***ADDED: Something else the Blaze didn’t bother to share was this.

You have to wonder what’s going on with Glenn Beck.

Beck’s fall from grace started when his site, The Blaze, falsely attacked James O’Keefe — to the delight of the very people who used to attack Beck. Then Beck, of all things, betrayed the Tea Party in the worst way any conservative could. I thought he’d hit bottom with that. After all, how much lower can you go than selling out to the mainstream media?

Well, yesterday, what I thought had been a rhetorical question was answered when The Blaze went full Andrew Sullivan, full Politico, full Wonkette, and and attacked Sarah Palin over a situation involving her family. 

The Governor’s sin? Composing what amounts to a touching article about her family’s life with Trig – Todd and Sarah Palin’s youngest son with Down Syndrome.

To understand how misleading the Blaze attack is, you first have to read what Beck’s writer, a piece of work named Eddie Scarry (more on him below), wrote:

What’s the first thing that came to mind when you heard that Rick Santorum‘s special needs child was in the hospital with pneumonia late last month? I bet all of Mitt Romney‘s money it wasn’t Sarah Palin unless you are Sarah Palin. …

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- How many times can Newsweek insult readers before they leave? Have you picked up a Newsweek lately? I flipped through one while in line at the gas station and was shocked to see how anemic it has become: it’s printed on a cheap, matte, flimsy stock, 1/3 of the pages of its heyday, and filled mostly with ads. Know why? Because of idiocy like this:

The above is what the cover looks like while wearing the media equivalent of beer goggles. Take them off.

Apparently Tina Brown was too busy playing paper dolls with Diana Spencer photos in Photoshop to actually put out a magazine this week. It’s obvious that they just completely stopped giving any sort of damn.

- Red State is hosting a Photoshop contest for the above.

- Brit Hume challenges claim US Marines urinating on dead Taliban is ‘despicable’:

I can’t wait to see progressives freak out over Hume.
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It seems like only yesterday Newsweek was sold to the highest bidder for $1.00. Of course a sweetheart deal like that had to have a catch, in this case the buyer’s assumption of the liabilities on Newsweek’s balance sheet. In 2009 alone, Newsweek lost $30 million, most likely due to “journalistic” efforts like this one:

Obama’s critics have gone from being racists to being just plain reckless. They see us as a gang of hayseed, Bible-thumping hicks clinging to their guns and religion while the most brilliant man ever to occupy the White House proceeds to turn America into a European-style democratic socialist state. Sullivan believes Obama is so smart he may just outfox everyone:

The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he’s a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.

For those who are unfamiliar with Andrew Sullivan, he is the Editor of The Daily Beast and contributor to Newsweek. He is most recently notorious for being a Trig-Truther and the class-act that spun-off a piece about Sarah Palin’s presidential campaign negatives using Steve Job’s death:

I know which one will get the bigger headlines tomorrow. And there is some comfort in knowing it will pain her.

Sullivan’s list of journalistic indiscretions and mind-numbing bloviating is so long and undistinguished that even just publishing the headlines causes irreversible loss of gray matter. I, your humble corespondent, have saved you from that fate.

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Is it a coincidence that four days after Nancy Pelosi sat and gave an exclusive pep talk/schmooze session with AOL’s Arianna Huffington and an all-female editorial meeting in the offices of AOL/HuffPo, Arianna’s Washington Bureau Chief phoned-in a “nothing-to-see-here” apologia for the former-Speaker’s congressional insider trading scandal?

Huffington Post's wishful thinking headline a few hours after a "60 Minutes" report on congressional insider trading.

As liberal news outlets like CBS News, Daily Beast/Newsweek and even MSNBC saw fit to report the fact that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in a sweetheart IPO for VISA, while at the same time ensuring that tough regulations that would have stifled VISA’s profits stayed bottled up in the Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives, AOL/HuffPo opted to re-print Pelosi’s talking points and obfuscations in lieu of doing actual reporting.

