With John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate and the attacks on her from the liberal left, we hear even more about it. Todays blog is not to talk about whether the bias exists. It does and everyone knows it. Today I want to talk about HOW they do it. Because if people understand how it’s done, they will have more tools in their toolbox to counteract it. Our goal today, then, is to teach people enough about the tricks and techniques so that they can make up their own minds on the stories they see in the media. The tricks and techniques are so subtle and invisible (normally) that this will not be an easy task to accomplish.

In 1984 I was stuck on a ship, the USS Simon Lake, in Kings Bay, Georgia, waiting on a transfer back to Charleston, S.C. where I lived. It took many many months to get the paperwork through so I had a lot of free time on my hands. If any of you have been in the service waiting on paperwork you know what I mean.

Now, this ship I was on, temporarily, was a Submarine Tender and wasn’t designed to go anywhere on a regular basis. It pretty much just sat in the middle of the river while submarines would come and get repaired and then head back out to sea. So, there wasn’t much real Navy work to do, and I consequently had plenty of free time.

With all that free time I watched a lot of TV and read a lot of newspapers. Being a newshound I mostly watched a lot of news shows. This was long before the internet.

In 1984 Ronald Reagan was running against Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s former Vice President. Now, being a Navy guy, Ronald Reagon was my candidate and I was very curious to find out as much about the campaign as I could.

During the day I would read every newspaper I could get my hands on, and in the evening I would typically watch CBS, NBC and the McNeil-Lerher Newshour on PBS for hard news. Then I would watch Pat Buchanan and those folks from Crossfire on CNN. This is a good time to describe the difference between a journalist reporting news and the commentators providing analysis of the news. One reports the news, the other analyzes the news, giving it context and meaning. Pretty simple division of responsibility. Journalist are expected to be unbiased when reporting. Commentators are expected to have an opinion.

My viewing habit ran to about four hours a day watching news shows, in addition to the newspapers. That’s a lot of news coming into my brain, and that’s critical to an understanding of media bias.

I began to notice something after a couple of weeks. In the presentation of identical news stories on different channels I would come away with a different sense of what those stories meant. This was curious as these were “hard” news shows. I noticed the slant, weight, seriousness, meaning and terminology used would differ amongst all the broadcasts pretty significantly, sometimes making the whole story different.

So lets look at some of the tricks and techniques the news media uses to advance their political agenda. The Celestial Junk Blog describes them better than most so here is how they describe it.

1. Omitting Context

A favorite trick of the MSM is to withhold context from reports. Much like a child leaving out need-to-know information when explaining a wrong to a parent, the MSM often does not provide the whole picture. A typical example would be the following statement:

“Insurgents in Iraq today attacked a police station in Mosul. Twenty Five people were killed, among which were civilians and police.”

A statement of this sort leaves the impression that the terrorists completed a successful attack, when in fact, most of the dead were terrorists and more importantly, the police demonstrated their ability to repel the attack and inflict heavy causalities. Some would argue that the only valid number is the

kill total, because people are people whether terrorist or not. But, in reality the purpose of misleading statements like this is to mislead. The reader is left with the impression of a successful insurgency battling a struggling police force. Furthermore, the report may neglect to mention that civilians called

the police on cell phones to assist them in repelling the attack, and that some actually attacked the terrorists. Furthermore, the report may mention nothing of the fact that in the hours after the attack, civilian tips assisted police in capturing a number of terrorists who fled the botched attack.

The MSM regularly omits context in order to create headlines. Can any of us, whether politically left, right, or center, trust the MSM to fairly represent issues if context is omitted? After all, context is the single most important element in any news story because it is context that gives us the whole picture; not just the snippet that the MSM or any other disingenuous force wants us to believe.

2. Images

The easiest way to manipulate the truth is through the use of misleading visual images. Digital technology gives newsrooms the choice of splicing and dicing from thousands of still images taken over very short periods of time. Any video footage can be dissected into a multitude of still images. It is child’s play to make sure that the visuals presented reinforce the expressed theme, even though in reality, the images used may be garnered out of context or selectively edited from imagery that in fact does not support the theme.

In other words, any event can be manipulated to present a certain theme by simply being selective of the imagery used. Furthermore, neglecting to use images that provide context, or scope, is akin to forcing consumers to view events with one eye closed, or through a keyhole. They simply don’t get the whole picture.

3. Controlling Focus

As news stories develop, there are often a number of directions they can take. One would think that it would be the responsibility for the media to explore all relevant angles to a story, especially if that story unfolds over a protracted period of time. All to often though, the media will take it’s lead either

from non-media sources such as the communications department of a political party, or will flog only one aspect of a story. Because I am conservative, I’ll use one recent example of this; keeping in mind of course that different agencies may favor different political perspectives.

For instance, coverage of Iraq has focused virtually exclusively on the violence. Reconstruction, heroic deeds on the part of Iraqis and Coalition forces, democratic reforms, and economic gains and successes have been virtually ignored. Nobody would argue that the violence in Iraq should not be covered; it should, but by not covering other and often positive aspects, the MSM has willfully mislead those of us who are not there to judge for ourselves. As a sign of rejection and mistrust of MSM attempts to write the agenda and keep world focus where it wants it, millions of consumers now turn to the New Media for alternate, and some would argue, more honest, information.

4. Creating Myths

The MSM often manufactures issues based on scant facts. In other words, some of the key political stories featured in the MSM are by and large baseless.

The method used is simple; seize onto an obscure comment, an obscure statistic, an announcement from a dubious source, or even a poll result, then create an issue around it that is many times larger than the statistics or facts suggest. Right-wing politicians are subjected to this sort of media spin more than any other group. They constantly find themselves explaining their way out of non-issues. The most insidious aspect of this type of media mendacity, is the fact that even its victims often begin to believe what is being postulated in the press. In the War on Islamic Extremism, MSM providers regularly post as fact information coming from incredibly dubious sources in the Middle East and elsewhere, while ignoring or scrutinizing sources from Liberal Democracies.

A perfect example of myth making is the rush by the MSM to proclaim as fact every supposed report of “massacre” by either Israeli or American forces. The problem comes not in the reporting of “rumors” but in the disseminating of unsubstantiated, unproven, and dubious information as if it were fact.

5. Circular Reasoning

Typical MSM circular reasoning works as follows:

Media outlet “A” presents a thesis or apparent “fact”, citing dubious source “B” or another media source “C” as evidence. Other media sources then cite media source “A” as proof of the same, completing the circle. The layperson then may state that, “I believe myth X, because media A said so. In parlor lingo, we’d call this one big “circle jerk!”

An international example of this is the myth that the United States virtually single-handedly armed Saddam Hussein. The main source cited for proof is usually the New York Times, which itself cites incredibly suspect sources, if any at all. Even academic sources on this topic often cite The New York Times.

After a while the myth becomes fact, when in reality, there was never any hard evidence to go by. Note that in this case nobody ever sites the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, because this Left-wing organization has hard factual data that debunks the Myth.

6. Disingenuous Retractions

When the MSM makes errors, rare is the occasion that it apologizes in a truly contrite manner. For example, if a story leaves false impressions, uses fictitious data, or counterfeit sources, by design or by accident, seldom are we treated to retractions that are equal in magnitude to the damage done or false impressions left.

For example: If a story is found to be false or partially false, for whatever reason, retractions are usually made in such a secretive and hidden manner that the average consumer is never made aware of them. My favorite culprit is the BBC. Anti-American stories that have fallen far short of journalistic integrity are usually retracted in the most minimal way possible. The BBC on-line news service usually posts retractions for very brief periods of time and buried so deep in the on-line site that an electronic retraction-meter would be needed to find them.

What do retractions have to do with bias in the media? Simply this: Tepid and limpid retractions, on political issues, leave intact the impressions left by the false story or false portions of the story. In this way, a scurrilous story can be published, a retraction issued, yet the damage permanently done. If any news organization has a political bent, which it is obvious I believe most have, then disingenuous retractions are one of the most arrogantly flagrant forms of bias.

7. Misleading Headlines

Headlines are often the most important part of a news piece, whether print or audio visual. Attention getting headlines are necessary in a competitive environment and are often the only thing that may halt a disinterested consumer long enough to actually pickup, listen to, or watch the product.

The problem comes when headlines scream out misleading information; misleading as to the actual content of the story or misleading as to the actual facts.

The danger of misleading headlines it that they may leave consumers with a completely wrong impression, especially consumers who do not take the time to actually read or listen to entire pieces.

Headlines that are politically based, and misleading, can be particularly damaging. When three centimeter block text on the cover of a newspaper is used, it can be read by passersby, and even if these people do not purchase the product, impressions are made. If the headline is disingenuous, then false impressions are left. Surely, given their literary skills, journalists could conjure up headlines that are catchy, enticing, yet accurate in their portrayal of what the story they advertise contains. It is the mere fact that misleading headlines are written at all, by people who’s literary skills far exceed that of the general public, that I contend that misleading headlines are not a product of accident.

A typical headline may read, “Blair Under Attack from Within”, or, “Clinton Aide Cleared”. Upon reading further, we may find that one Blair MP has expressed concern, and that the Clinton aid has been cleared of the least serious charge, out of six. If a consumer did not read further, the false impression in each case has been left. Why not a headline that reads, “So and So Dissatisfied”, or, “So and So Cleared of Fraud Charge”.

Headlining is part of the competitive game played between news providers, but it need not be misleading. I suggest that misleading headlining is a symptom of MSM editors playing god with our impressions of what the world is about.

8. Terminology

The MSM ascribes to benign terms, connotations that forever leave those terms loaded with singular meaning. Furthermore, it plays disingenuous games with terminology in order to either create impressions, suppress impressions, or distract.

A typical example of this is the use of the word “conservative” or “rightwing”. We have “conservative organizations”, “conservative think-tanks”, “conservative professors”, “conservative institutes, and even “rightwing Catholics.” We have the “radical-right”, “neocons”, “Christian Right”, “right-wing newspapers”, “rightwing magazines”, “rightwing filmmakers”, and even “rightwing Liberals.” And, in most cases the terms are used with a subtle negative connotation attached. A typical method of doing so would be to introduce two guests during a television news program; one a member of the “Conservative think-tank, the Fraser Institute”, and the other a Professor of Economics, from Simon Fraser University. We would not be told though, that the professor is a proponent of massive government intervention in the economy, in short, an economic socialist. Viewers impressions would change significantly if he were introduced as , “the leftwing professor of economics…”

Another example might be the introduction of an organization as a “rightwing anti-abortion organization”, or a member of the “Christian Right”. At the same time, a proponent of unrestricted abortion, say from the “Committee on the Status of Women”, would NOT be introduced with political connotation added at all, such as, “the member of the radical feminist organization…”

I ask in all sincerity, how often does one hear an introduction on an MSM television program that goes, “We have with us today, So-and-So of the Leftwing think-tanks…!” or “Mr. So-and-So, a radical leftwing member of the…!” I am sure there are examples to be found, but they are far and few between.

On the other hand, terms such as “progressive” are doled out by the media as rewards to those who move to the left, or towards that which the MSM views as being praiseworthy. We are assaulted with phrases such as “Progressive member of the ….”, or how about “progressive elements within the church”, or even “progressive members within the party…” In virtually every instance, the term is used in a positive light to denote a move to the left, especially on social issues.

Another example is the use of words such as “terrorist”, “freedom fighter”, “insurgent”, “killers”, “militants”, “assassins”, etc. In Iraq, where Coalition efforts are seen as an affront to World Government, a favored lovechild of the MSM are the killers of women and children in market places, who are simply called “insurgents”, and “militants”. Even after the London bombings, the bombers were not called “terrorists”, “killers”, or even “murderers” by the likes of BBC.

I simply ask that readers watch, listen, and observe the media at work, as it gently massages and corrals us with words and phrases. It creates negative connotations in order to disparage, and positive connotation for that which it approves. In most cases, I suggest that the practice is done as second nature, not through design, but simply as an extension of the superciliousness and pomposity that members of the MSM possess. This group has gotten by without serious challenge for decades; and because it works primarily in words, it’s intents, whether by design or by habit, can be seen in its manipulation of terms and phrases.

9. Passing the Buck

There are two activities engaged in by the MSM which should always raise eyebrows and which should always warn readers that all is not as it seems. The first is deliberate, the second, is a matter of economic necessity.

1. How often have you heard or seen media use “unnamed sources”, or “officials within the department of ….”, or “ military sources…”, or “some within the community”, or “a sampling of street interviews”, or “a member of the …”

Anytime unspecific sources such as the the above are used to bolster a story, I recommend flat out disregarding of the story. Turn off the TV, turn the page, toss the news paper. The above are typical ways that media uses substitution for hard facts, in order to fill out a story or to manipulate the truth.

Only in extremely rare cases, when the well-being of the “source” is at stake, should “unnamed” sources be used. Journalists like to justify the “unnamed source” technique by falling back on the long worn out credo of “protecting our sources”. Basically, it’s a canard. As of late, “unnamed sources” have become the chief sources of myth making and propagating rumors. The use of “unnamed sources” is basically the reduction of big-time media into small town gossip rag.

2. Out of economic necessity, media sources rely on international news providers, such as Associated Press and Reuters, when reporting on global issues. The main source of international news is, therefore, Associated Press and Reuters. AP and Reuters news, video, and photos, are purchased and run at face value worldwide. Canadian news media providers have virtually no way of checking the accuracy of these stories. Suffice it to say, that both AP and Reuters have given news watchers, whether bloggers or watch-dog organizations, within the United States, a hay-day in pointing out errant and even contrived reports or footage via these two souces.

Let’s consider the immense trust we have to put in the MSM if we are to believe a story from Iraq, or any other problematic corner of this globe. A little known source takes photos and pictures, ads interpretation, then sells the work to AP. AP adds it’s own interpretation, then sells the same to a MSM provider. The local provider adds interpretation, then sells the same to us. In short, do you really know, what you think you know, based on what you’ve just read or watched concerning events half a world away.

At this point you might say, OK, the media is biased. So what?

This is why it’s important. In 2006 I was deployed to the Middle East when the Haditha incident exploded in the media. You’ll recall Haditha is where Marines were accused of killing 24 people without justification. The only source of news I had, while deployed, was the Stars and Stripes newspaper and various web sites such as the New York Times.

At one point during this deployment I met a Marine Lt. Colonel who was a lawyer investigating Haditha. I said to him we Americans would like to believe we are above such things as Haditha, but a reading of history shows that we are not. He gave me a funny look, which I didn’t understand at the time, and then moved on.

Thus far, three years later, no Marine combat troops have been convicted of any wrongdoing in the Haditha incident. Despite my experience seeing the media bias during the 1984 election, and despite my military background, I still was taken in by the reporting on Haditha, assuming incorrectly, that the Marines had committed war crimes.

The danger of media bias is it inhibits the ability of Americans to make major decisions based on truth and facts. The only way an average person can filter out the spin is to spend most of their waking hours reading and watching every news item they can find.

That’s just not practical.

The media’s coverage of Sarah Palin is a case study in bias.

ADDITION FROM COMMENTS:

A conspiracy of NEGATIVE WORD EMPHASIS. Look at how rapidly a news report will be handled with the exact same negative adjective. Russ Limbaugh is a great one for exposing several newcasters initiating news in the first sentence with the same negative word. When instantiously compared it is quite laughable. Like you said in your post, who has time to read all the articles and see the rampant thread?

Which leads into the next propaganda method, REPETITION. If you repeat something long enough it becomes truth. This seems to be the great central “truth” and indicates the supremacy of psychology in the make up of today’s leftest journalists. We are to be acted on from an agenda, it’s a game for journalists to manipulate popular sentiment, which is the overriding concern of every politican. The best example is the Bush lied. Bush lied. Bush lied. Everyone had access to the same CIA reports, Where the leaders of the democratic party were universially calling for action against Saddam Hussein because of his U.N. violations, this proved to just be tough talking political sound bites. Bush surprized everyone by taking action. The Demos were imbarrassed to find themselves suddenly standing with a republican president. How did they fall for this? Bush lied.

CREATIVE CONTROVERSY by merely bringing up something negative, the adjective “controversial” can now be applied a common sense proposition.This creates imaginary backlash where it doesn’t exist.

Bladent PUBLIC EDITORIZING You are told how to think! The best example is the Roe/Wade abortion law. The circumstances surrounding the young lady is the very emotional context of being “gang raped”. When this admission was proven to be a lie, (Ms. Covey became a truth telling Christian),we were told in the news article that this had no bearing in the legality of the case!

VERY BOLD LYING. The master maniputator is Bill Clinton. My observation is that if enough people do it or if its a big enough authority done in a open bold fashion it will go under the radar. Look at Slick Willie telling us that a womens “constitutional right” to an abortion shall not be infringed upon. Hello? Where is that? Look at Bill in a telecast telling us that anyone protesting an abortion clinic will face a $250,000 fine and a minimum of 6 months in jail…….. Hello? What happen to swearing to uphold the Constitution where it declares we citizens are not be to be subject to unusual and excessive fines? Look at Bill telling us that Hitler was a “Christian”!!!!!!!!! What an indictment for us who really are Christians!!!! Look at the phoney religious front so common to politicans trying to fake being mainstream Americans!!! They are always shrinking Jesus to convenient platitudes of political purpose. this is not the bold significant faith of our founding fathers.

It’s can’t be enough to merely spot untruths in the media, I believe the message to them has to be that we no longer listen to them or buy their products. The media has insulted our intelligence long enough, if they will not engage in fair and balanced reporting they should find themselves out of work. How long should we tolerate liars in our life? They should be exposed for their criminal regard for truth. GO PALIN!!!!!! MCCAIN!!!!!!!!

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>>Critics Decry ‘One-Sided’ Media Coverage of Climate Change Debate (Foxnews, 091205)

The mainstream media are abandoning objective reporting and acting as full-time advocates for measures to combat global warming, some media watchdogs say, accusing them of pushing for a sweeping international agreement on climate change.

As President Obama prepares to travel to Copenhagen, Denmark, to attend an international conference on climate change scheduled for Dec. 7-18, the media are already “out in front of the administration” in pushing a liberal agenda, says Dan Gainor, vice president for business and culture at the Media Research Center.

“There’s no more clear religion in the mainstream media than the religion of global warming,” Gainor told FoxNews.com.

“It’s gone from being a situation where there was some debate, to now there’s almost none,” Gainor said. “You can’t say anything that even raises the question that there might not be real science here. That’s not what journalism is supposed to do.”

Obama, who will arrive in Copenhagen on Dec. 18, plans to unveil a 10-year plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by 17% below 2005 levels. The president will also take up a 181-page draft treaty proposed by the United Nations that calls on representatives from 170 countries to establish sweeping measures to reduce emissions and combat climate change.

And the mainstream media are hopping aboard the bandwagon, critics say.

“The media already accept the theory of manmade global warming, so their modus operandi will be — let’s come to an agreement on reducing energy, either through taxes or restrictions,” Cliff Kincaid, editor for Accuracy in Media, told FoxNews.com.

“The coverage is so one-sided,” Kincaid said. “It seems to me the media have an obligation to read the (treaty) and tell us what’s in it.

“Many in the media don’t want to hear that. If they would bother to read the treaty, they would report that there are numerous proposals for global taxes. I don’t think those are going to go over too well with the American people.”

But other media watchdogs say journalists are not biased on the issue. They say they are simply representing the facts offered by the majority of the scientific community.

“Journalists are not scientists — they do not have an extensive background in cutting-edge science,” says Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

“It seems to me that you have to defer to scientists on scientific questions, and get their take on what’s going on,” Naureckas told FoxNews.com.

“You’re dealing with very serious issues here. If one accepts that scientists generally know what they’re talking about on the topics they’re studying — then you’re dealing with an oncoming global catastrophe.

“It’s clear there is a scientific consensus on global warming that is quite compelling,” Naureckas said.

But critics say the mainstream journalists are ignoring the other side. Gainor pointed to what he said was the media’s inattention to the scandal dubbed “Climate-gate,” a series of e-mails made public recently after computer hackers obtained messages from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England.

In some of the e-mails, scientists appear to discuss hiding or deleting data that contradicts global warming claims. Some explicitly admit to hiding data that would indicate a global cooling trend rather than a rise in global temperatures.

“This is a story of global importance, involving potentially enormous scandal. Other than a little bit of print coverage, the mainstream media has made no comment,” Gainor told FoxNews.com.

“I would like a genuine, legitimate, scientific inquiry before we spend billions or trillions of dollars,” Gainor said.

Dan Amundson, research director for the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs, says the media have given less coverage to the climate change debate than other heated issues such as health care reform or foreign policy. But he says there seems to be a pattern of support for “some type of international agreement and taking concrete steps about carbon dioxide.”

“While global warming critics get more airtime and coverage than environmentalists would like, they are a small part of coverage over the years,” Amundson said.

A majority of Americans believe that climate change is occurring and that it is a serious problem, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll from Nov. 25, 2009.

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>>All the news that’s fit to omit (townhall.com, 051102)

by Michelle Malkin

When you read The New York Times (if you still bother to read it), always ask:

What is the Times NOT telling me?

The answers are invariably more compelling — and newsworthy — than what the paper actually deems “fit to print.”

Let me give you an example.

Last Wednesday, the Times published a 4,624-word opus on American casualties of war in Iraq. “2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, a Grim Mark,” read the headline. The macabre, Vietnam-evoking piece appeared prominently on page A2. Among those profiled were Marines from the First Battalion of the Fifth Marine Regiment, including Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr. Here’s the relevant passage:

Another member of the 1/5, Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr, rejected a $24,000 bonus to re-enlist. Corporal Starr believed strongly in the war, his father said, but was tired of the harsh life and nearness of death in Iraq. So he enrolled at Everett Community College near his parents’ home in Snohomish, Wash., planning to study psychology after his enlistment ended in August.

But he died in a firefight in Ramadi on April 30 during his third tour in Iraq. He was 22.

Sifting through Corporal Starr’s laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the marine’s girlfriend. “I kind of predicted this,” Corporal Starr wrote of his own death. “A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.”

The paper’s excerpt of Corporal Starr’s letter leaves the reader with the distinct impression that this young Marine was darkly resigned to a senseless death. The truth is exactly the opposite. Late last week, I received a letter from Corporal Starr’s uncle, Timothy Lickness. He wanted you to know the rest of the story — and the parts of Corporal Starr’s letter that the Times failed to include:

“Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I’m writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances. I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.”

Reader Michael Valois questioned the Times’ reporter, James Dao, about his selection bias and forwarded me the exchanges. A defensive Dao (who did not respond to my e-mail inquiry) argued “there is nothing ‘anti war’ in the way I portrayed Corporal Starr.” Dao then had the gall to berate the reader:

“Even the portion of his email that I used, the one that you seem so offended by, does not express anti-war sentiment. It does express the fatalism that many soldiers and marines seem to feel about multiple tours.

Have you been to Iraq, Michael? Or to any other war, for that matter? If you have, you should know the anxiety and fear parents, spouses, and troops themselves feel when they deploy to war. And if you haven’t, what right do you have to object when papers like the New York Times try to describe that anxiety and fear?”

Mr. Dao sounds a bit unhinged playing the far-left chickenhawk card. Only people who have traveled to Iraq can criticize a paper’s war-related coverage?

And Dao’s dead-wrong about Corporal Starr’s presumed “fatalism.” If you don’t believe Corporal Starr’s own words, which Dao chose to ignore, listen to Corporal Starr’s father, Brian. I asked him this week whether his son was fatalistic. “I don’t agree at all. Jeff had an awareness of death, but was very positive about coming home.”

Dao apologized to Valois for the tone of his snippy e-mail, but apparently feels no shame or sorrow for distorting a dead Marine’s thoughts and feelings about war, sacrifice and freedom.

Will the Times correct Dao’s grave sin of omission and apologize? Or will the paper just hope you shrug and look the other way?

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>>Obligatory New York Times Hypocrisy Item (Weekly Standard, 050316)

[Kwing Hung: true and direct hypocrisy!]

A January 1, 1995, Times editorial on proposals to restrict the use of Senate filibusters:

In the last session of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him. . . . Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which senators held passionate views, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, . . . an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.

A March 6, 2005, Times editorial on the same subject:

The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House’s judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. . . . To block the nominees, the Democrats’ weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. . . . The Bush administration likes to call itself “conservative,” but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.

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>>Liberal bias of the press (National Review, 010507)

So let me make the simple case. Journalists are liberal. Everyone knows this except for a few people on the extreme Left and journalists themselves. Indeed, according to one survey, 70% of self-defined liberals think the media has a liberal bias. Eighty-nine percent of journalists voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. The network of conservative think tanks and publications that Harris identifies exists precisely because the media have blocked conservative viewpoints. Media bias is, as Casey Stengel used to say, “a true fact.”

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>>Distorted Media Reports of the Pro-Family Rally (Kwing Hung, 030823)

[a personal witness of media bias]

On August 22, 2003, after the pro-family rally and anti-same-sex marriage in front of the Supreme Court of Canada and on the Parliament Hill, various newspapers, websites and television stations (English and French) were monitored on their coverage of the event. At the event, there were almost 10,000 people with a small of about 30 pro-same-sex demonstrators. However, almost all of them interviewed someone from the pro-same-sex group and only half interviewed someone who participated the rally. In addition, the reporters also took a pro-same-sex stance and all (100%) of the reports ended the report with a pro-same-sex comment as the “last say.”

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>>How High Is the Murder Rate in Baghdad? (Foxnews, 031216)

Despite Saddam Hussein’s capture this weekend, many are still pessimistic about controlling the levels of violence in Iraq.

Yet, this pessimism largely depends on the numbers one relies on. Take what has become a surprisingly controversial number: Baghdad’s murder rate. Some assert that in October Baghdad had one of the highest murder rates in the world, while others point to numbers that it was below even the U.S.’s own murder rate.

The apparently low crime rate was all the more surprising because Saddam had let all of Iraq’s criminals out of jail before his government was removed. In addition, Iraq is still in turmoil: Iraqi police are new to their jobs and terrorist attacks stretch them thin.

On the other side, a New York Times op-ed by two liberal Brookings Institution researchers, Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Michael O’Hanlon, claims that Baghdad’s murder rate is among the highest in the world. Supposedly Baghdad’s annualized murder rate from April to October this year ranged from an incredible 100 to 185 per 100,000 people — a number, they pointed out, that averaged several times greater than the rate in Washington, D.C.

Yet, according to the Wall Street Journal Europe, the U.S. Army 1st Division in Baghdad reports that the numbers fell continually from a high of 19.5 per 100,000 in July to only 5 per 100,000 in October. The October rate is actually lower than the 5.6 U.S. murder rate in 2002. By contrast, the New York Times’ latest numbers for October claim to show a murder rate of 140 per 100,000 — a difference of 28-fold!

Albuquerque and O’Hanlon not only imply that murders are rampant, but generally rising. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal Europe shows crime is under control and falling. So whom should we believe? The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal Europe?

I contacted the authors of both pieces. Albuquerque and O’Hanlon, who wrote the Times piece, provided two sources for their murder rate numbers: An article by Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times (Sept. 16, 2003) and a piece by Lara Marlowe in the Irish Times (Oct. 11, 2003). Yet, both references clearly stated that much more than murder was included in the reports that they used from the Baghdad morgue. MacFarquhar notes that these deaths also included “automobile accidents” and cases where people “were shot dead by American soldiers,” cases that clearly did not involve murders. The Irish Times piece mentions that “up to a quarter of fatal shootings [in the morgue] are caused by U.S. troops.”

For some perspective, in D.C., murders account for fewer than 5% of all deaths. Even counting only the types of deaths explicitly mentioned in the stories citing the Baghdad morgue (accidental deaths, murders, suicides) and assuming that soldiers were engaged in the same type of fighting in D.C. as they are in Iraq, murders in D.C. would account for just a third of deaths. (The respective numbers for the U.S. as a whole are even lower: a half of one percent and 11%.) Obviously, counting these other deaths as “murders” in D.C. would imply that murders were three to 20 times more common than they actually were.

The Wall Street Journal Europe instead relied on the U.S. Army 1st Division stationed in Baghdad. A public affairs officer with that division, Jason Beck, confirmed for me that a large part of the Iraqi legal system is being overseen by the U.S. JAG officers, and they are using the same standards for murder rates as used in the U.S. and separating out murders from other deaths.

Numbers mean a lot. Perceptions that conditions in Iraq are deteriorating constantly gets play in evaluating whether President Bush deserves re-election. When a publication of record such as the New York Times gets Baghdad’s October murder rates wrong by up to a factor of 28 to 1 and no correction is issued, the consequences are significant. To equate accidental deaths and U.S. soldiers killing terrorists with murders is irresponsible.

John R. Lott, Jr., a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “The Bias Against Guns” (Regnery 2003).

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>>A Unified Theory of the Old Media Collapse (Weekly Standard, 041228)

Asymmetrical tolerance and the collapse of Big Media credibility: How 2004 brought doom to legacy media.

IF OLD MEDIA—the “legacy media” of the big papers and old networks plus the newsweeklies—was a city and not simply a set of gasping institutions, it would look like Stalingrad circa 1944. Parts of most of the virtual buildings are still standing, but the devastation is pretty complete.

And the pummeling just keeps coming. On Sunday last, Power Line’s John Hinderaker undressed the New York Times biggest big foot, Thomas Friedman, for all the blogosphere to see, The Belmont Club was scissoring the Associated Press’s credibility, and I was pointing out the many defects in a Washington Post front-page story on an “Intelligent Design” controversy—in the process discovering that reporter Michael Powell, who came from a background of tenants’ advocacy, had written extensively on tenants’ issues without disclosing to the reader his past background.

And that was just three posts on a single day of the new world of accountability for the old media.

In my new book, Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That is Changing Your World, I devote a chapter to how the old media went left into a deep ditch of agenda journalism, forfeiting the trust of a large portion of their audience and, in the process, opening the door to Rush Limbaugh, the second generation of radio talkers, Fox News, and, of course, the blogs.

But I didn’t speculate on the “why” of that disastrous and uncoordinated choice made by the old media. Here’s my first take on a theory. Call it the

Theory of Asymmetrical Tolerance and its effects. It goes like this:

For many generations, Big Media represented the interests of the dominant political and business elites. Men like Henry Luce and William Paley represented that tradition.

Some of those interests were repugnant, especially those behind segregation. With the arrival of the civil rights movement, journalism slowly began to reform itself and to work overtime to represent underrepresented political and social points of view. There developed a great tolerance for viewpoints and perspectives from ideological minorities, and a great hunger to represent those views not only in the media product but also in the media workforces. First opposition to the Vietnam war and then the hunting of Richard Nixon accelerated this trend, so that old media quickly evolved into a fortress of “oppositional” reporting and personnel.

The new recruits to big journalism and their mentors did not work overtime to assure that, in the elevation of tolerance of ideological minorities, there would remain representation of majoritarian points of view. In fact, majoritarian points of view became suspect, and the focus of pervasive hostile reporting and analysis. Crusading journalists seemed to be an ideological pack. By the time the new millennium arrived, legacy media was populated at its elite levels by as homogeneous a group of reporters / producers / commentators as could ever have been assembled from the newsrooms of the old Hearst operation. Big Media had hired itself into a rut—a self-replicating echo chamber of left and further-left scribblers and talkers and self-reinforcing head nodders who were overwhelmingly anti-Republican, anti-Christian, anti-military, anti-wealth, anti-business, and even anti-middle class. These new journalists had no tolerance for majoritarian points of view, and the gap between the producers of the news and the consumers of the news widened until the credibility gap between the two made Lyndon Johnson’s look modest by comparison.

MEANWHILE, the majority of consumers grew tired of the exclusion of its views from the media. When Rush Limbaugh arrived, he prospered because at last there was a voice reflecting majoritarian points of view. The same welcome greeted Fox News and the blogs of the center-right.

In legacy media there is now much dismay. Many of their biggest names appear not too understand that they are distrusted by more than half of America, and don’t even seem to recognize their own contempt for majoritarian positions.

On Monday on my blog, I suggested that reporters and producers employed by Big Media should make available their biographies and résumés on the web for easy viewing by the public, as well as answers to ten brief questions, including: “For whom did the reporter vote for president in the past five elections? Do they attend church regularly and if so, in which denomination? Do they believe that the late-term abortion procedure known as partial-birth abortion should be legal? Do they believe same sex marriage ought to be legal? Did they support the invasion of Iraq? Do they support drilling in ANWR?” The outrage in response to my suggested disclosures from some bloggers was intense and immediate. One even suggested that posing such questions was incipient McCarthyism.

The old media, too, will likely recoil from the idea that their employees ought to disclose their past employment and education, their politics, and their policy positions. But why? My guess is that everyone reading already knows the answer: The uniformity of views within legacy media’s legion of employees is nearly complete and very far left-of-center. And that is precisely why the old media has run aground so hard and so fast. Everyone knows it. The consumers of news now have choices. As a result, CNN’s ratings over a decade are in a freefall. As are those of CBS. And the circulation of the Los Angeles Times is hardly graphing out better than either of those outfits.

The blogosphere is intensely partisan—just as old media has been. But, unlike the old media, there is truth in advertising on the Internet. This is a significant advantage going forward in the competition for credibility and trust. If old media does not develop tolerance for the majoritarian points of view in the United States, it will continue to decline in reach and authority.

Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That is Changing Your World. His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com.

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**Primetime propaganda: Liberal writers ‘hijacked top shows such as Friends, The Golden Girls and even SESAME STREET to push left-wing agenda’ (Mail Online, 110602)

It is a controversial theory about primetime television and its liberal bias that has never before been proved so publicly.

Several senior Hollywood figures have admitted they hired liberal-minded people specifically to write their entertainment shows and push a left-wing agenda.

Writers for household favourite shows such as Friends, The Golden Girls and Charlie’s Angels have all said in some form their shows veered from entertainment to left-wing political commentary.

The admissions come in a book, titled ‘Primetime Propaganda’ published by conservative author Ben Shapiro.

TELEVISION: ‘THE LEFT’S POLITICAL ARSENAL’

· Friends: The cast of the hit TV show, possibly the most popular ever, which was written with a left-wing bias, according to one of its writers

· Deliberate: Candace Gingrich-Jones, centre, the half-sister of Newt Gingrich, was cast as a minister at a lesbian wedding in Friends as a ‘f**k you to the right-wing’

· Friends writer Marta Kauffman cast Republican Newt Gingrich’s half-sister Candace Gingrich-Jones as a lesbian wedding minister to antagonise conservatives

· Family Ties creator Gary David Goldberg tried to make Republican character Alex Keaton the bad guy but it didn’t work because actor Michael J. Fox was ‘too lovable’

· When Dwight Schultz, who played Murdock in The A-Team, arrived for an audition he was told: There’s not going to be a Reagan a*****e on this show’

· Nicholas Meyer directed the huge 1983 movie The Day After with a ‘private, grandiose notion that it would unseat Reagan’

· Producer Marcy Carsey insisted on portraying characters smoking marijuana in ‘That ‘70s Show’

The book argues that TV bosses use their positions to advance a liberal agenda - a case based on surprisingly frank comments made by Hollywood writers, producers and executives in 39 taped interviews.

In one of the interviews which form the basis of the book, which is subtitled: ‘The true Hollywood story of how the left took over your TV’, Friends writer Marta Kauffman said she cast a role specifically to antagonise conservatives.

When Candace Gingrich-Jones, the half-sister of Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, was chosen to play the minister at a lesbian wedding, ‘there was a bit of a f**k you in it to the right-wing,’ she said.

Kauffman also said a liberal agenda was inevitable on the show as she ‘put together a staff of mostly liberal people.’

Susan Harris, the creator of The Golden Girls, added that conservatives are ‘idiots’ with ‘medieval minds’ and said that the agenda was working seeing as: ‘You know, we put Obama in office, and so people, I think, are getting – have gotten – a little bit smarter.’

Leonard Goldberg, who produced Charlie’s Angels and Starsky and Hutch said right-wing politics was ‘absolutely’ a barrier to entry into the business because liberalism is ‘100 per cent dominant, and anyone who denies it is kidding, or not telling the truth.’

Other examples of bias in the book include an anecdote about Dwight Schultz, who played Murdock in The A-Team and Barclay in Star Trek: The Next Generation, being turned down for a role because of his right-wing leanings.

When Schultz arrived for an audition for a show produced by the late Bruce Paltrow, he was told: ‘There’s not going to be a Reagan a*****e on this show.’

When director Nicholas Meyer was asked whether conservatives face discrimination in Hollywood, he said: ‘Well, I hope so.’

He added that when he directed The Day After, a 1983 TV movie watched by 100 million people, ‘My private, grandiose notion was that this movie would unseat Ronald Reagan when he ran for re-election.’

Shapiro writes in the book, which has been seen by the Hollywood Reporter: ‘Most nepotism in Hollywood isn’t familial, it’s ideological. Friends hire friends. And those friends just happen to share their politics.’

Even shows aimed at children, such as Sesame Street, have been used to advance a progressive agenda, Shapiro argues.

‘Television has been perhaps the most impressive weapon in the left’s political arsenal,’ Shapiro adds in the book.

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**Sesame Street’s pinko puppets brainwash our kids (The Independent, 110529)

That’s the claim by a right-wing author who says he’s exposed a left-wing plot behind some top TV shows

The TV series Friends undermined family values; Sesame Street taught ethnic minorities about civil disobedience; Happy Days had a subtle anti-Vietnam subtext; and the 1980s cop show MacGyver tried to persuade pistol-packing Americans that guns are bad. That, at least, is the considered opinion of Ben Shapiro, an investigative author and right-wing columnist who will publish a detailed exposé tomorrow telling how Hollywood producers, writers and actors have been secretly using TV to promote what he calls a “radical” left-leaning political agenda.

Shapiro’s book, Primetime Propaganda runs to 416 pages and revolves around comments by 70-odd industry heavyweights who he approached for interviews. The book promises to “profile the biggest names in showbusiness over the past 50 years” and includes a series of “gotcha” moments, in which the architects of the best-watched TV shows of modern times tell how they tried to use the medium of broadcasting to, as Shapiro puts it, “shape America in their own leftist image”.

“I was shocked by the openness of the Hollywood crowd when it came to admitting anti-conservative discrimination inside the industry,” Shapiro told The Independent on Sunday. “They weren’t ashamed of it. In fact, some were actually proud of it.”

The book’s contents will only add weight to allegations – often aired by conservative Americans – that Hollywood is the exclusive domain of leftie propagandists. Earlier this year, Republicans called for funding cuts to the public broadcaster NPR after one of its executives was secretly taped calling supporters of the Tea Party “racist”.

Among Shapiro’s most revelatory interviewees is Marta Kauffman, the co-creator of Friends, who recalls how she hired a “bunch of liberals” to run the programme to “put out there what we believe”. In 1999, she admitted casting the actress sister of Newt Gingrich, the prominent Republican, to play a preacher at a lesbian wedding because she wanted to annoy conservatives.

“When we did the lesbian wedding, we knew there was going to be some flack,” said Kauffman. “I have to say, when we cast Candice Gingrich as the minister of that wedding, there was a bit of a ‘fuck you’ in it to the right-wing, directly.”

Elsewhere in the book, Vin DiBona, the producer of MacGyver, agrees that Hollywood has a liberal bias, saying “I’m happy about it, actually.” The cult cop show advanced an anti-gun agenda, he added. “That was the whole premise of the programme, that MacGuyver used his brain power and skill and science, and solved all the difficulties through ingenuity. No Guns, no knives.”

Far from being just a comedy about military camaraderie, MASH meanwhile had a pacifist agenda, the show’s co-creator and director Gene Reynolds told Shapiro, who said: “We wanted to point out the wastefulness of war.”

And, with regard to Happy Days, writer Bill Bickley said he “had a whole subtext” attacking the Vietnam War. “If you really look for it, you can find it.”

Shapiro is relatively well known among the conservative commentariat, but believes he was able to persuade so many interviewees to reveal more than was perhaps sensible because they assumed he was a fellow liberal.

“There was a certain amount of stereotyping on their part in granting the interview,” he said. “Many probably assumed that with a name like Shapiro and a Harvard Law credential, there was no need to Google me: I would have to be a leftist. In Hollywood, talking to a Jew with a Harvard Law baseball cap is like talking to someone wearing an Obama pin.”

The book, published by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins is perhaps at its most condemnatory whenaccusing the creators of Sesame Street of attempting to brainwash young children. It quotes Mike Dann, one of the show’s founding executives, saying it “was not made for the sophisticated or the middle class”.

Early episodes featured the character Grover breaking bread with a hippie. Oscar, who lived in a rubbish bin, was supposed to address “conflicts arising from racial and ethnic diversity”.

“Sesame Street tried to tackle divorce, tackled ‘peaceful conflict resolution’ in the aftermath of 9/11 and had [gay actor] Neil Patrick Harris on the show playing the subtly-named ‘fairy shoeperson’,” notes Shapiro.

As to whether there may be a touch of McCarthy-esque paranoia about his belief that film-makers are planting the seed of socialism in the bosom of America, he adds: “It’s not paranoid to speak the truth. Hollywoodites admit openly to messaging their product, and to their scorn for conservative Americans. I’m just reporting what they told me.”

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**Big Media Suicide Compact (townhall.com, 110623)

Cal Thomas

Is there a profit-making business — other than TV networks and The New York Times — that so disrespects its audience it works overtime to offend them?

What other business metaphorically flips the bird to those who don’t subscribe to their social, cultural and political worldview? That is precisely what big media does to a large number of potential viewers and subscribers.

Three recent examples: 1) The inexplicable editing of the Pledge of Allegiance during the opening of last Sunday’s U.S. Open on NBC; 2) the naming of ultra-liberal Norah O’Donnell of MSNBC as CBS News’ new chief White House correspondent, in time for the 2012 election; and 3) last Sunday’s New York Times, which appeared to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Washington Blade, a leading newspaper for the LGBT community.

Let’s take them one at a time.

(1) Someone had to decide that “under God” and “indivisible” were extraneous and needed to be cut from the U.S. Open’s patriotic montage. Who was that person? What are his/her ideological and religious beliefs? What editor or manager decided it was OK to air the edited Pledge of Allegiance? Didn’t anyone at NBC, which later apologized on air to “those of you who were offended by it,” anticipate the reaction? Will heads roll? Probably not. Compare this to comedian Tracy Morgan’s crude remarks about gay people in a stand-up act not aired on NBC. His colleagues roundly denounced him and Tina Fey, creator/star of NBC’s “30 Rock,” suggested that without his gay and lesbian co-workers, Morgan “would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on ... or a printed paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket.” Morgan is now on the groveling tour, seeking absolution from gay rights activists.

(2) Norah O’Donnell has been an Obama cheerleader on MSNBC. When Newt Gingrich suggested the president plays too much basketball and should concentrate on more important things, O’Donnell intimated there might be racist overtones because “it suggests that the president is an athlete and some people may suggest, you know, because all black people are good athletes.”

All black people? Isn’t that racist? Some people may suggest? That’s a not-so-clever way journalists have of inserting their own opinions into a story or line of questioning. For many more examples of O’Donnell’s liberalism, visit newsbusters.org and search Norah O’Donnell. It doesn’t appear likely O’Donnell will put her views on hold while reporting on the president’s policies and his re-election campaign.

(3) Last Sunday’s New York Times (Father’s Day) engaged in blatant cheerleading for the gay rights agenda. It began with a front-page story titled “For President, Gay Marriage Views Evolve.” You know where his “evolution” is headed. The president wants and needs money from that lobbying group.

The cover of The New York Times Magazine featured “A Good Life in the Closet? Challenging the Orthodoxy of Coming Out.”

And then, just in case readers were still unclear about the Times’ editorial position on the issue, three full pages in the New York section were devoted to a story headlined, “And Baby Makes Four: How A Woman, Her Son, Her Sperm Donor And His Lover Are Helping Redefine The American Family.” This may be how liberal New York and The New York Times see the American family, but most American families don’t.

Reading this brought me as close as I have ever come to canceling my subscription, but I decided against it. I have to know what the culturally depraved are thinking.

Inserted in the newspaper was a “Dear Reader” letter from outgoing Executive Editor Bill Keller and Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal. It announced “new features and a new way of presenting our finest analytical and opinion writing.”

It may be a “new way,” but the content will remain the same and come from the same ideological perspective. At none of the big networks or at The New York Times is there a recognized conservative or traditional values commentator. It is why these entities are losing readers and viewers, though they don’t seem to care. Their ideology trumps their business sense. Meanwhile, the rise of alternative media makes them increasingly irrelevant.

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**Exposing the Hollywood ‘Clique’ (Townhall.com, 110603)

Brent Bozell

Born blocks from the NBC soundstage in 1984 to parents in the entertainment industry, Ben Shapiro is a natural choice to write a book about Hollywood. For his new book, “Primetime Propaganda,” Shapiro has studied decades of television content and interviewed a bevy of powerful Hollywood producers to document the degree to which they have created a political and cultural revolution of permissive leftism.

The project gets off to a harsh start. In his introduction, Shapiro attacks “traditional” TV critics on the cultural right for being “worse than useless,” suggesting some unnamed conservatives are insisting TV should not be watched. “When conservatives treat television as the Golden Calf, they leave no choice but to lay low the unbelievers — and most of us prefer to continue occasionally glancing at the offending cow.”

Let’s stipulate that perhaps Shapiro is trying to sell the usefulness of his own book by insisting it will succeed where other conservative critiques have failed. Because once you get past the straw-man introduction, there’s a lot of eye-opening detail that begs to be discussed.

Hollywood’s made endless movies about cruel, life-destroying blacklisters of communist sympathizers, which is rich irony given their ongoing efforts to blacklist conservatives from their own industry. Shapiro calls this chapter “The Clique.”

Actor Dwight Schultz (“The A-Team”) was overheard by producer Bruce Paltrow praising President Reagan in the 1980s at a theater festival, and Paltrow called him a “Reagan (A-word).” Months later, when Schultz came to audition for the role of Dr. Fiscus on the NBC show “St. Elsewhere,” Paltrow asked why he had shown up: “There’s not going to be a Reagan (A-word) on this show!”

Schultz, an accomplished voice-over actor in cartoons, found this viewpoint even in the animation genre. He received a casting call for the cartoon movie “Astro Boy” that described the character of “President Stone” as a “cross between a refined, somewhat more controlled version of General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) from ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and Dick Cheney.”

“You get this in the mail,” Schultz insisted about his cartoon work. “This is very typical, very mild... ‘He’s an (A-word), like George Bush.’”

Schultz doesn’t describe his experience as a blacklist, but as a mindset. “It’s a social network ... But the social aspect of the business is, to a large degree, everything these days.”

Leonard Goldberg, executive producer of “Blue Bloods” for CBS — says liberalism in the TV industry is “100% dominant, and anyone who denies it is kidding, or not telling the truth.”

Shapiro asked if conservative politics are a barrier to entry. “Absolutely,” Goldberg replied, adding that the late actor Ron Silver felt his opportunities became very limited when he vocally shifted to the right after 9/11.

It starts to sound like discrimination. There’s the story of Fred Thompson and “Law & Order” producer Rene Balcer, who insisted, “I said I’m not coming back as long as that guy is on the show. I didn’t think much of his acting or the character.” If you’re conservative, you somehow can’t act.

The book cites Entertainment Weekly editor Mark Harris saying he “expected to hate” ABC’s comedy “The Middle” due largely to the political views of right-leaning actress Patricia Heaton (but then was pleased the show was “left-populist”).

Shapiro says the Hollywood left cannot understand why anyone would attack their programming. “After all, they argue, Americans don’t attack the Associated Press’s reporting. Why should they attack Hollywood when it merely reports what’s happening in the world?”

That’s how Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group justified taking “ABC Family” into racier territory: “The best way to resonate with your audience is to be authentic. And you’re only authentic if you are holding up a mirror to your audience and saying, ‘I see you.’”

Many TV producers complained to Shapiro that Hollywood’s product was merely “reflective” of society and not “transformative.” But liberal producer David Shore, the creator of “House,” called that a “knee-jerk reaction” and a “cop-out,” because “we’re also thrilled by the fact that we’re touching people’s lives.”

Hollywood is completely inauthentic . It doesn’t reflect society. It distorts society. Why? They don’t reflect reality. It’s their own 90210 reality. They know nothing about the real world.

This is where Shapiro’s book really hits home. Television acts as a magnifier of the life experiences of Hollywood “visionaries.” They write what they know and how they live, with all of the libertine, “progressive” idealism and the anti-religious, anti-traditional cynicism combined.

His bottom line, after all of his interviews and all of his content analysis, is simple. “Television reflects those who create it and transforms everybody else.” That’s a very frightening 10 words about the future of our culture.

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**ABC, NPR and PBS Hosts Equate Christian and Muslim Violence (townhall.com, 100831)

Dennis Prager

There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student from modern liberalism. It was its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.

There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism; the liberal-led Korean and Vietnam Wars were examples. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the left, which had been morally confused about communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

After the Vietnam War, even liberals who continued to describe communism as evil were labeled “right-wingers” and “Cold Warriors.” And the United States, with its moral flaws, was often likened to the Soviet Union. I recall asking the pre-eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that the United States was a morally superior society to that of the Soviet Union. He would not.

Little has changed regarding the Left’s inability to identify and confront evil. And its moral equation of good guys and bad guys was made evident again in recent weeks by hosts on three major liberal networks — ABC, NPR and PBS.

First, on May 25, PBS host Tavis Smiley interviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Muslim Somali writer and activist for human, especially women’s, rights in Islamic countries. After mentioning American Muslim terrorists Maj. Nidal Hasan (who murdered 13 and injured 30 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood) and Faisal Shahzad (who attempted to murder hundreds in Times Square), this dialogue ensued:

Ali: “Somehow, the idea got into their (Hasan’s and Shahzad’s) minds that to kill other people is a great thing to do and that they would be rewarded in the hereafter.”

Smiley: “But Christians do that every single day in this country.”

Ali: “Do they blow people up?”

Smiley: “Yes. Oh, Christians, every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that’s what Columbine is — I could do this all day long. There are so many more examples of Christians — and I happen to be a Christian.

“There are so many more examples, Ayaan, of Christians who do that than you could ever give me examples of Muslims who have done that inside this country, where you live and work.”

Then, on Aug. 22, Michel Martin, host of NPR’s “Tell Me More,” in discussing whether the Islamic Center and mosque planned for near ground zero should be moved, said this on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” with Howard Kurtz:

“Should anybody move a Catholic church? Did anybody move a Christian church after Timothy McVeigh, who adhered to a cultic white supremacist cultic version of Christianity, bombed (the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City)?”

And third, on Aug. 26, ABC “20/20” anchor Chris Cuomo tweeted this to his nearly one million followers:

“To all my christian brothers and sisters, especially catholics — before u condemn muslims for violence, remember the crusades....study them.”

I have known Smiley since the 1980s when we both worked at the same radio station in Los Angeles. He is smart, and he is a gentleman who has accorded me great respect both on his television show and off air.

How, then, does such a man equate Muslims who murder in the name of Islam with Americans who “murder every day,” none one of whom commit their murders in the name of Christianity?

How does Martin equate the thousands of Islamic terrorists around the world, all of whom are devout Muslims, with a single American — one who, in any case, professed no religion, let alone Christianity?

And how does Cuomo claim that Christians cannot condemn Muslims for violence because of the Christian Crusades?

First of all, the Crusades occurred a thousand years ago. One might as well argue that Jews cannot condemn Christian and secular anti-Semitic violence because Jews destroyed Canaanite communities 3,200 years ago.

Second, it is hardly a defense of Muslims to have to go back a thousand years to find comparable Christian conduct.

Third, even then there is little moral equivalence. The Crusades were waged in order to recapture lands that had been Christian for centuries until Muslim armies attacked them and destroyed most Christian communities in the Middle East. (Some Crusaders also massacred whole Jewish communities in Germany on the way to the Holy Land, and that was a grotesque evil — which Church officials condemned at the time.) As the dean of Western Islamic scholars, Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis, has written, “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad — a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.”

So how did Smiley, Martin and Cuomo make such morally egregious statements?

The answer is not that these are bad people, let alone that they are not repulsed by terrorist violence.

The answer is leftism, the way of looking at the world that permeates high schools, universities, news and entertainment media. Those indoctrinated by leftist thinking become largely incapable of accurate moral judgments: They regarded America and the Soviet Union as morally similar. And today, they claim that people they call “extremists” within Christianity (who are they?) and Islamist terrorists and their supporters pose equal threats to America and the world.

That is how bright and decent people become moral relativists and thereby undermine the battles against the greatest evils — communist totalitarianism in its time and Islamic totalitarianism in ours.

The only solution is to keep exposing leftist moral confusion. One problem, however, is that in countries without talk radio, an equivalent to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, conservative columnists and a vigorous anti-left political party, this is largely impossible.

The other major problem is that the media that dominate American life have little problem, indeed largely concur, with the foolish and dangerous comments made by their mainstream media colleagues. That is why these comments, worthy of universal moral condemnation, were ignored by the mainstream (i.e., leftwing) media. Instead, they directed mind-numbing attention and waves of opprobrium toward Dr. Laura.

Those who don’t fight real evils fight imaginary ones.

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**Cultural Disconnect: Portraying Christians in Film (Christian Post, 100419)

By Chuck Colson

Peter Dans is a Johns Hopkins physician who loved going to the movies as a boy. He watched films like Going My Way and Boys’ Town, which featured honorable priests. But after the start of his medical practice in 1961, Dans no longer had much time for films.

Fast forward 30 years. Dans was asked to write a column about how Hollywood portrayed doctors for a medical journal. To write it, he had to start going to the movies again. He was struck not only by how badly doctors were portrayed, but also of the contemptuous treatment of Christians and the Church.

In his new book, Christians in the Movies: A Century of Saints and Sinners, Dans writes that when he was young, celluloid clergymen “were tough-yet-good-hearted priests, often played by big stars like Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien, and Bing Crosby.” But these days, he writes, virtually all priests, preachers, and believers are portrayed as “vicious predators or narrow-minded, mean-spirited Pharisees.”

What happened in those three decades? A huge shift in worldview.

In the early days of film, movie-makers understood that religion was a source of comfort and stability for most Americans. But by the late 1940s, Dans writes, social changes were taking place “that would alter Hollywood’s reverential approach” to religion.

American-made films were required to follow the Motion Picture Production Code, which demanded that subjects like religion and sexuality be treated with sensitivity. But foreign films were not bound by these strictures, and when they began pouring into the U.S., American filmmakers began to rebel against the Code.

Second, the tumultuous cultural events of the 1960s led to dramatic changes in our society-including, Dans writes, calls for “nonjudmentalism,” disagreements over right and wrong, and “the rise in the affirmation of personal autonomy rights.” As Americans became more affluent and secure, Dans says, “there seemed to be less of a need...[for] practicing a faith whose God demanded behaviors that restricted lifestyle choices.”

And third, polls reflected a huge gulf between the religious practices of the Hollywood crowd and ordinary Americans. This “cultural disconnect” and its reflection in films was accelerated by two important changes. First, after 1965, American Catholics were no longer obligated to avoid films condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency rating system. Second was the demise of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1968.

Today, with a few exceptions like Amazing Grace and The Blind Side, it’s hard to find films that do not depict Christians as charlatans, dupes, and hypocrites.

Many believers respond by simply refusing to see modern films. But we ought to care about how we are depicted on film, because films are immensely influential in shaping public perceptions of us.

We should lobby filmmakers about how we are portrayed-just as other cultural groups do. And when anti-Christian films emerge, we ought to confront them head-on, helping believers, especially our kids, understand the worldview that is driving these films-a worldview that sees Christianity, not as a source of truth and goodness, but of backwardness and evil.

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**Proclaiming Christ on Fox News (World Magazine, 100105)

Fox shock! As was noted on WorldMagBlog yesterday, Brit Hume crossed the line of decency on Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace (and on Sunday, of all days!) by recommending “the Christian faith” to Tiger Woods as the remedy for his personal problems.

“The extent to which he can recover, it seems to me, depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

As you can see, reflecting on the mess that Woods has made of his life—his career, his family—Hume pointed out that Woods’ religion, which is Buddhism, is ill-equipped to deal with the family side of the crisis, as there is no element of forgiveness and redemption in the Far East religion and philosophy. Essentially, Hume called him to give his heart and life to Christ.

Hume is Episcopalian, which is usually as Protestant as a public figure can become while still remaining respectable. He became much more serious about his faith after the suicide of his son, Sandy Hume, himself a prominent journalist, in 1998. When he stepped down from his role as a Fox News anchor and the news channel’s Washington, D.C., managing editor in 2008, he told The Hollywood Reporter about his plans:

I certainly want to pursue my faith more ardently than I have done. I’m not claiming it’s impossible to do when you work in this business. I was kind of a nominal Christian for the longest time. When my son died, I came to Christ in a way that was very meaningful to me. If a person is a Christian and tries to face up to the implications of what you say you believe, it’s a pretty big thing. If you do it part time, you’re not really living it.

Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, Hume went even further beyond the bounds of good taste and acceptable public morality (see video clip below). He used two of the nine words you must never use on the public airwaves: Jesus Christ. Swearing is OK, but he wasn’t swearing. Bill O’Reilly asked him if he was “proselytizing.” Hume said he didn’t think he was, but of course he was. Hume also denied that he was criticizing Buddhism, but he was obviously pointing out a rather stark and fundamental deficiency in that belief system, especially in comparison to what is found in Christ.

In a 2008 Reuters interview, Woods explained his religious practice this way:

“I practice meditation—that is something that I do, that my mum taught me over the years. We also have a thing we do every year, where we go to temple together.”

It is not just thoughtless ritual for him, however. He understands the spirit of it quite clearly: “In the Buddhist religion you have to work for it yourself, internally, in order to achieve anything in life and set up the next life. It is all about what you do and you get out of it what you put into it.”

Woods, the world’s greatest golfer knows what it is to work hard and reach a high level of achievement. It was not just his Buddhism that moved him toward this driven self-reliance. His father, Earl, was in the U.S. Army Special Forces. “A tough guy,” said Woods of his dad. And his Thai mother, Kultida, from whom he got his religious beliefs, was even more competitive, according to her son.

What has come crashing down is not only Woods’ primary sources of enormous income, but also his sponsorship network, his family life, and, more fundamentally, his entire self-understanding. Great men of extraordinary talent and relentless hard work do not humiliate themselves on such a universal scale. When someone who sees himself as a superman is forced to confront his fundamental human frailty, it is suitable and timely for someone to direct his attention to God’s grace for sinners in the Savior, Jesus Christ.

Was Hume abusing his position as a newsman on a panel of news analysts? Or was he just offering . . . analysis? Kyle Koster at The Chicago Sun-Times, for example, points out the oddity of “a newsman offering advice to the beleaguered golfer, not a religious pundit. Hume is a senior political analyst, so why is he doing his Bible-thumping on one of the station’s news programs?”

