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Media

Fox News Contributor Thinks ‘The Blacks’ Are Making Too Big Of A Deal About Trayvon Martin

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Mar 30, 2012 at 6:00 pm

While the controversy over the killing of Trayvon Martin largely skirted partisan politics in its first month, some conservative media outlets apparently saw an opportunity in the case and have spent the latter part of the week alternately smearing Martin, defending Zimmerman, or screaming about the dangers of viewing the case through a racial lens.

The conservative Daily Caller, a purportedly reported and fact-based news outlet, published parts of Martin’s life on social media, but only “selected [items that] reinforce the argument that the victim of the fatal shooting was a menacing figure who might plausibly have been mistaken for a criminal,” the New York Times’ Robert Mackey noted. They skipped over pictures from prom night or of Martin’s friends, cherry-picking shots of Martin flipping the bird or wearing fake gold teeth.

Former Republican congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called the posthumous vilification of Martin “beneath contempt” and “disgusting.” “I guess it’s because the President actually said something to comfort the parents, and I guess they just can’t handle that,” he said this morning.

Meanwhile, the Daily Caller did their best to defend Zimmerman’s account that Martin had beat him up, even when new surveillance footage cast doubt on that claim. But perhaps one shouldn’t expect better from an outlet whose top editors stood by a blatantly false report it published last year.

At the late Andrew Breitbart’s website attacked Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) for wearing a hoodie on the House floor in solidarity with Trayvon, writing a cynical story today headlined, “HOODIE-WEARING GUNMEN KILL 1, WOUND 5 IN BOBBY RUSH’S CHICAGO DISTRICT.”

On Fox News, host Sean Hannity and conservative media critic Brent Bozell, like many in the conservative echo chamber, have dwelled on the fact that the fringe New Black Panthers, who have been condemned by everyone, offered a “bounty” on Zimmerman’s head. And Hannity and Bozell found the real scandal here — that NBC News edited a 911 tape in a way that portrayed Zimmerman in a poor light.

Overall, the message seems to be, as Fox contributor Tamara Holder told Hannity: “The blacks are also making this more of a racial issue than it should be.” Watch it:

If one believes professional provocateur Ann Coulter, we may soon see black “lynch mobs” on the streets out to get “random white people.”

Alyssa

Conservative Filmmaker to Steward Breitbart News

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 21, 2012 at 4:36 pm

Both before and after their founder’s death, Andrew Breitbart’s entertainment site, Big Hollywood, was making hay (and presumably garnering pageviews) by complaining about the presentation of Sarah Palin in HBO’s movie adaptation of Game Change. Now, one of Palin’s strongest Hollywood defenders, filmmaker Stephen Bannon, has been named one of the people who will steward Breitbart’s stable of publications: he’s a founding board member of Breitbart News and now will become executive chairman of the company.

It’s not entirely clear what the change in leadership will mean for the fiscal health of the company or for Big Hollywood’s coverage in particular. It’s had to imagine that any one person, much less any set of people, will be able to neatly replace Breitbart as an enthusiastic fundraiser or as a public face of the brand. The Undefeated made just $100,085 at the box office, and Bannon’s other movies haven’t exactly set the world on fire. Big Hollywood already devotes considerable space to the complaint that Hollywood isn’t responsive to conservative values and is leaving a substantial conservative market untapped. Whether Bannon’s elevated role in the company increases the volume of those complaints or provides new perspective on them remains to be seen.

Media

‘Smoking Gun’ From Breitbart Site Is A Literal Joke Told By Harvard Professor

By Adam Peck on Mar 9, 2012 at 2:10 pm

Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree

Earlier this week and after much hype, Big Government’s Editor at Large Ben Shapiro unveiled a video of a young Barack Obama praising and hugging late Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell. Shapiro claimed the video was purposefully hidden by supporters of Obama in 2008, citing a few seconds of video they released from a lecture given by Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, in which he joked, “we hid this during the 2008 election.”

Shapiro and other conservative media figures like Fox News’ Sean Hannity took Ogletree’s obfuscation claims seriously, even though Ogletree laughed as he said it, as did the rest of the audience. This can be seen in the video posted on Breitbart TV, and even more so in the full lecture.

