In December a Federal District Judge, Marco Hernandez, ruled against blogger Crystal Cox who was being sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick, whom Cox accused of corruption on her blog. The ruling declared that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news. I happen to agree with his decision, but the case raises the question about what actually defines a journalist. Considering what the mainstream media represents today, the line between genuine reportage and political advocacy has been completely blurred.

In the past, many famous and well-respected journalists had no formal training but honed their craft on the job, in many cases beginning their careers as copy boys/copy girls. Walter Cronkite, once cited as the most trusted man in America, was a college dropout who had a series of newspaper jobs reporting news and sports. Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley started their careers as broadcast journalists but never had journalism degrees. Dan Rather did receive a degree in journalism, and we can see how well that turned out once he decided to switch to advocacy journalism instead of the traditional who, what, when, where and how protocol of traditional journalism.

Advocacy journalism intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint for either a political or social agenda and has morphed today into nothing less than media bias and propaganda. Today the mainstream media is predominantly composed of liberal democrats, and this bias has been quite evident since the 2008 presidential race. There is also a marked difference between opinion and reportage journalism.

I have a hard time claiming to be a member of the fourth estate, although I have been writing for newspapers since 1998 as an op-ed columnist. During that time, however, I have covered news events and press conferences and submitted non-opinion articles. I never attended Journalism College, nor have I even taken one writing course. I had to drop out of college to support my mother who had had a stroke. Mark Steyn, who is a brilliant writer, never attended college at all but can write reams around many inhabiting the elitist realm of the New York Times. (more…)

At what point does a newscaster lose credibility?

I’ll answer that myself. As long as you are a media leftist, you will always have credibility and have a seat at the table of activist, old media types.

Dan Rather, he of the 2004 fake documents scandal that attempted to get John Kerry elected over George W. Bush, is still called upon for his opinion by certain cable news networks. Seriously? Are there any “deal-breakers” that disqualify you at some point on the left? Guess not.

Rather was hanging out with four other leftists on “The Chris Matthews Show” this weekend (this is can’t-miss TV, if you count watching groupthink and close-mindedness as entertaining). Rather is doing some sort of “special” on the Occupy Wall Street protests, telling us what they are really all about and getting to the bottom of the story. He will try to tell us the truth this time. Honest.

I hope Rather’s report doesn’t miss this strange group chant. The masses refer to themselves as “the Block” and they must all speak in unison, the type of group-speak that Stalin would be proud of.  Watch this entire video and you’ll find humor in how this small, homogenized group cannot decide on a simple question of whether one of their ideological own, Congressman John Lewis, should speak. You wanna see gridlock, this is is gridlock at its finest–big government in a microcosm. What if they had to decide a serious issue, like who should use the toilet and when? Were “Saturday Night Live” impartial, they could kill with a parody of this. My favorite part is about eight minutes in when the guy with a megaphone (hey, that’s unfair that less than 1% of the crowd gets the megaphone!) does a series of mic checks and the crowd yells “mic check” every time he does a mic check. You can’t make this stuff up. (more…)

Rolling Stone’s hatchet job on Rep. Michele Bachmann has proven too much even for many liberals. As Yahoo News reports, there’s a controversy raging over the way the piece—sedately titled “Michele Bachmann’s Holy War”—“borrows heavily from a 2006 profile of Bachmann by G.R. Anderson” in the Minneapolis City Pages.

The problem with all that borrowing is that author Matt Taibbi didn’t bother to acknowledge it. Or rather, says editor Eric Bates, Taibbi did bother, but Bates himself cut the attributions because of “space considerations.” So apparently, if Bates had just been able to make a little more room in there, he could have left in those pesky sources. (Correction: that pesky source. Judging by the hyperlinks that did make it into the Web version of his piece, Taibbi appears to have quoted a grand total of one article.) As G. R. Anderson himself says:

“I would tell him that it’s very easy to cut five words somewhere else in the story, and put the five words in that actually [cite] the source.”

There’s something in that. Bates could have taken out “paranoid,” “psychopath,” “Machiavellian,” “pathological,” “conscienceless,” “dangerous,” “fanatic,” “narcissistic,” “hysterical,” “campy,” “bizarre,” “freakouts,” “grandiose,” “lunacy,” and “insane,” along with a couple of “Stepfords” and several instances of “crazy” (five of which appear in the same sentence). That would have provided plenty of room for attributions, although there wouldn’t have been much else left in the piece.

