Those bastions of objectivity over at Rolling Stone magazine have taken a break from publishing off the record comments and covering the exploits of Lady GaGa to defend America against non-liberal news bias.  Their target, of course, is Roger Ailes, President of the Fox News Channel.

As Brent Bozell at NewsBusters points out, the alleged “writer” used anonymous sources to make the obvious connection that being celebrated for success at a party is almost indistinguishable from a communist dictator with 70 million deaths on his record.

via NewsBusters:

After painting a picture of employees loyally cheering the boss at a holiday party, Dickinson entertained comparisons to…Mao Zedong.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” said disgruntled ex-employee Charlie Reina. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” added “a former executive” with News Corporation. Dickinson also said Ailes runs “the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside the communist bloc.”

Put aside that Ailes isn’t responsible for 70 million deaths and mass cannibalism, and that his politics are essentially the philosophical opposite of communism – and OK, he’s Mao.

The anonymous sources and story of the party that celebrated the Fox News executive mass murderer were from 2002, and, other than the fact that it’s extremely old, it’s hard to determine why this would suddenly be brought up now. (more…)

This is what libel looks like.

New York Magazine has claimed:

When we read this morning that ACORN-sting videographer James O’Keefe pleaded guilty today to attempting to tamper with the phones in Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu’s office, we wondered how Andrew Breitbart would react.

That is an outright falsehood. O”Keefe entered a plea to the misdemeanor crime of entering a federal building under false pretenses. The government couldn’t prove that he attempted to tamper with the phones in Landrieu’s office — which is why the charges were reduced to the far less serious misdemeanor charge.

The story links to another story at New York Magazine bearing the headline: “Activist James O’Keefe Pleads Guilty to Tampering With Senator’s Phones.” Wow — all of a sudden he’s not just “attempting to” tamper with the phones (which he never did) . . . in the headline they claim he actually pled guilty to tampering with the phones (which he didn’t do and didn’t plead guilty to). Here is the text of their bogus and false story:

Andrew Breitbart acolyte and sorta ACORN stinger James O’Keefe pleaded guilty, along with three other conservative activists, of trying to tamper with the phones in Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu’s office. O’Keefe, 25, will get three years probation, 100 hours of community service, and a $1,500 fine, but will no longer, presumably, be grounded. [WP]

False.

Let’s get screenshots in case they try to do a stealth correction, shall we? We shall: (more…)

Once upon a time, the New York Times was a credible source of information, and many educators demanded that their students use it for this purpose. I recall my senior year in a parochial high school being instructed how to fold the newspaper along the seams so as to read it without having to spread it out wide. That was a very long time ago. Now that once-esteemed broadsheet is agenda-driven, rather than journalistically driven, and one of the many sources to take with a large grain of salt.

Under the stewardship of Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, the Old Gray Lady is now known for printing all the news that fits his liberal Baby Boomer agenda, even in the most innocuous sections. The gardening column will somehow toss global warming into the article and let’s forget any objectivity in its science reporting. Needless to say, the Obama administration has this paper solidly in its pocket.

So I’ve learned to decipher Times articles for any legitimate documented facts instead of innuendo and this was particularly essential when the Times, for reasons know only to itself, decided to tarnish the Pope during this Easter season. The paper tried to imply that while the Pope was cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in Germany, he did not take steps to defrock a serial predator priest in Wisconsin. (more…)

No clearer difference can be seen in how the Old Media and its left-wing compatriots treat mass killers, terrorists and nutjobs than the way Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Joe Stack have been portrayed by the Old Media and the left. Abdulmutallab, the jihadi Christmas Bomber, was treated as an aberration unconnected with any larger group — despite that he trained with al Qaeda — and Joe Stack, who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, has been held up as the epitome of the “teabaggers” and the “anti-government right” despite that not a single tie to those folks has been yet discovered.

Immediately after Abdulmutallab tried to blow himself and a plane full of passengers into martyrdom on Christmas Day 2009, President Obama’s administration declared this guy an “isolated extremist” and said he had no connection to our Islamofascist enemies. Obama was helped along in this by many Old Media news sources.

On Dec. 26, for instance, CBS reported that Abdulmutallab was a loner: “As of now, he appears to be a lone actor with no conspirators. A report the following day said of the jihadist bomber, ‘We’re not aware of anybody else,’ one official told Orr. No further arrests are imminent.” (more…)

Readers rarely get a chance to see the re-writing of history, but they’re seeing an attempt in the recent reporting by the Legacy Media of the John Edwards Scandal.

Several recently-published books (Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Game Change and Edwards’ ex-aide, Andrew Young’s The Politician) examine the John Edwards scandal and Edwards’ elaborate cover-up of his affair and love child with campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter.

Halperin and Heilemann would have readers believe that they were on the trail of the story from the start–and perhaps they were.  It’s just that they didn’t bother to inform the readers of their employers, TIME and New York, while the scandal and cover-up were occurring.

Both books have prompted reports and discussions of the Edwards Scandal, particularly on ABC, which scored a series of exclusive interviews of Young, intent on publicizing his book.  The interviews along with other information is featured prominently on ABC’s website under John Edwards Scandal: (more…)

Remember when the Left was the champion of the Little Guy?  When they hated the “undemocratic” Electoral College and passed the 17th Amendment to force the direct election of Senators?  When Andrew Jackson effectively invented the modern Democratic Party by throwing open the doors of the White House to the people and defying Supreme Court orders?

Well, that was then and this is now, because here comes Kurt Andersen in New York Magazine to tell us that the problem with democracy is… you guessed it:

So now we have a country absolutely teeming with irregular passions and artful misrepresentations, whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web. And instead of a calm club of like-minded wise men (and women) in Washington compromising and legislating, we have a Republican Establishment almost entirely unwilling to defy or at least gracefully ignore its angriest, most intemperate and frenzied faction—the way Reagan did with his right wing in the eighties and the way Obama is doing with his unhappy left wing now.

Just as the founders feared, American democracy has gotten way too democratic. (more…)

Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)