It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Obama Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder is not just politicized and biased – it’s a hit squad for Obama’s enemies.
Remember when President Obama’s Department of Justice shut down investigation of the New Black Panther Party in the aftermath of their taped voter intimidation in 2008? J. Christian Adams, author of the book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department and former DOJ attorney, exposed the DOJ’s corruption in dropping the case altogether. Or how about when the DOJ stonewalled investigations into Fast and Furious, the gunwalking operation that ended with weapons in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels – weapons used to kill American citizens?
Well, the DOJ is on the warpath again. Not against the New Black Panthers or the Mexican drug cartels – against Rupert Murdoch. According to Reuters, “U.S. authorities are stepping up investigations, including an FBI criminal inquiry, into possible violations by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of a U.S. law banning corrupt payments to foreign officials such as police, law enforcement and corporate sources said.” What’s the evidence on which they’re basing the investigation? Says Reuters, “U.S. investigators have found little to substantiate allegations of phone hacking inside the United States by Murdoch journalists, the sources added.”
So why, then, is the DOJ so intent on finding wrongdoing about Murdoch? It couldn’t have something to do with Murdoch’s ownership of Fox News – the same network the Obama White House tried to exclude from inside administration interviews, according to papers uncovered by Judicial Watch – could it? (more…)
- Big Journalism’s Dana Loesch will be bringing coverage of Iowa with CNN beginning this evening. Larry O’Connor will be bringing coverage from Iowa on UStream; watch Breitbart.tv for details.
Before you get excited that this is a case of MSM turning on Obama, read this graph:
White House officials, however, counter that Mr. Obama’s detachment from Congress could end up benefiting him politically. After all, many Americans regard this Congress as dysfunctional, with abysmal approval ratings.
Its a campaign strategy. This is a president who has hosted countless A-list White House parties; he’s very social, but he needs to give the impression that there exists tension between him and congress because he needs a bogeyman and congress is the perfect foil.
- I dislike David Brooks, but his quip on Romney was funny:
He talks — he sings, or at least recites, some verses from ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ It’s as if he’s running to be Tom Sawyer.”
- Kathy Griffin is much more interested in taking her shirt off for people than people are interested in seeing her take off her shirt.
According to the Associated Press, Discovery is taking the long view and sees this as a three to five year investment, but with Winfrey’s increased involvement it is obvious that this is really the make or break year.
If things don’t improve, by this time next year Discovery could decide to dis-OWN the channel.
President Obama is scheduled to appear before hundreds of donors at a $7,500-a-plate noontime fundraiser today at San Francisco’s W Hotel – but not a single local reporter will be allowed inside to cover his only stop in the area, the White House said Monday.
Coverage instead is being restricted to a small pool of Washington-based reporters – a move that is a sharp departure from the practices of past administrations, political observers said.
Three former top White House press aides called the move insular and politically short-sighted. And some press watchers said it is hypocritical for an administration that Obama promised would be “the most transparent in history.”
Called MyMitt, the platform is tucked away on MittRomney.com, accessible only if you choose to register on the Action page and unadvertised in any proactive way. There’s no button pointing to it from the homepage, and the MyMitt Action Center looks like it’s only partially finished.
Nevertheless, close to 100,000 Romney supporters have created an account on MyMitt, a substantial number at this stage in the race. Here’s why this could be a big deal.
In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign built its own social network at My.BarackObama.com. Known as myBO for short, the platform made it easy for Obama supporters to create their own profiles on the campaign website, to write their own blog posts, start or join interest groups, organize their own house parties and, most important, initiate and track their own fundraisers.
Two million people eventually joined, and 35,000 generated more than $70 million in campaign contributions from their own personal networks. Enabling your supporters to visible share their enthusiasm with each other is a powerful way to grow a political network. Even more useful: The myBO platform also allowed the campaign to figure out which supporters were the most passionate activists and to concentrate attention on these “super-volunteers” for a variety of vital tasks.
While Obama’s re-election campaign brags about getting its millionth individual donor, basks in its 23 million-strong Facebook following and spends millions on building a sophisticated online campaign operation, it might be tempting to write off the Republican presidential candidates as hopelessly behind in the chase for support on the Web.
A “Millionaires March” Tuesday is scheduled to visit the homes of five of the city’s wealthiest residents to protest the December expiration of a tax on the Big Apple’s richest individuals.
