posted July 20, 2010 11:54 PM            

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomasky approved. “YES. A thousand times yes,” he exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list.

The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, “It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.”

Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. “All this hand wringing about just
how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going.”

“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote.

Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.

(Reached by phone Monday, Hayes argued his words then fell on deaf ears. “I can say ‘hey I don’t think you guys should cover this,’ but no one listened to me.”)

Katha Pollitt – Hayes’s colleague at the Nation – didn’t disagree on principle, though she did sound weary of the propaganda. “I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita,” Pollitt said.

“Part of me doesn’t like this **** either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

Ackerman went on:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Ackerman did allow there were some Republicans who weren’t racists. “We’ll know who doesn’t deserve this treatment — Ross Douthat, for instance — but the others need to get it.” He also said he had begun to implement his plan. “I previewed it a bit on my blog last week after Commentary wildly distorted a comment Joe Cirincione made to make him appear like (what else) an antisemite. So I said: why is it that so many on the right have such a problem with the first viable prospective African-American president?”

Several members of the list disagreed with Ackerman – but only on strategic grounds.

“Spencer, you’re wrong,” wrote Mark Schmitt, now an editor at the American Prospect. “Calling Fred Barnes a racist doesn’t further the argument, and not just because Juan Williams is his new black friend, but because that makes it all about character. The goal is to get to the point where you can contrast some _thing_ — Obama’s substantive agenda — with this crap.”

(In an interview Monday, Schmitt declined to say whether he thought Ackerman’s plan was wrong. “That is not a question I’m going to answer,” he said.)

Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman’s strategy. “I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”

But it was Ackerman who had the last word. “Kevin, I’m not saying OBAMA should do this. I’m saying WE should do this.”
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/documents-show-media-plotting-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/

posted July 21, 2010 11:13 PM            

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 (update: Spitz was a producer for NPR affiliate KCRW for the show Left, Right & Center), 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.”

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).”

“I’m not saying these guys are capital F-fascists,” added blogger Lindsay Beyerstein, “but they don’t want limited government. Their desired end looks more like a corporate state than a rugged individualist paradise. The rank and file wants a state that will reach into the intimate of citizens when it comes to sex, reproductive freedom, censorship, and rampant incarceration in the name of law and order.”

On Journolist, there was rarely such thing as an honorable political disagreement between the left and right, though there were many disagreements on the left. In the view of many who’ve posted to the list-serv, conservatives aren’t simply wrong, they are evil. And while journalists are trained never to presume motive, Journolist members tend to assume that the other side is acting out of the darkest and most dishonorable motives.

When the writer Victor Davis Hanson wrote an article about immigration for National Review, for example, blogger Ed Kilgore didn’t even bother to grapple with Hanson’s arguments. Instead Kilgore dismissed Hanson’s piece out of hand as “the kind of Old White Guy cultural reaction that is at the heart of the Tea Party Movement. It’s very close in spirit to the classic 1970s racist tome, The Camp of the Saints, where White Guys struggle to make up their minds whether to go out and murder brown people or just give up.”

The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage. When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.

“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”

And so a debate ensued. Time’s Scherer, who had seemed to express support for increased regulation of Fox, suddenly appeared to have qualms: “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

But Zasloff stuck to his position. “I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”

Scherer seemed alarmed. “So we would have press briefings in which only media organizations that are deemed by the briefer to be acceptable are invited to attend?”

John Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, came down on Zasloff’s side, the side of censorship. “Pre-Fox,” he wrote, “I’d say Scherer’s questions made sense as a question of principle. Now it is only tactical.”

posted July 21, 2010 11:31 PM            

The Democrats are depressed about their collapsing poll numbers, so it's time to start calling conservatives "racist."

As we now know from the Journolist list-serv, where hundreds of liberal journalists chat with one another, and which was leaked to Daily Caller this week, journalists cry "racism" whenever they need to distract from bad news for Obama. (Ironically, this story did not make headlines.)

When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal broke during the 2008 campaign, the first response of Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent was to demand that they start randomly picking conservatives -- "Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists."

Ackerman, frequent guest on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," continued on Journolist:

"What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically."

This is what "racism" has come to in America. Democrats are in trouble, so they say "let's call conservatives racists." We always knew it, but the Journolist postings gave us the smoking gun.

This explains why we've heard so much about Tea Partiers being "racists" lately.

But despite a frantic search, the media have been unable to produce any actual evidence of racism at the Tea Parties. Even the trace elements are either frauds or utterly trivial.

For example, there was blind terror last week over a Tea Party billboard in northern Iowa that showed a picture of Adolf Hitler, Obama and Vladimir Lenin under the headings: "National Socialism," "Democratic Socialism" and "Marxist Socialism."

