Matthew Vadum's blog

It appears the progressive New York Times is running an ugly campaign of character assassination against a real-life American hero who saved lives and helped to safeguard the nation’s sacred democratic process. The man with the bull’s eye on his back is Brandon Darby, formerly a far-left community organizer. The Old Gray Lady has accused Darby of encouraging a plot to firebomb Republicans at the 2008 nominating convention, when in fact he was instrumental in thwarting the conspiracy and saving the lives of Republican delegates and police officers.

Darby stands accused by the New York Times and by angry radical groups of acting as an agent provocateur. In the article Anarchist Ties Seen in ’08 Bombing of Texas Governor’s Mansion published February 23, 2011, the paper said Darby urged two radicals to firebomb the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. According to NYT reporter James C. McKinley Jr.:

For some in the left-wing mainstream media the truth is too much to handle. I am referring specifically to Salon.com's Alex Koppelman who is gunning for a spot on the list of "useful idiots" defending organized crime syndicate ACORN. (Salon's Joe Conason is already on the list.)

Koppelman didn't like what I wrote yesterday about Patrick Corvington working for the ACORN-friendly Annie E. Casey Foundation so he decided to accuse me of "sloppy reporting." It is a strange allegation to make, especially since he does not accuse me of making a factual error. He essentially admits in his piece that he didn't like the conclusions I arrived at so he simply went around the accuracy issue altogether and smeared me. It's all so typical of the left.

I'm guessing Koppelman felt compelled to act because my blog post got significant play in the media. It was cited by the Washington Examiner which in turn was cited by the Drudge Report.

Before I go farther, some background is needed here.

Arianna Huffington's liberal gossip site the Huffington Post has been vigorously defending green jobs czar and 9/11 "truther" Van Jones.

It turns out that Jones was Huffington's grassroots political director when she ran for governor in the 2003 recall election. In fact, Jones, a self-described "communist," thought Huffington was so wonderful he was part of the effort to draft her to run for office.

A San Francisco Chronicle article from Sept. 5, 2003 described Jones as Huffington's "grassroots director."

President Obama's controversial green jobs czar --a self-described “rowdy black nationalist” and "communist"-- is a co-founder of the same unsavory left-wing pressure group that is urging an advertiser boycott of Glenn Beck's TV show after Beck did several unflattering news packages on the czar. Not surprisingly, Big Media haven't noticed the connection.

The czar in question is Van Jones, a founding board member of Color of Change, an extremist racial grievance group that tries to stir up racial antagonism in order to promote a socialist agenda.

Updated below the fold

In a recent news package liberal journalists at CNN --in this case Dana Bash and Lesa Jansen-- attempted to discredit a Canadian brain tumor patient who received treatment in the U.S. after being told by Canada's health care system to shut up and take her place in line.

They were unable to actually discredit Shona Holmes of Waterdown, Ontario, but did manage to find another patient who claims to have received speedy treatment following a cancer diagnosis.

The serially dishonest Frank Rich, a New York Times columnist, wouldn't know an example of racism if it sat on his head.

In his latest column he haughtily bloviates in an attempt to turn the tables on Republican senators by accusing those who grilled Judge Sonia Sotomayor during her Supreme Court confirmation proceeding last week of being the real racists.

He writes

Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent. [...]

The New York Times was less than truthful in an editorial yesterday on ACORN's involvement in the 2010 census and implied that Republicans and Obama administration critics were paranoid.

After pontificating that Republicans' fears were overblown about Robert M. Groves, the statistical voodoo practitioner who was recently confirmed by the U.S. Senate as census director, the Old Gray Lady opined

Why is the fact-checking operation PolitiFact.com carrying water for the radical left-wing activist group ACORN and attacking Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) for trying to warn the public about the group?

A project of the St. Petersburg Times, the website's "Truth-O-Meter" purports to check and rate "the accuracy of statements by candidates, elected officials, political parties, interest groups, pundits, talk show hosts." After PolitiFact writers research a statement, it then receives one of six ratings on a continuum of truthfulness: True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False and Pants on Fire.