NEW YORK – Occupy Wall Street protesters are planning what is dubbed a “Millionaires March” Tuesday to visit Manhattan apartment buildings housing such millionaires as News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, the Daily News reported.
Kanye West Visits Occupy Wall Street ProtestsOccupy Wall Street: Hollywood Continues to Weigh In on the ProtestsThe march is set to visit the homes of five of the city’s wealthiest residents, such as Murdoch, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and billionaire David Koch, according to the paper.
After Media Matters falsely stated that Fox was ignoring the Murdoch scandal (they covered it quite a bit, actually) I thought it wise to check out their version of the Murdoch scandal, that of their financier George Soros reportedly roughing up his girlfriends.
It turns out Media Matters is completely ignoring the story.
There has been a good deal of discussion of late about whether or not the IRS should launch an investigation into Media Matters’ tax-exempt status. In today’s part two of a three part series from FOX Business’ Elizabeth MacDonald, details of the civilian complaint filed by C. Boyden Gray demonstrate why the former White House counsel to President George W. Bush believes that Media Matters should have its tax-exempt status yanked.
Citing a pattern of “unlawful conduct,” Gray writes in his petition, which FOX Business has obtained, that the nonprofit has “executed a partisan strategy” in violation of U.S. tax law as it exists “no longer to educate the public but, rather, to declare ‘war on FOX,’” Gray says, quoting from an interview its founder, David Brock, gave to the website Politico.
Also unlawful, Gray says, is the nonprofit’s reported goal to “disrupt” the commercial interests of News Corp. (News Corp. is the parent of FOX News and FOX Business.)
The phone hacking scandal that has killed the News of the World will surely engulf the entire Murdoch empire.
Could there by any greater cause for celebration? Could there be any news more gleeful? Is any other news worth reporting?
Let the Geraldos and the Hannitys and the van Susterens keep grasping at the unraveling threads of the Casey Anthony trial. They will not report–but you and I can decide: Fox News is done!
The foot soldiers at Media Matters for America, who did such sterling work in exiling Glenn Beck to the castaway island of Internet television, now have a new mission: to haunt every advertiser on the Fox networks, in every slot.
Do you know that by putting your products and services on Fox, you are subsidizing a global criminal enterprise? (more…)
Larry Flynt recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post lambasting Rupert Murdoch. In this piece, Flynt paints a stark contrast between his publishing practices and Murdoch’s regarding privacy: Murdoch “did not just cross the line – he erased it,” whereas Flynt has never “created sensationalism at the expense of people living private lives.” Sensationalism is a wholly separate problem, Mr. Flynt, whether you’ve technically respected privacy or not.
Flynt lives proudly on the outer fringe of free speech. The idea that the most offensive speech/expression is the most in need of protection is a philosophically sound idea whether you like pornography and Flynt’s brand of vulgar political commentary or not. It’s a similar idea regarding the right to bear arms: take assault rifles away and our spectrum of rights get smaller. It’s this defense of free speech that Flynt has been driving home for decades and one that many First Amendment theorists agree with.
Flynt’s assertion that Murdoch has “placed all of us who enjoy freedom of the press at grave risk” is a platitude made in a theoretical vacuum. Flynt’s claim that information procured illegally erodes the public’s trust in print media is pure self-interest on the one hand and a nostalgic yearning for an outdated archetype of a respected media and a virtuous public on the other. The media died, and the public significantly lost its virtue a long time ago, largely due to the fast-moving moral anarchy created by the “anything goes!” philosophy prevalent in publications like Hustler.
I’d argue that as much as anyone, Flynt is the perfect avatar for the trend in America that “the truth is whatever you believe it to be.” When your mission in life is to break down all barriers and taboos, you run the risk of chaos, both culturally and morally. It’s odd hearing Flynt claim the following:
The government needs to get back to its roots: protecting the privacy of its citizens while encouraging the individual freedoms on which this country was founded.
In my estimation, the people responsible for establishing the roots of our freedoms would not have supported Larry Flynt. They would have believed that mass distributed photographs that allow us to take a look inside a woman’s reproductive cavity, whether she was a willing participant or not, to be both morally vile and perhaps the ultimate invasion of privacy, albeit in a different way than Flynt sees it. Flynt would have been seen as a dangerous nihilist whose only goal was to destroy the moral edifice of society upon which our freedoms are based.
