Eugene Robinson, the name-calling scourge of all critics of Obama who writes one of the anti-conservative columns at the Washington Post and serves the same function on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” has just provided another example of what post- — or in this case, Post- — partisanship looks like in Obama’s Washington.
According to the Post-partisan Robinson, Arizona’s embattled S.B. 1070 “amounts to a prescription for racial profiling on a scale not seen in this country since the days of Jim Crow laws in the South.” It is “anti-Latino” and “patently unconstitutional.” Those who support it are “xenophobes” and “demagogues … who delight in turning truth, justice and the American way into political liabilities.”
It appears as though the vituperative Mr. Robinson hasn’t gotten the message — stated by pre-presidential Obama on the Rick Warren show in 2008, repeated (with increasing shrillness, as it has turned out) ad nauseum during the campaign, and just recycled on “The View” this week — that “we can disagree without being disagreeable.”
As one can clearly see, there is never any shortage of political invective in Eugene Robinson columns, but there frequently is a severe fact shortage. In the column under review (“Immigration Helps Dems Long Term,” July 30), for example, he asserted that: (more…)
Before we begin, let us pause for a moment to thank our Almighty for the small pleasures of life, such as almost a full week passing without having to suffer through yet another high cry and desperate whine from JournoList founder and Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, as he dishonestly complains about his online cabal of left-wing “journalists” being taken out of context by the Daily Caller’s damning and ongoing drip-drip-drip of an expose’.
JournoList founder Ezra Klein
Yes, thank you Ezra, for finally realizing that you were embarrassing yourself with these complaints as those of us watching this story wondered why you didn’t just go ahead and prove the Daily Caller a liar with a fully contextual response of your own, using that unique WaPo perch combined with the magic of the Internet and your very own personal copy of the full JournoList archives.
While I never took seriously my challenge to Mr. Klein to go right on ahead and clear up all his contextual concerns, he might want to consider doing so now. On June 29th, weeks before the Daily Caller announced the glorious fact that they were in possession of all or part of the JournoList archives, Klein wrote the following:
What if I told you I ran a secret e-mail list that connected progressive writers with staffers for Democratic politicians so that those staffers could tell the progressives what, exactly, their bosses wanted them writing about that day?
Sadly, I don’t run such a list.
You have to love that last sentence. The use of the word ”sadly” is soooo sly. Especially when it appears, that at times, that’s exactly the type of list Klein was running. (more…)
Has a shadowy gang of left-wing journalists and intellectuals been plotting to manipulate the news cycle…
His answer is, yes, perhaps so, but they’d be doing it with or without JournoList. Salan is more right than he probably knows.
The list of those identified as former members of the group is now up to more than 150 names, out of 400 in all. Nearly a quarter of those individuals were connected with another media organization called the Media Consortium. The Consortium is an organization of progressive media outlets formed in 2005, a full two years before JournoList. Its dues paying member organizations include The Nation, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect, Ms., Democracy Now! and many more (a complete list is here). The purpose of the group was explicit and can be found on their website:
Our mission is to amplify independent media’s voice, increase our collective clout, leverage our current audience and reach new ones. We believe it is possible and necessary to seize the current moment and change the debate in this country. We will accomplish this mission by fulfilling our five strategic principles: (more…)
Chris Matthews strayed from the liberal talking points today. But don’t worry, it only happened for a little while. Two hours, in fact, before he was back to his old self, lashing out irrationally at conservatives. We’re not sure where Matthews’ original bout of intellectual honesty came from, but we’re pretty sure that some sort of JournoListy Intervention occurred to get him back on message.
For those of you who don’t know (and according to the latest ratings, that’s most of you), Matthews does a 5pm “Hardball” on MSNBC that repeats at 7pm. Today, during the 5pm hour, Matthews had as his guests hardcore leftists Joan Walsh of Salon.com and former Governor Howard Dean. The issue at hand was Shirley Sherrod’s promise to sue Andrew Breitbart. Well, that wasn’t the real issue at hand. The idea was to beat holy hell out of Breitbart, but things didn’t exactly go according to the JournoListy Playbook.
