Media Matters for America - Columns by Eric Boehlert

Post-Hutaree: How Glenn Beck and Fox News spread the militia message

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:38:58 EST

Reading last week's disturbing news accounts about the Midwestern arrest of nine alleged members of a Christian militia known as the Hutaree, a group whose members were reportedly planning to kill cops in order to spark a wider, armed revolt against the U.S. government, I noticed this nugget [emphasis added]:

FBI agents moved quickly against Hutaree because its members were planning an attack sometime in April, prosecutors said.

My hunch is the self-described "warriors" of the Hutaree probably circled April 19 on their calendars for any cop-killing fantasy they might have planned to pull off. Why April 19? That was the day, 17 years ago, when the FBI staged its final failed assault on cult leader David Koresh's heavily armed compound in Waco, Texas. It was on April 19, 1993, following a 51-day siege, that Koresh's fanatical followers, rather than surrendering to authorities, staged mass suicides (and, in some cases, executions) as the compound burned to the ground.

Precisely two years later, on April 19, 1995, right-wing zealot Timothy McVeigh commemorated the Waco inferno by declaring war on the federal government and blowing up his rented Ryder truck outside of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. McVeigh's act of far-right radical terrorism sheared the north side off the Murrah Building, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. ("I reached the decision to go on the offensive -- to put a check on government abuse of power," McVeigh later wrote.)

April 19 remains an almost mythical date among dedicated government haters. It's a date that lives in infamy as proof of the dark consequences of when a tyrannical government (run by Democrats) turns on its own.

So yeah, as the Hutaree gun nuts allegedly plotted in the woods of Michigan on the best way to kill cops, pieced together their seditious plans to wage war on the U.S. government, and planned their upcoming confrontation with the Antichrist, I'm guessing the landmark militia day of April 19 loomed large.

For anyone who thought the dark, Waco-fueled chapter of domestic extremism in this country was behind us, the Hutaree arrests were a jarring reminder that, with the election of another Democratic president, the violent militia message is back.

And it's stronger than ever.

Not only have the number of radical-right extremist groups exploded in the wake of President Obama's election (more than 500 today, as compared to just 200 during the 1990s), but these militia members now have a proud sponsor in the person of Fox News' Glenn Beck, who has done more than any other person to amplify and mainstream the movement's hateful and foreboding anti-government message. Beck continues to give a voice, and national platform, to the same deranged, hard-core militia haters and self-style "patriots" who hounded the new, young Democratic president in the early 1990s in the wake of Waco.

On TV and the radio, Beck rarely bothers to mention the militia movement by name. Instead, he's simply co-opted their rhetoric as his own. He's acted as a crucial transmitter, warning about Obama fronting his own private "army," and urging followers to "start food storage."

Not to mention these previous militia moments:

Beck asserts: "The second American revolution is being playing out right now"

Beck says "what is ahead may loosen the bonds of society," may end with "a French Revolution"

Beck: "There is a coup going on ... it has been done through the guise of an election"

Beck: "You can't convince me that the founding fathers wouldn't allow you to secede"

Beck: "[I]f we don't have some common sense, we're facing the destruction of our country... it's coming"

The truth is that the daylight separating the radical, anti-government militia movement from self-styled mainstream conservatives is growing dimmer by the day. Like the fact-free Obama birthers, the militia remains a radical subset that today's right wing refuses to part ways with. That sad fact was highlighted when scores of far-right media voices initially downplayed the Hutaree arrests last week, or even defended the militia members and -- disturbingly reminiscent of Waco -- cast the FBI and the federal government as the over-reaching bad guys.

And at Fox News, it's not just Beck. The cable "news" channel's militia-flavored message (beware gun-toting IRS agents!) has been as simple as it's been relentless: Obama is destroying this country and he's doing it intentionally. It's not that people disagree with Obama and don't like what they call his "liberal" policies as applied to the economy and health care reform, etc. Instead, the conflict is much more dire. Obama is not just misguided in this political and legislative agenda. Instead, Obama is the incarnation of evil (the Antichrist?), and his driving hatred for America, as well as for democracy, runs so deep that he ran for president in order to destroy the United States from within.

Right on cue last week, Rush Limbaugh, who serves as sort of a militia godfather theses days, issued this back-against-the-wall warning: "Our country is being overthrown from within."

That's exactly what militias were saying about Clinton back in the 1990s, as historian David Bennett recently noted:

"I love my country but I fear my government," one bumper sticker proclaimed in the 1990s. A small North Carolina group of "Christian" constitutional literalists proposed to "resist the coming New World Order" by "removing treasonous politicians and corrupt judges." As today, they feared a liberal "tyrant" in the White House. At a gun rights rally in Michigan in 1995, a T-shirt called President Clinton a "Socialist-Marxist Comma-Nazi" ...

Sound familiar?

Folks, we're witnessing a militia rerun. Except this time, thanks to the likes of Beck and Fox News, the unwanted repeat is being broadcast nationwide.

Actually, today's hysterical warnings are probably even more extreme than the last time a Democrat sat in the Oval Office. What's disturbing is that instead of having to trade copies of The Turner Diaries, relying on grassroots fax networks, or traveling to gun shows to hear that kind of incendiary insurrectionist rhetoric (i.e. the president must be stopped!), haters can just turn on the highest-rated cable news channel.

In a way, I wonder why militiamen bother to form groups anymore if Fox News is willing to embrace and broadcast their fervent, anti-government New World Order rants on a daily basis? The militia flourished on the fringes in the 1990s, in part, because those on the far-right felt like their government-hating message was being ignored. But today it's celebrated and broadcast nationally. Talkers like Beck have trumped the militia movement. They've completely co-opted the message and made the groups increasingly irrelevant as Fox News cuts out the middleman -- the militia groups -- and hijacks their insurrectionist, government-hating rhetoric.

Don't think there's a larger connection? Just look at the initial reaction when news broke about the Hutaree arrests. The knee-jerk response from some right-wing bloggers to either defend the militia members, or at least raise all kinds of doubts and partisan suspicions about the law enforcement raids, told us all we needed to know about where their true allegiances lie. Meaning, conservative voices immediately telegraphed their support from the persecuted militiamen and clearly suggested they were being used as pawns in an Obama government abuse of power.

Blogger Pamela Geller complained that the FBI raids were "nuts." Glenn Beck's radio guest host Chris Baker decried the Hutaree arrests as "nothing more than attack on faith and free speech." And Washington Times columnist and frequent Fox News talker Monica Crowley likened Hutaree members to proud patriots, as she squarely placed the blame on the government for squelching the militia's right to dissent:

The Democrats handle dissent by isolating it, smearing it and delegitimizing it in order to crush it. The warning should be clear: If you have small-government, traditional values, you may be considered by your own leadership to be an enemy of the state.

Keep in mind that both Geller and Crowley conveniently forgot to inform readers that the militia members had been arraigned on charges of plotting to kill cops. Apparently that fact no longer moves the needle in today's right-wing media, which has severed its traditional ties with the law-and-order movement and instead today pledges its allegiance to whoever hates the government -- and Democrats -- the most.

Other conservative media voices rushed in to downplay the Hutaree news last week. At Lucianne Goldberg's site, the wannabe cop killers were portrayed as "dimwits that [sic] couldn't recognize a decent deer hunt." A New York Post editorial dismissed the armed Christian "warriors" as "a few guys in the woods with guns." And when not mocking the FBI's raid and raising doubts about the need for arrests, the right-wing blog Confederate Yankee referred to the Hutaree not as an anti-government militia group, but as a religious "cult." (Nice try.)

Still others took a third path, suggesting politics were behind the militia crackdown. For instance, this was what Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds instinctively wrote about the Hutaree raid:

THE TIMING APPEARS CONVENIENT

Reynolds, along with other right-wing bloggers, suggested the arrests were politically motivated; that the raid was perhaps part of a government-wide conspiracy to spotlight conservatives in a negative light and stymie dissent. Rather than immediately denouncing anti-government extremists who may have been plotting to kill cops, Reynolds played up the partisan angle, suggesting the timing of the raid was a bit too "convenient." (Of course it was convenient, but not in the way Reynolds meant: The FBI claimed the extremists were poised to strike this month, so naturally that wanted to act before then.)

And oh, by the way, at Tea Party Patriots: Official Home of the American Tea Party Movement, this was the headline that immediately went up after the first bulletins about the militia raids were posted:

That's right, some Tea Party leaders instinctively tagged the Hutaree compound as one of their own as it came under attack from federal law enforcement officials. And can you blame them? Today's right-wing, Obama-hating rhetoric -- as amplified by Glenn Beck and much of the GOP Noise Machine -- is indistinguishable from the militia message.

That frightening kinship is obvious for everyone to see and hear.

Follow Eric Boehlert on Twitter.

Boehlert: What if Fox News actually wants mob violence?

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 05:15:40 EST

Conservative commentators were atwitter last week following news that Ann Coulter's speech at the University of Ottawa was canceled in the face of protests. Of course, Coulter has the right to speak her mind on campuses. But in announcing the cancellation, her conservative Canadian sponsor, pundit Ezra Levant, put the blame on out-of-control liberals who had allegedly made it unsafe for Coulter to speak, breathlessly telling reporters that "the police and the security have advised that it would be physically dangerous for Ann Coulter to proceed with this event and for others to come in" and stressing the presence of an "unruly mob" outside.

Naturally, right-wing bloggers south of the Canadian border then went ballistic. Gateway Pundit claimed a menacing mob of 2,000, armed with "rocks and sticks," had surrounded the Ottawa campus building where Coulter was to speak. And yes, a fire alarm was even pulled.

Oh, my!

But it turns none of those hysterical claims were true (except for the part about someone pulling a fire alarm without cause). The 1,000 protesters were peaceful, according to university officials (good luck finding those rocks and sticks). And no, the police did not cancel the event out of our concern for Coulter's safety. They simply thought the event should have been held in a bigger venue to facilitate the large crowd. (Who invites Ann Coulter to campus and then books a lecture hall that, according to one estimate, holds just 400 people?)

Fact: Coulter and her promoters canceled the show on their own. There were no imminent signs of mob violence or threats of personal harm, just good old-fashioned, raucous, campus-style debate. But faced with a boisterous crowd, Coulter took her marbles and went home, while her conservative allies concocted tales of looming left-wing violence and feasted on the publicity.

Later, whining about her traumatic no-show in Ottawa, Coulter told a reporter, "I would like to know when this sort of violence, this sort of protest, has been inflicted upon a Muslim?" [Emphasis added.]

Oh, so now pulling a fire alarm qualifies as "violence"?

The hysterical hand-wringing was predictable. But the real stunner last week was watching the same conservatives who fretted over Coulter's safety then turn around and excuse and rationalize actual right-wing violence and intimidation stateside in the wake of the historic health care vote. Speaking out of both sides of their mouths with astonishing ease, conservatives denounced liberals who protested Coulter's appearance in Canada, and then played defense on behalf of marauding right-wing radicals who unleashed death threats, threw bricks through office windows, and hurled epithets at politicians. All in the name of saving America from President Obama's brand of evil socialism.

That form of intimidation and harassment the GOP Noise Machine had no problem with. Indeed, Democrats themselves were to blame for the rash of political violence.

Or so said the Tea Party team at Fox News, where there was little sense of remorse or shame -- or even apparent concern -- about the unprecedented bouts of violence and intimidation last week. (See list below.)

Instead, like Sarah Palin, Fox News simply reloaded and kept spraying the poisonous rhetoric all around. Worse, the "news" channel spent parts of last week either denying or rationalizing the uncorked madness. For instance, Glenn Beck suggested the incidents had been concocted. "It's almost as if the left is trumping all of this up just for the politics," said Beck.

Fox News friend Rush Limbaugh agreed:

Our side doesn't do this kind of stuff. It's all made up -- 95 percent of it's made up and it's being done to divert everybody's attention."

And from Andrew Breitbart's Big Government: "We doubt these threats are actually real."

Those who weren't denying the acts of violence were busy whitewashing them. On Fox News, S.E. Cupp made fun of Democrats who she claimed sought sympathy after being on the receiving end of a "couple of angry voices mails." Cheered Cupp, "I'm glad people are angry."

Hmm, "angry" voice mails? Here's an example of one of the actual hate messages left on a Democrat's voice mail:

"Congressman Stupak, you baby-killing mother f***er... I hope you bleed out your a**, got cancer and die, you mother f***er," one man says in a message to Stupak.

By skimming over the unpleasant details, Fox News talkers did their best to trivialize the illegal, terrorist threats made against elected officials. In fact, they were glad Democrats received voice mails like that.

And yes, it's been the rationalizing that's been so disturbing to watch -- the way the GOP Noise Machine fervently excused last week's violent behavior and eagerly tried to shift the blame onto the victims of the intimidation, and then demanded to know what the big deal was.

I mean, who hasn't had the line on a propane tank outside his house expected and nobody should have been surprised because Democrats, by passing the bill (i.e. desecrating the Constitution), pushed people too far. "So why are people angry?" asked Fox News' Steve Doocy last week. "Maybe because they didn't want this bill?"

Talk about the rise of tyranny and the minority-rule mob.

And that's where the fear of the perpetual angry mob comes in, and perhaps why Fox News, rather than lamenting the ugly and cowardly eruptions, seems to be encouraging it, or at least rationalizing it. Perhaps Fox News wants that threat of mob intimidation on the table, and Fox News, the de facto Opposition Party, wants Democrats to be thinking about the political consequences of further upsetting that unhinged mob.

As the blogger known as Digby noted last week:

They know that serious violence is very likely. They are simply inoculating themselves against the charge that it was their inflammatory rhetoric that caused it. It will be the Democrats complaining about their inflammatory rhetoric that made the teabaggers snap. If they'd just stayed quiet and not made daddy mad, he wouldn't have had to hit them.

And speaking of irresponsibility, who helped created the red-hot aura of right-wing hysteria over health care reform? Who has been driving the dangerous insurrectionist rhetoric? The right-wing media, of course. This was Beck, just days after the vote:

Get down on your knees and pray. Pray. It's September 11th all over again, except that we didn't have the collapsing buildings.

That's right, the U.S. government (by moving to help insure millions more Americans) had unleashed a surprise terrorist attack against the defenseless civilian population. But no, Glenn Beck doesn't incite people. Why would anybody think that?

And why would anybody think there was a connection between Fox News' hate speech and the recent police blotter of violent and frightening political incidents:

Rep. Tom Perriello's (D-VA) brother's address was erroneously posted online by a Tea Party blogger who invited activists to descend on the house. A gas line outside the brother's house was cut.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) was the target of threatening faxes and phone calls, including death threats. Some of the faxes included "racial epithets used in reference to President Obama," according to CBS News.

A brick was thrown through the window of the Democratic Party office in Rochester, New York. The note attached read: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," roughly quoting 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.

Rep. Anthony Weiner's office in Kew Gardens, New York, had to be evacuated after suspicious white powder was found in an envelope mailed to the office.

A thrown brick smashed a window at Rep. Louise Slaughter's district office in Niagara Falls, New York.

Slaughter also received a message claiming that "snipers were being deployed to kill those members who voted yes for health care," according to Politico.

A tossed brick demolished a window at the Sedgwick County Democratic Party headquarters in Wichita, Kansas.

There were confirmed accounts of Tea Party protesters hurling anti-gay slurs at Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) on the eve of the health care vote.

"Vandals also smashed the front door and a window at Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' office in Tucson early Monday, hours after the Arizona Democrat voted for the health care reform package," reported the Kansas City Star.

Fox News' response to the mayhem? "This happens all the time," shrugged paid contributor Stephen Hayes. His colleague Charles Krauthammer added, "I'm sure a lot of this is trumped up."

It's a chilling prospect, but one that seems more and more plausible: What if Fox News actually wants mob violence?

Follow Eric Boehlert on Twitter.

