I don’t know if I ever believed in the infallibility of a journalist’s objectivity, but I definitely stopped flirting with the notion as a young adult. There is bias for agenda and bias for truth.

Though I work in broadcasting and host a daily radio show, I got my start in print journalism. I’m a weensy-government conservative from the Midwest, Christian, mother of two, homeschooler, and my hobby, profession, and passion is news. I regularly provide political analysis on Fox, CNN, CBS, and ABC, and have been featured before on Big J as a contributor. I’ve blogged since 2001 and was first attracted to the medium by its wild west aesthetic, if simply telling the truth that corporate media wasn’t telling could be so rebellious as to be defined as “wild west.” Now, with the advance of social media, the combination of the mediums in a new era of information distribution are endless. It’s a great time to work in this field.

This past Saturday I sat in a hotel ballroom facing a host of journalists from across the Midwest as part of a panel which discussed reporting on the Tea Party movement. I told them what I believed was wrong with corporate media’s approach, “teabagging” notwithstanding. I was invited by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Political Editor, Christopher Ave, whose attention I caught when I railed against a particular piece the paper published involving a fire at Rep. Russ Carnahan’s office (which the alternative media implied was perpetrated by the Tea Party). He guested on my show after the piece published and we had a healthy discourse on journalism and its objectives. I trust him to deliver fair pieces on the movement, on conservatism – not coddling, kittens-and-sunshine hand-holding and kid gloves, but actual objective pieces designed to inform, not persuade. Perhaps in my lifetime there will be more exceptions to the rule like this

That sentiment is why I was thrilled when Andrew Breitbart unveiled Big Journalism because I knew that we had yet another eye to witness to the media’s dereliction of duty. I am honored to be chosen as Michael Walsh’s successor. (more…)

This is my last post as Editor-in-Chief of Big Journalism.

A year ago this month, Andrew Breitbart and I, along with the rest of the team at Breitbart.com, began planning this site, designing the logo and the layout, recruiting the writers and generally establishing the tone of a new conservative website devoted to all matters media, including the Mainstream Media, New Media and the blogosphere, and the intersection of politics, culture and the press.  We launched on Jan. 6, 2010, and we’ve never looked back.

So thanks to my colleagues — and most of all of to you, our readers — for making us a success, one of the top conservative sites in the country and, along with our Big sister sites — Big Hollywood, Big Government and Big Peace — a force to be reckoned with, with not only in the blogosphere, but in Hollywood, on Capitol Hill, and at the Pentagon.

Dana Loesch, whom you all know from her work not only as a blogger and St. Louis radio personality but also as a force in the Tea Party, will guide you on our collective journey from here on out. Please join with me in wishing her nothing but the best. (more…)

Big Journalism Editor-In-Chief Michael Walsh appeared on Michael Medved’s syndicated radio show last week and was given the rare opportunity to actually engage one of the left-wing “Senior Fellows”  from Media Matters for America.

Our pals over at the Soros-Funded Left-Wing Hack-Attack webpage have never accepted invitations to actually engage in ideas and back-up their outrageous and unfounded attacks on this website and the Tea Party movement.

But somehow, Senior Fellow Will Bunch agreed to go one-on-one with Walsh on Medved’s show.  I’ll let our readers draw their own conclusions about just how badly Walsh creamed Bunch.  I think this audio speaks for itself:

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To say I’m extremely flattered by El Rushbo’s very kind endorsement would be an understatement:

You can get the first book in the series, Hostile Intent, on Amazon or at any Barnes & Noble or other fine bookstore, and read a review here.

Ditto, so to speak for the sequel, Early Warning, of which you can read a review here. (more…)

Guess what’s on Rush Limbaugh’s reading list.

In his opening monologue this morning, Rush Limbaugh touted the novel Early Warning, written by Big Journalism’s own editor-in-chief, Michael Walsh and published earlier this month.

Rush plans to steal Walsh’s term from the book “bed-wetters at the New York Times” to describe those handwringing journalists populating the Make-Believe Media. From the transcript:

RUSH: I am reading a book: Early Warning. The author sent me a paperback version of the book, Michael Walsh is his name. It just came out this year. It is a great, great, great political thriller. I’ll have to get the name. It’s total escapism, but he’s got a great, great, great term for people at the New York Times. He calls them the bed-wetters at the New York Times, meaning all the hand-wringing, just constantly afraid of the wrong things, by the way. The bed-wetters at the New York Times, I’m going to steal that. Early Warning is the second in a series. The head honcho character is a guy named Devlin and this is the second of the two. I don’t know who the guy is. He sent me an autographed copy of the paperback version of the second Devlin book, a little note in there says, “Here’s a little book, spend some time when you’re flying around, airplane reading.” I noticed that it was the second, so I have ‘em both on my iPad. You know, iBooks has one of them, and I had to go to Barnes & Noble to get the other one. I read books on my iPad now.

By the way folks, I’m running — well, never mind. Steve Jobs will get mad at me. I’ve already got Hank Haney mad at me, so I’m not going to tell you that.

