NAACP's Benjamin Jealous

In a press release issued this morning, the NAACP condemned 24-hour cable news channel CNN for its recently announced prime time news lineup, calling the lack of diversity in its collection of news anchors a “glaring omission.”

“The NAACP is deeply concerned with the lack of African American journalists in prime time news, both on cable and national news shows,” NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said in the statement. “We have come to expect this from the likes of Fox News, but not other networks. While we understand that news is now a 24-hour cycle, most Americans get their news from the morning and evening prime time broadcasts.”

Again, says a group whose membership is strictly for one race. I’m the first to laugh and point at mainstream media, but the premise of this publicity stunt is devoid of logic. The NAACP assumes that CNN is barring black journalists as opposed to there not being enough black journalists ready and present for promotion to prime time. Did the NAACP take inventory of all the black people (or white, men and women) in the CNN newsroom?

If the NAACP is so concerned about diversity at the anchor desk, what are they doing to encourage that instead of taking the easy way out and bullying networks to garner themselves attention? How does that help the black community when the group who claims to hold the patent on black rights advances more tantrums than black Americans?

Why would he tell both TV and live audiences things like this….

Shirley Sherrod, is the next example. We didn’t rush to condemn her. This is another seemingly “redistribution of wealth” woman — who I would bet that I vehemently disagree with on probably everything. But she asked for the rest of the tape to be heard, the farmers in the story backed her up. It was a turning point story. We defended her and said her side of the story demanded to be heard — because context matters…

or this?

I have a story I want to share with you that I haven’t shared yet. Do you know why I didn’t do the Shirley Sherrod story? Did anyone think that story was uncommon for the people that we have in the White House? That there might be some prejudice that is happening? No. I stood in my office with my entire team, and I said, “something’s wrong, don’t do this story.”That’s what saved me: the Sword of the Spirit.

As you’ll see, both of those statements are totally false. Glenn Beck not only didn’t initially defend Sherrod but he actually dropped the entire context that Sherrod’s video clip was originally presented in. Close to a year later, Beck still hasn’t been honest about his initial context dropping attacks on Sherrod.

So – why? Did Beck start spinning a story and was unable to discern truth from fiction? Did he enjoy the praise he got from left wing sources, who believed his spin?

Back in July, 2010 an article TV Newser reported…

Fox News host Glenn Beck has received quite a bit of praise for his restraint regarding the Shirley Sherrod videos. When many other conservative commentators were condemning her, Beck was defending her, arguing that the brief video clip that cost her her job was taken out of context. As a result Beck was praised this morning by theNew York Times editorial page:

And here’s liberal news site Talking Points Memo…

This is patently false. Yes – on his TV show on July 20th, Beck defended Sherrod…but as you’ll see, this was after Beck has attacked Sherrod for three segments of his radio show.

Becks’ statements have helped muddy the actual story, leaving not just a false impression of Beck’s own involvement. Beck cuts out the context that Mrs. Sherrod’s remarks were placed in – namely, to show the NAACP audience’s reaction to Sherrod’s initial admission to not helping the white farmer. By dropping this essential detail, Beck helped promote the idea that Breitbart had launched an out-of-context personal attack on Sherrod.

Here’s an actual timeline showing how things really went down. On July 19, 2010 Breitbart published the initial blog post, which was focused primarily on a running dispute on racism and the Tea Party that Breitbart was engaged in with the NAACP. In fact, Breitbart mentions the NAACP by name 17 times in the piece while only using Sherrod’s name 4 times.

Beck’s July 19th TV show didn’t mention the story because the show wasn’t news driven, but instead focused largely on Beck’s upcoming 8/28 event.

The first time Beck mentioned Sherrod was on three segments of his radio show on July 20th. By this time, Sherrod had been forced to resign by the White House.

July 20, 2010 – Morning : Radio Show

Here are ‘the missing tapes’ that Glenn Beck doesn’t want you to hear.

Most of Beck’s impact comes from his TV platform, so his radio show comments flew under the radar. On the radio, Beck sliced and diced Breitbart’s two and a half minute video clip down to shorter sound bites. Beck focusing solely on Sherrod and dropping the NAACP angle that Breitbart had focused on. Beck’s radio show also edited out the section (that Breitbart had included) where Sherrod discusses it not ‘being all about race, but about rich and poor’.

At no point during Beck’s radio show does he do anything that could possibly be construed as defending Shirley Sherrod. Nor does he say anything about waiting to hear her side or waiting to see if more of the video will be released. In fact, at the end of the show Beck taunts Sherrod and says she will be the focus of his TV show that night.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Fox News building.

