04/10/15

Sharpton Calls for “National Policing”

Al Sharpton, President Obama’s “go-to man on race” as described by Politico last year, is at it again. After riling up the nation over false narratives about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, Sharpton has found a case he can get behind where there appears to be little doubt this time that a white policeman, Michael Slager, brutally and unnecessarily shot to death an unarmed black man in South Carolina.

But in our justice system, even that cop deserves his day in court. After all, we were reminded of that right when on Wednesday, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty on 30 counts for his role in the Islamic terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon that resulted in four deaths.

Within hours of the release of the cell phone video of Walter Scott being shot dead in North Charleston, South Carolina, Sharpton announced that “It’s time for this country to have national policing,” adding “We can’t go from state to state, we’ve got to have national law to protect people against these continued questions.” Never mind that the cop in question was quickly charged with murder, fired from his job, and is being held in jail without bail. Once again, it appears that Sharpton draws the wrong lessons from such tragedies. No peace, no justice? Or is this what justice should look like? Sharpton announced yesterday that his organization, National Action Network, would stand with Scott’s family.

Jack Cashill, an outstanding journalist, recalls in his latest article just how those false narratives, including the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, take hold. Cashill cites the case of Rolling Stone’s false, and now retracted, story of a gang-rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house. He makes the point that “all right thinking people were of one mind…on the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, a collective misreporting far more consequential than that of the Rolling Stone rape story.”

The mainstream media often treat MSNBC’s Sharpton like royalty, promoting his left-wing agendas while carefully avoiding mention of his conflicts of interest and continuing corruption. The Washington Post recently published a piece that serves as an ideal example of such biased coverage.

The piece, “Sharpton to lead advocacy campaign in advance of 2016 election,” written by Wesley Lowery, acts as a press release for Sharpton’s National Action Network’s radical civil rights agenda. Lowery described this agenda as promoting Loretta Lynch’s nomination to replace Eric Holder as attorney general, and “opposing state-level religious objections bills, seen as discriminatory against gays and lesbians, and pressing Congress to advance reforms of the criminal justice system.”

Accuracy in Media has extensively outlined how the mainstream media have worked first to stoke racial tension in places like Ferguson, Missouri and then called for criminal justice reform throughout the country, with Sharpton as one of the more vocal media mouthpieces.

“Although he is a lightning rod despised by many police groups, especially the New York Police Department, Sharpton is vowing to take a more considerate line,” reported Lowery.

“We demonstrate that we are serious when we say, ‘Let’s take the name-calling down,’ and when we’re willing to hear from everybody as long as they are serious in substance,” said Sharpton, according to Lowery. “We don’t need a season more of screaming. We need some real policy.”

Sharpton has a show, “PoliticsNation,” on MSNBC on weeknights. According to accusations in a $20 billion racial discrimination lawsuit, and public comments by Byron Allen, a black TV executive, Sharpton has his show on MSNBC “Because he endorsed Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal.” Could that have been a factor in NBC getting the first interview with the gentleman who took the video of the shooting in North Charleston?

Sharpton’s MSNBC show wasn’t even mentioned by Lowery. Neither was his failure to pay back taxes, nor allegations of pay for play, nor that Sharpton was found liable for defamation in the Tawana Brawley case. And with Sharpton’s latest call for “national policing,” once again, Sharpton isn’t getting the media scrutiny he deserves.

04/8/15

Journalistic Blindspots Exposed at Rolling Stone and Beyond

By: Bethany Stotts
Accuracy in Media

Biased journalists view the world locked into paradigms dominated by their own preconceptions. Often, they and their editors select stories designed to confirm those narratives at the expense of the facts. This is pure punditry masked as reporting.

Take Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus,” for example. The Rolling Stone magazine writer approached a former rape victim working at the University of Virginia “searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show ‘what it’s like to be on campus now … where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there’s this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture,’” according to Erdely’s notes of her now-retracted story, which were obtained during an independent but solicited investigation by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

In other words, Erdely had decided that rape was occurring at these schools, that it was a pervasive cultural problem, and that it was her business to dramatize her preconceived narrative about this contentious subject. “As much casting director as journalist, she was looking for a single character with an emblematic story that would speak to—in her words—the ‘pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture’ on college campuses,” writes Jonathan Mahler of The New York Times.

“By the time Rolling Stone‘s editors assigned an article on campus sexual assault to Erdely in the spring of 2014, high-profile rape cases at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Vanderbilt and Florida State had been in the headlines for months,” states the Columbia School report.

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana appears to have come to the story with the same preconceptions.

“‘My original idea,’ Dana said, was ‘to look at one of these cases and have the story be more about the process of what happens when an assault is reported and the sort of issues it brings up,’” states the report.

The authors of that report called Erdely’s tactics what they were: “confirmation bias.” Mahler reports that Rolling Stone suffered from a “lack of skepticism.”

But those two phenomena are just symptoms of the underlying problem in journalism: the pursuit of a liberal political agenda. “Like ‘A Rape on Campus,’ [the Duke lacrosse rape allegations] was a story that seemed to conform to a lot of the public’s worst ideas about the behavior of privileged young men at elite colleges,” writes Mahler.

Even MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews questioned back in December whether this story would end up just like coverage of the Duke lacrosse players.

Erdely and the editors at Rolling Stone consistently ignored suspicious behavior by their source, such as her fantastic recall of details of the event itself, yet apparent unwillingness to corroborate key facts through additional people. Even her mother wouldn’t talk to them. “She also said that her mother would be willing to talk to Erdely, but the reporter said that when she called and left messages several times, the mother did not respond,” states the report. Jackie’s contact was sporadic, and she would stop responding for periods of time.

