Falling to your own media malpractice makes you irresponsible, not a “victim.” It doesn’t make you a “target” when other people publicly note the absence of your journalistic integrity. Politico missed this bit of logic recently when it attempted to blame conservatives for the misdeeds of various members of the media, most recently NYT’s Natasha Lennard.

… these critiques may just muddy the waters enough to do some damage to both the media and the fledgling anti-Wall Street movement.

I’d like you to try to dig deep down in your heart and attempt to dredge up some compassion for Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi–I mean, real heavy spiritually-lifting compassion, the kind that is given even when it hasn’t been earned–Matt’s antics, from the horse semen pie incident (don’t click that link before lunch) to his vile attack on Michele Bachmann (ditto), have not earned him much compassion.  But try, anyway.

Here’s the position Taibbi finds himself him; he cares passionately about the problems created by the nexus of government and the big financial industry. He’s identified them countless times over the last few years but he can’t figure out who will actually solve them. Taibbi has no place to go.

Poor Matt knows that Obama and the Democratic party aren’t the answer. He’s given a ton of ink to stories about what sellouts the Democrats and Obama are. Here’s a quote from a recent Taibbi article called Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal:

My theory is that the Obama administration is trying to secure its 2012 campaign war chest with this settlement deal. If Barry can make this foreclosure thing go away for the banks, you can bet he’ll win the contributions battle against the Republicans next summer.

That isn’t a right-wing blogger calling the President “Barry” in a sneer. That’s Matt Taibbi calling the President “Barry” in a sneer.  The 2012 elections are on the horizon and no Democratic primary challenger is riding in to save the day, either. Game over. Matt is stuck with Barry. (more…)

- NewsBusters looks at a featured segment affiliated with the host of last night’s GOP debate on CNN.

CNN advertises Cooper’s regular segment, “Keeping Them Honest,” with the question: “Who’s Anderson keeping honest tonight?” Apparently, CNN and Cooper find Republicans are much more dishonest. Since July, a review of “Keeping Them Honest” segments found 24 reports tagging the Republicans with dishonesty, compared with just three for Democrats – a ratio of eight to one.

- Meanwhile, our own John Nolte felt he handled himself well as moderator. Weigh in with your thoughts below in comments, should you desire.

Whatever you might think of Anderson Cooper as a CNN anchor (I’m obviously not a fan), his performance as tonight’s moderator of the GOP’s 287th debate was stellar. His questions were all on point and he stayed far away from the divisive social issues no one but “journalists” interested in re-electing Obama care about. And, for the first time, it seemed as though everyone on the stage got close to equal time to speak.

- CBS bangs the drum for the Occupy movement’s incessant drumming as a means of achieving harmony.

On Tuesday’s Early Show, CBS’s Bigad Shaban, seemingly grasping for straws for any reason to report on “Occupy Wall Street,” played up the music performances from protesters down in lower Manhattan. Shaban emphasized how “music has helped spur movements,” and gushed that “some believe if history is any indication, they could provide harmony to a movement.”

- MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan has been hitting harmony like a drum beat, too. But then, the media didn’t just get the memo, in this instance, they helped write it, too, as we’ve shown.

Other exchanges and an email from Dylan Ratigan himself to the activist group were revealed in this Big Journalism post by Editor Dana Loesch. Note the subject header of Ratigan’s October 7th email at previous link: “Harmony.” Here is Ratigan invoking the same theme to a media reporter on October 12th.

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Yesterday Big Journalism first told you how NBC’s Dylan Ratigan and other media types were actively working with Occupy Wall Street to help them craft messaging (and in some cases, completely revise statements themselves) while simultaneously reporting on the movement as an objective network anchor. Afterwards, Retracto and I placed bets on the quickness with which Media Matters would spin for the embattled Ratigan. (I won, but Retracto was close.)

Eric Boehlert responded early this afternoon:

Since Boehlert edits a site called Media Matters, and since the primary obsession/focus of this website is Fox News, I figured Boehlert had written a piece detailing how Fox itself had clandestinely written talking points for the tea party while reporting on the movement. I asked Boehlert to produce this link, but as happens any time you bring up facts, Boehlert went silent.

The fact is that Media Matters wrote no such piece and Boehlert has no link to produce because it never happened.

The three people who read Media Matters valiantly tried to throw a besieged Boehlert a rope with the kooky argument that any Fox coverage of the tea party was equal to NBC’s Ratigan writing talking points for Occupiers. One asserted that 9/12 was a Fox event; it was not. In reality, Fox ran as far as it could from 8/28 and was one, if not the only, network to not report on 8/28 at all. This argument is invalid however, because it assumes that the 8/28 event was a tea party when it was not; the purpose of the 8/28 event was American unity. I was in DC covering the event; I saw not one Gadsen flag.

