Unless you missed it this week:

• Media Matters still refuses to condemn the violence in the Media Matters-endorsed OWS movement.
• Media Matters also refuses to answer why a “media site” is seemingly in violation of the rules binding 501 c(3)s by politicking. They were caught sending out emails to their “Democrat allies” last week.
• After failing to force censorship of Big Journalism’s Dana Loesch the week prior (and again today), Media Matters is attempting the same blacklist technique with Red State’s Erick Erickson. What’s unclear is whether the motivation comes from their intolerance of diverse thought on the airwaves or bitterness at the lack of invitations MMFA staffers, namely Editor Eric Boehlert, receive themselves from networks.
• MMFA Editor Boehlert also refused to condemn or disavow his site’s use of the slur “Israel firster.” MMFA has received heavy criticism for its continued use of the slur, even after its use was criticized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and MMFA ally and former journolister Spencer Ackerman.
• MMFA still hasn’t walked back its claim that the insider trading scandal, which resulted in the now-passed STOCK Act, wasn’t ‘a big deal.’

OUTSTANDING ITEMS

Media Matters has yet to correct these glaring mistakes:

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The modern Arab-Jewish conflict has played itself out on many fronts in the last 60 years. Israel has been vastly more successful on the field of battle, but the Arabs have managed to co-opt the media narrative. For a generation, the press has been sympathetic to the cause of those who strive to eradicate Israel. This has shown itself over and over again, not only in editorial decisions, but in the blind acceptance of reports coming from Arab sources in the region.
The problem is that those sources have repeatedly shown that they are not interested in reporting the news but, in many cases, in fabricating it. In many cases, these fabrications have been done with the active participation of “respected” news gathering organizations.

In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, the term Fauxtography was coined to refer to either the embellishing of existing photographs or staging others for the best effect to discredit Israel. The uncovering of tampering resulted in both Reuters and AP disciplining freelance “reporters” as well as having to kill pictures that they had syndicated.

The staging of news photographs, and news in general, is alive and well in disputed areas of Israel even now.

What remains surprising is how otherwise discerning news operations such as the Wall Street Journal still accept, uncritically, the output of suspect sources. Just this past week the Wall Street Journal, as well as a range of other international news operations, posted a picture submitted by Hazem Bader for Agence France-Presse (AFP).

WSJ's "Photo of the Day," Jan. 25, 2012

The caption on the photo explains that the man seen writhing in pain on the ground was intentionally run over by a tractor driven by an Israeli soldier. That is to say that the international press reported, without questioning, that an official representative of the Israeli Government had, without cause, purposely caused a grave injury to an innocent man.
The only problem is that it never happened. There is no record of anyone being injured. CAMERA, a watchdog group that specializes in following anti-Israel media activity, followed all possible leads to find the injured man.

Yet, after checking with both Palestinian and Israeli sources, it seems that the man was not at all injured, and there is no evidence that he was run over. On the Palestinian side, Tthe Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), which provides comprehensive weekly reports about all injuries, fatalities, incursions, and other incidents in both the West Bank and Gaza, makes no mention of this alleged injury in its report for Jan. 19- 25. In addition, the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency did not cover the alleged injury, even though it does report on Israeli army activity that day nearby in Tel Rumeida. And Ma’an also reported a hit and run incident, in which a Palestinian teen was hit by an Israeli driver at a checkpoint this morning. Presumably, then, had this worker actually been run over and injured on Wednesday, Ma’an would have carried the story. Nor does it appear that any English-language wire service or other media outlet covered the alleged injury.

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On Monday evening, the political blogosphere was rocked by the unprecedented publishing of a 200-page opposition research book on Mitt Romney written by the John McCain campaign for the 2008 GOP presidential primary. Who decided to release this information to the public? It wasn’t ThinkProgress; it wasn’t Newsweek or the Washington Post or Mother Jones. It was by a website which currently features the headlines “Martial Artist Kicks Down Banana Tree,” “Baby Flummoxed By New Sound,” and “Jessica Simpson Wearing A Giant Deformed Penis Mask.” I kid you not.

