So if I understand how this works, we currently live in a media world where “Juan” is racist, where “food stamps” is racist, where pointing out that a president who enjoys basketball enjoys basketball is racist. But “cracker“? Why, that’s not improper in the least.

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Well, I guess it’s okay to use the slur “cracker” for the for the same reason it’s okay to use the N-word. Some in the black community use the N-word and some in Florida use the word “cracker.”

Oh, wait; it’s not okay to use the N-word.

Anyway, what does logic have to do with the mainstream media justifying and rationalizing anything they do? But justify and rationalize Jonathan Martin did when he called in to Newsbusters to justify and rationalize his use of the word “cracker.”

You can read the whole thing here, but this is my all-time favorite part:

Let’s face it, you were on MSNBC where virtually every criticism of Barack Obama they report as being somehow racist.”

“Totally agree that there is now a culture in the sort of political media universe on both sides where there is this sort of outrage industry that has been created where both sides monitor the other and try to find examples of offensive comments that can be seized upon and stirred up entirely for political gain where you have this, again, faux indignation, but it’s really just posing as indignation,” he said. “It’s all about political point scoring, and I think it absolutely takes place now on both sides.”

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On Monday Representative Darrell Issa threatened Attorney General Eric Holder with a contempt of Congress if he does not fulfill Mr. Issa’s subpoena from October 12, 2011. Hardly anyone reported it. But then when I went to Google “Issa Eric Holder” this evening and a bunch of results came up. Unfortunately it was not about Mr. Issa’s statements. Instead it’s all about Mr. Holder and the Department of Justice’s remarks.

I’ve mentioned before it’s unusual for the Old Media to run any Fast and Furious news if the AP didn’t run something first. Same thing with this story. AP didn’t bother to post a story about Mr. Issa, but as soon as Mr. Holder says something they’re all over it. It’s quite pathetic and reminds me of Pavlov’s dog. This is the explanation of Mr. Issa’s letter:

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., made the accusation in a letter threatening to seek a contempt of Congress ruling against Attorney General Eric Holder for failing to turn over congressionally subpoenaed documents that were created after problems with Fast and Furious came to light. Holder was to testify Thursday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which Issa chairs.

That’s it. No mention that this is a response to his subpoena on October 12, 2011. No mention of the emails sent Friday night. But the media goes crazy and reprints this article.

Not every outlet used the AP story though. The Washington Post again had an original piece written by Sari Horwitz! Weird, isn’t it, that she writes original posts when the DOJ and Democrats are on the defense. Surprise surprise! The story is on the front page of the website.

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Senator Marco Rubio is a bona fide political star able to communicate his ideas and vision with an eloquence few can match. He’s also Hispanic and a Republican, which freaks the left out — and by “left,” I of course mean the mainstream media.

The media’s biggest fear is Obama losing his upcoming reelection, and Rubio is the kind of VP candidate that keeps the corrupt MSM up at night. Not only could he help swing the all-important Hispanic vote into GOP territory; he also hails from the all-important swing state of Florida.

The nightmare scenario for Obama’s MSM Palace Guards is this attractive, articulate young man taking it to Obama on the campaign trail while wrapped in the mantle of history as the very first Hispanic nominated as vice president.

Unfortunately, the MSM is corrupt but not dumb, which is why over the last few months we’ve seen two major pushes from two major news outlets to discredit, toxify, and marginalize Rubio. Oh, and both of those stories were riddled with factual errors that we’re assured were nothing more than honest mistakes.

The first hit came from The Washington Post back in October. Their information was so blatantly wrong that early one Saturday morning I caught them red-handed quietly scrubbing away their mistakes from the hit piece. This is what I wrote at the time:

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It’s been over 25 years since radio shock jock Howard Stern went national and in his own way helped to define today’s AM radio. So, it’s amazing to see the liberal media now suddenly discover a mean puritanical streak in what looks to be an effort to silence voices on the Right. And I thought it was the Christian right that seeks to enforce some moral order on the population?

With cross-over media and careers being so much in vogue today, should it really be a surprise that what may work, or be fine in one medium, could be interpreted as inappropriate on another? And why is it that only conservative voices seem to suffer this guilt by association, generated by the Left, to try and get them kicked off the air? This despicable political tactic deserves to be called out for what it is, the modern day equivalent of book burning.

