George Soros, billionaire investor and grand patron of the American institutional left, has just failed in his attempt to have his 2002 conviction for insider trading in France overturned. He plans to appeal.

The Soros result has gone virtually unnoticed in the U.S. media, which has paid more attention to a rather lame attempt by Bloomberg Markets magazine to develop the Koch brothers conspiracy theory into a tale of global corruption.

How bad was that article? The Atlantic summed it up nicely:

The article purports to be a hard-hitting exposé on the giant multinational, run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. According to Bloomberg, 14 reporters around the globe worked for six months on the story. What did they turn up? Really, shockingly little. And what’s worse: from the very outset, the reporters’ bias against the Koch brothers is utterly clear.

Meanwhile, Media Matters for America–the Soros-funded, self-appointed would-be censor of conservative opinion–continues hankering after the Koch brothers.

And just in time to catch the Astroturf fever of #OccupyWallStreet, Democrats are rumored to be heading to this weekend’s Sunday news shows armed with talking points about the Koch brothers’ alleged past dealings in Iran through a foreign subsidiary.

Yet Rahm Emanuel, who will appear on NBC’s Meet the Press, and Nancy Pelosi, who will appear on ABC’s This Week, received campaign contributions from companies alleged to have operated in Iran through subsidiaries–including Honeywell, for example, which has contributed to both. (more…)

Last weekend Americans For Prosperity once again held its RightOnLine conference, this year in beautiful downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. Consequently, the Atlantic Magazine decided to do a report on what went on at RightOnLine. Unfortunately, the whole thing was filled with opinions stated as fact, misconstructions of facts, and outright lies. Sadly, along with the rest of the Old Media, it seems as if the veracity of The Atlantic has taken a hit in this bad Obama economy.

The Atlantic assigned third string reporter Tina Dupuy to handle the RightOnLine retrospective, apparently, if her reports are any indication, because she was already in town to cover Netroots Nation. Netroots Nation is the far left conference made famous by the Daily Kos and its YearlyKos conference. YearlyKos started in 2006 and was later re-branded as Netroots Nation in 2008.

As always the RightOnLine event was held at the same time and in the same city as this year’s left-wing extravaganza. AFP does this because, in AFP President Tim Phillips’ words, “to see the true nature of our opponents.”

In order to ingratiate herself with the Nutrooters, at the top of her piece the Atlantic’s Dupuy went right for the left’s favorite boogey men: the dreaded Koch Brothers. Dupuy lamented, “Why is there a giant Koch-funded conservative gathering at the same time and in the same city as Netroots Nation, anyway?”

The question is laced with a typical authoritarian, leftist mindset. Its base assumption seems to be a raise of the eyebrow that the conservative group would dare visit the same city at the same time as the Netrooters. With her very question Dupuy seems to be saying that the conservative groups should somehow not even be allowed to confront the Netrooters head on. It’s a travesty, a shock, an affront to the good Nutrooters, I guess.

Someone has neglected to tell Dupuy that in America conservatives don’t have to ask lefties for permission to hold a conference.

Dupuy’s very second paragraph incongruously hung another lefty trope onto her coverage of RightOnLine. Dupuy belabored the contrasting of RightOnLine and Netroots Nation by trying to say that AFP’s event is somehow like a crisis pregnancy center fooling young women into entering only to find themselves being pressured not to have an abortion.

It was an absurd and malapropos comparison, but good reporting wasn’t Dupuy’s goal. Showing her far left pals that she is one of the kool kids was.

After a few paragraphs about Netroots Nation, Dupuy discusses the costs of the two conferences. Netroots Nation costs its attendees “a staggering $355 per registration,” Dupuy tells us. Meanwhile, RightOnLine is only $120 per person.

Dupuy thinks she knows why this is true: it’s them gosh darn Koch Brothers, dontcha know!

(more…)

As we’ve noted here at Big Journalism, faux-conservative blogger Conor Friedersdorf, now with the Atlantic, has made it his personal mission to police Andrew Breitbart and his websites.  In Internet parlance, he’s known as a troll.  Today he reviews the first chapter of Andrew Breitbart’s new book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (out today!), and claims to have refuted Breitbart’s calling-card claim “America is in a media war.”  There’s no need to read the article, however (but feel free), since The Atlantic demolishes Friedersdorf’s point while proving Breitbart’s just by publishing the article.  The left-leaning establishment news outlet that’s been around over 150 years published a hit piece by a writer creepily obsessed with Breitbart before he has even finished the book.  This effort to strangle the conservative media mogul’s book in the crib sure seems like “media war” to me.

