3. Conservative Media Watch Organizations Alleging "Liberal Bias"
Fortunately, their OWN record on accuracy competes with the best works of fiction 

3.4 Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC)

This blurb at Media Transparency gives you a slight advance hint on the depravity you are likely to see from CSPC or its partner organizations.  

The Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC) received $125,000 from the Olin Foundation and more than $480,000 from the Bradley Foundation in 1994, and has received substantial funds from the Sarah Scaife Foundation. Its mission, according to a recent CSPC direct mail appeal, is to "change the leftist, anti-American, elitist culture that is dominant in the entertainment industry [and to expose] the idiocies and the viciousness of the radical leftism in universities, the media, mainstream churches, and everywhere else this modern plague is found." The Committee on Media Integrity (COMINT), leader in the de-funding attacks on public television, is a project of the CSPC. - Buying a Movement, PFAW

David Horowitz, a lapsed leftist and former speechwriter for Senator Bob Dole (R.-Kansas), and his Cochair Peter Collier head two interrelated liberal-bashing organizations, the Committee on Media Integrity (COMINT), and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. COMINT spearheaded recent attacks against the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; CSPC focuses on "political correctness" and publishes a newsletter, Heterodoxy, full of mean-spirited rant about blacks, feminists, and homosexuals. Subscriptions to Heterodoxy or COMINT's Journal cost $25. - by James D'Entremont, from his web site

[By the way, The Wednesday Morning Club that is listed as a Department of CSPC has the who's who of today's Republican party participating in it, including Vice President Dick Cheney. The company you keep...]

All one needs to know about CSPC is that David Horowitz is one of the co-founders and brains behind it. This is the same Far-Right crackpot fraudster and serial liar who claims (among many, many other things) that African Americans benefited from slavery (see Brock, page 102) and also runs a website which has photos of various Democrats and progressives/liberals stacked right next to mass murdering terrorists like Osama bin Laden (as being part of a "network").

Michael Berube had commented on this website recently:

International leftist network exposed!

The latest product of the fertile mind of David Horowitz is finally available for public use!  It’s Discover the Network, and no, it’s not a cable channel that shows mammals doing the nasty.  It’s “A Guide to the Political Left"-- that’s right, a comprehensive introduction to some of the world’s leading traitors, terrorists, and useful idiots!!

And be sure to check out the “individuals” page, kids!  Because before today, you could plausibly say that you just weren’t aware of the connections between:

Bruce Springsteen and Mohammed Atta;
Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and Roger Ebert;
Martin Sheen and Ramzi Yousef;
Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Sean Penn;
Susan Sarandon and Zacarias Moussaoui;
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Rob Reiner; and, of course,
Barbra Streisand and the Ayatollah Khomeini

--but now you can’t use that excuse any longer!

So, kids, join the global war against the American entertainment industry and its alliance with Islamist religious fundamentalists whose beliefs about women, sexuality, and secularists only appear to be similar to those of Christian religious fundamentalists but are really allied with the decadent Fifth Columnists who introduced soul-sucking concepts like “the weekend” and “the minimum wage” into American life!  Remember, everyone can fight in this war-- even Sean Hannity and Jonah Goldberg!  Enlist today!

(Hat tip to Pete Simon.)

UPDATE:  Apparently Alex of Buck Hill was on the case yesterday, while I was still noodling around with my computer troubles.  But he’s got one important detail wrong:  Danny Glover is not connected to Mohammed Atta.  Danny Glover is connected to Fidel Castro.  Just FYI. 

Here's a follow-up from Berube (bold text, except headers, are my emphasis):

Clumpy v. smooth

In his latest, most Ward Churchillesque attempt to make the worst of a bad situation, my occasional sparring partner David Horowitz defends his “Discover the Network” site by pointing out that many of its critics have not, in fact, adequately discovered the network:

In the first place it should be pointed out that even though DiscoverTheNetwork consists of thousands of files, and is the product of years of work and decades of experience, these critics have launched their attacks within hours of its appearance on the web and before any serious person could have digested a fraction of its contents.

