Howard Kurtz: Who Watches the Watchdogs?

In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother increased chocolate rations from 30 grams per week to 25 grams per week. You read that right. There are no objective facts; there is only the word of the Ministry of Truth. The 21st century Thought Police, i.e. the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the JournoList, don’t just get the facts completely wrong, but they double down and congratulate themselves as if they’d gotten them right, so long as the misinformation they spread serve their political purposes. This mainstream media totalitarianism was on full display on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources this weekend on CNN:

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As we documented last week, Chris Matthews aired a highly entertaining segment of Hardball where he blasted Howard Dean for not watching the original Shirley Sherrod footage and rightfully pointed out that Breitbart had included footage of her redemption in the original video. Apparently, the Thought Police tracked Matthews down between shows and made him re-tape the segment with Politico’s Breitbart beat writer/lefty double agent Ken Vogel replacing Dean; the discussion changed from the actual substance of Breitbart’s multimedia presentation to popcorn “the state of journalism today” malarkey.

Kurtz, also of the Washington Post, dishonestly suggests Matthews had gotten his facts wrong regarding Breitbart including footage of Shirley Sherrod’s redemption. Even Joan Walsh of Salon, an unabashed left-liberal who appeared in the segment with Dean and Matthews, acknowledged “Matthews was right about the first video posted by Breitbart. It did include Sherrod alluding to the epiphany she describes in detail later, about the fact that many issues aren’t about black and white.” By playing this particular “heavily edited” Hardball excerpt, Kurtz intentionally leaves his audience with the mistaken impression Breitbart did not grant Sherrod her redemptive moment in the footage he published on BigGovernment.com, much less the article that accompanied it.

Reliable Sources, a self-appointed media watchdog, botched this story for the sake of politics. If Kurtz believes journalists ought to play every piece of video footage they air in its entirety, then excerpting any video under any circumstances is off the table, even for him. It’s a preposterous argument, the definition of a straw man.

I wish I could say my conclusion is that it’s a bad sign when the watchdogs need watchdogs and Kurtz should be more concerned with his own journalism than Breitbart’s, but those paying any attention know the reality is much more grave than that: Howard Kurtz, CNN, and MSNBC are trying to destroy Andrew Breitbart and the new media for their Thoughtcrimes. They are the Ministry of Truth and they are at war.