Overheated? Perhaps. Racist? No. Unless liberals are about to break the news that Lenin and Hitler were black, what we have here, gentlemen, is not racism.

I'm not even sure why liberals are so testy: As an aficionado of liberal talk radio, I've heard both Ed Schultz and Randi Rhodes repeatedly say socialism is terrific. (Given their ratings, this is understandable.)

Most sickeningly, the mainstream media continue to spread the despicable lie that someone called civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis the "N-word" 15 times during the anti-ObamaCare rally in Washington. Fifteen times!

That turned out to be another lie. About a week after the protest, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could produce a video of Lewis being called the N-word even once -- forget 15 times. (That's the most we can afford. Hey, who do we look like over here, George Soros?)

Plus, the winner might have his video appear on the new hit TV show, "America's Most Racist Home Videos."

With hundreds of news cameras, cell phone cameras and camcorders capturing every nook and cranny of the Capitol Hill protest -- and news media hungry for an ugly, racist act -- it defies possibility that someone called Lewis the N-word once, much less 15 times, without one single camera capturing the incident. And yet, to this day the reward remains unclaimed.

Democrats did their best to provoke an ugly confrontation by marching a (shockingly undiverse) group of black Democrats right through the middle of the anti-ObamaCare protest. But they didn't get one, so the media just lied and asserted Lewis was called the N-word. (If they wanted to hear the N-word so badly, they should have sent the congressional delegation to a Jay-Z concert.)

Indeed, news anchor after news anchor has indignantly claimed to have footage of the incident, teasing viewers by saying, "We'll get that right up" or claiming personally to have seen the video -– and then you watch the whole program without ever seeing footage of anyone calling Lewis the N-word.

Dateline: April 18, 2010, CNN's Don Lemon: "We have the tape here at CNN. I saw it on CNN's 'State of the Union.'" And yet, Lemon never got around to showing viewers that tape. IF YOU HAVE THE TAPE, DON, CLAIM YOUR $100,00 REWARD!

And now this week, with the NAACP accusing the Tea Partiers of harboring racists, and conservatives demanding proof, the George Soros-backed Center for American Progress ran a 45-second video allegedly showing racism at the Tea Parties.

One of the videos shows an obvious liberal plant announcing, "I'm a proud racist!" Apparently this was their best shot, because they had to work this video into the montage twice, amid utterly innocuous posters, for example, saying, "God bless Glenn Beck." So I guess they didn't have anything better.

Here's the part Soros' people didn't show you: In the fuller video shown on the Glenn Beck show, the Tea Partiers surrounded the (liberal plant) racist, jeering at him, telling him he's not one of them and to go home. In a spectacularly evil fraud, all that was edited out.

Just hours later on MSNBC, Chris Matthews was loudly proclaiming that he would believe the Tea Partiers weren't racist when he sees "just one of those Tea Party people pull down one of those racist signs at the next Tea Party rally. I'm going to just wait. Reach over, grab the sign and tear it out of the guy's hands. Then I will believe you."

posted July 22, 2010 08:29 AM            

Everyone knew most of the press corps was hoping for Obama in 2008. Newly released emails show that hundreds of them were actively working to promote him.

When I'm talking to people from outside Washington, one question inevitably comes up: Why is the media so liberal? The question often reflects a suspicion that members of the press get together and decide on a story line that favors liberals and Democrats and denigrates conservatives and Republicans.

My response has usually been to say, yes, there's liberal bias in the media, but there's no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal. If they came from West Point or engineering school, this wouldn't be the case.

Now, after learning I'd been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I'm inclined to amend my response. Not to say there's a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.

My guess is that this and other revelations about JournoList will deepen the distrust of the national press. True, participants in the online clubhouse appear to hail chiefly from the media's self-identified left wing. But its founder, Ezra Klein, is a prominent writer for the Washington Post. Mr. Klein shut down JournoList last month—a wise decision.

It's thanks to Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller website that we know something about JournoList, though the emails among the liberal journalists were meant to be private. (Mr. Carlson hasn't revealed how he obtained the emails.) In June, the Daily Caller disclosed a series of JournoList musings by David Weigel, then a Washington Post blogger assigned to cover conservatives. His emails showed he loathes conservatives, and he was subsequently fired.

This week, Mr. Carlson produced a series of JournoList emails from April 2008, when Barack Obama's presidential bid was in serious jeopardy. Videos of the antiwhite, anti-American sermons of his Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had surfaced, first on ABC and then other networks.

