141k) in September. In addition, the Blitzer-led program grew +19% in the demo (163k vs. 137k) and +22% among total viewers (590k vs. 483k) vs. last year. Sharpton was down -24% in the demo (141k vs. 185k) and -15% in total viewers (599k vs. 708k) compared to MSNBC’s programming a year ago.

The story is even more damaging when you look inside the numbers and realize that the 5:00 PM edition of “Hardball”, which airs right before Sharpton’s show, had more viewers than the civil rights activist-turned television journalist.  “Hardball” also beat Blitzer and CNN in that 5:00 PM time slot.

In other words, viewers who aren’t watching Fox News prefer MSNBC to CNN during the 5PM “Hardball” hour and then switch channels and watch CNN or Fox News when Sharpton appears on their screen.

The New York Times saw the trend in the ratings numbers and sounded the alarm earlier today with the headline:  MSNBC Is Close to Falling to Third Place in Cable News Ratings. The Old Gray Lady blames the ratings dive on the absence of Keith Olbermann, and surely that has something to do with it. But the weak lead-in to the prime time line-up supplied by Sharpton can’t help. Add to that the overall perception that MSNBC is no longer serious about journalism as evidenced by the controversial hire and it’s easy to reach the conclusion that so far, the Al Sharpton Experiment is a failure.

On the bright side for MSNBC, they’ve been able to celebrate the fact that so many video clips of Mr. Sharpton have made their way through the viral corners of the Internet.  Plus, the added benefit of watching their own anchor mocked on live television by Mr. Sharpton.  And let’s not forget the embarrassment of the MSNBC’s newest host not knowing when the civil rights act was passed or the proper way to pronounce “Galileo“.

All in all, hell of a job, Phil Griffin.

]]> http://bigjournalism.com/sright/2011/09/28/sharpton-hands-ratings-win-to-cnn-in-key-demo/feed/ 53 http://bigjournalism.com/sright/2011/09/27/exclusive-interview-ford-pulls-anti-bailout-ad-after-questions-from-white-house/ http://bigjournalism.com/sright/2011/09/27/exclusive-interview-ford-pulls-anti-bailout-ad-after-questions-from-white-house/#comments Wed, 28 Sep 2011 01:24:50 +0000 Larry O'Connor http://bigjournalism.com/?p=223812 This is all that remains of the very popular Ford commercial that went viral on the internet and was featured on cable news channels over the past three weeks:

According to the Detroit News, Ford has pulled the ad due to pressure from the Obama White House:

Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House questioned whether the copy was publicly denigrating the controversial bailout policy CEO Alan Mulally repeatedly supported in the dark days of late 2008, in early ‘09 and again when the ad flap arose. And more.

With President Barack Obama tuning his re-election campaign amid dismal economic conditions and simmering antipathy toward his stimulus spending and associated bailouts, the Ford ad carried the makings of a political liability when Team Obama can least afford yet another one. Can’t have that.

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart.com, the “star” of the popular ad, Chris McDaniel told me he was “a little bit flustered’ by Ford’s decision. He found out about it during a live radio interview this morning. “I had no idea. As soon as I got off the interview, I sent an e-mail to Ford’s VP of Marketing.” He told me, “I put myself out there on the line. You either stand behind it or you don’t.”

Ford has not yet returned Mr. McDaniel’s e-mail.

A note posted by Ford Motor Co. on Facebook responding to the controversy says:

“(W)e were not coerced into pulling the ad down. The campaign continues to run. We took the ad out of rotation after 4 weeks which is consistent with the typical lifecycle for the campaign.”

But this explanation is inconsistent with the past practice of Ford and their handling of these commercials. Other “press conference” style ads that they have produced are still available on YouTube, but the one featuring Chris McDaniel has been removed.

Mr. McDaniel says that Ford conducted “two hours of interviews” for the ad and used the famous moment where he took pride in purchasing a vehicle from a company that “didn’t take the money.” And, in true “Joe the Plumber” fashion, Mr. McDaniel has had to take some heat for his passionate stance. Many on the left accused the ad of being staged and scripted and challenged whether the sentiments were genuinely his. To combat the criticism, he took to YouTube himself and offered this response:

When I asked Mr. McDaniel what he thought about the reports that the White House may have pressured Ford into removing his commercial he said, “I understand the political world Ford lives in. I don’t fault them. But, I’m on the hook with my tax dollars on this Solyndra scandal. It’s exactly the same thing as the GM and Chrysler bailouts. Enough is enough! The only people on the hook in this country are the 50% of American who still pay taxes. And now we have the federal government butting their nose into this TV ad. Another example of them getting involved in things they have no business getting involved in. Where is the free speech of American citizens?”