Why should Christian categories and the spiritual dimension of the lives of public figures be forbidden in media discussion that is pitched to a broad audience? Most Americans identify themselves as Christian. So when “we,” through our journalists in the media, discuss our shared life, why should we pretend that we are an atheistic state like China, or an aggressively secularist state like France? That is an America that exists only in the minds and longing hearts of the secularists and libertines who dominate most of the media these days. But Fox News does not share that view. That may be part of the reason so many Americans prefer Fox for their TV news and analysis. Fox speaks their language and reports from within their world. Anyone who wants reporting and opinion with the presupposition of a Godless universe has many alternatives on other channels.

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**If You Can Find A Better Deal, Take It! (Ann Coulter, 100106)

Someone mentioned Christianity on television recently and liberals reacted with their usual howls of rage and blinking incomprehension.

On a Fox News panel discussing Tiger Woods, Brit Hume said, perfectly accurately:

Hume’s words, being 100% factually correct, sent liberals into a tizzy of sputtering rage, once again illustrating liberals’ copious ignorance of Christianity. (Also illustrating the words of the Bible: “How is it you do not understand me when I speak? It is because you cannot bear to listen to my words.” John 8:43.)

In The Washington Post, Tom Shales demanded that Hume apologize, saying he had “dissed about half a billion Buddhists on the planet.”

Is Buddhism about forgiveness? Because, if so, Buddhists had better start demanding corrections from every book, magazine article and blog posting ever written on the subject, which claims Buddhists don’t believe in God, but try to become their own gods.

I can’t imagine that anyone thinks Tiger’s problem was that he didn’t sufficiently think of himself as a god, especially after that final putt in the Arnold Palmer Invitational last year.

In light of Shales’ warning Hume about “what people are saying” about him, I hope Hume’s a Christian, but that’s not apparent from his inarguable description of Christianity. Of course, given the reaction to his remarks, apparently one has to be a regular New Testament scholar to have so much as a passing familiarity with the basic concept of Christianity.

On MSNBC, David Shuster invoked the “separation of church and television” (a phrase that also doesn’t appear in the Constitution), bitterly complaining that Hume had brought up Christianity “out-of-the-blue” on “a political talk show.”

Why on earth would Hume mention religion while discussing a public figure who had fallen from grace and was in need of redemption and forgiveness? Boy, talk about coming out of left field!

What religion — what topic — induces this sort of babbling idiocy? (If liberals really want to keep people from hearing about God, they should give Him his own show on MSNBC.)

Most perplexing was columnist Dan Savage’s indignant accusation that Hume was claiming that Christianity “offers the best deal — it gives you the get-out-of-adultery-free card that other religions just can’t.”

In fact, that’s exactly what Christianity does. It’s the best deal in the universe. (I know it seems strange that a self-described atheist and “radical sex advice columnist faggot” like Savage would miss the central point of Christianity, but there it is.)

God sent his only son to get the crap beaten out of him, die for our sins and rise from the dead. If you believe that, you’re in. Your sins are washed away from you — sins even worse than adultery! — because of the cross.

“He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross.” Colossians 2:14.

Surely you remember the cross, liberals — the symbol banned by ACLU lawsuits from public property throughout the land?

Christianity is simultaneously the easiest religion in the world and the hardest religion in the world.

In the no-frills, economy-class version, you don’t need a church, a teacher, candles, incense, special food or clothing; you don’t need to pass a test or prove yourself in any way. All you’ll need is a Bible (in order to grasp the amazing deal you’re getting) and probably a water baptism, though even that’s disputed.

You can be washing the dishes or walking your dog or just sitting there minding your business hating Susan Sarandon and accept that God sent his only son to die for your sins and rise from the dead ... and you’re in!

“Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9.

If you do that, every rotten, sinful thing you’ve ever done is gone from you. You’re every bit as much a Christian as the pope or Billy Graham.

No fine print, no “your mileage may vary,” no blackout dates. God ought to do a TV spot: “I’m God Almighty, and if you can find a better deal than the one I’m offering, take it.”

The Gospel makes this point approximately 1,000 times. Here are a few examples at random:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Ephesians 2:8.

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 6:23.

In a boiling rage, liberals constantly accuse Christians of being “judgmental.” No, we’re relieved.

Christianity is also the hardest religion in the world because, if you believe Christ died for your sins and rose from the dead, you have no choice but to give your life entirely over to Him. No more sexual promiscuity, no lying, no cheating, no stealing, no killing inconvenient old people or unborn babies — no doing what all the other kids do.

And no more caring what the world thinks of you — because, as Jesus warned in a prophecy constantly fulfilled by liberals: The world will hate you.

With Christianity, your sins are forgiven, the slate is wiped clean and your eternal life is guaranteed through nothing you did yourself, even though you don’t deserve it. It’s the best deal in the universe.

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**Theologian: Brit Hume is Right on Christianity, Buddhism Difference (Christian Post, 100112)

Journalist Brit Hume who urged Tiger Woods to “turn to the Christian faith” was right when he drew distinction between Buddhism and Christianity in terms of the concept of forgiveness and redemption, said a prominent evangelical theologian.

“I admire Brit Hume for saying something that was at the risk of bringing on this controversy because it really puts on the table the fundamental distinction of worldview: worldview A being Buddhism, worldview B being Christianity,” said Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., on his eponymous radio program last week.

Mohler, a sought-after commentator who has appeared on CNN’s “Larry King Live” and ABC’s “Good Morning America,” noted that while other major religions in the world believe in a god or gods, Buddhism is a non-theistic faith.

Buddhist teachings say that existence itself is the problem and the major goal in life is to achieve nirvana, or total absence of existence. To live is to suffer, adherents are taught, and the way to end suffering is to detach oneself from life by following the Noble Eightfold Path.

“That is not what Christianity is about at all. There is a dramatic distinction,” declared Mohler, who highlighted that nirvana’s non-existence goal is about “emptiness rather than filling.”

In contrast, Christianity does not view existence as the problem but rather sin as the issue. Existence is good, especially humans who are made in the image of God. Moreover, heaven is “maximum…forever, eternal…perfect, glorified existence.”

Sin, the Bible explains, is not just a personal issue but it is an offense against a holy God who will judge the person. By comparison, there is no god in Buddhism that holds a person accountable for his “sins” (there is no concept of sin in Buddhism). Wrongdoings are seen as foolish choices that result in bad karma. The consequences of foolish choices are the kind of existence a person becomes after he is reincarnated and the delay in the process of reaching nirvana.

But in Christianity sin has eternal consequences, which makes God’s atonement and forgiveness of our sins through the death of His son remarkable.

“Christianity is a faith of redemption. Redemption requires a God who redeems,” the theologian stated. “Buddhism is a philosophy of life that points in a different direction. Brit Hume understands that when he said, ‘I don’t think Buddhism will get you to where you need to go in terms of dealing with your sins.’”

On Jan. 3, Hume participated in a roundtable on “Fox News Sunday” and among the subjects discussed were sports and Tiger Woods. He famously called on Woods to seek redemption and forgiveness found in the Christian faith rather than the golfer’s reported Buddhist faith.

“Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether or not he can recover as a person I think is a very open question, and it’s a tragic situation for him. I think he’s lost his family, it’s not clear to me if he’ll be able to have a relationship with his children, but the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal – the extent to which he can recover – seems to me to depend upon his faith,” Hume said.

“He’s said to be a Buddhist; I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith,” the veteran journalist said. “So my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.’”

Hume received heavy criticism for “preaching” during a news show and for his “arrogant” advice to Woods.

Tom Shales, television critic for The Washington Post, wrote in a commentary that Hume’s remark would be remembered “as one of the most ridiculous of the year.”

Shales went further and wrote, “If Hume wants to do the satellite-age equivalent of going door-to-door and spreading what he considers the gospel, he should do it on his own time, not try to cross-pollinate religion and journalism and use Fox facilities to do it.”

But Hume’s supporters argue that it was an opinion-based news session and Hume approached the Tiger Woods scandal from a Christian worldview. They also contend that Hume had a right to express his opinion, as “there is no religious liberty without the possibility of conversion and persuasion,” wrote Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, in a commentary for The Washington Post.

“In this controversy, we are presented with two models of discourse. Hume, in an angry sea of loss and tragedy – his son’s death in 1998 – found a life preserver in faith,” Gerson wrote. “He offered that life preserver to another drowning man. Whatever your view of Hume’s beliefs, he could have no motive other than concern for Woods himself.”

The under-fire journalist, who said he came to a real relationship with Jesus Christ after his son’s suicide eleven years ago, maintains that he does not regret his comments.

“I don’t want to practice a faith that I’m afraid to proclaim. I don’t want to be a closet Christian,” Hume said in an interview with Christianity Today. “I’m not going to stand on the street with a megaphone. My principal responsibility at Fox News isn’t to proselytize. But occasionally a mention of faith seems to me to be appropriate. When those occasions come, I’ll do it.”

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**Top White House Official Says Obama Team ‘Controlled’ Media Coverage During Campaign (Foxnews, 091019)

The Obama campaign’s press strategy leading up to his election last November focused on “making” the media cover what the campaign wanted and on exercising absolute “control” over coverage, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told an overseas crowd early this year.

In a video of the event, Dunn is seen describing in detail the media strategy used by then-Sen. Barack Obama’s highly disciplined presidential campaign. The video is footage from a Jan. 12 forum hosted by the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development in the Dominican Republic.

“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” Dunn said, admitting that the strategy “did not always make us popular in the press.”

The video drew attention after Dunn kicked off a war of words with Fox News last Sunday, calling the network “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” The White House stopped providing guests to “Fox News Sunday” in August after host Chris Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Dunn complained about the fact-checking last Sunday. In the January forum, she provided details about the lengths to which the Obama campaign went to control the media message.

She explained that the campaign favored live interviews so that Obama’s words could not be edited — “so that what the voters heard we determined, as opposed to some editor in a TV station.”

She said Campaign Manager David Plouffe put out Web videos so the campaign could avoid talking to reporters and focus the media message.

“Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why the campaign was saying it,” she said. “One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters. ... We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it.”

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**Comedy Central Scoops Network News on Climate-Gate Scandal (Foxnews, 091202)

ABC didn’t cover it. CBS didn’t either. And NBC apparently wouldn’t go near it.

The network news broadcasts have ignored a growing scandal over evidence of a potential climate cover-up — and now they’ve even been scooped by the fake news at Comedy Central.

“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” produced its “reporting” on Climate-gate Tuesday night, when Stewart quipped, “Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. Oh, oh, the irony!”

Stewart described leaked e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia, including one referring to a researcher’s “trick” to “hide the decline” in some temperature readings in recent decades.

“It’s just scientist-speak for using a standard statistical technique — recalibrating data – in order to trick you,” Stewart said sarcastically.

Nearly two weeks since news broke of the e-mail scandal, climate change skeptics have gloated; a leading climate scientist has resigned; at least one U.S. lawmaker has called for an investigation, and countless prominent news outlets have deemed the story worthy of major reporting.

Still, according to a report Wednesday morning by the conservative Media Research Center, “none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed Climate-Gate or the incriminating Jones development. ... This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal.”

The Business & Media Institute had just as much trouble finding the networks’ Climate-gate coverage.

“An examination of morning and evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC since Nov. 20 yielded zero mentions of the scandal, even in the Nov. 25 reports about Obama going to Copenhagen to discuss the need for emissions reductions,” the Institute reported Wednesday.

But during that time, the Institute says, “the networks reported on pro-golfer Tiger Woods’ ‘minor’ car accident at least 37 times. They also found time to report on an orphaned Moose and the meal selection at the president’s State Dinner.”

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell reacted to the findings saying, “To pretend this story simply doesn’t exist is damning to journalism.”

That left Stewart to fill the void — with analysis of the comedic variety.

The comedian mocked the scientists for discarding the raw data used to formulate the adjusted temperature data that much of the scientific community agrees confirms global warming is occurring.

“Why would you throw out raw data from the ‘80s? I still have Penthouses from the ‘70s!” he joked.

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**AP Turns Heads for Devoting 11 Reporters to Palin Book ‘Fact Check’ (Foxnews, 091117)

Reviewing books and holding public figures accountable is at the core of good journalism, but the Associated Press’ treatment of Palin’s book seems an unprecedented move at the wire service

Sarah Palin is no normal politician, and at the Associated Press, apparently “Going Rogue” is no normal book.

When the former Republican vice presidential candidate and former Alaska governor wrote her autobiography, the AP found a copy before its release date and assigned 11 people to fact check all 432 pages.

The AP claims Palin misstated her record with regard to travel expenses and taxpayer-funded bailouts, using statements widely reported elsewhere. But it also speculated into Palin’s motives for writing “Going Rogue: An American Life,” stating as fact that the book “has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto.”

Palin quickly hit back on a Facebook post titled “Really? Still Making Things Up?”

“Imagine that,” the post read. “11 AP reporters dedicating time and resources to tearing up the book, instead of using the time and resources to ‘fact check’ what’s going on with Sheik Mohammed’s trial, Pelosi’s health care takeover costs, Hasan’s associations, etc. Amazing.”

The AP, an organization with over 4,000 employees and 49 Pulitzer Prizes earned for asking the hard questions, wouldn’t comment on their own reporting for this story.

Reviewing books and holding public figures accountable is at the core of good journalism, but the treatment Palin’s book received appears to be something new for the AP. The organization did not review for accuracy recent books by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, then-Sen. Joe Biden, either book by Barack Obama released before he was president or autobiographies by Bill or Hillary Clinton. The AP did more traditional news stories on those books.

The attraction to Palin doesn’t appear to be partisan, since AP didn’t fact-check recent political tomes by Republicans Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich.

The AP, however, regularly writes “fact checks” for major political speeches, such as a September health care speech by President Obama.

Doug Underwood, a University of Washington journalism professor who covered Washington politics in the late 1970s for Gannett, said Palin brings some negative attention on herself with a history of bad interviews and misstatements. In addition, the press cannot ever be perfectly consistent or fair, he said. Still, the media treated Biden and Palin differently, he said.

Biden’s book “Promises to Keep” became an instant best-seller when he was chosen to be Obama’s running mate, but was not fact-checked by the AP and only received passing interest. In a story last year on Biden’s Vietnam War draft deferments due to asthma, the reporter notes Biden didn’t mention the malady in his book.

Palin is not the standard presidential possibility for 2012, Underwood said.

“She’s a figure who’s a politician, but also a part of popular culture,” he said.

Palin supporters believe 11 reporters poring over every word of her book is excessive- and further proof of the media’s obsession and maltreatment of the hockey mom from Wasilla.

“They’re obsessed with trying to discredit her,” said Adrienne Ross, New York state organizer for the 2012 Draft Sarah Committee. “Because she’s a conservative woman, they make fun of her accent, comment about her looks. She doesn’t come in the package they want her to come in.”

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**White House Escalates War of Words With Fox News (Foxnews, 091012)

Calling Fox News “a wing of the Republican Party,” the Obama administration on Sunday escalated its war of words against the channel, even as observers questioned the wisdom of a White House war on a news organization.

“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente, who likens the channel to a newspaper with separate sections on straight news and commentary, suggested White House officials were intentionally conflating opinion show hosts like Glenn Beck with news reporters like Major Garrett.

“It’s astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming,” Clemente said. “It seems self-serving on their part.”

In recent weeks, the White House has begun using its government blog to directly attack what it called “Fox lies.” David Gergen, who has worked for President Bill Clinton and three Republican presidents, questioned the propriety of the White House declaring war on a news organization.

“It’s a very risky strategy. It’s not one that I would advocate,” Gergen said on CNN. “If you’re going to get very personal against the media, you’re going to find that the animosities are just going to deepen. And you’re going to find that you sort of almost draw viewers and readers to the people you’re attacking. You build them up in some ways, you give them stature.”

He added: “The press always has the last barrel of ink.”

Gergen’s sentiments were echoed by Tony Blankley, who once served as press secretary to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

“Going after a news organization, in my experience, is always a loser,” Blankley said on CNN. “They have a big audience. And Fox has an audience of not just conservatives — they’ve got liberals and moderates who watch too. They’ve got Obama supporters who are watching. So it’s a temptation for a politician, but it needs to be resisted.”

Nia Malika Henderson, White House correspondent for the Politico newspaper, also questioned the White House offensive against Fox.

“Obama’s only been a boon to their ratings and I don’t understand how this kind of escalation of rhetoric and kind of taking them on, one on one, would do anything other than escalate their ratings even more,” she said.

Dunn used an appearance on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” over the weekend to complain about Fox News’ coverage of the Obama presidential campaign a year ago.

“It was a time this country was in two wars,” she recalled. “We’d had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election, what you would have seen would have been that the biggest stories and biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and something called ACORN.”

Ayers was co-founder of the Weather Underground, a communist terrorist group that bombed the Pentagon and other buildings in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1995, Ayers hosted Obama at his home for a political function and the two men later served together on the board of an anti-poverty group known as the Woods Fund.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which once had close ties to Obama, has been accused by a variety of law enforcement agencies of voter fraud. In recent weeks, the Democrat-controlled Congress moved to sever funding to ACORN after Fox News aired undercover videotapes of ACORN employees giving advice on how to break the law to a pair of journalists disguised as a pimp and prostitute.

As for Dunn’s complaint about Fox News’ coverage of the Obama campaign, a study by the Pew Research Center showed that 40% of Fox News stories on Obama in the last six weeks of the campaign were negative. Similarly, 40% of Fox News’ stories on Obama’s Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, were negative.

On CNN, by contrast, there was a 22-point disparity in the percentage of negative stories on Obama (39%) and McCain (61%). The disparity was even greater at MSNBC, according to Pew, where just 14% of Obama stories were negative, compared to a whopping 73% of McCain stories — a spread of 59 points.

Although Dunn accused Fox News of being a “wing of the Republican Party,” she said the network does not champion conservatism.

“It’s not ideological,” she acknowledged. “I mean, obviously, there are many commentators who are conservative, liberal, centrist — and everybody understands that.”

Still, Obama refused to appear on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace on Sept. 20, the day he appeared on five other Sunday shows. At the time, the White House characterized the snub as payback for the Fox Broadcast Network’s decision not to air an Obama prime time appearance. But last weekend, Dunn blamed Fox News Channel’s coverage of the administration for Obama’s snub of Fox News Sunday.

“Is this why he did not appear?” Dunn said. “The answer is yes.”

Wallace has called White House officials “the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

Dunn was asked by CNN’s Howard Kurtz whether Obama would grant an interview to Fox News by the end of the year.

“Obviously, he’ll go on Fox, because he engages with ideological opponents and he has done that before, he will do it again,” Dunn replied. “I can’t give you a date, because frankly I can’t give you dates for anybody else right now.”

But last week, Fox News was informed by the White House that Obama would grant no interviews to the channel until at least 2010. The edict was relayed to Fox News by a White House official after Dunn discussed the channel at a meeting with presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs and other Obama advisers.

“What I will say is that when he (Obama) goes on Fox, he understands he’s not going on it really as a news network, at this point,” Dunn said on CNN. “He’s going on to debate the opposition. And that’s fine. He never minds doing that.”

Dunn also strongly implied that Fox had failed to follow up on a New York Times story about a scandal swirling around GOP Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, although Fox News broadcast the stories on numerous shows, including Special Report with Bret Baier.

Clemente questioned the motives of the White House attack, which comes in the wake of an informal coffee last month between Fox chairman Roger Ailes and Obama adviser David Axelrod.

“Instead of governing, the White House continues to be in campaign mode, and Fox News is the target of their attack mentality,” he said. “Perhaps the energy would be better spent on the critical issues that voters are worried about.”

Blankley suggested the war on Fox News is unpresidential.

“It lowers the prestige,” he said. “If you’re president or speaker, at a certain level, you don’t want to be seen to be engaging that kind of petty bickering. If you’re just a congressman, maybe you can do it.”

In an interview over the summer, Obama made clear that Fox News has gotten under his skin.

“I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,” he told CNBC’s John Harwood. “You’d be hard pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.”

At the White House Correspondents Dinner in May, Obama even mocked the media for supporting him.

“Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me,” Obama said, spurring laughter and applause from the assembled journalists. “Apologies to the Fox table.”

Gergen said the White House should delegate its attacks to outside support groups.

“Why don’t they take this over to the DNC, over to the Democratic National Committee, and have their struggles like that fought out over there and not out of the White House?” Gergen said. “I have real questions about that strategy.”

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**Most Major News Outlets Largely Ignore Van Jones Controversy (Foxnews, 090907)

Americans who rely on the network broadcasts or the nation’s top newspapers for their news may have just learned about the weekend resignation of President Obama’s “green jobs czar” or the firestorm of controversy that was set off weeks ago by the revelation of his past provocative statements.

Most of the major news outlets, like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS ignored the swelling heat surrounding former White House environmental adviser Van Jones and the videos surfacing of his controversial statements.

For weeks, conservative media led by FOX News commentator Glenn Beck has been criticizing Jones, a former self-avowed Marxist and anarchist, for his remarks and radical views, including his February denunciation of Republicans as “assholes” — a statement that came to light on Wednesday.

Jones issued two apologies last week — for his statement on Republicans and for signing a petition that suggested the U.S. government was involved in the Sept 11. terrorist attacks — and the White House responded to the growing controversy on Friday. Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Jones continued to work in the administration and asserted that the president didn’t agree with his controversial statements.

Yet most of the media still didn’t pay attention even after Gibbs’ comment.

CBS News became the first of the three broadcast networks on Friday to note the controversy, but ABC’s “World News” and “NBC Nightly News” again failed to report the story. After Jones’ midnight resignation over the weekend, all three networks aired the story on their Sunday evening newscasts. The Washington Post offered its first story on Saturday yet The New York Times’ print edition didn’t publish its first story until Monday — a story that appeared on the front page, under the fold.

Democratic strategist Julian Epstein defended the media, saying they strive to provide balanced reporting and that their “passing coverage” was similar to their reports on the controversy surrounding Sen. John McCain’s religious adviser last year during his presidential bid.

“I think some of the media is guilty of not covering things that are occurring on the right,” he told FOX News. “Other parts of the media are guilty of not covering things adequately that are occurring on the left. I think every news organization has to strive to be balanced on this.”

The booming calls for Jones’ resignation and questions over his ability to land such a position wasn’t just coming from Republicans. Democrats and security experts weighed in, wondering how Jones could have passed thorough and lengthy background checks and still land the job.

A cursory search of Jones would have revealed some of his most controversial statements including a speech in 2005 when he injected race into Columbine massacre, saying that black students don’t commit mass school shootings.

But Jones is towering figure in the environmental world. A New York Times best-selling author and Yale law school graduate, Jones was named by Time Magazine in 2008 as one of their “Environmental Heroes.”

Obama has named nearly three dozen czars in his administration to advise him on topics ranging from the auto industry to manufacturing. Critics note that czars, unlike cabinet-level positions, do not face Senate confirmation and therefore are allowed access and influence to the president without the proper checks and balances.

==============================

**By 5-to-1 Public Thinks Most Journalists Trying to Elect Obama (Media Resarch Council, 080909)

A week after a Rasmussen Reports survey discovered that by a ten-to-one margin the public believes the media are trying to hurt Sarah Palin, a new Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely voters, briefly highlighted Wednesday night on FNC’s Hannity & Colmes, determined “69% remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama.” Specifically, “50% of voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama win versus 11% who believe they are trying to help his Republican opponent John McCain” with 26% saying “reporters offer unbiased coverage.”

Even amongst Democrats, more think journalists are aiding Democrat Obama than Republican McCain: “While 83% of Republican voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama, 19% of Democrats agree, one percentage point higher than the number of Democrats who believe they are trying to help McCain.” Most telling, “unaffiliated voters by a 53% to 10% margin see reporters trying to help Obama.”

Matching the overall public perception of a pro-Obama media, “45% of Democrats say most reporters are providing unbiased coverage in the current presidential campaign, but only 20% of unaffiliateds and nine percent (9%) of Republicans agree.”

[This item, by the MRC’s Brent Baker, was posted late Wednesday night on the MRC’s blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ]

For Rasmussen’s full summary of the poll taken on September 8 and released on September 10, see: “69% Say Reporters Try to Help the Candidate They Want to Win,” at: www.rasmussenreports.com

An excerpt with other findings:

....Voters from both parties...are skeptical of media bias in general. Eighty-six percent (86%) of Republicans think reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and a plurality of Democrats (49%) believe that, too. Seventy-four percent (74%) of unaffiliated voters agree.

Only 21% of voters overall say reporters try to offer unbiased coverage....

Among all voters, 57% believe Obama has received the best treatment by the media, while 21% say McCain has been treated best. Only nine percent (9%) believe the media has been most favorable to Senator Hillary Clinton, who was Obama’s closest rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Forty-two percent (42%) think reporters would hide information that hurts the candidate they want to win, but 34% do not agree. But there’s a partisan divide here: While 63% of likely McCain voters believe reporters would hide information harmful to the candidate they favor, 52% of potential Obama voters do not agree....

END of Excerpt

The new Rasmussen survey echoes two other recent polls, one by Rasmussen and one by Fox News. The September 5 CyberAlert item, “Poll: By 10-to-1 Public Says Reporters ‘Trying to Hurt Palin,’” recounted:

“Over half of U.S. voters (51%) think reporters are trying to hurt Sarah Palin with their news coverage, and 24% say those stories make them more likely to vote for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in November,” Rasmussen Reports announced Thursday in posting survey results which determined “just five percent (5%) think reporters are trying to help her with their coverage, while 35% believe reporters are providing unbiased coverage.” In Thursday’s “Grapevine” segment, FNC’s Brit Hume highlighted the findings from the poll of 1,000 “likely voters.”

By wide margins, more Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters see the media as trying to hurt rather than trying to help Palin. For Republicans it’s 80 to 6%, for Democrats 28 to 4% (with 57% believing reporting is unbiased) and for unaffiliated voters it’s 49 to 5%.

And the July 25 CyberAlert posting, “Fox Poll: Two-Thirds Recognize Journalists Want Obama to Win,” reported:

Just days after a Rasmussen Reports survey was released showing more than three times as many likely voters “believe most reporters will try to help Obama with their coverage” than help John McCain, a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll taken July 22-23 of 900 registered voters discovered six times as many think “most member of the media” want Obama to win than wish for a McCain victory. On Thursday’s Special Report, FNC’s Brit Hume relayed: “67% of the respondents think most media members want Obama to win. Just 11% think most in the media are for McCain.”

A FoxNews.com article added this damning finding: “Only about 1 in 10 (11%) volunteers the belief that the media is neutral on the race to become the 44th President of the United States.” Those polled recognize the tilt in action: “When asked to rate the objectivity of media coverage of the campaigns, Americans feel Obama gets more of a positive spin by a better than 7-to-1 margin (46% more positive toward Obama; 6% more positive toward McCain).”

==============================

**Media Bias (Conservapedia)

Vision of the anointed

Economist Thomas Sowell in his book published in 1996, The Vision of the Anointed, discusses the anointed vision of liberals and liberalism to promote their agenda, and control the writing of history and the national consciousness.

Desperate evasions of discordant evidence, and the denigration and even demonizing of those presenting such evidence, are indicative of the high stakes in contemporary culture wars, which are not about alternative policies but alternative worlds and of alternative roles of liberals in these worlds. Opponents must be shown to be not merely mistaken but morally lacking. This approach replaces the intellectual discussion of arguments by the moral extermination of persons. This denigration or demonizing of those opposed to their views not only has the desired effect of discrediting the opposition but also has the unintended effect of cutting off the path of retreat from positions which become progressively less tenable with the passage of time and the accumulation of discordant evidence. The very thought that those dismissed as simplistic or maligned might have been right–even if only on a single issue–is at best galling and potentially devastating. Their last refuge in this situation are their good intentions.

For liberals, it is desperately important to win because their whole sense of themselves is at stake. Given the high stakes, it is not hard to understand the all-out attacks of liberals on those who differ from them and their attempts to stifle alternative sources of values and beliefs, with campus speech codes and ‘political correctness’ being prime examples of a spreading pattern of taboos. Here they are not content to squelch contemporary voices, they must also silence history and traditions–the national memory–as well. This too is a larger danger than the dangers flowing from particular policies.

History is the memory of a nation–and that memory is being erased by historians enthralled by liberalism. Open disdain for mere facts has been accompanied by adventurous reinterpretations known as ‘revisionist’ history. This is all yet another expression of the notion that reality is optional.

A very similar development in the law treats the Constitution as meaning not what those who wrote it meant, but what one small segment of the public today wants it to mean. This is the ‘living constitution’ of ‘evolving standards,’ reflecting what ‘thinking people’ believe. The law itself has been prostituted to the service of ideological crusades. The social cohesion that makes civilized life possible has been loosened by the systematic undermining of families and of commonly shared values and a common culture.

Examples of Liberal Style

The style of a liberal often includes these characteristics:

1. unjustified claims of expertise, authority or knowledge

2. insistence on talking more and having the last word in a discussion or debate, or last wordism

3. attempting to portray conservatives as callous or uncaring; bait them into making insensitive remarks; falsely describing them as angry

4. calling others “extremist” or “racist”

5. an obsession with and exaggeration of artificial scarcity, such as wealth, rather than focusing on creating more

6. ignoring or failing to recognize abstract concepts and denying obvious correlations between liberal beliefs and destructive behavior

7. deny the obvious and embrace the implausible; see examples of liberal denial

8. attempting to appear smarter than others, when often the opposite is true

9. attempting to appear more reasonable than others, when often the opposite is true

10. overreliance on hearsay, such as the false claim that most support evolution

11. unjustified praise of atheists and other liberals as “geniuses”, despite little achievement

12. denial of accountability

13. believing that bureaucratic honors or appointments are meaningful achievements, as fights over political office

14. insisting on a mindless equality, as in “if you have an entry for Beethoven, then you must allow entries for vulgar rap artists!”

15. concealing one’s liberal views rather than admitting them

16. calling conservative free speech “hate” speech

17. calling conservative humor “unprofessional and meaningless, and degrades the quality of your encyclopedia.”

18. pretending to know more than he does; Isaac Newton admitted that he knew almost nothing, yet a liberal rarely admits that and often pretends to know more than he does

19. resistance to quantifying things, such as liberal bias or openmindedness

20. preference for obscenity and profanity

21. over-reliance on mockery

22. over-reliance on accusations of hypocrisy

23. hostility to faith

24. insistence on censoring certain speech, such as a description of The Flood or even teaching children about a massive flood, despite its acceptance by a majority of Americans

25. believing that the education of children is for liberals to control

26. believing that conservatives will fail, and refusing to accept when they succeed, as when George W. Bush won in 2000

27. reluctance to admit that anything is morally wrong

28. bullying conservatives who disagree with liberal views

29. draw an analogy between opponents and racists, no matter how illogical

30. claim that science supports their position, and ignore any evidence that shows their position to be false

31. often declare that an adversary should be “ashamed of himself,” while rarely saying that about a fellow liberal (such as Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton)

32. willing to give away everything held dear by the majority to avoid serious conflict (such liberals who wish to pull our troops out of Iraq, and embolden the terrorists).

33. using hyperbole instead of fact-based logic in an attempt to tug at people’s emotions rather than appealing to their sense of reason.

34. often long-winded and verbose, and in debates liberals often consume more than their fair share of the alloted time, leaving less time for the other side.

35. attempting to control the rules of evidence used in a debate. For example, claiming that Young Earth Creationism is false, and then refusing to allow supporting evidence by claiming that the scientists are religiously motivated.

36. attempting to control the definitions of words through political correctness. For example, referring to Israel as “occupied territories” or suggesting that Al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq are not part of Al-Qaeda.

37. Dismissing legitimate criticism as “a joke”

38. Denying something widely known to be true but difficult to prove, such as observing that men are far more likely to work in gas stations than women.

39. Will often deny being a liberal, or will claim to be a “true conservative”, while spouting liberal and democratic talking points and criticizing basic conservative beliefs and principles.

40. using non sequiturs in argument, such as responding to the point above that liberals over-rely on accusations of hypocrisy by citing an example of conservatives’ observing liberal hypocrisy. But their example does not help their argument. Quite the contrary, use of that example tends to prove that liberals do over-rely on accusations of hypocrisy (relativism). Think about that.

41. selectively citing the Bible when convenient, even though they hold much of it in disdain.

42. silly demands for apologies.

43. can’t understand the difference between identity (e.g., color of one’s skin), perspective (e.g., Judeo-Christian) and bias (e.g., Bias in Wikipedia).

44. inability or unwillingness to differentiate between genuine conservative arguments and parodies of conservative arguments.

45. “Contrariness is creativity to the untalented” - Dennis Miller’s general observation about liberal behavior.

46. Assuming criminals are on the other side of the political fence, without evidence.

47. calling the use of the term liberal when used in a derogatory context “stupid”

48. denial that people can grow out of a liberal viewpoint, such as atheism

==============================

**Baseball’s ‘Broken Trust’ — What About Traditional Media? (Townhall.com, 080103)

By Larry Elder

When the Mitchell Report came out — accusing more than 80 professional baseball players of using performance-enhancing substances — television commentators lectured viewers about “broken trust.” One commentator, in particular, somberly expressed his disappointment.

I found myself asking, “Wasn’t this the same guy who, as a motorist, struck someone on a bicycle? And even though witnesses yelled, ‘Stop! Stop!’ he continued through two red lights while dragging the bicycle underneath the car?” The commentator insisted he was “unaware” he’d hit the cyclist. Charged with leaving the scene of an accident, reckless driving, assault and harassment, the commentator pled guilty to operating a motor vehicle knowing or having cause to know property damage had been caused. The bicyclist, who reportedly required elbow surgery, expressed disappointment that the court fined the commentator only $250 with 70 hours of community service. Broken trust?

A few weeks ago, an MSNBC reporter covered French President Sarkozy’s visit to China. With videotape rolling of President Bush flanked by Sarkozy to his left and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to his right, the reporter gushed, “(W)ho could not have a man-crush on that man? I’m not talking about the monkey, either. I’m talking about the other one.” Questioned by the show’s host, “Who’s the monkey?” the reporter clarified, “The monkey in the middle” — meaning President Bush. The reporter later apologized. Broken trust?

In a 1996 survey of Washington, D.C., newspaper reporters and bureau chiefs, 89% said they voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, while 7% voted for George Herbert Walker Bush. Numerous surveys over the years show reporters describe themselves as liberals or Democrats by a two-to-one or three-to-one margin. Broken trust?

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, this past Sunday, “interviewed” presidential contender Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. Stephanopoulos asked Clinton about the appropriateness of using her experiences as First Lady when touting her qualifications for the presidency. Clinton talked about the substantive nature of her activities as First Lady, and said, “You were there.” Indeed, Stephanopoulos was there. As a trusted aide for then-candidate Gov. Bill Clinton, Stephanopoulos campaigned hard for his boss’s election, and then served in the White House. Now we watch the new, improved, “nonpartisan” Stephanopoulos “objectively” interview the likes of Sen. Clinton on his weekly TV show. But isn’t this the same guy who, after Bill Clinton got elected, talked about his expectations for a better America through Clinton’s vision of bigger government? Broken trust?

Meanwhile, over at NBC, we watch Tim Russert, a former aide to liberal Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, similarly conduct “objective” interviews. On their sister cable channel, we watch a sputtering anti-Bush Keith Olbermann and equally anti-Bush Chris Matthews “cover” debates — and, in the case of Matthews, even host one! Yes, the same Matthews who spoke about the “criminality” of the Bush administration.

Speaking of “broken trust,” how long did it take for the traditional news media to recognize that the U.S. military’s surge was working? Some polls say half of Americans consider the country in a recession. Does the drumbeat of negative economic “news” coverage play a role?

On election night in 2000, a handful of journalists — friends, undercover, of course — told me that, in their newsrooms, they saw “objective” reporters crying when it appeared that Bush won the election. And whether covering the war, taxes, global warming, spending on education, spending on social programs, health care, abortion — those who report the news side with Democrats.

Now, what does this have to do with baseball?

Despite the tears and desk pounding, baseball over the years has seen record attendance, and the pace of ticket sales for the upcoming season predicts another all-time high. As for the traditional news, however, the major networks’ share of viewership continues to decline, and newspapers shed employees while downsizing. More and more consumers of news find other outlets to stay informed.

There are many reasons for this, but a 2003 Gallup Poll found 45% of respondents believed the media too liberal. A 2007 Zogby poll discovered 83% of likely voters believe bias remains “alive and well” in the mainstream news media. Ninety-seven percent of Republicans and two-thirds of independents call the press too liberal.

In the case of baseball, the owners knew, the players knew, and the fans either knew or didn’t want to know. But fans remain fans. As to traditional media, perhaps skeptical viewers see a “broken trust” — and now take their business elsewhere.

==============================

**NYT: Suicide Manual For Dems (Ann Coulter, 071122)

Here’s a story that may not have been deemed “Fit to Print”: In the six months that ended Sept. 25, The New York Times’ daily circulation was down another 4.51% to about a million readers a day. The paper’s Sunday circulation was down 7.59% to about 1.5 million readers. In short, the Times is dropping faster than Hillary in New Hampshire. (Meanwhile, the Drudge Report has more than 16 million readers every day.)

One can only hope that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are among the disaffected hordes lining up to cancel their Times subscriptions.

The Times is so accustomed to lying about the news to prove that “most Americans” agree with the Times, that it seems poised to lead the Democrats — and any Republicans stupid enough to believe the Times — down a primrose path to their own destruction.

So if you know a Democratic presidential candidate who doesn’t currently read the Times, by all means order him a subscription.

On Sunday, Times readers learned that despite this year’s historic revolt of normal Americans against amnesty for illegal aliens: “Some polls show that the majority of Americans agree with proposals backed by most Democrats in the Senate, as well as some Republicans, to establish a path to citizenship for immigrants here illegally.”

Was the reporter who wrote that sentence the Darfur bureau chief for the past year? By “some polls,” I gather he means “a show of hands during a meeting of the Times editorial board” or “a quick backstage survey in the MSNBC greenroom.”

As I believe Americans made resoundingly clear this year, the only “path to citizenship” they favor involves making an application from Norway, waiting a few years and then coming over when it’s legal.

Americans were so emphatic on this point that they forced a sitting president to withdraw his signature legislative accomplishment for his second term — amnesty for illegal aliens, aka a “path to citizenship” for illegals.

This was the goal supported by the president’s acolytes at the Fox News Channel as well as a nearly monolithic Democratic Party and its acolytes at ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Oxygen TV, the Food Network, the Golf Channel, the Home Shopping Network, The in-house “Learn to Gamble” channel at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and Comedy Central (unless that was just a sketch on the “Mind of (Carlos) Mencia”).

But ordinary Americans had a different idea. Their idea was: Let’s not reward law-breakers with the ultimate prize: U.S. citizenship. And the ordinary Americans won.

The Times disregards all of that history to announce that it has secret polls showing that Americans support a “path to citizenship” for illegals after all! These polls are living in the shadows!

Only those “angriest on immigration,” the Times said, are still using the various words related to immigration that liberals are trying to turn into new “N-words,” such as, for example, “immigration.” With an exhausting use of air quotes, the Times reports that: “The Republicans have railed against ‘amnesty’ and ‘sanctuary cities.’ They have promised to build a fence on the Mexican border to keep ‘illegals’ out.”

In liberal-speak, that sentence would read: “The Republicans have railed against ‘puppies’ and ‘kittens.’ They have promised to build a fence on the Mexican border to keep ‘baby seals’ out.” (In my version, the sentence would read: “Believing New York Times ‘polls,’ Democrats irritate ‘voters.’”)

Half the English language is becoming the “N-word” as far as liberals are concerned. Words are always bad for liberals. Words allow people to understand what liberals are saying.

According to the Times, all decent, cultured Americans cringe when politicians use foul words like “illegals” to describe illegals. Apparently, what most Americans are clamoring for is yet more automatic messages that begin, “Press ‘1’ for English.” That, at least, is the message the Times got from the stunning victory of grassroots over the elites on the immigration bill this year.

It is against my best interests to mention how utterly out of touch Times editors and reporters are with any Americans east of Central Park West and west of Riverside Drive. I enjoy watching the Democratic presidential candidates take clear, unequivocal positions in favor of driver’s licenses for illegals and then denouncing those very positions a week later (after the real polls come in).

Some people love watching the trees change color every fall. I enjoy watching the candidates’ positions on immigration change.

But it is too much for any human to endure to read the Times’ version of history in which “most Americans” agree with the Times on illegal immigration in the very year Americans punched back against illegal immigration so hard that the entire Washington establishment is still reeling. It’s not like we have to go back to the Coolidge administration to get some sense of what Americans think about amnesty for illegals. (I mean “amnesty” for “illegals.”)

==============================

**Phony Controversy: Defending Rush. (National Review Online, 071001)

[KH: see how the liberal media lied.]

By Peter Wehner

In the latest effort to target Rush Limbaugh, the left-leaning group Media Matters has manufactured yet one more false — and by now yet one more tiresome — controversy. This one has to do with Limbaugh’s use of the phrase “phony soldiers.” According to the Media Matters narrative, on his September 26 program Limbaugh accused troops who want to withdraw from Iraq of being “phony soldiers.” Once Media Matters published this charge, key Democrats dutiful echoed it. In a public statement, Senator John Kerry said this: “This disgusting attack from Rush Limbaugh, cheerleader for the Chicken Hawk wing of the far right, is an insult to American troops. In a single moment on his show, Limbaugh managed to question the patriotism of men and women in uniform who have put their lives on the line and many who died for his right to sit safely in his air conditioned studio peddling hate. On August 19th, The New York Times published an op-ed by seven members of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division critical of George Bush’s Iraq policy. Two of those soldiers were killed earlier this month in Baghdad. Does Mr. Limbaugh dare assert that these heroes were ‘phony soldiers’? Mr. Limbaugh owes an apology to everyone who has ever worn the uniform of our country, and an apology to the families of every soldier buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He is an embarrassment to his Party, and I expect the Republicans who flock to his microphone will now condemn this indefensible statement.”

What’s missing from the Media Matters account is one important thing: context — and without context, you get a completely false account of what happened. But perhaps that’s the intent.

If you go to this link, you can read the entire exchange. What you’ll find is that when the caller to The Rush Limbaugh Program, Mike in Chicago, mentions that the media “never talk to real soldiers. They pull these soldiers that come out of the blue,” Limbaugh interjects: “The phony soldiers.” The discussion continues, with the caller mentioning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In response, Limbaugh says the WMD issue is moot at this stage and returns to other matter. This is what Limbaugh says:

I want to thank you, Mike, for calling. I appreciate it very much. I gotta — Here is a morning update that we did recently, talking about fake soldiers. This is a story of who the left props up as heroes. And they have their celebrities. One of them was Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth. Now — and he was a corporal. I say in quotes. Twenty-three years old. What made Jesse Macbeth a hero to the anti-war crowd wasn’t his Purple Heart, it wasn’t his being affiliated with posttraumatic stress disorder from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. No. What made Jesse Macbeth, Army Ranger, a hero to the left was his courage, in their view, off the battlefield, without regard to consequences, he told the world the abuses he had witnessed in Iraq. American soldiers killing unarmed civilians, hundreds of men, women, even children. In one gruesome account, translated into Arabic and spread widely across the Internet, Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth describes the horrors this way. We would burn their bodies. We would hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque. Now, recently, Jesse Macbeth, poster boy for the anti-war left, had his day in court. And you know what? He was sentenced to five months in jail and three years probation for falsifying a Department of Veterans Affairs claim and his Army discharge record. He was in the Army, Jesse Macbeth was in the Army, folks, briefly. Forty-four days before he washed out of boot camp, Jesse Macbeth isn’t an Army Ranger, never was. He isn’t a corporal, never was. He never won the Purple Heart. And he was never in combat to witness the horrors he claimed to have seen. Probably haven’t even heard about this. And if you have, you haven’t heard much about it. This doesn’t fit the narrative and the template in the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party as to who a genuine war hero; don’t look for any retractions, by the way. Not from the anti-war left, the anti-military Drive-By Media, or the Arabic websites that spread Jesse Macbeth’s lies about our troops, because the truth for the left is, fiction is what serves their purpose. They have to lie about such atrocities because they can’t find any that fit the template of the way they see the US military. In other words, for the American anti-war left, the greatest inconvenience they face is the truth.

You’ll be shocked to learn that Media Matters does not include this portion of the transcript in their posting — and Senator Kerry and the others failed to mention it as well. I wonder why?

Perhaps — and this is only a wild guess — it’s because it would demonstrate that when Rush Limbaugh mentioned “phony soldiers,” he meant, literally, phony soldiers.

It happens that last Sunday Fox News linked to an AP story about Jesse Adam Macbeth. The Fox headline was titled, “Phony Soldier Charged With Making Up Claims of Atrocities in Iraq.” The AP story begins this way: “A man who tried to position himself as a leader of the anti-war movement by claiming to have participated in war crimes while serving in Iraq is facing federal charges of falsifying his record.”

THEY CAN’T MOVEON

What’s obviously going on here is that antiwar advocates were deeply damaged by the MoveOn.org ad smearing General David Petraeus. They were desperate to try to climb their way out of the hole they were in — and so they decided this was their opportunity to find a way out. MoveOn.org attacks Petraeus, they say, but Rush Limbaugh attacks members of the military who want to withdraw as “phony soldiers.” So if Republicans are going to criticize us for what we said about General Petraeus, they should criticize Limbaugh for his slander.

The problem, of course, is that that the charge leveled against Limbaugh is obviously false; his phrase “phony soldiers” applied to Jesse Adam Macbeth — and the phrase itself was clearly based on the news headline.

This effort to manufacture outrage does not sustain even minimal scrutiny — which doesn’t mean this story won’t be picked up by some news outlets. But in the end, the truth will out. The Left in America clearly wants to take Limbaugh out, and for obvious reasons: he is a deeply influential conservative voice and during the last 20 years he has changed American politics and the American media in profound ways. The Left hates him — but they have found no way to stop him. Like the Mississippi, he just keeps rolling along. And one gets the feeling that (as Churchill said in another context) he will continue to roll on full flood, to broad lands and bright days.

==============================

**Absolutely Fabulist (Ann Coulter, 070808)

In their latest demonstration of how much they love the troops, liberals have produced yet another anti-war hoax.

The New Republic has been running “true war” stories from a brave, anonymous liberal penning dispatches from Iraq. The famed “Baghdad Diarist” described his comrades joyfully using Bradley fighting vehicles to crush stray dogs, mocking a female whose face had been blown off by an IED, and defacing Iraqi corpses by wearing skull parts on their own heads.

Various conservatives began questioning the plausibility of the anonymous diarist’s account — noting, for example, that Bradley vehicles don’t “swerve,” as the diarist claimed. The editor of The New Republic responded by attacking the skeptics’ motives, complaining that some conservatives make “a living denying any bad news that emanates from Iraq.”

But when that clever retort failed to quiet rumblings from the right wing, The New Republic finally revealed the “Baghdad Diarist” to be ... John Kerry! Actually it was Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, Democratic candidate for president circa 2028. (That gives him 20 years to learn to pronounce “Genghis.”)

In revealing himself two weeks ago, Beauchamp lashed out at “people who have never served in Iraq.” He said he was too busy fighting “an actual war” to participate in “an ideological battle that I never wanted to join.”

He had tried to stay out of ideological battles by writing made-up articles in a national magazine claiming soldiers in Iraq had become callous beasts because of George Bush’s war, killing to “secure the riches of the empire.” Alas, this proved an ineffective method of keeping his head low. Beauchamp’s next bid for privacy will be an attempt to host “The Price Is Right.”

In response to Beauchamp’s revelation that he was the “Baghdad Diarist,” the military opened an investigation into his allegations. There was no corroboration for his stories, and Beauchamp promptly signed an affidavit admitting that every single thing he wrote in The New Republic was a lie.

According to The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb — who has led the charge of those who “make a living denying any bad news that emanates from Iraq” — Maj. Steven F. Lamb, the deputy public affairs officer for Multi-National Division-Baghdad, said this of the Baghdad diarist:

“An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by Pvt. Beauchamp were found to be false. His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims.”

In response, The New Republic went into full Dan Rather loon mode. This astonishing post showed up on The New Republic Web site on Tuesday afternoon:

“A STATEMENT ON SCOTT THOMAS BEAUCHAMP:

“We’ve talked to military personnel directly involved in the events that Scott Thomas Beauchamp described, and they corroborated his account as detailed in our statement. When we called Army spokesman Maj. Steven F. Lamb and asked about an anonymously sourced allegation that Beauchamp had recanted his articles in a sworn statement, he told us, ‘I have no knowledge of that.’ He added, ‘If someone is speaking anonymously (to The Weekly Standard), they are on their own.’ When we pressed Lamb for details on the Army investigation, he told us, ‘We don’t go into the details of how we conduct our investigations.’ — The Editors”

It’s good to see Mary Mapes is working again.

What on earth is going on? Either the military investigation found that Beauchamp lied or it didn’t. Either military personnel corroborated stories of soldiers wearing skulls as crowns or they didn’t. Either Army spokesman Maj. Steven Lamb gave a statement to The Weekly Standard or he didn’t.

At the same time as The New Republic was posting the above statement, which completely contradicted The Weekly Standard’s update, renowned right-wing news outlet ABC News confirmed that the military has concluded that Beauchamp was writing “fiction.” ABC also quoted Goldfarb’s account and said that Maj. Lamb reiterated his statement that Beauchamp’s stories were false to ABC. The New York Times had the same story on Wednesday.

The New Republic has gone mad. Perhaps the magazine brought its former employee, fantasist Steven Glass, out of retirement. It’s long past time for The New Republic to file for intellectual Chapter 7. Arthur Andersen was implicated in fewer frauds.

And we wonder how Democratic congressmen can lie about a vote they lost on the floor of the House — captured on CSPAN for all the world to see — changing the vote so that they win.

America’s imminent victory in Iraq and safety from terrorist attacks at home is driving them all crazy.

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Media downplays abortion-breast cancer risk (Christian American, 970400)

Despite powerful evidence, many reporters flocked to pro-abortion criticism of latest study.

by Jeffrey M. Peyton

WHEN RESEARCHERS AT PENN State University announced they had discovered that abortion is to blame for about 5,000 cases of breast cancer each year, those who thought the media would finally sit up and take notice were once again disappointed.

Despite a media infatuation with behaviors or substances that might increase the risk of cancer (remember the Alar apple scare, power lines, pesticides?), most news outlets moved quickly to discount the latest study - even to question the motives of its researchers.

The latest study - an analysis of 23 studies - looked at research from around the world to examine the possible link between induced abortion and breast cancer. The research analyzed cases dated back to 1957 and included 25,967 women with breast cancer and 34,977 women without it. Researchers found that women who underwent induced abortion were 30-percent more likely to develop breast cancer. Women who miscarried their pregnancies were subjected to no increased breast cancer risk.

Many publications that reported on the study downplayed or questioned it directly in article headlines. “Bias in abortion study is charged,” read a Boston Globe headline. “New breast cancer report debated; study hints 30% higher risk after abortion,” read a Chicago Tribune headline. The New York Daily News weighed in with “Disputed study links abortion, cancer.”

Some newspapers crammed as many negatives into their headlines as possible: “Challenged study says abortion increases risk of breast cancer. Even a researcher opposed to abortion disputes study’s findings,” said the Des Moines Register in the headline to its article reporting on the Penn State study.

A few members of the media saw the problem. Seattle Times columnist Michelle Malkin wrote, “Dubious studies on negligible environmental risks trigger apocalyptic front-page headlines with numbing regularity...yet abortion-breast cancer research - over 40 individual studies - is largely shunned by the mainstream media.”

U.S. News and World Report also acknowledged the lack of fair play in its Oct. 21 edition. “Debating abortion and breast cancer,” the magazine’s headline began. “Science is only part of the discussion when two supercharged issues are on the table.”

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Catholic group cites ABC pattern of bias (Washington Times, 980504)

A talk-show host ridicules the pope. A commentator bashes Mother Teresa during the broadcast of her funeral. An investigative special on cults includes pictures of the Vatican. A situation comedy airing Easter Week features a boy obsessed with the bloodiness of the Crucifixion, while another boasts as its main character an avowed lesbian.

A heavily promoted dramatic series features a young priest questioning fundamental church teachings.

All ran on the same network —ABC —and all are part of a pattern of attacks on Catholics and their church by the Walt Disney Co.-owned network, says William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

At a press conference here on April 16, Mr. Donohue singled out an episode earlier that month of “That’s Life,” an ABC sitcom, as “viciously anti-Catholic” and “relentless in its bigotry.” The program was an “in-your-face attempt to stick it to the Catholic Church” by ridiculing key church tenets and rituals, including the Holy Eucharist, Mass, the sacrament of penance, prayer, and the use of holy water.

ABC said that the program had already been canceled when the last segment was broadcast. In a prepared statement, the network said: “It was never the intent of the network, the studio, or the production team to offend any religious denomination with the last episode.”

Robert Iger, president of ABC, Stuart Bloomberg, chairman of ABC Entertainment, and Jamie Tarses, president of ABC Entertainment, declined to comment.

It isn’t the first time Disney and its entertainment empire have fallen afoul of religious groups. In June, the Southern Baptist Convention joined other Christian groups in a boycott of the company’s movies, theme parks and other business ventures, with one Baptist leader condemning what he called Disney’s “Christian-bashing, family-bashing, pro-homosexual agenda.”

The plot of the “That’s Life” episode cited by Mr. Donohue concerned a 10-year-old boy whose uncle takes him to Mass on Easter because his mother, hostile to Catholicism, does not approve. Citing the church’s views on women, abortion and homosexuality, she says, “C’mon, the church is dying because anybody with a reasonable amount of intelligence has left.”

At dinner, the child holds up a piece of bread, remarking on how “cool” it would be if he were actually eating a body. He says he also likes the church’s big cross with Jesus hanging on it, bruised, bloody and gouged by thorns. “He’s nailed up there with these spikes. Blood comes spurting out. Whack, whack, whack, whack,” says the boy gleefully.

Other elements in the comedy show cited by the League included a reference to confession boxes as “spiritual toilets,” a suggestion that priests are pedophiles, and a remark that everyone attending Christmas midnight Mass is drunk.

Mr. Donohue said he has sent out 1,200 copies of the offending episode to League supporters, non-Catholic religious leaders, members of Congress and the media.

He’s not seeking an apology from the network but would like to discuss the program with Mr. Iger.

In an interview, Kevin Brockman, vice president in charge of media at ABC, said he would not comment on the League’s protest beyond the network’s statement, except to say there was no intention to offend anyone.

The League cited several instances of anti-Catholic bias at ABC over the years, including the recently canceled dramatic series “Nothing Sacred,” in which a priest takes stands on social issues, such as abortion, that contradict church teaching. The League campaigned against the show, and about 50 major companies, including Weight Watchers, Kmart, DuPont, Sears and Honda, withdrew their advertising.

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Fox News beats cable competition during prime time (Washington Times, 021129)

Fox News is the only cable news network with improved ratings in the past year. The network is in prime-time triumph.

With an average of 1.4 million nightly viewers this month, Fox has had a 17% increase in viewership compared with a year ago, according to Nielsen Media Research numbers released Wednesday.

CNN lost 31% of its prime-time viewers compared with last year’s numbers, with an audience of 921,000. MSNBC continues to languish in third place with a 43% drop and 528,000 viewers.

Fox’s win lends some irony to former Vice President Al Gore’s implication that the network is nothing more than a Republican mouthpiece.

Cable news is “a hybrid product now that’s news plus news-helper; whether it’s entertainment or attitude or news that’s marbled with opinion, it’s different,” Mr. Gore told the New York Observer this week.

Savvy broadcasters could attract a “hard-core following that appreciates the predictability of a right-wing point of view,” then veil their partisanship “to avoid offending the broader audience that mass advertisers want,” Mr. Gore said.

“Thus the Fox slogan, ‘We report, you decide,’ or whatever the current version of their ritual denial is,” he said.

Still, Fox News produces four of the five top-rated cable news shows.

“The O’Reilly Factor” rules the evening with 2.4 million viewers, “Hannity & Colmes” is second with 1.6 million viewers, followed by “The Fox Report” with Shepard Smith with 1.4 million viewers.

CNN’s “Larry King Live” holds on to the fourth spot with 1.4 million viewers, though Mr. King has lost 20% of his audience in the past year.

Fox’s “Special Report” with Brit Hume is in fifth place, with 1.2 million viewers, while its “On the Record” with Greta Van Susteren bested CNN’s “News Night” with Aaron Brown in the 10 p.m. slot, 1 million viewers to 808,000 viewers, respectively.

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God in the Newsroom: Evangelicals get slammed by the New York Times (NRO, 030307)

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof dropped a bombshell in a recent column: He wrote, “nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46% of Americans.”

He’s talking about Evangelical Christians, who, in Kristof’s description, “are increasingly important in every aspect of American culture.” Kristof said he disagrees with Evangelicals on “almost everything,” but observed that “liberal critiques sometimes seem not just filled with outrage at Evangelical-backed policies, which is fair, but also to have a sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself. Such mockery of religious faith is inexcusable.” He went on to say that “liberals sometimes show more intellectual curiosity about the religion of Afghanistan than that of Alabama.”

Now, you may be saying, “This is news?” Yes, actually, it is, because this column appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times, the most highly prized piece of journalistic real estate in the nation, and the newspaper that, more than any other, sets the agenda in newsrooms across America.

“It’s the location, more than what he said,” says Terry Mattingly, a syndicated religion columnist and journalism professor. “It was in the Bible of those who put down all the people in the red states, going to their Evangelical megachurches. Reading this gave Evangelicals a tremendous sense of validation. They haven’t cheered this loud for anything in the Times’s pages since the days when Abe Rosenthal was writing about the persecution of Third World Christians.”

The Kristof column is a small but significant sign of progress toward what one hopes is a more fair and balanced approach to journalism in American newsrooms. Media-savvy religious conservatives tend to have favorite examples of the worst bias against our sort. Everybody remembers the astonishing paragraph from a news story of a decade ago in the Washington Post, in which a reporter remarked that religious conservatives were “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command” — a statement that was not only insulting, but factually untrue. Fewer are aware of a classic 1999 quote from a New York Times Magazine story about an anti-abortion fanatic, in which the writer observed, “It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy.”

Got that? If those who report the news consider religious conservatives (who are usually, but not always, political conservatives) to be part of a lunatic fringe, there’s no reason to take them or their views seriously. In fact, the people this writer considered “most of us” are in fact a minority. But it says a great deal that this writer, and his editors, took this worldview as normative. That was only one writer in one newspaper, but in my professional experience, that viewpoint is common in newsrooms.

