Archive for the ‘Hannah Giles’ Category
Mainstream Media: The Devil Wears Pravda
Posted by John T. Simpson in ACORN, Featured Story, Hannah Giles, Politics, Van Jones on September 19th, 2009
From the riots and chaos of the 1960s to the anti-war rallies of the Bush years, the American Left’s revolution has been widely televised. In fact, the Big Three and Dead Tree Press played a major part in that revolution. From negative field reporting during the Vietnam War to negative reporting on McCain/Palin and the beatification and election of Barack Obama, the MSM has been marching in lockstep and waving the banner for the American Left all the way. RatherGate, anyone? Doesn’t get much more lockstep than a reporter trying to subvert a presidential election to the Left’s advantage.
But there’s another revolution underway in America today, and you sure as hell won’t see it televised or reported on by our new fourth branch of government. It’s not in their interest to do so. Nothing new there. For a long time now, political corruption has been rampant in the Leftist ‘mainstream’ media. In 1998, Matt Drudge made his big mark breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which Newsweek had buried to protect President Clinton. Think Obama’s Tiger Beat would have done that for Bush?
It has only gone way downhill since into Soviet-era Pravda territory. The MSM’s modus operandi today is identical, and I don’t say that lightly. But having listened to Radio Moscow broadcasts on ham radio for years during the Cold War era, combined with some Naval Intelligence training and research into the subject, I deconstructed the Soviets’ propaganda MO down to five simple canons. All five are in direct violation of every principle of objective and unbiased journalism there is:
1. Always make the State and its political leadership appear infallible.
2. Promote the State’s ideology and official policies wherever possible.
2. Demonize political adversaries and dissidents as enemies of the State.
4. Suppress news that reflects poorly on the State or its leadership.
5. If bad news cannot be suppressed, attack and discredit the source.
Those canons apply to any totalitarian dictatorship’s propaganda machinery, really. Just ask the Green protesters in Iran. I referenced the Soviet-era Pravda because I know it all too well. Example. All five canons were applied in the days following the KAL 007 shootdown by Russian fighter jets on September 1, 1983. There was nothing from Radio Moscow for days, then a terse statement of how Russian fighters encountered KAL 007 before it “continued on to the Sea of Japan.” That’s verbatim.
Finally, when the big news and damning facts could no longer be suppressed, Radio Moscow went on an all-out offensive, blaming the Americans for their own rash action in shooting down a commercial airliner and killing all 269 passengers and crew. They even insinuated that the flight number, 007, proved that it was on a spy mission. Don’t expect reason or sanity from propagandists.
Now, take a look at those five canons again and compare the MSM’s response to the Van Jones, Yosi Sergant/NEA and ACORN video sting scandals, all stop-the-presses headline stories. Van Jones, a presidential ‘czar’ whom we discover is a radical racist, self-avowed Communist and 9/11 Truther. Yosi Sergant, communications director at the NEA, an independent federal agency, politicizing NEA by coordinating with the White House and artists nationwide to create art promoting Obama’s political agenda, a direct violation of NEA’s charter. And all with our taxpayer dollars.
Last but not least, six ACORN workers in three different field offices, all most willing to perpetrate housing and tax fraud to facilitate the establishment of brothels with illegal alien child sex rings, and all on our dime. Makes you wonder who they’ve placed already. I can just picture Pinchy doing a Dr. Evil-like “Ssssh!” on that last musing at a Times editorial board meeting. Given the Paper of Broken Records’ non-coverage of Van Jones and Yosi Sergant, I’d say Pinchy has a whole bag of “Ssssh!”
The Pulitzer Committee should add a new award category for Best Non-Coverage of a Major News Story. It would be an Oscar-like Battle for the Gold the first year out. It’s tragic to bear witness to, having been weaned on great American investigative journalism that seems almost nonexistent in the MSM these days. Very sad state of affairs, but We The People need to know who and what we’re dealing with here. This now-endemic political corruption in the MSM goes way beyond just reporting or not reporting the news. It violates the sacred public trust We The People have put in our media watchdogs to investigate and report the truth on our behalf so we can make informed decisions.
