Has the Media Meltdown Begun?

STORIED NEWS INSTITUTIONS HAVE HIDDEN, DISTORTED THE TRUTH ON OBAMA, WORLD EVENTS

by Sharon Rondeau

(Feb. 10, 2015) — In an April 2011 televised interview with the late Andrew Breitbart, Fox News host Sean Hannity reminded his guest that he had said that in 2008, “the media died.”

During the interview, Breitbart responded that he planned to “save the world” with a “citizen journalism revolution” through his several websites intended to counter what he claimed was “liberal” bias in the mainstream media.  As examples, he cited James O’Keefe’s work with Project Veritas, which exposed ACORN employees in 2008 and later, campaign workers in 2014 appearing to advocate, or at least not discourage, voter fraud.

At the time, Hannity said that in an apparent indication of their perhaps ultimate displacement, the major “mainstream media” stations were “contemplating whether they want to keep their nightly newscast on now.”

Breitbart managed The Drudge Report for a decade, then established The Huffington Post, working with Arianna Huffington, before launching his own business.

An article in the left-leaning Atlantic on March 8, 2013 reported that Breitbart’s work with O’Keefe had resulted in a lawsuit won by an ACORN employee interviewed on O’Keefe’s hidden camera who reportedly called the police after his meeting with O’Keefe and his partner, Hannah Giles, who posed, respectively, as a pimp and a prostitute seeking assistance in carrying out trafficking of underage young women across the Mexican border.

In the early morning hours of March 1, 2012, Breitbart unexpectedly died several hours after having spoken with Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio on February 29.  “He calls me, and right after that, he dies,” Arpaio told TruNews host Rick Wiles.  On the afternoon of March 1, Arpaio gave the first of what would be two press conferences in which he stated that the long-form birth certificate image posted on the White House website purported to represent Barack Hussein Obama’s original birth certificate from Hawaii is a “computer-generated forgery,” along with Obama’s purported Selective Service registration form.

In September 2011, Arpaio had commissioned his Cold Case Posse to investigate the image at the urging of 250 Surprise, AZ Tea Party members who were also his constituents.

In an obituary, Breitbart’s editor-in-chief, Joel Pollak, wrote that Breitbart had died of “natural causes,” specifically an enlarged heart, although there has been much speculation as to other causes.

Several weeks before he passed away, Breitbart promised an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), “This election we’re going to vet him,” meaning Obama (4:57).  “I’ve got videos,” Breitbart said to a cheering crowd, referring to what he claimed was Obama’s use of “racial division and class warfare.”

Breitbart is also credited with causing the resignations of then-Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod and U.S. Rep. Anthony Wiener after exposing the congressman engaged in sending inappropriate photos to women over the internet.

A story Breitbart published about the Wiener scandal has been pulled, but another appears here.

The second Arpaio press conference occurred on July 17, 2012, during which Arpaio and his lead investigator, Mike Zullo, stated that the “probable cause” standard of forgery of the birth certificate had been surpassed and called upon Congress to investigate their findings.  The mainstream media did not televise either of the press conferences, and reporters attempted to vilify the messengers with ridicule which continues today.

Zullo has said publicly that Obama “is the only president that has aliases.”  The media has explained Obama’s apparent alias of “Barry Soetoro” as the name by which Obama was known in Indonesia after his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, allegedly enrolled him in school there.

On May 7, 2012, Dr. Jerome Corsi of WND reported that Breitbart had told him that he possessed a video depicting “radical Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and Barack Obama at Harvard planning revolution in the United States.”  However, the video aired on Fox News days later showed Obama at a rally for controversial Harvard professor Derrick Bell.

Ten days later, on May 17, the Breitbart news site reported exclusively that in 1991, Obama’s then-literary agent had written in his official biography that he was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”  The biography was admittedly changed in 2007 to read that Obama was “born in Hawaii,” with the former agent explaining the discrepancy as a “fact checking error.”

Breitbart now displays only the headlines to its exclusive articles regarding Obama’s reported birthplaces.  Despite its significant reportage of the differing life stories reported about Obama, the Breitbart website made it clear that Andrew Breitbart had believed that Obama was born in Hawaii, the text of which no longer appears in a search for this writer in Breitbart’s material.

