To some media professionals whom I admire because you don’t let anyone tell you to sit down and shut up, please keep making the idiots’ heads spin. Thank you for not taking our Freedom of the Press for granted, you bold and patriotic, fair and balanced media folks. Keep calling it like you see it: Amanda, Andrew, Ann, Bill(s), Bob, Cal, Dennis, Dick, Eddie, Fred, Glenn, Greta, Hugh, Joey, John, Jonah, Larry, Laura, Lou, Mark, Mary, Michael, Michelle, R.A.M., Rich, Rush, S.E., Sean, Tammy, Walter… and there are more. I join you in standing up for what is right. Remember that as your voice is heard and your spine is stiffened, the spines of others are stiffened, too.

Who’s who? Here are my best guesses for most of them: Amanda Carpenter of The Washington Times, Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol, Bill O’Reilly, Cal Thomas, Dennis Miller, Fred Barnes, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, Hugh Hewitt, Jonah Goldberg, Larry Kudlow, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, Mark Levin, Michael Reagan, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry, Rush Limbaugh, S.E. Cupp, Sean Hannity, Tammy Bruce, and Walter Williams. Why not use their whole names? Good question.

It was telling that Fey should be the actress who impersonated Palin. The two women may look like each other, but they could not be more dissimilar. Each exemplifies a different category of feminism. Palin comes from the I-can-do-it-all school. She is professionally successful, has been married for more than 20 years, and has a large and (from all outward appearances) happy family.

The “outward appearances” bit gives me pause, as I know that Continetti has made trips to Alaska to research the book. And the Palin family has been the target of lots of tabloid rumors — some of those rumors pushed by Levi Johnston, the father of Palin’s grandson. Is the book going to tackle any of this? Moving on.

[W]hile Fey is also pretty, married, and has a daughter, the characters she portrays in films like Mean Girls and Baby Mama, and in television shows like 30 Rock, are hard-pressed eggheads who give up personal fulfillment—e.g., marriage and motherhood—in the pursuit of professional success. On 30 Rock, Fey, who is also the show’s chief writer and executive producer, plays Liz Lemon, a television comedy writer modeled on herself. Liz Lemon is smart, funny, and at the top of her field. But she fails elsewhere. None of her relationships with men works out. She wants desperately to raise a child but can find neither the time nor the means to marry or adopt. Lemon makes you laugh, for sure. But you also would be hard pressed to name a more unhappy person on American TV.

This is all subjective, but I’d say even the fictional Liz Lemon has fewer problems than the real-life former governor of Alaska, who quit her job under the pressure of frivolous ethics complaints and who seems to get into monthly feuds with her daughter’s ex-boyfriend.

In the wake of these recent revelations, the president should suspend any further appointments of so-called czars until Congress has an opportunity to examine the background and responsibilities of these individuals and to determine the constitutionality of such appointments.

Here’s the problem: Some of the people whom conservatives and mainstream media voices alike have labeled “czars” have been confirmed by the Senate. Some of them, and others, hold jobs that were created by previous presidents.

Take a look at Politico’s list of 31 “czars,” which shrinks to 30 without Van Jones. Republican strategists like Ed Rollins have used that “31″ number to allege that there’s a problem here. But perhaps the most controversial people labeled “czars” by Beck and by reporters have gone through Senate confirmations. Cass Sunstein, whom Politico labels the “regulatory czar,” is waiting for the end of a Republican filibuster so he can lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an office created in 1980. John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was confirmed by the Senate, unanimously, six months ago. But none of that seems to matter to their critics. Michelle Malkin, whom, again, Politico credited for making this an issue, relentlessly refers to Holdren as the “Science Czar” as if it was his actual title.

Let’s just go down the Politico list.

Pre-exisiting jobs:

“AIDS Czar” – Actually the Director of the Office of National AIDS Policy, created in 2001 by George W. Bush.

“Border Czar” – Actually the Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Special Representative for Border Affairs, created in 2003 by George W. Bush.

“California Water Czar” – Actually the Deputy Secretary of the Interior, who was given this extra portfolio by Secretary Ken Salazar in June.

“Central Region Czar” – The Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the “Central Region,” on the Nation Security Council.

“Drug Czar” – Actually the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, created in 1989 by George H.W. Bush.

“Faith-Based Czar” – Head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, created in 2001 by George W. Bush.

“Intelligence Czar” – This is actually the Director of National Intelligence, a position created in 2005.

“TARP Czar” – Actually the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability of the United States Herb Allison, who was confirmed by the Senate in June.

“Weapons Czar” – Not actually an executive branch position, but the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.

New jobs held by eminent people or people previously confirmed by the Senate:

“Afghanistan Czar” – Actually the United States Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the man holding that job, Richard Holbrooke went through a Senate confirmation hearing in 1999 when he became Bill Clinton’s U.N. ambassador.

