Falling to your own media malpractice makes you irresponsible, not a “victim.” It doesn’t make you a “target” when other people publicly note the absence of your journalistic integrity. Politico missed this bit of logic recently when it attempted to blame conservatives for the misdeeds of various members of the media, most recently NYT’s Natasha Lennard.

… these critiques may just muddy the waters enough to do some damage to both the media and the fledgling anti-Wall Street movement.

There it was in bold Gallup-type headlines.

Solid Majority of Jewish Americans Still Approve of Obama Changes in approval among Jews continues to reflect broader U.S. patterns.

The problem with the headline is that it is Dishonest.

Assuming  the overall Jewish American approval numbers are correct, they gave President Barack Obama a 60% job approval rating in June, down from 68% in May, but statistically unchanged from 64% in April and drastically below the 83% at the beginning of 2009, but its the comparison to the general population that is disingenuous.

Gallup’s monthly trend in Jewish approval of Obama continues to roughly follow the path of all Americans’ approval of the president, more generally, as it has since Obama took office in January 2009. The 14-percentage-point difference in the two groups’ approval ratings in June — 60% among U.S. Jews vs. 46% among all U.S. adults — is identical to the average gap seen over the past two and a half years. However, the monthly graph is somewhat variable due to the lower monthly sample size of Jewish respondents (around 350).

The problem with the comparison is that Jews can’t be compared with the total US Population, they are far more liberal-Democratic than the average voter.  According to Gallup US Party affiliation as of May, broke down as follows.

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Oprah Winfrey sounded the bell for the 2012 presidential race with her thinly veiled whack at Sarah Palin in the new issue of Parade Magazine; And the mainstream media are already lapping it like swine.

When asked whether Palin’s running for President scares her, Oprah was quoted as saying, “It does not scare me because I believe in the intelligence of the American public.”

So, is Oprah saying that the American people are too smart to vote for Palin? Is she also saying that intelligent people want Obama’s Big Government agenda that Palin is opposed to? If she is, did she bear witness to the recent Midterm Election Massacre of 2010 that symbolized the complete and utter rejection of the President and the progressivism he’s been force-feeding us? If that is indeed what the Queen of All Media is saying, someone may need to screw her head back on.

MSNBC’s Chris “Tingles” Matthews probably got a thrill up his other leg when he read the transcript of Winfrey’s comments. He praised the talk show diva saying, “Isn’t it incredible how Oprah can deliver a zinger like that while in the same sentence, offering such an uplifting portrait of us?” Yes, all hail Oprah.

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Former President Jimmy Carter didn’t start out bashing the media, as he often does today. In fact, prior to the election of Barack Obama, and after the media’s early-sixties love affair with all things Kennedy, it was Jimmy Carter’s turn to be the media’s annointed one. Post-Watergate and Vietnam, his consultants and their liberal media accomplices created everybody’s every man, Plains’ peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.

It was a cold and rainy October night when my mother and I stood outside a Skokie, Illinois Synagogue to hear and hopefully meet Georgia Governor James Earl “Jimmy” Carter. My parents and most Americans were still sickened over Watergate, President Gerald Ford’s unconditional pardon of Richard Nixon and the disaster of the Vietnam War. They hungered for “change” and “new hope”. Many Americans believed they found what they desperately yearned for in a peanut farmer turned politician from Georgia.

Carter started out by milking it for all it was worth from day one. Flashback to 1977. Carter didn’t fail because the media turned on, or was somehow out to get, him. Carter failed because the walks, talks and cardigans were mere pomp and circumstance. America demands a little bit more of its presidents once they get to the end of Pennsylvania Avenue they call home. But the combination of his liberal policies and naivete, if not incompetence, left Carter completely unable to deliver it – leadership. It took four years and Ronald Reagan to return that quintessential American quality to the White House. Pardon me if I look at Washington today and feel a sense of deja vu all over, again.

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Your tax dollars at work: hoop dreams, 2010:

Even Dana Milbank of the in-the-tank, corrupt Washington Post — Ground Zero of the JournoList — can’t take it any more:

While President Obama’s wife and younger daughter were conducting international relations in Majorca on Sunday with Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, the commander in chief was at home hosting a fantasy camp for himself. He and his buddies had a birthday weekend barbecue and basketball game with LeBron James, Alonzo Mourning, Magic Johnson and other legends of the sport.