It turns out that those who serve the Truth-O-Meter often have strange ideas about what constitutes truth.

A case in point is how PolitiFact handled Rep. Bachmann's recent claim that the much investigated activist group ACORN was eligible for up to $8.5 billion in federal funding this year.

Like everything having to do with ACORN, it's very complicated.

Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad.

But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff reporter Stephanie Strom's reporting about possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady's "public editor." Hoyt used the word "nonsense" to describe the allegations of impropriety leveled against ACORN and the Obama campaign. 

Hoyt writes in the Sunday New York Times

On March 17, a Republican lawyer, quoting a confidential source for a Times reporter, testified to Congress that the newspaper killed a story last fall because it would have been "a game-changer" in the presidential election.

Fair-minded conservatives were aghast in President George W. Bush's second term when the left-wing character assassination machine went into high gear to destroy Jeff Gannon.

Gannon, also known as James Dale Guckert, asked questions that annoyed liberals because they were based on a right-wing political perspective.

Liberals were outraged. How dare the White House allow a conservative in who didn't constantly bash President Bush. The nerve!

Partisan, ideologically-driven people shouldn't be allowed into White House press briefings, they howled in unison.

Gannon had skeletons in his past, which sent the left into deepening shades of delight. Even though the left prides itself on being gay-friendly, the fact that Gannon's indiscretions were related to his homosexuality only egged on the vicious hypocrites, feeding their schadenfreude.

The liberal media isn't going to spell out exactly how it goes about smearing conservatives, so Bill O'Reilly helpfully explained it last night on "The O'Reilly Factor."

Boiled down it goes like this: George Soros (and others) fund one of the left's most prominent noise machines, Media Matters for America, which distorts statements made by conservatives and then urges reporters to provide saturation coverage of such statements as proof conservatives are hypocritical and sinister.

In his "talking points" segment, O'Reilly references the Obama administration's strategy of attempting to marginalize its most vocal opponent, radio talk show giant Rush Limbaugh (video available at YouTube): 

BILL O'REILLY: The Limbaugh-Obama controversy is thankfully just about over, but the far-left smear machine that propelled it to our attention is just getting started.

Isn't this convenient? Finally, more than a week after Election Day, Chris Cuomo of ABC News' "Good Morning America" puts together a fairly hard-hitting look at terrorist William Ayers, the would-be mass murderer, who helped to launch the career of then-Illinois state senate candidate Barack Obama.

Now that it hardly matters anymore politically, now that Obama has secured at least 365 of the 538 votes in the Electoral College, Cuomo finally decides it's time to be a journalist and asks Bill Ayers hard questions over and over again. It's not a bad interview, but wouldn't it have had more news value a few weeks ago when Americans were weighing the content of now-President-elect Obama's character? (Article on GMA website here summarizes the interview.)

In the Coleman-Franken Senate recount battle developing in Minnesota, almost all media accounts fail to mention that Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who largely controls the process, is not only a liberal Democrat, but also an ally of ACORN and liberal philanthropist George Soros.

Even fewer media outlets report the fact that both Ritchie and fellow Democrat Al Franken were endorsed by ACORN. Ritchie, like so many liberals, is dismissive of electoral fraud allegations in general. He failed to investigate claims by a conservative group about voter roll irregularities. (See "SOS in Minnesota," American Spectator, Nov. 7, 2008)

Though members of the mainstream media seem to have noticed in recent days that the radical, thoroughly corrupt left-wing group ACORN exists, the MSM are still accepting ACORN's word that it is strictly nonpartisan.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

While the MSM continue to churn out stories about alleged "voter suppression" (yes, it exists, but it is a pretty minor thing, especially when compared to ACORN's widespread electoral fraud), ACORN's interim organizer in chief Bertha Lewis has removed any remaining doubt about which political party ACORN supports.

Lewis is featured in a video posted on YouTube by an ACORN affiliate,Working Families Party. Says Lewis:

The mainstream media is so in the tank for Barack Obama that only in the last few days has it begun to do some serious shoe-leather reporting and trace the connections between ACORN, Barack Obama, William Ayers, ACORN founder Wade Rathke and his embezzling brother Dale, the Weather Underground Organization, and the Democratic Party.