Two examples. When I was at the New York Post as a columnist, people thought of me as the “religion guy” because as far as anyone could tell, I was the only writer on this major daily who had an interest in religion. I penned a column once that had something to do with Evangelicals here in New York. It was shot down by a top editor, who told me, “New York is not a religious city.” Now, in this editor’s own neighborhood, there are at least three Catholic churches, two Episcopal churches, a synagogue, a congregation of Hispanic Baptists, and one of Hispanic Pentecostals. And a few blocks beyond his neighborhood, a rather famous mosque. But this editor didn’t know anyone who would attend these religious institutions; ergo, “most of us” don’t live in that world.

Before that, I worked for a fairly large paper that was particularly proud of its diversity program. I got into a peppery exchange with the newsroom executive in charge of running it. She said to me, “Don’t you think this newsroom should look like our city?” — by which she meant that it should more or less mirror the area’s race-gender-ethnicity demographic. I told her that it was more important that the newsroom represent the diversity of belief and experience in the city.

“How many conservatives do we have working here? How many Pentecostals?” I said. “You have people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds working here, you have gays, you have a lot of women — but everybody went to pretty much the same journalism schools, and as far as I can tell, everybody thinks more or less alike on most issues.”

She didn’t have an answer for that, but more to the point, I don’t think this had even occurred to her as a question worth asking. And media executives continue to wonder why they continue to lose reader confidence, and ultimately customers.

“Nicholas Kristof’s column is right on point,” says Aly Colon, diversity director at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank. “We need to be more knowledgeable about religion and faith and values so we can write about that not only accurately, but authentically.”

“It’s really what I call ‘complete journalism,’” he continues. “Too often we’re engaged in niche journalism, in which we think that covering areas of our personal interest are all that matters.”

There have been a number of studies and polls in recent years showing how dramatically different the opinions and lifestyles of the media class are from that of the people they ostensibly serve. Everybody knows that reporters at the Washington Post are very different from folks in Tulsa. But Peter Brown, an editor at the Orlando Sentinel, has done research showing that this phenomenon holds true even at the local level.

A decade ago, working with a polling firm and a market research outfit, Brown surveyed reporters in Dallas-Forth Worth, a major regional media market, and five middle-sized media markets around the country, and compared their views, values and lifestyle choices with those of their readership. “The data clearly show that journalists, although living geographically in the same markets as their readers, really do have a completely different mindset, and for the most part different values and behavior,” Brown says.

He also found that journalists were “much less likely” than people in their markets to pray daily, attend religious services regularly, or even to belong to a church or synagogue. Says Brown, “Many journalists will acknowledge that there’s a big demographic difference, but they say it doesn’t affect coverage. I don’t think that’s true.”

Brown and other critics say that bringing more Evangelicals into the newsroom not only makes journalistic sense, but business sense. “Evangelicals should make an outcry for diversity,” Mattingly says. “I’m not talking about affirmative action, but a call for bringing people with different life experiences into the newsroom.” Religious conservatives, he says, “have the information in their heads to see stories, valid journalistic stories, that need to be reported, that others will not see, stories that will help those newspapers to be more balanced, fair and competitive.”

But where are the Evangelical reporters? Mattingly, who has been teaching journalism in Evangelical colleges for years, says that there is a relative lack of interest in secular journalism among students who are also religious conservatives.

“Most of them have been raised in homes and in churches where the adults are so mad at newspapers that people don’t read them anymore. Many of them are brought up without a respect for the role that journalism is meant to play in our culture,” Mattingly says. “If you don’t have an appreciation for that, it’s hard to know what you can do about it. It’s hard to call a newsroom to accuracy and fairness if you basically hate journalism.”

When I speak to classes of Evangelical college journalists, I tell them that yes, they will face prejudice in newsrooms. But journalism is not a field for shrinking violets and people afraid to have their feelings hurt. But if you prove your mettle as a writer and reporter, you will win the respect of your peers, and open their minds. In my experience, the bias against religious conservatives in newsrooms is mostly a matter of ignorance, not outright malice.

The only interaction most journalists have with Evangelicals (and conservative Catholics too, for that matter) comes in nasty phone calls, e-mails, or letters denouncing the newspaper’s “bigotry” — often in terms that reinforce the negative stereotype newsrooms already have of religious conservatives. Rarely do editors and reporters hear from religious conservatives when they’ve done right by them.

Then again, MSNBC doesn’t seem to have learned much from a tsunami of phone calls it received from grateful Evangelicals several years back, when it was the only cable network to air live coverage of the massive Promise Keepers rally in Washington, D.C. Terry Mattingly was hired by MSNBC to do expert on-air analysis, and was present when the producers were told the switchboards were lighting up like Christmas trees with people calling to praise the coverage.

“During one of the breaks, [the host] said, ‘Aren’t there any people complaining about this? Where are our liberal callers?’” Mattingly remembers. “I leaned over and said to him, ‘You’ve just hit a big new demographic. They’re there, if you want them.”

They didn’t, apparently. Fast forward to the present day. MSNBC is in the ratings toilet. Fox, which is open to conservative voices and opinions, has them on the ropes. Lo, this past week, an unnamed MSNBC producer was quoted saying, “We don’t want people who just read the New York Times. We’ve got plenty of those types. We want people who read and understand National Review, the Drudge Report and Lucianne.com.”

Well, hallelujah. But don’t forget World, Christianity Today, and the Left Behind books too.

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Fox News scores big in war ratings (jsonline, 030413)

The ratings news is nothing but good for Fox News Channel.

Nielsen Media Research numbers show that Fox News’ morning show, “Fox & Friends,” actually beat CBS’ “Early Show” during the most recent measured week, March 31-April 6. It was a slim win: 2.9 million viewers for Fox compared with 2.8 million for CBS.

This is a crucial victory for Fox News shows in head-to-head competition with network news programming. CBS’ morning news show traditionally has been the third-ranked among the network morning programs.

It’s also a sign of the tremendous growth cable news coverage has experienced during coverage of the invasion of Iraq. The combined average audience for Fox News, CNN and MSNBC has jumped from 2 million viewers before the war to 7.4 million.

Looking at the overall cable ratings, Fox News held an incredible 36 of the top 40 spots in the rankings of basic cable, ad-supported programs, including all the top dozen spots, for the week of March 31-April 6.

Overall, the cable channels rank this way: Fox News, CNN, TNT, Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and MSNBC. The average audience for Fox News is 3.4 million households, CNN’s is 2.7 million and MSNBC’s is 1.3.

Interestingly, the top-rated cable show for the week was an episode of “The Fox Report” with Shepard Smith, a show that doesn’t run in prime time. Smith’s show pops up three times in the top-40 list.

CNN’s top-rated show was the Aaron Brown-anchored news at 9 p.m. on April 3, which came in 13th place in the rankings.

The only non-news shows that made it into the top 40 were two installments of TNN’s WWE wrestling programming.

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Survey: 93% of evangelicals distrust media (WorldNetDaily, 030429)

Shows ‘gulf of mutual suspicion’ separating them from society

Evangelical Christians in the United States regard the national media with profound distrust, according to a recent informal survey.

About 93% of the 37,000 respondents to a “Spiritual State of the Nation Survey” do not trust the media, according to Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The group said the findings are consistent with its past surveys and the recent admission of New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, who wrote “one of the deepest divides in America today is the gulf of mutual suspicion that separates evangelicals from secular society.”

Evangelicals are a group with which the news media is “completely out of touch,” said Kristof.

Secularists, he wrote, regard these devout Americans with uninterest or suspicion.

D. James Kennedy, president of Coral Ridge Ministries, said, “Kristof’s candid column only echoes what many evangelicals, myself included, have long recognized.”

“There is a cultural divide between pro-family Americans on one side and media and political elites on the other,” Kennedy said. “Too often the two sides peer at each other across the chasm with misgivings and misunderstanding.”

Kennedy said while evangelicals number 46% of the American populace, according to Gallup, “they are barely a blip on the radar of America’s political and cultural elite.”

Coral Ridge Ministries said the survey, conducted for the past 14 years, is an attempt to help bridge that gap by bringing the views of its largely evangelical constituency to journalists and government officials.

The annual write-in poll, while not scientific, provides a snapshot of evangelical opinion on a wide range of sensitive social and cultural questions, Coral Ridge said.

The survey found 98% favor school prayer, 85% want creationism taught in schools, 99% support public display of the Ten Commandments, 98% oppose “special legal rights” for homosexuals and 96% support a ban on partial-birth abortion.

About 88% said they support President Bush in the war on terrorism, and 82% trust the president.

“It is my hope,” said Dr. Kennedy, “that journalists will examine this expression of opinion from concerned pro-family Americans who very much want their voices and concerns to be both understood and represented in government and the media.”

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Results of Coral Ridge Ministries’ 14th Annual Spiritual State of the Nation Survey (Coral Ridge Ministries, 0304)

[Kwing Hung: opinion of evangelicals]

Religious Freedom Issues

1. Do you support efforts to uphold the rights of religious freedom and expression in public life? [98] Yes [0] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

2. Should pastors and others be allowed to publicly speak out against sexual sins, including homosexuality, without fear of being charged with a “hate-crime”?

[98] Yes [0] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

3. Do you support the protection of the public display of the Ten Commandments from the attacks of groups such as the ACLU?

[99] Yes [0] No [1] Undecided/No Answer

4. Should Coral Ridge Ministries continue to pray and support Chief Justice Roy Moore in his defense of the public display of the Ten Commandments?

[98] Yes [0] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

5. Should pastors be allowed to address political, moral, and social issues from their pulpits, without jeopardizing the tax-exempt status of their churches?

[98] Yes [0] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

6. Should students have the right to pray in public school classrooms?

[98] Yes [0] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

Government Issues

1. Do you agree with the President’s policies in the battle against terrorism?

[88] Yes [3] No [9] Undecided/No Answer

2. Do you agree with the ACLU’s attacks on Attorney General John Ashcroft, as his Justice Department helps protect us from terrorism?

[3] Yes [90] No [7] Undecided/No Answer

3. Should we back away from America’s traditional pro-Israel stance, in light of the hatred it engenders in the Islamic community?

[5] Yes [86] No [9] Undecided/No Answer

Media/Television Issues

1. Do you believe that the national media reports Christian, moral, and religious issues in an unbiased manner?

[4] Yes [91] No [5] Undecided/No Answer

2. Do you believe that some of the national media presents anti-Christian programming under the guise of “objectivity” and “journalism”?

[91] Yes [2] No [7] Undecided/No Answer

3. Do you support efforts to persuade advertisers and television networks to clean up “trash TV” and offer more family valued programming?

[91] Yes [0] No [1] Undecided/No Answer

Sexual Morality Issues

1. Do you support “special legal rights” for homosexuals?

[0] Yes [98] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

2. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of legalizing homosexual “marriages,” would you support a constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage?

[91] Yes [3] No [6] Undecided/No Answer

Education Issues

1. Should schools promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle?

[0] Yes [98] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

2. Should schools be required to teach evolution as a theory rather than a fact?

[81] Yes [14] No [5] Undecided/No Answer

3. Should schools teach creationism?

[85] Yes [6] No [9] Undecided/No Answer

4. Should schools teach abortion as a woman’s right to choose?

[1] Yes [96] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

5. Should schools teach about contraceptive use?

[12] Yes [75] No [14] Undecided/No Answer

6. Should schools be required to teach traditional American history—including our religious and moral heritage?

[98] Yes [0] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

National Defense

1. Do you support restoring our military strength to the level it was during the Gulf War?

[88] Yes [1] No [11] Undecided/No Answer

Family Issues

1. Do you support a ban on partial-birth abortion?

[96] Yes [2] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

2. Should parents be allowed to raise, discipline, and educate their children, free from government interference?

[94] Yes [1] No [5] Undecided/No Answer

3. Should girls under 18 be allowed to obtain abortions without parental consent?

[1] Yes [97] No [2] Undecided/No Answer

Confidence Issues

Do you trust each of the following groups? Your pastors

[84] Yes [3] No [12] Undecided/No Answer

Your local government officials

[21] Yes [46] No [33] Undecided/No Answer

Your local public school officials

[20] Yes [47] No [33] Undecided/No Answer

Your congressional representatives

[25] Yes [37] No [38] Undecided/No Answer

The President

[82] Yes [6] No [12] Undecided/No Answer

The media

[0] Yes [93] No [7] Undecided/No Answer

*Results are tallied from a random sample selected from the nearly 37,000 responses to this annual informal survey. Results do not equal 100% in all instances because of rounding. © 2003 by D. James Kennedy and Coral Ridge Ministries. All Rights Reserved. www.coralridge.org

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Study: Use of Profanity Increasing on TV (Foxnews, 030923)

LOS ANGELES — Television is cussing up an increasingly blue streak, according to a study of the major broadcast networks.

“During the 2002-2003 season, the broadcast networks attempted to rewrite the book on language standards for television,” the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group, said in a report released Monday.

The council said it studied all primetime entertainment series from a two-week period in 1998, 2000 and 2002 and found a jump in profanity on “virtually every network” and in every time slot.

The group called on the TV industry to “get serious about reducing the flood of vulgarity. ... Barring that, the FCC needs to get serious about enforcing broadcast decency laws,” the group said of the Federal Communications Commission.

The study examined ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB and UPN.

During the so-called “family hour,” from 8-9 p.m., foul language increased by 94.8% between 1998 and 2002, the study found. It rose by 109% during the 9 p.m. hour in the same period.

The smallest increase, 38.7%, occurred during the last hour of primetime, 10-11 p.m., when young children are least likely to be in the audience, the council said.

In a similar, earlier study, the PTC found that sexual content on TV was less frequent but more explicit.

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20 Years of Bias From ABC’s Peter Jennings: Summary (Media Research Center, 030910)

After sharing the top job with Frank Reynolds and Max Robinson for five years, Peter Jennings became sole anchor of World News Tonight on September 5, 1983. During the last twenty years, Jennings’ liberal tilt has been obvious — the ABC anchorman has pushed for European-style welfare programs, denigrated tax cuts, castigated Republicans as intolerant, scoffed at suggestions that Soviet communism was a threat and pushed the arguments of left-wing anti-war activists during this year’s successful war to oust Saddam Hussein.

To commemorate his 20th anniversary, the MRC presents some of the anchorman’s worst bias; many more examples are available at www.mrc.org. All quotes are from World News Tonight unless otherwise noted.

• Investigating Democrats is a poor use of resources: “When we come back, two investigations of fundraising abuse, two of them on Capitol Hill. Is it a waste of time and money?” (April 10, 1997)

• Republicans are intolerant: “We begin tonight with what you could call zero tolerance....Today by the time Mr. Dole spoke by satellite to his party delegates, who were already gathered in San Diego, all notions of tolerance on the subject of abortion had disappeared from the party’s platform.” (August 6, 1996)

• Dukakis was robbed: “There are people in the country who think George Bush won not in a landslide, but a mudslide.” (ABC’s election night coverage, Nov. 8, 1988)

• The pro-Gore Florida Supreme Court was actually conservative: “We, by the way, tried to avoid labeling people this week, but here’s a quick take on the makeup of the Florida Supreme Court. There are seven justices. Six were appointed by Democratic governors. Our legal analyst in Florida tells us that only one of the judges is considered to be a liberal. The rest are regarded as moderate to conservative.” (November 17, 2000)

• Republicans want to destroy the planet: “Next week on ABC’s World News Tonight, a series of reports about our environment which will tell you precisely what the new Congress has in mind: the most frontal assault on the environment in 25 years. Is this what the country wants?” (Promo aired during ABC’s This Week, July 9, 1995)

• Let’s copy Sweden: “Tonight we have put the best child care system in the world on the American Agenda. That is to say, the system which is acknowledged to be the best outside the home. It’s in Sweden. The Swedish system is run and paid for by the Swedish government, something many Americans would like to see the U.S. government do as well.” (Nov. 22, 1989)

Jennings lavished praise on Sweden’s government-controlled child care system.

• Let’s copy France, too: “On the American Agenda tonight, France. One of the things we have found...is how often there are lessons to be learned from other societies. It is one thing for the United States to spend less on children than almost any other country in the industrialized world. It is another to see what those countries get in return for their dollar, or in this case, their franc.” (December 3, 1991)

• But don’t waste any money on defense: “We’re going to take ‘A Closer Look’ tonight at the plans for an anti-missile defense system. The one that has never been proven to work and may never work.” (June 12, 2000)

• Tax cuts deprive government: “Mr. Bush believes in a universal tax cut, which would mean a very large chunk of money not available for government programs.” (Oct. 4, 2000)

• ...And they cause those awful deficits: “He [Treasury Secretary-designate John Snow] is said to be in favor of further tax cuts but against deficits. Doesn’t one lead to the other?” (To George Stephanopoulos, December 9, 2002)

• America is so backwards: “The United States has this unfortunate distinction: It is one of only two countries in the industrialized world, the other is South Africa, that does not guarantee basic health care for all its children.” (April 5, 1994)

• Castro’s revolution really improved Cuban life: “Medical care was once for the privileged few. Today it is available to every Cuban and it is free. Some of Cuba’s health care is world class. In heart disease, for example, in brain surgery. Health and education are the revolution’s great success stories.” (April 3, 1989)

• China isn’t communist any more: “Various Chinese tell us today that the only people who think China is a communist country now live in Washington. Today in China, for many people, it is really about the pursuit of wealth.” (June 25, 1998)

• It was silly to fear the Soviet Union: “There are some of you, I’m sure, who remember the days when we in the West were afraid that the Soviet Union would outdo the West technologically. They had been first into space. The CIA was pretty impressed, remember? And then the Soviet Union fell apart and we discovered how far behind they really were....Ah, yes, we used to take the Soviet Union so seriously.” (Story about a failed Soviet attempt to develop jet boots, July 7, 2000)

• Blix would have fixed Iraq: “So many people don’t understand why you shouldn’t let the inspections continue if they are accomplishing anything....Most people think they’re doing a reasonably effective job at the moment.” (Interviewing Colin Powell, March 7, 2003)

• Marxism for dummies: “By the way, ‘No blood for oil,’ from many people who are opposed to the war is, is not complicated at all. They believe the United States wishes to occupy Iraq in the long term to have the oil. Just so we understand why they wear those little buttons, ‘No blood for oil.’” (March 20, 2003)

• Liberation bad for sculptors: “Saddam Hussein may have been, or may be, a vain man, but he has allowed himself to be sculpted heavy and thin, overweight and in shape, in every imaginable costume....The sculpting of Saddam Hussein, which has been a growth industry for 20 years, may well be a dying art.” (During live coverage of the fall of Baghdad, as a crowd of Iraqis toppled a Saddam statue, April 9, 2003)

• Another casualty of war: free speech: “When we come back this evening, being against the war and in show business — and the people who want to punish you for that.” (April 16, 2003)

• George Stephanopoulos is scrupulously nonpartisan: “If there’s ever been a guy who’s come out of an administration, who has made a cleaner break, and proved himself as a journalist than George Stephanopoulos, I don’t know who it is.” (Radio interview with Bill O’Reilly replayed on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor, May 15, 2002)

• We have no axe to grind: “I think there is a mainstream media. CNN is mainstream media, and the main, ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media. And I think it’s just essentially to make the point that we are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least certainly not on purpose.” (CNN’s Larry King Live, May 15, 2001)

• ...But being biased is glorious: “We may tell you all the time that our principal aim in life is to communicate and assist, inform....But if you see injustice and you can get people to do something about it, ahh, it’s just a glorious feeling....There’s nothing a reporter likes more than to have an effect on policy.” (On a CBS News special, Breaking the News, August 24, 2001)

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World News Tonight With Peter Jennings: 20 Years of Liberal Bias (Media Research Center, 030910)

On September 5, 1983, Peter Jennings took the helm of ABC’s World News Tonight as its sole anchor. While based in ABC’s London bureau from 1978 to 1983, Jennings had shared anchor duties with Chicago-based Max Robinson and the Washington, D.C.-based Frank Reynolds, who was the newscast’s main anchorman until his death in July of 1983.

While his bias during the recent Iraq war was obvious, it is only the latest example of the ABC anchor’s bias. Jennings has been a reliable proponent of new European-style social welfare spending even while he has shown skepticism toward new defense spending and tax cuts. As Jennings framed it, communism was more a phantom menace than a serious threat, and he similarly whitewashed the despicable record of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, whose bombings killed more than 300 Americans in the 1980s. On the home front, he resented covering the Clinton scandals, portraying them as tedious sideshows. He billed Republicans as destructive and mean-spirited and used his newscast to tout the virtues of liberals such as Jimmy Carter, Robert Rubin, Marion Wright Edelman and Betty Friedan.

To mark his 20th anniversary at the helm of World News Tonight, we have assembled a package of Peter Jennings’ most biased episodes, including his denials that liberal bias exists.

Castigating Republicans — And the Voters Who Dare to Elect Them

The 1994 midterm elections gave Republicans a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1950s. Jennings reacted by demeaning the voters, casting the policies of the new Congress as destructive and mean-spirited, and commiserating with Bill Clinton about the public’s lack of regard for his liberal policies. He continued to rail against GOP policies, especially tax cuts, for years.

Spanking voters for electing conservatives: “Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It’s clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It’s the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week....Parenting and governing don’t have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.”

— In his daily ABC Radio commentary, November 14, 1994, after Republicans won control of Congress.

Voters didn’t give Bill Clinton enough credit: “I’d like to start, if I may, with what I think you may think is a puzzlement. You’ve reduced the deficit. You’ve created jobs. Haiti hasn’t been an enormous problem. You’ve got a crime bill with your assault weapon ban in it. You got NAFTA, you got GATT, and 50% of the people don’t want you to run again. Where’s the disconnect there?”

“Here’s another one. In our poll today, the absolute critical items for Congress to address. Number one, cutting the deficit. Number two, health care reform. The two issues which were absolute priorities for two years, and you don’t get any credit for them?”

—Two questions to President Clinton, January 5, 1995 World News Tonight.

Only naive racists support welfare reform: “The welfare debate has been getting more intense, ever since President Reagan regularly vilified what he referred to as the ‘welfare queens.’ Attitudes about people on welfare are sometimes based more on myth than reality. Most welfare mothers have only one or two children. Most welfare mothers had their first child when they were adults, not teenagers. Most people on welfare are not black.”

— World News Tonight, January 12, 1995.

Republicans want to destroy the planet: “Next week on ABC’s World News Tonight, a series of reports about our environment which will tell you precisely what the new Congress has in mind: the most frontal assault on the environment in 25 years. Is this what the country wants?”

— Jennings in a promotion shown during This Week with David Brinkley, July 9, 1995.

“[Republicans] are engaged in the most dramatic overhaul — or assault, some would say — on environmental legislation in 25 years.”

— World News Tonight, July 12, 1995.

Much better to keep punishing success: “Well, it helps to know this about a flat tax. It’s a very radical notion, and it’s not nearly so simple as it sounds....It is supposed to encourage savings and investment because profits would be tax free. But will plumbers be hurt more than plutocrats?...Certainly the rich would do better than the middle class....No Western country has ever tried to make such a seismic shift. How big will a flat tax need to be to raise the money which the government needs to run the country?”

— World News Tonight, January 15, 1996, referring to Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes’ plan for a single income tax rate.

Those intolerant Republicans: “We begin tonight with what you could call zero tolerance....Today by the time Mr. Dole spoke by satellite to his party delegates, who were already gathered in San Diego, all notions of tolerance on the subject of abortion had disappeared from the party’s platform.”

— World News Tonight, August 6, 1996.

“The right to abortion has never been an overwhelming issue for women at election time. But this fight within the Republican Party has many women questioning how far this party will go to limit their rights.”

— World News Tonight, August 13, 1996.

Tax cuts deprive government: “Mr. Bush believes in a universal tax cut, which would mean a very large chunk of money not available for government programs.”

— World News Tonight, October 4, 2000.

Ridiculing tax relief: “The President’s tax cut is beginning to show up. Will three extra dollars stimulate the national economy?”

— World News Tonight, July 8, 2003, referring to the estimated increase in one law librarian’s weekly paycheck.

Peter’s European Agenda

World News Tonight promoted liberal policy ideas in an ongoing feature segment called “American Agenda,” which was introduced shortly after the November 1988 election and continued until August 1996. When it came to health, education, and welfare, Jennings often rued that the United States was “lagging behind” the rest of the “industrialized world” in creating a palette of cradle-to-grave social services and employer mandates. The answer to any social problem was usually more taxes, more spending, and tighter rules to keep evil businesses from ripping off the public.

Let’s copy Sweden: “Tonight we have put the best child care system in the world on the American Agenda. That is to say, the system which is acknowledged to be the best outside the home. It’s in Sweden. The Swedish system is run and paid for by the Swedish government, something many Americans would like to see the U.S. government do as well.”

— World News Tonight, November 22, 1989. Jennings lavished praise on Sweden’s government-controlled child care system.

Hungry kids vs. White House greed: “Twelve million American children who do not have enough to eat, who lack adequate health care, and who are behind in schools and being left behind in life. Much of our broadcast will be dedicated to that, which makes the major news in Washington today seem even more of a contrast. The President’s Chief of Staff, John Sununu, is at the center of attention again, having to do with his use of limousines and corporate jets.”

— World News Tonight, June 18, 1991.

Poverty is a national disaster: “When you get close to the poor, you recognize right away that very often the level of assistance which they get from government doesn’t lift them up to the legal poverty line, let alone above it, which seems to say your congressmen and your state legislators have failed to recognize that children and families in poverty are a national disaster. In your name, they often argue about other priorities and welfare cheats. Twelve million American children who cheat.”

— World News Tonight, June 20, 1991.

Let’s copy France: “On the American Agenda tonight, France. One of the things we have found with every subject we address on the Agenda...is how often there are lessons to be learned from other societies. It is one thing for the United States to spend less on children than almost any other country in the industrialized world. It is another to see what those countries get in return for their dollar, or in this case, their franc.”

— World News Tonight, December 3, 1991.

America is so backwards: “The United States has this unfortunate distinction: It is one of only two countries in the industrialized world, the other is South Africa, that does not guarantee basic health care for all its children. “

— World News Tonight, April 5, 1994.

Really, we have to be more like the Europeans: “Those who argue for universal coverage very often make the point that the U.S. is practically alone in the industrialized world without it. Thirty million people without health insurance in the U.S. — compare that to Europe and Japan....In the great debate over universal coverage, a good many Americans believe it comes down to choices between haves and have-nots.”

— World News Tonight, July 26, 1994.

Millions hate deregulation: “We begin tonight with something to think about later this evening. You’re at home or in the office or the car, and you go to make a phone call. What do you think the chances are that when you do, you’re going to be ripped off by the phone company? There are millions of complaints in this age of deregulation, millions. And it’s a big enough problem for Congress to take up tomorrow.”

— World News Tonight, April 23, 1998.

We’re the “least generous” in saddling employers with new mandates: “The U.S. is actually the least generous of the industrialized nations. In Sweden, a new mother gets 18 months of maternity and parental leave, and she gets 80% of her salary for the first year. Mother or father can take the parental leave any time until a child is eight. England gives 18 weeks maternity leave. For the first six weeks, a mother gets 90% of her salary from the government and $86 a week thereafter. German women get two months of fully paid leave after giving birth. The government and the company kick in, and either parent has the option of three full years in parental leave with some of their salary paid and their jobs protected.”

— World News Tonight, April 19, 2001.

Price controls for prescriptions, now: “The pharmaceutical industry’s products have saved and improved millions of lives, but overall, are we getting our money’s worth? We do not believe so....The rules by which this hugely profitable industry operates do not always serve consumers adequately, and nothing is going to happen – no matter how angry consumers get – unless the Congress and the President decide that the time has come. The country can do better.”

— Peter Jennings Reporting, “Bitter Medicine: Pills, Profit and the Public Health,” May 29, 2002.

Our Overfed Defense

Jennings’ generosity with other people’s money did not extend to the defense budget — especially in his analysis of the proposed national missile defense system.

Let’s reverse those budget totals: “And yet, Congresswoman Schneider, in 1989, fiscal 1989 as we say in America, the Environmental Protection Agency got 5.1 billion dollars and the Defense Department got 290 billion dollars. What’s that tell us about our priorities?”

— From ABC’s September 12, 1989 news special, Capital to Capital.

Don’t waste money on bombers: “But if America wanted to go back to the Moon, it would take three years to get ready again. It might cost $10 billion to send men to Mars, which by the way is what it cost to produce just four of the nine B-2 bombers that Congress wants and the Pentagon says it does not need.”

— World News Tonight, December 12, 1997.

Let’s not be optimists: “We’re going to take ‘A Closer Look’ tonight at the plans for an anti-missile defense system. The one that has never been proven to work and may never work.”

— World News Tonight, June 12, 2000.

There’s a fire in your e-mail: “There is a little skepticism in the air here today. Some cynicism, too. The government has an idea of how to spend $50 billion of your money. That’s BILLION. It will be spent on building a system to safeguard the national security – but by the government’s own assessment it will probably not be foolproof, it will unnerve America’s allies, and in the end it may cost considerably MORE than $50 billion. A more critical assessment is that this system can never be made to work, that it will torpedo the basis of all arms control arrangements, and that in any event, any terrorist or ‘rogue nation’ that means to wreak havoc on U.S. soil can do so in ways that this system will not prevent.”

— From the anchorman’s Jennings Journal e-mail to viewers, May 1, 2001.

A liberal disclaimer: “One other note. Critics often object to the animation in news reports because the animation usually has the systems working.”

— On World News Tonight, May 1, 2001, as ABC graphics showed how an anti-missile defense system would destroy incoming warheads.

Jennings’ Liberal Hero of the Week

From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, World News Tonight celebrated heroes each Friday — political leaders, athletes, actors and anonymous do-gooders — by naming them the “Person of the Week.” The MRC documented the bias of this regular ABC News feature in 1992 and again in 1994.

Feminism helps us all (except maybe the unborn): “And, so we choose Betty Friedan because she had the ability and the sensitivity to articulate the needs of women, which means that she did us all a favor.”

— World News Tonight’s “Person of the Week,” February 19, 1988.

Carter “renewed respect” for America: “The person we have chosen this week has continued his life with distinction, considerable grace, and with a very strong commitment to peace and justice....In the public’s mind, the scales were never balanced. [Former President Jimmy] Carter’s success in foreign affairs — peace between Egypt and Israel, renewed respect for the United States in Latin America — have always been outweighed in the public mind by the hostage crisis.”

— World News Tonight’s “Person of the Week,” May 12, 1989.

Marian Wright Edelman loves children: “[She’s] always on Congress’s back for coming up with too little money....From her point of view, as you hear, it is a matter of the whole country’s future. The children are fortunate to have such an advocate.”

— Making the head of the Children’s Defense Fund the “Person of the Week,” World News Tonight, March 29, 1991.

Blessed are the federal regulators: “This week we have chosen a man who has appeared on our radar many times, for many reasons, a man who makes an enormous difference because he takes his public service so seriously...It is always the children for David Kessler. Dr. Kessler was trained as a pediatrician...All of this has made David Kessler something of a folk hero. Sometimes in Washington they call him ‘Eliot Nessler,’ after Eliot Ness, who fought the mob during the ‘30s...He conducts himself as the people’s guardian in matters of food and drugs with the utmost conviction.”

— Making the chairman of the Food and Drug Administration the “Person of the Week,” World News Tonight, June 24, 1994.

Still More of Jennings’s Liberal Heroes

Jennings did not confine his praise for liberals to Fridays, and his penchant for promoting liberal activists continued long after ABC cancelled its “Person of the Week” segment.

Courage to make you pay up: “When he entered the race nearly a year ago, he [Democratic presidential candidate Bruce Babbitt] had the courage to say that as President he would probably have to raise taxes. And he never recovered from his courage.”

— World News Tonight, February 18, 1988.

The fingers, the palms, even the thumb: “He’s become a little more disciplined, Bill Clinton, but you know he loves a crowd. And he has, don’t want to get carried away here, but he has the kind of hands that people respond to.”

— During ABC’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention, July 15, 1992.

Try to overlook Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and weirdness: “It would be astonishing if this public performance of Farrakhan were to end or even minimize the controversy which he inspires in the country as a whole, but it would be a terrible mistake not to recognize that here today, he inspired many people, and in a broader sense, as one participant after another has reaffirmed, this day, at this time and this place, really did mean unity over division.”

— Reporting on the so-called “Million Man March” for the October 16, 1995 World News Tonight.

Clinton surrounded himself with geniuses: “Good evening. The man who presided over the best economy in a generation is going back to private life. The Secretary of the Treasury, Bob Rubin, who said today that he really was resigning, has been described in such glowing terms that he’d begun to sound indispensable. All sorts of people today, including the President, have called him the best Treasury Secretary since Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Secretary in 1789 and did an enormous amount to put the United States on firm financial footing.”

— World News Tonight, May 12, 1999.

Bill’s indispensable life partner: “He’s leaving the greatest thing in his life, and you are about to meet the challenge of the biggest thing, certainly, in your political life. What if he needs you?”

— To First Lady and New York Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on Good Morning America, August 15, 2000.

Jimmy Carter’s greatness: “It was a great day for Jimmy Carter. The former President heard early this morning that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Carter was President from 1977 to 1981. He is the least popular President in the period after World War II. In the mid-1990s, on the other hand, he was occasionally introduced as the only man who has ever used the presidency as a stepping stone to greatness.”

— World News Tonight, October 11, 2002.

What Clinton Scandals?

Jennings routinely presented the many Clinton scandals as dastardly inconveniences that get in the way of American progress. He felt Bill Clinton’s pain when the joy of being President was ruined.

Dick Morris ruined Bill’s convention moment: “Here in Chicago, the President has been fine tuning, as they say, the speech he will be giving to this convention and to the country tonight, and he has a lot to be pleased about: A very upbeat convention, a very successful train trip here with rising poll numbers to accompany it, and a very important set of statistics about the economy today, which he will certainly point to as evidence that the country should re-elect him. And then along comes a nasty little scandal to take the edge off the good news, at least for one day.”

— On World News Tonight, August 29, 1996, referring to disclosure of the Clinton campaign adviser’s relationship with a prostitute.

Hearings into scandal aren’t a good use of resources: “When we come back, two investigations of fundraising abuse, two of them on Capitol Hill. Is it a waste of time and money?”

— World News Tonight, April 10, 1997.

The sooner they’re over, the better:

Linda Douglass: “It’s clear that many of the Senators now want to defuse the partisan warfare and get this whole messy issue behind them.”

Peter Jennings: “That will be a relief to the public.”

— World News Tonight, September 9, 1997.

Looking for an excuse to ignore Monicagate: “We know from just answering the phone around here that the amount of attention we are giving this story is, at the very least, debatable. We in the news [business]....are devoting major time and resources to these events, but have we been carried away, are we doing too much and are we not being fair?”

— On World News Tonight, January 23, 1998, just two days after the Monica Lewinsky story broke.

We’re the pro-Clinton clique: “Mandy, who do you think is now going to carry the water, briefly, for the anti-Clinton clique in the country or the anti-Clinton people in the country?”

— To Democratic consultant Mandy Grunwald on World News Tonight, April 1, 1998, after a judge dismissed Paula Jones’ sexual harassment suit against Clinton.

Clinton’s accuser is icky: “I certainly won’t go out of my way to say hi to her.”

— On Paula Jones’ presence at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, as quoted in the April 27, 1998 Washington Post.

Finding the heart of America: “Good evening. We begin tonight with the voice of the people heard from the Senate gallery today during yet another procedural vote at the President’s impeachment trial....’God almighty,’ the man said, ‘take the vote and get it over with.’ He was arrested, — that’s him in the beard, slightly balding, on the right. He may think it was worth it, speaking as he does for so many Americans, whether they believe the President should be convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice or not. The best that we can say tonight is they are getting there.”

— World News Tonight, February 4, 1999.

Another nightmare has ended:

Peter Jennings: “But just so that you don’t terrify people altogether, Jeffrey, this is going to be the last of the Senate impeachment trial this week, as far as we know.”

Jeffrey Toobin: “That’s right. This national nightmare is over. We’ll see if there’s another one.”

— ABC News live coverage of President Clinton’s impeachment trial, February 8, 1999.

Another Clinton moment ruined: “I gather that the Independent Counsel must have been hitting these people with a sledgehammer in the final days of the presidency....His critics will not be disappointed to see this happen, and his enemies too. Nonetheless, it’s a very sad, almost tragic way for the President to spend his last day in office.”

— During ABC’s live coverage of an announced deal between President Clinton and Independent Counsel Robert Ray, January 19, 2001.

Who’s Afraid of Communism?

Peter Jennings never seemed bothered by the threat to America from communism and Soviet expansionism. His philosophy seemed to match Strobe Talbott’s line in Time on January 1, 1990: “Gorbachev is helping the West by showing that the Soviet threat isn’t what it used to be — and what’s more, that it never was.” Instead, Jennings explained how communist countries could provide Americans with lessons in social advancement.

Castro’s communist success story: “Medical care was once for the privileged few. Today it is available to every Cuban and it is free. Some of Cuba’s health care is world class. In heart disease, for example, in brain surgery. Health and education are the revolution’s great success stories.”

— World News Tonight, April 3, 1989.

The KGB is more open than the CIA: “A brief report from the Soviet Union today to match the extraordinary times. Can you imagine five CIA agents answering the public’s questions during a live television show? Not likely. In the Soviet Union today, television viewers had the unheard of opportunity to ask questions of five KGB agents on a show broadcast live nationwide. Here’s one example. One listener asked, ‘Don’t we have too many secrets?’ ‘Yes,’ replied an agent, ‘and some stupid ones.’”

— World News Tonight, November 2, 1989.

The communists win again: “For the Bush administration and the Reagan administration before it, the [ABC News/Washington Post] poll hints at a simple truth: after years of trying to get rid of the Sandinistas, there is not much to show for their efforts.”

— World News Tonight, February 20, 1990, five days before the Sandinistas were voted out of power.

The Russian people really loved their dictator: “Suddenly, from about half the way across the square, I heard this, ‘Peter, Peter, come, I want you to meet some people.’ And he [Mikhail Gorbachev] plunged into this crowd and it was, again, impressionistic, right? But it was clear to me that in touching these people...it was clear that he wanted us to see that here were people who on a one-to-one basis really felt positively about him.”

— Nightline, July 29, 1991.

China isn’t communist anymore: “Various Chinese tell us today that the only people who think China is a communist country now live in Washington. Today in China, for many people, it is really about the pursuit of wealth.”

— World News Tonight, June 25, 1998.

Really, China isn’t communist: “Finally this evening, part history and part myth. It was 50 years ago this week that the People’s Republic of China came into being, Mao Tse-Tung its founding father. China’s going all out to celebrate the triumphs of the communist revolution and ignore its failures. And all the ceremony will also ignore the fact that China, today, is hardly a communist country.”

— World News Tonight, September 29, 1999.

Missing the old dictatorships: “It is probably hard for most Americans to imagine anyone feeling nostalgic about living behind the Wall. It may also be hard to imagine that anyone in the Western part of Germany would miss the Wall either. But miss it, some people do.”

— Introducing a Berlin Wall story on the November 9, 1999 World News Tonight.

The civilized solution is to send Elian back to Cuba: “Good evening. In Miami today, immigration officials met with the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez again, and once again the government has failed to get the kind of cooperation from the relatives that might allow the case of this young boy to end in a civilized manner that is best for him.”

— World News Tonight, March 28, 2000.

The “civilized” way to end the Elian Gonzalez stand-off, Jennings argued, was to send him back to the communists.

There’s no simple answer in choosing between the U.S. and Cuba: “Beyond the questions of custody, the Cuban-American community in Miami has always argued, almost every day in fact, that Elian Gonzalez would have a better life here in the United States than in Cuba. It’s been argued before, and there’s not a simple answer.”

— World News Tonight, April 12, 2000.

The Soviets were more silly than serious: “There are some of you, I’m sure, who remember the days when we in the West were afraid that the Soviet Union would outdo the West technologically. They had been first into space. The CIA was pretty impressed, remember? And then the Soviet Union fell apart and we discovered how far behind they really were — not that they weren’t trying....Ah, yes, we used to take the Soviet Union so seriously.”

— World News Tonight item about a failed Soviet plan to equip soldiers and police with jet-powered boots, July 7, 2000.

Mourning an American extremist: “We missed the death of a notable American this week, so we want to catch up. Gus Hall actually died on Friday. The son of a Minnesota miner became head of the U.S. Communist Party at the height of anti-communist McCarthyism in the late ‘40s and ‘50s. He spent eight years in prison and a lifetime in the political wilderness for his views here, but he was a dignitary in the Soviet Union. Even after his friends there abandoned the cause, Hall never wavered, and he was 90.”

— World News Tonight, October 17, 2000.

Jennings tribute to American communist radical Gus Hall, who “never wavered” in his beliefs.

Blame America First

After the September 11th terrorist attacks, all of the anchors gave viewers fair and even-handed coverage, but Jennings was the first to revert to liberal form: Adversarial coverage of U.S. actions and U.S. policies, and less judgmental coverage of tyrants and terrorists. During the war in Afghanistan, World News Tonight gave far more airtime than the other broadcast networks to Taliban claims of massive civilian casualties that Jennings and his team could not verify, and which ABC reporter Jim Wooten later commendably debunked as inflated enemy propaganda.

American food is just propaganda: “One other item about these food and medicine drops. They’re not popular with everyone. The international relief organization Doctors Without Borders, which won the Nobel Peace Prize for relief work, described it today as military propaganda designed to justify the bombing. The Bush administration points out it also has committed $300 million in other aid. It’s a question, ultimately, of getting it there.”

— World News Tonight, October 8, 2001.

Demanding immediate results: “The Secretary of Defense said today that those people who are questioning the effectiveness of the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan are too impatient, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said much the same thing. The Pentagon is being pressed harder to be specific about what it has accomplished so far. The bombing campaign against the Taliban is now entering its fourth week, and the Taliban are still standing.”

— World News Tonight, October 29, 2001, two weeks before the Taliban fled the Afghan capital of Kabul.

“Insular” Americans need enlightening: “It isn’t just about campaigning against terrorism around the world. That’s just too simple. There are a lot of root causes for dissatisfaction around the world, and I think for the country to exercise real global leadership, when globalization in itself is kind of complicated, it’s not just American business or selling American culture around the world. I think it’s a very big challenge for a leader to get us all engaged in that because, you know, Americans are pretty insular people for the most part.”

— On CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman, December 21, 2001.

One Man’s Terrorist Is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter

Even as the U.S. fought a war against terrorism, Jennings went out of his way to hide the anti-American crimes of Hezbollah, a Palestinian independence group that killed more than 300 Americans in the 1980s with car bomb attacks against the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.

Touting a terrorist’s denials while concealing their crimes: “It is Hezbollah, which means ‘The Party of God,’ that gets credit for liberating Lebanon from the long Israeli occupation. Yesterday, I went to see its 38-year-old leader, Hassan Nasrallah. He is a popular member of the political establishment. The Bush administration says Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. ‘Hezbollah was proud to resist the Israeli occupation,’ he says. ‘We gave our lives. We are not terrorists.’”

— In a report from Beirut, Lebanon, for the March 27, 2002 World News Tonight.

Disguising Hezbollah’s guilt, Jennings said only “a man” attacked the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in 1983.

“Today [the site of the former American embassy in Lebanon] is an empty lot. This is where the U.S. experienced the first suicide bomber. In 1983 a man simply drove his truck to the front door and blew himself up. Sixty-three people died. Later that year, the Marine barracks here were destroyed in much the same way; 241 Marines died.”

— Later in the same report, failing to state that Hezbollah was responsible for both anti-American attacks.

Only the government’s opinion? “In North Carolina, two men went on trial for smuggling cigarettes to allegedly help the group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the government calls a terrorist organization. Their lawyer says it will be extremely hard to find an impartial jury.”

— World News Tonight, May 20, 2002.

Opposition to Iraq

Jennings displayed an antagonistic attitude towards’ Bush’s Iraq policies for months prior to the actual start of the second Gulf War in March, 2003. Even after the rapid collapse of the Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, Jennings — more than any other news anchor — highlighted setbacks and scolded the military for its mistakes, leading to at least one embarrassing retraction.

Beating the war drums: “Wherever you live in the world today, the sound of war drums being beaten in Washington has become unmistakable. With the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks behind us...the administration’s preoccupation with Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction has rapidly become the number one issue in international affairs.”

— ABC’s live coverage of President Bush’s speech to the United Nations, September 12, 2002.

Unlike Republicans, Saddam funds the arts: “This week we were surprised to see several hundred artists and writers walking through the streets of Baghdad to say thank you to Saddam Hussein. He had just increased their monthly financial support. Cynical, you could argue with this particular time, but the state has always supported the arts, and some of the most creative people in the Arab world have always been Iraqis. And whatever they think about Saddam Hussein in the privacy of their homes, on this occasion they were praising his defense of the homeland in the face of American threats.”

— Reporting from Baghdad on World News Tonight, January 21, 2003.

Bush is spoiling for war: “The UN weapons inspectors go back to Baghdad this weekend. They have not been happy with Iraqi cooperation so far. We’ll see if the Iraqis do any better — and if that means anything to the Bush administration.”

— World News Tonight, February 7, 2003.

The U.N. can solve this: “So many people don’t understand why you shouldn’t let the inspections continue if they are accomplishing anything.”

“Most people think they’re doing a reasonably effective job at the moment.”

“Mr. Secretary, many people think that your dismissal again today of the inspection process is because your administration keeps moving the goal post, that it is not just about disarming Saddam Hussein. It is, as the President says, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein.”

— To Secretary of State Colin Powell in a World News Tonight interview, March 7, 2003.

Looking Forward to a Long War:

Pentagon reporter John McWethy: “As the U.S. begins to really squeeze Baghdad, U.S. intelligence sources are saying that some of Saddam Hussein’s toughest security forces are now apparently digging in, apparently willing to defend their city block by block. This could be, Peter, a long war.”

Peter Jennings: “As many people had anticipated.”

— World News Tonight, April 4, 2003.

A sad day for sculptors: “Saddam Hussein may have been, or may be, a vain man, but he has allowed himself to be sculpted heavy and thin, overweight and in shape, in every imaginable costume — both national, in historic terms, in Iraqi historic terms — in contemporary, in every imaginable uniform, on every noble horse. The sculpting of Saddam Hussein, which has been a growth industry for 20 years, may well be a dying art.”

— ABC’s live coverage of the fall of Baghdad, as a crowd of Iraqis toppled a Saddam statue, April 9, 2003.

Curious about Saddam’s sensitive side: “This is not, as you heard so many times today, the end of the war. But it is an occasion to wonder, as we sometimes do, did Saddam Hussein ever understand what people thought about him? Did he care? I’m Peter Jennings.”

— Concluding an ABC News special after the fall of Baghdad, April 9, 2003.

Oil-obsessed America neglected to save civilization: “The country has been a living archive of man’s earliest history, where real connections can be made between then and now, which is why the Pentagon is being so widely criticized for not protecting the history when it captured the capital city....The Pentagon has said, in reply, look, this is war, and stuff happens, the U.S. was fired on from the museum grounds. Not a satisfactory answer for people who say that if the U.S. managed to protect the Ministry of Oil, why not this repository of civilization? Why, they ask, is neglect forgivable?”

— World News Tonight, April 18, 2003.

On second thought: “The looting at the national museum may not have been as extensive as some people first reported. A Marine colonel who’s been investigating tells us today that hundreds of items have been recovered from smugglers, Iraqis have returned items they may have had for safekeeping, other pieces have been found in the rubble, and it turns out that many pieces were removed before the war. Twenty-seven so-called ‘significant pieces’ were stolen, some of them priceless, but those who said that more than 150,000 items were looted appear to be wrong.”

— World News Tonight, May 1, 2003.

Promoting anti-war protesters

When the far left would shout against U.S. military intervention — during both the first and second Gulf Wars — Jennings made sure anti-war protesters were presented as a credible, reasonable, patriotic opposition group, downplaying any extremism or anti-Americanism that emanated from them. Jennings portrayed those who dissented from the anti-war line as chilling opponents of free speech.

Pleading for understanding: “At every anti-war demonstration, they carry the flag high to make the point, they say, that American troops in the Gulf have their support. They object to the government policy that sent the troops there.”

— World News Tonight, February 7, 1991.

Won’t someone make the anti-war protesters’ case?

Peter Jennings: “I suppose it makes sense that the time for debating the war or the future of the campaign is completely over.”

Democratic Senator Joe Biden: “Completely over....”

Jennings: “Let me ask you this, then. There are still a large number of people in the country who are opposed to this, realize they cannot stand it, but look to members of the Democratic Party, particularly, to sort of be their port in a storm, their place to manifest their dissatisfaction. What happens to them at the moment?”

— Exchange during ABC’s live war coverage, March 20, 2003.

Marxism for dummies: “By the way, ‘No blood for oil,’ from many people who are opposed to the war is, is not complicated at all. They believe the United States wishes to occupy Iraq in the long term to have the oil. Just so we understand why they wear those little buttons, ‘No blood for oil.’”

— World News Tonight, March 20, 2003.

The right to free speech has been cancelled: “When we come back this evening, being against the war and in show business — and the people who want to punish you for that.”

— Previewing an upcoming segment on World News Tonight, April 16, 2003.

What Liberal Media Bias?

While Jennings has occasionally commented that conservatives have not received enough attention in the “objective” press, more often he has dismissed the claims of liberal media bias.

We have no axe to grind: “I think there is a mainstream media. CNN is mainstream media, and the main, ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media. And I think it’s just essentially to make the point that we are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least certainly not on purpose.”

— On CNN’s Larry King Live, May 15, 2001.

We were very tough on Clinton: “We all have baggage, but one of the good things about journalists is that they recognize bias and work hard to keep it out of their coverage....You can have all sorts of people who voted for Bill Clinton, but the media gave Clinton one hell of a time. Now we hear a lot from people who complain that we don’t give George Bush as hard a time as we gave Bill Clinton.”

— As quoted in the Miami Herald, March 17, 2002.

George Stephanopoulos is scrupulously nonpartisan: “If there’s ever been a guy who’s come out of an administration, who has made a cleaner break, and proved himself as a journalist than George Stephanopoulos, I don’t know who it is.”

— Radio interview with Bill O’Reilly replayed on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor, May 15, 2002.

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20 Years On the CBS Evening News: Dan Rather’s Outrageous Liberal Bias (Media Research Center, 030910)

Dan Rather replaced Walter Cronkite as anchor of the then-top rated CBS Evening News on March 9, 1981. Since then, his on-air liberal bias has become the stuff of legend. For Rather’s 20th anniversary in 2001, the MRC compiled some of Rather’s most quotable bias, along with illustrations of his nearly-nonsensical “Ratherisms” and his equally-comical denials of liberal bias. As ABC’s Peter Jennings and NBC’s Tom Brokaw reached their 20th anniversaries in 2003, Rather was still on CBS each night, a longtime liberal advocate masquerading as a journalist.

30 Straight Years of NASA Cuts: “There’s certainly been talk that in recent years that Congress’s attitude and, for that matter, the attitude of a succession of Presidents beginning with President Nixon, running through Carter, Reagan, Bush first and President Clinton and now President George W. Bush, there’s been more cost cutting that has resulted in safety cutting.”

— CBS’s live coverage on February 4, 2003 of a memorial for Columbia’s crew. Moments later, CBS space expert Bill Harwood corrected Rather, pointing out that “after Challenger, the budgets really ramped up.”

Dan’s Distorted Poll Reporting: “The President calls the tax cut necessary. Democrats call it a campaign for the wealthy. So far, it’s a problematic sell for the President. In a CBS News/New York Times poll out tonight, less than half the respondents thought the Bush tax cut would actually help the economy.”

— May 13, 2003 CBS Evening News. Rather failed to report that the poll he cited showed twice as many said tax cuts would help the economy (41%) than said new tax cuts would hurt (19%).

Bush’s Partisan Stance on Global Warming: “President Bush has been criticized at home and abroad for pulling out of the international treaty to curb global warming, the Kyoto Treaty. Now, CBS’s John Roberts reports, conservationists, environmentalists and some others are taking the President to task for what they say was the cynical changing of a major report on global warming. They say it was altered to put hardball partisan politics over hard independent science.”

— CBS Evening News, June 19, 2003.

Campaigning Against Free Speech: “In tonight’s Eye on America, CBS gives you an in-depth look at the sudden revival of congressional interest in legislation that’s been killed more times than Dracula: Legislation for serious campaign finance reform. In the wake of the Enron fiasco, will Congress finally put its votes where its mouth is?”

— CBS Evening News, January 25, 2002.

“Honest” Bill Revisited: “I think the fact that someone has told a lie, even a big lie or maybe several big lies over a lifetime, does not mean that they’re an inherently dishonest person....I believe in redemption and that Bill Clinton – is he an honest person? I think he is an honest person. Did he lie? Yes, he lied, and on those occasions he was dishonest.”

— Appearing on the Feb. 7, 2002 Imus in the Morning radio show defending his comment from May 15, 2001 on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor that Clinton was “an honest man” and that “you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”

Cheering Anti-Free Speech Law: “On Capitol Hill, it took seven years, but the shame of Enron finally got Congress to pass a campaign finance reform bill today. The legislation bans soft money, the unregulated special interest donations to national political parties. But it doubles the allowable hard money with donations to individual candidates now to be capped at $2,000.”

— CBS Evening News, March 20, 2002.

Rather’s Rather Ridiculous Rant: “It’s an obscene comparison, and I’m not sure I like it, but there was a time, in South Africa, where people would put flaming tires around peoples’ necks if they dissented. And in some ways, the fear is that you’ll be necklaced here, you’ll have the flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often. And again, I’m humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism.”

— Appearing on the BBC’s Newsnight program, May 16, 2002.

Ashcroft Saved Himself & Let Others Fly in Harm’s Way: “Increasingly, there are important questions that need to be asked...For example, the Attorney General of the United States before, just before September 11th, started inexplicably taking private aircraft to places where normally the Attorney General wouldn’t take private aircraft, you know, government planes. Well, that would indicate that somebody somewhere was getting pretty worried, but if you’re going to share that with the Attorney General, you know, why wasn’t it shared with the public at large?”

— On the Imus in the Morning radio program, simulcast on MSNBC, May 22, 2002.

Reality Check:

“There was a personal threat assessment done by security agencies at Justice, and it was determined that since John Ashcroft is such a polarizing figure, that the threat assessment against him would be high, and that shortly after he was sworn in, he started taking government planes all the time. It was recommended for his own security....It had nothing at all to do with any terrorist threat.”

— NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski later on the same program.

Pushing For More Spending: “Senior Americans who saw retirement savings evaporate in the Wall Street meltdown have another financial headache now. It turns out it was all talk and no action with the President and Congress again today on passing any version of Medicare prescription drug coverage.”

— CBS Evening News, July 23, 2002.

Bush’s Anti-Uniter Cabinet: “When you nominate someone to be Attorney General... who you know is going to raise questions, rightly or wrongly, justifiably or otherwise about race relations, quote ‘a hardline stance on a woman’s right to choose’ on abortion; when you appoint somebody, nominate someone, to be head of the Interior Department who says, ‘Listen, it’s alright for people who own private land to pollute,’ I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. I am saying that a lot are going to say, ‘Wait a minute, this is not uniter-divider country.’”

— Jan. 15, 2001 Late Show with David Letterman.

Clinton and Bush Abortion Executive Order Contrasts: “This was President Bush’s first day at the office and he did something to quickly please the right flank in his party: He re-instituted an anti-abortion policy that had been in place during his father’s term and the Reagan presidency but was lifted during the Clinton years.”

— Jan. 22, 2001.

Versus: “On the anniversary of Roe versus Wade President Clinton fulfills a promise, supporting abortion rights....It was 20 years ago today, the United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark abortion rights ruling, and the controversy hasn’t stopped since. Today, with the stroke of a pen, President Clinton delivered on his campaign promise to cancel several anti-abortion regulations of the Reagan-Bush years.”

— Jan. 22, 1993.

Treating Liberal Spin as Fact: “President Bush tonight outlines his cut-federal-programs-to-get-a-tax-cut plan to Congress and the nation. Democrats will then deliver their televised response, which basically says Mr. Bush’s ideas are risky business, endangering among other things, Social Security and Medicare.”

— February 27, 2001.

Choosing Cash Over Clean Air: “President Bush insisted today that he was not caving in to big money contributors, big-time lobbyists, and overall industry pressure when he broke a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. But the air was thick today with accusations from people who believe that’s exactly what happened.”

— CBS Evening News, March 14, 2001.

Kids Sacrificed for Big Tax Cuts: “On Capitol Hill, the Republican-controlled House voted mostly along party lines tonight to pass President Bush’s federal budget blueprint. This includes his big tax cut plan, partly bankrolled, critics say, through cuts in many federal aid programs for children and education.”

— CBS Evening News, March 28, 2001.

Another Environmental Rollback: “President Bush is ordering another rollback, another reversal in U.S. environmental policy. This time it amounts to abandoning support for an international treaty designed to reduce emissions linked to global warming. CBS’s John Roberts has more about the heat this is generating, environmental and political.”

— CBS Evening News, March 28, 2001.

Rather: Clinton “An Honest Man”

Bill O’Reilly: “I want to ask you flat out, do you think President Clinton’s an honest man?”

Dan Rather: “Yes, I think he’s an honest man.”

O’Reilly: “Do you, really?”

Rather: “I do.”

O’Reilly: “Even though he lied to Jim Lehrer’s face about the Lewinsky case?”

Rather: “Who among us has not lied about something?”

O’Reilly: “Well, I didn’t lie to anybody’s face on national television. I don’t think you have, have you?”

Rather: “I don’t think I ever have. I hope I never have. But, look, it’s one thing – “

O’Reilly: “How can you say he’s an honest guy then?”

Rather: “Well, because I think he is. I think at core he’s an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing anybody would say so, but I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”

— Exchange on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, May 15, 2001.

“Uncle Cheney” Really In Charge:

Rather: “I think by any reasonable analysis that George Bush is off to a pretty good start with his presidency.”

David Letterman: “You were pleased with how he handled the situation in China? You thought that went alright?”

Rather: “I’m pausing only because you said ‘the way he handled it.’ I’m not sure he handled it because, remember you have Uncle Cheney who runs an awful lot of things around there. No, I think that was handled very steadily. He pulled some good people around him. But now comes the difficult part: the stands he’s taken on the environment; his tax program, the details of which we do not yet know – all of these things have gotten him a reputation, justifiably or not, of running an administration that’s further to the right than most people expected.”

— Exchange on CBS’s Late Show, June 7, 2001.

CBS’s “Dumb-Ass” Anchorman: “Look, we’ve made mistakes in the past. Somebody wrote in the paper the other day that I was, quote, ‘boneheaded.’ Well, of course, it’s a matter of record I’m boneheaded, said, ‘well, this is bizarre.’ Well, of course I’m bizarre, you know, we’ve known that for a long time...Somebody, I don’t know if he put it exactly this way, but he said, ‘well, you know, it’s a dumb-ass thing he’s doing.’ Well, you know, I’ve been a dumb-ass all my life.”

