Journalists love transparency. As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.

No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, technology and “the masses” uncovered the conspiracy:

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here.

American journalism died a long time ago; today Tucker Carlson got around to running the obituary. What The Daily Caller has unearthed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is Journolist, or are guilty of sitting back and watching Alinsky warfare being waged against all that challenged the progressive orthodoxy. The scandal predictably involves journalists posing as professors posing as experts. But dressed down they are nothing but street thugs. They deserve the deepest levels of public consternation. We must demand that they do.

The only way that the media will recover from the horrifying discoveries found in the Journolist is to investigate and investigate until every guilty reporter, professor and institution is laid bare begging America for forgiveness. Will they do it?

If the powers that be don’t comply with this demand, we can always call Jonathan Alter and Eric Alterman racists.*

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: The Democratic Party, President Obama, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, California Budget, Global Warming and Cooling, Television Networks, Weekly World News, Dan Rather, Oprah Winfrey, Texas State Fair, and Food Poisoning.

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: President Obama, 2016 Olympics, Glenn Beck, Chicago, Dow Jones, Norman Hsu, New York Times, David Letterman, Sarah Palin, Dan Rather, Whoopi Goldberg, Hilary Duff, and Roman Polanski.

And with the full knowledge of what will happen next, the current King of Late Night. David Letterman announced to the world that he has been guilty of sexual indiscretions with some of his staff.

 That had to be difficult. Over the past 27 years we’ve enjoyed watching Letterman take apart people who have fallen prey to simple human urges. From Gary Hart’s Monkey Business, through Woody Allen and Soon Yi, into the Clinton years, and right up to the Palin scandal that forced an apology; David Letterman has been right on top of others’ indiscretions.

So he knew what he is facing. In a stifled apology on his show last night that sounded like it was written by Garrison Keillor, he got remorseful with the audience:

Maybe this looks better to you at noon, but six in the morning all you can think about is every terrible thing you’ve ever done in your entire life.

I am motivated by guilt…I’m just a towering mass of Lutheran Midwestern guilt

But you have to give Dave credit. He did do the right thing. A person of Letterman’s wealth and power could have paid the guy off. He also could have gone across the hall and had the guy fired.

I’m sure that CBS News, and “48 Hours,” both still reeling from the Memo-Gate scandal of 2004, would Rather have swept the whole thing under the rug (capitalization intended). They could have quietly dispatched him, and with a few well-placed phone calls made certain the guy never worked in another news room ever again. (As it looks now, Robert Halderman might be editing a Prison Newsletter in the near future.)

Yet, as Greg Gutfeld observed, he did the Right thing (again, capitalization intended). Many similar scandals have been worsened with a botched cover-up. This takes more courage from someone like Letterman, who knows all too well, the implements of his impending torture.

So now we wait for the court of Late Night to pronounce verdict. Will the other hosts show a little professional courtesy, or will they attack with all the bluster that Dave has attacked others in this predicament?

There is too much here NOT to go after: Ironic that Halderman wrote the Letter, and Letterman did the Handling.

And  these women should have KNOWN  they were working inside Worldwide Pants.

The top-ten lists practically write themselves.

I’m predicting that almost all the Late Nights will go after it. There’s just too much competition between the shows to let it lay. It would be hard not to.

Most interesting will be Craig Ferguson’s response. Craig actually works for the Pants, so it will be interesting to see if Craig’s impish personality will trump his corporate loyalty (assuming he’s even free to even mention it).

On the other hand, I think Bill Maher won’t touch it. Something tells me that Bill has several skeletons in his OWN closet, and will avoid it like a real debate. No sense setting up your own inquisition.

And the biggest question of all, what will David do?

Stay tuned!

Last week, Gerald Marzorati, editor of The New York Times Magazine (a lifestyle magazine insert published by none other than the infamously left-leaning New York Times Co.) publicly answered a wide array of questions about the economy’s affect on the magazine, “the future of long-form journalism,” the magazine’s music coverage and ideological perspective, among other related subjects. 

