- 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…)

Remember when the DLC published a “hit list” of vulnerable districts and included crosshairs over Gabrielle Giffords’s Arizona district–and then some time later Sarah Palin published a map doing the same outlining the same vulnerable districts? The media excoriated Palin, blamed her for the Tucson massacre, and completely ignored that Democrats had done it weeks prior, Gawker among them. The online outlet has apparently forgotten their dislike of such lists because they’ve recently published a “hit list” of their own.

Gawker describes it as:

Click here or on the image on the right for a map of where the most notable New York City 1%ers—including Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and a bunch of Wall Street billionaires—live, for your protesting needs.

(more…)

- Catherine Herridge’s bizarre discrimination claim thrown out of court:

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon sided with network and cleared FNC of the allegations.  Leon also noted that the reporter engaged in “puzzling” contract negotiations, which aligned with her claims of discrimination.  Records show that Fox offered Herridge a new, three-year deal in 2008: $495,000.00 for year one, $530,000.00 in year two, and $570,000.00 for the third year.  But Herridge held out and countered with a 5-year contract starting at a whopping $900,000.00.  A day later, FNC denied the counter and informed her agent that she was already the “highest paid reporter in the Washington bureau.”

“If you wish to have a serious negotiation…I suggest that you and Herridge become more realistic,” wrote Judge Leon in a summary document, highlighting the wild 95% salary increase request.

- NYT publishes spread from communist China Daily. The spread had to be marked as “advertisement” so that readers could tell the difference.

(more…)

“The whole attitude of the site sort of mirrors Joan Walsh’s imprint that she left there which is sort of cold, aloof, and off-putting. But nothing personal against Joan.”

(more…)

The picture of Anthony Weiner’s naked erect penis is now out there.  No, Andrew Breitbart DID NOT release the picture to the media.  But in typical liberal style, the rabid dogs at Gawker.com are going after Andrew Breitbart, calling him a liar, for something other people did.

Gawker’s Adrian Chen writes:

The picture comes courtesy of Sirus XM shock jocks Opie and Anthony, who had Breitbart on his show.  Breitbart has said he wouldn’t release the picture [of Weiner's penis] because “I don’t think I want to put his family through that type of thing.” But since Breitbart is a liar and keeps his Weiner cock shot on his person at all times (wouldn’t you?), he shared it with the guys on his phone. Then they took their own snapshot and put it on Twitter.

The desperate for ratings jerks are Sirus XM radio shock jocks Opie and Anthony who interviewed Breitbart then betrayed him by snapping a picture of Breitbart’s cell phone as he showed the two men the proof.  Gawker reports the whole affair complete with Weiner’s full monty picture and then has the brazen audacity to call Breitbart a LIAR!

(more…)

MAUREEN O’CONNOR, STAFF WRITER FOR GAWKER: You know, one thing I do take issue with is, as Nancy mentioned, at first people didn’t take the story seriously because it showed up on Andrew Breitbart’s website, and they say he has a history of trying to smear people. I think even if that’s the case, it was very quickly that you could have looked into this story and verified it for yourself. It didn’t take a lot of effort to realize that Anthony Weiner admitted, yes, this showed up in my Twitter feed. So, it clearly wasn’t some kind of like imaginary thing. He admitted, yes, this happened. (more…)

“I hope he [Weiner] comes after me. Look up my IP. Nothing to hide here. I’d voluntarily hand anything they want over. Check me and my IP. Anything. I did not post that tweet.”

Twitter user Dan Wolfe (known as @patriotusa76) has clarified several details concerning his involvement in the “Weinergate” scandal, insisting that a thorough investigation of the tweets in question will prove he did not compromise the verified Twitter account of Congressman Anthony Weiner (D, NY-9). In a series of direct messages on Twitter, Wolfe explains how he found the offensive image sent from Weiner’s Twitter account, his previous tweets about accounts followed by the Congressman, and his desire for law enforcement to investigate his online activity that night.

Asked whether he followed Congressman Weiner or the recipient of the controversial tweet, Wolfe states he “wasn’t following either of them ever.” He named several other twitter uses who he regularly communicates with, explaining, “Our twitter group mentions him a lot because he appears in media a lot and says things we hate a lot. If he wasn’t saying anything, we wouldn’t comment.” Wolfe claims that on May 27th, the date the tweet went public, he navigated to the @RepWeiner account by clicking on Weiner’s username on a retweet in his Twitter stream. The tweet in question was the much-discussed one where Weiner announced the time of his upcoming appearance on the Rachel Maddow show with the hashtag #Thats545InSeattleIThink. “I found the 5:45 tweet weird,” Wolfe says.

(more…)

NEW YORK (AP) – The publisher of Sarah Palin’s forthcoming book filed a lawsuit against Gawker Media on Friday for leaking pages of “America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag” before its release next week.

The legal complaint was filed Friday in federal court in Manhattan, said a spokeswoman for HarperCollins Publishers. The filing came two days after Gawker published images of 21 of the book’s pages and its dedication page. In response, Palin tweeted, “Isn’t that illegal?”

Her publisher contends it is. The lawsuit asks that Gawker be banned from what it terms “further copyright infringement” and that Gawker deliver the source material to the publisher so it can be destroyed. HarperCollins is also seeking financial damages.

Gawker did not immediately respond to e-mails seeking comment Friday evening, but an item published the day before and titled “Sarah Palin Is Mad at Us for Leaking Pages From Her Book” defended the blog’s actions and linked to websites defining the fair use doctrine of copyright law. (more…)

It was only a matter of time before the nutroots at Huffington Post would resort to desperation and utter ridiculousness in their frenzied Bush-bashing; behold, the unintentionally comical headline atop Huffington Post:

Before we go into the nitty gritty, can I just note the delicious irony of a website of repeatedly accused plagiarist like Arianna Huffington – who settled out of court for, what else, plagiarism! – falsely accusing another of plagiarism? Remember this?

Seemingly plagiarizing Larry King transcripts so she could crow about having a Clooney byline. The result was an embarrassing smackdown from an A-list celebrity and loss of credibility.

(more…)

Death and journalism have always maintained a delicate and sometimes weird relationship.  During my days as a news writer for the old United Press International, my first lesson on the subject involved events with death tolls.  Any time the death toll is uncertain, the rule was to always go with the lowest ascertainable figure available.  The logic for low-balling death counts was clear as crystal; in news copy, it’s easier to kill people than it is to bring them back from the dead.

Julianna and Theresa Rolle

I was also taught the standard rules that applied to reporting on deaths.  There’s weren’t a lot of them but they managed to cover most circumstances:

• Was the person a minor?  (Child deaths are always more sensitive)
• Was the person a public official? (The public’s right to know is paramount)
• Was the death a public event? (Was it caused by a natural disaster? A fire? A crime? People have a natural and legitimate interest)
• Did the person occupy a degree of public awareness? (Movie stars and other non-elected but notable persons fit into this category)
• Did the circumstances of the death include a societal or public safety issue? (Death caused by bad roads, bad policy or bad ideas are absolutely fair game)
• Was it a freak of nature? (People are just sort of attracted to, well, freak stories)
• Is it a slow news day? (Like it or not, it’s a fact of life when covering death)
• What is the geographic depth of interest? (A routine death in a smaller town is far more newsworthy than a routine death in a major city)

Regrettably, even these somewhat loosy-goosey protocols of decorum and judgment have been lost in what passes for 21st-century reporting, the most recent example being this dreadful breach of professionalism from Gawker. (more…)

The lurid website Gawker.com recently posted a story about the suicide of a Fox News employee that was entirely empty of any real newsworthiness, but did serve as a platform to throw a dig at Fox News. In fact, it seems the only reason that Gawker posted the story at all is to attack Fox News. Exploiting this poor woman’s death and mental anguish just to get a dig at Fox News is over-the-top even for Gawker, but it is the culture our friends on the left have fostered in America today.

Featuring a giant Fox News logo, the Gawker piece blares in a bold headline that “Former Fox News Producer Committed Suicide, Investigators Say.” From all the hoopla Gawker gave this story one would think that Fox News was central in the story. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Certainly the suicide of a Fox News employee could be newsworthy. If it had involved a high profile, on-air personality or high executive of Fox, perhaps the news of his suicide might be somewhat newsworthy. But the woman whose death Gawker and its commenters are chortling over is nothing of the kind. (more…)

What is it about Sarah Palin that drives the left nuts? They hate everything about her, and yet at the same time they can’t stop talking about her. Like a succubus, she haunts their fever dreams, visits them in their sleep, and sucks the life force out of them. No matter what she does, what she says, or where she goes, Sarah is an object of endless fascination to the “progressives,” who hate her with a mad passion, cower in fear of her awesome endorsement powers and well… just can take their eyes off her:

Sarah’s appearance at the Belmont Stakes on Sunday (right) has set them off again. Here’s the dreadful Wonkette, shamelessly ogling:

We got a political news tip on our Facebook page from Wonkette operative “Laura,” and it goes like this: “Sarah Palin 12/09 no boobs http://bit.ly/bmQtPJ #Sarah Palin today, Instant boobage! http://j.mp/dokqd2 only her #plasticsurgeon knows4sure.” We are not fluent in the Twitter-Facebook dialects, but somehow we can follow the gist.

