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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Time Magazine:

Andrew Breitbart sits in an Aeron chair at an iMac computer gazing out the sliding glass door of his Los Angeles home office. On the patio, a hula hoop and a portable basketball rim await his children’s return from school. Breitbart, 41, dressed on this late-winter day in his standard work uniform of a dirty oxford-cloth shirt and grungy khaki shorts, looks more like a surf bum than one of the most divisive figures in America’s political and culture wars. Then his BlackBerry rings.

The woman at the other end of the line, conservative fulminator Ann Coulter, is among Breitbart’s staunchest allies, and they soon are engaged in a spirited attack on liberals. “Their entire structure is writhing in diseased agony on the side of the road, and they don’t even realize it,” Breitbart says. But the left isn’t the only object of disdain. “I’m sick of this effete GOP nothing sandwich,” he adds, growing more animated. “As long as everyone is so pristine and socially registered, we’re going to lose.” Shortly before signing off, Breitbart says, “The second I realized I liked being hated more than I liked being liked — that’s when the game began.” (more…)

When I was at CPAC a few weeks ago, I decided to stay an extra day and do the Washington tour. Now as someone who lives in Los Angeles, it is simply shocking to me how much history is within walking distance of the Washington monument, say.

At the Air and Space Museum, you can see John Glenn’s FRIENDSHIP 7 capsule and a replica of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (you can tell it’s a replica, and not one of the built but unflown actual LMs, because the Lunar Module is so fragile it cannot support itself on its own legs in the Earth’s gravity field.)

Just a few blocks away is Ford’s Theater, and across the street, the Peterson House where Abraham Lincoln spent his final eight hours of agony. To go from that dingy, cheap little flophouse and then to the marble temple at the far end of the Mall produces a profound reaction in the human heart. But nothing I saw affected me as did the Declaration of Independence. I expected to be filled with reverence and awe. Instead, I was overwhelmed with despair.

My friends, the Declaration of Independence is gone: irreparably faded. And I fear that the ideals so boldly pronounced in that document are also fading from the pages of society. A few years ago, they opened the Super Bowl telecast by having players from both teams simply read lines from the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, and the switchboards were flooded with thousands of irate calls protesting this “right-wing propaganda.” (more…)

Andrew Breitbart’s recent smackdown of Max Blumenthal at CPAC (for his vicious smears against James O’Keefe) serves as a reminder to us all that when Liberal “journalists” attack, they have one goal – and it isn’t reporting the truth.  It is to win at any cost no matter what the damage is to the victim.  It is called the politics of personal destruction and it reflects the utter nihilism of Liberalism.

The tactic has been used repeatedly by the left (see Sarah Palin), but is particularly disturbing when used as a cudgel to destroy decent, hard-working Americans.  One such decent, hardworking (and extremely patriotic) American is Barrett Moore, founder of Triple Canopy.

I met Barrett a couple of years ago in Chicago at a luncheon for Navy SEAL, Marcus Luttrell author of the bestselling novel, Lone Survivor and boy do the Liberals hate him.

As I mentioned, Moore was the founder of Triple Canopy, one of America’s first private military companies (or PMC) and under his stewardship, he assembled one of this nation’s most impressive fighting forces – most of whom were retired members of the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (1st SFOD-D) (Delta Force) – and sent them overseas to help carry our burden in Iraq.  What’s more, he did it at a fraction of the cost and much more efficiently than the American government ever could.  That’s private enterprise for you, but because his private enterprise involved guns, the Liberals focused on him like a laser beam.

Their attacks would come not only while he was at Triple Canopy, but even more devastatingly once he had been forced out. (more…)

During an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Behar on Feb. 21, MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch let his bigot flag fly.  While fulminating against the tea-party movement in general and in particular against the candidate known as “the tea-party candidate,” who gave the rousing opening speech at CPAC, Deutsch blurted:  “You almost need that blank piece of paper. That’s the new model. Like, you know, this coconut (Marco) Rubio down in Florida.”

In settings like MSNBC (but usually backstage) the term coconut (brown on the outside white on the inside) is generally used to castigate “Hispanics” who ignore marching orders barked by Democratic/MSM drill sergeants—same as “Oreo” for similarly uppity blacks.

Never mind that the Cuban-American Marco Rubio is probably more purely Caucasian than Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Oral Roberts, Johnny Depp among many other southerners who boast Choctaw/Cherokee heritage. We’ll deal with Deutsch’s stupidity in another article. This one’s about Deutsch’s bigotry, a derivative of his stupidity.

