After reading a studious account of Imam Feisal Rauf’s Malaysian activities by my journalist colleague Alyssa Lappen, and listening to an interview of the courageous investigative reporter Steven Emerson, who has compiled recorded evidence of Rauf’s Islamic radicalism based upon hours of audio taped lectures and statements, I read Anne Barnard’s New York Times piece, entitled “Balancing Act for Imam in Muslim Center Furor.”

Reading Ms. Barnard’s story reminded me of Arthur Koestler’s description in “The God That Failed” of working for the Soviet Agitprop EKKI as a “delegate of the Revolutionary Proletarian Writers of Germany.” Koestler was a brilliant writer, but before qualifying for this particular writing assignment, he had gradually learned from his willing Communist indoctrination,

…to distrust my mechanistic pre-occupation with facts and to regard the world around me the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper color and fell into their proper place.

Extraordinarily well-paid for rather minimal effort, Koestler described how it was: (more…)

Not to be missed: the first of a two-part series of radio broadcasts detailing the West’s suicidal love affair with Soviet communism and the role the “useful idiots” — otherwise smart people who for whatever reason fell under the spell of the God That Failed:

The phrase ‘useful idiots’, supposedly Lenin’s, refers to Westerners duped into saying good things about bad regimes.

In political jargon it was used to describe Soviet sympathisers in Western countries and the attitude of the Soviet government towards them.

Useful idiots, in a broader sense, refers to Western journalists, travellers and intellectuals who gave their blessing – often with evangelistic fervour – to tyrannies and tyrants, thereby convincing politicians and public that utopias rather than Belsens thrived.

In part one John Sweeney looks at Stalin’s Western apologists.

You can listen to part one, available for only five more days, here. (more…)

Over the next ten days, I will present to you America’s top ten journalists that are most biased to the left. On this list you will find denizens of the Old Media that just can’t seem to help themselves from delivering the news with a leftward tilt, journalists for whom balance means to condemn all Republicans and conservatives, folks that never met a righty they could like much less agree with or even report upon fairly.

This list will be peopled by journos that, in true Kealian fashion, simply can’t understand those Republicans and/or conservatives. After all, these journalists never met anyone that would support a conservative so they just don’t understand how conservatives could ever stand for truth. These are folks that just don’t “get” that there is any other side to a story but that of their own ideologically leftward political bent.

\This list will be restricted to working journalists (or one who just retired in one case), so biased old hacks like Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, or Walter Duranty will be excluded even as we take their leftism for granted. Also you will not find those whose career is but a cartoon of journalism. People such as Keith Olbermann, John Stewart, Rachel Maddow, Maureen Dowd, or Chris Matthews do not belong on a journalist list, even one highlighting left-wing bias. Such people are simply too silly or admittedly partisan even for a list such as this.

The biggest problem is arriving at just ten. There are dozens of worthy nominees, we all know. Singling out so small a number from such a large field presented a challenge, for sure. (more…)

Ron Brynaert has a story over at his The Raw Story blog that reveals yet another denizen of the Old Media trying to be both a “journalist” and an operative of Barack Obama’s administration. She is Patricia McGinnis, an unpaid advisor at the White House and also one of the contributors to the Post’s “On Leadership” blog.

Once again we see the Old Media working hand-in-hand with the Obama administration and putting the lie to the idea of the “independent journalist” in traditional media outlets, this time with the Washington Post. Even worse than this collusion, though, is the fact that the Post somehow forgot to inform its readers of this little detail.

Is anybody surprised? From the “Cry Wolf” scandal, in which Big Journalism exposed an incipient pay-for-play “independent scholarship” racket that was designed to combat conservative ideas under the false flag of “academic research,” to the constant revolving door of “journalists” leaving their publications or networks for their first love, Democrat politics, to the existence of Ezra Klein’s “JournoList,” an email daisy chain of 400 leftist journalists, operating in secret to share policy ideas and hone talking points without letting either their readers or, in many cases, their employers know of their collusion, it’s clear that the leftist drones in academe and the media no longer feel the need even to pretend to be objective reporters of the political scene. They are operatives, plain and simple.

Think of them as an army of Walter Durantys, the Soviet fellow-traveler operating as a correspondent for the New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for whitewashing Stalin’s crimes for western public opinion. (more…)

Rasmussen has a fresh poll out on the topic of media bias. This is a poll of the public, not reporters. The poll makes some interesting comparison between the perceived influence of big media and big money in politics. Surprisingly, a majority think media bias is the bigger problem:

Fifty-five percent (55%) of U.S. voters continue to think that media bias is a bigger problem in politics today than big campaign contributions, identical to the finding in August 2008. Thirty-two percent (32%) say big contributions are the bigger problem, but that’s down four points from the previous survey.

There is a clear partisan split in the poll numbers:

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Republicans and 62% of unaffiliated voters say media bias is the bigger problem in politics, a view shared by just 37% of Democrats.

This makes perfect sense given how the public views reporters:

Fifty-one percent (51%) of voters say the average reporter is more liberal than they are. Eighteen percent (18%) say that reporter is more conservative…

But here’s the part I find really interesting: (more…)

“A foreign reporter — preferably American — was much more valuable to us at that time (1957) than any military victory,” wrote Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries. “Much more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda.”

“We cannot for a second abandon propaganda. Propaganda is vital — propaganda is the heart of all struggles,” said Fidel Castro in a letter to a revolutionary colleague in 1954.

“In all essentials Castro’s battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign fought in New York and Washington.” — British historian Hugh Thomas

Fought and handily won, I might add. (more…)

Of the many, many qualities I have come to admire in my friend, Andrew Breitbart, none of them appeals to me more than the white-hot rage one can generate in him by bringing up the subject of press malfeasance.

Andrew understands, as do I and this site’s editor, Michael Walsh, that press bias and incompetence and outright fraud is more of a problem than global warming or the healthcare “crisis,” or the rank corruption in congress, or even the criminal activity on the part of ACORN.  Just ask Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and’30s, and also an apologist for the crimes of Joseph Stalin:

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The press is supposed to be the immune system of the body politic.  The press is supposed to be anywhere and everywhere, seeking out corruption the way a white blood cell targets pathogens. When the press no longer serves this function of protecting the political body against abuses of power – because it is too ideologically blinded to be able to either see or act upon these threats —  then our Republic has a virulent and highly lethal (historically, anyway) form of AIDS. (more…)