“Still looking to make a difference.” – CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux introducing Anita Hill … because making a difference trumps everything, including truth and decency.

See if you can figure out which part of this gushing interview is the most troubling…

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In the wake of Fannie, Freddie, a housing collapse and a financial crisis that was in large part brought on by toxic mortgages given to those who couldn’t afford them, we are actually treated to a serious lecture here about how the government needs to get even more involved in making home ownership a reality for “everyone.” Malveaux informs us that Hill has been leading a quiet life for the last 20 years in Massachusetts — was it in a cave? Did she miss the whole, you know, meltdown?

Talk about a disconnect. And now I am angry at Justice Clarence Thomas… for doing everything he could to help this dim bulb find job after job after job…

Malveaux doesn’t even challenge Hill on this obvious point of recent history, but this is probably due to Malveaux’s obvious hero worship for Hill, which sets the tone for the entire interview.

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Weinergate and Sarah Palin have dominated this space the last couple of days, but another story with major media implications is that Jill Abramson will replace Bill Keller as the New York Times executive editor beginning September 6th.  The headlines have been boasting that Abramson is the Times‘ first female boss since the paper’s inception, but this shake-up is hardly progressive: Abramson was raised in New York, is Harvard educated, has little new media expertise (if any), and has a long history of liberal bias in her reports.  She’s a daughter of the old, biased, liberal MSM.

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was quick to point out this incredible excerpt from the NYT article announcing the change:

Ms. Abramson said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like “ascending to Valhalla.”

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.“

Scary.

Taranto then goes on to demonstrate that Abramson has a history of “trying to tear down” the Times‘ competitors, most notably Fox News.

Newsbusters, which has documented dozens of examples of liberal bias in Abramson’s past, focused a post on Abramson’s support of Anita Hill, the one-time Clarence Thomas colleague who bears major responsibility for the fiasco that was Thomas’s SCOTUS confirmation hearings.  (more…)

When Associate Justice Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, his Senate confirmation turned out to be what he described to as a “high tech lynching.” This was chiefly because accusations of sexual harassment by a co-worker, Anita Hill, were “leaked” to the press, then given a position of prominence in the hearings. With this, the white, liberal onslaught against a black conservative began in earnest.

Following the tortuous hearings, the Senate rejected Hill’s accusations and confirmed Thomas 52-48.

End of story, right? Wrong. Although Thomas became an Associate Justice, the mainstream media has continued to remind people of Hill’s accusations again and again (in a not-so-subtle attempt to discredit Thomas and his conservatism altogether).

As a matter of fact, on October 24, 2010, a full nineteen years since Thomas was confirmed, Lillian McEwen, a woman who describes herself as one of his past girlfriends, appeared on CNN’s Larry King to revisit Hill’s accusations.

When King brought up Hill’s accusations, McEwen would not denounce them. But she did tell King that when she was in a relationship with Thomas, he was a “raving alcoholic” whose worldview was framed by pornography.

While King and McEwen interacted on air, I couldn’t help but notice that he never once asked her if someone could verify her claims. In other words, he didn’t seem to care that her claims might prove as vacuous as Hill’s had nineteen years ago. Rather, he treasured the opportunity to ask leading questions that succeeded in securing what every liberal the world over wanted to see: newspaper headlines highlighting a drinking problem and a porn addiction Thomas allegedly had in years gone by. (more…)

In the wake of reports that wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, called Anita Hill for an apology for her performance before the Judiciary Committee nearly 20 years ago, the Washington Post has come out with a purportedly new story that contains absolutely nothing new, or the least bit scandalous, or damning of Thomas at all.

Well, there is one bit of scandalous information. The subject of the story, Lillian McEwen, an alleged former intimate of Thomas’s is shopping a manuscript. According to page 384 of Carl Bernsein’s Hillary book, A Woman in Charge, Clinton cronies such as George Stephanopoulus, who is quoted, will no doubt now cast her as of the “cash for trash” variety of woman, just as they did to Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers. I can hardly wait to see those fireworks on ABC.

And she is silent no more.

She has written a memoir, which she is now shopping to publishers.

Not only that, but McEwen admits to having what looks like a political motivation for now having issues with Thomas. Good luck digging this out of the three-page article. Of course, if you want to know about any political motivations of women once, or now, in Justice Thomas’ life – fear not! The Post was all too happy to label his wife, Ginny Thomas, a “veteran political activist” just two days ago. (more…)

“Where were you when George Bush was President?” You know that question well. It’s been asked of each of us more times than any of us would care to count. Do you know how I usually answer it?

I was home, enjoying my life. I went to work every day and focused on doing the best job that I could do. When I wasn’t working, I hung out with family and friends. I went to baseball games, and barbecues, and obscure little hole-in-the-wall joints to hear some of my favorite live music over a couple of Guinnesses. Yum.

Why? Because while George Bush was president, we had a media establishment that was challenging our government, not our citizens.

I wasn’t necessarily happy with the direction of the country in those days. But I could sleep at night, knowing that we had media that pressed George Bush and our Congress on every single issue. I could know at any given moment what the “death count” was in Iraq because just about every channel splashed a persistent counter in the bottom corner of the television screen. When bills like the Patriot Act were first introduced in Congress, I never lacked for any detail on the dangers of the legislation. There was barely a single detail that went uncovered in the daily political grind. When there was a scandal to research and report, I certainly never had to do that myself. There were reporters who did all that.

Yep, I’m actually missing the Bush days now. I had so much more free time. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always done my homework and researched issues on my own anyway. I recognize that all media is biased to some degree (and has been for quite some time). But I could always count on the media to challenge the government in the days of George Bush. I wrote my fair share of letters, I called and complained about the spending, even attended a few protests, but I can’t say that I ever felt there just wasn’t anyone challenging the president in the mainstream media. Quite the contrary, there was never any lack of DC pushback from the collective press in those days.

But we live in extraordinary times today. There now exists this giant, open cavity where that healthy pushback against government used to be. And when the mainstream media stepped away from that opening in 2008, two things happened:

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Creative editing of direct quotations often lands journalists in trouble – for good reason.

The ellipsis, usually shown in print as a series of three dots ( … ) between words, is an important tool for the journalist. It signifies that words have been omitted. Without ellipses, extended quotations would drag on, weighted down with information irrelevant to the story at hand. The ellipsis allows the writer to leave in the important words and banish the unimportant ones.

Failing to use an ellipsis when it is called for is misleading at best and dishonest at worst, but that’s exactly what National Public Radio did in a report that makes a conservative legal commentator look bad.

Curt Levey, executive director of the right-leaning Committee for Justice, discussed the nomination of Goodwin Liu, a radical Berkeley law professor with some very unusual ideas about the law.

In case you haven’t been following it, President Obama has nominated Liu to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The reason pundits the nation over are paying close attention to the nomination is because they believe President Obama is grooming Liu as a future Supreme Court nominee.

If hostility to the Constitution were a prerequisite for the federal bench, the radical leftist Liu would be a shoo-in. Liu has said with a straight face that “free enterprise,” “private ownership of property,” and “limited government” are “code words for an ideological agenda hostile to environmental, workplace, and consumer protections.” Liu’s sentiments are reminiscent of deposed Ways and Means Committee chairman Charlie Rangel’s (D-N.Y.) infamous rant that tax-cutting is Republican code for racism. (more…)