Naturally, Ben Smith, alleged Media Matters ally and self-admitted (former?) member of the JournoList, tried to beat them to the punch, as Joel Pollak writes at Big Government:

The video, which Kaczynski says was “licensed from a Boston television station,” shows a young Barack Obama leading a protest at Harvard Law School on behalf of Prof. Derrick Bell, a radical academic tied to Jeremiah Wright–about whom we will be releasing significant information in the coming hours.

However, the video has been selectively edited–either by the Boston television station or by Buzzfeed itself. Over the course of the day, Breitbart.com will be releasing additional footage that has been hidden by Obama’s allies in the mainstream media and academia.

Breitbart.com Editor-in-Chief Joel Pollak and Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro will appear on The Sean Hannity Show to discuss the tape. The full tape will be released tonight on Fox News’ Hannity.

Who is Derrick Bell? The Daily Caller reports today:

A new video of then-student Barack Obama in 1991 is revealing another corner of the president’s murky past.

The video shows Obama, when he was a Harvard law student, speaking at a student demonstration intended to boost Derrick Bell, a Harvard professor and an advocate of racial hiring.

At the time, Bell was demanding that the university hire African-Americans instead of Asians, Latinos or whites.

Critics said Bell wanted to lower recruitment standards to increase the number of African-Americans on the staff.

Bell claimed the hiring would increase the variety of experience among Harvard professors.

“Let’s look at a few qualifications — say civil rights experience … that might allow more folks here who, like me, maybe didn’t go to the best law school but instead have made a real difference in the world,” he said in a Boston Globe interview.

Bell’s pitch was part of the movement to increase “diversity” in universities, and to reduce traditional teaching of classical authors, nearly all of whom were white men.

“Bell’s scholarship was very controversial and Obama’s wholehearted endorsement of it is eyebrow-raising,” said Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity. Part of Bell’s pitch, Clegg said, is that “America is an irredeemably racist country.”

Bell was “speaking the truth,” Obama said.

Ahh, Bitter Clingers/Typical White Person, the early days.

Watch for the reaction from the MSM for the video to be dismissed as “old news,” and “everybody knows this stuff,” despite the fact that the consensus from the MSM on the eve and the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election, was that nobody knew much about the Man Who Would Be President:

CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

TOM BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.

ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

Almost a month after the election, a CNN journalist wrote, “The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”

All of which is an unintentionally damning summation of the “journalism” performed by NBC, PBS and CNN in 2008. But for the next eight months, watch the MSM to do their damndest to keep Obama’s radical past buried as deep in the Memory Hole as possible.

Update: But of course. “Andrea Mitchell Runs Defense for Obama, Derrick Bell.” No word yet on fellow General Electric spokesperson Al Sharpton’s response.

More: Wow, this video really is back to the early 1990s — let the politics of personal destruction begin.

Oh and, heh.™

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At his American Power blog, Donald Douglas links to yet another terrific observation by the late Andrew Breitbart.

And since I haven’t linked to it here, Breitbart was the topic of the first half my interview with another Andrew — Andrew Klavan — in a podcast we recorded on Sunday, and now online at the PJ Lifestyle blog.

(Via Theo Spark.)

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Fortunately, here’s a screencap for when it’s pulled:

H/T: Instapundit.com.

Update: And again. At last, an action from the Obama administration I could support!

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As you may know, the Big sites were all offline today, first 404-ing, and redirecting back to the Breitbart.com homepage. I stepped away from my computer for about 20 minutes and came back just now and saw this:

As Larry Solov writes there:

Today, as Andrew dreamed and planned, we launch what he called “Breitbart 2.0.”

Many of you wondered what he was working on so hard during the last year of his life. Here it is.

This was Andrew’s design. And it is Big, like everything else about him. It took him – and all of us – sleepless nights and countless hours to make it a reality.

We go forward infused with Andrew’s fire, his fight, his humor and his warrior spirit.

His voice lives on now through us and through you – the army of friends and citizen journalist contributors he so deeply inspired and whom he, in turn, admired.

Andrew’s battle – our battle – has only just begun.

And if you’re looking for more on Andrew, Ricochet.com has set up an archive of all of their Breitbart-related posts, which is accessible here.