The MSM is still largely downplaying Americans' justifiable fears that ACORN is attempting to steal the election through massive voter fraud. As NewsBusters has exhaustively documented, MSM talking heads say: fears of voter fraud are overblown, ACORN is just an innocent community group, Obama never technically "worked" for ACORN because when he worked for Project Vote it was allegedly an independent organization (that's a fave of Seth Colter Walls at the Huffington Post), and so on.

Sometimes the MSM needs some help.

I wrote the paper, "ACORN: Who Funds the Weather Underground's Little Brother?" for the November issue of Capital Research Center's Foundation Watch newsletter.

Read it here or read on for a summary.

"Meet the Press" interim moderator Tom Brokaw sits on the board of a liberal foundation that has given radical left-wing group ACORN $821,000 and that in turn is funded by liberal uber-donor George Soros, research reveals.

Conservatives have long considered Brokaw's political views to be somewhere on the left, but these revelations raise new questions about the former NBC News anchor's objectivity.

Here are the facts.

Brokaw sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that, according to its website, targets poverty in New York City by applying "sound investment principles to philanthropy." The foundation awarded ACORN a $456,000 grant in 2003 and a $365,000 grant in 2004. Brokaw does not appear to have played a role in the grants because he didn't become a member of the board until 2005 according to the guidestar.org database, but these are nevertheless the left-wing circles in which he travels.

UPDATED BELOW THE FOLD

Why is the mainstream media --which keeps lecturing Americans that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's Bailout Package Version 2.0 must be passed immediately-- ignoring what might be the most earth-shattering provisions in Paulson's package?

The media needs to start asking hard questions. Here is where they need to start. If you look at page 180 of the 451-page monster bailout bill that easily passed the Senate yesterday (PDF here), you will see that it includes at Section 116 language about the tax treatment of "industrial source carbon dioxide." It also provides, at Section 117, for a "carbon audit of the tax code."

What could a provision about the tax treatment of "industrial source carbon dioxide" and another provision about doing a "carbon audit" of the tax code possibly have to do with restoring confidence in Wall Street's troubled credit markets?

The answer: NOTHING.

This appears to be an attempt by global warming fanatics to lay the foundation for an economy-killing carbon tax just like the "cap-and-tax" system that is now destroying European industry.

Stop the presses!

After Rathergate, the New Republic's Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal, the protracted coverup of the John Edwards affair story, the ongoing refusal to challenge Barack Obama's claim that terrorist William Ayers was just "some guy" in his neighborhood, and Matt Drudge's history-changing decision to break the Monica Lewinsky story after mainstream media outlets refused to report it, it's clear that bloggers, many of whom spend their time fact-checking stories disseminated by the mainstream media, represent a threat to the mainstream media.

Johanna Neuman of the Los Angeles Times yesterday misrepresented First Lady Laura Bush's words to make it seem like she was backing away from GOP veep candidate Sarah Palin's criticism of Senator Barack Obama's community organizing days.

Recall, as I noted in the NewsBusters post "Media Freak Out Over Palin and Giuliani's ‘Community Organizer' Jabs" earlier today, that community organizing, in the sense that Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer uses the term, is Saul Alinsky-style political organizing. It's not about church bake sales, picking up litter, little leagues, or parent-teacher associations. It's about agitation aimed at securing big chunks of government money and radical social change. It is not noble. It is radical left-wing activism. It is not community service. It's more like community destruction. Think Jesse Jackson. Think Al Sharpton. Think ACORN. Think Mother Jones.

Apoplectic journalists have spent more than a week now howling with indignation at GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's belittling of Barack Obama's so-called community organizing. To recap, she accepted the veep nod quipping, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities." Neither Palin nor ex-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, who made similar comments, attacked the honorable American tradition of volunteerism, but the media reacted as if their comments were somehow un-American.