The fact that Friedersdorf’s post is possible–ney, expected–just as the book is hitting stores, is exactly why Righteous Indignation and continuing to shed light on the fact that the establishment press is conservative America’s primary adversary is so important. (more…)

Conor Friedersdorf, subbing for Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, is trying to tell you how to talk about Pigford.

In a couple of pieces recently, Friedersdorf focuses on the gap between the number of Pigford claimants and census records of the number of the black farmers. It’s an odd issue to focus on – although Media Matters does it, too – because it doesn’t really prove anything. It’s just floating numbers. What does prove something are the testimonies of Jimmy Dismuke, Willie Head, Eddie Slaughter, Lucious Abrams, and other black farmers who all have first hand knowledge of Pigford fraud.

Of course, Friedersdorf doesn’t mention the black farmers. They aren’t his concern. He’s much more interested in slicing and dicing numbers, comparing reports and – mostly – trying to impugn the motives of people like Andrew Breitbart (and Republicans in general) for covering the story in the first place.

Friedersdorf doesn’t care about the black farmers and their stories, so he can’t imagine anyone else caring, either.

And then the echo chamber begins, with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates discussing the motivation of Republicans while ignoring the actual black farmers and then The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer opining on what Friedersdorf and Coates said, while once again ignoring what the black farmers said. (more…)

If one looks at the politics of pseudo-conservatives Andrew Sullivan and Conor Friederdorf at the Daily Dish, along with their link patterns, they may be more Trotskyites than conservatives. Propped up by a Left-leaning magazine and approvingly linking to the Left more often than the Right, they are also conducting a not-so-subtle campaign to quash the most ardent and honest voices of conservatism.

Yesterday, they again partnered with the Left to launch a dishonest attack on National Review’s Andy McCarthy. Below, the aptly named Adam Serwer writes for the American Prospect. One can make what they will of Beck’s bit. A McCarthy passage Friedersdorf dishonestly casts as the same thing Beck is saying isn’t that at all. But Friedersdorf never seems to have a problem lying to push his agenda.

Once again, Adam Serwer is calling out Rich Lowry for criticizing Glenn Beck’s loony ideas even as he publishes similar stuff:

Either these guys don’t read their own magazines, or they’re perfectly comfortable printing paranoid nonsense about American liberals and Islam if it fits with their political agenda. The only real difference between Beck, Kristol, and Lowry is that the latter two let the mask slip more often.

That goes a bit too far, but it’s true that Lowry has published lots of indefensible work by Andy McCarthy. And every so often you’ll see something at NRO that makes you wonder what exactly they’re about:

Below is what McCarthy wrote that has Friedersdorf attacking him. It’s fact-based, not the thinking of some crazed conspiracy nut. Conservatives have had problems with State as far back as WWII. It’s no secret that they often tend toward accommodation, as opposed to confrontation, when it comes to America’s enemies. (more…)

This is really priceless. Since the Arizona shootings, Sullivan has been on a tear about the right’s rhetoric. After more than a week of this nonsense, Megan McArdle finally let Sullivan have it:

Andrew’s defense seems to be that there are a lot of right wing jerks out there, and that by combing Loughner’s writing, he can find a few sentences here and there that sort of sound like things that might have been said by one of those right wing jerks.  But I’m pretty sure that if I combed Loughner’s writing, I could find some sentences here and there that imply that Loughner read Andrew’s writing, or gay rights literature, or Edmund Burke.

Sullivan responded to McArdle Friday by quoting the paragraph above and saying:

Really? Go ahead. Make my day. Or withdraw the claim.

(more…)

Even as the early, sketchy details of the shooting incident in Arizona were still emerging some members of the left-leaning media were already trying to tie the killer to Tea Party activism in general and Sarah Palin in particular.

Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic.com was early to attempt to link lunatic killer Jared Loughner to the Tea Party, but he wasn’t the only one. The Washington Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar immediately attempted to color the story as an example of the “militant rhetoric” of the Tea Party movement and Sarah Palin.

Liberals on Saturday blamed the tea party movement’s sometimes militant rhetoric — for example, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s advice to her supporters via Twitter, “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD,” or Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R) advocating “second-amendment remedies” for some of the nation’s problems. Palin had also posted a U.S. map depicting crosshairs over the states where she hoped to oust Democratic incumbents. That map no longer appears on the Web site of her political action committee.

