Where are the obvious transitions, the segues that TV news loves so much?

I’ve seen them so strained that while anchoring a newscast I once refused to read a segue that went from Thanksgiving dinner to a double fatal car accident. It went something like this, “One local family will not be enjoying their Thanksgiving dinner because they were killed while driving south on I-15.”  Yes — not this year’s dinner, or next year’s or the year after. Producers in newsrooms consider it an art to be able to tie stories together so that the viewers can feel the “flow” of a newscast. Many producers take great delight in being able to tie stories together that have no natural tie. Yes, we have all seen new anchors strain at trying to tie stories together.

Now the strain is to totally ignore the perfect segue.

I’ve been waiting patiently to see one of the net’s do this Blizzard Of 2010 story and follow it with …” Meanwhile, President Obama is in Hawaii playing his 4^th or 5^th round of golf during his vacation.” Hummmmm. Haven’t seen that yet. Good Morning America had both the snow story and an Obama story in their opening segment on Monday, but they painfully put a story about stolen fertility eggs between Storm Watch2010 and Obama’s support of Michael Vick. A natural transition lost, or intentionally avoided. Do not believe things like this happen by accident. Placement of stories are carefully considered to give a newscast the flow that they so badly want.  In this case, flow was ignored to protect Dear Leader.

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Media Matters’ Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert is apoplectic because Chris Christie went on vacation to Disney World when a blizzard hit New Jersey.

I am almost positive that Boehlert’s job description in the Senior Fellows sacred Buffalo Bob skin-bound job manual reads: Obsess over conservative dudes. It’s been his entire focus for the past several days, giving Andrew Breitbart a reprieve. It’s a good thing that Media Matters doesn’t pride itself on consistency, because some may be wondering where this lefty tenacity was when Kathleen Blanco hemmed and hawed during Hurricane Katrina when she should have been calling out the National Guard, something for which Bush was blamed.

No, “NJ” didn’t call out the National Guard. Chris Christie called out the National Guard because that’s the job of the governor. Of course, I don’t expect a “senior fellow” who so zealously attempts debate on the matter to actually know what he’s talking about if he comes from Media Matters. Soros pays him to be persistent, not knowledgeable, folks.

Media Matters of course loyally defended Blanco even though Blanco and Nagin’s (and Brown’s) ineffectiveness made this national disaster a catastrophe. I would say “and now MMFA assails Christie for that which they defended Blanco,” except doing so compares Chris Christie’s performance and Blanco’s performance which is illogical because they are not equal. Christie is employing all his state’s resources and didn’t have to be prodded by the President (curiously, MMFA doesn’t assail Obama for being out of town when the massive blizzard hit) to call out the National Guard.

Says Christie spokesman:

“Yes, this was a big snow, but we are a northeastern state, and we get plenty of snow, including heavy hits like this,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Hill. “But the sky really is not falling, and we’ll get through this just as we always have, notwithstanding complaints from opportunistic partisans like Lesniak.”

Christie appears to be doing as much as he can with state resources, but it doesn’t help when communities are waiting for the disbursement of federal emergency funds. New Jersey’s finances have been mismanaged for years with Christie walking into an $11 billion dollar budget deficit.

After slashing the budget and making ends meet the man, like anyone, is entitled to a vacation just as President Obama is entitled to a vacation … another one. For which we all pay. MMFA’s criticism of Christie rests upon the presupposition that Christie isn’t doing anything, which is why their hollow criticism is so comedically false.

Interestingly, they say nothing of Michael Bloomberg’s response. Bloomberg’s response is actually less about response post-blizzard and more about what he did leading up to the storm:

Overnight, it seems, the avenues of Manhattan, already choked with motor vehicular traffic, are losing a lane to accommodate new curbside bike lanes. Under the new plan, cars and trucks that elect to park now do so in an essential limbo – in “non-spaces” between the bike lane and the leftmost lane of traffic.

Work on the project, which began in June, has now been completed on First Avenue on the East Side and Columbus on the West but is ongoing. Eventually both sides will meet in the middle, hampering the flow of traffic on all the major arteries.

Yes, I’m sure the narrow streets due to the bike paths are much easier through which emergency vehicles to travel.