Fox News, health care, and the right-wing nervous breakdown

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:42:19 EST

Watching Fox News personalities recently come unglued as the realization set in that (surprise!) Democrats might actually have the votes to pass health care reform -- and noting how extraordinarily loopy and dire both the attacks on the White House, and the proclamations for pending, apocalyptic doom were becoming -- I was getting nervous that one of Fox News' more unhinged hosts might finally just snap and pull a Rev. Jim Jones, beseeching viewers to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Honestly, unless you've been monitoring the ticking time bomb that is the far-right media in recent days, you probably don't appreciate how frighteningly possible that cultish scenario has become, as the GOP Noise Machine, led by Fox News, publicly suffers a nervous breakdown. It's a mental and emotional collapse that's been advertised in recent days as cablers, radio talkers, and right-wing bloggers have reached for increasingly hysterical, often blood-curdling rhetoric to describe the irreversible atrocity -- an incurable, metastasizing malignancy!! -- that's about to seize and destroy the United States in the form of a bill to expand health care coverage.

Listening to the calamitous warnings (i.e. "the end of America as we know it"), it's not that unreasonable to think that at some point one of the media mob leaders is going to suggest that life itself just is no longer worth living.

After all, late last week the nation stood on the precipice, just three "days away from the United States of America being over as we've all known it," according to Rush Limbaugh, who warned that reform would drive every private insurance company out of business. Glenn Beck also went full tilt, warning that the bill represented a "turning point," like the Civil War and Peal Harbor, while colleague Sean Hannity pinpointed the health care vote as the "very hour" that America turned "completely towards socialism."

The Washington Times likened reform to the "Black Plague," and the online reaction was somehow even more unhinged. It was "RIP USA," because with the vote, America would become "occupied by a hostile foreign power." Indeed, a "socialist putsch" had been sprung and "America's Day of Wreckoning [sic]" was at hand. Why? Because the Democrats' health care legislation "will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage."

Not scared yet? Well, just keep in mind that "Fascist healthcare will destroy America," "civil unrest is coming," and President Obama is to blame. More? "Fascist House Democrats are preparing to euthanize America." And don't forget that Sunday's health care vote in Congress represented a "dark day for America, the worst since 9/11."

And, progressive politicians, heed this warning: "Democrats who crammed this unwarranted bill down the throats of the American people who clearly and overwhelmingly opposed it deserve to be drawn and quartered."

That's right, tortured.

As Jon Stewart noted last week while playing the straight man in a Daily Show bit about the increasingly unhinged, right-wing response, "The rhetoric seems completely divorced from reality." And that observation came before the weekend theatrics inside the Beltway, when self-described patriots, egged on by the right-wing media, rallied to "Kill the bill!" and in the process reportedly tossed racial and anti-gay epithets at Democratic members of the Congress. (The far-right reaction? So what if they did?)

Trust me. This televised, incoherent meltdown has gone way beyond sore loserdom. Or even sore loserdom on steroids. This hasn't just been more of the usual Democrats-are-crooks type of whining that Fox News has turned into an art form since Obama's inauguration. And it's gone far beyond the usual scare tactics that the cable channel has trademarked. (Recent on-screen graphics: "Will the health bill ruin the economy?" and "Does Obamacare mean millions more jobs destroyed?")

Instead, this bout of spastic lashing out has been unique even by the previous standard adopted by Beck, who, on the eve of the health care vote, likened Democrats to Al Qaeda terrorists who were trying to bring America to its knees from the inside.

Because apparently when conservatives lose consecutive nationwide election cycles, thereby allowing Democrats to set the legislative agenda, conservatives' objections render passing bills a criminal act, and "tyranny" threatens to topple our democracy.

Let's face facts. It's never pleasant when activists are confronted with their own political impotence. (Not to mention their abysmal vote-counting skills.) But that's exactly what happened over the weekend as Democratic members of Congress passed health care reform -- reform that the radical right had already pronounced dead. In fact, the GOP Noise Machine had spent weeks dancing on reform's grave and mocking Democrats' inability to act. So how did it all go so terribly wrong for health care haters?

My hunch is that over the past few months, the right-wing media, along with self-adoring Tea Party members, made the mistake of believing their own hype. They convinced themselves that not only did 2 million people take to the streets of the nation's capital last September to protest Obama (a number that was off by 1.9 million), but that "millions" more had marched coast-to-coast over the past 12 months (a number that was completely fabricated). They fastidiously constructed their own parallel universe and convinced themselves that last summer's mini-mobs at local town hall forums had defeated health care reform. They thought their rowdy show of force, complete with Nazi and Hitler posters, and even some protesters parading around with loaded guns, had changed the debate.

Listening to Limbaugh, they thought they were dictating the agenda. Watching Fox News, they though they reflected the mainstream. And reading right-wing blogs, they thought they had killed health care reform.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. It was the sudden and rude realization that, instead, they'd spent the past few months trapped inside an echo chamber, I think, that created the volcanic and unhinged response we've seen play out in recent days. It's the kind of childish and hysterical reaction I didn't think we'd ever witness from a major political movement.

Indeed, imagine if this is how progressives and Democrats had behaved during the run-up to the Iraq war, the last time the country found itself in this kind of national public policy "debate." Imagine if the liberal pundits and opinion makers had reacted to the prospect of war not with thoughtful anti-war analysis (analysis that, it turned out, was dead on), but instead opted for tantrums and shameful vitriol, the way right-wing pundits have in recent days and weeks.

For instance, imagine if the anti-war movement, and its highest-profile media supporters, had attacked military families whose sons and daughters were fighting in Iraq as the invasion unfolded. That kind of abhorrent behavior would have been universally condemned as just being beyond the pale. Yet last week, as its opposition to reform grew increasingly futile, the GOP Noise Machine dedicated lots of time and energy to mocking and attacking cancer-stricken patients, as well as a motherless 11-year-old boy who had the audacity to speak out in favor of health care reform.

Limbaugh's immortal words to the boy: "Your mom would have still died, because Obamacare doesn't kick in until 2014."

To me, the attacks indicated a withering of the right-wing media's shrinking moral compass, not to mention common sense. (Mocking the seriously ill is a winning political strategy?) It was another tell-tale sign of the unfolding, and unstoppable, nervous breakdown.

Because how else do you describe this kind of erratic, disturbed behavior? And it's worth repeating: This wasn't coming from minor, fringe players. It's been coming from the supposed leading lights of the conservative media; leading lights who, blinded by paranoia, have suffered a collective collapse and can no longer make sense of their surroundings.

The media myth of Obama's "falling poll numbers"

Eric Boehlert — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:34:35 EST

The release of an Associated Press poll last week that showed President Obama enjoying a healthy job approval rating of 53 percent didn't generate much news beyond the wire service and produced even less commentary among the media's chattering class. Then again, neither did another piece of polling news from January, which showed Obama basking in the glow of a 56 percent job approval rating.

The cold shoulder was expected, though. Why? It's simple: the results didn't fit the script.

Adopting the polar opposite narrative from the Bush era when pundits and reporters seemed obsessed with trying to boost the president's standing, Beltway scribes today have made it plain that when it comes to Obama and polling, good news is no news.

Feeding off right-wing talking points, political journalists love to push the idea that Obama's polling numbers are in the tank and that he's fading fast. It's all part of the preferred, CW narrative that his entire presidency is slipping away. (It must now be "save[d]," according to Newsweek.)

Does the White House wish Obama's job approval rating was higher? I'm sure advisers do. Is there anything unusual in Obama's approval number, other than the fact that it nearly doubles the rating his predecessor left office with? No, not really.

Indeed, the news media's ongoing hand-wringing about Obama's polling numbers and how he's only around 50 percent (it's "tepid" and cause for "worry") is rather odd considering former President Bush served nearly his entire second term with an approval rating below 50 percent and left the presidency with an almost incomprehensibly low 22 percent approval rating.

Also note that for the majority of Bush's first year in office (i.e. up until September 11, 2001), his approval rating remained pretty much exactly where Obama's has been since late last summer: hovering around 50 percent. But do you recall a media obsession about Bush's super-soft poll numbers back during the spring and summer of 2001?

Neither do I.

More queries: Has there been any dramatic shift in President Obama's approval number since late last summer? No. (See below.) Has the press in recent months, busy echoing right-wing falsehoods, often pretended that there has been a sizable shift? Without question. (Rush Limbaugh, last month: "If Mr. Obama hasn't noticed, his approval numbers are in a free fall.")

Just take a look. From The New York Times, December 19, 2009:

After weeks of frustrating delays and falling poll numbers, Mr. Obama decided to take what he could get, declare victory and claim momentum on some of the administration's biggest priorities, even if the details did not always match the lofty vision that underlined them.

Washington Post, January 19:

On Wednesday one year will have passed since President Obama's inauguration. Much of the tidal wave of assessments has been negative: Falling poll numbers. Unfulfilled promises.

Miami Herald, January 29:

Amid declining poll numbers and political fortunes, President Barack Obama on Thursday tried to reconnect with the fickle state that helped put him in the White House and urged voters to keep the faith despite Florida's withering recession.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer, February 23:

The president's falling poll numbers, ongoing backlash from Republicans, even some grumblings from Democrats. Might someone inside the White House bear most of the blame?

Los Angeles Times, March 7:

For months, Obama had been on the defensive, facing electoral setbacks, declining poll numbers, dissident Democrats and stories that highlighted the deal-making often needed to grind out legislation.

Everybody agrees that Obama's poll numbers are falling, so it must be true, right?

Wrong.

If you look at Gallup's weekly ratings for Obama, in late August 2009, he had a 50 percent approval rating. And for the most recently completed weekly tabulation from Gallup, Obama's rating stands at 48 percent. That's right, over a nearly seven-month period, the president's approval rating, as measured by Gallup, dropped exactly 2 percentage points, which obviously falls within Gallup's margin of error. That means you could accurately say that Obama's job approval rating has remained unchanged over the last six-plus months.

And it's not just Gallup that has chronicled Obama's rock-steady polling numbers. Take a look at the cumulative ratings posted daily at Real Clear Politics, which averages eight different polls (including Rasmussen's outlier tabulations) to come up with Obama's composite job approval rating.

Here are some of the data points from RCP:

August 20, 2009: 51 percent
September 23, 2009: 52 percent
October 4, 2009: 52 percent
November 4, 2009: 51 percent
December 7, 2009: 49 percent
January 11, 2010: 48 percent
February 18: 48 percent
March 3: 49 percent

And for the most recent, month-long snapshot, between February 17 and March 14, RCP pegged Obama's approval rating at 49 percent. So, much like Gallup, RCP has found that, since last August, Obama's job approval rating has basically shifted downward just a few points, or again, within the typical survey margin of error.

Given those figures, I'll ask again: Why is the press so eager to push this storyline about Obama's "falling poll numbers"? Where is the proof to back it up? And since when does a 1-3 point movement in any direction qualify as news? It's absurd.

By the way, if for some reason Obama's approval rating does significantly sag this month, or next, that won't somehow vindicate the previously erroneous coverage. Because the press has been claiming for the last several months that Obama's poll numbers have already fallen noticeable (which they have not), not that they're going to.

The media fixation on a barely there approval decline is especially bizarre when you consider how blasé the same press corps was during the Bush administration when the president often suffered gargantuan job approval declines. For instance, between December 2003 and May 2004, Bush's job approval plunged 17 points, according to Gallup. But it's hard to find much proof that the Beltway press corps was obsessed with Bush's "falling poll numbers" at the time.

But back to Obama. From September 1, 2009, to March 1, 2010, there was literally no change in Obama's approval rating. So why is the press so anxious to push the "falling poll numbers" meme? And is that why, when the White House did receive rays of good polling news during those months, the press seemed so anxious to look away?

Was it because when it comes to covering this Democratic White House, good news is no news?

At times it sure seems that way.

Back in January when The Washington Post reported on its latest political survey, the newspaper forgot to mention that Obama's job approval had gone up that month. Not a single reference to that fact was made in the article, which did set aside plenty of space to pile on the doom-and-gloom rhetoric:

A year into his presidency, President Obama faces a polarized nation and souring public assessments of his efforts to change Washington, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Nearly half of all Americans say Obama is not delivering on his major campaign promises, and a narrow majority have just some or no confidence that he will make the right decisions for the country's future.

By the way, this was the Post's headline:

Poll shows growing disappointment, polarization over Obama's performance

According to the Post, there was "growing disappointment" over Obama. Yet the Post itself forgot to report that his approval rating had gone up that month.

The same was true over at CNN.com in December 2009. Writing up the results of its latest poll, CNN not only didn't think the news hook was that Obama's approval rating had gone up 6 points in just two weeks, but the CNN article didn't even reference that finding until two-thirds of the way into the piece.

And then there was the AP in November 2009. Same drill. Its polling at the time showed Obama enjoying a robust 54 percent approval rating. So where was that information buried? In the article's ninth paragraph, after the AP painted an almost comically bleak picture of the political landscape Obama faced at the time.

And again, it's not just that the press has often misstated the facts about Obama's polling numbers. It's that this is the same Beltway press corps that often treated Obama's Republican predecessor in the exact opposite way, often itching to suggest that Bush's horrendous polling numbers were on the mend and spending years denying Bush's glaring job approval ratings collapse.

For instance, in January 2006, Time magazine's Mike Allen announced that Bush had "found his voice" and that relieved White House aides "were smiling again" after a rocky 2005. Of course, within months, Bush's approval rating fell to new all-time lows.

In April of that year, Katie Couric, then with NBC News, was asking Tim Russert if the White House could "breath[e] a sigh of relief" because Bush's latest approval rating had only fallen to 36 percent. In the end, Bush's phantom rebound never materialized and he left office as the least popular president in modern American history.

And yet for most of his eight years in office, the press seemed to have a gut feeling that Americans just liked Bush. And today, their instinct tells them that Americans don't really approve of Obama.

Here's an idea: Maybe journalists should simply report what Americans tell pollsters and stop trying to concoct a storyline.

Follow Eric Boehlert on Twitter.

The Pentagon shooter, insurrectionism, and right-wing bloggers

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:31:20 EST

When news broke last Thursday that a deranged gunman had opened fire outside a Pentagon security checkpoint, wounding two officers before being stopped by return fire (the gunman later died from his wounds), the reaction from some oddly giddy right-wing bloggers was swift. They wanted everyone to pay attention to the story. Why? Because bloggers claimed the gunman, John Patrick Bedell, was a loony liberal.

Under increased scrutiny for the rampant anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement, along with its often violent imagery and open talk of insurrection, right-wingers seemed anxious, even frantic, to hold up the Pentagon killer as proof that they weren't responsible for -- or connected with -- every political act of vigilante violence that makes headlines these days.

But as more details emerge about the incident, the far-right bloggers may wish they hadn't shone a spotlight on the disturbing Pentagon story. If anything, as we learn more about the anti-government rantings and writings of Bedell, this madman attack looks an awful lot like a string of other "lone wolf" attacks, such as the recent kamikaze pilot who flew his plane into an IRS office in Austin.

They're attacks that appear to be fueled by an almost pathological hatred for the U.S. government -- the same open hatred that right-wing bloggers, AM talk radio hosts, Fox News' lineup of anti-government prophets, and Tea Party leaders have been frantically fueling for the last year; pushing radical propaganda and warning of America's permanent, democratic demise under President Obama.

As I noted last year when the first red flags were raised about the specter of anti-government violence, what the GOP Noise Machine is doing today is embracing, and mainstreaming, the same kind of hate rhetoric and doomsday conspiratorial talk that flourished on the far-right fringes during the '90s. (Think Waco and black helicopters.) And legitimizing that kind of talk is dangerous.

On the one hand, right-wing media love mainstreaming vile, alarmist, anti-government rhetoric. Yet they're also hyper-sensitive to the charge that they're, y'know, mainstreaming vile, alarmist anti-government rhetoric and might also be goading some crazies into action. Consumed with Obama Derangement Syndrome, 'wingers literally cannot help themselves. Just this weekend, one prominent, albeit unhinged, right-wing site branded Obama as "suicide-bomber-in-chief." They've removed all sensible filters, which means the crazy talk flows 24-7.

