I take no pleasure in the misery of others, but as someone who recognizes that the mainstream media is the arch-villain in the fight for human liberty and the survival of an America that doesn’t resemble a European socialist country – yesterday, it was impossible for my heart to do anything other than leap for joy when I read that the New York Times lost $40 million in 2011.

No one wants to see anyone lose their job, but the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and all the rest are nothing more than lairs for arch-villains, and when these hollowed-out volcanoes are bankrupted, the virtue of this outweighs what happens to the faceless henchmen who are now out on the streets looking for work. I wish them luck. I wish things were different. But this is about saving our country and humanity.

Over in England, some are openly panicking over the future of newspapers:

This isn’t a criticism of Steve Kroft, but has the CBS news veteran ever before left the confines of “60 Minutes” to go out on the cable news circuit with his interview subject (in this case our own Peter Schweizer) in order to push a story?

For those of us obsessed with news and the narrative and what’s happening in Washington D.C., the video below is dogs and cats sleeping together:

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Consider the dynamic. You have an openly conservative Breitbart editor, Peter Schweizer, joining forces with the mainstream media (Kroft) to expose the immoral insider trading taking place within the ranks of both Republican and Democrat Congressional members, and doing so on MSNBC.

Meanwhile, as The Huffington Post pretends none of this can possibly be happening and Politico gives it only cursory coverage, Schweizer’s story is shaking up D.C. as hearings are called, a GOP presidential candidate catches the wave, and Rep. Barney Frank(!) suddenly discovers his inner reformer.

These are strange times and strange bedfellows, to be sure. But this isn’t about partisan politics. If it were, Andrew Breitbart, the publisher of this site, wouldn’t have openly called for a sitting Republican Congressman to resign.

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I was in complete agreement when, last month, the triumvirate of right-wing firebrands Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart all condemned me for being more than just a journalist. They are correct, and I agree with every pundit who argues that I have no place in the mainstream media. – Former New York Times freelance reporter Natasha Lennard

What Ms. Lennard is referencing in her must-read piece is this bust that came courtesy of Big Government’s Lee Stranahan, where the one-time New York Times freelance reporter was outed as a supporter and activist for a movement (Occupy Wall Street) she was supposed to be covering as an objective observer. In response to the Big Government article, the New York Times quickly assured its readers that they had “no plans” to have her do any more freelance coverage of the ongoing protests.

The result of this was an apparent epiphany on Ms. Lennard’s part and while she’s obviously on the other side of my political spectrum, I’d still say this is a healthy decision:

In my view, it now makes little sense to be objective about Occupy Wall Street and its various, amorphous iterations across the country. As Matt Taibbi wrote recently in Rolling Stone about learning to love OWS: “People don’t know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.”

If the diffuse and experimental disruptions, discussions, assemblies, occupations, strikes, marches, chants and more that constitute OWS are primarily coherent only in so far as they agree that the current status quo, rife with inequity and cruelty, is wrong — I cannot but consider myself in agreement. As such, it would be disingenuous to play the “objective reporter.”

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This morning, Big Government posted video from an event at the National Press Club at which Faya Rose Touré (formerly Rose Sanders), an attorney from the $2.7 billion Pigford “black farmers” discrimination settlement, revealed major flaws in the claims process. Her statements support previous reporting by Big Government and Big Journalism–reporting which Media Matters ruthlessly and wrongly attacked as false.

At the same press conference, the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) and the Nation of Islam (NOI) joined in a barrage of racist, antisemitic, and homophobic rhetoric that went unreported by the mainstream media, though the event took place within their very own clubhouse.

The newly released video confirms much of what Pigford’s critics have been saying, destroying previous attempts by George Soros’s Big Labor-funded minions at Media Matters to hide the truth.

From Breitbart media’s earliest reporting on the Pigford settlement, Media Matters began recklessly hurling accusations of racism, and lying about Andrew Breitbart and others’ writing about the issue, while discounting facts now shown to be correct.

In hindsight, that appears to have been an orchestrated effort to suppress the truth behind Pigford and potentially keep the scandal from surfacing in mainstream media outlets.

It is an effort that has failed.

