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| Conservative Liars James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart |
If we had systematically pointed out that the pre-Murdock Wall St. Journal was a touch on the right, do you think they would have tried to resurrect Joseph Stalin to bring him in as a blogger? No? Then why the fuck do media organizations accused of being liberal need to hire (or validate) not just conservative, but the most discredited, lying, and bigoted conservatives they can possibly find to throw off the dreaded liberal label?
Here are three examples, just from the last year. (I'm therefore excluding, among other incidents, MSNBC hiring Michael Savage and the NYT and Washington Post hiring half the neo-con crazies in the world for their op-ed pages.) In May, CNN hired Erick Erickson. Most of us just chalked that up to CNN being as ridiculously, vapidly, stupid as they usually are. I mean, liberals and anyone paying attention to the media were upset, naturally, but CNN is an easy target, and they were worthy of nothing but scorn long before that.
My other two examples come from the last week. NPR's CEO Vivian Schiller was fired over the taped comments of executive Ron Schiller (no relation) calling the Tea Party racist. (You know our opinions on the truth of that statement.) Of course, the tape was created by lying, discredited, media stunt man James O'Keefe, As a refresher, he was behind the ACORN lies, he was the failed attempt to sexually entrap CNN's Abbie Boudreau, and he was arrested for breaking into Sen. Landrieu's office and attempting to tamper with her phones. Was anyone remotely surprised to find out that O'Keefe heavily edited the NPR video to make Schiller look a lot worse? Yet, NPR felt the need to give him credibility by immediately firing their chief executive.
Jay Rosen wrote about this:
1. As I said at PressThink four months ago: Wake up, public media people! You have no magic exemption from the requirements of political maturity. There are people out there who seek your destruction, and they are not evenly distributed. They reside among culture warriors on the political right. That is a fact, and you are in the business of reporting facts.He has a few more points, but I'll just quote the first three. And of course, he's absolutely right - how can NPR give credence to this asshole?
2. Among them is James O’Keefe, the trickster who secretly taped NPR executive Ron Schiller ranting about the Tea Party and saying other incendiary things. Like his patron, Andrew Breitbart, who has said he’s “committed to the destruction of the old media guard” (adding, “it’s a very good business model…”) O’Keefe is a performance artist who profits from the public wreckage and institutional panic his media stunts seek to create.
3. To give in to that panic is to cooperate in your own demise. Which is exactly what the NPR board did by demanding that Schiller–a visionary leader who knew where NPR had to go in the digital age–resign immediately, and without a fight. This was a stupid and cowardly act, which will be justified as institutional realism, the price for one too many slip-ups. It is not realism. The decision to let Schiller go originates in a delusion, captured so well by Jon Stewart during the Juan Williams controversy when he told NPR: you brought a tote bag to a knife fight! The delusion is that you can keep doing that and somehow it will all work out in the end.
Finally, the thing that just set me off, and caused me to swear continually while writing this: Andrew Breitbart, James O'Keefe's creator, who oversaw not only the ACORN stunt, but the Shirley Sherrod smear, and is also known as a fucking liar, is now a blogger for the (often actually liberal) Huffington Post.
Seriously, what bugs me about all this is not that conservatives are getting a chance to air their views (though God knows they don't lack for opportunity), but that the worst liars among them are being legitimated by the very media outlets they are trying to destroy. Hell, HuffPo wasn't even on the list because they're a blog site, and thus inherently unSerious, so there's no need to target them. I can guarantee that's HuffPo's motivation for this hire - to appear Serious by recruiting a conservative blogger and thus having "balance." It makes me want to light my hair on fire.
Honestly, I'm not sure which is worse: this behavior or the reflexive one-sided firings I've written about in the past, that are not based on lies, but only idiocy. I think this is worse, but both behaviors hasten the mission of the gotcha men that want to destroy the media. This is just unreal.
