- CBS studio team “Tebows”: After a miracle finish on the first play of overtime to give the underdog Denver Broncos a stunning win over the Pittsburgh Steelers, the analysts and anchors at CBS Sports had only one response.

- CNN “Early Start” tries to prank Chuck Nice by calling him at 3am Pacific time, calls and wakes up wrong person. MEanwhile, Nice watched the whole thing happen on television, live.

- Charles Payne drops an F bomb on Fox!

- Bill O’Reilly defends Gateway Pundit, as does Rush. Our previous piece on the subject: What Is More Racist®?

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- It’s so bizarre to watch this interview considering how Bill Clinton used the IRS to go after people like O’Reilly. Still, the Clinton survival instinct can make them seem almost likable at times, due to the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” rule. That being said, the one thing you can depend on more than Obama’s arrogance is the Clintons’s backchannel maneuvering to circumvent an Obama presidency. If Hillary had any intent on stepping back into the ring, we’d see Bill distancing himself from the president and Clinton cronies in action. Obama’s selection of Hillary as SOS was “keeping his enemy closer.”

- Seth Godin on journalism:

We don’t need paid professionals to do retweeting for us. They’re slicing up the attention pie thinner and thinner, giving us retreaded rehashes of warmed over news, all hoping for a bit of attention because the issue is trending. We can leave that to the unpaid, I think.

The hard part of professional journalism going forward is writing about what hasn’t been written about, directing attention where it hasn’t been, and saying something new.

- Because the gross Sandusky headlines just won’t quit:

Jay Gray, the NBC News reporter covering the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal in State College, Pennsylvania, was arrested on drunk driving charges after he attended a drunken football-watching party at Sandusky’s lawyer’s house, reports say.

The Pennsylvania State Police arrested Gray just before 2am December 12 during a traffic stop.

He was allegedly at the home of Joe Amendola, the eccentric lawyer defending Sandusky against allegations he molested 10 boys over the course of several years …

According to TMZ, Mr Amendola invited Gray and several other reporters over to his house to watch the New York Giants-Dallas Cowboys game.

The reporters, reportedly, were all vying for exclusive interviews with Sandusky, who has only further raised public suspicious about himself in two awkward media appearances, says TMZ.

So reporters get drunk with the creepy lawyer of an “alleged” kid toucher in order to impress him and score an exclusive? Yes, please keep lecturing to new media about “ethics,” MSM.

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- A video dedication to Eric Boehlert:

- Brokaw on Trump:

“[Trump] is an utterly shameless self-promoter” and the media should stop enabling him.”

- An update to our story about the blogger slammed with the $2.5m charge, from Forbes:

Crystal Cox was that the judge in the case determined that she wasn’t a “journalist” according to Oregon law, because she was not “affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.” This has led to a slew of angry stories, pointing out that bloggers are journalists. But these stories have not dug deeply enough. The facts in the case are far more complicated, and after hearing them, most journalists will not want to include Cox in their camp.

This story is not like that of Johnny Northside Hoff, the Minneapolis blogger who was (unfairly) ordered to pay $60,000 to a university employee after a truthful post about mortgage fraud led to his firing. If you Google Crystal Cox’swork about Obsidian Financial Group, you will find a host of websites full of erratic writing about the firm’s allegedly unethical practices, with domain names like “obsidianfinancialsucks.com.” She mainly directed her ire at firm principal Kevin Padrick. His search results are ruined — dominated by posts on websites Cox created, such as “bankruptcytrustfraud.com,” “realestatelies.com,” and “realestatehoax.com.” Obsidian’s tech team found dozens of sites that appeared to have been created by Cox to write about Obsidian, says Padrick, and over 1,900 others that she had created to write about other people and companies. This is not the work of a journalist, but the work of someone intent on destroying reputations.

The post was also updated with feedback from the comments.

- O’Reilly vs protester.

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- Two super fun facts about Matt Lauer.

- The UHF of cable news now has an app.

- NYT stock downgraded. Surprise.

