12/28/16

The CIA-Media-Academia Axis

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

As controversy swirled around President-elect Donald J. Trump’s battle with the CIA concerning its questionable intelligence product on Russian hacking, a strong defense of the agency and an attack on Trump came from Joshua Rovner of Southern Methodist University (SMU). Professor Rovner declared in a press release, “By ignoring intelligence, Trump risks policy tunnel vision.”

But the idea that the CIA’s “intelligence” was sacrosanct was put in question when it was suggested that Obama’s CIA director John Brennan was orchestrating what Rep. Peter King (R-NY) called a “hit job” on Trump. King said, “We have John Brennan—supposedly John Brennan—leaking to The Washington Post, to a biased newspaper like The New York Times, findings and conclusions that he’s not telling the intelligence committee…There should be an investigation of what the Russians did but also an investigation of John Brennan and the hit job he seems to be orchestrating against the president-elect.”

A press release sent to the media quoted the “expert” Rovner, the John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair of International Politics and National Security, as saying that Trump’s pick of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was “especially troubling” because of Flynn’s “extreme hostility towards the CIA—which he has called a political arm of the Obama administration…”

I was struck by the professor’s confidence in the CIA and wanted to question him about it. But he declined. “Dear Cliff,” he responded to my email request. “Unfortunately I’m not available. All the best, JR.” I asked if he would ever be available and that perhaps the particular day I offered for an exchange was not convenient. I never got an answer. No explanation was given for the refusal to be interviewed. But I suspect that he feared he would be questioned in a challenging manner and he realized his blind faith in the CIA would not hold up.

This is, unfortunately, what happens all too often at big universities, where professors are held up as “experts” on various subjects and offered to selected news organizations to back up pre-existing assumptions held by Big Media reporters. This is how professors get face time for the schools that employ them. The interviews are supposed to redound to the benefit of their universities.

Sometimes these appearances can backfire. Professor Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia runs a “Crystal Ball” political prediction service that said Hillary Clinton was going to crush Trump on Election Day. His erroneous prediction was also embarrassing to MSNBC, which had him on just before the election to talk about the drubbing Trump was going to receive. Oh well. Try, try again.

In the case of SMU, the school has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. But Rovner was unavailable to support the view that the CIA was right and Trump was wrong. I can only surmise that he had visited the AIM website and determined we were not going to toss him softballs.

Both The Washington Post and The New York Times have waged war on Trump and Flynn over their lack of confidence in the CIA. Professors like Rovner constitute back-up for the media in this war.

But why would the professor be so critical of Trump and Flynn?

It turns out that Rovner signed an ad in The New York Times in 2015 that argues that the Obama administration’s agreement with Iran on its nuclear program “furthers American interests.” Rovner was one of a group of “national security scholars” from several prestigious universities who endorsed the deal.

Meanwhile, Trump and Flynn opposed the Iran nuclear deal.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) also opposed the deal, saying, “Iran has killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers, tried to conduct a terrorist attack in the United States, and is committed to annihilating Israel. This deal will guarantee Iran the capability to carry out its clear intent.”

The aforementioned attack in the United States is a reference to an attempted assassination of a Saudi official, Adel Al-Jubeir, while dining at Cafe Milano in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. in 2011. The plot was confirmed by officials of the Obama administration and Obama himself.

General James N. Mattis, nominated to be Trump’s Secretary of Defense, commented, “We caught them [Iran] in the act and yet we let them walk free.”

House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-CA), who is Trump’s nominee to head the CIA, opposed the Iran agreement, calling it appeasement and surrender.

The Rovner-signed ad endorsing the Iran deal, published in 2015, said, “We recognize that the regime in Tehran is repressive and pursues dangerous policies, but the nuclear deal does not prevent us from countering them.”

The ad said nothing about the plot to bomb the Georgetown café, which could have killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Americans.

Not surprisingly, CIA Director Brennan has urged Trump not to scrap the Iran agreement. “I think it would be the height of folly if the next administration were to tear up that agreement,” he told the BBC.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected] View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

06/17/15

Study Marxism to Understand Hillary

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s speech that launched his presidential campaign on Monday noted that Hillary Clinton’s “progressive agenda” includes the admonition that traditional religious beliefs “have to be changed.” Mrs. Clinton’s entire quote, in talking about opposition to her version of feminism and demands for abortion, was that “…deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

Bush also said of the Democrats, “They have offered a progressive agenda that includes everything but progress.”

