via Breitbart Feed on 5/12/12
The inconsistency of the mainstream media's choices on newsworthiness is sometimes too absurd to fathom.
We know liberal reporters are obsessed with race, the most recent example being their reporting on Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. The mainstream press has also shown, in the face of falling opinion polls and revenue, they still will expend the resources to find ancient details on Mitt Romney's high school classmates or, when they want to, track down former President Barack Obama's composite ex-girlfriends. And when it comes to politicians, when the mainstream press smells any hint of an inconsistency or a cover-up, they usually pounce on and circle the politician like a gang of sharks ready to chomp into its helpless prey.
So when Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat running for Scott Brown's Senate seat, seemed like she was caught red-handed (no pun intended) lying about her "Native American" heritage at best, and at worst, perpetuating the falsehood so she or her employers could reap the benefits from it, it seemed like a tailor-made for the mainstream media to pounce on.
There was race. There were inconsistencies. There were walk-balks. There was a mystery -- whether Warren really had any Native American ancestors -- to be solved.
But because Warren is a darling of the liberal mainstream media, particularly among those in the D.C.-New York-Boston axis, they just ignored it. And in the old days, the story would have been swept under the rug.
But things are different now, as new media like Breitbart News flourishes while mainstream media organizations sink toward bankruptcy.
When Warren claimed she may have allowed herself to be listed as a minority or Native American in various professional listings and directories so that she could meet more people from those communities, it was Breitbart News Editor Joel Pollak -- and not the mainstream press -- who discovered that Warren never openly participated in the many events put on by Harvard's Native American student association.
When a prominent genealogical society (more on that later) told the mainstream press that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee, Breitbart News contributor Michael Patrick Leahy revealed one of Warren's ancestors was directly responsible for actually rounding up Cherokees for the infamous "Trail of Tears."
The mainstream uncritically accepted the assertion that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee, which they surely would not have done if she were anything but a darling anti-capitalist mouthpiece for them. Imagine the lengths the mainstream press would have gone to make Warren prove her ancestry if she were a conservative who was against affirmative action programs.
So, it was left to Breitbart News contributor Leahy, an amateur genealogist, to again do the work the mainstream press would not. And he found, "The slender thread upon which Elizabeth Warren's claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee rests—a purported 1894 marriage license application—has been exposed as non-existent."
Leahy contacted an official in the Oklahoma Court Clerk's office in Guthrie, Oklahoma and discovered the marriage license application in question was not stored and probably not even created. He also discovered, almost unbelievably, that no mainstream media organization had even contacted this official to inquire about the supposed document on which Warren's claims of being partly Native American rested. Leahy also found that the bride and groom, on the official license of the couple in question, left blank the column where they could have indicated their races.
Mr. Leahy also discovered the "source" for the Warren's claim Warren is a 2006 family newsletter, which the New England Historical Genealogical Society found sufficient to deem the assertion an indisputable fact. The Genealogical Society, caught red-handed, has changed spokesmen and now refuses to comment further on this case. But the damage has been done, as the mainstream media ran with their original assessment, now all but proven bogus.
And then there was the question of who was responsible for listing Warren as a Native American: the professor or her employers. With all the inconsistencies between Warren and Harvard's accounts, the mainstream media should have made trips en masse to the university. But, of course, they did not.
Instead, Breitbart News reporter John Sexton discovered both Harvard's and Warren's stories did not add up. Sexton discovered a letter written by a Harvard administration official, in response to a New York Times story played up Derrick Bell's complaints about the lack of diversity at Harvard Law School, indicating that Harvard had a Native American law professor, which was a reference to Warren. Because that letter was no longer available in the online New York Times archives, Sexton had to track down the letter at his local library.
Further, Sexton discovered that Warren most likely volunteered information that she was Native American to Harvard so the school could properly fill out its reports to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) because Harvard is a federal contractor.
As Sexton wrote, "the employer may visually identify the race of the employee, but in Warren's case that seems unlikely. No one looking at Warren would likely designate her as Native American. ... So the most likely way this information became part of Harvard's official records is via 'post-employment records' ... which Warren would voluntarily have filled out herself."
And with all this evidence and work put right in front of the mainstream media, they still have not put pressure on Warren, which proves the importance of new media and how much it is needed.
Further, this episode reveals two things Andrew Breitbart always said about the mainstream media and its members. First, they are often lazy and incompetent. Second, they protect their own.
Thank goodness there are new media reporters like Messrs. Pollak, Leahy, and Sexton to keep the mainstream media -- and the liberal politicians they seek to protect and coddle -- accountable.
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