In the last hour of Beck’s radio show, news breaks on CNN – apparently unknown to Beck, although I’ve since learned that there’s a ‘fourth hour’ of Beck available to private subscribers. I’ve been told that Sherrod was mentioned but I have not heard this personally.

(The following times are from Media Matter’s flawed but occasionally useful timeline.)

11:20 a.m.: On CNN Newsroom, farmer’s wife calls Sherrod a “friend” who “helped us save our farm.”

July 20, 2010 – Between Radio & TV Shows

Then Beck’s radio show finishes…and more of the story breaks in rapid succession.

• 1:03 p.m.: Video producer confirmed that “the full speech is exactly as Sherrod described … she goes on to explain learning the error of her initial impression.
• 1:36 p.m.: HotAir’s Morrissey reports that edited video was “the entirety of the speech [Breitbart] had in his possession.
• 3:58 p.m.: Breitbart confirms in a TPMMuckracker interview that he never had the full video of Sherrod’s remarks.
• 4 p.m.: Rick Sanchez devotes an entire hour of his show to the accusations against Sherrod

This all obviously changed the story from the way it was initially reported. And Andrew Breitbart was showing no signs that he was trying to hide anything. He said in that TPM interview…

Breitbart said he’ll post the full video, if he can get permission from the video production company who filmed it for a local NAACP chapter. He also maintained that he didn’t edit the clip and that it was sent to him already edited.

July 20, 2010 – Evening : Beck TV Show

And suddenly, Beck’s editorial focus and tone about Sherrod changes radically. What you see below is a blatant bait and switch that makes no mention of his clip-job radio show attack on Shirley Sherrod. Rather than use his show to get his viewers up to speed on the developments, he switches into full Beck egomaniac mode and desperately tries to make himself out as the real victim.

In part 2, he says…

“They are trying to make me into the bully.

I mean, she seems like a nice woman.”

But you’ll also note that at no point does Beck mention the wider context of Breitbart’s post. Instead, Beck makes the story all about his own victimhood. Beck lied to cover his tracks and spun out the narrative out in a dishonest direction that benefited no one but Beck himself.

And of course Beck has never had Breitbart on either his radio or TV show since this incident.

Later in the week…

Beck describes himself as ‘a prince of peace’.

In fact, watch at 2:40 – Beck tells O’Reilly a complete whopper where he claims that he ‘sat in his office’ and realized ‘something isn’t right with this’’ – then go listen to his radio show from the 19th. Beck is trying to take credit for getting the story right from the beginning, when he was clearly going after Sherrod on the radio.

At 4:20 or so, he also claims his initial reaction was to support her.

In this video by a Beck hater, Beck goes all in with his lie about deciding not to go after Sherrod and seems to imply that God told him not to go after Sherrod. Apparently, God doesn’t listen to Beck’s radio show, either.

The truth has no agenda. Glenn Beck does.

Van Jones is that kind of person.

In a recently discovered video, the former White House appointee and current hero of the liberal elite and de-facto Huffington Post/AOL editorial director is seen telling the adoring crowd,  “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.”  He said this after a whole host of speakers from the radical fringe fringe denounced our country and her policies and hijacked the tragedy to justify unloading a laundry list of cliched, left-wing reasons to blame America for the acts perpetrated by radical Islamist totalitarian terrorists.

Remember, this rally was taking place while the bodies of 3,000 Americans were still smoldering in the rubble of the World Trade Center and American heroes were putting their lives at risk at ground zero in a massive humanitarian effort.  What kind of monsters would use this occasion to turn Americans against one another?

It’s no wonder that this man is embraced and honored by groups like the once-relevant, now-radical NAACP and was given the high honor of holding a Presidential appointment in the first year of the Obama Presidency.  He speaks the revolutionary “blame America first” rhetoric of Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Malik Zulu Shabazz.

What is curious and confounding is that a major corporation like AOL is allowing a person with this kind of record to influence the content of their influential website through the intimidation tactics of Color Of Change, the anti-free speech organization he founded.

In light of this latest video revelation, Mr. Jones needs to finally explain, fully, his position on 9/11. Was it American bombs that caused the World Trade Center to fall as he suggested at this rally? Was the American government behind the attack as he once signed a petition purporting? Does he agree with his co-speaker that evening that the terrorist murderers were “heroes” or does he condemn that hateful rhetoric?

And finally, what is the AOL/HuffPo’s position on Mr. Jones’ contribution to their site?  Does his hateful attack on America rise to their new editorial standard used against me?

