Van Jones is that kind of person.

In a recently discovered video, the former White House appointee and current hero of the liberal elite and de-facto Huffington Post/AOL editorial director is seen telling the adoring crowd,  “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.”  He said this after a whole host of speakers from the radical fringe fringe denounced our country and her policies and hijacked the tragedy to justify unloading a laundry list of cliched, left-wing reasons to blame America for the acts perpetrated by radical Islamist totalitarian terrorists.

Remember, this rally was taking place while the bodies of 3,000 Americans were still smoldering in the rubble of the World Trade Center and American heroes were putting their lives at risk at ground zero in a massive humanitarian effort.  What kind of monsters would use this occasion to turn Americans against one another?

It’s no wonder that this man is embraced and honored by groups like the once-relevant, now-radical NAACP and was given the high honor of holding a Presidential appointment in the first year of the Obama Presidency.  He speaks the revolutionary “blame America first” rhetoric of Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Malik Zulu Shabazz.

What is curious and confounding is that a major corporation like AOL is allowing a person with this kind of record to influence the content of their influential website through the intimidation tactics of Color Of Change, the anti-free speech organization he founded.

In light of this latest video revelation, Mr. Jones needs to finally explain, fully, his position on 9/11. Was it American bombs that caused the World Trade Center to fall as he suggested at this rally? Was the American government behind the attack as he once signed a petition purporting? Does he agree with his co-speaker that evening that the terrorist murderers were “heroes” or does he condemn that hateful rhetoric?

And finally, what is the AOL/HuffPo’s position on Mr. Jones’ contribution to their site?  Does his hateful attack on America rise to their new editorial standard used against me?

Take a moment and sign our petition demanding that the Huffington Post not buckle under to the intimidation tactics of this man and the anti-free speech organization he founded. Make your voice heard. Speak truth to power.

Addendum:  The video discussed in this post was originally posted by BizzyBlog in September, 2009.  It was reported on at the time by PowerLine.

I’ve been a blogger at The Huffington Post for several years now and if you head over there sometime, you may notice that Rep. Michelle Bachman is featured quite often on the site — usually in a way that makes her appear either crazy or stupid or both. To be fair, the Bigs don’t go out of their way to make Nancy Pelosi look awesome, either. That’s the way the blogs bounce.

Still, I was somewhat surprised when I met the congresswoman at CPAC at how immediately I realized she wasn’t at all the person she’s portrayed — she’s smart, articulate, and her speech at CPAC about Pigford was pitch perfect in it’s focus on the real farmers as victims of Pigford fraud.

In this short interview, Rep. Bachmann and I discuss Pigford as well as an aspect of her life that — literally — not a single liberal friend of mine knew anything about: her commitment as a parent to her own five children plus over twenty foster kids. It seems to me that Rep. Bachmann’s opponents don’t want the image of her as that kind of person to be known because it would tend to make her seem human and likable.

As I say to the Congresswoman in the interview, she and I don’t agree on many issues, but there’s no reason for our fractured politics to mask our similarities. On the issue of the Pigford settlement, I’m proud to stand with Michele Bachmann.

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.

In the first segment, Breitbart discuss various stories from Big Government and Big Journalism including the SEIU protests at the home of B of A executive Gregory Baer and Huffington Post & Media Matters unusual involvement in the coverage of that story.

In the second segment, James O’Keefe and Shaughn Adeleye join Beck for a discussion of the latest video investigation surrounding the Census Bureau.

]]> http://biggovernment.com/sright/2010/06/02/audio-breitbart-okeefe-and-adeleye-on-glenn-beck-radio/feed/ 18 http://biggovernment.com/jjmnolte/2009/11/02/how-the-msm-might-survive-come-out-of-the-ideological-closet/ http://biggovernment.com/jjmnolte/2009/11/02/how-the-msm-might-survive-come-out-of-the-ideological-closet/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:03:18 +0000 John Nolte http://biggovernment.com/?p=24210 Whenever reading Politico, everything should be washed through this filter. You must always keep in the front of your mind that this supposed “news” organization took the time to dig up and publicize dirt on a private citizen whose only sin was asking a perfectly reasonable question of a public figure. Politico’s warning to the everyday American was clear: get in the way of our guy and we will summon all our resources to publicly humiliate you. This all goes to prove that Politico is nothing more than a digital version of the Dinosaur Media — and just as clueless and dishonest as their unholy brethren, especially when it comes to explaining why their counterparts are drowning in the tar pits of obsolescence.

