The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report Monday that said the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation unfairly treated gun dealers and other companies as illegal entities, and convinced banks to stop doing business with them under the Obama administration’s Operation Choke Point.

Choke Point is a program run by the Departments of Justice and Treasury that is ostensibly aimed at making sure illegal businesses don’t have access to the U.S. financial system. But many Republicans have said the Obama administration is using it to create hurdles for companies it doesn’t support, such as gun dealers and payday lenders.

The secretive program is rarely cited by banks as they close down banking services to companies. But many have said they believe they are victims of Choke Point, such as the Oregon gun maker who was told this year it no longer had access to credit card processing services.

The House oversight committee, run by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), has been looking at Operation Choke Point for the last year, and said in its final report that the initiative has prompted banks around the country to end relationships with “high-risk” companies identified by the government. But those companies, which FDIC encouraged banks to abandon, including many legal businesses, such as gun and ammo dealers, coin dealers and others.

Chokepoint

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As the Rolling Stone UVA story continues to disintegrate, they weren’t the only publication that had a really bad week; it was the liberal media in general. First, let’s discuss the Rolling Stone fiasco. They added to their “note to our readers” after other media outlets, namely the Washington Post, eviscerated them when it was discovered that Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who wrote the UVA piece, didn’t contact the alleged attackers of Jackie; the central figure of the article who alleges she was gang raped at a Phi Kappa Psi party. But, there are a few discrepancies in her account, like the frat never hosting a party on the night of her alleged attack to name one of them.

The Post’s Erik Wemple has documenting this meltdown extensively. On the Stone’s recent addition to their partial retraction, he noted how the magazine switched blame on the “misplaced trust” to them instead of Jackie, but noted that their continued investigation into the events of Jackie’s alleged account probably should’ve been done “before publishing.” While laying out reasons for why the UVA disaster is a case of media bias, Wemple discovered this interesting 2006 quote from Stone Managing Editor Will Dana, “we’ll write what we believe[italicized text is from Baker]:”

In a 2006 appearance at Middlebury College, Dana gave a speech titled, “The Myth of Fair and Balanced: A Defense of Biased Reporting.” According to a writeup in the Middlebury Campus, Dana put forth a common and compelling critique of contemporary standards under which journalists “worship the grail of objectivity” and “play twister to hide their bias,” said Dana, a 1985 graduate of Middlebury.

“I want to do stuff that’s biased.” He merely meant journalism driven by a worldview, as with Eric Schlosser’s 1998 Rolling Stone expose, “Fast-Food Nation” — a series that upended thinking on the world’s McDonald’s and the like. “We can become the seed pod for great things,” said Dana of such work.

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