In a good sign for blogger free speech, a lawsuit against a high profile conservative blog in Illinois has just been tossed out. A political contributor brought the lawsuit over a story about property tax reassessments and political contributions. This is a victory for free political speech as well as a victory for the status of blogs in the world of “journalism.”

I’ve been aware of this story for some time but the folks at Illinois Review, the blog in question, asked me to sort of keep it all quiet. There were all sorts of legal questions being thrown about and since the folks that run the blog don’t have deep pockets and the whole thing was being born at their own expense, they wanted to be sure this whole mess didn’t escalate and hurt them too bad financially.

The lawsuit meant to silence the blog was a convoluted one, to be sure. Illinois Review had posted a story that revealed that former Ill. State Rep. Paul Froehlich (R, Schaumburg) had sought campaign contributions from property owners who had won property tax relief claims that the Representative had assisted in getting settled. But after the story went live, due to the notoriety the county assessors office reversed those tax relief decisions.

One of the property owners mentioned in the original story was Satkar Hospitality. Illinois Review reported the facts of the case, noted that Satkar got a favorable property tax reassessment, and speculated that Satkar made “in-kind contributions” to Rep. Froehlich.

For his part Rep. Froehlich claimed that there was no quid pro quo and said he’d known the folks at Satkar “before they even opened their hotel and long before they contributed to my campaign.”

Satkar sued the Illinois Review for defamation — naming Fox News and others as coconspirators.

(more…)

I’ve already written on the Left’s special plan for Rick Perry. No need to go into it here but in case you missed them:

• Perry Should Have a Plan against Southern Bigotry
• Remember When I said Perry Should Have a Plan?

So why are they doing it? Just know that he is an insufferable candidate: Texan, Southern, with an accent. Most grievous to their sensibilities is that he is running against President Obama. Surely the only motive to this is that he is clearly a racist. I mean why else would he be running, right?

The media doesn’t have time for Perry to come right out and say he is a neo-confederate racist, so they took the liberty of speeding things along until that time comes, courtesy of Ed Shultz. (Larry O’Connor for Breitbart.tv)

Of course, they had to get creative with the editing of Perry’s speech. For MSNBC viewers, I’m sure it went over well. To the rest of us, it was criminal, especially considering that the video clip was so altered it resembled nothing of the original meaning and content of the governor’s speech.

If you look closely at that video, you’ll notice that the sound ends after Perry says, “That big black cloud that hangs over America,” but he’s still speaking.

Want to know what he said that Schultz and MSNBC intentionally cut out?

“That big black cloud that hangs over America, that debt that is so monstrous.”

Perry wasn’t suggesting, implying, or “inferring” that the “big black cloud that hangs over America” is President Obama.

He clearly – both before the phrase “big black cloud” and after – said he was speaking about America’s debt.

Yet Schultz and his staff edited Perry in mid-sentence to make it appear the Texas governor was making a racist remark about Obama.

In any other industry in this nation, such intentionally dishonest and misleading behavior would be met with the harshest of consequences. (News Busters)

UPDATE!!

(more…)

Stephen Marche — no doubt his pen name and stage name, probably pronounced Steffen (I picture a Bruno-like character) — mocks modern day journalism and it agents who openly display sycophantic behavior toward their liberal masters. In this case, he pretends to be an occult follower of President Obama, and he fittingly named his satirical piece of literature, How Can We Not Love Obama?

Steffen masterfully, and oh so subtly, captures the homoerotic tendencies that is, of course, absolutely essential in showing how (liberal men) deep their love affair and affection goes towards this man. That part is most important above all. Any good writer will strive for legitimacy, and Steffen almost makes you believe he is one of them. Since 2007, we have been witnesses to the adulation these cosmopolitan/metro-sexual liberal men have had for President Obama. In those regards, Steffen does a bang up job in this hit piece. It’s gut-wrenchingly funny and a little nauseating at the same time. Thank God it’s only an Onion-type parody. For example, no man could write this about another man and mean it. The art to this talented satirist’s humor is found in the absurd.