While the Q&A was nothing spectacular, a question about ideological perspective stands out from the rest.  A reader identified as “Ron Mwangaguhunga” wrote:

 “The New York Times Magazine, I’ve been told by a former editor, considers itself “centrist” — playing stories straight down the center. Any comment?”

Before I go any further, let it be stated that there is nothing centrist about The New York Times, so to expect that one of its Sunday supplements would be produced in journalism’s traditional middle-of-the-road sentiment is practically nonsensical.  But, I digress.

While I do need to give props to Marzorati for publicly addressing the question, rather than tucking it away and ignoring its tenants, it’s important to pay attention to his response:

“Interesting. What you’re asking is: Does the Magazine have an ideology? At the risk of giving some of my colleagues hives, I think it does.”

Upon first reading this, I was jubilant!  Finally, someone at The New York Times Co. admits that there is some form of inherent bias present in its reporting.  But, my joy was quickly impeded by the Times’ own irrationality as I read on. Marzorati continued,

“Call it Urban Modern. That is, I think it reflects not a left-or-right POLITICAL ideology but a geographical one, the mentality of the place it is created: 21st Century Manhattan.”

Wait, what?  Can anyone identify what “Urban Modern” means? I’m pretty sure most rational Americans would associate this ideological umbrella term with “liberalism.”  Furthermore, if there wasn’t some sort of socio-political attachment inherently present in the term itself, why would Marzorati risk giving his colleagues “hives”?  Ask anyone living in 21st Century Manhattan (or anyone with a base idea of what it’s like to be a conservative living in the greater-New York area) and they’ll tell you that the social and political spheres (i.e. “the basic mentality”) are dominated by liberalism. 

While Marzorati’s willingness to share perspective with America is surely delightful, his inability to recognize his outlets overt ideological vice and his refusal to acknowledge disparity in the outlet’s overall coverage is less than appealing.  This is reflective of the fact that those journalists, whether they cover entertainment or politics, living in the New York area don’t even recognize the political and social slant under and through which they live – and subsequently write.

If The Times Magazine wants to cover lifestyle through a liberal lens, that’s fine.  But, the editor should at least understand and properly convey the magazine’s bias.  It’s time for entertainment and lifestyle outlets to acknowledge their slant.  Whether they choose to include the nation’s majority political perspective (conservatism) in editorial discussions is up to them.  Either way, admitting that they have a problem is the first step toward recovery.

Except among his loved ones, the hoopla that has accompanied his passing has nothing to do with Walter Cronkite the man and everything to do with Walter Cronkite the symbol.  He symbolized a time – “The Golden Age” to hear the wistful liberals tell it – of a solid, unconquerable media monolith that passed judgment on What Is The News and defined Socially Accepted Opinion. 

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Oh, those glorious days of yesteryear, when those drooling slobs without the education or breeding to live in New York and work at the Times or at one of the three networks would genuflect before their black and white TV sets every evening and await Mr. Cronkite to bestow upon them The Truth!  Now (sigh), it’s chaos, with too many different media outlets and too many different opinions.  It’s gotten out of (our) control! 

Come back, Walter, and save us from Fox News!

It was a Golden Age, all right – a Golden Age of enforced unanimity and bogus consensus hidden behind the strained-serious face and stentorian oration of St. Walter.  It was an age of media liberalism unchallenged by anything like a conservative alternative. And it was all encompassing.  In recent days, many have watched the footage of Cronkite announcing the death of John F. Kennedy.  But if you watch the footage for a few minutes before his genuinely moving final bulletin, you’ll hear his innuendo hinting that Kennedy has been shot by disgruntled right-wingers. It must have broken his heart to find out that JFK had been murdered by a commie loner with an affinity for Castro. 

