Posts Tagged ‘Government & Press’

NewsBusters.org | Media Research Center
The Media and its Two Faces

UPDATE (below the fold): The Washington Examiner's Byron York just posted a piece - Andrew Breitbart's coin challenge for evidence of the "N" word has been verbally answered by AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka.

--------

Editor's Note: Video of conservative being beaten down below the fold.

The media and the Left (please pardon the redundancy) continue to insist that TEA Party participants are engaged in racist and violent behavior - at the surreptitious and stealth "hate speech" urging of talk radio hosts and Republicans.

These have almost all been phantom charges.  They are leveled by liberals and Democrats, and the media immediately report them as if they were true.  They rarely bother to look for evidence, which works out because most times there isn't any.

On the weekend that health care passed, Democrat Congressman Andre Carson of Indiana asserted that the "N" word was shouted fifteen times at him and fellow black Congressman John Lewis. 

The media went right to print with it, reporting it as if it were true.  But several videos of the encounter between the Congressmen and the TEA Party-ers surfaced soon after.  And on NONE of them could the word be heard once, let alone fifteen times in the chanted fashion that Carson claimed. 

Internet media mogul Andrew Breitbart offered $10,000 to the United Negro College Fund - and then later upped it to $100,000 - for any evidence that the word was used at all.  He's still got his coin. 

And of course, no correction or apology was forthcoming from the media.  In fact, some are still reporting it as if it actually happened.

The examples of media TEA Party malpractice are in fact myriad.  So too are the examples of their continuing to report it wrong even after the truth is revealed.

Let us flash back to last August, when (amongst many other outlets) NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC all ascribed posters depicting President Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache to conservatives and Rush Limbaugh. 

But the posters had on them the web address for left-wing 7-time Democrat presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.  On the site was the downloadable PDF file for the "Mass Distribution Poster" in question.

The media, however, are never ones to allow the facts to get in the way of a good ongoing beating.  To this day - eight months later - many members of the Jurassic Press still lambaste the TEA Party-ers as racist for having Obama-as-Hitler posters at their events.

Repeat the lie often enough, and it becomes a(n Orwellian) fact.

Of course when liberals depicted former President George W. Bush as Hitler, the media had no problem with it. (They in fact referred to the Bush-as-Hitler depiction as a "look-alike.")

So let us now revisit an event that actually, you know, happened. One that absolutely involves violence, and - one could indeed say - racism as well.  

As we first reported on August 7, black conservative Kenneth Gladney was beaten down by SEIU thugs at a town hall meeting in Saint Louis, Missouri. 

How do we know all of these salient details?  Because the beating took place on video camera - and the SEIU thugs were wearing SEIU-emblazoned garb.  See, members of the Jurassic Press?  That's evidence.

The first man to start beating down Mr. Gladney was also black - and he "used a racial slur against him before" he incepted the pummeling.

So we had a twofer, did we not?  Violence AND racism in one incident.  The media should have been ALL OVER this story. 

And it should be a FACTUAL part of the ongoing TEA Party narrative, right?  The way the fraudulent, fact-free charges of racism and violence against conservatives are, right?

Of course not. I would imagine most of you reading this essay have never heard of this.  And you guys and girls actually put forth tremendous effort in pursuit of the truth.

Which is somthing that can not be said of the Lamestream Media.

UPDATE: The Washington Examiner's Byron York just posted a piece - Andrew Breitbart's coin challenge for evidence of the "N" word has been verbally answered by AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka.

York was posting his piece whilst I was writing mine.  From it:

In the question-and-answer session, Breitbart said there is no video or audio evidence of either event happening. Breitbart has, in fact, offered a $100,000 award to anyone who produces evidence that the racial insult actually occurred, and so far he has had no takers.

Until now. As Breitbart spoke, Trumka said he himself had seen the events in question. "I watched them spit at people, I watched them call John Lewis the n-word," Trumka said. "I witnessed it, I witnessed it. I saw it in person. That's real evidence."

I am quite sure Breitbart was calling for physical rather than rhetorical evidence, so I'm not sure he's on the hook to pony up. 

Trumka's undoubtedly desperate to make up the huge and looming deficit his union's pension faces; I'm sure he thinks he could use the coin, regardless of whether or not he deserves it.  

My question is: does Trumka appear in any of the myriad videos of the incident where the "N" word did not?

Liberal commentator Nancy Skinner conceded there is one issue the right is right on - the value-added tax (VAT) is an absurd idea.

Skinner who is a regular guest on the Fox Business Network, stated April 7 that the VAT will do absolutely nothing to help the ailing economy, concurring with the "Bulls and Bears" panel.    

"Everybody, you're going to be surprised: I finally found a tax I don't like, and it's this VAT tax!" Skinner exclaimed. "Here's why - it doesn't produce any behavioral changes - it's hidden as Gerri Willis said. What you want in a tax is a tax that changes behavior."

As Reuters reported April 6, White House adviser Paul Volcker - of the Larry Summers school of economics - threw out a trial-balloon recently, saying the U.S. may need to consider a European-style value-added tax to raise revenue and bring the deficit under control.

Skinner prefers using taxes for social engineering, and cited cap-and-trade as an example.  

"That is why a cap and trade tax - it moves from fossil fuels to try to move us just like the baggage issue into clean energy technologies that spur growth. This does nothing," she said.   

Also on the "Bulls and Bears" panel was Mike Norman of Pitbull Economics. 

"Look this is very basic economics, taxes do one thing - they regulate demand," Norman said. "You increase taxes in an economy where demand is already very soft and the outcome is very clear - we go back down."  

"They did this in 1937. They did it in Japan in 1997, not a VAT tax, but they increased taxes, and it aborted their recovery at the time - and they're still struggling with this." 

"This is a dumb idea, we are facing a demand crisis," Norman continued. "If you want to shoot for income equality or greater income equality, you raise the people at the bottom. By the way, the VAT tax is very regressive, it's going to hurt people at the bottom who can't afford to be hurt anymore, it's a terrible idea. If they do it - the economy is going down."

Image via: guardian.co.uk