Additionally, within minutes of the attack, hard left-winger Paul Krugman of the New York Times asserted that the reason Giffords was shot was because her seat was not turned over to Republicans. Despite that no political motive was at all known, Krugman immediately asserted that it was the fault of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.

As to Andrew Sullivan, on his DailyDish blog for the Atlantic, Sullivan posted an unconfirmed and anonymous claim from “a reader” who claimed to have heard people in a store callously saying that they were glad that a Republican could be appointed to replace the wounded Giffords. This “reader” also claimed that one of them said, “Well, that’s to be expected when you’re so liberal.”

Sullivan’s disgusting attempt to smear conservatives went on even as it was emerging that the killer’s ideology seems incoherent and not legitimately anchored in the left or the right.

(more…)

According to Israeli police, the horrible Israeli wildfire that killed 42 people and forced the evacuation of thousands of others from the outskirts of Haifa through the Mount Carmel region of the country had finally been extinguished. The fire could not have been put out without the help of the sixteen other countries including Greece, Egypt and the United States. In response to the catastrophic forest fires in Israel, charities across the world have been collecting money to help the newly homeless rebuild and the injured to heal. But not everybody supports the effort.

In a surprising article, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, urged people not to contribute to these efforts. Called, Don’t Give to the Jewish National Fund. Goldberg urges people not to donate because the Israeli’s have money.

Israel’s per capita GDP is nearly $30,000. Israel is a rich country. The fact that it doesn’t possess adequate firefighting equipment is its own fault. The fact that the leadership of its fire service is incompetent is its own fault.  At some point, the good-hearted Diaspora Jews who still think of Israel as a charity case are going to have to tell their cousins to learn to fully-fund basic services like firefighting if they want to be thought of as citizens of an advanced country.

There are a great many good causes in Israel that deserve help, and a great many causes here in America that deserve our help. It seems to me, however, that Israel’s national fire service should be funded by Israel’s government, not by the people of Boca Raton, Potomac and the Upper West Side.

There are some who will say that Goldberg wrote his article because he is some kind of  self-hating Jew, or anti-Semite, those people are simply ignorant. Just because a Jew disagrees with Israel it does not make them a hater of Jews or Israel and that argument is counter-productive to the discusion. Jeff Goldberg is not making his request out of some hatred for the Jewish State, based on his writing he is a supporter of Israel, and often defends Israel against  attacks from his colleague at the  Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan.  He is requesting that his readers abandon the victims of the Carmel fire out of faulty logic.

(more…)

I’ve long known The Atlantic has at least one resident Jew hater and Israel basher in Andrew Sullivan. It appears the virus has spread to Jeff Goldberg as well.

In response to the catastrophic forest fires in Israel, the Jewish National Fund has mounted a special campaign asking for donations for its “Forest Fire Emergency Campaign.”

Goldberg urges people not to donate, because after all, those Rich Jew Boys have plenty of money, and besides, it’s all their own fault anyway for not having their fire services up to Goldberg’s standards, him being an expert and all.

(more…)

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.

And? The Atlantic bases their shock on the presupposition that the left would never do anything of the sort.

(more…)

John Donvan and Caren Zucker have written a beautiful article for The Atlantic, entitled, “Autism’s First Child”, accompanied by a video packet that ran on Good Morning America and followed by a lengthy interview on NPR, about the first patient ever diagnosed with autism, Donald Triplett.  These reporters share how they searched and found this man who had been lost to history, and share with the world what a successful life he turned out to have.

Donald was raised in a small town, by parents who stuck by him despite the recommendation of professionals to institutionalize him, and alongside neighbors who loved, accepted and supported him.  He went to college, joined a fraternity, worked at a bank, drives a car and plays golf.  It is a story that, as a mother of an eight-year-old boy with autism, gives me hope.

But the problem is that it wasn’t the whole story, or the most newsworthy part of the story.

You see, in 1943, Leo Kanner, a Johns Hopkins child psychologist, wrote a paper in which he described a rare disorder he found in eleven children.  The disorder became known as “autism” and Kanner referred to the first case he found as “Donald T.”, a boy who was indeed lost to history.  And it was a journalist who found that Donald was still alive and living well in Mississippi.  But it wasn’t ABC’s Donvan and Zucker who found him in 2010.  It was a UPI’s Dan Olmsted who found him in 2005. (more…)

Fidel Castro recently bestowed the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg with an exclusive interview. More than a mere exclusive, this is the first interview granted by the Stalinist dictator to an American reporter in four years.

