Frequent KMOX Guest Jim Hoft's Blog Is a Racist Cesspool

KMOX 1120 AM, proud host of Rush Limbaugh's misogynist, homophobic, and racist program also frequently has Jim "Gateway Pundit" Hoft as a guest on their Friday Roundtable. Hoft, for those that don't know, has promoted the white nationalist site Council of Conservative Citizens on multiple occasions and still has links up to it on his blog, uses source material from "DiversityisCrap.com", has been called out for racism multiple times by national news organizations, and regularly posts race-baiting articles that quickly devolve into explicit racism in the comment section. So naturally, KMOX thinks he's a great guy to have on to "balance" the opinions of Rush Limbaugh in the name of the public interest.

It should come as no surprise then, that Hoft is allowing racism to flourish on his blog in the wake of the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin, all in the name of "page views." Here's a sampling of the racist comments, pining for the good old days of the n-word, promoting racist sties like Stormfront and the Council of Conservative Citizens, and cheering for a race war.

Our black kids in action = rioting and stealing says this bigot:

Such a clever play on "African-American:"

Cheering for a "race war:"

"Kill yo cracka ass" is this guy's impersonation of R&B singers expressing support for Trayvon:

Apparently, this is all a secret plot to "keep white people in line:"

The "ghetto thug mentality" is a secret plot by the "Kenyan fraud President:"

kr says "blacks are not capable of governing themselves" and promotes the openly racist site Storm Front:

According to this lady, this has something to do with picking cotton, which apparently was the only thing that saved white people from looting:

Knuckle dragging animals

Cheering for profiling, because "blacks are the people who commit crimes:"

"Blacks are inherently violent:"

Complaining about "the n**ger class:"

This guy called Trayvon's mom "ghetto trash slut"

This guy wants his n word back:

Another person obsessed with "picking cotton:"

Rooting for a race riot:

Threatening response to the "no justice no peace" chant:

And here's an appropriate way to end. A commenter recommends the white nationalist site of the St. Louis Council of Conservative Citizens on Hoft's blog:

And the guy who runs the site jumps on to thank Hoft for his support in promoting one of his stories:

Note that despite this openly-racist garbage frequently being pointed out, Jim Hoft never does anything to condemn these racist comments or to let his commenters know that they are not acceptable. If Hoft made it clear that he won't stand for open racists on his site and thinks they're despicable, do you think they'd keep coming back? I guess we'll never know. Thanks KMOX!

Patricia Bynes Takes On Rush Limbaugh

Patricia Bynes, aka Patricialicious on Twitter, had a great segment on KSDK's "I'm Just Sayin" about the crazy idea to put a Rush Limbaugh bust in the Missouri Capitol:

For more information on local efforts to mitigate Limbaugh's corrosive influence on public discourse, see ForwardSTL.org.

Greater St. Louis Area/Missouri Limbaugh Update

What's happening locally after Limbaugh obsessively unleashed over 70 sexist smears against a college student last week:

• Progress Missouri reported at 12:30 that over 3,500 people have signed a petition asking Steve Tilley to reconsider his unilateral decision to put a statue of Limbaugh in the Missouri Capitol.
• There's an impromptu rally organized for the Capitol tomorrow to protest the statue. Please don't RSVP unless you can actually attend; they're trying to get an accurate head count.
• Missouri Democrats have sent a letter to the office of administration asking them to refuse the Limbaugh statue.
• Nationally, 43 advertisers (and counting) have dropped Limbaugh since his nasty comments.
• Turns out, FCC license renewal applications are due later this year.
• A Daily Kos diary has a very helpful guide for how to pressure radio stations that play Limbaugh, which might be the real key to making him actually accountable for his comments. Limbaugh currently makes a huge salary and radio stations pay big money to play his show, which could work against him. Brian Smith (@Moprog67 on Twitter) has started a list of local companies advertising on Limbaugh's show in St. Louis (on KMOX). Here's what he has so far:

1. Lakeside Exteriors 636-978-5000
2. Gershman Mortage 314-889-0600
3. Appliance Solutions
4. Wehrenberg Theaters
5. Golden Oak Lending 314-567-4653
6. Repertory Theater STL

KMOX's Sloppy Hit Piece on OccupySTL

As I've already mentioned, the right-wing fantasy that OccupySTL is trying to "disrupt" the World Series is false, and quite obviously false to anyone who bothers to actually read the comment thread the tea party selectively edited. Sadly, however, Rush Limbaugh's host station KMOX couldn't resist pushing this lame smear.

