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July 21, 2010
Liberal Journalists Target FOX News and Want Government To Shut It Down
Tucker Carlson broke the news last night on Hannity that the far left members of Journolist targeted FOX News and wanted it shut down by the government.
The source ...........The Daily Caller
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Publisher Neil Patel chats with Megyn Kelly about JournoList
The Daily Caller explosive story about JournoList, publisher Neil Patel chats with “America Live” host Megyn Kelly about a few thing more incendiary than sports.
“What we have found,” said Neil, ” are discussions in there directly working to try and elect Barack Obama and doing so in the most … loathsome ways.”
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Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright
By Jonathan Strong
It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.
The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”
Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”
Others went further. 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.”
Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”
“Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on,” Tomasky continued. “We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”
(In an interview Monday, Tomasky defended his position, calling the ABC debate an example of shoddy journalism.)
Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, “why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” Schaller proposed coordinating a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.
“It would create quite a stir, I bet, and be a warning against future behavior of the sort,” Schaller wrote.
Tomasky approved. “YES. A thousand times yes,” he exclaimed.
The members began collaborating on their open letter. Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones rejected an early draft, saying, “I’d say too short. In my opinion, it doesn’t go far enough in highlighting the inanity of some of [Gibson's] and [Stephanopoulos’s] questions. And it doesn’t point out their factual inaccuracies …Our friends at Media Matters probably have tons of experience with this sort of thing, if we want their input.”
Jared Bernstein, who would go on to be Vice President Joe Biden’s top economist when Obama took office, helped, too. The letter should be “Short, punchy and solely focused on vapidity of gotcha,” Bernstein wrote.
In the midst of this collaborative enterprise, Holly Yeager, now of the Columbia Journalism Review, dropped into the conversation to say “be sure to read” a column in that day’s Washington Post that attacked the debate.
Columnist Joe Conason weighed in with suggestions. So did Slate contributor David Greenberg, and David Roberts of the website Grist. Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, helped too.
Journolist members signed the statement and released it April 18, calling the debate “a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world.”
The letter caused a brief splash and won the attention of the New York Times. But only a week later, Obama – and the journalists who were helping him – were on the defensive once again.
Jeremiah Wright was back in the news after making a series of media appearances. At the National Press Club, Wright claimed Obama had only repudiated his beliefs for “political reasons.” Wright also reiterated his charge that the U.S. federal government had created AIDS as a means of committing genocide against African Americans.
It was another crisis, and members of Journolist again rose to help Obama.
Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list.
The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, “It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.”
Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. “All this hand wringing about just how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going.”
“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote.
Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.
(Reached by phone Monday, Hayes argued his words then fell on deaf ears. “I can say ‘hey I don’t think you guys should cover this,’ but no one listened to me.”)
Katha Pollitt – Hayes’s colleague at the Nation – didn’t disagree on principle, though she did sound weary of the propaganda. “I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita,” Pollitt said.
“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”
Ackerman went on:
I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.
Ackerman did allow there were some Republicans who weren’t racists. “We’ll know who doesn’t deserve this treatment — Ross Douthat, for instance — but the others need to get it.” He also said he had begun to implement his plan. “I previewed it a bit on my blog last week after Commentary wildly distorted a comment Joe Cirincione made to make him appear like (what else) an antisemite. So I said: why is it that so many on the right have such a problem with the first viable prospective African-American president?”
Several members of the list disagreed with Ackerman – but only on strategic grounds.
“Spencer, you’re wrong,” wrote Mark Schmitt, now an editor at the American Prospect. “Calling Fred Barnes a racist doesn’t further the argument, and not just because Juan Williams is his new black friend, but because that makes it all about character. The goal is to get to the point where you can contrast some _thing_ — Obama’s substantive agenda — with this crap.”
(In an interview Monday, Schmitt declined to say whether he thought Ackerman’s plan was wrong. “That is not a question I’m going to answer,” he said.)
Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman’s strategy. “I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”
But it was Ackerman who had the last word. “Kevin, I’m not saying OBAMA should do this. I’m saying WE should do this.”
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Reporters at Pravda weren’t this insufferable
By Andrew Breitbart
Journalists love whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them. Journalists love transparency. As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.
No journalistic steadfast rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle.
Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here.
American journalism died today. What The Daily Caller has unearthed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is Journolist, or are guilty of sitting back and watching Alinsky warfare being waged against all that challenged the progressive orthodoxy. The scandal predictably involves journalists posing as professors posing as experts. But dressed down they are nothing but street thugs. They deserve the deepest levels of public consternation. Will they get it?