Update: I’ve been meaning to link to PJTV’s report from the day of Breitbart’s death, in which Bill Whittle first confirmed that he had been aware of Andrew’s health problems:

And yes, that’s me at the beginning of the video, sitting next to Andrew and Glenn Reynolds for one of the first segments recorded during the launch of PJTV at the 2008 Republican convention:

In his post at the Tatler calling an Army of Breitbarts (to paraphrase the meme from the other new media pioneer I was seated next to in 2008), Zombie writes, “A good muckraking investigative journo-activist breaks shocking stories that change the political landscape. A great muckraking investigative journo-activist — like Andrew Breitbart — shows us that anybody can do what he does:”

Because that’s the secret of Andrew Breitbart’s career: He rose to the top despite not possessing any unique skills.

He wasn’t a great writer. Not bad; just serviceable. He didn’t have a PhD. He personally wasn’t very handy with a camera. (Though he certainly knew what to do with newsworthy photos or footage once he got his hands on them.) He wasn’t an economic theorist. He wasn’t a beacon of moral purity. He wasn’t a deep philosopher. He wasn’t even a professional journalist.

But whatever he did, he did with gusto. And not just run-of-the-mill gusto: extreme gusto.

When he got the ball, he never fumbled. He sent would-be tacklers flying. And even if his team wasn’t on offense, he’d snatch the ball anyway and score a backfield touchdown before the other guys even knew what happened.

One thing we must learn from Andrew’s life: If Breitbart could do it, anyone could do it. We no longer have any excuse. America’s bloggers and citizen-journalists and new-media mavens need to get off our collective asses and make news happen.

Every day, you need to ask yourself: What Would Breitbart Do?

Great advice — but…

There are certainly elements of what Andrew did that anybody can do. Anybody can quickly launch a blog. (is it just me, or does the new Breitbart logo look a lot like the old Blogger.com logo? Does that imply a connection between a former and current bastion of citizen journalism?) Anybody can learn to record their own podcasts and videos. But few people understood how both new media and old media worked and how intertwined they were; as another Andrew in new media — Andrew Klavan — told me today in a podcast interview that will be online early this week:

When [Breitbart] talked about how information flowed and how the left corrupted the flow of information, he made it visual. He actually seemed to see what he was talking about. And he had this unique genius for affecting that flow. The way he timed stories. The way he released them. The ways he held information back until the mainstream media made their attempt to corrupt the narrative, and then slammed them with a second punch that brought the narrative back where he believed the truth lay.

To lose that skill, to lose that talent. I mean, I was extraordinarily fond of the man personally.  I was very, very fond of him. To lose him is a personal blow. But just speaking politically and culturally, to lose that particular skill, he was just irreplaceable.

I witnessed Breitbart’s ability to discuss how media worked and information flowed in an almost “visual” fashion in person. As I said in 2005, “Breitbart knows the X’s and O’s of Internet news much the same way that Bill Walsh knows the West Coast Offense. You can almost see the sparks flying as he talks.” You can see it in Peter Robinson’s April of 2009 Uncommon Knowledge interview with Breitbart, back when Andrew had just launched Big Hollywood, his first “Big” site:

This was shortly before Breitbart becoming a master showman in the last years of his life. Any blogger can do some of what Andrew did, but would you want to jump up to the podium and make yourself the star of Anthony Weiner’s press conference? Would you even think of doing it?

Also, there are elements of Andrew’s approach to new media that serve as a warning, as Kathy Shaidle writes, drawing upon Bill Whittle’s follow-up to the above video:

He says Twitter killed Breitbart, with an assist from his ever-beeping Blackberry.

Unlike lots of folks praising Breitbart’s bulldog warrior habits-of-being — engaging in hours long RT skirmishes online — Whittle says that’s precisely what led to Breitbart’s extremely premature death.

The very things many grieving people say they will miss most about their friend — his bottomless, Viking-warrior-king-like appetite for food, drink and combat — are the very things that pushed him through the exit.

His lust for life killed him.

If you’re safely alive and looking at all this from a distance, as 99.99999% of us are, that’s what you call “ironic.”

If you’re Breitbart’s widow and four children? I don’t have the words.

I know that if I were his wife, I — being me, after all — would likely be muttering over and over again:

Happy now? Happy now? Happy now?

Addressing myself to my late husband.

And to his cheerleaders as well as his enemies.

Yes, we should all be Breitbart (as long as we occasionally find the time to get away from blogging and Twitter for sanity and health’s sake). But we’re going to find that the man himself very, very difficult to replace. Particularly since the left are doing their damndest at this moment to destroy his predecessor in big media.

