Category: Dana Loesch

Credit Where Credit Is Due: Breitbart, Beck and the Dana Loesch Lawsuit

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Back in the Day: Andrew Breitbart was a guest on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show

In April 2011, Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller reported that Glenn Beck had been accused of using bloggers’ content without attribution:

Mandy Nagy, a conservative blogger known online as Liberty Chick, spent untold hours last fall creating a chart that tracks left-wing billionaire George Soros’s influence over media organizations, only to see it appear, in its exact form and without any attribution, on Beck’s famous chalkboard. “We were laughing that he went to all the trouble of [recreating] the visual on the blackboard,” Nagy said, not sounding entirely amused.
John Sexton, who blogs at VerumSerum.com, has provided Beck with material several times, and has sometimes received credit for it. But in several other cases, Sexton says, “he’s used our stuff without any hat tip at all. I don’t understand that.” According to Sexton, in one instance even famously liberal CBS News credited VerumSerum.com for content it used, while Beck, who lifted the same material, did not.
Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com recalls watching Beck use a story she wrote about campaign contributions the Obama campaign received from donors in Gaza. Many other publications referred to the story, Geller says, but only Beck refused to give her credit for it.
“I went through thousands of pages of FEC documents and it was an enormous task to uncover the campaign contributions from Gaza, a Hamas-controlled area, to President Obama,” Geller says. “It’s in my book and it wasn’t a secret that I wrote the story. I don’t know how to describe such outrageous and proud thievery. I like his work, but he’s a thief.”

You can read the whole thing. Let’s be clear that Glenn Beck is certainly not the only broadcaster or journalist who has been accused of failing to give adequate credit to the work of others, and bloggers especially get used to being shortchanged by the big shots.

That April 2011 article, however, was sort of an Empire Strikes Back episode in what became a widespread backlash against Beck after he had a falling-out with Andrew Breitbart. And this is relevant now because, as I reported Christmas Eve, “people are telling me that it was Glenn Beck who wanted to hire Dana Loesch away from Breitbart.com,” and Dana has filed a federal lawsuit against Breitbart.com.

Let’s be clear (a) there’s a whole lot of backstory to this, which may never be entirely known, and (b) I cannot verify that there were actually any negotiations between Dana and Beck — it’s just what “people are telling me.” Obviously the plaintiff in a lawsuit can’t talk about it, and nobody at either Breitbart.com or Beck’s operation has said a word about it. Then again, I haven’t gotten any angry e-mails denying it, so . . .

In order to understand why Breitbart.com might take especial umbrage at the idea of Dana Loesch leaving to join Glenn Beck’s rival New Media operation, it helps to listen to a podcast interview Andrew Breitbart recorded in December 2011 with Stephen K. Bannon.

Because Bannon is now executive chairman of Breitbart.com, this is a very important interview. Becca J. Lower and Danielle Saul have provided a full transcript, which I briefly excerpt here:

Breitbart: [T]here are a lot of Beck supporters. In the past, Beck has made a lot of mistakes and his supporters come out and try to defend him, because Beck is a coward and will not defend himself when he makes a mistake or lies about a person or steals content —
Bannon: Hold on, I want to go back over this: you’re saying that Glenn Beck’s a coward, Glenn Beck’s a liar, and you’re saying that Glenn Beck steals material from people?
Breitbart: Oh yes, and this is well-documented. And whenever he does it, he never answers to the charges. He’s a coward. He won’t have me on the radio show, he won’t have himself [and] me on GBTV, refused to have me on Fox when he threw me under the bus. During the Sherrod thing, I asked to be on TV or radio to explain why he had it wrong. Months later, we found out why he wouldn’t have me on is because he lied to his audience on television that he didn’t do the Sherrod story. . . . In order to rectify the situation, he went on TV and tried to pretend like he was above the fray and told O’Reilly, to his face, a lie . . .
He also has historically been found to take countless bloggers’ content, to turn it into book gold, to turn it into chalkboard gold . . .He will not answer to the charges, and his minions online like to defend him. . . .

