This is the first in a daily series illustrating how MSNBC relies on Media Matters (the Soros-funded non-profit organization whose dubious tax-exempt status is currently under fire) as their research department.
In this inaugural video, we illustrate how David Shuster used talking points supplied by Media Matters for his infamous interview with Andrew Breitbart in 2010. And to make the relationship even more obvious, immediately following his exchange with Breitbart, Shuster brought on Media Matters’ Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert to provide his analysis and perspective.
It says a lot about who’s #winning when progressive activist groups have to take their sugardaddy billions to train other progs to be as good as conservatives on air.
The primary mission of Media Matters, he said, is to obsessively monitor Fox News and call attention to its distortions. But now it’s moving into the operational phase, transforming from observers to shock troops. The organization, he said, had to “professionalize the training and booking” of a left-leaning counterpoise.
Media Matters selected the coterie of attractive, articulate participants from 100 applicants, the largest pool so far. All in mid-career, the class included liberal think tank directors, former Capitol Hill staffers and presidential campaign aides, a pollster, a university professor, a combat veteran and contestants from both “American Idol” and “The Apprentice.”
Brenner, a former producer of CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer” and political director at MySpace, had recently founded a digital communications firm called FastFWD Group and an online magazine called HyperVocal.com.
To observe the training, The Post agreed to withhold the names of participants who asked not to be identified, which many of them did when instructors warned that a public alliance with Media Matters could jeopardize their chances of getting booked on Fox.
No, of course there isn’t any bias at the news networks. It’s like “Rock of Love,” but with progressive politics. Do go on!
Their conservative antagonists had all gone through rigorous media training at the Leadership Institute, he warned, but now they, too, would be armed with the ammunition to compete.
They’re teaching smarts? Or do they mean actual ammunition? It’s so hard to tell in this era of “no means yes” New Tone.
WaPo reports that David Shuster, known for being That Guy whose hysterical, over-the-top defamatory Tweets of James O’Keefe landed him in hot water with the MSNBC brass, is launching a new investigative journalism site focusing on the campaign cycle. He’s decided that taking cues from the Soros bloggers is legitimate study.
David Shuster, the former MSNBC reporter and man-about-D.C. who was ubiquitous during the 2008 campaign, thinks so. He got in touch to share new details about his project, which he described as a for-profit “investigative journalism venture.”
Shuster says he’s getting close to locking down funding for the project from a range of investors, and adds that he has been spending time over at Media Matters observing their operation.
After a heated appearance on MSNBC, Breitbart accused David Shuster of tricking him into an appearance on the show and attacked Shuster’s objectivity. On January 28, following an interview about O’Keefe’s Louisiana arrest, Breitbart assailed host David Shuster for luring him “into this story based upon the false premise of his objective neutrality.”
Breitbart’s fisking of Shuster was posted online while the two were on the air together, not afterward. Breitbart prepared the piece prior to going live with Shuster and in no way did the piece address the interview itself, just the events leading up to it.
The premise of Media Matter’s “Breitbart bites the hand that feeds him” piece is to demonstrate that Breitbart tends to report on the journalists to whom he grants interviews. And why not? We at BigJournalism are of the opinion that the media are frequently the message. But whether or not you support MMFA’s thesis that Breitbart is mereley “lashing out” after interviews, the David Shuster example they reference is an invalid piece of evidence and should be omitted from a corrected version of the article.
We kindly request Media Matters for America issue a formal correction.
Over the past several months I have had the honor of being Big Journalism’s official Correction Alpaca. I’ve requested over two dozen corrections at Big Journalism and many others on Big Hollywood, Twitter, and via email. Some of the news organizations I’ve addressed have done their journalistic duty and set their respective records straight, while others have neglected to fulfill this journalistic responsibility. Others still have delivered what Patterico refers to as “stealth corrections,” that is, where a post is corrected without formal acknowledgment by the publication that the public record had been amended. We acknowledge there is a time and place for this, but it’s done far, far, far too often in the internet age.
