INTRODUCTION

I. Whoever Controls “The Narrative,” Controls the National Political Conversation

When it comes to most of today’s mainstream media we are no longer talking about an entity that reports truth or facts. Everything about the MSM is now about The Narrative. Even though they’re supposedly made up of separate and competing newsrooms, there’s a very good reason why the MSM as a whole is usually covering, emphasizing and amplifying the exact same stories. This is what The Narrative is and its usefulness to the MSM is how it pushes particular stories to the forefront of public awareness in order to further a political agenda — an agenda that 90% of the time is meant to aid the Left and damage the Right.

Another part of The Narrative is what the MSM chooses NOT to cover; what they willfully ignore.

You can see The Narrative at work as I write this. The same MSM that assured us that when it came to Barack Obama, the church he attended for two decades didn’t matter, is now obsessing over a church Rep. Michele Bachman’s hasn’t attended in over a year. Here you have two separate (and wildly hypocritical) narratives at work: one meant to protect a Democratic presidential candidate, the other meant to damage a GOP presidential candidate.

On the other hand, you can also see The Narrative working by what’s NOT being covered today. The same MSM that obsessed over the Valerie Plame non-story is currently all but ignoring Obama’s brewing “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal –mainly because it’s exactly the kind of scandal that can swamp a presidency into paralyzing, under-40 approval ratings.

II. How Alternative Media Created the MSM’s Need for a Media Matters for America

Prior to the rise of the Internet, the Left almost completely owned the narrative. The simple truth is that before Al Gore’s invention was fully realized, other than a few esteemed columnists, the media had no serious ideological competition from the Right. The rise of the Internet, however, changed all of that as citizen journalists — many of whom are motivated by the MSM’s liberal biases — found this new tool invaluable when it came to both debunking the MSM’s latest lie (the most famous being RatherGate) or reporting on stories the MSM chose to ignore for ideological reasons.

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I’m not surprised; after all, this is the publication edited* by Joan Walsh who immediately thinks of black people when she hears the word “welfare” and who insinuated, sans apology, that Andrew Breitbart and I somehow fabricated Weinergate.

Alex Pareene wrote could barely contain his glee at the victory of big money over the little guy. I felt the need to examine Pareene’s piece graph by graph as a lesson in passing off uneducated propaganda as journalism.

Remember the story of Kenneth Gladney? You probably don’t, unless you’re a right-winger. He was a guy who got knocked over for a second during a contentious town hall meeting in St. Louis in 2009. He quickly became a folk hero to right-wing bloggers, because he was, if you squinted, a black conservative victim of Union Thug Violence.

Can Pareene explain to me how the video of the incident begins with Gladney on the ground as SEIU members stand over him? In fact, can any progressive explain this? They act as though a much-smaller Gladney attacked the SEIU members’ feet with his head.

Yes, he became a hero to conservatives and an “Uncle Tom” to progressives. Additionally, no one to this day has asked Gladney about his political ideology. Progressives assume and must vet those who ask for help, apparently, while conservatives simply saw a man being attacked and knew he deserved help regardless his politics. Thanks for illustrating that so perfectly, Alex!

He was also uninsured — yep! — and the hospital visit he had to make in order to demonstrate the severity of his “beating” also made him a right-wing charity case. He then began appearing at Tea Party rallies and on Fox News in a wheelchair, etc., etc. Liberals laughed bitterly at the “uninsured person protests government-funded healthcare” story and then forgot all about Gladney, forever. But the conservative bloggers never forget an exaggerated or wholly invented tale of victimhood.

Pareene here demonstrates a classic example of more zeal than knowledge. He wanted to write something nasty about this case more than he wanted to sound knowledgeable about it. Gladney was insured, in fact, through his wife’s employer. I’m sure Pareene didn’t bother checking Gladney’s medical records with the hospital either to see the extent of Gladney’s injuries, as other bloggers have done, since he couldn’t bother to verify whether or not Gladney was insured.

Even more disturbing, Pareene’s tone towards Gladney’s need betrays the progressive loathing of charity. Progressives will eagerly trot out the poor to use as electioneering devices but when it comes time to actually care for those in need, they kick them over to the government. They can’t be bothered. There are Appletinis to drink!