For example, Media Matters tried to dispel any link between Pigford and the New Black Panther Party (“Race-baiting confluence: On Breitbart site, Adams links Pigford to New Black Panthers“).

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Earlier this week, the Huffington Post published an article suggesting Andrew Breitbart may have doctored a video published here and Breitbart.TV that made CBS’s Norah O’Donnell look like the biased liberal she really is.  Of course, Breitbart did no such thing.  After HuffPo brass was alerted to what their bloggers and editors were up to, they jettisoned the article and posted a correction and apology in its stead.

Attempting to marginalize conservatives is beneficial to the left for at least two reasons: 1) the left doesn’t have a lot of effective arguments, and 2) even if they did, discrediting a person once burns far fewer calories than debating each point they make one by one. It’s easier to call someone a racist/sexist/bigot or a liar than it is to prove your own arguments are intellectually sound time after time; after all, who would take what a bigot or a liar has to say seriously?  By painting a person with that brush, the left has preemptively won any future debate they ever have with the “discredited” person.

In the case of Andrew Breitbart, this is exactly what the left has tried to do.  If people hear that “he’s the guy who doctors videos” over and over, they’ll eventually believe it, even if it’s not true, and will no longer think of one of the right’s most effective communicators as a credible source.  NBC, Media Matters, HuffPo, and countless others have tried for years to employ this guilty-until-proven-innocent method of character assassination.

We’ve heard this story before, and we will hear it again… right now.  From Tuesday’s Adweek:

So there you have it, HuffPo caved to Breitbart.  Not “HuffPo Righted a Wrong Done to Breitbart,” or “HuffPo Retracts a Baseless Attack on Breitbart,” Adweek’s editors want readers to focus on HuffPo’s capitulation to the devious Breitbart and his ability to make the liberal media bend to his will.  The word “caves” implies that HuffPo may have been making an important point, but Breitbart somehow applied such unbelievable amounts of pressure that they had no choice but to let the man have his way. As it happens, the rest of the piece was mostly accurate, but the tone of any article is set by the headline, and that’s exactly why the Adweek editors gave this post the title they did.

This whole saga is a lesson in how a meme is created; for those of you unfamiliar with the term, here is the dictionary.com definition*: (more…)

I don’t expect top-notch commentary whenever The Huffington Post is concerned, but I do expect accuracy.

In their latest piece, HuffPo accuses Andrew Breitbart of “editing” this clip wherein Norah O’Donnell exclaims to Jay Carney: “We got nothing!”

It was a video requested by me for this post and I watched the broadcast as I was prepping for my radio show. I reached out to Breitbart.tv editor Larry O’Connor and asked him if he saw it and if he could, to pull that clip straight from the air, as he has the ability to do so with live television. O’Connor did not “edit” the video in anyway, I did not “edit” that video in any way, and Breitbart certainly did not edit the video in any way and any rational, bipedal human with more than two brain cells to rub together could see that as well.

I watched the entire presser and even within the context of O’Donnell’s questions it was difficult to make out the beginning of her remark due to crosstalk, which was noted in the original article and skimmed over by HuffPo. I wrote of this on Big Journalism:

It’s difficult to tell if O’Donnell is quoting the Democratic base for the sake of the question (inaudible due to crosstalk in the beginning) or if she included herself in that “we” to cast her lot in with Democrats on this, but it’s an interesting clip.

What makes it even more interesting, though, is when Carney tells O’Donnell: “We didn’t get the grand bargain … up front.”

Wait! that’s on … a… Breitbart site? A post that debunks the entire narrative coming from HuffPo? But, but! Why is it an interesting clip? Because a member of the press that isn’t Ed Henry or Jake Tapper is arguing with the White House. A “hate-hate” (strong, but you get the idea) relationship, exactly as the media and government should be.

Shame they skipped clarifying this in an effort to avoid writing about how Joe Biden and almost every single MSM outlet yesterday called tea partiers “terrorists” and/or “extremists” in a tantrum over the economy. That seems like a pretty big “edit” from the pages of HuffPo, no?