If you recall, my responsibilities as Correction Alpaca commenced in order to alert the blogosphere of the mainstream media’s culpability and ineptitude in its mostly incorrect reporting of the James O’Keefe caper at Senator Landrieu’s Louisiana office earlier this year. As of Wednesday, this saga, dubbed “Watergate Jr.,” by MSNBC has come to an end, with O’Keefe pleading guilty to mere misdemeanor charges of entering federal property under false pretenses and getting a proverbial “slap on the wrist” sentence.
So, in memory of “Watergate Jr.,” I would like to draw your attention to these sites, which at the time of this publication, still have published unforced errors regarding the prank in New Orleans:
After pleading guilty to what is apparently the misdemeanor of “Entry by false pretenses to any real property, vessel, or aircraft of the United States” (18 U.S.C. § 1036), James O’Keefe has joined a long list of political activists convicted of charges related to their political activism. He’s just the only conservative one. Nonetheless, we look forward to the mainstream media enshrining him in its current pantheon of heroes of civil disobedience. And to elephants flying.
Like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, with their like-clockwork arrests protesting whatever is in the news at any given moment, O’Keefe’s antics were apparently designed to make a political point. In this case, the point seemed to be to show that the local staff of Senator Mary Landrieu (D., La.) was making up stories about her telephone system’s being down in order to dodge calls from outraged constituents decrying the health care reform bill.
It being a conservative point, rather than a left-wing attempt to raise racial tensions or extort money from cowardly corporations, we have not seen much sympathy for O’Keefe’s plight.
Of course, it is unfair to compare O’Keefe to lefty icons Sharpton or Jackson – unfair to O’Keefe. The precocious O’Keefe helped blow the lid off ACORN’s twisted willingness to break not only the law but also the most basic tenets of moral decency in order to assist what its representatives understood to be child sex slavers, leading to ACORN’s welcome demise. In contrast, Sharpton is a notorious charlatan who has spent years dodging the judgment against him entered after the Tawana Brawley charade, and Jesse Jackson is a noted shakedown artist, adulterer and father of a love child. (more…)
Things were going so well for David Shuster at the start of the year. On January 26, James O’Keefe, chief ACORN-buster, and several of his friends had just been arrested for “breaking into” the office of Senator Mary Landrieu. The MSM sharks started circling. Blood was in the water. Cries of “Watergate, Jr.” reverberated throughout the vast MSM echo chamber, led by the king reverberator himself, David Shuster, in this whole overblown non-scandal.
For a refresher course in MSM diversion and moral equivalence, watch Shuster bend over backwards, Cirque-du-Soleil style, to defend ACORN while simultaneously all-but-convicting O’Keefe of felony burglary. Shuster claims in the Breitbart video that “O’Keefe wanted to shame Senator Mary Landrieu.” Yes, Dave. He wanted to. But she’d already beaten him to it.
At the time of the real Watergate scandal, Shuster was just out of kindergarten. Perhaps this explains his first-grade level of skepticism of politicians. It makes one wonder: where did the man get his B.A. from– the Kumbaya School of Communications? Yesterday, O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in the Landrieu event. End of non-story. (more…)
James O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor today for his guerrilla-reporting stunt last January in the New Orleans offices of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. The charge that he has admitted to, “entering federal property under false pretenses,” is a far cry from the phone-bugging and Watergate Jr. distortions first screamed by the MSM in high-octane hyperventilation mode when the story first broke in January.
MSNBC devoted the top slot in each of its prime time shows to the story and created a special “Watergate Jr.” graphic, and Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann each took their turn at the James O’Keefe piñata, whacking away with full faith in the yummy morsels they expected to come tumbling out.
The big problem was that everything they “reported” to their viewers was based on pure conjecture and wishful thinking. If they had spent ten minutes reading the initial report from the federal investigators they would have seen that there was never an allegation of wire-tapping or bugging. But the facts, readily available to any journalist curious enough to find the truth, didn’t stand in their way of wall-to-wall “Watergate, Jr.” coverage. It was a typically disgraceful performance by the leftist American media.
President Obama’s distain for those associated with the Tea Party movement goes back at least as far as his 100th day in office when he said this:
The President’s mockery has continued with a sustained tone of ridicule that has ratcheted up as the Tea Party movement has spread. Last month he said this:
According to Jake Tapper in a forthcoming book, Obama blames the GOP’s resistance to the stimulus bill for the opposition against him. It’s all part of his linking the Tea Party movement to the Republicans and, thereby, aiming to make them what they are not – a partisan issue.