In the early part of the 5pm segment with Walsh and Dean, there appears to be some confusion over whether or not Matthews was aware of the fact that Breitbart posted two excerpts of Sherrod’s speech as opposed to the whole 35-plus minutes. But later in the segment — and this is important — after this discrepancy is cleared up and the full excerpt in question has been aired for Matthews and the “Hardball” audience (this, according to Newsbusters), a fully informed Matthews still defends Breitbart making the crucial and oft-ignored point that… (more…)
Today, on MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews acknowledged (and appears to be the first member of the mainstream media to acknowledge) that the video Andrew Breitbart posted in his July 19th Big Government article about an NAACP audience’s reaction to a particular moment in Shirley Sherrod’s speech, does in fact include Ms. Sherrod discussing her redemptive revelation (transcript from Newsbusters):
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, there you go. [Quoting Ms. Sherrod] “I opened my eyes. I realized it wasn’t about black and white. It was, but it was about other things, about poverty.” So … that part, that part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape.
This then prompts Mr. Matthews to ask his guests, Governor Howard Dean and Joan Walsh, a question that answers itself:
Yeah, but why do you think if this was a complete slime job, why do you think Breitbart kept that in there, Governor? Why did he keep in that part – let me let the Governor in here. Why did he put the redemptive part in here at all?
Dean admits he has never even viewed that 2:36 video in its entirety! Nor has he even read Andrew Breitbart’s original article, which states:
Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.
Of course that has not stopped Dean from appearing on multiple networks and ripping Fox News as being racist for having played the video of Shirley Sherrod released on BigGovernment.com (yes, the same 2:36 video he has not watched all — any? — of). (more…)
I imagine that the journalism profession has always attracted more than its fair share of people who are left of center. So in a way, the Journolist does not come as any great surprise. But what does stand out about it is the glaring in-your-face nature of the whole thing.
You see, the old school liberals in journalism, even though they were left-of-center, wanted to be journalists first and ideologues second. There was a code of professionalism, admittedly not always followed, that called on them to put the pursuit of truth first. (How one defines the truth is always the question.) Many of them would not even register to vote, or at least not register to vote with a party affiliation, because of they wanted to somehow conform to this code.
JournoList stands out because of the hubris of this new batch of liberal journalists. Forget old school; they are quite content to pass along emails and concoct plans to label people as “racist” who happen to raise questions about Jeremiah Wright.
The old timers were journalists first, liberals second. The new crop is clearly made up of those who are liberals first and journalists second. Indeed, their journalism is not an end in itself but a means to achieving their liberal ends. When the New Left began its Long March Through the Institutions in the sixties, it began with the universities and other centers of power. It is culminating in the media world. (more…)
You have to give mainstream journalists credit. No matter how high the evidence of liberal bias stacks up, they stick to the notion they don’t play favorites.
Rathergate? An aberration. A Washington Postombudsman admitting journalists favored Sen. Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election? Nothing but reporters chasing down history in the making.
Press blackouts on the Van Jones controversy? Oops, we missed it.
The New Black Panther case? Not enough reporters to cover it.
Ezra Klein, JournoList founder
Poll after poll after poll revealing journalists vote for Democrats over Republicans by a wide margin? Doesn’t matter, since they don’t bring their political impulses to bear on their work.
Meanwhile, the public’s faith in the media continues to plummet. And the one cable news outlet with enough reporters – and curiosity – to cover subjects like Jones and the New Black Panther Party, Fox News, continues to see its ratings soar. (more…)
My friend and thriller-writing colleague, the great Andrew Klavan, writes in City Journal:
Take the e-mails that the Daily Caller obtained from the now-defunct lefty Web service Journolist. Never mind the personal or psychological implications of a radio producer who lovingly imagines Rush Limbaugh’s death or a law professor who doesn’t know that the FCC has no power to deprive Fox News of a license or a reporter who wants to smear Fred Barnes and other right-wing commentators as racist in order to distract the public from the hateful radicalism of Jeremiah Wright, then Obama’s pastor. The point is not these people’s animus or ignorance or wickedness. The point is that what they desired was not victory in open debate but silence—the silence of censorship, intimidation, or the grave.
