How Come Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart Keep Scooping the New York Times?

Question by Randa: How Come Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart Keep Scooping the New York Times?
•BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
•SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
'Call Fox' - How Come Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart
Keep Scooping the New York Times?

By JAMES TARANTO

Last week we noted that Jill Abramson, managing editor of the New York Times, had acknowledged her paper was "a beat behind" on the story of Van Jones, the Obama administration's so-called green-jobs czar, who among other things once signed a 9/11 "truther" conspiracy petition. Times readers did not learn about Jones until he had already become the Obama administration's former so-called green-jobs czar. Abramson pointed out that long before the Times reported the story, "it had been discussed on talk radio, Fox News and other venues."

Our conclusion: "If you want to get the news ahead of the Times, watch Fox News Channel."

On Friday, Fox delivered on Abramson's promise by scooping the Times again. Early that evening, the network sent an email alert: "Census Bureau severs all ties with ACORN after hidden-camera videos expose 4 of group's workers advising 'pimp,' 'prostitute' on subverting the law." (Here's the full story.) The Obama administration had invited Acorn (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to "partner" with the bureau as "advocates for census cooperation and participation," as the bureau described it in its Dear John letter.

Readers of Saturday's Times got only a short (225-word) report from the Associated Press, which began: "The Census Bureau on Friday severed its ties with Acorn, a community organization that Republicans have accused of voter-registration fraud." It made no mention of the hidden-camera sting--although that was because of the Times's editing. The original AP dispatch, filed contemporaneously with the Fox alert, was twice as long. Among the material the Times cut was this:

ACORN fired two employees who were seen on hidden-camera video giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman who pretended to be a prostitute. Fox News Channel broadcast excerpts from the video on Thursday. On the video, a man and woman visiting ACORN's Baltimore office asked about buying a house and how to account on tax forms for the woman's income. An ACORN employee advised the woman to list her occupation as "performance artist."

Those two employees had worked in Baltimore (the other two were in Washington), and a story in Friday's Baltimore Sun reported that the investigators purportedly planned to traffic in child sex slaves:

The video depicts a man and a scantily dressed female partner visiting the Charles Village office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, where they appear to ask two employees about how to shield their work from state and federal tax requirements. The supposed pimp also appears to ask the employees how to conceal underage girls from El Salvador brought into the country illegally to work for him.

"If they don't have Social Security numbers, you don't have to worry about them," the employee says.

The Sun noted that the exposé, by 20-year-old Hannah Giles and 25-year-old James O'Keefe, was published on BigGovernment.com, a conservative Web site run by Andrew Breitbart, before being aired on Glenn Beck's Fox program.

It was a busy week for Beck and Breitbart. On Friday they claimed another victory when, as FoxNews.com reported, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it was "reassigning" Yosi Sergant, its communications director. On his Sept. 1 program, Beck had aired portions of a tape from an August conference call with artists, in which Sergant exhorted them to push the administration's agenda. The call was first reported on Big Hollywood, another Breitbart site, by a participant, Patrick Courrielche, who provided Beck the tape on which Sergant said this:

I would encourage you to pick something, whether it's health care, education, the environment. There's four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service. Then my task would be to apply your artistic, creativity community's utilities and bring them to the table.

Sergant also told the artists: "We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government, what that looks like legally. . . . We are participating in history as it's being made. So bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely and we can really work together [to] move the needle and to get stuff done."

Here is a reprint in full of the Times's coverage of the Sergant story: .

It's difficult to imagine that a Republican administration could employ an exponent of a crackpot conspiracy theory, "partner" with an apparently corrupt organization, or attempt to politicize an agency like the NEA without the mainstream media treating it as a major scandal. But with Obama in the White House? A quote attributed to the fired Washington Acorn employees sums things up nicely. The AP reported that they had advised Giles and O'Keef


Best answer:

Answer by truthsayer
The New York Times knows what's going on... But, they like Obama and aren't going to print anything that will make Obama look bad.

Ditto NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN.

This is the reason why so many folks are tuning in to FOX to see what's going on.

Update: Just to be "fair and balanced" CNN actually did at least one story not favorable to Obama.

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