With the awkward and ham-handed headline “Hit Job Falls Flat,” you can almost see Arianna herself hammering out bullet points on her blackberry, firing them off to reporter Ryan Grim in an effort to put her elegant fingers in the metaphorical dyke to stop the gushing in the most serious corruption story to hit Pelosi’s long career.  The banner headline, full of wishful thinking, ran just hours after the “60 Minutes” story.  First thing on a Monday morning at the beginning of a news cycle is a curious time to declare that a story “fell flat.”

In fact, the story was talked about on cable news and in the halls of congress all day.  It inspired new legislation to finally make the corrupt practice of congressional insider trading illegal.  Presidential candidate Rick Perry produced a 30-second ad featuring the story and calling for jail-time for any politician who profited from insider information.  If this is “falling flat” I would like to see AOL/HuffPo’s idea of a successful investigative report.

Seriously, I’d really like to see one.  Do they even do anything like that, or do they just sit back and let the rest of us do all of the real reporting?

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- Google chief: Internet keeps government honest.

Broader adoption of the Internet will keep governments on their toes as wired-up citizens exercise their newfound power to check rights abuses, Google chief Eric Schmidt said on Saturday.
“In nations and communities around the world, citizens are turning to online tools to keep their governments honest,” he told business leaders on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Honolulu.

“Whistleblowing has never been so easy,” he said.

- Requisite boring interview with misguided Gloria Steinem: “We need to be angrier.” Really? Angrier than this? Not one question for Ms. Steinem about the number of rapes at the OWS demonstrations and the need for some to create “safe women” zones because the movement overall is unsafe for women? Steinem doesn’t want to site that sarcastically as “progress” right along with her views of abortion? It’s 2011 and progressives can’t even have a protest without raping everything in sight.

- Forbes weighs in on the Chelsea Clinton hire:

But you can’t really buy authority. What you get instead is attention, and it’s not clear networks know the difference. (Have you watched the Today Show lately?) NBC in particular is hooked on this fame trading. Clinton joins a stable of other famous media-political offspring, including Luke Russert, Jenna Bush Hager, Meghan McCain. The message here is that fame and parentage confer journalistic authority, rather than talent or an ability to get the story right. If you’ve grown up in the media bubble that no doubt helps you understand how it works. But such experience doesn’t give you an insight into how the real world works.

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- Is Wikileaks fading?

But many others were wondering if it was one more indication that the WikiLeaks movement, which changed the face of journalism and the entire informational ecosystem, could be in doubt as well. Although stateless and seemingly beyond the reach of the law and its enemies, WikiLeaks was, from the beginning, subject to a number of internal frailties and external vulnerabilities. The fact that WikiLeaks came to be embodied in a single individual, especially one as mercurial as Mr. Assange, was chief among them. Internal battles led to the departure of a number of key programmers. Large, corporate enablers of online payments, including PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Western Union and Bank of America, declined to process donations, all but cutting off the organization from its funding base.

- LOL files: Former Newsweek editor says they didn’t run the Clinton-Lewinsky affair because they were afraid it would hurt the publication’s reputation. Good to know they’ve since (d)evolved beyond that standard now.

Former Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker said Sunday he chose not to run the story that former President Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky because he and his staff didn’t feel they were on firm enough ground.

“If we had gotten that wrong,” Whitaker told CNN’s Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources, it “could  have been a mortal blow to Newsweek’s reputation”

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-  Newsweek continues its victory lap around the toilet bowl.

- Female Mexican journalists killed because of their gender.

- You can’t call Ed Schultz’s ideology “extreme liberalism.” It’s an insult to classical liberalism. A “raging socialist on steroids” is more appropriate.

- Online video finally chipping away at broadcast TV:

A quarter of people in countries with access to high-speed broadband are streaming video to their TV, although more than 80 percent still watch broadcast television as well. But that’s slowly beginning to change: According to survey data from Ericsson, there’s been a slight decrease from 2010 to 2011 in the percentage of folks watching broadcast TV, while Internet-enabled options, such as long-form streaming sites like Netflix, short-form videos aggregators like YouTube and downloaded content are all on the rise.