Take a moment and sign our petition demanding that the Huffington Post not buckle under to the intimidation tactics of this man and the anti-free speech organization he founded. Make your voice heard. Speak truth to power.

Addendum:  The video discussed in this post was originally posted by BizzyBlog in September, 2009.  It was reported on at the time by PowerLine.

***

Yesterday, NPR’s Ombudsman released a column entitled “NPR Blog on Planned Parenthood Sting Earns Critics,” where the author’s critique of her own organization quickly devolves into a two-minute hate against Andrew Breitbart.  Alicia C. Shepard took the opportunity to trot out some of the left’s favorite anti-Breitbart talking points.  A highlight:

Breitbart posted the [ACORN] videos at biggovernment.com. ACORN, a left-leaning community services organization, subsequently was forced out of business, even though it had become clear that the videos had been heavily edited to make the actions of ACORN employees appear worse than they were.

Shepard is intentionally cryptic when she writes the “ACORN employees appear worse than they were,” but she’s presumably referring to the fact that the ACORN employees, who appeared to be engaging in illegal activities, were “cleared legally.”  It is a huge misconception that the ACORN employees were cleared because of malicious editing; they were not in violation of the law because the undercover actors didn’t have criminal intent.  This is all explained on page 16 in Jerry Brown’s ACORN California report:

Because O’Keefe and Giles’s criminal plans were themselves a ruse, one cannot be criminally complicit in those plans. In order to be liable as an aider and abettor, the perpetrators (in this case, O’Keefe and Giles) must have actually committed the planned or underlying crime. (See CALCRIM No. 401; People v. Perez (2005) 35 Cal.4th 1219, 1225.) Similarly, conspiracy culpability would require a finding that not only the ACORN employee, but also O’Keefe and Giles (the coconspirators), intended to enter into an agreement and intended to commit the target crime of that agreement. (CALCRIM No. 415; People v. Vargas (2001) 91 Cal.App.4th 506, 551.)

In other words, there is no reason to assume the ACORN employees from O’Keefe’s video exposé aren’t exactly as they appeared.

Another highlight from the Ombudsman’s post:

Breitbert is the man who selectively edited a video of Shirley Sherrod, a former black U.S. Agriculture Department worker, to make it appear she told the NAACP that she had intentionally discriminated against white farmers. Before anyone asked her what she really said, she was fired last summer. Many news organizations jumped on the story without checking out the entire NAACP speech.

This is the one that calls for a correction: Breitbart didn’t edit the Sherrod videos.  Both video clips in his original post clearly represent full, unedited excerpts of Shirley Sherrod’s speech before the NAACP.   To refer to full excerpts as “selectively edited” or even “edited” is misleading and not true.  (It’s duly noted that while Breitbart did not have the full video of Sherrod’s speech in his possession at the time he published the controversial article, the NAACP had video of Sherrod’s entire speech and still condemned her after the release of Breitbart’s post.)  What’s more, Big Government did in fact include the footage of Shirley Sherrod discussing her racial redemption, and Breitbart himself acknowledged as much in the text that accompanied the video footage of his multi-media presentation.  From the original article:

Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help.  But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind.”  She refers him to a white lawyer.

Someone at NPR should attend to these issues, but if the Ombudsman herself is so concerned with taking an editorial swing at Breitbart, who at the Soros/government funded organization will address these clear violations of responsible journalism?

Sharpton has billed himself as the voice of fairness, balance and authority, when it comes to the issues racial injustice in the Black Community, while boasting he is unafraid to debate anyone about the merits, yet unknown to many Al Sharpton is actually afraid to debate one man and that man happens to be Project21’s Chairman Mychal Massie.

Massie has put out several calls and letters to debate Sharpton on the issues of race relations, big activist government and the tea party movement, yet Sharpton and a whole host of other self-appointed Black Leaders are either unwilling or unable to debate the issues, yet they are willing to hide behind members of the press, who will allow them to filibuster and control as well as edit the segments in their favor.

I believe like many in the media Sharpton is simply afraid he would be unable to think on his feet and present his arguments logically against an Intelligent Conservative of Color, thus he would rather pretend that Massie does not exist.

Conservatives of Color such as Massie, myself and others have found themselves blackballed by members of the Mainstream Media because they allow persons and front groups like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Joe Madison, Walter Fauntroy, the NAACP and National Urban League to poison the airwaves with the myth that all persons of color are monolith in thinking as his recent attacks on Congressmen-Elect Scott and West recently shows.

