Is it a coincidence that four days after Nancy Pelosi sat and gave an exclusive pep talk/schmooze session with AOL’s Arianna Huffington and an all-female editorial meeting in the offices of AOL/HuffPo, Arianna’s Washington Bureau Chief phoned-in a “nothing-to-see-here” apologia for the former-Speaker’s congressional insider trading scandal?

Huffington Post's wishful thinking headline a few hours after a "60 Minutes" report on congressional insider trading.

As liberal news outlets like CBS News, Daily Beast/Newsweek and even MSNBC saw fit to report the fact that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in a sweetheart IPO for VISA, while at the same time ensuring that tough regulations that would have stifled VISA’s profits stayed bottled up in the Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives, AOL/HuffPo opted to re-print Pelosi’s talking points and obfuscations in lieu of doing actual reporting.

With the awkward and ham-handed headline “Hit Job Falls Flat,” you can almost see Arianna herself hammering out bullet points on her blackberry, firing them off to reporter Ryan Grim in an effort to put her elegant fingers in the metaphorical dyke to stop the gushing in the most serious corruption story to hit Pelosi’s long career.  The banner headline, full of wishful thinking, ran just hours after the “60 Minutes” story.  First thing on a Monday morning at the beginning of a news cycle is a curious time to declare that a story “fell flat.”

In fact, the story was talked about on cable news and in the halls of congress all day.  It inspired new legislation to finally make the corrupt practice of congressional insider trading illegal.  Presidential candidate Rick Perry produced a 30-second ad featuring the story and calling for jail-time for any politician who profited from insider information.  If this is “falling flat” I would like to see AOL/HuffPo’s idea of a successful investigative report.

Seriously, I’d really like to see one.  Do they even do anything like that, or do they just sit back and let the rest of us do all of the real reporting?

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- Google chief: Internet keeps government honest.

Broader adoption of the Internet will keep governments on their toes as wired-up citizens exercise their newfound power to check rights abuses, Google chief Eric Schmidt said on Saturday.
“In nations and communities around the world, citizens are turning to online tools to keep their governments honest,” he told business leaders on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Honolulu.

“Whistleblowing has never been so easy,” he said.

- Requisite boring interview with misguided Gloria Steinem: “We need to be angrier.” Really? Angrier than this? Not one question for Ms. Steinem about the number of rapes at the OWS demonstrations and the need for some to create “safe women” zones because the movement overall is unsafe for women? Steinem doesn’t want to site that sarcastically as “progress” right along with her views of abortion? It’s 2011 and progressives can’t even have a protest without raping everything in sight.

- Forbes weighs in on the Chelsea Clinton hire:

But you can’t really buy authority. What you get instead is attention, and it’s not clear networks know the difference. (Have you watched the Today Show lately?) NBC in particular is hooked on this fame trading. Clinton joins a stable of other famous media-political offspring, including Luke Russert, Jenna Bush Hager, Meghan McCain. The message here is that fame and parentage confer journalistic authority, rather than talent or an ability to get the story right. If you’ve grown up in the media bubble that no doubt helps you understand how it works. But such experience doesn’t give you an insight into how the real world works.

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Tacky Andrew Sullivan spins off Steve Jobs’ death with a bitter post about Sarah Palin’s negative on running for President. I will condense because I know it kills brain cells without the benefit of alcohol to read Sullivan:

I know which one will get the bigger headlines tomorrow. And there is some comfort in knowing it will pain her.

Palin talks to Mark Levin here (her voice is the deeper one). [...] But the idea that this person is protecting her family – after putting them all on a reality show, after deploying an infant with Down Syndrome as a book-selling prop …

ZING! Good one, Andrew! Making fun of her family and doing it off the death of a visionary, you sassy necromancer. Babies are easy targets because they generally suck at hitting back. Of course, Sullivan would attack her if she didn’t have her son with her while she was working, too, so it’s damn her either way scenario. I mean, I realize that it’s only 2011 and some males of the progression persuasion haven’t yet come to terms with women being all out in the open, free-range, and doing crazy things like voting (gasp!) and working (OMG!), but for someone who presents himself as such a forward thinker, I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Even more shocking: women have babies sometimes. And women are actually able to work and raise children at the same time.

