Democrat Front Media Matters Goes Old-Style Soviet Thug In It’s War Against Fox News

One of the interesting things about the mainstream media’s wars on Fox is just how hypocritical the Fox News haters are.

As an example, Geraldine Ferraro passed away.  Fox News spent the day honoring the first woman to truly break the ceiling in the modern political era.  And although a famous liberal, Ferraro was a Fox News contributor.  Because Fox News actually is fair and balanced.  Roger Ailes personally honored Geraldine Ferraro as a woman who “made deep contributions on a number of significant issues.”  Which is to say that Fox News shows a degree of class that is entirely lacking in the media dominated by the unbalanced and hysterical left.

When the mainstream media outlets hires Sarah Palin as a highly-respected contributor, come back and see me.

If you watch leftwing liberal hatchet organizations such as Media Matters, and then watch the mainstream news coverage, it is remarkable how often talking points that started with the KoolAid-drinking Media Matters end up on the “respected” mainstream media coverage.

It’s amazing how you hear a leftwing narrative, and then the rest of the mainstream media start screeching that same narrative like parrots.

And then, unlike Fox News – which frequently features liberals such as Kirsten Powers, Bob Beckell, Geraldine Ferarro, Geraldo Rivera, Wesley Clark, Judith Miller, Mara Liasson,  Harold Ford, Jr. Juan Williams, Al Sharpton, Ed Rendell, and many others – there are no conservative voices to rebut the Media Matters-mainstream media talking points that invariably and regularly appear on the other channels.

Media Matters says it.  The mainstream media outlets pick it up and report it much the way they pick up and report other ideological leftist sources such as the New York Times, and it is spat out as “fact.”

Meanwhile, the Democrats made fellow KoolAid organization the Daily Kos a host of one of their presidential debates, the founder of that organization went to another mainstream media organization (Newsweek), and Arianna Huffington’s ideological liberalism went even MORE mainstream with her going into AOL News.  And then there’s George Soros, the far-leftist money man for Media Matters, also giving $1.8 million to “objective” NPR to hire reporters so they can cover the news more “fairly.”

Hopefully, this will make that hypocritical and intellectually bankrupt pseudo-journalist propaganda a little bit tougher.  But I doubt it.

Media Matters’ war against Fox
By: Ben Smith
March 26, 2011 07:23 AM EDT

The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.

The group, launched as a more traditional media critic, has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the “nerve center” of the conservative movement. The shift reflects the centrality of the cable channel to the contemporary conservative movement, as well as the loathing it inspires among liberals — not least among the donors who fund Media Matters’ staff of about 90, who are arrayed in neat rows in a giant war room above Massachusetts Avenue.

“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.

The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.”

In an interview and a 2010 planning memo shared with POLITICO, Brock listed the fronts on which Media Matters — which he said is operating on a $10 million-plus annual budget — is working to chip away at Fox and its parent company, News Corp. They include its bread-and-butter distribution of embarrassing clips and attempts to rebut Fox points, as well as a series of under-the-radar tactics.

Media Matters, Brock said, is assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials. It has hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show. The group is assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy or other causes. And it has hired two experienced reporters, Joe Strupp and Alexander Zaitchik, to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network, due out in 2012 from Vintage/Anchor. (In the interest of full disclosure, Media Matters last month also issued a report criticizing “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy’s criticism of this reporter’s blog.)

Brock said Media Matters also plans to run a broad campaign against Fox’s parent company, News Corp., an effort which most likely will involve opening a United Kingdom arm in London to attack the company’s interests there. The group hired an executive from MoveOn.org to work on developing campaigns among News Corp. shareholders and also is looking for ways to turn regulators in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere against the network.

The group will “focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to disrupt his commercial interests — whether that be here or looking at what’s going on in London right now,” Brock said, referring to News Corp.’s — apparently successful — move to take a majority stake in the satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

A spokeswoman for Fox News, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on Media Matters’ efforts, but the group draws regular barbs from Fox hosts Beck and Bill O’Reilly.

“Tonight is not an episode you casually watch and take out of context like Media Matters does,” Beck remarked last month.

A more extended attack came in February on the freewheeling late night show Red Eye, which conducted a mock interview with a purported Media Matters employee.