With his daily radio show and media appearances Sharpton bills himself as authority on and within the Black Community, like many of the other self-appointed Black Leaders and Activists. Sharpton is aware that if he does in fact debates Massie and has his assets handed to him, that he will see media opportunities dry up, his political friends will stop calling and another new voice of color will emerge in this post-racial Obama Era.

Like many in the media Sharpton is a coward, who is simply trying to protect his turf and pockets.

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.

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 people turned out to cover the press conference – including black conservatives – than were there on behalf of the press conference itself.)

What was reiterated on the call by the NAACP and it’s minion of “progressive” allies was the same old, unproven, nonsensical charges against the strongest modern grass-roots movement in decades.

“The Tea Party used the N word against a Black Congressmen during the Healthcare Debate.” Indeed Ben Jealous, CEO of the NAACP had the audacity to reload this charge in spite of Andrew Breitbart’s $100,000.00 challenge to anybody that could document the occurrence and in spite of the Tea Party Federation’s unanswered challenge to the Congressional Black Caucus to have a joint investigation of the phony incident.

The most illuminating part of the call came when “progressive” ally, Larry Cohen of the CWA (Communication Workers of America) revealed the real agenda of the attacks on the Tea Party by the Left, “We disagree with the agenda of the tea party Movement… They advocate slavery,” and this classic gem, “We don’t need 19^th century capitalism.”

What this potpourri of “progressive” groups are really trying to do is inspire an uninspired liberal base of voters, days before the predicted November election bloodletting.

Over the past month, President Obama has also been putting a full court press on African Americans to turn out to vote in this mid-term election.  Not surprisingly, mainstream media writers are puzzled by the muffled response from what is viewed as the President’s core constituency.

The answer can be found in one number 49%.  That is the unemployment rate for black teens.

It is one thing to talk about empowerment, and quite another to deliver it.  And the legacy of the Reid/Pelosi leadership in Congress which has been embraced by President Obama is that young black people have no hope of finding work.  Parents know that when their kids can’t find an honest job, all too often the temptation is to make money with one that is not as honest.  That is nothing but the furthering of the cycle of poverty which continues to plague the African American community in our nation.

Reid, Pelosi, and Obama cannot shift the blame for the painful fact that half of all young African Americans who want a job cannot find one.  It is their policy decision to increase the minimum wage which is directly responsible for it.

Even former Clinton pollster Doug Schoen identifies the Pelosi/Reid minimum wage law as causing dangerously high unemployment among African American teens in a recent column in the Huffington Post.

Is it any wonder why African Americans are questioning why we should enthusiastically support the failed and disastrous economic policies of Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi?

Unfortunately, the self-appointed spokesmen for blacks, the NAACP, doesn’t view 49% unemployment among black teens as a civil rights issue, instead in their partisan zeal, they have become little more than a GOTV arm of the Democratic Party.  In their dying gasps of attempted influence, the NAACP is trying to create a climate of fear in the black community this election season by pushing false visions of white sheeted tea partiers taking over America.  Desperate to regain relevance, they use 1960’s imagery to an audience that for the most part hasn’t seen it, lived it and doesn’t buy into it.  Most African Americans have very familiar wants: safe neighborhoods to live in, a job, educational opportunities, and most importantly, a strong economic future for their children.  Instead, the NAACP is attempting to hand us outdated platitudes that play on the basest of fears.

If the NAACP were anything more than a partisan shill, they would be leading rallies across America demanding that the minimum wage be lowered.  Professor David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine has found that for every 10% the minimum wage is raised, minority teen unemployment increases by 6.6%.  Obama, Reid, and Pelosi raised the minimum wage by more than 40% in January 2007, and black teen unemployment skyrocketed from a still too high – 29.1% to 49% this past month.

The ultimate irony is that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer crowed at the time of passage that, “Dr. King once said: ‘Equality means dignity. And dignity demands a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week.’ Today, we heed those words.”

Four years later, I repeat back these words to Mr. Hoyer, “Dignity demands a job.”  The ill-advised minimum wage increase has stripped that very dignity from young African Americans, and now these very same Democrats have the arrogance to ask blacks to come to their rescue.

Is it any surprise that African Americans are resisting the same old scare tactics, and instead are questioning whether the promises of the left are really anymore than chains of dependency. By virtually ignoring unemployment horrors among black teens occurring on the ruling party’s watch and not holding them accountable, the NAACP is betraying its mission and constituents.

If I were Obama, Reid, Pelosi, and Hoyer, I wouldn’t look to the minority communities to throw me a life preserver this November.  After all, we are already paddling as hard as we can to keep ourselves afloat under the weight of their misguided policies.