Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere were on fire yesterday, with the news that Homeland Security Is Monitoring The Drudge Report, The New York Times, and other various websites.  The headline sparked burning blog posts all across the web, some bordering on hysterics. Type “Homeland Security” and “Drudge” into Google and perform a search within the last twenty four hours, and you’ll find 56,700 results at this writing.

The story was borne out of an upcoming privacy compliance review from the Department of Homeland Security regarding one of the agency’s initiatives that entails monitoring “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards.”  There’s just one important detail missing here:  the program was actually implemented in January of 2010.

The Volokh Conspiracy, a well-known group blog of law professors, puts the hype in check:

Matt Drudge and The Atlantic are hyperventilating, and Mark Hosenball of Reuters is bragging, about what The Atlantic calls an “exclusive” report that DHS “routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report.”

There are just two problems with this exclusive news report.

It isn’t news and it isn’t exclusive.

Readers of this blog could have learned exactly the same thing in one of my posts from, uh, February of 2010.

Here’s what I said two years ago:

With his usual nudge-and-wink, Matt Drudge invites us to be dismayed that “BIG SIS” — his moniker for Janet Napolitano — is “Monitoring Web Sites for Terror and Disaster Info.” Drudge links to a story saying that DHS will be monitoring social media like Twitter, as well as websites like Drudge, to keep abreast of events during the Winter Olympics. The source of the story is a twelve-page “Privacy Impact Assessment” issued by DHS.

This isn’t the first Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on DHS’s use of social media. A few weeks earlier, DHS wrote a similar assessment of using social media during Haitian rescue operations.

I am indeed dismayed, but not for Drudge’s reasons.  True, it’s disappointing that neither the Volokh Conspiracy nor www.skatingonstilts.com is deemed worthy of government monitoring.  But what’s really dismaying is that DHS and its Privacy Office felt obliged to labor over two separate and painfully obvious privacy assessments just to do things that you and I would do by simply firing up our browsers.

That’s it.  The story is that people at DHS are, gasp, browsing the Internet. As I said then, there’s no scandal, other than the electrons wasted by DHS agonizing over the privacy implications of browsing public Internet sources to find out what’s happening in the world.

The program is referred to as the Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative (pdf), and it was first implemented to monitor activity and news during events like those mentioned above.

Some seem especially concerned about the portion of the initiative that pertains to actually retaining personally identifiable information.

The DHS Privacy Office (PRIV) and OPS/NOC decided to further broaden the program’s capability to collect additional information, including limited instances of personally identifiable information (PII). As such, a Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) Update5 and new DHS/OPS-004 – Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative System of Records Notice (SORN)6 were issued on January 6, 2011 and February 1, 2011 respectively and are the basis for this Privacy Compliance Review (PCR).

But upon close inspection of “personally identifiable information,” the activity is really no different from what you or I might do to gather our own news interests.

(more…)

- DHS is monitoring Drudge Report, social networks:

A “privacy compliance review” issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a “Social Networking/Media Capability” which involves regular monitoring of “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.”

The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.”

- Piers Morgan tells Andrew Breitbart that he’s “evil.” At least Breitbart’s sites have never hacked phones on his watch.

- “Someone had a good time at her double nickel birthday!”

- Gawker: “N word did not get writer fired.”

- Comedy gold: Kremlin’s smear attempt on blogger backfires.

(more…)

Last week, Miami New Times Blogger Kyle Munzenrieder accused Matt Drudge of trying to stroke racial flames for reporting the facts in the news.

Mr. Munzenrieder is upset because Drudge linked to stories that reported the violence surrounding the Miami Beach Urban Weekend as part of a larger collection of links covering multiple incidents of youth related violence that gripped such cities as Boston, Nashville, Charlotte, and Rochester over the Memorial Day weekend.

Munzenrieder decried Drudge because some of the incidents in question involved Blacks and gangs, stating in his blog that he thought that covering such story was “kinda racist.” Munzenrieder went as far as to offer a quote a racial Gawker conspiracy theory: “since the president of the United States is a black man, and since black voters tend to align with his party, it is to the advantage of the Republican Party and its allies to inculcate fear and apprehension about people who look like him. Hence the top stories on the Drudge Report today.”

Mr. Munzenrieder is entitled to his opinions and theories–no matter how farfetched they may be–but to accuse an editor of racism for reporting the facts in the news is the sign of a sick mind. (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.

“Is Drudge America’s assignment editor?”

At just after 10 p.m. EST on Nov 2nd, CNN projected Republicans would take over the House of Representatives. Simultaneously, on NBC News, Brian Williams was pointing out that the elections were guaranteeing that the new Congress would have fewer Democrats in it than any Congress in more than 40 years. And the headlines on Drudge vacillated between “Tsunami Alert for House,” “Russ Feingold Out,” and “Pelosi in Denial.” And through it all, I couldn’t help but think of the fact that President Obama had given his only Election Day interview to pop culture’s Ryan Seacrest.

That’s right: Instead of sitting in front of a real journalist or news anchor who might have asked tough questions or demanded an account for the Democrat Party’s failures to this point, Obama gave an interview to a guy who’s day job includes interviewing the families of American Idol’s tone-deaf first-rounders, whose appearances on that show are only memorable because of how embarrassingly horrible they are.

And while I mean no offense to Seacrest, who actually deserves credit for landing such an interview, the facts are that Obama should have been sitting across from Chris Wallace at FOX NEWS. Instead, he placed himself in another situation where he’s lucky he got out of the interview without being referred to as “dude” again.

