Birch Society gets thumbs down
as politicians pursue China ties
Birchers have been cast out of the Conservative Political Action Conference scheduled for next February, according to the Daily Caller.

This follows a decision by the National Governors Association to bar a John Birch Society journalist this month from a conference on China trade, which the society opposes on grounds of communism representing a threat to national security. Chinese journalists, most of whom may not be overly objective concerning communist matters, were welcomed.

According to the Birch Society, Krista Zaharias, a senior press officer with the governors group, informed the Birch Society's New American in a series of emails that the group was denying credentials for William F. Jasper, a New American writer, and his colleague, Sam Antonio, producer of Liberty News Network, because Zaharias did not consider the New American’s articles to be written “in an objective manner.”

According to official letters obtained by the Daily Caller, the gay conservative group GOProud and the anticommunist Birch Society won’t be co-sponsoring the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2012.

The decision was reached by a full vote of the American Conservative Union’s board of directors. The ACU organizes and hosts CPAC each year.

Long targeted for its McCarthyist viewpoint, the John Birch Society’s campaign to thwart engagement with the communist Chinese regime is not welcomed by various powerful groups. The society stirred anger recently when it strongly opposed the appointment of Leon Panetta as defense secretary on grounds of a background of communist political networking and liberal positions it deemed as helpful to the communist causes.

Conservatives in the Senate joined in the unanimous vote to confirm Panetta's appointment.

The following information comes from Gary Benoit of the New American, a Birch publication:

On July 15 and 16, the National Governors Association Annual Meeting met in Salt Lake City and featured a first-ever U.S.-China Governors Forum that brought together provincial governors China with their American counterparts.

In addition to the many Chinese reporters based in the United States who covered the event, the Chinese governors brought along their own entourage of journalists, photographers, and videographers.

In January of this year, the international press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders reported that the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China had issued a series of directives ordering all Chinese journalists to undergo a six-month course aimed at training  them, among other things, to “recognize and avoid politically sensitive topics.” The real purpose of the directives, says Reporters Without Borders is,  “in short, to make journalists themselves actors in censorship.”

The governors group appeared to be "cooperating with China’s Propaganda Department in this new initiative, whether it realizes it or not," Benoit charged. "While dozens of Beijing’s trained propagandists posing as journalists were welcomed to the NGA summit, the New American’s senior editor, William F. Jasper, was singled out for exclusion."

Jasper and Antonio, however, managed to cover the event, Benoit wrote.

Salt Lake Tribune spotlights communist favoritism
http://www.ahorautah.com/sltrib/politics/52198373-90/credentials-governors-nga-jasper.html.csp

Newz from Limbo is a news site and, the hosting mechanism notwithstanding, should not be defined as a web log or as 'little more than a community forum'... Write News from Limbo at NewzfromLimbo=at=gmail=dot=com... The philosophical orientation of Newz from Limbo is best described as libertarian... For anti-censorship links: http://veilside78.blogspot.com/2010/12/anti-censorship-spectrum_23.html  (If link fails, cut and paste it into the url bar)...