POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Andrew Breitbart likens “Journolist” members to Pravda reporters

From the bad-old-days of the former Soviet Union; but, he says, the reporters at Pravda weren't such insufferable assholes !

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here.

American journalism died a long time ago; today Tucker Carlson got around to running the obituary. What The Daily Caller has unearthed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is Journolist, or are guilty of sitting back and watching Alinsky warfare being waged against all that challenged the progressive orthodoxy. The scandal predictably involves journalists posing as professors posing as experts. But dressed down they are nothing but street thugs.

AB is right on in the points he makes, there is a lot to this revelation and as Dan mentioned in his earlier post, its an important article; 3 pages that everyone should take a few moments to read.  Not only because of the blatant and shameless general agreement on the propagandistic "spin", the agreeded upon "narrative",  to be applied in every circumstance, nor because it verifies what many have suspected all along; that the "race card", or the charge that a particular conservative critic has a racist agenda, is utilized as a weapon in an almost arbitrary and capricious manner.  Indeed, in the article Dan linked to at the Daily Caller, Spencer Ackerman is quoted as directly suggesting that the best way to counter the growing Wright scandal would be to pick a conservative pundit and call them out as a racist

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."

Sounds familiar, doesn't it; like Alinsky's rule 12:

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it

No, the Daily Caller article is important because it exposes the underlying charade of media objectivity.  And that's really where the whole problem lies; in the underlying fact that these alleged jornalists-cum-propagandists are less interested in facts and honest reportage than they are in advancing an agenda.  It's an unfortunate mindset that seems to have infected the profession, one articulated a couple of years ago by Time's managing editor Richard Stengel when he told Joe Scarborough that good journalists should be trying to advance an agenda; in short, that it's ok for journalists to be activists as well.  Which is all well and good if it were common knowledge, but, the meta-narrative inculcated from an early age in grade schools is that media outlets objectively report the news, and editorializing and agenda "sawing" is relegated to the opinion pages.  A large number of people trust what they read and hear in media outlets, especially when they hear the same reportage from multiple sources; which is what makes the journolist ideological collusion rise to an almost RICO level of criminality, in my humble opinion.  Because it was information "fixing", in the same way that corrupt enterprises engage in price "fixing" and criminal enterprises offer "protection".

The founders of our nation considered a free press of the utmost importance in a free society where the right to govern stemmed from the people.  They went to extraordinary lengths to protect the fourth estate because they believed in the public's need to have, you know, actual facts informing their decisions.  That's what marks the journolist scandal as most insidious indeed, that these self-styled do-gooders, protectors of righteousness and the little man, would collude to skew the facts in a direction in order to control the flow of information; in the very ways that eeeevvvoollll reich-wingerz did, at least in their feverish fantasies.  They perverted a process, and an instution, that is one of the pillars of a free society in a way that only totalitarian regimes do, and did so with an intent to control the minds and ideas of the public at large; it is antithetical to America and the American way.  Which is why we must all see this through to the end, and make sure that the participants in the journolist propaganda cabal must be run out of the profession, either formally or through compete public discrediting.

Read the story at the Daily Caller Dan linked to, stay informed, fight the propaganda, and spread the truth.

Because, verily I tell you, "The truth shall set you free"...

[Update]:  Cap'n Ed at Hot Air really summarizes the propagandistic suggestion, and efforts, by Spencer Ackerman well:

Let’s put this in its proper perspective.  Ackerman wasn’t talking about a strategy to expose real racists, in the media or anywhere else.  The Washington Independent reporter wanted to conduct a campaign against any figure on the Right, including journalists like Fred Barnes, to smear him as a racist for the political purposes of electing a Democrat to the White House.  Notice that Ackerman doesn’t even bother to ask people to look for actual evidence of racism, but just suggests to pick a conservative name out of a hat.  Tellingly, the pushback from members of Journolist had less to do with the outrageous idea of smearing an innocent person of racism to frighten people away from the story than with whether it would work.

It certainly puts efforts by the Left to paint the Tea Party as racist in an entirely new light.  It also calls into question the ethics and judgment of anyone who participated in that Ackerman thread.  Finally, this first entry in the Journolist exposés — Tucker Carlson promises more to come — shows that far from being a benign place to have chats among colleagues, Journolist also served as a place for journalists to plot against their political opponents and strategize to twist the news and propose smear campaigns.

Check out Cap'n Ed's post, it has links to an Ed Driscoll video that attempts to correlate journolist activity with CNN declaring itself, "A Wright-free zone".

Rocketman