“But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength, by recalling it within the pale of truth.” —Thomas Jefferson (1805)

Mark Alexander’s remarks upon receiving the 2007 AIM Award for Grassroots Journalism 01 March 2007 – CPAC Reception

Selection Committee: Bill Gertz (Washington Times defense, intelligence and national security editor), Wes Vernon (longtime CBS Radio correspondent), R. Emmett Tyrrell (Editor in Chief, American Spectator), Reid Collins (anchor, CNN World News Today), Jeb Babbin (Editor, Human Events), Ralph Hallow (Washington Times chief political reporter) and Robert K. Knight (Media Research Center).

Thanks Don [Irvine – AIM Chairman], and thank you to the selection committee.

I bring you greetings from the Great State of Tennessee, the home-state of Academy Award winner Albert “Carbon Neutral” Gore, and I need not remind you, 11 electoral votes for President George W. Bush – twice. For the record, Gore did not lose in 2000 because of “dangling chads” in Florida, he lost because of resolute balloting in Tennessee. As for Gore’s most recent incarnation, I am not sure how private jets, limos and heated pool houses are “carbon neutral,” but I digress.

I am an analyst and writer, not a speaker. You are going to hear from a great speaker when the other recipient of this award, Michele Malkin, joins me on the stage – that is going to look like an old episode of “Beauty and the Beast”!

Allow me to first say a few things about Accuracy in Media.

About twenty-five years ago, when Ronald Reagan was restoring the nation’s sense of our great heritage and bright future, I came across a print newsletter that got my attention because its logo looked something like a target – a bulls-eye.

Now, I had been shooting since I was three years old, and anything with a target on it rouses my curiosity. So I thumbed through that newsletter, and discovered a small group of tireless Patriots under the leadership of a fellow named Reed Irvine. Seems they were intent on challenging the Mainstream Media (MSM) rhetoric, which masquerades as objective journalism.

Reed’s pioneering effort to challenge the “Fourth Estate’s” loss of journalistic integrity was, in part, inspiration for launching of The Patriot Post online fifteen years later.

Throughout history, the burden of keeping the flame of liberty bright has fallen on the shoulders of a few men and women. As Founding Patriot Samuel Adams noted, “Let us consider, brethren, we are struggling for our best birthrights and inheritance… Let us disappoint the Men who are raising themselves on the ruin of this Country.”

When we launched The Patriot Post in 1996, a key part of our mission was, and remains, to detach the Leftmedia’s stranglehold on public opinion.

Of course, today’s brand of fake news has been around in one form or another since Gutenberg invented the printing press. In 1710, Irish essayist and cleric, Jonathan Swift, wrote in his work “The Examiner,” [I]f a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work… Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late…" In more contemporary parlance, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on.”

We are continuing the charge Reed Irvine institutionalized.

Like many of the organizations represented here at CPAC, our primary mission is advocating for individual liberty, the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and the promotion of free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. But we can’t succeed without challenging the relentless propaganda machine we coined, the Demo/MSM propaganda machine – the greatest domestic threat to American Liberty today. The collusion between the Democratic Party and and their mainstream media public relations outlets, extends to the propagation of what we call the “Pollaganda Effect,” an insidious disingenuous use of outcome-base polls to advance a particular political agenda by giving the impression that agenda has majority support – and depending on the “bandwagon effect” to increase that support.

Allow me to quote from a recent column entitled, “Memo to the American Media from Sheikh Muhammad al-Zawahiri”: “At a recent national security briefing, the most senior presenter, a Vice Admiral, discussed the topic ‘Media as Terrain’ – how our adversaries use the media as a battleground. He used this declassified quote to make his point: ‘I say to you: that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.’”

That quote is from an intercepted and authenticated communiqué between Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, Sheikh Muhammad al-Zawahiri, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, before Zarqawi’s termination last June.

Again, Zawahiri writes: “More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.” Let that sink in.

The fact is, much of what is reported in the American media today reflects not only the propaganda machines of the Left, but also that of our Jihadi adversaries. Too often the content from those machines is indistinguishable, and Reed Irvine AIMed to set the record straight.

Like the AIM newsletter, The Patriot Post had humble beginnings – it was launched in 1996 from my home library. Today, almost 600 weekly editions later, we have an outstanding stable of editors, feature contributors and staff, an impressive National Advisory Committee, and we e-mail editions to hundreds of thousands of subscribers – grassroots activist – each week.

I was asked earlier this afternoon, “When does a grassroots publication become a mainstream publication?” I would have to conclude, when its publisher has to trade his frontline fatigues for a black suite more than once a month. Don, this fulfills my March allocation for “business attire,” lest we cross that threshold.

Back in 1978, after then-Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee’s editorial bias had been challenged by Reed Irvine, Bradlee characterized Reed as a “miserable, carping retromingent vigilante.” (To be perfectly honest, I had to look up “retromingent,” as it had been a few years since I was in a zoology class.)

If my fellow warrior, Reed, was with us today, I would simply say, “I hope we have risen to that standard!”

Don, to your board and distinguished guests, I am humbled by this award and thank you.