- Seriously, is there anything short of brain damage that qualifies as an acceptable excuse for watching MSNBC?

Take this evening’s Ed Show. Schultz accused Rep. Paul Ryan of “inciting civil war” and suggested Republicans might “want violence to take place in our society.” Not to be outdone, thankfully former Florida congressman Alan Grayson called Ryan and Republicans “the real killers,” akin to O.J. Simpson.

- Bill O’Reilly challenges Glenn Beck in the epic Restoring Battle 2011.

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As a communications professional, my assessment of the Obama Administration’s communications strategy is that it may be the most inept performance I have ever seen of any political regime.

Crisis communications is not a silver bullet.  Some thing simply cannot be repaired.  The whole point of communications in general, however, is that the job should never be challenging if the entity the communicator works for doesn’t provide fodder for the opposition.

The Obama Administration has repeatedly handed its opposition ammunition — not 9mm bullets, but everything from Stinger missiles to bunker-busters.  The result is the appearance, to this citizen, of a White House on the verge of panic.  I’m not the only one.  When legendary far-left blabbermouth James Carville tells the White House it’s time to panic, it’s time to panic (That’s no diss on Mr. Carville.  I love watching him.).

Almost none of this has to do with the truth or facts of any given situation.  It has to do with how it all appears.  Generally, it makes Mr. Obama appear like an amateur politician.

It Started Out So Well!

The Obama campaign had it made in 2008.  The GOP had put up the Grumpy Old Troll against a PR juggernaut — the first viable Black presidential candidate.  Young and slick vs. old and creaky.  The backlash against the Bush presidency had peaked — people were tired of the war in Iraq, gasoline had hit $4, and the mainstream media so controlled the political narrative that it would’ve taken a literal disaster to push the Obama campaign off-message.  Not only did the GOP face an uphill battle anyway, but now they were facing a wave of messaging that was hard to ignore: hope and change.  So powerful was this message that, despite it and the candidate it spoke for being utterly lacking in substance, it swayed enough of the electorate to create an historic moment for America.  The country had elected a God.  I don’t need to tell you how this photo comes off:

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Bill O’Reilly told his viewers tonight that he will demand that the FBI offer a statement to his show tomorrow on the Weinergate “hacking” incident.

His panel tonight did not believe Anthony Weiner’s claim that his twitter account was hacked.

Bill O’Reilly:

If a hacker is coming in and able to breach security of a sitting Congress person, it’s a big deal. I don’t care what picture’s involved… I want the FBI to tell the American public, and tomorrow I’m going to insist, what they’re doing about this… Even if he doesn’t file, it’s at the level now that the FBI has to come in and clarify. Tomorrow with all due respect Mr. Muller, the head of the FBI, we want a statement from you. With all due respect.

Reminder: We (Gateway Pundit Truth Alliance) are offering a $200 reward to anyone who offers information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the Weinergate penis hacker.

What drove Glenn Beck to tell an increasingly large series of lies about his participation in the Shirley Sherrod story that broke back in July, 2010?

Why would he tell both TV and live audiences things like this….

Shirley Sherrod, is the next example. We didn’t rush to condemn her. This is another seemingly “redistribution of wealth” woman — who I would bet that I vehemently disagree with on probably everything. But she asked for the rest of the tape to be heard, the farmers in the story backed her up. It was a turning point story. We defended her and said her side of the story demanded to be heard — because context matters…

or this?

I have a story I want to share with you that I haven’t shared yet. Do you know why I didn’t do the Shirley Sherrod story? Did anyone think that story was uncommon for the people that we have in the White House? That there might be some prejudice that is happening? No. I stood in my office with my entire team, and I said, “something’s wrong, don’t do this story.”That’s what saved me: the Sword of the Spirit.

As you’ll see, both of those statements are totally false. Glenn Beck not only didn’t initially defend Sherrod but he actually dropped the entire context that Sherrod’s video clip was originally presented in. Close to a year later, Beck still hasn’t been honest about his initial context dropping attacks on Sherrod.