When has Rush Limbaugh ever wished a liberal’s mouth closed forever? Really, who can deny that Rush would happily argue a point with absolutely anyone anywhere? When has Fox News ever done anything to its rival cable stations but trounce them in a free competition for ratings? When has Fred Barnes ever tried to bully or intimidate someone into shutting up?
The JournoList scandal is getting worse every day and the Washington Post is at the center of it. Blogger Ezra Klein ran the operation and at least three other staffers were members. (Blogger Greg Sargent claims he wasn’t a member after he joined the Post.) In addition, at least one member of Slate and two from Newsweek, also owned by Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, were members.
Ezra Klein, JournoList founder
The almost constant revelations of political activism and journalistic conspiracy raise an enormous number of questions about Post policies, professionalism and ethics. As a conservative, and therefore a member of the movement JournoListers sought to demonize, I feel Post readers are owed full disclosure.
Any understanding of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics makes clear this list and the Post’s involvement violate a number of ethical guidelines. In fact, much of the code seems to have been ignored. Here are just a few examples from the code: (more…)
One of the most unfortunate results of the race card being played is the fact that the players seldom have to live with the messes they make. For purely political reasons, blacks and whites have been intentionally polarized, starting way back when David Axelrod led Deval Patrick to the governorship of Massachusetts, and now with the troubled presidency of Barack Obama. The administration has long since deployed the now well-known liberal tactic: opposition is racism.
Behind closed doors, this White House must be laughing their asses off at how easily the liberal media and activists can be manipulated to save their agenda. (more…)
You really have to hand it to the hacks and non-entities over at Media Matters for America. I mean, they deserve an Olympic gold medal for the gymnastics they display while spinning the news to the extreme left-wing of the political spectrum. This whole Fox News/Shirley Sherrod story is a perfect example.
Eric “Boomarwrong” Boehlert is shamelessly spinning the story of the firing of USDA employee, Shirley Sherrod, as a Fox attack job with all his little Maoist heart. He is desperate to make Sherrod’s firing a result of a Fox News smear campaign and his reply to the posting at Johnny Dollar’s website proving that Fox News Channel didn’t really even take up the story until after Sherrod was fired by the White House is a masterpiece of spin.
Starting with, “So many people, all saying the same thing. The same untrue thing,” Johnny Dollar goes on to show the timeline of how Fox News approached the story. Then J$ posted the words of a Fox exec, to wit: “Michael Clemente, senior vice president of news editorial, said the network’s news programs reported the story with caution.”
After this set up, J$ goes on piece by piece to show that the news channel did not push the story on the air until after the White House pre-emptively and hastily fired Sherrod in the wake of the video Breitbart posted on Monday last week. He then shows all the lefty newsies who made the false claim that Fox News was peddling the Sherrod story before a panicky White House fired her.
But the moonbats at Media Matters have to make this whole thing a Fox conspiracy, despite the truth of the matter. So, “Boomawrong” Boehlert tries to refute J$’s correct assertion that Fox News didn’t push the story. And here is his… cough… evidence: (more…)
The existence of the JournoList should surprise no one.
I don’t know everybody on the list, but many of the names are easy to recognize and these are all the usual suspects. “JournoLists” combining with a common goal, to spread a leftist agenda.
That Paul Krugman agrees with Joe Klein, who agrees with JeffreyToobin, who agrees with David Brock should shock no one.