Meanwhile, two TV news outlets, shills for Obama since he announced as a candidate for the presidency, are losing their audiences. According to the New York Times: (more…)
We’ve already seen in the past how symbiotic the relationship is between MSNBC (whose ratings are cratering among adults 25-54) and Media Matters. Witness the now infamous “interview” conducted by suspended MSNBC employee David Shuster and Andrew Breitbart. His question at the 2:55 mark repeats an attack that appeared on Media Matters the very same day of the interview, January 28.
To make things even cozier, after Breitbart’s segment with Shuster, the not-quite-canned-yet reporter then turned to his next guest, Eric Boehlert, Senior Fellow at (you guessed it) Media Matters. Let’s just say the line of questioning was a little friendlier for Boehlert. Sample question:
What about the standard that is used at websites like Andrew Breitbart’s, the idea that even today you can go ahead and talk about “alleged crimes” of ACORN employees when there has (sic) been no crimes alleged… what’s that about?
But now, the MSNBC/MMFA ecosystem has come full circle as they now appear to work in mysterious tandem with each other to not just report stories, but to help create stories, report stories, and then cross-promote those stories. (more…)
Today, in his guise as the Washington Post’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander posted a discussion about the recent misreporting by the Old Media about the various “incidents” that supposedly occurred between the admittedly raucous tea party protestors and members of Congress in Washington, D.C., during the healthcare fight. But while Alexander finally makes some admissions on how the Old Media dropped the ball on these exaggerated reports, he still missed the point of the whole mess.
Alexander starts his report off with an interesting rhetorical style. He writes about incidents as if they actually happened even as he admits later down the page that either they didn’t or might not have. He recounts the supposed incidents in affirmative language instead of using qualifiers. “The Post and other news organizations had reported a series of incidents so ugly,” Alexander says, “they were denounced by congressional leaders of both parties.” Notice how he didn’t use qualifiers like “alleged incidents”? No, he said “reported on incidents” as if they were actual incidents that have been proven. If someone were to stop reading after the first few paragraphs they’d go away thinking those “incidents” were confirmed and true.
In any case, Alexander recounts the supposed “spitting” incident where Rep. Emanuel Cleaver complained that he was spat upon as he entered the capitol. He also recounted the name-calling that Rep. Barney Frank encountered as well as the thus far unproven “N” word incident that black members of Congress claim that they suffered through on the day they signed the bill providing for a government take over of America’s health system. (more…)
It’s official: David Shuster is in very bad odor at MSNBC. From Mediaite, quoting an email from Phil Griffin, Shuster’s boss, to a member of the public:
From: Griffin, Phil (NBC Universal)
Sent: Wed 4/07/10 11:16 PM
Sorry, but this is a business and I need team players. He was not moral, ethical or professional and that is not fair to the 500 people who work at msnbc.
Thanks for your note,
Phil
That’s probably it for our friend Dave, at least as far as his MSNBC career is concerned. His crime, reportedly, was taping a pilot for failing rival CNN, which would have brought him full circle on his tour through the cable-news jungles. After starting in the CNN Washington bureau, he moved on to Fox News, where he covered both the Clinton impeachment (Shuster had done some time himself in Little Rock, as a correspondent for KATV there, so he knew the territory) and the attacks of Sept. 11.
But then came the fateful bargain with MSNBC — (more…)
The entertainment web site TheWrap has posted a tip sheet for the embattled CNN cable news network.
CNN keeps hemorrhaging viewers, and TheWrap is offering some advice for the network to snap out of its funk.
Why any media organization feels the need to prop up a rival in our competitive culture is a mystery, but let’s assume TheWrap.com has only noble intentions. That’s why it’s a shame the web site doesn’t come close to offering practical solutions to CNN’s woes.
So, in the interest of media camaraderie, here are three steps that would actually help the network come back to life. Suffice to say TheWrap didn’t touch on any of them. (more…)
I wonder if MSNBC can get its money back on that special “Watergate Jr.” graphic and the ominous theme music they used when throwing their resources (and reputations) at James O’Keefe?
