Increasingly, Conservative Journalism Appears to be an Oxymoron

This is Not Star Trek. In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O'Keefe is clean shaven, and the good one, chief cat-herder for the Massachusetts Pirate Party, has a goatee.

So, the great triumph of the conservative gonzo journalism machine, the destruction has resulted in James O'Keefe paying a 6 figure settlement to one of the people he deceived:

James O’Keefe—the blonde bombshell who set the conservative world of hidden-camera YouTube movies ablaze—has just agreed to a $100,000 settlement to calm down the unjustly fired (and weirdly litigious about it) ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera. According to a copy of the deal, obtained late last night by your wonkettes and viewable after the jump, O’Keefe has also agreed to ink an 11-word non-apology apology, that sources close to reality are calling “insincere” and “suuuuuuuch bullsh%$.”

According to the final 5-page agreement, signed by O’Keefe and his legal counsel Mike Madigan this past Tuesday, the boy detective now publicly “regrets any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family.” O’Keefe and his counsel have also consented to fork over the $100,000 within 30 business days of the settlement agreement’s being signed.

(%$ mine)

Of course, this news comes out on the same week that we had a spate of other revelations about the right wing media machine:

The best piece of journalism I've read in the last couple of weeks — and certainly the most perversely fascinating — came from Chris Faraone in the slickly rejiggered Boston Phoenix. It was the story of Nadia Naffe, a woman who signed up into James O'Keefe's ratfking empire only to find herself the eventual target of said ratfking. Faraone's piece is long, but you should read it all, as the kidz say, not just because Faraone is a terrific storyteller, which he is, but also because his story dropped just as the insular universe of rightwing faux-journalism seems to be imploding to all points of the compass.

(Faraone's story on Naffe appears to be a chunk of an upcoming book. His earlier effort, 99 Nights With The 99 Percent, a collection of his insider reporting on the Occupy movement, is also required reading. I know, I know. You were told there wouldn't be homework.)

First, there was the embarrassing revelation that a host of rightwing bloggers — and one from the port side, Jerome Armstrong — were on the fiddle with the Malaysian government to the tune of almost 400 large. (One of them, Ben Domenech, was a recidivist embarrassment, having previously lost a sweet gig with the endlessly credulous Washington Post because he was a proven thief of other people's work.) Then, last night, it was revealed that Tucker Carlson's vanity project, The Daily Caller, appears to have been caught trying to sucker its audience regarding the tale of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez's patronizing of prostitutes. (TDC is standing by its reporting for the moment, although its explanation is rather heavy with the squid ink.) This is hardly the way you want to celebrate Holy Week commemorating The Passion Of Andrew Breitbart. On the other hand, maybe it is...

Being a polemicist is not necessarily antithetical to telling the truth, but it does appear to be so for the right wing media.

As to why, my guess is that this has a lot to do with the fact that their customers are not their readers as much as they are the people who bankroll them.  The Scaifes and the Kochs of the world have no concern with the truth.