Its really amazing how little the progressive mainstream media really understands. In yesterday’s NY Times, media reporter Jeremy Peters issued a warning to young journalists in a front page article “Covering 2012, Youths on the Bus” The warning?  There are partisan bloggers out there who are out to embarrass mainstream journalists. By partisan bloggers Peters means conservative bloggers, because to the NY Times a liberal bias is the definition of fair coverage.

CNN fired Octavia Nasr, its senior editor for Middle East affairs, after she composed a 19-word Twitter message expressing sadness after the death of a Hezbollah leader.

I get it! Media Matters for America (MMFA)  is being paid by George Soros and other progressive money-men to make sure the progressive point of view is protected.  That’s why they work so hard to fight the few conservative media sources trying to tell the truth about progressive policies. What I don’t understand is if they are so busy trying  to take down media sources such as Fox News and Breitbart’s “Big” sites, why do they feel the need to spend so much time pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes such as “the Jews control the government and the media” and  creating anti-Israel spin to the latest news?

The really sick part of it is,  along with their campaign against the Jewish people and the Jewish State, MMFA falsely attacks conservatives on Jewish issues in an attempt to brand them as Jew haters. The year-long MMFA campaign trying to falsely label Glenn Beck as an Anti-Semite is well known and readers of The Lid have read of the MMFA trying to brand this blogger as a Jew basher (a charge I didn’t hear about until hours later because it was made on the Sabbath), but MMFA has written inflammatory headlines to imply that there is  is a concerted effort by right-wingers to bash Jews. For example they wrote this about Jim Hoft, the Gateway Pundit.

Hoft The Latest Right-Wing Media Figure To Attack American Jews For Supporting Obama

What what the content of Jim’s horrible attack on American Jews? It was a comment on a recent Gallup poll, which said that Jews were sticking with Obama:

Sad.
The destruction of Israel is at hand and Jewish Americans still march blindly behind Obama.

That’s all! Beyond that reader’s of Jim’s blog (as I am) will report that Gateway Pundit is strongly pro-Israel and regularly “has the back” of American Jews.

The truth is if you really want to see attacks on Israel and American Jews become a regular reader of MMFA. Here are just a few examples:

• 6/14/10 Media Matter’s Senior Policy Fellow MJ Rosenberg created a piece for Huffington Post claiming that Helen Thomas’  was not being anti-Semitic when she told Israeli Jews to go back to Russia and Poland. I wonder what he thinks about Thomas’ claim
  

  “We are owned by propagandists against the Arabs. There’s no question about that. Congress, the White House, and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists. No question in my opinion. They put their money where there mouth is…We’re being pushed into a wrong direction in every way. [my emphasis]

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The most unusual part of Congressman Weiner’s mea culpa press conference today occurred before Weiner came to the stage.

Andrew Breitbart showed up at the presser and was immediately mobbed by reporters asking about today’s exclusive pictures of Weiner on Big Journalism and Big Government which seems to have pushed Weiner into admitting the truth.

Watching Breitbart take Anthony Weiner’s Stage and speak into the microphone Weiner rented showed how far Breitbart has come, but more importantly how far citizen journalism had come.

After ten days of being vilified by left wing media reporters, those same reporters were tripping all over their underwear trying to ask him questions about the story they had doubted until today.  Not only that, but at the behest of the same reporters who trashed him personally and his stories, Breitbart stood where Weiner was about to stand and demanded an apology from the slanderers in the press and from Congressman Weiner himself. (more…)

Helen Thomas is in the news again. This time not for saying something outrageous, but for not saying anything. Since her unceremonious firing from Hearst, Thomas has been the darling of the Anti-Israel left. She was even awarded a lifetime achievement by CAIR, unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist funding case.

Following her statements that Jews should go back Europe and leave “Palestine”, Thomas has been doubling down in subsequent interviews. She repeated this sentiment over and over again, on the “Joy Behar Show” and Playboy interview to name a couple.  She also added the patently false statement that there was no anti-Semitism in Europe following World War II.

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The April Issue of Playboy which hits the newsstands today, features disgraced newswoman Helen Thomas. I know what you are thinking, suicide, volunteering to fight for the Libyan insurgents, or  staring at the sun for about an hour to make yourself blind, just  to ensure that you never gaze upon those nightmare-inducing pictures. Calm down folks, I assure you that at age 85 Hugh Hefner still knows what is pleasing to the eyes as witnessed by his latest fiance.  Ms. Thomas’ was simply this month’s Playboy interview, no pictorial involved.

Ms. Thomas’ Playboy appearance is just as disgusting (albeit in a different way) as if she did do a pictorial. It is totally clear that the former Dean of the White House press corps does not understand why she has become a pariah that her hurtful words (and many of those made since) were not just anti-Israel but crossed the Rubicon into the world of Antisemitism.