Exit polls show that Cuban-Americans voted against Obama by the highest margins—and by far!—of any U.S. ethnic group, including “anglos.” So we’re fair-game for ethnic slurs—and have been for decades. In fact, Deutsch has as much reason to fulminate against Cuban-Americans as the most virulent nativist.  Regarding the U.S. political mainstream, Cuban-Americans obstinately refuse to assimilate. To wit: (more…)

With a whiff of nostalgia, I can imagine the old time journalist with the smell of coffee and cigarettes wafting through the click and clang of the typewriter.   Fifty years ago, a “journalist” had the ring of a dispassionate, creative, honest, fair, and trusted detective/storyteller.  Fifty years ago, if you graduated from an accredited journalism school, you were presumed “unbiased.”  Much as the physician takes an oath that she will “first, do no harm,” the “journalist” title meant that you were first, unbiased and balanced. Neutrality in the story was as necessary as it was assumed.

Sometime between half a century ago and today, something went very, very wrong.

We can speculate on what the “something” was, but we may never know for sure.  Much like the wind blows, there is no discernible source, but still we know it blows. Journalism became slanted to the left to the degree that the right had almost no voice by the mid-1980s.   Almost no voice, until Rush Limbaugh came on the scene.  Almost 30 years later, the tables have turned.  The problem for these journalists is that they have functioned robotically and cavalierly for so long, that they are not aware of the reality around them.  Things have changed. Drastically. (more…)

Max Blumenthal has an amazing thesis:  All conservatives and Republicans are beneath contempt.  He also has an amazing line of work.  He is underwritten by various media organs to prove his thesis.

In a previous era, Blumenthal and said media organs (Salon, Independent Film Channel, Huffington Post, etc.) were able to get away with this pathetic arrangement.   But now, we are on to Max, the spawn of Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal – he who attempted to ruin Monica Lewinsky’s life by falsely portraying her as Bill Clinton’s “stalker.”

The Blumenthal operation is now under the extremely close scrutiny of a camelid named “Retracto.”

The movement formerly known as the “Tea-Baggers” (with their flip cameras and new media skills) and various conservatives who have had enough with the excessive Alinsky tactics used most egregiously by Max and Sid but representative of main stream media’s odious guilt-by-association, repeat-the-same-lie-until-it-sticks, smear-any-conservative-as-racist-sexist-homophobic skill set, are now fighting back.

If the last two weeks have not humiliated him enough — and this Huffington Post rage-fest from yesterday with its title “Feeling the Hate at CPAC 2010 With Andrew Breitbart, Hannah Giles and the Crazy Mob” suggests they have not – then perhaps this coup de booger will tell him that we say what we mean and we mean what we say.

Max gallivanted around CPAC looking for prey.  He was treated with respect as he sought to make good and decent people look foolish on camera.  He decided he would go after a 20-year-old girl, one Hannah Giles.  And perhaps due to sexism or ageism he underestimated her ability.  Max should have called Bertha Lewis before he went after this young heroine.  Instead, he went to a gunfight with a knife – and a dirty nose.

Ladies and gentlemen, the much awaited, “Max Blumenthal Picks a Booger Out of His Nose at CPAC” video:

Max Blumenthal, this is what you do for a living. I can do it too (**wink **wink** Independent Film Channel).

Salon has already corrected his initial attempt to paint James O’Keefe as a White Nationalist.  They corrected his baseless assertion that O’Keefe planned the “Race and Conservatism” forum held at Georgetown Law Center, but he continues to hold that James O’Keefe is a racist, and that he was in some way involved with the “execution” of the forum.  His source for this claim?  Daryle Jenkins, whose credibility was recently eviscerated by Kevin Martin from Project 21.

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**Post UPDATED at bottom.

“We got him. We got him.” – Mediaite White House reporter Tommy Christopher to a few people just after badgering Andrew Breitbart with a race-baiting question.

My first CPAC and my first first-person look at how the corrupt left-wing media operates. I can’t pretend that anything surprised me, because as Mama used to always say, “Evil is as evil does.” But yes, Max Blumenthal, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher and some guy named Daryle Jenkins with something called One People’s Project stalked into CPAC like three old-media hitmen ready and eager to do some dirty work. So eager, in fact, that you could picture them the night before lying in bed at their parents’ house with visions of ambushing right-wingers in their heads.

