The Slatest

Today in Conservative Media: James O’Keefe Reveals CNN’s “Leftist Bias”

James O’Keefe.

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A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.

On Wednesday, conservative provocateur James O’Keefe announced on CNN that he planned to release more than 100 hours of audio recorded within that network’s headquarters in 2009. In an article titled, “CNN Throws Mud at James O’Keefe Ahead of Thursday’s Audio Bomb,” the Daily Caller mocked CNN’s Brian Stelter’s response to this threat, writing, “One thing is for certain: Stelter’s piece is a pre-emptive hit job on O’Keefe.”

After the promised Thursday release of those tapes, other conservative outlets quickly began to dig into them. Breitbart wrote that they “reveal CNN editors displaying their leftist bias.” By way of evidence, it pointed to one CNN editor’s dismissal of climate change deniers and another’s description of Fox News as “unbearable.” LifeZette focused on the former, claiming in a headline that the editor in question had “Disparaged Climate Change Doubters as ‘Creationists’ ”

Gateway Pundit covered the leak in multiple posts, including an “exclusive interview” with O’Keefe in which O’Keefe acknowledges that his source had been at CNN for some time and had “come forward” with the tapes. “Usually, we embed people … we still do that and have operative [sic] working at various organizations and media outlets as we speak.”

Another Gateway Pundit post described O’Keefe’s promise to pay $10,000 for additional recordings of “unethical” behavior from within newsrooms, as long as the resulting material is “good enough.”The Drudge Report also promoted that promise in the prime slot of its home page on Thursday afternoon:

Drudge Report

Several conservative sites also turned their attention to Democratic National Committee chair candidate Rep. Keith Ellison. The Daily Caller published no fewer than three posts on Ellison between Wednesday and Thursday. One, which hearkened back to a claim Ellison had made in 1992, read, “Keith Ellison Once Said Black People Don’t Have ‘Obligation’ to Obey Government.” The headline of another suggested that he had “Stumble[d] When Pressed on Anti-Semitism,” though the body of the article only acknowledges that Ellison had denied that he was an anti-Semite and gone “on to cite examples of supporter [sic] in the Jewish community.” In both posts, the site noted that Ellison is a Muslim.

The Daily Caller’s third Ellison post reported that the congressman had “called Wednesday for an impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump,” news that both Breitbart and Sean Hannity’s website also covered. In its short post on the topic, the latter wrote, “This isn’t surprising for a desperate leftist party lacking new leadership, new candidates, and new ideas.” Reporting on Wednesday night’s DNC chair debate, Breitbart wrote, “‘Division’ was the word of the night.

Coverage of the Conservative Political Action Conference focused primarily on shows of unity.

On Thursday, posts about the death of Fox News anchor Alan Colmes were widely shared from conservative Facebook pages: