Geraldo Rivera at Fox News:

Sitting at the bar in Paolo’s Restaurant at 92nd Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan Saturday afternoon, December 10th, I was shocked by the tone the conversation with my old ABC News colleague Lowell Bergman had taken. He was heading to London and had urgently requested that we get together before his afternoon flight from JFK.

Bergman

I remembered Lowell as a brave, competent, but hugely self-righteous old school investigative reporter, who famously produced the Mike Wallace expose of the major tobacco companies for ’60 Minutes.’ Al Pacino played him in the movie version of the saga, ‘The Insider.’

Although I hadn’t seen the now 60-year old veteran reporter since he parted ways with ABC back in 1982, I recognized him immediately. …

He explained that his investigative reporting program at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, in association with reporters from ProPublica are probing our corporate parent, News Corp’s U.S. properties; specifically the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

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Hilarious. After shouting down Fox News’s Geraldo at the Jazz Hands and Bongos Festival, protesters, for the lack of a more nuanced term, go a’ famewhoring.

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Today, Media Matters for America has taken it upon itself to ask the question: “Who Is J. Christian Adams?” .

They say:

New Black Panthers Party fabulist J. Christian Adams is a long-time right-wing activist who began working for the U.S. Department of Justice during its notorious era of politicized hiring and now blogs for the right-wing media site Pajamas Media, often issuing false attacks on the Obama DOJ for its supposed politicization and “racial agenda.” His forthcoming book, Injustice: Exposing The Racial Agenda Of The Obama Justice Department, promises to cover similar territory.

In its attacks on Adams, Media Matters has even stooped to posting his home address and alleging that he is a Republican donor–without mentioning that he has also contributed to Democrats.

Media Matters also tries to dismiss Andrew Breitbart’s report this morning that Barack Obama spoke and marched with the New Black Panther Party while he was campaigning for president. They note that “several thousand people ‘appeared and marched’ with the New Black Panthers that day”–a point that Breitbart’s post itself made clear.

What Media Matters doesn’t want to tell you is what Adams’s book reveals: that the New Black Panthers were there to support Obama, and said so earlier that day while Obama listened and smiled; that the Panthers shadowed him, left the march with him, and raised black power salutes over his head; and that Shabazz claimed he spoke with Obama.

If there was a 4th of July event and the Ku Klux Klan were given a speaker’s slot, would any GOP candidate be stupid enough to speak there? Why, then, is it acceptable to Media Matters for Obama and other Democrats to have spoken and marched with the Panthers?

Media Matters refers to the ‘fable’ of the New Black Panther Party, but they don’t tell their readers anything at all about the New Black Panthers. In fact, they don’t seem to be critical of the New Black Panther Party in any way.

So, who is the New Black Panther Party?

I’ll do a short summary with a lot of video because, frankly, a tiny bit of research quickly brings up how awful this group is.

Let’s start with a video of Geraldo Rivera taking on New Black Panther Party leader Malik Zulu Shabazz over his statement after 9/11 that “Brother” Osama bin Laden deserved “respect” and applause:

That’s the reality of the New Black Panther Party. The fact that MMfA chooses to shield their readers from it in order to attack J. Christian Adams–who opposes this group–is repulsive. Apparently, attacking a conservative trumps telling the truth about a racist, homophonic, antisemitic hate group.

Here are some more facts about the New Black Panther Party. (more…)

It’s easy to make fun of Geraldo Rivera, but in this interview with the posturing radical Malik Zulu Shabazz he reaches back to the glory days of “Willowbrook,” filled with righteous indignation:

For those who’ve seen this movie before — back in the late sixties — Shabazz is (so to speak) a pale imitation of his fiery forebears, but still spouting the same tiresome, second-hand communist-inspired separatist resentment and hate that could only be expressed by someone who has never had any real obstacles put in his way. (He’s a lawyer, for crying out loud.) It’s an act, a sham, but a dangerous one, and Geraldo is right to call him out on it.

In case you’re interested, here’s what the real Black Panthers — led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale — looked like back in the day:

And here’s the party platform: (more…)

When the Times Square bomb was discovered, the usual suspects in the press once again showed us how objective they really are. Geraldo Rivera, keen to outdo Keith Olbermann in the irrelevance department, blamed it all on white people, racists and conservative extremists (which are all the same thing to Jerry Rivers, apparently). And Katie Couric interviewed tiny but autocratic New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who ventured a guess that the bomber would turn out to be: “Someone home-grown, a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health-care bill or something.” Couric didn’t even blink or question that.

Why would she?  It fit the narrative.

And let’s not forget MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, who revealed her frustration that the suspect is an Islamic terrorist. The horror!

I mean the thing is that — and I get frustrated and there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.

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