Just announced from Accuracy in Media:

WASHINGTON, February 1, 2012—Accuracy in Media will honor Dana Loesch and Sharyl Attkisson for their outstanding contributions to journalism in a ceremony taking place at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference. The Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award is named for AIM’s founder, who was America’s original media watchdog.

“Accuracy in Media could not be more excited about the 2012 Reed Irvine Awards,” Chairman Don Irvine said. “AIM continues to be impressed with the leadership Dana Loesch has shown to grassroots citizen journalists. Her fearless challenges to biased media narratives are fine examples of citizens rising up in the name of fairness and accuracy. Loesch represents the essence of our Grassroots Journalism Award.

“For much of her 30 year career as a news anchor and reporter, Sharyl Attkisson has offered a clear example of what an investigative journalist should be doing. She has flown in a B-52 on a combat mission over Kosovo, shed light on TARP, dared to report on Operation Fast and Furious and has recently exposed dubious green energy loans from the Obama Administration. We are honored to present her with the Investigative Journalism Award.”

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- Media enacts DNC talking points on blaming tea party for congressional gridlock.

- Jay Gray, the reporter who got sauced with Sandusky’s equally creepy attorney as a way to win an exclusive interview (and was later arrested on DUI charges) may have been axed from the beat. The New York Post reports:

NBC’s Jay Gray may soon be taken off the Jerry Sandusky story, after he was arrested for DUI earlier this month …

… we’re told he “was kicked off the story” and left Pennsylvania this week. Another insider said Gray was on a family vacation, and the network “hasn’t made a decision” if he’ll continue to cover Sandusky.

- NatGeo writer says God is intolerant. Take it up with Him.

- New footage shows Ron Paul may not have stormed out of CNN interview after all.

- Congress calls on Twitter to block the Taliban.

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Falling to your own media malpractice makes you irresponsible, not a “victim.” It doesn’t make you a “target” when other people publicly note the absence of your journalistic integrity. Politico missed this bit of logic recently when it attempted to blame conservatives for the misdeeds of various members of the media, most recently NYT’s Natasha Lennard.

… these critiques may just muddy the waters enough to do some damage to both the media and the fledgling anti-Wall Street movement.

For those of you who might have missed the scandal, JournoList was a place where hundreds of members of the MSM (and those pretending to be conservative journalists)  got together to hone their anti-Republican narratives. In other words, this was where every conspiracy theory those of us on the Right held about the corrupt media was proven true. This was also where the MSM’s ongoing “call them racist” narrative in defense of Their Precious One was likely born.

JournoList might be dead as far as an organized infrastructure (though I suspect it lives on in informal emails, instant messaging and texts), but the corrupt spirit of it all is alive and well, especially at Politico, where no less than three of their “journalists” were members of Ezra Klein’s now infamous JournoList: Mike Allen, Ben Smith and Lisa Lerer.

This sort of background and context is important. We can never allow ourselves to forget what these “objective” news outlets have been a part of. What we know about their past tells us everything about who they are and the deceptions and dishonesty they are capable of.

It also helps to explain Politico’s behavior when they do something like this:

Conservatives looking to delegitimize the Occupy Wall Street protests have a new tactic — targeting journalists.

That is the opening sentence of a front page Politico piece posted just this morning that looks at how those of us on the right, especially this site and Big Government, have exposed the ongoing collusion and conspiracy between members of the mainstream media and the heavily astro-turfed Occupy movements currently stinking up public parks throughout the country.

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I ask what are we going to do about it? There’s no doubt that the MSM is in the tank for the Dems. That knowledge and a six pack will get me a buzz.

You’re connected and have a platform. Put the question out to all the folks who read your posts, “How do we combat this extreme bias?”

The alternate media does a great job but there are a TON of really intelligent people who are too busy earning a living to research things. How do we reach these people, most of whom are “Your father’s Democrats”?

The answer to this question is simple: Don’t stand for it.