The only way that the media will recover from the horrifying discoveries found in the Journolist is to investigate and investigate until every guilty reporter, professor and institution is laid bare begging America for forgiveness. Will they do it?
If the powers that be don’t comply with this demand, we can always call Jonathan Alter and Eric Alterman racists.*
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E-mails reveal Post reporter savaging conservatives, rooting for Democrats
By Jonathan Strong
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh famously said he hoped President Obama would “fail” in January, 2009. Almost a year later, when Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, Washington Post reporter David Weigel had a wish of his own. “I hope he fails,” Weigel cracked to fellow liberal reporters on the “Journolist” email list-serv.
“Too soon?” he wondered.
Weigel was hired this spring by the Post to cover the conservative movement. Almost from the beginning there have been complaints that his coverage betrays a personal animus toward conservatives. E-mails obtained by the Daily Caller suggest those complaints have merit.
Please continue HERE for the rest of this very interesting article
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Conservatives Karl Rove and Fred Barnes respond to Journolist ‘racist’ post
By Chris Moody
The Daily Caller revealed Monday that then-Washington Independent reporter Spencer Ackerman argued during the 2008 presidential campaign that the best way to combat criticism of President Obama’s former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright was to accuse those who raised the issue of racism.
“If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us,” Ackerman wrote on the Journolist listserv in April 2008. “Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
While many members of the group voiced concerns about Ackerman on strategic grounds, there seemed to be no clear disagreement with the substance. The strongest repudiation came from Mark Schmitt, now at the liberal magazine the American Prospect, who said the tactic of calling conservatives racist would do nothing to advance the argument.
Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes and former White House senior adviser Karl Rove told The Daily Caller they were disappointed that there was not more criticism from other Journolist members for Ackerman’s plan of attack.
“I’d like to hear an explanation from those who participated in the Journolist about this,” Barnes said. “Why didn’t they quit the thing when smearing other journalists to help Barack Obama was advocated? Why didn’t they denounce the idea in unison?”
Rove played down the notion that members of the mainstream press agreed with Ackerman but he said he found it curious that such talk was tolerated within the group. It was important, he added, not to judge the motives of members who chose not to respond.
“I thought it was a revealing insight in the attitude of one minor player in the D.C. world of journalism,” Rove said of Ackerman’s comments. “It’s an even more important insight into a broader group of more prominent journalists that they seem to be willing to tolerate the suggestion that they should all tell a deliberate lie or that they should take somebody’s head and shove it through a plate glass window. I would hope that somebody would say, ‘Mr. Ackerman, do you really believe we ought to fabricate a lie about people just because we don’t agree with them?’”
Barnes added that even if there was an effort on the left to smear opponents as racists, the plan wouldn’t work.
“The charge has been made so often without any evidence that it has lost its sting,” he said. “It has become the last refuge of liberal scoundrels.”
Mother Jones magazine writer Kevin Drum, who participated in the Journolist discussion and worked for the Washington Monthly at the time, said in an interview Monday that charges of racism should only be used “sparingly.”
“It’s not something you should do unless you’re really, really sure,” he said.
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And just a few snipets from Rush's show yesterday:
All right, there is a huge story out there today, but it could be even bigger, and it should be even bigger. It is from Chatsworth Osborne Jr.'s website, The Daily Caller, and it is about this Journolist, and what it shows is something that we have known all along, and that is that there's not just media coordination in order to advance the Democrat Party agenda and to rip and ridicule, criticize Republicans and conservatives. It's not just coordination. It is an outright propaganda campaign.
So liberals don't just lie, they lie to destroy people. No smear is too low or outrageous when it comes to conservatives.
So something that you and I have known instinctively all along has now been confirmed by the people at the Journolist, these people are in collusion. They're not journalists whatsoever. And any of you in this audience, if you are a journalism school graduates you ought to be ripped to shreds over this. There is a journalist conspiracy out there, we've all known it, it existed to elect Obama, it exists today to reelect Democrats and Obama, and it's done so for years and years and years.
So to say that this is just a small-time blogosphere that's involved in collusion is a big mistake. It's no accident Bob Schieffer has no idea about the New Black Panther Party. It's no accident that Charlie Gibson -- what was the story that he had no idea about while he was on vacation? ACORN. It was no accident Charlie Gibson didn't know about the ACORN tapes that Breitbart had uncovered. He didn't know about it. If it's not in TIME Magazine, if it's not on the other two networks or any of the three, if it's not on CNN, not in the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, they don't know about it. They're insulated. They live and exist for each other. You and I are three times as informed as the so-called veneered fourth estate. You and I know more about what's going on in this country than they do, and they are the ones with the arrogant condescension looking down on all of us. The only way they can discredit us is to call us names.