“It’s horrible. All we do is sit and watch Fox News and make up stuff about Fox News. It is the saddest place I have ever seen in my life. I think about it, and I want to throw up,” the mock employee said. “I get to work and I take off my clothes, and they strap me into a chair in front of a TV with [Fox News Channel] on. They keep my eyelids propped open like in “Clockwork Orange,” and I sit and type all day.

“If there was no Beck, George Soros would come down and demand we make it up,” the “interviewee” continued. “I would watch the “Flintstones” and transcribe Fred Flintstone’s words and attribute them to Beck. It was the only way to get Soros to stop hitting me.”

(A Soros associate said the financier, who gave Media Matters $1 million last year, did not earmark it for the Fox campaign. Soros suggested in a recent CNN interview that the Fox depictions of him as a sinister media manipulator would better be applied to Murdoch.)

In some views, the war between Media Matters and Fox is not, necessarily, bad for either side. Media Matters has transformed itself into a pillar of the progressive movement with its aggressive new brand of media campaigning. And the attacks cement Fox’s status on the right.

“Fox is happy about it — and it makes their position more vivid among their supporters,” said Paul Levinson, a media studies professor at Fordham University. “One way of keeping your core supporters happy is to be attacked by people your core supporters don’t like.”

But Media Matters says its digging has begun to pay off. The group has trickled out a series of emails from Washington Bureau Chief Bill Sammon, leaks from inside the network, which show him, for instance, circulating a memo on “Obama’s references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists.”

The leaks are part of a broader project to take advantage of internal dissent, Media Matters Executive Vice President Ari Rabin-Havt said.

“We made a list of every single person who works for Fox and tried to figure out who might be disgruntled and why, and we went out to try to meet them,” he said. “Clearly, somebody in that organization is giving us primary source documents.”

Media Matters, he said, is also conducting “opposition research” on a dozen or so “mid- and senior-level execs and producers,” a campaign style move that he and Brock said would simply involve recording their public appearances and digging into public records associated with them.

And Brock’s 2010 planning memo offers a glimpse at Media Matters’ shift from media critic to a new species of political animal.

“Criticizing Fox News has nothing to do with criticizing the press,” its memo says. “Fox News is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials and the public.”

The tactics that Media Matters are using – “sabotage” even on their own acknowledgment – ought to show any decent person that the mainstream media has truly been infiltrated by fascist, Soviet-style thugs.

I mean, think about it: “guerrilla warfare and sabotage”?  This is done by people and organizations who have “Little Red Books” or “Mein Kampfs” to accompany their tactics.  Fox News isn’t out there using “guerrilla warfare and sabotage”; it’s the people who say Fox News is evil who then use the most profoundly un-American tactics.  That should be very informative to non-moral idiots.

Sadly, while conservatives rose up in 2010, it seems that the long-term trend is that there are fewer and fewer decent people who are willing to do less and less.  And all the while the hateful left are busy working like ants stripping the dying carcass of America.

Bad people not only lie; they believe lies.  That’s why we’re seeing more and more lies today.  And it’s why the left can justify openly using “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” that would have been condemned by better people.

Jesus talked about the last days.  He said a lot of terrifying things would happen.  There would be worldwide economic collapses, wars and rumors of wars, many earthquakes and great signs in the oceans in many diverse places, and famines; all anticipating a coming antichrist (“the beast”) who would promise a Utopia but who would ultimately deliver hell on earth.

And it’s all coming while we watch NBC smuggle in Media Matters’ talking points in the guise of “news.”

Obama and his White House has tried to ban Fox News – one of the big four of the media – from being able to cover the news.   Obama’s White House has repeatedly launched flat-out propaganda campaigns against Fox news.  The news media – realizing how outrageous it would be if a conservative president did this same thing to one of them – erupted in outrage against Obama for his blatant attempt to control the media like a fascist dictator.  When Obama tried to freeze out Fox News even though Fox News had been a member of the pool consisting of ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox News since 1997, the ALL refused to send reporters until Obama backed down.  But Obama is STILL doing it as recently as yesterday.  At his heart, he is a fascist.  He demands that he be able to control the media and control the message.

The other day the Obama White House demonstrated this instinct toward fascistic control again: they literally shut a reporter in a cramped closet and kept demanding that he stay in there.

You can bet that the antichrist, the beast, will have control over the media and the message.

And sadddest of all, what Jesus said would precede all of this horror and misery as the leftwing socialist big government beast was the final apathetic and self-absorbed era of the Laodicean church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer – who gave his own life in his stand against Adolf Hitler – said a few things that truly apply to us as we sit idly by watching our boob tubes while bad people with a bad agenda take the world away from us:

“When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.” 