Indeed, today, Ogletree told the Boston Herald that the line was clearly meant as a joke:

Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree told the Herald he was just kidding when he suggested that a decades-old clip of a young Barack Obama praising and embracing controversial Professor Derrick Bell was kept hidden from voters during the 2008 campaign.

“It was a big joke,” Ogletree said. “If you watch the tape, the audience is laughing when I’m laughing.”

Breitbart.com wasted no time in attacking Ogletree’s response by saying that Ogletree made a similar joke in regards to Reverend Jeremiah Wright. If Ogletree was being serious, however, the Obama cabal didn’t do a very good job of hiding the tape, since the footage aired nationwide on PBS’ Frontline just days before the 2008 election.

Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation reported a new potential bombshell in the saga today, which Breitbart and other conservative media outlets quickly seized on — Professor Bell visited President Obama twice in 2010. However, ABC News’ Jake Tapper looked into the claim, and found that it was a different Derrick A. Bell listed in the White House visitor logs, and that the visits were merely a White House tour.

Justice

Breitbart’s ‘Bombshell’: The President Still Fights For Racial Equality

By Zack Ford on Mar 8, 2012 at 1:00 pm

Harvard Professor Derrick Bell (1930 – 2011)

Breitbart.com and Fox News believe that President Obama’s affiliation with the late Harvard professor Derrick Bell, as evidenced from a hug they share in a video from 1990, is some kind of “smoking gun” for his perspectives on “racial division and class warfare.” Bell was the first tenured African-American law professor at Harvard University and helped establish the study of Critical Race Theory (CRT). This morning, Breitbart.com editor Joel Pollak appeared on CNN to repeat this claim, but Soledad O’Brien was quick to point out that he had absolutely no understanding of CRT and that the clip presented no “bombshell” for the President:

O’BRIEN: What part of that was the bombshell? Because I missed it, I don’t get it. What was the bombshell?

POLLACK: Well, the bombshell is the revelation of the relationship between Obama and Derrick Bell—

O’BRIEN: Okay, so he’s a Harvard law student and a Harvard law professor. Yeah?

POLLACK: That’s correct. And Derrick Bell is “the Jeremiah Wright of academia.” He passed away last year, but during his lifetime he developed a theory called Critical Race Theory, which holds that the Civil Rights Movement was a sham and that White Supremacy is the order and it must be overthrown. Barack Obama was—

O’BRIEN: I’ll stop you there for a second and then I’m going to let you continue, but that is a complete misreading of Critical Race Theory. As you know, that’s an actual theory and you could Google it and someone would give you an good definition, so that’s not correct.

Watch it:

Critical race theory does not have an absolute set of principles, but later in the interview O’Brien accurately describes it as a theory that “looks into the intersection of race and politics and the law.” CRT emerged from a broader movement known as critical legal studies, which examines how factors such as race, gender and social class can often skew legal decisions in favor of privileged groups. Critical legal theory is, by definition, critical of how our law has developed and often calls for significant departures from existing law—but its central premise that judges are prone to decide cases in ways that advantage their own social group has certainly been vindicated by cases such as Citizens United.

CRT looks specifically at how race and racial privilege shapes the law. The purpose of CRT isn’t to wage war against white people, as Pollak and others of his anti-liberal ilk would have us believe. Indeed, its entire goal is to ensure that race not be forgotten as a significant factor in the operation of society. The value of this perspective is certainly demonstrated through voter ID laws, immigration policies, and drug enforcement penalties that disproportionately impact non-white populations. Policies that target racial majorities, by contrast, would never become law in the first place because the majority possesses the power to veto them.

The President should be applauded for standing with great minds who do not accept that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 marked an endpoint in the fight for racial equality. It is those who seek to disregard the experiences of all people of color — lest they confront the persisting effects of racial injustice — who should be ashamed.

Alyssa

Conservative Publisher Andrew Breitbart Dead At 43

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 1, 2012 at 11:25 am

It says a great deal about the quality of publisher and provocateur Andrew Breitbart’s showmanship and his commitment to carrying a performance through that, as the news broke this morning that he had passed away at the untimely age of 43, many people weren’t sure the announcement was real. At ThinkProgress, we send condolences to his family, and remember him as an expert and captivating provocateur, even in our many serious disagreements with him on the issues.