With ideas like that, no wonder the White House got involved.

In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today’s young may well get less than they put in).

Of course we all recognize that bit of inflammatory scare-mongering from Gov. Rick Perry’s book “Fed Up!” in which he tells the inconvenient truth about Social Security that every American knows but no politician is forth-right enough to confront.  That in its current state, it is doomed to fail and leave generations that had paid into it stuck without the return they were promised. In short: A Ponzi Scheme.

Oh, wait… my mistake. Thanks to some excellent work by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.com I now see that the quote above is not from Gov. Perry but from a young, idealistic economist named Paul Krugman writing in the Boston Review in 1997.

Yes, that same Paul Krugman who is cited as the liberal’s favorite go-to Nobel Economist always willing to throw incendiary polemic after incendiary polemic at any politician with an “R” after their name.  The same Paul Krugman who is held up by those liberal pundits and journalists as the smartest economist in the world.  The same Paul Krugman who just one year ago wrote this about Republican efforts to make reforms to Social Security to solve its inherent “pyramid scheme” structure:

Legally, Social Security has its own, dedicated funding, via the payroll tax (“FICA” on your pay statement). But it’s also part of the broader federal budget. This dual accounting means that there are two ways Social Security could face financial problems. First, that dedicated funding could prove inadequate, forcing the program either to cut benefits or to turn to Congress for aid. Second, Social Security costs could prove unsupportable for the federal budget as a whole.

But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come.

Apparently, when you’re a Nobel Economist you can make numbers mean whatever you want them to mean in any given decade depending on who your political target happens to be.  (Al Gore’s Peace Prize is making a little more sense now.)

Most significantly, this revelation should give pause to the Beltway Chattering Class who have confidently proclaimed that Gov. Perry’s “straight talk” (remember when they loved “straight talk” when it came from John McCain and was directed at George W. Bush?) about Social Security has doomed his chances of beating President Obama in a general election.

The fact remains that anyone who honestly looks at the numbers involved with Social Security without a political agenda can’t help but see the truth.  What was meant to be a retirement pension program for senior citizens has become a pay-as-you-go old-age entitlement that must be changed in order to survive.  We must either increase the amount of money put in to the program, or we must change the benefit payouts in the form of increasing the retirement age or reducing the number of people receiving benefits or the amount of those benefits.

And that’s not me or scary Gov. Perry talking, it’s Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Paul Krugman talking.  Well, at least the 1997 version.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

There is nothing wrong with reflecting on the events of ten years ago and making social and political judgements on our leaders’ reactions over the past decade.  In fact, most of us here at “The Bigs” have done so this morning at Big Government.

But this is clearly different.  As Krugman was posting his diatribe at 8:40 AM ET this morning, the air in lower Manhattan was still ringing with the haunting sounds of the bell used to commemorate each of the fallen heroes in the World Trade Center that horrible morning.  As the Washington Times’ Kerry Pickett points out, surely Krugman was inspired by President Bush’s appearance at the solemn memorial service and the warm reception he received from the crowd there.

Mr. Krugman couldn’t contain his vindictive hatred of the President and had to rush to the “blog of record” to let his venom flow.  The sanctimonious and self-righteous tone of Krugman’s post is something we’ve grown used to by now: “and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not”.  But this use of the 9/11 memorial as an occasion to accuse President Bush and Mayor Giuliani of political war profiteering is beyond the pale, even for Krugman.

To top it off, Krugman self-righteously proclaims, “I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.”  If by “obvious reasons” he actually means “Because even the left-leaning readers of the New York Times will find this post inappropriate and tasteless and I can’t handle the shit-storm that will inevitably hit this page if I allow comments,” then yes, we understand. But here at Big Journalism we have no such concern.

We’ll leave our comments open.  Let Mr. Krugman hear from you.