The charges against O’Keefe and three other men have been reduced to a misdemeanor offense of entering federal property under false pretenses. Yes, the extent of their offense is that two of the men dressed up like the construction worker in the Village People and claimed to be phone repairmen. Call it “Misdemeanor Mischief.”
O’Keefe and his cohorts now get their day in court to defend against these charges, or to negotiate a plea with federal prosecutors. So, to paraphrase former Labor Secretary Ray Donovan: Which office does O’Keefe go to get his reputation back? (more…)
That’s a sadder-but wiser David Shuster you see in the following teaser video on “media bias” from Mediaite, responding to off-camera questions from someone named Tommy “We Got Him“ Christopher. Watch in amazement as a chastened Shuster dodges, weaves, and rope-a-dopes Christopher as he simultaneously pacifies, propitiates and generally makes nice with Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keeffe, adamantly refusing to take the bash bait.
Shuster, you may recall, rather famously did battle with Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe over the latter’s arrest for his alleged involvement in an attempt to “maliciously interfere” with the telephones at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. In this preview of our interview, I asked Shuster for his take on the position of people like Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge, and James O’Keefe in journalism. His responses were rather surprising.
Shuster’s demeanor, for some reason, brings to mind this famous number from The Music Man:
First there was the old adage: never drink and dial.
Then we all learned that texting while driving was a very, very bad idea:
Now another no-no has been added to the list — for journalists. From Mashable comes this news about Reuters:
Last night, Reuters released their social media policy, which includes instructing journalists to avoid exposing bias online and tells them specifically not to “scoop the wire” by breaking stories on Twitter.
The strict instruction makes it clear that even though news continually breaks on Twitter first — especially in disaster scenarios — Reuters journalists are to break their stories first via the wire and not on Twitter.
Acronyms seem to be more popular than ever. The President is the POTUS, his teleprompter is the TOTUS, and the Supreme Court is the SCOTUS. The media should have its own acronym, so I have the perfect plan.
There are many ways to describe the media in America in its current state, most seem to fit pretty well. Most common is the Mainstream Media. The MSM acronym fits. I like it, it works and most people know what it means. I know the reference here is that they are mainstream with their own leftist ideas, but, there is nothing “mainstream” about the current state of the media in this country. In fact, it is far from the mainstream. The American media hates the mainstream when they protest against excessive federal spending and a loss of Constitutional values. The media ignores the mainstream when it figured out that global warming is nothing more than fraud. The media has long since left the mainstream in this country (Fox News being the exception) and they have become a radical arm of liberal politics.
I have used the phrase, Activist Old Media at times just because it fits with their agenda, but witness the children at MSNBC. You don’t have to be old to be wrong. That’s the kid network. At just 14 years old it is young and pubescent and likes it that way. Someday it may grow up, but until then we will watch and laugh and be amused at its adolescent behavior. (more…)
In an interview with Andrew Breitbart last week on MSNBC, David Shuster asserted that Mr. Breitbart hired the private investigator who uncovered the dumped documents outside of a San Diego ACORN office (exchange begins approximately 4:30 into video):
November 23, 2009, you reported that ACORN had been involved in an obstruction of justice because a private eye that you hired went to the ACORN offices in San Diego and found lots of documents.
At no point did Mr. Breitbart hire the private investigator who uncovered the ACORN documents dumped in San Diego.
Additionally, Mr. Shuster suggested that the documents uncovered from the dumpster at ACORN San Diego did not contain sensitive information:
When people actually looked at the documents, let’s see, they were documents of old fliers, food stamp applications, canvassing forms…
The laws governing how sensitive, personal information such as social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, immigration records, tax returns, etc. must be treated are very stringent, and thus it seems as if ACORN may have committed serious violations in that department alone, with thousands upon thousands of potential plaintiffs.
Given this information, it is clear that Mr. Shuster misrepresented the facts in regards to the ACORN document dump by intentionally highlighting only certain documents while ignoring other relevant ones.
We respectfully ask that Mr. Shuster issue a correction/retraction.
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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