Similar to the problematic birther brigade, the right-wing's crazy uncle who keeps showing up at public functions, radical insurrectionist rhetoric (i.e. war may have to be waged against the government) has been unleashed into the far-right masses and there's nothing that supposed leaders can do to contain it. They can't limit the violence that it continues to set off, either. Instead they scramble, like after last week's Pentagon attack, to shift the blame to the political left.

But the clumsy scapegoating doesn't work for obvious reasons: There are no major American liberal players, in media or politics, who today routinely preach the need to take up arms against the federal government. Conservative blogger Erick Erickson certainly couldn't point to any in his laugh-out-loud funny rewriting of history, in which he dutifully absolved the right-wing of any responsibility for anti-government violence, and instead blamed liberals.

Sorry, right-wingers, but you fostered this toxic environment. You're the ones who rally around Rush Limbaugh when he calls the president of the United States a Nazi. You're the ones who cheer when Glenn Beck compares our commander in chief to a dangerous, Hitler-like tyrant who wants to "take your gun away one way or another."

You're the ones who toasted the anti-Obama mobs last summer when members marched around with Swastika posters, brandished guns, and gave speeches about the need to wage bloody war against the federal government. You're the ones who compare health care reform to a bloody terrorism campaign waged by the government against its own citizens.

You cultivated this poisonous, arm-yourself-against-the-government hysteria -- and now you own it. You have to deal with increasingly predictable, and at times deadly consequences.

For instance, last year, it was Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a right-wing media darling and Tea Party favorite, who said to Glenn Beck during an interview on his radio show that she wanted "people in Minnesota armed and dangerous" to oppose the Obama administration. She also stressed that Thomas Jefferson "told us 'having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,' and the people -- we the people -- are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country."

We've been down this road before.

On April 19, 1995, feeding off his hatred of the federal government, Timothy McVeigh drove a rented 20-foot Ryder truck and parked it in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. His truck's three-ton ammonium nitrate bomb detonated and sheared the north side off the Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. McVeigh later wrote, "I reached the decision to go on the offensive -- to put a check on government abuse of power." McVeigh wanted to "send a message to a government" by "bombing a government building and the government employees within that building who represent that government."

Back in 1995, McVeigh, keyed into far-right conspiracies and still seething about the siege at Waco, declared war on the federal government. Today, more and more combatants seem to be signing up for duty.

Last week's shooter, who traveled all the way from California to attack the Pentagon, certainly expressed a dark and unstable contempt for the government:

When the government can control how private property is used, and especially when the government controls the monetary system that is use to exchange private property, the government has the mechanisms and the motivation to control individuals to the smallest detail.

And:

When governments are able to confiscate the resources of their citizens to fund schemes that need only be justified by lies and deception enormous disasters can result.

And:

The imperative to defend the freedom of conscience must lead us to eliminate the role of the government in education and leave parents and communities free to raise their children as they see fit.

As blogger Charles Johnson, at Little Green Footballs correctly pointed out: "If you gave a speech at a tea party rally consisting of nothing but the quotes from Bedell you see above, you'd get a standing ovation."

But today, far-right bloggers scramble to deflect the connection. They excitedly point to the fact that Bedell was a 9-11 "truther," who demanded answers about the government's supposed involvement in the attacks that day, and so that automatically made the mentally ill gunman a liberal. But wait, wasn't it a right-wing Tea Party candidate for governor who recently made news when she refused to knock down the anti-government "truther" conspiracy?

Indeed. Texas Tea Party activist and candidate Debra Medina appeared on Glenn Beck's radio show and suggested she was open to the idea that the 9-11 attacks were an inside government job. "I have not taken a position on that," said Medina. (It's the same insurrectionist Medina who told a Tea Party crowd that "we are aware that stepping off into secession may in fact be a bloody war. We understand that the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.")

And meanwhile, aren't lots of Ron Paul supporters famously attached to the 9-11 conspiracy theory? And isn't that the same Ron Paul who ran away with the straw poll at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference convention in Washington, D.C.?

And isn't the 9-11 truther movement's most famous advocate the conspiratorial radio nut (and full-time Obama hater) Alex Jones, who has been mainstreamed by Fox News? And isn't that the same Alex Jones who today complains that Glenn Beck's show now sounds so much like Jones' that Beck is just ripping him off?

From this month's issue of Texas Monthly (subscription required):

More troubling, [Jones] told me, is the way personalities at the top of the media food chain have been co-opting his message. Glenn Beck is the worst, he said. "Two weeks after I have a guest on, they have him on. ... Glenn Beck is literally word for word taking everything I do and twisting it and turning it into a Roger Ailes Fox News evil doppelgänger of my show," he said" [emphasis added].

Bloggers also pointed to the fact that Bedell was reportedly a registered Democrat as more proof of his allegiance to the left. But that doesn't make much sense, either. Are bloggers really suggesting that no registered Democrats have attended anti-government Tea Party rallies this year? Haven't Tea Party leaders been bragging about how they're attracting a wide range of disaffected voters? And in fact, haven't Tea Party leaders been stressing how wrong it is to assume the movement is synonymous with the Republican Party? But suddenly a distant political registration proves all.

For the record, I'm not suggesting that Bedell was a dedicated Glenn Beck fan, or that Rush Limbaugh made him do it. I think the specifics of this case are too muddled for those kinds of conclusions. But the idea that panicked right-wing bloggers can turn Bedell into a tree-hugging Greenpeace activist is ludicrous. The allegation doesn't withstand scrutiny, simply because dangerous, anti-government rhetoric is not part of today's liberal dialogue.

It is however, a proud cornerstone of the conservative one.

Breitbart confirms he was duped by O'Keefe and the ACORN pimp hoax

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:40:02 EST

It turns out that Andrew Breitbart didn't actually know what was on the ACORN tapes when he helped launch them on his website last year, and used the videos to fuel his oddly personal crusade against the low-income advocacy organization.

That's right -- Breitbart didn't know what was on the tapes. Take a few seconds to let the implications of that confession sink in, and what it means to Breitbart's already dented credibility.

Recall that for months Breitbart personally vouched for the ACORN videos, braying loudly that they could not be ignored and that they represented the unvarnished truth. Breitbart claimed he had told "the truth" every step of the way about the controversial ACORN clips and bragged that "[t]hroughout the ACORN story I applied my conscience to the material."

But now it turns out that Breitbart was fooled by the ACORN pimp hoax and mistakenly assumed, after watching deceptively edited clips from his protégé James O'Keefe, that O'Keefe strolled into ACORN offices wearing the outlandish pimp outfit.

Now Breitbart, the chief promoter of the ACORN sting, claims he "didn't know" the truth about the tapes. Although he's quick to insist it doesn't really matter anyway.

And yes, that sound you hear is Breitbart throwing O'Keefe under the bus. Because it's O'Keefe who Breitbart now blames for the "discrepancy" regarding the pimp hoax. It's O'Keefe, who Breitbart once touted as a should-be Pulitzer Prize winner, who created the false impression that he walked into ACORN offices last summer dressed as a garish pimp.

In a video interview posted Monday at Stark Reports, as well as The Brad Blog, Breitbart, filmed by blogger Mike Stark at the recent CPAC convention, claims he did not know the facts about O'Keefe's pimp outfit. (See video below.)

Essentially, Breitbart claims he was duped like everyone else who saw the ACORN clips created by O'Keefe. He was duped because at the outset, the misleading clips contain cut-away shots filmed outdoors, which feature O'Keefe decked out in the cane-fur-sunglasses pimp costume. (Breitbart deceptively refers to the dressed-as-pimp section as the "title sequence" of the videos, but it's really much more than that.)

It appears that many viewers just assumed O'Keefe wore the get-up while he surreptitiously filmed the ACORN workers who ignited a scandal when they gave O'Keefe and his pretend prostitute girlfriend, Hannah Giles, tax advice on how to run a brothel.

The dressed-as-a-pimp storyline was one Breitbart, O'Keefe, and others eagerly pushed last fall. And it was one the press quickly embraced. (In truth, O'Keefe was often dressed rather conservatively -- slacks and dress shirt -- when he talked to ACORN staffers, and he often presented himself as a law school student and an aspiring politician trying to rescue his prostitute girlfriend from her abusive pimp.) The outlandish costume was used as a prop to both mislead viewers, and to make ACORN staffers look like idiots for not being able to spot the obvious ruse.

But it was all a hoax. And for weeks now, ever since the trick was highlighted by blogger Brad Friedman, Breitbart has been wrestling with the glaring contradiction and struggling to explain his own role in the hoax. He's been straining to explain why, for instance, in a September 21 column in The Washington Times, Breitbart specifically claimed O'Keefe had been "dressed as a pimp" while receiving tax advice from ACORN workers.

That claim was categorically false.

He's been laboring to explain why he never sought a single correction last year when an avalanche of news outlets erroneously reported O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp inside ACORN offices.

And he's been struggling to explain why, in light of the pimp hoax, he refuses to release all of the unedited ACORN tapes so we can see what other discrepancies might pop up.

At least now, thanks to Stark, we finally have Breitbart's unequivocal admission: It was all O'Keefe's fault.

From the Stark interview [emphasis added; full transcript here]:

Hello to anyone that thinks that I was misleading. I did not know that there was a discrepancy between the title sequence -- I didn't think it was significant. I saw the videos. I read the transcripts to make sure that there was continuity, and my only mistake -- and I've admitted it to Brad, I've admitted it, now that I now know about it -- is that there is a title sequence and it doesn't reflect what he was wearing when he was in there. But he still represented himself as a pimp.

In the interview, Breitbart also stressed that because O'Keefe is an "independent film producer," Breitbart couldn't "tell him what to put on these things." And to make his point clear, when Stark pressed further about the hoax, Breitbart responded, "Your problem is with James."

Breitbart may have tried to shift the blame, but the admission was a devastating one. After all, he's the guy who won't stop bragging about how he's going to reinvent online journalism, and how he and his conservative activists are going to shame the liberal media with relentless fact-checking. Yet it turns out that for the biggest story of his career, Breitbart didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes.

Not only did Breitbart clearly fail Journalism 101 in this case, but the way he's refused to publicly accept responsibility for the blunder represents another body blow to his credibility. To date, Breitbart has made no effort to correct the record on his site, which helped launch the ACORN sting. Which means that, to date, Breitbart's sycophantic readers have not been told that, oh, by the way, that whole dressed-as-a-pimp thing was bogus.

With that in mind, what journalist would take seriously the next undercover video sting Breitbart might sponsor, when we find out that for the all-important ACORN caper he didn't even know what was on the tapes until observers pointed out a glaring discrepancy?

Meanwhile, should we believe Breitbart's pimp spin? Tough to say. It probably represents his only way out of this mess. If Breitbart actually confessed that he knew the pimp costume story was a fake, and that not only did he do nothing to try to stop the misinformation last year but actively helped to spread the hoax, then I think his credibility would be permanently demolished. At that point even mainstream journalists, who tend to turn a blind eye to Breitbart's mendacity, would have to acknowledge he is nothing more than a partisan propagandist.

So, searching for a face-saving move, it appears Breitbart has opted for Plan B: Blame the young "independent film producer" O'Keefe, who brought the videos to Breitbart, complete with the misleading pimp costumes shots already embedded. (Does Breitbart really expect people to believe that he never had a single conversation with O'Keefe about the pimp outfit prior to the release of the videos?)

The problem with Breitbart's alibi (i.e. it's O'Keefe's fault!) is that it means Breitbart has copped to the fact that he didn't know what was on the tapes that he relentlessly hyped and used as a weapon in his oddly unhinged attack on ACORN, an underfunded and somewhat adrift nonprofit that advocates for poor people. (In one disturbed dispatch from a pro-ACORN rally last year, Breitbart attacked the attendees as "common street thugs, the dregs of society.")

His new song and dance (literally -- see the 6:40 mark in the video below) is that none of this matters because it's irrelevant whether O'Keefe was dressed flamboyantly inside the ACORN offices. It's true, as I've stated many times, that the costume question does not negate what was captured on the ACORN videos. But the hoax certainly does matter in terms of the larger ACORN attack and how the press embraced it. Breitbart knows it, and that's why he's been so slow to clear up the confusion. (And it's why he seemed so eager last year to spread the confusion.)

As the blogger Digby recently explained:

But the less than obvious reason this is a big deal is that the pimp and ho costumes were a send-up of over-the-top racial stereotypes that both reinforced some very ugly notions about the African American community, but more importantly, made these ACORN workers look as though they were so dumb they shouldn't be allowed to cross the street, much less handle tax dollars. And this was done for a reason.

The pimp hoax is not some footnote that can just be dismissed. The glaring blunder goes to the heart of Breitbart's credibility as a wannabe journalist. The lie was absolutely central to the rollout of last year's ACORN attack campaign. And now, six months later, Breitbart claims he didn't know the first thing about the hoax because, truth be told, he didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes.

Will Breitbart, O'Keefe, and Giles come clean about the ACORN pimp hoax?

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:54:04 EST

Last September 12, when the story of undercover ACORN surveillance videos was just breaking, conservative activist Hannah Giles, who starred in the clips as a wannabe prostitute, appeared on Fox News. Host Greg Gutfeld was positively giddy during his Giles interview, as he mocked the ACORN employees who were caught on tape giving Giles and her undercover partner, James O'Keefe, all kinds of misguided advice on how a prostitute could pay* taxes on her late-night income.

The wisecracking Gutfeld especially loved the whole pimp-'n'-ho premise of the sting and was stunned that ACORN staffers bought the ruse, considering the outlandish way Giles and O'Keefe were dressed when they strolled into the community organizers' offices. In the ACORN clips posted online, viewers could see Giles strutting around outside in a revealing outfit, while O'Keefe was decked out in fur with sunglasses and a goofy-looking cane.

As Gutfeld excitedly mentioned to Giles [emphasis added]:

GUTFELD: It's amazing to me because, seriously, you guys look like you came from a frat party where it was pimps 'n' hos. I would think they just would've said, "Get out of here!" But in fact they were trying to help you set up a brothel.

According to Gutfeld, O'Keefe walked right into the ACORN offices looking like he came from a costume party, and they still didn't catch on.

But, of course, we now know Gutfeld had the story all wrong. As I noted last week, and as blogger Brad Friedman had pointed out previously, James O'Keefe never wore his crazy hustler outfit to meet with community organizers. Instead, the '70s-style blaxploitation pimp costume O'Keefe helped make famous was a propaganda tool used after the fact to deceive the public about the undercover operation.

Yet in the very infancy of the ACORN scandal, Fox News host Gutfeld was peddling a false story about O'Keefe's pimp costume, a false story that quickly morphed into accepted fact. (Eventually, after an avalanche of repetition, didn't pretty much everyone believe O'Keefe was decked out as a pimp?)

It quickly morphed into fact because the lead propagandists helped to spread the tall tale. And now they won't come clean about their role.

For instance, during that September 12 broadcast, Giles said nothing to set the record straight. That night, she sat and listened to Gutfeld tell the phony pimp story, and she became complicit in the lie. Obviously, Giles knew her undercover pal didn't look like he just came from a costume party when he walked into ACORN outposts with his undercover camera. But on Fox News, when Gutfeld spread that tale, Giles did nothing to correct the record.

Soon, her undercover cohort joined in the misinformation campaign. Two days later, O'Keefe appeared on Fox & Friends decked out as a pimp. Host Steve Doocy announced that O'Keefe was "dressed exactly in the same outfit that he wore to these ACORN offices up and down the Eastern Seaboard."

O'Keefe made no effort to correct Doocy's falsehood.

And then one week later, writing in The Washington Times, O'Keefe and Giles' mentor, conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, whose website Big Government first hosted the ACORN clips, added to the misinformation movement. He wrote that O'Keefe had been "dressed as a pimp" while "getting" tax advice inside ACORN offices.

It was all part of a campaign, often fueled by winks and nods, to plant the indelible image of O'Keefe strolling into inner-city ACORN workplaces on summer afternoons decked out in his furry pimp costume and clueless employees not batting an eye.