You can — and certainly should — read the whole thing.

 

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Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Chains Rattling, and Who’s That Ghost?

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P.J. O’Rourke encounters Andrew Breitbart at the
Manchester, N.H., Radisson Bar, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012

“At more than one point in the movie, Breitbart asks members of audiences he’s addressing to hold up their iPhones, pocket cams, and other recording devices and to turn them on. You, he says, are the media. That gesture is the essential takeaway of Andrew Breitbart’s work — and of the documentary Hating Breitbart. Such moments illustrate how something weird and wonderful is happening when it comes to media. . . .
“Andrew Breitbart understood that it’s easier than ever to own a press and that despite the vast, incomprehensible increase in chatter . . . the demand for even more is still infinite.”
— Nick Gillespie, “Hating Breitbart‘s Powerful Post-Partisan Message,” Nov. 2

One of my favorite books is P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government, which ought to be on every college freshman’s reading list. It therefore seemed obvious, when I bumped into O’Rourke in the bar of the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, N.H., after the Republican presidential debate, that I must introduce him to Andrew Breitbart.

So now I sit here and ask myself, “How would ‘a lone humorist’ attempt to explain the entire tragic situation at Breitbart.com?”

Having spent more than a few hours on the phone talking to people about it the past several days, a reasonably coherent picture is emerging, and I’m not really sure I want to be the guy describing it. In fact, the smartest thing for me to do would probably be to ignore it.

None of my business. Walk away and pretend nothing happened.

Except there’s a federal lawsuit filed by Dana Loesch, which is actual news, and maybe it’s not a good idea to let myself get scooped here.

Andrew Breitbart liked to say he had two modes of operation, jocularity and righteous indignation, and it’s rather unfortunate that he never got around to writing the book, Jocularity: Excuse Me While I Make You Laugh Your F–king Asses Off, because he certainly could.

In his righteous indignation mode, by contrast, Andrew went off on Glenn Beck last year, calling Beck a “coward,” a “snake” and a “huckster” in an interview on Stephen Bannon’s podcast:

You really ought to listen to that entire 13-minute interview. As a matter of fact, a transcript might come in handy, because (a) people are telling me that it was Glenn Beck who wanted to hire Dana Loesch away from Breitbart.com, (b) the same people depict Stephen Bannon as the villain of the story, and (c) I’m genuinely perplexed by all this.

My advice has not been solicited, because I’ve only worked in the news business since 1986, so what do I know about newsroom management?

Every newsroom is a seething cauldron of frustrated ambition. There has never been a news outfit that wasn’t afflicted by clueless management, inept editors and disgruntled reporters. “We’re working for chimpanzees,” as a former Washington Times colleague used to say.

Mistakes, conflicts, rivalries, backstabbing — it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, and the key to survival in the business is deciding how much craziness you can stand before you decide to sing that Johnny Paycheck classic, “Take This Job and Shove It.”

What’s bizarre about the case of Dana Loesch v. Breitbart.com LLC is that when Dana wanted to leave, they wouldn’t let her.

Or so Dana alleges, I hasten to add, because the last thing I need is someone suing me for defamation, tortious interference, etc.

“Mongo just pawn in game of life.”

The last thing I need is to insert myself into the middle of the New Media equivalent of the Battle of Stalingrad, but as I said a couple days ago, the sharks are going to have themselves a feeding frenzy no matter what I do (or don’t do) and why should I let myself get scooped?

Never mind my dilemma. Hear what Patterico has to say:

I never said this before, but I was personally the recipient of some pretty shabby treatment myself from that organization, after Andrew died.
[M]y experience was not the only such experience. Not by a long shot. And having been through it, it is plenty easy for me to believe that Loesch was also treated shabbily.
And when you treat people like crap, it doesn’t stay a secret.

Read the whole thing, because it’s exactly right. The world of conservative New Media is kind of like a small town, and if a secret is juicy enough, don’t think you’re going to keep the town gossips from doing what they habitually do. Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly.