Just like the most unhinged bloggers on the right, KMOX failed to provide any context to the piece by pointing out that the actual OccupySTL representatives were openly discouraging the idea of any disruption.

And they managed to write the entire story without even so much as asking anyone at OccupySTL what their plans were.

Horrible "journalism."

In fact, as I'm writing this, the devious plans of OccupySTL have been revealed: they're hosting a, gasp, VIEWING PARTY for the World Series!!!

Mark Reardon Says Pointing Out Inequalities Is "Class Envy" and "Jealousy"

The Post-Dispatch included an excellent editorial today pointing out the fact that sales of luxury items, such as $2,500 boots and $1,500 face cream, have been increasing even while 17% of Americans are living in poverty during a brutal economic period. The whole editorial is excellent, so I hope your read it, but here's a small sampling:

So for the sake of the economy and, especially, for the men and women working the selling floors of luxury retailers and the showrooms and service departments of expensive automobile brands, we all should hope that the latest spasms of the stock market don't scare upscale Americans into tucking away their Amex black cards.

At the same time, we can't help noticing how far removed a Mercedes S-class sedan is — for gas savings, consider the S400 Hybrid, starting at $91,000 — from Americans who don't know if they'll have a job next week.

We think about families who have no option but to keep squeezing miles out of aging cars that are just a paycheck away from being unfixable — AAA (the auto association) reported this week that a quarter of all Americans couldn't afford a $2,000 car repair bill if they were faced with it.

We imagine couples now living on one income instead of two, worried about meeting the payments of adjustable-rate mortgages. We know middle-aged, middle-class parents who've lived modestly and saved responsibly and wonder from semester to semester if there will still be federal Pell grants and subsidized loans to allow their kids to stay in college.

But of course pointing out the fact that there are economic inequalities rankled KMOX's Mark Reardon, who claimed that it was nothing but "class envy:"


Great to know that such caring and thoughtful people are given their own radio shows. I'm sure it's because Mark Reardon is just so much more intelligent and works so much harder than all of the people who live in poverty, right?

More From Humane Society President Wayne Pacelle

Humane Society of the United States President Wayne Pacelle holds his own against Mark Reardon:

Update: KMOX Gets It Right This Time Around

With the new UMSL statement, KMOX set the record straight:

The University has released a statement concluding that the original videos showcased by the website BigGovernment.com “were definitely taken out of context, with their meaning highly distorted through splicing and editing.”

In one instance, the edited video omitted a comment by instructor Don Giljum saying that intimidation tactics would not work in this day and age. In another clip, the BigGovernment video cut out a portion of a statement by a Kansas City instructor in which she attributed a statement condoning labor violence to a historical labor figure — making it sound as if she was condoning violence.

Though I have a strong feeling that the political inclinations of many of the people who work at KMOX are quite far away from mine, I think the fact they were finally able to set the record straight speaks highly of their commitment to being a hard news organization.

KMOX Allows False Information to Fester On Website for Over a Week

I had a nice conversation with KMOX reporter Kevin Killeen earlier this week. Unfortunately, it followed the same pattern I've experienced many other times with the CBS affiliate that hosts Rush Limbaugh in St. Louis: they're very nice and polite, they say I raise good points, and yet they fail to fix the problem.

KMOX was one of the first St. Louis media outlets to pick up the Breitbart smear story, and they reported it without noting Breitbart's extensive history of dishonesty. In the article, Killeen wrote that "Giljum appears to tell students that being a labor activist is not always calm discussion," (with an accompanying quote that's been edited to change the meaning) and that "Ancel appears to be telling students that violence is a legitimate tool of organized labor." Both of these claims and their corresponding video clips have been shown to be unambiguously false.

Keep in mind the serious consequences of this kind of dishonest attack: both Ancel and Giljim have received numerous threats based on the distorted videos. So by unquestioningly passing on videos from a source that has been shown to be dishonest on numerous occasions, KMOX is facilitating threats and intimidation against two innocent people.

On Friday of last week, I emailed links to Killeen with video that showed, conclusively, that the Breitbart sites had taken the video out-of-context. He responded by thanking me for the links, and telling me that he'd follow up on Monday of the next week with UM officials because he "already had a full assignment sheet." I didn't understand why he would need a quote from the University of Missouri just to point out that the original video was distorted and his reporting about it was wrong, and I also didn't understand why a news organization would decide to wait three days to correct a falsehood, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

The next week rolled around and Killeen still did not write any correction. So I sent the following message to Killeen:

Last week, you published a story based on videos from professional con man Andrew Breitbart. The links I sent you included clear video evidence that Breitbart's videos were edited completely out-of-context to put words into the instructors mouths. For example, you wrote that it "appeared" that Ancel was saying violence is an appropriate tactic, when in fact she was quoting a character from a movie to promote class discussion. I'mhttphttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif curious how long you want misinformation to sit on the KMOX web site without being corrected.