For example, Steffen writes about the Triune Nature of Obama :

“I am large, I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman [FIG.3] wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy. Christopher Booker’s 2004 book The Seven Basic Plots, a wide-ranging study from the Epic of Gilgamesh on and a surprisingly convincing explanation for why we crave narrative, reduced all stories to a few plots, each with its own kind of hero. Amazingly, Barack Obama fulfills the role of hero in each of these ancient story forms.

….I just found out it wasn’t a hit piece pointed at the absurdities of liberals. It’s for real. And he is one of them. And now I have the creeps because Esquire actually published it knowing full well it was real. Run for your lives! The Liberal Zombies are coming back out of their crypts!

Before the fall brings us down, before the election season begins in earnest with all its nastiness and vulgarity, before the next batch of stupid scandals and gaffes, before Sarah Palin tries to convert her movie into reality and Joe Biden resumes his imitation of an embarrassing uncle and Newt and Callista Gingrich [FIG.1] creep us all out, can we just enjoy Obama for a moment? Before the policy choices have to be weighed and the hard decisions have to be made, can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we’re going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph. Whatever happens this fall or next, the summer of 2011 is the summer of Obama.

In the battle over media and communications freedom, no group poses a more serious threat to a free and independent press than the insultingly misnamed regulatory activist group Free Press. Along with their founders, the prolific neo-Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney and Nation correspondent John Nichols, Free Press has engaged in relentless agitation for a truly radical media and communications policy agenda, and their influence is now spreading throughout the Obama Administration.

The Free Press-McChesney blueprint for media “reform” reads more like a script for State servitude. On the regulatory side, they call for media ownership restrictions, “localism” mandates, “Net neutrality” regulations, price controls on broadband, advertising and copyright restrictions, and layers of additional regulatory edicts.  Once all that red tape smothers the life out the independent press and private communications providers, they plan to have the State step in become the primary benefactor of the Fourth Estate and high-tech infrastructure. For starters, McChesney and Nichols advocate a $35 billion annual “public works” program for the press modeled after the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal era. Their media WPA would include a “News AmeriCorps” for out-of-work journalists, a “Citizenship News Voucher” to funnel taxpayer support to struggling media entities, a significant expansion of postal subsidies, a massive new subsidy for journalism schools, corporate welfare for newspapers sufficient to pay 50 percent of the salaries of all “journalistic employees,” municipal government ownership of press and infrastructure, and many more bureaucratic programs. (more…)

Today is the day that I have been invited to go on MSNBC for the very first time.  At no point during the ACORN story was I put on the hot seat to defend the work of James O’Keefe.  My thesis from day one has been that the mainstream media is biased in favor of the left and MSNBC is its most obvious case study.

So when MSNBC led the charge on Tuesday against James O’Keefe when he and three others were arrested in New Orleans at Senator Landrieu’s office, it came as no surprise that the cable network seized upon a narrative that presumed O’Keefe’s guilt, falsely extrapolated that he was being charged with felony wiretapping and instantaneously coined and repeated endlessly the new buzz phase, “Watergate Jr.”

Thus it came as no surprise to me that Keith Olbermann’s super sub, David Shuster, called me early Wednesday.  ”Watergate Jr.” pushed MSNBC to send Shuster down to New Orleans to own the destruction-by-media of James O’Keefe and anyone in his proximity.  I immediately told Shuster that I had been getting emails about his absurd, over-the-top and rush-to-judgment journalism.  He told me that I had him confused with Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, that he has “no horse in this race.”  He asked that I come on his show and that he would give me a fair interview.  He proceeded to send me the following emails to formalize the request.  See below <strong>(emphasis mine)</strong>:

As you see, Shuster is attempting to lure me into this story based upon the false premise of his objective neutrality on the issue. Notice he says, “As I said, I don’t have a horse in this race.” A simple Google search of David Shuster and James O’Keefe immediately finds that Shuster went into a Twitter frenzy to tar and feather James O’Keefe and propogated what are now provably false lies about the Landrieu case.