That political corruption also introduces severe conflicts of interest when ideology trumps major front page news stories, which has happened far too often lately. Our government should be fearful of a free press, not worshiped by it. That’s more apropos for North Korea, not America. A truly free press is supposed to keep public officials honest and on their best behavior, regardless of party affiliation. Unfortunately today, in Animal Farm-like fashion, our MSM pigs and government farmers are all gorging themselves at the same table and berating all the other farm animals who don’t fall in line.
In closing, I’d like to leave you with some schocka headlines from today’s wild British tabloid-like Pravda that you will never see in our ‘mainstream’ press in this Golden Age of the ObamaMessiah:
Obama Embodies Grand Failure of Great Hopes
Barack Obama and the Banality of Evil
By stark contrast, our own MSM has reversed roles with Pravda in through-the-glass-darkly fashion and morphed into the Dear Leader Soviet-era version. All major MSM outlets suppressed the Jones story until it was no longer feasible, then attacked and discredited those who would dare expose a self-avowed Communist presidential appointee, all the while omitting key elements of the story and praising Jones despite it all in order to make Jones look good and his political opponents nefarious. That’s all five old-school Pravda canons rolled into one story, and that’s just Van Jones. As an American citizen, how much does that suck? Orwell had days like this. Da Svidaniya, Comrades!
Charles Lipson: Independent Prosecutor for ACORN
Posted by Publius in ACORN, Hannah Giles, News on September 19th, 2009
From an article that will appear in tomorrow’s Chicago Tribune:
ACORN is in very deep, very public trouble, and the U.S. attorney general should appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate. What we know so far is due entirely to two amateur reporters, James E. O’Keefe III, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, who managed to videotape a web of corrupt practices in ACORN offices. Dressed as a pimp and prostitute, O’Keefe and Giles walked into ACORN offices from New York to California and simply asked for business advice. ACORN officials were happy to provide it and were secretly recorded explaining exactly how to evade the law and scam the government. The tapes were riveting. Fox News rolled out a new one each night for a week, creating a firestorm of outrage and a burgeoning political scandal.
ACORN employees, without raising an eyebrow, much less calling the police, explained how the young sex workers could label themselves “performance artists,” underreport their income, evade taxes, fraudulently buy a house to ply their trade, and, worst of all, import underage girls from Central America to use as child prostitutes. One ACORN employee helpfully explained that the teenagers would even be tax-deductible since they would be “dependents,” living in the pimp’s house. Some states, led by California, are saying they will investigate. But this is a national scandal and there ought to be a full-scale national inquiry. To ensure impartiality — and the appearance of impartiality — political appointees at the U.S. Department of Justice should recuse themselves. This case demands an independent federal prosecutor.
Read the full article here.
ACORN, Kanye West and the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney in ACORN, Hannah Giles, Obama, Politics on September 19th, 2009
Journalists need to ask themselves, how did this happen? How could they miss the corruption at ACORN? President Obama was once an ACORN lawyer, so the group is certainly significant enough to warrant media scrutiny. Then how did all the seasoned professionals get scooped by two students–James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles–one of whom isn’t old enough to legally drink?
ACORN’s many problems have been well known for quite a while, at least to anyone venturing beyond network newscasts and liberal blogs. As an organization, ACORN doesn’t just limit itself to churning out forged voter registrations. It’s a full-blown racketeering enterprise worthy of The Sopranos, and it finances its operations with the help of taxpayer money.
So how could the major media fail to hold ACORN to account all these years?
I have my pet theory.
