Salon, Mediaite and the Left's Cowardly Practice of Journalistic Rendition

**Post UPDATED at bottom.

“We got him. We got him.“ – Mediaite White House reporter Tommy Christopher to a few people just after badgering Andrew Breitbart with a race-baiting question.

My first CPAC and my first first-person look at how the corrupt left-wing media operates. I can’t pretend that anything surprised me, because as Mama used to always say, “Evil is as evil does.” But yes, Max Blumenthal, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher and some guy named Daryle Jenkins with something called One People’s Project stalked into CPAC like three old-media hitmen ready and eager to do some dirty work. So eager, in fact, that you could picture them the night before lying in bed at their parents’ house with visions of ambushing right-wingers in their heads.

There was only one problem: the unholy three appear to have forgotten that in this digital age everything’s changed. It’s no longer just the elites who come heavy. We all carry videos cameras and we all have access to a distribution system Al Gore named the Internet. So a funny thing happened while Max and Daryle were driving dad’s car home, maliciously editing manipulated footage in their heads (you know, kind of like this – gee, Max, what happened to Larry O’Connor catching you in a big fat lie? ), Big Journalism published the unedited footage for the whole world to see, and what the world saw was a raw look at how Journalistic Rendition operates.

And in the case of Tommy Christopher and Mediaite, they did our job for us.

Journalistic Rendition is exactly what it sounds like. Just as the Clinton administration kept its hands clean but still benefited from the intelligence gathered from terrorists shipped off to foreign countries willing to torture – media outlets like Salon and Mediaite benefit from the dirty work they also disavow.

Salon.com shipped their character-assassination assignment off to the unaccountable Max Blumenthal, and by extension Daryle Jenkins. Hoping to punish James O’Keefe for his part in saving the Republic by exposing ACORN, Salon‘s obvious desire was to smear O’Keefe as a racist in the hopes of moving the spotlight off a story they’re much less interested in: a taxpayer-subsidized organization that employs a troubling number of intelligent folks disturbingly eager to use their tax-law savvy to aid and abet those who would set up an underage prostitution ring.

And Blumenthal came through for Salon in a big way. The piece hit like a bomb and though it was obvious from the beginning that the very foundation of Blumenthal’s charges could only be supported with provable lies, the piece stayed up on Salon uncorrected for hours.

The Salon smear was so obviously inaccurate that even the Breitbart-obsessed Media Matters stayed away from it and no less than the Columbia Journalism Review found it such an affront to the very idea of journalism that they jumped in and scolded Salon as though there’s still some remaining shred of journalistic honor left to defend.

But Salon‘s Journalistic Rendition had worked. After hours of soulless searching and as though they were some kind of legitimate publication, Salon eventually published a correction and the blame fell on Blumenthal and by extension Jenkins. But the fire Salon wanted lit was smoldering and after spreading his lies at the well-trafficked publication, the unaccountable Blumenthal simply moved his smear campaign over to his unaccountable personal website.

See how nicely this worked out? Salon gets to play “Who me?” as the toxic lie of racism they published enters the webstream.

Now, watch this video and listen to Mediaite White House reporter Tommy Christopher’s question to Andrew Breitbart: “What do you say to people who think James’ selection of a pimp costume has racial overtones?” The question is answered more than once and yet Christopher won’t stop. That’s because he’s only a journalist according to Mediaite’s obviously low standards. In the real world he’s a bitterly angry junior league leftist with an ax to grind.

[Side Note to Christopher and Blumenthal: It’s people like you who automatically equate “pimp” with “Black” who should be thinking through their own prejudices.]

From a personal standpoint, Mediaite’s involvement in Journalistic Rendition is the perfect scorpion and frog story. I can’t speak for the other Bigs, but Big Hollywood’s relationship with Mediaite has always been a very friendly one and so surprised was I by Christopher’s wildly unprofessional race-baiting that I was sure his hand-written badge claiming he was from Mediaite was a lie. And when I heard him bragging afterwards — “We got him. We got him.” – I was positive.

Well, the scorpion struck when this pathetic example of Journalistic Rendition published on Mediaite Saturday evening with this equally pathetic disclaimer:

For the record, the thoughts and ideas expressed in this exchange are those of Mediaite columnist White House reporter Tommy Christopher and not those of Mediaite.

Don’t you just love that disavowal? Christopher isn’t some guy who threw the video over the transom. He’s Mediaite’s columnist and White House reporter. He’s “their guy” out on assignment, and not only was Mediaite willing to publish the video, it was their lead story for hours. Shouldn’t the disclaimer have read:

While we are paying for and benefitting from the wildly unprofessional race-baiting of our White House reporter and making this our lead story for hours, we want to assure everyone that we literally brought out a bowl of water and washed our hands before hitting the publish button.

Something else I learned at CPAC is that my boss knows exactly how to treat the media. And I only say that because what you won’t see on YouTube are the two days Andrew spent with a writer from Slate who was both friendly and professional, and in return received every spare minute Andrew had.

Then there are the “We got him” media-types, those under the mistaken belief that a byline, badge and race-baiting questions somehow make up for their deficits as human beings. They were also treated the way they deserved. After all…

We are at war with them because they are at war with truth.

UPDATED: Tommy Christopher’s “We got him, we got him” that I reference throughout this piece should not be confused with his saying “I got you” in the video of his confrontation with Andrew Breitbart. Christopher’s “We got him” happened minutes later in a hallway around the corner after things had broken up.