Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  Even after the Duke lacrosse rape case fell apart, the liberal media wouldn’t let it go. “As students of Duke University or other elite institutions, these young men will get on with their privileged lives,” wrote Terry Moran of ABCNews.com. “They are very differently situated in life from, say, the young women of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.”6 The Rutgers basketball team had indeed been foolishly and nastily slandered as “nappy-headed hos” by radio host Don Imus, generating national headlines. But the Duke lacrosse team had been accused of a brutal lynch raping, which could have resulted in long prison sentences—and at the very least, would follow them the rest of their lives. But Terry Moran was comparing the two. Somehow, this didn’t pass the smell test.

  In the aftermath of the Duke lacrosse fiasco, those in the media held their noses and admitted culpability. “It was too delicious a story,” said former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent. “It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press: white over black, rich over poor, athletes over non-athletes, men over women, educated over non-educated. Wow. That’s a package of sins that really fit the preconceptions of a lot of us.”7

  This was the crux of the matter. It wasn’t that the media was fooled. They have the same reasoning skills as the rest of us—and it was clear within days of the Duke lacrosse allegations that the case was somewhere between the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot on the truth scale. So why didn’t they catch on to the fact that all of this was less credible than Paris Hilton swearing chastity? Because they wanted it to be true. They needed it to be true. They had an agenda. And they were going to ensure that the story played out the way they wanted it to. The facts were irrelevant.

  In the case of the Duke lacrosse faux rape, there was no real coordination between the media and other leftist power institutions. But often, that isn’t the case. In situations of national importance, there is clear and convincing evidence of collusion between the leftist media and leftist politicians, interest groups, and other power brokers. And the media is the tip of that spear. They’re the new IRS, sicced by the organized Democratic infrastructure to destroy anyone who dares defy them. While the much-derided blogosphere breaks virtually every big story these days—Weinergate, Rathergate, Trayvon Martin—the mainstream media lag behind. And snipes. Tina Brown of Newsweek, a formerly great publication recently sold for the bargain-basement price of one dollar, suggests that those in the blogosphere aren’t “real journalists.”

  And she’s right. She’s right because all the real journalists are Democratic Party hacks.

  In March 2009, Politico—a publication that used to play at objectivity, but has become an obviously key cog in the left-wing media—revealed the existence of “an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.” The list was formed by Ezra Klein, a blogger for the far-left American Prospect—and who later became a columnist for the Washington Post. “Basically,” he told Politico, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.” Which journalists? Eric Alterman of the Nation; Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker; Paul Krugman of the New York Times; writers from the Huffington Post, Politico, Newsweek. The list went on and on.

  And they sure did coordinate. In April 2008, journalists suddenly began ripping ABC’s Democratic presidential debate coverage—particularly the focus on Barack Obama’s longtime mentor and pastor Jeremiah Wright. It seemed like a grassroots phenomenon. Not quite. Politico reported, “POLITICO contacted nearly three dozen current JList members for this story. The majority either declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests—and then returned to JList to post items on why they wouldn’t be talking to POLITICO about what goes on there.” But, said Toobin, “No one’s pushing an agenda.”8

  Right.

  In June 2009, Andrew Breitbart offered one hundred thousand dollars for a full emporium of all the JournoList emails. Nobody at JournoList took him up on the offer, though Ben Smith, then of Politico, played defense for JournoList: “This is a classic case in which secrecy produces wild imaginings. There aren’t many good conspiracies involving 400 people, some of them ideologues, some columnists, some mainstream media types like me who enjoyed access to that conversation, as I sometimes enjoy access to private conservative conversations at venues like New York’s off-record conservative Monday Meeting.”9 (Ben Smith, it’s worth noting, minimizes left-wing scandal so often that John Nolte, one of my Breitbart News colleagues, has coined a term for the tactic: Ben-Smithing.) The point, of course, wasn’t that every email in the JournoList chain was solid gold. The point was that these reporters were coordinating messages. Left-wing messages.

  Klein, who organized the list, admitted it. “The membership would range from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left. I didn’t like that rule, but I thought it necessary. . . . What I didn’t expect was that a member of the list, or someone given access by a member of the list, would trawl through the archives to assemble a dossier of quotes from one particular member and then release them to an interested media outlet to embarrass him. But that’s what happened to David Weigel.”10

  Weigel was, at the time, a Washington Post reporter. His job there was to report on conservatives.

  You can guess what happened next.

  On JournoList, it turned out, Weigel had been putting out one rabidly anti-conservative email after another. When Rush Limbaugh had chest pains, Weigel wrote, “I hope he fails. . . . Too soon?” Weigel wrote that conservatives used the media to “violently, angrily divide America,” mainly because they were racists protecting “white privilege.” And, of course, he went after the daddy of all right-wing influence wielders, Matt Drudge: “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.” As for Sarah Palin: “Let’s move the f—on already.” And on James O’Keefe, the man who broke ACORN, after O’Keefe’s runin with Louisiana authorities: “He’s either going to get a radio talk show or start a prison ministry. That’s was [sic] successful conservative ratf—ers do for their second acts.”11 Weigel had to step down from his job at the Post—and promptly began reporting for Slate. Had Weigel been a conservative masquerading at objectivity and unmasked politically, he would have found himself demonized by the mainstream media. But Weigel undoubtedly will at some point find himself serving in a Democratic administration. Then, after that, he can moderate presidential debates. After all, if it worked for George “the Keebler Elf” Stephanopoulos . . .