Update: From Jim Treacher: “Want to know why the left hated Andrew Breitbart so much? Because he took their cognitive dissonance and did magic tricks with it.” Don’t miss the video.

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Starting off with the above quote from Paulie on the Sopranos on how awful today feels, Jonah Goldberg told Hugh Hewitt this afternoon on his radio show:

One thing that he [Breitbart] and Bill [Buckley] shared was this basic contempt for the premise that the mainstream liberal elite institutions in the United States are in a position to judge and adjudicate the worth of conservatives. That they are in a position to judge our souls. That if we disagree with liberals, that proves that we are somehow wanting or lacking in compassion; lacking in humanity. That is a fundamental thing that enraged Andrew, this idea that if you disagreed about public policy, if you disagreed about how to organize society, that proved you were a racist. That proved you were a fascist. That proved you were a homophobe. It was the fundamental bad faith of the leading liberal institutions that controlled the commanding heights of this culture that infuriated him. And he refused, at the most basic level, to give them that authority over him or his ideas, and that is was fueled his Righteous Indignation, as his book title called it.

At National Review Online, former Breitbart colleague Michael Walsh describes Andrew as “the Right’s Achilles:”

In the war against the institutional Left, Andrew Breitbart was the Right’s Achilles; the bravest of all the warriors, now fallen on the plain. There was no combat in which he would not engage, no battle — however small — he would not join with glee, and no outcome acceptable except total victory. His unexpected death last night at the young age of 43 is not the end of his crusade, but its beginning.

No figure on our side was more despised in the whited sepulchers of the media/academic/political Left, and Breitbart wore their loathing as a daily badge of honor. His refusal to grant even a glimmer of moral absolution constantly enraged them, and his very existence was an affront to their carefully constructed — to use one of Andrew’s favorite words — “narrative” of moral superiority. Naturally, they are already dancing on his grave, with the manic joy of being suddenly and miraculously delivered from one of their most potent enemies.

Breitbart’s death is a tragedy, not only for those who delighted in following him into battle but for those who cheered him on as well. Andrew was larger than life, a charismatic natural leader, a big man in every way — physically, spiritually, and intellectually. He would meet a total stranger and immediately try to enlist him or her into his army, railing against the Left’s mendacity and misdeeds. He would practically pick you up by the lapels and shake you in order to make you understand the furious, urgent necessity of his fight.

Confrontation was his métier, and he routinely and gleefully waded into groups of lefties to challenge them face to face. Puckish humor was his stock-in-trade, and he would often disarm opponents with his boyish, goofy side. He was a virtuoso of the Twitterverse, a master of multi-tasking, and would think nothing of having a meeting with colleagues in his Westwood home while talking on the phone to someone else and working his Twitter feed. He joked that he had ADD, but what he really had was an outsized heart, fueled by courage and passion and, as the title of his recent book had it, by Righteous Indignation.

That indignation came to Breitbart in mid-life. A bluff Irishman who had been adopted as a baby by a Jewish couple in Brentwood (one of L.A.’s tonier neighborhoods), he moved to the right in college, at Tulane University in New Orleans, and crossed over completely with the Clarence Thomas hearings, which fueled his rage against the Left for their hypocritical treatment of American blacks. I can personally attest that no cause fired his righteous indignation more than the Left’s plantation attitude toward African-Americans.

Breitbart first made his mark on politics as Matt Drudge’s assistant on the influential Drudge Report, then honed his internet savvy by helping set up the Huffington Post — his impersonation of Arianna Huffington was uncannily spot-on — and, finally, created his collection of “Big” sites: Big Hollywood, Big Government, Big Journalism, and Big Peace. More “Bigs” were in the works.

As are more videos: “We Are Going to Release the Breitbart ‘Obama Harvard Tapes’ in One Week to 10 Days.”

Update: At Reason, Matt Welch adds:

He was genuinely, convincingly, overwhelmingly outraged at the workaday biases of liberal media, academia, and entertainment, and always positioned himself smack dab in the center of it. He’d be in the middle of some hilarious story about trying to do unspeakable things at some Irvine Meadows concert in the 1980s, and then if the conversation got steered toward the media, his eyes would narrow and redden, his face would go purplish, and Breitbart-Hulk would take over. Here’s how I described one such face-reddening moment in a 2004 Reason column:

“Every day I wake up in the battle about media bias,” he says. “The best analogy I can give to you is this: Have you ever gone to like the Santa Monica Pier, and seen one of those holograms on the wall, and you’re supposed to stare at it for a while, and there’s supposed to be, like, a magical castle in it? Well you look and you look and you can’t see that castle and you can’t see that castle, but eventually your eyes focus in such a way that the castle comes up. And then you can’t not see the castle. That’s how media bias comes to you from the conservative angle.” [...]

