JournoList scandal is back and prepare for it to be a driving force in the news for quite some time. The Daily Caller published an article tonight indicating they’ve obtained emails from the JournoList and the initial details are as damning as we expected when the list-serv, founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2007, surfaced with the Dave Weigel kerfuffle last month.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias.  It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” (more…)

A fixed fight: The Influence of Labor Unions in Academe. Part One is here.

In the academic world, employees are very often public employees. This means that they are also very often union employees. At all levels. This includes everyone from janitors, to dormitory housekeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, and computer techs, to even the graduate assistants and professors. While the salary gap between a cafeteria worker and a senior professor may be huge, the solidarity of the unions is a powerful magnet that creates an unbreakable bond amongst them.

Unions are fond of bashing capitalism with seething rhetoric, decrying the economic system as irredeemably corrupted by greed and racism and classism. But the ideology they themselves embrace is itself driven by the same ugly characteristics they profess to detest. Except in their case, power is the motivating force, the passion that drives them.

The burning desire for the power to control your life is the tie that binds the union service worker to the academic intellectual. It is this common fabric that connects the union janitor more closely to the ideological academic intellectual than to his working-class counterparts beyond campus.

What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as “social justice” – this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for “social justice.”

(more…)

The religiously pro-abortion New York Times recently gave needed, though less than straightforward coverage to the pro-life outreach, only recently successful, to black women regarding abortion. The issue, long neglected by the MSM, is significant: Although blacks make up only 13 percent of the population, black women undergo nearly 40 percent of all the nation’s abortions.

What is now rousing black audiences, according to Times writer Shaila Dewan, is the pro-lifers’ ramped-up message, which links abortion to slavery, lynching, genocide, Nazi-style eugenics, and birth control. As she describes the pitch of one of the newly effective pro-life groups, Georgia Right to Life, abortion is “a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.”

Perhaps, but Dewan and her article sources do not prove the charge historically. Nor do they specifically identify who these conspirators are. The reader is left possibly to infer that they lurk in the ranks of the very pro-abortion forces cited by Dewan, those forces that advocate, fund and perform abortions – to wit, abortion-providing organizations such as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (highlighted as under “sustained attack by black abortion opponents”); the U.S. government itself (duly noted as providing about $350 million a year to Planned Parenthood for “education and medical services”); pro-abortion politicians (who are let off the hook entirely); doctors who abort black children (black physicians who provided illegal abortions, Dewan points out, were praised as “community heroes”); and abortion-driving feminists (unmentioned, except for Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, whom Dewan portrays with unseemly ambivalence: Sanger’s guilt for having allied herself with eugenics is mitigated, the writer suggests, because “at the time [it was] a mainstream movement.”). (more…)

**Link fixed**

For years, the left has informed us that the right is interested in shutting down scientific inquiry.  As President Obama put it:

Our government [under President Bush] has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values … [P]romoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda – and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.

Of course, the fact is that the left is most interested in curbing science when that science conflicts with political correctness.  From comprehensive sex ed for teenagers (which ignores brain science demonstrating that teens are essentially incapable of regulating risky behavior even when given information about it) to global warming (which apparently causes earthquakes according to vagina expert Eve Ensler) to abortion (in which the actual biological development of fetuses is ignored in favor of niceties about cell clusters) to gay marriage (where leftists idiotically state that men and women are gender constructs), the left is constantly shutting down science in the name of ideology. (more…)

The Left accusing James O’Keefe of being racist against blacks is the equivalent of accusing Oskar Schindler of being racist against Jews.

Before O’Keefe became famous throughout the world for his undercover sting of ACORN, he was celebrated in the pro-life world for his undercover sting of Planned Parenthood in 2008, exposing it as the racist organization it was founded to be by eugenicist Margaret Sanger.

The sting was simple. The UCLA pro-life student group LifeAction.org had O’Keefe call several Planned Parenthoods around the country with the following pitch: O’Keefe said he would like to donate money, but only if Planned Parenthood would earmark it specifically to abort black babies, to “lower the number of blacks in America.”

No Planned Parenthood employee balked at or denied O’Keefe’s request. One even expressed excitement: (more…)

After Senator-elect Scott Brown’s resounding win in Massachusetts, it is clear that when Americans have the facts, they make informed decisions and let their voices be heard about the important issues facing our country.  Our founders understood how important information is to our Republic.  Thomas Jefferson once said:

It is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

Last year, I started the Media Fairness Caucus (MFC) in Congress to help ensure that Americans stay well-informed and get the facts on important issues.  The purpose of the MFC is not to censor or condemn, but to encourage the media to adhere to the highest standards of reporting and provide the American people with the facts, balanced stories and fair coverage of the news.  The Caucus also points out examples of media bias and I present a “most biased media story of the week” award regularly on the House floor. (more…)