But it’s never been the case that the progressive agenda offers real progress, as ordinary people understand the term. Instead, the “progressives” offer what Professor Paul Kengor calls cultural Marxism. This is the planned disintegration of the traditional family structure that has been the basis of Western civilization. Kengor, author of the new book, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, told me in an interview that the progressives are guided by the belief that “new rights are coming all the time and that everything is in a state of evolution.” He added, “There are no absolutes for them.” Hence, the gay rights movement has now morphed into rights for so-called transgenders, as we see in the relentless media propaganda that is designed to convince the public that men can, and perhaps should, become women. Kengor says the next step is for “progress” or “evolution” to a new level that includes such concepts and arrangements as multiple wives, group marriages, sibling marriages, fathers and stepfathers marrying daughters and stepdaughters, and uncles marrying nieces.

It’s no secret that Bill and Hillary Clinton’s family structure exists in name only. Bill, the disgraced former president impeached by the House, betrayed Hillary and had sex with a White House intern. He is a serial adulterer. But the Clintons have stayed together for political reasons, so that Hillary can pursue her political career. Together, along with daughter Chelsea, this arrangement has generated nearly $2 billion in donations to a family foundation that now finds itself embroiled in financial scandals over where the money went, and what it paid for.

Looking back on Mrs. Clinton’s career, I continue to be struck by the wisdom of Barbara Olson, the author of the 1999 book Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Olson was the lawyer and conservative commentator who was murdered by Islamic terrorists when the aircraft she was on, American Airlines Flight 77, was hijacked and flown into the Pentagon in the September 11, 2001, attacks. The crash killed 125 people on the ground and another 64 passengers and crew.

I interviewed Olson on December 8, 2000, when I hosted a radio show in the Washington, D.C. area. What follows is an edited transcript of that interview.

Q: Do you believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Marxist?

A: I believe she has a political ideology that has its roots in Marxism. In her formative years, Marxism was a very important part of her ideology…But when you look at her ideas on health and education, you see more government and less individual control. You see very little regard for families…

Q: Do you see Hillary as in favor of Socialist-style thinking at the global level?

A: We saw that with her activities as First Lady. She traveled more than any other First Lady. She had a global view. She spoke at the Beijing conference on women. She was very active in organizations and conferences that seem to be concerned about human rights but which are also directed toward a centralized governmental view. That is, one world. I looked at her travels and saw what she was doing. I always assumed Hillary was going to run for president. And I assumed that these international travels and her work with the Beijing women’s conference and the U.N. were going to be her way into the White House; that she was going to have a foreign policy platform that not many women have…

Q: So you do believe that she will run for president?

A: I do. She believes her ideology to the core. She’s worked for it behind Bill Clinton for years. I have thought that Hillary was going to run for the White House since 1993 when I started investigating the Clintons. She doesn’t compromise. She doesn’t come to the center. She believes in a true leftist, Socialist kind of government.

Q: She portrays her causes such as children’s rights and women’s rights in such an attractive manner. She has put conservatives on the defensive once again.

A: She has. That’s the central focus of her public relations campaign…But her ideas about health care and education have very little to do with women and children. They are the lever she uses to bring the government into the family.

Q: She’s been pushing treaties such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Isn’t she promoting global government?

A: Yes. We all know about her book, It Takes a Village. She says the future is not family but the larger village of teachers, pediatricians and social workers. She talks about raising children as less of a parental task than a social one…You have the destruction of the family unit. That’s very basic when you study socialism and Marxism.

Mrs. Clinton’s speech to the Women in the World Summit, where she spoke on how religious beliefs have to be changed, was significant for several reasons. The event was sponsored by Tina Brown, who launched The Daily Beast and later became editor-in-chief of Newsweek. The event was conducted in association with The New York Times, and included actress Meryl Streep and comedian Jon Stewart. These were the elites of the progressive media and Hollywood.

Typically, Mrs. Clinton talked about families at the event. “We know that when women are strong, families are strong,” she said. “When families are strong, countries are strong.” It’s important to understand this comment in light of her own failed marriage, which she has held together for political purposes, and how she has adopted the entire progressive agenda regarding how traditional families have to be changed to accommodate new sexual rights and new “family” structures. Olson’s book is still important in order to understand what Mrs. Clinton means by families, and how Marxists use family-friendly jargon to confuse and mislead. Kengor’s book is absolutely essential to understand how the progressive agenda would continue to transform the nation under a President Hillary Clinton.

Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign announcement demonstrated that he is aware of the political and semantic games that the modern-day progressives are playing on the American people. If he focuses on this Marxist strain in the Democratic Party in order to identify the forces that are rotting America to the core, he will find many conservatives receptive to his message. At the same time, if he pursues this course, the progressives in the media who gathered around Hillary Clinton during that April feminist summit will come down on the former Florida governor like a ton of bricks.