The “Note from Senior Management,” is, however, reposted here and states, in part:

Andrew Breitbart was never a “Birther,” and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of “Birtherism.” In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.

Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him...

It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

It is generally understood that a foreign-born person cannot be President of the United States because of the “natural born Citizen” clause in the Constitution.

Breitbart has never permitted comments about the reported forgeries of Obama’s long-form birth certificate and Selective Service form, and writers such as Andrea Shea King and Charles C. Johnson have stated that their columns on the subject for Breitbart News were never published.  In a recent interview with King, author Diana West confirmed that The Washington Examiner, where her syndicated column was regularly published, rejected columns containing any mention of the numerous lawsuits surrounding Obama’s questionable eligibility.

Corsi stated that he had arranged the interview between Breitbart and Arpaio on February 29, which Arpaio confirmed and which Corsi said “may have been his [Breitbart’s] last interview.”  In his recent State of the Union address, Obama reminded his audience that he “grew up in Hawaii.”

Before he ran for president, however, NPR and The Honolulu Advertiser reported Obama as having been born in Kenya and Indonesia, respectively.  No hospital in the world has claimed to be Obama’s birthplace.

In 2007 and 2008, remarkably little information was released about Barack Obama’s early life, college years, family life, and employment after college.  To date, Obama has not released his school, medical, university or voting records from his Illinois state senate or U.S. Senate terms.  In 2004, he was declared “a rising star” in Democrat circles for his energetic speech at the Democrat National Convention in Boston.

In December 2007, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews claimed on air that Obama was “born in Indonesia” and had “a Muslim background,” theorizing that Democrat primary contender Hillary Clinton would challenge Obama on those items.  The media did not investigate Matthews’s claims, although questions began to arise about Obama’s constitutional eligibility given that Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires the president to be a “natural born Citizen.”

As time passed and the questions went unanswered, anyone who began investigating or questioning Obama’s background was ridiculed, marginalized, harassed, threatened, received “abusive emails,” and in some cases, death threats, likely from Obama supporters known as “Obots.”

In late 2013, following more than two years of investigation into the birth certificate image, Zullo revealed that several “Obots” are employed by DARPA, a division of the Department of Defense.  DARPA works in the areas of psychological warfare and robotics.

Beginning in 2013, former CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson reported that her CBS and home computers were hacked and that her home security system, television, and personal cell phone and home phone were the focus of highly disruptive interference affecting all family members.  While CBS conducted a forensic examination at its expense, it did not reveal the results except to confirm that the equipment was, in fact, hacked.

After hiring her own forensics team, Attkisson was informed that a government agency had to have been the instigator of the hacking based on the sophistication of the intrusions which turned her computer off and on at night, planted classified documents in her hard drive which she had not obtained independently, captured her keystrokes, and erased files in front of her eyes.

Recognizing that her investigative work on Fast & Furious and the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya which took four American lives were marginalized by her employer of nearly two decades, Attkisson resigned in March of last year and launched her own website.

Hundreds of pages of emails obtained by government watchdog agency Judicial Watch published in November reveal that a spokeswoman from the Department of Justice and a White House press aide colluded as to how to silence Attkisson’s reporting on the Fast & Furious gunrunning operation which killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry.  While DOJ media aide Tracy Schmaler left the regime in 2013, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz remains in his post.

Schultz was noted in the email exchange with Schmaler to have said that Attkisson’s latest report “made the AG look bad.”

Judicial Watch has accused Schultz on Twitter of having intimidated journalists.

On Monday, Judicial Watch reported that longtime host of NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” David Gregory, was fired “several months ago” after he displayed on air a 30-bullet-capacity firearm magazine following “repeated” warnings from the local police department that doing so would be a violation of law.

After revelations surfaced last week that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, an “award-winning journalist,” fabricated the story that he was in a helicopter which was shot at in Iraq in 2003, Williams first said he would take a short leave from the broadcast until the point at which he is “worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us.”  He has now taken a leave of absence from his position, which pays him $10,000,000 annually.

Disgraced CBS journalist Dan Rather, whose storied career ended in 2005 after he was found to have presented unauthenticated documents purporting to show discrepancies in George W. Bush’s National Guard Service just before the 2004 presidential election.  A typography expert consulted about the documents described them as “blatant forgeries.”