For it seems that Taibbi’s preferred writing style, when dealing with conservatives, is simply to throw heaping handfuls of adjectives at them, along with a few choice nouns. And if those words sometimes land in a way that doesn’t make much sense, well, that’s just the way the ball bounces. (Case in point: “A photo shows Bachmann, only the top of her Stepford head visible  … ” Anyone want to explain what a “Stepford head” is?) Taibbi is widely considered a satirist, but you can’t write satire if you display neither (a) a sense of humor, nor (b) some idea of the way that words are supposed to go together. In short, Dorothy Parker he ain’t.

As for the actual claims in the piece, they’re reminiscent of those in the Killian memos, a couple of elections ago. Much as Dan Rather and others just felt that those documents were “fake but accurate,” as a New York Times headline put it, Taibbi just felt that Bachmann is a whackjob, and didn’t need to rely on such old-school methods as careful sourcing and fact-finding to make that assertion. He just felt that Bachmann is “crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.” (He also just felt that Bachmann’s former town of Stillwater, Minnesota, had “no black people” in it, even though, as he eventually confessed to Abe Sauer of The Awl, he hasn’t been there to see.)

Of course, all this talk of craziness is pretty rich coming from a guy who once threw coffee at Vanity Fair reporter James Verini, and then followed Verini down the street making threats.

(more…)

From Columbia University’s Journalism School’s website, a statement of their purpose for training journalists:

…finding out the truth of complicated situations, usually under a time constraint, and communicating it in a clear, engaging fashion to the public.

Similar rhetoric from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute:

Serious journalism begins with an ideal of public service, a commitment to truth, accuracy and fairness, and a belief that democracy can work if people know what is happening in their world.

Sounds wonderful… but think twice about attending these schools, at least as a lucrative career choice.

I’d argue that a journalism degree is not necessary to be a member of today’s American mainstream media; all you seem to need is a willingness to chug lefty Kool Aid faster than Frank the Tank pounds beer bongs full of crappy, American adjunct lager. This means an obsession with class, race, gender, and a progressive world view. Legitimate issues?  Of course they are, and ones I’m often interested in as fields of study, but when the issues become tied with political aspirations long after the state has done everything possible to address them, an incessant focus on past injustices becomes not only counter productive but also transparently political… mere grabs for the keys to the government in order to effect social change. (more…)

I’m a fan of ironic speeches.

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather is worried about the future of his profession.

The increasingly biased media will threaten the U.S. in Rather said at a speech here Jan. 24 as part of a Kennedy Political Union event.

“A free and independent press is the red beating heart of democracy and freedom,” he said.

Rather believes today’s correspondents give more lip service and less facts to support their stories.

(more…)

Guess what, the little cabal of journalists is being broken up.

This is frightening news to most of those in the activist old media, but for somebody like myself who has worked in that media for 30 years, I welcome the breath of fresh air that it brings.

Leftists love the word, “progressive” unless the progress hurts them (for the record, I cringe whenever somebody on the right uses the word “progressive” to describe the left because there is nothing progressive about their policies.)

You’d have to be blind (which many in the activist old media are) to not see this coming and to not see the far-reaching effect that this will have on the business, but agenda is more important than ratings.

It really hurts the fragile ego of somebody with a half dozen Emmys on their desk to get their butt kicked on a story by some blogger laying in bed in his/her pajamas. Ask Dan Rather. (more…)

Distantly related to Dr. Samuel Mudd, as in “your name is –,” he is the man who should have succeeded Walter Cronkite as the most trusted man in America at CBS instead of “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” Born in 1928, Roger Mudd finished a long and distinguished career at NBC.

Not incidentally, he did the nation an immeasurable favor by torpedoing the presidential campaign of the late Ted Kennedy by asking one simple question:

(more…)

Gunga Dan himself, of “Kenneth, what is the frequency” fame.  His eager, credulous acceptance of the faked Bush Texas Air National Guard memos brought an end to a career that began with the sheer luck of the Kennedy assassination and ended ignominiously with a failed lawsuit.

Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller notes an interesting and instructive conversation that was held publicly between lefty blogger Matthew Yglesias and National Review’s Mark Hemingway. During their exchange on Twitter, lefty Yglesias claimed that lying is a legitimate tactic for “advocates” to use to win the policy argument, thereby admitting that liberals think it is OK to lie in order to get their policies in place.

