Political Sleaze at the Columbia School of Journalism

Our good friends over at the David M. blogspot and the mediacrity blogspot have been doing a truly phenomenal job of exposing the political sleaze in the Columbia School of Journalism. CSJ is the school of journalism at the Columbia Madrassah on the Upper West Side. Yes, the same campus in which Joseph Massad jihads and Edward Said pouted.

Seems the CSJ runs its own magazine, which is as things should be at a major school of journalism. It is where the rookies and writers in training get hands-on experience. Unfortunately, it is not exactly a paradigm of serious journalism. It rushed to defend Dan Rather from the bloggers who exposed him. It also tends to bash Israel and defend others who do so. Now we know why!

It seems that the mavens at the School of Journalism decided mercilessly to turn over control of the school magazine to Victor Navasky, the editor and publisher of the far-Leftist magazine "The Nation". Navasky's commissarship of the school paper and his bankrolling of it has been kept hush hush by the paper. That has not stopped it from citing Navasky on its pages as if he were some sort of thinking sage. The paper ran a toady piece in which it cited Navasky as a "Columbia journalism professor Victor Navasky." Professor Navasky? CSJ never got around to informing its readers that Navasky now controls it and one has to learn this from the blogs, particularly http://davidm.blogspot.com/2005/05/nation-editor-and-publisher-running.html and Mediacrity.blogspot.com !

Navasky is a leftwing extremist who defended Joseph Massad and denounced those who criticized him as "McCarthyists", denounces patriotism and patriots, including in the movies, and is the country's leading anti-anti-communist. Navasky equates anti-Communists with the followers of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. According to Navasky their real agenda is "to discredit the left-liberal project today." Some people see "The Nation" as a propaganda mouthpiece for communism.

On the home page of "The Nation" the publishers declare: "The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body." We figure that will have you laughing so hard you will need to run to the loo! "The Nation" is the house organ of the American Lunatic Left, and competes with Counterpunch to see which can be the most extremist web magazine (while at the same time employing the editor of its competitor Counterpunch, Al Cockburn, as one of its regular columnists!). "Nation's" web site links to the ultra-Marxist "Z Magazine" as one of the "web sites we like". Need one say more?