Help! I Can't Stop Blaming Breitbart!

Former Politico reporter Joe Williams, who told MSNBC’s Martin Bashir on live television that Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney is more comfortable around “white folks,” can’t stop blaming his subsequent firing on the late Andrew Breitbart–and smearing Breitbart using tired mainstream media lies.

Williams writes today on The Grio that he is a victim of “Big Media [sic], an arm of the late Andrew Breitbart’s online empire.” He mentions Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, too, but returns to Andrew Breitbart, reciting left-wing myths about Breitbart’s videos being “heavily edited and taken out of context,” and claiming (falsely) that James O’Keefe “landed…in jail for tampering with the phones in the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).”

Not that Williams is claiming he was “heavily edited and taken out of context.” How can he? He admits: “I was careless on Twitter, ignored some warning signs, and realized too late that my followers weren’t the only ones watching me.” Obviously, it is understandable to assume no one watches MSNBC, but the whole world is on Twitter these days–there’s even a website devoted to recovering deleted political tweets. Williams knows that.

So Williams decides, instead, to smear Breitbart. He even attacks the “decades-old video that showed Obama, as a law student, once said some nice things about Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell”–ignoring Bell’s notorious Critical Race Theory, and the association with Bell that Obama continued for years afterwards, inviting Bell to blurb Dreams from My Father in 1995 (a blurb that vanished from subsequent editions).

Another false piece of evidence Williams attempts to introduce is the idea that MSNBC host Chris Hayes is an equal victim of the “Right Wing Noise Machine” for “questioning whether the word “hero” is overused to desensitize the American public to perpetual war.” That’s not what Hayes said–he said that calling soldiers who had been killed defending America “heroes” was “rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.”

Williams concludes: “Reporters and news organizations have always prided itself on being fearless, independent and intrepid, willing to push back on government and stand up for free speech. Now, in a hyper-kinetic, hyper-partisan age, it seems we’re not even willing to push back on our own critics, which doesn’t bode all that well for my colleagues.” But that’s not even remotely true. Politico and other mainstream media outlets are, in fact, hyper-partisan and dependent on the political left. 

Andrew Breitbart never wanted to deny them their right to be so–but he fought every day to expose the fraud of their supposed objectivity. Williams is a victim in only one sense: he was punished for doing what many journalists get away with every day.