The Day Journalism Died

By Gary P Jackson

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment I U.S. Constitution, ratified December 15, 1791

We are blessed as a nation. Our founders recognized that all men we born with certain unalienable rights. Rights granted to us by Nature’s God, our Creator. The purpose of the United States Constitution is to protect the citizens of our Republic from a government that would restrict or try to take away our rights. We all know the Marxist-progressive movement, now headed by Barack Obama, has been trying to usurp our Constitution, and enslave the people, for decades, but that’s another discussion for another time.

Along with freedom of speech, freedom to worship as we please, and the freedom to assemble, a free and honest press is one of our most sacred rights. In fact, a free and honest press is essential for this Republic to survive. Without it, people can’t trust the information they receive and can never trust their government. 

Moreover, a free and honest press should serve as a watchdog. Our media should keep an eye on our government, no matter who is in charge, and hold them accountable when they run astray. They should not be cheerleaders for one side or the other. Just the facts.

This is not to say there isn’t a place for opinion journalism. In fact, part of a free press is it’s ability to have a robust debate of ideas. The problems occur when opinion media, and just plain old yellow journalism, mix with so-called "straight" reporting.

The first time most of us heard of Journolist was when someone anonymously outed Dave Weigel, a supposed reporter who worked for the Washington Post. Weigel, whose job was to cover Conservatives for the paper, was best know to our readers for siding with Sarah Palin’s deranged stalker, Joe McGinnis, and trashing Sarah for not being happy she had a freak of nature living next door to her.

What we learned was Journolist was a formal e-mail list where many of the nation’s prominent "journalists" collaborated on stories, strategized against Conservatives, and shot the bull.

Someone, evidently angered by something Weigel had done, outed him, and many of the incredibly nasty e-mails he had written. This painted Weigel as a really hateful Marxist-progressive, who obviously was incapable of covering Conservatives properly because of his incredible hatred of them. In the end, WaPo showed Weigel the door.

By outing Weigel though, the first rule of Journolist was broken: Never talk about Journolist!

You ask any Conservative on the street and they will tell you there is massive bias in what Sarah Palin calls the "Lamestream Media." Anyone who paid attention during 2008 saw that the media covered up absolutely every negative thing about Barack Obama, often times refusing to even report some incredibly serious defects in the man.You can credit the media for helping Obama become President.

At the same time, the media went into overdrive trying to absolutely destroy Sarah Palin. This unprecedented effort is still underway today. Our readers are well aware of the part Obama played in this, as he had his closest advisers recruit bloggers, who were then given access to the media, to spread hate and lies at warp speed. We also know Obama’s people recruited a bunch of nerdowells to continually harass her as Governor, filing dozens of bogus ethics complaints. This is well documented, and you can read more here.

There’s one more thing though, that hasn’t gotten as much play. Remember the heavily edited Katie Couric interviews. The ones that were edited to make Sarah Palin look as stupid as possible? Well, creative editing isn’t the only thing that went on there.

Before The Perky One interviewed Sarah, she sat down with long time Marxist-democrat Sam Nunn, and was heavily coached on just the right "gotcha" questions to ask. This is noteworthy because Nunn was reportedly on Obama’s shortlist to be Vice President, and became part of Obama’s transition team after the election.

Can you imagine if  Sean Hannity spent some quality time with say, Sarah Palin, working on the strategery of how to play "gotcha" with candidate Barack Obama? The outrage would be palpable, and yet, few if anyone bothered to report on the fact that Couric sat down with a member of Team Obama in order to craft an interview that would hurt their opponent’s chances!

That’s sort of big news, don’t you think? You can read more here.

Anyone paying attention knew that not only was the media biased toward the Marxist-progressive agenda, but in many cases were actually working with the Obama regime to advance that agenda. In many instances, members of the media have become little more than stenographers for Obama and the rest of the Marxists.

Ed Shultz even claims that the White House is constantly in e-mail contact with the MSNBC show, Morning Joe! We also know that several top anchors for the networks participate in daily conference calls with the White House communication’s staff.