(Gladney wore a neck brace during the trial. The neck brace was unrelated to the two-year-old incident. You know that whole thing about frivolous lawsuits and tort reform and the culture of victimhood and ambulance-chasing trial lawyers? Yes, well, the conservative movement totally means all of that, until someone in an SEIU shirt briefly knocks someone over.)

Gladney wore a neck brace to the trial because he just had spinal surgery. Also, how is this a frivolous lawsuit again? Did Gladney ask for a frillion dollars in damages? Does Pareene understand what “tort reform” means?

This is where it gets really good: TBogg found BigJournalism.com’s explanation for how this travesty of justice was allowed to occur. Because of Media Matters! See, SEIU paid Media Matters some money, and then, mysteriously, Kenneth Gladney lost his case.

Actually, that wasn’t the point at all, but again, I don’t expect someone who doesn’t know he should verify information before he prints it to possess the reading comprehension required to understand the intent. Considering that Big Journalism focuses on journalism, the piece explored how Media Matters saw no conflict of interest in smearing Gladney and defending SEIU while being on the SEIU payroll. Pareene, of course, showcases the Myspace aesthetic of his blogging by refusing to further explore this aspect of the story.

Apparently SEIU and Media Matters for America and George Soros and the Tides Foundation and Eric Boehlert and the city of Montclair, N.J., acting on orders from the White House, all used their wizard powers to convince a jury in St. Louis that Kennedy Gladney was not actually assaulted. And that is how the vast left-wing conspiracy works.

The Gladney attack occurred right after HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius urged union members on a conference call to show up to town halls, right after the Obama admin told supporters to “punch back twice as hard“:

And they screened TV ads and reviewed the various campaigns by critics of the Democratic plan.

“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard,” Messina said, according to an official who attended the meeting.

You’re telling me that the same publication that encouraged the public to blame Sarah Palin for the Tucson shooting refuses to acknowledge the relationship between the Obama administration encouraging union aggression and the Gladney attack?

They’re more disingenuous and partisan than I’d ever before realized.

*Walsh took the opportunity to point out that she has been demoted from Editor of Salon, despite describing herself as “Editor at Large” on Twitter. Noted – yet she still has not apologized or corrected her previous insinuations related to Weinergate.

It’s no surprise that the tax-exempt Media Matters regularly features publishes proven-false propaganda pieces as “news,” and it’s no surprise that the site, led by Eric Boehlert, came out hard to spin and defend on behalf of SEIU. What Media Matters and Eric Boehlert have not disclosed is that they were paid by SEIU for unknown services and it begs the question of whether or not they were paid to help cover up SEIU’s mess in the Gladney incident.

From Liberty Chick’s post on the suppressed story from May of last year:

More specifically, in light of some recent posts regarding the Kenneth Gladney incident, I thought it appropriate to revisit donations made to Media Matters specifically by the Service Employees International Union.

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Hours ago a a St. Louis county jury found Elston McCowan and Perry Molens not guilty in the videotaped beating of Kenneth Gladney.

Elston McCowan, of St. Louis, and Perry Molens, of De Soto, had been charged with attacking a third man who was selling buttons outside the politically charged meeting, called by U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-St. Louis, at the height of debate over health care reform. Carnahan had wanted aging to be the subject, but many in the crowd wanted to argue over the president’s health care plan.

Kenneth Gladney said he was selling “Don’t Tread on Me” buttons and flags outside the forum when McCowan and Molens attacked him without provocation.

The two were charged with assaulting a person and interfering with police, both ordinance violations. The interfering with police charges were dropped and the trial was for assault charge, for which they could have each faced up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

In the above excerpt, the Post-Dispatch did not bother seeking quotes from Gladney or other witnesses, only Perry, Molens, and the defense attorney, a pricey private attorney I’m told is the best in the city.

Media Matters, who is partially funded by SEIU and who defended SEIU throughout the two years it took for Gladney to get a trial date, began spinning hard for SEIU once the verdict was reached.

