PARAMUS, NEW JERSEY- On New Hampshire Primary Day, Project Veritas, while violating no laws, exposed the ease in which voter fraud can occur in states lacking voter identification requirements.
Project Veritas’ work has been praised New Hampshire’s legislative leaders, yet the reaction also includes articles by large media organizations that stated false and defamatory statements and articles.
The New Jersey Star-Ledger editorial board reported O’Keefe “committed a felony by fraudulently obtaining a ballot in the name of another person; [broke] New Hampshire law by recording another person.” Additionally the Star-Ledger Editorial board wrote January 22nd, O’Keefe is “still on probation for trying to tap the phone of Sen. Mary Landrieu. The Star-Ledger had previously printed a retraction for this claim on November 3rd, 2010.
In this weekend’s featured interview in the Wall Street Journal, Juan Rangel, the leader of United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), attempts to sanitize the history of what was once one of the most notorious Alinskyite “community organizing” groups in Chicago.
Rangel paints his group as the moderate, patriotic alternative to the victim-mongerers at the National Council of La Raza and other Hispanic groups.
WSJ: Juan Rangel of UNO
The truth is more complex.
UNO is the Mexican-American ACORN, founded in 1980 by radicals who were tied to the left-wing academic/activist Chicago clique that would later produce Barack Obama. (more…)
Question: What do leprechauns, hookers, anti-Semite Muslims, Russian coke heads, drunken New Jersey teachers and pregnant 14 year olds have in common?
Answer: James O’Keefe
More specifically, these absurd caricatures have been used by James to incinerate the paper thin façade of tolerance and morality projected by the liberal establishment. The mainstream media has had a particularly difficult time swallowing the phenomenon of O’keefian investigative tactics. Perhaps this is due to journalistic envy. After the ACORN scandal, John Stewart memorably lamented “I’m a FAKE journalist and I’m embarrassed this guy scooped me!” “I agree there is a degree of contempt from the media. ‘How can these young people do something that we can’t do or we haven’t done?” James states regarding his relationship with the Media’s “Ivy Leauge.”
James’s recent write up in the NYT sheds some light on why he is particularly singled out for establishment vilification. “Muckrakers are hated or loved depending on the targets they choose” he states. Since James chooses targets like government squalor and advertent racism in the Liberal élite, he is enemy #1.
“(James O’Keefe has) a history of releasing deceptively edited videos that ultimately failed.”
“(James O’Keefe’s) record is defined by falsehoods, distortions, and discrediting stunts.”
These are only some of the things the reliable and George Soros avatars at Media Matters have to say about AIM’s most recent interview subject.
To see if Eric Boehlert and his fellow “Senior Fellows” were right, AIM’s Benjamin Johnson sat down with O’Keefe to discuss the efforts of his Project Veritas and why the mainstream media leaves a vacuum that young conservatives like James have to fill.
As the Weinergate story leaves behind many unanswered questions, the Twitterverse is not likely to get many truthful answers – not as long as Joan Walsh has anything to do about it. The Salon.com editor had some harsh words for reporters who tried to cover the story from an angle that didn’t suit her own anti-Breitbart bias.
Over Memorial Day weekend, the Weinergate story developed in the wee hours of the night on Friday evening and early Saturday morning, when a lewd photo purported to be from Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account surfaced on Twitter. Given that the story was literally unfolding on Twitter, where thousands of other users were witnessing the now infamous tweet in real time, it wasn’t exactly a “sit and wait” situation. In the age of social media, stories make themselves – good or bad, one tweet can erupt into a firestorm in the blink of instant. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. On one hand, media can wait and verify every fact, but at Twitter speed, the story will move far more quickly than standard fact finding and requests for comments can possibly occur. On the other hand, new media journalism can fill that void and get ahead of such a story before the firestorm gets out of hand.