BuzzFeed, the name of the site in question, is the latest venture for Politico’s JournoList-er Ben Smith, as previously reported by John Nolte. Smith is heading up the “Politics” section of BuzzFeed, and while he claims objectivity, the case of this leaked document reveals exactly how he plans to use the site to hurt the GOP and aid Obama’s reelection campaign.

Screenshot of BuzzFeed’s politics page

The “About” page of BuzzFeed presents the site as nothing more than a place where readers can find interesting and viral Internet content:

We feature the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends: an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame.

The site’s niche naturally extends to its political page, headed up by Smith. The political news cycle is chock full of bizarre and hilarious information that normally doesn’t end up on NPR–Mitt Romney sparring with pop group LMFAO, Herman Cain singing “Imagine” with pizza-themed lyrics, or Rick Perry blasting a coyote while jogging, for instance. Thus, a site to present this kind of offbeat content (the categories on BuzzFeed include “LOL,” “WTF,” and “Fail”) sounds like a great place to unwind, to set aside all the partisan bickering and just check out posts “for the lulz,” as we whippersnappers say.

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In a nutshell: Woman reporter with Vlad Putin’s Russian propaganda channel pulls a female Ted Baxter on Dana Loesch and says we should be angry at our government for sending military to Afghanistan. She apparently doesn’t realize the pejorative manner in which she frames their mission which proves Loesch’s point.

RT/Russia Today: Elaborate SNL hoax or actual media entity? You decide.

Wrote John Sexton last March:

RT is essentially a glossy brochure for Putin’s strongman statism. Lots of attractive presenters with no idea what they are talking about. With a few rare exceptions, everything they pump out is designed to present America as a failure and thereby subtly suggest that, hey, maybe things aren’t so bad in dear old Russia.

From AIM:

Relatively fresh in the fight for carriage in American cable markets, Russia Today stumbled into the ring with all the grace of a drunken Moscow ballerina.

The history of the outfit:

From the outset it was clear that RT was a propaganda effort controlled completely by the Kremlin. The Kremlin put up more than $30 million to get it started and spend double that to pay a staff of over 100 reporters in just its first year of operation.

This comical weblog/RT report keeps with that quality.

“Dana thinks that troops are fighting to keep us safe.”

How would RT know? I asked Loesch in an email this afternoon prior to writing this piece. They didn’t speak with her. At all. They literally made up a quote and attributed it to her. This after RT smeared Loesch on Twitter before turning around and asking her repeatedly for an interview. Loesch says she simply deleted their emails.

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After the fall of the Soviet Union, most Leftists in the US at least had the decency to mourn quietly over the demise of the Evil Empire. Being sympathetic to murderous communists became somewhat of a joke manifested in “CCCP” t-shirts worn ironically, for the most part. Slowly a real nostalgia started cropping up and now, as evidenced by the Occupy Movement, there are people who are wondering out loud whether the world is a better place post-USSR. There’s a serious anti-capitalist mood in the Left’s echo-chamber.

The Nation magazine is about to publish – in print, a couple of the articles are available online here and here – three articles where the authors ponder whether the world is safer, etc. without Soviet Russia. Here’s how The Nation’s editorial board introduces the series:

Virtually all American commentary about the end of the Soviet Union extols what the West is believed to have gained from that historic event. On this twentieth anniversary of the breakup, The Nation presents three writers who focus instead on what may have been lost. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader and first constitutional president, argues that a chance for a more secure and just world order was missed. Stephen F. Cohen, a historian and longtime Nation contributor, reminds readers of the political, economic and social costs to Russians themselves. And Vadim Nikitin, a US-educated Russian journalist, presents a new interpretation of pro-Soviet nostalgia. —The Editors

Yeah. Now go read the magazine’s “founding prospect.”

The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.

That was written in 1865 when the magazine was founded. Let’s just say they’ve come a long way–and considering that they’re clearly feeling the absence of the Soviet Union, one of the most violent and deceitful regimes in history, the irony is thick. (more…)

When the scandalous “Operation: Fast and Furious” began to get attention from Republican lawmakers and finally the press, the guardians of Left’s pro-Obama / Democrat narrative tried to discredit the people talking about it. Chief among the smear factories was, of course, Media Matters. The gun-walking operation, which has led to numerous deaths in Mexico and the murder of at least one Federal Agent – Brian Terry, is clearly a disaster. But in the sick and twisted world of Media Matters, the real threat comes from the people speaking out against their Dear Leader’s potentially criminal debacle.