It wasn't enough to uncover dubious practices inside the offices. Breitbart and his colleagues, consumed by hatred for an underfunded and somewhat adrift nonprofit, were determined to demonize ACORN (a "thug organization," as Giles put it) and paint its workers as immoral fools for not being able to spot the spoof a mile away. (In truth, O'Keefe was dressed rather conservatively -- slacks and dress shirt -- when he talked to ACORN staffers, and he often presented himself as an aspiring politician.)

Last week, when highlighting how the pimp story was a fake, I stressed two things. First, that fact does not change what happened on the Candid Camera tapes, and it certainly doesn't excuse the behavior of the low-level ACORN staffers who seemed shockingly eager to help people skirt the law. Second, the pimp revelation does raise all sorts of questions about the ethics and accuracy of Breitbart, O'Keefe, and Giles and indicate that the hoax should send up a red flag among journalists. Breitbart claims he's championing a new breed of "journalism." But is his brand built on lies?

If the trio's willing to obfuscate about clothing, then reporters and pundits need to use extreme caution when dealing with any claim they make in the future. And that probably goes double for O'Keefe, who offered up pretty dubious spin following his arrest in New Orleans last month in connection with the Keystone Kop capering inside Sen. Mary Landrieu's office.

So last week, Media Matters helped highlight how the pimp story was bogus, and what did Breitbart do in response? Did he accept responsibility and make plain to his Big Government readers that any confusion on the pimp issue was his fault and that he regrets not being straight about it?

Of course not. Breitbart, allergic to fair play and decency, at first insisted he had nothing to correct in his Washington Times column, even though he falsely reported O'Keefe was "dressed as a pimp" while receiving ACORN advice. He then posted a nasty, insincere "correction" via Twitter. And at CPAC last weekend, his voice dripping with contempt, Breitbart announced he was "so sorry" that O'Keefe "apparently" hadn't been dressed as a flamboyant pimp when taping ACORN. (Breitbart ought to take lessons from fellow conservative Michelle Malkin on how grown-ups post corrections.)

Meanwhile, Giles last week flatly denied they had ever claimed O'Keefe entered ACORN offices as a pimp:

"We never claimed that he went in with a pimp costume," said Giles. "That was b-roll. It was purely b-roll. He was a pimp, I was a prostitute, and we were walking in front of government buildings to show how the government was whoring out the American people."

Ah, the B-roll. For those unfamiliar with the video production term, B-roll is secondary footage often included in TV reports that shows the featured subjects in some sort of pedestrian action mode, like walking through their office or taking a phone call at their desk.

When the ACORN tapes were first posted at Big Government, they contained plenty of B-roll, or cutaway shots, featuring O'Keefe in his flamboyant pimp outfit outside. And, of course, that's a key reason viewers and news consumers first got the false notion that O'Keefe did his entire undercover sting in the costume, because the video-makers left that obvious impression. (Since O'Keefe did the ACORN filming, he's rarely seen on tape inside the offices.)

Indeed, wasn't the entire point of the deceptively edited B-roll clips to create confusion from the outset? Giles says they "never claimed" O'Keefe wore a pimp outfit, but why else would they purposefully include footage of him in the video if not to create that false impression? Meaning, the videos in and of themselves represent proof that Breitbart, O'Keefe, and Giles knowingly tried to peddle the pimp lie.

As blogger Conor Friedersdorf sensibly noted last week:

After watching the ACORN videos, I shared them with several apolitical friends who don't follow the blogosphere very closely. All assumed Mr. O'Keefe walked into the ACORN offices wearing the pimp suit.

For me, the "Hey, look, I'm dressed like a pimp" B-roll clips posted on Big Government tell us all we need to know about the purposeful attempt to mislead the public. But if you want more proof, let's continue.

Let's go back and reread a Washington Post article from last September and note the picture painted by O'Keefe. It seems pretty definitive [emphasis added]:

The proposition was outrageous, outlandish and right up James E. O'Keefe III's alley. Hannah Giles was on the phone from Washington, D.C., and she was asking him to dress as her pimp, walk into the offices of the ACORN community activist group, openly admit to wanting to buy a house to run as a brothel and see what happened.

It was serendipity, O'Keefe said Thursday. On that day in May, he was still burning mad after watching a YouTube video of ACORN workers breaking padlocks off foreclosed homes and barging in. "I was upset," he said.

O'Keefe, 25, packed his grandfather's old wide-brimmed derby hat from his swing-dancing days, his grandmother's ratty chinchilla shoulder throw, and a cane he bought at a dollar store, then drove from his parents' home in northern New Jersey to the District to execute the idea with Giles, 20.

Last September, the Post interviewed O'Keefe, who told the newspaper all about how the ACORN videos came to be. According to his telling, Giles called and asked him to dress as a pimp and "walk into the offices of the ACORN community activist group," as the Post relayed it. And after getting Giles' call, O'Keefe told the Post, he packed up his pimp costume and drove south to execute the plan.

But today, Giles claims they never claimed O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp for the sting.

Meanwhile, I already noted the time when Giles appeared on Fox News and remained silent while the host pushed the bogus talking point about the pimp costume. But that wasn't the only time Breitbart and friends remained mum.

Question: Isn't sitting idly by while a lie is broadcast about your story nearly as bad as broadcasting the lie yourself?

Let's go back to Sean Hannity's show on September 14, 2009. (That's the same day O'Keefe appeared on Fox News in his full pimp costume.) Giles and Breitbart were the guests, and host Hannity was hyping the ACORN clips (transcript from the Nexis database):

GILES: Yes. Imagine that. Everyone is suffering and looking for a loan and they tell us and you know, we're going through all this financial problems, and they're telling me to bury funds in the back yard so that the government or my pimp can't come steal the money.

HANNITY: And by the way, and he is the least convincing pimp that I would think in the world. But he pulled -- you guys pulled it off and did a great job.

Hannity claimed O'Keefe wasn't even convincing as a pimp, yet was still able to fool ACORN employees, to "pull it off." Of course, as we now know, O'Keefe wasn't dressed as a pimp inside the offices, so that didn't fool any of the employees.

So what did Breitbart and Giles do as Hannity pushed the phony pimp story on national TV? Did they jump in quickly to set the record straight, so no misinformation spread across the airwaves? Did they stress how important it was to be factually accurate about the ACORN sting operation and that neither one of them wanted to mislead Hannity's viewers into thinking O'Keefe was actually dressed as a pimp on the undercover videos?

Nope. Neither Breitbart nor Giles tried to correct Hannity, because by all indications, O'Keefe, Giles, and Breitbart wanted the bogus pimp story to be pushed in the press.

The same dance played out on November 16, 2009, when Hannity again hyped the tapes. His guests that night were O'Keefe and Giles (transcript from Nexis):

HANNITY: All right. You were both dressed as -- and by the way, you are the least convincing pimp in the entire world. I mean, I just don't -- I don't get it.

O'KEEFE: It's pretty outrageous. It's ridiculous. And look at the way that Hannah's dressed. They didn't blink an eye.

HANNITY: And by the way, Hannah, you are the least convincing prostitute. I want that to be clear, too, in the entire world.

But in all honesty, it is outrageous.

Not only did Giles and O'Keefe fail to correct Hannity's false implication that O'Keefe had worn the pimp outfit while secretly filming, but O'Keefe enthusiastically agreed the whole thing was "pretty ridiculous."

Last point: When many in the mainstream press began to erroneously report the pimp costume falsehood, did Breitbart or O'Keefe or Giles contact reporters to set them straight? Out of a concern for accuracy and fair play, did any of them step forward and spell out the facts, which were routinely mangled in the press? Did Breitbart, who seems obsessed with seeking corrections, contact New York Times editors, for instance, when the newspaper last year mistakenly reported that when he "visited ACORN offices," O'Keefe was "dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risque high school play"? Did Breitbart get in touch with the New York Post when it made a similar blunder? NPR? The Dallas Morning News?

I suspect the answer is no, because the right-wing activists wanted the falsehood to flourish. And, as I've detailed, they helped plant it in the first place.

But now the fooling is over, and it's time for Breitbart, O'Keefe, and Giles to come clean about the ACORN pimp hoax and their role in spreading it.

Follow Eric Boehlert on Twitter.

James O'Keefe and the myth of the ACORN pimp

Eric Boehlert — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:48:03 EST

Last September, when the ACORN scandal that his website helped launch was breaking in the press, Andrew Breitbart wrote a column for The Washington Times detailing the rollout of the undercover, right-wing gotcha. He recalled a 2009 meeting with "filmmaker and provocateur James O'Keefe" that took place in Breitbart's office in June. It was there that O'Keefe played the columnist the surreptitiously recorded videos he'd made with his sidekick, Hannah Giles, and which captured the two famously getting advice from ACORN workers on how prostitutes could skirt tax laws.

In his Times column, Breitbart was quite clear about what he saw that day in his office: He watched videos of O'Keefe "dressed as a pimp" sitting inside ACORN offices "asking for -- and getting -- help" from the misguided employees.

But today we know that's almost certainly not true. Breitbart didn't huddle in his office and watch clips of O'Keefe "dressed as a pimp" chatting with ACORN employees, because based on all the available evidence, O'Keefe wasn't dressed as a pimp while taping inside the ACORN offices.

Make no mistake: Last fall, both Breitbart and O'Keefe, with the help of Fox News, did their best to confuse people about that fact. It's true the duo seemed to purposefully push that falsehood and mislead the public and the press about the ACORN story. And more importantly, they did it to make the ACORN workers captured on video look like complete jackasses for not being able to spot O'Keefe's pimp ruse a mile away.

But the story was not true.

Fact: On the guerilla clips posted online and aired on Fox News, O'Keefe was featured in lots of cutaway shots that were filmed outside and showed him parading around with Giles in his outlandish cane/top hat/sunglasses/fur coat pimp costume.

The cutaway shots certainly left the impression that that's how O'Keefe was dressed when he spoke to ACORN workers.

But inside each and every office, according to one independent review that looked at the public videos, O'Keefe entered sans the pimp get-up. In fact, he was dressed rather conservatively. During his visit to the Baltimore ACORN office, he wore a dress shirt and khaki pants. For the Philadelphia sting, he added a tie to the ensemble.

Instead, the '70s-era, blacksploitation pimp costume was a propaganda tool used to later deceive the public about the undercover operation. It was a prop that was quickly embraced by the mainstream media and turned into a central part of the ACORN story.

It's true that Giles was seen on the ACORN office tapes scantily clad as she discussed her future prostitution plans with ACORN workers. But it was the pimp costume, or the idea that O'Keefe was sitting there getting ACORN advice while decked out in it, that really hit the laughter button and caused the press -- and public -- to guffaw at ACORN's apparent cluelessness. Read: Not only were the ACORN employees morally suspect for doling out tax advice to a would-be prostitute, but the low-income advocates were dumb as stumps to boot!

"I can't believe ACORN believes this dude is a pimp!" exclaimed a Washington City Paper blogger last year, falsely reporting that O'Keefe arrived inside ACORN offices "looking like he had recently crawled from a frat house basement."

There's no doubt the pimp costume story worked. (Raise your hand if you were duped.) My guess is if you polled Americans today, and even ones who followed the story closely last year (including right-wing partisans), at least 90 percent would say O'Keefe sat inside ACORN offices while decked out in his pimp costume.

But it's not true. At least there have not been any publicly released ACORN videos to suggest otherwise.

And no, by pointing out the holes in the ACORN sting story, I'm not trying to excuse what was captured (illegally?) on tape. Everyone knows the embarrassing mistakes the poorly trained, low-level ACORN employees made when dealing with O'Keefe and Giles. That situation, and the continued fallout surrounding it, is for the organization to deal with.

Why the costume story is still important, though, is that it highlights the almost pathological streak that runs through Breitbart and O'Keefe's work, and how the press too often falls for their concocted cover stories. (See below; and yes, Media Matters has, at times, incorrectly stated O'Keefe wore his pimp outfit while meeting with ACORN workers.)

It's important to understand how Breitbart and O'Keefe were able to so easily plant the ACORN falsehood. That's especially true in the wake of O'Keefe's recent arrest in New Orleans, where he was cuffed with entering a federal building under false pretense and tagged with intent to commit a felony. As blogger Marcy Wheeler noted, O'Keefe's cover story for that failed caper is riddled with holes, which should be a red flag for journalists as Breitbart concocts his contradictory spin.

Wrote blogger Brad Friedman last week, as he highlighted the pimp falsehood against the backdrop of the New Orleans arrest:

If O'Keefe, and Breitbart, who still employs him, were that willing to out-and-out lie about the ACORN scam, seen as a successful one, just how far would the two GOP operatives be willing to go to get off the hook for what appears to be a very serious federal felony?

More importantly, if news organizations are still making the dressed-like-a-pimp mistake, it's time that they stop. And yes, that means you, New York Times.

Friedman has been trying to get the newspaper of record to correct its inaccurate reporting on the pimp issue -- reporting that appeared as recently as last month, following O'Keefe's New Orleans arrest. When one of Friedman's readers contacted the newspaper urging the same request, the reader was informed, via email by a Times senior editor for standards, that because O'Keefe claimed he'd been dressed as a pimp inside ACORN offices, and because O'Keefe had appeared on Fox News and made that claim, the Times did not need to post a correction.

Wrote the Times standards editor: "We believe" O'Keefe. (Yikes!)

That's nuts. It's one thing to be suckered in by Breitbart and O'Keefe's pimp costume tale, it's another for the Times to now defend its erroneous reporting. And even worse is the Times' implication that it's O'Keefe who gets to decide which version of the pimp story is true, despite all the contrary evidence.

Last December, former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, commissioned by ACORN to independently review the facts surrounding the scandal, released his findings. Highly critical of ACORN and its employees, Harshbarger nonetheless concluded the undercover sting did not catch any employees breaking the law.

Harshbarger also shed light on the controversial videos, noting that portions had been "substantially" edited, including some voice overdubbing. And because O'Keefe and Breitbart refuse to let any outside observers -- including journalists -- view the full collection of unedited tapes, it's impossible to tell just how significantly the tapes were manipulated prior to their release.

This was another key, albeit mostly overlooked, finding from the report:

Although Mr. O'Keefe appeared in all videos dressed as a pimp, in fact, when he appeared at each and every office, he was dressed like a college student -- in slacks and a button down shirt.

It's worth nothing that if O'Keefe and Breitbart wanted to rebut Harshbarger's damaging claim about the lack of pimp costume -- a narrative both men worked hard to prop up last year -- it's logical they would release clips to disprove Harshbarger's finding. They would release a video that showed O'Keefe clearly dressed outlandishly as a pimp while sitting inside ACORN offices. But two months after the release of Harshbarger's report, Breitbart and O'Keefe have not done that.

Also note that earlier this month, after Friedman once again highlighted Harshbarger's finding, Breitbart posted this tweet:

How did the story first come to life? Not surprisingly, Fox News played a key role in hyping the phony pimp tale. During the second week in September 2009 when the ACORN story was breaking, O'Keefe appeared on Fox & Friends dressed up in his eccentric pimp get-up. Co-host Steve Doocy introduced O'Keefe as being "dressed exactly in the same outfit that he wore to these ACORN offices up and down the Eastern Seaboard" [emphasis added].

O'Keefe made no effort to correct Doocy's falsehood. Indeed, the entire point of O'Keefe dressing up that morning was so that Doocy could spread the pimp costume falsehood, which is why O'Keefe told Fox News viewers during the show: "I'm one of the whitest guys ever. I just wear ridiculous stuff and put people in ridiculous situations." The clear implication was that he wore "ridiculous stuff" into the ACORN offices.

There's just no proof he ever did.

Initially, many news outlets referred to O'Keefe as having "posed" as a pimp inside ACORN offices. And while there were problems with that wording, it was certainly better than claiming the undercover cameraman was "dressed" as a pimp while talking to ACORN employees. Yet for some reason, many journalists couldn't resist the lure of the "dressed" storyline.

Here's how CNN.com first reported the story on September 10, 2009:

Two employees at the Baltimore, Maryland, branch of the liberal community organizing group ACORN were caught on tape allegedly offering advice to a pair posing as a pimp and prostitute on setting up a prostitution ring and evading the IRS.

