As we’ve highlighted before, tax exempt Media Matters’ mission isn’t to correct misinformation in the conservative media. Their job is to promote narratives which will then be picked up by friendly outlets, like MSNBC, and seep out into the public consciousness. Their real purpose is to act as guardians at the gates of the Left’s ideological iron curtain and keep progressives from thinking for themselves. When you couple this narrative-shaping with the “mainstream” media’s ingrained left-leaning bias, you get, for example, polls showing the level of misinformation in the general public.

A recent NBC/WSJ poll (pdf) provides a classic example of how the left-leaning media takes a poll and uses it to shape and promote a narrative. Note first that this poll is a general opinion poll measuring public sentiment on a broad range of issues related to politics and the economy. Keep in mind that the Left has been in full damage control for the Occupy movement because a) Democrats have voiced support of it and b) the violence, vandalism, drug overdoses and reports of sexual assaults/rapes are beginning to get bad coverage – finally. The spin doctors are desperate for anything that can lend legitimacy to a solidly Leftist movement which is spiraling into chaos.

The Washington Post’s resident DNC talking point parrot (I know there are several), Greg Sargent, cites some findings of the new poll. The poll results are 27 pages long, but Sargent cherry-picks the stuff that can be spun into “positive” news for Occupy Wall Street.

A new NBC/WSJ poll finds very broad support for Occupy Wall Street’s critique of inequality, with more than three quarters agreeing with this statement: “The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich.” Eighty-four percent of working class whites agree with that statement, too.

To his credit, Sargent also notes that the poll finds a majority of the people are against raising taxes on anyone, but he questions the wording of that particular question. So he only gets half-credit because he didn’t question the wording of another finding that I’ll address in a bit. Actually make that 1/4 credit because he claims the critique in question is an “Occupy Wall Street” thing when this sentiment is shared by the Tea Party which has obviously been around longer. To sum it up, 53% either strongly agreed or mildly agreed with this statement:

The national debt must be cut significantly by reducing spending and the size of government, including eliminating some federal agencies and programs. Regulations on business by the federal government should be reduced and instead, the private sector and individuals should have greater control. The government should not raise taxes on anyone.

Sargent makes you go and look for this part of the poll. Chances are most people won’t. Let’s move on.

Greg Mitchell from the conservative bastion (that’s sarcasm), The Nation, picks up the cues from Sargent and tries to milk the poll to provide some much needed image nourishment to the Occupy Wall Street movement he’s been blogging – read cheerleading – about. Linking to Sargent, he writes:

7:00  Wash Post:  New NBC/WSJ poll–84% pf working-class whites say rich unfairly get breaks,  and also need more control of corporations… 71% say Obama did not go far enough in regulating banks….

Then, after scouring the poll results he does some more Occupy Wall Street cheerleading / tea party bashing:

7:20  More from new NBC/WSJ poll just out:  Occupy gets 32% positive number, 35% negative,  Tea Party 27% positive, 44% negative….  Occupy also “wins” in another question, with 25% saying it is a “good thing” for the country with 16% saying no, while Tea Party gets 31% good thing and 27% bad…. Finally 28% call themselves supporters of Occupy, with 25% backing Tea Party.  Also:  70% blame Bush and bankers for economic woes, only 21% name Obama…. 71% back total Iraq pullout…. and despite focus on jobs job jobs, concerns about health still nudge it as prime concern for most,  by 33% to 32%.

Notice how he doesn’t address the finding showing that a majority don’t think we should raise taxes on anyone – a core Occupy Wall Street demand. It doesn’t fit the narrative. The Occupy movement has “wins” he wants to highlight and The Nation readers are predisposed to Leftist “wins.” They won’t bother looking much further. The narrative is strengthened: “Hey! Did you hear about that poll showing OWS is winning?” So now, within the Leftist echo-chamber, the word is that recent polling is good for Occupy Wall Street and most have no idea that a central policy position isn’t “winning.”

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Remember last week when Rick Perry said that if Ben Bernanke kept printing money that he might “get treated ugly” in Texas? Remember the hysteria that erupted amongst progressives in media and the call for Perry to “tone it down?” (Of course, they were livid when he prayed for the nation, too.)

