Congratulations to the editors at the Washington Post.  Seventeen months after the Eric Holder Justice Department dismissed a slam-dunk case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, the Post gets around to printing a thorough vetting of the dismissal.  The story is slated for Saturday’s print edition.  While other media like Breitbart/The Bigs, Fox News, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Investors Business Daily, Pajamas Media, and Drudge have had dozens of stories on the corrupt New Black Panther dismissal, the Washington Post at last is in the game.

The story is a shocker too.  The shock comes from the middle of the road and factual nature of the story.

There are small problems with the story.  For one, the Washington Post is the only outlet that calls King Samir Shabazz by his old “slave name” (Shabazz’s own words) of Maruse Heath.  Even Heath doesn’t call himself Heath.  Of course this takes some of the sting off Shabazz’s rants against Jews and calls to kill “cracker babies in their crib.”

The Post’s decision to change a man’s name for him is controversial.  It has no place.

But overall, the story is very bad news for Eric Holder.  It debunks many of the myths spun by the administration.  Inside DOJ sources describe deep hostility to protecting whites at Justice.  DOJ sources say panther prosecutor Christian Adams never allowed his conservative views to influence his work, contradicting administration spin.  And perhaps most damning of all to Holder, sources defending the administration defend the idea that whites aren’t protected by the Civil Rights laws.  The latter is the blockbuster news in the Post piece. (more…)

You would think that a conference that features some of the world’s leading scientists talking about a hot-button issue like global warming would attract a bit of old media attention. The Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, currently being held in Chicago, features distinguished scientists like the University of Colorado’s Dr. William Gray, Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, MIT atmospheric physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen, former astronaut and United States Senator Dr. Harrison Schmitt and the guy who broke the hockey stick, Steve McIntyre. But, while there are a number of bloggers here, while Pajamas Media is here, while the European press is here – including the BBC – and while I’m here, the MSM is nowhere to be found.

What are they so afraid of – that they might learn something? It’s not like everyone is singing in chorus. For example, on Sunday night Steve McIntyre told the fascinating story of how and why Michael Mann and his cohorts “hid the decline,” complete with the relevant e-mails and published charts that irrefutably show how Mann, Jones and the rest of the climategate gang consciously discarded relevant data and then tried to cover their actions up.

The mainstream media meme, with regards to hiding the decline, is that while that this revelation was regrettable, it does nothing to disprove the theory that mankind is responsible for global warming. Guess what? McIntyre agrees. In fact, he went out of his way to say that he’s not your “go to” guy with respect to carbon dioxide’s effect on the climate. There are others who have that particular expertise. But, anyone who listens to McIntyre recount this story of scientific malpractice could not help but be deeply troubled and wonder: what else have they been hiding? (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…)