Still, as much as one could just feel it in their bones that all of these people coordinated their efforts, there was no real proof until Journolist was outed.

It just so happens Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller has secured an incredible amount of information about Journolist, including e-mails that are being gone through, and released to the public.

The first revelation, was the amount of effort Obama’s media partners went through to kill the story of Reverend Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright, Obama’s racist, anti-American preacher of 20 years. Wright was one of Obama’s closer mentors, and the one who married him and Michelle. Obama even had his second ghost written book named for one of Wright’s infamous rants.

So inflammatory was Wright, the media knew they had to make sure America never saw this person. EVER.

From The Daily Caller:

Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, "Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?"

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. "George [Stephanopoulos]," fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is "being a disgusting little rat snake."

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

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

Those are some big names in that pile. Notice how fast these Marxist-progressives rushed to play the race card, when no racism existed? This is straight out of Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals, and we all know these people worship Alinsky! They are doing the same thing now as they seek to paint all Tea Party Patriots as racists. It’s rather sad and pathetic. It’s also a disservice to every victim of real racism.

There’s more:

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: "Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people."

"Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on," Tomasky continued. "We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease."

(In an interview Monday, Tomasky defended his position, calling the ABC debate an example of shoddy journalism.)

Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, "why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?" Schaller proposed coordinating a "smart statement expressing disgust" at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.

"It would create quite a stir, I bet, and be a warning against future behavior of the sort," Schaller wrote.

Tomasky approved. "YES. A thousand times yes," he exclaimed.

The members began collaborating on their open letter. Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones rejected an early draft, saying, "I’d say too short. In my opinion, it doesn’t go far enough in highlighting the inanity of some of [Gibson's] and [Stephanopoulos’s] questions. And it doesn’t point out their factual inaccuracies …Our friends at Media Matters probably have tons of experience with this sort of thing, if we want their input."

This is pretty shocking. These people actually wanted to make other journalists afraid to ask the tough questions, lest they be ostracized by their peers. This is rather evil. BTW, for those that don’t know, Media Matters was founded and is funded by Barack Obama’s boss, George Soros. Readers know all about George Soros and Crime Inc.!

Jared Bernstein, who would go on to be Vice President Joe Biden’s top economist when Obama took office, helped, too. The letter should be "Short, punchy and solely focused on vapidity of gotcha," Bernstein wrote.

In the midst of this collaborative enterprise, Holly Yeager, now of the Columbia Journalism Review, dropped into the conversation to say "be sure to read" a column in that day’s Washington Post that attacked the debate.

Columnist Joe Conason weighed in with suggestions. So did Slate contributor David Greenberg, and David Roberts of the website Grist. Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, helped too.

Journolist members signed the statement and released it April 18, calling the debate "a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world."

The letter caused a brief splash and won the attention of the New York Times. But only a week later, Obama – and the journalists who were helping him – were on the defensive once again.

Jeremiah Wright was back in the news after making a series of media appearances. At the National Press Club, Wright claimed Obama had only repudiated his beliefs for "political reasons." Wright also reiterated his charge that the U.S. federal government had created AIDS as a means of committing genocide against African Americans.

It was another crisis, and members of Journolist again rose to help Obama.

There is a lot more to this piece, and believe me, it will make your skin crawl. These are some sick puppies, truly hate filled losers. You can read the rest here.

Andrew Breitbart, who is creating a new gold standard for investigative journalism, had this to say:

Reporters at Pravda weren’t this insufferable

Journalists love whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them. Journalists love transparency. As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.

No journalistic steadfast rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called "truth seekers" are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. "Journolist" — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle.

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here.

Read more here.

Sarah Palin has weighed in:

It’s encouraging for commonsense conservatives who are frustrated with media cover-ups and biases to see truth revealed.