And this is exactly what the Big sites did when Weinergate erupted. BigGovernment.com ran with a post just before 12:30am on Saturday, headlined “Weinergate: Congressman Claims ‘Facebook Hacked’ as Lewd Photo Hits Twitter.” Given that the story was in its infancy but was moving so quickly online, editors merely presented the facts as they were known at the time, indicating that it was a developing story. They also decided to publish the tweet and photo, but took caution by redacting all of the personal information of the young woman for whom the tweet was supposedly intended. (more…)
The word ‘war’ is overused. There is a “war on drugs,” a “war on trans-fats” and “a war on Lindsay Lohan” (the latter I completely agree with). Seems every minor cultural conflict is hailed as a new war. So when new media mogul Andrew Breitbart tells us he is at war with the “establishment media” there is some time to pause. Does this title actually apply or is it ever so cheaply used? A quick YouTube or Google search of the name ‘Breitbart’ should answer that question. The war against Breitbart is on.
Breitbart has extracted special venom from his loud and, at times, comically offensive critics. The name calling (David Letterman’s choice words had to be bleeped on network TV) is just the beginning. The vitriol carries down to the core of Breitbart’s morality and journalistic standards. Words like “hack” and “racist” are disfiguring enough, yet to call someone’s business model a “parade of feces” is a true salvo on editorial prose.
Andrew Breitbart sits down with FOX News’ Sean Hannity on April 18, 2011 to discuss his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World,” released April 15, 2011. It wasn’t all just book conversation though…you’ll have to watch it and see!
This weekend, President Obama’s senior advisor David Plouffe stepped into the Donald Trump MSM-birther fray, dissing – what he termed – Trump’s “sideshow” public appearances.
“There may be a small part of the country that believes these things, but mainstream Americans think it’s (Trump’s birther remarks) a sideshow,” said Plouffe.
“Birther,” is, of course, the media’s pejorative term for those that believe the President is not a natural born U.S. citizen. Back in June 2008, after months of speculation, then candidate Barack Obama succumbed to the political pressure and released a “Certification of Live Birth” from the State of Hawaii. Unfortunately for Team Obama, a certification is not the original record of live birth, the document has only continued to fuel the controversy.
Last week, I was enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee while perusing my local New Jersey newspapers online. That moment of serenity promptly evaporated when I was jolted by a headline that read, “Stop the Vitriol of the Right? A Lesson From the ACORN Tragedy.”
What? This wasn’t the Huffington Post or Media Matters, it was my local NJ online news site. After reading it, I initially dismissed the post, shrugging it off as an asinine tirade by the author, John Atlas, who also lives here in NJ and is a very active supporter of ACORN and hostile to any views that aren’t on the far left. While I almost expected the lecture about promoting civility in the wake of the Tucson tragedy, it was the ugliness of his rant against the right and the stretch he made to connect it all to ACORN that befuddled me. Nearly a week later, that post was still on my mind.
Then came the left’s latest meme against free speech, and this bizarre charade of hoisting Frances Fox Piven as their newest martyr. Ah, now it made sense.
To start with, Atlas’ post was certainly interestingly timed. Just last month, he was making the rounds promoting his new book, “Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group.” In this interview below, he ends by saying,
“We need organizations that are going to give voice to the poor so that our democratic system works better, and that is the biggest tragedy. And to the extent that Breitbart and his gang undermine that effort, I think that’s a disaster.”
(Part 1 of the video is here. Take notice of who’s conducting the interview, by the way. That would be IndictBreitbart.org, the campaign run by Velvet Revolution. We wrote about them and their co-founders, one of whom is a convicted domestic terrorist. The irony speaks for itself.)
I cringed for this reporter while watching this since he obviously lacked the modesty to feel embarrassment for himself. The Ted Baxter of local Philly Fox 29 got the vapors while interviewing ACORN dismantler James O’Keefe; O’Keefe’s latest video shows teachers’ union leaders discussing how they helped rig elections and call black students the N word.
Instead of asking why on earth an educational professional is caught on tape admitting to voter fraud, Local 29’s Jeff Cole ignores the actual story so he can show off his “investigative” chops and stroke his blatant agenda. What you are about to witness is comedy gold.
For Big Journalism readers keeping score at home, every time vote or voter fraud is raised as an issue by the Right, Democrats and the Left, often led by TPM, get so crazy they fall out of their collective tree. See this site search for “True the Vote” at TPM, for example – 1,370 hits for what is still a developing story. Wow!