LONDON (AP) – News International announced Thursday it is shutting down the News of the World, the best-selling tabloid at the center of Britain’s phone hacking scandal.
James Murdoch, who heads European operations for the paper’s parent company, said the 168-year-old weekly newspaper would publish its last edition on Sunday, without ads.
The abrupt decision to shut the newspaper follows an extraordinary three days in which multiple revelations about intrusive phone hacking cost the paper its advertising base and reader support. The tabloid was found to have hacked into the phone message of a teenage murder victim and was suspected of possibly targeting the relatives of slain soldiers in its quest to produce attention-grabbing headlines.
Britons of all stripes said they were disgusted and revolted by the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper’s tactics and British lawmakers held an emergency debate on Parliament on Wednesday in which many condemned the paper.
The tabloid’s executives had already admitted the widespread hacking of cell phones used by celebrities, film stars, royal aides and politicians and reached cash settlements with prominent victims. But the intrusion into—and possible interference with—an ongoing murder investigation of a child proved to be the final straw in losing the public’s trust. (more…)
In the wake of Tucson, we’re all supposed to be employing a New Tone. In fact, failure to do so is considered grounds for being hounded off the air, at least that’s the standard the shills at Media Matters have applied to Glenn Beck.
But I guess George Soros decided to scrap all that “new tone” business. Yesterday he appeared on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS show and promptly made a comparison between Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch and the Nazis taking over in the wake of the Weimar Republic:
To truly understand how surprising this is you need to know that Media Matters, which Soros supports financially, has been on a two year crusade to have Glenn Beck removed from television. In the last two-four months, a big part of their strategy has been to attack Beck for his use of Nazi references (you can find the mother-lode of oppo-research here). They’ve written dozens of dispatches on this subject, some contain penetrating questions like this:
[D]oes this mean that Beck really thinks that this is a defensible part of the reasonable discourse in this country given that Nazi tactics include detention and execution of political opponents, use of paramilitary force, banning other political parties, and of course the systematic genocide of Jews.
I suppose it’s a fair question. So now that Media Matters’ #1 fan and largest individual donor has done the same thing on national television, what do they have to say about it?
As the Torah says: Thou shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer among thy people (Lev. 19:16). The ancient Jewish Sages took that passage and said that there are three transgressions that would cause a man to lose his place in the world to come: murder, adultery, and idol worship, and that loshon hora (evil speech) is equivalent to all three (Bab. Erchin 15b). Jews believe that the harm done by telling tales about people is worse than the harm done by something like theft because one can repay stolen money, but harm done by speech can never be repaired.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, four-hundred Rabbis joined with a socialist Jewish organization called Jewish Funds for Justice (JFJ) to bring shame upon themselves, their holy profession and the entire Jewish people, and even worse have committed a Chillul Hashem (desecration of God’s name) with an open letter to Fox News against Glenn Beck (the full letter/ad can be seen here).
The letter states, “In the charged political climate in the current civic debate, much is tolerated, and much is ignored or dismissed. But you diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organization you disagree with. That is what Fox News has done in recent weeks, and it is not only ‘left-wing rabbis’ who think so.”
Mr. Beck’s three-day series defaming Holocaust survivor George Soros sparked the letter from rabbis. At that time, Mr. Beck claimed Mr. Soros survived the Holocaust as 14-year-old boy by collaborating with the Nazis to send other Jews to the death camps. Mr. Beck said, that Mr. Soros “used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here’s a Jewish boy helping send Jews to the death camps.”
Mr. Beck’s three-day attack on Mr. Soros was hardly the first time he has misused the Holocaust to incite viewers. The rabbis’ note Mr. Beck has made “literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom [Beck] disagree[s].” Beck routinely compares American leaders to Nazis, has likened his crusade against progressives to that of “Israeli Nazi Hunters,” and has said that putting the “common good” first leads to “death camps.”
In the face of mounting criticism by Jewish groups, Fox News chief Roger Ailes dismissed criticism of Mr. Beck in an interview with the Daily Beast as nothing more than “left-wing rabbis who basically don’t think that anybody can ever use the word ‘Holocaust’ on the air.”
We respectfully request that Glenn Beck be sanctioned by Fox News for his completely unacceptable attacks on a survivor of the Holocaust and Roger Ailes apologize for his dismissive remarks about rabbis’ sensitivity to how the Holocaust is used on the air.”
