Continuing our series illustrating how MSNBC relies on Media Matters (the Soros-funded non-profit organization whose dubious tax-exempt status is currently under fire) as their research department, we are pleased to present the Martin Bashir edition.
Watch how Mr. Bashir relies on actual, suggested questions supplied by the sad clowns at Media Matters in reaction to his colleague Dylan Ratigan’s interview of Andrew Breitbart that took place the day before. Media Matters scolded Ratigan for not confronting Breitbart and offered examples of questions he SHOULD have asked.
“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)
What drove Glenn Beck to tell an increasingly large series of lies about his participation in the Shirley Sherrod story that broke back in July, 2010?
Why would he tell both TV and live audiences things like this….
Shirley Sherrod, is the next example. We didn’t rush to condemn her. This is another seemingly “redistribution of wealth” woman — who I would bet that I vehemently disagree with on probably everything. But she asked for the rest of the tape to be heard, the farmers in the story backed her up. It was a turning point story. We defended her and said her side of the story demanded to be heard — because context matters…
or this?
I have a story I want to share with you that I haven’t shared yet. Do you know why I didn’t do the Shirley Sherrod story? Did anyone think that story was uncommon for the people that we have in the White House? That there might be some prejudice that is happening? No.I stood in my office with my entire team, and I said, “something’s wrong, don’t do this story.”That’s what saved me: the Sword of the Spirit.
As you’ll see, both of those statements are totally false. Glenn Beck not only didn’t initially defend Sherrod but he actually dropped the entire context that Sherrod’s video clip was originally presented in. Close to a year later, Beck still hasn’t been honest about his initial context dropping attacks on Sherrod.
So – why? Did Beck start spinning a story and was unable to discern truth from fiction? Did he enjoy the praise he got from left wing sources, who believed his spin?
Hitler represents of one of the most atrocious periods in the history of the entire world. His twelve year reign had a profound impact on the lives of many. Throughout the years of 1933 and 1945, Hitler invaded ten countries , including Poland, where one side of my stepfather’s family lived until 1940, when they were forcefully removed and put into concentration camps. The first husband of his mother was a Polish officer, and shortly after Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi Soviet Non-Aggression pact, he and other Polish officers were taken from their families, brought into the Katyn Forest, and summarily executed – simply for being Polish officers.
Under the Nazi regime, it is estimated that as many as between 11 million and 17 million civilians were killed – nearly 6 million of those exterminated solely for being Jewish. It’s been only 78 years since Hitler and the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and their reign remains an open wound – in the context of history, this is still a very recent occurrence. Survivors of this period are still with us today, as are first and second generation family members , many of whom are right here in the United States.
That’s why on May 18th , when I saw a post in the Guardian titled Andrew Breitbart’s ‘Electronic Brownshirts’, my hair stood on end. Who could write such a title? The author turned out to be none other than Amy Goodman, who hosts the famously popular daily progressive news program “Democracy Now“, and is also frequently referred to as a respected “progressive journalist“, investigative reporter and peace advocate. It was a post in defense of the controversial labor studies course that was the recent focus of a BigGovernment expose.
Tim Barker at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch falsely claimed that the exculpatory portion of Shirley Sherrod’s remarks were not included in the original posting or video originally posted on Big Government. Barker writes:
This isn’t the first controversy created by Breitbart’s heavy editing of videos. In another recent incident, a U.S. Agriculture Department employee was fired over what appeared to be a racist remark made in a speech. It was later revealed that the edited video left out a part of her speech that explained her comment as being part of a lesson on racial healing.
The story appeared in both the print and online version of the paper.
This claim is categorically false and is evident to anyone who took the time to read the actual original post, which included Sherrod’s exculpatory remarks and this commentary from Andrew Breitbart:
… Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help.
Smitten by her blonde curls and still blissfully unaware of how cruel the world could be, at the age of eleven I called my first crush on the phone fully confident it would end with the beginning of a lifelong romance. Yes, I had watched many a friend go down in a flaming ball of fail in similar situations, watched them die slow deaths brought on by awkward pauses and fits of panic blanking the mind. But that wasn’t going to happen to me. I had learned from their trauma. There was no way anything could go wrong because I … had written a script that laid out every possible conversational scenario…
If you’re wondering how my pathetic little phone call went, watch Laura Flanders’ sorry attempt (video here) to confront Andrew Breitbart. Methinks that the moment Flanders learned she would be on national television seated next to Breitbart, visions of liberal glory popped off in her fevered mind as she plotted to publicly demand he apologize to Shirley Sherrod.