I’m waiting for their reactions to this:

“This is a tough game. You can’t be intimidated. You can’t be frightened. And as far as I’m concerned — the tea party can go straight to hell.”

(more…)

The same media who smeared conservatives and Sarah Palin in the wake of the Tucson massacre (causing both Palin and Tucson tea partiers to receive a slew of death threats), the same media who ignored Obama’s “bring a gun to the knife fight,” the same media who excused Vice President Joe Biden when he called conservatives “terrorists” (or the other Democratic lawmakers who said the same and worse), who ignored it when an Obama advisor wondered aloud whether they should “kill Romney,” are suddenly mad over Rick Perry’s remarks on Bernake.

Greg Sargent led the pack this morning. His headline:

Rick Perry campaign not disavowing implied threat to Bernanke

I asked Rick Perry’s spokesman if the campaign is offering clarification of his widely discussed suggestion yesterday that Texas would offer some “real ugly” frontier justice to Fed chairman Ben Bernanke if he were to print money between now and election day.

The spokesman, Mark Miner, emailed me this:

The Governor was expressing his frustration with the current economic situation and the out of control spending that persists in Washington. Most Americans would agree that spending more money is not the answer to the economic issues facing the country.The important thing here is that this is the Perry camp’s official considered response — and he is not disavowing the implied threat in his original remarks. Instead, the campaign’s position seems to be that this was a legitimate expression of “frustration” with runaway Washington spending — one that other Americans surely share.

All of this hysteria over what?

“… if this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what ya’ll would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”

I was curious as to whether or not Sargent wrote similar retraction demands for President Obama, Vice-President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Sheila Jackson Lee, whew, we could be here for awhile. I couldn’t find any online and Sargent refused to provide links in case I missed them.

The question apparently made Sargent uncomfortable, as evidence by our Twitter exchange this afternoon.

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If you’ve been paying attention, clearly the Democrats have been using the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent as their go to guy for push back against Wisconsin Republican efforts to get the budget squared away under the leadership of Governor Scott Walker.

Yesterday from Sargent it’s an “advanced look” at a MoveOn.org sponsored poll – all for the cause. Yet, there is no poll data released. One has no idea what questions were actually asked, or how they were phrased. Yet, the Washington Post is comfortable performing this type of activism under it’s banner.

Andrew Breitbart is correct in audio of yesterday’s quote of the day. The false mask of objectivity in journalism is going away. Yes, the Post hired Jennifer Rubin. However, her reputation and work is far more in line with that of an actual journalist, as opposed to an activist, which is clearly how Sargent is using his byline as events play out in Wisconsin.

Poll: Majorities support recall of two Wisconsin GOP senators

I’ve got an advance look at some new polling by Survey USA that finds solid majorities in two GOP senate districts support the recall of their senators. The poll was paid for by MoveOn, which obviously has an ax to grind in this fight, but Survey USA is a respected non-partisan pollster that’s routinely cited by major news organizations.

Here are the numbers, sent over by a MoveOn official, in the districts of GOP senators Dan Kapanke and Randy Hopper.

Greg Sargent at the Post had an interesting theory on the real meaning of Obama’s memorial speech:

It’s true that Obama stated clearly there that rhetoric didn’t cause the shooting. But these lines are best understood as a set up to the larger point that followed, which is that the shooting confers a moral obligation upon all of us to improve the tone and integrity of our discourse. If Obama had delivered this latter message in isolation, without the set up, conservatives would have rejected it as political, as criticism directed at them…
Even if Obama didn’t say so, his larger mesesage that we all tone it down was mainly — though not exclusively — directed at the right. In a context where prominent conservatives have called accused Obama of not loving America and have called him a socialist, a Marxist, a secret Muslim sympathizer, and a coddler of our enemies, Obama’s insistence that we improve the discourse for the sake of our children and our country was unmistakably aimed mostly at them.

This is quite an interesting formulation. What Obama did say was only a clever pretext for what he didn’t say but really meant. I suppose anything is possible, but it’s not clear how Greg Sargent can claim to accurately know what Obama really meant if, by his own admission, it was left unsaid. Sure, in Greg’s mind, Obama had to be aiming his rebuke primarily at the right because of all the terrible things they’ve done. But of course he would say that.