Call it a Vast Left-wing Conspiracy, or some interesting connections if you follow New Media. It seems that not long after former Politico staffer Ben Smith moved to Buzzfeed, Politico may now be linking up with Buzzfeed to put some distance between itself and ideologically-biased media outlet Media Matters.

The most aggressive would be book burner at Politico these days appears to be Dylan Byers. After going after Big Journalism editor, Dana Loesch, he’s now targeted Erick Erickson for comments made on his AM radio show.

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Media Matters continues to deflect from accusations of antisemitism and extreme bias by trumping up nontroversies on other conservatives. In addition to watching Fox, scouring Andrew Breitbart’s Twitter feed, and recording Erick Erickson and Dana Loesch’s shows, Media Matters for America is also facing questions as to how their organization can actively politick, which is against their own mission statement. Their latest lie? “Dana Loesch compared Al Gore to Leni Riefenstahl.”

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Polk Award-Winning Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings made a startling set of admissions on CSPAN, recently. Not only did he admit that most “journalists” are liberals, but he implied that they really aren’t interested in just reporting the facts of stories. Instead he said they are filled with a liberal “moralistic righteousness” and their goal is to “afflict” those they disagree with.

In the discussion, Hastings laid out how he sees his work as a journalist. “I think any journalist worth his salt often has a real moralistic kind of righteousness to them somewhere in their soul… and we talk in grand terms about ourselves, you know, afflicting the powerful and comforting the afflicted,” he told the CSPAN host.

Not much “objectivity” going on there, is there?

In the video segment featured by Townhall, Hastings is initially asked about his “prestigious” Polk Award and this discussion led CSPAN’s Brain Lamb to ask Hastings about the ideological mindset of Polk Award winners. This brought Hastings to his admission.

Of course, if one has to explain how “prestigious” an award is, one should suspect it ain’t that prestigious! Prestige is something that others should assign to you, not something you should assign to yourself.

Now, you might recall Mr. Hastings as the man whose 2010 Rolling Stone article eventually led to the firing of General Stanley McChrystal. Hastings caught some off-record carping by McChrystal’s staffers the revelation of which made the General look bad to his political leaders. Even then, many might have questioned Hastings’ actions by actually publishing those unguarded and casual, off-record conversations. It smacked of agenda or “gotcha journalism.”

But as we see in this interview, as far as Hastings is concerned, that is what journalists are supposed to do. They are supposed to approach their work with a “moralistic” agenda guiding them. They aren’t supposed to just publish the facts and let readers decide. They are supposed to “afflict the powerful” and that with all the left-wing political ideology such a crusade implies.

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Left-wing operatives, like those who run Politico, are intentionally attempting to create their own reality. In the same way the left turned “30 Rock,” a show that ranked 106 in the ratings last season, into some sort of cultural phenom, the idea here is to push the political and social values of something no one watches into our country’s cultural and media narrative as though it’s something it’s not — popular.

Politico loves Stephen Colbert because Stephen Colbert loves Barack Obama and is waging war against the Right and free speech. America, however, is, to be kind, indifferent to Colbert. 1.44 million viewers and only half that among the 18-49 group, does not make you King of anything.

But Colbert knows how to play the game and understands that if he wants these kinds of hollow accolades and the opportunity to push his left-wing agenda and to have history revised in his favor, he must appeal to the right people, and the right people are not THE people; the right people are the left-wing elites who infest our corrupt media.

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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…)

Remember this? Yes, last Friday night the DOJ dumped documents on Congress about Fast and Furious. Anyone with an ounce of common sense & critical thinking skills would come to the conclusion based on the emails between Monty Wilkinson, Attorney General Eric Holder’s then deputy chief of staff, and then-US Attorney Dennis Burke, Mr. Holder and quite possible Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer knew about Operation Fast and Furious.

The majority of the media ignored the documents. They took the AP article and printed it, but buried it among other articles. Only NPR, The Daily Caller, and CBS had original articles. The New York Times really buried it: Even if you searched for it you wouldn’t find it. The AP article mentions the emails at the very end, but just repeats the talking points instead of using their common sense. “Mr. Wilkinson does not recall discussing this aspect with the attorney general.” Come on people let’s use our brains! Do you believe Mr. Wilkinson, Mr. Holder’s deputy chief of staff, did NOT tell his boss about this?