I can’t wait to delve into Never Never Land and see all the articles where Sullivan excoriates male candidates for daring to raise children while working. The Obama girls on the trail with then-presidential candidate Obama? The lack of such a balance would be repulsively sexist and Sullivan is too much of a progressive, forward thinker to betray his poseuriffic posturing as an equal-rights kinda guy while chaining women to some BS patriarchal stereotype, right?

The most unbelievable part of this article was when Sullivan wrote he was at the gym.

I was at the gym when the news broke, hence the late post.

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Yesterday Michelle Goldberg reported on the Glenn Beck event in Israel. Well, reporting is probably too strong a word. It’s a rambling post which states a great many liberal verities about Beck without even offering proof for them. I immediately found myself wondering if Goldberg was on vacation or if NewsBeast had actually send her overseas to “report” on Beck? It’s not clear. In any case, toward the end of her article she inserts this telling little vignette, bold my emphasis:

On Tuesday I stood with a mixed group of Americans and Israelis, most of us Jewish, looking at the site of Beck’s final rally…Looking at the site, my colleagues traded wry quips about Beck’s messianic metamorphosis. As they did, a white-haired American woman admonished us. “If you want war, continue to listen to this,” she said. “But he”—Beck—“is only for peace. And we don’t follow him—we follow Jesus.”

I have always believed that Meghan McCain was upset that the 2008 election produced a female superstar that wasn’t her. Since Sarah Palin’s ascendancy to the upper echelon of conservatives, McCain has been running hard, nipping at her ankles, in an effort to catch her. Every single PR roll out that McCain has done, including the launch of her book, was centered on Palin.

It’s a harsh truth to realize that no one is interested in you, your book, your website, or anything else remotely McCain unless you can promise them you’ll gab about Palin.

It’s also a harsh truth to realize that it isn’t Meghan McCain paying her bills, its her banking on Palin’s name that is paying her bills. Score one for the independent women!

All that aside, McCain’s latest novelty column for the Daily Beast focuses on … who else? Sarah Palin! McCain calls her a tease:

She’s more than happy to stay in the spotlight, as she teases and distracts the media from the other politicians who have announced their candidacy and are actively campaigning.

The irony of a woman who posted this photo on Twitter (and then got all self-righteous and angry when people responded negatively) calling Palin a tease is humorous.

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Our buddy Kyle Smith points out that the Daily Beast has made a laughably pathetic attempt to gin up some controversy over a line from the movie “Horrible Bosses,” which is in theaters today. From NewsBeast’s Ramin Setoode:

In the new comedy Horrible Bosses, Jennifer Aniston plays an overbearing dentist named Julia who tortures her assistant Dale (Charlie Day) by sexually harassing him. She’s one of three managers (along with Colin Farrell and Kevin Spacey) meant to be so detestable that their underlings plot to murder them. She constantly corners Dale, asking him to perform lewd sexual acts. In one scene, Aniston’s character calls him into her office, wearing nothing but a white lab coat. When he expresses discomfort, she taunts him like a high-school bully. “You’re starting to sound like a little faggot there, Dale,” she says.

[...]

“The GOP has become the Wahhabis of American government.”

“I think they’re the suicide bombers in all of this.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Conservatives Tried to Tempt Weiner

Two days after Rep. Anthony Weiner resigned from his seat in Congress following his Twitter sex scandal, a conservative group that operates under the alias #bornfreecrew that had been monitoring Weiner’s online behavior for months admitted they knew about people creating fake names and Twitter handles to gather more information on the politician.

And concerning a certain adult actress, we would like to add that this girl did nothing wrong. If you actually read her blog it is about politics and chronic illness. My husband and I read it together with our daughter. Again, ask yourself what your own personal prejudices and hangups are before you make accusations. [my emphasis]

So, no problem with the “Look at all the f*cks I give” comedic image here? Or, perhaps mom thought Ginger Lee’s school girl outfit, complete with knee socks and hands covering her breasts on her profanity-laced blog regularly announcing her stripping gigs was just the kind of fashion tip and info needed by her teenage daughter? That Christopher overlooked those and other obvious alarm bells in a rush to try and exonerate Weiner, while piling on the Born Free Crew, tells us more about him and his alleged professionalism as a journalist, than it does his bogus sources.

The Under-Aged Participants That Add Clarity And Exoneration

Betty’s mother (we’ll call her Mrs. Betty) says that she and her husband monitor all of Betty’s internet usage, and were incensed by this group’s behavior. Rep. Weiner, she confirms, never contacted Betty privately, with the exception of a Direct Message welcoming her to his Twitter stream, a message Mrs. Betty assumed was automatically generated.