The remarks on Twitter have been comical, “Bloomberg takes salt from your food but not the snow from your sidewalk,” and this from Scott Ott:

I realize that there is only so much officials can do when hit with 20 inches of snow in such a short period of time and while I know how frustrating it can be (hey – in St. Louis city the side streets aren’t plowed AT ALL, EVER, folks, so we win Blizzard!), Bloomberg seems to be receiving a lot more flack that MMFA is, of course, ignoring.

But Soros isn’t paying MMFA to go after Democrats.

Media Matters owes its readers an apology.

In my previous column, “Teachers Unions Gone Wild: The Director’s Commentary (Part 1),” I challenged Media Matters — who pompously mocked Trenton Tea Party Leader Daryl Brooks for believing in the authenticity of our videos because “[James] told [him]” they were — to hold Alissa Ploshnick and her spokesman Steve Wolmer to the same standard as Brooks.

Steve Wolmer spoke on behalf of Alissa Ploshnick, who is now “in seclusion,” claiming that when editing “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” I maliciously grouped two soundbites of hers together that were allegedly uttered in totally separate contexts. Wolmer claims that Ploshnick’s comment about a teacher calling a student the N word was actually an anecdote about a student-to-student confrontation in her high school days, and “had nothing to do with tenure.” Wolmer explains that we “edited that out and put it in the tenure conversation to make it look like that was the context.”

While I was admittedly tempted to sit back and hear more of their creative fairy tales, I had to set the record straight and release the unedited raw audio of Ploshnick’s dialogue, pulling the rug out from under her and Wolmer’s lies.

What is even more amusing is that Media Matters, after snobbishly chastising Brooks for trusting James’ word that the videos were authentic, flipped a 180 and took at face value Ploshnick’s and Wolmer’s alibis which I have now proven to be undeniable lies. (more…)

Tea Party groups in New Jersey are outraged over ads that have mysteriously surfaced in support of a supposed Tea Party candidate.  The sponsored ads on Google are being served up all over the web, in places like BlogTalkRadio, in support of one Peter DeStefano, and direct viewers to the website of njteapartycoalition.org.

The problem is, the NJ Tea Party Coalition, the owners of that website, did not purchase any such ads.

“I find this ad extremely troubling,” Brian Baldwin of the NJ Tea Party Coalition told local press. “We did not authorize this nor are we supporting Mr. DeStefano.”

What’s worse is that the group – and every Tea Party group in NJ that I’ve communicated with – has been denouncing DeStefano as a “fake” Tea Party candidate for months now.  They’ve all been complaining about this to the appropriate authorities for some time now.  After seeing these latest ads, Tea Party leaders in NJ are urging their members and other like-minded leaders to contact the local election officials and the Secretary of States’ office to look into DeStefano’s candidacy.

After hounding the press about their suspicions, some in the media had taken notice of the Tea Party’s claims in NJ.  And they agreed.

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If James O’Keefe and I were to release a video catching disguised al-Qaeda members casually joking about blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge, the mainstream media would likely be most interested to know who pays our salaries.

Upon the release of our ACORN videos which featured federally-funded ACORN employees aiding a “pimp” and a “prostitute” in setting up a brothel for 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, the MSM shifted the narrative towards James and Hannah, whether they were lying about their budgets, if Fox News hired them, and whether they were actually dressed as pimps and prostitute while entering the ACORN offices.

Predictably, the MSM has sounded the same recycled narrative in the midst of our more recent release of “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” evidencing tenured teachers calling black students the “N” word without proper reprimand, teachers using a taxpayer-funded New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) conference to rally for “slander” against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and union leaders sharing anecdotes about rigged elections and voter fraud, among other things. Rather than investigate the findings of our investigation, the media has found it more pressing to investigate us.

It’s embarrassing enough that we mere twenty-somethings manage to scoop seasoned, established mainstream journalists on outing corruption, fraud, and waste in government. So it is ironic that mainstream journalists feel compelled to embarrass themselves further by dismissing the juicy meat of our exposés to cover our material with awkwardly petty and irrelevant lines of questioning. They are like high school cheerleaders envious over the new girl who just started dating the captain of the football team. Like, do you have a rich family? Are you like, just a poseur or something? (more…)

How to deal with the left, courtesy of the New Jersey Governor: get right in their face, act like you have right on your side and never, ever back down:

Can you imagine what Christie would do to Obama in a debate?