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This past Newsweek cover of Presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann, shows the unfair portrayals of female politicians in the media. While Publisher of Newsmax, Christopher Ruddy, reasonably displays Bachmann as a lady of office, Newsweek Editor-in-Chief, Tina Brown’s choice of an unflattering picture depicts Bachmann as an insane politician. As if the photo isn’t weird enough, the article entitled “Queen of Rage,” presents a propagated notion of instability and lunacy, whereas “Heartland Warrior” better describes her candidacy.

Bachmann’s Newsweek scandal is only the most recent of sexist subjections. Rooted in what seems to be the Madonna verses whore syndrome, society continues to allow the media to degrade women without concern. Thankfully, the National Organization of Women declared the cover misogynistic, but where are the rest of the feminists?

The list of unfair projections is growing with every women who steps into the political arena. As soon as a powerful, strong, intelligent woman surfaces as a leader, the media immediately attempts to destroy her reputation. From the 1st Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro, who was thought to have mafia relations, Hillary Clinton, who was portrayed as an unattractive obscene Presidential contender, and Nancy Pelosi, who’s facial features have been criticized, to Sarah Palin, who’s intellect and family life was demoralized, Christine O’Donnell, who was characterized as a promiscuous witch, Meg Whitman, who was unjustifiably called a “whore” by political opponent, Jerry Brown, Jan Brewer, who was  labeled a racist for wanting to protect her state from illegal immigration, and Nikki Haley, who was accused of extramarital affairs during her 2010 campaign – these women have been torn apart on matters unrelated to the real issues they were fighting to solve.

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Sunday night we told you about Newsweek’s unflattering cover of Congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and how the magazine gleefully promoted it on Twitter with the hashtag #QueenofRage. (It sparked our own caption contest using an unflattering photo of Newsweek’s editrix, Tina Brown.)

Sexist shots at conservative women (of conservatives, period) by the media have become so prevalent that we hardly page so-called women’s groups any more because their support for female conservatives is non-existant. From the female equality industry, one group has been somewhat present, although vocally inconsistent: NOW.

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I don’t know about you, but when I want articles on women that read like bitter Summer’s Eve scripts, I turn to Newsweek. Under the editorial control of Tina Brown, the rice paper magazine barely struggles against its bias towards conservative women to view them with anything other than contempt.

Check out Newsweek’s latest cover, which they happily Tweeted out minutes ago:

When your premise is an unflattering photo (and if you don’t have them you’re a liar or Miranda Kerr) to sell your bias, you just might be a chauvinist.

So because Brown thinks bad images are fair game, let’s have fun with an image of her, taken from MSNBC. Bragging rights, kudos, and hopenchange to the pithiest commenter who can best CAPTION THIS:

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Ever since Tina Brown took the helm at Newsweek she has been courting controversy. The magazine, acquired for a dollar last year, has been shrinking in physical size, circulation and relevance since Brown took over. If there’s one thing she knows how to do it’s run a publication into the ground (Remember Talk magazine?) In recent months Brown’s desperation for attention has grown and manifested itself in Photoshopped and sensationalized cover stories hoping to boost circulation. Her Princess Diana and Mitt Romney covers were the most blatant examples … until now.

Newsweek has hit a new low with this week’s cover story on the crumbling sexual assault case against former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Under the headline “The Maid’s Tale,” they interview the accuser, 32 year old Nafissatou Diallo and present her in a very sympathetic light.

Newsweek makes passing reference to the fact that the case against DSK has obviously has catastrophic flaws and the ever-growing suspicious background of Diallo, but the bulk of the story friendly to Diallo. How a news magazine can so casually gloss over shady characters in Diallo’s life and the implausible aspects of her story can only be ascribed to the tabloid culture that has become all too prevalent in today’s media.