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.” 

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Stop letting these people “frame the news” while you watch like a slack-jawed drooling imbecile. If you’re going to sit there, at least muster the moral outrage to change the channel.

Dishonest Propagandist Government Network NPR Fires Juan Williams For Muslim Remark

Mainstream media outlets an d the apparatchiks who staff them reach low after low; and then keep right on digging.

Monday night Juan Williams appeared on Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly Program and said:

Well, actually, I hate to say this to you because I don’t want to get your ego going.  But I think you’re right.  I think, look, political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality.

I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot.  You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country.  But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

Now, I remember also when the Times Square bomber was at court — this was just last week — he said: “the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood.” I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts.

NPR is basically firing Juan Williams the day after getting $1.8 million from far-leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations to buy at least 100 “journalists” at NPR.

If that isn’t blatant enough, the same day far leftist radical George Soros gave that $1.8 million to NPR, he similarly gave another million dollars to the profoundly leftwing Media Matters, with the express purpose of attacking Fox News.  From Newsmax:

Billionaire currency titan George Soros, long a patron of liberal political causes in the United States, is giving $1 million to Media Matters in what he says is an attempt to stop the growing popularity of Fox News.

And, just to complete the picture, Media Matters proceeds to tell us the real sin of Juan Williams – appearing on Fox News – as it turns its demonization campaign to Mara Liasson.  From millionaire Media Matters:

News that Juan Williams’ contract with NPR was terminated over comments he made about Muslims while appearing on Fox News shines a spotlight on the radio network’s evergreen controversy: Its continued affiliation with Fox News. Specifically, NPR’s Mara Liasson and her long-running association with Fox News has often raised questions.  This might be the proper time for NPR to finally address that thorny issue.

So liberals, being the dishonest lying slime that they are, can’t just say, “We’re firing Juan Williams because he’s appearing on the most trusted name in news, which and we just can’t have that.”

A study last year by George Mason University stated, “Our results show a very significant liberal bias.”  And identified Fox News as the most balanced.  NPR wants bias, and they most certainly don’t want balance.

They don’t have the decency to say that former Nazi collaborator George Soros bought them 100 paid-in-fill propagandists, and probably instructed NPR to clean house of anyone who won’t properly march to his goose-step.

Instead NPR relied upon the favorite tactic of the left – the politics of personal destruction – in order to try to personally destroy Juan Williams’ character and integrity.

That’s just the kind of slimy reptiles these people are.

And to add “slimy” to “reptilian,” the NPR CEO issued a comment that implied that Juan Williams needed to see a psychiatrist.  Which is to say that that this woman – who just fired the only black journalist on her entire network – should fire herself for bigotry.

A few things come to mind as I think about the craven excuse NPR used to get rid of Juan Williams:

1) Juan Williams was fired for telling the truth, of all things.  You just can’t have truth in liberal “journalism.”  Because truth is an embarrassment to the left.

A Pew survey documented that journalists describe themselves as being even MORE LIBERAL than they were in the past.  Which is frankly amazing, given how liberal journalists were in the past.

NPR’s own ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, has acknowledged that NPR held a bias.

So NPR fired Juan Williams under the guise that Williams took a “personal public positions on [a] controversial issue.” But that wasn’t why he was fired, or else NPR journalist Nina Totenberg would have been fired for wishing that Republican Jessie Helms or his grandchildren would get AIDS.  That wasn’t why he was fired, or NPR journalist Andrei Codrescu who called the Christian doctrine of the Rapture “crap” wouldn’t still be part of the NPR team.  That wasn’t why he was fired, or else Cokie Roberts would have been fired for saying that “Actually, Beck is worse than a clown. He’s more like a terrorist who believes he has discovered the One True Faith, and condemns everyone else as a heretic. And that makes him something else as well — a traitor to the American values he professes so loudly to defend.” It very clearly and obviously wasn’t that Juan Williams expressed a “public position on a controversial issue” that got him fired; it was that he expressed such a position that did not conform to doctrinaire liberal political correctness.  And in particular, it was that he appeared on Fox News, a network that has the audacity to actually allow conservatives to offer (along with many liberals) their point of view.

Further, “government-funded” and “journalism” go together like ketchup and milkshakes.  NPR and PBS stand as embodiments of disgrace to journalism.  And when you add “George Soros” to “government funded,” you get something that is quintessentially dangerous to both journalism and democracy itself.