The MSM is absolutely agog with the catalogue of insights, woes and regrets bequeathed by the Cuban mass-murderer to Goldberg. “I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting” writes Goldberg.

“‘The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Castro replied.  And as mentioned the MSM and assorted “Cuba Analysts” are all aflutter over Castro’s “epiphany,”  “honesty,” “regret,” –take your pick—“that Communism “doesn’t work.”

Some actual study of recent Cuban history might enlighten these learned parties. To wit:

“This doesn’t work, I’m resigning!” (Fidel Castro, July 1959 during political crisis with his puppet “President” Manuel Urrutia)

“This doesn’t work! Terrible mistakes were made (especially in adopting Che Guevara’s moral incentives)–we need material capitalistic incentives. So I’m resigning!” (Fidel Castro, July 1970, after the much-ballyhooed “10 million ton” sugar harvest proved way short and utterly disastrous.)

“The capitalists organize production better than we do. There’s much we can learn from them.” (Fidel Castro, 1986 during “Rectification Process” i.e. another “re-evaluation” after another economic crisis.) (more…)

Ah, why don’t conservatives love Conor Friedersdorf? He is one of us, is he not? He even wants to help Andrew Breitbart – and even us poor little old folks here at Big Journalism. Things here would be fine with a little free counseling from Friedersdorf, who, as Features Editor, helped run website Culture 11 into the ground in record time, ” its lifespan was like one of those bugs that hatches, mates, and dies in just a few days,” wasting millions in the process. Oh, the unaccomplished Conor Friedersdorf was still in grad school in 2008. But he knows it all. I suppose the boy learns quick.

When I criticize Mr. Breitbart, or his sites Big Hollywood, Big Government and Big Journalism, part of my project is pressuring them to do better work. In fact, I’d happily provide my counsel to anyone at those sites privately and free of charge, and I think that much of the critiques I’ve published thus far are constructive.

Here is Conor Friedersdorf posting on Andrew McCarthy. Friedersdorf defends the Marxist Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), while calling McCarthy “ridiculous,” “dishonorable,” “odious” and “terrifying” as a public servant, dismissing his arguments as specious and simply slurs. He also defends the Left, while reviewing McCarthy’s book with this headline: “The Manifold Inaccuracies of Andy McCarthy’s New Book.” Why don’t conservatives love Conor Friedersdorf? (more…)

What is it about Sarah Palin that drives the left nuts? They hate everything about her, and yet at the same time they can’t stop talking about her. Like a succubus, she haunts their fever dreams, visits them in their sleep, and sucks the life force out of them. No matter what she does, what she says, or where she goes, Sarah is an object of endless fascination to the “progressives,” who hate her with a mad passion, cower in fear of her awesome endorsement powers and well… just can take their eyes off her:

Sarah’s appearance at the Belmont Stakes on Sunday (right) has set them off again. Here’s the dreadful Wonkette, shamelessly ogling:

We got a political news tip on our Facebook page from Wonkette operative “Laura,” and it goes like this: “Sarah Palin 12/09 no boobs http://bit.ly/bmQtPJ #Sarah Palin today, Instant boobage! http://j.mp/dokqd2 only her #plasticsurgeon knows4sure.” We are not fluent in the Twitter-Facebook dialects, but somehow we can follow the gist.

And the HuffPo: (more…)

Over the past several months I have had the honor of being Big Journalism’s official Correction Alpaca.  I’ve requested over two dozen corrections at Big Journalism and many others on Big Hollywood, Twitter, and via email.  Some of the news organizations I’ve addressed have done their journalistic duty and set their respective records straight, while others have neglected to fulfill this journalistic responsibility.  Others still have delivered what Patterico refers to as “stealth corrections,” that is, where a post is corrected without formal acknowledgment by the publication that the public record had been amended. We acknowledge there is a time and place for this, but it’s done far, far, far too often in the internet age.

If you recall, my responsibilities as Correction Alpaca commenced in order to alert the blogosphere of the mainstream media’s culpability and ineptitude in its mostly incorrect reporting of the James O’Keefe caper at Senator Landrieu’s Louisiana office earlier this year.  As of Wednesday, this saga, dubbed “Watergate Jr.,” by MSNBC has come to an end, with O’Keefe pleading guilty to mere misdemeanor charges of entering federal property under false pretenses and getting a proverbial “slap on the wrist” sentence.