— On the July 19, 2001 Imus in the Morning discussing his refusal to cover the scandal surrounding Democratic Congressman Gary Condit until his weekday CBS Evening News aired a single story on July 18.

I Can’t Figure This Out, So Go Buy a Paper: “Obviously, this is a very complicated subject. It’s the kind of subject that, frankly, radio and television have some difficulty with because it requires such depth into the complexities of it. So we can with, I think, impunity recommend that if you’re really interested in this you’ll want to read in detail one of the better newspapers tomorrow. This has been a CBS News Special Report.”

— Concluding CBS’s coverage of President Bush’s August 9, 2001 stem cell speech after only 53 seconds of analysis right before his network aired Big Brother 2.

Bush “Hard Right” Too: “Now to Bill Whitaker covering George W. Bush’s talking the right talk, as in Republican hard right, to try to take out Steve Forbes in Iowa and focus on eliminating John McCain in New Hampshire.”

— January 23, 2000.

Pushing Gun Control: “President Clinton met today with congressional leaders, pushing them for new gun control laws in response to more shocking gun violence. It’s been a week since a six-year-old Michigan girl was shot dead by another six-year-old. As CBS’s Diana Olick reports, the little girl’s death has many wondering what, if anything, more can be done and asking why Congress hasn’t done anything for months.”

— March 7, 2000.

Castro Cares about Cubans: “While Fidel Castro, and certainly justified on his record, is widely criticized for a lot of things, there is no question that Castro feels a very deep and abiding connection to those Cubans who are still in Cuba and, I recognize this might be controversial, but there’s little doubt in my mind that Fidel Castro was sincere when he said, ‘Listen, we really want this child back here.’”

— CBS News live coverage of the Elian raid, April 22, 2000.

Gee, Thanks Dan: “You may want to note that Cheney is referring to Clinton Gore, not Clinton and Gore, in effect making Clinton Al Gore’s first name: Clinton Gore.” — Dan Rather during Dick Cheney’s acceptance speech after Cheney said “We’re all a little weary of the Clinton-Gore routine...it is time for them to go,”

— August 2, 2000 CBS News Republican convention coverage.

Greeting Both Parties with Liberal Spin: “Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore officially introduced his history-making running mate today, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. History-making because Lieberman is of Jewish heritage and faith. The two started running right away. In their first joint appearance they gave a preview of the Gore-Lieberman fight-back, come-back strategy. Their message: They represent the future, not the past, and they are the ticket of high moral standards most in tune with real mainstream America.”

— August 8, 2000.

Versus:

“In the presidential campaign, the official announcement and first photo-op today of Republican George Bush and his running mate Richard Cheney. Democrats were quick to portray the ticket as quote ‘two Texas oilmen’ because Cheney was chief of a big Dallas-based oil supply conglomerate. They also blast Cheney’s voting record in Congress as again, quote, ‘outside the American mainstream’ because of Cheney’s votes against the Equal Rights for Women Amendment, against a woman’s right to choose abortion — against abortion as Cheney prefers to put it — and Cheney’s votes against gun control. Republicans see it all differently, most of them hailing Bush’s choice and Cheney’s experience.”

— July 25, 2000.

No Need for Proof Before Alleging GOP Dirty Tricks: “Al Gore must stand and deliver here tonight as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and now Gore must do so against the backdrop of a potentially damaging, carefully orchestrated story leak about President Clinton. The story is that the Republican-backed special prosecutor, Robert Ray, Ken Starr’s successor, has a new grand jury looking into possible criminal charges against the President growing out of Mr. Clinton’s sex life.”

— August 17, 2000, the final day of the Democratic convention. (The next day, a Carter-appointed federal judge revealed he had inadvertently leaked the news.)

Mean and Nasty George W. Bush: “On one bit of campaign meanness and nastiness in particular, George Bush now says he’s sorry his gutter language and personal attack was picked up by a microphone at a campaign stop yesterday, but he refuses to apologize for the substance of his comment. Bush’s remark was about Adam Clymer, a New York Times reporter whose coverage he doesn’t like.”

— September 5, 2000.

Gore a victim: “You’ve been part of an administration that one can argue has presided over the greatest economic, sustained economic boom in the history of the country. But here you are in the last week of the presidential campaign, in which even by your own estimate you’re locked neck and neck with the other guy. Why is that?....But surely sometime at night the two of you talking, you must have said, maybe one to the other, ‘Why is this happening to us?’”

— To Al and Tipper Gore in taped interview shown November 1, 2000.

Florida Secretary of State Has No Legal Authority: “Florida’s Republican Secretary of State is about to announce the winner — as she sees it and she decrees it — of the state’s potentially decisive 25 electoral votes.”

“The believed certification — as the Republican Secretary of State sees it.”

“She will certify — as she sees it — who gets Florida’s 25 electoral votes.”

“The certification — as the Florida Secretary of State sees it and decrees it — is being signed.”

— November 26, 2000.

George W. Bush Didn’t Really Win: “Good evening. Texas Governor George Bush tonight will assume the mantle and the honor of President-elect. This comes 24 hours after a sharply split and, some say, politically and ideologically motivated Supreme Court ended Vice President Gore’s contest of the Florida election and, in effect, handed the presidency to Bush.”

— December 13, 2000.

Impeachment is Coup D’Etat: “Is or is there not some concern of the public, concern in some quarters, not all of them Democratic, that this is, in fact, a kind of effort at a quote, ‘coup,’ that is you have a twice elected, popularly elected President of the United States and so those that you mention in the Republican Party who dislike him and what he stands for, have been unable to beat him at the polls, have found another way to get him out of office?”

— Interview with former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman, CBS coverage of the start of the impeachment trial, January 7, 1999.

Impeachment Too Distracting: “The Republican leadership has decided, and spoken....They want the calling of witnesses and the lengthening out of the process. This is where the matter now stands. Questions such as what to do about Social Security, improving the nation’s schools, and the drug menace among America’s youth basically are on hold. So is what to do about threats to health of the U.S. economy by what is happening in Asia and Brazil; the threats to U.S. security posed by Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; and the peril represented by a collapsing Russia and an emerging China — all important parts of the people’s business — all remain pretty much on hold, while the trial drags on.”

— January 25, 1999 “Dan Rather’s Notebook” radio commentary posted on the CBS News Web page.

Clinton Scandal vs. VP Bush Scandal: View a video comparison of how Dan Rather treated President Clinton in a March 31, 1999 interview in which Rather avoided the Chinese espionage and fundraising scandals and the Rather’s infamous interview of Vice President Bush on January 25, 1988 interview on Iran-Contra scandal in which Rather told the president, “You’ve made us hypocrites in the face of the world.” http://www.mrc.org/news/rathervideos.html#1

Hillary Clinton Fantastic: “Once a political lightning rod, today she is political lightning. A crowd pleaser and first-class fundraiser, a person under enormous pressure to step into the arena, this time on her own.”

— 60 Minutes II, May 26, 1999

Admiring the Kennedys: “We Americans, even those among us who have never liked the Kennedys’ politics, have long been fascinated by the Kennedy mystique. Or as some call it, the Kennedy myth. The dictionary defines mystique as ‘an aura of heightened meaning surrounding something to which special power or mystery is given.’ A myth is ‘a traditional story dealing with ancestors or heroes,’ a story that ‘shapes the world view of a people or delineates the customs or ideals of a society.’ By those definitions, like it or not, there is a Kennedy mystique and their history is mythic....

“What we do know is that some of the aching grief the family feels tonight we feel because the mystique and the myth are deep within us. That’s 48 Hours for tonight, an American Tragedy.”

— Concluding 48 Hours, July 19, 1999, after the death of John Kennedy, Jr.

Republicans Favor Sleazy Fundraising: “Republicans kill the bill to clean up sleazy political fundraising. The business of dirty campaign money will stay business as usual....Good evening. Legislation to reform shady big money campaign fundraising is dead in Congress. Republican opponents in the Senate killed it today.” — February 26, 1998.

“Republican” Ken Starr: “New indications in a CBS News poll out tonight of how the public perceives Republican special prosecutor Ken Starr’s investigation. Our poll suggests only 27% believe Starr is conducting an impartial probe. And 55% think it’s time for Starr to drop his investigation.”

— March 2, 1998.

Far-Right Republican Haters: “On another front, there could be trouble for the Ken Starr Whitewater investigation. Reports continue to surface that this key witness for the prosecution, David Hale, may have been secretly bankrolled by political activists widely regarded as Clinton opponents, people that Clinton supporters call Republican haters from the far right.”

— April 2 1998.

“Republican” Ken Starr Ruins Clinton’s Day: “Ken Starr drops another load on President Clinton....Good evening. Just as President Clinton was enjoying a day talking up the economy, officially announcing the first U.S. budget surplus in three decades, Ken Starr hit him again. The Republican independent counsel and special prosecutor decided late in the day to announce his decision to press his subpoena for samples of Monica Lewinsky’s handwriting, fingerprints and her voice.”

— May 26, 1998.

What Could Have Been If Not for Lewinsky: “It began with so much promise. Bill Clinton became the first Democratic President since Franklin Roosevelt to be reelected to a second term. This was the term he’d make his mark on history and determine how he’d be remembered. CBS’s Wyatt Andrews looks tonight at the state of the Clinton legacy.”

— August 18, 1998.

Just about Sex: “On Capitol Hill, the Republican-dominated House now plans to vote Thursday to approve an official impeachment investigation into President Clinton, his sex life, and lies he told to hide it.”

— October 6, 1998.

Hillary Clinton For President: “I would not be astonished to see Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee in 2000....Hillary Clinton is the Person of the Year in that, you talk about a comeback kid — she makes her husband look like Ned in kneepants in terms of comeback from where she was early in the Clinton administration. You know, you add it all up, and you can make the case that Hillary Clinton might, might — mark the word — be the strongest candidate for the Democrats.”

— Interview with CNN’s Larry King, December 3, 1998.

Conservatives Can’t Use Word “Conservative:” “The head of the Republican political lobbying group that calls itself, quote, ‘the Christian Coalition’ said today he’s leaving to start a political consulting business. Ralph Reed’s group took a beating on some of its hard-right agenda in the last election.”

— April 23, 1997.

Ending Affirmative Action like Spreading Syphilis: “Earlier tonight, we reported the President’s apology for medical experiments that allowed black Americans to die of syphilis. The President noted how badly this hurt public trust in government, especially among minorities. The same criticism is being made today on another score. As CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports, it’s the fallout from California’s voter-approved ban on state affirmative action programs.”

— Introducing a story on drop in minority admissions, May 16, 1997.

No Religious Persecution in China: “An editor’s note: When your reporter was in China recently, a very high ranking Chinese government official was repeatedly asked questions about religious persecution. He told me, and I quote directly, ‘These stories are untrue.. We do, as you do, have some trouble with cults and we, like you, deal with them accordingly but that’s all.’ End quote.

— July 22, 1997.

Republican Ken Starr: “The Republican Whitewater offensive is taking an unprecedented turn: First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has been subpoenaed and now must testify before a Whitewater federal grand jury. That grand jury is led by a Republican prosecutor, Kenneth Starr.”

— January 22, 1996.

Republicans Radical and Extreme: “Some of your staff members, not by name, have been saying, ‘Yes, the President thinks Bob Dole is a nice person and has been a pretty good leader in some ways but,’ they say, ‘he’s been captured by extremists in the Republican Party, the radical part of the Republican Party, including Newt Gingrich. Is that what you think?”

— 60 Minutes interview with Bill Clinton, Aug. 18, 1996.

Democrats Uncaring If Back Conservative Policies: “You said this morning that the party’s message will focus on the needs and cares of the people. Now, how do you reconcile that with a President who has just signed a, quote, ‘welfare reform bill’ which by general agreement is going to put a lot of poor children on the street?”

— To Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, August 25, 1996.

“Hard Right” Clinton: “Bill Clinton’s been running pretty hard to the right, so far that some Democrats now call him a ‘Republicrat.’ Do you go that far?”

— To Jesse Jackson, August 26, 1996 CBS convention coverage.

CBS News Competitors Morally Inferior: “It is not just Congress that is taking a sharp turn to the right. The surge to the right on Capitol Hill is making waves all over the country on openly politically partisan, and sometimes racist, radio.”

— January 4, 1995.

GOP Threaten Human Survival: “There was no doubt Republicans in the House had enough votes tonight to pass another key item in their agenda to rip up or rewrite government programs going back to the Franklin Roosevelt era. It is a bill making it harder, much harder, to protect health, safety, and the environment. For example: the benefit of any new regulation would be required to outweigh the financial cost.”

— February 28, 1995.

Republicans Kill Kids and Poor: “The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor.”

— March 16, 1995

Prelude to a Clinton Kiss: “President Clinton will outline his version of a plan he says will balance the federal budget in ten years without what Mr. Clinton sees as a radical and extremist Republican plan to gut programs that help the old, the young, and the poor in order to bankroll tax giveaways to the rich. Republicans, of course, see it a different way.”

— Before CBS News coverage of President Clinton’s budget address, June 13, 1995

Carpet Bombing Health and Safety: “This is just for starters on a tough week ahead for President Clinton and his agenda. From another offensive wave on Whitewater to a sweeping rollback of federal regulations on health, safety, and the environment, it’s a political carpet-bombing attack, wall to wall, House to Senate.”

— July 17, 1995.

Criticizing Gays as Bad as Fighting Communism: “Gays and lesbians are beaten to death in the streets with increasing frequency — in part due to irrational fear of AIDS but also because hatemongers, from comedians to the worst of the Christian right, send the message that homosexuals have no value in our society....In the post-cold-war era, gays have been drafted to replace communists as the new menace to the American Way: We’re told gays corrupt youth and commandeer art and entertainment to win converts.”

— Writing in The Nation, April 11, 1994.

“Republican” Ken Starr: “There is growing controversy tonight, about whether the newly named independent counsel in the Whitewater case is independent or a Republican partisan allied with a get-Clinton movement. Among the questions about Kenneth Starr are these: the involvement of anti-Clinton activists in pushing for Starr’s appointment to replace Robert Fiske. Also, Starr’s public stand actively supporting a woman’s current lawsuit against the President. This is a potentially important and explosive story, correspondent Rita Braver has the latest.”

— August 8, 1994.

Poor Threatened by Republican Takeover of Congress: “Soup kitchens around the country are reporting demand for their services is up this Thanksgiving — unfortunately, donations are down. And now with the coming shift of power and agendas in Washington, many charitable groups are worried about how they — and the people they help — can make it.”

— November 23, 1994.

Bill’s the Best: “[Clinton] pointed out the Andrew Jackson magnolia tree. He’s a very good historian. Harry, I think if you had been in the room, any viewer-listener who had been in that room, would have been impressed with the breadth of his knowledge. I mean he talked about the Oscars. He talked very knowingly about Clint Eastwood and his new movie Unforgiven, Jack Nicholson’s role in A Few Good Men, and then switched very quickly to a knowledgeable analysis of Arkansas’s chances against North Carolina in the big basketball game tomorrow night.”

— To CBS This Morning’s Harry Smith, after March 25, 1993 Clinton interview.

The Clintons are Terrific: “If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we’d take it right now and walk away winners....Tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we’re pulling for her.”

— To President Clinton, via satellite, at a CBS affiliates meeting, referencing new co-anchor Connie Chung to the Evening News, May 27, 1993

Hillary Clinton, Genius: “I hear you talking and, as I have before on this subject, I don’t know of anybody, friend or foe, who isn’t impressed by your grasp of the details of this [health care] plan. I’m not surprised, because you have been working on it so long and listened to so many people.”

— Interview with Hillary Clinton, 48 Hours, September 22, 1993

Dan the Welfare Expert: “Take an election year, add a budget crunch, and one sure result is an assault on the welfare system, help for the poor. Still, most of the people who attack welfare have little or no contact with the people who depend on it.”

— February 5, 1992.

Greedy ‘80s: “And, Eye On America — a town fighting back against greed, corporate raiders, and the hangover of the go-go ‘80s.”

— March 19, 1992.

Centrist Clinton-Gore Ticket, I: “Delegates approved the Clinton-Gore center-of-the-road Democratic Party platform, trying to move the party closer to voters around the malls in America’s suburbs.”

— First convention update during the All-Star Game, July 14, 1992.

Centrist Clinton-Gore Ticket, II: “Assembled delegates here approved a center-of-the-road Democratic Party platform to help the Clinton-Gore ticket go shopping for votes in the fall in America’s malls and suburbs.”

— Second convention update, July 14, 1992.

Centrist Clinton-Gore Ticket, III: “Earlier, the Democratic Party approved the Clinton-Gore middle-of-the-road platform calling for law and order, work for welfare recipients, and a strong U.S. military.”

— Third convention update, July 14, 1992.

Reagan Years Unfair: “Everyone knows the rich got richer in the 1980s. Now, a new study shows how dramatic the change was.”

— Reporting on a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a group founded by Dukakis and Clinton advisors, October 29, 1992.

Keeping Soldiers Safe: “Allied military units are on the move. Their positions, movements, and plans must be carefully safeguarded. We must assume that the enemy is confused about what is happening on the battlefield and it is absolutely essential that we not do anything inadvertently ourselves to clarify the picture for him.”

— Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in a press conference at the start of the Gulf War ground operation, February 23, 1991.

Versus:

“As part of our CBS News live coverage of the beginning of the ground war offensive, we’re talking to Bob McKeown, a CBS News reporter who’s one mile from the Kuwaiti border. Bob, any indication of how far up you the think the Allies are now?”

— Dan Rather, 21 minutes later.

Non-Liberal Blacks “Reactionaries”: “Black conservatives or reactionaries are getting a lot of attention since the Thomas nomination...It has been a common misconception that Americans who happen to be black also happen to be liberal or progressive. True, perhaps most are, but as Bruce Morton reports in tonight’s Eye On America, the terms black or African-American and conservative or reactionary are not mutually exclusive.”

— July 12, 1991.

Justice Souter, Right-Wing Woman-Hater: “Senator Simon, is there any doubt in your mind that [Souter’s] views pretty well parallel those of John Sununu’s, which means he’s anti-abortion or anti-women’s rights, whichever way you want to put it?”

— To Democratic Sen. Paul Simon, July 23, 1990.

Rather Classics

Soviet Citizens Liked Communism: “Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.”

— June 17, 1987.

Clinton Scandal vs. VP Bush Scandal: View a video comparison of how Dan Rather treated President Clinton in a March 31, 1999 interview in which Rather avoided the Chinese espionage and fundraising scandals (on right) and Rather’s infamous interview of Vice President Bush on January 25, 1988 interview on Iran-Contra scandal in which Rather told the president, “You’ve made us hypocrites in the face of the world.” Watch the videos below.

20 Years On the CBS Evening News: Dan’s Daffy “Ratherisms”

“We could be in for a long night with the Senate battle as tight as a Botox smile.”

“Polls closed one-half hour ago in Arkansas. We can tell you that race is crackling like a hickory fire.”

“A big win for the Republicans, and they’ll be breaking out the longnecks in Republican headquarters in Texas and elsewhere, not to mention the White House itself, although Lesley [Stahl] says they pop the caps only on Dr. Pepper ten, two and four there.”

— CBS’s election coverage, November 5, 2002.

“Now Florida, that race, that race, the heat from it is hot enough to peel house paint.”

“I can hear some people at home saying, ‘Whoa! If the electoral vote count is now what Dan Rather and CBS News says it is, 121 for Bush, 119 for Gore, it seems to me just a few minutes ago Bush had a long lead.’ His lead has evaporated and been melted faster than ice cream in a microwave, what’s happening here?”

“Now remember Florida is the state where Jeb Bush, the brother of George Bush is the Governor, and you can bet that Governor Bush will be madder than a rained on rooster that his brother the Governor wasn’t able to carry this state for him.”

“Bush has had a lead since the very start, but his lead is now shakier than cafeteria Jell-O.”

“Then in Tennessee, now Al Gore may be as cross as a snapping turtle about this Tennessee situation because it’s his home state.”

“Bush is sweeping through the South like a tornado through a trailer park.”

“Pennsylvania drops for Gore, 23 electoral votes, and for the first time tonight, mark it, if you’re in the kitchen, Mabel, come back in the front room, 145 for Gore, 130 for Bush, 270 needed win.”

“His [Gore’s] chances are slim right now, and if he doesn’t carry Florida, slim will have left town.”

“The presidential race still hotter than a Laredo parking lot.”

“I have to say, though, and I don’t mean to be flip about it, that I think you are more likely to see a hippopotamus coming running through this room than you are to see Governor Bush appoint Nader to the Cabinet.”

“Sip it, savor it, cup it, photostat it, underline it in red, put it in the album, hang it on the wall, George Bush is the next President of the United States.”

— During CBS News coverage of election night 2000.

“Ken Starr and his people have been working for three to four years, spent more than $30 million, they’ve used dozens if not a hundred or so FBI agents. They may have turned this up, whether you had the Paula Jones case or not. But again maybe not, but again that’s like if a frog had side pockets he’d probably wear a handgun. It didn’t happen that way.”

— On February 5, 1998 Late Show with David Letterman.

“Democrats and Republicans are nervous as pigs in a packing plant over these returns because the polls have closed and we don’t know the results....Now, if you’re in those states where the polls are open, let me encourage you to vote. And of course, if you’re in a state where the polls are closed, let me encourage you not to vote. It’s illegal.”

— November 3, 1998.

“Charles Schumer is one of the stunners of the night. This race was as hot and squalid as a New York elevator in August.”

“The call is just in for the South Carolina Senate race. This was one of the cardiac arrest time races. This thing was nasty enough to gag a buzzard. But it turns out that Fritz Hollings, the veteran Democratic Senator, has held on to win.”

— During CBS News’s election night 1998 coverage.

“I think you’re more likely to see the Pope ride through this room on a giraffe.”

— On the possibility of a CBS News cable channel, to Philadelphia Inquirer TV writer Gail Shister, February 18, 1997.

“In New Hampshire, closest Senate race in the country, this race between Dick Swett and Bob Smith is hot and tight as a too small bathing suit on a too long car ride back from the beach.”

— During CBS News 1996 election night coverage.

“Well, in Texas they have a saying: ‘That’s a good way for Momma to drive a Cadillac,’ which is a way of saying that if you play with one of these things, particularly if you are in a low-water area. I would say, Harry, this morning there must be lot of people who are in that let’s-have-another-cup-of-coffee-and-not-worry-about-it stage. And I agree with that. That’s the stage to be in.”

— On CBS This Morning co-host “Double T trouble. T is for Thelma, T is for Tennessee, and T is for big trouble tonight.”

“A lot of tight Senate races out there. Let’s hit those chips with another dash of salsa, Ed Bradley.”

— During CBS News 1994 election night coverage.

Rather Gettin’ Down:

Rather: “Some days I say ‘Why is he [Clinton] doing that?’ or ‘Gosh, can he do it a little better?’ But it may be time to, sort of as you say, chill. We know when it comes to politics and governing, whatever you think of this President, whether you voted for him or not, he can hang — which is to say he can do it-”

Arsenio Hall: “See! See! Dan is deep, ain’t he? Dan in the Hood!....I thank you for being here. You’re a special guy. And I hope whatever you have is contagious.”

— Exchange on The Arsenio Hall Show, January 28, 1993.

“Mr. Clinton was about as relaxed as a pound of liver.”

— Referring to his earlier interview with Clinton, January 20, 1993 CBS This Morning.

“If an American inauguration can’t bring a lump to your throat and a tear to your eye, if you don’t feel as corny as Kansas in August, maybe you need a jump-start and some vitamins.”

— During inauguration coverage, January 20, 1993.

“It will be so exciting as to make the wax pop out of your ears.”

“There’s material here that will make their fingernails sweat.”

“Texas...another of the so-called big enchiladas, or if not an enchilada, at least a huge taco.”

“This woman has gotten a very bad rap, Hillary Clinton. It is true that she’s smart. She didn’t go to school just to eat her lunch.”

“While the Clinton-Gore campaign was as unstoppable as say, a Beethoven symphony...”

— During 1992 election night coverage.

“I’d like to leave you with the words of that popular, secular, patriotic hymn: ‘Long may our land be bright with freedom’s holy light.’”

— Approaching tears at 2am EST on election night 1992.

“Now, walking down the red-carpeted staircase, President Bush, President Gorbachev, with Gorbachev’s interpreter in between. You can just see at the top of your picture that huge chandelier, almost 4,000 pounds. It’s the older sister of all chandeliers.”

— Dan Rather before START treaty signing ceremony, July 31, 1991.

“Stay with CBS now for more news, including: Is there a pall over the mall as holiday shoppers think small?”

— December 2, 1991.

Gorbachev’s Great Eyes: “He has, as many great leaders have, impressive eyes...There’s a kind of laser-beam stare, a forced quality, you get from Gorbachev that does not come across as something peaceful within himself. It’s the look of a kind of human volcano, or he’d probably like to describe it as a human nuclear energy plant.”

— Quoted in the May 10, 1990 Seattle Times.

“I wouldn’t touch that line with a 12-foot pole, which as you know is a pole I reserve for those things that I certainly wouldn’t touch with an 11-foot pole.”

— Response to whether he had a favorite candidate for President, election night 1990.

“Let’s go down to Texas and let me show you actual votes in and tabulated. This was a race considered so nasty it would gag a buzzard....This race is so close that everybody’s having a 4,000-calorie attack down there.”

— CBS News election night coverage, November 6, 1990.

Denials in Bias

Dan Rather has denied having a liberal bias almost as long as he’s been a news anchor. Highlights:

“I’m all news, all the time. Full power, tall tower. I want to break in when news breaks out. That’s my agenda. Now, respectfully, when you start talking about a liberal agenda and all the, quote, ‘liberal bias’ in the media, I quite frankly, and I say this respectfully but candidly to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

— To Denver KOA’s Mike Rosen, Nov. 28, 1995.

“I do believe in what’s become an archaic word for journalists, objectivity. You know my job is to be accurate, be fair, and in so far as it’s humanly possible, to keep my feelings out of every story...I do agree that one test of a reporter is how often he or she is able to keep their emotions out of what they are doing and keep their own biases and agendas out of it.” — On CNBC’s Tim Russert, Sep. 20, 1997.

“Well, my answer to that is basically a good Texas phrase, which is bullfeathers.... I think the fact that if someone survives for four or five years at or near the top in network television, you can just about bet they are pretty good at keeping independence in their reporting. What happens is a lot of people don’t want independence. They want the news reported the way they want it for their own special political agendas or ideological reasons.” — On CNN’s Larry King Live, Mar. 11, 1996.

“The test is not the names people call you or accusations by political activists inside or outside your own organization. The test is what goes up on the screen and what comes out of the speaker. I think the public understands that those people are trying to create such a perception because they’re trying to force you to report the news the way they want you to report it. I am not going to do it. I will put up billboard space on 42nd Street. I will wear a sandwich board. I will do whatever is necessary to say I am not going to be cowed by anybody’s special political agenda, inside, outside, upside, downside.”

— to CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg’s charge that the networks have a liberal bias, Mar. 6, 1996 New York Post.

CNN Crossfire Co-host Bill Press: “Why is it that you are the epitome of the left-wing liberal media in the mind of every conservative I’ve ever talked to? What did you do to get that reputation?”

Rather: “I remained an independent reporter who would not report the news the way they wanted it or — from the left or the right. I’m a lifetime reporter. All I ever dreamed of was being a journalist, and the definition of journalist to me was the guy who’s an honest broker of information. ...I do subscribe to the idea of: ‘Play no favorites and pull no punches.’”

— Exchange on CNN’s Crossfire, Jun. 24, 1999.

“I think the tag, you know, somehow or another, ‘he’s a bomb-throwing Bolshevik from the left side’ that’s attached to me, is put there by people who, they subscribe to the idea either you report the news the way we want you to report it, or we’re gonna tag some, what we think negative sign on you. There are people in the world that way, that, you know, part of growing up is to recognize not everybody is going to love you, and believe me, I recognize that.”

— Part of Rather’s response to Geraldo Rivera’s question “What I can’t figure out is why you rub the right so wrong. What is it about you that generates such ferocious criticism from one side of the American political spectrum?” on CNBC’s Rivera Live, May 21, 2001.

Don Imus: “Bernard Goldberg, your former colleague, in The Wall Street Journal the other day said that you possess a liberal bias that you’re even unaware of. What did you think of that? Well, first of all, do you? And second of all, what do you think of his comment?”

Dan Rather: “Do I what?”

Imus: “Possess a liberal bias.”

Rather: “No, I don’t think so, but other people have to judge that and, you know, he’s entitled to his opinion, and that’s, you know, I’m in favor of strong defense, tight money, and clean water. I don’t know what that makes me. Whatever that makes me, that’s what I am. But people are going to take those shots. When you’re on television every night, people are going to take those shots.”

— Exchange on the July 19, 2001 Imus in the Morning radio program simulcast on MSNBC.

==============================

NBC Anchor Boasted “We’ve Worked Hard to Drain the Bias” but Viewers Still Swimming in Liberalism (Media Research Center, 030910)

Marking Tom Brokaw’s Twenty Years of Tilt

On Labor Day, 1983, Tom Brokaw stepped away from co-anchor Roger Mudd and began 20 years as sole anchor of NBC Nightly News. One reason for his longevity, he claimed in 1996, is “we’ve worked very hard to drain the bias out of what we do.”

Not quite. While his advocacy is not as outrageous as either Dan Rather or Peter Jennings, Brokaw has celebrated the welfare state, lobbied for liberal campaign finance reform, praised an ex-Soviet dictator, and exhibited a partisan double standard on scandals.

On his 20th anniversary, we offer a replay of Brokaw’s greatest episodes of liberal advocacy, on Nightly News unless otherwise noted.

THE REAGAN DISASTER

• “I thought from the outset that his supply-side theory was just a disaster. I knew of no one who felt it was going to work.” (Mother Jones interview, April 1983 issue)

• “We wanted everything but the pain of paying for it....In a decade [the] deficit more than tripled. How? Ronald Reagan ran for President promising Americans more while asking for less: the Reagan Revolution.” (October 5, 1990)

• “Reagan, as commander-in-chief, was the military’s best friend. He gave the Pentagon almost everything it wanted. That spending, combined with a broad tax cut, contributed to a trillion-dollar deficit....Social programs? They suffered under Reagan. But he refused to see the cause and effect.” (Over video of homeless people on December 27, 1989 NBC News special The Eighties)

A “COURAGEOUS” AND “FUN” DICTATOR

• “I think Gorbachev is a great man in the 20th century because he forced his country to look at the hypocrisy and the fraudulence of communism and to begin slowly to make a turn away from it....He can still light up any room that he walks into. The eyes are flashy, you know, and the great command of the language and the feel that he has, the very physical presence of him. It’s still fun to be around him.” (Interview on PBS’s Charlie Rose, May 2, 1996)

Brokaw gushed over the former Soviet dictator: “It’s still fun to be around him.”

• “From the perspective of the West, the former President of the Soviet Union of course was a courageous, far-seeing prophet whose reforms set in motion the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship and the end of the Cold War....We know that you’ve devoted your life to peace and to changing your country and those of us who have gotten to know you count ourselves among the privileged.” (Opening and closing of MSNBC interview with Gorbachev, October 29, 1996)

THOSE SCARY REPUBLICANS

• “You’re opposed to abortion in any form. You also have opposed the E.R.A., and you’re opposed to increasing the minimum wage, which is important to a lot of women out there. Aren’t you going to have a hard time selling Dan Quayle to the women of this country?” (To Quayle, August 17, 1988 convention coverage)

• “A lot of people said, ‘Just too much red meat there [in the speech].’ You gave the impression that if you’re not a white, heterosexual, Christian, anti-abortion, anti-environment, you’re somehow not welcome in the Republican Party.” (To Pat Buchanan, August 18, 1992 convention coverage)

• “There are many people in the Republican Party who believe that the Republican National Convention in Houston, at which you were a prominent part, was simply too extreme, too strident in its positions, and they cite your speech and Pat Buchanan’s speech as well.” (To Pat Robertson on election night, November 4, 1992)

• “Is the Republican Party held hostage, in your judgment, Christie Whitman, by its views on abortion? So that people like you, who believe that there ought to be some choice, can never be considered for Vice President?” (To Whitman during MSNBC’s convention coverage, August 2, 2000)

• “Colin Powell, the most influential African-American in the Republican Party, will be talking to these delegates, reminding them that they have to think about minorities every day, not just every four years.” (Convention coverage July 31, 2000)

THE WELFARE STATE IS A “GODSEND”

• “When NBC Nightly News continues: in Washington, if they cut food stamps, who doesn’t eat?” (March 22, 1995)

• “Medicare, the health care program that has been a godsend to the elderly in this country, even with all its financial difficulties. Tonight, the President wants to dramatically expand its coverage to millions more.” (January 6, 1998)

EVEN BILL CLINTON WASN’T LIBERAL ENOUGH

• “I wanted to follow up just for a moment on welfare if I can. If in fact you sign the Republican bill that’s likely to come down from the Hill, all the projections show that that will push, at least short term, more than a million youngsters in this country below the poverty line. That’s a high risk for youngsters in this country who are already in peril.” (To Bill Clinton on MSNBC, July 15, 1996)

APPALLED BY REPUBLICAN SCANDALS...

• “And when the public phase of those hearings ended today with the testimony of Secretary Weinberger, we were left with an astonishing record of deceit, ignorance, naivete, good or bad intentions, failed policies, and discredited public servants, and this story is not yet complete.” (On Iran-Contra hearings, August 3, 1987)

...AND THOSE WHO INVESTIGATE DEMOCRATS

• “Still ahead tonight. Investigating the President. A growing backlash against independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Is he out of bounds or just tone deaf?” (February 16, 1998)

SEXUAL HARASSMENT: A GOP TERRORIST...

• “We begin tonight with U.S. Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, a man who championed women’s rights on the floor of the Senate and sexually terrorized members of his own staff.” (September 7, 1995)

...BUT AN “ANCILLARY ISSUE” FOR CLINTON

• “Do you think the press has been too fascinated with other ancillary issues...like Whitewater and Paula Jones?” (To Tim Russert after a Clinton press conference, November 9, 1994)

ON “REFORM,” HE’S AS OBJECTIVE AS JOHN MCCAIN

• “Beyond the tedium of the day to day campaigning, there’s another much more alarming development this year — money. Huge amounts of money pouring into both parties, raising very serious questions about influence and conflict of interest.” (October 29, 1996)

• “For all the rhetoric and the outrage about what happened in the ‘96 campaign, a bill that would overhaul the system was all but killed off today in a partisan battle.” (October 7, 1997)

• “The Republicans were outraged by the fundraising practices of the President and the Democratic National Committee — but not so outraged that they felt the need for campaign finance reform.” (In a New York Times column, February 7, 1998)

POPE & HELMS VETOED A GREAT VP CANDIDATE

• “You put Tom Ridge out there for example, the governor of Pennsylvania, big and important state, a guy with a great record, pro-choice, immediately the Catholic Church and Jesse Helms said no way.” (To George W. Bush, July 24, 2000)

Brokaw suggested the Pope and Jesse Helms controlled the Republican Party

REPORTERS ARE NOT BIASED...

• “Now to your larger question about, ‘Are reporters biased?’ No, I really don’t think that they are. I think that most of us are registered, as I am, which is [to] decline to, or [register] as independents. I never have revealed who I’ve ever voted for. But I can tell, it crosses back and forth between party lines. And I think most people feel that way who are reporters.” (CNN’s Larry King Live, Mar. 6, 2000)

...UNLESS THEY WEAR THE AMERICAN FLAG

• Tom Brokaw: “I wear a flag in my heart, but I think if you wear a flag, it’s a suggestion somehow that you’re endorsing what the administration is doing at the time. And I don’t think journalists ought to be wearing flags.”

Phil Donahue: “And I say hear, hear, hear.” (On MSNBC’s Donahue, July 25, 2002)

Phil Donahue applauded Brokaw’s refusal to wear an American flag pin.

==============================

20 Years of Bias: Network anchors are captains whose ships list left (Media Research Center, 030910)

Op-ed by L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Media Research Center, as printed in the September 10, 2003 edition of the Wall Street Journal

Both ABC’s Peter Jennings and NBC’s Tom Brokaw celebrated their 20th anniversaries as their networks’ top news anchors Friday, a milestone CBS’s Dan Rather passed 2½ years ago. Such longevity is extraordinary both in television and in politics, and these three wield considerable clout in both arenas.

As “managing editor” (Messrs. Brokaw and Rather) or “senior editor” (Mr. Jennings), these men rule their broadcasts. And while the Internet and 24-hour cable TV may keep a couple of million news junkies well supplied, the majority of Americans still rely on the information that makes the three anchors’ final cut. While 750,000 people are watching Fox News at any given time, 25 million watch the Big Three’s evening newscasts.

The network anchors are not equally biased, of course. If there were a Richter scale of liberal bias, Mr. Brokaw would rank about a 4 or a 5 and Mr. Rather a strong 8, while Mr. Jennings would be off the charts. But their consistently liberal approach has made network news an inhospitable environment for conservative ideas (never mind politicians) for the past several decades.

Remember when conservatives were trying to slow the growth of government in early ‘95 with the Contract With America? Dan Rather characterized that as a “legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor.” When George W. Bush was certified the winner in Florida, Mr. Rather repeatedly insisted the result was only as “Florida’s Republican Secretary of State . . . sees it and decrees it.”

These anchors love to advance liberal causes. ABC used to have a regular segment called “The American Agenda,” which spent a lot of time explaining how government bureaucrats could fix your life — with things like socialized medicine — if only they had the power. Introducing one such piece, Mr. Jennings said “the best child care system in the world . . . [i]s in Sweden. The Swedish system is run and paid for by the Swedish government, something many Americans would like to see the U.S. government do as well.”

The anchormen scorned Ronald Reagan’s priorities. “He gave the Pentagon almost everything it wanted,” Mr. Brokaw recalled during a 1989 NBC News special on the ‘80s. Then, as viewers saw pictures of homeless men in the streets, Mr. Brokaw condemned the conservative president: “Social programs? They suffered under Reagan. But he refused to see the cause and effect.” As the anchors tell the story, big-spenders are good and budget-cutters lack compassion. “If they cut food stamps, who doesn’t eat?” Mr. Brokaw wondered in 1995 of the Gingrich-led Congress.

These men have tilted our national debate for so long, it’s hard to contemplate a world without their bias. Imagine news anchors who matched every story reflecting a liberal premise with one framed around a conservative question: Are taxes too high? Are we spending enough on our national defense? Is the pro-abortion movement too intolerant? Is the environmental movement too radical?

Imagine if the anchors had been just as outraged by President Clinton’s ethical conduct as they were by President Nixon’s in the 1970s. But when Congress held hearings into Mr. Clinton’s 1996 fund-raising excesses, Mr. Jennings sniffed, “Is it a waste of time and money?” Three weeks after the Monica Lewinsky story broke in 1998, Mr. Brokaw would refer only to “the alleged White House scandal.”

And yet these anchors stubbornly, and foolishly, continue to deny their biases. “The idea that we would set out, consciously or unconsciously, to put some kind of an ideological framework over what we’re doing is nonsense,” Mr. Brokaw once told a C-SPAN audience.

In a 2001 interview, Mr. Jennings was a bit more candid about journalists’ willingness to be advocates. “If you see injustice and you can get people to do something about it, ahh, it’s just a glorious feeling,” he told producers from the Museum of Television and Radio. “There’s nothing a reporter likes more than to have an effect on policy.” But ask him if he’s biased, and you get the usual boilerplate: “ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media,” he told CNN’s Larry King. “We are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least not on purpose.”

During the past 20 years, these three anchors have used their privileged positions to pull the public, and our politics, to the left. But in so doing, they’ve created a stampede: Reportedly half their audiences have fled since 1994. Now that Messrs. Brokaw and Jennings have joined Mr. Rather in the 20th-anniversary club, they’d be well-advised to ponder why.

Mr. Bozell is president of the Media Research Center.

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CBS Won’t Air ‘Reagans’ Miniseries (Foxnews, 031104)

NEW YORK — CBS announced Tuesday that it won’t run the controversial miniseries “The Reagans” later this month.

The network said it was licensing the completed film to Showtime, a pay-cable network owned by CBS parent Viacom.

“Although the miniseries features impressive production values and acting performances, and although the producers have sources to verify each scene in the script, we believe it does not present a balanced portrayal of the Reagans for CBS and its audience,” the network said in a statement.

A broadcast network has different standards than a pay cable network, CBS said.

CBS insisted it was not bowing to pressure about portions of the script, but that the decision was made after seeing the finished film.

The flap over the $9 million miniseries, which was set to air on Nov. 16 and 18, began late last month with a story published in The New York Times revealing portions of the script that were unflattering to President Ronald Reagan and former first lady, Nancy.

That led to a firestorm by Republican-based political groups and Reagan supporters, some of whom threatened to boycott CBS and the products advertised during the program.

The Media Research Center asked major advertisers to review the script and consider not buying commercial time on the show.

In an unusual move, CBS officials said last week that portions of the movie were unfair and the film was being re-edited.

It is rare for a network to substantially rework a completed film just weeks before it is scheduled to be shown.

As soon as CBS made the decision to cut portions of the film, director Robert Allan Ackerman opted out of the editing process and lead actors James Brolin and Judy Davis — who were to play President and Mrs. Reagan — refused to do any publicity interviews for the miniseries, according to a report in Newsweek magazine.

That left the editing process in the hands of CBS executives, Newsweek reported.

Though no one who protested the miniseries has seen it, it was condemned by the former president’s friends and supporters as unfair and inaccurate.

Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told CBS President Leslie Moonves in a letter that historians should review the miniseries for historical accuracy, or the network should run a disclaimer that the program is fiction.

Gillespie said the miniseries might have omissions, distortions and exaggerations that could cause Americans to “come away with a misunderstanding of the Reagans and the Reagan administration.”

Some questioned airing any dramatization of the 92-year-old’s life while he struggles with Alzheimer’s disease.

Gillespie said he hasn’t seen the full miniseries but was uneasy because of news reports and brief clips that have been made public.

He said he resents particularly how the miniseries reportedly depicted the Reagans’ unsympathetic attitude toward AIDS victims and how it was said to portray Nancy Reagan.

CBS lawyers had reviewed the miniseries and given it the go-ahead, but Moonves ordered lawyers to give it another look and for CBS to cut out certain portions.

Among the parts that were snipped, according to Newsweek, were the inflammatory line “They that live in sin shall die in sin,” which is Reagan’s reply to Nancy when she asks him to do more for AIDS victims in the miniseries.

Those involved with the project admitted having no proof that Reagan ever made such a statement.

Newsweek reported that footage of Ronald Reagan Jr. doing ballet was also cut.

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15 4 the Gipper: Fighting for The Reagans (NRO, 031104)

On the evening of Monday, October 20, I was doing what many news junkies do when we sit at our computers — I was reading the Drudge Report. It was breaking word of a New York Times piece scheduled for the following day that exposed some of the lies in the upcoming CBS smear of the Reagans. I was furious. Like millions of Americans, I deeply admire the Reagans. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Enough said.

But while I had spent a decade in the political/government world — my claim to fame is a short time working at Ari Fleischer’s knee, learning the craft — for the past few years I’ve been an “at home” dad who just does a bit of government-affairs consulting during nappy time. What could I do other than seethe?

So I spent $8.95 buying a web address called www.boycottCBS.com. That might have been the end of it, but I found myself as the weekend arrived still angry about the lies contained in the Reagan series. So using a web tool that permits rudimentary website building by dummies, I punched out an essay calling for a boycott of the CBS series and its advertisers. I then wrote a press release — conjuring my best Ari mojo — and sent it to a few media outlets Monday morning. The tagline: “Don’t let the Hollywood Left smear the Reagans and the Reagan Legacy.”

Monday was fun. A couple hundred people signed up, especially after I appeared on a radio show hosted by Geoff Metcalf. It was a bit bothersome — the e-mails kept coming as I tried to do work, and I was literally adding the e-mail addresses manually to an Excel spreadsheet. One of the e-mails late Monday night happened to be from someone who had a “signature line” that mentioned her work with computer databases. At 2 A.M. Tuesday morning, I sent this complete stranger, Stacey Feldman, a desperate e-mail, requesting her help. The P.S. will give you a taste for my state of mind: “P.S. 16 MORE HAVE SIGNED UP SINCE I STARTED THIS EMAIL — -THIS MOVEMENT IS DOOMED WITHOUT YOUR HELP!!!!”

At 1 A.M. Tuesday morning, there was an Internet article up about the boycott site. My 15 minutes of fame had begun.

I woke up Tuesday with several hundred e-mails in my inbox. Someone on Fox had mentioned the site and so the e-mails were rolling in 6, 8, 10 each minute. Radio shows were lining up, too. I was doing live radio interviews with my young son in the next room, capable of making loud noises at any moment.

I commandeered his computer and turned that into a repository for boycott e-mails. By the time Stacey had a database system up and running later that day, my computer had several thousand pro-boycott e-mails on it and my son’s computer had more than 15,000.

People love the Reagans.

Wednesday brought even greater chaos. I did Bill O’Reilly’s radio show and then his Fox News Channel TV show that night. Two hours before show time, I realized I had no clean dress shirts. (I’m an at home dad, after all.) So on the #1-rated cable-news program in America, I wore a shirt that had been sitting in a pile for the dry cleaner.

Shortly after the O’Reilly segment began, our servers crashed. They were fixed an hour later, and the next morning, Wednesday, I was back at the studio to tape Fox & Friends (wearing the same shirt). Shortly after that segment ended, hits to the site peaked at 100 per minute before the site crashed again. This time, it was serious. The site would not go live again for more than 48 hours — tens of thousands of visitors would find only an error message in the interim — but when it did, it was on the “ReaganServer.”

The ReaganServer is the brains of Thomas Marshall, another guy I have never met. Thomas left me a voicemail after the second crash offering to host my site with his company at no charge. I was skeptical, paranoid that I am, but when he said he had named his son Reagan, I knew I had my man. The site is now invincible.

You can burn a lot of hours reading 75,000 e-mails. So many people revere Ronald Reagan, and so many want to protect Nancy Reagan like they would protect their own mother — it’s an emotional experience to read their messages. Of course, you get a few hate e-mails, too. A few liberals have told me they wish me and my family would die. (For them, I guess, it’s Saddam’s rape rooms: O.K. A guy who opposes a TV show: Evil.) But my favorite hate e-mails are from the Lefties who have mocked me for being an at home dad.

CBS is now backpedaling. With the show just two weeks away, the most-egregious lies are evidently being edited out and the network is reportedly handing the movie over to its cable relative, Showtime (guaranteeing a much smaller audience).

Last weekend I heard that Merv Griffin told a national TV audience on Scarborough Country that Nancy Reagan is gratified by the “boycott” effort. I never got to thank Ronald Reagan for all he did for our country and the world, but it’s nice to know that Nancy Reagan now knows how much we appreciate them.

Now excuse me while I return to potty training and playgrounds. My 15 minutes are about up.

— Michael Paranzino is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

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The Death of Spin: Everywhere you look this fall the left’s spinning is coming undone (Weekly Standard, 031106)

THE VERY BEST ASPECT of the decision by CBS to cancel its network showing of the Reagan miniseries was the first paragraph of CBS’s statement explaining its decision:

CBS will not broadcast “The Reagans” on November 16 and 18. This decision is based solely on our reaction to the final film, not the controversy that erupted around a draft of the script.

Sure. And New Coke really did taste great. And Michael Dukakis is glad he rode in that tank. You can hear Jon Lovitz in the background going, “Yeah, yeah. That’s the ticket. Nothing at all to do with the controversy.”

The New York Times dutifully reported Barbra Streisand’s angst—”today marks a sad day for artistic freedom”—and managed to find the nearly invisible Bill Maher, who intoned, “It looks so bad.” The Times then solemnly editorialized that “CBS was wrong to yield to conservative pressure and yank it.”

Everyone on the left seems to know that CBS crumbled under pressure, but CBS boldly asserts that it didn’t. This stubborn refusal to cop to the facts is more significant than the movie itself. A network that just trotted out Uncle Walter to help celebrate its 75th birthday should be more circumspect in its lying.

There is a pervasive dishonesty running throughout elite media. CNN admitted its cover-up for Saddam earlier this year. The Los Angeles Times is still reeling from the fallout from its recall bias which it swears didn’t exist. Maureen Dowd got caught slicing quotes to fit her needs, and now CBS is standing by its story on why it is not standing by its movie.

Truth is taking a beating on the left this fall. It turns out the entire “get real” Democratic debate on Tuesday night—with its turtle-necked general, its open-collared Senators, and its shirt-sleeved rolled, feisty stars-and-bars Vermonter—was contrived. CNN selected the audience, screened the questions, and even decided to which candidates those questions would be directed. “Rock the Vote” was as authentic as Velveeta. Al Sharpton dominated the debate. Al Sharpton!

None of this trifling with the truth is playing well because America is at war, and war demands seriousness. The elites continue to rage about talk radio and the blogosphere, but it doesn’t look like anyone is buying their spin. Voters in Kentucky and Mississippi continued Terry McAuliffe’s streak and the president keeps moving forward in a serious purposeful fashion.

Hugh Hewitt is the host of The Hugh Hewitt Show, a nationally syndicated radio talkshow, and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard. His new book, In, But Not Of, has just been published by Thomas Nelson.

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New Hoover Study Finds Labeling Disparity by NY Times, Washington Post (Media Research Council, 031113)

A study by two scholars at the Hoover Institution has proven that, during the 1990s, the New York Times and Washington Post labeled conservative Senators two to four times more frequently than liberal Senators, though both went untagged most of the time.

In a Wednesday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Hoover Senior Fellow David Brady, who is also a professor of political science at Stanford University, and economics student Jonathan Ma, outlined their findings after tracking labeling for ten liberal and ten conservative Senators from 1990 to 2002. In addition to the numerical disparity in the labeling rate — which found liberals tagged between 2 and 5% of the time compared to a labeling rate for conservatives of 6 to 12% of the time — the two central Californians discovered that “Times reporters often inject comments that present liberals in a more favorable light than conservatives.”

The duo also relayed: “We have detected a pattern of editorialized commentary throughout the decade. Liberal senators were granted near-immunity from any disparaging remarks regarding their ideological position.”

An excerpt of their November 12 op-ed, “Spot the Differences,” in the Wall Street Journal:

....We examined every Times and Post article that contained references to a senator. Specifically, we set out to reveal the treatment of the 10 most liberal and 10 most conservative senators from each congressional session....

Using a reliable news database, we deployed a constant search term to uncover when news writers labeled senators conservative or liberal. For five successive congressional sessions during this time period, we documented when Times and Post reporters directly labeled Republican loyalists “conservatives” and Democratic loyalists “liberals” in their news stories. (We excluded editorials.)

The first finding of our study is consistent with the results found for media stories on institutions such as corporations, Congress or universities, namely, that most of the time the story is straightforward — as in “senators X, Y, and Z visited the European Union Parliament.” However, when there were policy issues at stake we found that conservative senators earn “conservative” labels from Times reporters more often than liberal senators receive “liberal” labels.

For instance, during the 102nd Congress, the Times labeled liberal senators as “liberal” in 3.87% of the stories in which they were mentioned. In contrast, the 10 most conservative senators were identified as “conservative” in 9.03% of the stories in which they were mentioned, nearly three times the rate for liberal senators. Over the course of six congressional sessions, the labeling of conservative senators in the Washington Post and New York Times occurred at a rate of two, three, four and even five times as often as that of liberal senators (see chart nearby). It appears clear that the news media assumes that conservative ideology needs to be identified more often than liberal ideology does.

The disparity in reporting was not limited to numbers. Times reporters often inject comments that present liberals in a more favorable light than conservatives. For instance, during the 102nd Congress, Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa was described in Times stories as “a kindred liberal Democrat from Iowa,” a “respected Midwestern liberal,” and “a good old-fashioned liberal.” Fellow Democrat Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts received neutral, if not benign, identification: “a liberal spokesman,” and “the party’s old-school liberal.” In contrast, Times reporters presented conservative senators as belligerent and extreme. During the 102nd Congress, Sen. Jesse Helms was labeled as “the most unyielding conservative,” “the unyielding conservative Republican,” “the contentious conservative,” and “the Republican arch-conservative.” During this time period, Times reporters made a point to specifically identify Sen. Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming and Sen. Robert C. Smith of New Hampshire as “very conservative,” and Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma as “one of the most conservative elected officials in America.”

We have detected a pattern of editorialized commentary throughout the decade. Liberal senators were granted near-immunity from any disparaging remarks regarding their ideological position: Sen. Harkin is “a liberal intellectual”; Sen. Barbara Boxer of California is “a reliably outspoken liberal”; Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois is “a respected Midwestern liberal”; Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York is “difficult to categorize politically”; Sen. Kennedy is “a liberal icon” and “liberal abortion rights stalwart”; and Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey is a man whose “politics are liberal to moderate.”

While references to liberal senators in the Times evoke a brave defense of the liberal platform (key words: icon and stalwart), the newspaper portrays conservatives as cantankerous lawmakers seeking to push their agenda down America’s throat. Descriptions of conservative senators include “unyielding,” “hard-line” and “firebrand.” A taste of Times quotes on conservatives during the period of 1990-2000: Sen. Nickles is “a fierce conservative” and “a rock-ribbed conservative”; Sen. Helms is “perhaps the most tenacious and quarrelsome conservative in the Senate, and with his “right-wing isolationist ideology” he is the “best-known mischief maker.” Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona is “a Republican hard-liner”; Sen. Robert C. Smith is “a granite-hard Republican conservative”; Sen. Gramm takes “aggressively conservative stands” and has “touched on many red-meat conservative topics”....and Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho is “an arch-conservative.”

This labeling pattern was not limited to the Times. Liberal and conservative senators also received different treatment from the Washington Post. Distinctly liberal senators were described as bipartisan lawmakers and iconic leaders of a noble cause. In the 107th Congress, Sen. Paul Sarbanes of Maryland was described as “one of the more liberal senators but [with] a record of working with Republicans.” Sen. Harkin was bathed in bipartisan light: “a prairie populist with a generally liberal record, although he’s made a few detours to more conservative positions demanded by his Iowa constituents.” Of Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, the Post said: “Though a liberal at heart, she is more pragmatic than ideological.” Other liberals were lionized or cast in soft focus: “Sen. Kennedy is a hero to liberals and a major irritant to conservatives, plus an old-style liberal appeal to conscience”...

In contrast, the Post portrayed conservative senators unflatteringly. Republican loyalists were often labeled as hostile and out of the mainstream....Republicans were characterized as antagonists: Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma is “a hard-line GOP conservative”; Sen. Kyl is “a combative conservative”; Sen. Helms is “a cantankerous, deeply conservative chairman,” “a Clinton-bashing conservative,” “the crusty senator from North Carolina,” “the longtime keeper of the conservative flame,” and “a conservative curmudgeon.”...

END of Excerpt

For the piece in full, with a table showing the labeling percentages, go to: online.wsj.com

The findings of Brady and Ma match an MRC study last year which documented how the broadcast networks use the conservative label more often than they apply a liberal one. “Burying the Liberal Label on Network News,” read the headline over the June, 2002 study conducted by the MRC’s Rich Noyes. The subhead summarized the finding: “On Evening News Broadcasts, Conservative Tag Used Four Times More than Liberal Label.”

Major findings of the Media Reality Check study of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts over five years, from 1997 through 2001:

— On ABC, conservatives received 79% of the liberal or conservative labels; on NBC, 80%. On the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, 82% of the 353 ideological labels assigned by CBS’s reporters were given to conservatives.

— Only eight House Members were identified as liberals, compared with 34 who were called conservatives.

— Only one reporter, NBC’s Lisa Myers, used “liberal” to describe Democratic candidate Bill Bradley (Sept. 25, 1999), and no network reporter labeled Vice President Al Gore as liberal during the entire 1999-2000 election cycle. In contrast, then-Governor George W. Bush was called a conservative 19 times.

— The table with the key findings of the study:

Labels on Broadcast Network News

	“Liberal”	“Conservative”
ABC	96 labels (21%)	365 labels (79%)
CBS	64 labels (18%)	289 labels (82%)
NBC	87 labels (20%)	338 labels (80%)
Total:	247 (20%)	992 (80%)

For the Media Reality Check study with the full rundown of all the findings and several illustrative examples: www.mrc.org

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Arnot Sees Iraqis Angry at TV Coverage, Who “Love” Bush (Media Research Center, 031114)

U.S. TV network news about Iraq as distorted as al-Jazeera? Checking in from Iraq on Wednesday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews as part of that show’s look this week at “Iraq: The Real Story,” Bob Arnot highlighted a Muslim ayatollah in Iraq who “is furious at the press coverage. He says not only American television, but Arabic satellite TV, such as Al-Jazeera and the Abu Dhabi station, have mis-portrayed the great success that is Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.”

Arnot, MRC analyst Geoffrey Dickens noticed, documented how “Iraqis themselves are angrier than the American administration about the barrage of negative stories coming out of Iraq” on Arab television.

The night before, on Tuesday’s Hardball, Arnot contrasted the negative TV news image of widespread destruction and disgust for Americans with the reality he sees of Iraqis who “love the Americans and their President for cleaning up their streets, providing clean water, opening the schools.” Arnot explained:

“The conventional picture you see out here in Iraq is of angry Iraqis jeering at Americans. But we went to a town right in the heart of the Sunni Triangle which easily could have gone just as bad where they love Americans. Helicopters shot from the sky, military vehicles destroyed by roadside bombs, midnight raids on suspected terrorists. For many Americans watching from home, this is the American military’s fate in Iraq. But there is another reality.”

(On Monday’s Hardball, the November 12 CyberAlert recounted, Arnot contradicted the image of chaos in Iraq hyped by the media. Launching Hardball’s week-long series, “Iraq: The Real Story,” Arnot recounted the challenges faced by troops in hostile areas, but countered the negative image of the Iraqi situation he knows Americans get from TV news. Arnot argued: “The fact is in 85% of the country, it’s calm, it’s stable, it’s moving forward.” Touring a shopping area, Arnot relayed how, “from what you see on TV from Baghdad you’d think that, with the mortars and rockets, that this was a city under siege.” In fact, he contended, “nothing could be further from the truth in many neighborhoods.” www.mediaresearch.org )

On the November 12 Hardball, Arnot provided a glimpse into how Iraqis view the anti-U.S. bias of Arab TV news:

“This is one of the most beautiful mosques anywhere in the world. It’s the main mosque in the holy city of Khadamiya, third most religious city in Iraq. We’ve been invited here by the ayatollah. Why? He is furious at the press coverage. He says not only American television, but Arabic satellite TV, such as Al-Jazeera and the Abu Dhabi station, have misportrayed the great success that is Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The people of Khadamiya tell us that the picture painted by Al-Jazeera and other Arab satellite stations is a bleak one of daily death and destruction.