Will Bush follow up with a full frontal assault on the progressive forces destroying America? Or will he wilt under pressure and make nice with those prepared to destroy the country he wants to lead?

02/20/15

No “Major Scandal” in Obama Administration?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

David Axelrod’s book tour is off to a rollicking start, with perceived attacks on Hillary Clinton’s upcoming presidential run, and an absurd comment about the ethics and integrity of the administration he served so loyally, and continues to do so.

Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Obama, recently asserted something so patently untrue that it demands a response. “And I’m proud of the fact that, basically, you’ve had an administration that’s been in place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal,” he pronounced at a University of Chicago event.

The Washington Post leapt in to defend Axelrod’s claim by pointing to how President Obama’s approval ratings did not shift in the wake of the potential scandals he has faced since taking office. “It could be that scandals don’t have a lot to do with how Americans rate the president,” writes Hunter Schwarz for the Post.

It could also be that the liberal media, along with academia, determine what is classified as a “scandal”—and then refuse to report on scandals which don’t meet their own predetermined criteria. In this case, any lies, corruption, abuses of power, financial payoffs, or associations with unsavory characters or organizations that involve President Obama or anyone in his administration are never to be treated as a scandal.

The ongoing incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and the media often tilts in favor of the administration, leaving many scandals uninvestigated, minimized, or outright ignored. For example, both CBS News president David Rhodes and former ABC News president Ben Sherwood have siblings working for the administration. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, a former Obama staffer under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, joined Bloomberg News, while MSNBC hired Axelrod.

President Obama even joked in 2013 that “… David Axelrod now works for MSNBC, which is a nice change of pace since MSNBC used to work for David Axelrod.”

With so many members of the elite media in bed with the administration, Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan’s 2011 observation that “the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing” becomes essentially meaningless. Nyhan said that a scandal becomes a scandal “once the S-word is used in a reporter’s own voice in a story that runs on the front page of the [Washington] Post.”

If Axelrod is using the same criteria, then, of course, President Obama probably can be considered scandal-free. But a real scandal involves actual administration wrongdoing or lies, regardless of the “perceptions” dished out by the media.

Axelrod’s comments ignore the presence of a number of real scandals which the mainstream media, including The Washington Post, continue to report on as phony—including but not limited to:

Benghazi:

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 were greeted with a concerted public relations campaign by the Obama administration blaming the attacks on a protest inspired by a YouTube video, as revealed in the smoking gun Ben Rhodes email. (Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to President Obama, is CBS’ President David Rhodes’ brother.) The media, including David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times, continue to dispute key facts of the case such as al Qaeda’s involvement, have championed erroneous Congressional reports, ignore evidence of a cover-up, and have generally covered for the administration by promoting the idea that this is one of many “phony scandals.” The interim report of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi details the various failings and scandals related to Benghazi.

IRS scandal:

The IRS targeted conservative groups applying for non-profit status from 2010 to 2012. In what some see as an attempt to influence elections, the IRS began requesting inappropriate information disproportionately from conservative groups and then delaying their approval, generally chilling free speech throughout the country. Lois Lerner, at the heart of the scandal, has refused to testify before Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment. The media continue to argue that President Obama is not connected to this scandal, but it can be tied directly to the White House. The President has tried to assert that there isn’t a “smidgeon” of corruption at the IRS.

Fast and Furious

The Obama Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) encouraged gunwalking across the Mexican border of thousands of weapons, resulting, ultimately in the murder of border agent Brian Terry. An ATF whistleblower, John Dodson, spoke out in 2011 about the problems with the ATF’s decision to let guns go to Mexico. As I wrote about in 2011, Fast and Furious was a scandal that no longer could be denied, but the media continued to do so. Sharyl Attkisson recounts in Stonewalled, “But as outrageous and remarkable as the allegations are, most of the media don’t pick up on the story. They’re steering clear.” As I wrote, the scandal “involves some 1,500 guns, about 1,000 of which ended up in Mexico, and a Border agent…who was murdered with weapons found near the scene of the crime in Arizona. The weapons were among 57 linked to Fast and Furious which have been tied to at least 11 violent crimes in the U.S., including the Terry murder.” Like Benghazi, Fast and Furious resulted in real deaths—but the media continue to ignore or downplay this scandal.

