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…)

On Monday, students, faculty and supporters at the University of California, Davis, attempted a mass general strike to protest tuition hikes and to demand the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after police pepper-sprayed eleven protesters who blocked a public access way at an #OccupyUCDavis event on November 18th. Students maintain it was Chancellor Katehi who requested the police remove the Occupy encampment and clear access to the facility.  The incident sparked a firestorm of media all across the world and has become a viral phenomenon, and now even an Internet meme.

We stand behind those calling for Chancellor Katehi’s resignation.  But not for the reasons they might think.

The events of UC Davis and the way in which the pepper-spray was handled has set a number of dangerous precedents.  In the setting of academia, the rights of the majority of students are being trampled on to appease the tyranny of a minority.  Further, the very system of law and order and its public servants instituted to protect the rights of the public at large have been undermined by incompetent leaders, unable to withstand the growing pressure of a noisy minority and the corrupt media that supports it.  Most importantly, propaganda has established a foothold that is now stronger than ever, and far more dangerous than the short-term effects of pepper spray.

Over the last week, we have seen the media pick up the UC Davis story and run with it, always highlighting the same twenty seconds of one Officer Pike, methodically pepper-spraying eleven “peaceful protesters,” as onlookers gasp and scream in horror and dismay.  The public was almost undivided in its immediate condemnation of the act.

But just as Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Perhaps in this case, it’s not so much a lie, but a lot of omissions.

We know now that the Davis 11 locked arms to block the public access way, creating both a safety hazard and barring other students and the public from gaining access to facilities beyond that point.  What the media has never explained is that the protesters were repeatedly warned to clear the path.  Video shows officer Pike, the one with the pepper spray, informing each protester one last time that they would be “subject to the use of force” if they did not voluntarily move.  The protesters acknowledge the warning and hunker down for the consequences.

The media also never provides an accurate portrayal of why the students were protesting in the first place, and what prompted them to block the access way.  In an interview with Democracy Now, UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture student Elli Pearson, one of the protesters in the blockade who was pepper sprayed, reveals the truth.

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Columbia Journalism “Professor of Professional Practice” Sree Sreenivasan, still smarting from an encounter with James O’Keefe, seems to have declared himself the ultimate arbiter of what is, or is not, citizen journalism:

PEOPLE LIKE O’KEEFE THINK THEY ARE ACTING LIKE JOURNALISTS. They think having a camera makes them a journalist. Instead, this is a cheap caricature of journalism…

No, Prof. Sreenivasan, scribes who hide behind the varnish of objectivity to sell a political agenda are what pass for cheap caricatures of journalism.

The erosion of faith in media began before O’Keefe was born, and “professors of professionalism” like Sreenivasan enable it. There is no such thing as journalistic objectivity–accuracy, yes, but objectivity, no. Objectivity is a fairy tale told to idealistic activists who want to enter journalism so they can “change things”; they already know there’s no glory in the role of an “objective observer.”

Granted, there are a few who strive for objectivity as an ideal–but they are rare, and they won’t be found under the tutelage of Sreenivasan or fellow Columbia professor Dale Maharidge.

Prof. Sreenivasan has the audacity to lecture citizen journalists–who report facts that the mainstream media leaves out for the sake of “objectivity”–simply because they have, rightfully, reclaimed journalism? Please. Go troll on Facebook and whine about it some more, “professional journalists.”

Perhaps Prof. Sreenivasan believes that citizen journalists are responsible for polling such as this:

Pew: Public opinion of media never worse

Americans See Liberal Media Bias on TV News

Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High

The Hill Poll: Most voters see media as biased and unethical

Americans View Media Bias As Big Problem, Poll Shows

Public trust in US media eroding: Pew study – Yahoo! News

Shall I continue?

The continual decline of public trust in media is not the fault of James O’Keefe or other citizen journalists–citizen journalists were created in response to it.

People like O’Keefe have it in for professional journalists.

Could Prof. Sreenivasan be more self-exalting and misleading? Do “professional journalists” send out profanity-laden emails to people with whom they disagree? Is this what Sreenivasan calls “journalism?”

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What happens when you look at the facts involved with Issue 2 instead of basing your decision on the emotional hysteria coming from unions bent solely on preserving their power? You find out that the need for reform is real, and that Ohio NEEDS Issue 2.