Thomas trades on the stereotype that Jews control world, or as she said in a December rant:

As if Thomas was reading directly from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, she was saying those rich Jews control the world.

Thomas toned that sentiment down a tad in the Playboy piece, when asked if she had a personal antipathy toward Jews themselves see set out to deny the Jewish connection with the Holy Land and to brand Jews as Arab-hating racists:

I think they’re wonderful people. They had to have the most depth. They were leaders in civil rights. They’ve always had the heart for others but not for Arabs, for some reason. I’m not anti-Jewish; I’m anti-Zionist. I am anti-Israel taking what doesn’t belong to it. If you have a home and you’re kicked out of that home, you don’t come and kick someone else out. Anti-Semite? The Israelis are not even Semites! They’re Europeans, and they’ve come from somewhere else. But even if they were Semites, they would still have no right to usurp other people’s land. [my emphasis]

Thomas is ignoring the fact that Jews have lived in what is now Israel without interruption since the Biblical Joshua won that little skirmish in Jericho almost 3,600 years ago. She is also forgetting that there were more Jews kicked out of Arab lands and moved into Israel than Arabs who left the Holy Land in 1948. Beyond the numbers, Semite means descendant of the Biblical son of Noah, Shem. Abraham, the father of the Jews was a Semite. Does Ms. Thomas feel (as fellow Anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan does) that today’s Jews are impostors and have nothing to do with the Jews of the Bible?

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And he’s serious. Nicholas Benton, Owner/Editor of the liberal pub, the Falls Church News-Press, which recently hired her:

“She’s a rock star. She should be writing again. . . . She’s the Betty White of American journalism – I don’t know if you want to say that, does that diminish her?”

Yes. The Betty White from “Lake Placid.” (Earmuff the kids!)

Except it’s missing something about teh joos and the evil Zionist sympathizers.

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A few days ago the miserable Helen Thomas, famed long-time Washington correspondent, let her hatred for Jews get the best of her once again. At a workshop held in Dearborn, Michigan dedicated to fighting anti-Arab bias in the United States, Thomas came out forcefully against the “Zionists” in Israel and the United States and refused to back away from anti-Jewish comments she’s made in the past.

It seems that Thomas’s latest anti-Jewish comments have caused her to lose support of at least one institution: her own alma mater, Wayne State University. The school from which Thomas graduated in 1942 announced this week that it will no longer be awarding its Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in the Media Award to journalists that “stand out in their field.”

As Wayne State once described the award: “The award was established to recognize her leadership role in promoting diversity in the media and the issues of race in America.”

It seems that “diversity” isn’t something that much interests Thomas, however. As Jeff Dunetz reported on Dec. 4, Thomas launched into yet another anti-Jew attack in Michigan. Wallowing in that old the-Jews-secretly-control-everything trope, Thomas regaled her pro-Arab audience with her anti-Zionist comments.

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Proving once again that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, former White House Correspondent Helen Thomas told an anti-Arab-Bias workshop in Dearborn Michigan that she absolutely stands by her ugly comments about Jews made earlier this year, that they should return to Germany and Poland and went even further, even adding the anti-Semitic meme that Zionists  control U.S. foreign policy and other American institutions.

The Detroit Free Press which report about Thomas’ speech in Dearborn  characterized the comments that got her fired as something “which critics have said were anti-Israel,” perpetuating the myth that Thomas was fired for being critical of the Jewish State. Note to the Freep, no one gets fired for being critical of Israel, not even in Israel. Thomas’ comments back in June were anti-Semitic, she told Israeli Jews to go back to Germany and Poland [where they faced the horrors of the Holocaust]

During her anti-bias appearance yesterday, thomas was asked her about her comments:

“I paid the price for that,” said Thomas, a longtime White House correspondent. “But it was worth it, to speak the truth. The Zionists have to understand that’s their country, too. Palestinians were there long before any European Zionists.”

Thomas claimed that “You can not say anything (critical) about Israel in this country.”

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Lay, O Lord, a curse on press men, rude and churlish, sad, obsessed men
Who persist to query me on matters that they know I must ignore.
As I parry, neatly jinking, Tapper stares at me, unblinking;
No doubt he is thinking, thinking Robert Gibbs is short one oar.
“Jake the Malcontent,” I mumble, “never one to seek rapport.”
Of them all, him I abhor.

Yes, the fire’s now an ember from that long-ago November
When every media staff member bowed and scraped outside my door.
Confident, I held my pressers (Helen! Old as earth, God bless her),
Brushing off reporters–lessers, lessers who were such a bore,
Including Jake the Tapper, whom the gods named my bête noire.
From the start, we’ve been at war.

There! He rises, smarmy, sassy; I feel dizzy, bloated, gassy,
Sickened—stricken with the urge to swat this gadfly to the floor.
As I tamp down nauseation, purge my thoughts of his castration,
Jake the Tapper–this . . . crustacean–floats a challenge like a spore.
Yes, Jake Tapper the crustacean floats a challenge like a spore,
And it roots inside my core. (more…)

From the Associated Press:

In a radio interview, former White House correspondent Helen Thomas acknowledges she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were “exactly what I thought,” even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.

“I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas’ Washington, D.C., condominium.

Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get “out of Palestine.” She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

She has kept a low profile since then. (more…)

We have finally reached the number one, most left-biased journalist in America today on our top ten count down and our most biased journo pick probably won’t surprise any of you. Even though she just “retired” due to her outrageous bias and hatred for Israel, we just have to give the number one most biased slot to the ever-vitriolic Ms. Helen Thomas, long time employee of United Press International (UPI) and the Hearst New Service.

Thomas was an over 50-year employee of UPI but in the year 2000 she quit the wire service because it was bought by News World Communications which is affiliated with the Unification Church. She was proud of herself, though, because according to her she was “never, never accused of bias” in her reporting.

I worked for United Press International for more than fifty years, and I wrote straight copy. I was never, never accused of bias. I did not bow out of the human race. I permitted myself to care, to believe, to think. But I assure you, I assure you that it did not get in my copy.

But that isn’t what her record says. Bias was epidemic throughout. In May of 2000 the MRC went back and found at least half a dozen instances where Thomas readily revealed her bias. Instances range from Ronald Reagan’s days in office up to the year 2000 when she quit UPI.

The MRC found in part: (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…)

Who should replace Larry King? Wow, the question of the decade right there!

The excitement is mounting in CNN Land these days as we ponder who should replace the legendary broadcaster who many say actually left his show years ago.

My first thoughts are either Joy Behar (she could just move across the hall from Headline News) or Michael Moore. It seems like they are on the show almost as often as Larry himself, so it would make the transition for the sensitive viewers much easier. They may not even know there has been a change.

Ahhhh, but before we put Larry to pasture I think of the great moments in Larry King history.

The night he called Andre Agassi “Pancho Gonzales.” Andre was sitting right there next to Larry and Pancho had actually been dead for more than ten years at the time. I was watching the interview live, the look on Andre’s face was priceless. (more…)

It’s like a doctor who smokes. You’d think the last person to be done in by his own words would be a journalist. Shouldn’t a purveyor of words know better?

Yet as today’s forced resignation by WaPo columnist David Weigel proves, “Physician, heal thyself” is one piece of advice that seems to be ignored by wordsmiths of just about all stripes these days. On the heels of Helen Thomas—or are they flats?—Weigel is just the latest to join the Oral Suicide Club.

What was Weigel’s offense?  Unfortunately for him, the man hired by WaPo to write about the conservative movement couldn’t resist showing his true anti-conservative colors on what he thought was a “private” journalist email list called Journolist — which was disbanded today by its creator, Ezra Klein. In a June 24 Betsy Rothstein story on Fishbowl DC, Weigel in his own emailed words reveals what Weigel unplugged sounds like:

This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.

I’d politely encourage everyone to think twice about rewarding the Examiner with any traffic or links for a while. I know the temptation is high to follow up hot hot Byron York scoops, but please resist it.

Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller has unearthed other examples of Weigel’s bias, including a macabre death wish for Rush Limbaugh and other injudicious anti-conservative remarks. (more…)

Much has happened since Rabbi Nesenoff emailed me his video interview of Helen Thomas containing her now-famous declaration that Jews should get the hell out of Palestine and go back to their homes in Germany and Poland.  Upon first watching the interview, I saw it a big story and was determined to make it go viral. The objective was not to go after the 89-year-old newswoman per se, as a teaching opportunity, showing that anti-Semitism still permeated through normal American society. That teaching moment didn’t really happen; instead I was the one who did the learning, and the lesson was all about how the media really worked.

The White House Press corps seemed very reluctant to touch the story. On one hand it was understandable as Thomas was a respected colleague.  Most of them had worked with her for a very long time.  On the other hand it was big news, and if the Rabbi’s interview subject were a senior member of the Administration those same reporters would have been all over the story.

When they got around to covering the story, media got the “facts” of the incident wrong.  I am not talking about Rosie O’Donnell’s idiotic statement dismissing the anti-Semitism displayed by Thomas’s call for Israeli Jews to return to the scene of the concentration camps, or her ignorant belief that no Jews lived in the Holy Land before 1948.  The traditional media’s biggest factual mistake was reporting that the controversy surrounded Thomas making an anti-Israel comment. (more…)