Finally, Christopher’s trumped up sources did not support the purportedly conservative group that was on to Weiner, instead, it attacked them in the harshest of terms in a failed attempt to change the subject and clear Weiner. Consequently, The Daily Beast’s assertion that it was the same purported group of conservatives who manufactured the false identities that humiliated Christopher, his editor, Colby Hall, and Dan Abrams’ Mediaite by association, is illogical and patently absurd. But then, that is what most have come to routinely expect from the Daily Beast.

This young girl is troubled and she was hounded by a couple of members of that pack of harassing grown men and women until one of them got her to agree to follow him so they could send each other direct messages.

From there, this man questioned this young girl and was gleeful over anything that he could find to incriminate Rep Weiner. He goes by the name goatsred. He also tried to contact my daughter and she locked her account when this happened. After she locked her account he continued to send requests to follow her, she refused to allow him to follow her.

Well, here we go. Michele Bachmann’s impressive performance at Monday’s GOP Presidential debate, followed by her formal campaign launch, have kicked lefty smear merchants into gear, as evidenced by Michelle Goldberg’s latest piece in the Daily Beast.  Titled “Bachmann’s Unrivaled Extremism,” the 2500-word article seeks yo derail Bachmann’s deliberately moderate turn on Monday by revealing how she’s irrationally homophobic, speaks in Christian dog-whistle language, is hypocritical for being a working mother, is obsessed with gays, tainted public education by forcing partisan wedges into her foster children’s school boards, throws her family under the bus without a second thought, and, oh yeah– fears gays.

I first noticed the article on Twitter because of Roger Ebert’s takeaway: “Bachmann thought she was being attacked by an ex-nun.” He’s referring to the piece’s opening anecdote; Bachmann constituent Pamela Arnold went to a forum held by the Congresswoman in April 2005, and Goldberg dutifully parrots Arnold’s version of the meeting’s aftermath. After Bachmann ended the meeting early (because people dared to ask her about gay marriage, obviously), Arnold and an unnamed former nun followed her into the bathroom.

As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. “Help!” she screamed. “Help! I’m being held against my will!”

Arnold, who is just over 5 feet tall, was stunned, and hurried to open the door. Bachmann bolted out and fled, crying, to an SUV outside. Then she called the police, saying, according to the police report, that she was “absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her.” The Washington County attorney, however, declined to press charges, writing in a memo, “It seems clear from the statements given by both women that they simply wanted to discuss certain issues further with Ms. Bachmann.” (more…)

I have always wondered who made Howard Kurtz the arbiter of Reliable Sources, but in Weinergate, we are reminded that Kurtz’s ability to discern them is very much in question.  For that matter, so is CNN’s.  It has never been a secret that the supposedly even-handed journalism maven is in reality almost too liberal to function, but if he can’t get his head screwed on straight, he might have to fork over the name of his show to someone else altogether.  Hopefully Kurtz will have the decency to straighten out some of his Weinergate missteps soon and reconsider who really are “reliable sources.”

Kurtz’s history of judging Reliable Sources is staggeringly one sided and ideological.  For one thing, I have frequently seen him go out of his way to profess his respect for the reliability of Keith Olbermann, of all people, not to mention the rest of the guttersnipes at MSNBC:

Now, I don’t put Keith Olbermann in the same category as Beck at all. His MSNBC show, agree with it, disagree with it, was a very well-researched program.

Sure it was, Howard.  Also have a look at how incensed he got when Hugh Hewitt insulted Olbermann on Reliable Sources.  Kurtz and his publication The Daily Beast also seem to regard the Daily Kos, where Olbermann once blogged, as a very legitimate publication.  The most recent example comes during Weinergate.  The Daily Beast didn’t respond when I inquired who writes the captions for their “Cheat Sheet,” but have a look at this caption.  This is The Daily Beast’s own writing, not a quote from the linked story:

Not even a hint of suspicion about the reliability of the post by an anonymous blogger “stef” at a radically partisan website with absolutely no editorial oversight.  The Daily Beast simply reported it as fact. Not long after this story was posted, Kurtz gave it his blessing on twitter, boasting how his “wait[ing] for the facts” had just been validated:

The bottom line is that Kurtz actually believes “the facts” come from anonymous, unaccountable bloggers at one of the murkiest breeding grounds for partisan trolls there is.  Once “stef” weighed in, Kurtz could finally comment on Weinergate without even bothering to check.  “The facts” had arrived. (more…)

**UPDATE: I missed this earlier, but in another tweet, Kurtz offered the Clinton sex scandal–the one Kurtz’s Newsweek attempted to kill–as an example of unbiased media coverage of a Democrat sex scandal!  The hubris is breathtaking.  Kurtz also suggests that the old media handled the Spitzer and Edwards scandals admirably.  More here.

