The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy in the YouTube Era

Here's a story about how one woman became a major part of the "vast Right-Wing Conspiracy".

On August 4 of this year, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House, released a video where she instructed the public, "My job is to keep track of all the disinformation that's out there about health-insurance reform. And there are a lot of very deceiving headlines out there right now, such as this," she reads the Drudge Report from her computer screen, "'Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will Eliminate PRIVATE Insurance.'"

What most don't know is that Douglass was targeting a video unearthed by Key, first released on her video news website, Naked Emperor News, and then picked up by the Drudge Report. The video, which pieces together various Obama statements, damningly quotes the president at an SEIU forum in 2007 saying, "I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There's going to be, potentially, some transition process: I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out."

The same day the White House posted Douglass' video on its blog, it also released this message: "If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."

A self-described Reagan-conservative, Pamela Key laughs the whole thing off, noting that the White House's overreaction "hilariously made it a bigger story. Really bizarre." And bizarre is the word she comes back to, time and again, when she describes her informal foray into investigative journalism. Though her website, Naked Emperor News, debuted in 2008, she was first inspired to dig into Obama's past after reading his memoir Dreams From My Father at the end of 2007. It was then that she "realized what a total radical this guy was."

Originally intended to be a site about children's books, Naked Emperor News was coming together right as the Jeremiah Wright controversy exploded across the media. With a title appropriately suited to its content, Key decided to devote the website to exposing candidate Obama and his pals as mainline members of the political fringe. Obama, Key was certain, was not the centrist fellow the mainstream media was painting him to be in 2008.

Her gaudy website, Naked Emperor News, is not my style. It's past "tabloid" in its style, and consistent with "tabloid" in its headlines. Originally, her intention may have been partly to embarrass the mainstream media into doing their job. When I see one of her videos, my usual reaction is to want to get a balanced, complete picture of the stories behind the video. But these days, lots of people think that they are getting the news through TV and videos. Since liberal thought dominates the mainstream media (including TV), these videos provide some counter-balance. I do wish more people would go beyond the videos, however.

Key remarks sardonically that in 2008, when she started her site, she assumed it would be a temporary endeavor, that the mainstream media would begin holding Obama accountable. What amazes Key is that the media are becoming all the more subservient. Speaking about Obama's recent media circuit, Key says, "he did all those interviews and no one asked him about ACORN and Van Jones." Since the mainstream media is not doing its job, Key is still fishing through Internet archives to uncover information about her next target, ACORN.

Streaming across the head of her website is a quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran minister-turned Nazi resister, which summarizes the raison-d'etre behind Naked Emperor News. "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

There's more to her story at the first link. Example of her videos - What President Obama said about transparency BEFORE he tried to pressure Congress in August to pass a bill no one had read.