  Now, none of this is to argue that conservative journalists don’t talk among themselves and with people on their side of the political aisle. Of course they do. But they also don’t hide behind the façade of objectivity. Michelle Malkin is conservative. So is Sean Hannity. Bill O’Reilly is a populist. Rush Limbaugh’s a conservative. Conservative journalists are opinion journalists—and that doesn’t stop them from breaking stories. In fact, it’s that nonobjectivity that makes them more honest than the supposedly above-it-all crowd at the New York Times, which secretly shills for the Obama administration.

  But the left-wing journalistic establishment, which actively fights to keep right-wingers out, as Bernard Goldberg of CBS News pointed out in his book Bias, still pretends that they’re not biased. And that means that as their profit margins shrink, they call for aid from government. For the same reason that the government supports National Public Radio, they suggest, the government ought to support them.

  Not surprisingly, President Obama thinks this is a great idea. “I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” he said of prospective bills that would grant tax breaks to failing newspapers to turn nonprofit. “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking,” said Obama, “no serious attempts to put stories into context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a
lot of mutual understanding.”12

  Or you might get a variety of voices that report the news from different angles. You could even call it something creative . . . like the “blogosphere,” or something. You might end the hegemony of a Democratic journalistic establishment dedicated to upholding liberalism at all costs. And God knows, the media couldn’t allow that—the left couldn’t deal with the loss of control of viewpoint. The kind of control they had on the JournoList. And most of all, Obama couldn’t allow that. If he did, what would happen to him, and the movement that stands behind him?

  NONPROFIT BULLIES

  In 2004, perverse former conservative David Brock, a highly paranoid alleged drug devotee, founded Media Matters for America. It was an offshoot of the John Podesta–run Center for American Progress (CAP). Podesta, of course, was the former chief of staff to President Clinton, and CAP was a liberal nonprofit designed to act as an outlet for leftist politicians and viewpoints. CAP originally granted office space to Media Matters; Hillary Clinton advised it, and one of her closest confidants received some $200,000 to help out.13 Clinton even explained, “I only wish that we had this active and fighting blogosphere about 15 years ago because we have certainly suffered over the last years from a real imbalance in the political world in our country. But we are righting that balance—or lefting that balance—not sure which, and we are certainly better prepared and more focused on taking our arguments and making them effective and disseminating them widely and really putting together a network in the blogosphere in a lot of the new progressive infrastructure—institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress. We’re beginning to match what I had said for years was the advantage of the other side.”14

  The goal of Media Matters was simple: play defense for liberal politicians. And do it by attacking mercilessly all right-wing points of view.

  Media Matters’ bias is so obvious that even wild leftists like NBC’s Chuck Todd, who has a shrine to President Obama complete with lubricants and scented candles, can’t deal with them. Back in 2007, he pointed out that Media Matters was shilling for its erstwhile ally, Hillary, with a list of don’ts suggested for debate moderators. “Their ‘don’ts’ read more like facetious attacks on Edwards and Obama—right out of the oppo shop of either the RNC or, say, opponents of Edwards and Obama. By repeating these things, isn’t Media Matters doing Clinton or other opponents of Edwards and Obama a favor?”15 Or, as David Folkenflik of NPR put it, “They’re looking at every dangling participle, every dependent clause, every semicolon, every quotation—to see if there’s some way it unfairly frames a cause, a party, a candidate, that they may have some feelings for.”16

  It didn’t matter. The left loved it. As the New York Times reported, producers for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report coordinate regularly with Media Matters. James Carville, master Democrat strategist, says, “It was always kind of a dream, that we needed something like that.”17

  The funding flowed in, especially from leftist bullies like George Soros and the Tides Foundation. By November 2008, the organization—which, remember, provided no actual services other than Alinskyite distortion of conservative words—had grown to more than one hundred employees and $8 million in budget. While its longtime boss, Eric Burns, insisted that the organization had “leveled the playing field and maybe given Barack Obama a fair shake,” he said, “I’m not the Obama campaign. We’re an independent organization not beholden to anybody. . . . It’s bigger than any one candidate, it’s bigger than any one election.”18

  This is Media Matters’ favorite line. They constantly say they’re not coordinating with President Obama. That’s a lie.

  As it turns out, Media Matters is in the back pocket of the Obama administration—and acts as their go-between for other media outlets. When Brock wasn’t too busy reportedly indulging in illicit substances,19 he raised $50,000 for Obama. What’s more shocking is that Brock’s organization coordinates on a weekly basis with the White House. They were planning to spend some $20 million in 2012 to help Obama. Anita Dunn, a high-ranking Obama administration member, used to visit the Media Matters headquarters regularly.