But Congressional Democrats and the media don’t think this way. Instead of investigating further they simply take someone’s word, even if it sounds suspicious. This morning I saw an alert from The New York Times. The Democrats on The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee cleared the Obama administration of any wrong doing. This is the same Times that ignored the Friday night document dump. This story appeared on the front page of their US section and is an original piece written by Charlie Savage. Ironically the article by Pete Yost at the AP is the most concise one he’s written about Fast and Furious. Gee, I wonder why. The Huffington Post put Mr. Yost’s article on the front page of their politics section. What’s this I see? The Washington Post actually didn’t publish the AP article, but had Sari Horwirz write an original piece? I believe that hasn’t happened since September.

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After President Obama was caught playing tarmac theatrics with Gov. Jan Brewer, everyone accused Brewer of being a racist. (Though, if we’re playing identify politics, I’m not sure how a man storming off a plane with a thunderous expression, stomping over to a woman only to read her the riot act as she stands there with a handwritten note welcoming him to her state isn’t viewed as sexist.) The media would like for you to believe that Obama never thrust his finger in another’s face.

Remember when Obama wagged his finger in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s face? Neither does the media.

Apparently, the Brewer incident wasn’t the first time Obama attempted to create “Tarmac Theater” for the benefit of the watchful press corps. Jindal said the President’s outburst, pictured above, was “staged.”

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The gauzy puffery that the Old Media slathers upon the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped keep most Americans in the dark about how nasty, how violent, how outrageous, and even how incredibly lacking in integrity this movement is. On the conservative blogs the truth is well known, of course, but the fact that few Americans seem to know how bad the OWSers are shows that as conservatives we are not effectively getting our message out there.

We're sure this Occupy Oakland protester isn't vandalizing this building, rather he accidentally fell into this window with a hammer. Repeatedly.

For the initial two years of its existence the Old Media spent its every waking moment destroying, maligning, and out right lying about the tea party movement. Even today you’ll see an occasional swipe at the tea partiers made by some lefty hater and the Old Media is happy to “report” the slander, naturally.

You might remember when Obama operative Anna Park tried to start a counter movement that she prosaically called “the Coffee Party” during the heyday of the tea party. You may also recall that those Old Media mavens, while daily lying and lambasting the tea partiers, fell all over themselves to play up the silly and quickly failed and forgotten “Coffee Party” effort.

Similarly, when the Occupiers hit the scene, the Old Media went into paroxysms of ecstasy over the whole thing. Even today, after conservatives have so effortlessly ripped away the veneer from the absurdity and essential anti-Americanness of the OWSers, the Old Media is still slathering OWS with unearned and illicit praise.

Most Americans are unaware that real communists and socialists and other anti-American groups form the core of OWS. Few Americans understand that these people are drug addicts and criminals that have indulged every imaginable crime at these events. From property destruction to child abandonment to rape to gun crimes, just about every crime imaginable from small to large have been committed at these events. People have even died at these things!

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Yesterday, Juan Williams of Fox News doubled down on his accusation that Republican presidential candidates are using “racial code words.”

Today, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic has followed suit with an article rehashing the tired allegation that Republicans are using so-called “dog whistle” tactics–“the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters”–i.e. white voters (Democrats’ use of race to appeal to the prejudices and fears of black voters is rarely subject to scrutiny.)

Jeffrey Goldberg (Photo: Bloomberg News)

Goldberg says that the Obama’s Republican opponents have alleged the following (original links, including one to Media Matters–itself the subject of serious charges of antisemitism–included):

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

I’ll go even further, and admit that I personally heard a presidential candidate give a speech–in a church, no less–in which he blasted the black community, and black men in particular, for the phenomenon of single-parent households; who noted that black children with absent fathers have a greater chance of becoming criminals; who scolded black parents, “don’t just sit in the house and watch ‘Sports Center’ all weekend long”; and who told blacks to “read a book once in awhile.”

That candidate was Barack Obama.

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***UPDATE: Some are arguing “cracker” is acceptable within the context of Florida. Newsbusters, who also caught the slur, sums it up perfectly:

Jonathan Martin is also the left-wing operative who led the campaign to bring down Herman Cain over 15 year-old allegations. This partisan campaign was so frenzied and over-the-top and outrageous that even left-wing media watchdogs said so.

And now we get another glimpse into what motivates Mr. Martin, as he launches a racial slur against Southerners on a national cable channel:

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Wikipedia sums it up perfectly:

Cracker, sometimes white cracker, is a pejorative term for white people.

You’ll also note that MSNBC host Chuck Todd says nothing in response to Martin’s racial slur. In fact, Todd doesn’t blink an eye.

