“The trailer for the new film produced by Citizens United and directed by Stephen K. Bannon. ‘Occupy Unmasked’ goes deep into the ‘Occupy’ movement and exposes its origins as well as the radical ideas behind ‘income inequality’ that has become the centerpiece of the Obama re-election effort.”

After hours listening to the drone of Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, or Scott Pelley, one might conclude that America is a one-party state ruled by the GOP. But in fact the Republicans have controlled just one chamber of Congress for just one year, have been outspent by Democrats in the two most recent election cycles and are likely to be outspent in the current cycle, have drawn the ire and opposition of the 10 richest zip codes in the country, and have been so inept at shaping public opinion that one of America’s premier anti-cancer organizations had to backtrack when it decided to part ways with the country’s largest abortion provider.

Meanwhile, rather than tease out the connections between the big banks, unions, alternative energy companies, entrenched market incumbents, institutions such as the Center for American Progress and its Action Fund, and the policy apparatus of the Democratic Party, the press is far happier to mock Republicans as rubes and incompetents and to cover with relish Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe.

What would happen, though, if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right? What picture of the world would one have in mind if the morning paper read like the New York Times—but with the subjects of the stories and the assumptions built into the text changed to reflect a conservative, not liberal, worldview? What would happen if the media wolf pack suddenly had to worry about an aerial hunting operation?

You are about to find out. The Washington Free Beacon is here to enter the arena of combat journalism. Our talented staff will add to the chorus of enterprising conservative reporters, publishing original stories, seeking out scoops, and focusing on the myriad connections between money and power in the progressive movement and Obama’s Washington. Our research and war room divisions will supplement that reporting with context, additional materials, and breaking video. At the Beacon, you will find the other half of the story, the half that the elite media have taken such pains to ignore: the inside deals, cronyism cloaked in the public interest, and far-out nostrums of contemporary progressivism and the Democratic Party. At the Beacon, all friends of freedom will find an alternative to the hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole, and insipid folderol of Democratic officials and the liberal gasbags on MSNBC and talk radio. At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.

Hey remember all that hypocritical BS a year ago by an MSM railing against war and gun-related imagery? I think Continetti just told the MSM to shove it all up their lavalier mics.

And the timing of his new Website couldn’t be better, as an otherwise unrelated post by Peter Robinson makes clear today at Ricochet:

As recently as this past Friday, I would still have said that the single, overriding issue in this election year would be the economy.  Yet in the past 100 hours, Planned Parenthood and its pro-choice supporters in the press have savaged the Komen Foundation; the Obama administration, which might easily have backed down from its regulations forcing Catholic health care institutions to provide contraceptives in direct violation of Catholic teaching, has instead mounted a public relations offensive to insist upon its position; and the Ninth Circuit has ruled unconstitutional California’s Proposition 8, issuing its decision in language so self-righteous and so bald that it could only have been intended to insult the millions of Californians who supported the ballot measure.

As Peter writes, “Already the highest in a generation, the stakes in this election have just risen.” It would nice if the right had anything approaching parity with old media and the establishment left. Perhaps a more pugilistic tone might be a good first start.

Related: “And what is true of liberal politics is also true of liberal public policy, Jonah Goldberg writes in USA Today. “As the Obama administration has made clear to the Catholic Church, there is no neutrality, no safe harbor from liberalism’s moral vision. You’re either with us, or against us — which means we shall be against you.”

Online news sources such as Twitter and celebrity-focused blogs could put newspapers like The Sun out of business, its editor told a parliamentary committee on Thursday.

Dominic Mohan said that if such sites were able to report scandals that newspapers were forbidden to write about because of privacy injunctions, readers and advertising money could flow from the press to the internet.

Mr Mohan told the privacy and injunctions committee of peers and MPs: “We are competing for eyeballs with social media.”

Needless to say, this isn’t exactly breaking news.

The Washington Times reports their former editor, who was also an advisor and press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the heady Contract With America days has passed away:

Tony Blankley, a noted conservative author and commentator and former editorial page editor of The Washington Times, died Sunday morning, according to family sources. He was 63 and had been battling stomach cancer.

Mr. Blankley was an executive vice president of the Edelman public-relations firm in Washington, a visiting senior fellow in national-security communications at the Heritage Foundation, a syndicated newspaper columnist and an on-air political commentator for CNN, NBC and NPR.

He was also a regular weekly guest on “The McLaughlin Group.”

Mr. Blankley was editorial page editor of The Times from 2002 to 2007, and from 1990 to 1997 he served as press secretary and general adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

At the of the post is an interview Blankley gave to our Maximum Pajamhadeen during the early days of PJM’s existence.

• Matt Drudge
• National Review
• Reason
• World Net Daily
• The Brothers Judd (back when it was solely a book review site)
• Townhall
• Free Republic
• And the Media Research Center

At least, that’s where I spent the bulk of my time surfing for political news and opinion, until I discovered someone calling himself an “Instapundit,” who had linked to an article I had written for National Review Online. That was in early September of 2001, only a few days before the world changed.  I have a lot of respect for those early Websites and organizations that were willing to buck the establishment. They were the first to “think different” – as a popular ad campaign advised us all to do back then, while espousing perfect conventional wisdom sorts of figures – in the period before Weblogs made publishing on the Internet available to everyone. (Including me; I didn’t start blogging until March of 2002, and up until about 1999 or so, I was writing almost exclusively for that quaint medium called “dead tree.”)

So, I’m certainly honored to both once again be included in Doug Ross’s “Fabulous 50” list for the second year in a row, this time winning “The Bozell Award for Best Media Pundit.” Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center and the even older Accuracy in Media were calling the MSM on their leftwing bias back when the World Wide Web was just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.

Will I make it again for 2012? If not, it certainly won’t be for a lack of material, as the MSM promises to throw everything including the kitchen sink at whoever the GOP presidential candidate turns out to be. It’ll be a Dresden-like carpet bombing campaign by the media, to coin an MSNBC-approved metaphor.

And beyond that? Well, back in 1998, when actor Ving Rhames (from Pulp Fiction and the Mission: Impossible movie franchise) won a Golden Globe for playing Don King in a made-for-TV-movie, he immediately handed the award over to Jack Lemmon and said, “I feel that being an artist is about giving, and I’d like to give this to you.” The two immediately received a standing ovation from the audience. Maybe if I keep at this blogging thing for a few more decades, I’ll be able to hand over the Ed Driscoll Award for Best Media Pundit to Brent Bozell. In the meantime, a big thanks to Doug for the award, and for everyone for stopping by over the years – particularly since this coming March will mark our tenth anniversary in the Blogosphere.

So far, most Americans do not align with either movement. In a USA Today/Gallup poll taken last weekend, 26 percent of those polled said they were supporters of the Occupy movement, while 19 percent identified as opponents, and 52 percent said they neither supported nor opposed it. Meanwhile, 22 percent said they were supporters of the Tea Party, 27 percent said they were opponents, and 47 percent said they were neither.

But the large majority — 63 percent — said they did not know enough about the Occupy goals to say whether they approved or disapproved. In the early days of the Tea Party movement, a similarly large percentage did not know much about it.

Conservatives are trying to define the Occupy protesters before the protesters define themselves.

Gee, as opposed to the MSM going all out from the very moment the Tea Party first appeared on the national scene to define them as heavily-armed racist neo-Nazi reactionaries? But the MSM failed in their task in 2009 — despite throwing everything at the Tea Party — and as John Nolte wrote last week at Big Journalism, they’ve failed in their efforts as painting OWS in pastel United Colors of Benetton shades — to the point where they’re attempting to airbrush very recent history:

[T]he Left and their media allies didn’t expect New Media to own this story and to use the truth to drive the narrative out of their control. And we know they didn’t expect to lose this one because almost every prominent Democrat in America very publicly jumped aboard the Occupy movement with the expectation that their allies in the MSM could control the outcome.