“Yet Rolling Stone‘s senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems,” states the report. And yes, Erdely will continue with her work there. “Sabrina’s done great work for us over the years and we expect that to continue,” Dana told The Washington Post.

“Reading the Columbia account of the mistakes and misjudgments in my reporting was a brutal and humbling experience,” writes Erdely in her public apology. “I want to offer my deepest apologies: to Rolling Stone’s readers, to my Rolling Stone editors and colleagues, to the U.V.A. community, and to any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article.”

But, as Warner Todd Huston notes for Breitbart, members of Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity which Erdely and Rolling Stone maligned, are not mentioned in her apology. Maybe they are just part of the “U.V.A. community” and don’t deserve special mention. To be fair, however, they are mentioned in Dana’s apology in the editor’s note that introduces the report.

Of course, the fraternity has also announced it will sue Rolling Stone because of this story, stating that it suffered “130 days of living under a cloud of suspicion as a result of reckless reporting by Rolling Stone Magazine,” according to The Washington Post.

Rolling Stone is a biased publication pursuing a political agenda, no doubt about it. Yet The New York Times itself is no stranger to similar problematic reporting.

AIM reported at length how the Times’ Matthew S. Schmidt based an entire news report covering Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi emails on anonymous administration sources who failed to provide him or the Times with the text of the emails for verification. Such reporting opens the Times to the possibility of the same type of errors as were made in covering Jackie’s story—the inability to corroborate basic facts and perform a paper’s journalistic duties to the public. All papers, not just Rolling Stone, should consider “A Rape on Campus” a much needed caution against this type of biased news.

04/6/15

BS Grows Fat on the Rolling Stone

By: Frank Salvato

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has issued a 12,866 word report that literally shreds Rolling Stone magazine, convicting the publication and its employees of gross negligence and ethical malfeasance in the publishing of a story that falsely accused the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity members at the University of Virginia of gang-raping a freshman coed. Yet, no one at the magazine will lose their job, not the editors or the reporter. Evidently it’s a good time to be a Progressive media hack in the United States.

The Washington Times reports:

“In a stinging report released Sunday evening, an independent review by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said the magazine was reckless in vetting its sources, including the purported victim, identified only as ‘Jackie,’ and neglected ‘basic, even routine journalistic practice.’

“Rolling Stone Managing Editor, Will Dana,…said the publication was ‘committing ourselves to a series of recommendations about journalistic practices that are spelled out in the report’…However, he spelled out no consequences for any staff members involved.”

Well, isn’t that special. They’ll try to do better. And we’re supposed to believe that in the smear-merchant industry that is today’s magazine media Rolling Stone is suddenly going to transform from a publication whose genesis was high times and Hunter S. Thompson into a 2015 interpretation of the 1950s Wall Street Journal. Don’t hold your breath.

Liberal offerings like Rolling Stone are great for entertainment reading, but they aren’t serious news magazines; they aren’t balanced in their reporting or the injected opinion pieces, and they do not prompt any critical thinking for their readers. They publish narratives most often based in pure ideology and let the facts fall where they may. This is not news reporting or traditional journalism in any fashion of the imagination.

Today’s magazine journalism – and increasingly newspaper and television journalism – is activist journalism; journalism meant to persuade the consumer to a specific point of view or ideological affection, often not providing the total of the story and/or cherry-picking sources to craft a narrative sympathetic to achieving the ideological goals held by the author and the publication. Such is the case with Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine.

Isn’t it time that we – as a people; as a society – recognize that we should not be gleaning our news information from entertainment publications and programs? Rolling Stone was originally a magazine glorifying the 60s drug culture. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were both comedy shows. Late night talk show monologues are jokes crafted on current events meant to be entertaining and witty, not journalistic missives crafted to educate the public on the facts surrounding news events. One has to question when the transition was made that allowed comedians and the drug culture the arbiters of truth.

In Rolling Stone’s refusal to fire all involved in this public deception – this ideological manipulation of the people, they have relegated themselves to the lowest rung of the tabloid sphere. In fact, the warped cynicism of Mad Magazine now has more ethos than Rolling Stone. And the need for serious news outlets remains…and that’s no laughing matter.

Frank Salvato is the Executive Director of BasicsProject.org a grassroots, non-partisan, research and education initiative focusing on Constitutional Literacy, and internal and external threats facing Western Civilization. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His opinion and analysis have been published by The American Enterprise Institute, The Washington Times, The Jewish World Review, Accuracy in Media, Human Events, Townhall.com and are syndicated nationally. Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel, and is the author of six books examining Islamofascism and Progressivism, including “Understanding the Threat of Radical Islam”. Mr. Salvato’s personal writing can be found at FrankJSalvato.com.

12/10/14

Rolling Stone Reporter Boasts ‘Finely Tuned Bullshit Detector’

Bob McCarty Writes

As an investigative reporter and author, I’ve talked with hundreds of people over the years. Many were politicians with agendas. One had a felony record. Others were experts at determining when people were being deceptive. And then there is journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely who revealed she has a super power!

Charles Johnson at GotNews.com reported today that the Rolling Stone writer, who now faces allegations she fabricated a story about a gang rape at a fraternity house on the University of Virginia campus, told an audience at the University of Pennsylvania she has “a finely tuned bullshit detector and when it goes off I pay close attention because it doesn’t tend to go off without a reason.”