Tina Brown: Copycat, fraud, and failure

Tina Brown, whose massive losses at Newsweek and the Daily Beast are a matter of public ridicule, stepped up to the NPR microphone in an attack on the late Andrew Breitbart that revealed why her media enterprise are such failures.

Brown recommended David Carr's profile of Andrew Breitbart, which ran in this week's New York Times. The profile, while generally positive, included a bizarre ad hominem swipe at Breitbart, and also mangled the facts of the Shirley Sherrod controversy. 

Drawing a parallel between Breitbart and the behavior of journalists who aided the rise of Adolf Hitler, Brown told an amenable Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep:

• Breitbart didn't report anything, really. What Breitbart did was, he was a provocateur, he was a 'death by a thousand tweets'; he was quite happy to take the flying soundbite, any soundbite, and misapply it in its context and create an absolute mayhem for the person concerned--like he did for poor Shirley Sherrod, who was the obscure official in the Agriculture Department. He gave the impression by the cutting of her words in a tape that he released that she was giving racially motivated financing decisions--when actually she was doing the very opposite. So this was really using a kind of bastardization of journalism through the format of Web and tweeting and, you know, just simply using the Internet as a tool for activism.

Brown's claim that "Breitbart didn't report anything, really" is a laughable accusation that Anthony Weiner could easily refute. And Brown's pathetic resort to comparisons with Hitler and Nazi Germany affirms Godwin's Law while discrediting anything she has to say.
 
What is particularly interesting, however, is Brown's description of the Sherrod controversy, during which she uses Carr's exact words--verbatim, barely paraphrasing, and without indicating that she is lifting directly from Carr and the Times, not offering her own analysis.

Click here to read more on Breitbart.com. 

Also on Breitbart.com a glimmer of hope that Republicans can find a spine...

Republicans Sue Obama Over Recess Appointments

Today, Senate Republicans hired Miguel Estrada, the 2002 judicial nominee for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals filibustered by Senate Democrats, to press a lawsuit against the Obama administration. The lawsuit itself is based on President Obama’s non-recess “recess appointment” of political allies to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees management-union relations; it was originally filed by Noel Canning, a soft-drink business owner who sued the NLRB over its ruling that the company had to work with a labor union.
 
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell came out firing today:

“The president’s decision to circumvent the American people by installing his appointees at a powerful federal agency, when the Senate was not in recess, and without obtaining the advice and consent of the Senate, is an unprecedented power grab. We will demonstrate to the court how the president’s unconstitutional actions fundamentally endanger the Congress’s role in providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch.”
 
The Senate was technically in session when President Obama made his recess appointments; he unilaterally determined that there was indeed a recess. “The Senate should decide when the Senate is in session,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) stated.

Click here to read more from Breitbart.com on Obama's recess appointment lawsuit.