I’d like you to try to dig deep down in your heart and attempt to dredge up some compassion for Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi–I mean, real heavy spiritually-lifting compassion, the kind that is given even when it hasn’t been earned–Matt’s antics, from the horse semen pie incident (don’t click that link before lunch) to his vile attack on Michele Bachmann (ditto), have not earned him much compassion.  But try, anyway.

Here’s the position Taibbi finds himself him; he cares passionately about the problems created by the nexus of government and the big financial industry. He’s identified them countless times over the last few years but he can’t figure out who will actually solve them. Taibbi has no place to go.

Poor Matt knows that Obama and the Democratic party aren’t the answer. He’s given a ton of ink to stories about what sellouts the Democrats and Obama are. Here’s a quote from a recent Taibbi article called Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal:

My theory is that the Obama administration is trying to secure its 2012 campaign war chest with this settlement deal. If Barry can make this foreclosure thing go away for the banks, you can bet he’ll win the contributions battle against the Republicans next summer.

That isn’t a right-wing blogger calling the President “Barry” in a sneer. That’s Matt Taibbi calling the President “Barry” in a sneer.  The 2012 elections are on the horizon and no Democratic primary challenger is riding in to save the day, either. Game over. Matt is stuck with Barry. (more…)

Note to media: it’s the ethics, not the ideology!

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, also exposed as one of the alleged journalists working with the Occupy movement behind the scenes and undisclosed, offers up a weak defense of the inherent lack of ethics of those involved. Let’s square the circle and call it weak tea.

There is nothing terribly interesting in any of these exchanges. Most all of the things written were things all of us ended up saying publicly in our various media forums.

It likely fell to a mostly politically irrelevant Taibbi and Rolling Stone to lead the push back as a distraction from NBC’s big problem, Dylan Ratigan. The pigeon-coiffed man with the big mouth has some explaining to do, including to NBC suits and anchor, Brian Williams.

Emails included in Big Government’s document drop of emails exchanged by leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement make it clear that MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan has been directly involved with the group, including helping them to draft statements and offering revisions to a statement David DeGraw might later discuss on NBC News with Brian Williams. Scroll to the bottom of this particular email from David DeGraw to view this passage below and more.

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Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy Wall Street email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media.

Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear. The list also includes a number of radical organizers, such as Kevin Zeese.

In these emails we see MSNBC’s Ratigan, hawking his book in the footnotes, instructing occupiers on how properly to present their demands and messages while simultaneously appearing on television reporting “objectively” on the story (when he’s not taking part in the protests himself as content.)

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Rolling Stone, whose political editor Matt Taibbi used to co-edit the eXile with Mark Ames, is pushing Ames’s discredited Koch brothers conspiracy theory in a new article about voter ID laws.

The article, by Ari Berman, trumpets a supposed Koch plot in the sub-headline, but fails to deliver the goods, mentioning the Kochs only once in the entire article:

The GOP War on Voting

In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year

…

In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

“Funded in part.” Greenpeace — not a Koch-friendly source — claims the Koch brothers gave just over $600,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council from 1997 to 2009. That’s not pocket change, but at less than $50,000 per year, roughly $1,000 per state, it’s hardly enough to account for voter ID efforts in 38 states.

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Rolling Stone’s hatchet job on Rep. Michele Bachmann has proven too much even for many liberals. As Yahoo News reports, there’s a controversy raging over the way the piece—sedately titled “Michele Bachmann’s Holy War”—“borrows heavily from a 2006 profile of Bachmann by G.R. Anderson” in the Minneapolis City Pages.

The problem with all that borrowing is that author Matt Taibbi didn’t bother to acknowledge it. Or rather, says editor Eric Bates, Taibbi did bother, but Bates himself cut the attributions because of “space considerations.” So apparently, if Bates had just been able to make a little more room in there, he could have left in those pesky sources. (Correction: that pesky source. Judging by the hyperlinks that did make it into the Web version of his piece, Taibbi appears to have quoted a grand total of one article.) As G. R. Anderson himself says:

“I would tell him that it’s very easy to cut five words somewhere else in the story, and put the five words in that actually [cite] the source.”

There’s something in that. Bates could have taken out “paranoid,” “psychopath,” “Machiavellian,” “pathological,” “conscienceless,” “dangerous,” “fanatic,” “narcissistic,” “hysterical,” “campy,” “bizarre,” “freakouts,” “grandiose,” “lunacy,” and “insane,” along with a couple of “Stepfords” and several instances of “crazy” (five of which appear in the same sentence). That would have provided plenty of room for attributions, although there wouldn’t have been much else left in the piece.