And there’s no question that Breitbart could be a captivating presence. His Twitter feed (the last missive from it was “I called you a putz cause I thought you were being intentionally disingenuous. If not I apologize.”) was a vehicle for performance art and agitprop. A New Yorker profile of him in 2010 started with the image of Breitbart tweeting “Why is Steny Hoyer in Los Angeles sitting on Anthony Weiner’s shoulders screaming the N word into my home? Weird.” He used his feed to savage Ted Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of the Senator’s death.

That flair for the dramatic persisted off the internet: in the wake of Anthony Weiner’s Twitter flirtations scandal, Breitbart stepped off the plane in New York and went straight to a press conference to answer charges that he or someone in his employ had hacked the Congressman’s Twitter account, an event at which he complained that “72 hours in Palm Springs with your family is excruciating when you are being challenged.” It was an amusing, if self-aggrandizing, performance.

Breitbart’s more dramatic tendencies could affect his preferences in reporting. As a publisher, Breitbart’s first scalp—and his biggest—was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which withered after a so-called sting organization by conservative prankster James O’Keefe. The video hardly damned the organization as a whole, but the report succeeded in starving ACORN of much of its funding and eventually forced the group to reorganize. Despite the diminishing returns of O’Keefe’s hoaxes, Breitbart stood by him, and compared O’Keefe to Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Borat character, saying “I think Borat got real politicians/personalities to act in real ways that we hold them to account for. O’Keefe is more serious.”

That penchant for the dramatic and boundary-pushing also led Breitbart into places no credible journalist would tread, a tendency he held up as proof of his independence, but that led to embarrassing missteps. During the Weiner press conference, he complained that “The media says Breitbart lies! Brietbart lies! Breitbart lies! Give me one example of a provable lie!” But the edited video he published the year before that implied that Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod harbored racist sentiments against white farmers was demonstrably inaccurate and biased, and resulted in Sherrod losing her job. Breitbart declined to apologize publicly to Sherrod, and she sued him for defamation, a suit that is still pending.

If his addiction to drama didn’t exactly help Breitbart’s network of sites become a bastion of credible journalism, his combativeness and hunger for pageviews sometimes meant that he lent his support to more positive causes. After blogger Dave Weigel left the Washington Post after his private emails were published by rival conservative outlet the Daily Caller, Breitbart gave him space to explain himself. And at a time when the Republican party was falling back on socially conservative positions to gain support, Breitbart joined the board of gay conservative organization GOProud, saying “If being conservative means rejecting gay conservatives because they are gay, then fine, I’m not a conservative.” He later left the organization, but remained supportive of its aims.

NEWS FLASH

Breitbart Site Up In Arms Over Tea Party Joke On ‘Dancing With The Stars’ | Ever since ABC’s Dancing with the Stars invited transgender rights advocate Chaz Bono to compete, the show has become a priority target in the right-wing’s culture war. Now hyper-sensitive to the show’s attack on right-wing “values,” conservative sensationalist Andrew Breitbart’s site Big Hollywood is up in arms over another non-controversy. In a behind-the-scenes segment this week, contestant Carson Kressley gave a tour through the costume warehouse. Trying on former contestant Bristol Palin’s infamous gorilla mask, he quips, “Still smells like a Tea Party.” Watch it:

This joke was enough to send Breitbart’s blogger Warner Todd Huston into a bizarre rant about the show’s “left-wing attacks” on “over half the voters in America.” To Huston, Kressley is insisting that all “Tea Party activists smell like gorillas.” “Are we supposed to be laughing at that, now?” he asks, adding “So, what do Democrats smell like? Maybe Europeans? How about reds?” Wondering “how ABC will take attacking so much of its audience,” he urges readers to contact the network about the joke.