Moreover, keep in mind that these are the same MSM leftists who have and will continue to attempt to define every effective attack against Barack Obama as “racist” or as some sort of “racial dog-whistle.” This includes FACTS, such as the record increase in the number of food stamp recipients under Obama’s failed recovery.

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For a few days last week, the leftist media (redundant, I know) tried really hard to make a “spirited” discussion between Governor Jan Brewer (R-Arizona) and President Obama (D-Chicago) into a “something.” Luckily, they’ve cried wolf (read: racist) so many times that most people just roll their eyes, pat the little media types on the head, and tell them to walk it off. There’s no crying in politics. Stop being wusses.

via The Media Research Council

After failing to fan the racial flames again, the lefty media and blogosphere (the echo-chamber) then went with the “it was disrespectful!” angle. Apparently, it is disrespectful to point your finger at the President. Now, assuming Brewer was pointing/wagging her finger at Obama, and she was doing so in a scolding manner – let’s go ahead and ignore that the infamous photo above shows Brewer pointing up at the sky, shall we? – how is it disrespectful?

This is the United States of America. Sure, winning office grants you a certain level of respect, but are we really going to try and score political points when someone uses their hands in an expressive manner? She pointed/wagged her finger; she didn’t flip him the bird. What kind of politically correct nonsense is the media trying to pull here?

One could argue that on day one of his Presidency, Obama – or his sycophants in the media, to be more specific – commanded a certain level of respect. But there’s a history now, isn’t there? In Brewer’s case, Obama implied the now-infamous illegal immigration law she signed was racist. His Attorney General panned the law before he had ever read it. Isn’t that disrespectful to Brewer in her capacity as Governor? Where was the media’s outrage over this disrespectful behavior? There was none. (more…)

Today, The New York Times released a chart purporting to compare what the candidates made and gave away in 2010.

This is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, because the New York Times, like a lot of liberals, compares Romney’s income from capital gains (which were already taxed as income) to Obama’s salary as president (which is taxed as salary), but let’s go with it anyways.

Why only 2010? Because it would reveal how generous Romney is to include more years.

“[F]ew people know which is how incredibly generous [Romney] and his wife and his family have been to people in need. This is not sort of a bombshell surprise. I think it falls in the category of boring, nice surprise,” Scott Helman, co-author of The Real Romney.

But revealing more data would also show how stingy the Obamas were.

In 2011 alone, Romney gave nearly 20% of his income to charity. Barack Obama and his wife Michelle gave only $10,772 of the $1.2 million they earned from 2000 to 2004 to charities, less than one percent. In 2005 and 2006, the Obamas increased their giving to 5% of their $2.6 million income.  Biden’s 2006 tax returns showed the he gave just $380 to charity out of an adjusted income of $248,459, or roughly .15%.

Just as conservatives give more than liberals, so too do conservative politicians give more often than liberal ones. Bill Clinton famously got tax deductions in the ’80s for donating used underwear. In 1997, Vice President Al Gore gave just $353 in charitable donations, or roughly .0017% of his income to charity. Multimillionaire John Kerry’s 1995 tax returns showed he gave no money to charities at all. (more…)

Via Project Veritas:

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 22^nd, 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.

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The modern Arab-Jewish conflict has played itself out on many fronts in the last 60 years. Israel has been vastly more successful on the field of battle, but the Arabs have managed to co-opt the media narrative. For a generation, the press has been sympathetic to the cause of those who strive to eradicate Israel. This has shown itself over and over again, not only in editorial decisions, but in the blind acceptance of reports coming from Arab sources in the region.
The problem is that those sources have repeatedly shown that they are not interested in reporting the news but, in many cases, in fabricating it. In many cases, these fabrications have been done with the active participation of “respected” news gathering organizations.

In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, the term Fauxtography was coined to refer to either the embellishing of existing photographs or staging others for the best effect to discredit Israel. The uncovering of tampering resulted in both Reuters and AP disciplining freelance “reporters” as well as having to kill pictures that they had syndicated.

The staging of news photographs, and news in general, is alive and well in disputed areas of Israel even now.

What remains surprising is how otherwise discerning news operations such as the Wall Street Journal still accept, uncritically, the output of suspect sources. Just this past week the Wall Street Journal, as well as a range of other international news operations, posted a picture submitted by Hazem Bader for Agence France-Presse (AFP).