In a 2007 interview at Fairfield (CT) University, Williams told the student interviewer that “there were Katyusha rockets passing just underneath the helicopter in which I was riding” in Israel, then retold the now-discredited story he told of the helicopter incident in Iraq.

Williams spoke about Hurricane Katrina, stating that he spent a night “inside the Superdome,” where he “rode it out.”  He claimed that those who did not survive the devastation were not killed by the hurricane, but rather, by the “botched response” of the federal government.  “To grow up loving this country as I still do and have such great faith in this country, to then see us just fall apart…I was there to bear witness…” Williams said.

NBC has reportedly launched an “internal investigation” into Williams’ reporting in general following the exposure of the Iraq story as inaccurate.  Questions have arisen about the Israel incident and Williams’ reportage of seeing a “dead body” during Hurricane Katrina.

Williams has hosted “NBC Nightly News” for the last decade following the retirement of Tom Brokaw.

In a 2013 interview on WNYC, Williams was described as “keeping his opinions quiet” in an apparent reference to a journalist’s responsibility to report the news without political, personal or ideological bias.

On January 17, Fox News’s Julie Banderas “apologized” for “regrettable errors” made by the Fox News Channel regarding “no-go zones” in the UK and France.  Her comments related to alleged Sharia-law-compliant areas which the news outlet reported as barring non-Muslims and law enforcement in certain areas of Europe.

On January 14, Bloomberg reported that reports of “no-go zones” are “totally false,” citing Fox News guest Steve Emerson, who runs The Investigative Project, as having retracted statements he made on air about Muslim-only zones in Birmingham, England and other places.  On January 12, the group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) stated that Emerson posted “a retraction” on his website of statements he made to Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, but the link leads to an “Error 404” message.

The Post & Email located the apology here.  Comments made in response to his Fox News interview and apology claim that the “No-Go Zone” is a “Fox News invention.”

However, on January 7, Emerson told Sean Hannity that “When I was in Brussels a year ago when I asked the police to take me to the Islamic zone or the Islamic community area they refused. They said we don’t go there. This goes on in Belgium, this goes on in Sweden, in the Netherlands, in France, it goes on in Italy. It goes on throughout Europe. So there are no-go zones.”

In a 2012 report, The Gatestone Institute reported that there are ares in France with high crime which are heavily populated by Muslims.  An example Gatestone provided reads:

The Fafet-Brossolette district of Amiens is home to mostly Muslim immigrants from former French colonies such as Algeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Mali, Morocco and Tunisia. Unemployment in the riot-hit part of Amiens runs at 45%. Among people under 25 years of age, who account for half the population, two out of three are out of work.

In July 2011, The Christian Post reported:

An Islamic poster campaign declaring areas as “Sharia Law Zones” is spreading across cities in the United Kingdom.

The bright yellow posters say: “You are entering a Sharia-controlled zone – Islamic rules enforced.”

The posters include pictures which are crossed out in bold red typing indicating that drinking, gambling, music and concerts, porn and prostitution, drugs and smoking, are not allowed in the “zone.”

The campaign is being orchestrated by Anjem Choudary, a former lawyer that grew up in the UK and attended the University of Southampton, who is now the spokesperson for the banned militant group Islam4UK.

The Clarion Project described a potential “no-go zone” in Dearborn, MI, where local sheriff’s deputies refused to make arrests of Islamics throwing bottles and rocks at Christians at an Arab-American festival in 2012.

On February 6, Accuracy in Media reported that Prince Alwaleel bin Talal, a prominent stockholder in Newscorp, the parent company of the Fox News Channel, might have pressured Newscorp CEO Rupert Murdoch to alter Fox News’s coverage of Muslim youths’ rioting in 2005 in France.  Bin Talal has since been named as a possible donor to Al Qaeda by “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence for his role in the 9-11 attacks.

Fox News’s Megyn Kelly has decried MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry for a non-news interview of departing Attorney General Eric Holder in which Harris-Perry asks Holder to “quack like a duck.”  Kelly’s guest, Howard Kurtz, then hearkened back to Matthews declaration that hearing Barack Obama speak gave him a “thrill going up his leg” which Matthews claimed on Election Night 2008 that “most” people hearing Obama also experienced.