2) Every mainstream media outlet is fundamentally hypocritical as well as dishonest regarding Islam as the “religion of peace.”

On the one hand, we are constantly told that Islam is peaceful.  And that anyone who fears Islam is some kind of a bigot.

And yet, on the other hand, the same “journalists” and news outlets that say this to us are themselves so piss-in-their-pants afraid of this peaceful religion becoming über-violent at the drop of a hat that they constantly censor themselves lest they end up as terrorist murder victims.

Case in point: the Washington Post, the Denver Post, and many other mainstream media papers, refused to allow the following Non Sequitur cartoon:

“Piss Christ” – an image of Jesus Christ on a cross in a jar of urine – okay.  A cartoon that doesn’t even show Muhammad?  Not okay.

Why?  Because the people the leftist journalists so dramatically insist are “peaceful” will launch a murderous jihad if they feel insulted or offended in any way, shape, or form.

If NPR, the New York Times, the “ladies” of The View, or anyone else, wants to tell me that Muslims are peaceful, or that Islam is the religion of peace, let them publish pictures of an image of The Prophet immersed in a jar of urine.  So we can see Islamic “tolerance” in action.

And don’t let them hide and change their identities like cartoonist/journalist Molly Norris recently did, because THEY HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR FROM THESE PEACE-LOVING MUSLIMS, DO THEY???

The fact of the matter is that the very mainstream media news outlets that are the most vocal in telling us that fear of Islam equals bigotry are in point of fact the most terrified of Islam.  And journalists have literally bowed down to the point of becoming the most pathetic form of useful idiots out of fear of the thing they constantly tell the American people they must not be afraid of.

3) NPR, in firing Juan Williams, committed a terrorist act itself.  With this firing as their “jihadist propaganda bomb.”

I think that’s what Rush Limbaugh was getting at when he started referring to Muslims today as “Middle Eastern liberals.”

Let’s face it.  This wasn’t just about Juan Williams.  This was about any journalist who dares to cross the line from propaganda to truth.  If you tell the truth – especially on the most trusted network in news – they will bury you.

The idea was to strike terror in any journalist who would say, “I’m going to be objective for once in my life.”

I always got the sense that Juan Williams was both a personally gracious man and a straight shooter who called it as he saw it.

Now, having said all of that, I found most of Juan Williams’ offerings to be frankly idiotic.  And if the man was to be fired by anyone, it should have been by Fox News for offering mostly stupid, doctrinaire liberal crap.

Instead, he was fired by the left for telling the truth, and for appearing on a network these First Amendment-despising, “Fairness Doctrine” propagandists despise.

Government-Funded NPR Tries To Force Mara Liasson Off Fox News To Please White House Ownership

I have to say I find NPR’s thesis rather asinine.  Mara Liasson is presumably an objective journalists by their standards, considering that they hired her and have continued to employ her for years.  And to make it even more ridiculous, she has been part of Fox News since 1997.  But on their view, Fox News having Mara appear on their show to offer her objective opinion in a panel along with others somehow enables Fox News’ “bias.”  All of a sudden, and out of the blue.  And strangely timed to synchronize with the White House attack on Fox News (not to mention the 1st Amendment).

NPR reporter pressured over Fox role
By: Josh Gerstein
December 6, 2009 10:36 PM EST

Executives at National Public Radio recently asked the network’s top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network’s political bias, two sources familiar with the effort said.

According to a source, Liasson was summoned in early October by NPR’s executive editor for news, Dick Meyer, and the network’s supervising senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. The NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox’s programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network.

At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that she’d seen no significant change in Fox’s programming and planned to continue appearing on the network, the source said.

NPR’s focus on Liasson’s work as a commentator on Fox’s “Special Report” and “Fox News Sunday” came at about the same time as a White House campaign launched in September to delegitimize the network by painting it as an extension of the Republican Party.

One source said the White House’s criticism of Fox was raised during the discussions with Liasson. However, an NPR spokeswoman told POLITICO that the Obama administration’s attempts to discourage other news outlets from treating Fox as a peer had no impact on any internal discussions at NPR.

Fox News has Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity on their station, it is true.  But unlike Bill Moyers and his ilk, neither of them present themselves as “journalists.”  They offer their opinion on opinion programming.  The clear distinction between “news” and “opinion” becomes another yet another IQ test that liberals simply can’t pass.

