Journalists love transparency.  As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.

No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, technology and “the masses” uncovered the conspiracy:

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. They deserve the deepest levels of public consternation. We must demand that they do.

The only way that the media will recover from the horrifying discoveries found in the Journolist is to investigate and investigate until every guilty reporter, professor and institution is laid bare begging America for forgiveness. Will they do it?

If the powers that be don’t comply with this demand, we can always call Jonathan Alter and Eric Alterman racists.*

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

– Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776

For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”

– Esther 4:14

These are interesting times. Under President Obama and the most liberal Congress since 1965, the United States government is expected to borrow a trillion dollars per year for the next decade while the size and power of our federal government will grow at the expense of our liberties. 

In this environment, Democrats in Congress are working on a bill to give President Obama emergency control of the Internet (S.773) which would permit the President to seize control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.  Meanwhile, the President has appointed Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor, to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  Prof. Sunstein support controls on free speech on the Internet.  He views the Web as a Wild Wild West that needs taming and wants new laws to corral wayward bloggers. His book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (not to be confused with Noodge) urges employing the force of government to make us all better persons (“New Soviet Man” anyone?).  In his latest work, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, the Harvard professor, now top Information apparatchik, worries about “…institutions (being) harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet.” 

Of course, one man’s “falsehoods” might be another man’s facts.  Czar Sunstein’s extreme concern likely grows out of his acute understanding that our postmodern President simply speaks reality into existence; words are reality in the Obama White House.

Into this breach come the bloggers.  There are about 120 million blogs today.  Many of them are political, most are not.  

America’s political bloggers trace their heritage, their place in the body politic, to the Colonial era.  Most of today’s political bloggers would have been quite comfortable defying the British Stamp Act of 1765, were they around 244 years ago.  The Stamp Act was designed to impose government content control on the then 23 newspapers which served about two million Colonialists.  Not one Colonial newspaper bought the properly stamped paper.  In fact, the political content of the papers increased, to the alarm of the British authorities. On the eve of the Revolution, there were 31 papers in the Colonies, by the time of the Constitution’s ratification, there were 92, and by 1835, there were 1,200 newspapers serving 15 million Americans. 

Political bloggers became a force to be reckoned with in 2002 with Sen. Trent Lott’s comments on Sen. Strom Thurmond and again in 2004, when Little Green Footballs took down Dan Rather and Mary Mapes (ironically, Mapes writes for the Huffington Post now) over CBS’ airing of forged Air National Guard documents purporting to show that President George W. Bush avoided service in Vietnam.

With many blogs attracting more readers than daily newspapers while newspaper circulation plummets and experienced journalists are being laid off, we can see why Professor Czar Sunstein is worried – no longer do like-minded liberals in the major media have a lock on what passes for truth in the news. (This brings to mind the cynical critique of the former Soviet Union’s main papers, Tass (News) and Pravda (Truth) “Ni pravda Tass. Ni tass Pravda.” “There is no truth in Tass and there is no news in Pravda.”)

There’s a certain urgency in today’s blogosphere – an understanding that we are at a critical juncture in our nation’s history.  Conservative bloggers, mostly unpaid – concerned moms, talented lawyers, activist students – are acting as a potent counterforce against the attempted rapid remaking of America under Pres. Obama’s direction.  As such, today’s bloggers are the most visible manifestation of the Conservative Movement.  And this, as the Republican Party largely tracks aimlessly in opposition to President Obama, but without any apparent objective, other than to regain power for power’s sake in numb repetition of the errors of 2006 and 2008.

Were Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton (Publius) around today, they would surely be blogging right alongside the likes of the paid and unpaid authors of NRO’s The Corner, Michelle Malkin, RedState, Hot Air, Big Government, Big Hollywood, Flopping Aces, Infidels are Cool, Riehl World View, Red County, Ace of Spades HQ, Flashreport, Right Wing News, and many others.

Let the blogs bloom, for they have come for such a time as this.