See below:

(Read the full post and watch the video of the interview at BigJournalism.com)

I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. It felt like a scene from a movie that conveniently ties plot points together when two critical characters in the storyline share a moment of implausible significance – where the intrepid reporter finally runs his target to ground.

So at first I had trouble getting my words out. “I’m Andrew Breitbart,” I exhaled. Instead of hanging up, Bertha Lewis laughed like someone I would probably like in a different setting – but certainly not in this lifetime now that we are permanently and publicly tied to one another as media-based adversaries.

I knew the awkwardness of the moment would turn into trouble when I started asking her pointed questions and, sure enough, we soon we found ourselves in trouble.

“Did you go to the White House last year?” I asked.

Bertha Laughed heartily.  ”No,” she said.

“Really?” I pushed.

“No. One hundred per cent not. Not this year. Not last year. Not ever,” she stated firmly, all the while maintaining an awkward and ironic joviality that was likely born of the weirdness of our impromptu exchange. (more…)

The hidden-camera videos by James O‘Keefe and Hannah Giles detailing the inner workings of the taxpayer-funded leftist racket known as ACORN have set off a storm of journalistic controversy, but not in the way one might think.  Rather than engaging the substance of the stories first made available on Big Government and later on Fox News – that ACORN, to put it generously, seems to be staffed by an inordinate number of employees blithely willing to aid and, if possible, abet criminal activity – the dinosaur media has reacted not by investigating the message but by attacking the messengers, all in the name of “journalistic ethics.”

Now, when a “journalist” – I prefer the days when we called ourselves “reporters” – starts lecturing his readers about the saintly nature of “journalism” you know that the entropic, self-referential MSM has just about hit bottom.  Long gone, apparently, are the days of the old Front Page, the 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur – filmed four times – that lovingly limned the street-smart, ink-stained wretches (in the late Herb Caen’s famous phrase) who would stop at nothing to Get The Story.  For decades – and certainly when I started in “journalism” in 1971 – this was model of the enterprising reporter: check your conscience at the bar, get the story, go home, go to bed, get up the next morning and do it all over again.  These guys were our heroes:

Not pursuing a legitimate news story, as James Rainey and the rest of the Pecksniffian  bien-pensant staff of the once-great Los Angeles Times seem intent on doing, because the young reporters are “agents provocateurs” and “political guerillas,” is bad enough.  Who cares what they are?  It’s like saying Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns are scum-sucking bottom feeders who would steal milk bottles from babies and nickels from newsboys if they thought it was a Page One story; a badge-of-honor insult those old-school newshounds would have worn with pride, alongside the egg stains on their ties and the lipstick on their collars.

(more…)

Before Media Matters starts hurling childish invective about how we here at Big Government aren’t “real journalists” because we don’t follow the ridiculous guidelines they set up and then fail to adhere to themselves, it brings me great pleasure to back-up today’s post about “Bon Bon” Hurd with a second source: None other than Roseanne Barr.

Thanks to a tip from “Jim C,” a reader of Big Government, Rosanne’s interview from earlier this year at the Huffington Post reveals that it’s pretty common knowledge within the power structure of ACORN that they did, indeed, work to get President Obama elected:

But, the most impressive thing is that they elected Barack H. Obama through their fantastic organizing skills and knowledge.

I wonder how all of that organizing skill and knowledge to help elect President Obama coincides with ACORN’s use of Federal Funds and their status as a 501(c)3 non-profit. (more…)

From the Nashua Telegraph:

The state of New Hampshire last week agreed to guarantee 75 percent of a $250,000 loan from an Upper Valley bank to the new owner of the Eagle Times, an unusual deal because it involves a daily newspaper and the government it covers.

The Executive Council on Wednesday unanimously approved without debate the “working capital loan guarantee,” which would be administered by the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority.

Under the deal, the BFA and the state would be liable to pay up to $187,500 to Connecticut River Bank if Eagle Printing & Publishing LLC defaulted on the $250,000 line of credit it would receive from the bank.