Anyway, this wasn’t my plan for a cheerful Christmas Eve column, and I’m sorry for throwing this bummer on you when we’re all supposed to be making merry. But even heavy burdens are lighter when they’re shared by enough people, and maybe we can crowd-source this problem.

After all, as Breitbart said: You are the media.

UPDATE (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!





 

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Newsroom Management Training Video

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“The idea that I could do for a living that which I would do in my free time, for free, is the single greatest thing on the planet.”
— Andrew Breitbart, May 2007

“He had so much energy. He was so positive. . . . He was definitely a mentor. He was great to his employees. . . . He leaves behind a huge legacy.”
— Dana Loesch, March 1, 2012

“This case concerns a poorly managed but well meaning relationship gone tragically awry, resulting in the attempt by one vindictive party to sabotage the reputation and career of another. . . .
“For reasons that may just as easily be attributed to basic ideological conflicts, the working environment for Loesch became increasingly hostile.”
— Dana Loesch v. Breitbart.com LLC, December 2012

Generally speaking, when a routine personnel matter at a political news organization turns into a federal lawsuit that zooms to the top of Memeorandum, we might suspect that editorial management practices are not optimal, to say the very least.

Look, I once worked for the legendary notorious Otis Brumby, the pluperfect stereotype of the temperamental domineering publisher.

Otis recently did the world of journalism an enormous favor by dying, so that he can’t sue anyone for libel. Then again, truth is the ultimate defense and there were alway plenty of witnesses willing to testify that Otis was one evil, mean and crazy son of bitch.

A certain level of “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” in the newsroom therefore seems entirely normal to me, experience that came in quite handy during my decade at The Washington Times, another news operation where the words “commitment” and “institution” have special significance.

IYKWIMAITYD.

Megalomania as a managerial principle is perhaps a suitable topic for a graduate thesis at the University of Columbia J-school, but I digress . . .

Having further explored the background on what is now a matter of litigation (Loesch v. Breitbart.com), I think three things are obvious:

  1. Andrew Breitbart never would have let this happen;
  2. There’s much more to the story; and
  3. Dana Loesch has already won.

Whatever happens to the lawsuit, Dana is and will remain a person much beloved by the conservative Tea Party grassroots, whose light cannot possibly be kept hidden beneath a bushel.

The problem for the defendants in this lawsuit is that there is now blood in the water and the sharks — TPM, ThinkProgress, Media Matters, Mother Jones, Slate, Salon, Politico, Gawker, etc. — are going to insist on having themselves a feeding frenzy.

When McKay Coppins did his little “sources say” story in October, it pissed me off, because institutional loyalty and staff morale are essential to any news organization. It was shocking to think anyone who worked for Breitbart would have anything to say to McKay Coppins that did not begin with “fuck” and end with “you.”

Now, however, in my mind’s eye I’m seeing a 4,000-word article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, or an equally in-depth cover article in The New Republic — written by liberal journalists who despise everything that Andrew Breitbart believed — and there is nothing anyone can do at this point to prevent that from happening. Too many people are already talking, and the inherent news value is too great, to convince an editor that it’s not worth reporting at length.

Go read Dana Loesch’s lawsuit and ask yourself what is meant by such phrases as “poorly managed . . . vindictive . . . sabotage . . . basic ideological conflicts . . . increasingly hostile.”

Well, these are merely allegations, eh? So far as we can claim to know, all these things are wholly imagined by the plaintiff, and the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

I first met Andrew Breitbart at CPAC in February 2007, and interviewed him for a feature profile in May 2007. I hung out with him many times over the years, including at the Michigan AFP event in February this year, just a few days before his untimely death.

And I think everyone involved in this unfortunate mess — defendant, plaintiff, and the horrified witnesses — can agree with this four-word sentence: Damn, I miss Andrew.

 

 

 


Dana Loesch, Indentured Servant?