WSJ.com Columnist John Fund reports on a media scandal. Also, Columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady breaks down the President's pledge to end bailouts and analyzes the Fed Chairman's latest visit to Capitol Hill.
.JournoList contributors discussed strategies to aid Mr. Obama by deflecting the controversy. They went public with a letter criticizing an ABC interview of Mr. Obama that dwelled on his association with Mr. Wright. Then, Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent proposed attacking Mr. Obama's critics as racists. He wrote:

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists. . . . This makes them 'sputter' with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

No one on JournoList endorsed the Ackerman plan. But rather than object on ethical grounds, they voiced concern that the strategy would fail or possibly backfire.

Among journalists in general, there's always been a herd instinct. Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota senator and Democratic presidential candidate, once described political writers as birds on a telephone wire. When one bird flew to the wire across the street, they all did. In Mr. Ackerman's case, I'm glad none of the birds joined him across the street.

We've often seen media groupthink in campaigns. In 1980, most of the media decided that President Jimmy Carter was being mean-spirited in his re-election effort with his harsh denunciations of Ronald Reagan, his Republican opponent. The media turned the meanness issue into major story. In 1992, journalists treated the economy as if it were dead in the water, though a recovery from a mild recession had begun early the previous year. I could go on.

I think JournoList is—or was—fundamentally different, and not simply because one of its members proposed to make palpably false accusations. As best I can tell, those involved in JournoList considered themselves part of a team. And their goal was to make sure the team won. In 2008, this was Mr. Obama's team. More recently, the goal seems to have been to defeat the conservative team.

Until JournoList came along, liberal journalists were rarely part of a team. Neither are conservative journalists today, so far as I know. If there's a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I've never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.

My experience with other conservative journalists is that they are loners. One of the most famous conservative columnists of the past half-century, the late Robert Novak, is a good example. I knew him well for 35 years. He didn't tell me what stories he was working on nor ask what I was planning to write. He never mentioned how we might promote Republicans or aid the conservative cause, nor did I.

What was particularly pathetic about the scheme to smear Mr. Obama's critics was labeling them as racists. The accusation has been made so frequently in recent years, without evidence to back it up, that it has little effect. It's now the last refuge of liberal scoundrels.

posted July 22, 2010 10:08 AM            

But wait, journalism is supposed to be all about reporting the facts of stories. The "Who, What, When and Where". That's journalism. What these leftist clowns in the media are actually doing is trying to "Make the News" and that's not journalism. That's propaganda and political activism.

When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack
By Jonathan Strong - The Daily Caller | Published: 3:09 AM 07/22/2010 | Updated: 9:55 AM 07/22/2010

In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race, members of an online forum called Journolist struggled to make sense of the pick. Many of them were liberal reporters, and in some cases their comments reflected a journalist’s instinct to figure out the meaning of a story.

But in many other exchanges, the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom.

The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation,” wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. “How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin.”

Not a wise argument, responded Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. If McCain were asked about Palin’s inexperience, he could simply point to then candidate Barack Obama’s similarly thin resume. “Q: Sen. McCain, given Gov. Palin’s paltry experience, how is she qualified to be commander in chief?,” Stein asked hypothetically. “A: Well, she has much experience as the Democratic nominee.”

“What a joke,” added Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. “I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point. Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale.”

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”

Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter for Bloomberg News who was covering the campaign, sent a quick thought that Palin’s choice not to have an abortion when she unexpectedly became pregnant at age 44 would likely boost her image because it was a heartwarming story.

“Her decision to keep the Down’s baby is going to be a hugely emotional story that appeals to a vast swath of America, I think,” Donmoyer wrote.

Politico reporter Ben Adler, now an editor at Newsweek, replied, “but doesn’t leaving sad baby without its mother while she campaigns weaken that family values argument? Or will everyone be too afraid to make that point?”

Blogger Matt Yglesias sent out a new post thread with the subject, “The line on Palin.”

“John McCain picked someone to help him politically, Barack Obama picked someone to help him govern,” Yglesias wrote.

Ed Kilgore, managing editor of the Democratic Strategist blog, argued that journalists and others trying to help the Obama campaign should focus on Palin’s beliefs. “The criticism of her really, really needs to be ideological, not just about experience. If we concede she’s a ‘maverick,’ we will have done John McCain an enormous service. And let’s don’t concede the claim that [Hillary Clinton] supporters are likely to be very attracted to her,” Kilgore said.

Amidst this debate over how most effectively to destroy Palin’s reputation, reporter Avi Zenilman, who was then writing about the campaign for Politico, chimed in to note that Palin had “openly backed” parts of Obama’s energy plan. In an interview Wednesday, Zenilman said he sent the information as a means of promoting a story he had written for Politico.

Chris Hayes of the Nation wrote in with words of encouragement, and to ask for more talking points. “Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get,” Hayes wrote.