(more…)

Note to media: it’s the ethics, not the ideology!

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, also exposed as one of the alleged journalists working with the Occupy movement behind the scenes and undisclosed, offers up a weak defense of the inherent lack of ethics of those involved. Let’s square the circle and call it weak tea.

There is nothing terribly interesting in any of these exchanges. Most all of the things written were things all of us ended up saying publicly in our various media forums.

It likely fell to a mostly politically irrelevant Taibbi and Rolling Stone to lead the push back as a distraction from NBC’s big problem, Dylan Ratigan. The pigeon-coiffed man with the big mouth has some explaining to do, including to NBC suits and anchor, Brian Williams.

Emails included in Big Government’s document drop of emails exchanged by leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement make it clear that MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan has been directly involved with the group, including helping them to draft statements and offering revisions to a statement David DeGraw might later discuss on NBC News with Brian Williams. Scroll to the bottom of this particular email from David DeGraw to view this passage below and more.

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Dave Weigel acknowledges in his Journolist 2.0 analysis that as a member of the original Journolist, his take may not be well received.

I didn’t have a problem with his write up until I got to this:

Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy Wall Street email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media.

Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear. The list also includes a number of radical organizers, such as Kevin Zeese.

In these emails we see MSNBC’s Ratigan, hawking his book in the footnotes, instructing occupiers on how properly to present their demands and messages while simultaneously appearing on television reporting “objectively” on the story (when he’s not taking part in the protests himself as content.)

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Today’s Sound Bite. This is journalism? I was waiting for Ratigan to drop the mic and pick up a placard.

Oh my: at 4:15 in he does just about that: he leads the crowd in a stance and shouts “I agree with you!”

(more…)

He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

Well, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan has been saying some interesting things these days, hasn’t he? Most particularly, two amusing things scream out in a recent interview with The Atlantic. One was that he refuses to read newspapers and the other is that he wants people to think he isn’t the doctrinaire liberal everyone assumes he is. Neither claim will endear him to his lefty pals at NBC, but which one is more likely true?

First of all, it is pretty amusing to see a denizen of MSNBC diss the newspapers like Ratigan did. When asked how he takes his daily news he said, “I wouldn’t read a newspaper now unless you put a gun to my head and even then I would really try to negotiate with you. It’s not that I reject the content, it’s that I reject the format.”

Ouch. Of course, at some point one wonders what he’s reading if not at least some coverage of the newspapers even if only on the net. Still, it must hurt to have one on their own side saying that newspapers don’t fit in his world.

It is the other thing he said that seems to ring hollow.

One of my great frustrations with working in cable news is that the entire cable news infrastructure has been branded through partisan political lenses and so people assume that if you’re on MSNBC you’re left and if you’re on Fox News you’re right. There’s no question that I’m painted as left because of the network I’m on.

Just “painted” as left? Really?

He went on to say that the parties are exactly the same, both “bought by six industries: energy, banking, health care, defense, agribusiness and communications.”

Is Ratigan really trying to get us to believe that he isn’t just a regular old, doctrinaire liberal like all the other MSNBC staffers? Does he think any of us believe that he’s in any way upset that people assume he’s a lefty merely because he works for the farthest left of all the lefty “news” outlets in the country?

So, how do we assess Mr. Dylan Ratigan’s point of view?

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Continuing our 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, we are pleased to present the Martin Bashir edition.

Watch how Mr. Bashir relies on actual, suggested questions supplied by the sad clowns at Media Matters in reaction to his colleague Dylan Ratigan’s interview of Andrew Breitbart that took place the day before. Media Matters scolded Ratigan for not confronting Breitbart and offered examples of questions he SHOULD have asked.

Mr. Bashir got the message:

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Four months ago, AOL gave to Arianna Huffington $315 million and the keys to its news operations as part of their purchase of her progressive internet behemoth. At the time I contended that the most significant news property to be controlled by the Huffington Post’s progressive machine was the least known, Patch.com, a network of 500+ hyper-local websites covering 800 communities which combines national/regional information with local community news editors filing stories and updating community-specific within the communities they serve. The Patch network is concentrated mostly in the larger states.

Ms. Huffington agreed with my assessment, the day after the sale’s announcement she told Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent, that PATCH.com is indeed a major part of her 2012 Election plans.

“We are going to dramatically accelerate this in 2012,” said Huffington, who discussed the idea on a conference call yesterday with Patch.com employees. “We will have thousands and thousands of people covering the election. Covering the Republicans. Covering the Democrats. Just being transparent about it.”