I received no response from Killeen and in fact he wrote a new story that doubled down on the original dishonesty. His new story focused on the fact that UMSL claims Giljim resigned voluntarily, and Giljim said he was pressured, but it made no mention of the fact that the full videos show that the quotes were distorted. In fact, it doubled down on the original dishonesty by linking to a sound clip from Dana Loesch (BTW, a competitor to KMOX's Mark Reardon) that repeated the exact same falsehoods.

At this point, I called Killeen and asked him why he was not fixing this false information. He responded that he thought that the editor had added the links I sent him (Media Matters and Crooks and Liars), and that he would try to get them to change the story. I just checked back today and, unfortunately, the only "change" they made was to add the Media Matters and Crooks and Liars links to the "related content" section at the end.

Needless to say, these changes are virtually meaningless. As a radio station, the main audience is the people who hear the original report on the radio, who have been provided with no reason to question the original, false story. Out of the significantly smaller audience who read the stories online, very few are likely to come back to the site several days later to check to see if there are any updates. And of that small group, how many are going to notice a change in the "related content" that doesn't appear in the main story?

KMOX put out factually incorrect information. They were notified of this fact over a week ago, and still have not updated their original story nor issued a correction. They wrote a story based on Breitbart's smear video, yet have refused to write a story based on video that proves it to be false. And, in fact, they have not even adjusted the content of their claims in the new stories they've written since the longer videos came out.

I personally am not sure how KMOX expects people to regard them as a purveyor of trustworthy information when they so flippantly disregard information that shows their reporting to have been mistaken. It's one thing for a news service to make a mistake; it's quite another for them to hide this mistake even after it's been revealed. The later amounts to intentionally misleading their audience. Hopefully, they will move quickly to fix this mistake.

Update: They set the record straight with a new story.

KMOX's Mark Reardon: Only Non-Whites Have Pattern of Mistakenly Blaming Police

Two days ago, tragedy struck in St. Louis as U.S, Marshall John Marshall was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant to a man in South St. Louis. Apparently, some neighbors were critical of the police after the incident, which seems remarkably insensitive and wrongheaded after a law enforcement official was killed. However, that is no justification for KMOX radio host Mark Reardon bringing race into the discussion:


I'm just not sure how completely clueless Reardon would have to be to actually believe this. Perhaps Reardon is not aware that not all white people are latte drinking radio show hosts who get paid to fly to Los Angeles to hang out with B-list celebrities. There actually are quite a few communities of white people who are extremely distrustful of law enforcement officials, to the point where they might wrongly blame them for doing their job. Reardon's suggestion that this is "not a white pattern," implying that this is a pattern that has something to do with race, is absurd and offensive.

Reardon got called out for his comments by fellow KMOX host Mike Kelley:



And here was Reardon's response:


It's quite amazing that Reardon tries to cover up his despicable statement by playing the "aww, shucks, I'm a working person" card. Meanwhile, he spends most of his time on Twitter attacking people who do work that's much more difficult than what he does (teachers, firefighters, etc.). No wonder the tea party likes this guy so much.

What KMOX Left Out

I wrote earlier that KMOX had edited their story to leave out all accounts from people who witnessed the police beating UMSL student Brian Massey. The story went from one with a group of witnesses disagreeing with police, to a story relying completely on the police account of the incident. Well, Google Cache appears to finally be working so I'm posting below all of the information that KMOX edited out after they spoke with an UMSL spokesperson. Here are the passages removed from the old story by Jusin Wingerter that are completely missing from the new story;

ST. LOUIS (KMOX) – A November 17 altercation between University of Missouri – St. Louis police and a 46-year-old student has some calling for the police officers’ termination.

Witnesses say a disagreement between Brian K. Massey, a disc jockey at the campus radio station, and another radio station volunteer led police to the Millennium Center around 5 p.m.

“They had actually called the building police on her,” Massey said, referring to the 35-year-old volunteer he had a disagreement with. “The reason campus police were called wasn’t for me, it was for her.”

Massey and witnesses tell KMOX that police asked him for two forms of identification which he promptly handed over without complaint. Police then informed the criminal justice student that he was under arrest for trespassing after refusing to leave the building.

