Unlike the mainstream media (especially Politico), I believe in context. So below this poll, you will find any and all background information needed to answer questions 1 – 3.

Question number four speaks for itself.

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Oops. My headline mistakenly reads “cracker” journalism.

What I meant to write was ”crack” journalism – but in a completely sarcastic way.

At the top of Politico’s front page today sits a major spread on race and its cynical use in the presidential election. The co-authors claim that their inspiration came from (a week late) Arizona Governor Jan Brewer being called a bigot for daring to wag her finger at President Obama — something the media described as Speaking! Truth! To! Power! when Bush was in office.

Predictably, the article doesn’t hold the media accountable for blowing up, digging up, and focusing on bogus claims of racism, and just as predictably, the article doesn’t bother to mention Politico’s own racial scandal that blew up after their own Jonathan — He Who Investigates Private Citizens on Behalf Of His Precious One – Martin casually tossed off the slur “cracker” on a national cable channel last week.

I guess this is Politico’s transparently desperate way of pretending that neither they nor the rest of the MSM have anything to do with creating and/or fanning the flames of these phony racial firestorms, even though the media is usually the one holding the match.  The reason Politico wants to pretend the MSM isn’t the number one generator of this stuff is obvious. They want to report and create it but take no responsibility for it. This is how they fashion that artificial shield of objectivity for themselves even as they lead this partisan crusade.

It’s just a fact that both the Democrats and their MSM allies use these trumped-up racial charges as a way to distract from Obama’s failures, scandals, and issues that matter, like jobs and the deficit. By CONSTANTLY creating racism where none exists — food stamps, finger-wagging, basketball, Juan — the MSM also keeps the narrative alive that the right is racist which, in turn, keeps us on defense. After all, when we’re on defense, we’re not getting our message out.

As we’ve documented here, Politico isn’t simply reporting on this cynical game of racial gotcha; they are playing, contributing, and amplifying it.

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So if I understand how this works, we currently live in a media world where “Juan” is racist, where “food stamps” is racist, where pointing out that a president who enjoys basketball enjoys basketball is racist. But “cracker“? Why, that’s not improper in the least.

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Well, I guess it’s okay to use the slur “cracker” for the for the same reason it’s okay to use the N-word. Some in the black community use the N-word and some in Florida use the word “cracker.”

Oh, wait; it’s not okay to use the N-word.

Anyway, what does logic have to do with the mainstream media justifying and rationalizing anything they do? But justify and rationalize Jonathan Martin did when he called in to Newsbusters to justify and rationalize his use of the word “cracker.”

You can read the whole thing here, but this is my all-time favorite part:

Let’s face it, you were on MSNBC where virtually every criticism of Barack Obama they report as being somehow racist.”

“Totally agree that there is now a culture in the sort of political media universe on both sides where there is this sort of outrage industry that has been created where both sides monitor the other and try to find examples of offensive comments that can be seized upon and stirred up entirely for political gain where you have this, again, faux indignation, but it’s really just posing as indignation,” he said. “It’s all about political point scoring, and I think it absolutely takes place now on both sides.”

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Politico’s Jonathan Martin didn’t only malign residents of Florida’s Panhandle on MSNBC when he invoked the phrase “Cracker Counties” to refer to the region, he went on to equate the region with all of the Deep South, also mentioning Georgia and Alabama by name. We can also assume it would cover many of the military men and women residing in Florida’s Panhandle.

Jonathan Martin, right

Politico’s Jonathan Martin isn’t a big fan of everyday people, especially those who don’t vote for Obama. If you want to understand who this man really is, you need only click here. To protect then-candidate Barack Obama and get the heat off of him after making his infamous and revealing ”spread the wealth” comment, Martin needed to change the narrative quick, so he investigated and published dirt on a PRIVATE CITIZEN. What followed was a narrative-changing (to benefit Obama) MSM attack against a guy who was minding his own business when Obama approached him.

“Cracker” has a long pejorative history, much of it linked to slavery, as in he who “cracks” the whip, while other uses of the word always refer to the more lowly born.

Frederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from Connecticut, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and wrote that “some crackers owned a good many Negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated.”

Martin may just as well have slandered the people of the region by referring to them as “White Trash.” That is, in effect, how the word can be interpreted today. One can only imagine the outrage had a less than liberal outlet and journalist maligned an entire race or class, as Martin did. There’s also this from a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth. (more…)

Yesterday, Juan Williams of Fox News doubled down on his accusation that Republican presidential candidates are using “racial code words.”