“Because you ignored us,” Breitbart says, “because you ignored Rush and Drudge and God knows who else, we decided to go out and create our media. And I think that what we’re doing is building up something that may be bigger and better.”

Before talking about that “go out and create our media” part, which will be Breitbart’s true legacy, I would like to stress here that Andrew’s broader point about media bias, while always hyperbolic, was also based on something broadly true. Here, let’s look at something I read this very morning in The New Yorker, by Hendrik Hertzberg. In a piece that listed first among the Republican base’s “basest biases” its “fierce hatred of the mainstream media,” Hertzberg, the lead political commentator in the country’s most journalistically respected magazine, describes the GOP core like this:

an excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, à la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global-warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolaters, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists

I was a “media columnist” when I met Andrew, and I will probably always disagree with the conservative/Breitbartian conflation of “bias” with “agenda,” but he certainly sensitized me more to the friction that non-liberals feel when swimming against the current of Acceptable Opinion. For which he deserves a posthumous thanks.

As Welch writes, “The next Breitbart-hater to match his entrepreneurial esprit-de-corps will be the first.”

Update: “The Five Alarm Firebell Falls Silent.” Jonah’s encomium to Andrew is now online.

More: “So many people like Aleister had the same experience: “I can’t believe I’m talking to Andrew Breitbart,” Stacy McCain writes, linking to blogger Aleister G. “And now they all have the same painful feeling: ‘I can’t believe I’ll never talk to Andrew Breitbart again.’”

Late Update: Welcome to those readers down under clicking in from Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald Sun.

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“The biggest mistake we can make at this juncture is to go back to waiting around for the next Whoever to ride in and save us. Because that’s a strategy full of FAIL.”

“His bigger message was always the same: Change the culture and you’ll change politics.”

Update: “If you want to know who’s going to replace Andrew Breitbart, you’re asking the wrong question.”

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Yes, I’m as stunned as you are.

I first met Andrew in the lobby of New York’s W Hotel in November of 2005, during the launch of PJ Media (then in its brief OSM phase, soon to return to its Pajamas for the next six years). I complemented him on how much I enjoyed Hollywood Interrupted, the book he co-wrote on how Hollywood’s elites have mentally gone off a cliff — and he seemed oddly surprised that somebody actually enjoyed the book. (Hey, there’s a reason why I made its title one of my blog categories.) Later during the week of the launch, as I wrote on my blog back then, Nina and I and the founders of PJM had dinner with Andrew at Smith & Wolinksy’s around the corner; it was fun to watch the photons just bouncing off of Andrew, who was still transitioning from being Matt Drudge’s behind-the-scenes guy to becoming as well-known as Drudge himself. “Breitbart knows the X’s and O’s of Internet news much the same way that Bill Walsh knows the West Coast Offense. You can almost see the sparks flying as he talks. And we were all happy to listen and absorb his advice,” I wrote back then.

I guess around 2008 Andrew discovered Twitter and used it to play offense, as Ace writes today:

“Right now, my twitter feed is already calling me a big fat homosexual.

“Hello Children at home. No, your dad’s not gay. That’s just how the left rolls.”

“Because they’ve held over our heads, with contempt, the false narrative of their innate tolerance. The least intolerant people you’ll ever meet, I know it, I live it every day, and I retweet it [I republish their hateful remarks so they have a wider audience] to remind them I know exactly who they are.”

This guy collects some of the hateful dance-on-your-grave tweets from the left. [Update: Many more here -- Ed]

I was just making the point on Twitter that even in death, especially in death, the left makes Andrew Breitbart’s case for him. They never seemed to understand that while the right is his audience, the left itself is his most potent ally — they prove everything he says with each hateful remark, each “ur a fag why don’t you get AIDS and die” tweet.

The left makes all of his arguments for him. All Breitbart had to do was add two letters: “RT” [re-tweet].