And:

Massey and witnesses say he was grabbed by police, handcuffed, and then thrown against a concrete column without provocation. UMSL spokesman Bob Samples, meanwhile, says Massey grabbed the wrist of one of the officers and resisted arrest.

“I used my foot to stop my face from hitting the column,” Massey said. “They then threw me against the window of the radio station.”

Witnesses say that’s when the crowd, which had gathered as classes let out, became heated.

Massey, who suffers from diabetic neuropathy and says he’s listed as a disabled student by the university, said that police then began punching him and kicking him in the sides. Police agree that they were forced to “apply striking blows to soft tissue areas.”

Witnesses say Massey displayed “amazing calmness” as he was struck, eventually going down on one knee in hopes of avoiding further confrontation. But, he says, that only made him an easier target.

“They then hit me in the side, hit me in the legs again, pushed my head into the wall, and start hitting me in the head.”

It was only when a campus employee stepped between the officers and Massey did the beating come to an end, according to witnesses.

Massey says further improper treatment followed, including having his leg slammed in the police car’s door. He was charged with three misdemeanors – resisting arrest, assault, and trespassing - along with one felony count of assault of a police officer while undergoing treatment for his injuries.

“I spent the next three days handcuffed, and then - when St. Louis County came in - shackled to a hospital bed,” Massey said. “I was never even given a phone call.”

Massey was also suspended from the UMSL campus after being released on bond and told to leave his UMSL-owned apartment during which time he visited family in Chicago before being told he could return.

He says he’s since been hounded by police and lives in a state of fear and paranoia.

Massey also alleges that members of the UMSL administration have pressured him into not appealing the allegations against him and instead suggested that he remain quiet. But, he says, as a criminal justice major, he has been taught that keeping quiet simply isn’t right.

As for what he wants from UMSL police and administrative staff, Massey says he just wants to be exonerated.

“I need my named cleared,” Massey said. “These trumped up charges against me are exactly that.”

Meanwhile, some of Massey’s fellow students are calling for more than just exoneration.

“Ultimately, we want these officers removed from campus,” one student said.

And:

Massey has said he will support the sit-in and similar protests as long as they remain peaceful.

“If they’re going to go out on a limb for me, the least I can do is be there to support them supporting me,” Massey said.

And:

Organizers say Massey has shown incredible resilience throughout the ordeal and that they hope to forward his positive, peaceful way of thinking. Many people have suggested the attack on the African-American Massey by white officers was racially motivated but Massey disagrees.

“No, I don’t think race played a role in it,” Massey said.

The editor I spoke to said that he "balanced" the story after speaking with an UMSL official. However, if you look at the new story, you'll see that it only tells the UMSL police account of the incident. It is, in fact, far less balanced than the original story.

(I realize that I quoted a lot of text from the previous article. However, that article is no longer published on the KMOX site and I am quoting the text as part of "fair use," because ultimately I am reporting on the changes made by KMOX)

KMOX Edits Eye-Witness Reports Out of Story About UMSL Beating-Updated

Yesterday, I remarked that I was glad that the mainstream media was finally picking up on the story of the beating of UMSL student Brian Massey. I quoted the following text from KMOX:

Massey, who suffers from diabetic neuropathy and says he’s listed as a disabled student by the university, said that police then began punching him and kicking him in the sides. Police agree that they were forced to “apply striking blows to soft tissue areas.”

Witnesses say Massey displayed “amazing calmness” as he was struck, eventually going down on one knee in hopes of avoiding further confrontation. But, he says, that only made him an easier target.

“They then hit me in the side, hit me in the legs again, pushed my head into the wall, and start hitting me in the head.”

It was only when a campus employee stepped between the officers and Massey did the beating come to an end, according to witnesses.

However, today, at the exact same link, all of that text has been removed and the story has been changed to include only the statements of Massey himself as the counterpoint to the official UMSL police account. The reports from witnesses have been entirely removed. I can see why they'd want to update their story after speaking with UMSL, but I don't understand why a news organization would remove eye-witness testimony from their story. I called the KMOX newsroom and spoke with a very nice and helpful woman, but the person who edited the story was not yet at the station. I'm hoping to speak with him later today.

Unfortunately, since it didn't even occur to me that a news station would remove eye-witness testimony, I didn't get a screen shot of the original article. However, I have the next-best thing. I have a screen shot of the google search for terms in the original article that links directly to text from the KMOX article:

Also, here's a screen shot of the story posted yesterday on facebook, where you can see that the original story was framed around the testimony of witnesses:

The new KMOX story also contains some remarkable claims from UMSL spokesperson Bob Samples:

Samples says Massey grabbed the right wrist of an officer and was told he was under arrest.