***

From the NewsBeast/CNN news guy:

According to another tweet, he meant tweeps, not twerps.

A quick response to the guy who defended the HuffPo Breitbart front-page ban and got the Sherrod story wrong:  Even if the infamous Weinergate image was “faked,” that means someone hacked into a sitting congressman’s verified twitter account and posted porn. THAT’S STILL NEWS!  Why not report it as a developing story, just like we have here at the Bigs? If Kurtz truly believes Rep. Weiner is the victim of a hack-attack, why wouldn’t he cover the story for that reason?

Kurtz later walked back this statement by tweeting, “of course reporters should have looked into Weiner hacking controversy.”  To paraphrase Kurtz, sometimes it pays to think a second time.

I know Tina Brown took over Newsweek last year, but if this is the way their top-tier journalists are treating potential Democrat sex scandals (real or “faked”), this invites the question: has anything really changed?  You may recall it was Newsweek which killed Michael Isikoff’s Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair scoop over a decade ago.  The Drudge Report picked it up, and conservative new media was born.  So, we who make our livings in the new media all owe a debt of gratitude to Newsweek employees and their rich history of protecting Democrats, but America deserves better.

John Avlon, of no-labels shame, who also writes at the Daily Beast, has penned another hit piece on the supposed demise of conservative talk radio: The Right-Wing Talk-Radio Flame Out. My, oh my, … however will Conor with one N control himself? But this alleged demise has been predicted for 20 years.  Still, Avlon can hope - after all, he has another book to sell.

Avlon believes the future is ideologically muddled radio, the likes of Michael Smerconish and John Batchelor.  That’s right, muddle will drive listeners to the radio.  In fact, Avalon’s a frequent guest on Batchelor’s show, should we be surprised?  I can enjoy and have enjoyed Batchelor for his overseas and war reporting via various correspondents. But he tends to be muddled on domestic politics.

What Avlon conveniently ignores are the various host’s total syndication numbers and time-slots. Not only are the hosts he mentions barely syndicated, I’m unaware of any station that has built their entire schedule around one of them, as so many have done and still do with Rush, for example. And given their time slots, perhaps who Avlon is really missing is Art Bell. He could probably do a phone in from Schenectady in the evening and dominate the numbers; not to slight George Noory, or anything!

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Evidently, the newspeak definition of ‘misinformation’ is actually ‘opinions with which I don’t agree’. According to Media Matters for America that is, as The Right Sphere points out. They use an example given in Howard Kurtz’s article “Partisan Organizations Use Sound Bite Warfare” wherein Kurtz describes the “bat signal” given out by MMFA. This coordinated attack sprung from Governor Mike Huckabee making a remark on a radio show about Natalie Portman’s pregnancy and how he thought she was “boasting” about unwed motherhood:

Media Matters mission, and what presumably allows them the tax exempt 501(c)(3) status, is as follows:

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

Do you see the problem yet? No? They’re allowed tax exempt status because they claim to be an educational organization dedicated to correcting conservative misinformation. Now go back and read what Huckabee said. Where’s the misinformation? Since when is a person’s personal opinion “misinformation”? Huckabee didn’t make any declaration of fact. He wasn’t promoting a falsehood. He was simply expressing his opinion on Natalie Portman’s pregnancy. You can disagree or agree with Huckabee, but he wasn’t lying about anything. It was just a controversial statement which, as Kurtz pointed out, no one noticed for three days.

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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…)

Peter Beinart is at it again. He, in his capacity as Senior Political Writer for the Daily Beast, has attempted to tar Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and, by association, his fellow Republicans with the stain of religious intolerance. If you weren’t aware, Rep. King is Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and has recently opened hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. Mr. Beinart starts out by claiming Republicans have left their accustomed wheel house, concentrating on “unfettered capitalism, traditional morality and bucketloads for defense” to slide into anti-religious fervor.