By Tanya Somanader on Sep 28, 2011 at 11:00 am

Politics

Pro-Obama Chants At Rally Last Night Were Part Of Astroturf Conspiracy, Conservative Blogger Claims

By Lee Fang on May 2, 2011 at 5:09 pm

The news that Osama bin Laden was killed by American military forces yesterday has provoked a torrent of conspiracy theories from the fringes. Alex Jones’ website claims that bin Laden’s body has been frozen for “nearly a decade” and that the announcement yesterday was a fake. Similarly, ThinkProgress’ Judd Legum highlighted how Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment website is now floating the idea that bin Laden was not actually killed and that the body “should be digitally scanned” then displayed for public inspection.

In the midst of such “deather” conspiracy theories, some conservative bloggers are conjuring fantasies about the spontaneous rally outside the White House last night. The rally, which drew several thousand as soon as President Obama ended his televised remarks, included a variety of Americans from all sides of the political spectrum (some attendees even brought political signs supporting President Bush). Several times during the night, attendees broke out in chants of “four more years” and “yes we can.” RightNetwork blogger Jim Hoft, however, thinks the the pro-Obama chants were part of an orchestrated effort by the “left” to manufacture support for the White House. Under the title “Astroturfed Crowd at White House Chants ’4 More Years,’” Hoft writes that the jubilant crowd must have been “planned by the left”:

Just when you thought you’d seen everything… Leftists chanted “4 more years” and “Yes We Can” outside the White House after Osama Bin Laden’s death was announced last night. [...] College kids in front of the White House are chanting “Yes We Can!” according to a beaming CNN reporter. Funny… They didn’t get this excited when Al-Zarqawi was killed?

Does anyone out there actually believe this was completely spontaneous and not planned by the left?

Astroturfing refers to the process by which corporate interests generate public support by funding front organizations and fake citizens groups. Eager to paint any Obama supporters as fake, Hoft throws the astroturf charge out without a shred of evidence. If there is something to prove that the White House leaked the bin Laden announcement early to its twenty-something political supporters so they could in turn show up and chant “four more years,” Hoft hasn’t produced it.

Hoft is a blogger for RightNetwork, a conservative media outlet funded by Comcast executive Ed Snider. While many fringe conspiracies are easy to ignore, Hoft’s writing is well-funded and plugged into the right-wing echo chamber. Already, the website FreeRepublic is echoing the charge that Democrats concocted the rally and the bin Laden announcement as part of Obama’s reelection strategy.

Politics

Meet The Deathers: Andrew Brietbart Website Pushing Conspiracy Theory That Osama Might Not Be Dead

By Judd Legum on May 2, 2011 at 1:40 pm

Mere hours after President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, supported by incontrovertible DNA evidence, the conspiracy theorists are hard at work. Andrew Breitbart, a prominent right-wing commentator with close ties to the Republican Party and the Tea Party, is pushing the theory on his website Big Peace.

On Breitbart’s website, J. Michael Waller, suggests Obama take a number of extraordinary steps so he can “make sure [Osama] is dead.” Pictures are apparently not enough. Walker asserts that he needs to be able to “walk right up to bin Laden’s corpse and view it.” More:

The free world, particularly the United States, has a right to make sure Osama bin Laden is really dead. Every American has a right to walk right up to bin Laden’s corpse and view it. We are entitled to know for a fact that the witch is dead. No shroud for dignity’s sake, please – bin Laden’s naked, bullet-riddled corpse should be put on display in lower Manhattan for all the world to see. The entire body should be digitally scanned, inside and out – and made available for everyone to take his or her own picture.

Walker ads that “For us Doubting Thomases out there – we need to see in order to believe.”

Brietbart isn’t alone. On Twitter, Emily Miller, a senior editor at the Washington Times demanded “proof” that Osama is dead.

With birtherism quickly losing steam after the release of Obama’s long form birth certificate, will the right-wing follow Brietbart’s lead?

Update

Politico’s Ben Smith and Byron Tau have more.


Update

,Responding to ThinkProgress on Twitter, Breitbart wrote, “I am not a friggin’ ‘deather’” and noted that he doesn’t agree with everything written by other authors on his web sites. He said he is merely providing a forum for an “open debate” on whether or not Bin Laden is alive.

