Big Journalism:
As someone who has closely watched the media for over two decades now, I’ve seen an awful lot of shameful behavior. But I have never seen anything like CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien’s now infamous “do-over.” Never before have I seen a network anchor attempt to memory-hole and cover up her own misinformation campaign by bringing on as a guest someone who would agree with her 100%.
And as I watched this pitiful segment unfold, the first thing that came to my mind was, “Breitbart is here.”
It all started the day after Andrew’s funeral, when BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith thought he would scoop Breitbart by releasing video of a then 28-year-old Barack Obama speaking before a crowd at Harvard and asking them to “open their hearts and minds to the words” of Derrick Bell, a radical racialist and proponent of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Though he was wrong and did not have what Breitbart had, Smith thought he did and thought he had scooped us. That kind of competition is, of course, totally fair game. The problem, though, is that Ben Smith wasn’t as interested in scooping our story as he was in protecting Obama from what he thought was our story.
As I detailed in this piece, this is what Ben Smith does. It’s what drives him and it’s what has come to define him. He grabs hold of a potentially explosive story that could damage Obama and attempts to control the explosion in a way that protects Obama. In the case of Derrick Bell and CRT, Smith followed his usual protocol. The subtext to his partial release of the tape was obvious:Breitbart’s big Obama video-scoop only makes Obama look even more awesome than we already thought he was!
Talk about playing into Andrew’s hands.
In one fell swoop, Ben Smith did something we couldn’t. Breitbart’s Bigs not only had a story about yet another one of Obama’s radical past associations, but thanks to Smith, we now had that story with a side-order of media corruption.
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SOURCE: IOTW
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