The scandal surrounding the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has provided a number of case studies in liberal media bias. The initial silence of the vast majority of media outlets on the story, the attempts by leftist commentators to excuse ACORN and discredit the group's critics, and Andrew Breitbart's strategy of rolling out video exposes periodically to counter those commentators, all speak to the liberal media paradigm, and activists' efforts to combat it.

Breitbart and his filmmaking proteges James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles have released another video showing an ACORN employee volunteering her help in establishing an underage prostitution business. This employee, Lavelle Stewart, had been trumpeted by liberal pundits as a shining example of ACORN's refusal to aid in criminal deeds. Stewart, they claimed, had refused to help Giles and O'Keefe as many other employees had.

But the new videos (Part 1 video embedded below the fold) tell a different story. "There are ways, people do it all the time," Stewart told O'Keefe when asked if he could launder prostitution money into his congressional campaign. "Yeah there are ways, especially out here in California," she added. Stewart, who works in an ACORN office in Los Angeles, was the latest staffer of the organization to volunteer her services in smuggling underage girls into the country, setting up a prostitution ring with those girls, and laundering the proceeds into a political campaign.

Confirmed: Lou Dobbs announced his resignation from CNN on his Nov. 11 broadcast. Transcription at bottom.

Has Lou Dobbs been forced out at CNN by the left-wing attack machine and other liberal forces? Quite possibly.

According to New York Times reporters Brian Stelter and Bill Carter, CNN's Lou Dobbs will announce his resignation from CNN on his Nov. 11 show.

"Lou Dobbs, the longtime CNN anchor whose anti-immigration views made him a TV lightning rod, plans to announce Wednesday that he is leaving the network, two network employees said," Stelter and Carter wrote. "A CNN executive confirmed that Mr. Dobbs will announce his resignation plans on his 7 p.m. program. His resignation is effective immediately; tonight's program will be his last on CNN. His contract was not set to expire until the end of 2011."

Remember just a week ago when New York Times columnist David Brooks slammed the likes Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck? Naturally, that led to the left-wing noise machine, and the media which uses that message for show prep, to suggest there was a split in the conservative movement and therefore attempt to marginalize the conservative message.

However, will they be so eager to echo the sentiment of David Brooks in the wake of President Barack Obama's Nobel Prize announcement? On PBS's Oct. 9 "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," the Times columnist had some disparaging words for Obama's award - despite a sentiment from some liberals that those who question it were somehow un-American.

"Well, my first reaction is he should have won all the prizes because he has given speeches about peace, but also he's give economic speeches. He wrote a book - that's literature. He has biological elements within his body. He could win that prize. He could have swept the whole prizes," Brooks said tongue-in-cheek before delivering the knock-out blow. "Now - it's sort of a joke."

Recently, the McClatchy-owned The News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash. and the left-leaning Salon.com ran stories questioning whether or not Glenn Beck's mother, Mary Beck committed suicide. It was later propagated by the left-wing storefronts.

And, on Fox News Channel's Oct. 5 "Glenn Beck" program, Beck addressed that and some of the gripes he had about the media for not doing their job.

"I tell you all the time, I'm not a journalist," Beck said "I'm not. I joked that I'm a rodeo clown, but you know what - I take that back. I no longer am a rodeo clown. I am a dad, and quite frankly, I'm a little pissed off right now. You can call me names. You can make fun of me, whatever. I'm doing what I believe is right. I am doing a job as a private citizen right now."

The New York Times announced today that it would appoint an editor to monitor 'opinion media'. In an attempt to respond to criticism that it has been too slow to pick up on stories first reported by conservative blogs and talk show hosts, the Times acknowledged poor coverage, but denied a political agenda.

The self-proclaimed 'paper of record' was extremely slow in picking up on two recent stories. The first, the 'trutherism' of former White House Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, was initially reported by Pajamas Media, and later by Glenn Beck on his Fox News talk show. The Times did not cover the story until after Jones had resigned.

Later, the Times neglected to report on the undercover sting operation that exposed ACORN for offering assistance in a bogus child prostitution ring. The Times reported on Congress's votes to de-fund ACORN, but neglected to mention the sting operation that inspired the votes.