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In the wake of a Big Government exclusive report featuring audio of CBS Anchorage affiliate KTVA-TV staffers seemingly plotting potentially damaging scenarios for Alaska Republican Joe Miller’s Senate campaign, the station has been forced to cancel two evening news broadcasts, allowing time for extended discussion on journalistic ethics. Along with the cancelled broadcasts, the CBS affiliate had already quietly announced the dismissal of two producers in response to Big Government’s reporting.

Two newscasts from Anchorage’s CBS news affiliate, KTVA-TV Channel 11, were canceled Wednesday so staff could deal with fallout from a phone message left by a station employee on the voice mail of a staff member working on Senate candidate Joe Miller’s campaign Oct. 28, the station announced on its website.

Wednesday’s 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. broadcasts were canceled because of time constraints related to an internal discussion on journalistic ethics, according to a message the station’s general manager, Jerry Bever, posted at KTVA.com.

“Events over the last week and a half have been challenging for our station,” Bever wrote in the Wednesday statement. “As the result of a conversation within our newsroom that was accidentally recorded and released to the public, our newsroom credibility has been called into question, and the public’s trust in us has been tested.”

KTVA general manager Jerry Bever’s latest statements on the controversy stand in stark contrast to his earlier statements falsely claiming the CBS affiliate’s staff did nothing wrong.

The complete conversation was about what others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign, not what KTVA could do.

Rather than reporting the news accurately at the time, other mainstream media outlets, including the now apparently openly left-leaning Washington Post, simply reported Bever’s previous ridiculous statements without question, using them to attack Big Journalism’s reporting, instead. As has also now been reported, the released audio was complete and unedited. Yet, in another instance of ideologically driven journalistic malfeasance, the Washington Post appears to have done nothing to correct the facts, or address its own gross negligence in misleading its own readers.

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While liberalism looks to regain its composure after suffering a historic defeat at the polls yesterday, they and their cohorts in mainstream media will be holding up any little victory, no matter how small, to prove their ideological relevancy in a society that has soundly rejected them.

One of those instances of which I speak is the story of Andrew Breitbart and ABC. The Soros-funded bloggers at Media Matters think they won a victory in leading the tantrum to drive him off the air. I suspect it was far more rooted in envy than anything else; Breitbart has done more in a the last two years to affect the trajectory of policy in this country – publishing the tapes of the now-destroyed ACORN, raising the profile of the Pigford scandal, et al. – than Media Matters has accomplished in its entire existence. Maybe that’s why people like Eric Boehlert are continually omitted from invitations to national discourse? Maybe it’s why JournoListas like Greg Sargent formally of Soros-funded Talking Points Memo never gain national attention except in scathing critiques on blogs by people lamenting the loss of journalistic integrity from people who live off the unearned credit of the term “journalist.”

Make no mistake: the left failed to silence Andrew Breitbart on election night. His empire was represented by yours truly on air and his sentiment is one I share. (more…)

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post’s The Plum Line Blog recently posted a piece scolding BigJournalism.com for not properly observing journalistic ethics. Yet in the process Sargent made a number of assumptions based on his own biased beliefs and ultimately ended up not only muddying the waters but seeming to commit the same errors he claimed Big Journalism was perpetrating.

The BigJourno post written by P.J. Salvatore revealed a cell phone message recording left accidentally by a member of the staff of CBS affiliate KTVA TV in Anchorage. The recording was made while an editorial staff meeting was on going and the caller apparently didn’t realize he had not hung up the phone. What resulted was a recording of a few minutes of an editorial meeting the gist of which could easily be interpreted as a planning session on creating and airing attack reports on Alaska’s GOP senatorial candidate Joe Miller.

Sargent thought that Salvatore’s interpretation was absurd and speculated that the BigJourno piece was “about to be unmasked as bogus.” He went on to accuse the BigJourno team of editing the recording, leaving context out, and intimated that Salvatore tried to make a mountain out of a mole’s hill likely for ideological reasons.