Today, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic has followed suit with an article rehashing the tired allegation that Republicans are using so-called “dog whistle” tactics–“the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters”–i.e. white voters (Democrats’ use of race to appeal to the prejudices and fears of black voters is rarely subject to scrutiny.)

Jeffrey Goldberg (Photo: Bloomberg News)

Goldberg says that the Obama’s Republican opponents have alleged the following (original links, including one to Media Matters–itself the subject of serious charges of antisemitism–included):

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

I’ll go even further, and admit that I personally heard a presidential candidate give a speech–in a church, no less–in which he blasted the black community, and black men in particular, for the phenomenon of single-parent households; who noted that black children with absent fathers have a greater chance of becoming criminals; who scolded black parents, “don’t just sit in the house and watch ‘Sports Center’ all weekend long”; and who told blacks to “read a book once in awhile.”

That candidate was Barack Obama.

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***UPDATE: Some are arguing “cracker” is acceptable within the context of Florida. Newsbusters, who also caught the slur, sums it up perfectly:

Jonathan Martin is also the left-wing operative who led the campaign to bring down Herman Cain over 15 year-old allegations. This partisan campaign was so frenzied and over-the-top and outrageous that even left-wing media watchdogs said so.

And now we get another glimpse into what motivates Mr. Martin, as he launches a racial slur against Southerners on a national cable channel:

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Wikipedia sums it up perfectly:

Cracker, sometimes white cracker, is a pejorative term for white people.

You’ll also note that MSNBC host Chuck Todd says nothing in response to Martin’s racial slur. In fact, Todd doesn’t blink an eye.

Moreover, keep in mind that these are the same MSM leftists who have and will continue to attempt to define every effective attack against Barack Obama as “racist” or as some sort of “racial dog-whistle.” This includes FACTS, such as the record increase in the number of food stamp recipients under Obama’s failed recovery.

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(Note: RealClearPolitics has since updated the post in question.)

In defending the media against conservative charges of bias in the Herman Cain scandal, Carl Cannon, Washington editor of RealClearPolitics, claims today that Andrew Breitbart did the same thing to Anthony Weiner that Jonathan Martin of Politico did to Cain–make a broad, salacious claim based on one piece of evidence, and wait for the truth to emerge.

Cannon writes:

I don’t remember conservative commentators agonizing over the journalistic ethics practiced by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart in the Weiner “sexting” case. Acting on a hunch, Breitbart threw a salacious picture on his site, asserted he had evidence that it was Weiner, and let the blogosphere do the rest. And when it was clear that Weiner was misbehaving, and lying about it, the mainstream media basically hectored this guy into telling the truth, which he ultimately did — at the cost of his career in Congress.

That is, emphatically, not what happened in Weinergate. It is a gross distortion–an inversion, even–of what happened. In fact, Andrew and the entire team at Big Government and Big Journalism were meticulously careful in Weinergate, because we knew that as conservatives, we would be held to a different and higher standard than the mainstream media.

It is worth pointing out that Anthony Weiner outed himself, publicly tweeting the infamous “grey underwear” picture to a woman in the Seattle area. Big Journalism’s first story on Weinergate reported that fact, and noted that Weiner had claimed his Facebook account had been “hacked.” Weiner’s “hacking” claim, in itself, made the story newsworthy. Neither Andrew nor anyone else at the Bigs, at that point, claimed to have definitive proof that the person in the photograph was Weiner himself.

Other evidence, publicly available through Weiner’s Twitter profile and Facebook account, suggested the congressman had been communicating with other young women. When Andrew made that allegation on CNN, making clear the source and basis for his claim, the network attacked his credibility and brought analyst Jeffrey Toobin on air to declare Andrew’s story “outrageous.”

What Andrew did not reveal was that at the time of Weiner’s errant tweet, we already had evidence that Weiner had been involved in an online relationship with a woman in Texas, who claimed to have even more pictures of Weiner. As Andrew details in a forthcoming new chapter of his book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World, to be released in the book’s paperback edition, we spent several days researching that story before releasing it.

We could have done what Martin and Politico did–and which Cannon wrongly accuses us of doing: report that we knew of an inappropriate relationship, and allow the media to ask Weiner the tough questions. Except that we knew they wouldn’t, because Weiner is a Democrat, and we are a conservative news source. We had also been reluctant to pursue a story that seemed, until Weiner’s “hacking” allegation, to be solely about Weiner’s personal life.

Politico had no such scruples.

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Howard Kurtz to Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

You had to make a go or no-go decision. I think that at a lot of news organizations an editor would’ve said, ‘You have done some terrific reporting here, you’ve got some great leads here, but you don’t have it’.

Well, no kidding they “don’t have it.” All they do have is a 90-plus story feeding frenzy (as of Friday) based on two settled sexual harassment complaints from over a decade ago.