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I’m writing this column, hoping to avoid something tragic or horrible before it happens.

The media loves telling us how they are there to protect us from everything awful or dangerous. Okay, time to put up.

Conservatives are under attack from the left and you sit there on the sidelines.

I was in Chicago last year with Andrew Breitbart when an unruly crowd of leftists attacked him verbally and viscously. He stood strong. He had every right to be there, and it’s clear the instigators were from the left.

We’ve all seen the recent video of Breitbart in the lobby of the hotel at the gathering of leftist bloggers. Had I not already known the outcome of that encounter, it would’ve been easy to fear for his safety at that time as well. This was as close as you can get to a physical attack. Fortunately it was just verbal, but what is the next step after a verbal attack like that?

Now, the Glenn Beck situation. He takes his family to a play in New York and is accosted by a gang of leftists going after his wife and daughter. Beck travels with security—I’ve seen them and chatted with them. By all accounts, security could not have done much to help with this incident. Wine was kicked on Beck’s wife and an evening out with his family ruined. Leftists punks acted like paparazzi, taking pictures of Beck’s family and posting them on a left-wing web site.

My media friends, who are always so quick to point out conservative violence where there is none, are virtually ignoring this activity that is right at the edge of busting out into something much more serious.

The activist old media work overtime to bring cameras to tea party rallies hoping to spot violence, or the least bit of incivility, and lead the newscast with the result. They have been shut out. Now, we have documented evidence of conservatives under attack, and the media give us crickets.

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Another progressive who apparently missed the media’s lecturing about the New Tone:

St. Louis board of aldermen president Lewis Reed summed up the event when he said “the growth of the tea party is driven by hate. They are trying to turn our country around. However, we won’t go back. We have to get out every day and fight.”

Driven by hate?

FLASHBACK: Kenneth Gladney was beaten by St. Louis union activists, and Kelly Owens was punched in the face, in August of 2009. Should we be concerned when Reed says “fight?”

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The AP certainly doesn’t seem to be wasting any time in making an incident at a Kentucky political event big news. Editor Dana Loesch recently posted on the incident here at Big Journalism.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) – A Rand Paul supporter is being ordered to appear in court so a judge can decide whether charges are warranted after he was seen on TV stepping on a liberal activist’s head.

Lexington Division of Police spokeswoman Sherelle Roberts said Tuesday that officers will deliver a summons to Tim Profitt, a volunteer with the Republican’s U.S. Senate campaign. No date was given for the court appearance.

Keep an eye out for some contrast and compare of the coverage, folks. When Kenneth Gladney was beaten, Big Government was on the case for months simply trying to get a reasonable response from the usual suspects, directly connected to the beating, or not. Campaign for Liberty coordinator Kelly Owens was also punched in the face that night. (more…)

UPDATE: RS McCain notes how the man who tussled with Valle has since apologized and Paul booted him from the campaign. Compare that with Russ Carnahan who defended SEIU the following day and rallied with the attackers a week or so later.

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While reporting on the scuffle that broke out at the Rand Paul/Jack Conway debate, the mainstream media is keen to not identify that paid Soros activist and repeat trouble-maker Lauren Valle had the explicit intention of going to the debate to pull a stunt and start trouble, which caused the fracas in the first place.

My particular rule of thumb is to allow disruptors to let their flags fly. If they want to stage a stunt, who cares? They seek out attention and denying them that attention is a bigger blow to the ego than what took place at the debate, which was unnecessary.

I’m going to take bets that Valle gets “justice” for attempting to incite a riot and make the news at the Rand Paul/Jack Conway debate before SEIU victims Kenneth Gladney and Kelly Owens. (Or the man who had his fingers chewed off by a leftist.)

Owens is the lesser-known victim of the SEIU who was punched out on camera, which broke her camera and bruised her face–all this was witnessed by cops, according to the police report. No one rushing to defend Valle came to Owens’ defense, even after Owens discussed intimidation aimed at discouraging her from pressing charges.

