Hilarious! Loesch Sends Big Journalism Readers to Troll Student Newspaper

Talk about being thin-skinned! The Washington University student newspaper StudLife had an article on Friday asking for opinions on CNN hiring Dana Loesch as an election analyst. The article included quotes from members of the Young Americans for Liberty, the College Republicans, a media professor, and yours truly. Yet Loesch apparently was offended by the article and put a link up on her site Big Journalism to complain about the student newspaper "considering the merits of silencing Dana Loesch:"

Naturally, many of her followers put up angry comments on the site without even reading the article. Pretty hilarious.

While I'm at it, since StudLife (understandably) only included part of my comments after they asked me to weigh in, I thought I'd post them all here:

Hiring Dana Loesch as an election analyst severely damages the credibility of CNN as a news organization, not because of the fact that she's extremely conservative, but rather because she is a proponent of the Andrew Breitbart approach to journalism which is fundamentally dishonest when it comes to the gathering and presentation of information.

Andrew Breitbart was disgraced last year after he released a blog post and video claiming Shirley Sherrod was "racist" that resulted in Sherrod being fired. It was later found out that the video was highly edited and completely changed the context of Sherrod's comments, which were actually meant to illustrate that race does not matter. Dana Loesch was one of the leading people in the country pushing Andrew Breitbart's false claims to the media, and continues to defend him to this day. You can listen to an interview of Loesch and Breitbart the day after the story broke suggesting that Sherrod was racist here.

A bit closer to home, Loesch was completely dishonest about the Bristol Palin controversy at Wash U. As you can see at the 2:58 mark of this video from the past weekend, she claimed that Wash U paid Van Jones $20,000 to speak at the school. Actually, Van Jones usually speaks for $20,000, but agreed to speak at Wash U for only $5,000. Green Action applied for a small amount more for a panel, but they were turned down. She also tweeted and blogged about actress Kate Walsh, absurdly implying that Walsh's retweet at the request of a student was "organizing a rally" against Bristol Palin, which set off an array of false stories in the media that suggested that Walsh had something to do with Bristol Palin being disinvited.

There's much more I can talk about if you're interested, from Loesch's unending support of James O'Keefe and his cronies even after he was convicted of entering a congressional office under false premises and even after they were caught planning to sexually humiliate a CNN reporter, to the inflamed rhetoric of the St. Louis tea party where Loesch says "I love the smell of fire when it's burning tyranny" while her friends set fire to a photo of Congressman Russ Carnahan, to her conspiracy theories about President Obama ordering "thugs" to beat up tea party members in St. Louis, to her attacks on local school teachers based on misinformation, and much much more.

What I find really strange is that CNN seems to recognize that Breitbart and O'Keefe are toxic, and they rarely if ever have them on as guests. But by hiring Breitbart's top lieutenant Loesch (editor of his site Big Journalism), they seem to be suggesting that they're more interested in the appearance of credibility than actual credibility, because hiring Loesch is endorsing the exact same dishonest approach to journalism only without the baggage of O'Keefe and Breitbart's names. There are plenty of honest people out there who can effectively communicate a conservative message, so I see no reason why CNN should hire a person with Loesch's track record of pushing blatant misinformation.