Think of the proudest moments of the heroes of the media’s “Golden Age” – the McCarthy expose, the Watergate hearings, Cronkite’s own infamous thrust of the rhetorical dagger into the back of the fighting men in Vietnam (and of the Vietnamese who hoped for freedom) that was his Tet Offensive editorial.  It’s like a liberal greatest hits album. There’s nothing, nothing even remotely conservative in the pantheon – because nothing conservative would have ever even occurred to the media heroes like Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow and the rest. Their prized objectivity was really only a tool that justified their own biases and opinions – if they did it, by definition, it was “objective.” 

Cronkite was supposed to be the voice of the people of Middle America, but he was really just a loud voice speaking at them.  And soon after they turned and rejected the man Cronkite dubbed the smartest of presidents – Jimmy Carter!?! – and elected Ronald Reagan, he threw in the towel.  He passed the torch to Dan Rather, and the sun set upon the Golden Age of Media Liberalism.  For all his faults, at least Cronkite maintained a certain dignity, but Crazy Dan is a catastrophe.  When Rather dies, the quickest way to find his obits will be to Google the terms “Texas Air National Guard fraud” or “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”

The passing of Cronkite does mark the end of an era, but let’s not fool ourselves. He was human wallpaper to those of us who grew up watching him intone the news every night, a vaguely comforting presence during turbulent times for those of us too young to understand that much of what he was often passing off as the truth was the utter nonsense.  

But to simply dismiss his actions ignores their very real harm, and to simply write off the superficial eulogies of the mainstream media as mere nostalgia is to underestimate their danger. In the case of Vietnam, where he and the rest of the media elders did their level best to ensure that the Vietnamese had no chance of a free future, the killing fields of Cambodia are a stark reminder of the human cost of Cronkite’s conscience. And the threat of a return to a liberal media monolith looms ahead, with petty fascists fantasizing about re-branded censorship reestablishing their monopoly on public discourse under the guise of “fairness” and “community control.”

Walter Cronkite is gone.  Our condolences should go his family.  But we must also speak the truth – the man was not a hero, not a saint, and let us all hope our country never again sees another man like him.

The first rule of getting out of a hole you have dug yourself into is to stop digging.  But at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday, they handed out shovels at the door.

Let’s review the state of American journalism.  Newspapers are teetering on the edge of collapse, with a savvy investor sooner scooping up a handful of Chrysler common stock then pumping cash into the Boston Globe.  The New York Times’ stock is so toxic it can only be stored inside the Yucca Mountain repository, and I can’t drive by the Los Angeles Times building without some laid-off lifestyle columnist offering to wash my windshield for a buck.  Some newspapers have gone entirely on-line, making them not even newspapers at all. 

How about the traditional networks?  I’m not even sure that NBC has news anymore.  The audience for the CBS Evening News is getting so wizened that a recent survey revealed that the majority of its elderly viewers consider Murder, She Wrote reruns ‘too edgy.”  And their news department had the most efficient business model too – why pay to gather real news when you can just make it up?  By the way, was that Dan Rather I saw ranting on one of those weird networks at the far end of the cable box, between the channel running 24-hour a day Hummel figurine sales and the one devoted to large and loving it women?    

Now, if I remember correctly, about 53% of voters voted for the President.  Well, there’s no disputing that American journalism serves that chunk of the audience.  Their fawning subservience to those in presently in power is even starting to creep out President Obama.  “Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me,” he told his audience of tingle-legged supplicants.  The audience seemed to miss the point, which is that they have abandoned their cherished no-holds barred objectivity and that he now owns them body and soul.  Maybe I misunderstood from the assembled journalists’ delight, but isn’t that what the hip kids today call a “dis?”  

So, what about the other 47% who didn’t vote for this president?  With the Internet and cable undercutting newspapers and network news as business models, one might think that trying to appeal to this massive potential audience might pay dividends.  Apparently, one would be wrong.

In an example of outside the envelope thinking, America’s journalists have decided that the smart move to save their disintegrating industry is not to simply ignore this half of the populace but to actively insult it.  Guest comic Wanda Sykes set the tone by expressing her heartfelt desire that Rush Limbaugh’s kidney’s fail.  I’m no marketing genius, but I’m not sure that it’s smart to publicly wish for the death of the spokesman for a good portion of your potential consumers.  Sometimes it’s just best to keep the thinking inside the envelope.