Sargent reported that KTVA general manager Jerry Bever denies that the meeting heard on the recording was any sort of planning session on how to attack GOP candidate Miller, but was instead a meeting discussing what would happen IF such stories came out. It was a “what if” bull session, not a serious planning session said Bever.

Station manager Bever says, “While the recording is real, the allegations are untrue.” He went on to give his version of what the meeting was about.

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Apparently, shutting down Ezra Klein’s JournoList listserv wasn’t enough to kill it. I spotted it lumbering through the dense undergrowth of the MSM just today. Over at Newsweek, former JournoLista Ben Adler recycles the talking points of former JournoLista Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. To appreciate what’s going on here, a bit of background is necessary:

Last week, Greg Sargent was thrilled over Obama’s pro-Cordoba House speech, saying it would go down as one of the President’s finest moments. When Obama changed his tune the next day, Sargent was at pains to explain how the clarified position definitely did not represent a walk back. Defending the President had an added benefit. It allowed Sargent to avoid climbing down from his own over-the-top Obama cheerleading. It was a win-win in theory, though in actual fact his argument wasn’t convincing.

Now, a week later, Ben Adler jumps in to sweep the whole episode under the rug saying, “it looks as if everyone may have overreacted.” He then offers this sentence full of weasel words restating Greg Sargent’s arguments [emphasis mine]: (more…)

I thought Josh Marshall would take the crown for most hysterical reaction to opposition to Cordoba House. His call for a Shoah-like project to document the evil as it happened (i.e. resistance to Cordoba House) seemed like a shoo-in, but in the end he’s only first runner up. The tiara definitely goes to Peter Beinart for his piece at the Daily Beast which is full of statements like this:

The super-patriots on Fox News have… declared war on Islam.

Sept. 11, 2001

The ellipsis is his, I didn’t remove anything. This is what the left apparently takes for serious discourse on this topic now. There’s no attempt to engage with the actual arguments of critics, at least some of which are thoughtful. Instead it’s just one more typically unhinged leftist rant about the “intolerant” right:

Until a month or so ago, I genuinely believed that the American right had become a religiously ecumenical place. Right-wing Baptists loved right-wing Catholics and they both loved right-wing Orthodox Jews. All you had to do to join the big tent was denounce feminists, Hollywood, and gays. But when push came to shove, Sarah Palin didn’t care about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s position on gay marriage. In today’s GOP, even bigotry doesn’t spare you from bigotry…

People in Basra and Kandahar had better hope that America’s counterinsurgency warriors create a society in which they can practice their religion free of intimidation and insult. Because it’s now clear they can’t do so on the lower tip of the island of Manhattan.

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With fresh examples of the intellectually absurd, ethically compromised work of the in-the-tank members of the JournoList now being made complete fun of by the rational wing of the blogosphere, it’s time for this friendly reminder to the ‘Listas and their employers that we’re far from finished with the subject:

Greg Sargent is a Washington Post blogger and compromised JournoList hack whose “Plum Line” entries are decidedly left of center. Greg was overwhelmed with enthusiasm last Friday when, for a brief but shining moment, it appeared President Obama was supporting the construction of the ground zero mosque. He gushed that it would “go down as one of the finest moments of his presidency.”

Former Cathedral of St. Sophia, now a mosque

Sargent contrasted Obama’s bold stance with the “clever little dodge” which some Republicans were using. Here’s his description of the conservative stance, “The group has the right to build the center, runs this argument, but they are wrong to exercise it.”

That was Friday. On Saturday, the President gave an impromptu response to a reporter’s question, which went like this:

I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.

This struck a lot of people as very similar to the distinction made by conservatives, i.e. a legal and religious right to build does not equate to a good (or wise) idea. The only real difference is that President Obama refused to take sides on the crucial issue. In effect, he voted present on the wisdom question.

Needless to say, this came as a big disappointment to Sargent, who was quick to argue that Obama’s clarification was not a walkback: (more…)

Earlier this week, Left-Wing Gentlemen’s Quarterly (aka GQ) landed a big scoop that was destined to alter the shape of the 2010 elections, if not American politics as we know it: an anonymous source said Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul kidnapped a woman while attending Baylor university and forced her to take illegal drugs.  From the article published August 9th at 10:55am:

According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”

The gossip had been online just an hour and a half before Politico JournoListo Ben Smith reported it to his ample audience at 12:28pm.  Key quote:

This allegation from Jason Zengerle’s GQ profile of Rand Paul is a bit too big a deal to be left in its ether of anonymity and non-denial.