But then that’s the message of Andrew in a nutshell — and why the left hates him so, even in death. I’ll summarize it in a moment, but first, let’s go back to 1996, just before Matt Drudge appeared on the national scene. As David Gelernter wrote at the time:

Today’s elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the ‘96 Dole presidential campaign: ‘The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say “Yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You.” [Emphasis mine -- Ed] The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd – an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.

Andrew, Matt and Glenn and Roger, and the rest of new media helped to smash that world. Andrew Breitbart’s entire mission, both on Twitter and on his Big sites, was to say to the MSM, you don’t get the final word anymore. It’s now a conversation. We’ll consider what you report, and how you report it, and determine for ourselves how factually accurate it is. How well it matches up with our worldview. How well it matches up with modern “liberalism’s” mission statement that promises tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism — and if you can’t respect your neighbor, simply because he disagrees with you on the size and role of government, you’ve failed that mission statement. And when you’ve failed those objectives, we’ll call you out. That’s a very different media world than the Olympian redoubt that Walter Cronkite inhabited.

Tragically, one of the most potent voices for calling out the MSM has been silenced. But as Peter Ingemi, “DaTechGuy,” tweets, “I am Andrew Breitbart right now, and if you are a blogger on the right so are all of you.”

Keep calling them out.

Follow these links for some interviews and appearances from Andrew when he dropped by PJM’s old Sirius-XM radio show. And here’s my video of Andrew at Western CPAC in 2009:

Update: James Lileks on “The Toll.” And Andrew posthumously helps David Frum exits conservatism, stage left. And Ed Morrissey (who was with me when I shot the above clip at Western CPAC — Andrew mentioned “The two Eds” before the video rolled) has a moving tribute and helps answers the obvious question — how:

When a man as young as Andrew passes, everyone wonders how it could have happened.  According to Andrew’s father-in-law Orson Bean, he collapsed while taking a stroll near his home, and couldn’t be revived:

Breitbart was walking near his home in Brentwood, Calif just after midnight Thursday when he collapsed according to his father-in-law Orson Bean. Someone saw Breitbart fall and called 911. Emergency crews tried to revive him and rushed him to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center, Bean said.

He is survived by his wife Susannah Bean Breitbart, 41, and four children.

Terribly sad.  Again, keep Susannah and the children in your prayers today.

Indeed.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has a round-up of Andrew’s death and notes this:

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: “Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.”

Remember this stuff the next time one of these people tries to play the “Have you no decency?” card. As I said, even in death Andrew is exposing them.

William Kristol links to video of Jonah Goldberg’s tribute to Breitbart on Fox News; Jonah happened to be scheduled to appear on Fox today when he was told the news. Jonah dubs Andrew “The most fearless guy I knew.” Amen.

More: Michelle Malkin adds, “If he were here, he’d be retweeting all the insane tweets from the Left rejoicing over his death. Even in death, he succeeds in exposing the hate-filled intolerance of the tolerance poseurs.”

Still more: James Taranto adds, “An heir to Saul Alinsky is dead at 43,” and he’s right. “One key to understanding Breitbart’s effectiveness is Alinsky’s fourth rule: ‘Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.’ He demonstrated tolerance for bigotry at NPR and the NAACP, for violent partisan rhetoric at Common Cause, and for exploitation of the poor at Acorn. And he exposed Weiner, the sanctimonious male feminist, as a concupiscent con artist.”

Which led of course to one of Andrew’s finest moments, and the Greatest Press Conference In History:

Stacy McCain adds, “R.I.P., Andrew Breitbart: Innovative Genius of New Media Dies at Age 43.”

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Update (1:40 PM): The introduction to this post was written late last night, the night before news of Andrew Breitbart’s death broke throughout the Internet this morning. For my thoughts on Andrew’s career and the shock of his passing, click here. He’s not mentioned in the article below, because as of early 2002, he was still very much anonymously behind the scenes of The Drudge Report — which was still thought of as a one-man enterprise. Read the 1996 quote from David Gelernter on what we now call Old Media in the above post. It places into context both Andrew’s career and our snapshot below of where new media stood in early 2002. In retrospect, it’s a reminder of how quickly the Internet can level the playing field, and how quickly the Web can make the reputation of a man who had truly mastered all of its possibilities. Now back to our original post.