Pious liberal muckrakers ferociously attacked Palin and Giuliani, excoriating them for grinding one of their sacred cows into hamburger. Leading the chorus of indignation was Time magazine's Joe Klein, who described the GOP convention as an "extremely effective bilge festival." It was "infuriating" that Giuliani, who has "come to look like a villain in a Frank Capra movie" and Palin dared to question the value of community organizing whose goal is "to end poverty and promote social justice." Klein ranted: "To describe this service-the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other-as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme."

UPDATED BELOW THE FOLD

After sounding cautiously, perhaps nervously optimistic in today's column about John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate ("A Clear and Present Danger to the American Left," September 3), Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan performed an abrupt about-face in front of a live NBC microphone later in the day, apparently unaware she was being recorded. "It's over," Noonan said, apparently referring to the chances of the McCain Palin ticket sweeping to victory in November. (Link to NBC video clip)

Here is a transcript prepared by Frank James of the Chicago Tribune's blog, The Swamp:

MURPHY: You know, I come out of a blue, swing-state governor world. Engler Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, I mean, and these guys, this is all like how you win a Texas race, you run it up. It's not going to work.

NOONAN: It's over.

MURPHY: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.

The Associated Press used Orwellian language to transform illegal immigrants, their families, and the businesses that broke the law by hiring them - into "victims."

In the August 16 article, "A small town struggles after immigration raid," AP writer Monica Rhor describes Postville, Iowa, the site of a major immigration raid three months ago that led to the arrest of hundreds of illegal immigrants. She describes those in the town who were affected by the raid as "victims." Rhor writes:

It was as if a tornado had whipped through the town or a flood had swallowed up houses. A disaster. Man-made, but a disaster all the same. Three months after the raid, that's how many in Postville describe the events of May 12.

Lives disrupted. People pushed out of jobs and homes. Children separated from parents. Businesses verging towards collapse.

And as in any small town swept by disaster, the community quickly banded together to help the victims. 

But wait a minute: they're not victims.

It seems silly to have to belabor the obvious point that the illegal immigrants arrested were (alleged) lawbreakers, but it needs to be done.

The mainstream media has relentlessly hailed Al Gore as a visionary for urging America to get off oil but has essentially ignored the fact that Gore is personally invested in the most cutting edge oil extraction technologies. Media types have called Gore's speech "heroic" and "inspirational."

And the fawning continues. For urging the end of oil in America in a speech last month, Bob Herbert of the New York Times says Gore "is offering us the kind of vision and sense of urgency that has been so lacking in the presidential campaigns," and that his plan is a "visionary energy challenge." Columnist Marsha Mercer says Gore "has big ideas." The Baltimore Sun cheers that Gore's plan "offers the best chance to give the United States a brighter energy future and a cleaner environment."

The Boston Globe's Derrick Z. Jackson writes that the next president should "see what Gore thinks about running the Department of Energy, or the EPA, or both." The Honolulu Star Bulletin writes that Gore's "alarm should be taken seriously." Tom Osborne opines that "Gore's challenge suggests a can-do confidence" in Americans. Not heeding Gore's call "brings the world closer to that tipping point that spells global catastrophe," argues the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Gore "provides a voice of reason," says the Centre Daily Times (Pennsylvania). Columnist Marianne Means says he's "a prophet in his own time." The Press & Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, N.Y.) opines that Gore "does serve to keep the environment in the public conscience." The Contra Costa Times (California) said Gore "made a point that is well worth heeding."

Whenever Dr. David Madland of the Center for American Progress writes, Karl Marx must look up from the fiery torments of Hell and smile. According to Madland, director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress (CAP), American media outlets should revert to the Soviet era, routinely churning out tedious Pravda-style articles about how heroic workers received the Order of Lenin for selflessly boosting the nation’s industrial production. Exaggeration? Perhaps, but CAP is making the extraordinary claim that workers don’t get a fair shake from journalists. CAP, a liberal “action tank” whose stated aim is to “expose the hollowness of conservative governing philosophy, and challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter,” has decided to bring Marxist class warfare to its media bias research.