“Khadamiya’s leaders are so eager to show Iraq’s real story that the ayatollah himself sends his top lieutenant with us, Haji Ali [sp]. He acts as our guide, showing us a city of thriving outdoor markets, mosques and schools. In Khadamiya’s main shopping district, business is booming, from sidewalk vendors and vegetable stands, to gold merchants. On the streets, the U.S. Army patrols side by side with Iraqi soldiers, dismounted and at ease. At Khadamiya’s central mosque, pilgrims come from all over Iraq, Iran, even Afghanistan, eager to enjoy the religious freedom they were denied for decades. Khadamiya’s schools are in session, filled with happy children.

“15-year-old Daham [sp] says TV news reports he watches don’t tell the truth.”

Daham: “A lot happens good in Iraq when Saddam gone.”

Arnot: “So a lot happens good in Iraq.”

Daham: “The smile come back in Iraqi kids.”

Arnot: “After school, we visit a new radio and TV station run by Shia, an unheard-of freedom under the old regime. At the station, everyone we talked to agrees the Arab media is not telling the truth about what’s happening here. And Al-Jazeera tops the list. What do you think of Al-Jazeera?”

[Unidentified Iraqi man starts speaking in Arabic]

Arnot: “In English. In English.”

Unidentified man: “I hate them!”

Arnot: “Iraq’s new minister of industry and minerals had this theory about Al-Jazeera.”

Minister: “Well, I don’t know. Probably, they have something against the Americans.”

Arnot concluded: “As we’ve seen, Iraqis themselves are angrier than the American administration about the barrage of negative stories coming out of Iraq, so angry that the ayatollah himself broke the rules and allowed to us come into this, one of the holiest sites in all of Shia Islam, right during the height of Ramadan. Chris, back to you.”

The night before, on the November 11 Hardball, Arnot passed along what he saw in Tachi and Horia in the Sunni triangle where he found improvements made my Americans and an appreciation for it by the local Iraqis:

“Children used to drink filthy water from this ditch. Many sick, some dying of dysentery. Now a new pipeline, built by the Americans, brings the village clean water. But it’s not all waving children and happy smiles. Colonel Slate lives in one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq. Nearly every night he’s attacked, his base hit by mortars. Criminals, Iraqi themselves will soon be tracking down. Better security, clean water, education, more jobs part of a formula Colonel Slate hopes will win the toughest fight of his life.”

In a second segment, Arnot found Iraqis who “love” Americans: “Chris, you know, the conventional picture you see out here in Iraq is of angry Iraqis jeering at Americans. But we went to a town right in the heart of the Sunni Triangle which easily could have gone just as bad where they love Americans. Helicopters shot from the sky, military vehicles destroyed by roadside bombs, midnight raids on suspected terrorists. For many Americans watching from home, this is the American military’s fate in Iraq. But there is another reality.”

“American G.I.s swarmed by friendly children, who want to speak English and love the Americans and their President for cleaning up their streets, providing clean water, opening the schools. They meet with cooperative village leaders, keeping the banks up and running, and get regular leads on who the bad guys are.

“Meet Captain Gabe Barton, 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, on patrol in Horia [sp], a village just outside Baghdad. His day begins at the local school, where his soldiers are protecting schoolchildren threatened by terrorists, side by side with enthusiastic Iraqi soldiers of the new civil defense corps. At the police station, heavily defended against suicide bombers, he confers with a cordial chief of police, a police force patrolling Horia by themselves, using the U.S. military only as a backup. Next the bank, which his men help Iraqis keep safe enough, that locals deposit their money willingly and where there’s never been a run on the bank.”

Arnot, over vide of Capt. Gabe Barton having discussion with an Iraqi soldier: “That cooperation between American soldiers and Iraqi police has kept Horia’s economy up and running.”

Barton: “People need to have confidence that, if they deposit their money here, they’re gonna be able to come back and get it out.”

Arnot: “Back on the streets, these Iraqi army officers are standing post for the first time, a development welcomed by Gabe.”

Capt. Barton: “It shows the Iraqi people that we are not here for ourselves. We are not here for other reasons, we are here to help them create a better place to live.”

Arnot acknowledged not all is perfect: “Horia is a spectacular success, but there are also bad towns, Abu Ghraib among the worst, called, ‘Little Mogadishu,’ by G.I.s. Here, 3rd Brigade conducted the largest military operation since the war, with over a dozen Kiowa gunships, M1-A1 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, airborne and infantry companies side by side. Hours later, they conduct this nighttime raid in search of a man financing attacks on coalition soldiers. This is more a money guy, is it?”

Barton: “He is involved in the financing and support of the cell that he operates, yes.”

Arnot: “So this is who you might call the head of the snake?”

Barton: “Yes.”

Arnot: “The combined operations yield a treasure trove of weapons and cash used to finance terrorism. That combination of targeted strikes and community development has turned over 85% of this country into an under-reported success. Money is what allows these commanders to basically win hearts and minds. Now, the key source of that, Chris, was something called the Commanders Emergency Relief Fund. Those funds have virtually dried up, leaving commanders without the most important weapon they have in terms of winning hearts and minds and winning this war here in Iraq, Chris.”

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Networks Stress Anti-Bush Protests in Britain Over Pro-Bush Poll (Media Research Center, 031120)

Silencing the silent majority in Britain. A poll published in the left-wing Guardian newspaper in London on Tuesday, the eve of President Bush’s arrival in Britain for a three-day visit, discovered that 62% believe “that the U.S. is ‘generally speaking a force for good, not evil, in the world’” as “only 15% of British voters agree with the idea that America is the ‘evil empire’ in the world.” In addition, “more people — 43% — say they welcome George Bush’s arrival in Britain than the 36% who say they would prefer he did not come.”

A sarcastic Aaron Brown on CNN’s Newsnight Tuesday evening, after noting how a Guardian headline read “Majority Backs Bush Visit,” mused: “A cynic might say yes, all the better to protest.” John King ignored the Guardian numbers but made time for how “a Daily Mirror poll found only 27% of Britons believe the partnership is good for their country.”

Like Brown, the other networks on Tuesday night stressed protest and anger at Bush in Britain over the more cordial poll numbers.

ABC’s Peter Jennings asserted that “a very large segment of the British public is opposed to Mr. Bush for one reason or another.” On the CBS Evening News, John Roberts highlighted a Member of Parliament who rued how the British had to be “subject to the dumb and dumber show across London when the situation in Iraq is seemingly getting worse by the day.” Roberts only vaguely alluded to the poll numbers: “But not all Britons are against his visit. In fact, there is strong support for it and an overwhelming sense here that America is a force for good.”

“President Bush is the target of massive protests,” announced NBC’s Tom Brokaw before Dawna Friesen in London echoed how “anti-Bush and anti-war feelings run deep among many here. Only after focusing on protesters did Friesen acknowledge the poll, though again without citing any numbers or source: “But tonight, as the President sleeps in the place, he and his officials are taking heart from a new poll that shows more people welcome his visit than prefer he’d stayed home.”

Pro-Americanism, as might be expected, is strongest among Tory voters with 71% saying the US is a force for good. But it is nearly matched by the 66% of Labour voters who say the US is a force for good. Anti-Americanism is strongest among Liberal Democrat voters but is still only shared by 24% of them and the majority see the US as the “good guys”...

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NBC Sees “Extreme” & “Hardline” Gay Marriage View Only on Right (Media Research Center, 031121)

By nearly two-to-one, 59% to 32%, Americans oppose gay marriage, with the opposition crossing racial and geographic boundaries, but on Wednesday night NBC’s Jim Avila portrayed Republicans and conservatives as the ones who could turn off voters on the issue. He saw the “extreme” and “hardline” position on as the right against gay marriage, not on the left for it. “Swing voters,” Avila warned, “are often turned off by extreme rhetoric. Florida’s David and Laura Mead are independents who normally lean right, but reject single-issue, hardline rhetoric.” [Kwing Hung: this is the argument used by liberals.]

Avila, who avoided the term “liberal” but twice tagged “conservatives,” cautioned that “this year’s trap for the Bush campaign, say political consultants, could be pushing too hard. The constitutional amendment against gay marriage, legislation the President has avoided, but House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is ready to push.”

While a just-released poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center for The People and The Press and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, did find little support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Avila didn’t cite that finding as he relayed how Pew determined “Republican voters overwhelmingly against gay marriage — nearly 80% oppose — while Democrats are split down the middle: 48% opposed, 46% favor.”

In a story on Tuesday night, Avila had noted the 59 to 32% overall opposition to gay marriage. But on both nights, Avila failed to note a finding which undermined his premise as far more of those opposed than for it are passionate in their position. Pew reported: “Strong opposition to the idea of gay marriage is the plurality position. Among those who oppose the idea, nearly six-in-ten say they feel strongly about it (35% of the total population express this view.) Among those who favor gay marriage, fewer than three-in-ten say they strongly support the proposal (9% of the total.)”

While opposition is highest in those living in rural areas (against by 69 to 22%), the majority of those in suburbs (54 to 38% against) and urban area (52 to 36% against) also oppose gay marriage. And “there is little racial divide over gay marriage. Both whites and blacks oppose gay marriage by roughly two-to-one — most Hispanics also oppose the idea, but by a smaller margin (51% to 36%).”

Pew also discovered that “granting some legal rights to gay couples is somewhat more acceptable than gay marriage, though most Americans (51%) oppose that idea.”

For Pew’s findings in their October poll: people-press.org

From Miami, Avila opened his November 19 NBC Nightly News story by blaming conservatives for stirring up the issue, not liberal activists who pushed a court case:

“Gay marriage, America’s new cultural divide, fueling backlash from conservative groups like Focus on the Family, already fundraising to stop the quote, ‘devastating and potentially fatal blow to the traditional family.’ Concerned Women for America, e-mailing talking points.”

Avila: “New poll numbers show Republican voters overwhelmingly against gay marriage — nearly 80% oppose — while Democrats are split down the middle: 48% opposed, 46% favor.

Avila concluded, over video of what appeared to be gays and lesbians cheering inside a church: “The cultural issue of the year — divisive, passionate and filled with pitfalls for both political parties.”

But Avila expended a lot more energy on the pitfalls for conservatives and Republicans.

CNN’s Cooper Contends Mass. Justices Not “Radically Leftist”

Cooper’s contention came during a November 18 interview segment on Anderson Cooper 360 with Court TV’s Lisa Bloom, a supporter of that court’s ruling on same sex marriage, and talk show host and CNN contributor Michael Smerconish, an opponent of the ruling.

Smerconish dismissed Cooper’s analysis: “Well, Anderson, it is Massachusetts. I mean, we’re talking about the only state in the country to go for McGovern. We’re talking about the place that returns Ted Kennedy to the United States Senate every six years. I don’t put anything past, you know, the folks of Massachusetts. I don’t think this would have happened in any other state in the United States. And we’re coming close, but it’s still not.”

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MSNBC’s Arnot Balances Dismal Iraq News (Media Research Center, 031114)

The major problem during Vietnam, you’ll hear journalists say, is that public debate about the war was skewed by the Johnson administration’s erroneous happy talk. When reporters like CBS anchor Walter Cronkite began giving sour reports about the state of the war effort, the public’s support inevitably evaporated.

This time, the coverage suggests that reporters are bending over backwards to give the public a pessimistic portrait of the current U.S. mission in Iraq. Less than a week after the war started, on CBS’s 48 Hours, Lesley Stahl raised the specter of the only war America lost: “You fought in Vietnam,” she reminded Navy Secretary James Webb back on March 25. “Any feelings of deja vu?” Eight months later, CBS News is still pushing the public to see Iraq as another Vietnam. (See box.)

As in any war, there has been a lot of terrible, painful news coming out of Iraq this year. But MSNBC’s Hardball last week featured five days of in-depth reporting from Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Bob Arnot that went beyond the knee-jerk negativity of everyday network news:

• November 10: Arnot took his cameras to a Baghdad shopping district which bore no resemblance to a war zone: “Look at this,” he instructed host Chris Matthews as he stood in the center of a wide boulevard. “They’ve even painted the flower and tree boxes by the side of the street.” Arnot began exploring the stores: “Look at the quality of the shops. Now, gold you can get here for a very reasonable price. This is 21-karat gold. And they have beautiful necklaces, bracelets, rings here, high quality. Security is good enough that they can leave this window open.”

• November 11: Arnot visited a town in the Sunni triangle, the region which has been most dangerous for American forces, and showed how the Army works with local leaders to enact improvements: “Colonel [Nate] Slate and his men have refurbished a water pump station, irrigation ditches and schools....Children used to drink filthy water from this ditch, many sick, some dying of dysentery. Now a new pipeline built by the Americans brings the village clean water.”

• November 12: Arnot traveled to a religious city west of Baghdad and heard complaints about the media’s negative coverage. “The people of Kazimayah tell us that the picture painted by al-Jazeera and other Arab satellite stations is a bleak one of daily death and destruction. Kazimayah’s leaders are so eager to show Iraq’s real story that the ayatollah himself sends his top lieutenant.” The city tour shows a thriving marketplace and U.S. soldiers at ease with Iraqis.

• November 13: Iraq’s industrial production won’t reach pre-war levels until 2004, but the economic story isn’t as bad as reported elsewhere, Arnot tells us: “People have money to spend because government salaries have gone up and Iraq’s unemployment number is significantly lower than expected. It’s not the 70% you’ve heard of; it could be lower than 20%.” That 70% figure was cited repeatedly by ABC News the previous week.

• November 14: “There’s certainly a lethal insurgency trying to derail the birth of the new Iraq, running up the body count for the evening news,” Arnot explained in his wrap-up piece. “But the new Iraq is being born nonetheless....The U.S. military, America’s civil administrators and Iraq’s peaceful majority are in the fight of their lives, a hot war that is far from decided. But it is not a lost war, nor a hopeless one. And that is the real story.”

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MSNBC Producer: Reporters “Feel Vindicated” By Setbacks in Iraq (Media Research Center, 031210)

A month ago MSNBC producer Noah Oppenheim traveled to Iraq to “find out if things had really gone as horribly wrong as the evening newscasts and major print dailies reported.” In the latest Weekly Standard, he recounted how found that “the mounting body count is heartbreaking, but the failure of American journalism is tragic.” Oppenheim discovered that “America has brought to Iraq the notorious Red State-Blue State divide. Most journalists are Blue State people in outlook, and most of those administering the occupation are Red.” Since “most journalists did not support this war to begin with,” Oppenheim observed, they “feel vindicated whenever the effort stumbles.”

Oppenheim seems to have been the producer for a series on MSNBC’s Hardball in mid-November, “Iraq: The Real Story,” in which Bob Arnot provided a look at trouble spots as well as where things are going well in Iraq. Two CyberAlert items recited highlights from the series:

— Bob Arnot appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews to contradict the image of chaos in Iraq hyped by the media. Launching Hardball’s week-long series, “Iraq: The Real Story,” Arnot recounted the challenges faced by troops in hostile areas, but countered the negative image of the Iraqi situation he knows Americans get from TV news. Arnot argued: “The fact is in 85% of the country, it’s calm, it’s stable, it’s moving forward.” Touring a shopping area, Arnot relayed how, “from what you see on TV from Baghdad you’d think that, with the mortars and rockets, that this was a city under siege.” In fact, he contended, “nothing could be further from the truth in many neighborhoods.” www.mediaresearch.org

— U.S. TV network news about Iraq as distorted as al-Jazeera? Checking in from Iraq on Wednesday’s Hardball, Bob Arnot highlighted a Muslim ayatollah in Iraq who “is furious at the press coverage. He says not only American television, but Arabic satellite TV, such as Al-Jazeera and the Abu Dhabi station, have mis-portrayed the great success that is Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.” The night before, Arnot contrasted the negative TV news image of widespread destruction and disgust for Americans with the reality he sees of Iraqis who “love the Americans and their President for cleaning up their streets, providing clean water, opening the schools.” See: www.mediaresearch.org

An excerpt from Oppenheim’s story, “Flacks and Hacks in Baghdad: What it’s like to report from Iraq,” in the December 15 edition of the Weekly Standard:

....Four weeks ago, MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” asked me to go to Baghdad in search of the story most of the mainstream media were missing. The network’s vice president knew I was a supporter of the war, and suggested I find out if things had really gone as horribly wrong as the evening newscasts and major print dailies reported. What I found is that, in Iraq, the mounting body count is heartbreaking, but the failure of American journalism is tragic.

First, some popular illusions that need to be dispelled: Most correspondents for newscasts do very little, if any, actual reporting. They assemble the visual elements of a jigsaw puzzle whose shape is dictated by an unholy deity — “the wires.” Every day, the Associated Press and Reuters offer an account of the major events in Iraq. If a bomb has exploded or an American soldier has been killed, that is the day’s major event. Barring that, an alarming comment from an American official, like Ambassador Paul Bremer or General Ricardo Sanchez, will suffice.

Once the wires have dictated the day’s headline, television correspondents sometimes venture into the field. However, the purpose of leaving their fortress hotels is rarely to collect information. True, sometimes they’ll elicit a soundbite that fits their preconceived notion of the day’s narrative. More often than not, they simply need a scenic backdrop in front of which to recite their lines. Even this is optional. I have watched correspondents “report” stories having never actually left the bureau.

Which is not to suggest these correspondents are lazy. This is simply the way it’s done. The wire services now all have television divisions that provide video, in addition to copy, to all subscribers. Why send a correspondent and crew to a dangerous place if the pictures have already been recorded and the facts already written down?

The consequence of this system is that, on television, the story in Iraq is no more than the sum of basic facts, like casualties, crashes, and official pronouncements. Such things are important and should be reported. Unfortunately, when you add to the mix time constraints and the herd instinct — the general reluctance to depart from the story line common to all the major media on a given day — little else makes it on the air.

Beyond this structural failure, there is a problem of attitude. Along with freedom, America has brought to Iraq the notorious Red State-Blue State divide. Most journalists are Blue State people in outlook, and most of those administering the occupation are Red. Many of those who work for the Coalition, including civilians, carry guns. This either amuses journalists or makes them uncomfortable. Most of those who work for the Coalition are deeply invested, emotionally, in the success of America’s enterprise in Iraq. (How else to explain why someone leaves an apartment in Arlington to live in a trailer in Baghdad and endure mortar attacks?) Most journalists did not support this war to begin with, and feel vindicated whenever the effort stumbles....

Characters are the backbone of any good story, and the Americans working in Iraq are the finest I have ever met. People like Col. Nate Slate, a man trained his entire life to fire artillery, now doing a miraculous job rebuilding the town of Taji. People like Tom Foley, a multimillionaire financier, now walking the lines at Iraqi shoe factories, helping get an economy off the ground. People like Col. Joe Anderson, who despite the price on his head, patrols Mosul on foot so he can personally reassure shopkeepers and community leaders that America won’t cut and run.

The story of America’s presence in Iraq is the story of ordinary people, with the best of intentions, working ungodly hours, in unpleasant places, with no public acclaim. Their quiet work will never make AP headlines — indeed, it too seldom makes the wires at all — yet they are winning victories nonetheless.

The best metaphor I’ve heard about Iraq is that the country is like a child, and the American press is its parent. When you’re around a child every day, you don’t notice how dramatically he’s growing and maturing. But a more distant relative who sees the child only once a year is astounded by how much taller he keeps getting. Iraq is getting taller and healthier every day, but those responsible for documenting the growth are not noticing — or if they are, they’re not telling the people back home.

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CBS Insists Dean No McGovern, “Had a Moderate Record” in Vermont (Media Research Center, 031210)

Rest easy, America. Howard Dean may have opposed Iraq’s liberation, called partial-birth abortion a “phony” issue, and voiced his support for gay civil unions and a large tax increase, but none of that makes him a liberal. So insisted CBS reporter Byron Pitts, who claimed the former Vermont governor is a moderate on domestic issues.

Do you remember any CBS News stories in 1999 which countered liberal attacks on George W. Bush as a hardline conservative by emphasizing his moderate record as Governor of Texas? But on Tuesday night, CBS came to Howard Dean’s defense against charges he’s any kind of a liberal. Instead of looking at the left-wing policies Dean is now advocating, such as a massive tax hike, Byron Pitts insisted: “This five-term former Governor had a moderate record during his ten years in the Vermont state house. He was a fiscal conservative, well known for being frugal from budget cuts to his own bargain-basement wardrobe.”

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Study Finds Networks Overwhelmingly Negative Toward Bush on Iraq (Media Research Center, 031218)

In picking up on the CyberAlert item about how ABC News has avoided reporting its poll finding of a jump in Bush’s approval rating following the capture of Saddam Hussein, FNC’s Brit Hume also noted a new study from another media analysis group which found that negative evaluations of President Bush in Iraq stories on the broadcast network evening newscasts have soared since May.

Hume reported in his “Grapevine” segment on the December 17 Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC:

“A new study indicates that positive evaluations of President Bush on the network evening news have dropped from 56%, during the Iraq war, to 32% after the end to major operations was announced. The study, conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, shows that CBS News was the toughest on President Bush after major operations ended, with 77% negative evaluations, followed by ABC with 67% negative evaluations.

“This, as another group, the Media Research Center, is accusing ABC of burying one of its polls — which as we told you earlier this week — showed President Bush’s job approval on Iraq rose ten percentage points after Saddam’s capture. ABC News, the center says, only referenced the poll for a few brief seconds with a small graphic Monday morning and that was it.”

Indeed, the December 17 CyberAlert relayed:

ABC’s World News Tonight still hasn’t reported how, in the wake of the capture of Saddam Hussein, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that President Bush’s approval level overall rose four points with a ten point jump in approval for how he’s handling the situation in Iraq, but on Tuesday night Dan Rather found a few seconds to relay how a new CBS News/New York Times poll discovered a six point hike in Bush’s approval level....

As the December 16 CyberAlert noted, NBC showcased on Monday’s NBC Nightly News its survey finding that after Hussein’s capture Bush’s approval rating jumped by six points while his margin over Howard Dean expanded from 12 to 21 points.

But though Monday’s Washington Post featured the results of the ABC News/Washington Post survey conducted on Sunday afternoon and evening, Peter Jennings didn’t utter a word about it on Monday night and he didn’t catch up on Tuesday.

The only hint as to the good news for Bush in the ABC poll came in a small graphic on screen for a few seconds on Monday’s Good Morning America as Claire Shipman tried to diminish the impact of catching Hussein. She highlighted how “ABC News has a new poll out today that shows most Americans don’t believe Saddam’s capture means the job is done there” as she warned that if “if the situation isn’t stabilized,” the capture of Hussein “is not going to seem decisive for this administration.”

As she was saying that, GMA put up a picture of a bearded Hussein which filled three-fourths the screen with the left-hand fourth showing a graphic citing a single poll number from an “ABC News/Washington Post poll” on “President Bush’s Approval Rating,” listing it at 58% after Saddam’s capture compared with 48% in mid-November. In fact, the numbers were for approval of how Bush is handling the situation in Iraq.

WASHINGTON, DC — Evaluations of President Bush on the network evening news shows dropped from 56% positive during the Iraq war to only 32% positive during the six months that followed the end of formal military activity (2-to-1 negative ratio), according to a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA). Coverage of Bush administration policies nose-dived from 49% positive to only 26% positive, a 3-to-1 negative ratio, during the same period.

These findings come from CMPA’s study of 1,876 stories (54 hours, 36 minutes) on the Bush administration on ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news broadcasts from May 1st through October 31st.

Despite having given the most favorable coverage to the war, CBS was toughest on President Bush in its aftermath with 77% negative evaluations, followed by ABC with 67% negative and NBC with 62% negative comments.

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Christians Complain About Media Treatment (FN, 031224)

SEATTLE — From the big screen to the little screen and from sitcoms to the news, Christians say they can’t get a fair shake in the media.

Christians complain that the media portrays them as either bigots or buffoons, with such characters as Ned Flanders of “The Simpsons.” They point out that even Christmas symbols like Santa are ridiculed, as in the new film “Bad Santa.”

They also refer to Mel Gibson’s upcoming movie “The Passion.” The film, which closely follows the gospels in the New Testament, had difficulty getting financial backing and is being criticized as anti-Semitic.

“Christians seem to be the one religion that gets no respect from all the others. They’re the ones that can be kicked around and not tolerated as we’re being asked to do about everything under the sun,” said Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America.

However, other media observers disagree, citing the prevalence of shows about spirituality, including “Touched by an Angel,” “7th Heaven,” and “Joan of Arcadia.”

Tim Appelo, senior arts writer for the Seattle Weekly, said Christians are “winning and they still can’t see it, because they’ve spent so long in the desert. And so they’re back, they’re mad and they’re not going to take it again.”

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A Hole Into Which Liberals Can Pour Money (Free Congress Foundation, 031209)

Tom Athans, with something called Democracy Radio, is again trying to set up a liberal radio network. He thinks previous attempts have failed because they were too preachy. He wants hosts, such as Al Franken, who supposedly are funny. He is confident he will have enough stations in big cities where liberal shows can be run non-stop. Then various other stations can cherry pick individual shows.

Well, as someone who - ten years ago this month - launched a conservative television network, let me offer some unsolicited advice. Give it up. It won’t work.

The reason that conservative talk radio works is because there is an audience for it. Look at any survey that measures ideology. Self-professed conservatives comprise about 40% to 45% of the electorate. Self-professed liberals are only 15 to 20% of the electorate. So the core audience for the network is less than half of that for conservatives. Second, a quarter to a third of those who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are liberals. They obviously are masochistic. I doubt very much that conservatives will listen to Al Franken (or any of the other personalities they have lined up). That’s because our folks can learn the liberal viewpoint by watching ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN. And as far as radio is concerned there is our taxpayer-subsidized network, NPR. And thanks to the heiress of the McDonald fortune, NPR has a robust endowment that will enable them to increase their coverage. Politics aside, it will be hard for any new liberal radio network to outdo the professionalism of NPR.

Athans complains that of all the political talk shows, only 40 are liberal. Guess why? These are local shows. Local stations have to be able to hold an audience. For example, stations that carry Limbaugh and Hannity often follow them with a local conservative talk show host. Here in Washington, following back-to-back network programming by Limbaugh and Hannity, WMAL features the very able Chris Core for three hours. Core is a moderate who takes many conservative positions. And even when he doesn’t, he treats conservatives very fairly. Core is one of the better minds in talk radio so WMAL holds much of the audience who are loyal to Hannity. WMAL had one out and out liberal talk show host, Charlie Warren who followed Core. He has just been replaced by a network talk show featuring both a conservative and a liberal.

Conservative talk radio works because there are lots of conservatives who are convinced that they are not getting the whole story from the regular media. So along with several very popular Internet sites, talk radio has served as alternative media that gives listeners information that they otherwise would not hear. What is it that liberal talk radio can offer to its potential audience? Liberal politicians, experts, critics, authors, clergy and so on all get exposure in the so-called “mainstream” media. What is it that liberals aren’t hearing from radio? About all they are missing is wild conspiracy theories which thoughtful people, even liberals, won’t take seriously.

Advertisers are very wary of ideological media. Despite being able to demonstrate a very large audience, major advertisers at first wouldn’t touch Limbaugh. But after he single- handedly put Snapple products on the map, mainstream advertisers came on board. A liberal network will only survive if it can attract and motivate a lot of people. In all probability, in liberal areas where a network is buying stations, there are already liberal talk shows because places such as San Francisco and Seattle have liberal majorities.

The Fox News cable channel is doing very well because there is a market for what Fox News has to offer. A decade ago we began to cultivate this same audience with National Empowerment Television (NET). We did very well in every market where we were carried. Fox strives for balance so they give a lot of exposure to liberals. The difference between Fox and the other stations that are out there is that conservative views are taken seriously.

If a liberal News channel were launched it would fall flat on its face. There is no market for it. I’m sure my advice to Athans will not be followed. That’s fine with me. If liberals want to send tens of millions of dollars down the drain, I have no problem with that. If they make it, I’ll publicly apologize. I don’t expect to have to do so however.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

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Bozell Issues $1 Million Challenge to Tom Brokaw and NBC (MRC, 040108)

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Media Research Center President Brent Bozell is issuing a $1 million challenge to NBC and NBC Nightly News Anchor Tom Brokaw, calling Brokaw on his comments made in a recent interview with Columbia Journalism Review. In the interview, Brokaw directly took on Bozell and the Media Research Center while denying the credibility of their evidence of liberal bias in the press. Among other things, Brokaw said:

“What I get tired of is Brent Bozell trying to make these fine legal points everywhere every day. A lot of it just doesn’t hold up. So much of it is that bias — like beauty — is in the eye of the beholder.”

Bozell responded: “I know our evidence does ‘hold up’ and we’ll prove it. I issue this challenge to NBC and its anchor: let’s assemble a mutually agreeable third-party panel and have them review a compilation of the Media Research Center’s 16 years of evidence of liberal media bias. If this panel agrees with Brokaw’s contention, the Media Research Center will donate $1 million to the anchor’s favorite charity. If the panel agrees with us, NBC and Brokaw will donate $1 million to the Media Research Center.

“Oh, and to sweeten the pot we’ll do this: we’ll limit our evidence only to Tom Brokaw and NBC. Frankly, that’s all the evidence we need to prove the point.”

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Morning Donations to Democratic Dreams (MRC, 040107)

Every four years, ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS’s Early Show and NBC’s Today open their doors to those who would be President. In theory, that’s a good thing: While the evening newscasts offer only brief soundbites from the campaign trail, the weekday morning shows give millions of casual news watchers a chance to assess the candidates as they answer reporters’ questions.

But do these programs give liberal candidates an advantage? As the 2004 primary season begins, Media Research Center analysts reviewed all 44 of the Democratic candidates’ appearances on the ABC, CBS and NBC weekday morning news shows during the last six months of 2003, along with those of the Republican candidates for the same period in 1999.

The study found that Democrats got nearly twice as much airtime last year as the Republicans had in 1999. The questions posed by network interviewers in 2003 reflected a pro-liberal, anti-Bush agenda, but four years earlier the GOP candidates were rarely indulged with pro-conservative, anti-Clinton questions from their network hosts.

100 EXTRA MINUTES FOR THE DEMOCRATS

The ten Democrats running to unseat George W. Bush have collectively received 100 more minutes of airtime than the field of eight GOP candidates received four years ago. (See box.) Republicans were brought aboard the morning shows 20 times in the latter half of 1999. Those interviews totaled 2 hours, 16 minutes. Campaign regulation advocate John McCain received the lion’s share of airtime — nearly 64 minutes in ten interviews, seven of which were on ABC. Front-runner Bush was interviewed four times (37 minutes), but not once on ABC during the study period.

Since July, CBS’s Early Show has hosted 16 interviews with the Democrats, including co-host Harry Smith’s visit to Iowa for a profile of John Kerry that included an extensive Q&A. NBC’s Today offered 15 interviews, but they lasted longer — more than 111 minutes, compared with 64 minutes on CBS. Good Morning America’s 13 interviews gave the Democrats an additional 65½ minutes of broadcast airtime. Altogether, the Democrats were granted 4 hours of network morning airtime, or almost 10 minutes per week.

Most of that airtime went to just two candidates. Howard Dean has received nearly 70 minutes of network airtime in 13 appearances, slightly behind Wesley Clark, whose 13 interviews totaled 71 minutes.

Among the leading candidates, Dick Gephardt has been practically shut out, with only one appearance in the last six months (on The Early Show, November 10). That puts the former House Minority Leader on par with Carol Moseley Braun, Al Sharpton and Bob Graham, who has since dropped out of the race. Far-left, anti-war candidate Dennis Kucinich has yet to appear on any of the weekday morning shows.

INVITING THE CANDIDATES TO BASH BUSH

CBS’s Rene Syler served up this softball to John Kerry on December 4: “You called President Bush’s foreign policy arrogant, inept and reckless. Give us some specifics.”

On September 8, the morning after a Bush speech, NBC’s Matt Lauer opened the door for Howard Dean: “You called his speech nothing short of outrageous and said the President was, quote, ‘beginning to remind me of what was happening with Lyndon Johnson and Dick Nixon during the Vietnam War.’ Explain that to me.”

On September 24, ABC’s Charles Gibson asked Dean to repeat one of his smarmiest claims: “You said the extreme right wing has shown nothing but a contempt for democracy. Do you think the extreme right wing is in control of this administration, and do you think it shows contempt for democracy?”

While it may seem natural to ask challengers to criticize the current administration or the other party’s front-runner, that did not happen four years ago. Then, network reporters rarely asked Republicans candidates about either Clinton or Gore. A rare quote: “I know you’ve been critical of the Clinton presidency and what it’s done to the office,” Katie Couric prompted Dan Quayle on July 16, 1999.

Instead, reporters’ questions highlighted GOP schisms: “Is the leadership of your party in Congress out of touch with the American public, and is the party too much a captive of the right?” Gibson asked McCain on October 12, 1999.

BOTH PARTIES FACED LIBERAL QUESTIONING

In 2003, reporters posed 54 questions that could be categorized as reflecting either a liberal or a conservative view. Nearly all of these questions (47) were based on a liberal premise, compared with seven that reflected a conservative agenda. But that’s not just because the Democratic contest pits liberals against each other; reporters also posed far more liberal than conservative questions to Republicans four years ago. (See box.)

On November 16, 1999, Matt Lauer challenged Bush’s proposal for a missile defense system by citing the standard liberal objections that it might not work, would violate the ABM treaty and could “only jump-start a nuclear arms war.” ABC’s Diane Sawyer reflected the liberal view on September 27, 1999 when she saluted McCain: “However brave a stand campaign finance reform may be, members of your own party have rejected it. What’s the matter with them? Why don’t they get it?”

But instead of asking this year’s Democrats to respond to conservative arguments, the networks kept up their liberal approach. Unlike Dean, John Kerry would leave the middle class tax cuts intact, which earned him this rebuke from ABC’s Sawyer on Sept. 2: “If you only repeal those above $200,000, we calculate that it comes to some $40 billion against a potential $470 billion deficit. What does it gain?”

On October 1, Katie Couric demanded that Dean explain reports he once supported capping the growth of Medicare. She followed up with another question that doubted Dean’s liberalism: “Are you sorry that...you described Medicare as one of the worst things that ever happened and a bureaucratic disaster?”

As for those rare conservative-oriented questions, Couric on December 16 asked the anti-war Clark whether “an Iraq with Saddam in charge is preferable to an Iraq with Saddam in custody.” And on November 25, in an otherwise soft interview about the candidate’s new book, ABC’s Gibson challenged trial lawyer John Edwards: “So many people feel that it’s a system run amok, that there are frivolous lawsuits, that the litigiousness of our society has driven up the cost of everything.”

TOUGH ON LOSERS, NOT ON LIBERALISM

While they hardly ever challenged the candidates’ liberal beliefs, reporters did confront the Democrats with tough questions. On September 16, Diane Sawyer told Edwards he had little support in New Hampshire polls. “What are you doing wrong?” she demanded. CBS’s Rene Syler point blank asked Kerry on December 4: “Is your campaign foundering?”

Plainly, the networks aren’t shielding liberal politicians from all aggressive questions. But their performance over the last six months shows how rarely reporters question liberalism itself.

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FNC’s Hume & Columnist Cal Thomas Pick Up on CyberAlert Findings (MRC, 040112)

You read it here first. Last Thursday, FNC’s Brit Hume highlighted a CyberAlert report about how when Halliburton was being accused of wrongdoing, the CBS Evening News reminded viewers of Vice President Cheney’s tie to the company, but when the firm was cleared this month, the CBS show ignored the development. Plus, in a column at the start of the year, Cal Thomas expanded upon a CyberAlert article about how CBS’s Bob Schieffer described George Bush as “a polarizing politician,” but hailed how Howard Dean has “begun to bring people together” while ABC’s Terry Moran labeled Bush as “divisive.”

— On the January 8 Special Report with Brit Hume, during the “Grapevine” segment, Hume reported: “Last night we noted how some print media suddenly stopped mentioning in their leads that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run Halliburton Inc, once the company was, in effect, cleared of accusations that it overcharged for services in Iraq. According to the Media Research Center, the CBS Evening News referred twice to Cheney’s past connection to Halliburton. But, the center says, now that Halliburton has been cleared, CBS Evening News hasn’t mentioned that development at all.”

Indeed, the January 7 CyberAlert noted: Back in mid-December, the CBS Evening News twice led with stories about “war-profiteering” by Halliburton for the price of gas it sold inside Iraq, with Vice President Cheney’s name linked prominently. But three weeks later, when a January 6 front page Wall Street Journal story revealed that the Army Corps of Engineers had cleared Halliburton of any wrongdoing in its pricing, the CBS Evening News, which had earlier touted a concern of “Pentagon auditors,” ignored the development. But Tuesday’s CBS newscast had time for a full story on how, as anchor John Roberts put it, the Howard Dean campaign “offers America new love.” That was a piece on how young people are using Dean’s “meet-ups” as an opportunity to find a mate. See: www.mediaresearch.org

And the CBS Evening News didn’t find any time for the Haliburton development on any subsequent night last week.

The night before his MRC item, Hume related how some print publications had suddenly buried Cheney’s tie to Halliburton. Hume relayed on January 7: “Last month — while Halliburton Inc. was being accused of overcharging for fuel shipped to Iraq from Kuwait — the Associated Press began its report by saying: ‘A Pentagon audit has found Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company may have overcharged the Army.’ Reuters began its story in a similar way, describing Halliburton as, quote, ‘the oil services firm once run by Vice President Dick Cheney.’ And the BBC began its story by saying President Bush ‘expects an oil company once run by his Vice President to return money if it has overcharged for services in Iraq.’ But when Halliburton was, in effect, cleared of any wrongdoing earlier this week, the references to Cheney suddenly dropped out of the lead of stories from the same news outlets.”

— The January 3 nationally syndicated column by Cal Thomas, “When the media meet the candidates,” picked up some quotes first recited in the December 29 CyberAlert. An excerpt from Thomas’ column:

....The early media line was unveiled on ABC last Sunday, when correspondent Terry Moran, sitting in on “This Week” for former Clinton administration operative George Stephanopoulos (no ideological difference there) noted that in the 2000 race, George W. Bush campaigned as “a uniter, not a divider.” Moran concluded that he had failed and that he has become a “divisive president” and a “divisive figure.” To liberals like Moran, one is a divider when one doesn’t buy into the liberal line and offends their governmental, economic and cultural sensibilities. It does not matter to most of the media when conservatives are offended and thus “divided” and excluded from consideration by their leaders. To them, one can only unite (even though one divides conservatives) by reflecting a liberal worldview.

On CBS, Bob Schieffer echoed the Moran view, calling the president “a polarizing politician.” While acknowledging that Bush, as governor of Texas, did seem to bring people together, now, according to Schieffer, he “seems to have become someone that you either love or hate.” Liberal Democrats did not find that a problem with President Clinton. While agreeing that people either loved or hated Clinton, much of the media didn’t think that made Clinton “divisive.” They treated negatively people who hated Clinton, while they frequently treat Bush haters as noble and virtuous, wanting only the best for all of us.

Back on ABC, Moran was doing his best to set the tone and agenda for the media’s campaign approach. In a question to former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, Moran observed: “For many Americans, this is a divisive president. Is he vulnerable in the manner in which he seems to polarize people’s opinions?” Panetta answered, “I think that is the case.” (Surprise!) No self-respecting media liberal would ask such a question of, say, Sen. Hillary Clinton, about any of the Democratic presidential candidates and why they fail to draw conservative support. Apparently, division is a one-way street.

On CBS, Schieffer claimed that Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean is bringing people together. His source? A New York Times writer who believes the evidence comes from Dean’s success as an Internet fund-raiser....

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ABC Still Won’t Report Hike in Bush Approval Level, But CBS Does (MRC, 031217)

Rather reported, over matching graphics listing the numbers: “The capture of Saddam has also changed U.S. public opinion about Iraq and President Bush. In a CBS News/New York Times poll out tonight, 65% of Americans say U.S. efforts to bring stability to Iraq are going well — 47% thought so before Saddam’s capture. You may want to note, though, that only one in four Americans believes there will be fewer attacks on U.S. troops now. As for President Bush, his job approval rating has gone up six points since the capture of Saddam. It now stands at 58% in our poll.”

For CBS’s rundown of the poll results: www.cbsnews.com

The December 16 CyberAlert also noted that “as of late Monday night, I could not find any story on the ABC News Web site” about the poll. At some point on Tuesday, the Web site corrected that with a piece by Gary Langer, “A Sober Response: After Saddam’s Capture, Most Say Difficult Challenges Remain,” which carries a December 15 date.

Langer, the in-house polling expert for ABC News, wasn’t too impressed with the bump up for Bush, which may explain why the result never made it onto the air:

“Bush’s approval rating on handling Iraq remains below its levels last spring and early summer. And his overall job approval rating didn’t show a significant gain — it’s 57% in this poll, compared with 53% in an ABC/Post poll Dec. 7.”

But Langer acknowledged: “Still, the number who ‘strongly’ approve of Bush’s work, 37%, is now its highest since August, up seven points from its post-Sept. 11, 2001 low in late October.”

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Poll: Alternative News Gaining Influence (Mercury News, 040112)

WASHINGTON - People are shifting from traditional news sources such as newspapers and nightly network news for information about the presidential campaign, a poll found.

Led by young adults’ changing habits, the public is finding more of its information from such alternative sources as the Internet and even television shows like “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live.”

Young adults were leading the shift, with one-fifth considering the Internet a top source of campaign news for them, said the poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, released Sunday. About the same number said they regularly learn about the campaign from TV satires.

News-only cable networks are second only to local TV news when people are asked to say where they regularly learn something about the campaign. More than four in 10, 42%, said they regularly learn something from local TV, while 38% chose cable news channels, a slight increase from four years ago.

Nightly network news was named as a regular source of campaign news by 35%, down from 45% four years ago; and newspapers by 31%, down from 40%.

“Cable news and the Internet are looming larger as sources of campaign information as fewer people say they’re getting news from traditional sources such as newspapers and broadcast television,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.

Four in five respondents said they were most likely to get campaign news from television. Those who cited TV as a top source of campaign news most often mentioned CNN (22%) and Fox News (20%) as the leading source of information.

[Pew also discovered a partisan split in what outlets Republicans and Democrats favor, with Republicans more likely to watch FNC and Democrats more likely to watch ABC, CBS or NBC: “Fully twice as many Republicans as Democrats say they get most of their election news from Fox News (29% vs. 14%). Significantly more Democrats than Republicans get most of their election news from one of the three major networks (40% vs. 24%).]

The public is increasingly concerned about bias in campaign coverage by the media generally. About the same number, 39%, say there is bias in campaign coverage as the number that says there is no bias, 38%.

The number who feel coverage is biased has grown steadily since 1988, when 62% said coverage was not biased. That percentage has steadily declined to 53% in 1996, 48% in 2000, and 38% today.

Compared with 2000 a much larger number of Democrats believe that coverage of the campaign is tilted in favor of the Republicans (29% now, 19% in 2000). But Republicans continue to see more bias in campaign coverage than do Democrats. More than four-in-ten Republicans (42%) see news coverage of the campaign as biased in favor of Democrats; that compares with 37% in 2000. Among independents there also has been a significant decline in the percentage who say election news is free of bias (43% now, 51% then), though independents remain divided over whether the coverage favors Democrats or Republicans.

The 13% of people who called the Internet a top source of campaign news doubled that of four years ago. The number of people who say they regularly or sometimes get campaign news from the Internet increased to 33% from 24%.

Four years ago, young people were far more likely to have said they learned about the campaign from nightly network news, 39%, than the Internet or comedy shows. Now, all three are cited about equally as sources of campaign news.

The poll of 1,506 adults was taken Dec. 19-Jan. 4 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3%age points, larger for subgroups.

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Today’s Media Coverage compared to 4 years ago (Media Research Center, 040120)

Pre-Caucus GOP Guests in 2000 Greeted with Ideological Hostility

Bias Flashback, first of three. On Monday morning, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Howard Dean and John Edwards all appeared on the ABC and NBC morning shows with Kerry popping up on CBS, but were not presented with anything approaching the hostility to their political agenda as GOP guests and Steve Forbes got from Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and Bryant Gumbel on the day of the 2000 Iowa Caucus.

This year, Couric was off and ABC staffers other than Sawyer handled the interviews, and they stuck to the horse race (see item #3 above). That contrasts with Monday, January 24, 2000, when NBC’s Couric griped about how “Forbes has forced George W. Bush to...turn right...on taxes and abortion.” When Forbes said that his policies have “broad-based” appeal, Bryant Gumbel scoffed on CBS: “Do you really expect to win moderate votes in this country?”

An excerpt from the January 25, 2000 CyberAlert:

....— NBC’s Today talked to The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol about the upcoming Iowa caucus. MRC intern Ken Shepherd observed that after questions about how the caucus system works, what a big Gore win would mean for Bradley and whether Bush should be concerned about complacency, Katie Couric hit him with this ideologically-loaded statement in the form of a question: “Forbes has forced George W. Bush to, to turn right if you will, on taxes and abortion. Is that going to, are those positions that he’s had to take, in the face of a challenge by Forbes, will they be difficult to defend in a general election?”

— Over on ABC’s Good Morning America Diane Sawyer hit William Bennett with the same argument, MRC analyst Jessica Anderson noted. Previewing the caucus with Bennett and former Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, Sawyer pressed Bennett: “Well Bill, what about George W. Bush — you mentioned abortion — having to go fairly far now in being explicit about his pro-life stance, when 66% of Republican soccer moms nationwide are pro-choice. Gonna get him in trouble later on?”

— Bryant Gumbel sure doesn’t find any appeal in the Steve Forbes platform. Interviewing the GOP candidate on The Early Show, MRC analyst Brian Boyd noticed that Gumbel vehemently countered the idea that Forbes may have “broad-based” appeal.

Responding to Gumbel’s doubts about his ability to win over the wider electorate, Forbes asserted that many of his positions have “broad-based” appeal. Gumbel shot back: “You say it’s broad-based, but you oppose Roe v Wade, you oppose gays in the military, you oppose the teaching of evolution, you oppose the ban on school prayer, you oppose a waiting period on gun purchases. Do you really expect to win moderate votes in this country?”

Forbes replied that people want to keep more of what they earn, which is a position he offers. Gumbel quickly jumped in and talked over him, declaring: “But on a social agenda, you can’t win without moderates.”

In 2000, NBC Reporters Warned that Bush Moved Too Far Right

Bias Flashback, second of three. On Monday night the MRC staff did not see any instances of cable network reporters or analysts griping about how any Democratic candidate may have hurt himself by being too liberal, but four years ago, on the night of the 2000 Republican Caucus in Iowa, NBC’s star reporters contended that to win George Bush moved right, which would hurt with the wider electorate. “Bush had to run with Jesus Christ,” remarked Brian Williams. Consorting with religious types and conservatives, Tim Russert warned, “could hurt” Republicans “with a mainstream electorate in a general election.” Russert also expressed concern about how Forbes pushed Bush into a big tax cut.

Another excerpt from the Tuesday, January 25, 2000 CyberAlert:

.... — Brian Williams to Tim Russert during MSNBC’s 8pm EST special, an hour early edition of The News With Brian Williams: “Tim, in order to do as well as he [Bush] did tonight, and the following is meant with no disrespect and in capital letters, George Bush had to run with Jesus Christ. George Bush invoked Christ’s name during a debate, labeled him as a philosopher in so doing. He posed in front of a mural of Jesus Christ and talked about the topic of abortion in order to appeal to the group, the demographic you were just talking about. Absent that tonight may not have been such pretty a result for him.”

Russert: “I agree completely. The fact is George Bush held his own amongst conservative Christians. And I think it is important to note that George Bush is convincing in his belief in faith and it is part of his political leadership and he’s not afraid to say that. Is it a political asset in the state of Iowa? Absolutely. We also asked our people coming out of the voting booth what was the big issue tonight. And this is really interesting to me. Far and away the most important issue were moral values. 35%, followed by taxes 23%. Social security, Medicare 10, abortion just 10%. Education just 4%.”

— At the top of MSNBC’s 10pm EST “Decision 2000” special, host Tom Brokaw asked John McCain via satellite in New Hampshire: “Senator McCain, one of the things that happened here in Iowa as a result of the presence of Steve Forbes, who was well organized, well financed and Ambassador Keyes, who is very articulate on these issues, is that it did become a contest for the social conservative vote. It was driven slightly to the right from where it might have begun. Do you think that’s going happen now in New Hampshire?”

— Near the end of the 10pm EST hour, Tim Russert told Brokaw how Bush had been pushed to the right and out of the mainstream: “There is a local TV station in Manchester which calls part of its news building the Steve Forbes Wing because of the amount of money he spent in 1996 but Tom, I think his role is more important in looking at a general election. Right now George W. Bush had to put forward a tax cut plan of over a trillion dollars over a ten-year period. He had to agree with Steve Forbes on the language in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions. President Clinton seized on that yesterday, saying if George W. Bush is elected, you’re gonna see Roe v Wade overturned. The Democrats in Congress seized on the Bush tax cut plan, saying it’s Gingrich II and George W. Bush did not want to have to stake out those kind of strong conservative positions in a primary campaign that could hurt them with a mainstream electorate in a general election.”...

— NBC’s Today talked to The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol about the upcoming Iowa caucus. MRC intern Ken Shepherd observed that after questions about how the caucus system works, what a big Gore win would mean for Bradley and whether Bush should be concerned about complacency, Katie Couric hit him with this ideologically-loaded statement in the form of a question: “Forbes has forced George W. Bush to, to turn right if you will, on taxes and abortion. Is that going to, are those positions that he’s had to take, in the face of a challenge by Forbes, will they be difficult to defend in a general election?”

Few Liberal Labels, Four Years Ago CBS Issued 20 Right-Wing Tags

Bias Flashback, third of three. Liberal ideological labeling is rare on television news, and while an occasional story in Howard Dean’s heyday noted how some are concerned he’s too liberal to win a general election, there’s been hardly any labeling during the Iowa Caucus coverage this year and no labeling this campaign season approaches the onslaught of conservative tags that CBS News delivered over the weekend before the 2000 Iowa Caucuses.

Back then, in just three nights, the CBS Evening News used the labels “conservative,” “right” or “hard-right” an incredible 20 times, but did not once issue a liberal label. CBS tagged not only Bush and other Republicans, but the Supreme Court.

An excerpt from the Monday, January 24, 2000 CyberAlert:

Number of times the CBS Evening News over three nights, from Friday January 21 through Sunday January 23, used the terms “liberal,” “left” or “hard-left”: Zero. Number of times the CBS Evening News, over the same three nights, employed the labels “conservative,” “right” or “hard-right”: 19 times. That’s an average of 6.33 times a night. And that’s just in stories on the Republican presidential contest so it doesn’t even count Dan Rather’s bizarre assertion that the Supreme Court’s “new majority” may be showing a “shift to the right.”

Amongst the 20 ideological tags assigned by CBS in a mere three newscasts: Dan Rather claimed “George W. Bush’s talking the right talk, as in Republican hard-right.” Rather also highlighted “Bush’s sudden rush to the right.” Reporter Bill Whitaker warned, “Political observers say Iowa is a treacherous road for candidates to veer to the right without losing the middle.” Another night Whitaker asserted: “George W. Bush today ratcheted up the rhetoric on a tried and true right-wing issue: abortion.”

Bush’s comments about abortion fueled most of the CBS labels as the network portrayed conservatives as a ruinous force driving the campaign, but CBS’s own Bob Schieffer reported that Bush had not changed his position. While Dan Rather exclaimed on Friday that “George W. Bush punched to the right with more anti-abortion talk,” the next night Schieffer told viewers: “Bush says he will not use abortion as a litmus test in appointing federal judges. He hasn’t backed down from that so I think he has not changed his position a bit on all of this.”

CBS didn’t find anything about the Gore or Bradley campaign worth labeling, and neither did ABC or NBC over the weekend. But ABC was at least consistent in not labeling either party’s candidates. NBC’s David Bloom couldn’t refrain from applying two conservative tags on Republicans....

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Jennings Notes Public Trust in Democrats, Skips Trust in Bush (Media Research Center, 040120)

[a good example of bias by omission]

ABC’s Peter Jennings on Monday night highlighted how a new ABC News/Washington Post poll found that “50% or more of Americans trust Democrats in Congress,” over President Bush, “to deal with the economy, health insurance and the federal budget deficit.” But Jennings failed to note the issues on which voters trust Bush over Democrats or subjects on which Bush has a positive approval rating.

On the January 19 World News Tonight, following several stories on the about-to-commence Iowa caucuses, Jennings read this short item about a new poll:

“There is a new ABC News/Washington Post poll on President Bush who was, incidentally, rehearsing his State of the Union address today. It’s tomorrow. The poll finds that 48% of voters would choose Mr. Bush if the presidential elections were held today. It also finds that 50% or more of Americans trust Democrats in Congress to deal with the economy, health insurance and the federal budget deficit.”

The on-screen graphic showed Bush with 48% compared to 46% for a “Democratic nominee.” Under “trust Democrats to do a better job handling,” ABC listed the economy at 50%, health insurance at 52% and the deficit at the same 52%.

But the rundown on the ABC News Web site reveals that in three headings more trust Bush than Democrats: “Nation’s Main Problems,” by 45 to 44%, “War on Terrorism by 60 to 31% and “Situation in Iraq” by 56 to 36%. Plus, Bush’s overall job approval is now at 58% with 40% disapproval. The public approves of Bush on education by 55 to 37% and on the economy by 51 to 47%.

ABC News polling expert Gary Langer noted in his ABCNews.com story that Bush’s approval rating is “darn good.” Langer recalled: “Looking back nearly a half century, only one previous President has had a higher approval rating in January of a re-election year — Dwight Eisenhower in 1956.”

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Media Bias on Spanking Law (040131)

Kwing Hung: media bias again! In the CBC report on the decision by the Supreme Court on spanking, three quarters of those interviewed were against physical discipline (thus in fact presenting many reasons against the ruling), also their coverage time is longer; and again the interviewees and the reporter had the final say.

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CBS Evening News Ignores Own Poll Finding on Bush Leading Kerry (MRC, 040316)

When a CBS News poll found John Kerry leading George W. Bush by 48 to 43% amongst registered voters, Dan Rather reported it on the February 16 CBS Evening News, and when another CBS News poll two weeks ago put Kerry up by a mere one point over Bush, by 47 to 46% with registered voters, the February 28 CBS Evening News highlighted the finding. But on Monday, while the CBSNews.com home page, for much of the afternoon and into the evening featured the results of a new CBS News/New York Times poll, with a headline which declared, “Bush Moves Ahead of Kerry,” the CBS Evening News didn’t utter a word about the new numbers which put Bush up over Kerry by 46 to 43% with registered voters.

Two weeks ago, the CBS Evening News emphasized how Bush’s approval rating had fallen below 50%, but the new poll found his approval rating back above 50% — but that too went unmentioned Monday night.

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Times Never Changes: The Los Angeles Times, still biased (NRO, 040401)

The longstanding leftist orthodoxy of the Los Angeles Times has improved noticeably under editor-in-chief John Carroll, a respected newsman who moved here from the Baltimore Sun four years ago. Carroll has made a real effort to rein in the paper’s liberal bias, at least in straight news stories. Earlier this year, Carroll wrote a famous (in media circles) in-house memo scolding a reporter for a story about a Texas abortion law; the piece had implied anyone against abortion is obviously nuts.

I should note though, that this improvement at the Times was underway even before Carroll’s arrival, with the departure of former editor Shelby Coffey III in 1997. Like ex-New York Times editor-in-chief Howell Raines, whose upcoming 21,000-word non mea culpa in the May Atlantic has returned white male guilt to the media spotlight, Coffey grew up rich and liberal in the pre-civil-rights south, and expected his staff to atone for his privileged background. When a paper’s top editor is a self-styled Atticus Finch, watch out.

Who can forget (O.K., where’ talking the same media circles again, I suppose) the infamous Times style guidelines of the mid-’90s, which made the L.A. Times under Coffey a national laughingstock, with their risible combination of earnestly p.c. taboos combined with bloated middle management. My favorite guideline: “Pendejo... translates literally as pubic hair, but it is a vulgar term that means fool...should be used only in quotes approved by the editor, managing editor, associate editor or the senior editor.” (I remember thinking at the time: If you have to go through all that, why bother?)

Still, my favorite newspaper gave me a couple of déjà vu moments last week. The first, in the wake of the Spanish terror bombings, was Ariel Dorfman’s Mar. 21 Sunday opinion-section ode to the Chilean poet and leftist hero Pablo Neruda. The headline: “Words That Pulse Among Madrid’s Dead: Neruda’s Verses Howl Against Terror Today and Yesterday...”

Dorfman chided anyone who thinks that the result of the Spanish elections mean Spain has capitulated to terror — “Just because a sovereign nation decides to reject and oppose an unnecessary, unjust and deceitful war does not mean the people of that nation are not willing to defend themselves” — and quoted some lyrical verses Neruda wrote about Madrid’s barrios and clock-tower bells during the Spanish civil war.

But you would have no idea reading Dorfman’s piece that Neruda was such a hard-line true believer that he was awarded the International Stalin Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize. Nor that his poetry includes these lines written in 1953, upon the death of Stalin:

We must learn from Stalin His sincere intensity His concrete clarity... Stalin is the moon, the maturity of man and the peoples.

“Even by the standards of 1953 it’s repulsive,” said Roman Genn, my friend and National Review contributor, when he called up to complain about the Dorfman piece and send me the Stalin eulogy. “Neruda was not even a sympathizer — he was an active agent. We have no idea how much blood is on his hands in Spain, and I don’t mean just fascist blood we don’t care for.”

Roman is an artist who grew up in the Soviet Union and immigrated to Los Angeles in 1991 at age 19, when he began drawing caricatures for the Times op-ed pages. He values that gig. But he was so irritated by the clueless nature of the Neruda piece that he called some Times editors to complain.

“They told me, ‘Well, we all remember history differently,’” Roman recalled. “I said, ‘You don’t run favorable stories about Nazis.’”

My other déjà vu Times moment last week was the paper’s Mar. 23 editorial condemning Israel’s assassination of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin. The “murder” was wrong in the Times’s eyes because, for one thing, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw disapproved of it in strong terms. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, who “unfortunately said only that Hamas was a terrorist organization and Hamas one of its planners.” Also, Yassin was “a 67-year-old wheelchair-bound quadriplegic.” And therefore, you know, pitiful and weak.

What explains much of all this is journalists’ need to pat themselves on the back as friends of the oppressed. As I said, the Times is getting more hardheaded. But it’s about time that it does — and you don’t have to be an extreme Ariel Sharon supporter to see bias in its Mideast coverage.

