A new year and a new horrific story of US military gone wild!

Captain Owen Honors has been relieved of his duties over the aircraft carrier the USS Enterprise because of some joke videos he made a couple of years ago. The media is outraged! Forget the Navy’s overreaction here, that’s another issue.

Oh, make no mistake about it, the media is not just reporting this story, they clearly show their disgust and outrage that anybody would make politically incorrect videos and live to play another day.

I don’t know the politics of Captain Owens, and I don’t care. I do know the politics of the media and over the years I’ve seen plenty of joke videos that people in newsrooms have produced.

“Christmas Reels” is what they are sometimes called, videos that show the outtakes of mistakes during newscasts and behind the scene antics.

What I have seen of the Captain Owens video is mild compared to some of the newsroom videos I have seen. There’s no need to get specific with names, because they were done in the context of people joking about the business and relieving the pressures that you sometimes find in a newsroom (BTW, I’m guessing the pressures of working on an aircraft carrier during time of war are just a bit greater than the pressure of a newsroom at 4:30 in the afternoon.) Like this video on the aircraft carrier, the newsroom videos were not intended for outside viewing.

If I told you that newsroom videos were produced ridiculing an African-American reporter for his pronunciation of certain words, would you be surprised? Yep, the video was done and it was a running joke in the newsroom for years afterwards. These videos were for internal use only and may have been destroyed by now, so if it aint on videotape, I guess it never happened, right?

How about videos making fun of the Shuttle Challenger explosion? Yep—there was one of those too. Another funny Christmas Reel.

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On March 5, in a kicking-and-screaming, last-ditch effort to save her organization, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis wrote in BeyondChron.org of the “right-wing attacks” on ACORN by “undercover right-wing racist James O’Keefe,” repeating a Greatest Hits compilation of factually-defunct angles left has desperately drummed into the mainstream for the past five months, from the race angle to the doctored-videos angle.

On March 4, Stephen Colbert staked these angles to the pop culture turf in light of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s recent report that the undercover tapes were “heavily edited,” producing a satirically-edited interview with Sean Hannity to deride James’ allged “deceptive editing.”  No mention that Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, was endorsed by the ACORN-related Working Families Party during his recent bid for re-election. (Find the unedited audio and full transcripts here.)

And my recent bar brawl with Tommy Christopher — a Mediaite blogger who has been promoting the notion that James O’Keefe’s ACORN investigation was racially motivated — in Washington D.C. during CPAC, confirms my assessment of the utter desperation of O’Keefe’s critics.

Ironically, with no tangible evidence that O’Keefe’s videos were, in fact, “heavily edited,” the left has been literally heavily editing their attack plan against him – correcting, updating, and revising their angles of assault in order to catch up with the facts. (more…)

This post debunks several liberal myths about ACORN that have emerged in recent weeks — many from Eric Boehlert of Media Matters and Brad Friedman.

POSING AS A PIMP AT ACORN

Liberal Myth: James O’Keefe did not pretend to be a pimp inside ACORN. Instead, he merely presented himself as Hannah Giles’s boyfriend, trying to help her escape from an abusive pimp.

Examples of the spreading of the myth:

Eric Boehlert:

O’Keefe pretended to be an aspiring pol, not pimp, in first ACORN vid.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:

The video implies that the advice about the 13-year-olds was given with the intent of helping a pimp control them. This doesn’t fit the circumstances. In fact, it appears that what happened was that employees were responding to requests on how to get young girls out of sex work, not keep them in.

Brad Friedman:

After not hearing from New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt for nearly a week — during which I’d sent him more and more indisputable evidence that Andrew Breitbart employee James O’Keefe never played his infamous “pimp” character in the offices of ACORN — he responded with a couple of blistering charges. (more…)