"immediately recognized it as newsworthy" Why Stacy McCain matters

Look­ing at Robert Stacy McCain’s lat­est on the Brett Kim­ber­lin he, good blogger/​journalist that he is, leads with the most news­wor­thy ques­tion:

Today there is a mas­sive Meme­o­ran­dum aggre­ga­tion about con­victed ter­ror­ist Brett Kim­ber­lin, includ­ing one on an arti­cle by my film­maker buddy Ladd Ehlinger Jr.:

What Did Bar­bara Streisand Know …
And When Did She Know It?

An excel­lent ques­tion: Why would Bar­bra Streisand’s “phil­an­thropic” foun­da­tion donate money to a 501©3 whose direc­tor is a vio­lent felon noto­ri­ous for his dis­hon­esty (a “top-​flight con man“) to say noth­ing of the other heinous crimes Kim­ber­lin has committed?

For me how­ever when look­ing at this 9^th post since May 17^th Stacy has writ­ten on Kim­ber­lin, posts that have forced him to relo­cated both him­self and his fam­ily for their own safety there is a dif­fer­ent line that jumps out at me:

Last Thurs­day morn­ing, I was plan­ning to go cover the G8 Sum­mit at Camp David. Instead, I saw Aaron Worthing’s story, imme­di­ately rec­og­nized it as news­wor­thy…empha­sis mine

That phrase, “imme­di­ately rec­og­nized it as news­wor­thy” is the story of Robert Stacy McCain

As you may or may not know although I was blog­ging for three years as a tech blog­ger for the sup­port com­pany I worked for (HiWired) and 14 months before I first met him I con­sider Robert Stacy McCain my blog mentor.

The week he lived with me dur­ing the Scott Brown spe­cial elec­tion taught me more about actual report­ing than any­thing else. For exam­ple while I was inside lis­ten­ing to Bill Clin­ton giv­ing a speech to a bunch of ador­ing fac­ulty. Stacy McCain was out­side inter­view­ing peo­ple wear­ing SEIU shirts for Scott Brown.

More than 75 boost­ers of the GOP can­di­date turned out for the counter-​rally, stand­ing the sub-​freezing weather to wave Brown signs and loudly sing (to the tune of “Bat­tle Hymn of the Repub­lic”), “Glory, Hal­lelu­jah … Send Scott Brown to D.C.!”

Among the Brown sup­port­ers were — believe it or not — rank-​and-​file mem­bers of the Ser­vice Employ­ees Inter­na­tional Union.

“We’re Amer­i­cans — we have our free choice,” said one of the SEIU mem­bers, who iden­ti­fied her­self only as Michelle and said she drove more than 60 miles from West­ern Mass­a­chu­setts — “The stepchild of this state” — to show her sup­port for Brown in Worcester.

This was rapidly picked up by state & national blog­gers

“imme­di­ately rec­og­nized it as newsworthy”

And when you are capa­ble of see what is news, you can also see when a news­wor­thy story that like the story of David Epstein the Huff­post blog­ger and Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor who appar­ently took time away from hit­ting Palin to um…spend more time with his daugh­ter:

That rul­ing was on May 11 — two weeks ago — and yet I can find no news reports about Epstein’s con­vic­tion. You might think that at least the New York Times would find the dis­po­si­tion of this case newsworthy.

The alert reader who informed me of this pre­vi­ously unre­ported news also passed along the court doc­u­ments to some mem­bers of the Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity fac­ulty, result­ing in this angry e-​mail from Epstein’s lawyer

Stacy noted not only the NYT’s dis­in­ter­est in the incest story in four widely linked posts and two Spec­ta­tor sto­ries noted an inter­est­ing defense by the Mr. Epstein’s lawyer

But he ques­tioned why, if the alleged incest was con­sen­sual, why Epstein’s daugh­ter had been treated by pros­e­cu­tors as “some­how a vic­tim here, when she can be best described as an accomplice.”