Alienating potential customers is not proving to be an awesome strategy.  But instead of, say, not insulting them anymore, the journalism establishment is trying a new tactic.  It’s going to keep insulting its more conservative customers but tell these customers that it is in fact not insulting them and that they are stupid for believing they are being insulted. 

For example, I cancelled the Los Angeles Times years ago, and every time some boiler room flunky would call me to re-subscribe I would patiently explain that I didn’t particularly want to pay for regurgitated leftism when I could just turn on MSNBC for free.  I must not have been the only one because I started getting a scripted response that the caller would read off of a sheet that was probably labeled “Right Wing Idiot Spiel.”   I was told that I was wrong and that the Times provides and respects “a wide range of differing views.”  That’s true – it provides and respects the whole range of views from old fashioned New Deal liberal all the way to neo-Trotskyite communist. 

The Times recently had another marketing brainstorm.  Not enough people were buying the paper so they raised the newsstand price.  I like that – the Times not only opposes capitalism but engages in passive resistance to its most basic laws.

The traditional news media needs to put aside their shovels and stop digging.  But they won’t.   They don’t even realize what kind of hole they are in.  I just hope they keep those shovels handy - they’ll need them for their next job.

Please keep reading all of you who hate sports in general or golf in particular because this isn’t about sports or golf. In order to make sure I got the entire finish of the Masters I recorded the next two hours of programming on CBS. When I got home and watched the golf I realized I had inadvertently recorded “Sixty Minutes.”

I was just about to hit the delete button since I gave up watching this leftist propaganda program after Dan Rather flaunted his fake Bush Air National Guard documents. Then I thought what the heck I haven’t seen a good biased program lately and my wife and son were away for the evening. I decided to play a game and count the liberal clichés in the program. 

I wasn’t disappointed. First up, a piece about a Pentagon program for advanced prosthetics with only one mention of the Pentagon and no mention of Obama military cuts that will endanger this program. Second “news” story, a liberal standard: EVIL GUNS! Leslie Stahl and CBS just can’t seem to figure out why anybody would want to protect themselves with a weapon. In their world, if you outlaw guns then criminals will be forced to rob the local convenience store with a rock or a knife. You see, you silly, silly Second Amendment nut jobs, if we just had stricter laws then criminals would obey them!  Then Leslie interviews some college guy who admitted on national TV that he committed a gun felony by conspiring to buy a handgun without proper identification. Of course, he was breaking the law to show how easy it was to break the law! I wonder if any law enforcement agency will track down this gun felon. Here is my question: was CBS news complicit in this man’s crime? Did they encourage him to go into the gun show and buy a gun illegally? Did they give him the money? “I am sure CBS would never do anything like that!” He said, as the sarcasm dripped into the paragraph below.

The show closed with some old guy who reminded me of Andy Rooney but I am pretty sure Andy Rooney died in 1984.  A study at the University of Montreal discovered that Andy wrote his last funny line in 1977. It was a joke about Billy Carter and it almost got him kicked out of the East Coast Liberal Elitist Journalist Society. Since that incident he has been afraid to make any jokes since they might offend someone somewhere. Has anybody in America, left or right, every laughed at Andy Rooney? How does this guy still have a job? What does he have on the execs at CBS that they are afraid to get him a room at the Retired Leftist Home right next to Helen Thomas?

Andy closed out the show with a little global warming piece that hit all of the right liberal clichés. The poles are melting and the world water levels are rising, man is evil and using up all of the natural resources of the planet! We are running out of oil! We are cutting down all the trees! Andy even said that a big iceberg from the South Pole might hit the United States. I would try to dispel all of the eco-leftist lies that were in his piece but I don’t have the time. Come to think of it, Andy probably doesn’t either.