"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
Mark Steyn imagines the scene when the outlaw is apprehended:
When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.
(Via Instapundit.)
Professor William “Just a Blogger” Jacobson is available to accept your high-fives after he helped lead the citizen-journalist posse that exposed David Gregory’s violation of D.C.’s stringent gun laws. Dylan Byers of Politico has the latest network spin:
NBC’s David Gregory, the subject of a now-popular police investigation, is on vacation and will not host this Sunday’s edition of “Meet The Press.” . . .
Gregory’s vacation was scheduled prior to last week’s show, according to NBC. He is scheduled to host the Jan. 5 edition of “Meet the Press.”
NBC News has declined to comment on the investigation.
“According to NBC” — yeah, the gold standard for veracity there, eh? Professor Jacobson has at last verified the Dec. 24 police e-mail:
NBC contacted MPD inquiring if they could utilize a high capacity magazine for their segment. NBC was informed that possession of a high capacity magazines is not permissible and their request was denied. This matter is currently being investigated.
So, in full knowledge that possession of a 30-round magazine is illegal in D.C. — where Meet the Press is recorded — David Gregory and NBC willfully violated the law just so Gregory could dramatize his anti-Second Amendment lecture to the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.
Now . . . the rest of the story: Politico‘s Katie Glueck confirmed that D.C. police denied NBC permission to display the illegal magazine, but TMZ reports that a Meet the Press staffer conspired to circumvent D.C. law by appealing to the feds:
Well-placed law enforcement sources tell TMZ … a staffer from “Meet the Press” called ATF before the show aired to inquire about the legality of David holding the empty magazine during a segment on gun control. We’re told the ATF person contacted the D.C. police to find out if the District of Columbia — the place where the show is broadcast — had a law prohibiting such a display.
Our sources say the D.C. police official informed ATF David could legally show the magazine, provided it was empty. An ATF official then called the staffer from “Meet the Press” to inform them they could use the magazine.
What? The ATF abetting violation of gun laws?
I’m just shocked by this allegation that the federal agency which helped arm Mexican drug gangs would approve such a clearly illegal scheme.
Is David Gregory really on vacation? Or is he a fugitive from justice?
UPDATE: Evil Blogger Lady has a round-up on this scandal.
UPDATE II: Ed Driscoll rips it up real good.
UPDATE III: More blog commentary from Twitchy, NewsBusters, Hot Air, The Lonely Conservative, Clayton Cramer and I Own the World.
PREVIOUSLY: NBC: Nothing But Criminals
America’s least-trustworthy news organization and its most dishonest “journalist” have gotten themselves caught red-handed:
The Washington Metropolitan Police Department is investigating whether any city laws were violated when NBC’s David Gregory displayed what appeared to be a 30-round gun magazine on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday . . .
“The Metropolitan Police Department is investigating this matter,” said police officer and spokesman Araz Alali in an interview Tuesday. . . .
“There are D.C. code violations, D.C. code restrictions on guns, ammunition. We are investigating this matter. Beyond the scope of that, I can’t comment any further,” he said.
On Sunday, in an interview with the National Rifle Association’s head, Wayne LaPierre, Gregory displayed what appeared to be a 30-bullet gun magazine. He pushed LaPierre on the question of whether fewer children would have died during the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre this month had the gunman had access to fewer bullets.
NBC is stonewalling Professor William Jacobson:
My multiple attempts last Sunday to obtain a response from NBC News as to whether the magazine was real were met with stone cold silence. None of the three senior communications executives with responsibility for Meet the Press responded.
Video of the Meet the Press segment in which David Gregory says “here is a magazine for ammunition that carries 30 bullets”:
Meet the Press is recorded in D.C., where possession of a 30-round magazine is a crime. If David Gregory was telling the truth — if that was indeed an actual high-capacity magazine — then he and NBC News broke the law. Alternatively, if Gregory was lying and the “magazine” was just a phony prop, then NBC News deliberately deceived viewers.
Clearly, David Gregory must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and NBC should be declared a terrorist organization by the Department of Homeland Security, so that everyone associated with the network is subjected to hands-on searches by TSA agents at airports.
OK, maybe that’s going a little overboard. But clearly NBC News as an organization is hostile to Americans’ constitutional rights.
by Smitty
What a ludicrous standard! Matthews, how is it possible to speak to the ‘whole’ country? With ‘whole’ for a quantifier, it only takes one to require another pass. Pass, ‘whole’.
Newsbusters:
Minutes after Paul Ryan finished his RNC speech on Wednesday, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews slammed the Republican vice presidential candidate for supposedly ignoring blacks during his “very constricted, very negative, very nasty speech,” and suggested that he was directing the address to racists: “It’s clear that Paul Ryan was talking to people who think about rights as something…produced by Thomas Jefferson, ignoring the people for whom the rights only came in the 1960s.”
For a nominal Roman Catholic, Matthews cleaves to an obtuse, secular weltanschauung. Or one that only looks a certain direction:
Probably, by the time 2020 rolls around, and Paul Ryan is running for POTUS, Matthews shall have departed the scene in the I-love-me jacket.
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is in many ways too radical — with dangerous overtones of Nietzsche — but clearly enunciates certain basic insights. In one of her characters’ monologues, Rand expresses the fundamental problem with the Marxist maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
What’s wrong with that? It turns “need” into a virtue, a permanent license to take from others, and makes ability a burden.
The resemblance between Marxism and modern liberalism is a subject that conservatives aren’t supposed to mention, nor are we supposed to notice that the Left values loyalty to its agenda over competence or virtue. Warner Todd Huston reminds us how this works:
Proving that no misdeed goes unrewarded on the left, reports have it that once Microsoft and NBC News break up housekeeping and put an end to MSNBC.com in its current form, the resulting new Internet outlet will be getting a new chief. And that new chief will be none other than Vivian Schiller, the disgraced former head of National Public Radio (NPR).