The fact that DSK is not going to win any awards for being a good husband is clear, he’s admitted affairs in the past, but that does not make him a rapist. Newsweek knows full-well the case is falling apart and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance is on the verge of dropping the charges, so this piece, and the piece on The Daily Beast, are essentially another in the chorus of left-wing voices advancing the idea that this case should go forward without regard to evidence. They believe a “victim’s right to confront the accused” is more important than the facts is common among the Left, and a dangerous trend.

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Forbes Executive Editor for business news Dan Bigman told Big Journalism that Forbes stands by an online article accusing Sarah Palin of possibly breaking the law. He said Forbes was just “raising the question” of whether Palin broke Federal Trade Commission Rules regarding product placement.

Bigman stood by the article that went after Palin for wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the logo of a hometown Alaska gym for Palin’s cover photo on the current issue of Newsweek. “We believe the issue of product placement is … worthy of investigation”, Bigman said.

The Forbes article, entitled Did Sarah Palin Use Newsweek for Product Placement?, is based on little more than a cover photo, a bogus Wonkette article, a writer’s speculation — “It seems probable, therefore, that she’s getting something for her enthusiastic endorsements — perhaps free personal training?” and that the Wasilla gym, Edge Fitness, was seen in the “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” travel documentary series on The Learning Channel last year.

The Forbes article is reminiscent of the Arctic Cat jacket ethics complaint, one of the myriad dismissed moonbat ethics complaints filed against Palin when she was Alaska governor. Like a moonbat, Bercovici repeats as fact the false Wonkette story that Palin had a secret Facebook page — “(Edge Fitness) also received a plug on a Facebook page Palin apparently created under an alias and used for posting pseudonymous comments.” Sarah Palin issued a statement denying having a secret Facebook page.

Also like a moonbat, Bercovici accuses Palin of having a “taste for the perquisites of Hollywood-style fame” based on a March 4, 2010 Associated Press hit piece that paints Palin as a greedy celeb scarfing up freebies at a Hollywood ‘gift suite’. The article buries the fact that the event was for charity and that Palin made a “sizable contribution” to Red Cross Haiti relief. Bercovici of course failed to note the “sizable” donation Palin made in exchange for the gifts.

As part of his indictment of Palin’s character, Bercovici includes an unsourced accusation that Palin “has been known to seek payment from magazines in exchange for her participation in stories.”

The Arctic Cat ethics complaint was about Palin wearing an Arctic Cat logo jacket at the start and finish of the race. Arctic Cat was the sponsor of her husband Todd’s snow machine entry in the Iron Dog race.

The ethics investigation was dismissed with a finding that there was no agreement between Palin and Arctic Cat to wear the jacket. The Associated Press reported June 4, 2009 on the dismissal:

Biegel had alleged that Palin improperly used her position as governor and state resources for her personal financial interests by being “a walking billboard for Arctic Cat.”

The personnel board’s independent investigator, attorney Thomas Daniel, said there was no evidence Palin used her position for personal gain. He said there was no sign that Palin or her husband received anything of value in exchange for the governor wearing the jacket at the start and finish of the race.

The Arctic Cat sponsorship was valued at $7,500 in 2007, according to Palin’s financial disclosure for that year. Daniel said the value of the 2008 sponsorship is not yet available, but added it’s irrelevant because Palin had no agreement with Arctic Cat to wear the clothing.

“If the deal was, ‘You’ve got to wear this jacket acting as governor as a condition of the discount or the sponsorship,’ then yeah, it might have been a violation of the Ethics Act, but that’s not the case here,” he told The Associated Press.

Jackets worn by many Alaskans have company names or logos on them, Daniel noted in a report to the board Tuesday dismissing the complaint.

“So the fact that a person wears a jacket with a company logo on it is not evidence that the person is receiving a financial benefit as a result,” he wrote. “To the contrary, it is the company that is receiving the benefit in the form of free advertising.”

The Forbes article begins:

Sarah Palin is no fan of the “lamestream media” — except when she’s using it to serve her ends. Is she using Newsweek to get free personal training? And, if so, is that entirely legal?