There was only one problem: the unholy three appear to have forgotten that in this digital age everything’s changed. It‘s no longer just the elites who come heavy. We all carry videos cameras and we all have access to a distribution system Al Gore named the Internet. So a funny thing happened while Max and Daryle were driving dad’s car home, maliciously editing manipulated footage in their heads (you know, kind of like this – gee, Max, what happened to Larry O’Connor catching you in a big fat lie? ), Big Journalism published the unedited footage for the whole world to see, and what the world saw was a raw look at how Journalistic Rendition operates.

And in the case of Tommy Christopher and Mediaite, they did our job for us. (more…)

**Post UPDATED at bottom.

In the weeks leading up to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week, there was a sidebar skirmish involving two of the CPAC sponsors.  The new gay conservative group, GOProud.org, which was formed in 2009, wanted to make a splash at CPAC and introduce itself to the conservative movement.  But long-time sponsor, Liberty University, would have none of it:

Obviously as an exhibitor or participant, you don’t necessarily have to think that everyone agrees with you, and some people might even work against you [notes Liberty Law School Dean Mat] Staver.  But as a co-sponsor, even though not everybody would have the same mission, not everyone would agree with the same tactics, and some would actually focus on economics whereas others might focus on social issues and others might focus on national defense – the fact is they’re all conservative in nature.  You wouldn’t expect, however, a co-sponsor to actively work to undermine another co-sponsor, and that is in fact what GOProud does.

Liberty dropped, GOProud stayed, and CPAC took some heat.  So coming into CPAC, GOProud knew its presence would be controversial and their members were prepared to address opponents at the exhibit booth.  But last Friday, when a series of student activists spoke at the podium, no one imagined the undercurrent would erupt the way it did.

Alexander McCobin addressed the GOProud/Liberty sponsor issue head-on and praised CPAC for being inclusive and standing up for the principles of freedom and liberty.  McCobin was met with praise and applause for his remarks. (more…)

**UPDATE: The New Republic issued the following correction:

This was corrected from an earlier version, which incorrectly stated that O’Keefe had to return to “prison.”

We thank them for their diligence.

In Lydia DePillis’s article “Bodacious? Xtremely!,” published February 21st in the The New Republic, Ms. DePillis falsely states that James O’Keefe had to return to prison after he left the CPAC conference this past weekend:

[Hannah] Giles was there to accept the first annual XPAC Award for Impact on behalf of her undercover partner, James O’Keefe, who made it to the conference but had to return to prison earlier that day.

O’Keefe was released from prison jail in January on a pretrial services “signature bond.”  He may travel within the state of New Jersey and out of state with permission from his pretrial services officer.  He did not “return to prison” after leaving CPAC, nor was he obliged to do so.

We kindly request the issuance of a formal correction.

We are requesting Keith Olbermann issue an on-air retraction to his repeated assertions that James O’Keefe required “permission from his parole officer” to attend CPAC in Washington, D.C.

Around :40 into the above video, Olbermann says:

O’Keefe accepting an award there, I kid you not, with permission from his parole officer, according to Politico. Trust the law and order party to check in with its parole officers.

Olbermann’s source, Politico.com, has since corrected the bogus claim that O’Keefe needed permission from a “parole office[r].”  Since Olbermann’s source has been discredited, Olbermann himself should correct the record as well.

Fast forward to about 4:00 into the clip and Olbermann has this to say to The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel:

We’ll start with the law and order party, honoring the guy who needs to get his parole officer’s permission to attend.

The assiduous Patterico, who made a similar request of Olbermann last night, pointed out that this time, Olbermann neglected to source his false claim: “Note that, in the second passage, Olbermann does not attribute the claim to Politico, but makes it outright. Meaning he owns this falsehood and has an independent duty to retract it.”

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As Big Journalism readers know, a New York Times reporter accused a speaker at CPAC of using “racial tones” and “racial stereotypes.”

I was that speaker.

Last week, I was invited to participate on a panel to discuss my forthcoming book, Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation.  The New York Times’ Kate Zernike wrote up the speech for the NYT’s “Caucus” blog.  This was her headline:

CPAC Speaker Bashes Obama, in Racial Tones.

In the very first paragraph, Zernike writes, “How can conservatives win the youth vote that overwhelmingly went for Barack Obama in 2008? At the Conservative Political Action Conference, apparently, some are betting on using racial stereotypes.”