“Economic Czar” – Actually the President’s Economic Recovery Board, chaired by Paul Volcker, the deeply uncontroversial former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

“Energy and Environment Czar” – This is Carol Browner, the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 1993 to run the Environmental Protection Agency under Bill Clinton.

“Guantanamo Closure Czar” – Actually the Special Envoy to Guantanamo, Daniel Fried, who was the final Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the Bush administration.

There are other problems with the list. The so-called “International Climate Czar,” Todd Stern, is actually a special envoy who works in the State Department; several other “czars” were appointed to previously-existing institutions, like John Brennan, given a new portfolio in the 56-year-old National Security Council. But let’s read the list this way, and stop calling “czars” the people who were confirmed by the Senate at one point or given previously-existing jobs. That scary Politico list of 30 names is down to 15 names. It’s down to people like Lynn Rosenthal, the White House Adviser on Violence Against Women.

Now, President Obama has created several new offices and institutions: the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, the President’s Economic Recovery Board, White House Office of Health Reform, and the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board, to name some. But when Pence says Congress must “examine the background and responsibilities of these individuals” and “determine the constitutionality,” what is he suggesting? Should Herb Allison and John Holdren, who were confirmed by the Senate, resign and go through hearings again, just to be safe? Does he wonder whether the job of Director of National Intelligence is constitutional? That would be a shame, because Pence voted for the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which created the DNI.

A debate about the power of the executive branch and the collapsing trust between the president and the Senate — it’s the constant filibusters of presidential nominees that really started this process of end-runs around confirmation hearings — would be healthy. But so far this “czars” debate seems like a witch hunt egged on by sloppy reporting.

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An April 12 WorldNetDaily headline; Glenn Beck on Fox News (YouTube)

On April 12, the conservative Website WorldNetDaily published an expose on newly appointed White House “green czar” Van Jones that labeled the environmental activists a “an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Based on readily available online sources, including an alternative weekly paper in Oakland, California, Aaron Klein’s piece had a sensational title–”Will a ‘red’ help blacks go green?”–and a sensational spin. In the 2005 profile of Jones that Klein cited, reporter Eliza Strickland recalled Jones’s first year out of Yale Law School, working for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in the Bay Area, and how when he was “observing the first large rally since the lifting of the city’s state of emergency, he got swept up in mass arrests,” then came to sympathize with the black radicals and communists who’d been arrested with him, before leaving them behind to become an environmental activist. In Klein’s hands, the story took on a different, more sinister tone: “Jones said he first became radicalized in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, during which time he was arrested.”

Klein’s story made some small waves online, but it wasn’t picked up by the mainstream media until July 23. That was when Glenn Beck first told his Fox News audience about Jones. “This is a guy who is a self-avowed communist,” said Beck, “and he is in the Obama administration … this guy wasn’t a radical, and then was arrested. He spent six months in jail, came out a communist.”

Beck took a shot at the “avowed communist” Jones again on July 28, again on Aug. 4, again on Aug. 11 (”this is a convicted felon, a guy who spent, I think, six months in prison after the Rodney King beating”), again on Aug. 13, and again on Aug. 21. During that period, a civil rights group called Color of Change launched a campaign to get advertisers to drop Beck. The host responded on August 25 with a week-long special series, “The New Republic: America’s Future,” in which Jones became exhibit A of the “radical leftists currently advising the president of the United States.” Back at WorldNetDaily, Klein wrote matter-of-factly that “Beck’s segments about Jones were based in part on WND’s reporting that Jones was as an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader.”

The growing campaign against Jones — to date, Beck has warned his viewers about him on 14 episodes of his Fox News show — is a powerful example of the influence of a Website that’s very infrequently cited by name, even on the right. (Neither Klein nor Beck’s staff responded to TWI’s questions about the Jones stories.) But where other, more mainstream conservative sites cover partisan political battles and run dry op-eds by think tank experts, WND is all muckraking and rumor-chasing, all the time.

The 12-year-old Website, with 17 full-time editorial staffers, has a White House correspondent, Les Kinsolving, who is most often used by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs as a punchline. One staff reporter, Jerome Corsi, co-wrote the bestselling Swift Boat Veterans for Truth book “Unfit for Command,” but has been derided by other conservatives for what Politico called “outrageous assertions and fringe theories” about a plan to merge the United States with Mexico and Canada and a shadowy relationship between President Barack Obama and Kenyan Prime Minister Rail Odinga. And the site has relentlessly covered the conspiracy theories about Obama’s citizenship, with hundreds of articles, several petitions, a billboard campaign, and a $17.99 in-house documentary on the issue.