Media

In Reversal, Breitbart Refuses To Admit Posting Out-Of-Context Video Of Shirley Sherrod Was A Mistake

By Travis Waldron on Apr 20, 2011 at 2:44 pm

Conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who posted the heavily edited video of U.S. Dept. of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod that led to her unwarranted ouster last year, participated in a softball interview on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show yesterday. Among the critics of the interview was former MSNBC reporter David Shuster, who used his appearance as a guest-host on the Bill Press Show this morning to ask Breitbart some of the questions Ratigan ignored, including a few about the journalistic ethics of the Sherrod video.

Though Breitbart admitted last year that he had taken the video out of context, he walked that back today, refusing to acknowledge his wrongdoing when Shuster pressed him on it:

SHUSTER: You yourself have acknowledged that you took the Shirley Sherrod video out of context, didn’t you?

BREITBART: No, I –, … No! No! No. I gave her her redemptive story. […]

Because what happened, I gave the context in the article. You acted, and the media acted, like the video dropped out of nowhere.

Listen here:

The video Breitbart originally published shows Sherrod telling a story about reluctantly helping a white farmer while she was a state worker in Georgia. The full video, however, reveals that the clip was part of Sherrod’s larger narrative about the importance of moving beyond racial biases. In a July 2010 interview with Newsweek, Breitbart acknowledged that the video was selectively edited and taken out of context:

Do you agree that the edited video took things out of context?

Well, yes. But I put up what I had. It granted a great portion of her redemptive tale, but not all of it. If I could do it all over again, I should have waited for the full video to get to me.

In one of several borderline ridiculous comparisons that went unchallenged, Breitbart told Ratigan yesterday that he considers himself “the Upton Sinclair of the mainstream media,” comparing himself to the muckraking journalist who highlighted numerous social injustices in the early 20th century. His passion, he said, is holding the media accountable, and it angers him when reporters fail to present “exculpatory evidence” to back up their stories. Ratigan, meanwhile, fawned over Breitbart throughout the interview, calling him a “sharpshooter who’s good” and an “incredibly passionate and effective man,” and mysteriously saying he didn’t “even have an interest in debating the issues” with Breitbart.

Politics

Breitbart: Boehner’s Full Of Himself For Crying After Election, ‘He Broke Up At The Concept Of Him[self]’

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Nov 5, 2010 at 3:40 pm

Appearing on comedian Dennis Miller’s radio show Wednesday, right-wing media tycoon Andrew Breitbart criticized House Republican Leader John Boehner for crying during his self-congratulatory post-election speech, saying Republicans’ electoral victory Tuesday wasn’t about Boehner, but was about the tea party movement, which is skeptical about the future-speaker’s commitment to fiscal responsibility. “This wasn’t about ‘I,’ he broke up at the concept of him[self],” Breitbart said, ironically commenting that he was glad that those comments “can’t get recorded” so Boehner “won’t hear me”:

MILLER: What’d you make of Boehner last night? That got a little weird, huh?

BREITBART: It was a little weird but thankfully this can’t get recorded and he won’t hear me, what I have to say about it. This wasn’t about ‘I,’ he broke up at the concept of him. Nobody voted him — he hasn’t even been elected by his own caucus to be the House speaker, that thing is still up in play. It was not like the fait accompli that Nancy Pelosi was.

I mean, he was behind TARP. The Tea Party created this environment out there, this Juggernaut, and the tea party and America are going to have to judge whether or not these people are sober and serious and will allow for America to move into a more fiscally responsible era. They did not do this in 1994.

MILLER: Yeah, he’s on the clock now, I would agree with you. I like John Boehner, he seems like a nice man and the initial quiver in the voice was quite touching. When he got seized up and couldn’t move on, I remember thinking like [Tom] Hanks and ‘there’s no crying in blood sport,’ and I wanted him to get on with it. But you’re right, that TARP thing was ill advised in the first place.

Listen here:

Indeed, while Boehner has taken on the mantle of extreme frugality — he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer last night that his first priority is to “stop the spending” — as Breitbart noted, Boehner backed the TARP bailout. Despite its success, the TARP has become universally reviled by tea party activists, but Boehner took to the House floor in 2008 to passionately — though not quite to the point of tears — urge his colleagues to support the Wall Street bailout. Boehner’s support for TARP, and his past support for other supposedly fiscally irresponsible measures, has led several tea party-backed candidates and lawmakers to say they may not support Boehner for speaker.

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