The Diamond brothers, Thomas Walsh and Lucky Luciano -- ahead of their time
As a journalist I would never in a million years think to plan, organize, compile and collate stories among those whom I see as my competition. I want to beat them on stories, I want to break stories they don’t have and I want to report on angles they had never thought of. I like to do that here on Big Journalism I can read the other articles and admire the work I see and always try to come up with something better. I believe in competition. I love competition.
Besides, I might have a tough time finding a couple dozen conservatives in the media to collude with, much less the 400 or willing mainly Upper West Side white males who were part of the JournoList. I’ve have seen a hundred times more diversity at a Tea Party rally. (more…)
Last week, a post I wrote for Big Journalism which, unbeknownst to me, possibly inspired Bill O’Reilly’s Talking Points Memo later that evening. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t notice it at the time. I watch Bill and the rest of the Fox guys when I can, but with three kids in the house it’s not every day. In any case, my post and Bill’s memo were strongly worded critiques of this David A. Graham piece for Newsweek in which he downplayed the New Black Panther story. Last Friday, Graham issued a somewhat belated response to Bill and me (okay, I admit, I like saying that). Here’s how his piece opens:
Right off the bat we’ve shifted the goalposts. My critique was based on Graham’s biased handling of the material, in particular his use of the hacks and non-entities at Media Matters as a primary source, as well as his failure to get even Media Matters’ highly spun version of the story straight. Here’s a bit of what I wrote:
That second link–the one about questionable testimony–goes right back to Media Matters. David A. Graham summarizes MM’s lengthy hit piece by saying, “there are doubts about whether he was actually present for the incidents he described.” Well, no, there are not doubts about that at all. In his interview with Megyn Kelly (which Media Matters transcribes), [J. Christian] Adams plainly states that he wasn’t there…
That’s not a critique of Graham’s news judgment; it’s a critique of his facts. Rather than address the problem directly or issue a correction, he simply revises his original claim in the new piece: (more…)
Yes. America is not merely a genetic or geographic identity. Our country was founded upon a set of principles clearly expressed in the Declaration of Independence and ensconced in the Constitution. These include: God given rights; the importance of the work ethic; elected representation; local control limited government. All these uniquely American values are under assault from the modern Left, what I describe in To Save America as “Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine.” The President’s ideology is clearly more European than historic American and his policies are clearly going to centralize power in Washington. His economics are going to keep American unemployed while his total lack of reality in foreign policy makes America vulnerable. Collectively, this assault on our core identity and the danger to our economy and safety makes our situation pretty dire.
Q. If so, why did John McCain and the Republicans take so many issues off the table in the 2008 election, especially any meaningful discussion of Obama’s radical background and associates?
It was a mistake. Too many Republican politicians and consultants are anti-intellectual, don’t do their homework, and aren’t prepared to engage in a lengthy, intellectual debate with the editor of the Harvard Law review who taught at the University of Chicago. In order to convince the American people we should govern, we have to be willing to stand on the same stage as our opponents and debate. To quote Margaret Thatcher, “First you win the argument then you win the vote.” If you are not prepared to do your homework and learn the argument, you are not going to win it.
Q. In the introduction to your book, you refer to the legislative program of Obama and the Democrats as “alien ideology,” and quote your daughter as saying that “we were told to vote for change we could believe in and found we had elected people who wanted to change what we believe.” Why did this come as a shock to so many people? Did the media not do its job? (more…)
As the November mid-term elections draw near, race arsonists’ political distractions are seen in full action. Facing defeat at the polls, the Left is desperately resorting to its only remaining trick.
With different styles and brands of utopian-driven influence — from the dependent welfare state of the American Democratic party, the socialism of Marxist/Leninists’ Workers’ Paradise, the Open Society of Soros’ idol Karl Popper, or any of the current collective salvations of social justice — examining the tactics as they occur is an enlightening exercise.
On Sunday’s This Week, President Obama’s defacto spokesman, V.P. Joe Biden, was sent to poison the well. Host Jake Tapper asked, “The NAACP had a convention in the last week, and they passed a resolution saying that elements of the Tea Party are racist. Do you think elements of the Tea Party are racist?”
