Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy Wall Street email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media.

Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear. The list also includes a number of radical organizers, such as Kevin Zeese.

In these emails we see MSNBC’s Ratigan, hawking his book in the footnotes, instructing occupiers on how properly to present their demands and messages while simultaneously appearing on television reporting “objectively” on the story (when he’s not taking part in the protests himself as content.)

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On July 26th, 2011, Adbusters posted a page on its website that asked the following question:  “Is America Ripe for a Tahrir Moment?”  Only days later, Al Gore appeared on CurrentTV’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann program to discuss what everyday, ordinary, non-astroturf Americans who happen to be angry can do to get involved.

Surprise!  Guess what Al just so happened to suggest?

Here’s the transcript:

KEITH OLBERMANN:

“Obviously the first suggestion relevant to this would be to exercise every vote that one has available to one in the next sets of elections. What else besides that do you recommend to those of us who are angry, and who have been angry throughout this whole process?”

AL GORE:

“Well, I enjoyed your special comment last night, Keith, and I want to focus on one particular suggestion you had about using the wonderful tools that are newly available for the reinvigoration of democracy.  Now, they’ve been around for a while and more and more people have been  getting involved.”

“We need to have an American spring. You know, the Arab Spring — the nonviolent part of it isn’t finished yet — but we need to have an American Spring, a kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change, where people from the grassroots get involved again.”

“Not in the Tea Party style. There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party, I understand that, but that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch brothers, and promoted on Fox News and turned into a stalking horse for this right-wing agenda that a lot of people have been trying to push on this country for a long time. What’s sacrosanct for them is to have absolutely no tax increases on the wealthiest Americans — they are at a low level now — and to try to shrink down government so they can get it out of the way of powerful corporations and special interests, so that they can have free rein. And the Supreme Court has, of course, has now declared that they’re persons and make these secret contributions.”
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The left is afraid of the election of Marco Rubio as Senator of Florida in the exact same way as they were afraid of Sarah Palin when she was chosen as the Vice Presidential nominee by John McCain.  It has been clear from the beginning that both are ascendant as potential game-changing political stars and need to be destroyed.   So it’s no surprise that Arianna Huffington tweeted the following:
The reason why so few Senators are chosen as Presidential nominees is that the job is not an executive position; Governors tend to be preferable because they have executive experience.  Rubio was just elected to to vote “yes” or “no” on things, which is why Arianna’s analogy of “dictator” is incomprehensible and utterly unrelated to his leadership position.  There is nothing dictator-like about a Senator.  So what exactly was the Queen of social news media’s tweet really about? (more…)

In response to the announcement that I would provide my analysis on ABC News from Arizona on election night, like-clockwork, from the George Soros-funded Media Matters to Keith Olbermann to Huffington Post to Daily Kos to Talking Points Memo to Twitter (#boycottABCNEWS), the institutional left began on Friday to inundate ABC News with a wave of partisan objections and unfounded allegations against me.

Make no mistake: this is a calculated “astroturf“ intimidation campaign by the well-funded and frightened-for-their-political-lives institutional left to quash dissenting voices. It’s what they do.

What was ABC News’ response? Not standing up for free speech and the 1^st Amendment. Not sticking by their original invitation. Not standing up for diversity of opinion.

Instead, on Saturday, ABC News issued an official statement that was immediately heralded as a victory by the anti-free speech forces on the left:

Since conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart announced on his website that he was going to be a participant in ABC’s Town Hall meeting at Arizona State University, there has been considerable consternation and misinformation regarding my decision to ask him to participate in an election night Town Hall event for ABC News Digital. I want to explain what Mr. Breitbart’s role has always been as one of our guests at our digital town hall event:

Mr. Breitbart is not an ABC News analyst.

He is not an ABC News consultant.

He is not, in any way, affiliated with ABC News.

He is not being paid by ABC News.

He has not been asked to analyze the results of the election for ABC News.

Mr. Breitbart will not be a part of the ABC News broadcast coverage, anchored by Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. For the broadcast coverage, David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg will contribute reaction and response gathered from the students and faculty of Arizona State University at an ABC News/Facebook town hall.