Maybe Obama bemoans the fact that he’s President as much the American electorate has come to bemoan it? (I’m being serious.) Or maybe he just saw the writing on the wall, and couldn’t cope with the fact that the repudiation voters handed him on November 2^nd actually signaled the end of his 2008 election mandate, while consequently demonstrating the momentum Conservatives are enjoying? (more…)

Last week, the DNC announced the launch of “The Accountability Project,” a new website volunteer project “to hold Republican candidates accountable for their claims, their public statements, and their campaign tactics.”  To call the project “grassroots” while a banner at the bottom of the page states that the site is paid for by the Democratic National Committee is surely pushing the frontiers of shamelessness; but desperate times call for desperate measures.  For citizen journalists have been making the news as well as reporting in recent weeks, and not in ways favorable to the left.

On the reporting front, the career of far-left journalist Helen Thomas was ended by a camera-wielding Rabbi posting footage of her anti-Semitic rantings on his website.  Meanwhile, conservative citizen journalists have been physically assaulted, notably by Democrat representative Bob Etheridge and at a campaign event for Illinois senatorial candidate Alexi Giannoulias.   It seems that, when it comes to citizen journalism, liberals can dish it out, but they can’t take it, and in considering just why they are apparently so touchy with respect to this particular manifestation of “new” media, we need to look at the a bigger picture, one which goes beyond the significance of the stories broken, or the merits or otherwise of the tactics employed; what is really remarkable is that conservative “citizen journalists” exist at all, and that they are reaching an increasingly wide audience with their exposure of the antics of liberal activists and Democrat politicians.  You see, it was not supposed to be like this. (more…)

All week we’ve been exploring America’s ten most left-biased working journalists and now we come to spot number four on the list. And so, for his close attention to pushing the spin and as one of the most active members of the Old Media’s Obama Butt Covering squad, we are pleased to award the number four spot to NBC Political Director Chuck Todd.

Todd is one of those journos that came from Democrat political circles — having worked for Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential run — and then crossed over into the world of “journalism.” With that you just know that he can be as unbiased as the best of them in his reporting. Well, if he can we’ll never know it because so far he has not been. Just the opposite, really.

Todd has done a bang-up job for the left in his journalism career. Likely Todd’s loyalty to the Democrat Party is probably why he felt the need to slam Senator Joe Lieberman last year, for instance. Proving his blindness to real political analysis, Todd claimed that Joe Lieberman was the “polar opposite” of the Senate’s lone socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (officially an “independent”).

In a discussion on the Today Show about the then yet to pass Obamacare bill, Todd said of Lieberman and Sanders, “Meanwhile, the Senate’s two Democratic independents, polar opposites ideologically, are split over the bill’s government-run public option and both are threatening to scuttle the process if they don’t get their way.” (more…)

In December 2008, a few days after Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested, I discovered this photograph in a newsletter published by the State of Illinois on November 12 celebrating the election of Barack Obama:

The photo was posted along with an article discussing the selection process for Obama’s replacement in the Senate. The caption to the photo read simply:

Governor Blagojevich confers with now President-elect Barack Obama

Within hours after we published the photo on Verum Serum, and after it was picked up by Hot Air and ultimately the Drudge Report (along with other blogs), the newsletter disappeared from the State of Illinois web site. Fortunately we were smart enough to save a copy.

The question of course is this: when did this meeting take place and what exactly were Blagojevich and the President-elect “conferring” about? (more…)

One must at least credit NBC’s Chuck Todd with one virtue.  He is utterly transparent.

When real “journalist” Todd – Chief White House Correspondent for NBC News and the co-hose of The Daily Rundown — gave this impish put down of what he calls, “Drudge-Driven Journalism,” his resentment, fear and school-boy petulance could not have been clearer to any sentient observer.

Such a pity, really.  A grown man reduced to whining in front of the White House makes his viewers so embarrassed for him that it’s painful to watch.  He should have saved all that peevish poppycock for Al Gore, the inventor of the internet.  For, in reality, the saving grace of journalism today – the only thing that gives these leftist buffoons in the MSM even a tiny shred of credibility – is the internet’s check and balance on their politically driven narratives.

Their animus is usually aimed at the Drudge Report because of the number of hits.  It’s Drudge’s numbers that drive the most powerful wedge between these MSM indoctrinated monkeys parading as journalists and their monopoly on the “truth.”  And all it takes is a single flashback to know why all the hacks associated with the once-august MSM fear “Drudge-Driven Journalism” – down to their quaking toes in their manure-muddied Gucci’s.

Flashback:  Dan Rather, 60 Minutes Wednesday, September 8, 2004. (more…)

In a recent interview with Tommy Christopher from Mediaite, NBC’s Chuck Todd was asked, “To what degree do you think the opinion media influence the questions that are asked here?” “Here” refers to the White House press room.

Todd replies that “there is no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it.” Apparently it’s “an obsession” of his because he doesn’t think “that’s the proper way for us to decide what’s news.” (emphasis added)

And there you have it, folks: the legacy media no longer control the narrative and knowledge of that fact is causing more itching and chafing amongst “professional journalists” than a truckload of baby powder could cure.

Journalism isn’t just about facts, even though getting the facts right is obviously important. It’s also about what people know and from what perspective it’s told. For literally decades, ABC, CBS and NBC – along with partners-in-crime the New York Times, Washington Post et al. – have had a stranglehold on what the people know and when they know it. Journalists who cover the national scene created an exclusive club, deciding what would be covered and how. They lunched together and gave each other prestigious awards, basking in the limelight of their own making and smiling down at the little people from their pedestals on high. They’re still doing it, in fact. (more…)