But note the erroneous change CNN made the following day:

T.J. HOLMES: Allegedly video out there taken by a conservative activist who dressed up like a pimp and had someone with him that was dressed up like a prostitute. They go into an office in Baltimore, one of these ACORN offices.

Soon, claiming O'Keefe was decked out in his comical pimp outfit while sitting inside the ACORN offices became the accepted norm.

New York Times:

They visited Acorn offices in Baltimore, Washington, Brooklyn and San Bernardino, Calif., candidly describing their illicit business and asking the advice of Acorn workers. Among other questions, they asked how to buy a house to use as a brothel employing under-age girls from El Salvador. Mr. O'Keefe, 25, a filmmaker and conservative activist, was dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risque high school play.

New York Post:

O'Keefe and Giles were garishly dressed as a stereotypical pimp and prostitute. O'Keefe was decked out in excessively snazzy flesh-peddler couture, and Giles, going by the name "Eden," wore almost nothing. The ACORN workers were not the slightest bit judgmental or put off by the request for help in getting financing for a brothel.

Philadelphia Daily News:

O'Keefe and Giles were dressed as a pimp and prostitute, just as they were during undercover visits to ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington, Brooklyn and San Bernardino, Calif., over the summer.

NPR:

If you watch cable TV at all this week, you've almost certainly seen the images again and again -- a young man dressed as a pimp with a young woman posing as a prostitute. They are with ACORN workers who were supposed to be advising low-income people on taxes and home loans, but instead you hear this.

Dallas Morning News:

James O'Keefe, 25, dressed up as a cartoon version of a pimp. Hannah Giles, 20, barely dressed as a stereotypical hooker (or "freelance performing artist," as one Baltimore ACORN worker helpfully suggested). They stashed their camera and walked into ACORN offices from coast to coast, blatantly asking for help setting up housing for a prostitution business, which also would employ underage prostitutes from El Salvador.

Baltimore Sun:

The video sounds like a satire: A young man and woman, dressed as caricatures of a pimp and prostitute, walk into the Baltimore office of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and spin an outrageous story about how the woman needs help buying a house to set up as a brothel for underage Salvadoran girls.

Breitbart and O'Keefe have made it clear that they think they've stumbled onto the future of "conservative journalism" in the form of undercover pranks, so look for more Punk'd-style capers to come. But based on the trumped-up pimp story, and the fact that they chose to mislead the public about something as trivial as clothing, it should be clear journalists cannot accept as fact anything either man says.

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Palin headlines birther conference; press pretends not to notice

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:20:42 EST

If you don't think there's a media double standard that favors Republicans over Democrats, then let's play a game of what-if.

What if, in 2006, at Yearly Kos, the first annual convention of liberal bloggers and their readers, organizers shelled out $100,000 for former Vice President Al Gore to address attendees? And what if the same organizers booked as an opening-night speaker a fringe, radical-left conspiracy theorist who'd spent the previous year pushing the thoroughly debunked claim that some Bush White administration insiders played a role in, and even planned, the 9-11 attacks. What if the speaker (also proudly anti-Semitic) received a standing ovation from the liberal Yearly Kos crowd?

Given that backdrop, and given the fact that the 9-11 Truther nut had for weeks bragged about his chance to share the stage with Gore, do you think the press would have demanded that Gore justify his association with a hateful conference that embraced a 9-11 Truther? Do you think pundits would have universally mocked and ridiculed Gore's judgment while condemning the Yearly Kos convention as being a hothouse of left-wing hate? Do you think Gore's appearance would have become a thing?

I sure do.

Gore and liberal bloggers would have been crucified by the press and the D.C. chattering class if the scenario I described ever unfolded in real life. (FYI, it goes without saying that organizers for Yearly Kos, now known as Netroots Nation, would never dream of mainstreaming an anti-Semitic 9-11 Truther via a prime-time speaking gig.)

But this past weekend in Nashville, at the first National Tea Party Convention, the Beltway press did just the opposite with regard to Sarah Palin's keynote address, which did follow a prime-time speech by "birther" nut Joseph Farah, who over the years has carved out a uniquely hateful and demented corner of the right-wing blogosphere. Because, yes, at the Tea Party convention, Farah, a proud Muslim-hater and gay-hater, did receive a standing ovation from the conservative crowd after he unfurled his thoroughly debunked birther garbage. (i.e. Obama "doesn't have a birth certificate.") And Farah did brag in the weeks leading up to the event about his chance to share the stage with Palin, to associate with Palin. ("Sold out! Palin-Farah ticket rocks tea-party convention," read the headline at Farah's discredited right-wing site, WorldNetDaily.com.)

Worst of all, though, the press played dumb about the whole thing.

Fact: Virtually nobody in the corporate media said boo about Palin helping to legitimize Farah by sharing the same stage with him. She was given a total free ride.

And I mean nobody. According to Nexis, there were more than 150 newspaper articles and columns published in the U.S. last week that mentioned both Palin and the Tea Party. (Combined, The New York Times and The Washington Post published 18 of them.) Yet out of all those articles and columns, exactly two also mentioned Joseph Farah by name. (Congrats to the Philadelphia Daily News and New Hampshire's Concord Monitor.)

And keep in mind that lots of scribes, even after listening to Farah's rambling rant, filed dispatches from Nashville stressing how mellow and mainstream the Tea Party convention was turning out to be. According to the Post, the mood at the Nashville confab was "festive, even giddy." And no, not a single word in the Post dispatch mentioned Farah's high-profile birther harangue.

Bottom line: The birther movement embarrasses most conservatives. Yet even when they invite a birther nut to speak at their conference, the press still won't ask tough questions. Instead, journalists politely look away.

It didn't used to work that way. There's been a long media tradition of holding politicians accountable for their public associations, especially when they appear at conventions that feature fringe rhetoric from controversial speakers. Reporting on who politicians agree to share a stage with has always been considered not only fair game, but genuinely newsworthy.

It's just that in this instance, the press gave Palin a complete and unobstructed free ride, a free ride Al Gore never would have been afforded.

In fact, the stage-sharing question was actually of added importance at the Tea Party event, because the movement remains somewhat undefined, since, unlike a political party, it does not have obvious leaders. The people Tea Party organizers choose to associate with provide telling insight into where the movement might be headed.

As Joel Mathis at Philadelphia Weekly wrote last week (emphasis in the original):

Whenever liberals point out some of the nuttier stuff at the Tea Party gatherings -- the racist signs, the comparisons of Obama to Hitler or the talk of revolution and secession -- Tea Party sympathizers offer a couple of excuses: The nutty stuff is at the fringe, not really representative of the group as a whole and it's not fair that you focus on that! Or that the whole thing amounts to political theater, not to be taken that seriously.

But this convention is making it harder for a reasonable observer to distinguish between the nuts and the mainstream. They're all on the same stage together.

I realize some people will take issue with my headline and my claim that the Tea Party gathering in Nashville was a "birther conference." They'll claim the controversial topic was not the dominant issue addressed at the event and that I'm trying to tar a mainstream movement with the distasteful fringe. And that's why there was no reason for the press to dwell on the issue over the weekend.

Baloney.

I'm not the one making the birther connection. It was the Tea Party convention planners who made the conscious decision to place the topic front and center. Face it, when organizers invite a high-profile birther disciple to address the entire convention, and when he receives a standing ovation after pushing the birther craziness, then they're hosting a birther conference. End of story. (And that's when the press should have taken note.)

And can we please retire the media-sanctioned Republican defense that the racially tinged birther crusade represents a tiny, misguided element of the conservative movement? That's more baloney. Birthers have been mainstreamed, thanks to the GOP Noise Machine. How else would you explain the fact that more than 60 percent of self-indentified Southern Republicans either believe Obama was not born in America or aren't sure?

Birthers have hit critical mass, which became blindingly obvious over the weekend when mainstream GOP star Sarah Palin spoke at a convention that rolled out the red carpet for the No. 1 birther cop.

Again, if Tea Party organizers didn't want the conference to be viewed as a birther clearinghouse, then they shouldn't have invited Farah, whose only real claim to fame in the past year has been his increasingly deranged obsession with Obama's birth certificate. (FoxNews.com on Farah: His "raison d'etre of late has been to challenge Obama's eligibility to be president.")

But they did invite him.

If Tea Party organizers had pangs of guilt after Farah's speech, they could have denounced his comments. Sure, it would have been incredibly hypocritical, since, again, they invited Farah, and everyone in the Nashville ballroom knew what he was going to talk about. But if organizers wanted, for purely political reasons, to retroactively distance themselves from the debunked conspiracy theory, they could have done that.

But nobody did.

Keep in mind that there was online speculation Saturday that conference leaders were going to hold a press conference to downplay the birther angle.

But the press conference never happened.

There was also speculation that Palin might show some courage Saturday night and, from the Tea Party stage, create her own Sister Souljah moment and denounce the birther garbage.

But Palin did not. (Recall that in December, Palin told a radio host the public was "rightfully" making an issue about Obama's birth certificate and that she didn't "have a problem with that." Farah's WND used her comments to highlight its prior "reporting" on Obama's birth certificate and sell its birther swag.)

And wait, didn't conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart call out Farah at the Tea Party convention?

Didn't Breitbart denounce the birther crusade as a "self-indulgent," "narcissistic" "losing issue"? Well, yeah, but that happened outside the convention hall, and out of view of the conventioneers -- not exactly a profile in courage. Meaning Breitbart was reportedly "grumbling audibly" about the birther stuff during Farah's speech, but when Breitbart had the convention stage to himself that night -- when Breitbart followed Farah's crazy remarks -- did Breitbart loudly denounce the birther nonsense in front of the Tea Party convention crowd?

Plus, before Breitbart gets credit for being a conservative voice of reason on the birther obsession, please note that last year, one of Breitbart's own sites, Big Hollywood, routinely pushed the "self-indulgent" birther crap. (e.g. "In Defense of the Birthers.") So it's hard to take Breitbart's sudden birther denunciations seriously.

Let's return to the original what-if scenario, just to stress that if a high-profile liberal netroots conference during the Bush years ever, ever embraced the 9-11 Truther crusade the way Palin's Tea Party convention so publicly did last weekend with birthers, the emerging online progressive movement would have instantly discredited itself in the eyes of corporate media. Adopting a one-strike-you're-out rule, journalists would have gleefully written up the netroots' obituary, denouncing the movement as unserious and unstable. And yes, they would have taken special pleasure in piling on Gore for having anything to do with such an odious event.

But Palin strolling onto the same Tea Party stage after convention-goers gave a birther fanatic a standing ovation? That's just not news, people.

Curse that liberal media!

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Today's "conservative journalism" -- what would Bill Buckley say?

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:13:40 EST

Between the embarrassing New Orleans caper where self-described "journalist" James O'Keefe was arrested after helping infiltrate the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, Jackass-style, to the unhinged State of the Union response from elite members of the right-wing punditocracy (i.e. Obama's an "arrogant," "fake" "jerk"), a disturbing portrait emerged last week that helped confirm the sad state of "conservative journalism" in America today.

And yes, I prefer to put the oxymoronic phrase "conservative journalism" in quotation marks since it seems to exist more as an idea than a functioning entity. Instead of being in the news gathering or analysis business, "conservative journalism" today appears to be more akin to propaganda/name-calling -- or, thanks to O'Keefe's Keystone Kops routine, more like dirty tricks/propaganda/name-calling.

It's political warfare (or pseudo-journalism) being waged by people who want the protection and prestige that comes with being called a journalist, even though few of them actually practice the craft. It's fueled by thoughtless defamation. And yes, the lack of adult supervision has become glaringly obvious, which is why I can't help wondering what William F. Buckley would make of all this.

Buckley died in 2008, and, of course, is credited with revitalizing modern-day American conservatism. With his magazine, National Review, as well as his three-decade run as the host of the wonky Firing Line on PBS, Buckley also served as the father of conservative journalism in this country, as he worked to cultivate a space where partisan reporters, pundits, and essayists could join the media landscape and influence the public debate. (Ronald Reagan often credited National Review for inspiring him.)

But would Buckley even recognize "conservative journalism" today, where pundits rush to be the first to broadcast their childish Obama taunts? And where sloppy P.T. Barnums like Andrew Breitbart seem to encourage a new generation of "journalists" to skirt the law in the name of vilifying Democrats?

If Buckley had lived to see the right-wing media's unhinged, Obama's-a-Nazi/communist/racist rhetoric of today, as well as the O'Keefe-style, let's-pretend-we're-above-the-law brand of "conservative journalism," what would Buckley's reaction have been? Would he have remained silent or called it out for what it is? Sort of like how, decades ago, Buckley's National Review finally worked up enough nerve to call out the radical right's John Birch Society and its fringe activity.

As Buckley used to say, the pyrotechnicians and noisemakers have always been there on the right. But that didn't mean he condoned or legitimized them. And I doubt he would today.

Don't worry, I'm not trying to suddenly turn Buckley into some kind of saint, or pretend that, for decades, National Review was some sort of beacon of impeccable journalism. We all know Buckley wasn't above lobbing cheap shots. And truth be told, National Review under Buckley leaned a lot more toward (lazy) pontification than it did gumshoe reporting. But it seemed that most of the time, it strived toward being a serious endeavor and to carry the flag for conservative journalism. For instance, during the Clinton years, National Review left "Troopergate" and other conspiracy foolishness to The American Spectator, which ended up taking many spectacular falls. Editorially wrong-headed? Sure. But serious, or at least pretending to strive for seriousness and intellectual honesty? I would say yes, Buckley's brand of conservative journalism did that.

But today? Ugh. One of National Review's high-profile editors now teams up with Glenn Beck to push the wholly discredited nonsense about how liberals were to blame for Hitler's atrocities. And yes, it's the same National Review editor who defended Beck when he claimed that the president of the United States (i.e. "this guy") has a deep-seated hatred for white people, the white culture, and is in fact a "racist."

Since Buckley's passing in 2008, there's probably been more damage done to the cause of "conservative journalism" -- more steps have been taken backwards -- than in the many decades Buckley ran the National Review.

It was telling, for instance, that when the White House Correspondents' Association last year expanded its roster of eligible reporters for in-town pool reports and accepted representatives from online sites, not a single conservative outlet was represented. Instead, Salon.com, Huffington Post, and Talking Points Memo got the nod. Conservatives were locked out because there wasn't a single site in operation on the right side of the Internet that consistently produced original and dependable journalism. Not one. And why is that? Because conservatives appear to have given up. They don't respect journalism and they don't have the foggiest idea how to produce it. They're clueless.

In a piece last week at Daily Beast, and in the wake of the O'Keefe arrest, Benjamin Sarlin detailed the chronic failure of conservatives, especially online, to produce good, ethical journalism. He noted:

It's difficult to build up newsmaking capabilities while a huge chunk of the right's base believes that mainstream news reporting is itself a left-wing practice.

I don't think Sarlin got it quite right. I would have phrased it this way: "It's difficult to build up newsmaking capabilities when a huge chunk of the right's base hates journalists and journalism."

And it's that guttural hatred that taints everything about today's "conservative journalism." Part of it is the new, instant-reaction media landscape and the way it seems to reward crude behavior. I have no doubt, for instance, that years ago some partisan National Review writers and editors watching Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton address joint sessions of Congress, likely muttered "jerk" under their breath. But the scribes weren't juvenile enough to publish any sophomoric slams.

Now it's a point of pride. Last Wednesday night, National Review staffers and contributors, as well as other high-profile "conservative journalists," seemed to race online to see who could insult and denigrate the president first.

For those who weren't scoring at home, the president was a "flippant," "snitty," "self-serving," "thin-skinned," "cocky," "patronizing," "arrogant," "fake" "jerk." Although, back in the real world, President Obama received very high marks from State of the Union viewers, according to most of the media's instant polling that night.