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Rumbles of discontent at Breitbart.com, which I’d been hearing from various sources since spring, have finally erupted into actual news, as Dana Loesch has filed a federal lawsuit seeking (a) $75,000 and (b) to be released from her contactual obligations:

St. Louis talk radio host Dana Loesch, also a frequent guest on CNN, alleges in the suit filed in federal district court in St. Louis that the site is refusing to publish her work while “sabotag[ing] her attempts to labor in a similar fashion elsewhere through public misstatements and private threats to sue those who would otherwise employ Loesch.” . . .
Breitbart.com is “binding Loesch to what amounts to an indentured servitude in limbo,” she charges in the suit, which was first reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

More at the BuzzFeed. It’s unfortunate that matters came to such a pass, and I don’t want to get into the blame game in a situation where I don’t know both sides of the story.

As I said, I’ve heard “rumbles” about the Breitbart.com operation for several months, but having spent so long in the newspaper business — where every newsroom is a seething cauldron of frustrated ambition — it’s something I didn’t want to read too much into.

Dana Loesch is one of my favorite people in New Media, and I know she was one of Andrew’s favorite people. It’s just very sad to see things break down so badly so soon after Andrew’s death.

Click here to read the eight-page text of Dana’s lawsuit.

UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread. I’ve printed out the lawsuit and may have further comment after I read it.

UPDATE II: OK, now having skimmed over the lawsuit, the claim is that in October 2011, Breitbart.com failed to exercise its option to renew Dana’s contract for another year, so that her employment thereafter was on a month-to-month basis. In September of this year — perhaps having been offered better terms by another site — Dana gave a month’s notice of her intent to leave Breitbart.com, at which point management claimed that she was still contractually bound to the company, and threatened legal action against any company that hired Dana.

Four word come to minds: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Without regard for contracts, it is just plain nuts for Breitbart.com to try to keep Dana if Dana wants to leave. What is this, the Mafia or something, where once you’re in, you’re in for life?

Frankly, I’ve never heard of anything like this before. It simply doesn’t make sense: If, as Dana alleges, Breitbart.com no longer wants to publish her writing, why would they prevent her from taking her work elsewhere? If her services are not valuable to them, why deny her the right to find another publisher who might value her services more?

Maybe management at Breitbart.com can explain this, or maybe I’m somehow misunderstanding the dispute, but what it looks like is, they’re trying to drive Dana Loesch off the Web altogether: She can neither write for Breitbart.com, nor write for anyone else.

How the hell can they do that in America?

UPDATE III: Linked by Doug Hagin at Daley Gator and by The Lonely Conservative. Continuing rumbles indicate that the situation with Dana Loesch may be part of a larger issue with the business model and the management philosophy at Breitbart.com: More like an old-style Hollywood studio system, oriented toward celebrity “star power,” so that if they can’t have Dana Loesch, nobody can have Dana Loesch. Or something like that, anyway.

David Martosko at the Daily Caller points out that, since Andrew died in March, “a coterie of friends of the company’s late namesake has continued to run the  company, most recently hiring a raft of conservative bloggers and reporters that  included former Washington Times staffer Kerry Picket and former Daily Caller  reporter Matthew Boyle.”

Knew they had hired Boyle, a young investigative reporter, but didn’t realize they’d also hired Picket, an ultra-aggressive Capitol Hill reporter. And, to show you how little attention I pay to these things anymore, I hadn’t seen this Dec. 10 story by Betsy Rothstein at Fishbowl DC, talking about Breitbart.com’s Stephen K. Bannon hiring up reporters by the bushel basket load, signing them up to four-year contracts:

Reporters around town being wooed for Breitbart.com include: Katie Pavlich of Townhall, Lachlan Markay of Heritage, Charlie Spiering of the Washington Examiner, Caroline May of The Daily Caller and Daniel Halper at The Weekly Standard.
Some have described a cultish feel to the process, with phrases such as “This is the way Andrew would have wanted it” being bandied about in conversation.

So, if they’ve got all this cash to throw around for hot talent in D.C., why should they insist on keeping Dana Loesch sidelined?