Brought to you by ElectionJournal.org, the website that broke the Black Panther intimidation story in 2008. iReport is the first iPhone application dedicated to reporting voter fraud, intimidation and other election irregularities.
What’s unclear is if TPM is worried about ACORN, various Democrat nuts, or fraudulent voters getting caught by the short and curlies with Mike Roman’s new app. Careful, TPM, I know Roman somewhat, he can be a real ball-breaker, if you get my drift! (more…)
It was April 15, 2009 when Speaker Pelosi pronounced the Tea Party protests as fake, using the term AstroTurf (as in phony grass roots).
The entire MSM covered that story and many worked overtime to brand the Tea Partiers as “AstroTurf” in an effort to discredit a genuine, homegrown movement the likes of which has not been seen in this country in decades.
Despite the fact that tens of thousands of people were part of hundreds of protest events held around the country on Tax Day 2009, NBC’s Chuck Todd appeared on the Today Show telling Matt Lauer the Tea Party movement was one that “hasn’t really caught on”:
On August 4, of last year, while on MSNBC’s Hardball, Senator Barbara Boxer joined in the discredit chorus, telling Chris Matthews that the protesters were “too well dressed” and too well organized to be legitimate: (more…)
On his Twitter account, David A. Graham’s bio reads “Reporter at Newsweek.” Got that? He’s a… reporter. You see, when it comes to Newsweek you have to check for stuff like that because the difference between a reporter and a left-wing opinion columnist has nothing to do with what that particular individual writes. Everyone shares the same tank marked OBAMA, they just wear different uniforms under the mistaken impression they’re fooling someone — especially themselves.
Earlier today, John Sexton did a superb job exposing Graham for what he really is: yet another one of Obama’s Media Palace Guards terrified at the prospect of what a serious investigation — media or otherwise — into the charges of ongoing and systemic discrimination at the Department of Justice could do to an already embattled and increasingly unpopular Obama administration. Here are the facts of a story that in no way interest David A. Graham Reporter:
After winning a case of voter intimidation against The New Black Panther Party, the Obama Department of Justice inexplicably dropped the charges.
Yesterday, the Washington Times reported a direct tie between the NAACP and The New Black Panther Party…
…the very same NAACP that just stirred the racial pot something fierce with a condemnation of the Tea Party that just happened to occur as the DOJ scandal was starting to gain a little media traction. Hmmm…?
And then there’s J. Christian Adams, a legitimate government whistle-blower who has testified that he was told by his fellow DOJ staffers to all but ignore cases where the defendant is a minority and the plaintiff white.
With all these dots begging to either be connected or discredited, what’s does David A. Graham Reporter suggest be done? Further investigation? Nope. Congressional hearings? Nope. Instead of wanting to get the bottom of the story, Graham instead attempts to smoke-and-mirror the story right off the MSM radar by writing the whole thing off as nothing more than right-wing political theatre — you know, like ACORN was.
ACORN’s radical allies are now attempting to rewrite history to cast the organized crime syndicate as victim instead of as the prolific victimizer that it has been ever since it was created in 1970. ACORN online campaign director Nathan Henderson-James served notice in February that a propaganda effort was about to begin.
“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he wrote to members of Townhouse, a discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”
Such a narrative must be fought, Henderson-James argued, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”
The effort was already underway when Henderson-James reached out to the leftist community. After ACORN’s national board expelled ACORN founder Wade Rathke for engineering an eight-year cover-up of a million dollar embezzlement, Rathke wrote a combination political memoir/manifesto called Citizen Wealth. More recently, Seeds of Change, an institutional hagiography of ACORN by true believer John Atlas was published.
And now comes the “Cry Wolf” Project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group. (more…)
Jersey City pimp Allen E. Brown was recently sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for trafficking underaged prostitutes. Perhaps he would have gotten off had he simply claimed in court that he wasn’t dressed as a pimp when operating his prostitution ring.
For the past nine months, Media Matters for America has obsessively defended ACORN’s video-verified role in helping James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles set up a brothel for pubsescent sex slaves on the basis that James was not dressed as a pimp and that Hannah was not dressed as a prostitute — as she was in my creative b-roll portion of the videos — when entering the offices.