Aye, there’s the rub! Is it possible for Ms Huffington to cover both parties and fairly? Her track record says no.  The danger may not be in the way stories are reported but which stories are reported.  The Huffington Post knows who their major constituency is, and bows down to them all the time as in the case of booting Andrew Breitbart off their front page of featured columnists because of pressure from self-avowed communist Van Jones and his Color of Change organization.

(more…)

Most of the time when a guest appears on a news show he’s there because he’s trying to sell a book. That was certainly the case when Ted Rall appeared on Dylan Ratigan’s show on MSNBC yesterday. What’s different about this appearance is the nature of what Rall is selling. Here’s an excerpt from chapter one of his book, titled The Anti-American Manifesto:

We are here because the U.S. is going to end soon. There’s going to be an intense, violent, probably haphazard struggle for control. It’s going to come down to us versus them. The question is: What are you going to do about it?

Ted Rall is very clear what he wants to do about it. He wants to take up arms and, sooner rather than later, get on with killing people:

A war is coming. At stake: our lives, the planet, freedom, living. The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. Are you going to fight back? Will you do whatever it takes, including taking up arms?

(more…)

Chris Matthews reported today that Joe Miller’s campaign arrested a liberal blogger “because [he] dared to ask a question of a candidate in a democracy.” He called them thugs and said he expected to see Bounty Hunter Dog at Millers side.

Chris Matthews has never seen anything like this. Really?

Except in Martha Coakley’s case it was a reporter for the Weekly Standard.

If Matthews is against such thuggish behavior, one wonders where Matthews’s outrage was when the thugs with SEIU violently attacked Kenneth Gladney. Where was Matthew’s outrage of thuggery when Black Panthers intimidated voters at a polling station? Dylan Ratigan also chimed in on the story today when he had an analyst say unchallenged on his show that the guards were a “para-military force” by Miller’s side.

Never a dull moment in everybody’s favorite nut house:

Now that Pastor Jones has called off the Koran-burning, will Breitbart get the credit? (more…)

Counting down to the fatwa now…

From Mediaite:

Andrew Breitbart was back on Dylan Ratigan’s MSNBC show this afternoon to talk about Elena Kagan.

Last appearance saw the debut of “jovial and measured Andrew,” while today it was all about the “irony mustache.”

Here’ the explanation:

I told you when I was wearing a beard at the White House Correspondents Dinner that I would debut an irony mustache. Some people were meant to have mustaches. The Tom Selleck, and people in pornography. But I’m not. I said I’d wear it once. I’m going to shave it when the show’s over. Hopefully it doesn’t take away from the seriousness of the discussion at hand.

Ok then.

The discussion at hand was Elena Kagan – and Breitbart’s belief that we shouldn’t be discussing her personal life and it is liberals who are driving the discussion in the first place.

Read the full article here.

As a black proud Tea Party patriot, I am extremely offended by MSNBC’ host Dylan Ratigan’s baseless accusation that the Tea Party Movement (my white brother and sister fellow patriots) embraces Nazis and racists. Ratigan’s attack epitomizes the liberal media’s commitment to protect Obama and his radical agenda at all costs. They have a genuine disdain for freedom, capitalism and We The People. No tactic is too low. Ratigan’s rant:

While interviewing (really badgering) Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express, Ratigan outrageously to portray the Tea Party Express but tour as a far right hate group supportive of the killing of blacks and Jews. Well then, what the heck am I doing on the bus? Did I miss the “People We Hate” memo? Or perhaps, the organizers hid that memo from me and other blacks on the tour.

Left wing fanatics such as Ratigan have no shame. Incredibly they will throw the innocent Tea Party patriots under the bus in defense of Obama and his far left radical agenda. (more…)

Ever feel that you’re trapped inside a lunatic asylum, where all the normal rules of logic and discourse have been turned on their heads, and screaming nutbags roam the halls, hurling imprecations at imaginary enemies?  A place where up is down, black is white and left is right? Welcome to MSNBC, whose daily lineup has become a who’s who of strutting Napoleons, fantasy Christs and various Emperors of Cloud Cuckoo-Land.

Look!  Here’s Dylan Ratigan now, in his memorable, nearly career-ending exchange with Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

Which may explain why Ratigan (who, like MSNBC regular Donny Deutsch, has a claim to punditry fame based on… what, again?), and his antagonistic show Morning Meeting vanished from the low-rated cable network in December, to be replaced by the kiddie corps of Chuck “Horse Race” Todd and the utterly unintelligble Savannah Guthrie (as Henry Higgins might ask: why can’t young American women learn to speak?).

So you’ll be pleased to know that, for some recondite reason, the pride of Saranac Lake is now back on the air weekday afternoons as host of The Dylan Ratigan Show.  Whence comes this great moment in television: (more…)