Suzanne Nossel, chief of operations for Human Rights Watch, added a novel take: “I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualifications or views.”

Mother Jones’s Stein loved the idea. “That’s excellent! If enough people – people on this list? – write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket,” he wrote.

Another writer from Mother Jones, Nick Baumann, had this idea: “Say it with me: ‘Classic GOP Tokenism’.”

Kilgore wasn’t sold: “I STRONGLY think the immediate task is to challenge the ‘maverick’ ******** about Palin, which everybody on the tube is echoing. I’ll say it one more time: Palin is a hard-core conservative ideologue in every measurable way.”

Zenilman of Politico, a purportedly nonpartisan journalist, weighed in with tactical advice: “The experience attack is a stupid one. It’s absolutely the wrong tack — the tack that McCain took when he was losing, and that Hillary and Biden took all primaries.” Zenilman said Wednesday he was offering “typical offhand political analysis.”

Joe Klein of Time stopped by with an update on the latest from his magazine: “We’re reporting that she actually supported the bridge to nowhere. First flub?”

Klein, who displayed an independent streak in other circumstances (“anybody who knows me knows I do my own thinking,” he said in a Wednesday interview), seemed to exude more partisanship that day than usual.

As the morning wore on into the afternoon, some on Journolist came to believe the Palin pick had been shrewd. Palin was coming off as appealing and a maverick, they worried.

“Okay, let’s get deadly serious, folks. Grating voice or not, ‘inexperienced’ or not, Sarah Palin’s just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick ‘outsider’,” Kilgore said, “What we can do is to expose her ideology.”

Ryan Avent, then blogging for the Economist and now an editor there, agreed that criticizing Palin’s experience might not work. “I really don’t think the experience argument needs to be made by the Dems. It’s completely obvious to any reasonable person. Instead, hammer away at the fact that she has terrible positions on things like choice, and on the fact that she has no ideas on the issues important to people,” he wrote.

Journolist’s founder Ezra Klein, now a blogger at the Washington Post, reached an entirely different conclusion: “I see no reason to attack Palin. I think you accurately describe Palin and attack McCain.” Klein linked to an article he had written for the American Prospect that calmly described Palin’s thin resume.

Time’s Joe Klein then linked to his own piece, parts of which he acknowledged came from strategy sessions on Journolist. “Here’s my attempt to incorporate the accumulated wisdom of this august list-serve community,” he wrote. And indeed Klein’s article contained arguments developed by his fellow Journolisters. Klein praised Palin personally, calling her “fresh” and “delightful,” but questioned her “militant” ideology. He noted Palin had endorsed parts of Obama’s energy proposal.

posted July 22, 2010 04:14 PM            

We began our series on Journolist earlier this week with the expectation that our stories would be met with a fury of criticism from the Left. A hurt dog barks, after all.

The response hasn’t been all that furious, actually, probably because there isn’t much for the exposed members of Journolist to say. We caught them. They’re ashamed. The wise ones are waiting for the tempest to pass.

There have, however, been two lines of argument that we probably ought to respond to, if only because they may harden into received wisdom if we don’t. The first is that our pieces have proved only that liberal journalists have liberal views, and that’s hardly news.

To be clear: We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption. Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.

The second line of attack we’ve encountered since we began the series is familiar to anyone who has ever published a piece whose subject didn’t like the finished product: “You quoted me out of context!”

The short answer is, no we didn’t. I edited the first four stories myself, and I can say that our reporter Jonathan Strong is as meticulous and fair as anyone I have worked with.

That assurance won’t stop the attacks, of course. So why don’t we just publish all the threads we have and end the debate? Because a lot of them have no obvious news value, for one thing. Gather 400 lefty reporters and academics on one listserv and it turns out you wind up with a strikingly high concentration of bitchiness. Shocking amounts, actually. So while it might be amusing to air threads theorizing about the personal and sexual shortcomings of various D.C. pundits, we’ve decided to pull back.

Plus, a lot of the material on Journolist is actually pretty banal. In addition to being partisan hacks, a lot of these guys turn out to be pedestrian thinkers. Disappointing.

We reserve the right to change our minds about this in the future, but for now there’s an easy solution to this question: Anyone on Journolist who claims we quoted him “out of context” can reveal the context himself. Every member of Journolist received new threads from the group every day, most of which are likely still sitting in Gmail accounts all over Washington and New York. So feel free to try to prove your allegations, or else stop making them.