He has been invited as one of several guests, from a variety of different political persuasions, to engage with a live, studio audience that will be closely following the election results and participating in an online-only discussion and debate to be moderated by David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg on ABCNews.com and Facebook. We will have other guests, as well as a live studio audience and a large audience on ABCNews.com and Facebook, who can question the guests and the audience’s opinions.

George Stephanoplous quickly tweeted, “Breitbart NOT on ABC network broadcast http://bit.ly/bgkseJ.” (more…)

In the face of what is almost certain to be a massive electoral repudiation of President Obama, the Democrat controlled Congress, and their far left agenda at the hands of American voters on November 2nd, the radical far left website “Daily Kos” is pleading for its readers to engage in a coordinated effort of “cyber insurgency” or what could be termed “cyber-astroturfing” or “cyber-turfing.”

Kos has previously engaged in this practice which is also known as “search engine optimization” or SEO. Essentially this is a coordinated effort to flood the internet with unflattering stories about Republican Congressional candidates in the run up to the November 2^nd mid-term elections. This “cyber-turfing” effort would cause internet search engines to “top list” negative stories from the Main Stream Media, leftist blogs, and other anti-conservative internet content by moving it to the top of search engine “results” list.  The effectiveness of this technique stems from the reality that most readers confine their attention to just the headlines or first few lines of stories about any given subject as they search the internet using just a few key “search terms.”  Kos’s “cyber-turfing” would keep eyes on anti-Republican/conservative media and blog stories that pop up first.

This effort is aimed at undecided independents seeking information about particular candidates who “Google” them on the internet. This “cyber-turfing” negative campaign effort involves using hyperlinks to redirect and drive internet traffic to specifically targeted negative stories about Republicans running for the U.S. House of Representatives. The Daily Kos is targeting these races by determining, through various polling sources, what are considered to be the 98 most competitive Congressional races. (more…)

There is more than one way to manipulate the public, and the progressive movement has turned it into an art form. Less than one week after their AstroTurf rally in Washington DC, where unions and socialist organizations foot the bill to bus people to the nation’s capital city, the Daily Kos has developed a new AstroTurf program with the objective to use Google to trash Republican Candidates.

Here at Daily Kos, we are going to engage in very different, but still very important, form of election activism. It’s a type of activism no one else is working on, and it is well-suited to our medium as a blog. It’s a grassroots-based search engine optimization campaign, which I call Grassroots SEO for short.

The purpose of the SEO Astro Turf program is to influence undecided voters by having them read negative articles about Republican candidates for Congress. This exploits the fact many undecided voters conduct pre-election research via search engines like Google.

Kos is urging their members to sign up for a program to conduct research and then link damaging articles with the purpose of manipulating them to the top of the Google rankings where they will be the first thing read when an undecided voter is researching their candidates. (more…)

It was April 15, 2009 when Speaker Pelosi pronounced the Tea Party protests as fake, using the term AstroTurf (as in phony grass roots).

The entire MSM covered that story and many worked overtime to brand the Tea Partiers as “AstroTurf” in an effort to discredit a genuine, homegrown movement the likes of which has not been seen in this country in decades.

Despite the fact that tens of thousands of people were part of hundreds of protest events held around the country on Tax Day 2009, NBC’s Chuck Todd appeared on the Today Show telling Matt Lauer the Tea Party movement was one that “hasn’t really caught on”:

On August 4, of last year, while on MSNBC’s Hardball, Senator Barbara Boxer joined in the discredit chorus, telling Chris Matthews that the protesters were “too well dressed” and too well organized to be legitimate: (more…)

A few weeks ago I noted the President’s support for an Organizing for America letter-writing campaign for health reform. This involved a web form and a few talking points which at least 72 papers around the country were fooled into reprinting as letters to the editor. Now I’ve I received notice of a follow up campaign by OFA, this time promoted by Vice President Biden. He writes in part:

Believe me, senators and their staff read the letters page — because they know just how influential it can be. Your letter could make a tremendous difference….