It's the same immoral, right-wing reward system that creates unintentional comedies like O'Keefe's Louisiana mishap. According to his recounting, O'Keefe's intent was to see if Sen. Landrieu's office phones weren't being answered and to make a hidden video in the process; a video designed, of course, to make her, or her staff, look bad. Meaning, O'Keefe and his Jackass pals set out to embarrass a Democrat. Period. There was no "journalism" being practiced inside Landrieu's office. It was a Donald Segretti-like dirty trick.

Still, O'Keefe fancies himself as the GOP Bob Woodward. Because what did O'Keefe learn from last year's ACORN controversy, in which he starred as an undercover videographer? He learned that even if he appears to break some laws in the process of an undercover sting (privacy laws he later claimed he knew nothing about), it doesn't matter because the right-wing media don't care. They rewarded his unethical behavior. And yes, the ends clearly justified the means.

Thirty-one Republican members of Congress co-sponsored a resolution in October 2009 honoring O'Keefe and partner Hannah Giles for "display(ing) exemplary actions as government watchdogs and young journalists uncovering wasteful government spending." Nobody inside the right-wing world cared if O'Keefe and Breitbart allegedly edited out exculpatory portions before releasing the tapes. They don't care that he and Breitbart refuse to this day to release all of the unedited videotapes so independent observers can determine just how manipulated they were before posting them online.

So the moral is obvious: To get on Fox News, you concoct a video that makes Democrats look bad. End of story. But of course, that's not journalism.

Don't just take my word for it. In the wake of the ACORN videos story last year, a few voices within conservative media actually pointed out the obvious. James Taranto, a member of the far-right Wall Street Journal editorial board, included this boulder-sized caveat in his otherwise fawning interview with O'Keefe's mentor and employer, Andrew Breitbart, last year:

The approach Mr. O'Keefe and Ms. [Hannah] Giles used -- lying to prospective sources or subjects -- is grossly unethical by the standards of institutional journalism. Almost all major news organizations, including the Journal, strictly prohibit it.

Fox Business' Rebecca Diamond made a similar point during an interview with O'Keefe last November:

But, James, if you want to be considered a real journalist and not just a conservative activist -- just doing stuff on behalf of your conservative agenda -- you can't pretend you're somebody you're not. ... If I did that, Roger Ailes would probably fire me because it's unethical as a journalist, as a real journalist.

Which brings me back to Buckley. If you rewind to the time of the National Review's founding in the 1950s, Buckley had to decide how to treat the emerging right-wing influence of the radical John Birch Society, which at the time was convinced Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, that most of the U.S. government was run by communists, as were the health care and education industries. As Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus explained to Bill Moyers on PBS last year, at first the National Review indulged the John Birch Society because it was fanatically anti-communist, which bolstered the conservative movement.

Then, finally, in the mid-1960s (and yes, it took way too long), Buckley said "Enough." As Tanenhaus recounted last year:

And he said, "We can't allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe." So, he turned over his own magazine to a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its "drivel" were circulated in advance to three of the great conservative Republicans of the day, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, from your home state of Texas, and Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line.

"We can't allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe," said Buckley, referring to the conservative movement as a whole. Today, however, rife with would-be lawbreakers and committed name-callers, "conservative journalism" faces the same fringe conundrum.

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Does Fox News coverage = GOP campaign contribution?

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:41:50 EST

With its open and aggressive cheerleading -- not to mention on-air fundraising -- for Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown last week, Fox News crossed yet another threshold in its unabashed transformation into a purely political entity. Now completely turning its back on producing any semblance of independent journalism, Fox News eagerly flaunts its role as GOP kingmaker.

That relentlessly partisan approach continues to raise fundamental questions about what role Fox News plays in our political culture and, thanks to its shameless GOP boosterism, whether the cable channel and its programming should fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Election Commission. Meaning, does Fox News' gung-ho GOP campaign coverage double as a contribution to the Republican Party, a contribution that should be regulated?

The Commission defines "contribution" to include any gift of money or "anything of value" made for the express purpose of influencing a federal election. A key Commission exemption for decades, though, has been granted to the news media, since they have been seen as "neutral" and not controlled by political interests. Therefore their editorial product could not be considered a "contribution" or "expenditure" to any campaign.

The exemption was created, in the words of the Commission, to ensure "the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns," which makes perfect sense, since there's nothing wrong with newspapers endorsing candidates or columnists berating incumbents. The exception has allowed journalists (and more recently bloggers) to report and pontificate about campaigns without having to worry about federal finance laws and whether their editorial efforts cross the line into candidate contributions.

That approach worked well because for decades there has been both a spoken and unspoken understanding among professional journalists as to what kind of guidelines and standards ought to be upheld in the pursuit of the news. That was especially true of cable and network news broadcasters, who wield so much influence in our TV-centric culture.

As former Federal Communications Commission chairman Reed Hundt once wrote:

Part of this tradition is that broadcasters do not show propaganda for any candidate, no matter how much a station owner may personally favor one or dislike the other. Broadcasters understand that they have a special and conditional role in public discourse... Virtually all broadcasters understand and honor it.

But as we've been stressing for the past year, the radically transformed Fox News no longer plays by any discernable rules. I mean, allowing one candidate, on the eve of a special election, to repeatedly raise funds on the air? That's unthinkable in any other newsroom in America. Yet that's the platform Fox News opened to Scott Brown in his quest to defeat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts last week. That is, when Fox News wasn't regularly smearing Coakley.

So the question must now be raised: Is Fox News' relentlessly one-sided coverage the equivalent of a massive campaign contribution to the GOP? And based on some recent regulatory language used by the FEC, the answer might just be "yes."

This type of issue has been raised in the past. For instance, in 2004, the National Republican Congressional Committee filed a complaint with the FEC accusing two co-hosts at Los Angeles' KFI-AM of "criminal behavior," claiming they were attacking Republican Congressman David Dreier while endorsing his Democratic opponent.

Following that same 2004 campaign season, the conservative Center for Individual Freedom filed a complaint with the FEC, claiming that CBS's controversial report on President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard (i.e. Memogate) constituted an "illegal expenditure" on CBS's part to Sen. John Kerry's campaign because the network knowingly aired a false broadcast intended to curtail Bush's re-election bid.

The Commission swatted those complaints away because for decades it has given a wide berth to who qualifies for the media exemption, specifically allowing outlets to remain eligible "without regard to whether programming is biased or balanced," insisting that approach falls within "legitimate press function."

Frankly, I think most people -- and certainly most journalists -- would prefer to keep federal authorities out of newsrooms. They'd prefer not to have the government involved in making editorial judgments in terms of who's a journalist and who is not. (One of the beauties of journalism has always been that no higher authority makes that call.) And honestly, prior to Fox News' relentless, and unapologetic, partisan campaign on behalf of Scott Brown, I had always sort of shrugged off the suggestion that any form of biased news coverage or punditocracy doubled as a "contribution" or should be regulated by the government.

And I certainly didn't think much when conservative writers last year raised the dark specter of the Obama administration unleashing the FEC on Fox News, and alleged that that's why the White House criticized Murdoch's channel and labeled it illegitimate -- so the FEC could swoop in to "stifle speech" the government doesn't like. (I don't see any evidence that that's the case.)

But now I'm having second thoughts, simply because of how dramatically Fox News has ramped up its obvious pro-GOP campaign coverage just within the last couple of months. Recall that in November, Fox News pushed a handful of Republican and conservative candidates in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. The openly one-sided coverage, in which Surprise!)

Honestly, the November coverage paled in comparison to last week's Fox News GOP orgy, where the cable outlet pushed Brown's candidacy incessantly -- as well as exclusively -- and then celebrated his win just as fanatically.

If Fox News made such a huge leap between last November and this January, imagine what Fox News' programming will look like this coming autumn, when the entire House of Representatives is up for re-election, as is one-third of the Senate. In other words, the Brown production was merely a (tame?) preview of what's to come. Fox News obviously liked what it saw with the Brown victory, and if it's not already collectively drunk with kingmaking power, it will soon become completely inebriated, and its relentless pro-Brown campaign will likely look reserved come November. And the "contributions" will be almost too many to count.

Which brings us back to the point Media Matters has been stressing for months, and which the serious media elites have been slow to acknowledge: Fox News is the Opposition Party. Period. And that's why Fox News ought to no longer qualify for the FEC's media exemption. That's why Fox News' cheerleading-on-steroids for Republican candidates obliterates all previous guidelines set by the Commission.

Note that in March 2006, the FEC moved to include bloggers, and others doing online activism, to be part of the established media exemption. Even though individual blog sites might be uniformly partisan, that didn't mean their content represented an expenditure to the bloggers' favorite candidates or political party. The FEC used its standard criteria and ruled that because blogs were "neutral," meaning they were not controlled or owned by a political entity, they shouldn't be subject to federal campaign finance regulation.

So, because Fox News is "neutral" and is not owned by a political entity (although you could certainly argue it's controlled by the GOP), then it has free reign in terms of the media exemption, and is free to transform itself into GOP Central and the FEC shouldn't say boo, right? Case closed, correct?

Not quite.

Let's look at the case of the recent start-up company Melothe Inc., which petitioned the FEC for a press exemption. Melothe described itself as a Web-based TV station that would go inside the campaigns of Democratic candidates and provide Web video and programming that would be of special interest to Democrats and progressives.

But Melothe did not qualify for the exemption, as explained in a November 13, 2008, memorandum, signed by FEC's general counsel. Even though the FEC and the courts have used a very liberal definition of "press entity" for the exemption, the Commission ruled that Melothe did not qualify because it would essentially be indistinguishable from the interests of its chosen candidates.

Sound familiar?

See if the highlighted passages below from the FEC memo remind you of a certain "fair and balanced" cable channel:

Melothe, Inc. proposes to work with the campaigns of only Democratic candidates and, potentially, only one candidate of that party. The commission recognizes that lack of objectivity is news and commentary does not automatically disqualify an entity from coming within the press exemption. ... Here, however, the featured campaign's message would be indistinguishable from that of Melothe, Inc. itself, indicating it would function not as a press entity but a press arm of the candidate's campaign.

Melothe, Inc.'s proposal, however, further indicates that Melothe, Inc. intends to engage in core campaign activities that are not legitimate press functions. Melothe, Inc envisions that program hosts, interviewers and news anchors will regularly solicit contributions, with links to the candidate's contribution page appearing on the screen during programming. ... In these respects Melothe, Inc. would be functioning not as a press entity but as a fundraising arm of its chosen campaign.

The FEC's conclusion:

Here, the Commission finds that the purpose of the venture would be to actively participate in the chosen campaign's activities, to promote the chosen candidate and the campaign's message, and to solicit money and support on behalf of that candidate. This purpose and function cannot be viewed as normal business activity of a press entity.

If you weren't already aware, Fox News pretty much did all those things on behalf of Scott Brown.

The FEC made the correct, sensible decision in 2006 when it extended its media exemption to include bloggers, even though many of them broadcast a proud partisan voice online. There's nothing wrong with a strong editorial voice. What Fox News is doing today, however, goes so far beyond broadcasting an editorial voice, skating so close to GOP campaign management, that it should no longer enjoy the distinction of a media exemption.

Indeed, with its radical transformation into a purely political entity, Fox News has changed the rules governing politics and the press. It's time for the FEC to recognize that, look at Fox News with a fresh set of eyes, and act accordingly.

Come back, Bob Woodward. Save us from Game Change journalism

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:28:22 EST

Dear Bob Woodward, all is forgiven.

Well, not all of it. But as someone who's been highly critical of Woodward's work in recent years and who thought he'd become romanced by his Bush White House sources and had played dumb about the Valerie Plame leak story, I'm here to say that viewed against the current backdrop of Beltway journalism's dwindling standards -- as measured by the recent campaign book Game Change -- Woodward's workmanlike approach suddenly never looked so good.

I'm not saying that Woodward didn't deserve the whacks he received, especially from the liberal blogosphere. He did. But I'm having second thoughts about my attacks on him, only because if I knew just how dramatically Beltway journalism would dissolve in the ensuing years -- to the point where a nasty, vindictive, and dubiously sourced book like Game Change would be held aloft by elites as a great work of reporting and political analysis -- then I probably would have gone easier on Woodward's transgressions.

Given the choice between Woodward's consistently serious, albeit flawed books -- which always carry with them an air of professionalism and class -- versus the flashy, hollow, click-through brand of journalism championed by Game Change, I'll take Woodward's approach every time. Because despite their flaws, Woodward's books are mostly about policy, about historic White House initiatives and how they get made, including all the backroom administration wrangling involved. Game Change, by comparison, rarely aspires to be more than a gossip clearinghouse. (And, yes, that's why The Village loves the book.)

After finishing Game Change, I'd be surprised if many readers had any deeper understanding of why the central players ran for president, or of the platforms on which they campaigned. Game Change, like the Beltway press, doesn't do public policy. It doesn't even do candidate profiles. Instead, the book is quite literally a celebration of (gossipy) process over substance, and is just as often relentlessly -- and gratuitously -- unserious and mean. It's filled with wildly one-sided, stick-figure portraits of the campaign's major players. (Elizabeth Edwards "barked," "snarled," "badgered," and "berated" her husband's campaign aides, all on one page.)

Believe it or not, in terms of capturing one section of the book, this New York Daily News headline wasn't that far off (emphasis added):

Book 'Game Change' portrays Sarah Palin as unstable ignoramus who believed Saddam was behind 9/11

As Joe Conason noted at Salon, Game Change is so infuriating that even progressives might (might!) end up feeling sorry for Palin, based on the relentlessly negative portrayal she received in the book. And, yes, we understand that GOP campaign guru and key Game Change source Steve Schmidt hates Sarah Palin. We get it. But does that intramural feud mean that the GOP's 2008 general election campaign played out exactly the way Schmidt told the Game Change authors that it did? Not likely. (Life is never that simple.)

So, if Game Change represents some kind of change in the Beltway media guard -- after all, Game Change Central (aka Politico) last week dubbed co-author Mark Halperin "the high priest of establishment political journalism" -- then I'm going to resist change to cling to the Woodward model of elite Beltway reporting.

It was Woodward, of course, who practically trademarked the omniscient, trust-me approach to inner-circle reporting as he re-created scenes as well as extended dialogues, often without explaining to readers exactly who his sources were. (And, yes, that led to legitimate debate about his reporting methods.) It's the same trick Halperin and co-author John Heilemann try in Game Change in hopes of creating a "sweeping, novelistic" feel. A key difference, though, is that Woodward employs a velvet writing touch, as compared to the subtle-as-a-sledgehammer style of Heilemann and Halperin, who, along with their score-settling sources, bury most of their key players under a pile of invective. In other words, in Woodward's books, most of the key players don't come off looking like assholes. In Game Change, they do. (Another glaring difference is that Game Change is littered with clichés: "smarter than the average bear"; "put his shoulder to the wheel"; "glacial pace"; "hit them like a ton of bricks"; "an iron grip"; "polar opposite"; "ready to stir the pot" ... )

The book is so mean-spirited that, as I read it, I wondered why Heilemann and Halperin wrote it. The duo certainly don't seem to hold the candidates, let alone politics, in high regard. And the end result is so gossip-driven that I doubt it will stand any sort of test of time as a serious retelling of the 2008 campaign.

In their "Author's Note," here's how the two earnestly explain the need for another retelling of the 2008 campaign (emphasis added):

[W]e have tried to address the multitude of vital questions that daily journalism (and hourly blogofying) obsessed over briefly and then passed by, or never grappled with in the first place. How did Obama, a freshman senator with few tangible political accomplishments, convince himself that he should be, and could be, America's first African American president? What role did Bill Clinton actually play in his wife's campaign? Why did McCain pick the unknown and untested governor of Alaska as his running mate? And who is Sarah Palin, really?

Really? Those topics weren't discussed enough? That's odd, because I'm pretty sure that if you printed out all the cable TV transcripts from 2008 programs that dealt specifically with those topics and stretched them out end-to-end, the transcripts would likely run from Washington, D.C., to Bangor, Maine.

But according to Heilemann and Halperin, they wrote Game Change because the press hadn't addressed these questions often enough. Since that reason defies logic, I'm still curious about the real reason they decided to write Game Change. (FYI, the book has been optioned by HBO.)