So – why? Did Beck start spinning a story and was unable to discern truth from fiction? Did he enjoy the praise he got from left wing sources, who believed his spin?

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Jon Stewart got away with a lot of ridiculous arguments on The Factor the other night.  Stewart’s argument that Common wasn’t actually supporting cop killing because he somehow believes that both Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal are actually innocent of the crime – and therefore should be excused – is both irrelevant and ludicrous.  O’Reilly didn’t completely let him get away with it, but he went easy on Stewart.  Does Stewart think Rashard Mendenhall should be off the hook because he *technically* doesn’t support or sympathize with terrorism if he actually thinks Bin Laden’s hijacked airplanes might not have been the cause of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing?  Attempting to rewrite the history of clearly and unforgivably evil people is decidedly rejected by good and decent people.  Stewart can shove that argument.

Mendenhall recently lost his endorsement from Champion Sports over a few infamous, perhaps impulsive tweets.  Common wrote a damn love song about convicted cop-killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, went to visit her in Cuba, and named his daughter after her.  I have attached that song at the end of this post, because I want everyone to see exactly what we’re talking about here.  If you name your daughter after a convicted cop-killer, domestic terrorist and violent, militant Black Nationalist, then the song you wrote worshipping said cop-killer was not simply adopting an artistic voice, another defense Stewart attempted.  If your defense is going to be that you believe she’s really completely innocent, you better have some damn good reasons for believing so if you expect anyone to let it slide.

Common’s taking sides with Assata Shakur doesn’t have anything to do with his expert legal opinion.  He’s taking sides with Assata Shakur because he worships everything for which she stood – Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army (BLA), ethnic sectarianism, and the great socialist revolution.  He didn’t write a song arguing that even though Assata Shakur joined a reprehensible, racist and violent terrorist organization like the BLA and did a number of awful things with them, in this particular incident there were anomalies in the application of due process.  He wrote a song worshiping her values and her life’s mission.

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Truth be told, watching some on our side make an issue out of Common’s lyrics/poetry kinda depressed me. It’s an argument lost before it can even begin. Artists frequently create characters in their work, most especially songwriters. Did Johnny Cash really shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die? Did Bruce Springsteen really go for a ride where ten innocent people died? Even Common’s call to “burn” Bush can be defended as metaphor. But the real reason this approach depressed me is because it was totally unnecessary. Not as as a poet, not as a singer and not as a character, it’s just a naked fact that Michelle Obama’s White House guest defends convicted cop killers and opposes interracial relationships. Which brings me to my point…

Thank you, Bill O’Reilly:

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Some, like O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, did bring up Common’s open opposition to interracial relationships and his craven support of two convicted cop killers. In other words, on top of the lyrics, there was also a discussion at FNC (and elsewhere) about the full context of this extremely divisive and sometimes repulsive “artist” the White House saw fit to stamp with their approval. But Comedy Central’s “New Murrow” only wanted to discuss Common within a safe-for-Obama context (the lyrics) and in the above video, Bill O’Reilly calls Stewart out for this act of “comedic” intellectual dishonesty.

Naturally, in their journ-o-listic quest to put the story to bed before the full truth gets out, the MSM grabbed hold of Stewart’s dishonest attack on Fox News, labeled it “epic,” pronounced it “ownage” (want to see how corrupt journ-o-lism works? Click this and this), and positioned it as the last word. But this story — and some of this is our fault for making lyrics an issue — still hasn’t been properly told. O’Reilly understands this and to his great credit has no intention of allowing Stewart, the MSM and the White House to wriggle off this hook so easily.

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The story that Soros tried so hard to discredit via his pad blogging team is spreading, first John Stossel’s report last weekend, now Bill O’Reilly.