To repeat: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Democrat Troll Accounts Wage Hateful ‘War on Women’ Against Dana Loesch

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Evidently, the polls in the Missouri Senate race — which show Claire McCaskill at only 45% and Todd Akin within 2 points — have unhinged Democrats, who have adopted a “kill-the-messenger” frenzy against St. Louis-based Dana Loesch:

Why does Twitter @Support permit vile monsters like @KognitiveDiss to use their service, and thereby make Twitter such a toxic pool of filth? This isn’t about “Free Speech.” The First Amendment imposes no requirement on commercial providers to allow their services to be abused in this digusting manner. Dana Loesch’s political opinions — she wrote about the Missouri Senate race yesterday — should not make her an open target for these kind of hatefully obscene attacks from troll accounts.

UPDATE: Here’s a nice video from Glenn Beck’s “American Voices” series in which Dana Loesch explains who she is:

What kind of wicked person — what kind of vicious twisted soul — would say the hateful things about her that @KognitiveDiss has said? And why would Twitter @Support not automatically delete that kind of troll account?

When Trolls Attack: Marcusean Mob Gets @ChrisLoesch Bounced from Twitter

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“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
— Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 1965

Sunday night, I was a guest on “BlogMock Radio,” the weekly online podcast hosted by Blogmocracy and Diary of Daedalus, and a caller asked, “Did you hear what happened to Chris Loesch?”

Chris Loesch is a musician who joined forces with Steven Crowder to perform as Powdered Zombies for the viral rap hit “Mr. America.”

Chris is also, not coincidentally, the husband of blogger/talk-radio host/CNN contributor Dana Loesch. Chris was arguing with some left-wingers on Twitter who had attacked his wife when the enlightened tolerant progressives decided — to borrow a phrase from Spencer Ackerman — to smash him through a plate-glass window. Chris explained to Twitchy what happened:

I was suspended 20 minutes after I was done debating a few liberals. Twitter’s suspension message to me stated that I had used “Abusive Language” I never cursed, threatened or belittled anyone. . . .
I stumbled upon a few tweets between the liberals I was debating, discussing getting groups together to block conservative twitter accounts in mass. I am certain that @OccupiedMuslim got her entire OWS rally in NYC to report me for spam. I wish I would have taken a screen shot because those tweets were deleted as soon as I started making noise about it. . . .
This is clearly a tactic being used by the left and Twitter is either ignorant or allowing it to occur.

Got it? Any conservative active on Twitter is familiar with how left-wing trolls — many of them associated with the Occupy movement — like to get up “in your face,” hurling abusive language and dishonest smears. The best response usually is to ignore them.

Most people don’t have time to waste on such vermin, but ignoring the troll attacks will sometimes give them the idea that they are “winning” (Charlie Sheen-style), so that the trolls start congratulating each other on their success, and claiming that the objects of their attacks are too stupid or too cowardly to engage them in arguments. You’ll never guess who wrote this:

Right wingers harass, abuse, insult & attack people constantly on Twitter, then act outraged and whine when their accounts are suspended.

OK, maybe you did guess, huh? This is what happens when the target responds to the trolls: The enlightened tolerant progressives deliberately mischaracterize the response as an “attack,” or “whining,” as if the targets of their vicious dishonest online aggression had no right to answer them back. And now, as the case of Chris Loesch dramatizes, the Left has begun organizing stalker mobs to falsely report conservatives for “spam”/”abuse,” in order to silence the Right on Twitter. Why?

Silencing opposition is the Left’s only hope for success.

If conservatives are permitted a fair chance to critique the Left’s agenda, to expose the Left’s tactics and demonstrate the failure of the Left’s policies, the Left loses. Not content to dominate academia, public schools, the entertainment industry, book publishing and the mainstream news media — all of which cultural institutions are characterized by an overwhelming liberal hegemony — the Left is now determined to silence conservative opposition in the few bastions of freedom that remain: Talk radio, cable TV and the Internet.