The article notes that Newsweek responded to an inquiry about Palin’s cover attire by saying Palin had no stylist for the photo shoot and chose her own clothes. Palin, SarahPac and Edge Fitness did not return queries seeking comment. So, based on a bogus Wonkette article and a cover photo, Forbes and Bercovici smeared Palin as a likely lawbreaker.

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This is the kind of childish speculation you expect to see at some lowly, left-wing hit site like the Soros’-owned, tax-exempt Media Matters — not at a brand publication like Forbes. Based ONLY on a sweatshirt logo, Jeff Bercovici, who writes at the Forbes’ Mixed Media site, created a 400+ word piece of wild speculation in order to disguise yet another tired Palin=celebrity article as “news” and, most importantly…

…to create the following anti-Palin headline:

Did Sarah Palin Use Newsweek for Product Placement?

Huh?

Whuh?

Where in the world did that come from? Well, it looks as though Forbes has some sort of editorial policy that allows their “journalists” to think and mull and speculate out loud. Because if you read the actual piece, there’s no beef there other than the subtext of a writer desperate to trash Governor Palin … just cuz.

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Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift:

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I have always wondered who made Howard Kurtz the arbiter of Reliable Sources, but in Weinergate, we are reminded that Kurtz’s ability to discern them is very much in question.  For that matter, so is CNN’s.  It has never been a secret that the supposedly even-handed journalism maven is in reality almost too liberal to function, but if he can’t get his head screwed on straight, he might have to fork over the name of his show to someone else altogether.  Hopefully Kurtz will have the decency to straighten out some of his Weinergate missteps soon and reconsider who really are “reliable sources.”

Kurtz’s history of judging Reliable Sources is staggeringly one sided and ideological.  For one thing, I have frequently seen him go out of his way to profess his respect for the reliability of Keith Olbermann, of all people, not to mention the rest of the guttersnipes at MSNBC:

Now, I don’t put Keith Olbermann in the same category as Beck at all. His MSNBC show, agree with it, disagree with it, was a very well-researched program.

Sure it was, Howard.  Also have a look at how incensed he got when Hugh Hewitt insulted Olbermann on Reliable Sources.  Kurtz and his publication The Daily Beast also seem to regard the Daily Kos, where Olbermann once blogged, as a very legitimate publication.  The most recent example comes during Weinergate.  The Daily Beast didn’t respond when I inquired who writes the captions for their “Cheat Sheet,” but have a look at this caption.  This is The Daily Beast’s own writing, not a quote from the linked story:

Not even a hint of suspicion about the reliability of the post by an anonymous blogger “stef” at a radically partisan website with absolutely no editorial oversight.  The Daily Beast simply reported it as fact. Not long after this story was posted, Kurtz gave it his blessing on twitter, boasting how his “wait[ing] for the facts” had just been validated:

The bottom line is that Kurtz actually believes “the facts” come from anonymous, unaccountable bloggers at one of the murkiest breeding grounds for partisan trolls there is.  Once “stef” weighed in, Kurtz could finally comment on Weinergate without even bothering to check.  “The facts” had arrived. (more…)

I’m not sure where it comes from, but there seems to be an innate human need to blame natural disasters on human failings. This receives much deserved ridicule when religious fanatics blame earthquakes on a preponderance of cleavage. The non-religious crowd, however, needs a different type of moral turpitude on which to lay the blame. The obvious culprit of choice is your lifestyle of consumption which causes global warming…err climate change.  Both sides try to make political hay from human suffering and both cases are pretty despicable.

This time around, Newsweek wants you to know that the tragic destruction in Joplin, Missouri is the fault of the Bush administration and its corporate task masters.

“Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage.”

Yes, it was a bad year for tornadoes. The visuals coming out of the areas affected have been heart wrenching. The most that can be said is that it’s an above average year. That’s what happens. Some years have more extreme weather, some less. It’s called climate and it always changes. That’s how nature works.