On his Twitter feed, Yglesias told Hemingway, “I think fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do, yes. That’s an honest view.”

Matthew Yglesias, JournoList tough guy and taqqiya advocate

Aside from the amusing incongruity of the statement — how can dishonesty be “an honest view” — it is telling that a liberal like Yglesias doesn’t see anything wrong with using lies to win a policy argument. After all, many famous folks on the left have agreed that a lie or two used to gain power is not such a crime.

Certainly Yglesias’s mode of arguing for policy is along the same line of thinking proposed in the famous Goebbels quote: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” (more…)

*** Corrected

By now, readers of Big Journalism are more than familiar with the liberal media’s exercise in conspiracy, collusion, and confusion that was the JournoList.

For most on the political right, the leaked emails being exposed by Tucker Carlson and his DailyCaller website serve as proof that the Mainstream Media has jumped the shark, compromising its traditional credibility and betraying a deep, passionate left-wing bias beneath what was supposed to be objective journalism.

Matthew Yglesias, JournoList tough guy

But while all of that is certainly true, I believe it is based on a flawed premise. Specifically, that the Mainstream Media has ever been – or even should have ever been – credible and objective.

The historic reality is that media in America has always been a tool of partisans. During the years proceeding the American Revolution, the revolutionary founders used the pages of the emergent colonial newspapers to rally support for their petitions against the crown. In fact, newspapers were perhaps the most powerful tools in moving public opinion in favor of independence, both through publication of stories hostile to British intentions, or editorial tracts promoting revolution. (more…)

You have to give mainstream journalists credit. No matter how high the evidence of liberal bias stacks up, they stick to the notion they don’t play favorites.

Rathergate? An aberration. A Washington Post ombudsman admitting journalists favored Sen. Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election? Nothing but reporters chasing down history in the making.

Press blackouts on the Van Jones controversy? Oops, we missed it.

The New Black Panther case? Not enough reporters to cover it.

Ezra Klein, JournoList founder

Poll after poll after poll revealing journalists vote for Democrats over Republicans by a wide margin? Doesn’t matter, since they don’t bring their political impulses to bear on their work.

Meanwhile, the public’s faith in the media continues to plummet. And the one cable news outlet with enough reporters – and curiosity – to cover subjects like Jones and the New Black Panther Party, Fox News, continues to see its ratings soar. (more…)

Journalists love whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them.

Journalists love transparency.  As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.

No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, technology and “the masses” uncovered the conspiracy:

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here.

American journalism died a long time ago; today Tucker Carlson got around to running the obituary. What The Daily Caller has unearthed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is Journolist, or are guilty of sitting back and watching Alinsky warfare being waged against all that challenged the progressive orthodoxy. The scandal predictably involves journalists posing as professors posing as experts. But dressed down they are nothing but street thugs. They deserve the deepest levels of public consternation. We must demand that they do. (more…)

Over the next ten days, I will present to you America’s top ten journalists that are most biased to the left. On this list you will find denizens of the Old Media that just can’t seem to help themselves from delivering the news with a leftward tilt, journalists for whom balance means to condemn all Republicans and conservatives, folks that never met a righty they could like much less agree with or even report upon fairly.

This list will be peopled by journos that, in true Kealian fashion, simply can’t understand those Republicans and/or conservatives. After all, these journalists never met anyone that would support a conservative so they just don’t understand how conservatives could ever stand for truth. These are folks that just don’t “get” that there is any other side to a story but that of their own ideologically leftward political bent.

\This list will be restricted to working journalists (or one who just retired in one case), so biased old hacks like Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, or Walter Duranty will be excluded even as we take their leftism for granted. Also you will not find those whose career is but a cartoon of journalism. People such as Keith Olbermann, John Stewart, Rachel Maddow, Maureen Dowd, or Chris Matthews do not belong on a journalist list, even one highlighting left-wing bias. Such people are simply too silly or admittedly partisan even for a list such as this.

The biggest problem is arriving at just ten. There are dozens of worthy nominees, we all know. Singling out so small a number from such a large field presented a challenge, for sure. (more…)

KATIE COURIC:  I appreciate your coming on, Mr. Vice President.

JOE BIDEN:  No problem, Katie.  Loved you on American Idol, by the way.  We’re off the record, right?

COURIC:  Um, no, sir.

BIDEN:  Whatever. Hit me with your best shot.