Several commentators have speculated the operation was purposely botched in order to lend some real world data to the assertion that the guns used in Mexico mainly come from the United States, the crux of the argument being that this statistic bolsters attempts for tighter gun control here in the US. It may be a leap to make the connection, but the statistic has been used in reporting about the Mexican drug wars. Reporting including statements like this:

But finding a way to stop the weapons flow, now known as the “Iron River,” is being hindered to some extent by U.S. gun laws, officials say. In November, the inspector general of the Department of Justice detailed the problem, citing the lack of a federal statute specifically prohibiting firearms trafficking.

Again, it might be a leap, but the jump isn’t that far. The point is that there’s really no reason to paint those who have been following Fast and Furious as kooks because they see the potential. Someone should be asking these questions, but those questions are uncomfortable for the Obama administration, and Media Matters can’t have that. When Democrats are being questioned, Media Matters goons suddenly become strict constructionists in interpreting journalistic standards. They also try really hard to shoot the messengers like Mike Vanderboegh.

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We’ve been highlighting how Media Matters For America is really just a conveniently tax-exempt political operation and propaganda factory for Democrats. Their status as a taxpayer subsidized 501(c)(3) may be in jeopardy, but in the meantime, we will continue to provide the evidence proving they’re not who they claim to be to the IRS.

The latest example comes from the unironically titled Senior Fellow, Eric Boehlert. It seems he has major issues with someone leaking critical Obama re-election campaign strategy to Politico. The website posted an article where they cite numerous Democratic campaign sources who provided details into what the Obama campaign is planning for 2012.

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.

This set Boehlert into a tizzy.

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George Soros’s latest attempt in new media is about two years behind the conservative trailblazers who changed the face of elections and political blogging.

At 27, he is a full-time “tracker” for American Bridge 21st Century, a new Democratic organization that aims to record every handshake, every utterance by Republican candidates in 2011 and 2012, looking for gotcha moments that could derail political ambitions or provide fodder for television advertisements by liberal groups next year.

[...]

While the Democratic National Committee and Democratic candidates also have trackers, federal campaign laws prohibit the outside organizations from coordinating closely enough to use their videotapes in their advertising efforts.

Soro’s Media Matters, the (for all intents and purposes) activist arm for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has joined together with other Democratic groups to form American Bridge 21st Century.

By tapping into his network of Media Matters donors, American Bridge officials say they have raised several million dollars and hope to bring in $15 million to make the group part of a new liberal infrastructure that will last far beyond the 2012 cycle.

From astroturfed rallies to astroturfed citizen journalism, American Bridge sounds more like a “spin” center of which famed propagandist Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud.

“I can come up with the spin. I need the facts,” said Paul Begala, a former top adviser to President Bill Clinton and a senior strategist for Priorities USA Action, an outside group that is working to re-elect President Obama. Mr. Begala said American Bridge would help fuel his group’s ads. “Let’s go to the videotape!”

I realize that the left is very excited about their new effort, but the logic fueling the creation of their new propaganda center seems overblown. Here’s the thing: when it’s a competition, biased media loses every time. Look at the dwindling circulations of the most infamous left-leaning publications. Check the ratings and see which cable news outlet has the longest #1 streak. Compare the success of conservative talk radio to failed enterprises like Air America.

People are exposed to biased media every single day when they turn on a broadcast network and see their supposed nonpartisan anchor using public trust as a welcome mat for bias. Americans are tired of it:

• In U.S., Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Remains a Rarity
• Americans View Media Bias As Big Problem, Poll Shows | CNSnews.com
• Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High
• Americans See Liberal Media Bias on TV News

Progressive media is an over-saturated industry.

The problem with Soros and co.’s enterprise is that it leaves the gate without public trust. Conservatives have for the past several years punked candidates (and their associates) of all parties with their own words. The difference is that the Soros American Bridge project will ignore Democrats and focus on Republicans, likely making it up if they don’t get the money shot they’re after. Why wouldn’t they? They’ve done it before.

