Joel Pollak

Saturday, Joel Pollak at Breitbart's Big Journalism observed that President Obama is having some trouble drawing big crowds these days, and that the national press is exaggerating the turnout at his events.

He specifically cited the situation this weekend where Politico and the Wall Street Journal claimed there were "18,000 people inside a 5,000-seat arena at an Obama event in Milwaukee on Saturday." I looked at the Associated Press's national site, and the AP did the same thing, while adding that the crowd with the made-up size was "the largest yet of Obama's reelection campaign." Really.

When Breitbart.com's Joel Pollak went on CNN and connected then-law student Barack Obama to radical Harvard professor Derrick Bell, CNN guest Jay Thomas of Sirius radio began creepily asking Pollak if he was afraid of violence from black people, on Thursday morning's Starting Point.

During the chippy segment, host Soledad O'Brien fiercely defended Bell and insisted that Obama's previous support of him was a non-story. She accused Pollak of "misreading" Bell's critical race theory, even though the professor has clearly espoused radical views in his past, including writing a fictional account of how blacks would be sold to aliens as slaves. O'Brien also failed to disclose that she herself is an admitted admirer of Bell's. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Remember that touching picture of Yassar Arafat donating his blood to the 9/11 victims that was conveniently published after CNN ran footage of Palestinians cheering and handing out candy to celebrate the destruction in New York? Now France 2 journalist Charles Enderlin says that photo was staged; Arafat never gave blood.

The photos were taken by an AP photographer with a history of biased journalism and given captions that read like “a press release covering talking points.” Power Line's Scott Johnson reported Enderlin's revelation in a January 24 Weekly Standard article (bold mine throughout):

As Joel Pollak recounted online at the site Guide to the Perplexed [ed. link here], Enderlin told his Harvard audience "that Yasser Arafat had faked his blood donation to the victims of the September 11th attacks. Enderlin said the event had been staged for the media to counteract the embarrassing television images of Palestinians celebrating in the streets after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks."