Following in the footsteps of the Washingtn Post, The NY Times mad fools of themselves when they suddenly decided that Glenn Beck and his right wing cohorts like Andrew Breitbart are credible news sources.
Eric Boehlert explains in his excellent article: The NY Times' pointless pursuit of right-wing "buzz" stories

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was "slow off the mark," and blamed "insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio." She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.

-- New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, September 26 column [emphasis added]

Talk about great timing!

Just after The New York Times announced it would appoint somebody to monitor the partisan opinion media more closely, and right after editors were chastened for reacting too slowly to buzzworthy news scoops launched by the conservative media, the right-wing press went into overdrive last week.

Like a proud peacock showing off its feathers, the right-wing media was in full bloom, showing the Times all the tricks that have made the movement's trade so renowned. There was outright lying, lying by omission, attempted guilt-by-association, U.S.-bashing, hateful smear campaigns (lots of those), fearmongering, incompetence, and just batshit crazy stuff. (Did I mention the heavy dose of crazy?) All the key notes were hit -- and in just one epic week. I hope the Times is enjoying its new-found, front-row seat to the right-wing media's slow-motion crack-up...read on

Please read the entire article for a list of lies the right has been pimping. Does the media really have to ask why Americans don't trust the traditional media as much anymore? When the Washington Post and the NY Times turn to FOX Noise for what the now seem to believe is legitimate news sourcing one has to wonder what ever happened to the meaning of the word "journalism." Acorn, dudes!

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Eric Boehlert at Media Matters wonders if Glenn Beck has forgotten that the entire reason he is in hot water with advertisers revolves around the fact that he called the President of the United States a "racist" and someone who has "a deep-seated hatred of white people".

Because, you know, in all of his lashing out this week and last at his critics, he has yet to address this central point. Certainly he has not apologized for it. In fact, he's acting as though he never actually said it. As Boehlert puts it:

I ask because watch this clip below of Beck on Bill O'Reilly's show this week and watch as the two men bemoan the attempts by nasty liberals "loons" to shut Beck up; to snatch away his Freedom of Speech.

What's rather astonishing is that while Beck and O'Reilly clearly make (indirect) references to the ad boycott campaign, they never explain to viewers what sparked the outrage. They never explain why. They never explain the campaign was launched in direct response to the fact that Beck went on national television and called the President of the United State a "racist"; somebody who flashed a "deep-seated hatred of white people."

At Fox News, that smear has been flushed down the memory hole, and all that's left is playing victim.

Ah, but here's the one thing: If you've been watching Beck this week on his program, he's been imploring his audience to record it -- write it all down, even -- because it's the Most Important Stuff They'll Ever Watch on the Teevee.

That's because, if you watch what he's been doing so far, what seems to be emerging is that he is basically building a case justifying his declaration that Obama is a racist who hates white people.

This became crystal-clear midway through his Fox News program Thursday night, during a segment featuring ex-Democrat now complete loser Patrick Caddell and the ever-vivacious Michelle Malkin to heartily agree with whatever craziness came burbling out of his mouth.

They were all gathered to talk about the "army" of "thugs" that President Obama is planning to gather under the combined umbrellas of ACORN, SEIU, Color of Change and whatever other insidious "radicals" Beck believes he's uncovered.

And what does this "army" of "thugs" look like?

Why, they're all black people, of course.

Watch the segment and observe the examples he offers of the kinds of "thugs" he says Obama intends to incorporate into his army: some gun-toting Black Panthers, a shot from a Louis Farrakhan sermon before a Nation of Islam gathering, and a group of young black men doing military-style exercises.

This, as he explained earlier in the show, will be "Obama's SS."

So we now can see the arc of Beck's thesis this week: He was right to call President Obama an anti-white racist because he is this very moment forming an army of militant black thugs to take over your white neighborhoods and threaten your children and impose a liberal fascist state.

Or something like that.

You do have to wonder when the honchos at Fox will realize that Glenn Beck may bring in the ratings, but he is inflicting a deep scar on their brand name that will be a long time fading.

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Howard Kurtz this weekend was only the latest media critic to pile on Lou Dobbs for his promotion of the Birthers' conspiracy theories on CNN. Like nearly everyone else, Kurtz dismissed the coverage of the story as "ludicrous," and his guests pointed out how profoundly irresponsible it was.