Rush Limbaugh (left) celebrates the release of his book "See, I Told You So," with collaborator Joseph Farah (right). (WNDBooks)

But WorldNetDaily’s Web traffic, revenue, and influence are impressive. It frequently leads the pack in conservative online media. According to James R. Whelan, the Florida-based marketer who runs WorldNetDaily’s ad operations, the site has already surpassed $1 million in ad revenue for 2009. It has a mailing list of more than 355,000 e-mail addresses, which has been built up through tools like daily polls on the site, and has been rented (through third-party vendors) by the Republican National Committee.

“I don’t listen to what idiots like Katie Couric say, about how this is a bad economy and how you can’t do business right now,” said Whelan. “We’re having a great year. We have a great, loyal audience, made up of politically active people who are more or less after the truth.”

The driving force beyond the site’s financial success is its traffic. Whelan tells potential advertisers that the site reaches “6 million unique viewers every month.” That number is difficult to confirm with public information, but it’s not far off. According to siteanalytics.compete.com, WorldNetDaily had more than 1.9 million visitors in July, the month when the “birther” story peaked. That was the slowest month for the site in more than a year. In June, a more average month, it drew in more than 3.9 million visitors. For comparison, that month Free Republic had around 3.2 million visitors, The Washington Times had roughly 2.9 million, Townhall.com had 2.5 million, HotAir.com had 2.4 million, National Review had roughly 2.2 million, Human Events had 1.4 million, LewRockwell.com had 1.1 million, CNSNews.com had around 532,000, and The American Spectator had around 358,000. Among conservative news sites, only Fox News, with roughly 50 million monthly visitors, and Newsmax, with around 6.2 million in June, regularly beats out WND. It’s tougher sledding for Websites that attempt to carve out a more refined audience of conservatives: in June, David Frum’s New Majority had only 42,000 visitors. (According to Google Analytics, it fared quite a bit better at 72,000 unique visitors.) WND, unlike New Majority, has a permanent link at the Drudge Report; according to Alexa.com, Drudge accounts for 13 percent of WND’s traffic.

“The problem is that the mainstream conservative world is not impermeable to this stuff,” Frum told TWI. He cited a persistent rumor that President Obama’s administration was setting up special camps to imprison its political foes. “The idea that the administration is setting up concentration camps has actually bled through to Fox News.”

This week, the libertarian conservative blogger Jon Henke, a consultant who worked for Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) in 2006, challenged fellow conservatives not to buy ads or otherwise do business with the site. “No respectable organization,” wrote Henke, “should support the kind of fringe idiocy that WND peddles.” That inspired Joseph Farah, the founder and editor of the site, to attack Henke. And it didn’t inspire much fear in Whalen. “The heck with that guy,” Whalen told TWI.

“On the Internet, the right is still divided into Web 1.0 and Web 2.0,” Henke told TWI. “There are news sites that arose in the 1990s and became popular with cultural conservatives, but never moved beyond. WorldNetDaily is one of those. And there needs to be a bright line in between the type of people or rhetoric or movements that traffic in conspiracy theories and the decent right.”

While some Washington conservative distance themselves from WorldNetDaily (”I don’t know anyone who reads it,” said Henke), its associations with the rest of the movement run deep. Farah founded the site after a stint as a “newspaper doctor” led to hiring Rush Limbaugh as a columnist for the Sacramento Union, and after that led to a job co-writing Limbaugh’s book “See, I Told You So.”

“Rush Limbaugh is generous, funny, encouraging, kind, and insightful,” Farah wrote in his 2007 memoir “Stop the Presses!: The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution.” “[W]orking closely with Rush Limbaugh on his bestselling book was a treat for me and a memory I will always cherish.”

Farah founded WorldNetDaily two years after that, and has seldom had trouble bringing prominent conservatives into his orbit. In “Stop the Presses!” Farah recalled how Bill O’Reilly came to him in 2000 to launch an opinion column anchored at the site. “I want my show to be the number one cable show,” said O’Reilly, according to Farah. “I want to write a bestselling book. And I want to launch a nationally-syndicated newspaper column.” That year, political pollster Scott Rasmussen wrote a column for the site, too. In 2002, WorldNetDaily launched a publishing arm, WNDBooks, that would release political tracts and memoirs by Tom Tancredo, NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre, and most impactfully, radio host Michael Savage. His first WNDBooks release, a collection of WND columns titled The Savage Nation, became their first New York Times #1 bestseller. Savage’s relationship with WND continues to provide them traffic — 6 percent of their readers arrive from his Website, according to Alexa.com — and his success would be matched in 2008 with the release of Corsi’s The Obama Nation.

“I don’t think life is long enough to go around debunking the various ideas that have occurred to Jerome Corsi,” Frum told TWI.