I still remember an astonishingly sob-sistery front-page Christmas Day, 2001 story by correspondent Tracy Wilkinson. The headline: “Arafat Forced to Miss Mass in Bethlehem.” The opening sentence: “In a centuries-old tradition, worshipers congregated here Monday where Jesus is believed to have been born and ushered in a joyless Christmas made all the more somber by Israel’s refusal to permit the participation of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat....”

Did the Times actually mean that a Christian holiday was “joyless” because a Muslim terrorist wasn’t there to help celebrate? Apparently so. I imagined the L.A. Times version of Little Women for Palestinians:

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without President Arafat,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

“It’s so dreadful to be Palestinian!” sighed Meg, looking down at her old chador.

“I don’t think it’s fair for the Israelis to have plenty of pretty things, and then they restrict our movements just because we like to make pretty explosions,” added little Amy, with an injured sniff.

“We’ve still got Hamas and Hezbollah and each other,” said Beth contentedly, from her corner.

Really, as last week reminded me, you could still fill a whole book with parodies of L.A. Times stories. But I’ll leave it to someone else to come up with that particular anthology — unless you’re making an offer.

— Catherine Seipp is a writer in California who publishes the weblog Cathy’s World. She is an NRO contributor.

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The Other Lame “Times” (Ann Coulter, 040519)

If liberals won’t move on from the prison abuse photos calculated to incite hatred toward the very troops liberals loudly claim to “support,” I’m not moving on from the fact that the editor of the Los Angeles Times, John Carroll, is instructing journalists on ethics. The editor of the Los Angeles Times telling reporters how to behave ethically is a complete contradiction, like ... oh, I don’t know ... giving Yasser Arafat a Nobel Peace Prize or something. You know, just patently silly.

This is the same L.A. Times that engaged in desperate, 11th-hour attempts to sabotage Arnold Schwarzenegger during the California recall election with lurid sex stories from anonymous assistant crudite girls who worked the craft services tables on Arnold’s movies from the 1980s and were still trying to break into show biz 20 years later.

Books

This is the same L.A. Times where reporters had to be told in an internal memo (from Carroll himself) to stop injecting opinion in news stories, specifically the practice of prefacing the term “pro-life” with the term “so-called.”

This is the same L.A. Times that in recent years instituted racial and gender quotas for sources on “so-called” news – oops, I mean, news stories – which puts reporters in the position of having to round up a black expert on nuclear fusion, a Native American expert on cubism, and a female expert on great moments in football.

This is the same L.A. Times that responded to the largest number of canceled subscriptions in the paper’s history from readers enraged by the paper’s liberal bias by putting Michael Kinsley, one of America’s leading leftists, in charge of the editorial page.

And this is the same L.A. Times that pays unrepentant Castro fan and former North Korea defender Robert Scheer for his hysterical anti-American rants every Tuesday, after hiring him mostly because his wife was on the editorial board.

The title of Carroll’s speech was “The Wolf in Reporter’s Clothing: The Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America.” One has to admit: If you wanted an expert on the practice of partisan pseudo-journalism, you could do a lot worse than the editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Alas, Carroll’s speech wasn’t the “how-to” lecture dozens of would-be yellow journalists were expecting when they showed up for his presentation. Like the “ombudsman” at the New York Times, Carroll chastised his own newspaper for some small, irrelevant infraction no one would ever complain about while ignoring the paper’s consistent Soviet-style reporting that has led thousands of readers to cancel their subscriptions.

Instead, Carroll’s speech was an attack on Fox News Channel. If conservatives complained about CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Reader’s Digest, NPR, etc. etc. half as much as liberals scream about Fox News, even I would say conservatives were getting to be a bore on the subject.

Carroll’s case-in-chief of Fox News’ “pseudo-journalism” is “The O’Reilly Factor.” (Only liberals could force conservatives into defending Bill O’Reilly.) Carroll lyingly says of O’Reilly: “Where, he asked, was the L.A. Times on the so-called Troopergate story?”

In fact, O’Reilly never mentioned “Troopergate.” He didn’t mention the Arkansas State Troopers. And he certainly didn’t mention “so-called Troopergate.” He compared the L.A. Times coverage of Schwarzenegger’s alleged inappropriate behavior decades earlier with that paper’s coverage of the scandals of various Democrats – among them the stunning, contemporaneous sexual assaults by Bill Clinton on identifiable women.

I suppose it’s easy to confuse sex scandals involving Bill Clinton – I keep a “Women Bill Clinton Has Raped or Groped at a Glance” file on my Blackberry, just as a time-saver – but O’Reilly was referring not to the 1993 allegations from Arkansas State Troopers, but to the 1998 Clinton sex scandals involving allegations from specific women, such as Kathleen Willey. We know this because while the word “trooper” never passed O’Reilly’s lips, he did expressly refer to “Kathleen Willey.”

When it came to these Clinton sex assaults, how did the L.A. Times do? Reporter Richard A. Serrano described Willey as “embittered” and said her accusations were “fraught with contradiction” – unlike the truth-tellers who waited 20 years to make anonymous accusations against Schwarzenegger. The Times angrily editorialized that Clinton’s impeachment was “grounded not in what is right for the country but what best helps House managers save face.” (How anyone can use the expression “save face” in defense of Bill Clinton is beyond my understanding.)

You don’t have to enter the “No Spin Zone” to see the “disconnect,” as liberals love to say, between the L.A. Times’ frantic, wild-eyed search for a woman – any woman, even anonymously – to accuse Schwarzenegger of groping her at some point during the previous quarter century, and the Times’ equally determined efforts to discount the many credible accounts of women, all named, who plausibly accused Bill Clinton of raping, groping or otherwise sexually assaulting them.

But Carroll dearly wishes O’Reilly had said “Troopergate” because apparently that’s the last time Carroll can remember the L.A. Times going after a Democrat the way the Times goes after Republicans as a matter of policy. The Times’ Troopergate story came out in December 1993. But Carroll is still citing that one time over a decade ago when the L.A. Times engaged in nonpartisan reporting, bragging: “At one point, it had nine reporters in Little Rock.” OK, but there were 24 reporters on the Schwarzenegger story.

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Liberal Media Evidence (WS, 040528)

A new poll by the Pew Center proves that the media is as liberal as ever. When will “diversity” mean more conservatives?

THE ARGUMENT over whether the national press is dominated by liberals is over. Since 1962, there have been 11 surveys of the media that sought the political views of hundreds of journalists. In 1971, they were 53% liberal, 17% conservative. In a 1976 survey of the Washington press corps, it was 59% liberal, 18% conservative. A 1985 poll of 3,200 reporters found them to be self-identified as 55% liberal, 17% conservative. In 1996, another survey of Washington journalists pegged the breakdown as 61% liberal, 9% conservative. Now, the new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found the national media to be 34% liberal and 7% conservative.

Over 40-plus years, the only thing that’s changed in the media’s politics is that many national journalists have now cleverly decided to call themselves moderates. But their actual views haven’t changed, the Pew survey showed. Their political beliefs are close to those of self-identified liberals and nowhere near those of conservatives. And the proportion of liberals to conservatives in the press, either 3-to-1 or 4-to-1, has stayed the same. That liberals are dominant is now beyond dispute.

Does this affect coverage? Is there really liberal bias? The answers are, of course, yes and yes. It couldn’t be any other way. Think for a moment if the numbers were reversed and conservatives had outnumbered liberals in the media for the past four decades. Would President Bush be getting kinder coverage? For sure,

and I’ll bet any liberal would agree with that. Would President Reagan have been treated with less hostility if the national press was conservative-dominated? Yes, again. And I could go on.

The Pew poll also found that 55% of national journalists believe that Bush should be treated more critically by the press than he has been. They think he’s gotten off too easy, despite empirical evidence of media Bush bashing. The Center for Media and Public Affairs has examined the coverage of Bush by the broadcast network evening news shows and found only two periods of favorable coverage: in the weeks after September 11 and during the actual war in Iraq. This year, roughly 75% of the stories about the Democratic presidential candidates were positive. For Bush, they’ve been 60-plus percent negative.

With the evidence of liberal dominance so overwhelming, a leading press critic is now calling for more ideological diversity in the media. Tom Rosenstiel, who helped design the Pew poll and who runs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says it’s necessary not to think just of diversity that makes newsrooms “look like America,” but to create a press corps that “thinks like America.”

In truth, the effort to hire more minorities and women has had the effect of making the media more liberal. Both these groups tend to have liberal politics, and this is accentuated by the fact that many of the women recruited into journalism are young and single, precisely those with the most liberal views. “By diversifying the profession in one way,” Rosenstiel says, “they were making it more homogenous in another.”

Rosenstiel insists it would be quite possible for news organizations to find journalists with conservative views to hire. “There are ways to change the culture of the newsroom,” he says. Media recruiters can turn to different colleges than the ones where they’ve traditionally recruited. They can look to different parts of the country. And they can seek assistance from organizations that already train young conservatives for careers in journalism.

Those who still doubt the press needs fresh, preferably conservative, blood, should consider these numbers: In 1999, 12% of journalists said fairness and balance were a big problem for the media. Now, in the Pew survey, only 5% say so—this, after further proof of liberal dominance and noisy debates about liberal bias. And in 1999, 11% said ethics and standards were a major concern. But after high-visibility scandals involving fabricated stories and controversies about plagiarism, only 5% agree today. The case for ideological realignment of the media is closed.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

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‘Outfoxed’ Attempts to Show FOX News’ Bias (FN, 040713)

NEW YORK — A new documentary backed by liberal political groups aims to document that the FOX News Channel is anything but “fair and balanced,” despite the cable-news network’s motto.

The film, “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” draws on clips compiled during weeks of round-the-clock taping of the network to demonstrate what the filmmakers believe is a pattern of right-wing bias and support for the Republican agenda.

“What we found is not that FOX is a conservative network, but that it’s a network that follows the party line of the Bush administration,” said “Outfoxed” filmmaker Robert Greenwald, a Hollywood producer-director whose credits include the 2003 documentary “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War” and such TV films as “The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth about Enron” and “Blonde,” a biopic of Marilyn Monroe.

Greenwald said he decided to make the film after hearing numerous journalists refer to the “Foxification” of the news. That approach, he says, has served the 8-year-old FOX News Channel well, and “put pressure on many of the other networks to move in the same direction: cheap news, ranting and raving, pseudo-patriotism.”

Greenwald’s 75-minute film includes complaints from several FOX News staffers about the workplace climate at the outlet of the global Murdoch media empire. They say their bosses promote a conservative slant.

“We weren’t necessarily, as it was told to us, a newsgathering organization so much as we were a proponent of a point of view,” says Jon Du Pre, a former FOX News correspondent.

The film also quotes internal memos from a top network executive that seem to call for pro-Bush coverage.

“Ribbons or medals? Which did John Kerry throw away after he returned from Vietnam?” wrote senior vice president for news John Moody in an April memo to the staff. “His perceived disrespect for the military could be more damaging to the [Democratic presidential] candidate than questions about his actions in uniform.”

In a statement Monday, the network dismissed the whistleblowers as “former low-level FOX employees” who are “hardly worth addressing.” It challenged other media organizations to make public their own employee memos, whereupon “FOX News Channel will publish 100% of our editorial directions and memos, and let the public decide who is fair.”

The film also draws on a study commissioned by Fairness & Accuracy in Media, a national media watchdog group. The study found conservatives accounted for nearly three-fourths of ideological guests on the network’s marquee news program, “Special Report With Brit Hume,” between June and December 2003, and that Republicans outnumbered Democrats five to one.

“Outfoxed” was compiled during the past seven months in association with liberal political organizations Center for American Progress and MoveOn.Org, as well as the citizens’ lobbying group Common Cause.

Budgeted at $300,000, the “guerrilla” documentary will premiere Tuesday at the New School University in Manhattan, then initially be distributed through private “house party” screenings and DVD sales.

At a news conference to introduce the film Monday, Greenwald called FOX News Channel “an opinion station, not a news station.”

When former White House terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke testified before the 9/11 commission, he apologized to the American people for the government’s failure to protect them.

The film displays a flurry of FOX pundits blasting Clarke, often in similar terms. “It was almost like FOX News was working off of the playbook coming out of the White House, that he had to be torn down,” FAIR co-founder Jeff Cohen says in the film.

FOX host Bill O’Reilly is seen on his show insisting he has told a guest to shut up “only once in six years,” after which he is seen in clips telling one person after another with whom he disagrees to “shut up.”

The documentary also includes a rapid-fire succession of clips of more than a dozen FOX hosts using the phrase “some people say” — which the filmmakers say is a way to insinuate opinion disguised as reporting into on-air discussions.

“There’s no smoking gun,” Greenwald admitted in explaining what his film set out to reveal — “just a pattern.”

==============================

FOX News Channel Statement on ‘Outfoxed’ (FN, 040713)

Any news organization that thinks this story is legitimate is opening itself to having its copyrighted material taken out of context for partisan reasons. The illegal copyright infringement actions of Moveon.org in cooperation with the New York Times, including “cutting a deal” not to give FOX News Channel adequate time to react, is unprecedented. The New York Times corrupts the journalistic process by taking orders from a George Soros-funded web site – Soros is a left-wing billionaire currency speculator who funds many liberal efforts. This is the real story. If any news organizations decide to make this an anti-FOX News story, then all of their material becomes fodder immediately for possible out of context and biased documentaries.

The former low-level FOX employees are hardly worth addressing. Some of the “sources” for this documentary never worked for FOX News Channel. Some left because of incompetence, and none expressed concern about editorial policy while employees. They represent fewer than 10 employees out of 2,000 over 8 years. Any news organization that believes this story is big and FOX News Channel is a problem will be challenged by FOX News Channel in the following manner:

If they will put out 100% of their editorial directions and internal memos, FOX News Channel will publish 100% of our editorial directions and internal memos, and let the public decide who is fair. This includes any legitimate cable news network, broadcast network, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

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Details About Employees Featured in ‘Outfoxed’ (FN, 040713)

In the film “Outfoxed,” four people are identified as former employees of FOX News. FOX News officials, saying their employment history was misrepresented, issued the following clarification:

• Alexander Kippen is referred to as a “former FOX News producer” when in fact he was never employed by FOX News Channel. He was an employee of WTTG-TV, a FOX affiliate** in Washington, DC.

• Frank O’Donnell is referred to as a “FOX News producer” in film materials, which is factually incorrect. O’Donnell worked for FOX affiliate WTTG** from 1984 — 1991 and was never a FOX News Channel employee.

• Jon Du Pre was hired in 1999 as a reporter for FNC’s Los Angeles bureau, not an anchor as the film material states. His contract was not renewed in 2002 because, as his personnel file states, he was considered to be a weak field correspondent and could not do live shots. At the time his contract was not renewed, Du Pre was applying for an anchor position on FOX News Channel.

• Clara Frenk was a pool booker, not a “producer” in the FOX News Channel Washington, D.C., bureau. She worked at FNC from February 1998 until March 1999 and expressed no concern about the editorial process while she was employed here.

**FOX affiliates are run independently and overseen by FOX Television Stations Inc. FOX affiliates are separate entities from FOX News Channel. FOX News has no editorial oversight of any FOX affiliate.

Two stories that appeared in The Washington Post pointed out additional parts of the movie that are distorted and factually incorrect:

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The Case of Reuters: A news agency that will not call a terrorist a terrorist (NRO, 040713)

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following appeared in the July 26, 2004, issue of National Review, a special issue made possible by the Media Research Center.

Many people still think of Reuters as the Rolls-Royce of news agencies. Just as the House of Morgan was once synonymous with good banking, Reuters has long been synonymous with good news-gathering. In 1940, there was even a Hollywood film about Paul Julius Reuter, the German-Jewish immigrant to London who as early as 1851 began transmitting stock-market quotes between London and Paris via the new Calais-Dover cable.

His agency quickly established a reputation in Europe for being the first to report scoops from abroad, such as of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Today, almost every major news outlet in the world subscribes. Operating in 200 cities in 94 countries, Reuters produces text in 19 languages, as well as photos and television footage from around the world.

Though it may report in a largely neutral way on many issues, Reuters’s coverage of the Middle East is deeply flawed. It is symptomatic, for instance, that Reuters’s global head of news, Stephen Jukes, banned the use of the word “terrorist” to describe the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. Even so, such is the aura still surrounding Reuters that news editors from Los Angeles to Auckland automatically assume that text, photos, and film footage provided by Reuters will be fair and objective. Reuters and Associated Press copy is simply inserted into many correspondents’ reports — even in the New York Times and Washington Post — without, it often seems, so much as a second thought given to its accuracy.

This has led to some misleading reporting from Iraq, and still worse coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The newswires are much more influential in setting the news (and hence diplomatic) agenda of that struggle than most people realize.

One veteran American newspaper correspondent in Jerusalem, eager to maintain anonymity so as not to jeopardize relations with his anti-Israel colleagues, points out that “whereas foreign correspondents still write features, they rarely cover the actual breaking news that dominates the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In terms of written copy on the conflict, I would estimate that 50% of all reporting, and 90% of the attitude, is formed by these news agencies. The important thing about Reuters is that it sets the tone, and here spin is everything.”

In a study last year, the media watchdog HonestReporting found that in “100% of headlines” when Reuters wrote about Israeli acts of violence, Israel was emphasized as the first word; also, an active voice was used, often without explaining that the “victim” may have been a gunman. A typical headline was: “Israeli Troops Shoot Dead Palestinian in W. Bank” (July 3, 2003). By contrast, when Palestinians attacked Israelis (almost always civilians), Reuters usually avoided naming the perpetrator. For example: “New West Bank Shooting Mars Truce” (July 1, 2003). In many cases, the headline was couched in a passive voice.

Often it is a question of emphasis: Important and relevant information is actually contained in Reuters text, but buried deep down in the story. Many newspaper readers, however, never get beyond the headlines, and for space reasons many papers carry only the first few paragraphs of a report — often inserted into their own correspondents’ stories. When the TV networks run only brief headlines, or Reuters news ribbon at the foot of the screen, the full text is never shown.

Sometimes, Reuters presents unreliable information as though it were undoubtedly true. Most people are unlikely to notice this. For example, Reuters will note that “a doctor at the hospital said the injured Palestinian was unarmed” — when in fact the doctor couldn’t possibly have known this, since he wasn’t present at the gunfight. But because he is a doctor, Reuters is suggesting to readers that his word is necessarily authoritative. Unfortunately, Reuters headlines and text are used unchanged by newspaper editors because they assume it is professional, balanced copy, which doesn’t need any further editing.

Reporters of course can’t be everywhere at once. The increased speed of the Internet and the demand for instant, 24-hour TV news coverage means that the world’s news outlets rely heavily on Reuters and the AP, which in turn rely on a network of local Palestinian “stringers.” Virtually all breaking news (and much of the non-breaking news) on CNN, the BBC, Fox, and other networks comes from these stringers.

Such stringers are hired for speed, to save money (there is no need to pay drivers and translators), and for their local knowledge. But in many cases, in hiring them, their connections to Arafat’s regime and Hamas count for more than their journalistic abilities. All too often the information they provide, and the supposed eyewitnesses they interview, are undependable. Yet, because of Reuters’s prestige, American and international news outlets simply take their copy as fact. Thus non-massacres become massacres; death tolls are exaggerated; and gunmen are written about as if they were civilians.

As Ehud Ya’ari, Israeli television’s foremost expert on Palestinian affairs, put it: “The vast majority of information of every type coming out of the area is being filtered through Palestinian eyes. Cameras are angled to show a tainted view of the Israeli army’s actions and never focus on Palestinian gunmen. Written reports focus on the Palestinian version of events. And even those Palestinians who don’t support the intifada dare not show or describe anything embarrassing to the Palestinian Authority, for fear they may provoke the wrath of Arafat’s security forces.”

One Palestinian journalist told me that “the worst the Israelis can do is take away our press cards. But if we irritate Arafat, or Hamas, you don’t know who might be waiting in your kitchen when you come home at night.”

Some of Reuters’s Palestinian stringers are honest and courageous. But, according to several ex-Reuters staffers, they feel the intimidating presence of Wafa Amr, Reuters’s “Senior Palestinian Correspondent.” Amr — who is a cousin of former Palestinian minister Nabil Amr, and whose father is said to be close to Arafat — had this title specially created for her (there is no “Senior Israeli Correspondent,” or the equivalent in any other Arab country) so that her close ties to the Palestinian Authority could be exploited.

As one former Reuters journalist put it: “She occupies this position in spite of lacking a basic command of English grammar. The information passed through her is controlled, orchestrated. Reuters would never allow Israeli government propaganda to be fed into its reports in this way. Indeed, stories exposing Israeli misdeeds are a favorite of Reuters. Amr has never had an exposé on Arafat, or his Al-Aqsa Brigades terror group.”

But things may well be improving. Lately, with a new Jerusalem bureau chief, Reuters has taken some steps to ensure greater balance. For example, it no longer claims Hamas’s goal is merely “to set up an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza” (which it is not), but instead writes that Hamas is “sworn to Israel’s destruction” (which it is).

Reuters no longer carries the highly misleading “death tolls” at the end of each story that lumped together Palestinian civilians, gunmen, and suicide bombers. (Agence France-Presse continues to do this.) And, apparently, there are plans to relocate Wafa Amr by next year. Is it too much to hope that one day soon Reuters might actually call terrorism terrorism?

— Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph of London.

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Incredible Media Bias During Federal Election (Christian Coalition International, 040630)

Two of the most notable slogans by media guru Marshall McLuhan were “the medium is the message” and “all news is fake.” Given the recent Canadian federal election campaign, one can verily say that truer words were never spoken.

“Mainstream” media outlets and their reporters exhibited a shocking degree of selective, slanted and outright biased coverage throughout the campaign, but never more so than when it came to the so-called hot-button issues of abortion and homosexuality. In fact, if one took the coverage at face value, it would be difficult to discern that these were even contentious and controversial issues at all. Instead, one might easily have thought that the whole country was pro-abortion and pro-homosexual, and that anyone thinking outside that little box was an extremist wingnut of the first order.

The ball started rolling when media pundits jumped on Conservative Rob Merrifield’s rather tame remark early in the campaign that women may benefit from receiving third-party counselling prior to undergoing abortions. That was the red blanket that the pro-abortion bulls, and their allies in the media, needed to swing into action.

“The Conservative party’s health critic is advocating a dramatic shift in abortion regulations,” claimed the Globe and Mail’s Jill Mahoney in a June 1 article. Mahoney went on to quote extensively from outraged remarks by the usual suspects, including Henry Morgentaler, the Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada and the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League.

Opposing these three pro-abortion voices was just one pro-life voice – Campaign Life Coalition’s Jim Hughes – but the reporter did not contact any of the post-abortive women suggested as sources to her who could have added a unique and often ignored perspective on the issue. Nor did the media report on the press releases issued by groups such as CLC and the Canadian Physicians for Life. The Canadian Press claimed Conservative leader Stephen Harper was “on the defensive” over the issue.

In a follow-up Globe article the next day, Mahoney and Brian Laghi characterized Merrifield – who ultimately was re-elected – as “beleaguered.” Even National Post commentator John Ivison characterized Merrifield’s remarks as “a gaffe.” The Toronto Star, that bastion of liberalism and leftist thinking, came up with an editorial suggesting “Harper’s position on abortion (is) unclear” – even though he unequivocally stated his prospective government would not be introducing abortion-related legislation in the next Parliament.

Globe columnist Margaret Wente opined that Merrifield’s observations immediately lost the urban Ontario female vote. The Hamilton Spectator, in a June 4 front-page piece, printed an all-capital headline that only lacked an exclamation point at the end: “HARPER WOULD ALLOW FREE VOTE ON ABORTION” – as if that was a hideously undemocratic thing to do.

Anne Dawson of CanWest News Service, in a June 5 article, suggested that “demons of the past … dangerous and uncomfortable moral issues” (read: abortion, same-sex marriage and capital punishment) had come back to “haunt” the Conservative party.

Mainstream reporters then obsequiously filed into a pro-abortion press conference June 4 to hear and report on outrageous comments by Morgentaler (again), June Callwood, Doris Anderson (curiously, chair of the Ontario Press Council), Shirley Douglas and Norma Scarborough. Toronto Star reporter Caroline Mallon, in a generously long article on the non-event, amazingly could find no space for rebutting comments from pro-life representatives.

One Columnist Honestly Asks, “On abortion, who’s the extremist?”

A little bit of sanity was provided by National Post columnist Andrew Coyne – a journalist who is not pro-life - who, quite appropriately, asked the question, Coyne accused reporters of fabricating a “self-generated story … reporting about reporting.” He said, “The media manage to make themselves a part of every campaign, but it’s rare to see them openly acknowledge this role.”

Toronto Sun columnist Linda Williamson, meanwhile, observed that there is a “commandment” in Canadian politics that reads: “You must not raise abortion as an issue – not in your first term, or ever. You must not allow anyone else to put forward a private member’s bill on it, either, or allow a free vote on it – even though that’s what parliamentary procedure dictates. Better to shut down all debate on this one, regardless of your professed devotion to democracy, MPs’ rights or ‘fixing the democratic deficit.’”

Around the same time, results of a survey in the U.S. revealed that only seven per cent of national news journalists there considered themselves conservative. Eighty-eight per cent, on the other hand, believed society should accept homosexuality. One suspects the situation is not any better – and is likely worse – in Canada.

When the Liberal party dredged up a video of Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant at this year’s March for Life, comparing abortion to the beheading of civilians in Iraq, the mainstream press jumped on that bandwagon. CTV News suggested that Gallant “has already caused her party leader trouble this election campaign.”

The ambush didn’t hurt Gallant’s re-election bid, however, as she won handily in her Renfrew-Nippissing-Pembroke, Ont. riding.

Media also went into a tizzy when Catholic Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary publicly pointed out Prime Minister Paul Martin’s “moral incoherence” for claiming to be a devout Catholic while supporting unrestricted abortion rights. One Calgary newspaper ran a poll on whether people approved of Henry’s statements, yet it would have been hard to imagine a media outlet doing the same over, say, Henry Morgentaler’s wading into the abortion-politics fray.

In a June 7 editorial, the Globe and Mail predictably – but erroneously – echoed Jean Chretien’s old line that “social peace on the status quo” on abortion is prevailing. Then, Globe columnist John Ibbitson, in a June 8 piece, suggested discussions on abortion were obscuring “more important issues” – like money. The same day, CTV News, in a blatantly untrue statement, reported that, “Polls have found that a large majority of Canadians are satisfied with the status quo (on abortion).” In fact, polls consistently show Canadians do not want unrestricted abortion-on-demand.

Tories Benefited From Emphasis on Abortion

What effect was all this negative media coverage having on the Tories? None at all. In fact, it may have even been aiding their electoral efforts. A June 11 poll revealed that women’s support for the Tories was rising, from 26 to 28 per cent.

As the abortion issue faded in intensity during the campaign, the media bias quotient similarly diminished. However, until the end, the Liberal party kept playing up its charges of an alleged Conservative threat to a woman’s “right to choose” (whatever that means) and mainstream media outlets continued to paint the Conservatives as out-of-sync with alleged “Canadian values” (whatever those are) on other issues such as the Charter of Rights, use of the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution, Supreme Court appointments, hate-crime revisions and the like.

But as Globe Media Watch columnist Hugh Windsor put it so well in a June 8 piece, mainstream media have been engaging in, and have often prompted, hyperbole. He chastized them for going along with it and openly questioned whether they had unwittingly become partners in Liberal election strategies.

Whatever the answer, one must conclude that the mainstream media were, as a whole (with the possible exceptions of the National Post and the Sun Media chain) hopelessly biased, if not negligent and incompetent, in their coverage of social issues during the recent election campaign.

Given McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message, Canadians need to – with apologies for stealing the Conservative campaign slogan – “demand better” from their news media. The era when reporters acted as lackeys for abortionists, homosexual activists, feminists, liberals and other assorted narrow interests should be long past. That it still isn’t is a troubling situation that needs to be dealt with immediately, before another election campaign comes upon us.

Write letters, send e-mails, support alternative media, yell, scream, jump up and down and do whatever you have to do to demand better and fairer coverage from our well-paid and monopolizing mainstream media. The future of our country – not to mention generations of unborn Canadians and families – depends on it.

Tony Gosgnach is the assistant editor of The Interim Newspaper

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The Liberal Media (Media Research Centre, 040630)

Every Poll Shows Journalists Are More Liberal than the American Public — And the Public Knows It

By Rich Noyes

Director of Research

Executive Summary

Over the next four months, the media establishment will play a central role in informing the public about the candidates and the issues. As the countdown to Election Day begins, it is important to remember the journalists who will help establish the campaign agenda are not an all-American mix of Democrats, Republicans and independents, but an elite group whose views veer sharply to the left.

Surveys over the past 25 years have consistently found that journalists are more liberal than rest of America. This MRC Special Report summarizes the relevant data on journalist attitudes, as well as polling showing how the American public’s recognition of the media’s liberal bias has grown over the years:

Journalists Vote for Liberals: Between 1964 and 1992, Republicans won the White House five times compared with three Democratic victories. But if only journalists’ ballots were counted, the Democrats would have won every time.

Journalists Say They Are Liberal: Surveys from 1978 to 2004 show that journalists are far more likely to say they are liberal than conservative, and are far more liberal than the public at large.

Journalists Reject Conservative Positions: None of the surveys have found that news organizations are populated by independent thinkers who mix liberal and conservative positions. Most journalists offer reflexively liberal answers to practically every question a pollster can imagine.

The Public Recognizes the Bias: Since 1985, the percentage of Americans who perceive a liberal bias has doubled from 22% to 45%, nearly half the adult population. Even a plurality of Democrats now say the press is liberal.

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Bright Light in a Big City: A high-spirited paper encourages a real marketplace of ideas (NRO, 040719)

Think of last Thursday as a tale of two front pages. Splashed across the top of Paper A was the headline, “BRITISH ASSESSMENT CLEARS BUSH ON URANIUM.” Paper B buried the Butler Report story on page six; similarly buried, on page seven, was coverage of the Philippines’s capitulation to terrorism. This was front-page material for Paper A, which, just under the Butler headline, proclaimed, “FILIPINO RETREAT CALLED A CAVE-IN IN FACE OF THREAT.” What was deserving of front-page coverage for Paper B? A triumphant “SENATORS BLOCK INITIATIVE TO BAN SAME-SEX UNIONS; Amendment, Endorsed by Bush, Fails After Days of Debate.” Paper A, to its credit, also put this story on its front page, but with the less hysterical “Vote on Gay Vows Leaves Issue Alive; Marriage Amendment Halted in Senate.”

Until recently, if eight million-plus people wanted to take in a broadsheet with their morning’s coffee, Paper B — the New York Times — was their only option. In 2002, this monopoly was broken by Paper A: the New York Sun.

This was not the first time the Sun had saved New York from media imbalance. In 1868, when journalist Charles Dana returned to New York — after covering the Civil War at Abraham Lincoln’s behest — he arrived in a city that, prior to the war, had been a cesspool of pro-slavery sentiment. It had also lacked an outspokenly abolitionist voice among its news offerings; Dana did not want the same tepidity to afflict the Reconstruction era. He wanted a newspaper that would argue in favor of limited, honest government, free enterprise, and equality before the law. So Dana acquired the New York Sun, which he transformed into a standard-bearer for these values, and a vehicle for high-quality, literary journalism.

One hundred thirty-four years later, when Seth Lipsky sought to establish a new daily newspaper in New York, he wanted to accomplish much the same thing. Inspired by Dana’s example, he settled on reviving the Sun — which has challenged the liberal domination of New York’s media since.

A MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS

Taking up challenges seems to be Lipsky’s specialty. Prior to reestablishing the Sun, he and Sun founding partner Ira Stoll had tried to take the weekly Jewish Forward daily. “We failed at that,” says Stoll (who had been the Forward’s managing editor), with a grin. “So we decided it would be easier to take on the New York Times.”

Lipsky and Stoll both have very flattering things to say about the Times. So does Roger Hertog, one of the Sun’s “financial angels”: “The New York Times is a great paper; it’s a well-written paper. Its journalists are among the most talented in the world.”

“But on many issues,” Hertog adds, “they have a worldview that I don’t quite agree with. And so if you believe in free markets and free minds, then competition in the world of news makes some sense.”

This is not to say that the Sun exists only to challenge the Times. “You don’t have to hate the Times to love the Sun,” Lipsky assures. In fact, the Sun responds to several New York publications: “The New York Post — which we love — is a tabloid,” says Stoll. “And the Wall Street Journal is a national business paper. So we saw an opening in the market here for an upscale, right-of-center broadsheet.”

Upscale and right-of-center it is. Across its 20-plus pages, the Sun reflects the intellectual sophistication, stylistic flair, and high-spirited energy of the city that hosts and shapes it. And fittingly so: The paper started out with a “New York on Page One” slogan (to combat the Times’s shift away from local coverage). When the Times met this challenge by moving Metro stories to the front page, the Sun settled into being its own entity, making sure that all of its coverage — local, national, international — embraced the paper’s values and priorities.

WINNING THE CULTURE(D) WARS

Those values and priorities are rare among metropolitan dailies. Take, for example, the Sun’s culture coverage, which has made an impact on the city’s arts criticism, accruing rave reviews in the process. This accomplishment belongs largely to deputy managing editor Robert Messenger, who, as culture editor in the paper’s first year, effectively built that section from scratch. Prior to joining the Sun, Messenger had been an associate editor at The New Criterion, and brought many of its values to his new publication.

Messenger attributes much of the culture section’s success to its critics: “We want writers who have strong opinions,” he explains — writers who are enthusiastic about their respective arts. But the section is also distinguished by its traditional perspective on art criticism. “It’s the idea that there’s one set of standards, which doesn’t recognize whether you’re black or white, male or female,” says Messenger. One is unlikely to find this viewpoint in many newspaper arts sections, insofar as they exist at all. (Messenger notes ruefully that the Washington Post — which he considers one of the nation’s finest papers — has only a “Style” section.)

The Sun’s priorities are also on display in its opinion pages, which are a source of special pride for Lipsky: “We’re starting to build a great lineup of columnists: Bill Buckley, William Hammond, Michael Barone, Daniel Pipes.... And I think our editorials have been well received.”

Perhaps this is because they take positions unpopular among the “media elite,” and argue them daringly, and well. The Sun is passionately in favor of lower taxes, school choice, and tort reform. It has been highly supportive of the war in Iraq, and has tried to bring balance to coverage of the conflict there. It is also a strong proponent of Israel’s right to defend itself. Explains Stoll: “There are people who think Bush should pressure Israel to make more concessions to terrorists. But we think he should support [Israel] in fighting the terrorists. I don’t get why, in a city attacked by terrorists, and with a large Jewish population, people would think otherwise.”

But people do — like the people shaping editorial opinion at the Times, and, indeed, in most of the rest of the world media. The Sun’s position is a relatively lonely one, requiring a brave attitude to embrace it, and a bold voice to argue it.

A MAN AND HIS DREAM

This courage and passion are the paper’s defining qualities, and can, in large part, be traced to Lipsky — and his love of journalism.

“I’ve been pretty much set on a newspaper life since I became conscious,” says the journalism romantic. “I also knew that I would eventually try to organize my own paper in New York — probably since I was about five.” This lifelong dream would eventually come to fruition, but not by the most direct path: Lipsky spent 18 years at the Wall Street Journal, where one of his assignments was to help set up the Asian Wall Street Journal. “For someone with my entrepreneurial bent, it was just a fabulous experience.” So was working under Robert Bartley, whom Lipsky describes as “one of the great influences in my life — not just intellectually, in the battle for ideas, but also just as a great newspaperman and scoop artist.”

Lipsky’s Dow Jones adventures took him to Brussels, to be editorial-page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe. “If one wants to talk about the romance of newspapering, it just doesn’t get more romantic than to be in league with Amity [Shlaes, Lipsky’s wife] in Europe during the climactic years of the Cold War.” As proof, Lipsky recounts a climactic Cold War event: Returning from a business trip, Lipsky landed in Brussels — where he and Amity were living — “on the morning of November 10, and found a note on my desk saying she was staying in Berlin owing to events.” So Lipsky caught a flight to Berlin, where “people were in the streets. We went to the East, and came back through Checkpoint Charlie. People were swarming over the Wall; people handed us rock-climbing hammers; and we set to chipping away at the wall with a hundred thousand people.”

After that experience, Lipsky figured it was “a good time to go back to New York, and on to the next story.”

TEACHING BY EXAMPLE

This spirit of journalistic adventure infuses the Sun — and spills over to the rest of the 90-person staff. “A newspaper startup kind of attracts an adventurous, high-spirited group,” Lipsky observes. Small wonder: A startup comes with no small amount of risk, as the Sun’s (re)founders know all too well. Explains Hertog: “Great projects are never started by the faint of heart. You have to take some risks, and you have to really believe in something. And you have to have people who really believe in something.”

Those affiliated with the Sun definitely believe in their paper, which is why they are so excited about the steps it has already taken, and the strides it has yet to make. And deservedly so: In bringing greater ideological balance to — and, through competition, improving the quality of — the city’s media, the Sun is an invaluable addition to New York journalism. Its benefits, however, are not confined to the city: First, those outside the Sun’s print-distribution range may read the very well-formatted online version. Next, there’s the fact that it has been picked up by other news outlets, and has begun to influence debates nationwide. And then there’s the power of its example. Says Stoll, “If we’re successful here, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in other cities where there are liberal-monopoly newspapers, people might think about mounting challenges.”

Readers in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, Baltimore, Chicago...take note. And readers in New York?

Be grateful.

— Meghan Clyne is an NR associate editor.

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Worse than Tom and Dan? Peter, we mean (NR, 040726)

RACHEL ZABARKES FRIEDMAN

“My mother...was pretty anti-American. And so I was, in some respects, raised with anti-Americanism in my blood, or in my mother’s milk at least.”

That’s Canadian-born reporter Peter Jennings, appearing on Letterman, in September 2002. Jennings — who’s been the sole anchor on ABC’s World News Tonight since 1983 — became a dual U.S. citizen just last year. As anchor, Jennings is elegant, urbane, and a touch condescending: He speaks slowly, like a teacher to his pupils, nodding seriously and often. But for all Jennings’s apparent desire to educate viewers, some media-watchers consider him the worst — the most ideologically liberal and consistently biased — of the network news anchors. And given that he attracts, on average, between 8 and 9 million viewers each night, that charge isn’t something to take lightly.

Studies of Iraq-war coverage by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that World News Tonight had “the most anti-war coverage” of the nightly newscasts on the three major networks in both 1991 and 2003. The 2003 study found that Jennings’s show aired the most criticism of the Bush administration and featured the most opposition to the war. (For example, Jennings found plenty of time for anti-war rallies, but said not a word about a pro-troops rally in New York City that drew 15,000 people.) Even before the release of the study, Jennings said: “We have been criticized...by people who think I was not enough pro-war. That is simply not the way I think of this role. This role is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public.”

And question he has, at least when it comes to the Bush administration. Like many others, Jennings pounced on the 9/11 commission report on Iraq–al-Qaeda ties as an opportunity to question Bush’s reasons for going to war. Introducing an otherwise fair June 16 segment, he said, “One of the Bush administration’s most controversial assertions in its argument for war in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda. Today, the 9/11 commission said unequivocally, not so.”

But the commission did not say “unequivocally, not so”: It did describe possible links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, though it didn’t find conclusive evidence of Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks. But that qualification clearly would have taken the wind out of Jennings’s “Bush lied” sails.

Jennings’s professed skepticism of government stops where his socialist leanings begin: He’s repeatedly praised European social-welfare policies (compared with America the Greedy) and described tax cuts as money sucked from government programs. In 1994, when voters elected a Republican majority in both houses of Congress — expressing their own skepticism of government — Jennings retorted on his daily ABC radio commentary: “Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week. . . . ‘Parenting’ and ‘governing’ don’t have to be dirty words.”

Jennings has also been known to put in a plug or two for Communist regimes. Take a 1989 report about Cuba: “Medical care was once for the privileged few. Today it is available to every Cuban and it is free. Some of Cuba’s health care is world class....Health and education are the Revolution’s greatest success stories.” Jennings then quoted a Cuban saying, “They are the most important, the two most important things that a people can expect from a government, and we have the both of them.” (Popular though Castroite propaganda may be, quality of life in Cuba has hardly been something to celebrate since 1959, as Mark Falcoff, for instance, shows in his recent Cuba: The Morning After.)

And then there’s the Middle East. Jennings — who dated former Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi when she was a graduate student in Lebanon — has a reputation for anti-Israel bias that goes back at least to the 1972 Munich Olympics. It is remembered that he refused to use the word “terrorists,” and called the killers “guerrillas” or “commandos” instead.

Alex Safian, associate director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), calls Jennings “by far the most anti-Israel of the major network anchors and reporters” and “the most apologetic when it comes to Palestinian terrorism.” Consider as an example — just one of many — Jennings’s 2000 introduction to a story about the killing of two Israeli reservists who had made a wrong turn and ended up in Ramallah:

It has been another terrible day of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. There was a particularly ugly incident in the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Forty-thousand people live there. This week they’re all angry at the Israelis. There was about to be another funeral....At least two Israeli army reservists were clearly in the wrong place. They were stopped and taken into a police station. That was not enough for their protection.

Jennings said not a word about the Israeli victims, or the fact that their brutalized bodies were put on public display. His implicit message: “Don’t forget, Palestinians are the victims here.” (The following report, by another journalist, did broadcast images of the scene, but described the event in only a few sentences before declaring, “There was little doubt that Israel would retaliate.”)

The late journalist (and pianist) David Bar-Illan once wrote that “in turning a massacre of Israelis into pro-Palestinian propaganda, no one is a greater virtuoso than...Peter Jennings.”

ABC’s Paul Slavin, senior vice president of worldwide newsgathering and former executive producer of World News Tonight, says, “Peter has very strongly held personal opinions,” but he’s “good at recognizing when those opinions are seeping into his reporting.” Slavin insists Jennings is “fiercely objective.”

Of course, it’s difficult to prove bias. Studies rely on criteria some will find subjective. Isolated statements aren’t enough to make a home-run case; the key lies in patterns that emerge over time, including which stories are chosen and which are rejected, and how certain topics are repeatedly presented.

The pattern that emerges from the dogged work of a CAMERA or a Media Research Center — both of which have followed Jennings closely for some time, and from which most of the examples in this piece are drawn — suggests he isn’t as good at filtering out his own opinions as he thinks, or suggests. So do the testimonies of some former ABC reporters who have spoken out about Jennings’s bias.

Robert Zelnick, head of Boston University’s journalism department, covered Moscow, Israel, and the Pentagon for World News Tonight for twelve years. He says, “There was always the ‘Peter factor’ to deal with” in filing a news story for Jennings.

Zelnick recounts one instance from his time in Tel Aviv, when an Israeli tank fired at and hit an unauthorized vehicle carrying two CBS crew members on its way to a blockaded Lebanese village; both crewmen were killed. News executives immediately condemned what they claimed was the Israelis’ deliberate killing of the newsmen. But Zelnick wasn’t convinced. Seeing the site, he says, “it was clear to me that the Israelis might have acted arbitrarily, and cruelly, but there was no proof that they acted intentionally to kill a Western newsman.”

So he filed a report to World News Tonight that stopped short of accusing the Israelis of intentionally killing the crewmen. He soon heard back from Jennings and a producer saying he should take into account the executives’ allegations. Zelnick rewrote the piece to address those claims, but declined to conclude that the Israelis had killed intentionally. When, after a second call from Jennings, Zelnick still refused to make the claim himself, the piece was dropped for that night. It ran only the following evening, after articles in the New York Times and Washington Post had come out corroborating Zelnick’s take on the story.

Another former ABC reporter says, “Scripts I wrote were often subject to pressure.” In a report on the anniversary of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, Jennings asked the reporter to add more positive statements about the Sandinistas’ accomplishments. “Well,” the reporter says, “there weren’t any.” Eventually a positive statement was inserted, but the words Communist and Marxist were not: “I was only able to get the word Communist into my copy a few times,” he recalls. ABC responded to the reporter’s claims by questioning the quality of his journalism.

Zelnick says that in his experience, when a reporter held his ground about a story, Jennings would relent. “I found him to be an excellent newsman and to have great integrity,” Zelnick says. But he also explains, “The anchorman is a very powerful figure at ABC and other networks.” Even if not confronted directly, many junior reporters may feel pressure to report what their superiors — Jennings most of all — want to hear.

But that may be changing. World News Tonight does air even-handed reports, and it is possible that on some issues the slant has lessened in recent years — thanks to the existence of watchdog groups, competition from other media, and a younger generation of journalists responding to those pressures. Slavin admits that debate on staff helps make for better news and says there are more Republican-leaning reporters at ABC now than in the past. And as viewers become increasingly aware of network bias and the younger among them move to cable or the Internet — getting their news from a variety of sources rather than through the filter of one all-knowing anchor — the incentive for the networks to straighten out is likely to increase.

But that’s no reason to stop monitoring Jennings. Knowledge and competition are the best weapons we have against the “Peter factor” and other such distortions.

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A Week in the Life . . . of the Big Bad Nets (NR, 040726)

On the subject of media fairness, people who aren’t remote-tossing conservatives often ask, “What do you mean, liberal bias?”

In a nutshell, bias is all about selective storytelling. Which stories do you tell, and which do you bury in a drawer somewhere? As a story is assembled, whom do you build up as the hero, and whom do you paint as the villain — and how do you describe them? Do you tell a story to inspire, or to amuse? To inform, or to scare? As a program is assembled, in what order do you put the stories? Which are novels of epic proportions, and which are the length of a classified ad?

At the top TV-news outlets, these decisions are shaped daily by a crusading liberal impulse, whereby journalists think that pursuing objectivity and balance on controversial issues is a cowardly means of evading tough choices: between justice and injustice, or between the good guys and the bad guys. A look at a typical week’s programming — seeing how the nightly news unfolded for ABC, CBS, and NBC viewers — will make clear how the bias works.

Monday, June 21. The Supreme Court decides 9-0 that HMOs cannot be sued in state courts, and network coverage follows a predictable story line. All three networks feature good-guy plaintiffs with sad stories of malpractice or lost loved ones owing to bad-guy HMO accountants. Each includes a soundbite from HMO industry spokeswoman Karen Ignagni. But ABC and NBC describe her opponents from liberal groups like the AARP and Families USA favorably — and without identifying the groups’ ideological leanings — as merely “patients’-rights advocates.” Neither story notes that these groups were major backers of the Clintons’ health plan in 1993, which would have put most of America’s patients in these dastardly managed-care programs.

Dan Rather follows up on his interview of Bill Clinton with previously unseen footage of Clinton defending his foreign-policy record. Dan sits calmly and listens as the former president talks about his bold dealings with North Korea, which Clinton weirdly calls “the last great Communist outpost.” CBS will compound the weirdness on Wednesday with a report on how the Bush administration has “finally put a deal on the table” for an arms agreement with North Korea — making no mention of the fact that North Korea blatantly violated the last such agreement.

Tuesday, June 22. The big story is that a federal judge has allowed a whopping class-action sex-discrimination suit against Wal-Mart. It looks a little like a repeat from Monday night, with female HMO victims replaced by female CEO victims. CBS has no Wal-Mart spokesman, just upset female employees and attorneys. NBC at least features a Wal-Mart voice while noting, “Wal-Mart is already reeling from accusations of employing illegal immigrants and shaving hours off time cards.” ABC includes Wal-Mart’s CEO, and highlights immediate pressure to settle: “Lawyers for the women workers told ABC News that if they win the case at trial, a jury award could approach a billion dollars, but money isn’t everything.” The networks express no concern that Wal-Mart’s litigation problems might result in layoffs or higher prices.

Tom Brokaw promises: “Coming up later on NBC Nightly News: Former President Clinton kicks off his book tour in a frenzy that would make Elvis proud.” Andrea Mitchell’s story is soft-soap: “From coast to coast...the selling of Bill Clinton. His fans have been lining up since noon yesterday...midnight in Washington....Dawn in New York, rain or shine...it is the Bill Clinton book club.” At least she mentions that Clinton had a $10 million advance to try to earn back for his publisher. CBS’s Jim Axelrod does a story lamenting that the book’s buzz carries too much focus on Monicagate. Unasked question: Whose decision was that?

Wednesday, June 23. The big-impact story tonight on all three networks is an anonymous CIA officer we’re told has been one of our government’s top Osama bin Laden trackers. Shadowed in black, he sounds amazingly like John Kerry, saying that we are losing the War on Terror because we waged an unnecessary war in Iraq that only delighted Osama. He also sees nothing but disaster in Afghanistan. He makes grand and scary predictions that al-Qaeda is still capable of plotting an attack on American soil even more lethal than 9/11. He has an “anonymous” book coming out in three weeks titled Imperial Hubris. We never learn anything about this man, or his possible personal or political affiliations.

Is this fair? Haven’t the networks already promoted a parade of anti-Bush books this year — Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson? (Wait, correction: Wilson’s book was crowded out by Abu Ghraib.) Here’s one way to think about it: If this CIA officer had written an anonymous book in the Clinton era with the message that President Clinton’s anti-terrorism policy was poor and could lead to a lethal attack on American soil, would he have received major publicity on the national TV news without any knowledge of his personal background? Answer: Try to find an author of a non-anonymous book questioning Clinton’s defense policies who was a sensation on all three network news programs. Good luck.

Thursday, June 24. All three play up dramatic incidents of violence against Iraqis, in which more than 100 were killed in systematic attacks. The daily soundtrack out of Iraq builds anxiety at home, helping to fuel negative views about Bush’s waging of the terror war, and casting doubt as to whether the war in Iraq was “worth it.” This is not to say, of course, that attacks in Iraq are not newsworthy — but equally newsworthy are our successes there, which certainly do not receive equal airtime.

The two political stories of the day are the president’s Oval Office testimony in the Valerie Plame leak case and the Supreme Court ruling supporting Dick Cheney’s position against releasing internal energy-task-force documents. Strangely, the anchors highlight how rare it is for presidents to testify in federal criminal proceedings without mentioning that the last president certainly did — for the Kenneth Starr investigation.

Cheney’s presumably good-guy, anti-secrecy adversaries from the liberal Sierra Club and the conservatives-turned-mugwumps at Judicial Watch are blandly identified as “opponents” (ABC), “environmentalists” (CBS), and “interest groups” (NBC). In the Clinton era, Judicial Watch was routinely labeled “conservative” — when it was mentioned at all, that is. Peter Jennings wouldn’t even say the words “Judicial Watch” on the air before the group sued Cheney in 2002. In all the coverage, secrecy is underlined, as in this introduction from Dan Rather: “The Bush administration would like to keep the workings of Vice President Cheney’s energy-policy task force secret. Environmentalists and others want to know what’s been going on and who’s been doing it behind closed doors.” No reference is made to Hillary Clinton’s health-care task force.

Friday, June 25. Liberal bias is not unremitting; occasionally, the networks relent. After airing several televised segments with far greater promotional value, ABC and NBC both offer “truth squad” pieces rebutting claims in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. CBS and NBC both ignore the New York Times article finding contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, a link they both disparaged nine evenings before while mischaracterizing the 9/11 commission’s finding of no “collaborative relationship” between the two. (ABC, which used the stronger words “no connection” on June 16, reports on the Times story.)

One story suggests a regular spin to look out for over the next few months. NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell touts John Kerry’s move to the center: “At every stop...on a range of issues, Kerry tries to line up in the center, hoping to reach beyond his own Democratic base...Kerry as corporate friendly....Eager to tap fiscal restraint...and national defense.” The whole piece lays out the thinking of “senior aides,” who are “feeling no pressure from the far left.” (Now, there are two words rare on television!) They say Kerry is “working off a successful Clinton centrist model,” not the Gore populist model. Kerry’s shifting rhetoric is, again, newsworthy — but so too is the fact that, prior to Kerry’s presidential bid, the senator had long enjoyed a reputation for being a fervent “Massachusetts liberal.” This network coverage, then, would be greatly improved by a laugh track — and mention of Kerry’s lifetime American Conservative Union score of 5 out of 100.

Mr. Tim Graham is director of media analysis for the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va.

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Newsweeklies, Not So Newsy (NR, 040726)

Time and Newsweek serve up a lot of opinion — from guess which quarter?

RAMESH PONNURU

U.S. News & World Report, the major newsweekly with the lowest circulation, is also the one that gives conservatives the fewest fits. It is, however, capable of raising our eyebrows. The June 28/July 5 issue carries a long series of articles on “Defining America.” One of the things that define America is “dissent,” and Thomas Hayden has written an article on it. It contains nothing terribly provocative, or interesting, until the end, when Hayden suggests that America post-9/11 has silenced dissent. “[A]s shown by the current spate of media self-examination over an obvious lack of questioning of the government before the Iraq war, sometimes non-dissent can be just as harmful to the state.”

Let’s leave aside the equation of questioning and dissent, which in Hayden’s formulation seems to give the media some quasi-governmental role and a duty to “dissent” from whatever administration is in power. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the media should have questioned widespread assumptions about Iraq’s WMD program. But it is simply untrue that the media failed to dissent from the Bush administration, or to cover its opponents, about the war itself. Hayden need not examine how Howell Raines or Peter Jennings handled the pre-war debate to see this. He could just look at the newsweeklies.

In the August 12, 2002, issue of Time, for example, Michael Duffy saw an administration split into two camps: “one pragmatic, the other jihadist.” He labeled Secretary Rumsfeld and his colleagues “the hotheads” and “the war party.” They were “guys in ties” (not uniforms). Paul Wolfowitz was “fiercely gung-ho.” Duffy told us twice, in the same article, that Bush had an “obsession” with Iraq. It would take a fairly dim reader not to see which side he was supposed to be on.

Duffy is still at Time. In the June 14, 2004, issue, he has an article on James Bamford’s book A Pretext for War. There isn’t a word of criticism of the book in the article. Duffy treads gingerly when describing Bamford’s thesis: “Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel’s hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. . . . Bamford . . . suggests that Washington mistook Israel’s interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year.” Duffy is careful not to endorse that crackpot thesis — and equally careful not to question it.

Over at Newsweek, there is some good coverage of the war, including the July 5 cover story on Lt. Gen. David Petraeus’s efforts to build Iraq’s security forces. Yet the editors cannot resist using the line “Mission Impossible” — three times. It’s in the cover text, the table of contents, and the subheadline. The editors also let Michael Isikoff write a short article debunking Michael Moore’s movie, with a follow-up in the online edition. Isikoff’s piece accompanies a longer one that is essentially pro-Moore. David Gates writes that Moore’s “reading of recent history is hardly a seditious salvo from the extremist fringe. Last week alone, two mainstream bipartisan groups — the 9-11 commission and a delegation of retired diplomats and generals calling for ‘regime change’ in Washington — made some of the same points Moore does, though without the entertainment value.” (The worst thing Time could think to say of Moore in its cover story was that he is as bad as Rush Limbaugh.)

I shouldn’t give the impression that the newsweeklies offer unrelieved liberal bias in every story. For one thing, each of them carries conservative columnists. George Will is in every other issue of Newsweek, John Leo and Michael Barone run regularly in U.S. News, and Time often carries Andrew Sullivan or Charles Krauthammer on its back page. (Social-conservative columnists are, however, beyond the pale.) They may not get cover stories, the way liberal columnists such as Joe Klein and Jonathan Alter do, but it’s something.

Other non-liberal copy can be found in the magazines. Robert Samuelson has a center-right economics column in Newsweek; Kenneth Woodward covers the religion beat for it with insight and without condescension. The July 5 Time had a balanced and thoughtful article by Daren Fonda and Barbara Kiviat on the controversy over the marketing of medicines for unapproved uses. It’s much better than the hyperbolic demagoguery that Donald Barlett and James Steele, two Time writers who clearly think of themselves as populist crusaders, serve up on pharmaceutical issues and, come to think of it, all other issues. (They can’t be trusted even when they’re right, as they are about corporate welfare.)

What you will not find is copy that is reliably non-liberal, or even intelligent. On June 7, Time ran a cover package on America’s obesity “epidemic.” Page after page was devoted to advocacy for wide-ranging government intervention to alter Americans’ eating habits, with a mere 350-word dissent by libertarian blogger Radley Balko. On June 28, David van Biema wrote about the travails of female preachers; all their difficulties at breaking “the stained-glass ceiling” are chalked up to “patriarchy.” Only the absence of Samuel Johnson’s quote about women preaching kept the article from being a complete cliché. Newsweek’s “conventional wisdom” watch is, notoriously, the most compressed expression of the liberal attitudes of the moment: an expression of conventional wisdom rather than a skewering of it, and an insufferably smug expression of it at that. The July 5 edition gives Bush, Cheney, and Wolfowitz down arrows; Michael Moore gets an up arrow.

Time’s New Democrat columnist Joe Klein used to be, at least, interesting. He is increasingly conclusory and decreasingly novel. In 2003, he wrote that the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of racial preferences at universities was “a reassertion of sanity” that troubled only the GOP’s “florid assortment of wing nuts.” Everyone in the “vast sensible center of American politics” knows that racial preferences are obligatory. (Klein’s center apparently excludes a majority of the voters of California. Must all be wing nuts.) His take on Bill Clinton, whom he interviewed as part of the publicity campaign for the former president’s book, was all too predictable. “In retrospect, it is clear that there was no substance to the Whitewater allegations and the other White House scandalettes. . . . It seems clear that Starr conducted an unseemly and irresponsible investigation. . . . And it also seems clear that the press was way too credulous about Starr’s allegations and didn’t pay nearly enough attention to his methods.” Q.E.D. Klein adds that it’s too bad that Clinton was and is so “in thrall” to “his demons.”

Liberal attitudinizing about current affairs affects even the newsweekly’s coverage of the events of 200 years ago. The July 5 Time has a cover package on “the radical mind of Thomas Jefferson.” In an introductory essay, novelist Walter Kirn notes Jefferson’s opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts and adds, “To the extent that certain elements of the current Patriot Act smack of oppression, Jefferson might find it alarming too.” A later article concerns the Alien and Sedition Acts exclusively. Its headline? “The Patriot Act of the 18th Century.”

The essays get Jefferson wrong in their zeal to make him out as a civil libertarian: It’s a matter of record that Jefferson supported state-level sedition acts that punished his opponents, and his objection to the federal acts was at least as much a federalist objection as a civil-libertarian one. More to the point, the comparison to the Patriot Act is absurd to the point of libel. The Sedition Act threatened imprisonment for “false, scandalous and malicious” writings against the government. The Patriot Act’s controversial provisions involve, among other things, letting investigators in terrorism cases, upon approval from federal judges, search suspects’ homes without telling them until later. It’s not reasonable to call this oppressive, and it’s not even arguable that it suppresses free speech.