The presidential reply is as follows:
Well, the truth is that at least elements that were involved in some of the Tea Party folks expressed racist views, you saw that on television. But, I don’t think — I don’t — I wouldn’t characterize the Tea Party as racist.
There are individuals who are either members of or on the periphery of some of their things, their — their protests — that have expressed really unfortunate comments. And, again, it was all over TV, all over your network, you know? A black Congressman walking up the stairs of the Capitol.
First off, I want to express my gratitude to Tucker Carlson, The Daily Caller, Jonathan Strong and whoever released the JournoList archives for doing a remarkably righteous service for their country. Those of us who have watched the media for any amount of time aren’t at all surprised by these revelations, but it sure is good to have our worst fears (and then some) confirmed, and to have these manipulative, race-baiting liars dragged out into the sunlight where they belong.
Ezra Klein, JournoList founder
Before we get started, one little, itsy-bitsy request: Please, please, please name the JournoListers from Politico. You know, Nothing To See Here Politico? No need to speak anyone’s name out loud. Just come a little closer and whisper them in my ear. Or we can do a Bob Woodward. I’ll call you, start going down the list of Politico ”reporters,” and then when I get to the right name(s) you simply hang up. Email me at: jnolte@DefeatPolitico.com.
The founder and ringmaster of JournoList is the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, who we should also thank for falling back-assward into a service for his country by putting the cabal together. Though it was purely by accident, if it wasn’t for Klein, America wouldn’t now have all kinds of proof (and more to come — tee hee) of just how morally and professionally corrupted the left-wing media is. (more…)
Frightened by websites that don’t only report on stories that are Soros- and Obama-administration approved, CNN decides it just better to demand that free speech be shut down.
Yesterday on CNN’s American Morning, Kiran Chetry and John Roberts interviewed Shirley Sherrod about her response to the recent controversy over the release of her comments at an NAACP dinner.
When Roberts pressed Sherrod about what she would like to see Andrew Breitbart do in response to her summary firing by Labor secretary Tom Vilsack over her comments she said, “apologize.” That was the extent after rephrasing multiple times, “an apology.”
Apparently that wasn’t enough for Chetry. She responded by saying, “Would you like to see his site shut down?”
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann came back from vacation to rant about the Sherrod story and now CNN is directing, completely unprompted by their guest, Sherrod to demand that Breitbart’s site be shut down. Olbermann and the rest of the left haven’t stopped blaming Fox News since Sherrod lost her job at lightning speed for her own comments that were in context (even though Fox News didn’t report on the Sherrod story until after she lost her job).
How do we go from “an apology” to shutting down free speech? It’s easy for the fascist left. (more…)
One of the nastiest episodes in American journalism occurred in the immediate aftermath of John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate during the 2008 election. It was a potential game-changer and, for a moment, it rocked the leftist media back on its heels. Who can ever forget Andrea Mitchell’s gaping-fish-out-of-water reaction to Palin’s electrifying acceptance speech? For one brief, horrible moment, the Marxist Media saw its dream of a People’s Republic dying, shot through the heart by the moose-hunting mom from Nowhere, Alaska.
Soon enough, though, the counter-attack began… almost as if it was co-ordinated. And you know what? It was! From the Daily Caller:
In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race, members of an online forum called Journolist struggled to make sense of the pick. Many of them were liberal reporters, and in some cases their comments reflected a journalist’s instinct to figure out the meaning of a story.
Here’’s the most famous graduate of Cornell Cow College, proving once again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing — in Keith’s hands, very dangerous. Watch if you can this amazing portrait of a former sportscaster in the throes of a nervous breakdown, lashing out at both the right and the left in his historical ignorance and unearned dudgeon:
Eugene Robinson, the name-calling scourge of all critics of Obama who writes one of the anti-conservative columns at the Washington Post and serves the same function on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” has just provided another example of what post- — or in this case, Post- — partisanship looks like in...
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