Attacks on Jennings from Fox, Accuracy in Media

As the go to media outlet for the American Taliban (whoops, religious right), it’s no surprise that yesterday, one of the left hand ledes on the Fox website shouted “Chapter and Perverse, Safe School Czar Hit For Promoting Sex-Explicit Books. “Chapter and Perverse” – Isn’t that a bit “tabloid” for a “news” website? It’s all very NY Post; but then that’s Murdoch fer ya. But it’s not about news – it’s about advocacy and seeing that the orchestrated radical right wing crusade against Jennings hasn’t resulted in his firing (which Sean Hannity is actively campaigning for), it looks like Fox, once again, is setting their sights on Jennings with more homophobic lies and smears – and a very defamatory headline. The smearmeister who wrote this article, Maxim Lott, is no stranger to smearing Jennings. This article is just more of the debunked bullpuckey sourced from the same old homophobic bigots who are putting a lot of time and effort into their homophobic smear campaign directed towards Obama’s openly gay “safe school czar.” So, again, it’s not suprising that the Fox News website is promoting the homophobic attack squad.

It's never good when an organization does something that runs contrary to its name.

In the case of Accuracy in Media, that means publishing something inaccurate. But AIM has done that before -- its columns by Cliff Kincaid and Don Feder, among others, are laden with false, misleading, or just plain bizarre claims. This time, however, AIM went from beyond merely false to potentially libelous.

A Dec. 10 AIM blog post by Allie Duzett, "an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia," was headlined "Media Ignore Pedophile Schools Czar" and began this way:

While CBSNews.com has 108 stories on the Salahis, the site only features one story on the "Safe Schools Czar" of the Obama administration, Kevin Jennings. The article on Jennings, entitled "Kevin Jennings Gets Boost from White House," was written on October 1, 2009. The article defends Jennings, who was selected for the position largely because of his work founding and directing the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a radical gay promotion group.

However, since October 2009, a lot has happened with President Obama's favorite pedophile. Videos have surfaced of Jennings teaching 14-year-old boys the dangerous sexual practice of "fisting," and discussing with them the particulars of oral sex.

The second paragraph is entirely false. The controversial session to which Duzett is referring -- one of "over 50 sessions" at the 2000 conference sponsored by GLSEN, according to Jennings, founder of the group and its executive director at the time -- was run "by two [Massachusetts] Department of Education AIDS-HIV education specialists and a consultant to the department," as reported in a May 18, 2000, Boston Herald article highlighted by Media Matters. The Herald article went on to state that GLSEN "agreed yesterday that three workshop leaders crossed a line with raunchy content directed at students as young as 14 years old" and quoted Jennings as saying, "We need to make our expectations and guidelines to outside facilitators much more clear because we are surprised and troubled by some of the accounts we've heard."

Those false claims, it seems, was the basis of Duzett's claim that Jennings is a "pedophile." In fact, no allegations of pedophilia have been made against Jennings.

Shortly after Media Matters posted an item discrediting Duzett's claims (disclosure: I wrote that item for Media Matters), AIM removed Duzett's post from its website. (A screenshot of the full post is available at ConWebBlog.)

Given not only the false claims but the potentially libelous nature of Duzett's "pedophile" allegation, it seemed that more than a mere deletion was in order. AIM followed up the next day with a blog post that appropriately began with an apology:

Accuracy in Media regrets the publication of a blog entry accusing Department of Education official Kevin Jennings, a homosexual activist, of being a pedophile and personally teaching perverted sexual practices to young people. We have no evidence to support those specific charges. The blog entry was posted by an intern without permission, and has been taken down.

A good start. But then, AIM seemed it wanted to demonstrate that it had learned nothing from the incident by once again attempting to smear Jennings:

We continue to urge the media to vigorously investigate Jennings' background, which includes praise for homosexual activist and communist Harry Hay, a supporter of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Jennings' role in promoting the homosexual agenda and exposing children to discussions of dangerous sexual practices through his organization, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), should also continue to be investigated. For the facts on Jennings, we suggest three important websites: www.missionamerica.com, where Linda Harvey has broken many stories about Jennings and GLSEN; www.AmericansforTruth.com, where Peter LaBarbera writes regularly about the controversy; and www.massresistance.com, where Brian Camenker has covered the scandal of Obama's appointment of Jennings in much detail.

Linking Jennings to Hays is nothing more than a guilt-by-association smear -- Jennings has never praised NAMBLA. If that's a game AIM wants to play, then it's fair to note AIM'sappreciation for convicted felon and unrepentant domestic terrorist G. Gordon Liddy.

The organizations cited as a place to get "the facts on Jennings" have issues as well.

MassResistance is an anti-gay organization declared a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center that, as Media Matters has detailed, has been the springboard for numerous instances of right-wing falsehoods and misinformation about Jennings. Camenker has not only likened the gay-rights movement to Nazis, he has denied that gays and lesbians were a target of the Holocaust.

The other two organizations AIM cited are no better.

How anti-gay is Mission America's Linda Harvey? She has advocated (in her column published, naturally, at WorldNetDaily) that parents remove Harry Potter books from their children's collections because author J.K. Rowling revealed that Dumbledore is gay, assertedthat "Open or suspected homosexuals should never be elected" because they are involved in "[w]eird sex, public displays of "affection" and nudity, and sex with youth," and complainedthat activists who opposed a bill to allow same-sex marriage in Maine weren't anti-gay enough. Mission America's attacks on Jennings and GLSEN are little more than warmed-over smears from other right-wing groups -- i.e., repeating claims about the explicitness of GLSEN's list of recommended books without noting that GLSEN also recommends that "adults selecting books for youth review content for suitability."