I think I can answer Rob't Farago's question. Dan Freedman, The Cowardly Liar. 21st Century Yellow Journalism at the Hearst newspaper chain.

"Yellow journalism, in short, is biased opinion masquerading as objective fact." -- Oracle.

The New York World, run by Joseph Pulitzer and The New York Journal, run by William Randolph Hearst, vie for credit in starting the Spanish American War.


Robert Farago, writing at The Truth About Guns, asks, with justifiable outrage:

How could the Houston Chronicle write about Mexican gun running without once mentioning the ATF’s Gunwalker Scandal? Actually, I’ve got a better question: why would the Houston Chronicle write about the guns smuggled to Mexican drug cartels without making a single reference to the fact that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let thousands of guns walk across our southern border to the bad guys?

Farago ascribes reporter Dan Freedman's Gunwalker allergy to "that worst of all possible journalistic combinations: willful ignorance . . ."

"Willful ignorance"? Certainly true, at least in part. Farago concludes:

The ATF must love reports like this. Stories that repeat the same old lies and distortions about the source of the Mexican drug cartels’ firearms and make it seem like America’s lax gun laws are to blame for the narco-terrorists’ endless killing spree.

Also most certainly true. And that is WHY Dan Freedman wrote the story he did, to please his ATF/DOJ/Obama Administration sources.


The cowardly liar. Dan Freedman: Hearst's Numbah One Ichiban Boy in the District of Criminals.

You see, Dan Freedman is not some local Houston Chronicle reporter, he is news editor of the Hearst Newspapers Washington bureau -- providing material to the entire Hearst newspaper chain -- and all you Texans can breathe easy because according to New York on the Potomac, he "has deep New York roots."

A native of New York City, he has covered six Supreme Court confirmations and wrote about major court opinions, as well as issues ranging from abortion to immigration to the wars on drugs and terror. He also covered the George W. Bush campaign in 2000 and headed a Hearst team in 2002 that produced a ground-breaking series on the USDA National School Lunch Program, which won awards from the National Press Club and the Association of Food Journalists.

Dan Freedman's continued utility to Hearst newspapers -- reflected in his paycheck -- involves stories dependent upon sources within the federal government. As Hearst's Numbah One Ichiban Boy in the District of Criminals, Freedman can hardly be ignorant of the Gunwalker scandal. If he chooses not to write of it, it is because he is KNOWINGLY engaged in "biased opinion masquerading as objective fact."

This is, I suppose, "willful ignorance," to use Farago's term, but only in the 1984 Orwellian sense where Freedman obligingly "forgets" that which is no longer approved by the Party.

Freedman, faithful to the Hearst tradition (and to whom I am forwarding a copy of this post to his email address, dan@hearstdc.com ) is engaging in 21st Century yellow journalism. Yellow journalism as in "biased opinion masquerading as objective fact" but also yellow as in cowardly.

Freedman has not covered, and will not mention, the Gunwalker scandal, because he is a cowardly, paid liar who knows where his paycheck comes from. If the Party decrees that the murderous Gunwalker scandal shall not be mentioned, then the propagandist slash auto-scribe (I will not use the term "reporter") Dan Freedman will certainly see that he does his part to send it down the memory hole.

Thus is his "story" explained.

Mike Vanderboegh