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It’s unfair to analyze Spencer Ackerman, arguably the most immature and ugly contributor to the now infamous JournoList, through the hyperbolic battlefield exchanges of prosaic political warfare that exist between pundits of the Left and Right on the Internet. But there is ample reason to view him as one of, if not, the worst of the offenders.

The record reveals that he was all too happy to light the torches for a mob of journalistic-malpractitioners intent on leaving integrity behind on this, or that, malevolent and persecutive march - so long as it advanced their political agenda. Evidence of his more notable transgressions has been widely reported. Another example of Ackerman’s orgasmic-like fantasy plate glass window tossing fetish behavior towards his political opposition was reported by the Daily Caller.

Having taken the time to try and understand who he was and the forces that shaped man-child Spencer Ackerman back before he became nestled snug in his singularly-minded D.C. womb, I think I understand his need for a womb with a plate glass window Washington, - call it, Spencer Ackerman’s Washington womb with a view. It may be the only environment in which he can exist, given the abuses and rejections the less than talented scribe believes he has endured over his still young years.

At one point, Ackerman suggested that fellow members of the listserv should fight the way the right is fueling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story by choosing one of Obama’s conservative critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” … , “what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

… In other words, find a right winger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear.

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Ben Smith of Politico has posted a story that essentially mislead readers about what newfound conservative hero Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey thinks about immigration. Smith’s article spins Christie into an “amnesty” supporter when it doesn’t seem he is. One has to wonder: why did Smith do this?

Among many other issues, in the multipage interview with Christie, Smith broached the immigration issue. Being a governor, Christie is faced with as much trouble over the issue as any other, of course, but Smith’s characterization of Christie’s position on immigration would tend to make one feel that Christie is an amnesty supporter. In fact, Smith seems to impute several ideas or feelings into Christie’s replies that may not have been in them at all.

First off, Smith says that Christie had “long declined to ‘demagogue’ the issue” of immigration. It does not seem, however, that Christie has ever claimed to have a long record of refusing to “demagogue” the immigration issue.

Next Smith asserts that Christie says that “stringent state-by-state laws – such as in Arizona – are the wrong approach” for immigration. However, there is no sentiment about stringent anything in Christie’s reply to Smith’s questions. The word stringent did not appear at all. (more…)

The case of Too Much Media, LLC (Plaintiff) v. Shellee Hale (Defendant), decided by the Superior Court of New Jersey Appellate Division on April 22, 2010, is not a decision that should cause alarm among those who are engaged in, or are patrons of, new media news sources.

Internet enterprises associated with mainstream news outlets run their own news-related websites. Legitimate self-interests led them to challenge the trial court’s understanding of slander per se in this case. Consequently, if you consider the defendant, Shellee Hale, a member of the “new media,” then NBC and the New York Times came to her partial defense.

But… here’s the question: Does Hale become a journalist of the new news media by simply submitting a comment on a website?

Hale’s act of posting a comment on a website did not, in the Appellate Court’s decision, singularly qualify her as a journalist. Consequently, she is not a heroine of the independent (of legacy media affiliation) internet news media, and not one around whom we should necessarily rally to support. (more…)

Things are crazy out there, and getting crazier.  From the Washington Post:

Cartoonists rely on iconography. Symbol is ready metaphor, and not just such trite-and-true staples as donkeys and elephants and American eagles. No editorial toolkit is complete without the darkest of symbols — the emblems of evil that never lose their emotional impact. The KKK hood. The noose. The swastika.

When employing the most vile of emblems, editorial cartoonists sometimes mine the embedded power for hyperbole. So it is that the Anti-Defamation League might have presumed New Jersey cartoonist Jimmy Margulies was being hyperbolic when several days ago, in reaction to Arizona’s new immigration law, he drew Gov. Jan Brewer’s state as the mustache of Hitler.

Point made. But powerfully. Arizona puts the “AZ” in “nAZi.”

