Christopher Knight writes for the “Culture Monster” a column over at ”The Incredibly Shrinking L.A. Times,” and guess what our progressive friend sees when he looks at this innocuous and obvious political cartoon of First Lady Michelle Obama:

Believe it or not, Mr. Knight sees an “uppity Negro.” Those aren’t my words, those are his:

The caricature of Obama as a profligate queen relies on the racist stereotype of an “uppity Negro[.]“

Who other than someone with their own disturbing prejudices would look at that obvious piece of political satire hitting the First lady up for her excessive and lavish vacationing and think “uppity Negro”?

Naturally, though, like all bigoted leftists, Knight attempts to project his own troubling racial issues on others:

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One of the Old Media’s favorite ways of attempting to hide the ideological track of a story is to somehow forget to mention which party someone in the news hails or to whom they owe their fealty. In this case, it is what they don’t report that misleads. This week we find a classic what-they-don’t-say story concerning the judge that blocked sections of South Carolina’s new immigration law. For those unaware, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel temporarily blocked segments of South Carolina’s new immigration laws because he claimed that some of its provisions impinged on federal prerogatives, things over which the state has no jurisdiction. The South Carolina law was opposed in court by Obama’s left-wing, activist Department of Justice headed by Eric “Fast And Furious” Holder and a gaggle of civil rights groups. Judge Gergel agreed with these attackers and issued an injunction to stop implementation of the provisions in question.

The Old Media reported a lot of details in the story, of course. We learned all about who opposed the provisions, who scoffed at the injunction, in what District Judge Gergel hailed, and in some of the reports we even get to hear what Republican South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley had to say about it all. But there is one thing few news outlets seemed to report that might help readers understand the decision better. Judge Richard Mark Gergel is an Obama appointee. (more…)

I see Black and Hispanic people.

Do you see Black and Hispanic people?

Photo editing, even for a failing newspaper nobody likes, is a painstaking and deliberate process. A whole lot of thought goes into each selection. So you have to ask yourself why a left-wing outlet like The Incredible Shrinking L.A. Times would use the photo above to accompany a story about an increase in violence along the boardwalk in Venice, California.

See if you can crack the code:

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved an ordinance to limit commercial selling on Venice Beach’s famed Ocean Front Walk.

The ordinance is the latest in a series of efforts to tame the popular but unruly attraction, which draws about 16 million visitors annually but has lately seen more than the usual number of transients and violent crimes.

[...]

But merchandise with more than “nominal utility” beyond protected speech would be prohibited. Banned items would include clothing, sunglasses, incense, perfume, lotions, candy, toys, housewares, auto parts, crystals and jewelry.

“This is a public safety issue,” said Los Angeles Police Capt. Jon F. Peters, commanding officer for the Pacific area. Since October 2010, he said, the area has experienced “a general sense of lawlessness,” with aggravated assaults up by 16%.

A cast of colorful characters, many of them longtime boardwalk denizens, testified for and against the measure in council chambers. A few speakers vowed to take the city to court, but Assistant City Atty. Valerie Flores said the ordinance incorporates definitions and standards that have held up against challenges.

To punctuate a story about an increase in violence along the Venice Beach boardwalk, L.A. Times’ readers are treated to the sight of a Mexican bandit and Black rapper in the foreground and, in the background, a menacing looking Black man in a hoodie who looks like he has murder on his mind. Behind him is another Black man.

Well, maybe the photo represents Ocean Front Walk.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Anecdotally, as someone who’s been there, I can tell you the photo is absurd. First off, Venice Beach is bright, sunny, and filled with people and families of all races and backgrounds out to enjoy the ocean, the sidewalk cafes, and, yes, the many street vendors. And the facts prove that my eyes don’t lie:

As of 2008, the population is estimated to be around 40,885. The median household income is $67,057, making it one the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. The racial and ethnic composition in Venice is White (63.9%), Latino (22.2%), African American (5.6%), Asian (3.7%), and Other (4.6%).

What conclusion are we to make other than the left-wing L.A. Times consciously or unconsciously associates violent crime with Black and Hispanics.

L.A. Times:

Why did you want to go from the top of the men’s magazine world to Fox News?