I was a liberal until about 1991, and what a shocker it was to discover that the very same media I had no problems with prior to seeing the light was now filled with lies, propaganda, half-truths, and any number of parlor tricks intentionally set up to destroy our side. Unless you lived through it, you can’t imagine how frustrating it was to sit through the ‘92 election unable to do anything about the corrupt MSM’s partisan crusade to elect Bill Clinton.

Keep in mind that this was before the Internet, before email, before Andrew Breitbart, before Twitter, before Fox News, and before talk radio was the force that it is today. At the time, the only person going on television and aggressively exposing this injustice and saying the things I wanted to say was one of my few living heroes, The Mighty Brent Bozell.

The good news is that it’s not 1992 anymore and you no longer have to sit around frustrated waiting for someone else to speak for you. Best of all, you also aren’t in a position where you have to put all the effort into composing a letter of complaint hoping some newspaper will print it.

If you want to do something about media bias — which is doing something for America — use the Internet. Also…

Use us.

Help us. (more…)

Soros blogs were left scrambling late yesterday evening after spending all day carefully constructing a house of cards narrative designed to spin Jimmy Hoffa Jr.’s incendiary remarks into a positive light. Media Matters specifically accused Fox News of “editing” Hoffa’s remarks — apparently “editing” them in real time as they came out of his mouth — and further blamed conservatives such as myself for “buying into it.” (It’s also important to mention that MMfA is a union-funded blog defending a union in this story.)

Right-wing bloggers misled by dishonest Fox News video editing are attacking Teamsters President James Hoffa, Jr. for supposedly urging violence against Tea Party activists during a Labor Day speech. Conservatives are also attacking President Obama, who appeared at the event, for “sanctioning violence against fellow Americans” by failing to denounce Hoffa.

Media Matters and other progressives hammered away with their ridiculous “edited video” narrative, their only defense for the rest of the day:

Loesch’s comments in particular were already way over the top. But they became truly embarrassing at around 3 p.m., when the whole story collapsed after Fox finally got around to airing what Henry had called the “full quote” of Hoffa’s “take these son of a bitches out” comment …

Except later on, after Soros bloggers spent so much effort attempting to spin this as a “doctored” video, Hoffa doubled down on the remarks and made it very clear that he wasn’t talking about “voting.” TPM inadvertently wholly destroyed the careful narrative Media Matters spent literally all day fabricating:

Teamsters union president James Hoffa would say it all again if he could, he told TPM Monday.

Hoffa riled up Fox News and the right wingMonday with a Labor Day speech in Detroit in which he called Republican members of Congress “sons of bitches” and said union workers are ready to “go to war” with the tea party next year and “take out” Republicans at the ballot box.

Hoffa said he’d say the exact same words all over again.

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Jorge Ramos is the most famous and respected Spanish-Language television journalist.  He is often invited to participate in the political roundtable on ABC’s “This Week” program and last election cycle he was given the honor of moderating debates between the Presidential field.  When candidates Obama and McCain made their last appeals for the Latino vote, it was Jorge Ramos who had the honor of interviewing them on Univision.

There is no denying that Mr. Ramos is the most influential television journalist in the Latino-American community and this Sunday he interviewed Andrew Breitbart for Univision’s version of “Meet the Press”, “Al Punto”.  The following exchange was not only an example of typical “gotcha” journalism but unfortunately for Mr. Ramos, it also shows that he or his staff might be getting their talking points from the sad clowns at Media Matters for America.

RAMOS: In one of your websites, in “Big Peace,” there was an article written by Jason Bradley titled “Terror Babies: A Growing National Security Threat.” Do you share Mr. Bradley’s point of view?

BREITBART: I didn’t even read that article but I can tell you this, I created the Huffington Post in the United States of America which is a left of center blog. I created my blogs which are mostly right of center and I believe in open debate in our society. That’s why I believe so strongly in the first amendment, so I don’t know the specifics of that article, had I known going into this interview, I would’ve read it and we could have talked about the specifics.

RAMOS: Well the specifics is that Mr. Bradley’s view is that children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants are terror babies.

BREITBART: I’ve never read that, I’ve never heard that and I’d have to see the context of that to give you an opinion. I would never call people that are born in this country who are from Mexico terror babies.

