Andrew Breitbart was in the news again this week, and you can be assured that when Breitbart makes news, it's rarely the kind that's actually true. This week, he was purposefully misrepresenting White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina's metaphorical remarks to Senate Democrats in order to make it appear as if the White House was calling on "union thugs" to "punch" out people at health care town halls. He repeated this falsehood both in The Washington Times and on Glenn Beck's Fox News program.
To be honest, by the standards of Beck, The Washington Times, and even Breitbart, these misrepresentations are no big deal. If you are among the benighted minions who take such sources seriously, well, that's your problem (and to be perfectly honest you're probably not reading this). The problem arises when the rest of the media--those outlets that we assume we can believe--allow Breitbart's brand of hucksterism to infect their own reporting.
This is exactly what happened, of course, regarding ACORN, when Breitbart orchestrated the successful campaign by pseudo-journalists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles to discredit the organization with a series of doctored videos and false testimonies. It's beyond ironic to note, as we have done here previously, that respected members of the mainstream media beat themselves up in public for failing to follow the lead of these hucksters--hucksters who, in O'Keefe's case, have since revealed themselves to engage in criminal behavior to make their points.
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