Her evidence? Nothing I actually said, but to her tin ears, I was allegedly channeling a “Chris Rock” voice.  Yes, Chris Rock.

Regarding my closing statement, Zernike opines, “Can we save our generation from Obama zombies, he [Mattera] asked. He answered himself by borrowing the president’s campaign slogan: ‘Yes, my brothahs and sistahs. Yes we can!’”  Obviously, Zernike is insinuating I purposely mispronounced the words “brothers” and “sisters” in order to mock black people, particularly President Obama.

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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.

**Post updated with higher quality video and audio.

For those you who haven’t been following our extensive coverage of Max Blumenthal’s character assassination attempt of James O’Keefe, a fringe blog called One People’s Project was the key source in Blumenthal’s research.  Darlye Jenkins, who runs the blog One People’s Project, stopped by CPAC, according The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel, “for the express purpose of confronting [Andrew] Breitbart.”  Here is footage of that confrontation:

The reason why One People’s Project was not the focus of our ire during the Blumenthal scandal is because, as Breitbart succinctly put it in this video, they are not accountable to any standard of journalism.  Unlike for Salon.com, there is little at stake for them if they fail to tell the truth (not to mention the scope of their readership and influence is comparatively minuscule).  That still is the case, and it goes without saying we are giving Mr. Jenkins and his blog publicity simply by posting this video, but we’ll indulge him this time around.

We’ll indulge him because we believe this encounter is illustrative of tactics the left employs far too often when they engage in verbal fisticuffs–calling their ideological opponents “racists” or some other invective, selectively ignoring essential details of the story when it’s advantageous to their cause–but it’s also illustrative of tactics the right doesn’t use often enough.  Breitbart is one of the few high profile conservatives in the media today ready and willing to take the fight to the left the way they’ve always taken it to us (I’m a former Berkeley College Republican, I know).  As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina famously said, “If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard.”  Breitbart has turned the left’s tactic back on them and the net result is an offensive conservatism that’s been largely absent from political discourse in recent memory.  And if the cheers at the tail end of this video are any indication, we would probably benefit from a few more confrontations like this one. (more…)

**Post updated with higher quality video and audio.

A funny thing happened on the last day of CPAC.  Max Blumenthal, recently corrected and embarrassed “journalist” from Salon.com paraded through the convention with a camera crew.  Like last year, he was looking for a confrontation of some kind.  I’m not sure what Max uncovered in his fact-finding mission, but I know that as he was leaving, a confrontation found him.

As luck would have it, Andrew Breitbart was walking in the front door of the Wardman Park Marriott Hotel at the exact moment Blumenthal was walking out.  Breitbart took this opportunity to address his beef with Blumenthal head-on and assailed Blumenthal for his attempt to link James O’Keefe to white supremacists.

Toward the end of the conversation, Blumenthal says to Breitbart that he did not call anybody any names.  At this moment I jumped into the fray and challenged him on the point.  I reminded him that he had, in fact, called O’Keefe a racist.  Blumenthal attempted to deny it, but as you can see from the video, he was only able to stick to that story for so long.

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It’s hard to believe this mistake is still being made.  Actually, it isn’t that hard.:

In the column “CPAC Goes For X Factor With Young Conservatives” of February 19, 2010, David Gauvey Herbert of the National Journal refers to a wiretapping plot by James O’Keefe at the offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu:

Conservatives who celebrated O’Keefe after that takedown distanced themselves from him after he was arrested Jan. 25 in an attempted wiretapping scheme at the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

There are no allegations of any “wiretapping scheme” plot in the the FBI affidavit that was released nearly a month ago, which your reporters could have easily consulted in numerous places. Also, a law enforcement official has conceded that the four men were not attempting to wiretap or intercept calls.  Furthermore, legal representation for the accused has gone on record stating there were no intentions to bug the phones in the Senator’s office.

We kindly ask you to issue a correction/retraction to the story.

We have made similar requests of numerous news sources to correct similar errors. The Washington Post, MSNBC’s David Shuster, Talking Points Memo, CBS News, the Associated Press, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and TIME, among others, have already posted corrections or retractions.

