The New York Times reported today (9/13/11) on the controversy, citing FAIR:

But the CNN debate on Monday was the first event hosted jointly by a major news organization and a Tea Party group. And their partnership left some questioning whether the network had gone too far in reaching for centrist credibility.

"Is there really a need for another national cable news channel devoted to promoting far-right elements within the Republican Party?" the liberal media watchdog group FAIR said Monday in an e-mail alert to its members in which it labeled the Tea Party "a controversial political group."

Jeremy Peters and Brian Stelter also picked up on CNN's weak attempts to spin their Tea Party connection--despite the fact that questions were being piped in from Tea Party events, and the Tea Party Express picked the audience members inside the auditorium:

Here in Tampa, there were signs the network was sensitive to perceptions that it was being too cozy with Tea Party activists. During a tour of the debate hall, Mr. Feist referred to the gatherings in Arizona, Virginia and Ohio, saying, "We'll have watch parties." He was swiftly corrected by CNN's special events producer, Kate Lunger, who interjected, 'Well, we won’t have watch parties."

That distinction--whatever it might be--was probably lost on most viewers.

Veteran journalist Bob Parry wrote a great piece about "the hidden political reality behind 'centrist' journalism--a never-ending pandering to the right." Parry added that he's seen this kind of thing first-hand:

it's useful to have some specific right-tilted story--or event--to point to, just in case a right-wing critic decides to target you as a "liberal." CNN, which the right has sometimes smeared as the "Communist News Network," can now cite its collaboration with the Tea Party as valuable right-wing "cred."

When I was working at PBS Frontline in the early 1990s, senior producers would sometimes order up pre-ordained right-wing programs--such as a show denouncing Cuba's Fidel Castro--to counter Republican attacks on the documentary series for programs the right didn't like, such as Bill Moyers' analysis of the Iran/Contra scandal.

In essence, the idea was to inject right-wing bias into some programming as "balance" to other serious journalism, which presented facts that Republicans found objectionable. That way, the producers could point to the right-wing show to prove their "objectivity" and, with luck, deter GOP assaults on PBS funding.

That's not my opinion-- that's what I learned reading the New York Times today (6/27/11). Jeremy Peters profiles the right-wing scam artist, telling readers (emphasis added):

Some of his reader-generated scoops have reverberated all the way to the halls of the United States Capitol, like the Weiner photos and undercover video he released of ACORN workers offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. After the videos went viral Congress ended grants to ACORN, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.

That wasn't the lesson of the ACORN videos at all. After  a long battle, the Times admitted that much of its coverage of the Breitbart/James O'Keefe videos was misleading. The paper told readers that O'Keefe actually went into ACORN offices dressed in a ridiculous "pimp" get-up. He did not.

What the Times would not concede, though, was that the actual videos show very little in the way of tax evasion and prostitution advice. But that's the story Breitbart and O'Keefe were pushing; watching the actual videos doesn't provide much, if any, support for those claims. But they're still being made in the New York Times--which might be Breitbart's greatest triumph.

Peters goes on:

The stories and videos Mr. Breitbart plays up on his websites--which include Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood--tend to act as political Rorschach tests. If you agree with him, you think what he does is citizen journalism. If you don't, his work is little more than crowd-sourced political sabotage that freely distorts the facts.

This is absurd.

If you think that Breitbart distorts the facts, that's because HE DOES. To suggest otherwise is to assert that there's no way to ever know the truth about anything.  Is that the standard in "objective" journalism?