After Months of Myopic Musing, Media Matters Still Misleads

Our friends, the really important and incredibly influential Senior Fellows at Media Matters for America, are projecting again. And, as usual, they are misleading their readership, which largely consists of the interns at the Maddow, Schultz and Olbermann shows.

They have devoted months of coverage over the prospect of seeing James O’Keefe behind bars. They misled their readers by claiming his statements regarding the events surrounding his arrest in New Orleans were “riddled with falsehoods,” even though now that the matter is concluded, the U.S. Attorney’s final report mirrors O’Keefe’s account to the letter.

It’s been said that Lenin first popularized the tactic: “Always accuse your opponents of what you, yourself are doing,” so it makes sense that Pravda-lite’s message today sounds eerily like what we wrote about them yesterday:

Andrew Breitbart and his band of bloggers remain quite distraught over their colleague James O’Keefe’s humiliating guilty plea in New Orleans yesterday. And yes, there continues to be lots of thrashing and lashing out over at Breitbart’s site.

Let’s remind our readers that:

• MMFA spent months salivating over the O’Keefe story.
• They posted fifty-three features in three days.
• They happily speculated that O’Keefe had hardly any friends left after the arrest.
• They asserted that his defense was “lame” (lame enough to have reduced charges and no jail time?)
• When he would not comment to the media on the charges, they accused him of “pleading the 5th“
• They even mused “What did Andrew Breitbart and Fox News know, and when did they know it?”

After all of that hype and wishful thinking, who seems distraught and humiliated: the guy preparing his next big story to rock the left back on their heels, scrambling for a half-hearted and half-witted response? They guy who has been vindicated and proven to be measured and truthful throughout this entire ordeal?

Or the organization that jumped to conclusions, wasted George Soros’s resources on misleading stories and openly dreamed of O’Keefe sitting friendless in his parents’ home waiting to be sent to jail?

[youtube mHV0KBtOnXs nolink]

They are also violating rule #1 of journalism (I thought they were the watch-dogs): they have their conclusions and they are desperately hunting for “facts” to back them up. To fit their narrative, they quote from a court order from someone they identify as “O’Keefe Judge” and from the U.S. Attorney’s Press Release.

The judge they refer to is not the judge who presided over the plea and sentencing yesterday. To call him the “O’Keefe Judge” the day the plea is announced and to quote from a statement he made last week is… what’s the word…? Misleading? Incompetent?

And the press release from the U.S. Attorney apparently carries more weight to the legal-eagles at MMFA than an actual court document?

You would think that the most important document to quote from in this matter, to ascertain the legal facts, would be the actual, final, official, legal document pertaining to the case. In fact, it’s called the “Final Factual Basis.”

To assist Media Matters, here’s the key point:

In this case, further investigation did not uncover evidence that the defendants intended to commit any felony after the entry by false pretenses despite their initial statements to the staff of Senatorial office and GSA requesting access to the central phone system. Instead, the Government’s evidence would show that the defendants misrepresented themselves and their purpose for gaining access to the central phone system to orchestrate a conversation about phone calls to the Senator’s staff and capture the conversation on video, not to actually tamper with the phone system, or to commit any other felony.

In other words, everything O’Keefe has said about this incident has been accurate and true from day one. Everything.

But Media Matters seems to think that if they keep saying that this is humiliating and embarrassing enough times, somehow it will be true.

I wonder if any of their intelligent and logical readers have asked themselves this: If this is so embarrassing and humiliating, why does Big Journalism keep writing about it and hitting MMFA so hard about it? You’d think we’d want the story ignored if it was humiliating, wouldn’t you?