The cartoon brought an immediate complaint from the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman: (more…)

According to a New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Judge, Bloggers are not considered journalists in the eyes of American jurisprudence.  In his decision, Judge Anthony J. Parrillo wrote:

There is, of necessity, a distinction between, on the one hand, personal diaries, opinions, impressions and expressive writing and, on the other hand, news reporting.

By this definition, Thomas Paine, Father of the American Revolution, was not practicing journalism when he printed Common Sense.

Thomas Paine, often held up as America’s first journalist, was really just a blogger using parchment and a printing press instead of a laptop and broadband connection.

Read Common Sense, the tract that is credited with inspiring the American Revolution: (more…)

A New Jersey court decision has determined that a writer in Washington State named Shellee Hale is not protected by New Jersey’s shield law protecting journalists from being forced to reveal their sources because… wait for it… the court says she’s not a journalist but merely a blogger.

Some folks are saying the ruling is the death of online journalism and an effort to cement journalistic power with the sick and dying mainstream media. As a former newshound and right-of-center web reporter/editor, I’m not so sure I would ring the alarm bells just yet.

Let’s look at a few salient things involving the Hale case. Based on the available information, Hale found herself in hot water with a New Jersey software company for an entry she wrote in the comment section of a blog regarding the company, which subsequently sued her for defamation. During the course of the trial, the company also wanted to know the source of the information in Hale’s comment, which she refused to disclose.

Set aside for a moment the refusal, the blogging, her past writing for other media outlets and so forth and take a look at something that seems largely overlooked in this. According to the coverage of this event that I’ve been able to find, Hale wasn’t reporting on anything at the time of her ill-fated musings. She was posting a comment about a subject on a blog. I couldn’t even find anything indicating this was part of a research effort for a news story. It looks like she just put up something in a comment section and that was that. (more…)

A New Jersey court has ruled that bloggers are not journalists (now they’ve taken to the courts to establish this!). New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Judge Anthony J. Parrillo ruled last week that a blogger named Shellee Hale is not a journalist, and so does not enjoy the same protections that journalists do from being forced to reveal their sources.

Actually, this tool of a judge is right. For the most part, journalists today act as shills for the Democrat party. They cover up for the party’s crimes and excesses, obfuscate the effects of its disastrous policies, and propagandize for Obama’s agenda.

In that sense, bloggers are not journalists. The best bloggers aren’t shilling for Obama and Pelosi the way journalists are. Instead, bloggers are doing the heavy lifting. Who breaks the stories today? Bloggers. Take my own blog, AtlasShrugs.com, for example. I broke the explosive story of tens of thousands of dollars of Obama contributions from a Hamas-controlled “refugee” camp in Gaza. Did the “journalists” in the mainstream media pursue this story? Not a chance. Obama’s odd relationship with Kenyan pro-Sharia politician Raila Odinga? Atlas! Not to mention the numerous revelations I broke on the Rifqa Bary story (here and here and here and here), the story of the young Ohio girl who fled from her family in fear for her life after converting from Islam to Christianity.

If I am not a journalist, Anthony Parrillo is not a judge. (more…)

The Garden State has a shield law for journalists, meaning the government cannot force reporters or opinion writers to reveal their sources. There is nothing more vigorously defended among journalists than the right to keep secret one’s anonymous sources in service of “the public’s right to know.” The decades-long secret identity of “Deep Throat” in The Washington Post’s Watergate exposés is the standard of that journalistic principle.

But a New Jersey state appellate court last weekruled that a woman named Shellee Hale is not a “real” journalist, but just a blogger, so is not protected by the state’s shield law.

In the words of New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Judge Anthony J. Parrillo:

Simply put, new media should not be confused with news media.

This backward-looking, snobbish decision is troubling for many reasons. Before we get into the upcoming righteous outrage from someone who was a regular member of the “news media” for nearly 20 years — but is now a “new media” journalist — here’s some background on the case. (more…)

We are requesting Keith Olbermann issue an on-air retraction to his repeated assertions that James O’Keefe required “permission from his parole officer” to attend CPAC in Washington, D.C.

Around :40 into the above video, Olbermann says:

O’Keefe accepting an award there, I kid you not, with permission from his parole officer, according to Politico. Trust the law and order party to check in with its parole officers.

Olbermann’s source, Politico.com, has since corrected the bogus claim that O’Keefe needed permission from a “parole office[r].”  Since Olbermann’s source has been discredited, Olbermann himself should correct the record as well.

