Tim Graham was in the mddle of an Oct. 19 NewsBusters rant about the Washington Post review of the the documentary “Hating Breitbart” and its pointing out that “Breitbart’s Web sites specialized in showing people behaving stupidly, which is (or should be) a relatively small part of what professional journalists do” — something Graham doesn’t contradict beyond whining about it — when he added: “The Post’s movie reviewers prefer radical-left rabble-rousers — like Daniel Ellsberg. Forty years after his heyday, Ellsberg was still ‘astonishingly germane.'”
Huh? What does Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, have to do with any of this?
Graham links to a 2010 post he wrote about a Post review of a documentary about Ellsburg, in which he calls Ellsberg a “America-bashing radical leftist whistleblower,’ going on to rant: “Ellsberg isn’t a leftist to the Post. He’s a ‘consciousness-raiser.’ He’s one of those leftists who thinks the public is largely un-conscious.”
Graham’s dragging Ellsberg into the conversation actually ends up demonstrating how correct the Post review is about the Breitbart film. Leaking the Pentagon Papers — which demonstrated how government officials deceived the public about U.S. involvement in Vietnam — had an impact on the public discussion about the war, and resulted in a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court and resulted in a ruling that stood up for First Amendment rights.
The Breitbart sites, meanwhile, have little to point to in the way of accomplishment besides falsely smearing Shirley Sherrod and being so slavishly pro-Romney that not even Graham could have failed to notice the the bias, since it’s so much greater than anything he’s ever found on the TV networks.
Not that Graham will ever admit any of this, of course.