That what the newspapers from Ohio’s three largest cities found out when the looked past the rhetoric, and focused on the facts. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Cincinnati Enquirer all agree. Ohioans should vote YES on Issue 2. And what they say pretty much mirrors what we have been telling you.

Some key quotes from The Plain Dealer:

Ohio law must not impede reform, and it won’t if it creates a level playing field for public-sector workers and their employers.

Right now, that field is tipped in favor of the unions. Recognizing that reality does not mean we oppose public-employee unions or that we do not appreciate what their members do and the sacrifices some already have made…

In schools, the emphasis has to be on the progress of children, not the comfort of adults. In city halls and county offices, the impact on those who pay the bills — and the sheer magnitude of those bills — must be paramount.

Rules that made sense in 1983 do not make sense anymore. Ohio needs a fresh start…

When they mark their ballots, Ohioans cannot worry about what is best for any political party or interest group — on either side of this debate. They need to consider what’s best for the future of their children, their communities, their state.

They need to pass Issue 2.

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During the latest campaign appearance disguised as a presidential press conference, President Obama uttered one straight out lie that stands out above the rest of them. To help sell his “jobs bill,” Obama claimed to have met a Boston-based teacher named Robert Baroz and intimated that Baroz had no job despite his excellent teaching credentials. The problem is, neither claim is true. Obama simply lied. So, where is the national Old Media to pin Obama to the wall over this out right lie?

During his presser, Obama introduced teacher Baroz into the national discussion of his “jobs bill.” Obama claimed to have met Mr. Baroz and lamented that Baroz was out of work.

I had a chance to meet a young man named Robert Baroz. He’s got two decades of teaching experience. He’s got a master’s degree. He’s got an outstanding track record of helping his students make huge gains in reading and writing. In the last few years, he’s received three pink slips because of budget cuts. Why wouldn’t we want to pass a bill that puts somebody like Robert back in the classroom teaching our kids?

The problem with this little tale of woe? Firstly President Obama did not meet teacher Baroz. Robert Baroz did attend a Rose Garden press conference last September with a few other teachers, but the closest he ever got to the president was Baroz’ front row seat during the event. The two never came face to face, never shook hands, never actually met. Baroz saw Obama up at the lectern and Obama may have noticed Baroz sitting in the audience. That hardly makes for a meeting.

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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…)

A known liberal activist that has for months been stalking several Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin, verbally abusing them, has finally crossed the line into a physical attack. So … where is the Old Media to chronicle this assault? Sadly, no where to be seen.

On Sept. 14 left-wing activist Miles Kirstan entered The Inn at 22 S. Carroll Street in Madison, Wisconsin, began to harass some GOP lawmakers patronizing the establishment, and ultimately attacked them, throwing a mug of beer on them.

The Madison Police Department confirmed to the MacIver Institute that the incident occurred and the group found that Republican State Rep. Robin Voss (Burlington) was the main target. Reps. John Nygren (Marinette) and Scott Suder (Abbotsford) were also a victim of the attack.

Kirstan is a well-known face among the extremists that have been railing against the Walker administration over the budget cuts and other legislative efforts.

He’s well enough known that some halfwitted groupies have excitedly delivered their hosannas to him online.

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The cover story in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review is this article by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger calling for an American ‘World Service’:  “ … a media institution with sufficient funding to bring the highest-quality American journalism to the global public forum.”  To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the president, but nepotism is not the only reason the CJR gave such precedence, if you’ll excuse the pun, to a vapid liberal treatise that would make an Obama speechwriter blush; at every turn, Bollinger’s article perfectly encapsulates the elitist liberal academic view of the world.

After the usual Freidmanesque boilerplate about the world being interconnected/flat/insert cliché here, Bollinger explains that we must engage with it through institutions such as the university and the press, both of which, he informs us, “…are concerned with providing objective and accurate information, ideas, and analyses that we need in order to understand and act in our world” (I’ll pause here for the reader to pick himself up off the floor and rub his aching sides).  But as Bollinger surveys the global mediascape, he finds it dominated by the BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24 and China’s CCTV.  Sure, the US has CNN, but he yearns for a more authoritative – i.e. state-sponsored – American voice.  Bollinger offers the “highly respected” BBC World Service as a model of what a state-funded American global broadcast operation might look like; unfortunately, his exemplification comes as the corporation is being taken to court in the UK to force it to disclose the findings of an internal report on its anti-Israeli bias.