Time’s understanding of history is seriously distorted by its current political preoccupations. “It’s a subject worth lingering over: Jefferson and Iraq,” writes Kirn, just before proving that it isn’t. The actual details of Jefferson’s views are skipped over in the course of making a polemical point — and in a way that suggests real contempt for readers. Amid the Iraqiana we get this: “One controversy that led to his great split with Hamilton . . . boiled down to the financing of the Federal Government.” And that’s it. He won’t worry our pretty little heads with that! Onward to the precious now. “It isn’t difficult to imagine where he would stand on current debates about prayer in public schools, say, or faith-based funding for social projects.” I imagine he would have opposed the social spending altogether — if I were inclined to indulge the preposterous set-up in the first place.

The newsweeklies still break stories, and drive much of the agenda of the Sunday talk shows. I’ll bet that Time or Newsweek will have the best tick-tock on how John Kerry picked John Edwards. But there are enough other media out there now, and the market has fragmented enough, that these magazines are must-reading only for a very small number of people. Most of us, even Washington journalists, get along fine without reading them closely. Good thing, too.

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Things We Like (NR, 040726)

I’ve always found Dennis Miller an odd and rather queer fish. His inflammable down-home populism, pragmatism, and patriotism, combined with a slick showbiz persona, make him one of Dr. Moreau’s more intriguing media experiments. As I discovered when I chatted with him, he’s also quite pleasant on the phone.

And on TV as well. The former Saturday Night Live news anchor, HBO comic, and all-round ranting man has a new(ish) show, on CNBC, eponymously titled, which transmits Monday to Friday at 9 p.m.

Not merely an excuse to crack wise (à la Bill Maher on HBO), nor an exercise in corporate plugging (Letterman, Leno, et al.), Dennis Miller has its share of japes (good) and shilling (bad — a segment with the repulsive Larry Flynt, who’s “written” a new book, was unpleasantly obsequious), but it also allows a surprisingly broad range of amusing, and sometimes intelligent, non-celebs and celebs to make their points. Miller — refreshingly for a talk-show host — lets his guests talk (even Dennis Rodman sounded fairly literate), then makes a joke to change the subject or to draw in those hitherto quiescent. I think he’s found a fair balance between politics and comedy, and, compared with the inanities inflicted upon us by the 24-hour news cycle, the “Varsity Panel” part on Dennis Miller can be like attending high table at All Souls with Izzy Berlin.

Miller is socially libertarian and fiscally conservative (at anything above a “50% taxation rate, I’m tempted to dress up like an Indian and go to Boston Harbor”). He’s not hugely enamored of John Kerry (“looks like an Easter Island statue in a power tie”), nor of the New York Times, which “has the reliability of Auto Trader but calls itself the paper of record” — a slander, I thought: Auto Trader’s employees don’t invent datelines or rely on “intelligence” provided by dubious Levantines.

September 11 galvanized Miller. He’s since become a big-time, national-security, shoot-first hawk, the same man who compared Newt Gingrich to Hitler in the ‘90s today berating Marxoids for likening Bush to Hitler. Though comedians are not known, and rightly so, for their political consistency, Miller’s revision of his opinions in the light of recent events seems genuine.

All in all, right now he’s the ant’s pants, the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas of politico-comedic talk-show ringmasters. And better yet, he’s a National Review subscriber, which means we love him long long time.

— ALEXANDER ROSE

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Green Grow the Pressies: How the media get the environment wrong (NR, 040726)

In 1995 they told us that Yucca Mountain was going to explode in a nuclear firestorm. It won’t. In 1998 they told us that nuclear-weapons installations were making people sick. They weren’t. In 2000 they weren’t concerned with arsenic in the water. In 2001 they were. This year they have claimed that the Pentagon is worried about global warming and that phosphate mines are harming Floridians. “They” are journalists, and the issue is the environment. What makes this particular issue so susceptible to bad journalism?

At least part of the answer has to be politics. If you followed the controversy over arsenic in drinking water in 2001, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Bush administration was plotting to poison the reservoirs. Yet in fact the Environmental Protection Agency had simply chosen to revert to standards that were changed only in the last few days of the Clinton administration. The press had gone almost eight years without noticing that Carol Browner and the Clinton EPA were happy to allow these “dangerous” standards of arsenic in the water.

In other areas too, the press deliberately changed its tune. In 1987, the Washington Post had editorialized in favor of oil exploration in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, saying, “That part of the Arctic coast is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life.” By 2000, when George W. Bush had made drilling in ANWR part of his proposed energy policy, the Post became concerned about whether “the oil to be gained is worth the potential damage to this unique, wild and biologically vital ecosystem.” The New York Times similarly reversed its position on the issue between 1989 and 2001.

As strong environmentalism is one of the defining characteristics of the modern liberal, it should come as no surprise that the media lean toward environmentalism in their coverage of key issues.

Hence the pivotal role of Britain’s leftist bible, the Guardian, in so many recent stories. Now that the Internet has made it possible to read other English-language papers daily, the Guardian has become a regular stop for those who find the New York Times too conservative. Given the highly politicized nature of most British papers, it is hardly surprising that its combative style has won many admirers on the American left (just as a whole new audience of American conservatives has come to appreciate the stance of the Daily Telegraph).

So when Fortune magazine ran a story in January about the Pentagon’s investigation of the potential security impacts of global warming, no major American newspaper picked it up. On February 22, however, nearly a month after the Fortune story, the Observer — the Sunday sister paper of the Guardian — ran with the preposterous headline “Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us.” The sub-heads ranted, “Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war”; “Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years”; “Threat to the world is greater than terrorism.”

This is appalling journalism. The Pentagon had judged that the $100,000 report did not “meet its needs” and so rejected it. In any case, the report was not secret and was by no means “suppressed by U.S. defense chiefs and obtained by the Observer” — presumably by the furtive and dangerous method of asking the Pentagon for it. The report’s only mention of Britain relates to its being a nuclear power; and the comparison to terrorism is actually made not by the Pentagon but by British scientists on their own crusade to terrify America into adopting the Kyoto Protocol. Far from concluding that global warming “will destroy us,” the report actually concludes that such a dramatic event as the sudden onset of an ice age would present “new challenges” for the United States.

It was only after the Observer’s scaremongering that environmental groups over here noticed the story. After they made a fuss about it, it entered the journalistic lexicon to the extent that it seemed every other review of the silly disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow contained a reference to it. The Guardian has gone on to break other environmental scare stories later picked up by the American media, such as allegations against the effectiveness of genetically modified rice in preventing blindness in the Third World.

Yet politics cannot be the whole answer. Sensationalism and ignorance are also to the fore. In 1995, for instance, New York Times science writer William Broad publicized speculation by two Los Alamos physicists, Charles Bowman and Francesco Venneri, that nuclear-waste materials stored beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada might explode. Their view was dismissed by other researchers as fanciful, and in any event would not occur for thousands of years. The front-page treatment by the Times was clearly inappropriate. Why did they do it?

One important insight comes from the admirable environment correspondent of the Times, Andrew Revkin. He says “environmental issues — at least the most profound ones — are generally the antithesis of news. They are subtle, slow-moving, complicated shifts that often hide in plain sight.” To get the news value out of the issue, sensationalism is always a tempting option.

Just as egregious was a series of investigative reports in the Tennessean in 1998 that alleged “mystery illnesses” were plaguing people who lived near, or worked at, nuclear-weapons plants. Yet the evidence provided was a self-selected, self-reported sample. Just this year, as the Statistical Assessment Service has pointed out, the Tampa Tribune has been doing something similar in no fewer than 119 articles about Coronet Industries, owners of a phosphate plant in Plant City, Fla. The paper’s claims of elevated health hazards associated with the plant have not been borne out by the state’s independent scientific review. The Tribune’s response was illuminating: Its campaign had been “an exercise in journalism, not science. We wanted to know what ailed people, not what caused it.”

When journalists are happy enough to junk the well-established scientific tools that help us separate truth from fiction in favor of their own methods, there’s a problem. Whether they are motivated by politics, sensationalism, or a strange mixture of ignorance and arrogance, journalists the world over are painting a misleading picture of the environment. Small wonder that the issue is of little importance to Americans. In a Gallup poll for “Earth Day” this year, they ranked it second-last in importance from a list of no fewer than twelve major political issues.

Mr. Iain Murray is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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The Case of Reuters: A news agency that will not call a terrorist a terrorist (NR, 040726)

This has led to some misleading reporting from Iraq, and still worse coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The newswires are much more influential in setting the news (and hence diplomatic) agenda of that struggle than most people realize.

One veteran American newspaper correspondent in Jerusalem, eager to maintain anonymity so as not to jeopardize relations with his anti-Israel colleagues, points out that “whereas foreign correspondents still write features, they rarely cover the actual breaking news that dominates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In terms of written copy on the conflict, I would estimate that 50% of all reporting, and 90% of the attitude, is formed by these news agencies. The important thing about Reuters is that it sets the tone, and here spin is everything.”

Mr. Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph of London.

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A Sad Falling Off: The New York Times’s cultural coverage is . . . well, not what it used to be (NR, 040726)

In 1891, Henry James meditated on some of the difficulties newspapers and magazines faced in attempting to publish intelligent cultural criticism. Perhaps the chief difficulty revolved around the exigency of the deadline. “Periodical literature,” James wrote,

is a huge, open mouth which has to be fed — a vessel of immense capacity which has to be filled. It is like a regular train which starts at an advertised hour, but which is free to start only if every seat be occupied. The seats are many, the train is ponderously long, and hence the manufacture of dummies for the seasons when there are not passengers enough. A stuffed mannikin is thrust into the empty seat, where it makes a creditable figure till the end of the journey. It looks sufficiently like a passenger, and you know it is not one only when you perceive that it neither says anything nor gets out.

I try to remind myself of this extenuating passage whenever I am forced to ponder the cultural coverage at the New York Times. Imagine having to fill all those pages, day in and day out. No wonder a squadron of dummies is kept in reserve!

I should say at the outset that I more or less gave up reading the Times in any regular way at the conclusion of Lent a few years ago. Why continue the penance? I asked myself. I quickly found I was missing . . . nothing. Oh, sure, there is the odd outrage on the op-ed page, and a publicist on the arts page touting some particularly horrible specimen of artistic nullity. But all that could be garnered in two minutes on the Internet without besmirching one’s hands or compromising one’s pocketbook.

As Jay Nordlinger pointed out in these pages a few months ago (“Going Timesless,” March 22), the phenomenon of Times-quitting is gaining steam across the country. Everywhere, it seems, people are waking up and testifying to having broken the habit. Many stout souls go cold turkey. Others, less stalwart, continue to sneak the odd peek when safely out of sight of their friends (there is, after all, the matter of the crossword puzzle . . .).

Why? Politics is part of the story. The Times was always a left-liberal paper, but there was a time when one could distinguish between its editorial position and its reporting. In recent years, that has been less and less the case. There is also the issue of the Times’s coverage of culture. This is not, as it happens, wholly separate from politics. The politicization of culture has been one of the chief cultural facts of the last 25 years, and the Times has been an active abettor of that unlovely development.

Still, cultural coverage is distinct from political coverage, and about the Times’s cultural coverage three separate areas of deterioration may be observed. In the first place, its cultural coverage has become markedly less intelligent. Second, it has become notably concerned with maintaining the politically correct line about the subject at hand. And, as a corollary to both these things, it has become increasingly parochial: What the Times omits to notice these days could fill a newspaper.

Compare the range of reference, the diction, the level of seriousness in a typical article from the 1970s with one from today. The difference is startling. Here, for example, is Hilton Kramer writing in 1976 about the departure of Thomas Hoving as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kramer acknowledged that Hoving had mounted some excellent exhibitions, acquired many important works, and greatly — enormously — expanded the museum. Nevertheless, Kramer continued,

he has also helped to create a large blur . . . where there formerly existed a clearly perceived distinction: in the area where the experience of high art is distinguished from vulgar imitations and commercial substitutes. In everything from the creation of overglamorized installations to the actual manufacture of reproductions, the Metropolitan in the Hoving era has led the way in erasing a precious distinction — the distinction, after all, that is the museum’s very reason for being — between the authentic and the inauthentic in art. This is what Mr. Hoving has taken away: our confidence that the museum can be completely trusted to defend the interests of high art.

Fast-forward to 1997, when Herbert Muschamp — until a few weeks ago, the Times’s chief architecture critic — offers a love letter to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Muschamp, readers of the Times will recall, was the man who had earlier compared a Calvin Klein advertisement for men’s underwear in Times Square to Michelangelo’s David. What words can he find to praise Gehry’s twisted mass of titanium-clad steel plopped incongruously in the Basque foothills? Well, “masterpiece” was one word, along with “miracle” and “a Lourdes for a crippled culture.” Reaching for his most exalted terms of praise, Muschamp concluded that the building is “the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” (One recalls Susan Sontag’s observation that “camp is the triumph of the epicene style.”) The really great thing about Gehry’s building, Muschamp explained, is that it severed architecture’s chains to the past: “An art form that has long depended upon appeals to external authority — history, science, context, tradition, religion, philosophy or style — has at last come to the realization that nobody cares about that sort of thing anymore. Architecture has stepped off her pedestal. She’s waiting for her date outside a bar on a rainy early evening in Bilbao, Spain.”

That’s quite a list: history, science, context, tradition, religion, philosophy, style. “Nobody cares about that sort of thing anymore.” Nobody at the Times, anyway.

When it comes to writing about culture, Muschamp is the model, not the exception, at today’s Times. Pick a trendy artist or movement; the Times is there to celebrate it in the most extravagant terms. Many readers of National Review, having led exemplary lives, will be unacquainted with the work of Matthew Barney. He made a name for himself with video works like the five-part film cycle Cremaster, which was named for the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles, and Field Dressing (Orifill), in which he is filmed “naked climbing up a pole and cables and applying dollops of Vaseline to his orifices.”

That description comes from Michael Kimmelman, the Times’s chief art critic, who went on to describe Barney as “the most important American artist of his generation.”

In the Times for Sunday, July 4, readers were treated to two inane interviews, one with the former Beach Boy Brian Wilson, one with the German Dada artist Gerhard Richter. Sample exchange from the former: “Is summer your favorite season?” “No, I like fall.” The interview with Richter is about War Cut, a collage about the war in Iraq in which bits of 216 newspaper articles are counterpoised with images from the artist’s 1987 abstract painting No. 648-2. Richter’s October 18, 1977, his suite of 15 paintings commemorating the suicide of several members of the Baader-Meinhof gang, was just the sort of thing to guarantee Richter’s status as a “transgressive” cultural icon. Sure enough, here is the Times in a note accompanying the interview assuring readers that Richter is “perhaps the most influential painter in the world.”

The lead story in the arts section of the Times on July 4 dealt with the lavish salaries paid to conductors (and some musicians) at prominent orchestras. The writer radiated disapproval of the orchestra’s largess, but the story-behind-the-story was the fact that such well-paid, white-tie-wearing maestros “reinforce classical music’s image as an elitist, exclusionary world that is increasingly out of touch with its listeners.”

Actually, classical music, like all high art, is inherently elitist, but only in a restricted sense of that word: It requires discipline, talent, and specialized knowledge to practice or appreciate effectively. In principle it is open to all, but in fact it is open only to those possessing the talent and the capacity for spiritual exertion that serious music demands. It is just this that the Times cannot abide. A friend reported a comment someone made about the Times’s coverage of music: “The attitude of the paper can be summed up in one sentence: ‘Contemporary good, traditional bad.’”

That gets at half of the problem. It is true that the Times gives preferential treatment to the new in all realms of cultural endeavor. But it does so only when the new is certifiably trendy. Let there be an artist of more traditional aspiration, and you can be sure that the Times won’t have time for him or her. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Times made a concerted effort to cover most new gallery openings. Now it finds space only for the trendiest and most ephemeral.

It’s the same with its books coverage. Many, many important books never make it to the Times’s review columns, but they always have space on the front page of their book review for a new biography of the pop singer Neil Young or the latest thriller from Stephen King.

What a sad spectacle; what a falling off. Dumber, more PC, more blinkered. It reminds me of that passage in George Gissing’s New Grub Street, where a new paper for “the quarter educated” — people “who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention” — is founded. It’s a great success, of course, but then P. T. Barnum did pretty well for himself, too.

Mr. Roger Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion. His latest book is The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art (Encounter).

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Almost all political cartoons are on the left. Why should this be? (NR, 040726)

When editorial cartoonist Wayne Stayskal retired from the Tampa Tribune last December, he left as one of his profession’s most admired craftsmen. (He still draws for a syndicate.) For four decades, Stayskal’s distinctive, loose style and razor-sharp wit have thrilled his admirers, enraged his political targets, and explored the frontiers of political satire. In short, Stayskal embodies those qualities that make a great newspaper cartoonist: He draws both blood and laughs.

And yet Wayne Stayskal has never won the newspaper industry’s top honor: the Pulitzer Prize. For Stayskal made one crucial career mistake.

He is an unapologetic conservative.

As Stayskal’s experience shows, “diversity” — today’s media mantra — applies exclusively to race and gender. At a time when news organizations have aggressively diversified their newsrooms by hiring more minorities and women, they have also become much less politically diverse. This monolithically liberal press — and the intolerance it has bred — are affecting one of the most outspoken, dynamic art forms: the political cartoon.

In the last ten years, not a single conservative editorial cartoonist has won a Pulitzer. In fact, of 30 nominations for the prize during this time (three are sent to the Pulitzer board every year), only five have been of conservatives. And it’s not because the judges eschew strong opinions. In fact, the Pulitzer trend (echoed in other industry contests) has been to reward the most provocatively left-wing cartoonists in the business. In the last five years, Joel Pett, Ann Telnaes, Clay Bennett, David Horsey, and Matt Davies — Stayskal’s sharp-penned peers on the far left — have all won the award.

The Pulitzer establishment’s bias has become so predictable that many conservative cartoonists simply refuse to submit for the prize. Award submissions, after all, require preparation and thought (and cost $50). Why waste one’s time and money if the result is predetermined? Stayskal himself admits that he has not bothered to submit in recent years because of this prejudice.

Glenn McCoy of the Belleville (Mo.) News-Democrat, Stayskal’s heir apparent as perhaps our funniest conservative cartoonist, also has stopped submitting. Explains McCoy: “Because of their obvious bias, I believe the Pulitzer is a totally illegitimate judge on the art of cartooning.”

This current leftist dominance betrays a tradition of American cartooning that has historically been rich and varied in its political opinion. During the 20th century, for every Paul Conrad or Herb Block on the left, there was a Bruce Russell or Rube Goldberg on the right. Two- and three-newspaper cities fed readers’ thirst for a variety of political views, and by the 1960s American editorial cartooning had matured into the best in the world. The creative fires were further stoked by Australian Pat Oliphant, who created a splash when he came to the U.S. in 1964 and treated Americans to comic scenes punctuated with biting, hilarious cutlines.

While Watergate unleashed a new generation of liberal activism in America’s newsrooms, cartoonists — both conservative (Jeff MacNelly, Stayskal) and liberal (Mike Peters, Don Wright, Jim Borgman) — were creating funny, hard-hitting, visually playful cartoons in metro dailies across the land. This diverse stable of talent coincided with the presidencies of Nixon, Carter, and Reagan, and produced some of the best political art ever seen. Oliphant’s Nixon, MacNelly’s Carter, and Borgman’s Reagan were sophisticated satires that visually defined their presidential targets.

In the 1990s, the increasingly partisan liberal press rallied behind an embattled Bill Clinton. Faced with “the Democrat’s Nixon,” newsrooms demonized Kenneth Starr, and, incredibly, gave Clinton more favorable press coverage than the prosecutor investigating him, according to the (non-partisan) Center for Media and Public Affairs. Cartoonists, less inclined to embrace the herd instinct than their newsroom peers, bucked the trend. Regardless of their politics, they smelled a snake-oil salesman — and Clinton proved to be a rich source of cartoon material.

But the emergence of a uniformly liberal press — accelerated by the 1990s consolidation of the industry into one-newspaper cities — was closing off opportunities for conservative satirists. The zesty menu of political cartoonists was being reduced to just one entrée: liberal.

And that’s a pity, because American politics has changed, and satire needs new blood.

Unlike their colleagues in America’s newsrooms (Dan Rather: “When you start talking about a liberal agenda and all the ‘liberal bias’ in the media, I don’t know what you’re talking about”), editorial cartoonists are actually quite refreshing on the point of leftist bias. They, at least, admit it. And they wear it as a badge of honor. Liberalism is necessary, these cartoonists say, because a good cartoonist is anti-establishment; he is suspicious of power and authority. It’s no wonder, they say, that the anti-establishment ‘60s bred such a fine generation of cartoonists.

But “the establishment” is a moving target. The notion that liberalism is anti-establishment is a nice illusion, but it’s 30 years out of date. Today, the hypocritical, self-satisfied protectors of the status quo are on the left.

The welfare state has failed, with its liberal champions denying their legacy of fatherless, unemployable children and tattered inner cities. The civil-rights movement has become desperate quackery, abandoning Martin Luther King’s ideal of “the content of their character” for a permanent racial spoils system. “Green” pols park their SUVs at the curb and then bloviate about America’s wasteful consumption. And fantastically rich trial lawyers claim to represent the “little guy” while looting 50% of their clients’ winnings.

Imagine the possibilities! This grotesque menagerie is as worthy of satire as the fat cats of Tammany Hall or the railroad barons of yore. But this kind of commentary requires a conservative’s eye, and today’s liberal press is blind to it.

There are simply too few opportunities for conservative cartoonists in today’s newspapers. Where metropolitan areas once offered readers at least two newspapers and at least two editorial opinions, most of today’s metro papers enjoy monopolistic control over their markets — and are predominantly liberal.

St. Louis, Memphis, Des Moines, Atlanta, Charlotte, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Louisville are typical examples of conservative, middle-American cities that have only one cartoonist: a liberal one. Even in metropolitan areas where two newspapers do exist — Philadelphia and Denver, for example — both newspapers boast just a liberal cartoonist. And in Chicago, the Tribune — which was once home to generations of America’s finest conservative cartoonists, such as Joseph Parrish, Vaughn Shoemaker, MacNelly, and Stayskal — no longer even employs an editorial cartoonist.

In this parched landscape, the weeds of political correctness threaten to strangle cartoonists not only on the right, but also on the left. These left-wing newspaper monopolies are increasingly sensitive to special interests representing minorities, women, unions, and civil-liberties groups, and they see conservative cartoonists as a liability — as politically incorrect rabble-rousers who provoke letter-writing campaigns and canceled subscriptions. Liberal cartoonists have been largely free of these concerns, continuing to attack conservative special interests — the religious Right, gun-makers, industrial manufacturers — with impunity. But the left-wingers are looking over their shoulders, wondering how long it will be before publishers feel compelled to avoid all controversy.

Liberal Ann Telnaes — one of only three nationally syndicated female cartoonists in the nation, and a Pulitzer Prize winner — strongly believes that a woman’s point of view brings a different perspective to editorial cartoons, and is outspoken about the need for more women in cartooning. But if gender diversity makes editorial cartoons stronger, why not political diversity? A commitment to politically provocative and ideologically diverse cartoons would invigorate newspapers and ensure that editorial cartooning remains at the forefront of satirical invention.

If the newspaper industry wants to take that commitment seriously, it can get off to a relatively easy start: by recognizing Wayne Stayskal’s brilliant career with the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Won’t someone nominate him?

Mr. Hnery Payne is the editorial cartoonist for the Detroit News and a freelance writer.

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More of the Same: Watching Robert Greenwald’s “Outfoxed” with a MoveOn.org crowd at the Peace House (WS, 040719)

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, liberal activist group MoveOn.org organized more than two thousand screenings across the nation for op-ed filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s assault on Fox News Channel, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism. The DC Metro area played host to 16 screenings, with some 800 registered attendees.

With the end of the Sopranos season, my Sundays have been devoid of mob mentality, so I signed up to join the festivities. Unable to resist the masochistic temptation, I registered for a screening at an indigenous cooperative proclaiming itself the “Peace House.”

Arriving on the scene, I was greeted by a large German Shepherd sleeping next to a Beware of Dog sign in the dwelling’s open doorway. Above the door’s mantle, the words “Peace House” were painted in green and yellow block letters. Behind me followed a married couple, slightly passed middle age, dressed in matching khaki shorts and white t-shirts, with Kerry/Edwards buttons fastened in bold display.

Approximately 20 of us had gathered for the show. Over the following 90 minutes I was educated on the insidious tactics employed by Fox News. Did you know, for example, that Bill O’Reilly often shouts? Perhaps more shocking, was the discovery that some former employees of the Fox empire were disgruntled when they left their jobs. However, worst of all was the revelation that conservative pundits are given airtime to match that of liberal pontificators on the nation’s most watched cable news network. Something must be done.

Former Fox News producer Clara Frank explained to us the “most outrageous” moment

in the network’s history came in 1999 when Special Report anchor Brit Hume openly advocated for NBC News to air its interview with Juanita Broderick. Granted, Frank admits much-respected NBC veterans Lisa Myers and Tim Russert also advocated release of the video. But as Frank told it, “To even have an anchor going on the air wearing an American flag pin can be a problem.”

Vermont’s congressman, Bernie Sanders, seethed as he lamented Fox’s success. But refusing to succumb to despair, he notes, “Thankfully, in the past year or so, progressives have been making their own strides in getting on talk radio and cable news. We don’t yet have our own political plan in place, but much progress has been made.” MoveOn.org is surely part of that progress—the group provided most of the funding for Outfoxed’s $300,000 budget.

Also onscreen were Eric Alterman, David Brock, and Al Franken, who appear in succession attesting to the wicked nature of conservative media. Socialist media advocate and Free Press co-founder Robert McChesney goes a bit further saying, “This is precisely the prescription for what a press system should do according to Goebbels in the Third Reich.”

In recent days, Outfoxed has received its share of criticism. Director Robert Greenwald admits that he used all of the Fox News footage without the network’s consent. After the New York Times ran a glowing, in-depth profile of Greenwald, FNC spokeswoman Irena Briganti accused Times editor James Ryerson of limiting her network’s response time to under 24 hours, “He said it was part of the deal we made with the subject that we would hold off on contacting you.” Ryerson responded, “I can’t remember what exact conversation we had. We certainly contacted Fox News and gave them plenty of time. She may have misunderstood something.”

Outfoxed relies heavily on memos circulated by Fox News VP John Moody that Greenwald claims show an editorial bias in dictating the day’s coverage of events. However, USA Today revealed that Greenwald intentionally excluded a number of Moody memos instructing reporters to give equal time and credence to speeches given by John Kerry and “not overdoing” credibility given to Kerry critics.

After the movie finished, I made my way across town to Visions Cinema, which also hosted a showing of the film, where Greenwald and Al Franken were conducting a video conference beamed to several of the screening locations. I expected to find a ravenous crowd of hissing twentysomethings. Instead, the loudest sound coming from the theater lobby was a collective order to hush.

Most of the audience had stuffed itself into the bar area, where six smaller televisions and one giant projection screen had been switched to a National Geographic Explorer documentary entitled Girl Power, examining the sexual prowess of female fish, primates, and birds.

Eric Pfeiffer is a Senior Writer for National Journal’s Hotline.

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Kerry’s Troopers : Déjà vu anyone? (NRO, 040811)

It all seems so familiar now. In their overt desire to reject a second term for a President Bush, the liberal media elite allows the Democratic candidate to create a legend around himself and his past. Whatever inconvenient holes or weaknesses there are in his personal history are whitewashed out. When the Democrat’s critics challenge these legends, only then is it time to travel beyond the mythology and launch into investigative journalism — but only to expose the cynical conspiracies of the partisan plotters against the Democrat.

This entire cycle, which recalls 1992 and then repeats in every other year of the Clinton era, is now coming around again with the ad and book campaign of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In Clinton-era terms, it could echo the Paula Jones case. Like Jones, the vets held a press conference (at the National Press Club in early May) that most national media outlets strenuously ignored. So months later, they created another splash to draw the media out, only to be sharply criticized.

But the better Clinton-era comparison for the swift-boat veterans are the Arkansas state troopers. Obviously, Vietnam was no walk through a Little Rock nightclub. But these men know Kerry, as the troopers knew Clinton. They say they are eyewitnesses to some moments that do not match the much-seen flattering filmstrips of his wartime experiences. It is the very possibility of their persuasive power that causes Democratic-media apparatchiks to decide they must be discredited. Their motives for lying were the primary focus, and reporters rarely sought to confirm the negative stories, preferring to leave them unsubstantiated and uncirculated.

Why would the media approach the swift-boat vets opposing Kerry by completely changing the subject instead of engaging the battle on the turf of Kerry’s record? If they’re so confident Kerry is unassailable and the vets are politically daft, why not demand Kerry’s records to shut it down? Here again you can see the Clinton parallels. Behind the pro-Democrat bravado is a real lack of confidence in what a careful evaluation of the public record will show. They change the subject to motivations and personal attacks because merely raising the subject, the question of whether Kerry served or protested honorably and without great political calculation is a loser for Democrats. If the portrait of Kerry tips even a bit from jut-jawed hero to unreliable ally in a crisis, a self-promoter with presidential ambitions in the most trying situations, Kerry’s chances with veterans and military families may be quite hampered.

If conservatives were slow to see Clinton parallels, the media liberals were not. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann noted that the new Swift Boat veterans book comes “from Regnery Press, which is supported in some way by Richard Mellon Scaife of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and you now bring in the whole mystical right-wing conspiracy jazz.” Keith doesn’t feel he has to have any proof of Scaife-prints on Regnery or the veterans, just a vague but vivid belief in harmonic conservative convergence.

Wall Street Journal pundit Al Hunt denounced the effort in the classic Washington way: When you don’t want to assess whether an attack is true or false, just say that asking the question is crappy politics. “Suppose in the 1992 presidential election, after an unconfirmed rumor surfaced about an alleged affair then President Bush had years earlier, Clinton supporters decided to make marital fidelity a central issue. That would be almost as crazy as the current effort by some Bush backers to focus attention on John Kerry’s Vietnam War record and subsequent protests.” For Hunt and others, the calculus is easy: Bush ducked, Kerry fought. What Kerry did while fighting or protesting is “beyond the pale” of public discussion.

Conservatives and liberals can debate whether the veterans charging Kerry is “Unfit for Command” are a boon or a bane to Bush. But the news media is supposed to operate on a different plane with a different formula. What is the true and full biography of a man who wants to be president? They’re supposed to investigate, and then report if the substance of the charges is true or false. Instead, the media act with extreme political calculation at the risk of their own reputation for fair play — just as they did in the Clinton years.

On NBC, the swift-boat-vet ad isn’t a new frontier for investigative journalism, but an undesirable outbreak of free speech that should have been prevented by law. Tom Brokaw asked Friday night: “Up next, NBC News ‘In Depth’ tonight: The latest campaign ad from an independent political group. Harsh attacks. Are these ads totally out of control?” Could he telegraph any more blatantly that he wished this ad did not exist, or that he would have liked to control it right into the dumpster?

He later explained: “NBC’s Andrea Mitchell tells us tonight, the campaign-finance law supposed to fix the system left this very big loophole.” The network stars have discovered that “527” groups, which the Democrats have built willy-nilly to defeat President Bush, have suddenly become undesirable. So we should ask: Is Tom Brokaw out of control? Aren’t he and his fellow reporters one giant “loophole” in our campaign speech system?

The mere fact that we’re at this embryonic stage of Kerry’s biography in August shows the lack of media vigilance about Kerry’s resume. If anyone would question the timing of the current Swift Boat vets campaign, they are correct. They could have started in May at the National Press Club. They could have started in February, when Terry McAuliffe and the Democrats drew two weeks of meticulous network pounding of George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. (For example, take CBS’s John Roberts on February 12: “Officials hoped the release of Mr. Bush’s dental records would end the matter, but the dentist who treated him has no specific recollection of seeing the future president.”)

But they should have been exploring this story on their own in January, when Kerry broke out of the Democratic pack through powerful and repeated war heroism stories. Since Sen. Kerry began putting his Vietnam experience into biographical overdrive before the Iowa caucuses, it might have seemed like an obvious task for reporters to assess Kerry’s service in greater detail. But they did not. They are more interested in electing Kerry than telling us about him.

— Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and an NRO contributor.

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The Hoaxing of CBS: Why were they so easily duped? (Weekly Standard, 040910)

A NUMBER OF EXPERTS have now weighed in on the inauthenticity of the documents CBS breathlessly revealed on 60 Minutes earlier this week—documents purportedly typed by the deceased commander of George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard unit in 1972 and 1973, but actually produced on a personal computer using Microsoft Word. I predict—and here I’m going out on a limb 10-feet wide and only an inch off the ground—that it’s only a matter of time before CBS admits it was deceived. If there’s any honor and professional pride left in the CBS newsroom, they will then expose the party or parties who deceived them.

Why did the premier news show in what was once reputed to be the premier television newsroom fall for such transparent fakes? Anyone old enough to have used a typewriter can look at them for a few minutes and figure out that they weren’t typed on a typewriter in the early 1970s. A poster on FreeRepublic.com whose screen name is “Buckhead” was, to my knowledge, the first to do so at midnight Wednesday, shortly after CBS’s scoop had aired. “Every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman,” this person wrote. “In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. . . . I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.”

Indeed, some have speculated that a generation gap may

have contributed to the blunder, since only those of us over 40 can remember what it was like to try to type, say, “187th” with the “th” raised above the baseline. You had to turn the platen by hand. (Do you remember what a platen is?) And you couldn’t have gotten a smaller “th” without changing the little type ball. Would you have gone to such trouble in typing a memo for your own files?

But the more important reason CBS was duped is that they wanted to believe the story. And the memos neatly fit the anti-Bush narrative that they believed to be true: Namely, Bush was a slacker at the end of his tour of duty and his superiors covered for him because they were under political pressure to do so.

Here’s a revealing anecdote reported by Michael Dobbs and Mike Allen in this morning’s Washington Post:

A senior CBS official . . . named one of the network’s sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents’ alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said that a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone, and that Hodges replied that “these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time.”

“These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people,” the CBS News official said. “Journalistically, we’ve gone several extra miles.”

Obviously, you can’t authenticate a document by reading it to someone over the phone. (CBS claims to have had other “experts” examine the documents but has been unwilling to name them.) What this reporting should have suggested to CBS is that whoever forged the documents was someone who knew what CBS’s sources would be saying—someone well informed on the anti-Bush scuttlebutt about his National Guard service. The “documents” neatly reflect the reigning anti-Bush theories of the events of 1972 and 1973 and perfectly buttress the anti-Bush narrative because they were produced by someone who was obsessing over that narrative and understood that reporters would need “documentation” to advance the story.

Just as obviously, the journalists who went into overdrive for the National Guard story when the phony memos were released, with few exceptions, want to see Kerry win and Bush lose. This makes them suckers for a good anti-Bush story. It’s conventional to call this media bias and be shocked by it. But really it’s just human nature. That’s why we have to be especially skeptical of the stories we fall in love with. And that’s why CBS screwed up.

Richard Starr is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.

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Rather Flawed (Weekly Standard, 040920)

From the September 20, 2004 issue: New evidence emerges of media incompetence.

LAST WEDNESDAY, CBS News’s 60 Minutes II aired a report that strongly challenged George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. It’s a story that has been explored dozens of times in the past five years. Two things in the 60 Minutes II story made it fresh—or, in newsroom parlance, gave it a peg. Ben Barnes, who served as attorney general in Texas at the time of Bush’s service, claimed that he had been pressured to help Bush avoid going to Vietnam. But there were problems with Barnes’s story, not least that he had previously, and rather specifically, denied the account he gave on 60 MinutesII. (Republicans questioned Barnes’s motive, too, pointing out that he is a lifelong Democrat who has raised significant money for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.)

The second news peg was more important. 60 Minutes II had obtained “new documents” from the “personal files” of the late Jerry Killian, Bush’s commanding officer. That the documents were unearthed some 32 years after the activities they describe must have greatly excited the CBS producers who worked on the story.

According to an Associated Press story, the Killian memos “say Mr. Bush ignored a direct order from a superior officer and lost his status as a Guard pilot because he failed to meet military performance standards and undergo a required physical exam.”

If accurate, then, the memos would provide documentary evidence to support the long-circling rumors that Bush received preferential treatment to get out of serving in Vietnam.

But almost immediately, the authenticity of

the typed memos was questioned. Although CBS claimed to have had them reviewed by document experts, numerous forensic document examiners interviewed last Thursday by THE WEEKLY STANDARD and several other media outlets concluded that the documents were likely forgeries.

“These sure look like forgeries,” said William Flynn, a forensic document expert widely considered the nation’s top analyst of computer-generated documents. Flynn looked at copies of the documents posted on the CBS News website. “I would say it looks very likely that these documents could not have existed” in the early 1970s, he says, when they were allegedly written.

Several other experts agreed. “They look mighty suspicious,” said a veteran forensic document expert who asked not to be quoted by name. Richard Polt, a Xavier University philosophy professor who operates a website dedicated to the history of typewriters, said that while he is not an expert on typesetting, the documents “look like typical word-processed documents.” He adds: “I’m a Kerry supporter myself, but I won’t let that cloud my objective judgment: I’m 99% sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s.”

Philip Bouffard, another document expert who plans to vote for Kerry, reviewed the documents at the request of Bill Ardolino, a weblogger who runs INDC Journal. Says Bouffard: “It is remotely possible there is some typewriter that has the capability to do all this . . . but it is more likely these documents were generated in the common Times New Roman font and printed out on a computer printer that did not exist at the time they were supposedly created.”

Sandra Ramsey Lines, a document expert from Arizona, told the Associated Press: “I’m virtually certain these were computer-generated.”

The experts pointed to numerous irregularities in the Killian memos that aroused their suspicions. First, the typographic spacing is proportional, as is routine with professional typesetting and computer typography, not monospace, as was common in typewriters in the 1970s. (In proportional type, thin letters like “i” and “l” are closer together than thick letters like “W” and “M”. In monospace, all the letters are allotted the same space.)

Second, the font appears to be identical to the Times New Roman font that is the default typeface in Microsoft Word and other modern word-processing programs. According to Flynn, the font is not listed in the Haas Atlas—the definitive encyclopedia of typewriter type fonts.

Third, the apostrophes are curlicues of the sort produced by word processors on personal computers, not the straight vertical hashmarks typical of typewriters. Finally, in some references to Bush’s unit—the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron—the “th” is a superscript in a smaller size than the other type. Again, this is typical (and often automatic) in modern word-processing programs.

There are also problems with the substance of the memos Killian allegedly authored. One of the memos, dated May 19, 1972, recounts a telephone conversation Killian is to have had with Bush. “I advised him of our investment in him and his commitment. I also told him I had to have written acceptance before he would be transferred, but think he’s also talking to someone upstairs.”

But

as Byron York of National Review points out, Killian signed off on a “glowing report” about Bush on May 26, 1972, just one week later. Lt. Col. William D. Harris authored the memo praising Bush. “Lt. Bush is an exceptional fighter interceptor pilot and officer,” it read. “He eagerly participates in scheduled unit activities.” Killian signed below a statement indicating he agreed with Harris. “I concur with the comments and ratings of the reporting official.”

Killian’s son and widow also claim that Bush’s commanding officer liked Bush and would have been unlikely to have authored the memos. “It just wouldn’t happen,” Gary Killian told the AP.

Despite these questions, CBS News anchor Dan Rather strongly defended the reporting on Friday’s Evening News, and lashed out at those who would question CBS’s reporting. “Today, on the Internet and elsewhere, some people—including many who are partisan political operatives—concentrated not on the key questions the overall story raised but on the documents that were part of the support of the story.” After a long but relatively thin attempt at refuting the charges against CBS, Rather ended this way: “If any definitive evidence to the contrary of our story is found, we will report it. So far, there is none.”

There are several steps CBS could take to clarify the situation.

(1) Obtain the original memos. CBS based its reporting on photocopies. If CBS can produce the original memos, both the paper and the ink can be accurately dated. And the paper can be checked for the indentations made by a typewriter.

(2) Produce other documents written by Killian around the same time that have the same characteristics as the documents in question.

(3) Find any typewriter from the early 1970s capable of producing replicas of the Killian memos. Several experts have already recreated the memos using Microsoft Word. Surely if the documents are authentic, somewhere there is a typewriter that can reproduce them.

If CBS can’t provide more definitive evidence of the authenticity of the memos, its anchor will live to regret these words posted late Friday by Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds:

“To err is human but to really foul up requires a computer.”

Who said them? Dan Rather.

Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

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The Burden of Belief (Weekly Standard, 040913)

A list of what you need to believe in order to conclude that CBS’s documents aren’t forgeries.

CBS has left the flap over purported documents involving President Bush’s record in the Texas Air National Guard in this posture: Who are you going to believe, CBS or your lyin’ eyes?

To accept CBS’s insistence the four documents from the early 1970s are authentic, you would have to believe the following:

(1) That the late Jerry Killian, Bush’s commanding officer, typed the documents—though his wife says “he wasn’t a typist.”

(2) That Killian kept the documents in his personal files—though his family says he didn’t keep files.

(3) That the disputed documents reflect his true (negative) feelings about Bush and a contemporaneous official document he wrote lauding Bush did not.

(4) That he typed the documents on a technically advanced typewriter, an IBM Selectric Composer—though that model has been tested and failed to produce an exact copy of the documents.

(5) That this advanced typewriter, which would have cost $15,000 or so in today’s dollars, was used by the Texas National Guard and that Killian had gained the significant expertise needed to operate it.

(6) That Killian was under pressure to whitewash Bush’s record from a general who had retired 18 months earlier.

(7) That Killian’s superior, Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, was right when, sight unseen, he supposedly said the documents were authentic, but wrong when, having actually viewed the documents, he declared them fraudulent.

Now if you can’t accept all that, there’s another side. To believe the documents are forgeries, you have to believe this:

(1) The documents were typed recently using Microsoft Word, which produces documents that are exact copies of the CBS documents.

(2) There’s no number 2. All you have to believe is number 1.

In response to questions about the authenticity of the documents, CBS has acted more like an embattled political organization than a news operation. It has stonewalled rather than joined with skeptics in a search for the truth.

Last Friday, CBS anchor Dan Rather declared the document authentic and that no investigation by CBS was needed. He told the Washington Post: “Until someone shows me definitive proof that they are not, I don’t see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumor mill.” In other words, it’s not up to CBS to prove the authenticity of the documents. It’s up to critics to prove otherwise, a twist on normal journalistic procedure. However, a CBS spokeswoman said on Sunday that the network “continues to work the story.”

A forthright news organization would not impede the critics, but CBS has. It hasn’t made its handwriting expert, Marcel Matley, available. Nor has it allowed the producer of the story, Mary Mapes, be interviewed by the press. And, so far as is known, CBS hasn’t asked two of its sources in Texas, Robert Strong and Bill Burkett, to step forward and answer questions. Finally, CBS hasn’t explained where the documents came from, though an explanation would be helpful after Killian’s family said he didn’t keep files.

Now that Matley’s past writings have been unearthed, it is particularly important for CBS to make him available. But Matley told the Washington Post CBS had asked him not to give interviews. CBS relied on Matley as its chief authenticator of the documents, which are copies, not originals. But Matley seems to have violated his own rules.

Here’s what he wrote in 2002 in a journal called The Practical Litigator:

In fact, modern copiers and computer printers are so good that they permit easy fabrication of quality forgeries. From a copy, the document examiner cannot authenticate the unseen original but may well be able to determine that the unseen original is false. Further, a definite finding of authenticity for a signature is not possible from a photocopy, while a definite finding of falsity is possible.

That, plus all the other the other evidence of a likely forgery, puts the ball back in CBS’s court. Otherwise, you would be free to assume that scenario #2—that the documents were produced recently by a computer using Microsoft Word—is the correct one.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

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Watching the Media Watchdogs (Weekly Standard, 040914)

The liberal media-criticism establishment ignores the CBS News story—while the Washington Post delivers the coup de grace.

Breaking their silence on the CBS forgeries, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk finally mentioned the scandal yesterday afternoon. In a post titled Blog Report, CJR finally turned to the biggest media story in recent memory; they gave it five sentences:

Last week’s CBS report on the disputed Jerry Killian memos and the blogosphere’s role in first questioning their validity is the subject of much back-and-forth in the ‘sphere this morning.

(As an aside, the mainstream press moved in to give credit where credit’s due. The Los Angeles Times ran a story crediting alert bloggers for first suspecting a hoax and introducing the possibility of forgery. And New York Times op-ed columnist William Safire today lashed out at Dan Rather, urging him to re-examine the sources.) Mostly, the frenzy consists of various bloggers swearing on the lives of their mothers that the Killian memos are authentic, and an equal number of bloggers swearing on the lives of their fathers that the Killian memos are fabricated.)

As for those writing about things other than typewriters and superscripts . . .

That’s it. It is, of course, astounding that CJR could avoid covering the CBS forgery as a media story for almost a week. But here they’re giving it short shrift as a blog story. There is, quite literally, no bigger story in the history of blogs. Yet somehow the writer—one Thomas Lang—manages to write about happenings in the blog world for another 420 words without touching further on the matter.

Such is the state of professional media criticism.

Meanwhile, Jim Romenesko continues his half-hearted coverage of the story by headlining this morning’s installment “Rather’s colleagues say they’re worried about memos flap.”

Romenesko then goes on to quote a New York Times story, saying, “One source describes the state of the CBS News staff as ‘deep concern, I’d say not panic—we all want it to be right. Dan really put himself on the line and I can’t imagine him knowingly defending something he knew not to be the case.’”

Romenesko buries (and CJR ignores) the definitive story on the case: this morning’s devastating Washington Post article by Howard Kurtz and Michael Dobbs. The Post scores the following knockout punches:

(1) They get Marcel Matley to give an interview. Matley now says he examined not the documents, but only one signature and that “There’s no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them.”

(2) They reveal that the Post has run its own, independent comparisons and found “dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.”

(3) Among these inconsistencies: “Of more than 100 records made available by the 147th Group and the Texas Air National Guard, none used the proportional spacing techniques characteristic of the CBS documents. Nor did they use a superscripted ‘th’ in expressions such as ‘147th Group’ and or ‘111th Fighter Intercept Squadron.’”

(4) And factual problems, too: “A CBS document purportedly from Killian ordering Bush to report for his annual physical, dated May 4, 1972, gives Bush’s address as ‘5000 Longmont #8, Houston.’ This address was used for many years by Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush. National Guard documents suggest that the younger Bush stopped using that address in 1970 when he moved into an apartment, and did not use it again until late 1973 or 1974, when he moved to Cambridge, Mass., to attend Harvard Business School.”

(5) And also important stylistic differences: “The CBS memos contain several stylistic examples at odds with standard Guard procedures, as reflected in authenticated documents.”

(6) They demolish CBS News defenses: “In a CBS News broadcast Friday night rebutting allegations that the documents had been forged, Rather displayed an authenticated Bush document from 1968 that included a small ‘th’ next to the numbers ‘111’ as proof that Guard typewriters were capable of producing superscripts. In fact, say Newcomer and other experts, the document aired by CBS News does not contain a superscript, because the top of the ‘th’ character is at the same level as the rest of the type. Superscripts rise above the level of the type.”

(7) And then take down last night’s new CBS expert, Bill Glennon: “But Glennon said he is not a document expert, could not vouch for the memos’ authenticity and only examined them online because CBS did not give him copies when asked to visit the network’s offices.”

(This is the same Bill Glennon, as Little Green Footballs points out, whom Time magazine described yesterday as a former typewriter repairman.

But what’s really funny, as Tim Blair points out, is that Glennon first entered the fray as a commenter on the far-left Daily Kos website! So, after sneering at bloggers non-stop for four days, CBS was finally reduced to tracking down a former typewriter repairman who posted a comment on Kos—and putting him forward as their chief defender.)

(8) Finally, they get bonus points for quoting Joseph M. Newcomer, of Flounder.com fame.

Yet the most damning bit might be the reaction quote Kurtz and Dobbs get from CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius. “In the end, the gist is that it’s inconclusive,” she says. “People are coming down on both sides, which is to be expected when you’re dealing with copies of documents.”

Old CBS default position: “The story is true. The story is true.” New CBS default position: Who knows what the truth is! You can’t prove anything!

Jonathan V. Last in online editor of The Weekly Standard.

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Rather defends ‘thrust’ of report on Bush service (Washington Times, 040916)

By Bill Sammon

[Kwing Hung: The media would not even apologize for using forged documents to defame the President.]

A defensive Dan Rather suggested last night that although he may have used forged documents in a CBS report criticizing President Bush’s military service, the “thrust” of his report was true.

“Those who have criticized aspects of our story have never criticized the heart of it, the major thrust of our report,” he told viewers on “60 Minutes.” “George Bush received preferential treatment to get into the National Guard and, once accepted, failed to satisfy the requirements of his service.”

He added: “If we uncover any information to the contrary, rest assured we shall report that also.”

The unusual remarks were made hours after CBS News President Andrew Heyward grudgingly promised to “redouble” efforts to answer questions about whether the network used forged documents in a report that aired on the Sept. 8 edition of “60 Minutes.”

“We would not have put the report on the air if we did not believe every aspect of it,” he said on “CBS Evening News.” But he added: “Enough questions have been raised that we’re going to redouble our efforts to answer those questions.”

The remarks by Mr. Heyward and Mr. Rather marked the first time in a week that CBS appeared to be entertaining the possibility that it had built its story on forged documents. But Mr. Rather challenged the president through an interview published yesterday in the New York Observer.

“With respect: answer the questions,” he said. “We’ve heard what you have to say about the documents and what you’ve said and what your surrogates have said, but for the moment, answer the questions.”

He added: “They’d be a lot stronger in their campaign if they did do that.”

But even before Mr. Rather issued that challenge on Tuesday, The Washington Times published a front-page article in which the White House said Mr. Bush did not defy a direct order from his commanding officer. One of the CBS documents purports to show that Mr. Bush refused an order to undergo a physical examination.

Many in the media and in Congress have called for an apology, but Mr. Rather only tried to downplay questions about the authenticity of his documents while clinging to the essence of their accusations. To that end, he aired a lengthy interview with 86-year-old Marian Knox, the secretary who worked for Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Mr. Bush’s former commanding officer, who died in 1984.

Mrs. Knox said last night that she did not type the documents, which she called forgeries. She speculated that the forger had based the documents on real memos, although she could not produce them.

“It seems that somebody did see those memos and then tried to reproduce and then maybe changed them enough so that he wouldn’t get in trouble over it,” she said. “That’s all supposition.”

In an interview with The Washington Times yesterday, Gary Killian rebutted Mrs. Knox’s previous claims that his father kept secret files.

“She alluded to the fact my dad had a secret file and kept secret documents in it,” said Mr. Killian, who had served in the same squadron as Mr. Bush during the time in question. “I can tell you he didn’t. He wasn’t the type person to do that. He was direct. If he had a problem, he would deal with the person directly.”

Asked about the son’s statement, Mrs. Knox replied on CBS: “He has no way of knowing whether it’s true or not.”

Mr. Rather and Mr. Heyward were not the only CBS officials who sounded defensive yesterday. Wyatt Andrews, the CBS correspondent tasked with reporting on his own network, said on Mr. Rather’s show last night: “Some at this network believe the backlash against the ‘60 Minutes’ report is pure politics.”

Meanwhile, a Republican lawmaker called for a congressional investigation.

Rep. Christopher Cox of California said there is a “growing abundance of evidence that CBS News has aided and abetted fraud.” He suggested that the probe be conducted by the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt called on CBS to retract its story and accused the network of stonewalling. He sent a letter, signed by 40 House members, to Mr. Heyward.

“CBS’s response to the specific and devastating criticisms of the accuracy of its reporting has been to question the motives of its critics, to offer half-truths in its own defense, to refuse to disclose crucial evidence, and to circle the wagons,” Mr. Blunt wrote.

“CBS reporters would not accept such behavior from public officials like ourselves, and we cannot accept it from them,” he added.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi lashed out at Republicans for going after CBS.

“The Republicans’ latest attempt to intimidate the news media is a waste of taxpayer money and an egregious example of how this Republican House only exercises its oversight responsibility for partisan political reasons,” the California Democrat said.

“Clearly, Republicans will stop at nothing to distract the public from their miserable record,” she added.

The White House pointed out that although Mr. Bush has publicly praised Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry’s military record, the Massachusetts Democrat has not reciprocated.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan blamed Mr. Kerry’s campaign for the latest assault on Mr. Bush’s service in the National Guard.

“I believe that Democrats and the Kerry campaign are behind these old, recycled attacks on the president’s service, absolutely,” Mr. McClellan said. “Democrats are clearly orchestrating attacks on the president, because they can’t talk about the future, and they can’t win when the discussion is on the issues.”

Both the White House and the Bush campaign stopped short of echoing first lady Laura Bush, who called the documents apparent forgeries. But Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke called them “creative” and accused the Democrats of giving them to CBS.

In addition to broadcasting the interview with Mrs. Knox, CBS released a statement saying the network was “not prepared to reveal its confidential sources or the method by which ‘60 Minutes’ ... received the documents,” and characterizing questions about the authenticity of the memos as “disagreements among ‘dueling experts.’ “

While acknowledging “unanswered questions about the documents,” CBS defended the story itself: “Through all of the frenzied debate of the past week, the basic content of the [Sept. 8] report — that President Bush received preferential treatment to gain entrance to the Texas Air National Guard and that he may not have fulfilled all of the requirements — has not been substantially challenged.”

==============================

Taxes, truth and CBS (Washington Times, 040916)

How do you think the sanctimonious people at TV’s “60 Minutes” would portray a company charged by the FCC with “serious indecency violations,” that made expensive settlements with employees and others because of injuries related to asbestos and other hazardous material exposures, underfunded its employee pension, is legally accused of securities violations, employs those who widely distributed forged documents in an effort to destroy political opponents, failed to dismiss or discipline employees who violated the company code of conduct, owned offshore enterprises that paid little or no U.S. corporate tax, and operated in and/or dealt with countries harboring terrorists?

The company that engaged in all of these practices is Viacom, parent company of CBS, which produces “60 Minutes.”

The folks at “60 Minutes” remind me of the preacher who damns the sinners every Sunday, but then is caught in the brothel. Viacom is a huge media company that not only owns CBS, but hundreds of individual radio and TV stations; cable operations like MTV, Showtime and Nickelodeon; Paramount Pictures; theme parks; publishing houses, including Simon & Schuster; and many other operations around the globe.

The problem with Viacom is not its difficulties with some acquisitions and operations, but that its CBS News unit has a long and continuing record of misrepresentation, hypocrisy, or worse is allowed to continue in clear violation of the company’s own code of conduct and best economic interest.

The people who produce “60 Minutes” have a long history of pursuing corporate and individual wrongdoers. This is all to the good, provided it is done honestly, and not just to make those with different political or other views (such as religious) or competitors look silly or corrupt. Over the years, it has been all too obvious a (liberal Democrat) political agenda at CBS has taken priority over factual news.

In an attempt to discredit Vice President Dick Cheney, “60 Minutes” recently did a hatchet job on Halliburton, where Mr. Cheney once was chief executive officer. The central CBS charge was that Halliburton created offshore companies to reduce its tax burden. The fact virtually every large company with sizable foreign operations does the same thing, and it is totally legal and proper, escaped the people at “60 Minutes” in their rush to tarnish Halliburton and Mr. Cheney.

To make the story more interesting, “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl and her team went to the Cayman Islands where Halliburton has incorporated some of its affiliates. Miss Stahl first implied there was something illegal or shady about having a Cayman business — which is both untrue and a slander on all world-class professionals in the Cayman financial industry. She then went to a local Cayman law firm to interview a couple of the lawyers who set up corporations, with the explicit agreement that the interview would not be filmed.

Instead, Miss Stahl and her crew hid a camera in a notebook, filmed and broadcast the interview in direct violation of their promise. (I learned about this accidentally when a colleague and I interviewed the founding partner of the same law firm regarding a book we are writing on Cayman economic success.)

Miss Stahl then went on to rap CBS competitor General Electric Co. (which owns NBC) for similar tax practices, even though both GE and Halliburton are the epitome of corporate virtue compared to Viacom and CBS.

The real scandal “60 Minutes” should have reported is the U.S. corporate tax has made U.S. businesses noncompetitive. Chris Edwards, director of Tax Policy at the Cato Institute, has authored a new study showing the U.S. corporate tax is second highest of all developed member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD.)

The average U.S. corporate tax rate is 40% vs. 27.7% average among the European countries. Corporate managers have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to legally minimize their tax burden. Businesses that do not do so put themselves at a competitive disadvantage to their foreign competition, which ultimately means lost market share and U.S. jobs. No company can avoid U.S. tax liability on its operations within the U.S. through the use of a Cayman or any other low-tax country affiliate.

U.S. companies still must pay tax in every country where they do business. Places like Cayman, Bermuda or Ireland merely allow them to avoid a tax disadvantage on foreign operations vis-a-vis overseas competitors. Offshore incorporation of foreign operations only helps defer the double tax.

The Viacom (CBS) corporate responsibility statement says: “Obeying both the letter and spirit of the law is one of the foundations of Viacom’s ethical standards. It is Viacom’s policy to comply with all applicable laws, rules and regulations. You must always conduct your business affairs with honesty, integrity and good judgment.”

Obviously, Viacom has not been enforcing its own standards at CBS News. The blatant partisanship, continuing misrepresentation and lack of ethical standards at CBS News probably explains part of its continuing drop in market share — not good for stockholders and a failure in top management.

(If you wonder where I got all of the dirt on Viacom reported in the first paragraph, it was found in its own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and recent news reports.)

Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.

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Report: Bush Docs Came From Texas (Foxnews, 040917)

The authenticity of memos concerning President Bush’s service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War era continued to create a swirl of controversy Thursday.

The Washington Post reported that documents CBS says were written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian — who, at the time, was Bush’s commanding officer — bore markings showing they were faxed to CBS News from a Kinko’s copy shop in Abilene, Texas.

Those documents, which surfaced last week, have raised questions about whether Bush shirked his military duties with the Texas Air National Guard. Several typography analysts have said that the documents are forgeries that were prepared on a modern computer rather than a typewriter in 1972 and 1973.

Robert Strong, one of three people interviewed by CBS’ “60 Minutes,” told the Post Thursday he was shown copies of the documents by CBS anchor Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes on Sept. 5, three days before the broadcast that revealed the memos. He said at least one of the documents bore the faxed header “Kinko’s Abilene.”

The sole Kinko’s in Abilene is 21 miles from Baird, Texas. The Post reported that Baird is the home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents.

CBS so far has refused to reveal the identity of the source who provided the documents, even though many document experts have questioned their authenticity.

When asked what role Burkett may have played in CBS’s reporting, CBS News President Andrew Heyward told The Washington Post: “I’m not going to get into any discussion of who the sources are.”