It’s just the first step, but one letter from a constituent is worth a hundred paid advertisements. So please make sure your friends and neighbors understand the benefits this law will bring to ordinary Americans — take three minutes and write a paragraph or two now:

http://my.barackobama.com/SenateThank

Thanks,

Vice President Joe Biden

While this campaign may be new, the talking points that appear in the sidebar of the OFA website are not. They appear in this March 24 e-mail sent out by the President: (more…)

They claimed to have “thrown the rightwing bloggosphere [sic] into a tizzy” with their dog-and-pony show announcement of “infiltrating the tea parties” on April 15th. Problem: pretending that you’re Harriet the Spy and infiltrating tea parties only works if you’re covert about it, otherwise, you’re just showing up.

They state:

WHO WE ARE, Crash The Tea Party style, is a lesson in Marxism 101: “A nationwide network of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are sick and tired of that loose affiliation of racists, homophobes, and morons; who constitute the fake grass-roots movement which calls itself “The Tea Party.”

Fake grassroots? Racists? A lesson in Marxism 101? It’s elementary enough that I’m further intrigued.

Their Twitter stream is rife with the sharp, lip-smacking sounds of liberal plebeians sucking up to government media elites:

@KeithOlbermann I love your work! Hope you like mine too: www.crashtheteaparty.org
about 8 hours ago via web

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UPDATE: The bounty is now $100,000 for any audio/video footage of the N-word being hurled at Congressmen John Lewis and Andre Carson.

***

After 14 months of committing 100% to health care reform, the day after the signing of the Health Care bill was to mark the Democratic Party’s new primary concern: destroy the uprising, annihilate by all means necessary, the Tea Party movement.

The first sign that a plan was in place was the ham-fisted, high-camp posturing of the most controversial members of the Democratic caucus walking through the peaceful but animated “Tea Party” demonstrators on Capitol Hill. There is no reason for these elected officials to walk above ground through the media circus amid their ideological foes. The natural route is the tunnels between the House office buildings and the Capitol. By crafting a highly symbolic walk of the Congressional Black Caucus through the majority white crowd, the Democratic Party was looking to provoke a negative reaction. They didn’t get it. So they made it up.

The proof that the N-word wasn’t said once, let alone 15 times, as Rep. Andre Carson claimed, is that soon thereafter — even though the press dutifully reported it as truth — Nancy Pelosi followed the alleged hate fest, which allegedly included someone spitting, by walking through the crowd with a gavel in hand and a shit-eating grin on her face. Had the incidents reported by the Congressional Black Caucus actually occurred the Capitol Police would have been negligent to allow the least popular person to that crowd – the Speaker – to put herself in harm’s way.

That crowd was a sea of new-media equipment. Not only were tens of thousands people armed with handicams, BlackBerrys and iPods, so also was the mainstream media there, covering every inch of the event. Why did not one mainstream media outlet raise the specter that perhaps a video would exist to prove the events occurred? I am still dealing with the same press telling me we didn’t prove that ACORN was aiding and abetting criminal activity because we “did not provide enough audio and video evidence.” (Insert laugh track.) Is there not a blatant double standard at play here? Nancy Pelosi tipped her hand that race was a central part of her strategy. She invoked the Civil Rights Act and compared it with the universally reviled health care bill. Her caucus is doubling down on the civil-rights rhetoric. There are no coincidences.

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Organizing for America (formerly Organizing for Obama) has a Health Reform Action page which encourages members to write a letter to the editor. After typing in your zip code you get a list of local news outlets with radio buttons you can click:

The next page gives you a large comment box to compose your letter and in the sidebar are a list of suggested talking points:

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You can dump only so much manure on a plant before it has to thrive on its own, and the same principle applies in journalism. An initiative that lacks grass roots can wither in the sun despite liberal doses of mainstream media Miracle-Gro—which explains why Air America found a more receptive audience in the press than in the public, and why Martha Burk’s protest against the men-only membership policy at Augusta National Golf Club drew fewer demonstrators (a couple dozen) than the total number of New York Times stories hyping her who-cares crusade (more than 100).

Having enjoyed seedling-of-the-month treatment in the MSM greenhouse since late February, Coffee Party USA—the supposedly less strident alternative to the Tea Party—designated Saturday its National Coffee Party Kick-off Day. With gatherings in “more than 350 coffee shops in 44 states,” according to its Web site, the fledgling political organization was hoping to make a statement. Instead, it merely raised questions, exposed truths and, worst of all, inspired ridicule.