These are also two complaints that seem to be settled for next to nothing when you consider we’re talking about an organization as large as the National Restaurant Association and a high-profile target (even during the nineties) like Herman Cain. Furthermore, these disputed events occurred during the nineties at the height of the post-Anita Hill sexual harassment jamboree when any of us who were in the business world at the time remembers the litigious atmosphere (more on this below).

But the key word here is “disputed,” isn’t it? After all, although Cain and his campaign weren’t very sophisticated in how they handled the story last week, one area in which there has been nothing but consistency is the candidate’s firm denial that he never sexually harassed anyone, ever.

And yet,  if you listen to Jonathan Martin, these charges against Cain are neither alleged or disputed — they are FACT:

Martin: “Well, we had the fact that one of these women was brought upon by Cain in a hotel room and was made to feel very uncomfortable. We reported later this week more upon what actually happened with that episode, Howie. She was upset by that, that hours later she confronted a member of the board to complain about Cain’s treatment of her, an explicit sexual overture in a hotel room.”

I’ve seen serial killers, rapists, and child molesters given the benefit of the doubt with the word “alleged,” but black conservatives apparently don’t qualify for those kinds of niceties.

Over the weekend I was told something by an old friend–and since it took place in my small town, I had remembered the incident, but this was the first time I had been made aware of the details. I’m changing a few things around for obvious reasons, but the moral of the story remains the same…

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Huge headline at Politico:

Opening paragraph of the story:

When pressed for specifics about Herman Cain’s supposed wrongdoing beyond “gestures of a non-sexual nature,” Politico’s Mike Allen responds with, uhm, Twitter mentions.

Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Politico’s Jonathan Martin — whose Indian name is He Who Trashes Private Citizens For His Precious One — thinks it’s Herman Cain who should tell the world what he was accused of:

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Therein is the problem with this story. If the facts as published were part of a memo to Politico’s editors, they would amount to a first-rate tip on a story.

Stephen Engelberg:

Politico’s story on possible sexual harassment [2] by Herman Cain may be the biggest investigative scoop of the campaign season. But it would be hard to deduce that from the facts as published.

Via Newsbusters, Politico’s Jonathan Martin never met an Unnamed Source he didn’t like.

Incredibly, when Willie Geist asked him to describe specifically what Politico is accusing Cain of having done, Martin hemmed, hawed then ultimately said “we’re just not going to get into the details of exactly what happened with these women,” beyond the sketchy generalities in the Politico story.

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One day, in the heat of the 2008 presidential election, the mainstream media’s anointed candidate was strolling through a swing-state neighborhood looking for a quick photo-op so he could be seen touching the flesh of a few “bitter-clingers” — and then something amazing happened. One of those “bitter clingers,” a man simply minding his own business in his front yard, dared to ask the mainstream media’s anointed candidate the kind of tough question the mainstream media never would. The Anointed One, not used to tough, probing questions, revealed something in his answer about his True Beliefs — the kind of thing neither he nor his media pals ever wanted made public.

Politico’s Jonathan Martin

We all remember what happened next, a “spread the wealth” YouTube moment was born, Sen. John McCain amplified it, and Obama faced a few tough news cycles. And unfortunately for Obama, the moment itself was so raw and revealing there was no way for him to squirm out of it. And so there was only one solution: change the narrative by destroying the messenger. Obviously Obama couldn’t be seen openly destroying private citizens (he’d have to wait until he was elected and the tea party came to life to do that), so the dirty work was left to his media minions, who were all too happy to do whatever was necessary.

Desperate to change the subject from Obama’s default socialism, Jonathan Martin at Politico stepped in and did something that can only be described as morally obscene — he published oppo-research against this private citizen (who eventually came to be known as Joe the Plumber).

So what does this have to do with Politico’s Rick Perry hit-piece?

Well, the left-wing hitman who wrote the “Is Rick Perry Dumb?” piece is the same Jonathan Martin who savaged that private citizen, and the reason he wrote the Perry piece is for exactly the same reason. This is all about protecting Barack Obama, all about creating a negative narrative around any threat to Barack Obama; and if Politico and Martin were willing to slime a private citizen to elect Barack Obama in 2008, what do you think they’re willing to do to see their investment re-elected in 2012?

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The good news is that Politico’s Andy Barr is now going to work out in the open against Palin and the Right, as opposed to what he’s been doing since 2008, and that’s the exact same thing at Politico under the failed disguise of an objective journalist. One wonders if all he had to do in order to get his Democratic Party job was either staple his Politico work to the application or simply write “I work for Politico” when asked for a list of experience in promoting the Leftist cause.