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Phil Christofanelli’s odyssey in Introduction to Labor Studies at the University of Missouri bobbed back to the surface Thursday when Big Government reported on internal emails among administrators. Those emails demonstrate that Christofanelli was targeted because of his conservative political views and imply collusion with the Soros funded Media Matters:

[UMSL Senior Associate Vice President Ron] Gossen added: “Media Matters did our work for us in showing how [the video’s] edited.” Indeed, the emails suggest that UMSL may have relied on left-wing blogs rather than conducting its own research.

A couple months ago, with turmoil swirling around the University of Missouri’s Labor, Politics, and Society course, the Ivory Tower’s official fishwrap, Inside Higher Ed, came to the defense of the course’s lecturers: Judy Ancel and Don Giljum:

Videos posted by the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart appear to have ended the teaching career of an adjunct at the University of Missouri — even as university officials issued a statement backing the contention of the two instructors of the labor studies course that their comments in the class had been edited to present an “inaccurate and distorted” picture of what was said.

It is specious to complain that video is edited since nearly all video is edited before being released. However, if editing is a concern, then why doesn’t the University make all of the video from the course available? Their claim that existing videos are “inaccurate and distorted” could be dismissed with just such a release. The fact that neither the University nor the media companies that were given the full videos have produced a video exonerating Ancel and Giljum suggests that exculpatory evidence does not exist. Again, release the video.

Gail Hackett, the provost of UMKC, hid behind the protection of “academic freedom” (from Inside Higher Ed):

Hackett’s statement went on to “underscore our commitment to the importance of academic freedom, freedom of speech and the free-flowing discussion of challenging topics in our courses,” as well as “the serious responsibilities this places on us to ensure a balanced perspective is offered to our students within our curriculum.”

Hackett’s suggestion that she is committed to “a balanced perspective” is unsupported by the evidence in the classroom. It’s laughable in light of the way that her fellow administrators targeted Christofanelli because of his conservative political views. But her pontification about ”academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the free-flowing discussion of challenging topics” give away the game. Hackett is defending her own academic fiefdom without serious regard to either free speech or free-flowing discussion.

She asserts that the inclusion of students in the video “without their permission is a violation of [the student's] privacy rights.” Is Hackett really arguing that students on her campus have a right to call for the violent overthrow of the US government? Big Government reported on this comment from one student:

…Ancel introduced the idea that “violence is a tactic.” . . .

The very next statement was by a student following up Ancel’s point: “I don’t necessarily want to be a part of capitalist society. I want to take over the state with a revolutionary movement, which doesn’t exist.” Ancel did not comment on his call to overthrow the government.

The comments of students are relevant for another reason: they are a testament to the efficacy of Ancel and Giljum’s teaching. The student’s words above and willingness to voice them openly show that the professors view violence as an effective union tactic and that the professors fostered an academic atmosphere that is hostile to political dissent. That contradicts Hackett’s stated goals of balance and free-flowing discussion and demonstrates the extent of the Gramscian damage at Mizzou.

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This morning Joel Pollak wrote how emails between UMSL administration show how the university was preparing to go after student whistleblower Phil Christofanelli. Background of UMSL story is here.

Now we know that the publicly-funded university and its labor studies program relied heavily on the taxpayer-exempt Media Matters for legwork:

On May 9, Christofanelli published a detailed first-hand description of the course. UMSL officials were determined to ignore his evidence: “Provost Cope, regardless of the accuracy of the student’s blog, is fully behind the appropriateness of the course,” wrote UMSL Senior Associate Vice President Ron Gossen in an email to staff on May 10.

Gossen added: “Media Matters did our work for us in showing how it’s [the video’s] edited.” Indeed, the emails suggest that UMSL may have relied on left-wing blogs rather than conducting its own research. In a subsequent email, Cope appeared to admit tacitly that she had not actually watched all of the videos, as she and George had claimed. [my emphasis]

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Well, maybe John Sexton and I both gave Obama a little too much credit on this “intercontinental railroad” gaffe? When he and I wrote about this little gaffe we both assumed that it was no big deal, that it was juts a slip of the tongue — and an easy one to make at that — but that it was evidence of how the Old Media gave Obama a free pass on mistakes. But now it is starting to look like Obama really doesn’t know the difference between the words “intercontinental” and “transcontinental.”