The day before, it was a four-hour golf outing for Obama and the boys. On Monday, he hosted the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints at the White House and talked about his own exploits on the gridiron last year with Saints quarterback Drew Brees. “He tossed me a nice tight spiral that I then lateraled to a kid on [Dallas Cowboys linebacker] DeMarcus Ware’s shoulders,” the president recalled. “I also want to point out I beat [Pittsburgh Steelers safety] Troy Polamalu over the middle on that throw.” Obama turned to Brees. “You remember?”

Boys will be boys — even if they’re presidents…

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There was a particularly disturbing segment during Howard Kurtz’ Reliable Sources program on CNN this weekend. Host Howard Kurtz was interviewing David Remnick, Editor-in-Chief of the New Yorker, who was “pimping” his new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.”

Kurtz asked Remnick a question about the love affair between the mainstream press and Obama during the campaign to which he answered the media was in love with the narrative of having an African-American win the presidency and that was a legitimate approach for a journalist to have.

Kurtz: What came over the press in 2007 and 2008 when it came to Barack Obama?

Remnick: … let’s face it, Barack Obama was a part of a narrative of the most painful and prolonged history that we have in our country, which is the epic story and extremely painful story of race in America. And the business of him being a serious candidate for the presidency, not just a symbolic run, not one that’s doomed to failure, but one that could quite possibly reach the end and be elected president, well, I think we were all taken up with that, and I think legitimately so. I think the notion of an African-American running successfully for president –

Even Kurtz thought the editor’s comment was a bit much: (more…)

Acronyms seem to be more popular than ever. The President is the POTUS, his teleprompter is the TOTUS, and the Supreme Court is the SCOTUS. The media should have its own acronym, so I have the perfect plan.

There are many ways to describe the media in America in its current state, most seem to fit pretty well. Most common is the Mainstream Media. The MSM acronym fits. I like it, it works and most people know what it means. I know the reference here is that they are mainstream with their own leftist ideas, but, there is nothing “mainstream” about the current state of the media in this country. In fact, it is far from the mainstream. The American media hates the mainstream when they protest against excessive federal spending and a loss of Constitutional values. The media ignores the mainstream when it figured out that global warming is nothing more than fraud. The media has long since left the mainstream in this country (Fox News being the exception) and they have become a radical arm of liberal politics.

I have used the phrase, Activist Old Media at times just because it fits with their agenda, but witness the children at MSNBC. You don’t have to be old to be wrong. That’s the kid network. At just 14 years old it is young and pubescent and likes it that way. Someday it may grow up, but until then we will watch and laugh and be amused at its adolescent behavior. (more…)

Once upon a time former Governor, Presidential candidate, and Chairman of the Democrat National Committee called the GOP the “White Party.”  CNN commentator Lou Dobbs took Dean to task for his language.

So was Dr. Dean, and those among the Left who share his understanding of history, accurate?  Is the GOP the party of white people?  Let’s test the good doctor’s diagnosis.

Fifteen questions follow.  The correct answers are provided at the end. No peeking!

Question #1.  During whose administration did the signature of an African-American first appear on U.S. currency? During that of a Republican or a Democrat President?

Question #2.  Was the first African-American diplomat appointed by a Republican or a Democrat President?

Question #3.  Was the first African-American popularly elected U.S. Senator a Republican or a Democrat? (more…)

During his recent State of the Union speech, the President issued a call for civility in America. Forget the fact that he once made a joke about Special Olympics kids and his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently even called his fellow liberals “f-ing retards.” The President sounded good when he scolded America for its negative tone.  Oh, he also attacked Las Vegas again:

You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t go blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.

As a long-time Las Vegan and a parent of a special-needs child, I sometimes wonder if the President of the United States of America is out to get me.  I’m not the paranoid type, but I’m fitting all the profiles that he likes to attack.  Thank God Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman gave the president what for over his most recent attack on my city:

He’s not our friend. I don’t know about Nevada, but Las Vegas, he’s sure not our friend.  He has a real psychological hang-up about the entertainment capital of the world.

Everybody says I shouldn’t say it, but I’ve got to tell you the way it is. This president is a real slow learner. (more…)

This is the kind of story that might be expected to draw a journalist’s attention, for it has the kind of elements that should outrage the average reader: a commander playing politics with the military, troops called upon to execute a mission they had neither expected nor been trained for, and subsequent accusations that heavy casualties might have been avoided, but for politically-motivated shell games.