Moral rel­a­tivism is eas­ier if your rel­a­tives are immoral.

“imme­di­ately rec­og­nized it as newsworthy”

When the News­me­dia used Pamela Geller’s bust­line to dimin­ish her actions against the Ground Zero mosques the father of Rule 5 called them out:

The video is from August 2006 and out of all that Geller has done in the ensu­ing four years — includ­ing author­ing The Post-​American Pres­i­dency: The Obama Administration’s War on Amer­ica with her fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor, Robert Spencer — evi­dently noth­ing lends itself so eas­ily to a fea­ture lede as her bikini moment.

Geller laughed about this treat­ment when I spoke to her on the phone last week, and at her blog says, “It is com­edy. It is to laugh. It is to cry.” Geller told me she was amazed at how she has been sin­gled out as the insti­ga­tor of con­tro­versy over The Lower Man­hat­tan Islamic Cul­tural Cen­ter That the Asso­ci­ated Press Won’t Call the “Ground Zero Mosque” Anymore.

Yes Pamela Geller’s beauty is self evi­dent but her work on Rad­i­cal Islam is the real story. The MSM doesn’t see it, Stacy McCain does.

“imme­di­ately rec­og­nized it as newsworthy”

Stacy McCain spent weeks in Iowa cov­er­ing the start of the cam­paign with the type of leg­work that would make any major news orga­ni­za­tion proud and when the entire talk of the GOP was Rick Perry as sav­ior he saw what was com­ing first:

There have been a few lit­tle things — includ­ing one source who says Perry has been on the wrong side of the eminent-​domain issue — that lead me to think Perry is a lot less cer­tain ulti­mately to win the nom­i­na­tion than some peo­ple seem to think. What I fear will hap­pen is that Perry will spend sev­eral months suck­ing up media oxy­gen and burn­ing through GOP donor cash, only to col­lapse early next year. This will have the effect of suf­fo­cat­ing other con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­dates, and thereby lead to … Rom­ney 2012.

and rec­og­nized what did him in:

His fel­low GOP can­di­dates fired at the Texas gov­er­nor all night, but it wasn’t until Min­nesota Rep. Michele Bach­mann said the phrase “inno­cent lit­tle 12-​year-​old girls” that he suf­fered any seri­ous wound

“imme­di­ately rec­og­nized it as news­wor­thy”

When Deuce Biga­low Blog­ger Gigolo Will Folks grad­u­ated from Nikki Haley rumors to fake pro-​life activists Stacy Called him on it:

And to return to my orig­i­nal ques­tion: “Who Is Eliz­a­beth Reichert?” Read the Will Folks story and you’ll see he refers to her as a “pro-​life activist,” but we have no rea­son to sup­pose that she is such an “activist,” if she even exists. Prior to Folks’s report­ing of this mys­te­ri­ous flyer, there was no online record of her, cer­tainly not in con­nec­tion with any sort of pro-​life activism.

“imme­di­ately rec­og­nized it as newsworthy”

And when the Wein­er­gate story broke and the MSM & left alter­nated between ignor­ing the story

Wein­er­Gate has been at the top of the Meme­o­ran­dum aggre­ga­tion for hours, and yet it appears that no tra­di­tional news orga­ni­za­tion finds it newsworthy.

and blam­ing Andrew Breitbart

Jesse LaGreca at Daily Kos is try­ing to turn this into a story about Andrew Bre­it­bart, which is ridicu­lous. We seem to have actual facts here, facts which require some plau­si­ble explanation.

Stacy Asked the rel­e­vant ques­tions on day 1

Very sim­ple ques­tions: Was Rep. Weiner exchang­ing online mes­sages with Ms. Cor­dova? If so, why? If this is all just a mis­un­der­stand­ing — if Rep. Weiner was the vic­tim of hack­ers — why was Ms. Cor­dova the recip­i­ent of that mes­sage? Why would a hacker ran­domly select a stu­dent jour­nal­ist in Wash­ing­ton State to send that to?