Well, now Democrats like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are way out on a limb and have been caught in bed encouraging, endorsing, and attempting to legitimize a wildly unpopular movement most voters now  find repulsive.

So what’s a shameless left-wing media to do?

What they always do. Rewrite history.

And it looks as thought the Associated Press has decided to start the memory-holing with the following:

Democrats See Minefield in Occupy Protests

NEW YORK (AP) — The Republican Party and the tea party seemed to be a natural political pairing. But what may have seemed like another politically beneficial alliance — Democrats and Occupy Wall Street — hasn’t happened.

Insert record scratch here.

Sorry AP, but the only reason Democrats see a minefield is because they’re standing in it.

Democrats such as…

…House Democrats. And look, the story about House Democrats endorsing Occupy is an AP story!

…Top Democrats.

…Nancy Pelosi.

…A President named Obama, who said of Occupy, “We are on their side.”

…The SEIU.

Need I go on?

When the AP matter-of-factly (the most effective way to propagandize) states that this natural alliance “hasn’t happened” … they are lying.

Today at Big Journalism, Kurt Schlichter explores the Occupy movement’s next phase, and charts a response to continue the left’s Epic Occufail:

As we found during the BlogCon 2011 convention, the Occupiers are uniquely vulnerable to mockery.  By grabbing victim status, they hope to avoid the derision that they so richly deserve– which threatens them more than anything else.  The key to their success is to be taken seriously as a political movement.  By mercilessly pointing out their failures, foibles and felonies, we out-Alinsky the Alinskyites by utterly depriving the Occupiers of any ability to connect in a meaningful way with significant numbers of normal people.

No one wants to be part of a bunch of losers.  If we keep showing normal Americans that’s exactly what the Occupiers are, the Occupiers will fail.  Phase II – the Innocent Victims of the Fascist Police State Phase – is designed to reset the narrative that the Occupiers have lost control of largely because of people like us.  We can’t let that happen.  These people are clowns, and we need to spread the word.

It’s not time to wind down but to wind up, to get out there in the alternative media and through social media – and through personal, one-on-one contact with non-politically active people – and make the truth known.  The Occupiers are a bunch of losers.  If they don’t want to get pepper sprayed, they ought to stop doing the kind of things that get people pepper sprayed.  And we conservatives stand with the cops.  Liberals, who are you with – us and the cops, or with the guy with the Che t-shirt, Guy Fawkes mask and STD?

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this information battle, our pictures and our words telling the truth and providing context are priceless.

Read the whole thing.

Related: “If you want to see a revealing look at the emotional, and not simply political, investment liberals have in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, watch Mika Brzezinski and Jeffrey Sachs respond to Newt Gingrich’s comments over the weekend that the protesters should get a job and take a bath. Their rage is uncontained, almost tear-inducing, and comical. The whole crew and conversation, with one liberal egging on the other, is a fantastic window into the dominant mindset of modern-day liberal journalists.”

* Well, we think it’s unintentionally hilarious. With Zernike, you never know.

– H.L. Mencken, c. 1942.

• “I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”

– The late Deborah Howell, then the Post’s ombudswoman, November 14, 2008.

• “At Washington Post, mum’s the word on JournoList.”

– Byron York, the Washington Examiner, July 20th, 2010.

• “Much of the suspicion of press bias comes from two assumptions that are commonplace, if contradictory. The first is that reporters are out to get their subjects. The second is that the press is too close to its subjects—in the parlance of journalists, ‘in the tank.’ The press has been guilty of both sins at various times.”

– Evan Thomas in Newsweek, then still owned by the Washington Post, March 1st, 2008, in “The Myth of Objectivity,” an article whose subhead claims, “Is the mainstream press unbiased? No, but we aren’t ideological.”

No, of course not:

Click here to view the embedded video.

“When the dean of Columbia Journalism School whips out a camera to take your picture…” Kathy Shaidle notes, “Just wow.” O’Keefe is deep, deep inside the heads of “objective” journalists who just love having their century-old tactics thrown back at them.