Police say, as Massey was being handcuffed, he swung around and tried to strike an officer.

Massey was subdued and Samples says one officer was injured. Massey says he was kicked and punched.

This is an absolutely extraordinary claim. In the three and a half weeks since this happened, the UMSL police have discussed the incident on two other occasions, and never said anything about Massey trying to "strike" an officer. Here's one previous description:

During the response, the lead officer observed an individual whose presence elevated the anxiety of the student in crisis. Building and radio station officials asked the individual to leave the area. When he refused, two officers were asked to intercede,” Samples said. “The individual was not cooperative. In the process of determining identification, the individual in question grabbed the arm of an officer. The officer advised the individual that he was under arrest for assault.”

Van Ness said the student complied when asked for identification, providing both a state ID as well as his UM-St. Louis student ID. “But as the officer walked him out he grabbed the officer’s wrist and tried to remove documents from officer’s possession,” Van Ness said. The student was then told he was being placed under arrest.

“There was resistance on part of the student to avoid full incarceration,” Van Ness said. “We used prudent professional techniques that are used to force compliance on part of the noncompliant party. In this instance because everyone was so close to everybody we couldn’t deploy pepper mace. We were forced to put hands on the student to control his behavior, to apply striking blows to soft tissue areas.”

Van Ness also commented on a second story in the UMSl Current, and again said nothing about Massey trying to strike officers or officers being injured (note as well that the articles has several witnesses taking issue with the claim that Massey grabbed the officers arms). So we are now supposed to believe that Massey was beaten because he tried to strike an officer and that an officer had been injured, but that the police had just forgotten to mention those facts for the past three weeks?

At this point, as someone who has been closely following the story, I know of at least five people who have witnessed the arrest. Absolutely none of them have said that Massey tried to "strike" the officer. This is a story for good journalists to dig in to, not run away from, and I hope KMOX steps up to the plate.

Update: I spoke with the editor who said he changed the original story. He said he was "balancing" the original story after speaking with UMSL officials. He also said that they removed the witnesses from the updated story because they had spoken to any of them directly. But, of course, the original articles in the UMSL Current cited at least three witnesses who all disagreed with the official police story.

Not Bad: Mainstream Media Reports on UMSL Beating Only 5 Days After Activist Hub

On Monday, I reported on Brian Massey, a student badly beaten by UMSL police in November. Today, five days later, KMOX is reporting on the story:

Massey, who suffers from diabetic neuropathy and says he’s listed as a disabled student by the university, said that police then began punching him and kicking him in the sides. Police agree that they were forced to “apply striking blows to soft tissue areas.”

Witnesses say Massey displayed “amazing calmness” as he was struck, eventually going down on one knee in hopes of avoiding further confrontation. But, he says, that only made him an easier target.

“They then hit me in the side, hit me in the legs again, pushed my head into the wall, and start hitting me in the head.”

It was only when a campus employee stepped between the officers and Massey did the beating come to an end, according to witnesses.

Naturally, KMOX doesn't provide any acknowledgment of this blog, of the St. Louis American (which wrote about the story on Friday), or of the UMSL Current, the newspaper that really broke the story. But whatever: I'm just glad the story is finally getting out, and KMOX does do a nice job digging into the details.

Despite Media Hype, The St. Louis Tea Party Has No Clue How to Organize

Proposition A, the ballot initiative to restore and expand public transportation in the St. Louis region via a 1/2 of 1% sales tax, won a landslide victory yesterday. Many, many people in the media were predicting throughout the week that the initiative would fail. Despite the fact that the opposition to the initiative showed absolutely no signs of organization, and despite the fact that polls showed that a majority of people in St. Louis County supported the initiative, the St. Louis media apparatus created their own narrative based on their "gut feelings" of what St. Louis County is like, and then started to believe the narrative that they in fact created.

For example, yesterday, Jake Wagman wrote that critics of Prop A had offered "a spirited opposition." Here's what I replied in the comments:

Spirited opposition? Really? The Stop the Prop group tried to raise $10,000 and only raised $750. The largest rally they’ve had was 25 people. The only sense in which they’ve been “spirited” is that they’re good at getting media attention, but that’s just because of the local media’s willingness to give equal time to right wing opposition, no matter how coherent that opposition actually is.

I think the election vindicated my comment. The St. Louis Tea Party never had to produce any people or any money in opposition to Prop A in order for the local media apparatus to treat them like a large movement making good faith arguments. In fact, yesterday, Charlie Brennan and the Beacon were willing to push a hoax by John Burns and Gina Loudon where they claimed that Chesterfield Mayor John Nations was oppressing them. The only thing the tea party did well during this whole campaign was get published in media venue after media venue, and get more airtime on local radio than the people who support Proposition A, largely because KMOX hosts Brennan and Reardon were wholly opposed to the initiative.

On some level, I can understand the media going out of their way to give the anti-Prop A group a chance to express their opposition. But in large part the media completely failed to fact-check the ridiculous and often blatantly false claims made by the tea party opposition. Furthermore, it's not cool for the media to then believe their own echo chamber so much that they start announcing that Prop A will lose before the election based on nothing more than their own gut feelings. I think the excellent ground game is what ultimately won the election for Proposition A, but if we didn't have a really strong pro Prop A presence on social media like Twitter and Facebook, my guess is that the "it's going to lose" media narrative would have spun out of control and probably determined the election by causing transit advocates to give up hope.

So much for the media, but how badly did the Tea Party lose this campaign? Pretty amazingly badly. They put their full weight against it. The official St. Louis Tea Party site railed against it. Dana Loesch came out against it on her blog and on her radio show. Gateway Pundit, one of the most read political blogs in the country, wrote against it and regularly gave a platform to John Burns. Furthermore, as I tweeted yesterday, and as Clark at Show Me Progress wrote about in more detail, the St. Louis Tea Party loudly announced on multiple occasions that their opposition to Prop A was going to be a demonstration of their organizing ability. And they were right. Proposition demonstrated clearly that the St. Louis Tea Party doesn't have a clue how to organize.

First of all, consider this: Proposition A won with 63 % of the vote and 37% opposed. Can anyone honestly imagine a bill for a new tax getting less than 37% in St. Louis County in the current economic climate? I certainly can't. And this strongly suggests that the Tea Party, despite all of their bluster and media attention, did not affect the vote in any significant way. Unless, of course, the absurdity of their opposition actually increased the the winning percentage.

Only yesterday, the Tea Party was claiming that they were going to win. Now, they're whining about how they were outspent. Unfortunately for them, they undermined their own whining a few days ago when they said, "nearly every transit tax in the region has been defeated despite similar funding imbalances." According to their own view then, this means that they must have been an especially bad opposition. Furthermore, the tea party attempted to raise $10,000, but their position was so extreme they could only raise $750, probably from all of the usual suspects! So the fact that they didn't have any money wasn't the cause of them losing; it was a symptom of the real reason they lost: they took a position that was so extreme that no one (other than the media) could take them seriously.

Clark cleverly referred to the Tea Party opposition as the Underpants Gnome plan. For those who aren't familiar, the underpants gnomes' plan to make money in a South Park episode was the following: "1. Steal underpants. 2. ?? 3. Profit!" The Tea Party plan was just about as inane. They seemed to literally believe that just blogging, tweeting, and milking their right wing radio connections was sufficient to convince the public to vote for a crazy position. They spent last Saturday driving around St. Charles County (which didn't vote on Prop A) in trucks with anti Prop A messages scribbled on them. Twice. Their election day plan was to stand on street corners with signs. They literally are completely clueless about how to win elections. And just to clarify, unlike Dana "literally stomping on the constitution," Loesch, I do in fact understand the meaning of "literally."

One last thought: Clark also reference that this is the group former Matt Blunt Chief of Staff Ed Martin is counting on to win in November. In fact, Ed Martin signed up for the Drive Around St. Charles with Anti-Prop A Signs facebook event along with only 19 other people:

As far as I know, Ed Martin did not actually make it out to the event. But can anyone doubt that Martin, the ultimate political opportunist, would have been trumpeting up and down how everyone hates taxes if Proposition A had failed? Martin is trying to run as a St. Louis Tea Party candidate. But Proposition A has shown just how far away from normal people's views of good government the Tea Party really is.

Tea Party Uses Dirty Tactics in Anti-Prop A Effort

A brief recap:

John Burns falsely accused Washington University several months ago of shutting down a "gulag display" on the Washington University campus because it was "offensive." Actually, Burns' group Young Americans for Liberty only said they would be passing out literature and never filled out paperwork for building a structure on campus, even according to their own members.

