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Stealing Elections for Democrats: Games the Media Play

By Selwyn Duke

The Democrats have the best public-relations team in the world.

It’s called the U.S. media.

As a consequence, the Republicans essentially have to spot the Democrats a certain number of points every election. How much do the media steal for statists? While it’s hard to say if the figure is 10, 15 or 20 percent, how it’s stolen is obvious — if you’re not trapped in the Media Matrix.

When Texas Governor Rick Perry scuttled his election chances by forgetting in the CNBC GOP debate a third federal agency he’d like to abolish, it was headline news. And rightly so. Yet when Barack Obama indicated that our nation has 58 states, the media were missing in action. In fact, someone close to me had never even heard about the President’s incredible gaffe — although “gaffe” doesn’t really do such an unfathomable mistake justice — until recently when she watched a comedic campaign commercial I put together that includes footage of it (below):

Read the rest here.

Cain’s Pains: Let’s Talk about Character

Selwyn Duke

In the Republican debate on Wednesday, moderator Maria Bartiromo raised the issue of the sexual-harassment allegations that have plagued Herman Cain. “Why should the American people hire a president if they feel there are character issues?” she asked the GOP hopeful. It’s a question we should pose more often.

That’s not to say I lend credence to the charges leveled against Cain. It’s not uncommon today for well-heeled entities to pay five-figure settlements to put nuisance lawsuits to bed — as Cain’s former employer, the National Restaurant Association, has — and a couple of the candidate’s accusers have questionable backgrounds. It’s also odd that, as Ann Coulter pointed out, the allegations leveled against Cain have a David Axelrod connection. Axelrod has been called Barack Obama’s “hired muscle” by the New York Times, and he has a history of smearing Obama opponents with accusations of sexual misconduct. And what is this Axelrod connection? Among other things, Cain’s latest accuser, Sharon Bialek, once lived in Axelrod’s building, and she admits having met the political hit man. But you can read Coulter’s piece for the rest of that story, because my focus here will be different. After all, character does matter and all prospective leaders deserve scrutiny.

And this brings me to my point. If I’d been a candidate at the debate, I would have loved to have chimed in when my turn came and made this statement:

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MediaMatters takes another shot at stirring up anti-truth outrage

By Selwyn Duke

It really is a shame when a media watchdog has a twisted nose that mistakes putrescence for floral aroma—and vice versa. In a piece published yesterday, self-proclaimed media watcher MediaMatters (MM) criticizes Fox News for running the supposedly “misleading headline”: “Cambridge, MA set to Pay Gay Employees More Than Straight.” MediaMatters takes issue with Fox because the headline doesn’t explain that the reason for the measure is to compensate homosexuals for a tax that married couples don’t have to pay.

Of, course, a headline is a hook, designed to draw readers in, not an explanation. But Fox offered no such explanation—at least that’s what MM leads its readers to believe. The attack dog writes that Fox “excerpted an article from The Daily Mail, which has a similarly misleading headline. However, the Daily Mail article clearly explains that the city is offering gay employees a stipend to offset a federal tax that does not apply to straight employees.” The Daily Mail “clearly explains” this, so, obviously, Fox doesn’t.

Except that it does.

Soviet Style, Facebook Plants Negative Stories about Google

By Selwyn Duke

Sometimes you just wish that both sides in a contest could lose. Such is the case with respect to the latest revelation about Facebook: that it hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google. Writes Dan Lyons at The Daily Beast:

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like the Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

After learning that the unnamed client was Facebook, The Daily Beast subsequently received confirmation from a company spokesman that it had, in fact, hired Burson. And the company is well-suited to the task it was assigned. Lyons also tells us, “Mark Penn, Burson’s CEO, has been a political consultant for Bill Clinton, and is best known as the chief strategist in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.” In other words, Burson could probably disgorge a 25-page analysis on the definition of the word “is.”

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Review of "Trickle Up Poverty"

By Selwyn Duke

As I was listening to Michael Savage’s radio show no more than a year ago, I heard something that might have caused his faithful listeners to scurry for the anti-depressants. (That is, if the host weren’t so steadfast in counseling against their use.) Dejected over his unfair inclusion on a list of individuals banned from travel to Britain, Savage expressed an intention to leave the airwaves in the not-too-distant future. Since then, however, certain events have changed his mind. Not the least of these, I believe, is his desire to fight the good fight against the statist advance under the Obama administration. And the result of this patriotic motivation is his latest book Trickle Up Poverty (TUP).