A few years later, when I began to produce my Silicon Graffiti videos, an unanticipated side benefit is that I found myself using Photoshop more and more to produce artwork to go into the videos, including on the monitors in the virtual set behind me. If you watch the shot that begins here of a mushroom cloud followed by photos of various dictators, everything behind me, including the virtual set, is a single Photoshop .PSD file, with various layers animated in Adobe’s Premiere Pro to appear in sequence, timed to an ancient British Cinesound explosion sound effect.)

However, producing artwork for PJM, including many of the 85X85 pixel thumbnails on the PJM homepage greatly accelerated my learning curve. Around Christmas of 2009, while visiting the now sadly closed Borders bookstore in Santana Row, I came across Art and Design in Photoshop: How to simulate just about anything from great works of art to urban graffiti. While a fair amount of political correctness and left-wing sucker punches (including a demonic Reagan Photoshop parody) mars the book, there’s a lot to be gleaned from it. As its subtitle implies, the book walks the reader through how to recreate everything from old movie posters to food and toy packaging to Mondrian, Roy Lichtenstein, and other pop art images.

I also found a slightly older title, Photoshop Classic Effects: The Essential Effects Every User Needs to Know, which I purchased later, to be an excellent learning guide. (The one thing I miss about the local Borders closing is being able to browse through books such as these to see which ones viscerally grab me. If it’s love at first sight, I’m much more likely to spend hours in the book, rather than a how-to guide I feel like I’m pulling teeth to learn from.)

And so from those books, and a lot of trial and error, here are some of the better images I’ve produced over the last few years.

This image of President Obama in his plus-fours, inspired by a quip by Mark Steyn, grew out of a shot of Donald Sutherland in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, and was bordered by a Polaroid Photoshop brush plug-in, which James Lileks referred me to:

This Salvador Dali parody was produced following the instructions in the aforementioned Art and Design in Photoshop. I just replaced the melting clocks with similarly dissipated Obama logos:

Last fall, when Obama became obsessed with his sippin’ Slurpees metaphor, this was a natural, which I used for a time as my Twitter avatar. It’s just the hat artwork that Stacy Tabb produced for my blog’s masthead back in 2004 on top of an existing 7-11 Slurpee ad, on top of a default Photoshop gradient layer. The shadows and reflection at the bottom were cribbed from the instructions in  Photoshop Classic Effects:

Having been one of those legendary 45,000 people who bought the Velvet Underground’s first album shortly before forming his own rock group, this parody for a Zombie blog post’s thumbnail, when former VU drummer Mo Tucker supported the Tea Party last year, was a natural:

I had lots of fun parodying MSNBC’s silly “Lean Forward” ads in the fall of 2010. This one, created when Olbermann was still earning a paycheck from General Electric proved to be strangely prophetic…

When it was obvious that their party was going to lose Congress last year, and a majority of Americans disapproved of the Ground Zero Mosque, the MSM really teed off on their customers. This was my response to a bitter and punitive Time magazine cover late in the summer of 2010:

In 2009 or so, I purchased some Photoshop templates from Digital Juice for use in both videos, and as stand-alone artwork. I spent a pleasant half an hour or so putting this one together one Saturday last year:

This one I think I did around Christmas of 2009. It took quite a while to copy and paste, and line-up the text to produce this Spinal Tap-inspired image, which appeared in a Silicon Graffiti video on media bias, and an item here and during a stint guest-hosting on Hot Air.com about studying the Washington Post (then Newsweek’s owners) Kremlinologist-style.

