Posted by Kyle-Anne Shiver Jan 29th 2010 at 1:02 pm in Featured Story, Justice/Legal, journalism, media bias.
James O’Keefe still gets my vote for investigative journalist of the year. Teaming with Hannah Giles to expose illegal and immoral tactics deep in the ACORN shakedown operation was brilliant. Now, O’Keefe has one-upped himself with his exposure of an MSM drowning in its own leftist ideology.
American journalists once cheered for those among their own who were brave enough to risk jail in the quest of exposing corruption and malfeasance. Yet when O’Keefe and his band of whippersnapper journalists went undercover, disguised as telephone repairmen in the hopes of exposing Senator Landrieu’s denying her own constituents phone access to her, the MSM fell all over themselves denouncing the young men.Rush to judgment? No. It was a stampede.
Bravo Mr. O’Keefe, honey!
Writing as a boomer conservative, who was in my youth a raging leftist, I know well the forces at work against you now, and can only salute your willingness to go to the mat to expose liberal corruption, wherever you find it. Although, as an old mom, I would discourage you from carrying through with, perhaps, not-thought-all-the-way-through plans in the future, I still must commend not only your intentions, but also your guts.
Though you may pay personal consequences for your actions in the Senator’s office, you have succeeded in bringing two important items to light.
One, you brought necessary scrutiny to the charge that Senator Landrieu may have been, on purpose, blocking phone calls from her own constituents. You learned firsthand, evidently, that her phone system was not unable to receive calls as she was apparently telling her constituents. In allegedly blocking thousands of irate voters’ calls, under the guise of a malfunctioning telephone system, Senator Landrieu may have been abusing her office in quite dishonest fashion. If true, then that would be a serious breech of public trust, as any fair journalist would be forced to admit. Of course, the Senator denies this allegation and has insisted that too many calls “jammed” her phone lines. Nevertheless, now pressure will mount on the Senator to deal with disgruntled voters.
Second, you have demonstrated in full public view – once again – why the MSM is literally drowning itself in its own leftist ideology.
This isn’t your grandfather’s mainstream media.
During the 1960s a veritable revolution was brought to bear on American institutions by disenchanted young people, namely my own generation. The revolutionaries’ primary raison d’etre, in the beginning, was ending the Vietnam War. At the war’s conclusion, however, the American boomer left, some of whom had by now become communist revolutionaries, was far from satisfied. From their own privileged pedestals of affluence and prestige, they viewed America has inherently corrupt and in dire need of complete reorganizing.
As two former top-echelon radicals, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, documented in their book, The Destructive Generation, the radical communist revolutionaries of the 1960s never went away. They simply left the streets and poured into American institutions, working their ideology into every university. Their primary targets were the law and journalism schools, the colleges of education and the machinery of the Democratic Party. In all of these endeavors, they have been amazingly successful.
Horowitz and Collier summarized the ultimate aim, as elucidated by the movement’ chief philosopher, John Jacobs, thusly:
The idea was not to create a perfect state operating by the clockwork principles of Marxist law but to promote a chaos that would cripple America and ultimately cast it into receivership that would be administered by the morally superior third world.The American mainstream media, after several decades of this leftist ideology permeating journalism schools, now works on a predictable paradigm.
The primary operating principle of the leftist journalist’s paradigm is the presumption that all former underdogs (“the morally superior third world”) are, in fact, always morally superior — in every instance. Our mainstream media is now under what they consider a power-reverse mandate. Every member of every group that were once underdogs in America – all non-whites, women, gays and now Muslims – are to be given the extreme benefit of the doubt in terms of means, motives, and ends.
In the 60s radical worldview, nothing can be right with the world until the former underdogs are running everything. And it is the job — in their minds — of every “journalist” to advance this aim. Even though members of these once-underdog groups now are in the pinnacles of power, including the presidency, ideological journalists cannot embrace the shift because, in their minds, it is far from a complete and irreversible takeover. Complete and irreversible it must be – in their brainwashed minds.
Assuming untruths to be true, simply because they come from an erstwhile “underdog” group, is not journalism. Presuming innocence of all like-minded partisans to further a political ideology is as far from genuine reporting as one can get. It is blatant ideology masquerading as “fair” and “non-partisan.” And it is this blatant leftist ideology, which is drowning the MSM. Radical communism is no more palatable to knowledgeable Americans today than it was in the 1960s. It simply looks as though it is because the radicals espousing it now do so wearing suits in mainstream media outlets. The people, however, see through the tacky façade and, more and more, tune them out every day.
So, once again, I say bravo to Mr. O’Keefe and to every brave, young soul that dares to face off against the mainstream media today. You are the counter-revolutionaries we’ve been waiting for.
Big Journalism