Over the last several weeks, no one has been the target of the left-wing media and blogosphere more than Fox News host Glenn Beck, even more so than his radio host counterpart Rush Limbaugh.

Although conservatives have decried the daily ad hominem attacks, some voices on the left are starting to realize that's not an effective strategy for championing their cause, especially when it comes to the hot-button issue of the day, health care.

And that is really starting to bother Air America host Lionel - that is the daily repetitive nature of attacking Glenn Beck and/or Rush Limbaugh by giving a litany of complaints about what they said, as he laid out in a nearly three-minute tirade on his September 14 Air America radio show.

His show has usually been Fox News third-highest show, behind Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. And since Fox News host Glenn Beck has come on the scene, he has been a thorn in the side of the left-wing machine.

But his July 28 "Fox & Friends" criticism of President Barack Obama's comments on the racially-charged Cambridge, Mass. incident in which a local policeman arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has sent the liberal nutroots over the edge. After left-wing storefronts drew attention to Beck's analysis, groups want to viewers to boycott his sponsors.

MSNBC host David Shuster on Thursday relied on the liberal group Media Matters to help him as he tried to "sift through the spin and get at the truth" of a Republican-created chart purporting to show government-run health care as a confusing maze of bureaucracy. Shuster began by complaining, "Is the conservative media deliberately trying to avoid any fact-checking when it comes to Republican talking points?"

The cable anchor appeared incensed that the graph, released by congressional Republicans, has been featured on Fox News and the Drudge Report. Introducing Karl Frisch, Senior Media Fellow at Media Matters, Shuster attacked its reliability and fumed, "Is this another example of, at least with some of the conservative media, it’s to their strategic benefit not to bother checking things out?"

You'd expect to see this in the liberal blogosphere or possibly some of the national mainstream media outlets with an obvious agenda. But now some of the preemptive strikes against Republican senators leading up to the Senate confirmation hearings and eventual vote to confirm President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, are finding their way into local newspapers.

An op-ed published in The Anniston (Ala.) Star on May 28 by Ari Rabin-Havt, the managing director of the left-wing Media Matters Action Network, attacked the new ranking Republican of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. He alleged that if Sessions and other Senate Republicans didn't commit to taking a filibuster off the table for Sotomayor's confirmation, they would be guilty of hypocrisy.

Keith Olbermann, who in March scolded Fox News's Brit Hume for admitting that he often used information provided by the Media Research Center in his "Special Report" program, has once again channeled material taken directly from the far-left, George Soros funded, Clinton front-group Media Matters for America.

Even better, the story was actually precipitated by an article read on the air Friday afternoon during -- wait for it!!! -- Rush Limbaugh's radio show.

But before we get there, embedded below the fold is the video and partial transcript from Friday evening's "Countdown" on MSNBC:

Since former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean stepped down as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he has ventured into other opportunities.

One of those opportunities was to be a business pundit for the financial news channel CNBC, even though Dean's background prior to politics was in medicine. But just over a week later, in an e-mail dated April 2 to MoveOn.org mailing list subscribers, Dean wrote he was leaving Washington to hit the campaign trail "to help President Obama win health care for all."

The Washington Post published an extensive investigative piece about Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Friday which was a collaboration with the far-left media outlet ProPublica (h/t Carter Wood).

As NewsBusters executive editor Matt Sheffield and I reported last September, ProPublica was founded by Herb and Marion Sandler, the California billionaires that have contributed millions to liberal causes and entities such as MoveOn.org and the Clinton front-group Center for American Progress.

Readers might recall the Sandlers being lampooned by "Saturday Night Live" last October for having a hand in the financial crisis. NBC later caved to pressure from the couple and edited out any reference to them in the video of the skit posted at the network's website (Pat Dollard still has the full video here).  

In October 2007, shortly after the Sandlers announced their new media venture, Slate's Jack Shafer expressed concern:

Throughout George W. Bush's presidency, insults were doled out repeatedly about the commander-in-chief and that was just a fact of life for the highest-ranking public official in the land. However, now there's a new president, there seems to be a different standard on how you talk about a president.