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Last week, Drummond Pike took his FOX News fight to a whole new level, this time painting all of the right with a scarlet letter.  Coincidentally, Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald had also published a similar piece in much the same vein, only a week prior.

In his opinion contribution piece to Politico titled “Why Does the Right Hate Soros?”, the founder and CEO of Tides Foundation pondered aloud the imaginary reasons he’s fabricated in his mind for the animosity toward the Hungarian born billionaire.

His conclusion?  Because we hate immigrants.

This is the typical left.  When you don’t get the response you want, inject a new element of manufactured hate into the mix – when you can’t make it about race, make it about immigration.  Drummond Pike even decided to step up the rhetoric, implying that George Soros is in danger because of right-wing media outlets and bloggers.  But the sad truth behind this piece, behind all of these public letters, boycotts and petitions is that they are all coordinated, and they are all aimed at turning the public opinion against those who do not share the ideals of the leftist agenda.

Some highlights from Pike’s opinion piece:

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Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller notes an interesting and instructive conversation that was held publicly between lefty blogger Matthew Yglesias and National Review’s Mark Hemingway. During their exchange on Twitter, lefty Yglesias claimed that lying is a legitimate tactic for “advocates” to use to win the policy argument, thereby admitting that liberals think it is OK to lie in order to get their policies in place.

On his Twitter feed, Yglesias told Hemingway, “I think fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do, yes. That’s an honest view.”

Matthew Yglesias, JournoList tough guy and taqqiya advocate

Aside from the amusing incongruity of the statement — how can dishonesty be “an honest view” — it is telling that a liberal like Yglesias doesn’t see anything wrong with using lies to win a policy argument. After all, many famous folks on the left have agreed that a lie or two used to gain power is not such a crime.

Certainly Yglesias’s mode of arguing for policy is along the same line of thinking proposed in the famous Goebbels quote: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” (more…)

Here’s what happened yesterday morning along the so-called Blue Line, the internationally recognized, UN-codified border between Israel and Lebanon. Israeli soldiers were trimming trees and clearing brush as they routinely do, because that kind of natural cover has been used by Iranian-backed Hezbollah soldiers to kidnap Israelis and start wars.

Behind them there was a group of commanders who were supervising the operation, because Israeli protocol calls for troops working near the border to be supervised from afar – again, in case Iranian-backed Hezbollah soldiers try to kidnap Israelis and start wars.

Israel’s physical border fence is very specifically built several meters on the Israeli side of the border inside the Jewish State’s territory, so that the Israelis can safely trim trees and clear brush, because – you know.

At some point soldiers dressed in Lebanese Armed Forces uniforms launched an ambush, with snipers trying to kill the supervising commanders in the distance. The Israelis promptly retaliated, wounding several of the LAF-uniformed soldiers. Then the Israelis – after receiving an explicit request from the other side of the border – suspended their fire so that the wounded could be evacuated. The Lebanese used the momentary humanitarian gesture to again open fire on the Israeli troops – this time it was an RPG at an Israeli tank – and the Israelis again retaliated. Israel is reporting one IDF soldier killed, one wounded.

There’s a post to be written about how this is the predictable outcome of the U.S. pouring weapons and logistical training into the LAF, even though the Lebanese political hierarchy and several LAF units long ago fell under Hezbollah’s control. Of course some of that security assistance will inevitably find its way into a battle with Israel. Of course it will be. But that’s not this post. (more…)

It’s hard to respect a “journalist” who repeatedly insulted and mocked leading conservatives he was assigned cover, and even wished death on some of them, to a secretive email list comprised of liberal media figures around the country.  Whatever this says about Weigel’s political orientation, it speaks loudly and clearly to the fact that he was an unprofessional jerk, and that’s putting it kindly.

Weigel has mostly owned up to this fact, which I think says something positive about his character.

But as long as Weigel is airing more of his “Journolist” laundry, perhaps it should be pointed out that at one point in time Weigel aired this same kind of vitriol against leading liberal figures.

For example, do you think Dave still thinks Paul Krugman is “obviously insane”, “simple-minded” and a “cancer on the Times”? Does he still think that Krugman’s column is a “litany of propaganda, lies, and insults”?