I’ve seen the tape of Valle vs. the Paul supporters. She was described as having “lunged” and “stalked” Paul, which, considering the history of leftist violence and threats (I know from experience: I’m preparing to go to court over threats made against my children, not to mention the death threat I received this week), made the debate attendees nervous. (more…)

The St. Louis Tea Party’s Ben Evans fights back against the ridiculous defamation from the NAACP:

Adolophus Pruitt, the man who stood silently and idly by at the press conference where the NAACP mocked Kenneth Gladney and called him an “uncle Tom” and then later lied about it on camera, as reported by Adam Sharp earlier today.

Kudos to KMOV Channel 4 for offering this forum for both sides, one of the first news outlets to do so.

In light of the St. Louis NAACP’s own racism issues, I was surprised to find out that they planned to hold a press conference to attack the TEA Party as racist…again.

The same chapter of the NAACP that uses racial slurs in their press conferences …

… preaching to the city whose TEA Party leads the way in policing itself. Irony.

I attended this press conference in order to confront the hypocrites in the St. Louis NAACP. I was met with evasion, half truths and flat out lies…then they kicked me out of the press conference for covering it. (more…)

The NAACP is back again with yet another attempt to defame and smear the multicultural tea party movement.

Strike 1: July 2010 the NAACP’s demand for tea party racism repudiation fell flat when video emerged the day before showing an NAACP press conference where the victim of a racially-motivated crime was mocked, called an “uncle Tom,” slurred, and had his melanin content questioned.

Strike 2: The NAACP releases teapartytracker.org, a website devoted to all things tea party extremist.

NAACP “proof” of tea party extremism:

Still no word from the NAACP on BushHitler.

STRIKE 3: The NAACP realized their mistake with the last statement and this time brought in the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. The IREHR is a group comprised of liberal journalists and activists who are led by ideology and seek to use their bias against conservatives as a fulcrum to further push apart the country. I would bet that most – I really believe all but I’m being generous – have never been to a tea party event like UCLA grad student Emily Ekins.

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Chris Matthews reported today that Joe Miller’s campaign arrested a liberal blogger “because [he] dared to ask a question of a candidate in a democracy.” He called them thugs and said he expected to see Bounty Hunter Dog at Millers side.

Chris Matthews has never seen anything like this. Really?

Except in Martha Coakley’s case it was a reporter for the Weekly Standard.

If Matthews is against such thuggish behavior, one wonders where Matthews’s outrage was when the thugs with SEIU violently attacked Kenneth Gladney. Where was Matthew’s outrage of thuggery when Black Panthers intimidated voters at a polling station? Dylan Ratigan also chimed in on the story today when he had an analyst say unchallenged on his show that the guards were a “para-military force” by Miller’s side.

The Mainstream Media got caught with their hands in the cookie jar again.  They were jubilant to jump on the “it’s the Tea Party’s fault” bandwagon within hours of an August 17  firebombing of Democrat Congressman Russ Carnahan’s St. Louis office. No one was hurt.  The finger pointing was immediate, because this was a double header for the MSM.  Not only did this give them an opportunity to try to pin something, anything, on a Tea Partier, but it also gave them a chance to take pot shots at conservative favorite, Ed Martin, who is currently gaining in his race to oust the unpopular, liberal Carnahan in Missouri.

Speculation began immediately for the liblogs, and in some local papers.  St. Louis Tea Party Founder Bill Hennessy quickly put out a statement that the bombing of a Congressman’s office should be immediately investigated by the FBI.  Bill and I  spoke at that time along with others in Tea Party leadership.  We knew,  without asking around or knowing the details, that this was not a Tea Party tactic, and that the investigation would lead to  the truth and further embarrassment of the left, by the left.

The Riverfront Times and other blogs reported that since the description of the suspect was “50, white, angry — he certainly fits the demographics of a Tea Party member.” (more…)

We’ve already noted how two HuffPo reporters ran defense for SEIU: First there was Erica Payne, HuffPo blogger, lover of all things Media Matters, who appeared on Fox News to try to shift blame of SEIU antics onto the tea party.