Blogging about the book and the obvious journalistic questions it raised in terms of dubious sourcing, Greg Sargent wrote:

[W]hat's mystifying is that virtually none of the media figures lavishing attention on this book have broached the sourcing issue, something you'd think would merit a bit of discussion among professional journalists.

Sadly, I was not as mystified. It's true that the ethical questions Sargent pointed to used to be the kinds of red flags that prompted serious discussion and debate among Beltway scribes and journalism pros. But no more. And my guess is Heilemann and Halperin knew that and didn't really concern themselves with possible pushback among their colleagues. Instead, the duo seemed more interested in generating presale buzz, regardless of the ethical questions involved.

For instance, this damning portrait from Game Change, filled with all kinds of loaded language, was hyped by lots of media outlets as a prime example of what an unbearable witch Hillary Clinton was during the campaign. The Game Change scene takes place in an Iowa hotel suite on the night Clinton finished third in the state's caucuses:

The advisers in the room were all longtime intimates of the Clintons and had experienced their squalls of fury many times. But to a person, they found the display they were witnessing now utterly stunning -- and especially unnerving come from Hillary. Watching her bitter and befuddled reaction, her staggered lack of calm or command, one of her senior-most lieutenants thought for the first time, This woman shouldn't be president.

But let's examine the paragraph that directly preceded that anonymous takedown of Clinton, which received less media attention:

Losing always tests a politician's composure and grace. Hillary had never lost before, and she found little of either trait at her disposal. Presented with the carefully wrought, sound-bite-approved text of the concession speech she was soon supposed to deliver before the cameras, she sullenly leafed through the pages, cast them aside, and decided to ad lib. Her phone call to congratulate Obama was abrupt and impersonal. "Great victory, we're three tickets out of Iowa, see you in New Hampshire," she said, and hung up the phone.

Do you see Game Change's glaringly dishonest disconnect?

Anxious to portray Clinton as a mindless hag, Game Change claimed she had become so unnerved by her Iowa loss that she'd stunned her (anonymous) aides ("to a person") with her "staggering lack of calm and command." But what did Clinton actually do that night in Iowa? According to Game Change's own account, she ad-libbed her concession speech and called Obama to congratulate him. ("Great victory.")

That's it. That's the authors' evidence of an epic Clinton meltdown. There is no evidence, which means the whole premise is senseless. But in the end, the authors got their buzz thanks to a prized Hillary-hating passage ("Watching her bitter and befuddled reaction ... "), even though they appear to have built it on the back of a lie.

And, by the way, go here to watch Clinton's composed and graceful concession remarks from Iowa that night. (And read Mayhill Fowler, here, for more examples of how the authors got Iowa wrong.)

Now let's look also at Game Change's already infamous "coffee" non-quote from Bill Clinton, reportedly spoken to Ted Kennedy. The authors not only couldn't confirm the inflammatory quote (so they printed it as a paraphrase), but then they went on television and improved the story. Out selling their book, the duo seemed to spike the tale with new information not found in the book.

This was the (supposedly) news-making passage:

But Bill [Clinton] then went on, belittling Obama in a manner that deeply offended Kennedy. Recounting the conversation later to a friend, Teddy fumed that Clinton had said, A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.

The idea that Heilemann and Halperin would publish that anecdote even though they could not confirm the Clinton non-quote is rather astonishing, especially since the authors knew it would be controversial and "would get a lot of attention," as Halperin told radio host Don Imus last week. Worse, not only did they include the unconfirmed passage, but it came to them third-hand. Meaning, the tale didn't come from Clinton, and it didn't come from Kennedy, but apparently it came from a Kennedy "friend" who heard Kennedy recount what he claimed Clinton had once said to him. That's more akin to the children's game of telephone tag than it is to professional reporting, and it's amazing that any journalist would include controversial information obtained from such a sketchy line of origin.

So the anecdote was already saddled with problems. But then Heilemann and Halperin added to the woes. First, in that same appearance with Imus, Halperin claimed the "coffee" story had come from "sources" -- plural -- which would suggest the anecdote was both legit and accurate. But in the book, readers are told the anecdote was relayed to a single Kennedy "friend." So which was it? Did the story come from a "friend" or from "sources"? And why the sudden confusion from the authors when they were pressed about the non-quote?

Even more disturbing, though, was how after the book arrived in stores, the authors stressed that Kennedy had detected a nasty "racial" undertone to the "coffee" non-quote. Reading the book, however, that's not at all clear. The book tells us that Kennedy was "offended" by the alleged "coffee" crack, but that could easily be interpreted as Kennedy being offended because Clinton was treating Obama as a political neophyte -- as an amateur. The "coffee" quote could be seen as offensive without having anything to do with race. (Why, in the 21^st century, would somebody who got senators and presidents coffee be presumed to be black?) And in Game Change, Heilemann and Halperin made no suggestion that Kennedy detected or interpreted a racist attack in the comment.

But, again, as with the flexible "sources" retelling, out publicizing the book, the authors suddenly changed the story and explicitly claimed Kennedy had been angered by Clinton's "racial" coffee remark. "It enraged Kennedy because he took it as a pretty serious slam on Obama with some kind of negative racial connotations," Heilemann told Imus (emphasis added). Heilemann made the same claim appearing on Anderson Cooper's CNN program.

Well, if that was the case, then why didn't the authors include that fact in their book?

And how did Heilemann suddenly know that Kennedy detected a racial connotation to the Clinton non-quote? Did the Kennedy "friend" (or "sources") tell the authors that? After Kennedy told the Clinton coffee story, did Kennedy explicitly say he found it racially offensive, or did the Kennedy "friend" (or "sources") simply infer that, and now Heilemann states it as fact, even though it's not mentioned in the book?

Either way, the book passage is a mess and reflects the deeper problems with Game Change.

As for Bob Woodward, he's currently working on a new book: an insider's account of the Obama White House. For the record, I have no idea whether it will be any good or not. But compared to the soggy standards set by Game Change, Woodward's effort is bound to improve Beltway journalism.

Stenography 101: How the press let Palin and Cheney rig the system

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:45:22 EST

Not content with its lapdog coverage of President Bush over the past decade, the Beltway press has adopted a new, super-soft way to deal with Bush's former vice president, Dick Cheney, as well as GOP media star Sarah Palin. Journalists have set aside what had been decades' worth of guidelines and embraced special new rules for how Cheney and Palin get treated.

In a word, it's stenography.

That's how too many scribes have covered Cheney and Palin in recent months, allowing them to dispense tightly controlled pieces of information, which journalists then trumpet as breaking news. And yes, the trend is unprecedented in modern day American politics.

It's actually a two-fer. First, it's unprecedented because the Beltway press has never showered attention on political losers, such as Cheney and Palin. Meaning, the press has never cared what a former VP had to say about current events right after leaving the White House (think: Dan Quayle), or what a failed VP candidate had to say just months after losing in a landslide (think: Geraldine Ferraro). Traditionally, pundits and reporters disdain political losers (think: Mike Dukakis). But for Cheney and Palin, the rules have been generously reworked.

The second oddity is that journalists now allow Cheney and Palin to completely dictate the media ground rules and afford them the chance to have one-way relationships with the press. Palin, for instance, perhaps still bruising from her woeful 2008 media performances, still hasn't allowed herself to be interviewed by a single independent political journalist since she launched her book in November. Instead, she mostly communicates with the mainstream media via Facebook. And now that she's signed on to join the Fox News staff, the chances of Palin ever speaking with the serious press seem to be less than zero. That lack of openness stacks the deck and leads to dreadful bouts of stenography; of literally recording what controversial Republicans say, and nothing more.

Of course, the Cheney brand of stenography has been trademarked by the news crew at Politico, and recently reached its unfortunate, albeit predictable, crescendo when the outlet simply reprinted Cheney's latest Obama-hating "statement" (read: press release) in the wake of the failed terrorist attack aboard the Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit on Christmas Day. What happened was that following the botched attack, either Cheney reached out and provided Politico with an exclusive statement, or Politico contacted Cheney asking for one. (It's not clear who contacted whom. And yes, journalistically, it matters.)

Then Politico, rather than incorporating some of Cheney's comments in an actual news article about the political ramifications of the attempted terror strike, and rather than contacting Cheney for an actual interview where reporters could flesh out his comments with follow-up questions, simply reproduced Cheney's wildly inaccurate, and inflammatory, Obama's-making-us-less-safe "statement," in full. All 660 words of it.

The stenography became so unseemly that MSNBC's Chris Matthews even called Politico out:

To make matters worse, when asked to defend Politico's Cheney-friendly stenography, editor John Harris mounted a completely illogical defense and refused to address the rather obvious complaints about the news outlet's outlandish practice of simply acting as a loving, unwavering conduit for Cheney. "Trying to get newsworthy people to say interesting things is part of what we do," was how, in the wake of the Cheney kerfuffle, Harris explained Politico to blogger Greg Sargent. Well, of course. Nobody objects to the pursuit of interesting quotes. That's what good journalists do. But they don't turn around and simply print the quotes as gospel, devoid of any context. Especially when the "interesting things" that "newsworthy people" actually consist of an avalanche of partisan lies.

The truth is, Politico used to at least send reporters over to Cheney's Virginia office in order to perform their stenography in person. Following a sit-down Q&A, this was the Politico lede from Feb. 9, 2009, under the doomsday headline: "Cheney warns of new attacks":

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a "high probability" that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration's policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed [emphasis added].

That's right, Obama's "policies," which at the time were two weeks old, were endangering America and making it susceptible to nuclear attack. (Cheney doesn't really do subtleties.) On its face, the fearmongering claims were preposterous. But Politico's Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei, and John Harris played it straight. Worse, they played it as big, from-his-lips-to-our-ears news.

And let's not lose sight of just how extraordinary it was for Allen/VandeHei/Harris to even care what Cheney had to say in early February of 2009, because I can't stress enough how completely unprecedented it is for any major Beltway news outlet to turn to a dislodged vice president as a partisan newsmaker less than one month after he left office. And for Cheney to be the object of Politico's newsroom desire last February was even more bizarre since the Republican had just completed his stint as arguably the most unpopular politician in modern day White House politics. (Somewhere Richard Nixon was smiling.)

That is not an exaggeration. According to a CBS/New York Times poll at the time of the Cheney's White House departure, his job approval rating stood at a how-is-that-possible 13 percent. Yet despite his historically poor standing with the public, and despite the fact that his party had just been trounced in an electoral landslide, and despite the fact that former VPs were never considered to be newsworthy just two weeks after they packed their White House bags, there was the Politico brain trust in February 2009, sitting at Cheney's knee ("Suddenly a man of leisure ... his own mood was relaxed, even loquacious") and treating him like he was still vice president -- treating him like he was a popular vice president. Treating Cheney like a man with all the answers.

For Palin, it hasn't just been Politico's staff that's adopted the unfortunate stenography approach to covering the failed VP candidate. The truth is that since the launch of her book last November, Palin has refused to sit down with a single serious, independent reporter. Instead, she's stuck close to lifestyle interviews (i.e. Oprah and Barbara Walters) as well as taking questions from her professional right-wing media enablers.

Can you imagine the media caterwauling if, for instance, Hillary Clinton published a book and then refused to sit down with a single nonpartisan cable TV host, radio talker, or political reporter from a major newspaper or magazine? If Clinton roped off the press while she only did interviews with The Nation, Rachel Maddow, and Air America? The Beltway press would go berserk mocking Clinton for her timidity. But Palin completely snubbed the D.C. press corps, and rather than calling her out, journalists rewarded her with probably tens of millions of dollars in free book publicity. (Not that most Americans even cared about her book launch.)

Worse, Palin's refusal to engage directly with the press has, at times, led to confusion about what she did and did not say. The confusion may be purposeful on her part, but it hinders public debate and makes precise journalism nearly impossible. That trend was famously highlighted after Palin posted on Facebook her claim that proposed Democratic health care reform would mean bureaucratic "death panels" would ultimately decide whether Americans would live or die. (Palin specifically referenced her parents and her son as possible "death panel" targets.) Of course, the claim was thoroughly debunked and eventually named "Lie of the Year." In response to that dubious achievement, Palin returned to Facebook and claimed people had misunderstood her original "death panels" reference. It was an explanation some journalists echoed before Media Matters then debunked that as well.

But guess what? If Palin, like virtually every other politician on the planet, agreed to talk to real reporters on occasion, that kind of "confusion" would quickly be solved. Rather, Palin hides from the press. And instead of punishing her for her timidity, journalists act as dutiful stenographers by typing up Palin's online postings -- which she may or may not write herself -- and treating them as news.

From a journalism perspective, the whole spectacle has been embarrassing to watch. As David Weigel at The Washington Independent noted, "The media's indulgence of Palin's strategy -- which often results in pure stenography of press releases that may or may not have been written by her -- is ridiculous, bordering on pathetic."

And Weigel's right. Those Facebook postings are nothing more than modern-day press releases, yet they're treated as news. In the not-so-distant past, newsroom trash cans (both physical and email) were filled with politicians' press releases, tossed aside by dismissive scribes who would never dream of lowering themselves to regurgitating quotes typed up on some hand-out. Media elites didn't waste their time with press releases.

First of all, it's considered an embarrassment and a public acknowledgment that journalists don't have any juice; that they don't have real access to important people. Second, typed-up statements don't lend themselves to context or understanding. But for covering Palin, regurgitating press releases has suddenly become the accepted norm.

From a recent Wall Street Journal news article:

The White House is fending off charges from Republicans, who suggest the administration should have turned over Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to military custody and declared him an "enemy combatant."

Sarah Palin, former GOP vice presidential candidate, said in a Facebook message that Abdulmutallab is "not just another criminal defendant. It simply makes no sense to treat an al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die in the course of massacring hundreds of people as a common criminal." [emphasis added]

That's just nuts. If Palin steadfastly refuses to engage with journalists and insists on hiding behind her Facebook page, there's simply no reason reporters should give online press releases from a failed VP candidate (and half-term governor) the slightest bit of attention.

Indeed, if members of the Beltway press corps have any self-respect left, they'd call off the stenography sessions and get back to practicing real journalism.

Auld Lang Syne: Farewell to another decade of "liberal media bias"

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:11:28 EST

It might seem futile to try to select just two quotes from the previous decade and single them out as bookends to illustrate how the political press so often malfunctioned over the last 10 years. But if pressed, I know which duo I'd nominate in hopes of highlighting the absurdity behind the never-ending right-wing claim about supposed "liberal media bias."

Y'know, the same "liberal media" that over the previous decade unleashed its venom on Al Gore, morphed into George Bush's lapdog cheerleaders, and created unfair double standards for covering the new Democratic president, Barack Obama.

The first quote I'd nominate actually comes from very late 1999, but the implication was pure 2000 and the decade that followed. The passage appeared in a Time report about the unfolding Democratic primary battle and came just as the Beltway press was unveiling its unapologetic War on Gore, as The Daily Howler might put it.

The orgy of resentment that erupted toward Gore during the 2000 campaign season was likely unprecedented in American politics, as media elites did very little to hide their disdain for Gore. For years, they mocked him, bad-mouthed him, and made up nasty stories about him. (Hint: Inventing the Internet.) Acting as a conduit for the RNC, the press actively tried to delegitimize the Democratic Party nominee for president. And the chronically caustic and unfair press coverage cost Gore the election in the historically close 2000 campaign.

Which brings me to Quote of the Decade No. 1, courtesy Time's Eric Pooley and his New Hampshire primary dispatch: [emphasis added]:

[T]he 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it. Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.

If readers needed confirmation regarding the open contempt for Gore, blogger Mickey Kaus soon traveled to New Hampshire and announced the consensus among journalists: "They hate Gore. They really do think he's a liar. And a phony."

My second Quote of the Decade nominee arrived 110 months later and via NBC's Chuck Todd. It was uncorked inside the new Obama White House press room, on January 23, 2009. The topic on the table was the administration's proposed economic stimulus package and whether the White House, which was hoping for a bipartisan effort on the legislation, would be disappointed if the bill passed with little or no Republican support. And that's when Todd asked Robert Gibbs the following:

Would [the President] veto a bill if it didn't have Republican support?