The commander in question is the commander-in-chief, who has made it the policy of his administration to reduce troop deployments in the “bad war” (Iraq) while increasing the number of boots on the ground to fight the “good war” in Afghanistan. While the President has followed through on the latter, the former has yet to happen in any substantive way and our troops have paid the price for this political sleight of hand.

On February 17, 2009, the Defense Department announced, to great fanfare, that it was deploying an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, including the 5^th Stryker Brigade, 2^nd Infantry Division. The problem with that, which would soon become evident when the 5^th Stryker entered combat, is that the Brigade was trained to fight one kind of war and then, apparently for the sake of political expediency, deployed to fight quite another.

One of the 5^th Stryker’s units, the 1^st Battalion, 17^th Infantry Regiment (1-17) has been particularly hard hit since arriving in Afghanistan last fall, suffering twenty-one combat deaths in one battle in the Arghandab district alone. One of the battalion’s company commanders, Capt. Joel Kassulke was replaced after that action, a move that angered some of the Captain’s troops, according to this Army Times article. The problem, some soldiers said, was not their commander, but mismatched training: (more…)

When a story ends the way the MSM doesn’t want to end, it has a simple solution. It largely ignores it.

Recently, Big Journalism’s Mark Klugmann illustrated how the MSM shaped the story concerning the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya to fit a “pre-shaped comic book narrative.”

To be fair, ABC’s Charlie Gibson did, though, air an unbiased report during the early stage of the story.

But most of the MSM coverage leaned more toward that offered by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow who, at the 1:30 mark in this video, accused Senator Jim DeMint (R.SC) of committing treason by opposing the Obama administration’s support of Zelaya. (Watch the entire video at your own risk.) (more…)

In the Honduran news fable, one of the central images on the mainstream media storyboard has been the press conference Mel Zelaya conducted in his pajamas in Costa Rica.

Yet the Honduran military has now declared on the record for the first time – in a judicial proceeding – that the pajama gambit was a fake.  They stated that Zelaya was sent out of Honduras fully dressed in normal clothing and his customary cowboy boots.  That is the same account of events that the Honduran authorities were privately telling people from the first moment, but no military official had ever stated it on the record until now.

From the first moment news commentators and arrogant interviewers would nail their argument by saying “when a president is flown out of the country in his pajamas how can that not be a military coup”.  No legal analysis was really needed because of the pajamas. (more…)

If you live in Chicago and your only source of news is the venerable Chicago Tribune, it would take you a while to figure out that something happened in Massachusetts Tuesday night. One would think that an editor might place a story with the following lead – oh, I don’t know – front page, top of the fold, maybe?

In a stunning blow to Democrats, Republican Scott Brown ended the party’s half-century grip on the Senate seat once held by Edward M. Kennedy, coming from nowhere to give the GOP the crucial 41st vote needed to thwart President Obama and his agenda, possibly starting with healthcare.

It ended up on page fourteen.

Allow me to repeat: page fourteen. An election that stunned both parties, sent a thundering message to the President and his party, threatens the very existence of the signature piece of legislation that this administration – and the Chicago Tribune – believe is vital to the health and welfare of Americans is a story that, in the judgment of what used to be the beacon of Midwestern values, less important than finding Asian carp DNA in Lake Michigan yet again. (more…)

The president of the United States is a “light-skinned” man “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”  That, at least, is the carefully considered opinion of soon-to-be-former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, quoted in a forthcoming book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change, about the 2008 election of Barack Obama.  The thing is, Hapless Harry meant it in a good way.

At least he did until now, when the news of the explosive statement found its way into The Washington Post and Politico.  Already reeling in his hopeless, doomed-as-Chris-Dodd campaign for re-election this fall, the Sage of Searchlight no doubt thought he was being complimentary in his usual clueless, white-guy-of-a-certain-age way.  After all, when Harry was growing up, “Negro” was the polite term you used to show you weren’t a racist, and as for light-skinned, well, we all knew what that meant.  Why, the next thing you know, Unhorsed Harry will be describing Obama as “a credit to his race.”

The authors write: “Reid was convinced, in fact, in fact,that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.”  Gee, that sounds a lot like what Geraldine Ferraro said, and her reward was practically being drummed out of the Democrat Party.