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Considering how incredibly rare it is to find balanced global warming reporting in the mainstream media, Noel Sheppard’s 4/24 NewsBusters headline was worthy of a double-take: “Retired Anchorman Apologizes for Presenting Both Sides of Global Warming Debate.” Having written an American Thinker article last year where I quantified the outright bias at the PBS NewsHour to be a ratio of 3 “skeptic” to 200+ “pro-Al Gore/IPCC” going back to 1996, I was puzzled. Who could it be?

I was disappointed to see a name I didn’t recognize – imagine it being NBC’s Tom Brokaw. The bigger disappointment for me was in Sheppard’s third and fourth paragraph reproduction of the original Duluth Budgeteer article, where it said:

The TV newsman’s mea culpa about having misreported climate change came after of years of treating the story the same as he would any other, requiring the views of two opposing parties…

….climate change is not a pro or con issue; it’s a scientific fact. And journalists who work to “balance” a story present an inaccurate picture when they give equal weight to sources promulgating inaccurate facts.

The significance of that eludes most people, but I’d been researching the origins of the fossil fuel funding accusation against skeptic scientists for 16+ months, two of my articles about it are at Breitbart pages here and here, among a pile of others I’ve written. For me, the words “equal balance”/”equal weight” in reference to people pushing “inaccurate facts” jumped right off the page as yet another repetition of 15-year old talking points consolidated by anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan and his associates at the Ozone Action enviro-advocacy group in 1996. For those not familiar with that group, just think Greenpeace because its founder John Passacantando merged Ozone Action with Greenpeace USA in 2000 and took over as its new executive director. (more…)

Howard Kurtz, the longtime WaPo staffer who jumped ship for the Daily Beast (and a cool $600k/year), hosts a show on CNN called Reliable Sources, which airs Sundays.  Reliable Sources, according to CNN, “is one of television’s only regular programs to examine how journalists do their jobs and how the media affect the stories they cover.”  This is, without a doubt, a great idea for a show.  Only there’s one major problem: Kurtz.

You see, there’s nothing on CNN’s show page for Reliable Sources that explains that Kurtz comes from a left-of-center point of view and is more than willing to suspend basic journalistic principles to win a victory for his side.  The question I’ve posed CNN in the past is, who watches their watchdog?  After viewing this must-watch segment, you’ll wonder the same thing:

The Reliable Sources host gets his hypocrisy on in this segment, pure and simple.  Kurtz, who has previously criticized Breitbart for not providing full context in his multimedia presentation on the NAACP that led to last year’s Shirley Sherrod kerfuffle (i.e the redemptive moment, which Breitbart did), left out major details of today’s report on the Huffington Post’s front page Breitbart ban. The self-appointed constable of context selectively edited the details of this story to do the bidding of far-left Color of Change and Van Jones by omitting the facts that HuffPosters are among the Internet’s most predictable flamethrowers and that Breitbart’s statement was perfectly defensible.

Kurtz, who is also the Daily Beast Washington bureau chief, laughably mocks Breitbart by saying, “I’m all for people speaking their mind, but if you want to hang out in nicer neighborhoods, you can’t shout quite as loud.”  First off, Breitbart happens to be the city planner for that “nicer” neighborhood, and that neighborhood happens to be frat row.  Huffington Post is a unique space online where public figures like Aaron Sorkin can call other public figures like Sarah Palin (and other hunters) “faux-macho shitheads” with impunity, and people like Van Jones, who has called Republicans “assholes,” and Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a “twat,” are front page regulars.

And let’s not forget when HuffPoster Sorkin called Sarah Palin an “idiot” on Kurtz’s very own CNN. (more…)

After flying Andrew Breitbart all the way out to Phoenix, Arizona yesterday to participate in an online Townhall election event, after taking him out of his home state, away from his business, and nearly making it impossible for him to vote in today’s crucial midterm election (though he’s on an airplane now in order to cast his ballot), at about as close to the last minute as you can get, Andrew Morse, chief of the ABC News digital division, sent the following email late this afternoon abruptly canceling Breitbart’s appearance:

We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABC News.com and Facebook.   The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News.   We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall.  Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage.  As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.