Does he still think that Maureen Dowd “sucks” and that her work is “absolute tripe”? Does he still wonder: “why is this woman employed”?

Because I sure do (all of the above), but then I do not have a professional need to ingratiate myself with the liberal media establishment. (more…)

And so we begin to hear some feedback from the liberal side, including direct comments from one prominent member of the “Cry Wolf” project.  On the Inside Higher Ed website Friday, founder and editor Scott Jaschik addresses Big Journalism’s Academia-Gate series in his post, “Who Is Crying Wolf?”

Some prominent liberal academics are soliciting short essays from faculty members and graduate students to document a pattern in American history of major social advances being opposed by conservatives who “cry wolf” about the impact of proposed reforms. The campaign — known as the “Cry Wolf Project” — hasn’t been officially announced. But conservative bloggers obtained some of the solicitations of essays and published them this week, along with considerable criticism.

A series of posts on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism Web site have called the program “Academia-Gate” and suggested that the effort is inappropriately political. The creators of Cry Wolf, meanwhile, say that what they are doing is awfully similar to the ways that right-leaning scholars have used academic work to advance their causes over the years.

Jaschik acquaints readers with the members of the “Cry Wolf” project coordinators and the details of the request for proposals.  He then goes on to cite from a couple of BigJournalism’s posts in the series:

One post on Big Journalism noted that those involved in the project are sympathetic to organized labor, and that many influential academics are serving on the advisory board. “This is what our higher education system has become – a publicly funded amplifier of progressive ideology,” says the post by Patrick Courrielche. “If this Cry Wolf program were just limited to a few faculty members at a limited number of universities, it would be of little concern. But the project reaches into some of the most prestigious public and private schools of higher learning in the U.S., including MIT, Yale, Harvard, USC, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and President Obama’s alma mater — Occidental College.”

Liberty Chick, the blogger who started calling Cry Wolf “Academia-Gate,” described her concerns this way: “What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as ’social justice’ — this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for ’social justice.’

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After a week-long series of Big Journalism articles delving into the funding, agenda and dubious academic credentials behind the now-infamous “Cry Wolf Project,” the program’s co-chair, Prof. Peter Dreier has finally emerged from his bunker at Occidental College to respond to the controversy.

After first quoting heavily from the Soros-funded talking points supplied by our pals, the Senior Fellows over at Media Matters, Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd.com, quotes Dreier as follows:

Dreier, one of the organizers of Cry Wolf, said in an interview Thursday that the furor over the project was unfair. “This is legitimate work,” he said, and the essays will be scrutinized for accuracy. The end result will simply be better organized resources that might be consulted by the public, op-ed writers or others. He also said that he didn’t view this effort as either replacing traditional scholarship or doing anything that conservative groups don’t already do. He added that the pattern of “the world is going to end” reactions to “progressive efforts” is a legitimate issue for scholars to raise and explore.

Why are the conservatives so critical? Said Dreier: “That’s what they are paid to do.”

Let’s savor the delicious irony of Dreier’s last statement. (more…)

Patrick Courrielche’s kickoff article exposing major university faculty and graduate students’ Cry Wolf Project is alarming. Each installment in the series has only made it more so.

CWP’s solicitation for policy briefs designed to construct politically driven narratives is a confession of academic malpractice. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, its participants’ intentions are unethical, insubordinate, and potentially illegal.

The CWP email shows its players to be intolerant of varying viewpoints in the pursuit of their ideological ends. The fact that they are offering colleagues and grad students money to predetermine outcomes proves their intent: to tell partisan political stories:

What are they afraid of? (more…)

ACORN’s radical allies are now attempting to rewrite history to cast the organized crime syndicate as victim instead of as the prolific victimizer that it has been ever since it was created in 1970. ACORN online campaign director Nathan Henderson-James served notice in February that a propaganda effort was about to begin.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he wrote to members of Townhouse, a discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

Such a narrative must be fought, Henderson-James argued, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”

The effort was already underway when Henderson-James reached out to the leftist community. After ACORN’s national board expelled ACORN founder Wade Rathke for engineering an eight-year cover-up of a million dollar embezzlement, Rathke wrote a combination political memoir/manifesto called Citizen Wealth. More recently, Seeds of Change, an institutional hagiography of ACORN by true believer John Atlas was published.

