'You Are a Bad, Bad, Bad Journalist'

I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. It felt like a scene from a movie that conveniently ties plot points together when two critical characters in the storyline share a moment of implausible significance – where the intrepid reporter finally runs his target to ground.

So at first I had trouble getting my words out. “I’m Andrew Breitbart,” I exhaled. Instead of hanging up, Bertha Lewis laughed like someone I would probably like in a different setting – but certainly not in this lifetime now that we are permanently and publicly tied to one another as media-based adversaries.

I knew the awkwardness of the moment would turn into trouble when I started asking her pointed questions and, sure enough, we soon we found ourselves in trouble.

“Did you go to the White House last year?” I asked.

Bertha Laughed heartily. “No,” she said.

“Really?” I pushed.

“No. One hundred percent not. Not this year. Not last year. Not ever,” she stated firmly, all the while maintaining an awkward and ironic joviality that was likely born of the weirdness of our impromptu exchange.

“Are you aware that the White House is claiming that the proof you are not the Bertha Lewis who was given a personal tour of the White House residence in early September is that you are Bertha M. Lewis? I asked. “And the one on the visitors log is Bertha E. Lewis. In an online database I see you once had ‘Evans’ in your name.”

“That was a former husband, who is now dead,” she said.

“I’m sorry about that,” I responded sincerely, as we defied the odds that the awkwardness couldn’t get any greater.

I respected her for staying on the phone when she had no reason not to hang up. I even believed her when she claimed she wasn’t Obama’s personal guest in their White House residence even though in the last four months Bertha Lewis rarely uttered a statement in public that wasn’t a provable lie.

And her friends in the press did everything they could to pretend they didn’t notice her lies – and repeated them often to ensure the group didn’t completely implode.

ACORN was the underdog for the media from the word “ho” – and African-American ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis was chosen over Caucasian ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson because Bertha Lewis, a former theater gal, played the perfect victim.

So when, at the height over the furor of the ACORN videos last fall, Bertha Lewis, the embattled “chief organizer” of the corrupt community organizing group, spoke at the National Press Club, she was given an introduction by the club’s former president, the hopelessly politically correct Bloomberg reporter, Jonathan Salant, that might have befitted the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nothing spoke more eloquently about the unholy alliance of the Democrat-Media complex. Nothing spoke more eloquently about how PC has hindered free and independent inquiry. Nothing spoke more eloquently about the sorry state of the contemporary American news media.

Challenging the party line now is akin to showing one’s John Birch Society membership card. It’s a form of intimidation that creates timidity in those not ideologically in line, and grants free rein for leftists to use establishment journalism as a cudgel with which to beat their ideological opponents. In one year there have been too many administration lies and too many media cover-ups and passes to treat the future as anything but a hostile environment.

Welcome to Big Journalism.

Back to the weird phone conversation: “I issued a correction on my site clarifying that I couldn’t prove whether you were at the White House or not.”

“That’s good,” she said.

But I don’t really believe it wasn’t her. And that’s why I called. I’m skeptical and biased – and I think it’s what makes me good at what I do. No journalism symposium can convince me otherwise.

The mainstream media largely ignored the ACORN story because any exploration into the tapes is bad news for the political left, President Obama and the Democratic Party. The Washington Post reporter who was forced to retract her lies about James O’Keefe even argued with me when I answered her question about seeing the ACORN tapes and thinking they were “The Abu Ghraib of the Great Society.”

“You just caught a bunch of dummies on tape!” Carol Leonnig protested after I answered her question as honestly as I could.

“That’s what Bush called the “soft bigotry of lowered expectations,” I exclaimed. “Those people were SMART and knew how to brilliantly rig the system to defraud taxpayers!”

The net political effect of the ACORN story, which has played out on our sister site, Big Government, shows the new media has the power to influence the national experience. The ACORN story – like Rathergate & the Clinton Impeachment Saga – showed that regular people could change the elite media narrative. The people certainly have the technology to affect change, but Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe showed how it could be done with gusto. And as Patrick Frey has been doing to the Los Angeles Times and other media miscreants over at his influential blog, Patterico.

Throughout the ACORN story I applied my conscience to the material. Strategy and tactics were built around my understanding that the mainstream media would be the enemy of the truth, and that we would have to go to extreme measures to get the American people to see and to contemplate what was on the shocking and historic O’Keefe and Giles tapes.

This week I issued my first correction, even though I wasn’t proved wrong. I just couldn’t prove I was right. I can live with that rule.

What I can’t live with is a dying “mainstream media” (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Time Magazine, Newsweek, et al.), not just taking such rigid ideological positions but also waging war against those new media outlets that choose to report the stories they won’t cover.

Big Journalism is staking the claim that media is now at war with one another: Big Media versus Small Media; Old Media versus New Media; Left Media Vs Right Media. You get the picture. The practice of journalism will never be the same, and not the New York Times‘s Pinch Sulzberger nor all the sniping children at Gawker and Media Matters can un-ring this bell – which, after all, tolls for them.

It seems for the first time in my life people who agree with my broad point of view are using the media to tell their truths, to go on the offensive, to act as checks and balances against entrenched media power. And to have a major effect.

I sleep well being part of this process of stratification. If the media isn’t going to take the large clues of losing subscribers, dwindling viewers, thriving alternatives – perhaps something more aggressive will instigate a change for the better.

Even if you’re one of those awful, biased old-media types we seek to destroy, welcome to Big Journalism, where the spirit of free inquiry lives on.

Frank Ross, crusading reporter

After all, any reasonable person might well wonder: what are the odds that ACORN’s Bertha Lewis wasn’t the mysterious visitor – the one who got a special Saturday tour to private quarters of the White House?

Or that other White House visitors — Malik Shabazz, Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright — weren’t their famous namesakes?

Maybe, maybe not. But we have a right to ask these questions. And we will.

My call with Bertha M. Lewis ended as abruptly as it started. A happy ending it wasn’t as our conversation turned hostile.

“Well then, ” I continued. “Will you issue a correction for the lie that you peddled at the National Press Club where you repeated a lie that the Washington Post had already retracted that James O’Keefe was motivated by racism when he investigated ACORN?”

“No,” she said. “Why would I do that when I believe it in the bottom of my heart?”

“Because you pushed a lie that the Washington Post created from whole cloth, and you hold yourself to account for propagating it,” I responded.

“You are a bad, bad, bad journalist,” Bertha Lewis exclaimed.

Did she hang up? I looked at my cell phone. She had.