Dick Morris Receives Mightier Pen Award at Thursday’s National Security and New Media Conference; South Sudan Topic at Lunch; Breitbart and Simon Lay Into MSM

Commentator Dick Morris was on rhetorical fire at last week’s National Security & New Media Conference, where he received the Mightier Pen Award. Granted by the Center for Security Policy, a Washington D.C.-based national security think tank, the award is granted “in recognition of individuals who have, through their published writings, contributed both to the public appreciation of the need for robust U.S. national security policies and the perpetuation of military strength as indispensable ingredients in international peace,” according to the Center’s web site.

Also speaking at the luncheon, which took place in midtown Manhattan, were Andrew Breitbart, founder of the conservative web site Big Peace; Roger Simon, CEO of Pajamas Media; Sara Carter, war correspondent for The Washington Examiner; and David Feith, assistant op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal.

Morris ripped into President Barack Obama as overseeing an administration that “will go down in history not for its radicalism, but for its weakness.”

Morris asserted that passivity on the part of the Obama Administration is allowing America’s enemies great leeway, despite heroic efforts of the FBI, CIA, and U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.

“[On foreign policy] and national security, this administration is characterized by apathy, distraction, passivity, appeasement and sabotage,” Morris asserted. “This President has himself confused with Queen Elizabeth the Second, and by that I don’t mean in imperiousness but I mean in passivity … Now, our enemies are not passive. Our enemies are quite active …[O]ur national security, Homeland Security, FBI, and CIA are like the goalie on a heavily overmatched soccer team, and the team isn’t good enough to stop the shots from coming in and the goalie frantically is jumping all over the place to block each shot …
“But there will be a significant and important terror attack on the soil of the U.S. and that will be a total game changer in the politics of this Administration.”

Foreign policy, Morris asserted, is “the forum through which we judge Presidential personality” and other examples of what he characterized as Presidential passivity included “the drift in Afghanistan” and the “willful desire to ignore Iran exists.”

He also ridiculed Obama’s focus on Israeli settlements as a meaningless distraction from the mideast’s real problems.

“This whole big furor that went on for a year and a half about Israeli settlements … and the whole world was going crazy over it, now the United States has dropped the position,” Morris said.

Morris briefly discussed the Administration’s domestic policies as, in his view, weakening the country overall.

“Ten percent unemployment, negative growth or less than two percent growth, at some point in a few years rampant inflation – this is going to be the ‘new normal,'” said Morris.

In the question-and-answer session, Morris pointed out that hypocrisy regarding illegal immigrants exists across party lines

“Republicans want illegals to work but not to vote,” he said. “Democrats … want illegals to vote but not to work.”

The preceding panel addressed the issue of bias versus perspective in media and reporting, with a focus on the way the internet has altered reporting and journalism. Panelists Breitbart and Simon spoke of increased information flow, purveyors of mainstream media feeling threatened by sites such as theirs, and checks and balances between traditional and new media.

Simon explained that his site, Pajamas Media, took its name from the Dan Rather affair in which the veteran newsman and his producer Mary Mapes were exposed by bloggers whose research revealed that a letter Rather used on-air as evidence of President George Bush’s shirking his National Guard service was in fact a fake.

(At the time, Rather’s defenders responded to incontrovertible evidence unearthed by the bloggers by calling these bloggers “amateurs in their pajamas.”)

Some of the ad hominem attacks on bloggers can be attributed to “nervousness on the part of mainstream media” that they no longer monopolize access to information, according to Simon.

“September 11th started to explode the idea that the media was hierarchical and we were all going to be blessed by the New York Times,” he said.

Simon, who is also a screenwriter, pointed out that, whether in new or old media, the sensational tends to trump the substantive when it comes to making money. He said he would like to be able to employ a full-time terrorism correspondent in Yemen or Sudan, but that at this point, his business won’t support that.

“People want to read about Sarah Palin versus Joe Biden on any given day — it’s more glamorous and more trivial” than serious human rights coverage.

However, he said that Pajamas Media strives to provide coverage of life-and-death human rights issues by relying on committed reporters and bloggers who work practically for free.
“We have people writing for very little or no money,” said Simon. “They do it for love of the truth, and for love of themselves, meaning, to get their ideas out.”

Breitbart spoke of Matt Drudge’s “Drudge Report” as a pioneering example of new media that mainstream media felt threatened by when it came online, but that ultimately the MSM had to reckon with.

“Drudge showed up and said, ‘I’m not your friend and I’m going to tell the truth about you and I don’t need to go to dinner at Sally Quinn’s house,” said Breitbart. “Essentially he was finding buried ledes from pages A-31 to A-35 and turning them into a siren. The MSM attacked Drudge, then they realized, ‘My story doesn’t exist unless it’s on Drudge.'”

Breitbart spoke of going on offense to make a conservative narrative dominate in media.
“Forty percent of Americans self-identify as conservatives, 20 percent as liberals,” he said. “Yet the liberal narrative dominates [in media.]”

As an example, he cited MSM coverage of the proposed Ground Zero Mosque.
“Seventy percent of Americans are against this and not because they are prejudiced,” he said. “When [the MSM is] dictating that the opinion of a solid majority of Americans is ‘controversial'” that is skewed coverage, he argued.

Breitbart feels that the attacks on his sites, which include Big Hollywood, Big Journalism, Big Government, and Big Peace, reflect the insecurity of the MSM.

“Now the other narrative is getting out, we have been able to obliterate the left’s claim that they are ‘objective,'” he said. He analogized American media consumers infatuated and/or shocked by new media’s ideological boldness to “teenagers who have just discovered sex.”

In reality, he countered, there “has always been an adversarial press in this country” and the MSM’s claim to strive for perfect objectivity was a unique oasis in U.S. history.

American media is moving closer to the British model, he believes. In Britain, newspapers like the (right-wing) Daily Mail and the (left-wing) Guardian make no secret of their ideological perspective and, while they view it as imperative to get their facts right and provide some context that another perspective exists, do not claim perfect objectivity.

“You can get truth from all of these sources,” he said. He argued that, to recognize different sources have different biases is “more mature” than expecting one’s source of news to spoon-feed perfectly objective coverage.

The existence of old and new media, as well as media sources that span the political spectrum, promote truth and accuracy in reporting, he argued.

“MSM watch us as we watch them and they report when we get something wrong,” he said. “I call that checks and balances”

He cited the Dan Rather debacle as evidence of mainstream media bias as well as a lack of accuracy that he noted Rather was unwilling to cop to – even when it was undeniable.

“One of their top ‘objective’ people was not objective, and even when caught with his hands in the cookie jar was not able to go out with grace,” Breitbart said.

He concluded, “I blame the MSM for their own downfall. They have allocated no resources to report on the plight of [genuinely] moderate Muslims. No one tells the truth — that Council on American Islamic Relations is tapping into political correctness. The counter-narrative people have been too polite, have tried to coax them to be reasonable and they have not been.

“Do not cry when The New York Times goes under.”

Between panels Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, commented that new media has the potential to enable unprecedented circulation of truthful reports that may not fit conventional MSM narratives. These include firsthand reporting on jihad and its victims around the world. He said he is working on putting boots on the ground to cover the upcoming referendum in South Sudan.

Set for January 9th, this referendum will allow the Christians and animists of South Sudan to secede from the Arab Muslim north, which is led by a regime that sheltered bin Laden in the 1990’s.

Efforts are afoot, according to Gaffney, “to try and help people in South Sudan to document what folks in the North are going to try to do. This footage will turn up on these guys’ web sites and will help to rouse people.”

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on December 15, 2010 at 2:48 pm and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>