One final note: Editing this series has been something of a depressing experience for me. I’ve been in journalism my entire adult life, and have often defended it against fellow conservatives who claim the news business is fundamentally corrupt. It’s harder to make that defense now. It will be easier when honest (and, yes, liberal) journalists denounce what happened on Journalist as wrong.
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/22/letter-from-editor-in-chief-tucker-carlson-on-the-daily-callers-journolist-coverage/

Don't hold your breath Carlson waiting for the thundering leftist herd to admit that political activists and propaganda artists posing as journalists....is wrong.

posted July 22, 2010 05:12 PM            

but it seems you are hell bent on making sarah palin into THIS year's messiah even though you cringe at obama being one...

posted July 22, 2010 10:59 PM            

Further katatonic, you denigrate others...in politics who are attempting to shut them down. Sarah Palin, no friend to the so called "ruling class" comes to mind readily.

posted July 23, 2010 11:50 AM            

so now she is painting the "rogue" picture because that is her only road into washington.

the side you listen to is as blatantly favouritist as the side you abhor. the fact that they believe abortion doctors DESERVE to be killed by nutjobs, that the poor should be allowed to starve till they get them some gumption, and that FOX NEWS is a news station...very scary.

posted July 23, 2010 12:05 PM            

This is the ruling class you say you oppose...yet, your words in their defense don't show any opposition at all.

I'm working to get them defeated and out of government and that work includes members of the Republican Party...the RINOS..republicans in name only.

Btw, that "few dollars" of oil revenue spread to Alaska citizens totals about $17,000 for a family of four. Some of it in the form of a direct payment and the rest goes into a fund for roads and other repair and improvements which reduces taxes for every citizen of Alaska.

posted July 23, 2010 01:33 PM            

Is this a story or isn't it? It doesn't seem surprising to me in slightest way that people of the same trade would congregate on the internet, especially when the trade is the trade of information and the internet is the greatest vehicle for trading information ever created. Calling it a conspiracy is a really tough call.

posted July 23, 2010 02:16 PM            

i don't know where the thread is about the murder of the abortion doctor but i remember you shrugging it off as "rough justice" - your attempts to caricaturize women who abort babies as monsters and murderers who make such decisions callously and selfishly, and your depiction of welfare families as tivo watching slugs. among other choice slanders you use repetitively ..

basically you do the same thing as you are objecting to here, as do the bloggers you quote ad nauseam. whether they think they are right or not, encouraging people to violence and pretending that this govt has tried to disarm the general public...and on and on. you are running a smear campaign and that is what i object to.

you can wait as long as you like. i am not enrolled in jwhop college and i will post what i see fit.

posted July 24, 2010 10:55 AM            

and this man calls himself a journalist too. how embarrassing. and even now that he has been shown to be manufacturing news he is blaming the "left" for misunderstanding his lies. weird.

posted July 27, 2010 11:54 PM            

You also don't remember me saying he/she deserved it.

So, what we have here are so called journalists, some who work for major main stream media sources getting together to figure out how they could report the news in such a way as to help O'Bomber get elected.

To that end, they were willing to lie and it was suggested that they lie to their readers about conservatives....pick a couple, Rove and Barnes...whoever, and call them racists.

To that end, they attempted to deep six the Reverrrrend Wright story...to help O'Bomber.

And then of course, it was A-OK to speculate in news stories about the real mother of Trig.

posted July 28, 2010 12:14 AM            

You're even more confused than usual katatonic.

The person who posted the story about the black woman working at the Dept of Aguraculture who made those racist remarks wasn't at Daily Caller.

It was on Big Government dot com and he posted the thrust of what she said to a meeting of the NAACP.

Then, SHE said she started getting calls from the Deputy Sec of Agriculture telling her the White House wanted her to resign. Three calls in all and in the last call, SHE said the Deputy Sec told her the White House wanted her to pull over to the side of the road and resign right now...as in immediately.

The posting by Andrew Breitbart contained the part where Sherrod had a revelation that what she was doing...23 years ago was wrong...that was in the video clip Breitbart posted...but apparently the O'Bomber administration didn't take the time to find out what the facts were..in typical leftist fashion...and neither did the NAACP...which was in possession of the whole tape of her 40 minute speech.

The O'Bomber administration acted stupidly and so did the NAACP and both wanted her to resign or be fired.

Now katatonic, you say the person who posted the video of Sherrod "ADMITTED" he lied.

Show me where Andrew Breitbart "ADMITTED" he lied...or where he did lie..."ADMITTED" or not.

posted July 28, 2010 11:05 AM            

Thus, through a confluence of bizarrely unlikely events, the vicious act of falsely accusing people of racism became a laughing stock. It went from being a career killer to a punch line; from villainy to vaudeville; from knife in the back to pie in the face.