Nearly half a century has passed since Marxist theoretician Herbert Marcuse proposed a “liberating tolerance” — in fact, progressive intolerance — that would silence the Left’s opposition. Many old-fashioned liberals at that time recognized the totalitarian nature of Marcuse’s formula. Leszek Kolakowski observed that the ultimate object of Marcuse’s ideology was “Marxism as a Totalitarian Utopia. . . . the freedom he advocates is non-freedom.”

Here we are now in 2012, and we see mobs of left-wingers still pursuing the Marcusean totalitarian formula: Smash the opponent “through a plate glass window,” as Spencer Ackerman infamously said, and do not scruple about the means to the end. If one imagines that the Right is Evil by definition, then defeat the Right “by any means necessary,” to employ a favorite slogan of the Left.

Ten days ago, Daniel Vergara committed libel against me — and Twitter has still done nothing about Vergara’s defamation.

Yesterday, a left-wing online mob attacked Chris Loesch, and Twitter suspended Loesch’s account. When conservatives rallied under  Ben Howe’s #FreeChrisLoesch banner, Loesch was briefly reinstated, but continued agitation from the left-wing Twitter trolls resulted in a second suspension. If this could happen to such a prominent person, whose wife is a paid contributor to CNN, what do you suppose happens to smaller, less influential figures online?

As Twitchy documents, these attacks have happened to many conservatives, and Twitter has done nothing to stop it.

Anneke Green reports the story at The Washington Times. Now a Memeorandum thread, with commentary from Hot Air and Nice Deb.

Conservatives must defend free speech now, before the Left uses Marcusean “liberating tolerance” to silence all opposition.

UPDATE: Darleen Click on the Twitter troll tactics:

They even believe they “own” certain hashtags and target conservatives who engage, mockingly or seriously, in “their” space.
Sister Toldjah was able to uncover one of the “hit lists” and, scroll down and you’ll find me and Serr8d on the list.

She’s exactly right: The Left wanted to “own” the #OWS and #Occupy Twitter hashtags, and when conservatives began using those tags to promote stories documenting the criminal violence of the Occupy movement, the Left became enraged. Well, they were enraged already, I guess, but they went into an especially demented sort of frenzy at being unable to control the “narrative” of the Occupy movement.

UPDATE II: Da Tech Guy sees Soviet tactics by the Left, while Dan Collins discusses the possibility that the White House is orchestrating such attacks. One need not believe that to understand that Our President has done nothing to discourage the Left’s venomous hatefulness and has, indeed, in many ways fomented it.

 


The Girl With the Ephesians Tattoo

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“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.”
— Ephesians 6:12-13 (KJV)

When Ali Akbar and I were in Tampa for the CNN Tea Party debate in September, there was a bit of embarrassing “hubba-hubba” in the comments when I mentioned that we would be having lunch with Dana Loesch. She’s a nice-looking lady, but also a married mom. And then I scored a brief video interview with Dana:

The comments on that post? Polite and appropriate. Once she brandished that Bible-verse tattoo, even our usually rowdy commenters were like: “Oh, she’s a Christian.” And they piped down.

Kind of an interesting effect to observe.

So anyway, the other day, a blogger pointed out that Charles Johnson had described Catholic nuns as “uppity” — a word which, according to CJ, was raaaaacist when used by Rush Limbaugh. This caused Jazzy McBikeshorts to get all sniffy about context:

Sure enough, dozens of wingnuts are busily retweeting it today, after it was picked up by Breitbart.com blogger Dan Riehl and then retweeted by CNN contributor Dana Loesch . . .
I know wingnuts aren’t big on the whole context thing, especially when they’re getting their smear on . . .
I’ve never been able to tell if people like Dan Riehl and Dana Loesch are really this dense, or if they’re cynically manipulating those who are.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, CJ decided to get in Dana’s face about it: Big mistake, resulting in an epic beatdown captured by Diary of Daedalus, worth reading for amusement. Comic denouement? LGFers have now announced they’ll boycott CNN because of that mean ol’ Dana Loesch — who is, of course, wearing “the whole armour of God.”

They can’t touch her. And it drives ’em nuts.