Veterans Administration

Following revelations in 2014 that there was widespread Veterans Administration falsification of health care wait times, and that certain locations had created secret waiting lists for veterans, the media finally declared this a scandal. But it’s not Obama’s scandal, it’s a Veterans Affairs scandal. Hunter Schwarz writes for the Post that “It was a very significant scandal, to be sure, but perhaps not one that people laid directly at Obama’s doorstep.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler recently referred to this one as a scandal, noting that only eight people have lost their jobs so far as a result of this veterans care debacle, not 60 as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said last week on Meet the Press. But as I have argued, there were really two scandals at the Veterans Administration at the time: health care wait times and the disability benefits backlog.

Solyndra

Solar panel business Solyndra received more than half a billion dollars as part of the administration’s green energy program, before going bankrupt. Its executives took substantial bonuses before the layoffs began. And, a Solyndra investor was also a major bundler for Obama, demonstrating a conflict of interest when the administration refused to turn over more documents as part of a Congressional investigation. And yes, the Post reported on its front page that the Obama administration had asked the company to “delay announcing it would lay off workers until after the hotly contested November 2010 midterm elections that imperiled Democratic control of Congress.” But NPR ran an article last year victoriously announcing that “Now that the loan program is turning a profit, those critics are silent”—as if that had anything to do with the crony capitalism of the Solyndra scandal.

Obamacare

Obamacare is an ongoing debacle of premium increases and high deductibles coupled with crippling regulations. It leads to less, not more, health care access. While the focus has been on errors made within the “Obamacare rollout,” the media continue to champion exaggerated statistics regarding the alleged 10 million who have received health insurance under President Obama’s signature legislation. In reality, this program marks a rapid increase in Medicaid, and many enrollees are part of a “substitution effect” by which people who previously had insurance have switched to Obamacare. The subsidies, which the media casts as essential to the law, are under dispute in the courts, and increase the burden on the American taxpayer. Even Politifact called President Obama’s false assertion that Americans could keep their health plan if they liked it the 2013 “Lie of the Year.” Meanwhile, the complicit media finds every chance it can to champion this legislation’s “successes.”

This list just scratches the surface. Executive overreach has become standard fare, whether on immigration or environmental regulations. The Obama administration’s penchant for controlling leaks, a lack of transparency, and a war on journalists has been noted by the likes of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie Jr. who said “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration leaks,” and New York Times reporter David Sanger who said, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” James Risen of the Times added that the Obama administration has been “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”

The administration’s Middle East policies have been a disaster, if not scandalous. Just look at the growing threat from the Islamic State (ISIS) and other radical jihadist Muslim groups. More than 200,000 have been killed in Syria, Libya has become a jihadist playground, described by former CIA officer Bob Baer as “Mad Max,” and Yemen, as recently as September held up as example of where Obama’s foreign policy is working, has seen a coup by Iranian backed jihadists. And looming over all of this is the unfolding, outright appeasement of an Iran with nuclear aspirations.

What unifies all of these scandals and lies is how our news media have looked past all the administration’s corruption, treating, these occurrences as discrete, minor grievances, gaffes—or even conservative or Republican political maneuvering. This means that the constant lies by the administration, and President Obama himself, can be made with impunity. The media simply will not hold President Obama, or any of his associates who might tarnish his reputation, accountable.

12/20/14

Journalism Educator “Hates” Republicans and Loves Marxism

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

A feminist professor of communications at the University of Michigan has become a laughingstock for a poorly-sourced column in a socialist newspaper about the academic basis for hating Republicans. In the article, Susan J. Douglas began with the statement, “I hate Republicans” and declares that “marrying a Republican is unimaginable to me…”

A specialist on “Gender and the Media,” she is reportedly married with a daughter.

I’ve got something that beats that. Curtis J. MacDougall, the author of a journalism textbook that I used in college, was a Marxist with a 319-page FBI file, who wrote favorably about Fidel Castro and feared Joe McCarthy. MacDougall was an activist in the communist-dominated Progressive Party.

As a young journalism student, I studied from MacDougall’s textbook, Interpretative Reporting, which encouraged a form of advocacy journalism, and “learned” that Walter Duranty of The New York Times was one of the great figures in the media. I later discovered that Duranty was a stooge of Stalin and one of the greatest liars in the history of journalism. In fact, he helped Stalin cover up the deaths of 7- to 10-million Ukrainians in a forced famine.

A modern-day MacDougall, Professor Douglas tries to sound like an intellectual and apparently wants to be taken seriously. She insists in the article that a “series of studies has found that political conservatives tend toward certain psychological characteristics,” such as “Dogmatism, rigidity and intolerance of ambiguity; a need to avoid uncertainty; support for authoritarianism; a heightened sense of threat from others; and a personal need for structure.”

She cites unnamed “researchers” as proving that “the two core dimensions of conservative thought are resistance to change and support for inequality.”