Indeed, Kurtz was a bit late to the story, as Jamison Foser observed:

Well, by the time Kurtz got around to addressing the issue on today's Reliable Sources, CNN President Jonathan Klein had weighed in, calling Dobbs' birtherism "legitimate" and denouncing Dobbs' critics as "people with a partisan point of view from one extreme." (Klein had earlier indicated that the story was dead and the birthers' claims baseless; his flip-flop raises the question of who is in charge -- Klein or Dobbs.)

... Had Kurtz addressed the Dobbs issue last week, when he should have, he might have been able to get away with not coming back to it. But by waiting until today, he put himself in a position where he had to either address Klein's comments, or shy away from criticizing the boss. He chose to keep quiet about Klein. And so we learned from Kurtz's unwillingness to criticize Klein that he likes having the job of media critic more than he likes doing the job of media critic.

As Eric Boehlert observes, the whole dustup has been overall a good thing:

But there was some good news last week, and it came from watching Dobbs' slow motion train wreck unfold on the airwaves. It came from seeing how eagerly -- how convincingly -- the birther claims were debunked, not only online by progressives, but within the mainstream press as well -- the same mainstream press that's often reluctant to show up high-profile media players such as Dobbs, no matter how badly it has botched the facts. And let's not forget conservatives, who dismissed and ridiculed the birther claims.

In the case of the birthers, though, Dobbs' corporate media colleagues were utterly relentless in their fact-checking. I still don't think Dobbs knows what hit him. And frankly, I'm not sure I've ever seen such a well-deserved media pile-on. It's hard to see how Dobbs' career survives the humiliation.

Of course, it's always dangerous when hateful and cuckoo conspiracy theories are ushered into the mainstream and right-wing critics are given a platform to peddle their hateful whodunits about Obama's nationality the way Dobbs did. But, in this case, I almost think it was worth running that risk in order to watch the tidal wave of media disapproval that Dobbs' fearmongering unleashed.

This is all true. It certainly is a heartening sign that Dobbs is finally facing this tidal wave for attempting to present as mainstream absurd rhetoric from the fringes of the far right -- because he has been getting away with doing precisely that for years.

Most of the time, this has involved his rantings about immigration, including his false claims that immigrants were bringing leprosy across the border and that they intended to take back the American Southwest for Mexico. As Alex Koppelman noted at the time, there was a consistent pattern even back then of Dobbs drawing on beyond-dubious far-right fringe sources for his "reporting."

Meanwhile, Dobbs has been overly generous in his dealings with right-wing extremists on his show. He's hosted Glenn Spencer of American Border Patrol without explaining to his audience that ABP is a longtime SPLC-designated hate group, and for good reason: they are unmistakably racist and white supremacist. He also hosted many leaders of the Minutemen movement (most notably Chris Simcox) on his programs over the years while hailing them as "a neighborhood watch" -- though he noticeably has failed to report it when the evidence becomes violently manifest that it is not anyone's idea of a civic-minded organization. More recently, Dobbs was one of the many right-wing pundits who attacked the Department of Homeland Security for its warnings about right-wing extremists.

That Dobbs has been permitted to operate in this fashion without facing the consequences among his fellow journalists has been one of the real ongoing media scandals that no one in the media wants to write about. So now it's out in the open -- and about time.

MM has put together a page where you can chime in on CNN's Lou Dobbs problem. Go make yourself heard.

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We've been reporting here at C&L for a long time on the way mainstream conservative pundits have been transmitting talking points, ideas, and a panoply of fake "facts" that originated on the extremist right and treating them as legitimate, thereby giving them credibility with the public they do not deserve, and in the process radicalizing increasing segments of the American Right.

Yesterday, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters hosted a panel of leading progressive who are ready to start speaking out about the phenomenon. It included officials from the Southern Poverty Law Center, America's Voice, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the National Council of La Raza, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, who set out "to examine how the mainstreaming of extremism impacts our security, politics, and culture."

The discussion follows on the heels of LCCR's timely report that was released earlier this week pointing out the toxic effects of mainstream right-wing punditry in helping to foment the atmosphere of intolerance, scapegoating, and violence that now surrounds the immigration debate. (Think Progress has more on this too.)

A classic example of this is about to occur: As America's Voice explains in a background briefing, this weekend's "America's Cause" conference will be a prime breeding ground for this kind of rhetoric:

For those who cover immigration issues, none of this hate speech is new. Nor is the fact that so-called legitimate spokespersons deliver hate-filled messages that flow seamlessly from CNN to the white nationalist foot soldier and to Congress in a flood of angry faxes and phone calls.