(more…)

On Friday, we brought you the story of the little reporter who could…corner the market on nuttiness in under 5 sentences. As rants go, it was pretty impressive. What it lacked in eloquence or, even, coherance, it made up in pounds of rage per square inch. (Since the reporter so clearly aligns himself with the Democrat party, the rant does beg the question: Dude, why so angry? “Your side” controls everything in Washington and most states by a wide margin. Given the current state of the GOP, they are the least of your worries.)

These days, uncovering the fact that a reporter has a strong leftist political bias is a ‘dog bites man’ story.  What was surprising, though, is that he felt perfectly comfortable expressing his rage through his work e-mail, in response to an elected official’s press release. (He even sent the email in the middle of the afternoon, suggesting that the three-martini lunch is alive and well in the Florida Keys.)

Most editors, one imagines, would typically frown on their journalists displaying such raw partisan anger. The reporter’s boss, Tom Tuell, however, isn’t like most editors…

(more…)

Sometimes it takes an outsider to show the press corps the way.
By Jack Shafer

Among the many glorious things about American journalism is that no credentialing organization or regulatory body stands between an individual who wants to break a story and his public reporting of it.

In the old days, one significant barrier did deter aspiring reporters: If they couldn’t find a publisher for their piece or afford to self-publish, they were SOL. But now, thanks to the free-for-all environment created by the Web, those publication and distribution worries have evaporated. Anybody can be a journalist in the new regime, we’re told, and on some days, it seems as if everybody is.

Last week, thanks to the sponsorship of Andrew Breitbart’s new site BigGovernment.com, self-described activist filmmaker James O’Keefe, 25, and his colleague Hannah Giles, 20, brought national scrutiny to the progressive Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, with a series of guerilla videos that are one part 60 Minutes, two parts Punk’d, three parts Ali G, and four parts Michael Moore, all bubbling under a whipped topping of yellow journalism. (more…)

As read on “The Rush Limbaugh Show”:

So far CNN has only reported on the breaking story on blatant ACORN CORRUPTION from angles that attempt to extricate the government funded “community organizing”  enterprise from the extreme crime we caught on videotape.

First CNN pushed the false ACORN line that “[t]his film crew tried to pull this sham at other offices and failed.”

To set that record straight please check the Washington D.C. tape we dropped today at BigGovernment.com, which is also being aired on your cable news competitor with curiously higher ratings.

Now that ACORN lied to you, Jonathan Klein, what are you going to do?

Here’s what I have noticed from your coverage: You brought in the damage control crowd to FRAME the story. Before even airing our damning Baltimore video. You know your audience would turn on ACORN if you showed them the evidence. So instead you put your competitors in journalism in the crosshairs instead of airing a blockbuster report making massive waves elsewhere.

You even trotted out shameless Clinton era apologist Joe Conason to challenge the ETHICS of our expose. Unreal.

What about the ethics of those at ACORN caught on tape trying to help create a brothel featuring illegal immigrant age range 13-15 from El Salvador? (more…)

When James O’Keefe came to my door in August, I was shocked by how young he looked. Kinda like Matthew Modine circa “Vision Quest.”

“Come on in,” I said, and I took him to my basement command center. He opened his laptop computer and showed me the very-hard-to-believe independent film investigative journalism project he had described to me over the phone

How can I describe the video I watched? Is it a put on? I almost can’t believe what I am seeing. But with regards to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, I am quite cynical. So I do believe it.

But I still find myself wanting to believe it is fake.  It’s just too weird. It’s too wrong. But James continuously reassures me it’s real.

So who is James O’Keefe?

Morley Safer meets Sacha Baron Cohen, I think. Not precise. But you get the point.

This isn’t your mother’s “60 Minutes.” But then again, why would a twenty five-year old even think straight journalism? His crowd doesn’t even know who Don Hewitt is. They need it quick cut, set to music and packaged to go viral on YouTube.

From what I gather, James wants to speak to his twenty-something peers who have been asked to pay for unaccountable big government ventures like ACORN on their maxed-out generational credit card. To the tune of potentially billions. (more…)