Political correctness has been slowly rotting the establishment media to its core, to the point where few professional journalists would dare launch a serious investigation into the exalted Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. Why? Simple: according to the tenets of political correctness, the racial makeup of the communities being “organized” automatically confers the presumption of moral superiority upon ACORN. So all those nasty rumors about ACORN must be no more than lies spread by racist propagandists.
To understand the mindset of the politically correct, there are a few rules of racial relations that you need to know. These rules establish the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism:
- If a person is a member of a group guilty of past racial oppression, that person has no moral standing in relation to anyone in any group that’s ever been a victim of that oppression.
- A member of an oppressor group is always assumed to be guilty in relation to a member of a victim group.
- An oppressor can only avoid presumed guilt by making a display of his or her sympathy for the oppressed.
- Members of victim groups can lose their moral standing by expressing a preference for individual rights as opposed to group rights.
- Advocating on behalf of a victim makes one almost as unassailable as being that victim.
- Coming to the defense of an oppressor is even more repugnant than being that oppressor.
This thinking is so common these days that many prominent liberals–from New York Times columnists to former presidents–believe that criticism of President Obama can only be motivated by racial bigotry.
That’s because people at a lower rung of the Multicultural Hierarchy are never allowed to challenge those above them. The purpose of this is to quell criticism and enforce thought conformity. Why break the rules and risk being thought of as a bigot?
Media coverage of Kanye West’s latest outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards illustrates this. Imagine the racial roles reversed:
It’s the Country Music Awards. A black female performer is accepting her first-ever award. She’s happy and a bit surprised; her style of music doesn’t usually win Country Music Awards. Halfway through her emotional acceptance speech, a white male country music singer runs up on stage, grabs the microphone from her, and announces that another woman should have won, a white woman–a “real” country singer–instead of the underdog black woman.
I’d bet my life savings that the reporting would be quite different than what happened in Kanye’s case. Sure, he was roundly criticized in the media, but we’re in an age when hidden motivations are attributed to every interracial interaction, so it’s interesting that few dared to discuss a racial angle to the Kanye West/Taylor Swift confrontation.
There’s a simple explanation. By the rules of the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism, when a member of a victim group is the actual victim in a real-world encounter, it’s an example of oppression. But when an oppressor becomes a victim in real life, that’s just karma, man. Any possible racial angle becomes irrelevant.
So forgive me if I don’t believe that the abundantly Caucasian and overwhelmingly liberal journalist class is capable of taking on a target like ACORN, no matter how apparent the criminality might be.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. The work of Giles and O’Keefe highlights the diminishing relevance of the establishment media. Despite the story getting no coverage on broadcast TV or in any major newspaper, it propagated online, then to talk radio and Fox News. And before any “mainstream” media outlet covered it, the political pressure grew to the point that the Census Bureau cut all ties to ACORN, and U.S. Senate voted by the overwhelming margin of 83-7 to cut off the group’s federal funding.
Even after these events, a vast majority of the media ignored the story. And yet the public kept getting the truth, which only made the media appear to be in the business of hiding news rather than reporting it. Realizing that this is not a winning business model for an ailing industry, a few of the more independent-minded reporters started covering the story, and now the White House Press Secretary is busy deflecting questions about the president’s former colleagues and fellow community organizers at ACORN. Despite the media’s best efforts.
James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles represent another massive power-shift in the age of Internet media. The first occurred when the Drudge Report broke Monica Lewinsky’s affair with President Clinton, a story that Newsweek got first but declined to run. The second was when CBS News got hoodwinked by documents that purported to impugn President Bush. After bloggers exposed them as forgeries, the documents ended up tarnishing CBS News instead. Long-time anchor Dan Rather was forced to retire in disgrace.
This is another huge embarrassment for Big Media–not so much because they look foolish, but because they’re beginning to look irrelevant.
Evan Coyne Maloney is a documentary filmmaker based in New York City. His film Indoctrinate U is currently airing on the Documentary Channel. He also the curates the website Brain-Terminal.com and can be found on Twitter at @BrainTerminal.