Then, a month later, John Burns falsely accused Washington University of "fraud" when the university asked for members of Young Americans for Liberty to pay for the cleanup of the spray-painted hammers and sickles on campus that corresponded with their gulag display.

And here we are on election day for Proposition A. Burns mysteriously decides at the last minute to hold a anti-Prop A rally in Chesterfield and, lo and behold, he accuses the Chesterfield Mayor of ordering the police to kick the protesters off of the intersection. The police chief says that they don't let anyone stand in the median, but Burns and tea partier Gina Loudon still allege that this is a massive conspiracy, and get coverage from KMOX and the Beacon.

The Tea Party uses absolutely ridiculous and shameful tactics over and over again. When is the local media going to learn?

Mark Reardon Lobs Softballs, but Gateway Pundit Whiffs Anyway

It was obvious that KMOX radio host Mark Reardon, a self-professed fan of Rush Limbaugh and of Gateway Pundit himself, was not going to ask Gateway Pundit (Jim Hoft) any tough questions as he interviewed Hoft purportedly to "get the facts" about the recent "coffingate" controversy. Reardon was happy to play along with the tea party story that the whole thing was the result of a massive conspiracy between the Left and the mainstream media. And he naturally failed to provide any relevant context for the incident, such as the fact that, according to Gateway Pundit's own blog, the tea party had just the day before set pictures of Congressman Carnahan on fire while chanting "death to the dictator!"

But Reardon made that crucial mistake of actually thinking during the interview for a brief moment, which is the practical equivalent of dumping a gallon of hydrochloric acid on the foundations of any of the tea party's conspiracy theories. Reardon asked Hoft,

Do you think that...there are some people who are going to say you guys, OK, maybe you get away with it going to the office, but you crossed the line when you went to his home. Do you feel like that's a possibility at all?

And check out Hoft's pathetic response:

Oh certainly, I understand that there are people who feel that way. Um....we were...um...I was one who, maybe that wouldn't have been my idea, but I did go along with the consensus of the people I was with...and we made sure we weren't on his lawn...we weren't on the grass...we didn't leave anything there...we were there for 10-15 minutes and left. And there was no one home. And we didn't got up to his door.

Reardon did not follow up and instead shifted the conversation back to the original "Carnahan conspiracy" plot line, but Hoft's answer was revealing for a couple of reasons. First, he provided no explanation whatsoever for why they brought the coffin to Carnahan's house. They had already "said a prayer" at the office, so what was the intention of going to his home? The obvious explanation, from my and others perspective, is that it was meant to send the message, "we know where you live.'

Furthermore, Hoft tries to pass the buck on going to Carnahan's house, and says that, "it wouldn't have been my idea." But this is at odds with the facts. As it happens, the Tea Party, and Jim Hoft in particular, initially announced that the rally was going to be at Carnahan's house, and only later changed it to his office (probably because the media said they wouldn't cover it if it was at Carnahan's house). First, check out the html address for Hoft's original post, which clearly indicates that his first edit was announcing that the rally would be at Carnahan's home:

Second, though Hoft deleted his original tweet, you can see from people's retweets that he initially announced that the rally was going to be at Carnahan's home.


Hoft's attempt to pretend that this was just a last minute decision and that he was just "going along with the consensus" is a complete farce. He, and the rest of the St. Louis Tea Party, are just lucky that interviewers like Reardon aren't willing to ask them any tough questions.

KMOX Publicizes Protests from the Right, but not the Left

KMOX, which is competing with 97.1 to be the official media outlet of the "grassroots" tea party, wrote an article today giving advance publicity to the St. Louis Tea Party's rallies in St. Charles and St. Louis in conjunction with President Obama's visit. But they unsurprisingly failed to mention that there would be groups on the left rallying for a public option and for a clean energy bill. Boy, it sure makes it a lot easier to be a grassroots movement when you have your own corporate radio stations!

Another interesting item from the article: Bill Hennessy of the Tea Party claims that, "the real answer to America's health care dilemma is to convince people to adopt healthier lifestyles." I can see that he's given some serious thought to this issue. We can always count on KMOX to give airtime to Bill Hennessy's gut feelings while ignoring those damn dirty hippies with their "data analysis," and "citations of actual statistics."

Case Study: KMOX Shows How Not to Report the News

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but some recent developments make it especially relevant. I'd like to use a example from KMOX to illustrate what I think is irresponsible journalism and a lesson in how the local tea party is willing to manipulate the local media. This story, in my mind, provides some interesting context for the controversy surrounding KMOX's coverage of St. Louis County Executive Charlies Dooley.

