Posted on 09/07/2009 9:17:50 PM PDT by RobinMasters
WASHINGTON – Perhaps you think the Van Jones appointment as a White House czar was an aberration and, now that he is gone, America will never hear from him again.
Think again.
His biggest fans and closest friends tell a much different story.
For instance, Don Hazen, executive director of the Independent Media Institute, a "progressive" alternative media outlet heavily funded by the likes Teresa Heinz Kerry's Tides Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, says Jones' talents were actually wasted in the position of "green jobs czar" Barack Obama gave him.
He calls Jones "arguably the most effective communicator in Democratic and progressive politics – and yes, that includes Obama." He didn't like that he was in a position where he would "have to control his tongue, and in many cases shut his mouth."
"Part of what made Jones popular was telling it like it is. Jones inspired audiences, especially young people, with the notion that a radical vision, combined with innovative ideas and fundamental organizing, could work in tandem with our political system," Hazen writes.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Putting lipstick on a pig...
Well shut my mouf!
Spin spin spin spin
Spin spin spin spin
Wonderful spin, Marvelous spin...
Have you ever notice how the 'RATS always praise each other by saying how good someone is at shooting off their mouth? So far this year, they've said this about Barry and Gibbs. (Barry Gibbs?)
He’s a major liability. O had to get rid of him.
Don Hazen is executive director of the Independent Media Institute and executive editor of AlterNet. The former publisher of Mother Jones magazine. He managed political campaigns in New York City for Ruth Messinger and David Dinkins.
There must have been a conference call with LIBERALS today because Arianna Huffington said the same thing. It's BS!
I hope he keeps on spouting his venum. What he says will be a reflection on O from now on!
Don Hazen’s sleaze
THE INDEPENDENT MEDIA Institute, the San Francisco-based group that runs a news syndication service for the alternative press, has become embroiled in yet another serious ethical conflict that demonstrates the fundamental problems with foundation funding of media and political groups.
IMI operates Alternet, an online wire service that distributes stories to alternative newspapers all over the country. It started out as a simple, relatively small-scale operation created by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, a national trade group. Alternet picked up the best stories from the alternative press and resold them to other papers.
But some 10 years ago, Don Hazen became executive director of IMI (which back then was called the Institute for Alternative Journalism), and he quickly began moving to turn the outfit into his own personal fiefdom. Gone was much of any interest in serving the alternative press, particularly the small, struggling independent papers. Instead Hazen began looking for ways to get foundation funding to expand the size of his operation. He began looking for programs that the donors would fund.
The problem, of course, is that an organization that is heavily dependent on foundation funding has to tailor its agenda to meet the interests of the funders (see “Pulling Strings,” 10/8/97). And indeed, Alternet soon stopped running stories that might offend the folks with the money.
For example, he blacked out all of our reports on the privatization of the Presidio – at the same time as he was soliciting grants from the Tides Foundation, which had just gotten a sweetheart lease at the Presidio. Tides was also getting money from the Energy Foundation, which was pushing energy deregulation – another story Hazen wouldn’t properly cover.
The worst problem: Hazen kept all of this information secret. He wouldn’t make public the source or amount of his funding and refused to reveal what conditions were attached to his foundation grants.
That policy has just created a new firestorm in alternative media circles. Al Giordano, who runs an independent Web site called Narco News (www.narconews.com) that reports on drug policy, released an in-depth investigative report last week revealing, among other things, that Hazen had a special, secret arrangement with a private donor to pay IMI a “bounty” on every drug-policy story that Alternet placed in a publication. In other words, Hazen was pushing stories about a certain topic because he was getting extra cash for it. And – in what could prove to be a serious embarrassment to newspapers that regularly use Alternet stories – he never disclosed that those stories were in part underwritten by a private donor.
That violates a basic ethical standard that almost every major publication follows: When there’s outside funding for a story, you disclose it. In this case, Giordano wrote, Alternet “compromised the ethics of its subscribing newspapers. It denied them the knowledge they needed to make their own full disclosure. This is an example of how Alternet tangles other parties in its web of deceit.”
To make matters worse, Alternet pays writers half of the money it gets from selling their stories – but as far as Girodano could tell, none of the “bounty money” has made its way back to the writers.
Giordano has sent Hazen a list of 10 key questions (which are posted on his Web site and at www.sfbg.com). Among other things, he asks, “Are there bounty payments for other issue areas?” In other words, is almost everything on the Alternet wire compromised? Is there any way for any of the papers that use the material (or their readers) to know? Not so far, because Hazen is still keeping it all secret: he refused to respond to Girodano and to a series of questions that we submitted and has offered only a brief nonresponse to media critic Dan Kennedy (www.dankennedy.net) in which he doesn’t deny the “bounty” system.
The problem is that all of this sleaze tarnishes the good name of the alternative press and all of the writers who sell their work through Alternet. Hazen needs to come clean – now – or his board of directors needs to force him to do so. If he won’t answer the questions, the newspapers that provide and run Alternet material and the writers who submit it have no choice but to stop doing business with IMI.
Fine. They can have him. He’ll turn out to be a millstone around their necks.
Thanks for the PM. As long as he’s tied to Zero, the more he opens his mouth radically, the more it will hurt his former boss, IMO. Let him talk...and we shall broadcast it!
Fine. They can have him. He’ll turn out to be a millstone around their necks.
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Jones will now do a lot of damage from somewhere behind the scenes.
We won’t see him but he’ll be doing his dirty work.
Whats funny is that as much as we didn’t like him, no one filed a single phony ethics charge against him. No one did anything at all to hurt him personally.
All anyone did was to play his own videotape and audiotape. Thats it. We didn’t fire him, we don’t have that power.
O pushed him out.
Or, I guess the other possibility is that “he’s a quitter”. But so far no one has accused him of that either. And no one has suggested that he owes the taxpayer anything for having resigned his position. He resigned, probably under pressure from O who, while he no doubt agrees with everything that comes out of Jones’ mouth, does not have the grit to stand by him.
This is just a shot in the dark. Is a Hungarian guy (one G. Soros) a contributor to the Tides Foundation? Perhaps a shadow of said G. Soros? And, oh, by the way, did you know that Tereza’s hubby, John F’in Kerry, served in Vietnam?
From DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderProfile.asp?fndid=5184
“Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response.” Tides later replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was financed in large measure by the Open Society Institute of George Soros, who has donated more than $7 million to Tides over the years. Reciprocally, the Tides Foundation is a major funder of the Shadow Party, a George Soros-conceived nationwide network of several dozen unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks whose agendas are ideologically to the left, and which are engaged in campaigning for the Democrats.”
There’s a whole, long page of stuff about the Tides Foundation at that link.
No doubt he will soon be swept up by some University to indoctrinate more little communists.
I agree. Let's listen to Van Jones and Rev Wright together, on the same stage.
Yep or to prisons to recruit NICE inmates prone to violence to promote his agenda.
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