Ten years ago at Ed Driscoll.com, A blog was born — after first stumbling across something called Instapundit.blogspot.com in early September of 2001, a story I’ve told before, and can be found here. But since my first post consisted of this, allow me instead to reprint an article I wrote in February of 2002, which went online in March of 2002 at the libertarian Spintech Website, which is now sadly offline. It was titled “The New, New Journalism,” and began by channeling the ghost of a 1960s-era critic of new technology, last seen being plucked out of a Manhattan movie line in 1977 by Alvy Singer…

Marshall McLuhan, the nerdy but influential pop prophet of the 1960s, who coined those hip aphorisms “the global village” and “the medium is the message”, would probably love today’s phenomenon of Web logs. In fact, I checked with him, at my last séance. Here’s what he had to say:

Web logs make the reader both author and publisher in tendency. The highly centralized activity of publishing naturally breaks down into extreme decentralism when anybody can, by means of Web logging, assemble printed, or written, or photographic materials which can be supplied with sound tracks.

But Web logging is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a total revolution in this old sphere, or this old technology.

OK, to be honest, I wasn’t rapping with McLuhan at some 1960s cultural icon séance. But this is a direct quote, although it was actually about Xerography, or photocopying, as we like to call these days. I just changed “Xerography” to “Web log.”

And like Xerography, err photocopying, Web logging is a revolution, albeit, at the moment, a minor one.

In the past, essayists and critics became figures of some importance, largely because the print medium was so expensive to operate. The end product (newspapers, magazines and books) didn’t cost the consumer much, but the production of it, via the printing press, wasn’t cheap. So anybody who was in print, expressing his views (as opposed to simply slogging it out in the trenches as a reporter), had to be, and therefore became a very serious and important figure.

Today, the cost of putting a Web site up ranges from free to a hundred bucks or so a month (that’s simply the monthly fee for a server such as Verio, Hosting.com or Exodus. I’m not talking about graphic design, content, etc.) Compare that to the late 1980s. When Rush Limbaugh began his national radio show in 1988, Ed McLaughlin, his producer, had to go from station to station, to get them to buy his show. In comparison, ten years or so later, when Limbaugh put up a Web site, he was able to reach a national audience (heck, a planetary audience, although I don’t know how well El Rushbo translates in other countries) simultaneously, for the cost of his Web server.

So all of a sudden, a whole lot of folks are running around, kicking up a storm on the ‘Net, expressing views that are not necessarily anywhere near being “all the news that’s fit to print.”

Ground Zero for the Bloggers

Ground Zero for all of these textual shenanigans is Blogger.com, the most well known of several providers of free software that allows even the technically and artistically incompetent to present their ideas in a pleasing and easy to follow format. It also provides instructions, encouragement and its own awards. It’s like a film school, a camera store and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science all rolled up in one place…for bloggers.

When the Web log concept first debuted, it was largely used for on-line personal diaries. Lots of “day in the life” stuff; lots of updates of family information; lots of photographs of nature and birthday parties; lots of nice pretty, stopping and smelling the flowers commentary by assorted emotional exhibitionists. And this is still a common use for Web logs.

Then September 11th happened.

One interesting byproduct of that awful day was that the servers on most major news sites (CNN, The New York Times, etc.) were blown out from over capacity. Since a big chunk of America either didn’t go into work, or left early that day, they went home, turned the TV on, fired up the computer, and wanted to know just…what…the…hell…was…going…on.

But with the Web sites of news biggies jammed to capacity, some people started going to alternative sites. Little funky one man or one woman sites. And some of those men and women, such as Virginia Postrel on her page, The Scene, and Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com, spent the day keeping the nation, hell, the world, just as informed as the traditional news sites people couldn’t get into.

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Yesterday, Patterico wrote on his blog, “I am having this strong premonition that [David] Shuster’s half-assed ‘apology’ [on Twitter] is not going to save him from a lawsuit. Given his total distortion of the facts regarding O’Keefe, it shouldn’t. Again, time will tell.”

We didn’t have to wait very long — Christian Hartsock at Big Journalism writes today:

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe filed suit for defamation this morning against Al Gore’s CurrentTV, as well as “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann and guest host David Shuster, for falsely referring to O’Keefe as a “convicted felon” and falsely reporting that O’Keefe had been accused of rape.

O’Keefe has not been charged with a felony, much less convicted of a felony, and he has not been accused of any inappropriate sexual or even physical contact. Both facts are a matter of public court record, and therefore the statements by Current TV, Olbermann and Shuster likely amount to defamation with actual malice.

