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In the segment above, it’s fascinating to watch Howard Kurtz and his two guests, Glynis MacNicol and Paul Farhi, agree 100% with one another. This, of course, is how the MSM creates their own reality, how they intentionally create an atmosphere where if you’re watching and disagree with them you’re the weirdo, you’re the odd man out. Judging from the James O’Keefe undercover video in question, this sinister ability to create this false reality is something Kurtz and company learned at J-school.

Watch O’Keefe’s video and see if you catch my meaning:

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In the eyes of Kurtz and the two “Reliable Sources” guests he brought on so they could all dutifully agree 100% with one another, O’Keefe’s “sting” is much ado about nothing because it was filmed at a seminar that recently took place at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, taught by professors Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky. Which begs the question…

Isn’t that… worse?

I’m not saying Kurtz and company are correct in their coordinated wrist-flicking of O’Keefe’s larger point, but even if they were, the fact that they and the rest of their MSM counterparts dismiss this troubling video betrays another kind of bias.

I would actually be more comfortable with O’Keefe’s video if it had been shot in the boardroom of the New York Times as opposed to a college seminar. The Times is at the very least a private business. A university, on the other hand, is where you expect to see an environment open to all ideas, and yet what I see Rosen and Shirky (mostly Shirky) doing is what I saw Kurtz and company do in the clip above–creating their own false reality.

University professors enjoy a captive audience, and it’s just  fact that if you want a job in the “elite” (Shirky’s word, not mine) media you have to attend a J-school like the one that held this particular seminar. And what do we see going on in this environment? Two professors abusing their captive audience by pretending there’s only one valid belief system. This is especially obvious at the 6:10 mark where Shirky says (as though it’s a settled fact) that Rep. Michele Bachmann is “unelectable,”  incapable of governing, and that mainstream Midwesterners won’t vote for her.

From my vantage point, Shirk is abusing his position in four ways (and I’m likely missing a few):

(more…)

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…)

MAUREEN O’CONNOR, STAFF WRITER FOR GAWKER: You know, one thing I do take issue with is, as Nancy mentioned, at first people didn’t take the story seriously because it showed up on Andrew Breitbart’s website, and they say he has a history of trying to smear people. I think even if that’s the case, it was very quickly that you could have looked into this story and verified it for yourself. It didn’t take a lot of effort to realize that Anthony Weiner admitted, yes, this showed up in my Twitter feed. So, it clearly wasn’t some kind of like imaginary thing. He admitted, yes, this happened. (more…)

“No it wasn’t deceptive, that’s what everybody’s saying about it. I saw the first version of it, and it told pretty much the whole story, of how that woman had gone through an epiphany of understanding how race works.”

Related:
Nolte: Who Got to Chris Matthews?: ‘Hardball’ Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed (July 30, 2010)
Marlow: WaPo’s Kurtz “dishonestly suggests Matthews had gotten his facts wrong regarding Breitbart including footage of Shirley Sherrod’s redemption” (August 3, 2010)

Howard Kurtz, the longtime WaPo staffer who jumped ship for the Daily Beast (and a cool $600k/year), hosts a show on CNN called Reliable Sources, which airs Sundays.  Reliable Sources, according to CNN, “is one of television’s only regular programs to examine how journalists do their jobs and how the media affect the stories they cover.”  This is, without a doubt, a great idea for a show.  Only there’s one major problem: Kurtz.

You see, there’s nothing on CNN’s show page for Reliable Sources that explains that Kurtz comes from a left-of-center point of view and is more than willing to suspend basic journalistic principles to win a victory for his side.  The question I’ve posed CNN in the past is, who watches their watchdog?  After viewing this must-watch segment, you’ll wonder the same thing:

The Reliable Sources host gets his hypocrisy on in this segment, pure and simple.  Kurtz, who has previously criticized Breitbart for not providing full context in his multimedia presentation on the NAACP that led to last year’s Shirley Sherrod kerfuffle (i.e the redemptive moment, which Breitbart did), left out major details of today’s report on the Huffington Post’s front page Breitbart ban. The self-appointed constable of context selectively edited the details of this story to do the bidding of far-left Color of Change and Van Jones by omitting the facts that HuffPosters are among the Internet’s most predictable flamethrowers and that Breitbart’s statement was perfectly defensible.

Kurtz, who is also the Daily Beast Washington bureau chief, laughably mocks Breitbart by saying, “I’m all for people speaking their mind, but if you want to hang out in nicer neighborhoods, you can’t shout quite as loud.”  First off, Breitbart happens to be the city planner for that “nicer” neighborhood, and that neighborhood happens to be frat row.  Huffington Post is a unique space online where public figures like Aaron Sorkin can call other public figures like Sarah Palin (and other hunters) “faux-macho shitheads” with impunity, and people like Van Jones, who has called Republicans “assholes,” and Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a “twat,” are front page regulars.

And let’s not forget when HuffPoster Sorkin called Sarah Palin an “idiot” on Kurtz’s very own CNN. (more…)

Debra Saunders: An island of sanity and resilience in San Francisco and in the media.

Anyone who’s been paying attention for the last ten years is aware that the level of public acrimony has been increasing steadily. This applies to acrimony in politics and journalism, as well as to surging xenophobia in many countries around the world, involving Jews, Catholics, Americans, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, French, Mexicans, and so forth.