So, Coffee Kiddies, you want to be like the big boys and girls in the Tea Party treehouse? Sit down and have a cup of reality. Here are 10 reasons why your Coffee Party Kick-off didn’t amount to a hill of beans: (more…)

Many people over the last few weeks have noticed the fawning media coverage on behalf of the Coffee Party movement. Moreover, no skepticism or research was done to investigate the claims made by the newest Coffee Party leaders. Simple Google searches, however, have revealed that they are simply former Obama campaigners upset that the Tea Party has been able to thwart their Leftist agenda.

As a result, I decided to join the Coffee Party’s gathering on March 13th, in Washington, D.C., to learn what it was really all about.

The meeting started by people introducing themselves and saying why there want to be part of the Coffee Party. Many were upset about the the Tea Party movement. Others had absolutely incoherent reasons for being there.

One thing that I noticed was that many attempted to appear nonpartisan and open to discussion. However, their personal tweets have demonstrated that, that is not their agenda. In fact, when I sat down to talk to some of the people off camera during the group therapy sessions (see video below of the sessions), I heard the phrase “Teabagger” thrown around quite a bit.

The video below captures most of the event. There were about 100 people attending. Thankfully, after being there I could see that this is most certainly not going to grow into the Tea Party movement, unless of course the media keeps propping it up as something that it is not.

Video follows after the jump: (more…)

What is it that the left and the Old Media said about the Tea Party movement? Didn’t they say it was not really filled with regular folks and didn’t they say it was not really a grass roots level effort because some nefarious “top-down” Republican groups were secretly behind the whole thing? That’s what Paul Krugman said in The New York Times. So did Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi — after someone taught her what “astroturf” meant, that is. In fact, the whole left-wing Old Media establishment attacked the tea party movement as some fake, manufactured thing and claimed that it wasn’t peopled by regular folks like you and me. All you need do is put “astroturf” and “tea party” in a search engine and you’ll get thousands of hits revealing the left’s unhinged response to the tea parties, whose spirit was so memorably captured in this photograph by Glenn Reynolds (the great Instapundit) at the Quincy, Ill., tea party last year:

So, since they seem to want us to believe that they hate astroturf, will the left-wing press get all upset that this “coffee party” effort really is astroturf? Will the Old Media explode with charges of “astroturfing” as it did during the early phases of the tea party movement? Or will they pretend that this coffee party business is real grass roots and report on the effort based on that false assumption? Already it seems as though the coffee party effort is not meeting any real scrutiny and I just got an email that proves the essential “top-down” style upon which this effort is built. (more…)

What product works best for hiding artificial roots? Printer’s ink, of course!

For more information, check recent copies of The Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which portrayed 41-year-old Annabel Park as a concerned citizen from Virginia who became the accidental founder of a new grass-roots liberal political group, Coffee Party USA.

In the articles, Park—who is identified as a “documentary filmmaker”—preaches “respectful and civil engagement,” even with the more successful source of her knockoff inspiration, the populist Tea Party. And in an online chat presented by the Post, she issues the following declaration: (more…)

I don’t know about you – but I’ve watched in awe as the Tea Party movement has taken America by a storm. People have questioned the authenticity of the Tea Party movement. People have called us all kinds of names. Nancy Pelosi called the Tea Party movement “Astroturf.” People have slandered us, tackled us, and yet the Tea Party movement has stood its ground, and is stronger than ever. I for one, feel the Tea Party is here to stay.

But not only is it important that people show up at the Tea Parties today, it’s important that they continue to show up down the road, because the problems we’re fighting aren’t going away just yet. But how can we guarantee that people will continue to show up? Is the Tea Party movement going to diminish over time? Here’s what I’m doing to ensure that people keep showing up at the Tea Parties, get informed and continue to hold politicians responsible…

Is the Tea Party only for adults? NO. An effort has been launched to get not only the adults who are falling into debt involved, but the people who are going to have to pay for this insurmountably massive debt in the future: the kids. Yep, the kids. We are the ones picking up the tab for the spending happening today. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this. (more…)