The first incident that John found was posted at Verum Serum a few days ago. He found a video clip of Obama calling the famous American railroad line finished in 1869 an “intercontinental” railroad. Of course it was not intercontinental at all as it was fully contained inside but one country: ours. It was, of course, a transcontinental railroad as it ran across our own country from coast to coast, bringing our nation into one more easily traveled land mass for the first time.

Now, when John and I first saw this gaffe we imagined that it was less evidence of Obama’s stupidity and more evidence of the Old Media’s penchant for covering for any Obama mistake simply because the gaffe had never been reported by the national news. Obviously Obama’s verbal mistakes are not ballyhooed like those mistakes made by conservatives and this little incident was an example of that.

But since John and I gave Obama the benefit of the doubt, John found yet another instance where team Obama called the railroad in question an “intercontinental” project instead of properly calling it transcontinental.

John’s eyebrow was raised on this. He found the coincidence a bit too coincidental and thought it smacked of a mindless talking point, one never reviewed carefully by those mouthing it.

Well, I’ve been alerted to two other incidents of Obama making this same gaffe. (more…)

The newly publicized life-story of award winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas seems to be one of those revelatory stories that tends to confirm some of the worst charges against liberals and the Old Media. The media sees no reason not to break the law, it employs people with political agendas, and all the while refuses to inform customers of the “news” that this is the case. As it happens, Vargas is an illegal immigrant in this country and has been for decades.

Vargas won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, he also made tongues wag recently with an exclusive interview with the reclusive founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. But his chief journalistic interest has been as a political reporter for the Washington Post.

Vargas tells ABC News that he found out that he had a fraudulent green card when he was a 16-year-old boy trying to apply for a California Driver’s license. The DMV told him his immigration card bought by his family in the Philippines was fake and “warned him not to return.”

Breakdown of the law number one was his family’s purposeful commission of a crime. Breakdown number two was a government agency assisting after the fact. The California DMV directly assisted an illegal immigrant and his entire family stay here as law breakers by telling a 16-year-old Vargas to run and hide from authorities.

Vargas took the DMV’s advice and began to train himself to speak without his native accent.

“I remember the very first instinct was, okay, that’s it, get rid of the accent… ‘Because I just thought to myself, you know, I couldn’t give anybody any reason to ever doubt that I’m an American,” Vargas said.

Notice how his “very first instinct” was to continue to break the law and compound that by engaging in subterfuge. Not to try and become a legal citizen.

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The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof is a simpleton. There is really no other way to say it, no gentler phrasing possible, to explain how childish and uncluttered his tiny little mind really is. The latest example of his utter inability to think clearly can be seen in Kristof’s screed against Americans that love America. Kristof thinks that conservatives and Republicans should look with longing at the troubled nation of Pakistan and see it as a model state. He says that they are no better than Muslim extremists that employ oppression, murder, and terrorism as a tool of the state. No, he’s serious.

How does he justify this simple-minded, hyperbolic, partisan hate-speech? Not very well, I’ll tell you that much.

He makes all sorts of idiotic charges against Republicans, but the best way to understand how unthinkingly childish his screed is, is to simply imagine that everything he says conservatives support he must imagine that liberals are against. After all, the only way to see his calumnies as such is to imagine he thinks that he stands on the opposite side of the ideas of which he accuses conservatives of being in favor.

Let’s take his points and then imagine what the opposite is and you’ll see what I mean.

He says that Republicans are for the lowest tax burden. If this is true and he finds this a negative point, then we must assume Kristof wants the absolute highest tax burden, a crushing tax burden that destroys all capitalist endeavors. That would be the opposite, wouldn’t it?

Next Kristof says Republicans want a limited government so that, “burdensome regulations never kill jobs.” The only take away here is to understand that Kristof sees this as a bad thing. He is smarter than we are, you see. So, Kristof, then, wants a government that is so burdensome that it kills jobs. He must. He finds the non-burdensome government to be a negative against Republicans doesn’t he? (more…)

Surprised?

According to a University of Miami study, those historical rankings of American presidents that pop up every year or so are significantly weighted in favor of Democrats, thanks to the liberal leanings of academia.