  And they scored hit after hit against Obama enemy after Obama enemy. As the Daily Caller reported, they worked with other groups like ColorOfChange, Van Jones’s nonprofit, to organize astroturfed campaigns against figures like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.

  But just as importantly, they were funneling White House talking points to media outlets, which were willingly taking them. “In ’08 it became pretty apparent MSNBC was going left,” one source told the Caller. “They were using our research to write their stories.” Media Matters staffers apparently called MSNBC president Phil Griffin regularly. They were also in touch with Greg Sargent of the Washington Post; Daily Kos; Sam Stein and Nico Pitney of Huffington Post; Jim Rainey at the Los Angeles Times; Eugene Robinson and E. J. Dionne at the Washington Post; and Brian Stelter at the New York Times. And, of course, Ben Smith. If a reporter didn’t work with Media Matters and published something Media Matters didn’t like, they’d get smacked by thousands of emails inundating them for bias.20

  How close was the coordination between Media Matters and the White House? So close that Alan Dershowitz, no ardent right-winger, suggested that he’d support President Obama only if he disassociated from Media Matters. Why? Media Matters’ senior foreign policy reporter, M. J. Rosenberg, was a massive anti-Semite who routinely used the white supremacist phrase “Israel Firsters” when describing pro-Israel Jews.21

  Within a few weeks, Rosenberg had stepped down at Media Matters. Rosenberg himself spelled out the rationale for his resignation: “The reason for this step is that it disturbed me greatly to see an organization to which I am devoted facing possible harm because of my critical writings about Israel. I have no doubt that the crowd that opposes any and all criticism of Israeli government policies will continue to turn its guns on Media Matters if I am associated with it. I could not live with myself if that happened—not only because I care deeply about the organization and my colleagues, but also because Media Matters does such important work confronting the lies that emanate from the far right and especially Fox News.”22

  In other words, President Obama told Media Matters to toss Rosenberg under the bus. Rosenberg would still be able to use Media Matters resources, of course.

  Now, all of this would be fine and dandy, except for one small problem: Media Matters is a charitable nonprofit organization. One element of that status: organizations can’t “attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities” or “participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.” In particular, Media Matters is distinguished from its conservative counterparts by the fact that it actually engages in partisan training for Democratic campaigns—like the “Progressive Talent Initiative”—and the fact that it’s covertly coordinating with the White House regularly.23

  It’s entirely possible that Media Matters isn’t violating its nonprofit status. But the 501(c)3 world has come to be dominated by liberal organizations that bully the living hell out of their opponents in a way no conservative organization does or would. Leading boycotts against Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Don Imus, and Lou Dobbs? Par for the course for Media Matters, Center for American Progress, and the myriad other leftist surrogates set up by Democratic Party hacks. The use of such organizations to bully conservatives into silence is just the latest tool in the liberal arsenal. They want fewer voices, not more. And they’ll work with their political allies to achieve their fascistic vision of politics.

  UNIVERSITY BULLIES

  There is no less tolerant place on the planet than the faculty lounges of America’s major universities. Not only is dissent not tolerated, it’s not even acknowledged to exist. Every poll of college faculty ever taken has shown an unhinged imbalance between conservatives and liberals on campuses. A recent 2012 poll showed that for every conservative professor, th
ere were at least three liberals. And a full third openly admitted that ideology entered the classroom.24 Older polls show a full 72 percent of American university and college faculty identifying as liberal, with just 15 percent conservative. At top universities, that statistic is 87 percent to 13 percent.25

  Big government is worshipped on campus. While 60 percent of professors said that Ronald Reagan wasn’t one of America’s top ten presidents, a full 54 percent of professors, polled in 2012, thought that Franklin Roosevelt was America’s best president ever—they must have missed those eight long years of the Great Depression prior to the start of World War II. If it weren’t for FDR, the Great Depression would have been a lot less Great, and a lot less Depressed. But according to college professors, FDR is God.26 If there were a God, that is. College professors are significantly less religious than the general public. Over half of professors say they never or rarely go to religious services; just 31 percent say they go to religious services regularly.27

  Anti-Americanism runs rampant on college campuses. In fact, America’s campuses are the only places where these ne’er-do-wells can find a job that doesn’t involve a mop and a pail. Who else would employ former Palestine Liberation Organization spokesman and Obama bestie Rashid Khalidi? Or pay a rapping racialist who preaches communist theory upward of six figures to travel around the country lamenting the fate of poor blacks, as Cornel West does? Or keep fake Native Americans who believe that the victims of September 11 were “little Eichmanns” employed, as University of Colorado did with Ward Churchill? Or pick up the tab on terrorist professor Sami Al-Arian, who supported Hamas financially? The list of unmentionably bad employees goes on and on. And all of them are employed by the universities.