#MoralMondays coverage: mainstream media bumbling OR sinister conspiracy? You make the call. | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: Brant Clifton stays on "Moral Monday" in his "bare knuckles" Conservative online publication known as The Daily Haymaker.

    What's left of our state's mainstream media has sunk to an all-time low with their coverage of this Moral Monday silliness on Jones Street. We're getting a lot of dictation. We're hiding the affiliations of arrestees and protest spokespeople. We're not seeing any fact-checking of the garbage being spewed by The Round Rev and his posse.

    Ignoring Dana Cope. We've got the leader of the State Employees Association of North Carolina publicly stating that the Moral Monday protests are a huge mistake, and that GOP legislators have been much fairer with state employees than the Democrats ever were. You would think THAT would be huge news - especially since it is coming from a leader of a group long associated with supporting the North Carolina Democrat Party. As far as I can tell, we are the only media source that has reported on Cope's comments. I am sure Cope would talk to any mainstream media journalist that had the desire - or integrity - to go speak to him about his feelings on Moral Monday and the GOP legislative leadership.

    Would this be happening if a conservative activist publicly lambasted a major Tea Party protest?

    Ignoring involvement of national SEIU operatives in Moral Monday. My research shows that our site, Lady Liberty 1885, and Carolina Plotthound are the only outlets that have reported on the extent of SEIU's involvement in this Moral Monday circus. The stupid, lazy sycophant mainstream media has pretty much taken dictation from the left and poo-pooed claims that "outsiders" are involved in Moral Monday. Never mind what that hardcore right-winger Dana Cope says. Never mind the fact that the protesters have a NY-based PR rep.

    Ignoring affiliations of - and basically lying about - Moral Monday protesters. We've been subjected to spin suggesting that all of these folks at the legislative building are wide-eyed mainstream innocent rookies who are new to this whole protesting-and-getting-ziptied thing. We got a story about an esteemed researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill bravely stepping into the realm of protesting. The media neglected to mention said researcher had the connections to get an excluisive backstage photo with Big Barry (and uses said photo with his profile on the UNC web site).

    A Chatham County paper reported comments by arrested protester Lorene Yarger. The report failed to give us details about Yarger's day job - working for a radical peacenik group that protests at military bases and encourages soldiers to go AWOL. *Just another mainstream North Carolinian. Nothing to see here.*

    McClatchy-Raleigh reported on comments from protester Elizabeth Benefield - identified in the article as a "professional fundraiser." They neglected to mention her extensive work at the UNC-CH School of Social Work - that bastion of social and fiscal conservatism.

    In Moore County, our Nobel Prize-winning thrice twice-weekly local paper reported on the Moral Monday arrests of three veteran activists from the miniscule, ever-dwindling Moore County Democrat Party.

    WRAL was breathless to report on "research" by a UNC academic on the protesters. His data, of course, showed that most of the people were from North Carolina - therefore making the Republicans liars. The researcher's past involvement in the Moral Monday protests and his donations to the Obama-Biden campaign were, of course, downplayed. Why impair the "credibility" of this 'research'? Why kill the narrative?

    It's clear that we are NOT getting anything close to the truth from the mainstream media on this whole Moral Monday thing. Is it incompetence, or are the media willing accomplices to a clear attempt by national leftists to push North Carolina back into the Obama column?