It’s at that point when Beinart starts building straw men.

“King isn’t holding hearings on domestic terrorism; he’s holding hearings on domestic terrorism by one religious group. Is most American terrorism Muslim terrorism? Actually, no.”

Well, the majority of terror attacks in America in the last decade were done by Muslims. Of course, he has to go through the regular list of home grown terrorists, from McVeigh to Kaczynski and on to, strangely, Jared Lee Loughner, whom, if I understand correctly is more of an insanity case then a terrorist. Curiously missing from the list are folks like the Weather Underground or the Speedway Bomber, but that might cause some embarrassment to people Beinart holds in high esteem.  In the end, if he is willing to accept the premise that American Muslims are statistically more likely to commit terrorism than non-Muslims, it’s wrong to point out their religion. (more…)

An interesting article comparing the success and pathways of the Daily Beast’s Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington.

The same day that Huffington’s $315 million deal with AOL was announced,Media Week’s Brian Morrissey reported that Tina Brown’s merged Newsweek-Daily Beast had yet to find a revenue model to match its glamorous masthead.

According to comScore, The Daily Beast drew 2.9 million visitors in December, up only slightly from the same month a year before. Newsweek had traditionally done better, but its audience has shrunk and its traffic deal with MSNBC.com was dissolved, leaving the NewsBeast with a combined audience of about 5.2 million.

Compare that with the Huffington Post’s reported 25 million unique monthly visitors – a figure rivaling the traffic of the New York Times website – and it becomes clear that comparing Brown’s and Huffington’s sitesis like comparing apples and oranges.

Yes, both are middle-aged, English-educated women whose personal brands are in some ways greater than the brands that they created. And yes, they have been friends for 30 years.

[...]

“Ms. Huffington has thousands of raucous voices on her site, many of them emanating from her high-profile friends, as well as large-scale aggregation of news from around the web. Ms. Brown’s formula is more like that of a magazine – rather than compile mounds of material and offer a platform to almost anyone with a laptop, she chooses what she likes.”

Yes, and even some whose names Huffington used without permission. Then there was the HuffPo blogger who carried out an incestuous affair with his daughter. Then there were all the stories about plagiarism.

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I thought Josh Marshall would take the crown for most hysterical reaction to opposition to Cordoba House. His call for a Shoah-like project to document the evil as it happened (i.e. resistance to Cordoba House) seemed like a shoo-in, but in the end he’s only first runner up. The tiara definitely goes to Peter Beinart for his piece at the Daily Beast which is full of statements like this:

The super-patriots on Fox News have… declared war on Islam.

Sept. 11, 2001

The ellipsis is his, I didn’t remove anything. This is what the left apparently takes for serious discourse on this topic now. There’s no attempt to engage with the actual arguments of critics, at least some of which are thoughtful. Instead it’s just one more typically unhinged leftist rant about the “intolerant” right:

Until a month or so ago, I genuinely believed that the American right had become a religiously ecumenical place. Right-wing Baptists loved right-wing Catholics and they both loved right-wing Orthodox Jews. All you had to do to join the big tent was denounce feminists, Hollywood, and gays. But when push came to shove, Sarah Palin didn’t care about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s position on gay marriage. In today’s GOP, even bigotry doesn’t spare you from bigotry…

People in Basra and Kandahar had better hope that America’s counterinsurgency warriors create a society in which they can practice their religion free of intimidation and insult. Because it’s now clear they can’t do so on the lower tip of the island of Manhattan.

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In a widely read and discussed piece at the Daily Beast, Reihan Salan asks:

Has a shadowy gang of left-wing journalists and intellectuals been plotting to manipulate the news cycle…

His answer is, yes, perhaps so, but they’d be doing it with or without JournoList. Salan is more right than he probably knows.

The list of those identified as former members of the group is now up to more than 150 names, out of 400 in all. Nearly a quarter of those individuals were connected with another media organization called the Media Consortium. The Consortium is an organization of progressive media outlets formed in 2005, a full two years before JournoList. Its dues paying member organizations include The Nation, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect, Ms., Democracy Now! and many more (a complete list is here). The purpose of the group was explicit and can be found on their website:

Our mission is to amplify independent media’s voice, increase our collective clout, leverage our current audience and reach new ones. We believe it is possible and necessary to seize the current moment and change the debate in this country. We will accomplish this mission by fulfilling our five strategic principles: (more…)