For it seems that Taibbi’s preferred writing style, when dealing with conservatives, is simply to throw heaping handfuls of adjectives at them, along with a few choice nouns. And if those words sometimes land in a way that doesn’t make much sense, well, that’s just the way the ball bounces. (Case in point: “A photo shows Bachmann, only the top of her Stepford head visible  … ” Anyone want to explain what a “Stepford head” is?) Taibbi is widely considered a satirist, but you can’t write satire if you display neither (a) a sense of humor, nor (b) some idea of the way that words are supposed to go together. In short, Dorothy Parker he ain’t.

As for the actual claims in the piece, they’re reminiscent of those in the Killian memos, a couple of elections ago. Much as Dan Rather and others just felt that those documents were “fake but accurate,” as a New York Times headline put it, Taibbi just felt that Bachmann is a whackjob, and didn’t need to rely on such old-school methods as careful sourcing and fact-finding to make that assertion. He just felt that Bachmann is “crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.” (He also just felt that Bachmann’s former town of Stillwater, Minnesota, had “no black people” in it, even though, as he eventually confessed to Abe Sauer of The Awl, he hasn’t been there to see.)

Of course, all this talk of craziness is pretty rich coming from a guy who once threw coffee at Vanity Fair reporter James Verini, and then followed Verini down the street making threats.

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Those bastions of objectivity over at Rolling Stone magazine have taken a break from publishing off the record comments and covering the exploits of Lady GaGa to defend America against non-liberal news bias.  Their target, of course, is Roger Ailes, President of the Fox News Channel.

As Brent Bozell at NewsBusters points out, the alleged “writer” used anonymous sources to make the obvious connection that being celebrated for success at a party is almost indistinguishable from a communist dictator with 70 million deaths on his record.

via NewsBusters:

After painting a picture of employees loyally cheering the boss at a holiday party, Dickinson entertained comparisons to…Mao Zedong.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” said disgruntled ex-employee Charlie Reina. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” added “a former executive” with News Corporation. Dickinson also said Ailes runs “the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside the communist bloc.”

Put aside that Ailes isn’t responsible for 70 million deaths and mass cannibalism, and that his politics are essentially the philosophical opposite of communism – and OK, he’s Mao.

The anonymous sources and story of the party that celebrated the Fox News executive mass murderer were from 2002, and, other than the fact that it’s extremely old, it’s hard to determine why this would suddenly be brought up now. (more…)

There’s a lot of buzz on the Internet about what has been called the JournoList. This was a private e-mail list maintained by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein of about 400 journalists, bloggers, and academics who may have colluded in aiding the election of Mr. Obama. Mr. Breitbart is the king of the alternative media and created his “Big” sites to report what was being unreported by the mainstream media. Big Journalism and Big Government are two Breitbart sites that have uncovered scoops that took weeks for the mainstream media to report. The Acorn scandal would never have come to light without this exposure. On May 10, Brad Thor posted on Big Government the capture of Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Pakistan, yet to date we haven’t heard a ripple in the mainstream media.

Mr. Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide the complete Journolist e-mail sessions and while no one has claimed that reward yet, Tucker Carlson, the editor of the DailyCaller.com, has released copies of some of the e-mail correspondence. These have been reported on the “Big” sites and Fox News. What they reveal is very disturbing to those who still naively believe that the Fourth Estate is incorruptible. Uncovered is an egregious conspiracy to slant the news for an ideological motive rather than journalistic integrity.

The mostly white, liberal, leftist group correspondence suggested ways to cover the 2008 presidential campaign that would benefit Mr. Obama and vilify the McCain/Palin team. Of course, this media bias is not news to anyone on the right, but for the first time there is concrete proof that Mr. Obama was the choice of the mainstream media, which aided and abetted his campaign. (more…)

Hardly surprising, eh?

Counterinsurgency – “COIN” – is the military term for nation-building.  The media throw it around like loose political change.  But it’s useful not only in describing President Obama’s wavering policy in Afghanistan.  As General McChrystal’s experience with Rolling Stone proves, the politically-activist media are an insurgent force that has to be dealt with in order to enable American voters to understand what is going on in the war.

Let us belabor a metaphor.  If the liberal media are the Taliban, how shall the counterinsurgency be conducted?

The Pentagon’s strategy has to gel around the classic anti-guerilla tactic taught at the JFK Special Forces School at Fort Bragg.

General Stanley McChrystal and his “Team America” staff apparently forgot the lessons many of them were taught there.  They apparently believed, to predictable result, that if you’re the coolest spec ops guys, everyone will automatically treat you as such no matter what you say or do.

A few years ago, I observed a part of the Green Beret school’s graduation exercise.  For reasons long forgotten, it’s called “Robin Sage.” The principal objective, for “A-teams” of would-be grads, is to be inserted into the “Peoples Republic of Pineland,” find a designated guerrilla group (comprised of former SEALs, Green Beanies and such), earn their confidence and begin to “train” them.  The “guerrillas” don’t make it easy on them. (more…)

On Wednesday night, in an interview with Larry King, the author of what is surely one of the biggest pieces Rolling Stone has ever published revealed his true intentions behind the research and publication of his article.

King asked Michael Hastings, “Is there a part of you that feels bad for the General?” Hastings responded, after giving a bit of praise to McChrystal as an “impressive individual”, by saying “I think the problem becomes, in my view, is when guys like General McChrystal, who spent the last nine years fighting these wars… I think when war becomes your life, I think it’s very difficult to have the proper perspective to be able to create a fully balanced policy. And I think that’s what’s happened here: the policy between the military side of Afghanistan and the diplomatic side is totally out of whack and General McChrystal controlled both of them.”

So Hastings, when asked if he felt any remorse or any negative feelings at all about the fate of the General, responded by making a clear admission that the policy that he personally feels should be executed in Afghanistan was not the same policy that was being pursued by the General. (more…)

The end of a noble military career, live on national television.  Go ahead, play columnist for a day:

In his June 8, 2010, 7,000-plus word Rolling Stone article entitled “The Spill, The Scandal, and the President,” Tim Dickinson fixed blame for the oil leak in the Gulf, but ignored how the effort to fix the mess it’s causing has been badly mismanaged. In that sense, he hit his intended targets, but missed the mark.

The subtitle of the piece identifies his targets.

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder.

The storyline is simple. A notoriously negligent oil company, British Petroleum (BP), plus a corrupt Minerals Management Services (MMS) inherited from Bush, equals The Spill. It’s a variation on the “It’s Bush’s Fault” motif.

Even a Republican Congressman piled on:

It’s tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office. But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill. “Bush owns eight years of the mess,” says Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. “But after more than a year on the job, Salazar owns it too.”

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As everyone knows – everyone, that is, excepting those sophisticates who revere The New York Times – the former “paper of record” routinely plays fast and loose with news that bears on its ideological agenda, both by how (and whether) such stories are reported and, more subtly, by the emphasis they’re given (or not given) by their placement in the paper. Thus it was, for instance, most infamously, that Abu Grahaib was on the paper’s front page for an astonishing 32 straight days; while The Times somehow managed to report on Barack Obama’s dropping a certain Reverend Jeremiah Wright from the ceremony announcing his candidacy for the presidency without getting into the ugly details of precisely what it was that made his self-identified mentor so embarrassing. And, by the way, even then, burying the story on page 19.  The Wright story was there for the taking – he’d already been quoted in all his inflammatory viciousness by Rolling Stone – but, given The Times’s outsized influence with the lemmings of the mainstream media, the practical effect of its indulgent coverage was to bury for a full year the story that would  have surely derailed the freshman senator’s candidacy before it got started.

Then, again, sometimes ideologically difficult stories never get run at all. Which brings us to the curious case of Eric Massa, the upstate New York Democratic congressman who’s just resigned in the face of an ethics investigation for having allegedly harassed an aide. Last Thursday, the Times covered the story the same way as everyone else – okay, they stuck it on page 28, and they didn’t specify the aide was male, (except via a single reference to the aide as “him”), the same way males and females are interchangeable in their wedding announcements, but that sort of lunatic p.c. is pro forma. So, for that matter, was that Massa’s resignation seemed as much a concern for Timesmen David Halbfinger and Raymond Hernandez as for “blindsided Democratic leaders in Washington, who are already facing a brutal political climate as they try to defend the party’s majority in the midterm elections in November.”

Nor was the paper’s Saturday follow-up story on Massa’s mea culpa – “there is no doubt that this ethics issue is my fault and mine alone” –  problematic. Indeed, for Times readers that seemed the end of the story. As usual, they dwell in smug ignorance. (more…)