Larry O’Connor’s well-caught “sound bite for the day” yesterday deserves further elaboration.

Yesterday, on MSNBC, left-wing journalists Chris Hayes of The Nation and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post–no strangers to Democrat-media collusion–revealed that they had been part of an off-the-record White House briefing in which it was made clear that President Barack Obama planned all along to let the temporary payroll tax holiday expire, and then blame Republicans.

The meeting may have been the one first revealed on December 19, 2011 by ABC News’s senior White House correspondent, Jake Tapper, who tweeted that day that “a group of progressive media stars” had attended a private meeting at the White House with the President.

However, if Hayes is to be believed, the message of that meeting may have extended far beyond the “progressive” media niche at MSNBC, and reached a broader audience in Washington.

According to Hayes, “everyone in Washington” knew that Obama wanted the payroll tax extension to fail–and yet the same journalists eagerly covered the subsequent payroll tax debate as if Republicans were the only obstacle to an extension. The result of the media’s collusion was a year-end political victory for Obama and the Democrats at the expense of House leaders, the Tea Party, and Republicans in general.

Here is the exchange between Hayes and Klein (0:44 to 1:04), with MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry chiming in encouragingly (transcript follows):

According to a New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Judge, Bloggers are not considered journalists in the eyes of American jurisprudence.  In his decision, Judge Anthony J. Parrillo wrote:

There is, of necessity, a distinction between, on the one hand, personal diaries, opinions, impressions and expressive writing and, on the other hand, news reporting.

By this definition, Thomas Paine, Father of the American Revolution, was not practicing journalism when he printed Common Sense.

Thomas Paine, often held up as America’s first journalist, was really just a blogger using parchment and a printing press instead of a laptop and broadband connection.

Read Common Sense, the tract that is credited with inspiring the American Revolution: (more…)

I have often said the purpose of TV news is to “scare women 18-54 into watching the next newscast.” When I tell people that simple line it’s very interesting to see their reaction. They laugh and they get it. They know exactly what I’m talking about. All of a sudden they understand why TV news does all those stories on “baby buggies that kill,” or “make-up that could be deadly.”  You think I’m joking?  Those are lines from TV newscasts that are used on a regular basis. Of course, rarely does the content of the story actually match the headline, but what the heck, we’ve scared her into watching the next newscast, so mission accomplished.

The “sausage making” of TV news is not a fun thing to watch.  On one level it is silly and ridiculous, on another level it is demeaning and insulting, especially to women. The business that prides itself on protecting women actually holds them in derision.

The first thing you need to know is that women are the target viewer of any newscast.  Advertisers know where they can find the men, they’ll flip on the tube…oh, sorry, they don’t use tubes anymore… they’ll flip on the LCD 1080p HD on Saturday or Sunday to watch football.  Women supposedly are home morning, noon and night and they want their news. TV newscasts are Oprah without Oprah, since she can’t be everywhere all the time protecting women. (more…)

Today is election day in Massachusetts, for what could be the most important and ironic political race of the last 100 years: A country swerving out of control; helmed by a supermajority Democratic machine that might just be slammed back on the rails by a one-party Democratic state, that in any other time but this one, is of the bluest kind.

I am a friend, political addict, and a newcomer citizen journalist for Andrew Breitbart.  I looked at this race weeks ago, and I knew if Scott Brown won, it would make history and literally upend the political landscape of the US and the world.

I had stumbled into the citizen journalist role via an unintended run-in with ACORN in Los Angeles, and followed up with a piece on the interesting nepotistic habits of Senator Max Baucus.  But this was bigger, and I knew it. (more…)

The information coming out of Iran is raw, and sporadic.  Mainstream press coverage is simplistic. Be careful what, and how, you read.  Here’s what to do.

Why is it so confusing?

Both information and disinformation arrive in fragments and in waves. The fragmentation reflects myriad goings-on coupled with regime’s censorship and disruption of communications.  The wave-like nature of the raw feed reflects the ebb and flow of the protests: planning and then action, planning and then action.

Eye-witness accounts are first-hand, but partial.  Twitter and YouTube bring us breathless updates, along with warnings that some Twitter usernames have been co-opted by the regime and relay false information.  “Leaked” documents and the informant-of-the-day offer uncertain and conflicting information.

Who is involved and what’s at stake may be changing. In July, the issue was electoral irregularities.  Now, depending on what you read, the protesters are young and old, liberal and conservative, and the argument(s) are about which players will the levers of power within the Islamic Republic, or how the Islamic Republic should work, or whether there should be an Islamic Republic.

Then there are the regime’s atrocities. These are undeniable, and the impact of the images is visceral.

(more…)

Media Matters (for America, they claim) has officially become a parody unto itself.  What started as a wonderful (if not Orwellian) dream of a non-profit entity living off of the ample teat of George Soros busily crafting “rapid response” items in opposition to the small yet enormously effective voices from the right in journalism, has now turned into what appears to be a bunch of guys monitoring radio, TV and the internet with the hopes of finding the slightest divergence from left wing orthodoxy as dictated by their founder, spaceship enthusiast John Podesta.

John Podesta

It isn’t enough that they label as “homophobic” any questions about Safe School Czar Kevin Jenning’s objectively questionable judgment with regard to the teaching materials associated with his organization GLSEN.  And it isn’t enough that they dismiss any video report exposing left-wing sacred cows such as ACORN and Planned Parenthood as “heavily edited” as if editing automatically renders a report untruthful (even though the entire, unedited transcripts and audio for the ACORN stories have been available at Big Government).  No, those ridiculously laughable positions that fly in the face of common sense are not enough to keep the team at MM(FA) feeling smugly supercilious and self-important… now they go on the attack if a journalist dares to refer to Guantanamo prisoners as “terrorists,”   No, this is not a parody. (more…)