It seems that some within the Mainstream Media have been trying to send the American public a clear message, “It is time for you to get over the 9-11 attacks.”

A majority of Americans have always seen the attacks of 9-11 as being on par with the attack upon Pearl Harbor since the dual attacks happened within our nation.

The members of the Mainstream Media always saw the attacks as the defining moment of the much-hated Bush Presidency. Now that another of President Obama’s teachable moments has blown up in his face, some of the Mainstream Media have sought to portray the growing opposition to a Community Center/ Mosque, two blocks from Ground Zero as an issue of racism and religious freedom.

From the Daily Kos to Fox news Contributor Bob Beckel, 9-11 victims, first responders and Americans have been attacked for not supporting the project and/or not simply getting over the attacks some nine years later. The Daily Kos went as far as to compare car accidents to 9-11 boasting that, “It was only 3,000 people come on, as more people die in car accidents yearly! (more…)

After pleading guilty to what is apparently the misdemeanor of “Entry by false pretenses to any real property, vessel, or aircraft of the United States” (18 U.S.C. § 1036), James O’Keefe has joined a long list of political activists convicted of charges related to their political activism.  He’s just the only conservative one.  Nonetheless, we look forward to the mainstream media enshrining him in its current pantheon of heroes of civil disobedience.  And to elephants flying.

Like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, with their like-clockwork arrests protesting whatever is in the news at any given moment, O’Keefe’s antics were apparently designed to make a political point.  In this case, the point seemed to be to show that the local staff of Senator Mary Landrieu (D., La.) was making up stories about her telephone system’s being down in order to dodge calls from outraged constituents decrying the health care reform bill.

It being a conservative point, rather than a left-wing attempt to raise racial tensions or extort money from cowardly corporations, we have not seen much sympathy for O’Keefe’s plight.

Of course, it is unfair to compare O’Keefe to lefty icons Sharpton or Jackson – unfair to O’Keefe.  The precocious O’Keefe helped blow the lid off ACORN’s twisted willingness to break not only the law but also the most basic tenets of moral decency in order to assist what its representatives understood to be child sex slavers, leading to ACORN’s welcome demise.  In contrast, Sharpton is a notorious charlatan who has spent years dodging the judgment against him entered after the Tawana Brawley charade, and Jesse Jackson is a noted shakedown artist, adulterer and father of a love child. (more…)

To those of us who attended college in the late sixties and early seventies, the killings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 remain indelibly fixed in memory.  They came at a particularly turbulent time in the country’s history, following the annus horribilis of 1968 and the murders of Martin and Bobby; the student strikes and uprisings, not only in the U.S. but in Europe, particularly France; the Cuban airplane hijackings, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism and the tumult of the Nixon Administration.

For years, the media narrative has been fixed: that a skittish and undisciplined National Guard fired unprovoked into a crowd of student protesters, killing four.  Now comes Fox News’s James Rosen with a revisionist take:

Previously undisclosed FBI documents suggest that the Kent State antiwar protests were more meticulously planned than originally thought and that one or more gunshots may have been fired at embattled Ohio National Guardsmen before their killings of four students and woundings of at least nine others on that searing day in May 1970.

As the nation marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State antiwar protests Tuesday, a review of hundreds of previously unpublished investigative reports sheds a new — and very different — light on the tragic episode.

(more…)

Sad but true: Bill Moyers Journal has shuffled off the air and into the archives of PBS and the Paley Center for Media. From a story in the Columbia Journalism Review:

In 1948, when he was fourteen years old, Bill Moyers heard Lyndon Johnson give a rousing speech at a courthouse in Marshall, Texas. Without a megaphone or a loudspeaker, LBJ mesmerized the crowd. “I remember the sheer presence of the man,” Moyers has recalled. “And I thought, ‘That’s what power is. And this man is reaching this audience. And he’s got this audience. And he’s telling this audience something that’s very important.’ ” Years later, through a different medium—television—Moyers would achieve a similar kind of power, and he has yet to abuse it. Moyers’s conversational ease, his earnest delivery, his fierce intelligence—all of it has transformed him into our leading television intellectual, and a worthy successor to Edward R. Murrow.

Yes, the former press secretary to one of the most reviled presidents of the 20th century — reviled especially by the left — has become one of the icons of the very same left that once chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?”

Moyers somehow escaped being tarnished with the disaster that was the Johnson Administration and went on to a career as a staple on PBS, playing the role of the Guilty White Southerner (he was born in Oklahoma, but raised in Texas); it’s a wonder he didn’t end up editing the New York Times.  With his trademark combination of folksy unctuousness and schoolmarmish hectoring, he became the go-to guy for people who wanted to feel good about their best and most noble liberal impulses. (more…)

The media have an inadequate understanding of religion. This simple fact is corroborated frequently, as mainstream outlets attempt to illustrate stories, explain religious themes and delve deep into faith-based systems.  Unfortunately, most outlets miss the mark entirely, as journalists do not have proper understanding of the constructs through which they are attempting to report.  As a result, the American public suffers a lack of pointed and well-presented information on a subject that stands at the forefront of important global and domestic issues.

Case in point, Christiane Amanpour’s 2007 CNN mini-series entitled, “God’s Warriors.”  The three-part series delved into the world’s three largest religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  As is typical of the secular media, an enhanced level of relativism led the Iranian-bred Amanpour (born in London to a Persian family) to equate “extremism” within and among adherents to the three religions.  While each belief system has had moral failures, equating the deaths as a result of radical Islamic fascism to those of contemporary Christianity and Judaism is absurd.  Furthermore, as is the case when journalists attempt to cover religion, Amanpour left out essential details that would have provided a more fair-minded picture. (more…)