The American Spectator

So.

The names are CBS reporter Jan Crawford.

And NPR reporter Ari Shapiro.

These are the names of the reporters now caught on audio coordinating their questions on the Middle East to Governor Romney. The audio scoop was uncovered exclusively by the aptly named RightScoop.

Then Newsbusters followed through (here), identifying two of the reporters as CBS reporter Jan Crawford and NPR’s Ari Shapiro.

Shapiro had earlier been identified by Newsbusters (here) because:

“As a reporter I’m torn about joining in the pledge of allegiance/national anthem at rallies. I’m a rally observer, not a participant.”

Hint: Shapiro sits during these moments.

One can only laugh out loud at this nonsense.

If Mr. Shapiro isn’t a participant, what in the world is he doing “covering” a campaign rally in the first place? Non-participants are somewhere else.

Of course he’s a participant. And as his actions both with the pledge/national anthem and the Romney questioning incidents clearly show, he is decidedly both a cultural and political participant.

Furthermore, in Shapiro’s case, this is an NPR reporter. And as Juan Williams — no conservative — learned the hard way, what one NPR executive called “NPR’s values” are in fact the “values” of the hard-left. One suspects that if Mr. Shapiro were in a situation where the value in question was not saluting the flag but, say, saluting abortion or gay marriage or voting for a liberal black man for president or some such Shapiro would be saluting these proverbial flags post-haste. That is where the liberal herd runs, and Shapiro wants to run with the liberal herd. If he doesn’t — like Juan Williams Shapiro would instantly be tossed out of the left-wing Culture Club that is NPR.

Again, let’s run that quote about the journalists covering JFK from Teddy White’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making of the President 1960: 

By the last weeks of the campaign, those forty or fifty national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps — they had become friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers. When the (campaign) bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr. Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.

Mr. Shapiro is either not smart enough to understand the impression his conduct has left (doubtful) — or he is defiant about his own cultural and political biases and has every intention of inserting them into his coverage of the presidential campaign.

What Shapiro and Crawford were quite openly about yesterday was constructing the liberal media narrative on Romney. Or, as Teddy White put it, “marching like soldiers of the Lord” for the liberal narrative, the liberal agenda. They just didn’t think they would get caught at it. They were.

Within hours the RightScoop scoop was posted. Rush Limbaugh had it. Sean Hannity had it, both on his radio show and his TV show. Now NewsBusters has the identity of two of the “journalists” involved.

Again, as we also noted of the media in that piece on NewsBusters a few weeks back:

The game afoot here is to shape a narrative… a moving negative narrative of conservatives and Republicans that is molded afresh every night and every day…. No matter the issue — economics, national security, or social issues like abortion, race, same-sex marriage or whatever — the goal always and forever is above all to advance the liberal narrative.

They are players. Not umpires. Participants. Not Referees.

Shapiro and Crawford are now outted as exactly this.

They are participants. Partisans.

The goal is not to report the news. The goal is to shape the liberal narrative.

The only difference in 2012 from, say, 1960, is that the New Media is here. Rush. Sean. Levin. Talk radio. Fox. The Internet.

Everybody knows what Ari Shapiro and Jan Crawford are about.

The game is over.