Yes, Rand Paul hadn’t publicly denied the allegations within 93 minutes of their publication, so it was time for Smith to play them up!  Mind you, this same Ben Smith won’t mention an on-the-record whistle-blower charging the DOJ with discrimination, but a decades-old off-the-record charge against a Tea Party Republican is worthy of his investigative journalism and online real estate. In Smith’s defense, the mistake might be due to the fact that he no longer has his fellow JournoListas to bounce stories off of before taking the plunge. (more…)

Two stories have recently appeared reporting NBC Political Director Chuck Todd’s reaction to the revelations of the JournoList, that website were avowed left-wing journalists congregated to talk about their profession and plot to foster a left-wing agenda in their work in the media.

Todd was reported to have found the JournoList revelations to be “very depressing” and said that the story had “kept him up nights” because of the overt leftist bias evinced by the list member’s emails released by Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller website.

Journolist was pretty offensive. Those of us who are mainstream journalists got mixed in with journalists with an agenda. Those folks who thought they were improving journalism are destroying the credibility of journalism.

Chuck Todd, non-JournoList member

But later that day another story claiming that Todd was taken out of context emerged that told a slightly different tale. In the afternoon JouronLista Greg Sargent wrote in the Washington Post that Todd was more upset that conservatives that were using the JournoList controversy to push their agenda and was much less upset that the story revealed a left-wing media conspiracy.

So, once again, it appears that the Old Media’s leftist guard is spinning to try and make these revelations all the fault of the conservatives that merely made the list public knowledge. Like the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar and blaming his brother for telling him to get some cookies, JournoListas are doing everything they can to shift blame. (more…)

Greg Sargent is a Washington Post blogger. He’s also a former member of JournoList and a friend of Ezra Klein. Any or all of that may explain why he’s twice used his platform at the Post to claim that there is a media conspiracy surrounding the Daily Caller’s publication of JournoList archives:

The real media conspiracy here is on the right. It’s a conspiracy to pretend that there’s a story here when there isn’t one.

Yes, you read that right. He’s accusing the right of a media conspiracy. It’s the sort of fabulist, black-is-white inversion of reality we’ve come to expect from Media Matters, not from the Washington Post. So let’s take a look at Sargent’s case for a right-wing media conspiracy and see if it passes the belly laugh test.

In his first stab at this claim, he took issue with the headline for one of the Daily Caller’s pieces:

It has this huge headline: JournoList debates making its coordination with Obama explicit. But way down in the 13th paragraph, the story quotes a post from the very same thread in which J-List founder and Post blogger Ezra Klein explicitly rules out any such coordination…In other words, the headline on this story could have been: “J-List founder ruled out conspiracy.”

If the Daily Caller was part of a right-wing conspiracy, why bother to include the line Sargent just quoted, or the one that came immediately afterwards which also depicts a list member rejecting the idea? Wouldn’t the conspiracy be more successful without any contradictory evidence? What Sargent wants us to blithely ignore is statements like this from Todd Gitlin of Columbia University: (more…)

Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent, who writes under the by-line The Plum Line, criticizes pollster Whit Ayres for suggesting that the failed Times Square bomb incident gives Republicans a political opportunity.

Sargent closes his blog with:

Ayres is the GOP equivalent of prominent Dem pollster Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps or John Podesta of the liberal Center for American Progress. If Greenberg or Podesta had explicitly said after the capture of the Shoe Bomber under Bush that it presented Dems with a political opportunity, you can bet that some folks would have made a lot of noise about it.

Here’s what Greg misses: The “Dems” don’t necessarily have to overtly declare a “political opportunity” as long as they have the Post and other MSM outlets to exercise the opportunity for them.

For example, here’s a January 2008 WaPo blog by Andrew Cohen who writes under the by-line Bench Conference: (more…)