This isn’t the first time the scrappy little Mormon boxer has found himself on his keister over race.  He had some ‘splainin’ to do when the seat-warming, monument-building senator from Illinois, Roland Burris, explicitly charged him with racism for trying to block indicted Gov. Rod Blagojevich from appointing an African-American to replace Obama in the senate.  Watch and listen to Harry dance as David Gregory grills him on Meet the Press:

But there’s bigger game afoot than one pathetic little man’s attempt to cling to his rapidly diminishing power.  With Dodd and Byron Dorgan having defenestrated themselves, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, two of the nastier people in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, are busily greasing the skids for obvious Democrat losers like Reid, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and other endangered-species types. (more…)

Media Matters (for America, they claim) has officially become a parody unto itself.  What started as a wonderful (if not Orwellian) dream of a non-profit entity living off of the ample teat of George Soros busily crafting “rapid response” items in opposition to the small yet enormously effective voices from the right in journalism, has now turned into what appears to be a bunch of guys monitoring radio, TV and the internet with the hopes of finding the slightest divergence from left wing orthodoxy as dictated by their founder, spaceship enthusiast John Podesta.

John Podesta

It isn’t enough that they label as “homophobic” any questions about Safe School Czar Kevin Jenning’s objectively questionable judgment with regard to the teaching materials associated with his organization GLSEN.  And it isn’t enough that they dismiss any video report exposing left-wing sacred cows such as ACORN and Planned Parenthood as “heavily edited” as if editing automatically renders a report untruthful (even though the entire, unedited transcripts and audio for the ACORN stories have been available at Big Government).  No, those ridiculously laughable positions that fly in the face of common sense are not enough to keep the team at MM(FA) feeling smugly supercilious and self-important… now they go on the attack if a journalist dares to refer to Guantanamo prisoners as “terrorists,”   No, this is not a parody. (more…)

Back in September, after the Giles-O’Keefe ACORN reveal had blown through the alternative media with Katrina-strength winds, the New York Times‘ public editor, Clark Hoyt (Mr. Collins to the Gray Lady’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh), wondered if just maybe the paper had tuned in a bit late to the story.  Managing editor for news Jill Abramson joined him in the public fret-fest, conceding the Times was “slow off the mark,” blaming “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” Hoyt then disclosed that Abramson and executive editor Bill Keller “would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.”

“Clueless Clark”

Who was this individual assigned by the Times to give them a window on the alien universe of Fox, talk radio and the conservative blogosphere? Keller – the Times‘ transparency and all that — announced he/she would remain anonymous, since he wanted to spare “X” “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

Oh, and here’s how Hoyt concluded his column:  “Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.”

And they say the Times has no comics section! (more…)

To “storyboard the news” is to replace straight news reporting with a pre-shaped comic-book narrative, an edited fable sustained by selective reporting.

Victims of media fraud suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder will be excused for hearing the phrase as a riff on Guantanamo, that “storyboarding the news” occurs when the MSM submerges the facts underwater until the truth surrenders.

The truth about Honduras – such as why the so-called “coup” was not a coup at all – was left by the MSM on the cutting-room floor, edited out of the news reporting because it did not fit into the storyboard.

A storyboard is a sequence of pictures that tell a story, like a comic strip.  In Hollywood or on Madison Avenue, the storyboard is used as a production guide for building a narrative.  In the hands of the MSM, the narrative becomes a news fable in which what gets left out is just as important as what gets included, and the story is frequently written years before the events themselves unfold.

Hence, the 2009 Honduras news fable can be seen as a sequence of iconic images: (more…)

I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. It felt like a scene from a movie that conveniently ties plot points together when two critical characters in the storyline share a moment of implausible significance – where the intrepid reporter finally runs his target to ground.

So at first I had trouble getting my words out. “I’m Andrew Breitbart,” I exhaled. Instead of hanging up, Bertha Lewis laughed like someone I would probably like in a different setting – but certainly not in this lifetime now that we are permanently and publicly tied to one another as media-based adversaries.

I knew the awkwardness of the moment would turn into trouble when I started asking her pointed questions and, sure enough, we soon we found ourselves in trouble.

“Did you go to the White House last year?” I asked.

Bertha Laughed heartily.  ”No,” she said.

“Really?” I pushed.

“No. One hundred percent not. Not this year. Not last year. Not ever,” she stated firmly, all the while maintaining an awkward and ironic joviality that was likely born of the weirdness of our impromptu exchange. (more…)