So, in memory of “Watergate Jr.,” I would like to draw your attention to these sites, which at the time of this publication, still have published unforced errors regarding the prank in New Orleans:

Newsweek
The Los Angeles Times
The Atlantic… (more…)

In Robert Wright’s May 11 New York Times essay,“The Making of a Terrorist,” we learn a very interesting and useful fact: terrorists are complicated.  No offense, Hamlet, but there needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this.

Yet tell us Wright does. Refuting the (in Wright’s mind) simplistic takes of The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and National Review Online’s Daniel Pipes that “jihadi intent” drove Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, Wright writes:

I’d like to invite Pipes and Goldberg to imagine an alternative universe, a universe in which behaviors — such as planting a bomb — don’t have a single “root” cause. In this universe, bomb-planting behavior is kind of like the bombs themselves: a number of ingredients have to come together before things get explosive. If you figure out what those ingredients are, and which of them you can control, maybe you can make bomb-planting behavior less common.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, liberal commentator Ellis Hennican espoused nearly an identically-worded theory on Fox News Channel’s News Watch program on Saturday, only Hennican used the more palatable metaphor of a cocktail of ingredients as opposed to a pipe bomb of factors. (more…)

Should reporters who believe that most of America is stupid and insane be in the journalism business? Let’s consider the question.

Take left-wing journalist Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic. He’s not bad at his job. His insights are often worthwhile and occasionally wise. Yet Ambinder sometimes writes things so foolish that one might expect to read them at the leftist propaganda site Media Matters for America.

His latest adventure in pseudo-intellectual self-absorption passing for journalistic analysis is, “Have Conservatives Gone Mad?” It brims with elitist condescension.

Ambinder observes that:

Serious thinkers on the right have finally gotten around to a full and open debate on the epistemic closure problem that’s plaguing the conservative movement.

The issue, to put it in terms that even I can understand, because I didn’t study philosophy much in college: has the conservative base gone mad?

(more…)

In a new article, Marc Ambinder, politics editor of The Atlantic, asks: Have Conservatives Gone Mad?  He says yes.

Serious thinkers on the right have finally gotten around to a full and open debate on the epistemic closure problem that’s plaguing the conservative movement. The issue, to put it in terms that even I can understand, because I didn’t study philosophy much in college: has the conservative base gone mad?

Here are his main points:

• Conservative journalists, including TV personalities (obviously referring to FOX), but excluding those few “serious thinkers” among conservatives, have become “untethered” from the “real world.” Correspondingly, the Republican base – he doesn’t define it – “seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.”
• The “most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes” from the left. He cites MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann among several examples.
• Meanwhile, the media – meaning the only true, authentic and professional journalists like those who work for ABC where Marc once worked, and at CBS where he is now chief political consultant – are reasserting themselves as “gatekeepers.”  That begs the questions: When and why did its assertion cease? And is one journalist, Jake Tapper, sufficient proof of a collective “reassertion?”

(more…)

In Megan McArdle’s piece “A Tape Too Far” of January 26th, 2010, Ms. McArdle repeatedly refers to an alleged wiretapping plot by James O’Keefe at the offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu:

James O’Keefe, the guy who did the ACORN sting, doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a completely legal recording of an interview between you and someone else, and a completely illegal and reprehensible wiretapping of someone’s phones. Journalists are not spies, and there are very good reasons that you need a warrant to bug a telephone system or otherwise eavesdrop on third-party conversations.

Like many 24-year olds, he may not have fully appreciated why what he was doing was wrong, but if the allegations are true, I hope that the judge explains it to him while handing down a stiff penalty.

There are no allegations of any wiretap plot in the FBI affidavit, and a law enforcement official has conceded that the four men were not attempting to wiretap or intercept calls.  Furthermore, legal representation for the accused has gone on record stating there were no intentions to bug phones in the Senator’s office.  The Atlantic’s own Politics blog recently published a post acknowledging there was no attempt to wiretap.

We kindly ask you to issue a correction/retraction to the story.

We have been/will be making similar requests of other news sources to correct similar errors.  Some, such as the Washington Post, MSNBC’s David Shuster, and Talking Points Memo already have posted corrections or retractions.

In addition, Mr. O’Keefe is 25-years old.