This image was for a thumbnail for a post last year by Richard Fernandez called “Gone with the Wind.” For most of these images, I start big, and then use Photoshop’s “Save To Web” feature to reduce the images down to an 80 or 85 pixels square jpeg. I always save the layers in their original size as a Photoshop file, since you never know when you’ll need a larger image, or want to modify the image into something else. For obvious reasons, I’m hoping to reuse this image right around this time next year:

This was for a Victor Davis Hanson post last year on Obama’s poll numbers going into freefall. I wonder how many people have looked at this, and assumed it was simply a skydiver promoting Obama in 2008? I took an existing photo of a skydiver, tilted his angle to make him appear more out of control, and then placed the Obama logo on top of his ‘chute. I cut the various colors of the Obama logo into different layers, and then set the blending options on each layer to different settings, and different degrees of transparency, to make it appear as if the whole thing was blended into the fabric of the parachute. A fair amount of work, but the end result was pretty effective, I thought:

Finally, another image for a VDH post, this one from last month on “The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance,” and really well received. (The lads on Trifecta even mentioned it on PJTV.) It’s a photo of Obama heading for Marine One, with the sky clipped out, and a glorious sunrise pasted in underneath. I tried to visually convey the message of VDH’s post: When BHO is no longer POTUS, it will be Morning in America once again:

Interesting clip from James O’Keefe, built around some sort of recent panel discussion by Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen, both NYU media professors. Rosen once wrote quite perceptive pieces on the media in the mid-naughts, but was last seen here having Andrew Breitbart occupying a fair amount of the real estate in his cerebral cortex. Ace of Spades has a nice rundown on the clip, particularly on the portion that focuses on the New York Times’ early coverage of Obama:

Clay Shirky discusses the issue of bias in coverage, and how it’s done.

Regarding Obama in 2006 and 2007, he notes — at this point in time, at least — there really was no very credible reason to cover Obama seriously. He was a little-known very inexperienced freshman Senator. And black. The odds of him becoming President were less than 100:1.

And yet the Times realized (correctly) that he could be a viable candidate. But that itself is not supposed to be news; that is, the Times can’t “create the news” with a headline like:

Thirty Out of Thirty-Two New York Times Editors Agree: Obama Would Be A Good Democratic Candidate

Now that’s actually what they want to say. That is, in fact, the news: that a major influence-leading liberal news organization is impressed by a liberal politician (and so of course will be giving him favorable coverage in the future).

But they can’t say that, because supposedly they’re not liberal (wink) and because they are supposed to report the news made by others, not report the “news” of their own beliefs and opinions.

So what do they do? They begin covering stuff like Obama Girl, noting the cultural phenomenon of Barack Obama (which wasn’t really a phenomenon when they began treating it as such). Without expressly running a story with the headline, Reliably Left-Liberal News Organization Has Decided To Give Barack Obama Favorable Coverage Because They Like Him, that was in fact what was going on, as evidenced by their choice to elevate a little-known freshman Senator into Someone You The Reader Should Be Taking Seriously Because All These Smart People (Not Us!) Are Taking Him Seriously.

And of course, the first viral video clip on Obama was created by the Obama camp itself, responding to Hillary’s safe, lame “I’m starting a dialogue” first video in early 2007:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And once the snowball began rolling downhill, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Also in the clip, Shirky and Rosen discuss the NYT’s happy, shiny coverage of Occupy Wall Street — up close and personal in more ways than one.

There is a through-the-looking glass element to some of the criticism. The Daily Caller reported that based on photographs, the Occupy forces were almost exclusively white (numerous studies and polls have shown the Tea Party, too, has proportionately few members of minority groups).

The Tea Party, too, was vague about its frustrations in its early days, or contradictory, as in the sign at one rally that was cited as evidence that the Tea Party itself was uneducated and uninformed: “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.”

At Tea Party protests you could find the kind of one-off cranks that conservatives have found at Occupy rallies — Tea Party organizers would explain them as fringe-y interlopers. (Those Obama-as-Hitler posters, they noted, were the work of Lyndon LaRouche supporters, not Tea Party activists.)…

Conservatives are trying to define the Occupy protesters before the protesters define themselves.

Ed Morrissey, writing in The Week, insisted that the Occupy movement wants “seizures and redistributions, which necessarily means more bureaucracies, higher spending, and many more opportunities for collusion between authorities and moneyed interests in one way or another.”