At any rate, it’s a great term, bed-wetters at the New York Times. (more…)

Arrogant? Entitled? Petty? You be the judge:

While researching my first novel, Exchange Alley, I spent several weeks at the National Archives, working with the JFK Assassination Records Collection material, which was then housed there.  I went through the FBI reports, the CIA reports, the taped conversations between LBJ (who was terrified at the notion that the Soviets might have had a hand in the killing, given that Oswald was a self-declared Marxist who had defected to the USSR and then returned home) and various figures in the government, including J. Edgar Hoover. (The plot of my novel has to do with a renegade KGB agent trying to sell his agency’s file on Oswald, which has never been seen in the west.)

I also pored over Oswald’s hand-written notes, his middling translation of an aria from Tchaikovsky’s opera, The Queen of Spades, handled the famous photographs of Oswald with his rifle. At the end, there was only one possible conclusion: that Lee Harvey Oswald brought his rifle to work that day in Dallas, went up to the sixth floor, and shot the President of the United States from behind as the motorcade turned into Elm Street in Dealey Plaza.

Everything else — his connections to the KGB, the FBI, the Cubans — is commentary that may or may not speak to motive, but not to action.

So this is sad, really:

For the definitive study of the assassination, please read Gerald Posner’s indispensable Case Closed. For an even more exhaustive treatment, recommended for assassination buffs only, there is Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,600-page Reclaiming History. (more…)

Thanks to all of you, my new novel, Early Warning, is in stores now, as well as on Kindle. It’s the sequel to last year’s thriller, Hostile Intent, which went to No. 1 on Kindle upon its debut, sat high on the  the Barnes & Noble mass-market list for months and even managed to sneak onto the New York Times extended bestseller list.

Clearly, something about my protagonist, “Devlin,” resonated with the public, and I hope you find his latest incarnation even more compelling. He’s a hero for our times, a complex man with a mysterious past, part superhero and part everyschmuck, the kind of guy you probably wouldn’t notice on the street but who you most definitely do not want to meet in a dark alley — or, in the case of Early Warning, under the Central Park Reservoir — when he’s got his blood up.  As the most secret, and lethal, weapon in the United States’ arsenal, he puts the security in the Central Security Service — which, believe it or not, actually exists.

The themes of this series — there will be at least three more installments — are the very real and manifest security threats that keep our Homeland Security and intel agencies johnnies awake at night. In Hostile Intent, it was a terrorist assault on a middle school in the Midwest and an EMP attack on the east coast; in Early Warning, it’s a Bombay-style assault on Times Square, complete with car bombs, automatic weapons fire and one hell of a subway explosion. And yes, I wrote it all months before the Times Square bomber.

One of the tricks of the thriller-writing business is extrapolating horrific scenarios from known facts, keeping the tale plausible while still observing at least some of the conventions of the genre — even if the story itself may be, if not impossible. not-yet thinkable. One of the greatest of all thrillers, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, manages to keep us in suspense right to the end, even though we all know that De Gaulle died in bed, not at the hands of an assassin. And of course we all hope that there won’t be an armed attack on Times Square, a school hostage crisis, or something even worse…

We”l be posting a couple of excerpts from Early Warning over at Big Hollywood next week. In the meantime, here’s a Q&A I did for Books-a-Million. I hope it raises more questions than it answers, and that you’ll check out Early Warning for at least some of the solutions: (more…)

You all remember when Babs Boxer, the Terror of Tiny Town, went Brooklyn-nuclear on a hapless Army Brigadier General, Michael Walsh, who had the insolence to call her “Ma’am” instead of “Senator” when testifying before her short but august majesty.

Lest we forget this great moment in civilian control of the military, here it is:

OK, maggots — got the message?

Now let’s watch how the Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II treats his subjects. Here he is yesterday, swatting away a pesky, impotent Sen. John McCain. Everyone in the room addresses the former Barry Soetoro  as “Mr. President,” but the Punahou Kid can’t bring himself to give McCain the dignity of a title:

Yes, I know it’s kind of fun to watch the man who never saw an aisle he didn’t want to reach across in order to appease his tormentors and double-cross his pals grit his teeth and seethe, but still… “John?”  To a man who not only has a military rank but holds high civilian office?

Wouldn’t it have been fun to see the combined scenes played something like this? (more…)

Of the many, many qualities I have come to admire in my friend, Andrew Breitbart, none of them appeals to me more than the white-hot rage one can generate in him by bringing up the subject of press malfeasance.

Andrew understands, as do I and this site’s editor, Michael Walsh, that press bias and incompetence and outright fraud is more of a problem than global warming or the healthcare “crisis,” or the rank corruption in congress, or even the criminal activity on the part of ACORN.  Just ask Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and’30s, and also an apologist for the crimes of Joseph Stalin:

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The press is supposed to be the immune system of the body politic.  The press is supposed to be anywhere and everywhere, seeking out corruption the way a white blood cell targets pathogens. When the press no longer serves this function of protecting the political body against abuses of power – because it is too ideologically blinded to be able to either see or act upon these threats —  then our Republic has a virulent and highly lethal (historically, anyway) form of AIDS. (more…)