Douglas, who graduated from Elmira College in New York and received a master’s degree and a doctorate from Brown University, is not only a professor but the head of the University of Michigan communications studies department.

Since MacDougall’s textbook, Interpretative Reporting, was instrumental in training a generation of journalists, perhaps he influenced Douglas.

Now, she is trying to influence her students. But her self-declared “hate” for Republicans has backfired. She has exposed the real purpose of her “educational” pursuits.

The Detroit News reports that Andrea Fischer Newman, a member of the UM Board of Regents, said she found Douglas’s column “extremely troubling and offensive,” and that it condoned “hatred toward an entire segment of individuals in our society based solely on their political views…”

Grant Strobl, head of Young Americans for Freedom at the school, called the Douglas piece “ugly and full of hatred.”

While the article has to be taken seriously, its dependence on clearly dubious “studies” and “research” make it practically ridiculous.

Douglas ought to be laughed out of academia.

In an earlier piece for In These Times, she also gave us a precious insight into her own ideology. She hailed Stuart Hall, the founding editor of New Left Review, as a “towering Marxist public intellectual” who had “influenced multiple generations of professors and their students…” It’s apparent she is one of them.

Indeed, she appears to thank Hall for helping establish “communication studies” as “one of the most popular majors in the United States…” She wrote, “We owe him a monumental debt.”

She notes that Hall was a follower of Antonio Gramsci, but doesn’t point out that Gramsci was an Italian communist whose writings were introduced to the United States in the mid-1950s by Carl Marzani, a publisher and Soviet KGB agent whose publishing house was subsidized by the KGB. (Interestingly, Curtis A. MacDougall’s history of the Progressive Party, Gideon’s Army, was published by Marzani as well.)

Gramsci popularized the idea of destroying Western society through infiltration rather than armed revolution. It helps explain why Weather Underground terrorists such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became college professors after giving up on a communist armed revolution inside the United States.

Robert Chandler, in his book Shadow World, noted that Gramsci’s Marxist theory of cultural revolution “stressed that dominance over the existing order in the West, including religion, was rooted in education, the media, law, and a mass culture of beliefs, values, and traditions.” In order to overturn the existing order and “Marxize the inner man,” Gramsci taught that “one must create a subversive program of ‘counter-hegemony’ against its supporting culture,” in order to “negate the established modes of thought and ways of doing things.”

That appears to be Susan Douglas’s mission in academia and journalism.

Douglas’ Curriculum Vitae identifies her participation in a “Rethinking Marxism” conference in 1992, delivering a talk on “Pop Culture, Kitsch and Social Change in the 1960s: Hegemony, Subjectivity and the Rise of Feminism.”

The editors of the journal, Rethinking Marxism, also sponsor “Marxism and the World Stage” conferences, described as “celebrations of the Marxian tradition.”

Douglas’s “academic credentials” include numerous articles for such publications as The Nation, The Progressive, and In These Times.

Her hate for Republicans is making news, but don’t think students in her classes haven’t been aware of the agenda she’s been pushing. Some of the comments from students who have taken her classes include:

She openly states that she hates certain members of the student body based on their political opinions. Avoid this closed minded intolerant person….
Boring and disorganized. Talks to students like they are children. I think she rates herself to get good scores.
Condones hatred and intolerance towards differing viewpoints.
Socialist feminist nut.

This controversy will serve a purpose if it renews a focus on the corruption in journalism education and why left-wing and even pro-Marxist bias in the media is getting worse.

Her book on decoding “enlightened sexism” was the subject of a talk she gave that was video recorded. An elitist who knows better than everyone else, she claims to be an expert on uncovering “subtle” forms of sexism in the media.

Her courses include:

Media, Culture, and Society
Media Theory and Criticism—introductory and advanced levels
Qualitative Methods in Media Studies
Gender and the Media
History of Broadcasting
Origins of Mass Culture: 1870-1930
Images of Women in Popular Culture: 1945-present
Analysis of Television News
Motherhood and the Mass Media
The Social History of Radio in America
History of Communications Technologies
Introduction to Mass Communications

In a University of Michigan profile of Douglas, she was asked, “What inspires you?,” and she replied, “My students inspire me. I love teaching undergraduates: their energy, their optimism, their openness to new ideas.”

But this “love” seems to have undergone a transformation into a closed mind of hate toward opposing views. She has made explicit what we know and understand to be their usually hidden biases.

Thank you Ms. Douglas for telling us openly what we always suspected to be the case. Thank you for alerting us to the Marxist revolutionaries in positions of power in journalism and academia.

Now, please tell us why you deserve to be in a position of trust and authority over students who desire a good education and want to make something of their lives.