This is yet another obvious attempt to  build a narrative that puts the blame on Breitbart when the truth is that this is nothing more than ABC News caving in to and attempting to appease the organized left’s outrage machine that went into full astroturf mode after Breitbart’s ABC News appearance was made public.

As a reminder as to who’s exaggerating, here is exactly how Breitbart’s election night townhall event was described by an ABC News producer to him in an email:

This program will broadcast on the ABC Television Network, abcnews.com, ABC News Now, and ABC News Radio. …

The show will be live on the web and ABC News Now as well as on the network from 4:00pm till 11:00pm MST.

With this in mind and in writing, here is how Big Journalism announced Breitbart’s ABC News appearance: (more…)

Congratulations to the editors at the Washington Post.  Seventeen months after the Eric Holder Justice Department dismissed a slam-dunk case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, the Post gets around to printing a thorough vetting of the dismissal.  The story is slated for Saturday’s print edition.  While other media like Breitbart/The Bigs, Fox News, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Investors Business Daily, Pajamas Media, and Drudge have had dozens of stories on the corrupt New Black Panther dismissal, the Washington Post at last is in the game.

The story is a shocker too.  The shock comes from the middle of the road and factual nature of the story.

There are small problems with the story.  For one, the Washington Post is the only outlet that calls King Samir Shabazz by his old “slave name” (Shabazz’s own words) of Maruse Heath.  Even Heath doesn’t call himself Heath.  Of course this takes some of the sting off Shabazz’s rants against Jews and calls to kill “cracker babies in their crib.”

The Post’s decision to change a man’s name for him is controversial.  It has no place.

But overall, the story is very bad news for Eric Holder.  It debunks many of the myths spun by the administration.  Inside DOJ sources describe deep hostility to protecting whites at Justice.  DOJ sources say panther prosecutor Christian Adams never allowed his conservative views to influence his work, contradicting administration spin.  And perhaps most damning of all to Holder, sources defending the administration defend the idea that whites aren’t protected by the Civil Rights laws.  The latter is the blockbuster news in the Post piece. (more…)

Taking a look at the big media picture, and especially among our brethren, on the Right such as Fox and Breitbart, it might seem that the biggest story of the year is the Tea Party movement. It’s supposed to be indicative of a deep-seated anger among voters, a sign that people are all but ready to stage a Second American Revolution to take their country back.

As such, the Tea Party is being met with some confusion from those in the political center and outright hatred from bastions of the Left. So, as a reporter with 14 years of experience at both major dailies such as the Chicago Tribune and big weeklies in Chicago and Los Angeles, I’m here to declare that the real story of change in America in 2010 isn’t coming from Barack and the Democrats on the left, nor from the tea party movement on the Right.

Never a dull moment in everybody’s favorite nut house:

Now that Pastor Jones has called off the Koran-burning, will Breitbart get the credit? (more…)

James O’Keefe turns his hidden camera from ACORN to the Census. Tune in at 7:30 EDT.

Update: Politico corrected this piece and issued the following statement:

CORRECTION: This story was altered to reflect that O’Keefe and Basel are on pre-trial release, not probation or parole, as was stated in an earlier version.

We thank them for their diligence.

**

In Kenneth P. Vogel’s piece “James O’Keefe says next video ‘ready to go,’” published by Politico on February 18th, there are a number of factual errors that ought to be corrected.  The problematic sentences are identified in block quotes with explanations of the errors beneath each quote:

O’Keefe – who had to get permission from his parole office to attend CPAC – told POLITICO he wasn’t sure if the terms of his probation would allow him to remain in Washington to accept the award or would require him to return to his parents’ home in New Jersey.