David’s right about this, of course.  The project was years-- nay, decades-- in the making, and smug snarkmeisters like me came along within hours to make fun of it, just because it contained an “Individuals” page that listed people like Roger Ebert next to Mohammed Atta.  David has every reason to feel sandbagged.  All that time, all that effort-- only to meet with uncomprehending derision.  Now he knows how Michael Cimino felt when he screened that seven-hour version of Heaven’s Gate for those bean-counting United Artists executives!

It is difficult not to regard such attacks as politically motivated attempts to stigmatize, tarnish and yes, smear, the new website, and thus bury the enterprise in a way that would preclude having to deal with the information it displays.

Hey, if it’s difficult, don’t do it!  Just go ahead and say that the leftists and liberals smeared on the site are themselves smearing the site.  We won’t mind!  We love this kind of thing.

Thus, instead of parsing and analyzing the actual contents of the site– the detailed profiles of individuals and organizations and their links to networks defined in the site– these critics have seized on a quirk in the format, an entirely innocent feature of the site, as an opening for their attacks. This is the “Individuals” search page, which functions as a table of contents for one section of the site. Actually it is even less than that. What they have attacked is a picture grid on the Individuals search page which was intended as a kind of visual enticement to enter the actual profiles of the site. Thus if one were to click on the picture of Barbra Streisand or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or Michael Moore on this page, one would be immediately directed to their individual profile pages.

The mere listing of these figures in the database was not intended to suggest that there are organizational links or common agendas or coinciding agendas between these individuals.

My apologies for seizing on a mere quirk in the format, FrontPage fans!  Not being very good with computers (as this blog’s regular readers are well aware), I had no idea that the posting of Bill Moyers’ picture alongside the Ayatollah Khomeini’s was an entirely innocent feature of the site.  Nor did I understand that the mere listing of these figures in the database was not intended to suggest that there are organizational links or common agendas or coinciding agendas between these individuals.  Again, I’m not very good at deciphering databases.  I simply thought we were being invited to, uh, how you say, “Discover the Network,” and that the “Individuals” page indicated pretty clearly that the Network consisted of people like Bruce Springsteen, Zacarias Moussaoui, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Rob Reiner.  My mistake!  Thanks for clearing that one up!

And then it gets personal [Berube's emphasis]. Not content with the defense of the site’s formatting quirks and innocent features, David proceeds to make fun of my tentative, innocuous, well-meaning post on the Network, calling it “a pretty good rendering of the paranoid fantasies of the left” and claiming that “its ‘humor’ . . . is so clumpy, however, that you would hardly suspect his expertise was literary.” Well, I ain’t no Ring Lardner, people, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard tell of “clumpy humor.” It’s true that some of my jokes have had to huddle together for warmth in recent months, because the Bush Administration has been deliberately withholding heat from blue states (and no, that isn’t a paranoid fantasy, David-- the BTU readouts don’t lie, dude), but that doesn’t make them “clumpy.” In fact, as the recent Koufax Awards have definitively demonstrated, this blog’s humor is exceptionally smooth, with a full body and an effervescent finish.  Cheers!

More important, this blog has a really good memory.  For example: David appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on February 1 and claimed that although he had been invited to speak at Hamilton College, it was at the behest of “conservative kids”:  “It’s not like the faculty brought me up there,” he said.  But actually, it was like the faculty brought him up there.  In fact, it was exactly like the faculty brought him up there.  And who says so?  Why, David Horowitz says so-- or he did, on his very own blog back on September 18, 2002:

Today I am at Hamilton College in Clinton NY to speak on the Sixties. It is one of the rare occasions I have been officially invited, in this case by historian Maurice Isserman with whom I have had an email correspondence for some time. Isserman is that rare specimen, an honest leftist. He has written an excellent biography of Michael Harrington called The Other American, and one of the only studies of the Sixties by a leftist that I would recommend, If I Had A Hammer. I had dinner with Maurice and another leftist here whom I respect, Phil Klinkner, the author of a book on the civil rights movement, The Unsteady March, whom I once blasted on these pages. Having talked at length to Klinkner I realize I misjudged him, an error encouraged by the fact that his article appeared in The Nation.