By now we’ve all heard the reprehensible remarks made by Congressional Black Caucus Whip Andre Carson (D-IN) where he told the audience at a CBC Jobs Fair Town Hall in Miami that Tea Party Congressmen would like to lynch black people. Given the opportunity to revise or retract his remarks, Carson instead stood by “the truth” of his comments.

So now it seems pretty fair to say that Andre Carson is a race-baiting bigot who has brought shame upon the U. S. House of Representatives. But any regular reader of Big Government knows that this is not new information. In fact, Andre Carson’s despicable, divisive slander of August 22nd is just the latest of bogus attacks made by the 2nd term congressman against the Tea Party. Andre Carson is the man who told the mother of all race-baiting lies against the Tea Party: That racial slurs were screamed “fifteen times” at he and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) in Washington DC on the day before the ObamaCare vote in 2010.

The headlines at the time (as well as Topic #1 on cable news and Sunday talk shows) was “Racist Tea Party Yells ‘N-Word’ at Civil Rights Icon John Lewis”. Andre Carson’s name was hardly mentioned in any of the stories. But a Big Government investigation revealed that it was he, in fact, who gathered Capitol Hill reporters around himself on March 20, 2010 and breathlessly told them what had happened “outside of Cannon (Congressional Office Building)” just moments before. (audio courtesy Kerry Pickett, Washington Times)

By now you know the story become part of Democratic Party lore showing up in talking points as recently as just last week as Alan Colmes mangled the “facts” but still was able to perpetuate the lie on Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor”. You should also know by now that Andrew Breitbart offered a $100, 000 reward for anyone who can produce video proof o the supposed racial hatred. The only videos uncovered were found by the Big Government staff. They show the exact moment Carson described, “down the steps of Cannon”, from four different angles. Not only were there no slurs heard on any of the videos, but the scene is not at all how Carson described it to Capitol Hill reporters.

Just like Carson’s evil lie that Tea Party would like to see blacks “hanging on a tree”, the claim that protestors screamed the “N-Word” at him on March 20^th, 2010 is a myth and should be condemned.

So who is this guy? Who is this second-term congressman prone to tell tall-racist-tales against his political opponents?

Andrew Carson is a convert to Islam, thus making him the second Muslim to be elected to the House of Representative, the first being the equally mendacious Keith Ellison (D-MN). Because of this distinction, he is often trotted out by main stream media outlets as the “go-to” expert on political issues related to the Islamic world.

His congressional seat (representing greater Indianapolis) used to be his grandmother’s. Julia Carson held the seat for ten years until her death. Race-baiting anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan spoke at her funeral. When Carson ran for her open seat he refused to denounce Farrakhan or his hateful record.

Breitbart.tv uncovered an interview with Rep. Carson that was conducted before the infamous day in Washington DC. In it he was asked about the greatest threat to America and without hesitation he answered “racism”. This was a fine bit of foreshadowing to his remarks to reporters on Capitol Hill. After vividly describing the scene where he and Rep. Lewis had to withstand Selma revisited, he then educated the reporters by telling them:

REP. CARSON: I’m from intelligence, and I’ll tell you, one of the largest threats to our internal security…I mean terrorism has an Islamic face, but it really comes from racial supremacist groups. (inaudible) Its the kind of thing we keep a threat assessment on record [for].

PICKET: From groups like this?

REP. CARSON: Oh absolutely.

So let’s review what we’ve learned about Rep. Andre Carson:

• He inherited his seat from his grandmother who was close to Louis Farrakhan
• He has refused to denounce Farrakhan
• He went on record early in his congressional career to say that racism was one of the greatest threats to our country
• He told reporters that Tea Party protesters screamed racial slurs at him even though video of the event belies this as well as overwhelming number of eyewitness accounts (including a GOP congressman walking right behind him at the time of the alleged event)
• He equated the Tea Party with racial supremacist groups and said they were a bigger threat to our country than Islamic terror
• He told a gathering of black voters that Tea Party congressmen would like to lynch them

Many reporters who were questioned about why they took Carson’s word for it that day in March 2010, and ran the story as fact without trying to verify his account said that Carson had always been a quiet unassuming congressman, not prone to over-the-top hyperbole or over-heated rhetoric. In light of Carson’s recent remarks it might be time for these reporters to re-think that assessment, and re-visit the “N-Word” story.