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Have you ever heard someone say that a rape victim was “asking for it” by dressing a certain way, entering a certain place, or behaving a certain way? You’d rightly dismiss them as sociopaths or enablers or sociopaths. However, a growing number of media figures– Mediaite,  Time’s Joe Klein, and now even FNC’s Bill O’Reilly– would have you believe it’s a valid assertion, if we’re to apply their logic concerning Floridian Koran-burner Terry Jones.  Instead of framing the recent murders in Afghanistan as a shocking overreaction to an insensitive expression of free speech, these personalities and publications focused their ire and blame on Jones.

Terry Jones

“This Terry Jones idiot has blood on his hands;  he had to know fanatical Muslims would go crazy,” O’Reilly stated. Ah, yes, because as we all know, the only possible response from the Muslim world would be violence; that’s not an ugly, condescending stereotype at all!  I’m no fan of Sharia, but to insinuate Jones “should have known” that someone would take anger beyond any acceptable societal standard without personally knowing any of the individuals who killed is just like saying that a rape victim “should have known” that the sight of her would cause her assailants to fly into an uncontrollable lustful rampage.

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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.

“And Bill O’Reilly who claims he’s such a patriot, how unpatriotic in my view to treat a president that way … I just find it astounding.”

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What are we, in round 9 now? Can we go fifteen?

In the video above, Jon Stewart does a good job catching the story up to speed, so rather than me recap, go ahead and press play. What you’re going to see is Stewart doing a lot of hair-splitting and then insist the argument remain narrowly confined to his terms. But the crux of his argument goes something like this: Megyn Kelly says you guys never speed and I caught you speeding. Period. End of argument. Context doesn’t matter. Why you were speeding doesn’t matter. Well, how far is Stewart willing to take that argument? Since someone calling for the death of an elderly woman based on her politics doesn’t qualify as a justifiable reason to, uhm, speed, what does? What if we find out the HuffPo commenter sports a little Charlie Chaplin mustache? Or what if he’s 95 years-old and made his way to America through South America somewhere around, say, 1949?

But, as always, Stewart is only Captain Literal when it suits him. On goes the clown nose and he then goes on to make it sound as though FNC uses Nazi references as frequently as a teenager uses the word “like.” But then he has to go back years to nail O’Reilly — which brings this argument full circle to where it all started… (more…)

Yesterday, in this piece about Stephen Colbert,I mentioned Jon Stewart’s attack on Fox News but couched it with as much skepticism as possible because, frankly, it didn’t pass the smell test, especially in the area of context. To have those suspicions confirmed last night by Bill O’Reilly came as no surprise (see the video below). Furthermore, I respectfully disagree with O’Reilly that Stewart should be held to a lower factual standard because he’s a “satirist.” Stewart isn’t a satirist, he’s a political partisan disguised as a satirist, a man as determined to defeat the right as Nancy Pelosi and Bill Maher. The difference between Pelosi and Maher, though, is that they step into the arena of political battle and fly their flag. At the very least you can respect them for that. They come to wage open war whereas Stewart and Colbert come to throw rocks while wearing the protective shield of a clown nose.

I love our side and there’s really no lower form of life than someone on our side who undermines their own, so I say this to be constructive, not destructive. There are a lot of people on the Right who love Jon Stewart, people I respect, some of whom I know and like. And I agree that Stewart’s very good at what he does (which is why I take him seriously). But a conservative admiring the brilliance of Jon Stewart’s talent is like a boxer admiring the power of Mike Tyson’s punch as he’s beating you senseless. You have to fight back and in that respect, last night O’Reilly did an excellent job of threading a very difficult needle. Stewart is not easy to lay a glove on, but this was a clean hit. (You’ll be glad to know that I am now out of boxing metaphors).