The example revolves around the case of Kenneth Gladney, a case I've discussed in detail on this blog. In addition to suggesting that the case involved a massive conspiracy which includes everyone from President Obama to Health Care for America Now director Magarida Jorge to the local dogcatcher, the local tea party is also convinced that the St. Louis County government delayed charges in the case due to partisan interference.

Now, anyone who follows this blog will know that the tea party alleging some massive Democrat/SEIU conspiracy is hardly a newsworthy event. However, if you'd like to be charitable, I suppose you could say that given that this particular case was highly charged and revolved around an important political issue, it was worthy of being covered by the local news in one of your typical "tea party outraged about X" stories. And if KMOX's Kevin Killeen had simply written one story about the issue, I wouldn't have thought much about it.

But Killeen didn't write just one story. He wrote four stories. In fact, he basically wrote the same story over and over again spaced apart by a few days. And in doing so, he consistently used the following formula for this stories: "Suggestion of conspriacy by County Counselor. County Counselor denies charge."

To get a little more specific, here are the stories.

The first, from November 18, was titled "Still No Charges in Town Hall Protestor Assault" and ended with County Counselor Patricia Reddington saying the incidence "hasn't been swept under a rug."

Six days later, Killeen then wrote a story titled "Victims family questions delay in town hall assault case." That story quoted Gladney's brother Keith saying "I think someone's either slow dragging or they're buying time for some reason...They're giving him enough time for... basically for this whole case that slipped through the cracks" and again ends with Reddington's same quote.

Six days after that, after already reporting on the charges filed and Gladney's reaction, Killeen was back again with, "Tea Party boiling-mad about charges filed in beating case." In this story, Killeen dives full bore into the conspiracy theories, quoting Republican politician/tea partier John Loudon as saying the following: "I think these Service Employees Union people went in there and committed the assault, because they felt that the system, the partisan political system, would protect them...And I think the partisan political system appears to be protecting them." Once again, the only "balance" of the story is Reddington's quote about the case not being swept under a rug.

So here we have a reporter reporting the exact same story three times, separated by exactly six days each time. It doesn't take a psychology degree to know that if you play a story on the news enough times that roughly follows the format "Person A accused of malfeasance. Person A denies. Person A accused of malfeasance. Person A denies. Person A accused of malfeasance. Person A denies," some listeners will eventually start to believe that Person A was up to something sketchy even if no evidence was ever provided. So Killeen's reporting appeared to be deliberately designed to either pressure the county counselor or to make the county government look bad. Furthermore, every one of the four stories Killeen produced featured a picture of Kenneth Gladney in a wheelchair, a prop so ridiculous (since Gladney was seen walking around after the original fight) that it earned Gladney an Ass Clown of the Week award from Riverfront Times readers.

So what is the moral of this story? In my opinion, it's hardly news when people make wild accusations they stand to gain from, especially when those accusations are not supported by any evidence. But more importantly, when a supposedly unbiased reporter brings up the same accusations over and over again with no supporting evidence, that raises some serious red flags about the objectivity of the reporting. Also worth noting: I sent Killeen an email raising questions about the tea party story, and he never bothered to correct any of his reporting or to respond.

Given this background, I find the current controversy about KMOX' coverage of Charlie Dooley extremely interesting. First, on Feb. 19, the same Kevin Killeen reported that "unnamed sources" said that there was a federal investigation of people "with connections to the County Executive's Office" and that the charges went " all the way up the elevator". The next day, Killeen wrote another story claiming that Dooley had "ducked" questions about the probe. Killeen provided no new evidence beyond his previous "unnamed sources." After Dooley responded forcefully at a County Council meeting, Killeen again filed a new story relying entirely on "a growing number of independent sources." Finally, the FBI explicitly stated that Dooley was not being investigated. Killeen responded by stated that he stood by his original stories, that he never said explicitly that Dooley was the target of the investigation, and that he still heard from "multiple sources" that there's an investigation of whether campaign money influenced the selection of vendors.

As should be obvious, these "unnamed sources" have no accountability. They literally can say whatever they want and if it turns out to be false they will not suffer any consequences. This is the same type of strategy the Bush administration used to great effect to influence public opinion about Iraq.

A more important question is would there be any consequences for Killeen if it turns out there's not an investigation? Given that he's already shown a propensity to go after the county government with no supporting evidence, could he just blame any bad information on his sources? My guess is that now that Dooley responded forcefully and the FBI commented, there's a lot riding on what we find out about any potential investigations. It will be very interesting to see how things pan out.