Fast forward to about 4:00 into the clip and Olbermann has this to say to The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel:

We’ll start with the law and order party, honoring the guy who needs to get his parole officer’s permission to attend.

The assiduous Patterico, who made a similar request of Olbermann last night, pointed out that this time, Olbermann neglected to source his false claim: “Note that, in the second passage, Olbermann does not attribute the claim to Politico, but makes it outright. Meaning he owns this falsehood and has an independent duty to retract it.”

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Update: Politico corrected this piece and issued the following statement:

CORRECTION: This story was altered to reflect that O’Keefe and Basel are on pre-trial release, not probation or parole, as was stated in an earlier version.

We thank them for their diligence.

**

In Kenneth P. Vogel’s piece “James O’Keefe says next video ‘ready to go,’” published by Politico on February 18th, there are a number of factual errors that ought to be corrected.  The problematic sentences are identified in block quotes with explanations of the errors beneath each quote:

O’Keefe – who had to get permission from his parole office to attend CPAC – told POLITICO he wasn’t sure if the terms of his probation would allow him to remain in Washington to accept the award or would require him to return to his parents’ home in New Jersey.

There are multiple problems in this sentence.  First, Mr. O’Keefe did not need “permission from his parole office to attend CPAC,” as he has never been paroled.  We’re not sure Mr. Vogel meant “parole office” or “parole officer” (the latter makes more sense since O’Keefe does not own or operate a New Jersey parole office), but the claim is factually inaccurate either way.   The lead entry for the word “parole” at dictionary.com is, “the conditional release of a person from prison prior to the end of the maximum sentence imposed.” In other words, in order to be paroled, one must first be convicted and sentenced.  Mr. O’Keefe, of course, is still pending trial.  In a statement to BigJournalism.com, Mr. O’Keefe said he was granted permission to attend CPAC from a “pretrial services officer” from the New Jersey Pre-Trial Services Agency.  The role of the officer assigned to him is to “investigate defendants who are charged with federal crimes and awaiting a court hearing.”  The operative word being “charged.”  Politico’s characterization of Mr. O’Keefe implies a conviction. (more…)

An entire generation of Democrat voters failed to vote in Massachusetts Tuesday night.  The same generation of Democrat voters failed to thwart recent GOP victories in New Jersey and Virginia.  But no one’s reporting on them.  They’re the silent generation.

The Silent Generation is between the favored ages of 18 and 37 years old.   There are over 49 million of them, and they make up approximately 15% of the American population, certainly enough to swing any election in any state in any race.  Problem is this:  they have been denied the right to vote in these elections.

That’s because, thanks to Roe v. Wade, which was decided 37 years ago today, they’re not even here.

Ironically, the ACLU does not concern itself with them.  They are never interviewed and are rarely mentioned by Democrat candidates.  No one knows for sure how many of them are Democrats or Republicans or independents for that matter because they are invisible and unregistered.  They are those Americans, those voters, who have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized their demise.  They cannot vote because they were denied lives as American citizens. (more…)

Yesterday’s big upset in Massachusetts, placing Republican Scott Brown in Ted Kennedy’s old seat, was a clear message from the voters to the Democrats, especially the president, that even lifelong Dems are balking at the crazed zealotry on display in Washington.

Obama’s response?  Full speed ahead.  “In substance, the mission can’t change.”

To prove he’s determined to stick to his plans, including nationalizing student loans, “card check,” cap and trade and immigration reform are also slated to be pushed by this administration. All are unpopular. The voters are disturbed by the backroom deals to special interests, the disregard for the public’s outrage, the marginalization of dissenters like the tea party movement.

All of this has lead to an anti-incumbent voter rebellion which resulted in yesterday’s Bay State thumping, just as it did in New Jersey and Virginia last November. The Democrats tried to rationalize away those defeats last year. The question is, will they do that again? Many long-term Democrat legislators are feeling the ground shifting beneath their feet as even safe Dems are no longer secure. The leadership of the party is putting on a brave face, saying they plan to plow ahead with Obamacare.  But many of the rank and file who voted for the earlier bills may bail on it now, seeing their political futures in peril. (more…)