Well, misjudging Klinkner was an understandable mistake on David’s part, and it was good of him to own up to it-- The Nation is part of The Network, after all.  And speaking of The Nation, I see that Bruce Shapiro’s memory of Horowitz’s visit to Hamilton is every bit as good as mine.  Anyway, David is right-- Maurice Isserman is an honest leftist.  Let us all emulate his example, cough cough.

On the “Academic Bill of Rights” front, by the way, David is now claiming that

[w]hen I drafted the Academic Bill of Rights-- and before I published it-- I took pains to vet the text with three leftwing academics-- Stanley Fish, Todd Gitlin and Michael Berube-- and with Eugene Volokh, a libertarian law professor at UCLA, who is one of the nation’s leading experts on First Amendment law. Anything in the original draft of the Academic Bill of Rights that so much as irritated these gentlemen I removed.

But as Stanford professor Graham Larkin has pointed out (with a little help from Fish, Gitlin, and me), that’s not quite right either.

Thanks once again to everyone who voted for me in the Koufaxes and honored me with three very respectable finishes.  This humble blog vows to remain humble, to remain full-bodied, and most of all, to remain smooth.

UPDATE:  SMOOTH CREDIT WHERE SMOOTH CREDIT IS DUE.

I remember David’s visit to Hamilton College because he wrote to me about it back in 2002-03 when we were sparring about leftist “second thoughts" and the leadership of the antiwar movement.  At the time, he complained to me that he rarely received invitations to speak as a serious intellectual historian of the sixties, and I’d replied that surely this was partly his fault:  you invite David Horowitz to your campus, you don’t know whether you’re going to get the guy who aspires to be a serious intellectual historian of the sixties, or the agent provocateur who peppers campus newspapers with ads that claim (among other things) that welfare constitutes a form of reparations for slavery (which must surely come as a surprise to all the white folks who received welfare checks between 1935 and 1996!).  But I did not know that Horowitz had-- ah, how should I put this-- innocently misstated the facts about his invitation to Hamilton when he appeared on The O’Reilly Factor.  For that I have to thank the invaluable Rick Perlstein, who sent me a transcript of the show (which, in my computer-coffee travails, I quickly misplaced):

O’REILLY: All right. We’re talking—Nancy Rabinowitz is on the faculty at Hamilton, and . . .

HOROWITZ: Right.

O’REILLY: You know-- but it is to Hamilton’s credit that you were invited to speak there, correct?

HOROWITZ: Yes. Well, I-- you know, the conservative kids invited me.  It’s a little different when you’re invited as a-- you know, a speaker paid by and invited by the faculty. It’s not like the faculty brought me up there.

Thanks, Rick!  Now we know that honest leftist professors who invite David to speak on their campuses run the risk of being pissed on in national media.  Smooth!

Knowing this (and much more about Horowitz), it is downright appalling that a man with his penchant for lunacy and extremism, exerts tremendous influence in the Republican party of the United States. Brock has covered in a fair amount of detail (pages 104-109) how it was Horowitz's (often bogus) attacks on PBS in the 1990s that weakened PBS and allowed the Republican controlled Congress to drive it in a conservative direction.

NOTE: As it turns out Horowitz also runs a campus "watchdog", which as you can expect, is fact-challenged as well. Here are a couple of recent examples from Media Matters.

One:

Right-wing activist David Horowitz, the president of Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), which purports to fight anti-conservative bias on the nation's college campuses, has admitted that a story highly publicized by his group concerning alleged events at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) "appears to be wrong," and that "our presentation of this case appears now to have had several faults." Horowitz made the concession in an article posted on FrontPageMag.com, his online magazine, on March 15, under the headline, "Correction: Some of Our Facts Were Wrong, But Our Point Was Right."

On March 14, in a post on his FrontPageMag.com blog titled "A new Brock slander goes round the web (and is refuted here)," Horowitz had accused Media Matters for America, which raised questions about whether the Colorado story was true in a March 7 item, of "slander" and insisted the story was true. Despite Horowitz's March 15 concession that the story is not true, the false attack on Media Matters is still posted on his blog.