I loved Fox News. I’d been on a couple of times, and I found it refreshing. Before Fox News, what was there? There was this terrible sameness — all the same faces with the same assumptions about America’s place in the world. The news was deliberately obscuring another perspective, and it was one that reflected reality in my mind and who I was, and the gap between what was real and what was on the news, I thought, was huge. And FNC at least for me filled that gap.

What do you have to say to critics of Fox News who regard it as a tool of the right wing?

I always love questions like that, because no one ever says, “I don’t like Fox News.” They say, “What do you say to the critics?” In the old days, major media was outrageously liberal, but they owned all the players on the teams, they owned the ball, they owned the stadium. And when Fox News shows up to play, everyone else wants to take the ball and go home. You hear nothing but whining about Fox News because they’re kicking everybody’s butt. And I love that. The people who whine about Fox News are hypocrites — they say they’re totally tolerant, but when they run into someone who doesn’t share their assumptions, they say, “Fox News is evil, and it must be stopped.”

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Tim Rutten is a left-wing, hack writer from L.A. He is always good for contemporary left wing trope but the other day we discovered that he is also good for the sort of uninformed blathering that leftists of his ilk pretend is American history. Chiefly that of America’s religious history and the so-called “wall of separation between church and state.”

In a June 1 piece about Mitt Romney, Rutten regaled us with his “reading” of Mitt’s current political reality. Rutten proposed that any question about Mitt’s Mormonism was somehow a threat to the United States.

Before I get to Rutten’s warped take on U.S. history, let’s take this business about the attacks on Mitt’s Mormonism.

To make his point, Rutten proves himself keen on unduly enlarging the supposed attacks on Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion from both today and in his earlier run for the White House. While there were attacks on Romney for his religion in 2008, those attacks were relatively minor and never really made much headway against his candidacy.

Certainly there are many thousands of Christians that don’t think Mormonism is a Christian religion. I believe that it is a correct assessment, too. But so what? Whether Mormonism is a Christian religion or not has nothing whatever to do with Mitt Romney’s suitability for becoming president of the United States. Only a small minority of Republican voters hold Romney’s Mormonism against him. I’d guess that number would dwindle to even less should Mitt become the GOP nominee, too. (more…)

Earlier this week I ran a piece at Big Journalism that examines how the MSM, in their desperate efforts to undermine and destroy Sarah Palin, are willing to weaponize her own children as political bludgeons against her. The idea is, at all costs, to undermine her seriousness and to create a relentless storm of nonsensical controversies around her that serve the leftist MSM’s partisan desires in three ways. First, by creating a narrative out of the ridiculous, the Governor is never allowed to get her message out. Second, it furthers the goal of turning her into a punchline. Finally, this Palin-Fury the MSM constantly brews up is meant to condition us to wince every time she pops her head out of the ground. Simply put, Palin’s MSM enemies want to exhaust us to the point where we start to wish she’d just go away; and the day after that piece published there was yet another textbook example.

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Monday night, at a military fundraiser, Governor Palin laid out what you might call the Palin Doctrine, a five-part plan that defines her vision for American national security. As a potential GOP candidate, any mainstream news outlet that wasn’t corrupt would find this to be a very big deal, but what did we get instead? Alinsky 101:

ABC News: Palin (Sort of) Praises Obama on Bin Laden

Mediaite: Palin Thanks President On Bin Laden’s Death, But Doesn’t Mention Obama By Name

Los Angeles Time: Sarah Palin credits Bush for Osama bin Laden’s death, omits Obama’s name

These headlines are actually dumber and more misleading than they look when you read (video clip above) what the Governor actually said:

Yesterday was a testament to the military’s dedication in relentlessly hunting down an enemy through many years of war, and we thank our president. We thank President Bush for having made the right calls to set up this victory.

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Jerry Brown’s campaign conspired to commit political rape, calling Meg Whitman, his female political opponent, a “whore.” And he got N.O.W.’s political endorsement for doing so. The liberal beauty mask is so off the wrinkled, geriatric, age-spotted National Organization of Whores (yes, only a woman could write that so I just did).