Remember the infamous "JournoList" – the listserv chat group of hundreds of "prominent" mainstream media personalities? It seems The Daily Caller obtained copies of the JournoList email exchanges from the 2008 campaign having to do with the media’s coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, then candidate Obama’s pastor of 20 years. It’s everything you may have suspected.

Read more here.

Glenn Beck also weighed in. His discussion about Journolist starts at 5 minutes 30 seconds into the video.






Glenn Continues:





So where do we go from here? It’s obvious that you can’t trust the "Lamestream Media" any longer. You can’t trust the newspapers, you can’t trust the network news, or outlets like CNN and MSNBC. That leaves us with Fox, and the new media. And frankly, one should trust, but verify what you see there!.

I find myself reading international news more and more, as certain media in Great Britain, Canada, and even Russia have become more reliably honest than our own news sources. If you are reading this, it means you have a computer. Do what we do, if something doesn’t smell right to you, go and do some research. Bing is your best friend!

The one thing I try to do is research past the known left wing websites, and such, and try to get as close to the original source as possible. It’s even better if one can find things in their original text, or hear people’s own words.

We are blessed to live in an era where, if we work hard, we can find the actual truth, but we must be actively engaged. We can no longer lazily consume and digest the news. We must actively seek to separate the truth from the lies, and make our decisions based on the truth.

As I write this in the early morning hours, The Daily Caller has just published a second installment of what will almost assuredly be a series of articles based on the thousands of e-mails between those on the Journolist. We can’t wait to see what they have on these people regarding Sarah Palin!

Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would.

But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all.

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would "Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out" as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. "I never knew I had this much hate in me," she wrote. "But he deserves it."

Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.

In the summer of 2009, agitated citizens from across the country flocked to town hall meetings to berate lawmakers who had declared support for President Obama’s health care bill. For most people, the protests seemed like an exercise in participatory democracy, rowdy as some of them became.

On Journolist, the question was whether the protestors were garden-variety fascists or actual Nazis.

"You know, at the risk of violating Godwin’s law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts?" asked Bloomberg’s Ryan Donmoyer. "Esp. Now that it’s getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s."

We must note that at this point the only violence that had occurred was when a bunch of purple shirted union thugs from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), acting on Obama's instructions to "punch back twice as hard," brutally attacked Kenneth Gladney, a black man, who they beat unconscious, while calling him a ni**ger. But of course, who cares about details when you are a bunch of dishonest swine like those who inhabited Journolist.

Richard Yeselson, a researcher for an organized labor group who also writes for liberal magazines, agreed. "They want a deficit driven militarist/heterosexist/herrenvolk state," Yeselson wrote. "This is core of the Bush/Cheney base transmorgrified into an even more explicitly racialized/anti-cosmopolitan constituency. Why? Um, because the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. But it’s all the same old nuts in the same old bins with some new labels: the gun nuts, the anti tax nuts, the religious nuts, the homophobes, the anti-feminists, the anti-abortion lunatics, the racist/confederate crackpots, the anti-immigration whackos (who feel Bush betrayed them) the pathological government haters (which subsumes some of the othercategories, like the gun nuts and the anti-tax nuts)."

Read more about these amazingly deranged hatemongers here.

It’s amazing to visualize the amount of hatred the left spews. It’s their nourishment. Their very oxygen. It also boggles the mind to hear this bunch of Marxists compare the American people to Nazis! Kind of funny when you consider that the word Nazi comes from Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National Socialist German Workers' Party. Now who is it again that sides with the labor unions against American businesses and the American people?

It's doublely ironic that this bunch can call the American people Nazis, while at the same time plotting ways to convince the government to crush free speech, and shut down Fox News!

One doesn’t have look real hard into the early Nazi movement to see some serious parallels with the modern day Marxist-progressives and the Obama regime. We’ve went over this many times, and Thomas Sowell makes the comparisons quite nicely, which you can read here.

This leads one to more commentary, and a question. We know Marxist-progressives and their agenda are downright evil. Are these so-called "mainstream journalists" who make up the Journolist just as evil, or are they simply what the communists used to call "useful idiots"?

We may never know.