Lessons from the Van Jones affair

It was in April when Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for WND.com, broke the first major story on Van Jones, who was identified as a self-described radical communist and "rowdy black nationalist" who said his environmental activism was actually a means to fight for racial and class "justice."

Succeeding revelations by WND included:

• Jones
  previously served on the board of an environmental activist group at
  which a founder of the Weather Underground terrorist organization is a
  top director.
• 
  Jones was co-founder of a black activist organization that has led a
  campaign prompting major advertisers to withdraw from Glenn Beck's
  top-rated Fox News Channel program. The revelation followed Beck's
  reports on WND's story about Jones' communist background.

• That Jones and other White House appointees may have been screened by an ACORN associate.

• 
  One day after the 9/11 attacks, Jones led a vigil that expressed
  solidarity with Arab and Muslim Americans as well as what he called the
  victims of "U.S. imperialism" around the world.

• Just
  days before his White House appointment, Jones used a forum at a major
  youth convention to push for a radical agenda that included spreading
  the wealth and "changing the whole system."

• Jones'
  Maoist manifesto while leading the group Standing Together to Organize
  a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, was scrubbed from the Internet
  after being revealed by WND.
• Jones
  was the main speaker at an anti-war rally that urged "resistance"
  against the U.S. government – a demonstration sponsored by an
  organization associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party.
• 
  In a 2005 conference, Jones characterized the U.S. as an "apartheid
  regime" that civil rights workers helped turn into a "struggling,
  fledgling democracy."

• 
  Jones signed a petition calling for nationwide "resistance" against
  police, accusing them of using the 9/11 attacks to carry out policies
  of torture.

Joseph Farah's book "Stop the Presses: The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution" explains why traditional news sources are gasping for breath amid Internet, talk radio phenomena

While talk radio and cable television picked up WND's reporting and increased the pressure on the administration to cut Jones loose, there was no significant press coverage of the scandal by the major U.S. news media until late last week.

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There was a day in America when a top White House official could not be forced to resign without scandal coverage from the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, NBC News and CBS News.

That day is long gone, as the fall of "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones demonstrates.

Even following Jones' resignation over the Labor Day weekend, the major media have failed to report the key issues of who he is and how he got his job.

Van Jones didn't just utter some ill-advised and stupid remarks about Republicans. He didn't just sign a petition accusing the federal government of plotting the 9/11 attacks, as the Big Media reported reluctantly. He was a hard-core communist and anti-American extremist. That's what he was the day Obama hired him, and he knew it.

His activities weren't the misguided pursuits of a misspent youth in the 1960s or 1970s. Van Jones became radicalized in the 1990s! That didn't deter Obama from hiring him. It didn't deter the media from extolling him.

Nevertheless, Jones is gone – forced out by the New Media.

What an embarrassment to the press establishment!

First it fails to report that a guy who ought to be considered a national security threat is occupied in a high White House office with no accountability to the people, no vetting by the Senate with broad and ill-defined powers that have nothing to do with the Constitution.

Then, when others do the work of the Big Media and expose the guy, leading directly to his resignation, the press establishment still refuses to cover the story because it would, in turn, expose its own institutional failings.

I don't know who is more despicable – Barack Obama for elevating this revolutionary, Van Jones himself for rejecting the privileged life he found in America or the press scoundrels for covering up the whole sordid affair.