We’ve also read how HuffPo blogger Arthur Delaney was embedded with SEIU to cover their home invasion of Bank of America employee Greg Baer which terrified Baer’s young son who hid in the bathroom (we’re still waiting for the Carnahan Coffin-Gate drama queens to repeat their hysterics over this but so far, nothing); Delaney became the first to parrot SEIU’s baseless accusation of “conflict of interest” at Fortune columnist Nina Easton after she published her firsthand account, as Baer’s neighbor, of the same protest. Monday we exposed Huffington Post’s own conflict of interest when we discovered that SEIU had paid the site $15,000 categorized as “political activities and lobbying.”

Is this what SEIU money is buying? Two HuffPo bloggers running their media defense? Of course, this could be a routine advertising expense. But, Big Government has learned that the Huffington Post has inserted themselves into SEIU’s most notorious violent incident: the Kenneth Gladney beating of last August.

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People on the left are constantly asking Andrew Breitbart who funds his “operation.” It’s grown to become rather amusing, actually. For those of us who are bloggers on The Bigs, we know the truth, we see how things operate. We know there’s no giant conservative-leaning lump of cash greasing this machine. If that were the case, I for one think Andrew would probably be home with his family even more, rather than traveling around, worrying about advertising or other ways of self-funding this little “hobby” of his, as the left often like to refer to it.

But let’s just look for one moment at where some of that line of thinking comes from on the other side. I’ve written previously about the birth of Media Matters as a spawn of Rob Stein’s Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix road show, from which the Democracy Alliance was born. It’s through this organization from which much of the organization’s funding had come; in recent years, more has been spread out across other progressive organizations, but the funders often remain the same names in most cases. For instance, The Tides Foundation gave Media Matters and their Action Network over $175,000 just last year. In earlier years, groups like Montclair, New Jersey-based (hometown of Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert) Schumann Center for Media & Democracy gave the organization $500,000.

The donors’ list is vast and diverse, and we plan to cover that in detail in the future. So I’ll focus in on one set of donors to Media Matters, which is the Labor Unions. More specifically, in light of some recent posts regarding the Kenneth Gladney incident, I thought it appropriate to revisit donations made to Media Matters specifically by the Service Employees International Union.

When you look at the timeline of events and the media calendar in general leading up to the Gladney incident last August, it’s difficult not to conclude that there was collaboration amongst White House staff, components of Big Labor, and certain liberal media outlets. However, we know that all will continue to deny it. (more…)

The leftist elements of the mainstream media (MSM) could be content just to gloat because they got away with the biggest coup in political history.  Instead, they are launching a full frontal assault on conservatism.  The left must be very afraid.

The accusations are flying.  Virtually every MSM news outlet is running commentary of alleged “racial slurs” and “violent outbursts.”   Shouldn’t they be running video of the actual incidents, instead (if they actually happened)?

Congressman Emanuel Cleaver (D, Mo.) made accusations and the media took the allegation as gospel despite the absence of any corroborating evidence.  The  MSM reported the allegation as news. Interesting, there was almost no national MSM coverage of an innocent black man who was attacked, beaten, and stomped on tape by SEIU protesters in St. Louis.

When Representative Cleaver found media attention for his yet unfounded accusations, others jumped in with more accusations.   They all got press, too.  They all accused conservative groups like the Tea Party of the threats, violent actions, and vicious activities. (more…)

The Democrats and their activist old media are running in circles and working themselves into pretzels trying to define the “Tea Party” movement. It can be quite entertaining to watch.  They really have no idea what is happening right in front of their eyes. The media would have an easier time reading Mandarin Chinese than they would deciphering the signs at a Tea Party rally.

You could argue that they don’t want to understand what they are seeing because that means they would have to admit that Democrats have lost the beloved grass roots that they claim to have had forever, and I would not disagree. But, for the moment, let’s just say that they are really trying hard to figure this out and it’s just not sinking in to their brilliant Ivy League minds.

Let’s give them a little hint:

Sunday on Meet the Press, Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton press secretary, took a stab at defining the Tea Party movement. “I’m not sure exactly where this is going….is it a third party, is it part of the Republican Party?” (more…)