Another point O’Reilly made that should be highlighted, is how the so-called “objective” or “legitimate” media too often takes what Stewart and Colbert do as some kind of gospel. Because Stewart is a “comedian,” the liberal media uses that as an excuse to blow up what he does on their air or online without bothering to fact-check, even when the stakes involve reputations. We’ve seen this before. Nobody watches “Saturday Night Live” but everyone saw Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression. With a smirk, and as though it didn’t matter, the left-wing media let Tina Fey do their dirty work on Palin with the endless looping of those SNL clips all in the name of “fun.” Well, it’s not fun, it’s an attempt to dehumanize someone into a national punchline and the media knew it. (more…)

Andrew Potter at Mediaite took a serious swipe at Jon Stewart this week, dragging “The Daily Show” host over the proverbial coals for not doing his job in the wake of the Tucson massacre:

[Stewart] …instead of taking sides, placing blame, and ultimately doing the satirist’s crucial job of holding a mirror up to power, … took the safest route imaginable and blamed the media…

To quote Stewart: “Really? Really?”

Stewart did place the blame — on the deranged shooter himself, exactly where it should be. Unless he’s got some evidence to the contrary, Potter should come to the same reasonable conclusion. But it looks like he has other sampler platter items to fry, all while trying to shield what is perhaps the most pervasive entity in American culture–the media–from social criticism. Absurd.

The media represents significant power in this country and it is the last thing that should be exempt from scrutiny. In a classic conundrum, to fight power you must amass power. The media has been a powerful influence for a long time; it is not some romantic “truth to power” enterprise. Much of the media has descended into partisan cliques whose legitimacy erodes more each day. Has the media forgotten that with power comes responsibility, not an exemption from criticism? Do J-Schools teach this, or only as it relates to left wing agendas? Stewart did the safe thing … Really? I disagree; chugging the commentariat Kool-Aid is the safe thing, not going against it. Railing against the right, conservatives, Sarah Palin, guns… that’s the easy thing to do … telling your own that they are acting like buffoons takes much more conviction and a much larger pouch.

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Rep. James Clyburn (D- SC) went on government-funded radio Monday to advocate for censorship and government controlled “restraint on speech”.    He positively yearns for the romantic time of the 1960’s, before the internet, when the government’s “Fairness Doctrine” controlled the free-flow of opinion in our country.  Bizarrely, Rep. Clyburn concedes that the 1960’s had some “unfortunate” murders (some would call them political assassinations) but maintains that our society would be better if the government took on the role of censor.

We’ve grown accustomed to high-ranking Democrats calling for restraints on political speech.  They always seem to cite Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and always seem to overlook the far more incendiary rantings of Ed Schultz, Randi Rhodes and the odious Mike Malloy.  But in Rep. Clyburn’s NPR interview, two chilling new wrinkles to the speech-squelching movement are revealed.

Number one, why did Rep. Clyburn mention the internet as part of his tirade against free political expression?  The “Fairness Doctrine” was created to control the content of radio and television stations.  Newspapers and periodicals were never affected because, unlike TV and radio, they are not licensed by the Federal Government.  The internet (and the content that appears on it) falls under the same guidelines as newspapers.  Or, at least, it did.

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Is it because his ratings are in?

It began last night:

And continues today.

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We all supported Juan Williams when he was dumped from NPR for actually trying to have an honest conversation about terrorism. We cheered for him as he was hired by Fox News. I applaud O’Reilly when he has Williams host. I mean, when was the last time Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann had a moderate conservative sit in for them? Over the weekend, however, Juan Williams reminded us all why he is still a “brain-dead” liberal.

There is no doubt that if Palin went back to college at an Ivy League university and received a Ph.D. in physics that liberals would still say she was “anti-intellectual” or just plain stupid. They hate her. They hate her family, her husband, her children, and her beliefs. They hate her success and the adoration that she has gained from a large amount of the American population. This will never change. And just has these realizations were frustrating me as I watched this clip, I realized that Juan was right. Palin can’t stand on the same stage, intellectually, with Obama.

If you’ve watched 10 minutes of Sarah Palin’s Alaska on TLC or even a 5 minute interview with Sarah you’ll recognize instantly that she doesn’t mince words. Sarah Palin doesn’t beat around the bush. She doesn’t hide her meanings and she doesn’t use childish analogies about cars in ditches to illustrate America’s complex problems. She talks straight, albeit sometimes in extraordinarily laymen’s terms.

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