Political science professor Joseph E. Uscinski, one of the study’s authors, said the new analysis shows that the overwhelmingly liberal academic community consistently ranks Republican presidents about 10 spots lower than the public would.

“I don’t think anyone is surprised,” Mr. Uscinski told The Washington Times. “Among the political scientists and historians that I work with, Democrats outnumber Republicans 8 to 1.”

What was eye-opening, he said, was the stark difference between the historians’ assessments of Republicans and the grades given by the public.

“On average, all the Republicans get the short end of the stick,” he said. “But the one it impacts the most is [Ronald] Reagan. It’s often difficult for people to fathom why he’s ranked as low as he is.”

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Hitler represents of one of the most atrocious periods in the history of the entire world.  His twelve year reign had a profound impact on the lives of many.  Throughout the years of 1933 and 1945, Hitler invaded ten countries , including Poland, where one side of my stepfather’s family lived until 1940, when they were forcefully removed and put into concentration camps.  The first husband of his mother was a Polish officer, and shortly after Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi Soviet Non-Aggression pact, he and other Polish officers were taken from their families, brought into the Katyn Forest, and summarily executed – simply for being Polish officers.

Under the Nazi regime, it is estimated that as many as between 11 million and 17 million civilians were killed – nearly 6 million of those exterminated solely for being Jewish.  It’s been only 78 years since Hitler and the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and their reign remains an open wound  – in the context of history, this is still a very recent occurrence.  Survivors of this period are still with us today, as are first and second generation family members , many of whom are right here in the United States.

That’s why on May 18^{th ,} when I saw a post in the Guardian titled Andrew Breitbart’s ‘Electronic Brownshirts’, my hair stood on end.  Who could write such a title?  The author turned out to be none other than Amy Goodman, who hosts the famously popular daily progressive news program “Democracy Now“, and is also frequently referred to as a respected “progressive journalist“, investigative reporter and peace advocate.  It was a post in defense of the controversial labor studies course that was the recent focus of a BigGovernment expose.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

The Washington Post noted that House Speaker John Boehner’s commencement speech at the Catholic University of America (CUA) was non-political. But the Post story about the speech was entirely political. The story slammed Boehner’s conservative Catholic views by using a student at the event—one of about 30 liberal “social justice” advocates—to argue that the Republican from Ohio isn’t compassionate enough toward the poor.

Here’s how the Post story by Katherine Shaver began:

“Katy Jamison strode toward her graduation from Catholic University on Saturday wearing the requisite black robe and mortar board—plus a neon green message to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). ‘Where’s the compassion, Mr. Boehner?’ said the 8-by-10-inch sign pinned to her chest.”

Jamison, it turns out, was one of “about 30” involved in this “protest,” out of 1,500 students receiving bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral graduates. And this is what the Post decided to emphasize. It is a case study of liberal media bias through deliberate distortion. The purpose was to portray Boehner as not only heartless but out of step with the teaching of the Catholic Church. But the ploy failed, based on the paltry numbers of protesters, according to the paper’s own account.

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Much of the class time was dedicated to political organizing. They brought in an organizer with the Communist Party who was in his early 20s, didn’t have any academic credentials and who took up two hours of class time talking about his problems with the Missouri legislature, and offering his phone number and telling people how they can join the Communist Party, so essentially recruiting …

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Yesterday I interviewed Phil Christofanelli, a student from the UMSL labor relations class taught by Don Giljum. Christofanelli discusses his experience in the class, how the video series came to be, and corrects the fabrications surrounding Giljum’s scuffle with a citizen journalist.

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Richard Cohen is what passes for an opinion editorialist in the Washington Post — not a learned one, just a bloviating one. Cohen’s latest, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” is at the same time as self-loathing as it is historically stupid. Not only does this nonsense Cohen ladled out upon us all serve an example that you don’t have to actually know anything to be in our modern Old Media establishment, but it is evidence that the profession of editor is long dead.

In his ten paragraphs Cohen indulges every left-wing trope that one can find. Whites are all racist, we don’t do enough for “the poor” in America, Christianity is the root of all evil, and it all started in the 1850s when the Republican Party was born. Most ridiculously, Cohen a-historically seems to think that the art of compromise died in American politics when the GOP was born. This last bit alone is guffaw worthy to say the least.

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