“From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet.” (more…)

So, this past weekend Sarah Palin visited Israel. Obviously this couldn’t pass unmentioned in the hallowed halls of the MSM. All of it dripping with digs on Mrs. Palin, Israel, and right-wing American Jews.

For instance, Dan Ephron, of Newsweek, writing for the Daily Beast starts with this classic:

Wearing a large Star of David around her neck, Palin prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, then spent two hours with guides in the Western Wall tunnel, an archeological site whose excavation in 1996 caused Palestinians to riot.

Palin in Israel

While that last bit has absolutely nothing to do with the story, it is also provably false.  The riots, also called the Second Intifada were well planned in advance. There was a great deal of build up and incitement leading up to the “spontaneous outbreak” of violence, as well as promises from heads of Palestinian security that nothing would happen.

Ephron goes on to mention that the trip is also Palin trying to make amends for her use of the phrase “blood libel” after the shooting of Rep. Giffords, when the entire institutional left lied about her and the entire right’s culpability in the actions of a mad man. Except that Palin is on the record standing by her comments.

And then, in the end, it always comes down to money. The real reason Palin went to Israel was to tap into the deep pockets of a few wealthy Jews. Of course, it’s not enough to mention them by name, but as “casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson or the bingo billionaire Irving Moskowitz.” When George Soros gets identified as war profiteer or Pyramid schemer Norman Hsu I’ll have less of an issue with the such mentions. (more…)

Newsweek has published another one of those aren’t-Americans-Stupid articles wherein we find that few Americans know anything about either our history or our political system. People have no idea who our current vice president is, they don’t know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, and they haven’t a clue who takes the office of president if the prez and the VP are incapacitated. But what is more interesting in Newsweek’s article is the reason the news magazine thinks that we are so stupid. Absurdly Newsweek thinks it’s because government doesn’t spend enough money on education.

First of all, I have to agree that Americans are as ignorant as can be on our history and our system of government. You can see it just about everywhere. In fact, you can see it in voting patterns. Illinois is a perfect example. The corruption has been endemic in the Democrat Party in Illinois for decades, yet voters repeatedly pull that donkey lever. It is clear they are ignorant of why things are so bad in the Land of Lincoln and they send the same crooks back to the state house over and over again.

Certainly it is impossible to dispute Newsweek’s central claim that Americans display an appallingly high level of civic ignorance. But Newsweek doesn’t just report its findings, it goes on to opine on just why we as a nation are so ignorant of our civics and history.

Newsweek thinks it’s because we don’t spend enough money on education: (my bold)

It doesn’t help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, “it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English.” When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U.S. actually holds its own against Europe.

Newsweek’s claim here is as appallingly ignorant of the facts as someone who doesn’t know that the law of the land is the Constitution of the United States!

Even the left-wing New York Times realizes that the U.S. spends more on education that almost every other nation on earth. For instance, recently the Times published a piece that contained the following:

In an interview, Mr. Schleicher said the point was not that the United States spends too little on public education — only Luxembourg among the O.E.C.D. countries spends more per elementary student — but rather that American schools spend disproportionately on other areas, like bus transportation and sports facilities.

Spending isn’t the problem. The problem is that Democrats and left-wingers have taken over our education and devastated its effectiveness. The left has dumbed down our education from the lowest grades to the halls of our institutes of higher learning until what passes for education is merely a joke.

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Yawn.

The new cover features United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the magazine’s special edition, “150 Women Who Shake the World.”

Brown, who previously captained Vanity Fair and the New Yorker magazines, took over the flailing news-weekly in November when it merged with her website, The Daily Beast, which launched in October 2008. Brown is now the editor in chief of both the Daily Beast website and the new Newsweek.

[...]

Although Brown is one of the most highly respected magazine editors in the world, her legendary 35-year career has not been without the occasional disappointment, such as the much-heralded but short-lived Talk magazine – which also featured Hillary Clinton on the front cover of its first issue.

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