CNN's Rick Sanchez, the host of the 3 p.m. hour of "CNN Newsroom" on April 2 took offense to conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh described a flowery praise of President Barack Obama by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

"Well, some folks are naturally graceful, some not so much," Sanchez said. "By that measure alone, radio yacker Rush Limbaugh is the polar opposite of our Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama. Now, you can just disagree with Barack Obama on his leadership, perhaps his policies. But it's hard not to at least acknowledge the ease with which America's 44th president handled himself in London on a global stage, even among royalty."

More and more people are starting to take notice of CNBC's dramatic shift to the left and the liberal groups promoting it.

On Fox News Channel's March 27 "The O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly and Bernard Goldberg, author of "A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media" took a look at trends pointing to this shift that started after the feud between "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer and "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart.

O'Reilly cited a column written by NewsBusters Associate Editor Noel Sheppard on March 26 for The Washington Examiner that noted some of the things indicating CNBC's leftward swing.

A health policy expert who Keith Olbermann eviscerated during Thursday's "Countdown" (video embedded below the fold) has officially challenged the disgraceful MSNBC personality to a debate concerning provisions in the soon to be enacted stimulus plan.

In a press release issued Friday, Betsy McCaughey stated (h/t TVNewser):

If Keith Olbermann of MSNBC could defend the health provisions slipped into the stimulus bill on their merits, he wouldn't be resorting to personal attacks on me. Olbermann calls me a shill funded by the drug industry (2-12-2009). That's not true...If Keith Olbermann has the courage, I invite him to debate me on his program...Mr. Olbermann, do you have the backbone (and the facts) to debate me?

Our story began last Monday when McCaughey published the following at Bloomberg:

The Obama economic adviser who doesn't want infrastructure "stimulus" spending to only benefit "white male construction workers" is angry at Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michelle Malkin for having the nerve to report his racist remarks the mainstream media compliantly boycotted for several weeks.

In an open letter posted at his blog Saturday, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich accused the trio of "manifestly distorting [his] words and pulling them out of context."

Ironically, Reich used as his character reference the George Soros-funded Clinton front-group Media Matters for America which on a daily basis manifestly distorts people's words and pulls them out of context (h/t Michelle Malkin):

The good folks at Media Matters for America are displeased with the New York Times having the nerve to point out the hypocrisy inherent in environmentalists destroying the environment.

For those that don't actually care about such things, the Sundance Film Festival began last Thursday, and as the video embedded right demonstrates, the organizers are supposedly going to great lengths to make this year greener than ever.

Unfortunately, such efforts seem to be failing according to an article published in the Times Arts section Saturday.

This didn't sit well with MMA's Eric Boehlert who in a posting at the group's County Fair blog Sunday seemed oblivious to his own hypocrisy:

On PBS's Web site today, ombudsman Michael Getler writes of complaints over an incident during last Sunday's pledge drive.  He describes the cheap shot taken by actor Mike Farrell against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

According to Joseph Campbell, vice president of fundraising programs, here's what happened:

 On CNN's American Morning today, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on Barack Obama's campaigning in Virginia.  Afterwards, anchor Kiran Chetry had a question:

CHETRY: All right. And Suzanne, what's on tap for the campaign today? And please tell me it's not lipstick again.

MALVEAUX: Let's hope not. He's going to be in Norfolk, Virginia. That is in southeast Virginia, and it's home to the world's largest Naval base. It's one of the most competitive areas that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. It's a critical piece of property, piece of land there with folks in Virginia, and they want those voters.

Have you ever considered who's financing the various new media outlets spreading extreme-liberal viewpoints around the country?

Most people think the biggest source is George Soros. However, there are others that are not necessarily household names, but are having a huge influence on the state of journalism today and in the future.

More importantly, they're on a mission to redefine the political landscape in ways you might not have imagined. 

As reported by NewsBusters Matt Sheffield and Noel Sheppard in the September issue of the Capital Research Center's "Foundation Watch":