According to the complaint (after the jump):

Regarding Shuster’s “apology” on Twitter, Ace adds:

We’ll see if he corrects on Olbermann’s show, where he’s guest hosting, and where he made his libelous remark.

Shuster, of course, has been claiming this for years. No matter how many times people informed him he was factually inaccurate, he kept on claiming it.

Because he’s not a journalist, and realizes his reputation is too stinky to ever work in that field again. He’s now just a rabble-rouser in a suit.

The Leftist Media

We’ll report the truth. If under court order.

Naturally, Dave Weigel of the Washington Post-owned Slate calls the story “James O’Keefe, Libel Hunter.”

Because Al and Dave and Keith are victims here.

Related: “By following the narrative, it’s easy to deduce that while Shuster, Olbermann, and the rest of Al Gore’s network are no fans of James O’Keefe, they have their sights set on a bigger target: Andrew Breitbart.”

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“Could someone explain why the Daily Caller felt compelled to ask a race car driver/swimsuit model [Danica Patrick] about Obama’s contraception mandate?”

Yes, this post is illustrated. And quite nicely so…

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James Carville has been endlessly quoted as saying that “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.” Though perhaps we should add more than a little touch of Michigan into that mix as well. This new video from Reason.TV makes Harrisburg, the state’s capital, sound very much like Detroit:

The city of Harrisburg is Ground Zero for America’s municipal debt crisis.

Pennsylvania’s capital city has liabilities estimated at $610 million, which is nearly ten times its annual budget. The city is so deep in the red that last year it attempted to file for bankruptcy. Reckless spending did more than ruin Harrisburg’s balance sheet; it crowded out private industry and distracted from the city’s core functions. Today, Harrisburg is a dangerous, poverty-stricken city, with failing schools and a shrinking population.

Harrisburg’s fiscal nightmare may be a harbinger of things to come for American cities. In the mid-90s, local governments embarked on a spending binge, bringing total municipal debt in the United States to more than $2.8 trillion. Along with Harrisburg, Jefferson County, Alabama, Vallejo, California, and Central Falls, Rhode Island have filed for bankruptcy in the past few years. Several more cities are on the brink of default, largely thanks to taxpayer-financed stadiums, museums, housing, commercial complexes, other misconceived economic development projects, and runaway public sector salaries, pensions, and benefit packages.

Is your hometown the next Harrisburg?

Shot, edited, written, and produced by Jim Epstein, who also narrates.

It certainly makes for a bracing double-feature alongside Steven Crowder’s epic late 2009 video on Detroit’s woes for PJTV:

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“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.”

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I have no idea whether or not Matthew Continetti’s new Washington Beacon will ultimately succeed, but he kicks it off with one helluva manifesto, which promises a little political jiu-jitsu. “What would happen,” Continetti asks, “if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right?”

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.”

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“The Sun says tweets and blogs threaten future of paper,” the Financial Times breathlessly reports:

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.

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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.

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Back in early 1999 or so, I first had my cable modem installed, which was branded at the time with the logo of @Home, then later by AT&T, and now Comcast – and I may be forgetting an interim broadband provider or ten along the way. Web surfing immediately became fun, fast, cheap and with unlimited access, no longer a nasty, brutish, slow, and expensive Hobbesian proposition. I immediately started searching online for Websites that went against the grain of the MSM. You young kids on the Web today may not believe this, but back then, in those Paleolithic pre-Blogosphere days, there weren’t that many choices. If I’m remembering correctly, there was basically:

• 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.

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Back in October, even as Paul Krugman was claiming a close institutional kinship between his newspaper and Occupy Wall Street (leading James Taranto to dub them “Krugman’s Army”), Kate Zernike, his fellow Timesperson was writing an article with this unintentionally* hilarious passage:

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.”

(more…)

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•  “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.”

– 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:

“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.

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I started out on Photoshop in the early naughts, fumbling my through the program and using it for basic photo editing. A minor breakthrough came in 2005, when I submitted some Photoshopped images of Hugh Hewitt’s Blog book in various strange places. This was for a Fark-like Photoshop contest that Hugh’s producer Generalissimo Duane held, and I ended up placing Hugh’s book on Lawrence of Arabia’s desk, being bandied about by the pioneering multimedia journalists of the New York Inquirer, and being promoted by Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock:

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:

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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:

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.

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