…And then I realized it was by Kate Zernike, who presumably is still smarting from being called out (“pwned” as the kids on the Interwebs are wont to say) by Andrew Breitbart at CPAC in February of 2010 after her attempt to smear conservative journalist Jason Mattera* and the rest of the CPAC attendees as racists:

Kate Zernike of the New York Times, are you in the room? Are you in the room? You’re despicable. You’re a despicable human being. You’re the New York Times.  What is your headline here? You came to CPAC to get your prey and here’s your prey, Jason Mattera from HotAir and also from Young America’s Foundation. This is the headline: CPAC Speaker Bashes Obama, comma, in Racial Tones.

And also by Glenn Reynolds a few months later:

OBSCURANTISM:

Kate Zernike of the New York Times describes how tea-party activists explore “dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas” and study “once-obscure texts” by “long-dead authors.” She is of course referring to Friedrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom was excerpted in Reader’s Digest and never has been out of print, whose Nobel Prize for economics in 1972 celebrated the importance and mainstream acceptance of his thinking, and whose death in 1992 isn’t exactly ancient history.

If they didn’t learn it in college, it’s “obscure.” Which, alas, merely highlights the inadequacy of their educations. (I, on the other hand, took a semester-long seminar on Hayek in college.) At any rate, the “obscure” Road to Serfdom is currently #56 on Amazon.

Related: Stuart Schneiderman: Who’s Smarter Now?

UPDATE: Reader Michael Costello writes: “How long has Karl Marx been dead? And Friedrich Hayek outlived Saul Alinsky by 20 years.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: OUCH:

If I had said a day ago that your typical New York Times reporter doesn’t have the vaguest sense of what the rule of law means, I would have heard from all sorts of earnest liberal readers — and probably some conservative ones too – about how I was setting up a straw man. But now we know it’s true. It’s not just that she doesn’t know what it is, it’s that even after (presumably) looking it up, she still couldn’t describe it and none of her editors raised an eyebrow when she buttered it.

The claims of superior intellect on the part of the legacy media seem unfounded.

Regarding Zernike’s story on OWS, I love this notion of conservatives “trying to define the Occupy protesters before the protesters define themselves.” How does a movement not define itself before it starts? The Tea Partiers were very specific: stop spending, stop the bailouts, and once ObamaCare began to metastasize, stop that as well. Protests in the 1960s were highly specific as well: more civil rights for black Americans, let South Vietnam get clobbered by the North end the Vietnam War. How is it that Occupy Wall Street couldn’t articulate a similarly straightforward message?

But as far as actually defining the Occupy protesters, sorry, but the MSM established the baseline in early 2009. A CNN anchorman told his viewers that “It’s hard to talk when your teabagging.” One of his colleagues — holding herself out as an objective, in the field journalist — interjected herself into the story, arguing with the protestors about their motives. A prominent General Electric spokesman questioned the racial makeup of the Tea Party, and then refused an invitation to attend himself proffered by numerous minority tea partiers. The MSM set the baseline; they shouldn’t be surprised that the conservative Blogosphere returns the volley. And while the left sees OWS, the difference between two movements spotlight why there’s been so much bad press this time around: Tea Partiers general gathered in a single area, listened to speeches — and then went home to their jobs and families. For OWS, whether it’s NYT-approved trust fund babies or 38-year old moms who’ve chucked their lives to camp out in a park, spending 24/7 in squalor will only increase the odds that somebody will meltdown and do something stupid — particularly given the ubiquity of social media (which the left championed as a key tool during the 2006 elections.)

As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2005, while gathering the material that would become Liberal Fascism:

Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them. McCarthyism was a direct consequence of both the Red Scare and the Brown Scare. And when the tactics they mastered were turned on them, they acted as if they came from nowhere.

Which brings us back to the beginning of our post.

* Who unlike Zernike punches above his institution’s weight.

Related: “I confess, I haven’t been to any tea-party rallies so you’ll have to tell me: Are there a lot of ‘here’s what to do if you’re raped today’ fliers circulating at those too?”