WSJ's "Photo of the Day," Jan. 25, 2012

The caption on the photo explains that the man seen writhing in pain on the ground was intentionally run over by a tractor driven by an Israeli soldier. That is to say that the international press reported, without questioning, that an official representative of the Israeli Government had, without cause, purposely caused a grave injury to an innocent man.
The only problem is that it never happened. There is no record of anyone being injured. CAMERA, a watchdog group that specializes in following anti-Israel media activity, followed all possible leads to find the injured man.

Yet, after checking with both Palestinian and Israeli sources, it seems that the man was not at all injured, and there is no evidence that he was run over. On the Palestinian side, Tthe Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), which provides comprehensive weekly reports about all injuries, fatalities, incursions, and other incidents in both the West Bank and Gaza, makes no mention of this alleged injury in its report for Jan. 19- 25. In addition, the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency did not cover the alleged injury, even though it does report on Israeli army activity that day nearby in Tel Rumeida. And Ma’an also reported a hit and run incident, in which a Palestinian teen was hit by an Israeli driver at a checkpoint this morning. Presumably, then, had this worker actually been run over and injured on Wednesday, Ma’an would have carried the story. Nor does it appear that any English-language wire service or other media outlet covered the alleged injury.

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“It’s almost as laughable as accusing Fox News as being … news!”

The Fox News segment Kermit and Miss Piggy are responding to (in the video below) can be watched here, and you can see it’s a rather innocuous and perfectly valid discussion about the culture. As a response, and nearly a week after the segment aired, the Fox-hating entertainment media (which is all of them) viralized the clip, blew the controversy up into something it really wasn’t, and did so because they find it impossible to turn down an opportunity to prove they’re one of the minions in the club.

What effectively happened, though, is a week-old Fox Business segment was consequently amplified into the news narrative, which turned the new Muppet film into a political and partisan football. Only our wildly out-of-touch entertainment media minions would think this is a good thing, and as a consequence, a well-reviewed film that opened above expectations entered the divisive culture and political wars and didn’t do anywhere near as well at the box office as some had expected and hoped.

That, however, wasn’t the fault of the Muppets.That was the immature, clubby entertainment media. The video below, though, puts the Muppets themselves into this controversy, which will only further alienate a very large segment of their audience:

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ABC is back at it with their hidden cameras series, “What Would You Do?” They put actors in provocative situations and use hidden cameras to see how people react.

Alan Funt, this aint. “Candid Camera“ was a fun show where people laughed when caught in funny and embarrassing situations. “What Would You Do?” has a clear social agenda where they seek to find and expose people’s racial, sexual and personal prejudices.

I must say this, the reporter, John Quinones is a nice guy. We spent some time on the news set together when he came to Las Vegas while doing a story on a polygamist colony in Arizona. We talked live on air about his segment and then chatted after. You would be hard pressed to find a nicer guy in the business, but he clearly has an agenda here—he is an activist. Fine, it is what it is and that’s how the show is formatted. ABC has chosen which groups to protect and which groups to expose and they will do it in prime time.

Here are some of the recent scenarios where they used actors to get reactions from real people:

A Muslim woman attempts to buy some items from a bakery and a rude and prejudiced cashier makes bigoted comments to her.

Homosexual parents take their children to a restaurant.

Homosexual partners kiss in public.

Racial profiling of Hispanics in a restaurant in Arizona. This segment was done in opposition to Arizona’s Immigration Law (1070) and the scenario they posed would not have been allowed by the law, but not to bother, they did it anyway. They showed the security guard demanding “ID, documentation and papers” without cause. The Arizona law doesn’t allow that and ABC has to know that, but they presented the scenario as permissible under 1070.

The show admits a social agenda, but there is a clear political agenda as well.

Which reminds me, NBC used similar tactics when it sent hidden cameras and  “Muslim-looking” men to a NASCAR race to record instances of prejudice after 9/11. I can hear the producers at NBC sitting in a meeting planning that segment, “Hell, those NASCAR fans are a bunch of  drunk, fat, white guys who hate anybody who’s not like them, we’ll get some great video!” If they didn’t say it, they thought it. I’ve been in those meetings where similar things have been planned. Like the ABC show, you must first come from the position that the prejudice is there, or why would you set up these scenarios in the first place? Does that not show prejudice also?

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The protest endorsed by progressive media. From Huffington Post San Francisco:

Have you noticed that MSM started distancing itself from the occupy protests?

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