To hear Politico tell it, CNN’s stuck in humiliating fourth place behind FOX, MSNBC and their own Headline News because they’ve made the mistake of not appealing to the great unwashed who prefer partisan bickering and echo chambers:

With the proliferation of media across platforms these days, there’s less shared knowledge among people, who are increasingly heading to niche outlets for information. At the same time, there’s a large appetite for the new media world where the MSM gatekeepers no longer hold as much clout, and “he said, she said” journalism gives way to strong point of view. …

There’s no doubt that the over-the-top, and politically partisan, hosts are having more success attracting viewers on nights when there’s no major news event.

And what better place for Politico to get an opinion on such a matter than The Nation aka: “The flagship of the left“:

“The whole notion of citizenship has been declining for decades now.”

In other words, CNN is dying because of their oh-so noble and self-sacrificial decision to remain unbiased and objective. We know CNN agrees with this sanctimonious rationalization because they’re quoted saying so in the article:

CNN President Jon Klein says he knows why those approaches work, and he’s not going to go there. “It’s the oldest trick in the book to trot out over-the-top hosts and put them on a cable-news show[.]” …

Klein told staffers on Tuesday, according to TVNewser, that CNN “refuse[s] to do the things that might get us a quick number or cater to the extremes that would alienate our core viewers.”

Maybe CNN’s problem is that their president doesn’t watch his own network. After all, what self-respecting individual not wanting to smell the hot breath of someone laughing in his face could be aware of Rick Sanchez and say such things?

But online or not, this is what the dying Dinosaur Media so desperately wants to believe – or at least wants history to believe – that their slow, painful demise was the result of journalistic integrity. “We would rather be extinct than get in the gutter with low-brow partisan journalists who appeal to the lowest common denominator!”

Well, I’m going to go ahead and appeal to the lowest common denominator by stating, what a load of crap.

CNN, and much (though never enough) of the Dinosaur Media, are dying because everything they do and everything they stand for is predicated on a lie. They are liars of the highest order, have been for decades, and now that alternatives (who are not liars of the highest order) are available … we turn to them.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have too many flaws to even begin to list here, but both are open and honest about their partisan agendas, and the same is true for the whole of MSNBC. The cable net may have never proclaimed, “We’re in the tank for all things liberal!” but they’re so shamelessly open about it there’s no need. Sure, MSNBC tells and spreads lies, but their existence is not based on a lie any more than the DNC.

On the other hand, CNN’s very foundation is built on a lie; the lie that they’re objective … and people, left and right, are turning away from them and others like them because they’ve had enough. No one likes smug, sanctimonious, phony posturing – and from the dim-bulb Wolf Blitzer to the Cover Boy Anderson Cooper to the Shark-Eyed Campbell Brown to OlberGeraldo Rick Sanchez – CNN is up to their 4th place necks in smug, sanctimonious, phony posturing.

What Politico and their delicate compatriots at The Nation describe as “catering to extremes” and “he said, she said” journalism, the rest of us call intellectual honesty. And no matter how sober and thoughtful, no matter how hushed the tone or furrowed the brow, CNN is a network stacked mostly with hardcore Leftists pretending not to be. Given the choice between CNN’s dishonest con job and MSNBC’s shameless hack job, I, and many others, choose a shamelessly honest hack job.

Fox News beats everyone and has the most ideologically diverse audience of them all because their straight news is straight, their opinion news is presented as such and even Obama’s biggest fans have come to learn that if they don’t tune in they’ll miss important stories like, say, that whole ACORN thing.

Of course, the Politico article won’t even consider that argument because Politico has the same con job going as CNN, and isn’t about to cry foul on their entire way of doing business.

You want to survive, Dinosaurs? Give up the asinine charade.

CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR… do your ratings, shareholders and consciences a favor and join the Daily Kos, Breitbart’s Bigs, The Huffington Post, National Review, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow in coming out of the ideological closet.

You’re no longer fooling  anyone, and as you swirl the drain we chuckle at your charade like a parent dealing with a dumb little kid who insists on pretending they’re invisible.