Train meet wreck. Ooh, that left a mark. But the truth usually does.
I was in the audience last night (pretty sure that’s Alex Marlow and I clapping all by our lonesome at the 11:05 mark), and while the crowd (who took our solo applause in stride) was obviously on Flanders’ side politically, her humorlessness eventually cost her their sympathy. Throughout the night, she tossed out one wet blanket after another with her joyless left-wing talking points that violated the spirit of the conservation. Eventually, in the “Overtime” segment, Breitbart turned to her and said:
Andrew Breitbart was confronted on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” by liberal political analyst Laura Flanders. Ignoring Maher’s questions and moving on her own agenda for the show she challenged Breitbart to apologize to Shirley Sherrod. It didn’t end well for Ms. Flanders.
You have to hand it to Andrew Breitbart; he doesn’t avoid “enemy” territory. The political activist/web entrepreneur/ showman is on tour hawking his new book, Righteous Indignation.
Yesterday, the book tour took him to Martin Bashir’s program on MSNBC. But instead of having an opportunity to discuss his book, Breitbart walked into an ambush where the TV host tried to pin false charges of racism on the author.
For those of you who are not familiar with Bashir, he made his name in 2003 with a “news” special called “Living with Michael Jackson.” After spending eight-months as part of Jackson’s entourage, Bashir conducted a series of interviews with the pop singer. The final edit of the interview was widely seen as an example of yellow journalism, deliberately skewed to make the entertainer look a certain way.
It was obvious that Bashir exploited the friendship he developed with the singer to further his own career. Following the broadcast, The New York Timescalled Bashir’s journalism style “callous self-interest masked as sympathy.”
John Hawkins of RightWing News recently interviewed Andrew Breitbart about his new book. It’s a fun interview and a great read!
I always find it fascinating when people who used to be liberal say they turned to the right. That happened with you. Can you tell us about it?
Well, it’s a cliché from the left to the right. And it’s usually a story of opportunism in those few cases where the people move from the right to the left. It’s almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible. It was go-along to get-along social. It was living in Los Angeles, being young, and single, and flowing with the trendy liberal crowd.
When I started to work in Hollywood at a fairly low level delivering scripts around town, listening to AM talk radio, I at first listened to it as a novelty. But I started to have certain things in my life going on such as living in a rent controlled apartment, having listened to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the OJ Simpson trial — I just started to see trends in my personal experiences that ran so contrary to what the media narratives were. At first I was flummoxed by it and then I just started to listen to certain people on the radio who were more clear thinking than the professors that I had in college.
I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose high lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense but I thought that was my problem. So when I started to listen to conservative thinkers and to read conservative thinkers, there was a clarity of thought. It wasn’t muddled. It wasn’t confusing. It started to make sense at an intellectual level and tie into the values that my parents gave me when I was a young kid that I diverted from when I was in high school.
So it was basically a reconnecting with everything that my parents attempted to instill in me in my youth. It has made me sleep a lot better at night, being centered and oriented with human nature as opposed to living in a world of self loathing nihilism, trying to undo human nature, and trying to create a path towards an unrealistic utopia.
Now, you were recently banned from the front page of The Huffington Post….
Oh, the tragedy of my life.
(Laughs) It is, it is. Apparently you made some sort of ad hominem attack on Van Jones and The Huffington Post has a policy against that. It must have been in place for at least two minutes or so before you were banned. Can you talk about that?
The group founded by Van Jones (remember him?) is breathless in their hysteria and somehow managed to blame Andrew Breitbart for the words which fell from the mouths of Planned Parenthood employees.
The rightwing smear machine that took down Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones and ACORN is at it again. This time they are going after Planned Parenthood.
Are the willful actions of employees part of the “rightwing smear machine?” [Editor's note: Dibbs on the band name.] Unless … oh my: Andrew Breitbart has discovered a cloaking capability which allows him to, sight unseen, manipulate the words and actions of individuals across the country from him.
I stated incorrectly that Andrew Breitbart selectively edited the Shirley Sherrod video that got her fired from the US Department of Agriculture. Instead, he was involved in promoting the out-of-context video excerpts on his new sites.
Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind.” She refers him to a white lawyer.
Despite the correction, the NPR Ombudsman continues her pattern of irresponsible journalism in order to smear Breitbart and his family of websites.