I’ve written about continually increasing acrimony many times on my web site, over the last eight years. The one time that I got a big chuckle out of all the political bickering occurred in 2007, when I wrote, “Today’s Schadenfreude: The Congressional pay raise is blocked.” If bickering prevents a Congressional pay raise, then it can’t be all bad.

Journalistic acrimony was the subject of CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday. Moderator Howard Kurtz began the program this way:

We [journalists] have been called everything from patsies to pinheads, blamed for bias, skewered for sensationalism, ripped for recklessness. The atmosphere is just plain ugly.

What accounts for these mean-spirited attacks on the media, and in many cases perpetuated by the media? Why are journalists being called not just wrong, but dishonest, racist, corrupt? …

It’s not that the criticism is not legitimate. The media did perform badly, by and large, in the sacking of Shirley Sherrod. Liberal journalists did say some awful things about conservatives on that off-the-record discussion group [the Journolist]. Conservative commentators did accuse the mainstream media of shilling for Obama by not getting exercised about that New Black Panther Party controversy. There are serious questions about what Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings did with General McChrystal.

But never in my professional lifetime has the media bashing been so deafening, so personal, and so much of it carried out by some pundits against other pundits.”

Here are quotes from several of the clips that Kurtz showed to illustrate the point: (more…)

My colleague Alex Marlow has already done an effective job of pointing out how Howard Kurtz of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” maneuvered his Sunday coverage of last week’s “Hardball” redo into yet another MSM hit that intentionally ignores the fact that the video Andrew Breitbart posted on Big Government did in fact include footage of Shirley Sherrod discussing her racial redemption. But that was only the first part of Kurtz’s dishonest segment. The second part was how Kurtz chose to tell his audience only a half-truth about what really happened during the hour of  “Hardball” in question.

Kurtz is supposed to be a media gatekeeper, a watchdog. But he’s not. If he were, everyone in the MSM wouldn’t affectionately refer to him as “Howie.” If Kurtz wasn’t a member of the club, if he truly held the JournoListas accountable, they wouldn’t refer to him with any affection whatsoever. The JournoListas love Kurtz because he’s a media guard dog disguised as a watchdog and the rhetorical tricks played in the “Reliable Sources” segment below are a perfect example of how a “media analyst” can abuse his responsibility and not only mislead viewers but also willfully ignore what would be The Real Story for any true media analyst.

Let’s watch the Kurtz segment again: (more…)

In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother increased chocolate rations from 30 grams per week to 25 grams per week.  You read that right.  There are no objective facts; there is only the word of the Ministry of Truth. The 21st century Thought Police,  i.e. the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the JournoList, don’t just get the facts completely wrong, but they double down and congratulate themselves as if they’d gotten them right, so long as the misinformation they spread serve their political purposes.  This mainstream media totalitarianism was on full display on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources this weekend on CNN:

As we documented last week, Chris Matthews aired a highly entertaining segment of Hardball where he blasted Howard Dean for not watching the original Shirley Sherrod footage and rightfully pointed out that Breitbart had included footage of her redemption in the original video.  Apparently, the Thought Police tracked Matthews down between shows and made him re-tape the segment with Politico’s Breitbart beat writer/lefty double agent Ken Vogel replacing Dean; the discussion changed from the actual substance of Breitbart’s multimedia presentation to popcorn “the state of journalism today” malarkey. (more…)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had just about enough of this nonsense:

Transcript from Newsbusters:

KURTZ: Let’s start with the obvious question. Why did you not ask Eric Holder in that interview about this former Justice official’s allegation that a case against the New Black Panther Party was dropped because of racial politics?

SCHIEFFER: Well, it’s certainly a question that is a legitimate question to ask. And basically what happened was this all really became a story when the whistleblower came out and testified that he’d had to leave the Justice Department and so on. And, frankly, had I known about that, I would have asked the question.

I was on vacation that week. This happened — apparently, it got very little publicity. And, you know, I just didn’t know about it.

I mean, you know, God knows everything, but I’m not quite that good. Every once in a while, something will slip by me. And in this case, it just slipped by me. If I’d have known it, I would have asked about it.

This is, of course, Howard Kurtz interviewing Bob Scheiffer on Reliable Sources.

Bob Schieffer marginalized the DOJ/New Black Panther controversy first by not asking the Attorney General about it, and then again with his phony “it got very little publicity” line.  Of course “it got very little publicity,” Mr. Scheiffer; you’re the guy in charge of publicity!  When a mainstream media authority whines that something wasn’t covered in the MSM, it’s the definition of a circular argument.  (more…)

Well, the cat is finally out of the bag and guess who let him out?  None other than Morning Joe’s own resident heartthrob, Mika Brzezinski.  In an interview with TV Newser’s Julie Menin, promoting her new book, All Things At Once, the daughter of Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor had this to say about the mainstream media:

I’ve worked in the mainstream media for all the networks and I will say what people aren’t saying. It’s got a liberal world view. There are great people working at the networks, and they’re mostly Democrats, ok?

I think honestly what needs to happen, is we need to stop pretending about who we are and every journalist should tell us what their political affiliation is, who they voted for,  and we go from there.

I hate the polarizing extremes that we’re seeing on cable where there’s these sort of “Think my way or you’re evil” kind of subliminal message or cartoonish type characters on the right and the left. I think we try and break a lot of those barriers on Morning Joe.

(more…)