It started at about noon Monday when Andrew Breitbart publishes on his website an edited video of Shirley Sherrod (giving a speech to an NAACP audience this spring), which he describes, in part thusly: "Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn't do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from "one of his own kind".

"She refers him to a white lawyer. Sherrod's racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement."

The week before, the NAACP, without evidence, had attacked the tea parties for alleged racism in its rank and file. This is part of a running smear now about a year old, by prominent Democrats such as Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and legions of Democratic Party support groups that the Tea Party (now identified with by about a third of the country) is racist, Nazi, un-American, etc.

Breitbart strikes back, with evidence (in the form of the video of the audience reaction to the moment in Sherrod speech before she talks of racial reconciliation) demonstrating anti-white racism in a NAACP audience. The story of the week is thus launched.

Notice, by the way, that he alerts the viewer that "Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help." It's in the video and it is in the text of Breitbart's original post on the topic. But the mainstream media selectively edits out this exonerating fact in
virtually every story about Breitbart. So the subsequent charges against Breitbart by the mainstream media that his editing was misleading was itself misleading and wrong.

In a seemingly unrelated story just after midnight Tuesday morning (July 20) Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller reported on leaked emails from the liberal media cabal Journolist in which, when the Rev, Wright issue first emerged during the 2008 campaign, one of the participating liberal
journalists, Spencer Ackerman, proposed defending Obama by using a racial smear tactic:

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us.
Instead, take one of them-Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares-and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

At last, we have the smoking gun that proves to the American public that at least some liberal reporters are quite prepared to make false charges of racism to advance their liberal political agenda-and to conspire with other like-minded character assassin journalists in the so doing.

So far, there are just two web site stories. But then the White House panics, and turns a couple of, until then, minor web stories into one of the worst political weeks for any White House since Nixon's many sad examples of terrible political weeks in 1974.

According to Mrs. Sherrod, she is forced to resign her post immediately at Department of Agriculture under pressure from the White House which was afraid that Glenn Beck was about to report the story of her NAACP speech. (In the Obama version of FDR "The only thing we have to fear is the Glenn Beck Show itself-- -nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. "

The compliant NAACP then itself apologizes. The next day, more of Mrs. Sherrod's speech becomes available, where she describes how she over comes that first instinct of racial bigotry three decades ago and helps out the white farmer. The white farmer's wife then goes on CNN and says what a nice and helpful lady Mrs. Sherrod is.

The White House panics again and instructs the Sec. of Agriculture to apologize and offer her job back to her. The NAACP then withdraws its apology and says it was "snookered" by Breitbart (even though it was their event with a room full of their members available to the NAACP last week.)

Then some more of her speech-after the reconciliation of the races section-is made available and includes the following sentences: " I haven't seen such a mean-spirited people as I've seen lately over this issue of health care. (Murmurs of agreement.) Some of the racism we thought was buried -- (someone in the audience says, "It surfaced!") Didn't it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bushes and we didn't do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president. (Applause) " (Text courtesy of National Review).

In other words, she is accusing up to 70 million Americans (registered Republican voters) of opposing Obamacare because the President is black-rather than because we disagree with the policy-as we did with Hillarycare in 1994. That is a broad-brush bigoted attitude by Mrs. Sherrod against all of us who opposed the president's healthcare policy. She implicitly accuses all 70 million of us of being racist.

Then Mrs. Sherrod goes on CNN with Anderson Cooper and says she thinks that Andrew Breitbart wants America to return to slavery for the blacks. And that is the last mainstream television seems to want to present of Mrs. Sherrod live and unedited. After dominating the news for the week, the eloquent Mrs. Sherrod is not invited to a single Sunday show.

And so did the rank cynicism of overplaying the race card turn that dreaded knave into a joker.
www.rasmussenreports.com

**Edited:

OK then katatonic, show me where Andrew Breitbart "apologized".

"it doesn't seem to bother you that the blogger who first broke this story about the slant created by "leftist" journos has admitted the way he lied and created a scandal around a black woman's supposedly racist behaviour to make the tea party look innocent in the face of accusations of racism? "..katatonic

posted July 28, 2010 11:23 AM            

How ironic that on a day when we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, The Daily Caller released 15 pages of JournoListers’ email exchanges about a dark and demented conspiracy regarding my son, Trig.

It’s tough to fittingly describe these numerous members of the mainstream media who actively engaged in the debate about this conspiracy back when I was first introduced as John McCain’s running mate, and it’s impossible to legitimize any “prominent” media publication that continues to traffic in this bizarre narrative today. It wasn’t just a few fringe characters in that JournoList discussion. It included writers for major newspapers, magazines, and online news publications. Those participating in this immature exchange in attempts to plant seeds of doubt and falsely accuse even included a famous historian.