You may remember Vivian Schiller for her bungled firing of the NPR commentator Juan Williams back in 2010.
As a loyal leftist, Schiller can only fail upward, just as Anthony Weiner’s disgrace cannot disqualify him from aspiring to disgrace Democrats in some new office, and Ted Kennedy . . .
Well, Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.
Not content to reward failure and celebrate vice, however, the Left’s perverse beliefs require them also to mock virtue and punish success:
Barack Obama wants us to live in an America of his imagining — a magical land of perfect equality where the laws of economics and human nature do not apply, where everyone gets his own unicorn and the only ones who have to pay are the mythical “rich,” who toil endlessly to provide for us all without complaint. . . .
Coming up on the first anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, it will be victory-lap time on Fox News Sunday, CNN’s State of the Union and ABC’s This Week, with counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan as the guest. Andrew Malcolm writes:
You remember Brennan as the one rushed out to the White House briefing room the next day to provide the hungry media with their cherished tick-tock account of the commandos’ penetration into Pakistan and the slaying of the instigator of 9/11.
Unfortunately, so eager was the administration to tell its story quickly, that Brennan’s premature enunciation of the event contained numerous details later adjusted or contradicted, detracting from the anticipated accolades.
By now, however, most of the raid confusion is cleared. And everyone knows that the successful killing was mainly the result of Obama’s brave decision, although the SEALs, the stealth helicopter pilots and the Air Force electronic cloaking crews probably helped a little.
Oh, look, it’s an election year!
Sarcastic much? Allahpundit says you should skip the three-network BrennanFest in favor of Bob Schieffer’s lineup on Face the Nation:
CBS looks like the better bet for OBL coverage, though. They’ve got David Ignatius, whose new column argues that the Islamist trend in the Arab Spring has given Bin Laden the last laugh, and Peter Bergen, who interviewed OBL four years before 9/11 and has a new book on the manhunt for him out on Tuesday.
From that David Ignatius column:
Egypt is a case in point: This has been a year of mostly nonviolent democratic revolution. But it has brought to power some Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood groups that share common theological roots with bin Laden. And the al-Qaeda goal of driving the “apostate,” pro-American President Hosni Mubarak from power has been achieved. . . .
What we’re seeing now in Egypt is something that might be called electoral bin Ladenism. Take the group Gamaa Islamiya, which under its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, made the first unsuccessful attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Today, the organization has formed a Salafist political party with the benign name Building and Development Party. This organization, which like al-Qaeda traces its roots to the Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, has 13 seats in the new Egyptian parliament.
You might also want to check William Jacobson’s argument: “Obama got Osama, but lost the Middle East.”
While you browse your local TV schedule for Sunday show times, a couple more points: CNN’s also has House Speaker John Boehner, while NBC’s Meet the Press goes straight to the presidential campaign, with Ed Gillespie for the Republicans and Robert Gibbs for the Democrats — plus Hilary Rosen and Rachel Maddow!
If any of these people make actual news, I’ll let you know.
If that complaint seems absurd, how about the complaint made by Ann Curry on NBC’s Today Show?
“You know, it’s about those with money having an easier life than those who don’t. And there’s something fundamentally unfair about that. Because not everyone has access to being able to get money, to work for money.”
“Fairness,” defined as equality, means that everyone must be exactly the same. Everything must be split 50-50, even-Steven, or else whoever gets less is a victim of social injustice, unfairly oppressed and exploited by whoever gets more. Instapundit is therefore violating my civil rights!
NBC officials are refusing to provide a full accounting — and name names of those responsible — for the misleading edit of the George Zimmerman 911 call. NBC’s editing created the false and inflammatory impression that Zimmerman had singled out Trayvon Martin on the basis of race. In fact, as the unedited audio of the call showed, Zimmerman was asked by the 911 operator about Martin’s race.
Dan Reihl at Big Journalism called attention to the deceptive edit a month ago. An NBC employee was then fired (but not named by the network) and now, according to the Miami Herald, a reporter/producer at NBC’s Miami affiliate, Jeff Burnside, has also been fired. John Sexton at Big Journalism culls this telling quote from the story:
“The network is very sensitive about the whole Al Sharpton/MSNBC issue, so when the right-wing bloggers started hammering, they needed to throw them fresh meat,” said the station source, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the controversy. “It’s not at all clear how this happened. Obviously, there was miscommunication.”
Wait a g–damned minute here: Has NBC so completely abandoned any pretense to basic accuracy in its reporting that the only reason they take disciplinary action is to throw “fresh meat” to “right-wing bloggers”? And isn’t it at the same time true, as Ace of Spades says, that the media have become so reliant on left-wing blogs that major news organizations routinely re-hash misleading or even blatantly false stories pushed by the online Left, while only rarely and reluctantly acknowledging stories originated by the online Right?
Isn’t this what the Elizabeth Flock story showed us? Notorious moonbat John Avarosis makes an outrageously irresponsible accusation — that Mitt Romney is recycling KKK slogans — and the Washington Post can’t even be bothered to verify it?
Journalism has evidently become so politicized that there is apparently no longer even any need for NBC News to pretend that it is engaged in anything other than partisan propaganda — even when, in the pursuit of an overtly political agenda, they are providing manufactured falsehoods to serve as fodder for dangerous racial demagoguery.
So if NBC reports complete dishonest bulls–t, that’s just fine. However, if “right-wing bloggers” start hammering, they’ll be thrown some “fresh meat” — a couple of low-level employees thrown under the bus — while folks in the executive suites at 30 Rock are never held accountable, or compelled to confront the fact that they have presided over the destruction of their own organization’s journalistic credibility.