Dinesh D'Souza

The cabal that chooses the 15 nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature has issued its 2013 selections. Why was the the top-grossing documentary of 2012 -- and the fourth most-successful documentary of all time – not on that expansive list?

Because it was “2016,” the film in which conservative author Dinesh D’Souza warns of a dark future for America if Barack Obama is re-elected. The film’s producer, Gerald Molen, who’s already won an Oscar for “Schindler’s List,” was scandalized. "The action confirms my opinion that the bias against anything from a conservative point of view is dead on arrival in Hollywood.”

Two weeks ago, Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “2016: Obama’s America” passed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” for second place on the all-time box-office money list for political documentaries. It now has a box office gross of more than $32 million. But if you’re an independent or a liberal who’s unplugged from conservative websites and talk radio, you’d never know.

You didn’t see D’Souza on CBS or NBC (although he showed up on ABC’s “Nightline” in late night). There were no cover stories in Time or Newsweek. The film opened on just one screen in Houston when it premiered on July 13, and then spread to 10, and eventually to 1,000 theaters in August and 2,000 theaters in September. A cultural sensation, yes – but somehow not newsworthy.

Journalists are tweeting about a YouTube video of Washington Post reporter David Maraniss speaking Monday at the University of Virginia's "nonpartisan" Miller Center. When asked if there were Obama books out there that he thinks were wrong, and he said to laughter, "Man oh man, are there." Maraniss began by listing all the Obama books by his fellow reporters in the WashPost/New York Times mob. Jodi Kantor is "a very earnest and smart reporter" and David Remnick's book is "very smart about race."

Then Maraniss turned to the "books I don't respect. He strongly denounced both Ed Klein for The Amateur as "basically a political diatribe," and all the Obama work by Dinesh D'Souza. He accused D'Souza of being "a professor who I think is violating every standard of serious history." (Video clip and transcript below)

Nightline reporter David Wright on Wednesday night profiled the new conservative documentary 2016: Obama's America, but warned that the film was a "conspiracy" movie that included "disingenuous" ideas.

D'Souza asserted that he takes Obama and his words seriously, prompting him to believe that the President is pushing an anti-American agenda. Wright scolded, "That's a little disingenuous though." The ABC reporter knocked the film as unreliable, downplaying, "D'Souza spins out the conspiracy theory that, by 2016, the U.S. economy will collapse and there will be a United States of Islam led by a nuclear armed Iran and that Obama wants it."

In a video interview, anti-Obama filmmaker and author Dinesh D’Souza told The Hollywood Reporter that MSNBC and other media outlets were “cowards” because they would not acknowledge his new documentary 2016: Obama’s America, despite the film’s emergence this last week in the Top Ten.

D’Souza said: “Look at MSNBC. You could watch that channel and not even know we have a film out – unless you saw a commercial that we’re running for our film. You look at Lawrence O’Donnell, you look at Rachel Maddow, you look at Chris Matthews. I mean, look at those cowards!”

As I suggested yesterday (hardly a prediction since it was so clearly going to happen), "2016: Obama's America" has taken in enough in estimated gross proceeds this weekend ($6.238 million from Friday through Sunday) to become the top conservative post-1982 documentary (and number six overall, behind four Michael Moore films and Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth").

Some critiques, currently compiled at the Hollywood Reporter (this post went directly to the underlying write-ups), are coming in, and let just say that there's no Michael Moore-level fawning:

The Washington Post film review of the new conservative documentary 2016 mocked the movie as a "fear-mongering" "infomercial" that is too opinionated. The same paper, however, gushed over the "emotional power" of liberal filmmaker Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, praising it as a "cultural juggernaut."

2016 reviewer Michael O'Sullivan knocked the "slick infomercial," deriding, "As these things go, the movie seems destined to irritate the president’s supporters while mobilizing his detractors, even as it is doomed to win precious few converts. It’s a textbook example of preaching to the choir." In contrast, Fahrenheit 9/11 critic Desson Thomson defended, "Documentaries aren't news articles; they're subjective points of view, which is why Moore has almost endless fun at the president's expense."

Here's an example of a former newspaper man correcting a politician's claim -- and his correction requiring a correction.

Appearing on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" on Monday, MSNBC's Chris Matthews offered kneejerk condemnation of Mike Huckabee saying President Obama grew up in Kenya as "racist," an assertion Huckabee had acknowledged as inaccurate.

Matthews piled on, making his own demonstrably false claim in the process (video after page break) --

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, George Will this weekend lambasted Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee about separate comments the two have made regarding Barack Obama's background and upbringing.

On Monday, during his fifth day in a row on this subject, MSNBC's Chris Matthews actually compared Will's column to William F. Buckley Jr. banning anti-Semitic writers from the National Review in the '50s (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Friday, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz wrote a "White House rips Forbes" article. Dinesh D'Souza has drawn a "torrent of criticism" for writing that President Obama is motivated by his African father's "anti-colonial" views, Kurtz wrote, but emphasized how the White House is training its fire on Forbes magazine for publishing it, suggesting it's un-factual. Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs asserted "It's a stunning thing, to see a publication you would see in a dentist's office, so lacking in truth and fact." (Has he read Newsweek?)

This isn't about "facts," it's about spins. D'Souza can be accused of putting the president on a psychoanalyst's couch about his father. (As if the media never did this for George W. Bush.) D'Souza shot back to Kurtz that it's simply a fact that the president had a Kenyan father. But Kurtz went into Gibbs-echoing rebuttal mode: 

The facts are also these: Obama Sr. abandoned the family when his son was 2, and the future president saw his father only one more time, during a visit in Hawaii when he was 10. Obama Sr. died in 1982.

Gibbs says the Forbes attack comes at a time when there is "no limit to innuendo" against the president, including baseless charges that he is a Muslim and was not born in the United States. Forbes, he says, "left the facts on the cutting-room floor."