Larry O’Connor
BigJournalism.com
3/31/2010
Over the past two days, BigGovernment.com has been exposing the identities of members of IBEW Local 357 who taunted, harassed, intimidated and threw eggs at peaceful Tea Party protestors in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada last weekend. This could signal in important turning point in citizen journalism and the use of the internet and social media to reveal the truth about an important dynamic in American Politics.
These reports are relevant for two important reasons:
First, they highlight the incredible lack of evidence the mass media had when they loudly and unabashedly repeated the claim that Tea Party activists in Washington, D.C., hurled racial epithets at members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
When the CBC marched down the middle of the protests on the day of the health care vote in the House of Representatives, there were hundreds and hundreds of hand-held cameras and cell phones that recorded the event. Here we are, ten days after the event and not one person has produced a video or audio recording proving anyone used a racial epithet.
But, within days of the egg-throwing incident, we have seen video showing:
• An egg whizzing by Andrew Breitbart’s face.
• The man holding the egg.
• The union protesters taunting and intimidating Breitbart and his fellow conservative activists.
• Protesters using a typical “Alinsky” tactic of accusing their targets of doing the exact thing they do. In this case, throwing an egg and then telling police that Breitbart had thrown it.
And, once BigGovernment.com released the footage, multitudes of readers have come forward identifying the people in the videos and providing further evidence of similar activities involving these agitators in the past.
Isn’t it a stark contrast? The mass-media proclaims and repeats the un-proven assertion that racial epithets were hurled at the CBC and produce no video to back-up the claim, and at the same time, the incidents in Searchlight are detailed, documented, proven and the identities of the perpetrators are easily acquired due to nothing more than an open and free flow of information between a news outlet (Big Government) and the public.
The second reason this is an important development in the use of new media is that for too long, these protestors and agitators have been able to show up and scream and shout the other side into silence. The intimidation techniques were perfected by the now-defunct and disgraced ACORN, and were also used most effectively by SEIU thugs last summer during town hall meetings over ObamaCare.
The article continues at BigJournalism.com
