Pre-written journalism

Recently at CPAC, the Center’s President, Frank Gaffney took part in a panel discussion hosted by the Breitbart News Network known as ‘the Uninvited’ panel.  The panelist discussed the threat that radical Islam poses at home and abroad.

Interestingly, another thing that occurred as a result of the discussion was a far-left journalist getting caught writing an opinion-fluff piece and then passing it off as a news article.  According to the Breitbart article, a PJ Media reporter was sitting next to Jillian Rayfield, the assistant news editor on politics for Salon.com.

Shortly after Salon.com published an article  supposedly detailed Islamaphobia at CPAC, Breitbart media’s Matthew Boyle posted an article calling her out.  The timing of the Breitbart post — which came out only a few minutes after the Salon post — shows that unless Boyle was privy to the Salon article before its publication, he knew what Rayfield was going to write about.  Rayfield already had the article titled, framed and ready to go before the panel even started.

Rayfield — who is supposedly a journalist — was not interested in listening to what the panel had to say, having already formulated her article before they started speaking.  Rayfield, actually only stayed for the panel to get a few quotes in order to pretend that what she wrote was a news article and not an opinion editorial.

In what seems to be a typical move within the liberal media, Rayfield disregarded the issue under discussion and wrote an op-ed that fits her worldview, which she later tried to pass off as journalism.