The Horowitz about-face appears to have been prompted by a report, also posted March 15, on InsideHigherEd.com, which describes itself as "the online source for news, opinion and career advice and services for all of higher education," that refuted nearly all of the claims Horowitz and his SAF group had made regarding a student's purported allegations of political bias against her criminal justice professor at the UNC. Horowitz and SAF had alleged that a student in "[a] criminology class at a Colorado university," when asked on a midterm essay exam to explain "why President Bush was a war criminal," received a failing grade for answering instead why Saddam Hussein was a war criminal, and that this constituted anti-conservative bias. However, InsideHigherEd.com quoted a UNC spokeswoman as saying that "the test question was not the one described by Horowitz, the grade was not an F, and there were clearly non-political reasons for whatever grade was given." All the information the university had "was inconsistent with the story Horowitz has told about this incident," the website reported having been told by the UNC spokeswoman. The article also reported that the professor Horowitz and SAF attacked, Robert Dunkley, is a registered Republican.

Before retracting their claims, Horowitz and SAF had gone to great lengths to maintain their veracity in the face of skepticism from Mano Singham, the director of Case Western Reserve University's Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education, who questioned the Colorado story March 4 in a Cleveland Plain Dealer op-ed; and from Media Matters, which noted that media outlets were reporting the Horowitz story as if it were true even though there was no evidence to support it.

[...there's a lot more in the article...]

The blog on DiscovertheNetwork.org, a website run by Horowitz that purports to "identif[y] the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it," also touted Horowitz's "refutation" of the March 7 Media Matters item (here and here). The author of the posts, Richard Poe, who is identified as the blog's managing editor, has a reputation for spreading misinformation and using smear tactics. As Media Matters for America has documented, Poe floated a raft of distortions and factual misstatements in an attempt to smear billionaire philanthropist George Soros on the May 19, 2004, edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, and in a May 2004 article in the right-wing NewsMax magazine, of which Poe is a contributing editor.

Two:

Foothill College student Ahmad al-Qloushi -- who claims that he received a failing grade on a term paper about the U.S. Constitution because it was "pro-American" and whose allegations have been publicized by right-wing pundit David Horowitz -- appeared as a guest on the February 17 edition of FOX News' Hannity & Colmes. But no one on the show mentioned that al-Qloushi's professor disputes his version of events, that al-Qloushi's claims were originally publicized by the Foothill College Republicans (of which al-Qloushi is president), or that al-Qloushi has been touted by Horowitz to promote Horowitz's right-wing university campus initiatives.

"The Foothill College Republicans blasted faxes to reporters this month complaining that a professor had forced a student to see the college therapist merely because the student wrote a pro-American essay," the San Jose Mercury News reported on December 26, 2004. On January 6, Horowitz's right-wing website FrontPageMag.com posted an article by al-Qloushi about the incident. The Washington Times ran an January 16 article titled "California professor flunks Kuwaiti's pro-U.S. essay," in which it relayed al-Qloushi's claims and noted only that "Mr. Woolcock did not respond to telephone and e-mail inquiries." On February 1, al-Qloushi appeared on a segment of ABC's World News Tonight about "conservatives who claim they are victims of a double standard on college campuses," where his assertion that "I was attacked and intimidated because I love America" went unchallenged.

On the February 17 edition of Hannity & Colmes, al-Qloushi reiterated his story, claiming that his professor, Joseph Woolcock, "threatened [him] into seeking regular psychological treatment ... by threatening [his] visa status." But in a statement responding to al-Qloushi, Woolcock provided his version of events, which was ignored on Hannity & Colmes. According to Woolcock, he never "threatened" al-Qloushi's visa status or "threatened" him "into seeking regular psychological treatment," as al-Qloushi claimed. Woolcock also noted that al-Qloushi had "failed to write the mid-term assignment" and had turned down offers of assistance before turning in his final term paper

...

Al-Qloushi's essay, which is posted on Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom website, has been described by conservative blogger and political science professor James Joyner as "an incredibly poorly written, error-ridden, pabulum-filled [sic], essay that essentially ignores the question put forth by the instructor." Another conservative blogger, political science professor Steven Taylor, concluded: "I can see how this essay resulted in a failing grade."