There have been 3,607 posts at Big Peace,  3,659 posts at Big Journalism, 8,039 posts at Big Hollywood, 7,329 posts at Big Government and 35,422 posts at Breitbart.tv.  For Ramos to ask Breitbart about one post from March of this year, that didn’t exactly make headlines from coast-to-coast is unfair on its face.  But then for Ramos to characterize the post as saying “children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants are terror babies” is the kind of mis-representation that could only have been made if his staff only read the Media Matters lies about the post instead of the post itself.  Ramos not only slandered the post and its author with that statement, he also misinformed his audience about an article that most of them probably did not read.

Breitbart’s answer to Ramos’ fabricated mis-characterization of the post was “I would never call people that are born in this country who are from Mexico terror babies” and of course, neither did Mr. Bradley or anybody else in the Big Peace post in question.

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The most unusual part of Congressman Weiner’s mea culpa press conference today occurred before Weiner came to the stage.

Andrew Breitbart showed up at the presser and was immediately mobbed by reporters asking about today’s exclusive pictures of Weiner on Big Journalism and Big Government which seems to have pushed Weiner into admitting the truth.

Watching Breitbart take Anthony Weiner’s Stage and speak into the microphone Weiner rented showed how far Breitbart has come, but more importantly how far citizen journalism had come.

After ten days of being vilified by left wing media reporters, those same reporters were tripping all over their underwear trying to ask him questions about the story they had doubted until today.  Not only that, but at the behest of the same reporters who trashed him personally and his stories, Breitbart stood where Weiner was about to stand and demanded an apology from the slanderers in the press and from Congressman Weiner himself. (more…)

On March 24, HuffPost once again revealed its subversive, hypocritical, double-jointed double standards — this time, in regards to the standards of conduct it applies to actions and statements by its authors (“bloggers”)… even off-site.

Olbermann is back with two clips courtesy of Mediaite. Olbermann vies for the self-effacing guffawing “aw shucks you really love me” but it’s odd to see him not snarling about Fox for more than a minute.

In one of the clips he thanks Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, and yours truly, which was a bit of a surprise as just two weeks ago he called me a “b*llsh*t mouthbreather” and blocked me on Twitter, but I guess things have changed. I never thought the donations were a big deal, the only thing was MSNBC’s own policy and how employees, if they like earning money, should listen to their employer or at least approach them about it before breaking it.

It did strike me as odd that he admitted we probably treated him better than he would have treated us. He would have been unnecessarily harsh simply because of ideological differences? Principle is principle and frankly, I couldn’t care less about the cosmetic stuff surrounding it. I hope at some point Olbermann cares less about that, too. (more…)

The Left nauseatingly pays lip service to the terms “tolerance” and “diversity.” In reality, they are highly intolerant and they hate diversity, particularly diversity of thought. They hate free markets and really loathe free marketplaces of ideas. As such, the stompy foot temper tantrums were in full force when it was announced that Andrew Breitbart and Dana Loesch, would be participating in ABC’s election night coverage. A coordinated effort between the usual suspects immediately, and predictably, sprung up. How dare ABC include people who won’t merely spout the Left’s talking points and somehow blame George W. Bush and people too stupid to understand the “nuance” of Democrats and their policies?  Oh, and racists, natch.

The first usual suspect to start shrieking in typical intolerant lefty fashion was the ever-inane Media Matters. Media Matters, an organization filled with tools so sanctimonious that they give themselves titles like “Senior Fellow.” Dude. You are a blogger. They, of course, offered only ad hominem attacks on Breitbart, like calling him a “propagandist.” Hello, pot! Meet kettle.  Cowardly ABC  immediately started to spin, by offering Media Matters this wuss statement:

ABC News’ David Ford told Media Matters: “He will be one of many voices on our air, including Bill Adair of Politifact. If Andrew Breitbart says something that is incorrect, we have other voices to call him on it.”

Because, of course, the liberally biased Politifact would be the one to go to if Andrew Breitbart did something pesky like, you know, tell the truth. The ever buffoonish Keith Olbermann weighed in as well and, having no actual argument, resorted to fart jokes. No, really. The Huffington Post joined the fray and soon thereafter ABC spinelessly caved and issued a statement walking back Andrew Breitbart’s participation on election night; a statement full of lies, even going so far as to claim that Andrew Breitbart was never meant to be part of that night’s broadcast coverage. Alas, email is a funny thing. The emails sent from ABC to Andrew Breitbart expose the truth. ABC executives, in an attempt to cover their own hides out of fear of the Left not only caved to the Left’s intimidation attempts, but also lied when they did so. A snippet: (more…)

UPDATE:
More scrutiny of the timeline over this weekend shows the internal war going on at ABC News.  As producers are undermined by on-air talent and ‘un-named’ insiders whispering to reporters.

The Washington Posts’ Greg Sargent appeared to spend his entire weekend taking deep-background calls from un-named ABC employees complaining about the Breitbart booking.

It looks like lefty bloggers aren’t the only ones irked by ABC News’s decision to tap Andrew Breitbart for election-night analysis: People in ABC’s newsroom were also caught completely off guard by the news, a newsroom source tells me.

“This blindsided a good portion of the team here,” the source emails. “And not in a good way.”

The infighting at ABC News and managements’ lack of control over their staff has become so obvious that even the ultra-left Guardian noticed.  They referred to ABC’s memo as:  ”distanc(ing) the network from him (Breitbart) with comical vigor”

—

George Soros gave Media Matters for America one million dollars.  Over the weekend, Media Matters for America mobilized a small army of writers, researchers and rabble-rousers to intimidate, pester and bully ABC News into rescinding their offer to have this site’s publisher as part of their on-air election night coverage.  This begs the question:  How much influence does Mr. Soros’s contribution ultimately have over ABC News’ independent decisions?

Of course, Mr. Soros didn’t give any money to ABC News.  But, ABC News clearly changed course due in large part to the overwhelming avalanche of pressure put upon them by the well-funded critics at MMFA.  Just look at the timeline of events:

Friday, Oct 29th

11:50 AM PT:  Big Journalism announces Andrew Breitbart and Dana Loesch have been invited to be a part of ABC News’ election night coverage.

2:33 PM PT:  Media Matters slams the announcement and includes comments from ABC News spokesman David Ford:  ”He will be one of many voices on our air, including Bill Adair of Politifact. If Andrew Breitbart says something that is incorrect, we have other voices to call him on it.”

Overlook for a moment the insulting nature of the second part of the comment (do they keep people on staff to correct Arianna Huffington or any other person of the left?) notice that Mr. Ford is confirming that Breitbart will be on the air at ABC.

Saturday, October 30th (more…)

Jerry Bever, general manager for Anchorage station KTVA, issued a statement today regarding the inadvertent voice mail left on the phone of a senior staff member of the Joe Miller campaign.  He claimed that the discussion his staff members had regarding potential scandals for the Miller campaign was taken out of context:

The complete conversation was about what others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign, not what KTVA could do.

The American public is supposed to believe that the staff of KTVA were sitting around imagining potentially scandalous stories that others might foist upon the Miller campaign and not ideas that they, themselves were conjuring.

Instead of just taking Mr. Bever’s word for it (like so many in the media and at Soros-Funded left-wing activist organizations have), lets actually hold the statements made on the recording up to the context Mr. Bever has provided.

Look at what was said and try as hard as you can to fit these sentences into that context:

MALE REPORTER: Oh yeah… can you repeat Joe Miller’s…uh… list of people, campaign workers, which one’s the molester?

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE VOICE: We know that out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.

[Laughter]

MALE REPORTER: You have to find that one person…

If they were discussing what others might do, why do they keep saying “You” and “I”?  Why don’t they say “They have to find that one person…” or “They know that out of all the people…” (more…)

On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times gave Rahm Emanuel the gift of a front-page feature story called “Rahm on the Record” by reporter Fran Spielman. I wonder how many of the other Chicago mayoral candidates will get this kind of feature coronation-style press? The Chicago media, even at this point, appears to be giving Emanuel exalted status.