COURIC:  Is our government broken, sir?

BIDEN:  No, Katie.  The country’s in bad shape, yes, but the federal government hasn’t been this hale and hearty since I became a senator in ’73.

COURIC:  Can you list some accomplishments of the Obama administration? (more…)

The idea of citizens writing the news is not a new one. In fact, it is an idea that is as old as the newspaper itself.

There were no professional journalists around 50 BC when Julius Caesar, serving as the First Counsul of Rome, ordered scribes to publish the Acta Diurna, a daily report of governmental activities.

There were no professional journalists in the early 1400s to take advantage of Johann Gutenberg’s new and exciting moveable type press. In fact, it wasn’t until 1505 that a German printer in Augsburg named Erhard Oeglin put out a broadside that announced the discovery of Brazil.

There were no professional journalists to chronicle the travels of Marco Polo (1300s) or to report the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus (1492) or to tell the horrors of Russia’s Ivan the Terrible (1500s).

There were no professional journalists to chronicle the challenges to the Crown by Oliver Cromwell (1600s) or to report the advancement of freedom during the American Revolution (1700s) or to tell the stories of the Spanish-American War or even the Civil War, which ended in 1865.

After the Civil war, things began to change. (more…)

The Garden State has a shield law for journalists, meaning the government cannot force reporters or opinion writers to reveal their sources. There is nothing more vigorously defended among journalists than the right to keep secret one’s anonymous sources in service of “the public’s right to know.” The decades-long secret identity of “Deep Throat” in The Washington Post’s Watergate exposés is the standard of that journalistic principle.

But a New Jersey state appellate court last weekruled that a woman named Shellee Hale is not a “real” journalist, but just a blogger, so is not protected by the state’s shield law.

In the words of New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Judge Anthony J. Parrillo:

Simply put, new media should not be confused with news media.

This backward-looking, snobbish decision is troubling for many reasons. Before we get into the upcoming righteous outrage from someone who was a regular member of the “news media” for nearly 20 years — but is now a “new media” journalist — here’s some background on the case. (more…)

Washington, D.C. (Reuters) – In bold bid to preserve the nation’s access to free and unfiltered information, President Barack Obama has named Dan (Kenneth, what is the frequency?) Rather to head the administration’s “Newspaper Relief Agency.”

Mr. Obama introduced Rather as America’s first “Dead Tree Press Czar” at an unannounced 2:00 a. m. briefing last night in the White House sub-basement.  As DTPC, Rather will dispense no-string grants to failing liberal newspapers, assisted by his deputy, Lucy Ramirez, who was not present at the impromptu press conference and could not be reached for comment.

In a statement released this morning, the president said, “I simply can’t allow vital house organs and their veteran journalists who support my agenda to disappear simply because they’ve lost the public’s trust.  The science is settled, and the time to act is now.” (more…)

Castro’s Stalinist regime just released pictures of 16-year-old Elian Gonzalez, resplendent in the uniform of a Communist Party youth. The timing of the photo release may coincide with the tenth anniversary of Elian’s shanghaiing from the U.S.

The magnitude and methodology of  the snow-job Fidel Castro, with the aid of his ever-faithful  MSM and Democrat allies, pulled on the American public (69, per cent of whom  fell for it and  embraced Castro’s position on the kidnapping) is partly explained here.

Thanks to MSM-Castroite collusion most  people forget  (or missed) the crucial legal and ethical details of this circus/tragedy– which were mostly established during the first week after Elian’s rescue at sea, after his heroic mother’s drowning. The “son-belongs-with-his-father” crowd, for instance, “missed” (with the help of the MSM) that Elian’s father was initially delighted that his motherless son was in the U.S. and in the loving arms of his uncles and cousins.

The evidence—frantically buried by the mainstream media—was overwhelming.  Mauricio Vincent, a reporter for Madrid newspaper El Pais, wrote that during that first week he’d visited Elian’s home town of Cardenas and talked with Elian’s father, Juan Miguel, along with other family members and friends. All confirmed that Juan Miguel had always longed for his son Elian to flee to the United States. Shortly after Elian’s rescue, his father had even applied for a U.S. visa!

In phone call after phone call from Elian’s Cuban family to Elian’s Miami family, the Cuban Gonzalez family always made themselves very clear:  “Please take care of Elian. His father’s on the way….even if he has to row over in a washtub.” (more…)