This JournoList exchange exposes the warped nature of today’s media, thus explaining why many of us are forced, in fairness to the public, to utilize other mediums to communicate until the mainstream media wakes up and begins respecting the public’s intelligence and desire for truth in reporting. There is a sickness and darkness in today’s liberal media. With revelations like the JournoList exchanges, may the light keep shining to expose the problem.

It’s always darkest before the dawn. My hope, therefore, is that today, marking the anniversary of our nation’s attempt to show respect for our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters with special needs, will also mark the beginning of a new, more respectful discourse among members of our media who at least aspire to be fair and objective.

posted August 11, 2010 08:58 AM            

For those who don't pay attention to how America's mainstream media actually functions nowadays, the recent JournoList scandal may prove a bit shocking. JournoList was a listserv[1] created by Ezra Klein, a sanctimonious young man who regularly appears on MSNBC. Mr. Klein writes for the Washington Post, which owns the JournoList email archive.

According to Mr. Klein, the JournoList forum was created for members of the mainstream media as a "wonkish, [2] fun, political yelling match." During its existence, it accumulated tens of thousands of emails from its roughly 400 participants. Recently, it was discontinued when its contents were leaked to the public.[3]

Some of the JournoList emails reveal that the mainstream media has been deeply complicit in deceiving the American people about Mr. Obama.[4] Other emails reveal that some of the luminaries in the mainstream media are both cruel and churlish. But what is perhaps most significant is that some of the emails show that the mainstream media is afflicted with a disability that might best be described as a form of social psychosis.[5]

For example, one of the JournoList participants is a woman by the name of Katha Pollitt. Ms. Pollitt is a writer for The Nation magazine, and is also published by The New Yorker, Harper's, Ms., and The New York Times. In commenting on the Tea Party movement, Ms. Pollitt had this to say:

"... today's US rightwingers have nothing concrete to offer people. Just the pleasures of racism and selfishness and fear."

At the level of political theory, Ms. Pollitt's comment seems woefully devoid of verisimilitude. She makes an implicit assertion that the proper role of our national government is "to offer" something to the American people. This kind of thinking is what leads to a totalitarian nanny state. In our country, the proper domestic function of the federal government is to maintain a minimum structure of national rules that ensures the maximum amount of personal freedom consistent with lawful behavior. Beyond that, the Founders intended that the federal government should stay out of the way of the states and the American people, leaving them free to determine how best to secure their own happiness.[6]

Ms. Pollitt's comment also reveals that she, like so many of her JournoList colleagues, is trapped in a state of pathological projection[7] about "racism and selfishness and fear." Despite many weeks of claiming that the Tea Party movement is racist, nobody in the mainstream media has been able to produce one iota of evidence to substantiate the charge. As for selfishness, surely there is nothing more selfish than expecting millions of hard working Americans to shoulder the burden of ever-expanding government programs for a permanent welfare class and tens of millions of illegal aliens in order to empower the left -- yet, that is precisely what the mainstream media wants Americans to do. And, as to fear, it takes only a cursory glance at the JournoList emails to see how central that emotion is to the gestalt of Ms. Pollitt and her JournoList colleagues.

Considering the evidence, an objective observer must conclude that when it comes to "the pleasures of racism and selfishness and fear," the mainstream media and their cultural Marxist heroes beat the Tea Party hands down!

_______________________________

1 A listserv is electronic mailing list software that allows someone to send an email and reach a whole group of people.

2 The word "wonkish" is apparently an adjective meaning bookish.

3 In criminal law, when someone runs away after a crime is committed, it is considered evidence of scienter, a Latin word that refers to a person's awareness of having done something wrong. So, too, in civil law, when a manufacturer of a product abandons a product's design after the product causes injury, such after-the-fact conduct may be introduced into evidence to prove that the product was originally defective or unsafe.

4 It is with good reason that the JournoList members considered the mainstream media to be the "non-official campaign" for Mr. Obama.

5 I use the word psychosis in its generic sense here, denoting a loss of contact with reality. In psychiatry, psychosis refers to a mental state characterized by delusional thinking and distorted perceptions of reality.

6 The Constitution of the United States would not have been ratified unless the Founders included the Bill of Rights, also known as the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment provides "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." The Ninth Amendment provides "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

posted August 11, 2010 09:09 AM            

The known members of JournoList, a conspiracy to manipulate media coverage to favor leftist positions, now number 151. Which means that about 2/3 of the list remain covert operatives, still functioning without public knowledge of their membership. New additions are:

Amanda Marcotte
Karen Tumulty (often seen on cable news as a commentator)
Kevin Carey
James Fallows

Removed from the list is Will Bunch, who has denied membership via Twitter. A complete list follows below.