***
Yesterday, NPR’s Ombudsman released a column entitled “NPR Blog on Planned Parenthood Sting Earns Critics,” where the author’s critique of her own organization quickly devolves into a two-minute hate against Andrew Breitbart. Alicia C. Shepard took the opportunity to trot out some of the left’s favorite anti-Breitbart talking points. A highlight:
Breitbart posted the [ACORN] videos at biggovernment.com. ACORN, a left-leaning community services organization, subsequently was forced out of business, even though it had become clear that the videos had been heavily edited to make the actions of ACORN employees appear worse than they were.
Shepard is intentionally cryptic when she writes the “ACORN employees appear worse than they were,” but she’s presumably referring to the fact that the ACORN employees, who appeared to be engaging in illegal activities, were “cleared legally.” It is a huge misconception that the ACORN employees were cleared because of malicious editing; they were not in violation of the law because the undercover actors didn’t have criminal intent. This is all explained on page 16 in Jerry Brown’s ACORN California report: (more…)
Remember when Brian Williams showcased the story of Pigford whistleblower Jimmy Dismuke’s firsthand account of fraud in the case?
“Even if you got a potted plant, that makes you a farmer,” Dismuke recalled of the meetings he attended with Thomas Burrell, President of the Black Farmers and Agriculture Association. ”I thought that was pretty odd because I was really a farmer. I didn’t know that was the easy way you could farm and get money!”
Or do you remember the “60 Minutes” special on the Pigford fraud and the loss of attention to real discrimination due to those who smelled a payout?
Lawyers were churning applications. My name starts turning up on documents as someone who denied someone services. Trouble was those people were hundreds of miles away. I think there was something like 700 forms filed with my name on them—it was outrageous. I had never heard of any of them. I discovered that my name had been put on leaflets, which charges that I was a racist, and people just put my name on Pigford applications. I finally had to get black farmers to vouch for me. They all said I treated everyone fairly, which is what I tried to do.
What about the White House Press Corps asking President Obama if he knew how racked with fraud Pigford had become? Remember when the media grilled Shirley Sherrod and asked her what her involvement was with Pigford and if this was the reason Tom Vilsack fired her so quickly, to keep this story from getting out and upsetting the apple cart that was to be its passage?
Remember Lawerence O’Donnell’s segment asking who exactly is getting paid and who lobbied for whom?
No, you can’t remember because it never happened. Why? Because as Dismuke says, none of this was made public due to political purposes. Our embarrassment of a national press are guilty of dereliction of duty. The watchdogs for the people invested not in first-class reporting to ensure their longevity in an era where the Internet is changing how news is done, but rather they invested in Barack Obama, tying all their hopes, their dreams, their credibility, to him. If he fails, they fail, and they know it.
I knew I was going to be whacked hard, but I didn’t know when.
On Thursday, July 15th, I warned NAACP president Ben Jealous to stop the race-baiting. I directed my ire at Jealous on the Scott Hennen radio show:
“I have tapes, a tape, of racism, and it’s an NAACP dinner. You want to play with fire? I have evidence of racism, and it’s coming from the NAACP.”
This was part of an ongoing defense of the Tea Party, and in particular, a volley back against the NAACP for creating a week-long mainstream media-enabled attack built upon the provably false premise that a “mob” of the Tea Partiers hurled racial epithets at Congressmen Andre Carson (D-In) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga).
“You are manufacturing this in a summer in which the economy is the No. 1 issue affecting blacks and whites in this country,” I said on Hennen’s show. “This country can ill-afford the schism of race to be exploited the way you are, based upon the false premise of the Tea Party being racist… This is absolutely manufactured for political gain.”
My warning to Jealous was received with modest coverage in the conservative blogosphere.
I strongly believed, and still believe, that I had irrefutable evidence that showed the NAACP caught in an act of racism far worse than anything the media and the Democrat Party had attempted to manufacture in a year and a half of relentlessly trying to destroy the Tea Party. (more…)
The Huffington Post regularly receives criticism on this site for offenses ranging from bias to outright absurdity, but every now and we’re surprised.
Take for instance blogger Lee Stranahan’s analysis of conservatives’ treatment and the fradulent claims in Pigford and how the media just hasn’t gotten around to actually talking about it – as seen most recently in the Rep.King vs. John Boyd battle on AC360 last week.
If you’re a progressive and you think the right tosses out the term ’socialist’ like an odd form of Ayn Rand Tourette’s Syndrome, just take a look at the comments section of your favorite left wing blog (including HuffPost, to be fair) and see how often the word ‘racist’ gets used as pretty much the sole argument against someone.
[...]
King is making a factual claim. Why not follow that line of inquiry? Why go down the racist rabbit hole? Show me the box and the dude. If you can’t show them to me, explain why you can’t. The box is either real or not and it either proves that there were more than three (3!) fraudulent claims or it doesn’t.