The best way to say it is there is nothing that is media as you and I think of media. There are no reporters. The media is simply an arm of the left. It is the Democrat Party
Marxism, socialism, whatever you want to call it, it's the left -- and they are all considered to be members of the ruling class, and that ruling class has its agenda.
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Wild Thing's comment.......
WOW!
If the framers of the constitution were writing it today, instead of being concerned with separation of church and state, they would insist on separation of media and state.
Today our media is nothing more than a branch of the government and a tool for the destruction of our liberty.
With the media in this country, Obama has a thousand Goebbels. Hitler had one.
Posted by Wild Thing at July 21, 2010 06:49 AM
Comments
"Obama has a thousand Goebbels. Hitler had one"
really gets to the hart of America's problem.
Congradulationn on a memerable turn of phrase.
Posted by: Avitar at July 21, 2010 09:24 AM
By the way as a hat tip to Blen Beck he has pointed out that Woodrow Wilson's Department of Public information was 75,000 strong.
Posted by: Avitar at July 21, 2010 09:28 AM
The writers of JournOlist have formed their own group and make the claim that they are so pure and driven to equal rights. This is just another form of Collectivism, where the individual doesn't exist as a Sovereign person but exist for the group or in this case the state.
When necessary that individual can be erased for the good of the group as in this case Fox news. These people claim to be working for the minorities of this country but isn't the individual the smallest minority on the planet, so where are his rights.
This is proof positive they are not interested in equal justice for all but for a few as they see and say who deserves it.
Posted by: Mark at July 21, 2010 12:24 PM
The state of American journalism in 2010 is at best in flux, but undeniably in decline in both content and exercise for a host of reasons.
Most notably is the fact that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone under 30 today with the ink of newspaper on their fingers.
Much has been written about journalism as the fourth estate and its vital and important role within a republic:
From the first colonial newspaper, The New England Courant published by printer James Franklin, brother of Benjamin Franklin, to Horace Greeley, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and the notable and extensive debates of the 1920’s by writer Walter Lippmann and American philosopher John Dewey on the proper role of journalism in civil society and an enduring republic.
One of the best texts written on this subject is:
“The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and The Public Should Expect” by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstie (both still alive).
In it they write of the nine elements of journalism in order for a journalist to fulfill their duty of providing the people with the information they need to be free and self-governing.
They must follow these guidelines:
1. Journalism's first obligation is to the truth.
2. Its first loyalty is to the citizens.
3. Its essence is discipline of verification.
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting, and relevant.
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.
We should all strive to be better citizens and better journalists and recognize how we are not just inhabitants and free writers,
that there is a common role we share as Americans first and foremost,
and that today there are far too many of us, that for a host of reasons, have strayed from our roles as American citizens and American journalists and these principles.
Remember, the practice of journalism requires no license by the state, as it should, and thus conduct must be guided by a code of ethics.
You know, those "code of ethics" created by honest men and women of a common trained discipline that existed in every trade and profession before current government licensing of every profession became so commonplace.
Today’s probing, ceaselessly questioning, worn shoes on the pavement, pen and pad, hound dog reporters have been replaced by graduates of enlightened educations and not much more than compliant lap dogs to this administration.
This must change, and it will soon, as despite this current collectivist leadership that will well serve as a failed example, we are on the cusp of an American renaissance as the last best hope for freedom and the leader of the free world as well we should be. I’d like to write more, but I’m behind in my work and we all have to make a living.
Later,
-Carlos.
Posted by: Carlos at July 21, 2010 11:08 PM
Avitar, giggle thanks. And thanks for that too from Glenn Beck about Woodrow Wilson.
Mark, I agree, I wonder if one day it will turn around.
Carlos, wow thank you for that, I really liked seeing the guidelines listed. There was an old movie about a newspaper with Clark Gable that was really good. This whole thing happening has reminded me of that film too.
Posted by: Wild Thing at July 21, 2010 11:59 PM
I think you're reminded, Wild Thing, of Clark Gable's role as a reporter in 1934's Best Picture "It Happened One Night", also his only Oscar award for Best Actor.
Posted by: Carlos at July 22, 2010 12:36 AM