In Madland’s recent study, “Journalists Give Workers the Business: How the Mainstream Media Ignores Ordinary People in Economic News Coverage,” he argues that the views of workers are ignored by the capitalism-loving mainstream media. He found that “the perspective of workers is largely missing from media coverage, while the views of business are frequently presented.” The study examined 480 news reports about employment, the minimum wage, trade, and credit card debt. Those economic issues “were chosen because they represent a range of economic issues that impact ordinary citizens and that many citizens have defined opinions about.” The reports appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, and CNBC in 2007. Among the study’s findings were the following:

John McCain has many, many, many faults -chief among them that he is at best a lukewarm conservative- but whatever his shortcomings the Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war is not in the habit of clinking champagne glasses over brie with living, breathing, remorseless terrorist traitors who continue to seethe with hatred for the United States.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, doesn't have a problem with such people until he gets nailed on it. In fact, Obama has a close personal relationship with a man who did everything in his power to hurt John McCain and other U.S. personnel serving in Vietnam.

But more on that in a moment.

Much has already been written of the U.S. Supreme Court's lawless, nonsensical decision in Boumediene v. Bush that gives America's terrorist enemies unprecedented access to our civilian court system, but little has been written about the aggressively anti-American public interest law firm that helped to make it happen.*

The nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, which acted as co-counsel in the case, is deeply enmeshed in the politics of terrorism (take one guess on whose side) and has even taken money from groups linked to terrorism. CCR donors include the Ohio branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Safa Trust Inc., and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, all of which have been accused of connections to Islamist terror groups.

Last week Newsweek reporter Allison Samuels defended Barack Obama's decision not to leave the church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright whose America-hating sermons have become a big political issue on the campaign trail. Responding to questions from host Greta van Susteren on the Fox News show "On the Record" May 5, Samuels goes easy on Obama, excusing his decision to stick with Wright for years after Obama supporter Oprah Winfrey quit the Trinity United Church of Christ (apparently) in disgust. (Video here, transcript here, Samuels article on the same subject in May 12 Newsweek here)

But what Samuels didn't disclose to TV viewers was that she is no neutral observer standing on the sidelines making a good faith effort to objectively chronicle the truth for posterity. More on that in a moment.

A real-life secessionist movement seizes a historic American landmark and major media outlets treat the uprising as a curiosity of mere passing interest. Meanwhile, that same media gives a thumbs-up to a seditious, balkanizing plan for Aloha State apartheid.

AP's Mark Niesse reported yesterday, "Native Hawaiian sovereignty advocates" who are members of the group known as the Hawaiian Kingdom Government occupied the grounds of the palace of Hawaii's final monarch, Queen Lili`uokalani. "Hawaiian activists have long used the palace as the site for protests of what they call the United States' occupation of the islands, but never before had they physically taken control," wrote Niesse.

Pacific Business News reported that the "protesters" surrounded the Iolani Palace in Honolulu, chained palace gates, posted no-trespassing signs, and told "palace officials that the palace is their rightful seat of government." The PBN story noted that "Only those with Hawaiian blood, as well as news media, were initially allowed onto palace grounds."

The Honolulu Advertiser reported that the "sovereignty group" claimed its actions were "not a protest or demonstration but a reoccupying of its legitimate seat of government." CNN called the occupiers simply a "group of native Hawaiians."

David Brock, the president and CEO of the George Soros-funded character assassination factory, Media Matters for America (MM), which euphemistically describes its mission as “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” isn’t even pretending to be nonpartisan or fair anymore. Brock has assumed the chairmanship of Progressive Media USA (PMUSA) and in that role will spearhead “a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Sen. John McCain,” the Politico reports. “We’re a little behind where we need to be,” Brock said last week of the fledgling group’s fundraising following a Manhattan meeting with Soros, the left-wing philanthropist, and Paul Begala, the ubiquitous TV talking head and longtime Democratic Party operative.

Not too many commentators seem to have noticed that George Soros is slowly but surely becoming the mainstream media that is the focus of the analysis we do at NewsBusters. The liberal billionaire-turned-philanthropist has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run their own lives.