Posted on 10/29/2007 4:14:43 PM PDT by Richard Poe
| by Richard Lawrence Poe Monday, October 29, 2007 |
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LAST WEEK this column unveiled Bloggergate, a massive effort by Hillary Clinton to tilt the blogosphere in her favor, by subsidizing leftwing bloggers. Hillary’s ambition to control the Internet did not form overnight. She was already pondering how to do it in 1995.
Of course, no one used the word "blogger" in 1995. In those days, online forums called "newsgroups" provided the medium of choice for anti-Clinton writers.
Hillary formed a special task force within the White House Counsel’s office to fight the New Media. As noted in my 2004 book Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists, the task force compiled a secret report titled, The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, written by White House aides Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane.
The report blamed talk radio, online newsgroups and other New Media outlets for spreading “conspiracy theories” about the 1993 death of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster. Hillary viewed these "conspiracy theories" as the number one threat to the Clinton White House, at the time.
Her Conspiracy Commerce report accused Pittsburgh newspaper mogul Richard Mellon Scaife of fabricating rumors about Foster's death, then feeding these stories to conservative publications, whence they filtered into mainstream media.
According to the report, the Internet fueled Scaife's success. The report complained that the Internet “allows an extraordinary amount of unregulated data and information to be located in one area and available to all. The right wing has siezed upon the internet [sic] as a means of communicating its ideas to people”.
After its completion around July 1995, White House operatives began circulating the report among like-minded journalists, to help them smear anti-Clinton researchers as Scaife stooges.
One of their targets was British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, then Washington bureau chief for the London Sunday Telegraph, one of England's most respected newspapers. Hillary's report inaccurately called the Sunday Telegraph a "tabloid", though it is actually printed on broadsheet.
In his 1997 book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, Evans-Pritchard writes, "I kept getting calls from reporters asking the same questions: `Did I know Scaife? Had I ever accepted money from Scaife? So who owned the tabloid I worked for? You mean it's not a tabloid? Oh".
The Wall Street Journal finally exposed Hillary's report on January 6, 1997. The revelation brought mostly yawns from mainstream journalists on the Clinton beat, most of whom already had a copy.
One journalist took special note, however. In a New York Times piece of January 25, 1997, David Sol Bennahum offered the Clintons some fateful advice. Agreeing with the report's essential claim, Bennahum wrote, "[T]he GOP has made clever use of the Internet, astutely building informal networks of like-minded, interconnected Web sites…" Bennahum then added, "Democrats should learn to build such networks of their own.”
A technology journalist, a contributing editor to Wired magazine, an author of futurist books and a venture capitalist, Bennahum today has become a powerful operative in Hillary’s Bloggergate network.
The Bloggergate scandal erupted when an anonymous video appeared on YouTube on October 2. It showed Hillary speaking at a conference of leftwing bloggers on August 4, 2007.
In it, Hillary declared, “We are… putting together a network in the blogosphere”. She attributed its success to the efforts of “institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress…”
With these words, Hillary confessed to a federal crime. Both groups are supposedly “non-partisan”, 501(c)3 tax-free organizations, strictly prohibited from coordinating efforts with a national political candidate such as Hillary.
More importantly, the two groups Hillary mentioned are deeply implicated in Bloggergate. Democrat billionaire George Soros launched the Center for American Progress in 2003 with a $3 million donation. The Center subsequently launched Media Matters for America in May 2004, which in turn launched the Center for Independent Media (CIM) in April 2006.
CIM tax filings bear the same address as Media Matters in Washington, DC.
The Center for Independent Media awards "fellowships" to leftwing bloggers, including cash subsidies, free legal service, free access to LexisNexis database searches and more. Its founder, President and CEO is none other than David Bennahum.
Bennahum helped found Media Matters, where he served as one of its original senior fellows.
On January 27, 1998 -- ten days after Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story -- Hillary Clinton told reporters at a White House press conference that the Internet needed an “editing function or gatekeeping function”.
With the help of David Bennahum and others, Hillary may finally achieve her goal.
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Richard Lawrence Poe is a contributing editor to Newsmax, an award-winning journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. His latest book is The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Siezed Control of the Democratic Party, co-written with David Horowitz. |
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF of my Hillary ping list.
Ping!
Many of us remember Hillary’s statement that they (the Clintons) control the MSM, but that they need to get control of the internet to complete their control of information.
So, she was lining up the blogosphere at the same time or even before she denied that her senate run implied a run for President. I’m shocked, SHOCKED! I tell you.
“”[T]he GOP has made clever use of the Internet, astutely building informal networks of like-minded, interconnected Web sites...”
Uhh, right. The success of conservative websites has happened in spite of the GOP.
Let me know when the GOP starts using electric lights instead of candles.
If she becomes President, you can kiss FR goodbye.
Hillary really needs to take it up with Algore for not incorporating a dem controlled blogshere module at the internet’s inception.
When David Bennahum, the president and CEO of the Center for Independent Media, a progressive organization based in Washington, D.C., decided to create his first state-based spinoff, he looked to Colorado. His creation went live last year.
David S. Bennahum (French-American) posted a brief piece on abolishing the Electoral College, because its set up unfairly.
“For those of us who want to reform the Electoral College, by either abolishing it or changing it state by state to remove the “winner take all” principle, now is the time to self-organize and start a process to get others on board.”
1995...hmmm...that was about the time the mysterious Quidam appeared on FR spouting outrageous claims clearly designed to discredit this site. Hillary, are you Quidam?-LOL.
Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet, but he sure did make up Global Warming!
David Bennahum is a 1990 graduate, magna cum laude, of Harvard College with a degree in History and Literature. As a writer living in New York, he explores and explains the cultural, economic and political consequences brought on by cyberspace. David is a Contributing Editor at Wired, Spin, Lingua Franca, and I.D. His articles apprear in the New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, New York, The Economist, Marketing Computers, Slate, Feed and NetGuide.
Can you spell censorship? Can you spell IRS Audit?
Thank God JR had the guts and brains to make this site for all of us that went through that fiasco at Prodigy... the rest is History
Thanks for the ping, Richard Poe. Thanks very, very much for your work.
Thanks again for additional information, kcvl. BTTT!
Wow, what’s your number around here, 2? You have the oldest “since” date I’ve ever seen.
His number is 48 and yours is 62,246:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/user-posts?id=48
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/user-posts?id=62246
You’re a newcomer!!
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