Kelly then told Kurtz that “Brian Williams may make up things, but I’d take him any day over Melissa Harris-Perry interviewing the attorney general.”  Kelly then stated that Williams had removed himself from the Nightly News and referred to his interview at Fairfield University.

On May 30, 2012, the first cable news network, CNN, published a story in which it misled readers by suggesting that microfilm it showed contained an impression of Obama’s original birth certificate when in truth, the microfilm was not made available to any member of the public or media.

On August 29, 2010, Williams interviewed Obama on various topics, including the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  Williams began the interview by making some statements of his own, followed by a question:

Just a block from here, you may not have known it, you drove by houses with holes still in the roof, where there’d been live rescues. There’s still FEMA markings in spray paint. And yet, New Orleans is like this. This is a symbol of recovery. Katrina was about so many things. It was about class and race and government and — and the environment. What ever happened to that national conversation we were supposed to have about it?

Obama responded:

Well, I think that we’re still having it. I — I don’t think that conversation happens in — one instance. I think that there’s a constant evolving debate about what are our obligations to each other. How do we make sure that in moments of devastation that we are looking out for one another? How does government organize itself, both at the federal level interacting with state and local officials?

How do we make sure that folks who were already vulnerable before a catastrophe hits aren’t made worse off as a consequence of it? And, you know, what you’ve seen I think in New Orleans is steady progress. But, you know, we’ve still got a long way to go. And part of the reason that I wanted to come down here today to mark the fifth anniversary, was just to send a message to the people of New Orleans, but also the entire Gulf Coast, that they’ve, you know, gotten hit pretty good over the last several years. And all of America, not just people here, not just folks in the White House, but all of America, remains concerned and remains committed to their rebuilding.

and Williams followed up by asking:

Do you still get driven to anger over it when you see those pictures again after five years?

During the interview, Obama said that “my job as President is to make sure in part that we’re upholding our Constitution” in response to his support of the building of a mosque at Ground Zero, the location where the Twin Towers stood in Manhattan before two airliners flown by Islamic militants destroyed them, and total of nearly 3,000 lives, on September 11, 2001.

Obama said that he was not “endorsing” the mosque project, but rather, “our Constitution.  And what is right.”  “Now, the media, I think — anticipating that this was going to be be a firestorm politically — seemed to think that somehow there was inconsistency and there wasn’t. And I was very specific to my team and will be very specific to you now. That the core value and principle that every American is treated the same. That doesn’t change,” Obama said, to which Williams responded:

Mr. President, you’re an American born Christian.

Last Wednesday, Obama arguably insulted the Christian faith by comparing the Crusades, which began in 1095 to retake the “Holy Land,” including Jerusalem, from Islamic control.  After his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, to which a Sudanese terrorist was invited and who attended, an editorial at The Fiscal Times stated that “…Obama has given ISIS a propaganda clip of incalculable value, and they don’t even have to edit it. As he stood at the Prayer Breakfast last week and likened the barbarity of current-day Islamic extremists to atrocities committed during the Crusades and the Inquisition, Obama seemingly validated the terrorists’ centuries-old calls for vengeance.”

There is little evidence that Obama is a practicing Christian.   In a 2008 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Obama referred to “my Muslim faith” in the context of stating that his opponent, Sen. John McCain, had not mentioned it in the campaign to that time.  McCain was also noted to have avoided the articulation of Obama’s middle name, “Hussein.”

Stephanopoulos quickly “corrected” Obama’s statement to say, “your Christian faith.”  On January 19, 2007, ABC News described Obama as “a devout Christian.”

Some have suggested that Obama has ties to Saudi Arabia and a “deep Sunni background.”  Carl Gallups, who has been close to the Cold Case Posse investigation, has stated that Obama “is a supporter of The Muslim Brotherhood,” which wishes the demise of Western civilization and its conversion to Sharia law.

Whether or not the media has been covering up Obama’s true past could come to light if Arpaio holds the third press conference to which he has alluded over the past nine months in the alternative media.  Gallups has reported that major media will participate.

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Update, February 11, 2015:  NBC News has reported that Williams has been suspended for six months without pay.