Yet for all the mild hand-wringing over whether the “w-word” should have been used, no one in the Make-Believe Media is even questioning N.O.W.’s endorsement much less mocking the utter hypocrisy of it all. A women’s organization rewarding a politician for calling a woman a whore and no one notices. They’re all too busy with damage control for Brown’s campaign.

Stephanie Schriock, the leader of the prominent pro-abortion group Emily’s List, ever so gently criticized Brown in a remarkably tepid and muted way, concluding that, “It’s unfortunate to hear it in any place.”

“It’s inappropriate; it’s just wrong,” said Stephanie Schriock, the leader of EMILY’S List, a Democratic group dedicated to electing pro-choice women, on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers.” Such words “just shouldn’t be used anywhere by anyone, period. It is just not what our democracy is about. It’s unfortunate to hear it in any place.”

Unfortunate?!? “Unfortunate” is when it rains on your newly washed car or you break a nail. How about “vile” or “despicable” or “reprehensible”? Get a thesaurus, Ms. Schriock.

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In the journolista MSM’s perpetually coordinated effort to help further the leftist cause, over the past couple of weeks it’s become quite obvious that destroying Andrew Breitbart is the new priority number one and that the latest set of instructions raging through JournolistLand are to find and/or help to create a wedge between the Slayer of ACORN and the conservative community. And what better way to do that than with a conservative willing to go on the record and speak out against him?

The idea, obviously, is to toxify Breitbart in such a way that no “reputable conservative” would ever associate with him again. Yesterday, in that beacon of journolista integrity called the Nearly Bankrupt L.A. Times, we got an early first glimpse of just how well that plan is working.

Or not.

After using the front page of their Sunday editorial section as bait, the best the Nearly Bankrupt L.A. Times could come up with was someone they would normally mercilessly ridicule over cocktails, Intelligent Design proponent David Klinghoffer. Which isn’t to say Klinghoffer didn’t perform well. Here’s his opener: (more…)

For over a year, Big Hollywood contributors have been documenting Hollywood’s intolerance towards all things conservative — both when it comes to our ideas being given a fair shake in the industry’s product and, most importantly, the intolerance towards individuals whose beliefs stray from the liberal plantation. Again and again, people have come to us to share the stories of how their social and political beliefs hurt their show business careers in ways both big and small. And to their great credit, most of these individuals have said so on the record; with their names and faces prominently displayed in the upper left-hand corner of their Big Hollywood testimony.

Without fail, every single time someone tells their story here, the insulting snark hits from every corner of the web, dismissing out of hand our ever growing list of witnesses to this new blacklist. Sure, the Gawkers and the Farkers are entitled to their fun. They peddle in shallow superiority and there are plenty of buyers. Welcome to Al Gore’s creation.

Lately, however, Patrick Goldstein, a film writer at the L.A. Times, has been taking his own partisan shots. Tuesday, after Jonathan Kahn came out in the Wall Street Journal, there was this:

[I]t’s seems like quite a stretch to say that Kahn’s politics have held him back. But that’s what all too many conservatives do. They put the blame for their stalled careers on liberal Hollywood, when lack of marketable talent might be a far more likely source for the problem.

What’s curious about this argument regarding Kahn needing “marketable talent” is how Goldstein willfully ignored this part of the WSJ story:

One person stunned to hear of Mr. Kahn’s double life as a tea-party troubadour is top Hollywood record producer and Grammy Award-winner Walter Afanasieff. The two have worked on projects for years and are now midway through writing and producing an album for a young singer.

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If you’re like me, you’re tired of being lied to.

That’s what got me started in media criticism.  I would read the Los Angeles Times every day and shout at the newspaper’s reporters and editors over my cornflakes.  “This isn’t true and you know it!” I’d yell.

Of course, nobody over there was listening.  But they listen to me now… sometimes.

Back in February 2003, I started writing my blog, primarily as an outlet for my frustration at the bias, omissions, and distortions I found in the L.A. Times on an almost daily basis.

Since then, I’ve managed to get the editors’ attention a few times.

During the Iraq war, I questioned an L.A. Times report that a U.S. airstrike in Ramadi had “pulverized” 15 homes and killed 30 civilians.  My military and other local sources denied the report.  Based on my post, the editors backed off their initial claims.

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