ACORN’s many problems have been well known for quite a while, at least to anyone venturing beyond network newscasts and liberal blogs. As an organization, ACORN doesn’t just limit itself to churning out forged voter registrations. It’s a full-blown racketeering enterprise worthy of The Sopranos, and it finances its operations with the help of taxpayer money.

So how could the major media fail to hold ACORN to account all these years?

I have my pet theory.

Political correctness has been slowly rotting the establishment media to its core, to the point where few professional journalists would dare launch a serious investigation into the exalted Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. Why? Simple: according to the tenets of political correctness, the racial makeup of the communities being “organized” automatically confers the presumption of moral superiority upon ACORN. So all those nasty rumors about ACORN must be no more than lies spread by racist propagandists.

To understand the mindset of the politically correct, there are a few rules of racial relations that you need to know. These rules establish the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism:

1. If a person is a member of a group guilty of past racial oppression, that person has no moral standing in relation to anyone in any group that’s ever been a victim of that oppression.
2. A member of an oppressor group is always assumed to be guilty in relation to a member of a victim group.
3. An oppressor can only avoid presumed guilt by making a display of his or her sympathy for the oppressed.
4. Members of victim groups can lose their moral standing by expressing a preference for individual rights as opposed to group rights.
5. Advocating on behalf of a victim makes one almost as unassailable as being that victim.
6. Coming to the defense of an oppressor is even more repugnant than being that oppressor.

This thinking is so common these days that many prominent liberals–from New York Times columnists to former presidents–believe that criticism of President Obama can only be motivated by racial bigotry.

That’s because people at a lower rung of the Multicultural Hierarchy are never allowed to challenge those above them. The purpose of this is to quell criticism and enforce thought conformity. Why break the rules and risk being thought of as a bigot?

Media coverage of Kanye West’s latest outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards illustrates this. Imagine the racial roles reversed:

It’s the Country Music Awards. A black female performer is accepting her first-ever award. She’s happy and a bit surprised; her style of music doesn’t usually win Country Music Awards. Halfway through her emotional acceptance speech, a white male country music singer runs up on stage, grabs the microphone from her, and announces that another woman should have won, a white woman–a “real” country singer–instead of the underdog black woman.

I’d bet my life savings that the reporting would be quite different than what happened in Kanye’s case. Sure, he was roundly criticized in the media, but we’re in an age when hidden motivations are attributed to every interracial interaction, so it’s interesting that few dared to discuss a racial angle to the Kanye West/Taylor Swift confrontation.

There’s a simple explanation. By the rules of the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism, when a member of a victim group is the actual victim in a real-world encounter, it’s an example of oppression. But when an oppressor becomes a victim in real life, that’s just karma, man. Any possible racial angle becomes irrelevant.

So forgive me if I don’t believe that the abundantly Caucasian and overwhelmingly liberal journalist class is capable of taking on a target like ACORN, no matter how apparent the criminality might be.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. The work of Giles and O’Keefe highlights the diminishing relevance of the establishment media. Despite the story getting no coverage on broadcast TV or in any major newspaper, it propagated online, then to talk radio and Fox News. And before any “mainstream” media outlet covered it, the political pressure grew to the point that the Census Bureau cut all ties to ACORN, and U.S. Senate voted by the overwhelming margin of 83-7 to cut off the group’s federal funding.

Even after these events, a vast majority of the media ignored the story. And yet the public kept getting the truth, which only made the media appear to be in the business of hiding news rather than reporting it. Realizing that this is not a winning business model for an ailing industry, a few of the more independent-minded reporters started covering the story, and now the White House Press Secretary is busy deflecting questions about the president’s former colleagues and fellow community organizers at ACORN. Despite the media’s best efforts.

James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles represent another massive power-shift in the age of Internet media. The first occurred when the Drudge Report broke Monica Lewinsky’s affair with President Clinton, a story that Newsweek got first but declined to run. The second was when CBS News got hoodwinked by documents that purported to impugn President Bush. After bloggers exposed them as forgeries, the documents ended up tarnishing CBS News instead. Long-time anchor Dan Rather was forced to retire in disgrace.

This is another huge embarrassment for Big Media–not so much because they look foolish, but because they’re beginning to look irrelevant.