Peas in a pod

The Daily Caller reports:

If you’re tired of hearing me remind you that the corrupt MSM’s 2012 gameplan is to keep a relentlessly hostile spotlight on the Right in order to ensure Obama’s re-election, you’re going to get a lot more tired of it before this is all over. Simply put, if 2012 is a referendum on Obama, he loses, and so the media will stop at nothing to target the Right and make the election all about us for the next 19 months. Any narrative that can be created to destroy us will be, and as you’ll see below, the MSM track is already being laid to create an insidious wedge between Republicans and the crucial Independents Obama will need to recapture the White House.

We’ll start with the Today Show’s Matt Lauer. Please listen closely (you’ll have to scroll down some at the NewsBusters page):

“…and when you look at some of the things the Tea Party and others on the far right….”

One of the Left’s favorite rhetorical tricks is to oh-so casually state the most dishonest and outrageous things; the idea being to send a message that this is now a settled matter and no longer in dispute — a well-known, universally accepted fact. See how that works? Lauer knows exactly what he’s doing here. He’s sending a message to millions of Americans that the Tea Party is “far right,” is scary and extremist. And naturally this all fits into a larger puzzle the corrupt MSM is currently fitting together about the “scary” Republican Party as a whole — you know, as opposed to President Obama aka Mr. Calm, Cool and Reasonably Centrist.

The plan? Scare the crucial Independent vote back into the Obama 2012 camp. Isn’t that obvious?

Furthermore, do you think Lauer ever uses the term “Far Left” to describe MoveOn, Media Matters, or the Daily Kos? A good faith search of Google and Media Matters says no.

My next example is even worse. But first some background on one of my favorite “journalists,” who really should be one of yours… one Mr. Jonathan Martin of Politico.

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Several days ago we here at Big Journalism politely requested for Politico’s Jonathan Martin to retract this sensationally false statement:

In his piece today entitled “Sarah Palin is wreaking havoc on the campaign trail, GOP sources say,” Politico’s Jonathan Martin (who was tasked with the Republican Party beat for the website for the 2008 elections) falsely claims Sarah Palin backed out of a scheduled interview with talk-radio host Mark Levin:

According to a source familiar with the situation, she backed out of planned interviews with conservative talk-show hosts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin the morning she was scheduled to talk to them.

Levin contested this claim on his facebook page, and has asked Politico to retract this statement:

This is a flat out lie. Sarah Palin never backed out of any interview with me. Period. And John Martin, the reporter, never contacted me to ask me directly. I insist on a retraction.

Dan Riehl again reminded Mr. Martin of his responsibility to his journalistic ethic again in this space.

Dana followed up on Twitter and reminded Mr. Martin of his responsibility to report the facts accurately:

Mr. Martin has done nothing but in response except to antagonize the Palin camp on Twitter (Mansour is head of Palin’s PAC):

One would think that after his smear campaign against Joe the Plumber, Mr Martin would want to earn back a decent reputation as a man of the facts, but so far we’ve seen nothing from Martin to indicate such.

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Relying upon multiple named sources, not Jonathan Martin’s anonymous know-it-alls, new media as an enterprise is humiliating Politico and Martin. For now, they still seem bunkered down. At this rate, it looks like something of a journalistic suicide watch for Politico and Martin, though the reputations of both as sources for credible journalism may, in fact, already be dead in the eyes of many.

Big Journalism’s Retracto weighed in last night, calling for Politico’s Jonathan Martin to correct the record after publishing a smear of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin with false facts, the bulk of them reported based upon anonymous sources. Popular talk radio host and best selling author Mark Levin, was out of the gate early, leading a charge of what is now several named sources calling for Politico to address Martin’s journalistic malpractice.

This is a flat out lie. Sarah Palin never backed out of any interview with me. Period. And John Martin, the reporter, never contacted me to ask me directly. I insist on a retraction.

Sarah Palin herself has also now weighed in via Twitter, pointing out how full of Retracto crap is Jonathan Martin, also pointing out the reporting of Shane Vander Hart, which accumulates solid, named sources directly refuting Martin’s shameful bit of hackery.  There’s still more of Vander Hart’s work on this story here. (more…)

In his piece today entitled “Sarah Palin is wreaking havoc on the campaign trail, GOP sources say,” Politico’s Jonathan Martin (who was tasked with the Republican Party beat for the website for the 2008 elections) falsely claims Sarah Palin backed out of a scheduled interview with talk-radio host Mark Levin:

According to a source familiar with the situation, she backed out of planned interviews with conservative talk-show hosts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin the morning she was scheduled to talk to them.

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…)