This weekend's American Cause conference is a vivid example of how the worlds of extremism, media and politics converge.
Look Who's Coming To Virginia:

According to the conference website, joining the Buchanan siblings at the meeting are such right-wing luminaries as: Tony Blankley, Tom Tancredo, Phyllis Schlafly, Terry Jeffrey, Ward Connerly, John Hostettler, Ken Blackwell, Christopher Horner, Richard Scott, Lou Barletta and Peter Brimelow. Leaders in the fight against healthcare reform, environmental protection, and more are joining unvarnished white nationalists to "Build the New Majority."

I've been talking about this subject on the radio quite a bit this past week, since it is the core subject of my book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. I've been pointing out how the underlying dynamic is almost identical in nature to the challenge confronting communities when they have to deal with hate crimes and hate groups in their midst -- writ large, as it were.

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Well, at least Charles Krauthammer didn't call Sonia Sotmayor a racist on Fox News Sunday. He just argued that she's basically a Latina supremacist:

KRAUTHAMMER: It’s a big deal because it tells you it was not a slip. It is who she is and who she thinks she is.

And the reason it’s disturbing is because Obama -- the premise of Obama’s candidacy was always that he was the post-racial American. And here he is appointing as his first truly important appointment a person who can only be called pre-racial.

He gave a speech in which he emerged on the world stage and said, “We’re not black America, white America, we’re not Hispanic America, Asian America. We are the United States of America.” And she says as a wise Latina, she has physiological, cultural endowments which make her superior to a white judge.

The real issue here is she’s going to end up on the court, but we can’t have a national debate about this issue. The civil rights movement abolished the idea of a superior race or class or ethnicity in America.

Are we going to have a person like her who believes that some ethnicities are endowed with a superior endowment and superior judgment and superior entitlements as a result of race?

Juan Williams attempted to knock this down by explaining what she was in fact trying to say with these remarks. But even he failed to explain a very simple, fundamental fact about the comment: She made it strictly within the context of a discussion on race- and sex-discrimination cases.

As we noted awhile back:

In that context, what Sotomayor was saying was neither controversial nor even particularly noteworthy -- it is in fact a matter of simple common sense. Of course someone who has lived through the realities of race and sex discrimination will be better attuned to the consequences and realities of the laws that judges will rule upon than someone who has been shielded from those realities.

Eric Boehlert examined the problem in even greater detail recently at Media Matters, and pointed out that there's been a massive failure across the board within the media to explain this simple fact:

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While Dick Cheney is praising Rush, Clear Channel is laying people off by the thousands.

Eric Boehlert writes:

Limbaugh's living large while radio boss Clear Channel implodes

Clear Channel's fall from business grace remains epic in its proportions. In 10 years time the company has gone from dominating a flourishing radio industry to a corporation that now teeters on the brink. (Clear Channel stock traded for $90 a share in 2000. When the radio company went private last year, pre-crash, the stock was already down in the $30s.) Lots of over-extended, debt-ridden media conglomerates are struggling through today's deep economic recession, but few face a future quite as perilous as the one staring back at the San Antonio radio giant.

And yet Clear Channel's most famous employee, Rush Limbaugh, remains oblivious to it all. I sometimes wonder what Limbaugh thinks when he reads about the not-so-slow-motion collapse of his radio employer while lounging in his 24,000-square-foot Florida estate or motoring in his $450,000 car to the airport to ride in his $54 million jet. Does Limbaugh feel bad? Does he feel a little guilty? And does he ever think about giving some of his riches back so that thousands of radio colleagues wouldn't have to be bounced to the curb?...read on

While this is happening, Rush is bragging to his fat-cat donors about his success and mocking the recession and its victims:

Last night, Rush Limbaugh came to Washington, D.C. to address the President’s Club Dinner, a meeting of wealthy donors and supporters of the Heritage Foundation. The audience included Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), as well as various millionaire trustees of the Heritage Foundation, like Thomas Saunders.

After more or less reprising his radio show routine, Limbaugh went on to brag about his $400 million contract with Clear Channel Communications. As he continued to gloat about his show’s success, Limbaugh mocked the idea that Americans are suffering, noting, “I’ve never had financially a down year” despite the “supposed” recession:

LIMBAUGH: But during all this growth I haven’t lost any audience. I’ve never had financially a down year. There’s supposedly a recession, but we’ve got - what is this May? Back in February we already had 102% of 2008 overbooked for 2009. [applause] So I always believed that if we’re going to have a recession, just don’t participate. [laughter]

I'd love to hear how all the laid off workers feel about RushBo's arrogance. I'm sure they'd all love to not have to participate in losing their jobs. But I don't think they have a choice; do you, Rush?