That's right. Just days into the new presidency, Todd wanted to know if Obama would go ahead and take the unprecedented action of vetoing his own legislation designed to immediately jump-start the faltering economy because not enough members of the opposition party supported the stimulus bill.

If nothing else, Todd's absurd query highlighted the unheard-of double standard the press constructed for the new Democratic president. Namely, when addressing the issue of bipartisanship (i.e. "involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties") the press decided to hold only one of the political parties accountable: the Democrats. Bipartisanship was now something Democrats had to bring to fruition.

My bookend quotes capture how the "liberal" Beltway press corps changed the rules to cover Gore at the beginning of the decade and Obama at the end of it. And how did the same press corps spend the years between Gore and Obama? Lying down for Bush, of course. Having developed rabbit ears for the right-wing taunt of "liberal media bias," reporters, editors, producers, and pundits seemed determined during the Bush years to prove how un-liberal they really were. In the process, the press abandoned its traditional watchdog role and morphed instead into lapdogs.

Specifics? Almost too many to count. But who can forget the defining prime-time press conference Bush held in the East Room of the White House just weeks before the 2003 Iraq invasion began and how that press conference came to symbolize the media's lapdog approach? (Not to mention the media's monumental failure during the run-up to the Iraq invasion.)

Laying out the reasons for war, Bush that night mentioned Al Qaeda and the September 11 terrorist attacks 13 times, yet not a single journalist challenged that implied (and false) connection. And during the Q&A session, nobody bothered to ask Bush about the elusive Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind whom Bush had vowed to capture. Follow-up questions were nonexistent, which only encouraged Bush to give answers to questions he was not asked.

And then it got really bad.

At one point while making his way through the press questioners, Bush awkwardly referred to a list of reporters whom he was instructed to call on. "This is ... scripted," he joked. The press laughed. But Bush meant it literally. Bush had been given a cheat sheet that instructed him not to call on reporters from some prominent outlets such as Time, Newsweek, USA Today, or The Washington Post. Yet even after Bush announced the event was "scripted," reporters, either embarrassed for Bush or embarrassed for themselves, continued to play the part of eager participants at a spontaneous news conference, shooting their hands up in the air in hopes of getting Bush's attention. For TV viewers it certainly looked like an actual press event.

More? Prior to the start of the news conference, White House handlers, in a highly unusual move, marched veteran reporters to their seats in the East Room, two by two, like schoolchildren being led onto the stage for the annual holiday pageant.

Bonus: Following the White House performance, MSNBC host Chris Matthews, in order to get a wide array of opinion, invited on a pro-war Republican senator (Saxby Chambliss, from Georgia), a pro-war former secretary of state (Lawrence Eagleburger), a pro-war retired Army general (Montgomery Meigs), a pro-war retired Air Force general (Buster Glosson), a pro-war Republican pollster (Frank Luntz), as well as, for the sake of balance, somebody who, 25 years earlier, once worked in Jimmy Carter's White House and who today often sides with Republicans (Pat Caddell).

Meanwhile, how did that ferociously liberal newspaper from heart of Manhattan deal with the run-up to war? "[A]ccording to half a dozen sources within the Times, [editor Howell] Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs," wrote Seth Mnookin in his 2004 book Hard News. Mnookin quoted Doug Frantz, the former investigative editor of the Times, who recalled how "Howell Raines was eager to have articles that supported the war-mongering out of Washington. He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of Al Qaeda."

And that other supposedly ferociously liberal daily, The Washington Post, how did it cover the crucial months prior to the Iraq war? Basically, the paper couldn't stop publishing pro-war editorials -- 26 in all between September 2002 and February 2003. As for its columnists and contributors, it was like a neoconservative open casting call as the Post flooded its readers with an avalanche of war cheerleaders.

The pro-war march at times seemed to fog the paper's news judgment. In September 2002, Sen. Ted Kennedy made a passionate, provocative, and newsworthy speech raising all sorts of doubts about the war. It was a speech in which the liberal senator warned against virtually every major shortfall that eventually plagued the post-invasion operation. Yet the prophetic speech garnered just one sentence -- 36 words total -- of coverage from the Post, which in 2002 printed more than a thousand articles and columns, totaling perhaps 1 million words about Iraq. But the daily only set aside 36 words for Kennedy's antiwar cry. The Post was not alone. NBC's Nightly News devoted just 32 words to Kennedy's speech, compared to 31 words on ABC's World News Tonight, and 40 words on the CBS Evening News. And on the Sunday talk shows on the weekend immediately following Kennedy's timely address, the senator's name never came up on NBC's Meet the Press, CBS' Face the Nation, or ABC's This Week.

Not surprising. A survey conducted by the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which focused on the first two weeks of February 2003, found that of 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports about the war, just 17 percent of them expressed skepticism about the looming invasion. This at a time when polling showed that approximately 50 percent of Americans had doubts about the planned war. And according to figures from media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department. Just 8 percent of the television news reports were of independent origin.

Of course, GE-owned MSNBC was so spooked about employing an on-air liberal host who opposed Bush's ordered invasion that it reportedly fired the highly rated Phil Donahue in early 2003 after an internal memo pointed out the legendary talk show host presented "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war."

Oh, and remember the Downing Street Memo, the secret top-level British government memorandum consisting of minutes from a July 23, 2002, meeting attended by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his closest advisers? The memo revealed their impression that the Bush administration, eight months before the start of the Iraq war in 2003, had already decided to invade and that Washington seemed more concerned with justifying a war than preventing one. The implications were obvious: that President Bush lied to the American people and Congress during the run-up to the war with Iraq when he insisted over and over again that war was his administration's last option. That Bush had decided to invade Iraq in July 2002. That Bush would justify the war with a WMD argument. That the intelligence to make that case was being "fixed around the policy." That the administration didn't much care what the United Nations thought. And that few war planners were concerned with the aftermath of the war.

But boy, the "liberal" media sure ran away from that messy story.

According to TVEyes, between early May 2005 and early June of that year, the story received approximately 20 mentions on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS combined. By contrast, during the same five-week period, the same outlets found time to mention more than 250 times the oddball controversy that erupted when a photograph showing Saddam Hussein in his underwear was leaked to the British press.

In the weeks after the Times of London published the Downing Street memo on May 1, 2005, White House spokesman Scott McClellan held 19 daily briefings and fielded approximately 940 questions from reporters. Exactly two of those queries were about the Downing Street memo and the White House's reported effort to fix prewar intelligence.

But wouldn't you know that the White House press corps' collective somnambulant streak was magically cured with the arrival of Democrat Barack Obama, as reporters and pundits magically awoke from their Rip Van Winkle-like slumber? In fact, even before Obama was sworn in, portions of the press corps were busy spreading the lie that Obama's extravagant inauguration cost $100 million more than George Bush's swearing-in.

False. The costs were nearly identical.

That same inauguration week, the White House press corps greeted the new Democratic team with catcalls. "Game On! Obama's Clash With The White House Press Corps," reported The Daily Beast. And under the headline "Obama press aide gets bashed in debut," The Washington Times' Joseph Curl reported:

Although President Obama swept into office pledging transparency and a new air of openness, the press hammered spokesman Robert Gibbs for nearly an hour over a slate of perceived secretive slights that have piled up quickly for the new administration. It wasn't pretty.

Curl reported there was much yelling and shouting from journalists inside the briefing room that day. One even "spat" a question at Gibbs. And yes, this is the same White House press corps that treated the early Bush administration with kid gloves eight years earlier. Washington Post reporter John Harris observed in 2001, "The truth is, this new president [Bush] has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton."

Yet in the same Bush-era piece, Harris went on to cheer, "[G]ood for Washington in giving a new president a break at the start."

Behold your liberal media. And what a decade in left-wing bias it was.

P.S. If I've got to squeeze in two more decade-defining "liberal media" quotes, I'd pick a Mark Halperin beauty from June 2006. Just five months before the Democrats' historic congressional victories, Halperin issued this CW warning to Democrats: "If I were them, I'd be scared to death about November's elections."

I'd also nominate this one from CBS' Dan Rather, from September 17, 2001:

George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions. And, you know, it's just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he'll make the call.

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According to its ethics code, NPR still has a Fox News problem

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:52:03 EST

Smart newsrooms develop an ethics code to help journalists do their jobs well, and to create clear lines of demarcation for when inevitable conflicts arise. To its credit, National Public Radio operates under a wide-ranging ethics code that leaves little doubt about how its journalists should conduct themselves.

And yet still, NPR finds itself struggling with the evergreen controversy that surrounds Mara Liasson and Juan Williams, two well-known NPR voices who regularly appear as commentators on Fox News. Last week Politico reported that NPR news executives approached Liasson and asked her to re-think her weekly Fox News appearances. (She declined to cut her contractual Fox News ties.) And in February, the same NPR bosses asked that Williams no longer be identified as an NPR journalist when he appeared on The O'Reilly Factor.

If NPR bosses don't want the network's name associated with The O'Reilly Factor, and if they asked Liasson to re-think her Special Report and Fox News Sunday appearances, then that confirms there's a problem that ought to be resolved. Why else would the issue keep popping up? And the problem is this: A thoroughly respectable and professional operation like NPR has no business associating itself with Fox News these days, by lending its status and credence to an utterly irresponsible enterprise like the one Roger Ailes is running. Consequently, by continuing the association, NPR is doing real damage to its brand and its hard-earned credibility.

The need for action is confirmed by NPR's own ethics code, which specifically spells out why the Fox News-type of alliance is such a bad idea. And yet, at least publically, NPR executives continue to duck the matter. I'm not sure what all the dithering is about, the issue does not appear to be that complicated.

NPR's association with Fox News has been a thorn in the radio network's side for years. From NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard, Dec. 8, 2009:

Barely a week goes by without my office getting an email or phone call insisting that NPR tell Mara Liasson or Juan Williams that they should not and cannot appear on Fox News.

And from then-NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, May 15, 2006:

Nothing riles some public-radio listeners like NPR journalists appearing on FOX News television programs.

Maybe if we turn the tables slightly and look at the conflict from a different perspective, the picture will come into sharper focus.

Imagine this scenario: What if NPR currently did not have an association with Fox News and Ailes' team reached out to public broadcasting in 2009, the year Fox News co-sponsored political rallies, promoted partisan conservative PACs on the air, backed hosts who attacked the president of the United States as a racist and a socialist and a communist and a Nazi, passed off a Republican Party press release as its own research (typo and all), and featured a sister website that regularly cheered "Victory!" whenever an Obama initiative failed. Given that media landscape in 2009, would NPR executives today think it would perfect make sense to begin aligning itself with Fox News?

In the year that Fox News seemed to proudly obliterate any barrier between journalism and politics as it morphed into the de facto media engine driving conservative politics, invited fringe conspiracy theorists on air, declared itself the "voice of the opposition," and promoted violent political rhetoric, would executives in charge of protecting NPR's brand and credibility be willing to now begin associating their network with Fox News?

I seriously doubt it.

And yet today, NPR remains publically, and stubbornly, aligned with an organization that makes a mockery of NPR's own ethical standards, a cable outlet whose employees would be summarily fired from NPR for the seemingly countless and chronic journalism transgressions they make.

The roiling controversy seems to represent a clear case of how the media players have changed dramatically in recent years, yet NPR's leadership has failed to adjust. I don't think there was anything wrong with Liasson or Williams signing on to be contributors with Fox News back in its early days, during the Bill Clinton's second term. At the time, Fox News was truly a right-leaning news organization. Meaning, it framed the news from an obvious conservative perspective, and it employed conservative hosts such as Bill O'Reilly. But the Fox News that Liasson signed on with 12 years ago is virtually unrecognizable to the overtly partisan and chronically deceitful Fox News that broadcasts today, acts more like the RNC than NBC, and which no longer even qualifies as a legitimate news organization. (Read 30 reasons why.)

That's what's changed. And while I'm not surprised that Liasson and Williams want to maintain their high-profile, well-paying TV jobs (TV always trumps radio on the Beltways' celebrity totem pole), Fox News' radical new direction this year means the sweetheart deals it's offering the NPR personalities not only continue to do real damage to NPR's reputation, but they clearly violate NPR's ethics code.

Indeed, it's not even close.

Public broadcasting guidelines clearly state that when appearing on outside programs "journalists should not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist." And, "They should not participate in shows electronic forums, or blogs that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis."

The NPR ethics code, written "to protect the credibility of NPR's programming by ensuring high standards of honesty, integrity, impartiality and staff conduct," also forbids NPR journalists from participating in appearances that "may appear to endorse the agenda of a group or organization." Is there any independent viewer still watching Fox News today who thinks it does not endorse a political agenda? Its on-air hosts help raise money for GOP PACs, for crying out loud.

According to the ethics code, the solution to such transgressions is quite simple:

Permission for such appearances may be revoked if NPR determines such appearances are harmful to the reputation of NPR or the NPR participant.

How is being so publically associated with wildly partisan and habitually irresponsible Fox News not harmful to NPR's reputation? Or to put it another way, does anyone think that being aligned with Fox News today helps NPR's reputation? Yeah, me neither.

According to Politico's reporting, when recently confronted about her Fox News appearances, Liasson claimed that because she appeared on "serious" news programs and not the heavily opinionated ones, her pundit job shouldn't cause NPR any problems, and that, by extension, there was nothing wrong with her cashing Fox News checks and allowing the channel to buy her NPR status each week.

But that's an awfully narrow, naïve, and convenient reading of the situation. Liasson is part of the Fox News family. Period. For instance, Liasson appears on the Fox News website as a "Fox News contributor," not as "Fox News contributor to the sorta/kinda serious shows." The only way she'd really be able to defend her continued alliance would be to argue that Fox News in its entirely (i.e. Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity) is a serious endeavor worthy of NPR's status. But if Liasson can't defend all of Fox News, then her half-pregnant approach (i.e. she's only employed by a tiny portion of Fox News) just doesn't fly.

And by the way, the fact that Juan Williams is now an NPR "news analyst," rather than a full-time staffer, does not solve the radio network's quandary. Being a news analyst under contract does not mean that Williams' regular appearances on Fox News don't pose an ethical problem, because according to NPR's guidelines, free-lancers like Williams must also adhere to the network's ethical standards:

The code also applies to material provided to NPR by independent producers, member station contributors and/or reporters and freelance reporters, writers, news contributors or photographers.

And what if a non-staff contributor violates the code of ethics? NPR has the option simply to stop using that person in the future:

Because contributors in this category are not NPR employees, the remedy for dealing with a conflict of interest or other violation of the principles of this code is rejection of the offered material or of any future programming proposals similarly affected by the conflict or other violation of the ethical principles. NPR may also terminate any ongoing contract with the freelancer.

I admit that the ongoing Fox News controversy is a thorny one for NPR. But it's really a political mess, not a journalistic one. Meaning, if the simple question before NPR executives revolved around whether associating with Fox News caused harm to NPR, and whether it ran afoul of the network's ethics code, the answer, I think, is quite obviously yes. And if that were all there was to the story, I think NPR leaders would move quickly to end the associations given how Fox News has transformed itself in 2009 into a purely partisan entity and not one that still adheres to traditional journalism standards.

However, anything having to do with Fox News and the partisan debate about its obvious failures means NPR bosses are really wrestling more with a political problem. Because if they forbid Liasson and Williams from regularly appearing on Fox News, NPR would have to deal with the wrath of the right-wing noise machine and right-wing foot soldiers who would no doubt descend (electronically and perhaps even physically) on NPR and raise holy hell. And let's face it, that's not a pleasant scenario to contemplate, especially when the previous Republican administration launched a federal crusade to rid public broadcasting of its alleged liberal bias; a crusade that came with it the implicit threat of funding cuts.

But for the sake of NPR's long-term health and reputation, the network's signal callers need to face that right-wing mob and do what's right according to the ethics code. NPR needs to cut its ties with Fox News.