To the best of my knowledge, Mara Liasson has never ONCE appeared on either Glenn Beck’s or Sean Hannity’s programs.  She has appeared on Fox News Special Report with Brett Baier and with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.  Unlike the Kool-aid-drinking mainstream media, Mara has been smart enough to understand the difference between news and op-ed, and she has remained on the news side.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media’s malicious and dishonest smearing of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh was apparently NOT “biased.”  CNN’s “fact checking” of an SNL sketch critical of Obama (while hypocritically ignoring months of unrelenting SNL sketch attacks against Sarah Palin) was NOT “biased.”  The mainstream medias’ frequent “reporting” about conservatives “organizing” while simultaneously ignoring PAID liberal activists’ organizing was NOT “biased.”

Take a gander at MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann’s bias (see HERE and HERE) and then recognize that he is immediately followed by Rachel Maddow (see here and here), who is nearly as bad.  There’s your Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity on steroids.

The mainstream media seem to love bias and propaganda, just as long as it is LIBERAL bias and propaganda.  And anything LESS THAN liberal bias and propaganda sends them into a hissy fit of galactic proportions.

The NPR people have been trying to force Mara Liasson off of Fox at the same exact time that Obama demonstrates his naked contempt for a free press in his attacks against Fox News – even acknowledging that they used the White House attack to attack Liasson – and then display their chutzpah by asserting that the two events had absolutely nothing to do with each other.

I was holding the smoking gun when they found me standing over the body.  But the two events have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

The Obama administration has literally been fascist in its attempt to attack any news outlet that refuses to unquestioningly advance its propaganda.  And the mainstream media have been pathologically tilted to the political left (as Bernie Goldberg details in his book, A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media), but insanely continue to focus on the splinter in Fox News’ eye while ignoring the gigantic log in their own.

You can go back a few years ago and find NPR executives actually admitting they had a liberal bias.

The NPR ombudsman responded to a Pew study that challenged the liberal bias of the mainstream media by saying this:

There is much that can be pointed to as examples of inherent bias in the media — including NPR.

The media — as a class — tends to be remarkably homogeneous. As an NPR editor pointed out to me recently, “How many of our journalists have ever operated a business?” The poll indirectly points to the need for more diversity in our newsrooms — both intellectual and cultural. […]

This poll may have been done correctly, but in this one aspect — questioning the professionalism of journalists — the result will be a disservice to American journalists and journalism. In order to avoid the “liberal bias” accusation, some journalists might feel there is safety in pack journalism and that is likely to have a chilling effect on tough, independent journalism.

The media and its management have an obligation to maintain a skeptical and adversarial role to whatever party is in power. This poll could discourage that by implying that journalists will always let their personal politics trump their professional obligations.

Keep in mind that for much of the 2008 election campaign, and for most of Obama’s presidency, Fox News was basically the ONLY “adversarial” voice.  Fox News has in fact stood alone in avoiding the “pack journalism” that the rest of the mainstream media has pursued.  Which is to say, Fox News has actually done exactly those things that the NPR ombudsman argued that the media had to do.

Nevertheless, in spite of that admission, NPR has continued in its bias.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough pointed that liberal bias out in the discussion over NPR’s pressuring of Mara Liasson.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Well I just want to say, I love NPR and I listen to NPR, but I’ve been listening to reformed, pot-smoking hippies for the past thirty years on NPR with a very substantial left-wing bias – and I don’t care that they eat tree bark like Euell Gibbons, and I don’t care if they are still smoking pot in their sixties. They put on great radio. But for NPR – for NPR, the leadership at NPR to question the bias of Fox News is a joke. They have been biased – again, I still listen to them, because like “The New York Times” they are the best at what they do. But, please, that is a laugh.  NPR –

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: It’s very soothing listening, too.

SCARBOROUGH: It is soothing, it is very soothing.  Just put a mirror to your face, NPR.

Instead of pressuring Mara Liasson to leave Fox – which only reveals your own liberal bias – why don’t you take Joe Scarborough’s advice and put a mirror to your own face instead, NPR?

A few other articles that very relate to the current White House attempt to attack and undermine Fox News and a free press:

More Self-Referentially Absurd Claims Of Fox News Bias

White House Ignores War In Afghanistan To Purse New War On Fox News

Anti-Free-Press Obama Demagogue Anita Dunn A Self-Admitted Marxist