In the Sun-Times story’s Q&A format, there were few follow-up questions and little-to-no rebuttal. Mr. Emanuel was allowed to dismiss questions and had the last word every time to spin the more controversial aspects of his candidacy. In reference to the Blagojevich trial, Spielman asks, “You were wheeling and dealing about names anyway? Was that appropriate?” Rahm’s answer: “That’s a characterization. They’re prosecuting the governor, right?” However, I, at least, appreciated that some of the questions were tougher than the usual softballs. Spielman’s questions were not all “How are you feeling today, Rahm?”

Unfortunately, if recent events are any indication, “touchy feely” press is what the Chicago media will be trending for Emanuel. Anyone who contradicts or attempts to circumvent that trend will be attacked and vilified.

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I don’t know if I ever believed in the infallibility of a journalist’s objectivity, but I definitely stopped flirting with the notion as a young adult. There is bias for agenda and bias for truth.

Though I work in broadcasting and host a daily radio show, I got my start in print journalism. I’m a weensy-government conservative from the Midwest, Christian, mother of two, homeschooler, and my hobby, profession, and passion is news. I regularly provide political analysis on Fox, CNN, CBS, and ABC, and have been featured before on Big J as a contributor. I’ve blogged since 2001 and was first attracted to the medium by its wild west aesthetic, if simply telling the truth that corporate media wasn’t telling could be so rebellious as to be defined as “wild west.” Now, with the advance of social media, the combination of the mediums in a new era of information distribution are endless. It’s a great time to work in this field.

This past Saturday I sat in a hotel ballroom facing a host of journalists from across the Midwest as part of a panel which discussed reporting on the Tea Party movement. I told them what I believed was wrong with corporate media’s approach, “teabagging” notwithstanding. I was invited by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Political Editor, Christopher Ave, whose attention I caught when I railed against a particular piece the paper published involving a fire at Rep. Russ Carnahan’s office (which the alternative media implied was perpetrated by the Tea Party). He guested on my show after the piece published and we had a healthy discourse on journalism and its objectives. I trust him to deliver fair pieces on the movement, on conservatism – not coddling, kittens-and-sunshine hand-holding and kid gloves, but actual objective pieces designed to inform, not persuade. Perhaps in my lifetime there will be more exceptions to the rule like this

That sentiment is why I was thrilled when Andrew Breitbart unveiled Big Journalism because I knew that we had yet another eye to witness to the media’s dereliction of duty. I am honored to be chosen as Michael Walsh’s successor. (more…)

Big Journalism Editor-In-Chief Michael Walsh appeared on Michael Medved’s syndicated radio show last week and was given the rare opportunity to actually engage one of the left-wing “Senior Fellows”  from Media Matters for America.

Our pals over at the Soros-Funded Left-Wing Hack-Attack webpage have never accepted invitations to actually engage in ideas and back-up their outrageous and unfounded attacks on this website and the Tea Party movement.

But somehow, Senior Fellow Will Bunch agreed to go one-on-one with Walsh on Medved’s show.  I’ll let our readers draw their own conclusions about just how badly Walsh creamed Bunch.  I think this audio speaks for itself:

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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:

Last week, I found myself in the crosshairs of conservative ire because a news analysis I wrote didn’t take the allegations of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party story as seriously as conservatives felt it should.

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…)

The purpose of local TV news is to scare women 18-54 into watching the next newscast.

I put that line in a column in Big Journalism last January and people had no problem figuring out what I meant.

You can be reminded of this mission of local TV news just about any time you watch a newscast. You will almost always find stories of “baby buggies that kill” and “infant seats that maim.” I was reminded of the mission of local TV news once again this week when I heard this promo (the name of the TV station is changed because it’s irrelevant since they are all the same—but the quote is accurate):

On Super Duper Action My Eyewitness News live at 11, police say a man is driving up and down a valley street looking for women to attack. We’ll tell you where you need to be on extra alert.

So, let me get this straight. Cops say there’s a guy out there right now who wants to attack my wife and daughter, but you won’t tell me where he is until tonight at 11pm. Did I hear that right? Yes, I did—I played it back on TiVo so my wife and daughter could hear. (more…)