Right-Wing Hitman Andrew Breitbart Targets Union-Friendly Professors

Andrew Breitbart, founder and publisher of America’s premier right-wing smear outfit, BigGovernment.com, has released yet another candid cam hatchet job, this one supposedly showing two professors at the University of Missouri instructing students on how to use violence to further the goals of the labor movement. The only problem is that the videos appear to be a heavily edited fraud, like the ones Breitbart released targeting ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, NPR and other political targets in the GOP’s cross hairs.

While publicly the university defended the professors against Breitbart’s charges, school administrators demanded in private that one of the professors submit his resignation. The professor said after quitting, “Teachers here are no longer going to be able to express comments, theories or counter-positions or make statements to force students to push back and critically challenge the comments and statements of the teacher.”

The takeaway message: Breitbart’s Internet video hit jobs are extremely effective. Welcome to McCarthyism 2.0. –YL

Associated Press:

University of Missouri-Kansas City officials say they’re standing behind a labor studies professor whose lecture comments about union agitation tactics have created an Internet stir among conservative commentators.

Video clips on conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website show professor Judy Ancel seemingly endorsing violence as a union tactic during a recent class. UMKC Provost Gail Hackett Provost Gail Hackett pledged support for the academic freedom of the school’s professors [and claimed that the edited videos distorted the truth]. …

Breitbart was at the center of two video controversies in recent years — one that led to the firing of a U.S. Agriculture Department employee over an edited video of what appeared to be a racist remark, and another that embarrassed the community group ACORN when workers were shown counseling actors posing as a prostitute and pimp.

In the Kansas City video incident, Ancel says she was paraphrasing a statement made in a documentary shown in class about the 1968 Memphis garbage workers’ strike and Martin Luther King’s assassination. […]

The edited videos also featured comments about union tactics from Don Giljum, an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who helped Ancel teach the class. Giljum, a former union business manager who represented workers at utility Ameren Corp., resigned this week.

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