There are multiple problems in this sentence.  First, Mr. O’Keefe did not need “permission from his parole office to attend CPAC,” as he has never been paroled.  We’re not sure Mr. Vogel meant “parole office” or “parole officer” (the latter makes more sense since O’Keefe does not own or operate a New Jersey parole office), but the claim is factually inaccurate either way.   The lead entry for the word “parole” at dictionary.com is, “the conditional release of a person from prison prior to the end of the maximum sentence imposed.” In other words, in order to be paroled, one must first be convicted and sentenced.  Mr. O’Keefe, of course, is still pending trial.  In a statement to BigJournalism.com, Mr. O’Keefe said he was granted permission to attend CPAC from a “pretrial services officer” from the New Jersey Pre-Trial Services Agency.  The role of the officer assigned to him is to “investigate defendants who are charged with federal crimes and awaiting a court hearing.”  The operative word being “charged.”  Politico’s characterization of Mr. O’Keefe implies a conviction. (more…)

Andrew Breitbart used his address to CPAC yesterday morning to continue his assault on the mainstream media, but at around the 5:00 mark, he moved the ball in a different direction altogether.  Listen for the part where he invites citizen-journalists on campus to turn their video cameras on academics. Needless to say, the best of the bunch would be featured at the forthcoming Big Education.

From FoxNews.com:

James O’Keefe, accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, was “framed” by the media and the U.S. attorney’s office, Andrew Breitbart, publisher of BigGovernment.com, told Fox News Monday.

The same day the man who first published James O’Keefe’s explosive videos exposing wrongdoing at community organizer ACORN came to his defense Monday, claiming the conservative filmmaker “sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney” while the prosecutor made his case to the media, the U.S. attorney involved stepped down.

O’Keefe, accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, was “framed” by the media and the U.S. attorney’s office, Andrew Breitbart, publisher of BigGovernment.com, told Fox News Monday.

Hours later, Jim Letten, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, recused himself from the case.

The Department of Justice announced the change in a news release Monday night, but did not say why Letten wanted off the case. (more…)

From the U.K. Telegraph:

2009 was the breakout year for the irrepressible Andrew Breitbart, 40, a conservative firebrand operating deep in enemy territory in Los Angeles, and the sky will be his limit in 2010. A regular presence on Fox News and a Washington Times columnist, Breitbart cut his teeth working for Matt Drudge’s eponymous website and also had a spell with the Left-wing Huffington Post. He took on Hollywood in his group blog site BigHollywood and broke the ACORN scandal when the young unknown filmmakers Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe approached him with undercover footage of employees of the Left-wing community organising group condoning under-age prostitution by illegal immigrants. The mainstream media were slow to pick the story up but eventually they could not ignore it.

The public editor of the New York Times eventually conceded that his newspaper needed “to be alert” to such stories “or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself”. Outspoken and fearless, Breitbart has extensive contacts throughout journalism and revels in partisan combat, venturing onto shows like Real Time with Bill Maher which most conservatives steer clear off because they view it – accurately – as a hostile, liberal forum. Has also founded BigGovernment and BigJournalism sites while his Breitbart.com is a major driver of web traffic. Deeply versed in the potential of the internet and an accomplished talk radio host, Breitbart has issued a clarion call for conservatives to seize back the media. ““I want to be the kingmaker,” he said recently. “I want to find the best voices so that ideas and truth that have been suppressed for too long can find their way to a mass audience.”

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I welcomed the Daily Caller to the community today with this article:

The launch of the Daily Caller is a necessary step toward creating ideological parity in the all-too-clearly biased mainstream media. It is a good thing that you, Tucker, are admitting that you come to the table with certain ideological baggage, and my new site Big Journalism will be there to watch your back when the well-funded, organized left’s knives come out to try to discredit and attempt to destroy you. Believe me, they will.

In my mind, you are coming to the table as an honest broker, like me and Arianna Huffington. As partisans and ideologues, to one extent or another, we don’t have carte blanche to propagate lies. In fact, our survival and success depend on creating trust with our readership, and ensuring that the mainstream media can’t ignore the stories we break.  By being upfront about our political ideals, readers can process the facts through their own ideological prisms and then make up their own minds. This process is how it’s been done for fifteen years online, and it has worked incredibly well.  The mainstream media is dying as we are rising, and yet their only explanation for their fate is that Craigslist has stolen their classified advertising.

Over the last fifteen years, the Internet has become the battlefield, where the mostly false notion of “objective” and “bias-neutral” journalism clashes with those of us on the right who believe that media bias is the central issue facing our nation, and even the world. (more…)