Despite the audio-recorded conversations in which Hannah was indisputably introduced as a prostitute requesting ACORN’s assistance in establishing a brothel, in which almost all ACORN workers approached offered their assistance — in Media Matters’ eyes, the wardrobe factor automatically rendered the damning investigation a “practical joke” and a “hoax.”
But while they laughed at the apparently trivial reality of a taxpayer-funded organization enabling underaged sex slavery, when O’Keefe set up in New Orleans what was actually intended as a practical joketo be taped and put up on YouTube as a minor radar-blip project to punctuate his more serious investigations — the left was not laughing. (more…)
The following is a document that James O’Keefe sent to me last night and has authorized me to publish. It is O’Keefe’s version of events in New Orleans. I believe this is the first time anywhere that he has publicly given his full statement of what occurred.
The document was drafted by lawyers based on O’Keefe’s statements, and was intended to be offered as the factual basis for his plea. O’Keefe confirmed for me that this document is an accurate account of what happened.
What Really Happened in New Orleans
Factual Basis
On January 25, 2010, Messrs. James O’Keefe, Stan Dai, Joe Basel, and Michael Flanagan (collectively “Defendants”) entered the Hale Boggs Federal Building located at 500 Poydras Street, New Orleans, Louisiana (“Hale Boggs Building”), with no intent to commit a felony, but rather an intent to engage in political speech with respect to pending national healthcare legislation (the “Healthcare Bill”). During the several days before their entry to the Hale Boggs building, Defendants discussed opportunities to engage in independent journalism and political advocacy. One of the ideas raised during those discussions was a method to test the truthfulness of Senator Landrieu’s statements as to the reason for the inability of Tea Party members and other Louisiana constituents to contact her staff on the telephone to discuss her vote on the Healthcare Bill. The Defendants were advised that this was a recent story in the news in New Orleans. (more…)
If even a blind pig can find an acorn or a truffle every once in a while, even a mainstream media journalist can figure out that there’s a new sheriff in town, although it generally takes him or her a while.
For a good example, consider this colloquy at the august Nieman Foundation at Harvard between “Internet thinker” Clay Shirky and investigative journalist Walter Robinson of the Boston Globe, who led the paper’s prize-winning coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex scandal.
There’s some discussion specific to the state of the Catholic Church, but for the most part it’s a conversation about how investigative work is made both more effective and (arguably) less common by the Internet — with an emphasis on how the declining role of giant, storied newspapers is impacting what some powerful folks can get away with.
Of particular interest to readers of the Big sites are the following remarks:
Shirky: So if you want to bury a story now, to take the second half of your question, there’s been a curious inversion of the news cycle. It used to be the front-page news was bad for you because that would indicate some synchronization of the public. But with the news cycle now down at 36 hours if you want to bury a story, get it all out at once right away. Everything. Everything on one day, and then the next day say, “That’s yesterday’s news.” The thing that kills people now is drip, drip, drip.
Rachel Maddow had a story to tell. The story was that Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe’s ACORN videos were “severely edited” to make an innocent man who did the right thing look as though he was doing something nefarious, immoral and illegal. She had almost an hour of unedited video footage to work with. Her segment was approximately twelve minutes long so some editing had to be done. What she chose to use and what she chose to leave out shows that she is guilty of exactly what she is accusing O’Keefe of doing.
She led with the tiresome and irrelevant argument about O’Keefe’s wardrobe during the opening credits versus what he actually wore in the ACORN offices. Patterico rips this apart better than I can, instead, I want to expose Maddow’s first lie of her report as it relates to this “Pimp Costume” diversion.
In her blockbuster “exclusive” she breathlessly says: “Check out the UNEDITED tape. This is the very end of that visit to the office in San Diego.” She then plays a clip that shows O’Keefe’s arm opening the door to the ACORN office and the video shows he is wearing a pin-stripe dress shirt.
Her narrative here is meant to suggest that by accessing the footage that O’Keefe purposely left out of his videos she is exposing the fraud of the pimp costume which O’Keefe desperately tried to conceal with his severe editing. Only problem is the footage she shows is actually in the edited video! That’s right, the blockbuster unedited video revelation she leads her story with has been released and available for all to see since September.
But that is only the beginning of Maddow’s attempt to re-write history. (more…)
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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