And the HuffPo: (more…)

Did MSNBC’s prime time clean-up hitter go crazy in the locker room last week? That’s the story bouncing around the web and even the New York Times.  Olbermann has denied derailing the Donny Deutsch train, but he admits doing nothing to stop Deutsch’s early dismissal from the 3 p.m. time slot.  As the Left likes to say, silence is consent, Mr. Olbermann.

What could be so offensive that would have Keith Olbermann (allegedly) going “full diva,” demanding Deutsch get put on double-secret probation?  Simply this: the most famous graduate of Cornell Cow College’s name was mentioned in a segment about some of the loudest media voices on the first episode of “America The Angry.”  Remember, Keith Olbermann is the guy who spends an hour a night, calling other people names, on a show featuring a segment where he nominates and crowns someone the “Worst Person In The World.”

Perhaps Olbermann’s rage is fueled by fears of his own demise?  According to the ratings, Mr. Olbermann’s spot atop the MSNBC Star Chart is in danger: (more…)

Whenever one respectable media outlet publishes lies, misinformation, and distortions, an inevitable consequence is that other sites pick up the bogus story, repeat the false or unproven facts, and attribute them to the original source.  The original source is the tentpole, and if it’s broken, the entire edifice crumbles.  Or does it?

Do the writers and publications who merely quoted from the original article have plausible deniability and are thus free from guilt when the truth is fleshed out?  Are they are off the hook entirely?  Just because these sources can shift blame, does it mean they aren’t responsible for what is published on their pages and site?  If the information they publish is later proven to have no factual basis, retractions are still necessary.

All of the sites listed below point to Max Blumenthal’s Salon.com piece as a primary source.  It would be excessive to hash out the individual errors in each because all have been thoroughly documented here in our retraction request to Salon:

Gawker’s Alex Pareene writes a column “James O’Keefe Pals Around with White Supremacists.”

In the Newark Star-Ledger: “Fake ACORN Pimp Tied To White Supremacists,” by author John D. Atlas.

(more…)

I woke up this morning to an email from Gillian Reagan, the reporter who had slammed me in a hit piece for Business Insider, defending her work and mitigating her sins, while not seeing how they all added up to an obvious hit job.  Thus began a war of words that’s continued all day.  Honest journalistic enterprise or partisan attack piece?  You be the judge:

PART 1: Gillian Reagan’s email

Hi Andrew,

We’d like to respond to your post on Big Journalism. May we repost the entry onto BusinessInsider.com so we can respond?

Let us know how you’d like to work it out.

Best,

Gillian

–

Gillian Reagan

The Business Insider

xxx@businessinsider.com

xxx Fifth Avenue, 7th Fl

New York, NY 10003

646-xxx-xxxx

~~~~

PART 2: Blodget Response to My Piece

From Buisness Insider:

Our Response To Andrew Breitbart’s Allegations About Us And Our Story

Yesterday, we published a story about Andrew Breitbart’s new site, Big Journalism. The story contained numerous quotes from Breitbart, including this one, in which the right-leaning Breitbart was describing sites operated by the left-leaning Arianna Huffington:

(more…)

Yesterday, I made the mistake of answering the following email, addressed to Big Government editor Mike Flynn, promptly:

Hi Mr. Flynn,

I’m a reporter from the Business Insider working on a short item about the new Big Journalism site launched today. Any chance you’d have Breitbart’s email so I can get in touch with him?

Would appreciate it so much.

Best regards,

Gillian

–

Gillian Reagan

The Business Insider

XXX@businessinsider.com

XXX Fifth Avenue, 7th Fl

New York, NY 10003

646-484-XXXX

twitter: XXXXXXX

I spoke with Ms. Reagan for about ten minutes and gave her a long explanation as to why I started Big Journalism. I awoke to something so far off from what I said that I called her back and asked her specifically about the following quote that is a composite of her question, a hodge-podge of my response and flat out lies.

Let me begin with the biggest deception of all: Business Insider is a front for Gawker, the notorious leftist/media snark site.  If she had been up front with me, like any sane person I never would have responded.  (Go to www.Gawker.com to see why.)  But she came to me under false pretenses.

Next, let me point out that when I told her she’d misquoted me, she told me that she had taped the conversation without my knowledge or my consent!

(more…)