JournoList member Ben Smith of Politico continues doing the propaganda work of the group by publishing a piece picking up on an anonymous, unsubstantiated accusation published in GQ that in college GOP Senate nominee Rand Paul tied up a teammate to "force her to take bong hits."

Here is the list as it stands today, courtesy of Buckeye Texan, as published on Free Republic (hat tip: Clarice Feldman):

posted August 15, 2010 11:01 AM            

Let's make these warnings mandatory!

posted March 25, 2011 03:34 PM            

The last NPR biggie left standing is named Steve Inskeep, and he just assured the Wall Street Journal that NPR would never tell a lie.

This would be funny if it weren't sickening. Where's my sick bag?

How can habitual liars know they're lying? It's like the famous liar's paradox from formal logic, where Epimenides the Cretan said that "All Cretans are liars." Was Epimenides lying or not?

Well, Steve Inskeep is telling us that NPR never tells a lie, but Epimenides was a lot more honest.

There's plenty of evidence for coordinated propaganda lies in the media. We even have an apology from Roger Simon of Politico for the corrupt and massive coordination of media headlines using the JournOlist email list. They say they've dropped JournOlist, but they are still at it every single day, probably through a secure website. We know that the Washington Post, the NYT (all the news you're allowed to think), and the UK Guardian (an old Stalinist rag, as Malcolm Muggeridge revealed in his autobiography), are talking to each other all the time.

In fact, the Washington Post just reported on a journOliar "boot camp" for junior leftocrats to learn to how lie to millions of others. Yes, it's a boot camp for liars in training!

That's how a minority cult of brainwashed leftists stay in power in the Western world. But don't think the oil-rich radical Muslims haven't figured it out. How do you think the Islamophobia rumor got started? How else could all the liberals in the world suddenly discover a new kind of "racism" that doesn't exist?

Media leftists are liars. That's the only way they can say the same words on the same day, every day. Rush Limbaugh has been proving it for years just by recording the talking heads of the MSM on any given day, all aping the same words, syllable by syllable. Even monkeys are smarter than that.

Normal human beings don't talk in lockstep. Try playing the game of "telephone" with four kids, and you'll see that the actual words they whisper change as the message goes from child to child. Real human beings have trouble memorizing sentences.

That's why college students are supposed to take notes in classes -- because human memory is not a tape recorder -- and the notes they write are never identical. If your students are giving you identical answers on an essay question, you know they're cheating.

Well, that's how we know the libs are cheating, too. We can even see them telling each other how to cheat.

For the Left, in the beginning was the Lie.

Here's the latest Stalinoid Party Lie about Sarah Palin.

Just Google these words: "Sarah Palin loses popularity."

I just got more than 8 million hits on that phrase in 0.22 seconds.

The hits include:

1. The New York Times. (Natch!)

2. McClatchy.

3. CBS News

4. HuffPo.

5. Newsweek.

6. Mother Jones.

7. Obama.org

... et mendacious cetera.

We know who started that little viral lie. It came from the Washington Post, from Dana Milbank, who whipped up a twitter mob for the specific purpose of shutting Governor Palin out of the liberal media. That's how scared they are of the Governor of Alaska.

All the little brainwashed Leftobots went Heil Dana! Zum Befehl! And then they marched stiffly to all their twitter pods and typed in the message from the Politburo. It's just like those old Nuremberg mobs in the 30s. Libs are really disgusting human beings.

And now the words "Sarah Palin is losing popularity" has 8 million hits on Google.

How's that for mass brainwashing?

When JournOList was exposed, we found out how dozens of famous "reporters" and "commentators" were coordinating their exact words, just like Stalin's Party Lies.

Real humans are individuals; they don't march in lockstep. If every brand of beer tastes the same, you're not getting it from your local hand-crafted microbrewery.

Conservatives understand about systematic lying in the media because we see it every day. Liberals are afraid to question the catechism, so they keep falling for it. Which is why they are so robotic.

Robolefties just go Hup! Two, Three, Four! -- and they don't know they're doing it, just as Jim Jones cult members never knew what they were doing until the Kool-Aid got passed around.

The media aim for consensus. But any scientist, engineer or farmer knows that consensus is just the voice of a mob. You can't run a farm or a laboratory without running headlong into reality. Chemistry experiments really do blow up in your face if you add a beaker of water to concentrated acid rather than vice versa. That is called "reality."

The media are "post-modernists" -- they are looking for a consensus lie among the in-crowd. Louis Farrakhan has the same standard to convince his followers about the Mother Ship.

Consensus in a cult is the lowest standard for the truth. Our media literally have lost the knack of thinking for themselves. If they ever had it.