And now comes the “Cry Wolf” Project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group. (more…)

Over at the website Minding the Campus, Prof. KC Johnson takes a look at the academic astroturf project called “Cry Wolf” that Big Journalism has been breaking all week.  The reviews are not good for Prof. Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College:

A newly announced project called “Crying Wolf,” organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom… project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university’s Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in “history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy”) to perform “paid academic research” that can “serve in the battle with conservative ideas.”

The initiative is open about its biases: it intends to “construct a counter narrative” against what it describes as conservative opinions about taxation and regulation policy.

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The co-chair of the ‘Cry Wolf” project, Professor Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College, is a sort of email buddy of mine. If by “email buddy” I mean someone who once sent me a snide one-line missive with a link to an alternative weekly paper political cartoon depicting me in a negative light.

I’ll show you that email shortly but first background on why Professor Dreier is in my life:

In late September of 2009 two weeks into the beginning of the explosive James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles ACORN video scandal, an academic study critical of media coverage of ACORN came out from Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, professor of journalism, University of Northern Iowa, Department of Communication Studies. The study, “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, or,What the News Got Wrong,” was billed as “[a]n independent study by two prominent academics” that purported to have “found repetition of unverified allegations and distortions was the rule in national reporting of a purported ‘voter fraud’ scandal involving the community organizing group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) during the 2008 presidential campaign.”

Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College

When I first saw the study’s press release, I naively reached out to Professor Martin to offer him and Dreier a place at our new website Big Government to act as ongoing ombudsmen of our ACORN story. We were cognizant that a left-leaning media would likely come to ACORN’s defense, so why not provide a platform for two professors claiming the media had wronged ACORN in its previous coverage of the organization to show that we were doing everything in our power to play the story fair? Recall, we proactively offered unedited transcripts and audio of O’Keefe and Giles work to show that the edited videos did not take things out of context.

After conferring with his colleague, Professor Martin declined my offer: (more…)

A fixed fight: The Influence of Labor Unions in Academe. Part One is here.

In the academic world, employees are very often public employees. This means that they are also very often union employees. At all levels. This includes everyone from janitors, to dormitory housekeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, and computer techs, to even the graduate assistants and professors. While the salary gap between a cafeteria worker and a senior professor may be huge, the solidarity of the unions is a powerful magnet that creates an unbreakable bond amongst them.

Unions are fond of bashing capitalism with seething rhetoric, decrying the economic system as irredeemably corrupted by greed and racism and classism. But the ideology they themselves embrace is itself driven by the same ugly characteristics they profess to detest. Except in their case, power is the motivating force, the passion that drives them.

The burning desire for the power to control your life is the tie that binds the union service worker to the academic intellectual. It is this common fabric that connects the union janitor more closely to the ideological academic intellectual than to his working-class counterparts beyond campus.

What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as “social justice” – this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for “social justice.”

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Critical Mass, a blog devoted to what’s wrong with American academe, has weighed in on the emerging scandal we here at Big Journalism are calling “Academia-Gate” — the “Cry Wolf” request for proposals devoted to pre-empting and discrediting conservative political positions in the sheep’s clothing of disinterested academic “scholarship,” spearheaded by leftist professor Peter Dreier at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

It’s not a pretty sight:

On the one hand, there are no surprises–there has been a decades-long academic tradition, at this point, of discounting the notion that disinterested research is even possible, and of selling the idea that the proper response to this is to shape one’s scholarship self-consciously, as a means of ensuring that it assists and justifies the kinds of social justice one would like to see in the world. On the other hand, this activist line of thought has historically had only one line of defense–and that is that it is conducted with impeccable scholarly integrity, is entirely above-board vis a vis research ethics, and is unimpeachable from within the standards of professional conduct. In other words, the ethical standards that accompany interested scholarship are, in theory, terrifically strict. That’s how such scholarship can continue to call itself scholarship, and escape being dismissed as propaganda. It’s a shaky edifice, but it’s an edifice all the same, and it has succeeded. Arguably, though, the Cry Wolf project undermines that entire edifice, as it explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.

Ya think? (more…)