And even a few fraudulent claims add up. Let’s do some simple math.
Those defending NPR’s reactions say that Williams “smeared” Muslims and portrayed them in a bad light.
Does not a group of men hijacking planes and flying them into the World Trade Center killing over three thousand people in the name of Islam portray Islam in a bad light?
Does not men hijacking a plane to fly into the Pentagon in the name of Islam portray Islam in a bad light?
When individuals strap bombs onto their bodies and detonate in public thoroughfares, killing men, women, and precious innocent children, all in the name of Islam, does not that paint Islam in a bad light?
When men bomb the USS Cole in the name of Islam, does that not portray Islam in a bad light?
When a Chechen group terrorizes school childrenin Beslan in the name of Islam, does that not portray Islam in a bad light?
I adore it when a publication commits a heinous irony while attempting to condescend to its ideological opposition in a long and tortuously drawn out essay. Behold, The Atlantic presents you with this comedic headline, comedic, considering the subhead that follows: How can Americans talk to one another—let alone engage in political debate—when the Web allows every side to invent its own facts?
THIS PAST AUGUST, the left-leaning San Francisco–based Web site AlterNet posted a remarkable scoop: members of a group calling itself the Digg Patriots were banding together to promote conservative-leaning online stories and to drive down the rankings of stories that the group felt showed a liberal bias.
[...]
Further, the AlterNet story alleged, Digg Patriots were creating ghost accounts whereby they could muster “bury brigades” with far more influence than their actual numbers permitted. “One bury brigade in particular,” the article said, became “so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours.” The effect of this burying was to prevent other Digg users from finding those articles and rendering their own opinions on them, effectively coming as close to censorship as is possible in the social-media sphere. After the AlterNet article was posted, the Digg Patriots user group was taken down, and Digg eliminated the “bury” option on its site; Digg also began an internal investigation into AlterNet’s claims.
As important as it is to point out moments of bias in the mainstream media, it’s also important to point out moments when the mainstream media gives us a glimmer of – dare I say – “hope” that someone out there wants to do their job. Anderson Cooper has certainly had moments of blatant bias. A good example is when he did an investigative report on Planned Parenthood. Cooper came to the table with the belief that abortion clinics, as they are now, are a necessity and that they should be covered by insurance. But recently Anderson Cooper has shown on more than one occasion that he is capable of giving a hard interview to the normally unchallenged left. It started with Shirley Sharrod. When Sherrod went on AC360, Cooper let her claim that Andrew Breitbart wanted to take us back to a time of slavery unchallenged. Cooper later apologized to his viewers and since then has found a new vigor in interviewing controversial guests.
The left uses CNN as their crutch for “brave” interviews. If you go on MSNBC it’s just too obvious that you’re not interested in having an interview with any real challenge. When Rep. Bernice Johnson went on Anderson Cooper a few weeks ago, she got way more than she bargained for and we applauded Mr. Cooper for that. It’s time once again to give credit where credit is due to Mr. Cooper.
L’Affaire Sherrod provided a rare peek into a potential legal and government boondoogle: The Pigford Settlement. The Settlement arose out of a handful of credible claims of racism by black farmers against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Tens of thousands of claims later, the final chunk of money to pay off the settlement, about $1.5 billion, awaits action by the U.S. Senate.
Soon after Shirley Sherrod was fired by the USDA, it was revealed that she and her husband were among the biggest recipients of Pigford, personally receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars for ‘pain and suffering,’ while their collective farm was tapped to get over $13 million. It also emerged that Ms. Sherrod was hired by the USDA just days after her settlement was announced. Hmm.
In the video below, Fox News begins to explore several issues related to the Pigford settlement.
As they say, “Stay tuned.” There is a lot more to this story. We will begin telling it over the next several weeks. We don’t yet have all the answers, but what we’ve learned so far has shocked our own cynical selves.
It seems to me that the truth ought to be a defense against any charge of racism or slander. You shouldn’t be able to generate outrage over the fact that person A calls person B a communist, for instance, if person B is on record identifying himself as a communist.
And yet that’s partly what Rachel Maddow does in her extremely lame attempt to prove that Fox News in general and Bill O’Reilly in particular are trying to make white people afraid of black people. She gives us the following examples:
The Shirley Sherrod video
ACORN sting videos
Van Jones is a Marxist
Eugene Robinson “traffics in racism”
Black/White divide on limited government
Let’s go through these, in terms of news value, one at a time… (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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