Two weeks ago today conservative bloggers, especially those who post at sites run by Andrew Breitbart, were celebrating the release of James O'Keefe's NPR sting videos. Breitbart's Big Journalism outpost was especially enthusiastic in hyping the breaking story.
But just a few days later Glenn Beck's website, The Blaze, helped pull back the curtain on the type of unethical editing O'Keefe used to push his gotcha onine. It was kind of a big deal.
It's been 11 days since The Blaze published its damning analysis of O'Keefe's work, but have Breitbart bloggers been banned from mentioning that fact? And have they been banned from mentioning “The Blaze” at all? A search of Big Journalism's archives shows there's been just two blog references to The Blaze in all of March, and only one in the wake of the site's takedown of the NPR tapes. That single reference appeared as part of a cut-and-past quote from another source. Meaning, according to the archives, not one Breitbart blogger at Big Journalism has sat down and typed a direct reference to The Blaze in the context of the NPR sting.
Keep in mind, Big Journalism boasts a lineup of more than 200 bloggers. But over the last week-and-a-half, not one of them has explicitly commented on how the O'Keefe tapes were analyzed by Glenn Beck's website. Coincidence? I doubt it. More likely, marching orders were issued for the site.
Adding to the oddity is the fact some Breitbart bloggers are writing about the O'Keefe/NPR story and are now busy trying to prop it back up. They're just not acknowledging the most important part; that O'keefe used dishonest editing to push this story.
Instead, we get misguided passages like this from Big Journalism:
The genius of journalism is the cleverer you are in obtaining your story, the more successful you are.
I don't even know what that means. But the Breitbart blogger continued:
The Watergate reporters employed a number of tactics to garner lead after lead. In recent years, Dateline's “To Catch a Predator” profiled the creeps that lurk on the Internet connecting with underage kids.
See, O'Keefe is just like Woodward and Bernstein. And O'Keefe is just like that NBC show that catches sexual predators. Why? Because O'Keefe videotaped an NPR fundraiser at lunch.
Or something.
The point is, by refusing to acknowledge that the NPR story took a dramatic turn for the worse (from O'Keefe's perspective), Breitbart bloggers not only confirm that they're propagandists, but they're also left holding the bag.