On February 18, 2010, at 12:45 PM, Kate Zernike’s piece “CPAC Speaker Bashes Obama, in Racial Tones” went live on the New York Times’ Website. Just after 4:00pm that afternoon, Andrew Breitbart received the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award from AIM for uncovering corruption at ACORN this past year.  He used part of his speech to voice his opinion of Zernike’s piece.  Transcript begins at around 6:05 into part I:

Kate Zernike of the New York Times, are you in the room? Are you in the room? You’re despicable. You’re a despicable human being. You’re the New York Times.  What is your headline here? You came to CPAC to get your prey and here’s your prey, Jason Mattera from HotAir and also from Young America’s Foundation. This is the headline: CPAC Speaker Bashes Obama, comma, in Racial Tones.

How can conservatives win the youth vote that overwhelmingly went for Barack Obama in 2008? At the Conservative Political Action Conference, apparently, some are betting on using racial stereotypes.

It goes into a story that does not express that he used a racial stereotype.  It is just built upon a bed of lies. It says that he went into a Chris Rock voice. She’s the one that correlated his voice to Chris Rock. He happens to be from Brooklyn. He’s using HIS voice.

Part II of Breitbart’s speech after the jump.

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My friend Jason Mattera, Young America’s Foundation spokesman and conservative gadfly, is never afraid to speak his mind.  Even if you don’t totally embrace his style, he’s thoroughly entertaining and a really great, energetic guy.  What he’s not, however, is a racist.  But that’s exactly what New York Times reporter Kate Zernike concludedafter attending a CPAC panel discussion in which Mattera participated yesterday.

She posted on the Times‘ political blog that Mattera had “bashed Obama…in racial tones.” GASP!

See full video of the speech and read relevant quotes from the New York Times article here.

Anyone who meets Jason quickly becomes aware of the fact that he’s from Brooklyn.  His accent makes it hard to miss.  Like many people, when he talks excitedly, the pitch of his voice goes up.  This combination, Zernike concluded, constituted a “channeling” of Chris Rock and an obvious case of racism.  If Zernike had bothered to, oh I don’t know, speak to the person at whom she was hurling a provocative and damaging accusation, she may have noticed that Mattera happens to speak “like Chris Rock” all the time.  With the slightest bit of effort, this New York Times reporter may also have discovered that Rock also grew up….in Brooklyn.  Maybe this New York (!) Timesreporter may have put two and two together before dashing off her insulting and pathetic blog post. (more…)

The BigJournalism.com editorial panel is attending this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., and it didn’t take long for a media-induced controversy to break out.  We expected the mainstream media couldn’t cover a gathering of 10,000 conservatives for an entire weekend without playing the race card at least once, but The New York Times‘ Kate Zernike charged Young America’s Foundation Spokesman and CPAC panelist Jason Mattera with “using racial stereotypes” by lunchtime of Day 1.

We’ve included the video of his speech below, as well as relevant excerpts from Zernike’s New York Times piece.  Let us know if you think it was appropriate for her to describe Mr. Mattera  using some of the most caustic vocabulary in American life.

We’ll be offering our commentary in the days to come.

Bonus question: Identify with time stamps where Mattera uses the “Chris Rock voice.”

February 18, 2010, 12:45 pm
CPAC Speaker Bashes Obama, in Racial Tones
By KATE ZERNIKE

How can conservatives win the youth vote that overwhelmingly went for Barack Obama in 2008? At the Conservative Political Action Conference, apparently, some are betting on using racial stereotypes. (more…)

It’s quite a stretch to call The Nation’s Max Blumenthal a journalist.

A real journalist is free to have an opinion and even to express it, but he doesn’t fabricate things to make his subject look bad. A real journalist tries to understand his subject and help his audience understand it instead of just subjecting it to abject ridicule.

Blumenthal, who leaped to conclusions in his since-corrected Salon.com article to slander Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, is an ethically challenged agitprop creator and self-indulgent performance artist. His slurring of O’Keefe, who helped to expose the criminal inclinations of ACORN, as a racist is the same thing that ACORN does when it’s attacked. If you disagree, you’re a racist. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!

This left-wing extremist, who wrote the book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, is so consumed by his hatred of the other side that he can’t think straight. His work is littered with factual errors, non sequiturs, selective use of evidence, glittering generalities, and hyperbole.

Blumenthal hates the Christian right, evangelicals, supporters of Israel, tea party activists, conservatives, and Republicans. This is not an exhaustive list. To him, conservatives are a “movement that’s filled with people who can’t handle individual freedom and the pressures of democracy.” Conservatives also are needy losers seeking redemption, according to Blumenthal: (more…)