While TUP is Dr. Savage’s latest book, it is no more the first than radio is his first career. The many-hatted host — who holds a doctorate in epidemiology and nutritional science — actually spent a good part of his life as a botanical Indiana Jones, traveling the South Pacific in search of plants with medicinal qualities. Considered a pioneer in the field, he wrote 17 books on health and herbal medicine and, upon transitioning to nutrition for the mind, wrote numerous best-sellers on politics and social issues.

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The Independent’s Over-the-top Anti-Catholic Bias

By Selwyn Duke

Except for those still caught in the web of the media matrix, it’s no secret that the Fossil Press seeks to destroy conservatism, tradition and Christianity.  It’s also plain that central to this are unrelenting attacks on the Catholic Church.  But a February 5 piece in The Independent written by one Michael Day reaches a low worthy of Cold War commissars.

Is it Time to Expand the Fairness Doctrine?

By Selwyn Duke

In keeping with the demagogue’s credo “Never let a good tragedy go to waste,” some among us are extracting as much mileage from the Jared Loughner massacre as they can.  It is being used to raise money and reduce freedom, with the latter amounting to calls for gun and speech control.  And among these calls is the proposal to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine (FD).

The basic idea behind the legislation is that if a radio station airs some controversial opinion, time must be provided for the “other side.”  And quite coincidentally, I’m sure, this is only to be applied to talk radio, an arena in which the “other side” happens to be the left side.

The Arizona Shooting: The Left’s Prejudice and Hypocrisy on Display

By Selwyn Duke

It was wholly predictable. When the shooter of Democratic Congressman Gabrielle Giffords turned out to be a white male — one Jared Lee Loughner — it was a given that the blame gamers would use the tragedy to tarnish the right. And, sure enough, the onus is, in fact, being placed on talk radio and Tea Parties, on Sarah Palin and Second Amendment proponents, on conservatives upholding constitutionalism.

This is just what the Left has been waiting for. They will not, to use a variation on that infamous Rahm Emanuel line, “let a good tragedy go to waste” — especially when it has been so, so long in coming. When a bomb was planted in Times Square last year, Mayor Bloomberg, ever detached from reality, flaunted his prejudices and theorized that the perpetrator might be someone who “doesn’t like the healthcare bill.” Hey, it fit the leftist narrative and certainly was “newsworthy.” And imagine the disappointment when the culprit turned out to be — as 99-plus percent of the terrorists bedeviling us today are — an olive-complected Muslim jihadist. Then it was, “Hush, hush, child. Nothing to see here. Move along.” It’s the quickest way to get a story off the front page.

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Whoopi Goldberg’s Ignorance

By Selwyn Duke

Since I’m well aware of how leftists’ claims of erudition are as empty as their ideology, not many of their failures surprise me.  But an exception came last Tuesday when Whoopi Goldberg was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly.  The two were discussing their differing views on the nature of the Islamic threat, with O’Reilly maintaining that we have a “Muslim problem” and Goldberg insisting that, no, we have a “terrorist problem.”  In typical leftist style, she even went so far as to rationalize away the threat, implying at one point that terrorists were as likely to be white guys as anyone else.  But as ridiculous as this denial of reality is, it was followed by an admission of ignorance that was truly staggering.  It occurred during the following exchange:

Caught Red-handed: CBS Reporters’ Scheme to Undermine Republican Joe Miller

By Selwyn Duke

In a case of JournoList redux, mainstream media reporters have again shown that their business is propaganda, not news.  In a shocking voicemail accidentally left on the cell phone of Alaska GOP senatorial candidate Joe Miller’s spokesman, Randy DeSoto, journalists can be heard scheming to manufacture stories for the purposes of undermining the Republican’s campaign.  Reporting on the story, WorldNetDaily’s Aaron Klein writes:

the journalists can be heard plotting to "find" a "child molester" among the politician's supporters.