But the piece is not grabbing attention merely because it compares an urged expansion of government power to one of history’s leading efforts to constrain government.  In addition, the post just so happens to echo several grievances of Wikileaks, relating to Internet firms’ decisions to “constrain” (in Lee’s words) the organization:

Several companies constrained WikiLeaks, including Amazon, which kicked WikiLeaks off its servers after pressure from American lawmakers; PayPal, which suspended WikiLeaks’ account; and credit card companies, which refused to take donations for it.

Governments at this point rarely act directly to constrain the Internet; instead, their policies are mediated through privately owned and operated services, Ms. MacKinnon said.

Lee, it just so happens, has “been assisting” Wikileaks with their PR and social media strategy.  Last year, after some back-and-forth, she admitted to the Columbia Journalism Review that she had helped Wikileaks roll out video of a 2007 missile strike on a van in Baghdad.

Eyebrow raising, to say the least.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias. It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

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.”

***

Jeremiah Wright was back in the news after making a series of media appearances. At the National Press Club, Wright claimed Obama had only repudiated his beliefs for “political reasons.” Wright also reiterated his charge that the U.S. federal government had created AIDS as a means of committing genocide against African Americans.

It was another crisis, and members of Journolist again rose to help Obama.

Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list…

…Katha Pollitt – Hayes’s colleague at the Nation – didn’t disagree on principle, though she did sound weary of the propaganda. “I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita,” Pollitt said.

“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

Ackerman went on:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

***

Read the full article at the Daily Caller.

Below is a page from ACORN’s 2005 Annual Report. In it, they tell the story of how one of their employees teamed up with NBC Dateline to do a ‘video sting’ on tax-preparer Jackson Hewitt.

Pages from 2005-ACORN-Annual-Report-web -

Somehow we missed the missives from the Columbia Journalism Review condemning NBC for staining journalism. We also can’t find James Rainey’s cliche-riddled scolding of NBC for taking part in ACORN’s intentional deception. We can’t imagine the journalism mandarins would approve of such tactics only because they approved of the target. Surely, the criticism of NBC must be out there. If our readers find any links to these critiques, please include them in the comments.

For greater context on the long history of hidden-camera videos and other forms of aggressive investigative journalism, see Michael Walsh’s piece here.

What the Columbia Journalism Review is doing is very similar to what Media Matters is doing: protecting the Democrat-Media Complex, the natural alliance of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media.  This ACORN investigation has been going on for two months and Hannah, James, and I have proven to be truth-tellers every step of the way, while the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now has been proven time and again to be liars.

Yet instead of engaging the real, newsworthy issues of ACORN’s possible corruption, malfeasance and illegal behavior, the CJR, like its more overtly political online counterpart Media Matters, and indeed every other MSM outlet, has been sitting it out on the sidelines, waiting – rooting – for Hannah Giles, James O’Keefe and me to make a mistake.  In fact, my appearance Thursday night is the only time in which the media has introduced itself into this ongoing narrative: proof that it’s paying attention and taking sides.

Neither, by the way, has the CJR challenged James Rainey, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, who has consistently shaded his coverage favorably toward ACORN since we first broke the story back in September, evincing little interest in the truth but instead muttering about the standards of the Society of Professional Journalists (take link, be sure to read the comments).  “But the Society of Professional Journalists has set a standard that deception should be used only when every other reporting approach has been exhausted and only then in certain cases, most notably to reveal a severe social problem or to prevent people from being harmed.”

A “severe social problem”?  Perhaps that’s exactly what Congress saw when both the Senate and the House de-funded ACORN (at least temporarily), and the group’s tie with the census was abruptly severed in the wake of our reports.  So thank you for the clarification, CJR, and thank you to its appropriately named Mr. Marx for showing that hallowed institution’s true colors at a moment when any sentient being can recognize that the credibility of journalism is on the line.   It’s a little like the Sarah Palin situation: the media simultaneously dismisses her as an inept idiot and yet hangs on her every word, hoping to entrap her.  Why else would MSNBC send Norah O’Donnell, armed with talking points, to “fact-check” a tee shirt being worn by a young woman at one of Sarah’s recent book signings?

And now to address the fever-swamp’s notion that what I said on “Hannity” last night was “blackmail.”  Blackmail occurs when one party threatens to reveal an unsavory piece of information about another party, and demands money in exchange for silence.  For obvious reasons, it is most often conducted in private.  I, on the other hand, went on national television with a challenge to the Attorney General to do his job; unlike this administration and its justice department, what I did was fully open and transparent.

There will be consequences if there isn’t an investigation into ACORN.  The videos will be shown and at a particular moment.  There is nothing illegal about my proposed response to the continued inaction from this justice department, and there’s nothing I’d like more than to have my day in court and let a jury hear why I have gone to such extraordinary measures to tell a major story that the dying, partisan, leftist media has worked so hard to suppress.

The days of the Democrat-Media Complex controlling the narrative are in their end times.  And if the AG wants to turn his focus on me instead of ACORN, then that day will be closer than many of them think.

Columbia Journalism Review Q and A with Liberal Historian Rick Perlstein on ACORN:

As the recent scandals surrounding the green-jobs advocate Van Jones and the community organizing group ACORN have shown, even under a Democratic White House and Congress, the conservative media have an ability to place a story on the national agenda. Those episodes have also prompted some mainstream media outlets to examine their own practices. A recent column by Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander reported that the paper’s executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, pressed his staff for more ACORN coverage; Brauchli was also quoted expressing the concern “that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It’s particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view.”

This relationship between “conservative issues” and national issues more broadly is one that’s been of interest for some time to Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland and Before the Storm. A leading liberal historian of the conservative movement, Perlstein’s work has won respect from some leading conservatives; writing for CJR, he once praised the late journalist Paul Cowan for his sensitivity to the “dignity and value” of conservative subcultures. But Perlstein has also chastised the media, in the pages of the Post, for being too sensitive to conservative criticisms….

…The Post’s irresponsibility when it comes to ACORN is symbolized by the fact that the word “Drudge” doesn’t show up in that article. The idea that this guy Andrew Breitbart [a protégé of Matt Drudge, and the founder of Big Government, the Web site that presented the ACORN videos] is just floating out there in the ether as some kind of independent conservative activist—he’s a very powerful person, in a lot of ways he might be more powerful than ACORN.

Read the full interview here.