Loshen Hora is not permitted even when true, but in this case there is nothing to worry about because it’s not true.
Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog that spends most of its time attacking Fox News, won a charity auction lunch with Rupert Murdoch for $86,000.
“I look forward to this opportunity to have a friendly lunch with Rupert Murdoch, along with five of my invited guests,” said David Brock, the Media Matters founder and CEO who will be doing the actual lunching. “I will soon contact Mr. Murdoch’s office to determine a mutually convenient time and place in New York.”
Besides the first question, how does a a 501(c)(3) afford this?How can they still operate as a 501(c)(3) when the outfit behaves as a tool through which Soros exercises his hatred of all things conservative?
If you’re tuning in to Sunday’s lineup of network TV news shows, remember this interesting fact: Democrats received 88 percent of 2008 political contributions from ABC, CBS and NBC executives, writers and reporters. Their donations to Democrats totaled more than $1 million.
The Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott has the scoop. Working with the Center for Responsive Politics — proprietor of OpenSecrets.org — Tapscott discovered the overwhelming imbalance. Here’s a breakdown of the data by party affiliation:
The Democratic total of $1,020,816 was given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks, with an average contribution of $880.
By contrast, only 193 of the employees contributed to Republican candidates and campaign committees, for a total of $142,863. The average Republican contribution was $744.
Columbia University is the place where leftists give leftist journalists Pulitzer Prizes and then tell each other how prestigious leftist journalism is because—wow!—look at all the Pulitzers they’ve won.
This week, the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, wrote a specious opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, crying that American journalism, dying in the free market, needs to be bailed out by government support.
Katie Couric Lip-Synching Foreground While Leftism Sings Behind.
Two memories come to mind from my years in England during the nineties:
In the first, recovering from an operation, I’m watching television and trying not to bust my stitches laughing at an hilarious sketch by young comedians Hugh Laurie (now TV’s House) and Stephen Frye. In a send-up of It’s A Wonderful Life, Frye’s angel is showing Laurie’s villainous Rupert Murdoch what the world would be like if he’d never been born: a virtual paradise!
And again, I’m watching TV. Innovative writer Dennis Potter, dying of pancreatic cancer, gives a final interview to presenter Melvyn Bragg. As Bragg chuckles amiably, Potter declares he has named his cancer after Murdoch and that he would use his last days on earth to “shoot the bugger if I could.” (more…)
The Wall Street Journal must be doing something right, even if it doesn’t have the respect of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
The latest numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations show the Journal with a healthy gain of 3.37 percent over the six-month period that ended March 31. With an average circulation of 2,092,523 during the workweek, it remains the most-read newspaper in America.
Yet success on the newsstands hasn’t translated into recognition among the newspaper’s peers. Even though the Journal continues to innovate — recently launching a local edition to challenge an old rival, the New York Times — the newspaper hasn’t won a Pulitzer Prize since 2007.
In other words, the Journal hasn’t been awarded journalism’s most coveted prize since conservative publisher Rupert Murdoch acquired the newspaper.
As the New York Observer recently noted, former Journal editor Paul Steiger has won more awards running ProPublica, the liberal-leaning nonprofit, than the Journal has since Murdoch bought Dow Jones & Co., its publisher, from the Bancroft family.
We’ve already seen in the past how symbiotic the relationship is between MSNBC (whose ratings are cratering among adults 25-54) and Media Matters. Witness the now infamous “interview” conducted by suspended MSNBC employee David Shuster and Andrew Breitbart. His question at the 2:55 mark repeats an attack that appeared on Media Matters the very same day of the interview, January 28.
To make things even cozier, after Breitbart’s segment with Shuster, the not-quite-canned-yet reporter then turned to his next guest, Eric Boehlert, Senior Fellow at (you guessed it) Media Matters. Let’s just say the line of questioning was a little friendlier for Boehlert. Sample question:
What about the standard that is used at websites like Andrew Breitbart’s, the idea that even today you can go ahead and talk about “alleged crimes” of ACORN employees when there has (sic) been no crimes alleged… what’s that about?
But now, the MSNBC/MMFA ecosystem has come full circle as they now appear to work in mysterious tandem with each other to not just report stories, but to help create stories, report stories, and then cross-promote those stories. (more…)
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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