Corsi’s reporting is responsible for much of WND’s current notoriety. But the Van Jones model — relentlessly covering Obama appointees until the rest of the media notices–has gotten the best recent results. WND cited a 1977 book co-written by White House science czar John Holdren to report that he “called for forced abortions.” The site has run multiple articles about Cass Sunstein, the president’s nominee to run the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, alleging that he wanted to censor the Internet and that he favored “gun grabs” and “animal rights.” Not only have those allegations made it into the wider conservative media, they’ve fueled Republican holds on Sunstein’s nomination. WND’s coverage of the Obama birth certificate conspiracy, often written by Corsi, has been packaged as an ongoing, dogged investigation. Last month the site published an image of a forged “Kenyan birth certificate” appended with a column by Farah dealing with their editorial decision. “No one here has made a judgment that it is real,” Farah wrote. “What we did was report a fact – that California attorney Orly Taitz has filed a motion in federal court to determine its authenticity.”

Asked by TWI about WND’s critics, and whether his reports could reach as wide an audience at WND as they could reach on the TV shows that have cooled to inviting him on, Corsi told TWI that the question answered itself.

“If you didn’t consider WND effective,” said Corsi, “you wouldn’t be writing about us.”

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CNBC, which is ostensibly a financial news channel, has upped its number of appearances by a member of Congress whose anti-Fed-centric economic policy has been tutored by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

The biggest swing region in the poll? The South. In Southern states, 46 percent of viewers say that Fox News is “extremely reliable” or “reliable.” Only 6 percent of them say that of MSNBC, compared to 26 percent who say it of CNN, a huge shift from the days when CNN was derided as the “Communist/Clinton News Network.” And non-white viewers really don’t like Fox. Only 5 percent of African-Americans, 11 percent of Hispanics, and 8 percent of other minorities consider the network reliable, while a majority of every one of those groups trusts CNN and sizable pluralities trust MSNBC.

“If anything surprised me, it’s how many people have heard about this,” said Michael Dimock, an associate director at the Pew Research Center. “When we put the question in, we said to ourselves, well, Lou Dobbs has covered it, and it’s been discussed on the Internet. For 80 percent of people to have heard something about this is pretty high.”

Dimock told TWI that the survey’s sample was not large enough to find statistically significant breakdowns from one region of the country to the other, or to break the poll down between whites, blacks, and other minorities. The high number of Republicans who want “coverage,” said Dimock, does not necessarily mean that they’re all “birthers.” Instead, the number could be viewed as a screen for the persistent doubts of Obama’s political skeptics.

“It goes back to what we tracked last year, when we consistently found that 10 or 11 percent of Americans believed that he was Muslim,” said Dimock. “There is a core group of Americans who have never been comfortable with Barack Obama. A story like this sort of resonates with these folks. Oh! Maybe he isn’t one of us!”

Am I the only one to notice that mainstream media attention to the “Birthers” has picked up in recent weeks — and that this increased attention is coincident to the turn in Obama’s approval ratings?

A search of The Washington Post web site, for instance, on the term “Birther” yields as its oldest hit this one, from July 6; a search of The New York Times, though, shows first mention of the term on July 22.

Far be it from me to assume one is the cause of the other — as faithful readers know, I do my best to avoid falling into the post hoc, ergo propter hoc trap — but, still, it is an interesting coincidence.

I can’t speak to discussions inside those newspapers’ newsrooms, but I have been following this, err, story for a year, and before the blow-up this month, there were several bursts of “birther” attention whenever these people got into a courtroom to make their case. And searching for the term “birther” isn’t the way to check this.

For example, in December 2008 a New Jersey lawyer got the Supreme Court to read a lawsuit about Obama’s “natural born” status and consider it for the 2009 docket. That generated a lot of attention, including cable news and a column by Dana Milbank. But the high court passed on the case and America moved on. At that point, President-elect Barack Obama was riding on a wave of goodwill, so it’s hard to suggest the media was covering up for him. I’d track the current “birther boom” to the mid-July lawsuit filed by Orly Taitz on behalf of Maj. Stefan F. Cook. That got, among other coverage, a national heads-up from Sean Hannity on his Fox News show.

Last Monday I noticed a July 10 YouTube video of a woman in red howling at Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) about the birth certificate. I posted it at 8:57 a.m. The Drudge Report posted it at some point between 9:23 a.m. and 9:33 a.m. (You can see in Drudge’s archives that it was not up yet 26 minutes after my original post.) So I guess I started this current wave of birthermania. Sorry, Bill Pascoe!

More seriously, it’s impossible to imagine these people getting attention from mainstream media reporters if they didn’t get members of Congress to endorse their agenda with things like Rep. Bill Posey’s (R-Fla.) “birther bill,” or get Republicans at the state level to join onto to lawsuits against Obama, as several Tennessee Republican legislators have. The media isn’t forcing them to do this.

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