The congressman’s office can either answer those ques­tions — and answer them PDQ — or else wait until every polit­i­cal reporter on the West Coast is camped out in front of Ms. Cordova’s house.

and 55 posts later he reported on the res­ig­na­tion:

For the first 10 days, Weiner lied, lied, lied, and the lib­er­als who believed Weiner were wrong, wrong, wrong, while con­ser­v­a­tives were right, right, right. In the past 10 days, since Weiner’s June 6 press con­fer­ence, lib­er­als have tried to for­get that their credulity in believ­ing Weiner’s lies, and the idi­otic con­spir­acy the­o­ries they prof­fered in his defense.

“imme­di­ately rec­og­nized it as newsworthy”

But there is one post in that series that per­fectly encom­pass every­thing I’ve writ­ten here:

Few things annoy me more than hav­ing my news judg­ment ques­tioned. Dis­agree on pol­icy or doubt me on pol­i­tics — we might argue, but such argu­ments do not call into ques­tion my com­pe­tence as a pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ist. And, by God, after 25 years in the news busi­ness, I know what’s news.

… as soon as I began research­ing the back­ground of last weekend’s inci­dent I real­ized, Hey, there’s a legit news story here.

What’s more, there was a per­fect oppor­tu­nity to get ahead of the story, because the main­stream media had been ini­tially reluc­tant to report it. Sat­ur­day after­noon, I checked Google News and there was zero, zilch, nada from major news orga­ni­za­tions. Yet I antic­i­pated (cor­rectly) how the story would develop, and so began hoover­ing up every fact I could find online and aggre­gat­ing every tid­bit of infor­ma­tion other blog­gers were reporting.

And that is what Robert Stacy McCain’s crime is to the left as a whole. Brett Kim­ber­lin might have gone after Stacy for expos­ing him but for years he has cov­ered the sto­ries that the left would rather not see pub­lished and in a year when Barack Obama will be fight­ing for his polit­i­cal life it is vital that voices like Stacy McCain are muted.

That’s why the MSM will not be talk­ing about Robert Stacy McCain’s story. That’s why the Tides foundation’s and Bar­bara Streisand’s con­tri­bu­tion to Kimberlin’s 501©3 will not be pur­sued by the left. That’s why the Brad Blog and oth­ers on the left will be retain­ing Kim­ber­lin and his ser­vices. While Andrew Bre­it­bart was alive he was their pri­mary tar­get, now that he is no longer there to oppose them, those other voices that might speak out on sto­ries they “imme­di­ately rec­og­nized it as news­wor­thy” must be silenced…

..at any cost.

Update: Right Wing Granny gets it:

When I began this blog, my chil­dren asked me not to con­nect my name and address with the blog. They feared that some­one would get upset at what I wrote and choose to attack a lit­tle old lady. I thought they were being ridicu­lous, but I have gen­er­ally respected their wishes. Some­thing has been hap­pen­ing lately that shows the wis­dom of their request.

This is EXACTLY What is desired. The Tea Party move­ment and the rise of the right that dev­as­tated the left in 2010 and the estab­lish­ment GOP in pri­mary after pri­mary is fed by folks like Right Wing Granny. If they are stopped at the start it serves their pur­poses well.

Update 2: Lady Lib­erty 1885 notes Babs has inter­est­ing giv­ing tastes:

So not only does Babs give to Kim­ber­lin who gets money from Soros, but she also gives to Soros directly. It’s ring around the check­book with these peo­ple. Dis­cover the Net­works pro­file for The Streisand Foun­da­tion also lists Tides as one of their recip­i­ents and is more up to date, although JTMP is not on the list.

I won­der if she knows what’s coming?

Update 3: Stacy links from an unknown loca­tion. As long as the inter­net exists you can’t keep him down.