Meanwhile, a newly surfaced document purportedly from Bush’s military file — whose authenticity has not been verified — shows more “proof” that Bush failed to fulfill his military obligations more than 30 years ago, Salon.com reported Thursday.

In a 1968 contract posted on a Web site run by Philadelphia researcher Paul Lukasiak, Bush agreed to serve as a pilot for five years. The Web site that posted the document calls itself “The AWOL Project: An Examination of the Bush Military Files.”

“I desire to enter undergraduate pilot training as an officer of the Air National Guard and, in consideration therefore (including the expenditure of extensive public funds), do hereby agree that upon successful completion thereof I will serve with my parent ANG unit as directed by the unit commander, unless sooner relieved by competent military authority, for a minimum period of five years,” the agreement says.

Bush completed his initial training at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia on Nov. 26, 1969, and his final F-102 training on June 20, 1970. He received a promotion later that year and continued to participate in drills at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston.

On Sept. 6, 1972, Bush’s request for a three-month transfer to 187th TAC Recon Group, Montgomery, Ala., was approved so he could work as political director for the Senate campaign of Winton M. Blount, a friend of his father. In November, he returned to Ellington to participate in drills, which he did through 1973.

On Sept. 18, 1973, Bush got permission to transfer to reserve status and was placed on inactive guard duty about six months before his six-year commitment was to end. He attended Harvard Business School in the fall. On Oct. 1, 1973, he received an honorable discharge.

Thursday’s developments come one day after CBS News said once again that it stands by the basic content of its report.

But the network acknowledged that the memos may have been forgeries, and said it would “make every effort to resolve the contradictions and answer the unanswered questions about the documents and will continue to report on all aspects of the story.”

“We will keep an open mind and we will continue to report credible evidence and responsible points of view as we try to answer the questions raised about the authenticity of the documents,” Rather said on “60 Minutes.”

Later, Rather told The Washington Post: “If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story …Any time I’m wrong. I want to be right out front and say, ‘Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.”‘

Rather later told USA Today that no one has disputed “the heart” of his original report last week, but complained that a “thick partisan fogging machine seeks to cloud the core truth of our story by raising questions about the messenger, methods and techniques.”

The memos in question indicate that Killian had been pressured to sugar coat Bush’s performance and that the future president had ignored an order to take a physical.

CBS on Wednesday flew Killian’s former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, 86, from Texas to New York for an interview, where she said that while she believed the documents were fake but their content accurately reflected Killian’s opinions.

“I know that I didn’t type them,” she said. “However, the information in those is correct.”

When asked about Knox’s comments, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: “We don’t have to rely on the feelings of a nice woman who has firmly stated her opposition to the president.”

McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One, “CBS has now acknowledged that the crux of their story may have been based on forged documents.”

“There continue to be questions raised about these documents,” he said as Bush flew to Minnesota to campaign Thursday.

As for Rather’s comments, McClellan said, “so now some [journalists] are working on feelings instead of facts.”

“It’s always best for journalists to stick to the facts and not dispense campaign advice,” McClellan added.

On Wednesday, 40 GOP House members circulated a memo calling on Heyward to retract the network’s story and to disclose the identities of the people used to help “authenticate” the documents.

“We are writing to express our dismay that CBS has become part of a campaign to deceive the public and to defame the president,” says the letter.

A House memo being circulated by GOP Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri calls on Heyward to retract the network’s story and to disclose the identities of the people used to help “authenticate” the documents.

“We are writing to express our dismay that CBS has become part of a campaign to deceive the public and to defame the president,” says the letter, which FOX News has learned has been signed by about 40 House members.

Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., chairman of the House Policy Committee and of the Homeland Security Committee, called on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., to investigate CBS News’ use of “apparently forged documents concerning the service record of President George W. Bush intended to unfairly damage his reputation and influence the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.”

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Rather apologizes for CBS ‘mistake’ (WorldNetDaily, 040920)

‘After extensive additional interviews’ no longer ‘confident’ in Bush memos

After 11 days of widespread criticism, CBS News anchor Dan Rather issued a statement saying he no longer will defend the authenticity of documents he used in a report that raised questions about President Bush’s National Guard service.

A separate statement by CBS News President Andrew Heyward identified the source of the documents as former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett, a fierce critic of Bush.

Rather’s statement said:

“Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a ‘60 Minutes Wednesday’ story about President Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question—and their source—vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where—if I knew then what I know now—I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.

Please know that nothing is more important to us than people’s trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

Anticipating the statement, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wrote it would “represent a huge embarrassment for the network, which insisted for days that the documents reported by Dan Rather on ‘60 Minutes’ are authentic.”

But Kurtz said the statement would “also help defuse a crisis that has torn at the network’s credibility.”

Heyward said Burkett “has acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents” and “admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents’ origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source.”

But in a letter to the American Spectator, Burkett’s lawyer David Van Os said:

“Based upon my personal knowledge of Bill Burkett’s character from knowing him and knowing of his reputation among his peers, I will state unequivocally that Bill Burkett did not falsify or create the “CBS documents.” I do not assume that anyone falsified or created those documents until more is known, but if anyone did, it was not Bill Burkett. I will stake my reputation and good name on this certainty. Further from my knowledge of Bill Burkett’s character and integrity, I will state unequivocally that if, hypothetically speaking, Bill Burkett handled documents that were recent creations rather than true copies of originals, he would have done so only because he had reason to believe they were true copies rather than recent creations.”

‘Continue to work tirelessly’

While not stating the documents are forgeries, CBS News said it could not authenticate them.

“Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report,” Heyward said. “We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret.

“Nothing is more important to us than our credibility and keeping faith with the millions of people who count on us for fair, accurate, reliable, and independent reporting,” the CBS News president said. “We will continue to work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust.”

The network said additional reporting on the documents will air on tonight’s “CBS Evening News,” including an interview of Burkett by Rather.

CBS News pledged “an independent review of the process by which the report was prepared and broadcast to help determine what actions need to be taken.”

The New York Times reported network officials met last night with Rather to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before deciding on any final course of action.

The admission the network was misled into putting false information on the air is a major reversal from previous statements by Heyward.

“We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would not have put them on television,” Heyward said last week on the ‘CBS Evening News.’ “There was a great deal of corroborating evidence from people in a position to know. Having said that, given all the questions about them, we believe we should redouble our efforts to answer those questions, so that’s what we are doing.”

As WorldNetDaily reported, CBS News stood by its claims in the face of widespread accusations that early 1970s documents used on a Sept. 8 “60 Minutes II” segment to discredit Bush are forgeries, created with a modern word-processing program.

Among the assertions “60 Minutes II” derived from the documents – four memos by Bush’s late squadron commander Col. Jerry Killian – were that the commander was pressed to “sugar coat” a performance evaluation for Bush and that the future president did not follow an order to report for a physical.

According to the Times, document specialist Emily Will who inspected the memos for CBS and said she raised concerns about their authenticity, confirmed a Newsweek report that “a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail.”

She reportedly declined to name the producer who told her this, but indicated the producer was in a position to know.

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A Grand Media Bargain: Rathergate offers a chance to redraw the media’s political lines (National Review Online, 040921)

I’d like to propose a deal. Our media wars have gone on long enough. We can and should put an end to this ongoing source of national division by negotiating a historic media agreement between liberals and conservatives. John Kerry and his advisers are aficionados of the “grand-bargain” approach to foreign policy: They believe that both Iran and North Korea can be induced to dismantle their nuclear programs in return for a comprehensive, negotiated resolution of all major outstanding differences between these two countries and the United States. When it comes to nuclear proliferation, I happen to think the grand-bargain approach is a naïve and dangerous thing. Yet when it comes to ending America’s media wars, I believe a grand bargain will work.

We need to arrange a trade. This nation would be released from continuous conflict over the question of media bias if our major news outlets were roughly equally divided between liberals and conservatives. So to put this needless battle over media bias behind us, I propose that we convene a summit of liberal and conservative media leaders. These distinguished representatives of both ideological camps could solve our national dilemma by dividing up the media pie on a far more equitable basis. Just as the Congress of Vienna was able to apportion territory so as to establish a stable balance of power in Europe after the fall of Napoleon, so a congress of American media notables can establish a stable balance of power between liberals and conservatives in the newspapers, magazines, and airwaves in the wake of the Rather Affair.

To negotiate on behalf of conservatives, I nominate Paul Gigot, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page; Roger Ailes, chairman and CEO of Fox News; Rich Lowry, editor of National Review; William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard; and Rush Limbaugh, dean of conservative talk-radio hosts. To represent the liberal media, I suggest Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, chairman and publisher of the New York Times; CBS news president Andrew Heyward; Peter Jennings, news anchor at ABC; NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr; and Al Franken, aspiring deacon of liberal talk radio.

The basic terms of the agreement that must be reached are fairly clear. At the moment, conservative perspectives are essentially shut out of all three major television networks, as well as the news pages of virtually all major newspapers with national reach or reputation. (True, conservatives control the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, but this does not include control of the news pages. In any case, the Journal concentrates on economic matters. It is not a comprehensive source of news.) Conservative perspectives are also largely shut out of news coverage in the major national news magazines. On the other hand, with the important exception of NPR, liberal views are largely absent from talk radio. These are the imbalances that need to be redressed at a congress of media notables. (Internet blog sites are already sufficiently balanced, although Glenn Reynolds and Joshua Micah Marshall might perhaps attend the media congress as consultants and observers.)

I would suggest the following steps as a rough outline of a resolution of our national media conflict. Conservatives need to control at least one major broadcast television network news division; at least one, and possibly two, major national newspapers; and at least one of the two major national news magazines. In addition to their current control of NPR, liberals need to be granted ownership of at least one-third of all existing talk-radio stations in the country. So, for example, we could solve the media-bias problem by giving ABC News, the Washington Post, USA Today, and Newsweek over to conservatives, while allowing Al Franken to dispense about one-third of all talk-radio stations to his allies. With the successful completion of such a grand bargain, America’s media-bias problem would be effectively solved.

A HORRIFIED FASCINATION

Of course, the greatest barrier to this bargain is the requirement that the Left give up so much more than the Right. However much liberals may covet a presence on talk radio, no one seriously believes that these radio stations are remotely as prestigious or influential as the major television networks, national newspapers, or national news magazines. So my purpose here is to reach out to liberals and explain why it is ultimately in their interest to accede to such an apparently unequal bargain.

The truth is, both sides in our media wars have paid a considerable price. No matter how confident conservatives may sound in their media redoubts, the persistent stigmatization of their viewpoints in prestigious circles has left them embarrassed and lacking confidence. Liberal command of the mainstream media not only undercuts conservative influence on politics and culture, it is downright humiliating. Conservatives are livid about Dan Rather because his egregious actions speak boldly and openly of a bias they are tired of enduring in the softer daily drumbeat of media news.

Apparent conservative glee over the Rather fiasco is actually closer to obsessive fascination, relief, and terror. It’s a bit like having a doctor cut out and show you a tumor you knew was inside you, but never imagined was so ugly, dangerous, or just plain real. You’re riveted, revolted, happy, and scared all at once. To see displayed so openly the bias and treachery conservatives always knew was under the surface of network news is both a relief and a warning. In short, the conservative obsession with Rathergate is not so much a political tactic as an index of just how much the mainstream media spook the Right.

PRETENDING NO MORE

No doubt, being able to mess with conservative minds is a big part of why liberals love sitting in the media catbird seat. So why should they ever give it up? Maybe because even liberals pay a price for their lopsided control of the media. It’s often been pointed out that the liberal media echo chamber tends to lull Democratic candidates into error and overconfidence. Dukakis might have answered attacks by the first George Bush, and Kerry might have thought twice about focusing his race on Vietnam, had they been given early warning of what was ahead by the comments of mainstream-media conservatives.

Then there’s the lure of simple relief at no longer having to pretend to be fair. Imagine the effort it must take to create a patina of balance and objectivity when your very reason for being a journalist is to help move the country leftward. True, the authority conferred by a reporter’s apparent objectivity is a major asset in any attempt to influence the voting behavior of a trusting public. Yet it’s no longer clear that liberals want or need that pretense. A bestseller list dominated by angry attacks on President Bush, along with the embrace of Michael Moore by even the most respectable senior Democrats, suggest that nowadays liberal reporters might as well let their bias show. Once the media are divided into two openly partisan camps, liberal journalists would be free to serve as political advocates. That would be a personal relief for them, and just might turn out to be more politically effective than the journalistic deceit so commonly practiced today. Liberals, as noted, are famous for wanting to defuse seemingly interminable conflicts by fair and comprehensive negotiated solutions. So why not take that step here? Why not show fairness to all?

No doubt, several further objections will be raised to my proposal. Conservatives will complain that it smacks of an artificial attempt to manipulate the market. And even if we wanted to reapportion ownership of various media outlets along the lines of a political deal, how could we get station owners and publishers to cooperate? The most profound objection of all may be that the barons of the liberal media will never surrender their control for the flimsy reasons I’ve suggested so far.

NO TIME FOR PRINCIPLED OBJECTION

After all, if the liberal media actually believed in liberal principles, we wouldn’t have the problem of media bias to begin with. Reporters would make more of an effort to be fair to conservatives, and news outlets would be as keen to hire journalists with conservative leanings as those with liberal ones.

Yet here is the beauty of my proposal. The fact that conservatives would have to betray their principled belief in free markets in order to get this deal is another major carrot to lure the Left into an agreement. From the moment this deal is made, liberals will be able to taunt conservatives for their hypocrisy. What a trump card the Left will have in political arguments: “How can you conservatives jabber on about free markets when you accepted the grand media bargain of 2005?” Liberals will torment conservatives for years to come with this question. And that is why my grand media bargain is in the selfish interest of the Left.

As for conservatives, I believe we are sufficiently desperate to surrender our fundamental principles in order to gain a comprehensive media deal. If Dan Rather actually survives this controversy, there will be a serious downside for conservatives. We will have exposed the depth of media bias, but also our own powerlessness to do anything about it. That humiliation will be too great to bear. For the sake of achieving balanced media for the foreseeable future, I believe conservatives must jettison our free-market principles — just this once.

SHATTERING ILLUSIONS

As for the practical problems of transferring ownership, they are surmountable. The negotiators for both media camps are obviously very prestigious people. They will speak for their respective halves of the country, and will command the respect and cooperation of many wealthy and powerful people and institutions in both political camps. By appealing to patriotism, offering financial compensation, and threatening legal and financial strong-arming when necessary, the negotiators will be able to get the relevant owners to cede control of the stations and publications in question. And don’t forget that for dispossessed journalists on each side, there will be a chance of gaining a new position at one of the radio stations, newspapers, or magazines received from the opposite camp.

One final set of objections to this deal remains. Perhaps in some fundamental sense I have misjudged the liberal media. I have claimed that left-leaning journalists actually know themselves to be biased, and would therefore relish the chance to discard the pretense of fairness and turn into open political advocates. But couldn’t it be argued that what most characterizes today’s mainstream liberal journalists is the illusion that their own prejudices are indistinguishable from fairness itself? And doesn’t this illusion actually depend upon the exclusion of conservative perspectives from any serious consideration? If that were true, then the trade I propose could never be successfully consummated. That’s because, for liberal journalists, to acquiesce in such an exchange would be tantamount to confessing a bias they are incapable of acknowledging, even to themselves.

A MATTER OF DAYS

I reject this challenge to my proposal. It is impossible that a respectable liberal journalist might actually confuse his own political biases with fairness itself. To believe that liberal journalism (and by extension, American liberalism itself) is this far gone, we would have to believe that Dan Rather was incapable of acknowledging how profoundly he has betrayed his own journalistic principles. Yet I know that within just a day or two, Dan Rather will wake up to the fact that he is actually a biased liberal journalist, will say so publicly, and will voluntarily resign. And I know that liberal journalists in general will soon begin to treat the Rather fiasco not as a silly distraction from the election campaign, but as a critically important sign of just how troubling the problem of media bias has become. When all of this happens (as I’m sure it will within days), the grand bargain I have outlined here — so badly needed by our country — will at last be achievable.

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NBC Nightly News Puts “ILIE” in Graphic Next to Bush’s Face (Media Research Center, 041005)

NBC’s “RATS”? Four years ago, the NBC Nightly News took seriously the appearance of the letters “RATS,” in a single frame of an enlargement of part of the word “BUREAUCRATS,” in an anti-Gore ad from the Bush campaign. The September 12, 2000 NBC Nightly News carried two full stories on the controversy. Jump ahead four years, and on Monday night the NBC Nightly News displayed the letters “ILIE” for 16 seconds next to President George W. Bush’s face in a “Decision 2004” graphic beside anchor Tom Brokaw as he introduced a story by David Gregory.

The letters came from the word “FAMILIES” in a sign on the far side of Bush, which read:

“TAX RELIEF
FOR
WORKING FAMILIES”

At the Iowa event, Bush signed bills to extend some provisions of his tax cuts which otherwise would have expired next year.

The right half of NBC’s screen was consumed by a waist-up shot of Brokaw. On the left, at the bottom, the NBC News “Decision 2004” graphic. Above that, a side shot of Bush’s head turned slightly toward the TV viewing audience. The letters “ILIE,” the MRC’s Tom Johnson astutely noticed, ran from screen edge to his Bush’s chin. The rest of the background was blank. The letter “I” could be seen, but since it was partially cut off on the lower left side of it, viewers may have assumed they were only seeing part of another letter and so saw “LIE.” If they identified it as an “I,” then they saw: “ILIE.” Brokaw’s intro took 20 seconds, but for four seconds Bush’s movements obscured the last two letters, “IE.”

To view a picture of what NBC displayed, go to the posted version of this CyberAlert where the MRC’s Mez Djouadi will place it: www.mediaresearch.org

Inadvertent, I’m sure. Just as was “RATS,” for much less time, in the 2000 anti-Gore ad from the Bush campaign. But NBC took it quite seriously, covering it for two straight mornings on Today and devoting campaign stories to it at night.

[Web Update, October 6: The DrudgeReport picked up this catch and on Tuesday Rush Limbaugh discussed NBC’s lettering display. Plus, NBC News responded: “To see a hidden message in this is just plain silly.” But a September 12, 2000 NBC Nightly News story on the “RATS” lettering for a single frame in the Bush campaign’s anti-Gore ad warned: “A marketing expert on the effects of so-called subliminal advertising says in his experience this sort of word flash is not accidental and it can be effective.”]

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Ultimate expose of America’s ‘POISON PRESS’ (WorldNetDaily, 041016)

WND documents how ‘big media’ create their own ‘virtual reality’

The scandalous pre-election hucksterism of CBS News and other “big media” organizations – their usual facade of objectivity worn thin by their zeal to elect John Kerry – doesn’t even begin to reveal their monumentally destructive influence on America, according to the newest edition of WND’s acclaimed Whistleblower magazine, titled “POISON PRESS.”

“This amazing issue on the news media literally begins where other exposes of the press leave off,” said Joseph Farah, founder and editor of WorldNetDaily and Whistleblower.

That starting point, of course, is that the “mainstream press” is very far out of the mainstream. In fact, a poll of 153 national journalists at the Democratic convention showed three times as many supporting Kerry for president as Bush, while the 50 or so Washington-based journalists surveyed favored Kerry over Bush 12 to one.

“However,” said David Kupelian, managing editor of WND and Whistleblower, “this issue of Whistleblower is not about how the press is too ‘biased’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘left-wing.’ That’s old news – very old.

“What this Whistleblower issue does is document how the ‘old media’ are literally the creators and sustainers of what many Americans perceive as reality, very much like the malevolent computer program in ‘The Matrix’ film trilogy.”

That is, the issue reveals dramatically how, in issue after issue – the presidential race, the Middle East conflict, abortion, “gay rights,” the terror war and others – the “virtual reality” created in the public’s mind by the establishment media is profoundly and provably at odds with reality.

Much has been made of the CBS News scandal in which Dan Rather and that network’s executives stonewalled the entire world – even the rest of the press – defending the obviously bogus documents Rather and “60 Minutes” had featured for the intended purpose of bringing down a U.S. president.

“But that was just the time they got caught,” said Kupelian. “What about the other thousands of news stories that form the fabric of confusion, cover-up and deceit that passes for ‘political analysis’ in the establishment press?”

“POISON PRESS” unplugs the media matrix program and helps readers view the world through fresh eyes, and not those of agenda-driven manipulators in the major media.

But that’s only part of what’s contained in this special Whistleblower edition dedicated to the news media.

Fortunately, “POISON PRESS” also documents conclusively that the “Old Media’s” decades-long monopoly on the news is slowly but inexorably coming to an end. At the same time, the inspiring present and awesome future of the Internet-based New Media is laid out as never before.

Contents of “POISON PRESS” include:

* “The way back to a free press” by Joseph Farah, a fascinating and prescient look at the future of American journalism, and proof that “the old days” of lockstep print and TV news are gone forever.

* “The collapse of America’s media elite” by Hugh Hewitt, an upbeat, inspiring and fact-based piece on how the Internet is causing a true journalism revolution.

* “The media matrix” by David Kupelian, a groundbreaking look at how the press creates a virtual-reality world most people think of as real.

* “Castro, good. Reagan, bad” – how a classic and in-depth poll of students at America’s premier journalism school showed their preference of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro over President Ronald Reagan.

* “‘Impartial’ editor blasts pro-lifers” – about how a Reuters editor lashed out at National Right to Life after receiving a routine press release from the pro-life organization.

* “The poll was wrong” – showing how when U.S.A. Today’s post-Democratic convention poll didn’t show the desired “bounce” for John Kerry, the pollsters extended the polling period until the poll came closer to reflecting the newspaper’s intended outcome.

* “They’re terrorists – not activists,” by Daniel Pipes, who asks, “How many ways can the media avoid using the word ‘terrorist’?” See the long list of almost two dozen preferred terms – including “perpetrators” (New York Times), “gunmen” (Reuters) and “radicals” (the BBC) – used by the biggest news organizations, all to avoid using the “T-word.”

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Who Are The “Brainwashers”? (Media Research Center, 041019)

by L. Brent Bozell III

The decision of Sinclair Broadcasting to air an anti-Kerry documentary in late October is a nightmarish recipe of “creeping fascism, state propaganda, Big Brother and brainwashing.” So says the unhinged Molly Ivins, giving voice to the outrage felt by her colleagues in the news media.

Liberals are positively panicked at the idea that somewhere, on some station, at some late date, someone will say something negative about John Kerry without a moment for balance on the other side. Let’s be blunt: welcome to our world, liberals. You’re all for propaganda and brainwashing when it’s Dan, Peter, Tom & Co. are spinning wildly in your direction. In your world, a free press is defined as what happens when so-called “news” professionals sell liberalism relentlessly like a kitchen gizmo on a late-night infomercial.

Conservatives are used to seeing our leaders hounded and our ideas pounded without any quaint notions of balance or fairness on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, and so on. This does not occur on one night every four years. It happens on a daily, even hourly basis. TV news stars have foisted Microsoft forgeries on President Bush (CBS), framed his face next to the letters “I LIE” (NBC), and composed internal memos declaring that the Bush campaign is a cavalcade of liars and must be exposed as such (ABC).

For most of this year, these left-wing journalists have portrayed John Kerry’s war years as if he were a combination of Private Ryan, Sergeant York, and G.I. Joe. They have touted his “chestful of medals,” and swooned over every replay of his military home movies (yes, the ones he vowed he’d never use for political gain). Those who remember him differently – as a man who went to battle to polish his political resume and then returned home to smear his comrades in the war effort as vandals, rapists, and murderers – are not to be defined as “newsworthy.” Their views are sometimes questioned, usually condemned, parceled out in half-teaspoons of Swift Vet ad clips. They are never invited to sit for extended interviews with Ted Koppel or Dan Rather.

The film Sinclair has ordered its stations to air, “Stolen Honor,” interviews Vietnam prisoners of war and their wives at length about the wounds they feel over Kerry’s infamous 1971 Senate testimony. It is a powerful film. It’s a devastating story. It’s no wonder the liberals want it blacklisted before it can be located on television.

But with all the one-sided boosterism of Kerry the war hero, we must ask: Is “Stolen Honor” a blatant offense against balance? Or can it qualify, at least in a few media markets, as a limited but razor-sharp contrast to the liberal media monoculture, as the arrival of balance? “Stolen Honor” critics ought to shut up, sit down, and watch before they condemn it.

For the latest example of the liberal media’s extreme revulsion to the views of anti-Kerry veterans, see ABC’s “Nightline” on October 14. In four previous shows on Kerry’s war history and Swift Boat veteran ads, Ted Koppel never granted an anti-Kerry veteran an extended interview. But this time, Koppel’s show did the incredible, traveling all the way to Vietnam and interviewing self-proclaimed soldiers for the communist regime, soliciting their viewpoint. In aiming to determine what happened on the day Kerry put in for his Silver Star medal, February 28, 1969, Koppel said these old enemies had “no particular ax to grind for or against John Kerry.” The spokesmen for a regime that tortured and killed countless American POWs were more trustworthy than American POWs.

After a parade of unsubstantiated hearsay from these Vietnamese peasants, interviewed with an official minder from the communist regime standing around, Koppel sat down with an anti-Kerry veteran on live television for the first time this year. John O’Neill was so shocked by the audacity of ABC’s “news” judgment that he kept returning to the objection that Koppel had been used: “You’ve been had, Ted.”

Koppel framed the show as a “chance to set the record straight” – against John O’Neill. Kerry’s G.I. Joe narrative must be upheld, even if it requires traveling around the world and looking up the “independent” Viet Cong to “confirm the essence” of the Kerry mythmakers.

How dare these partisan hacks at ABC and elsewhere sit pompously in their studios and condemn Sinclair! They have no gauntlet of objectivity to toss at anyone. They accuse others of trumped-up, slanted propaganda? In this Kerry-coddling campaign cycle, the pot has never been blacker before rebuking the kettle.

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Media Bias during the Election (National Review Online, 041104)

Care to hear a word about media bias? I didn’t think you’d object. Whenever I watch TV news — as I did Tuesday night, for hours — I find all my suspicions confirmed. I wish it weren’t so.

Four years ago, I wrote a piece about Election Night (which I spent in Austin), and I would like to quote a little of it now:

Conservatives, I find, usually make too much or too little of media bias. The more common error, I now believe, is to make too little of it. As Kate O’Beirne says, it’s astonishing that a Republican ever wins.

One of the worst things, of course, about a rough election night is having to hear the television people report it. They can’t help looking pleased as punch. For instance, I thought some of the newscasters would wet themselves when announcing that Hillary Clinton had won in New York.

I was reminded of a story about Reagan (as we junkies so often are): It’s November ‘82, and he’s watching the midterm results, in the White House residence. The Republicans have had a lousy day; a lady correspondent is saying so. Reagan says — to himself, under his breath — “Wipe the glee off your face, sister.”

I’ve always loved that: “Wipe the glee off your face, sister.” Exactly.

During the 2000 campaign, I would sometimes listen to music through headphones, while others were watching television around me. (I need not go into the circumstances now.) And I remember being able to tell — merely by the look on her face — whether Katie Couric was interviewing a Republican or a Democrat. It was uncanny.

And I have a further memory of Judy Woodruff interviewing Ralph Nader. She was pressing him on why he wouldn’t drop out of the race, and I thought she was going to cry. She was kind of angrily tearful, or tearfully angry. She was virtually pleading with Nader, as a Gore partisan would.

I thought of that Tuesday night, when Woodruff appeared onscreen to say that a source in the Kerry campaign had confided to her that the campaign had given up on Florida. She looked unbelievably mournful — not just sober, in the accepted manner of a news reporter, but mournful. If you had instructed an actress, “Do this mournfully,” you would not have gotten a different result.

And then when she — and legal sidekick Jeffrey Toobin — got wind of Ohio’s provisional ballots, you could tell that they were excited, hopeful, almost given a new lease on life: for Kerry might still win.

Now, you could claim that my reaction is biased — warped — and maybe it is. But you should have seen it. If you saw a tape, I don’t think you’d disagree. The CNNers were so jazzed about the provisional ballots, they could barely get the words out.

How about the Fox guys? Did they evince the same bias? I don’t think so. But then, I may be too deep into it to tell.

And CBS! How could I forget CBS?! When other networks had become resigned to a Bush victory, Dan Rather was still playing it as a cliffhanger, even talking up the possibility of a Kerry comeback. Was this merely to retain viewer interest? That’s not how it seemed to me — it seemed to me an expression of rooting.

I tell you nothing you don’t know (you who are Bozellian — and Nordlingerian — conservatives out there). But I myself was amazed to have conservative suspicions and beliefs about the media so amply confirmed two nights ago.

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Amazing Loss: The media threw everything, including the sink, at Bush (National Review Online, 041104)

If we projected the winner of a presidential race based on the assumption that voters reflexively followed every didactic anchorman lecture, every trumped-up anti-Bush investigative hit piece, and every gooey Kerry valentine, we would have expected George W. Bush to lose in a resounding defeat. The media’s coverage — in terms of its intended political effect — was a landslide for John Kerry: a landslide that began in the summer of 2003 and continued for more than a year.

Consider the second half of 2003, as the Democratic field circled around the artificial Howard Dean bubble. The morning shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC offered up four hours of face time to the Democratic contenders from July to December, almost twice as much time as the Republican contenders received in 1999.

The morning hosts posed 319 questions to the Democratic candidates, nearly one-fifth of which (58) were designed to get them to reiterate or amplify their condemnations of President Bush. The morning hosts often asked the candidates to repeat charges they had leveled elsewhere. Four years before, only four out of 179 questions similarly invited the GOP candidates to differ with Bill Clinton or Al Gore. CBS’s Rene Syler served up this softball to John Kerry last December 4: “You called President Bush’s foreign policy arrogant, inept, and reckless. Give us some specifics.”

As John Kerry emerged as the likely Democratic nominee, the media all followed Democratic Chairman Terry McAuliffe like Pavlov’s dogs. McAuliffe rang the “AWOL” bell on President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, and the networks followed, with 63 morning- and evening-news segments on the Big Three networks pounding Bush to prove he wasn’t “AWOL.” (In 1992, they aired only ten evening-news segments on Bill Clinton’s draft evasion in the first two weeks of that story.)

Kerry’s emergence was helped along further as reporters insisted that his liberal record wasn’t a fact, but just a Republican insult. From mid-January to early March, reporters for the Big Three presented the “Kerry is a liberal” concept as a GOP charge 27 times, compared with just three occasions when reporters stated Kerry’s ideology as a matter of fact. Republicans were always “painting” Kerry as a liberal, in a tone that suggested reporters wanted to say “finger-painting.”

That pattern continued all year.

Every anti-Bush angle, however, was explored with great ferocity. Almost every week of 2004 was a bad media week for Bush. There was Paul O’Neill Book Week. There was 9/11 Ads in Bad Taste Week. There was Richard Clarke Book Week. There was Bob Woodward Book Week. There were two weeks of Alabama National Guard Whereabouts Hunt. There were four weeks of Abu Ghraib hype (NBC dedicated ten times as many stories to prison abuse as they did to Saddam’s mass graves). Every goofy liberal rumor — from kicking Dick Cheney off the ticket to replacing him with John McCain — was repeated with mischievous grins. Every liberal propagandist, from Michael Moore to Kitty Kelley to Al Franken’s Air America, drew respectful promotion. The first good media week for Bush all year centered around an event the press could neither control nor ignore: the death of Ronald Reagan.

From May to August, the networks studiously ignored Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. ABC’s World News Tonight would not mention the group at all on the air until Kerry denounced them on August 19. The group’s members were never granted a live interview on NBC, although the network gave Kitty Kelley three days in a row on Today. John O’Neill drew one debate on CBS’s Early Show, and one appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. O’Neill fought with Ted Koppel on the October 14 Nightline, after Koppel sent a crew to Vietnam to interview the Viet Cong for their account of how Kerry earned his medals. The Swift Vets received airplay on cable, and big play on talk radio, but the networks themselves were very stingy. When pundits say the Swift Vets “dominated” August coverage, they overlook what really dominated network coverage that month: the Olympics.

Once again this year, the conventions were a matched set: a pajama party for Democrats in Boston, a four-day exposé of Republicans in New York. Reporters virtually ignored any discussion over the fringe composition of the liberal delegates, the liberal platform (abortions should be subsidized by the federal government), or the liberal menu of speakers.

The same network journalists felt in New York the pressing need to underline, in metaphorical red pen, the ridiculous sham before their eyes: “Hard right” social conservatives were being hidden behind Giuliani, Schwarzenegger, and John McCain. When Tom Brokaw began the week by calling it a “con game” at the end of his Sunday-night newscast, he was stating publicly what his colleagues insinuated all week long.

The debates were obviously not as much of a sweep for John Kerry as the networks asserted. Once again, the Republicans mysteriously agreed to four debates with four liberal-media moderators, and whatever Charles Gibson provided in the second, surprisingly balanced, townhall-style debate, Bob Schieffer took back in a shockingly slanted performance in the final match-up. The late media hits — from al-Qaqaa to Halliburton whistleblowers — didn’t work.

But the biggest measure of bias in 2004 may be all the stories, large and small, that the media omitted in John Kerry’s defense. What a list we could make of largely avoided topics: the 1971 Senate testimony, the 20-year U.S. Senate record, Teresa’s tax returns, Teresa’s foundation politics, Teresa’s near-daily gaffes, internal Democratic infighting, U.N. corruption in the Oil-for-Food scandal, etc.

Yet despite these efforts in behalf of Kerry, George W. Bush has amassed the highest vote total in American history. The media took their defeat graciously, if a little slowly; on these occasions, they put on statesman masks and pretended they didn’t have a horse in the race. But they have been left only with the feeling that their power is sapped, their influence is waning, and their credibility is collapsing.

There are two brakes on the arrogance of liberal media bias: One is declining ratings; the other is liberal politicians’ losing and conservative politicians’ winning. The message of popular resistance to the liberal media has been sent once again. We may be optimistic about the new makeup of Washington, but it makes no sense to be optimistic about the liberal media’s recognizing their arrogance. We can only be optimistic that their meltdown continues.

— Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and an NRO contributor.

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Liberal Reporting? (Foxnews, 041029)

The Kerry campaign isn’t backing away from the missing explosives story, even though details of the story have yet to be fleshed out.

The original report written on Monday in the New York Times was co-authored by David Sanger, about whom John Kerry had this to say in July: “I believe if you talk with Warren Hoge [another New York Times writer] or you talk to David Sanger, you talk to other people around the world, they will confirm to you, I believe, that it may well take a new president to restore America’s credibility on a global basis so that we can deal with other countries and bring people back into alliances.”

The New York Times says its reporting doesn’t favor either candidate. But Bush backers note that the Kerry camp rolled out an ad campaign based on the Sanger story just a day after the story appeared in print, leaving open the question of whether the Kerry camp had advance notice of the story’s appearance. So does the New York Times use reportage to push a political agenda?

The paper’s own, self-appointed critic addressed the question earlier this past summer. New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent asked, rhetorically: “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is. The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage, but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.)”

So saith The New York Times.

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Talk About Bias (Foxnews, 041027)

With news organizations like CBS and ABC churning out almost twice as many negative stories about Bush than John Kerry, you may think that our media is biased against the incumbent.

But the BBC sees it exactly reversed. BBC World Service and Global News director Richard Sambrook was at Columbia University yesterday preaching to budding journalists about the U.S. media’s bias “in favor” of George Bush and the war in Iraq. He scolded the U.S. media for “wrapping themselves in the flag” and not asking the tough questions about the Bush administration’s reasons for going to war in Iraq.

So what is BBC’s view of fair and balanced? Well, the BBC just unveiled details of its U.S. election coverage.

Headlining the coverage is an election special featuring “Fahrenheit 9/11” director Michael Moore. Joining Mr. Moore will be former Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal, former Clinton secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and the militantly anti-Bush billionaire, George Soros. Fair and balanced?

Monty Python could not have written a sillier script.

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Media missteps (Washington Times, 041105)

Here’s a thought for downcast Democrats trying to figure out why things went so right for President Bush: Stop listening to your own press. For the past two years every major organ of national communication except talk radio — network TV, New York publishing, major dailies, Hollywood and the music industry — ran with a single, anti-Bush theme. Cloistered in their opulent, heavily liberal urban centers, these outlets provided the Democrats with ready-made talking points from which to attack the president for his “failures,” “lies” and faith.

In an unprecedented campaign to bring down a sitting president, the media long known for its liberal slant outdid itself in the ferocity and magnitude of its intentional partisan assault. The rule of thumb was to give every Bush-basher his due. Discredited partisans, like Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson earned top billing on the New York Times bestseller list, while their own lies went unreported. Tabloid biographer Kitty Kelley was given a three-day interview on NBC’s “The Today Show” for a book even most newspapers refused to review, while swift-boat veteran John O’Neill was slandered on a nightly basis.

The media awarded special attention to its celebrity clientele, of which no Hollywood temporary celebrity was too ignorant to point a camera at. They rolled out the red carpet for propagandist Michael Moore. They invited Bush-bashing tag-team Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins to join their talk shows, while Sean Penn was given column space in major daily newspapers. The anti-Bush teen-idols of MTV’s “Rock the Vote” and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’ “Vote or Die” were dignified as the answer to the younger generation’s low voter turnout. HBO gave Bill Maher an hour for Bush bashing, and Comedy Central gave Jon Stewart a half-hour. Like groupies, reporters followed Moveon.org’s “Vote for Change” tour, which headlined such rock ‘n’ roll legends as Bruce Springsteen.

In their coverage, the elite media pumped stories that would get laughed out of any honest newsroom: The New York Times’ front-page spread of the “web of connections” between the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and Republicans; Dan Rather’s unapologetic use of forged memos; and the al Qaqaa cache of missing explosives that the NYT dropped one week before the election, and which CBS News planned to air 48 hours before voters went to the polls. And so it goes.

The problem for the Democrats is that none of this, as much as it is, worked — not even on the margin. The president stands astride the biggest electoral victory since 1988, earning more votes than any president in history. Meanwhile, the elite media executives no doubt are as shocked as the Democrats who trusted them. Months before the election, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas had one of the worst predictions in presidential politics: “The media wants [John] Kerry to win ... There’s going to be this glow about them that is going to be worth ... maybe 15 points.”

By any standard, the elite media’s performance has been shocking. With Mr. Bush back in office, will it now learn from its mistakes? Probably not, but the Democrats should.

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The Other Losers Tuesday Night (Weekly Standard, 041115)

From the November 15, 2004 issue: The failed media effort to oust George W. Bush.

“WE’D RATHER be last than wrong.” So said Dan Rather anchoring election night coverage for CBS. He was apparently serious. That he could say this with a straight face only weeks after presenting the world with forged documents to bring down the president should cement his reputation as the least trusted man in America.

Dan Rather is just a small part of a much bigger story. His careless reporting and, later, dogmatic defense of his errors were but one episode in the media’s long offensive against George W. Bush.

The assault began in July 2003, when Joseph Wilson accused the president of lying. Wilson’s charges have since been thoroughly discredited and the author of The Politics of Truth revealed as unreliable. But the damage was done. Wilson’s claim that the Bush administration had knowingly cooked intelligence provided the prism through which many reporters viewed the election.

For some 16 months, then, journalists at the New York Times and the Washington Post and the television networks saw themselves not as conveyors of facts but as truth-squadders, toiling away on the gray margins of political debate to elucidate the many misstatements, exaggerations, and outright lies of the Bush administration and its campaign affiliates. Sometimes these “fact-check” pieces were labeled “news analysis.” More often, they were splashed on the front page as straight news or presented on the evening news.

Many of these reporters were trained at the best universities in the country. They fancy themselves thinkers, not mere scribes. They go to work every day to tell us not what the Bush administration has said, but what it has left unsaid. They are scornful of the president’s “simple” worldview—where Americans are good and terrorists are evil, where nations are with us or against us—and suspicious of his motives. They inhabit a world where Bush administration policymakers are incapable of telling the truth and “intelligence officials,” especially those who provide them leaks, are unimpeachable. They knew that the Bush campaign lied more than the Kerry campaign and that when the Kerry campaign lied it was of little or no consequence.

Think I’m exaggerating? Consider the memo written some three weeks before the election by ABC News political director Mark Halperin.

“[T]he current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” Halperin wrote. As a consequence, ABC has “a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that. . . . It’s up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest [sic]. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.”

Halperin was way behind. His colleagues had been on the job for months. Here is a brief, random review of their effort.

Joseph Wilson—When Wilson claimed that his clandestine work proved the Bush administration was lying about alleged Iraqi attempts to procure uranium from Niger, he was lionized as a courageous truthteller willing to stand up to a corrupt and deceitful administration. Oops. In fact, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee review of pre-Iraq war intelligence concluded that Wilson’s findings contradicted his earlier public claims and that despite his insistence that his wife, undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, had had nothing to do with his selection, his work was undertaken after she recommended him for the job. The media buried those reports.

Richard Clarke—Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism czar, was similarly celebrated when he published a book criticizing the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror and the Iraq war. The Fox News Channel released a transcript of a background briefing Clarke gave while he was still at the White House in which Clarke praised some of the very efforts he would later criticize. Most journalists focused on the propriety of Fox’s action, not the contradictions in Clarke’s accounts. Clarke also argued that Iraq had never supported al Qaeda, “ever.” Several months later, the final 9/11 Commission report, however, quoted an email Clarke had written in 1999 in which he cited the existence of an agreement between Iraq and al Qaeda as evidence that Saddam Hussein had assisted al Qaeda with chemical weapons. Most journalists ignored the revelation.

Dan Rather—The CBS anchor aired a story about “new” documents suggesting that the young George W. Bush had received preferential treatment from political big-wigs to avoid serving in the Vietnam war. The documents were forged—something CBS had been warned about before the story was broadcast. When numerous forensic document experts concluded that the memos were fraudulent, Rather lashed out at his critics as partisan hacks and spoke of the supposed broader truth of the allegations. Although CBS later backed away from the story, Rather never apologized to President Bush.

The Missing Explosives—Eight days before Election Day the New York Times published a major story about missing high explosives in Iraq. The Times’s account was based largely on an erroneous assessment from IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei. The Times collaborated on the piece with 60 Minutes, and a producer from CBS admitted that they had hoped to hold the story for October 31—two days before voters would go to the polls.

These are some of the big ones. There are dozens of smaller examples. Knight-Ridder newspapers reported that President Bush had claimed an “operational” relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in a speech he delivered in Tennessee. He had said nothing close. The Washington Post omitted a key phrase from one of Vice President Dick Cheney’s appearances on Meet the Press, an omission that inverted his meaning. And on it goes.

Evan Thomas, a veteran correspondent for Newsweek, offered a refreshingly candid assessment of the impact of a pro-Kerry media before the election, saying it could provide the Massachusetts senator with a 15-point bump. Thomas later revised this estimate down to 5 points. There’s no way to know, of course, but I believe his first guess was more accurate.

What does all of this mean? Will there be a postelection rapprochement?

We’re not off to a good start. Minutes after President Bush thanked the country for electing him to a second term, Mark Halperin, author of the ABC memo, called the president a “lame duck.”

Here we go again.

Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

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Twice as Many Saw Pro-Kerry Than Pro-Bush Tilt in Media Coverage (Media Research Center, 041109)

By 46% to 42%, those who voted on election day in 12 “battleground” states, believed “that the media’s coverage of this year’s presidential election was biased towards one candidate or party,” a survey conducted by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates determined. Within the 46%, more than twice as many, 32% of the total number of those polled, saw a tilt in favor of Kerry and Democrats than in favor of Bush and Republicans, 14%. By 30% to 12%, independents saw the bias going in Kerry’s direction. Of those who saw bias, 68% perceived more than in past election years.

The poll of 1,000 people who voted that day was conducted on November 2. The survey focused on those in these twelve states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Asked, “Generally speaking, would you say that the media’s coverage of this year’s Presidential election was biased towards one candidate or party or was it unbiased?,” the results:

Biased:

Overall: 46% (In favor of Bush/GOP: 14%; in favor of Kerry/Democrats: 32%)

Republicans: 63% (In favor of Bush/GOP: 4%; in favor of Kerry/Democrats: 58%)

Democrats: 32% (In favor of Bush/GOP: 25%; in favor of Kerry/Democrats: 7%)

Independents: 42% (In favor of Bush/GOP: 12%; in favor of Kerry/Democrats: 30%)

The Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll matches two earlier ones. As recounted in the November 1 CyberAlert:

Two polls released last week found that more people perceive the media tilting coverage in favor of Democrat John Kerry than in favor of Republican President George W. Bush. Gallup determined that 35% think coverage has tilted toward Kerry compared to just 16% who said it favored Bush. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press discovered that “half of voters (50%) say most newspaper and TV reporters would prefer to see John Kerry win the election, compared with just 22% who think that most journalists are pulling for George Bush.” While 27% described Kerry coverage as “unfair,” 37% labeled Bush coverage as “unfair.” Pew also learned that “voters who get most of their election news from CNN favor Kerry over Bush, by 67%-26%.”

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Spinning a Good Economy into Bad News (Media Research Center, 0410)

When Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996, unemployment was 5.2%, inflation 3%, and economic growth 2.2%. Economic conditions are similar, if not better, today: unemployment is 5.4%, inflation 2.7%, and economists’ consensus forecast for economic growth this quarter is 3.7%. But the networks have stressed the downside of the most positive economic reports, and given wide play to any statistics suggesting weakness.

On April 2, after the Labor Department announced how 300,000 jobs were created in March, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was dubious: “Today’s announcement was such a badly needed shot in the arm for the Bush administration — and was such good news — some thought the numbers were too good to be true.”

The networks quickly got back to pessimism: On ABC’s World News Tonight the next evening, anchor Dan Harris introduced a story on how “some of those who are actually finding jobs are not getting the ones they had in mind.” Reporter Heather Cabot looked at an accountant who is now driving a cab in New York City. Cabot asserted, “He’s not the only over-qualified cabbie on the road. Today, nearly 16% of America’s taxi drivers have attended college.”

In May, the networks pounded the bad news of “record-high” gas prices, even though the inflation adjusted price of gasoline never approached the record highs of the early 1980s. Reporters fell over themselves trying to push the same negative line, from Peter Jennings (“certainly a record”) to Dan Rather (“record highs”), Tom Brokaw (“record-high gas prices”) to CNN anchor Aaron Brown (“rising to records”), CNN’s John King (“certainly a record”), NBC’s Carl Quintanilla (“record-high gas prices”), CBS’s Julie Chen (“record gas prices”), and finally ABC’s Jake Tapper (“record-high prices”), who found a man on the street to lament, “It’s going to kill us. These prices are going to kill us, man.”

At the time, real gas prices stood 26% lower than their peak in March 1981, when the average price per gallon translated to $2.99 in today’s dollars.

CBS specialized in cherry-picking bad news. On Friday, June 4, we learned the booming U.S. economy created 947,000 new jobs in March, April and May, but CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather spent just 20 seconds on that good news. Reporter Jim Axelrod then devoted two minutes to an Ohio company that was laying off employees. “After 103 years,” Axelrod intoned, “work at this plant in Canton, Ohio is set to stop. The Timken Company is shutting three factories and shedding 1300 jobs....The 1300 jobs lost here, at a company whose chairman is one of his strongest supporters, that’s bad for the President, very bad.”

Clinton Good, Bush Bad: Spin of Economic Stories On June 30, CBS business reporter Anthony Mason hyped how a slight increase by the Federal Reserve to a 1.25% interest rate meant “the era of cheap money is over.” Instead of saying that the Federal Reserve’s rate change ratified the recovery’s growing strength, Mason on the CBS Evening News stressed bank layoffs and the harm to everyday consumers: “Your credit card interest rate will be rising. So will adjustable rate mortgages. And say goodbye to those zero percent auto loans.”

On October 8, after the 13th straight month of reported job gains, CBS anchor Dan Rather chose to link President Bush with the worst economic period in American history. Apparently assuming poor job growth over the next four months, Rather proclaimed, “It’s the first net job loss on a President’s watch since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression of the 1930s.” But in none of CBS’s employment reports this year did the network quantify for viewers the number of jobs lost as a direct consequence of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

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Hate TV (American Spectator, 041203)

In June of 1991 the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah aired the first broadcast on its own satellite channel, al-Manar or “The Beacon.” The Iranian/Syrian funded channel quickly took off and became a regional hit with its combination of relentlessly anti-Semitic/American programming and conspiratorial “news” that wouldn’t even clear the lax fact-checkers over at al-Jazeera.

Sadly, the station’s success in the poisoned, regressive culture that reigns throughout much of the Middle East is no surprise. But it was somewhat of a shock when two weeks ago France gave al-Manar a license to broadcast throughout the European Union over the protests of already-embattled Jews throughout Europe. France’s Higher Audiovisual Council dismissed the criticism with a haughty announcement that al-Manar had agreed not to “incite hatred or violence.” Al-Manar’s head, Mohammed Haidar, was even so kind as to call the decision to air accusations that Jews use the blood of goyim in their holiday treats as an, um, “mistake.”

Well, we all make mistakes, right? Still, not a week after the channel began beaming into European homes it aired a program on Israel’s dastardly plan to infect the entire Arab world with AIDS through exports. Now, embarrassed, France’s Higher Audiovisual Council is scrambling to ban the channel they just proudly (and publicly) announced a deal with — but because the organization has authorized the program, it’s up to the French courts to decide what will happen. In the meantime, Hate TV is on the air, spewing a degree of anti-Semitic propaganda not seen in Europe since the 1930s.

All of this could have been avoided if the French government, eager as it is to embrace anything even vaguely anti-Israeli, had bothered to take a quick glance at the al-Manar programming guide.

Consider the following: One of al-Manar’s most popular programs is the game show, “The Mission.” For every question a contestant answers correctly about the American-Zionist conspiracy, he moves a step closer to Jerusalem on a large map. The standard game show chitchat is here as well, except instead of talking about contestant hobbies, the host praises suicide bombings and pleads for viewers to keep the faith that one day Arabs will “recapture” the land stolen by the Jews. The first contestant to reach 60 points stands atop the holy city and receives a check for $3,000 while the Hezbollah anthem plays in the background — “Jerusalem is ours and we are coming to it.”

And this isn’t the worst of it. The popular weekly program, “Sincere Men,” for example, airs edifying profiles of suicide bombers. Hate-laden “sermons” by well-known Hamas and Hezbollah figures are broadcast over and over again alongside video of terrorist marches. A new documentary series promises to expose “crimes perpetrated by the Zionist enemy” and “recalls the Zionist massacres, and brutal practices.” Before Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, the station aired attacks against Israeli soldiers live and broadcast threats against the Jewish state in Hebrew.

Showing its own true colors, the al-Jazeera network ran a story describing French protests against al-Manar as being based on “perceived anti-Semitic content.” Al-Jazeera was recently lionized as the sole unbiased organization fighting American deceit and lies in the provocative film, The Control Room, and yet it cannot come out and say that claims that Jews sacrifice children to make better bread are anti-Semitic. Some truth-tellers.

How’s this for “perceived anti-Semitic content”? Al-Manar was the first station to air the rumor — persistent to this day in fundamentalist circles — that 4,000 Jews failed to report to work at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, thereby suspiciously avoiding the terror attacks, which were perpetrated not by Osama bin Laden, but the “Jews, Israel, and Mossad,” of course.

This bit of investigative reporting doesn’t quite make al-Manar Friends of America, however.

“Today, as the region fills up with hundreds of thousands of American troops, our slogan was and will remain ‘Death to America,’” a Hezbollah official warned Americans during a broadcast earlier this year.

Defying all facts on the ground and programming on the air, France opted to take a leap of blind faith and go on Mohammed Haidar’s word that al-Manar was not owned by Hezbollah — an organization that France, at any rate, refuses to label as a terrorist organization. But in Beacon of Hatred, an exhaustive study of al-Manar, Avi Jorisch of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, quotes al-Manar’s chairman of the board, Nayef Krayem, describing the relationship between Hezbollah and the station thusly: “They breathe life into one another. Each provides the other with inspiration. Hezbollah uses al-Manar to express its stands and its views, etc. Al-Manar in turn receives political support for its continuation.”

Jorisch also quotes an al-Manar employee explaining the station helps members of the public who are “on the way to committing what you in the West call a suicide mission. It is meant to be the first step on the process of a freedom fighter operation.” This must be the perception gap the folks over at al-Jazeera are referring to.

But the truth is, there is some hope in the whiff of desperation one comes across while scanning the al-Manar website. It sometimes reads as if they are rage, rage, raging against the dying of the fundamentalist light.

“Despite its huge burden on every Lebanese, the occupation was not the one and only concern,” the station’s website reads. “Lebanese TV channels have been overwhelmed by a trend of movies and programs that can only be described as immoral…Numerous TV channels have been broadcasting programs that would decay one’s ethics and provoke his or her instincts, instigating violence and identifying with western living patterns which are quite remote from our Islamic and Eastern values and culture.”

Al-Manar is a token act of desperation as technology facilitates communication and an escape from the persistent, singular message of fundamentalist/totalitarian governments. They are more afraid of our music and our movies than our bombs, because our popular culture carries with it an inherent sense of individualism and freedom. Those ideas are not exclusive to America, and are more powerful than even the most powerful army in the world. So, does anyone honestly believe the stilted, clunky entertainment of al-Manar will prevail over Western entertainment in the long-term? Apparently even the French government has been disabused of that foolish notion now.

Shawn Macomber is a reporter for The American Spectator. He runs the website Return of the Primitive.

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Bias Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Weekly Standard, 041213)

Yes, the media are overwhelmingly liberal.

THE ONGOING UPROAR over Dan Rather and CBS News has intensified concern about whether the mainstream media have a liberal bias. Some analyses, such as those by the Pew Research Center, document the strong tendency of journalists to describe themselves as liberal. This propensity—also prevalent, alas, among professors—is interesting but does not prove bias in coverage. Reporters might maintain objectivity despite their personal viewpoints, or the conservative leanings of most company owners might offset the liberal inclinations of the journalists.

In this spirit, in February 2003, the former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines said at a meeting of journalists: “Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news-reporting craft that is truly nonpartisan.” Paul Krugman went further in his New York Times column of November 8, 2002, when he asserted that the media actually had a conservative slant: “Some of the major broadcast media are simply biased in favor of the Republicans, while the rest tend to blur differences between the parties.”

The question is, Who is right? Is there a left- or right-wing bias, or have the media actually managed to be objective? A serious assessment requires quantification of the output put forth by the media. The best analysis I know along these lines is the ongoing study “A Measure of Media Bias,” by professors Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo of the University of Missouri.

These researchers use a clever statistical technique to construct an objective measure of conservative or liberal bias in the news coverage of major U.S. television and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. Their main finding is that the liberal inclination of the mainstream media is clear. Among 20 major outlets, Fox News and the Washington Times emerge as conservative, but the other 18 range from slightly to substantially left of center.

Groseclose and Milyo’s analytical method begins not with the media but with the voting records of members of Congress. They use the well-known ratings of members’ voting records issued by Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a self-described liberal organization. First, they adjust the members’ ADA ratings for the 1990s to ensure comparability over time and between the House and Senate. The ADA score has a 0-100 scale, with 0 meaning that a legislator voted with the ADA 0% of the time and 100 signifying 100% agreement. The researchers use scores scaled to correspond to the House ratings in 1999. On this scale, the average ADA score for 1995-99 in the House and Senate was 50.1, when senators were weighted by state population, and the District of Columbia was assigned phantom liberal legislators. If members of Congress reflect the views of their constituents, we can view “50” as close to the position of the average voter.

Among well-known liberal senators, John Kerry had an adjusted ADA rating of 88, close to Ted Kennedy’s 89. On the conservative side, Bill Frist had 10, whereas John McCain had 13. Results closer to the center were Joe Lieberman’s 74, John Breaux’s 60, Arlen Specter’s 51, and Olympia Snowe’s 43.

The next step in the research is to measure the tendency of Senate and House members in their speeches to cite 200 prominent think tanks. Citations considered were limited to those that referred favorably to a view or fact reported by a think tank. For example, the Heritage Foundation was cited favorably by legislators whose average ADA rating was 20, substantially conservative. Also highly conservative were Americans for Tax Reform (19), the Family Research Council (20), the National Right to Life Committee (22), and the Christian Coalition (23). Liberal think tanks included the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (88), Citizens for Tax Justice (88), the Consumer Federation of America (82), the Economic Policy Institute (80), the National Organization for Women (79), and the NAACP (75).

The last step is to measure the tendency of 20 prominent media outlets to cite favorably the same 200 think tanks. An important point is that the researchers considered only programs or stories labeled “news.” They excluded editorials, talk shows, and the like. The idea was to assess political bias in programs billed as news, not the more transparent slant contained in self-identified opinion pieces. The periods assessed ranged from 1990 to 2003. The researchers used these data to calculate, effectively, an ADA rating for each media outlet. The idea is that outlets that refer favorably to conservative think tanks are reasonably viewed as conservative, whereas those that refer favorably to liberal think tanks are plausibly labeled liberal.

The final product—shown in the table—is a list of ADA ratings for the 20 media outlets. Each rating can be compared with the congressional average of 50, which breaks down into 16 for Republicans and 84 for Democrats.

On the conservative end, the only two outlets below 50 were the Washington Times (35) and Fox News Special Report with Brit Hume (40). Although right of center, these ratings are much closer to the centrist position of 50 than to congressional Republicans’ average position of 16.

The other 18 outlets are on the liberal side of 50. Particularly striking are the high liberal ratings for the New York Times and CBS Evening News (both 74), not too far below the average score of 84 for Democratic members of Congress. The news programs of the other two traditional television networks are closer to the center—62 for NBC Nightly News and 61 for ABC World News Tonight.

The one Internet representative, the Drudge Report, comes in at 60, moderately left of center. The most balanced reporting shows up in the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN News Night with Aaron Brown, and ABC’s Good Morning America, each of which had a score of 56. Interestingly, these balanced programs provided three of the four anchors for the main election debates—Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill from PBS and Charles Gibson from ABC. (It’s hard to understand how Bob Schieffer from CBS made it in.)

One surprise is that the Wall Street Journal’s news pages have the most liberal rating of all, 85, about the same as the typical Democrat in Congress. The rating for the Journal’s editorial pages would of course look very different. (As one quipster observed, James Carville and Mary Matalin probably agree more often than the news and editorial divisions of the Wall Street Journal.)

The bottom line from the Groseclose-Milyo study is that the political slant of most of the mainstream media is far to the left of the typical member of Congress. Thus, if the political opinions of viewers, listeners, and readers are similar to those of their elected representatives, the political leanings of most of the media are far to the left of those of most of their customers. This mismatch suggests profit opportunities for conservative-oriented, or at least balanced, media outlets. Fox News is probably only the beginning. Maybe the next conservative entrant will be a recreated CBS News.

Robert J. Barro is Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

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The Year of the Blog (Weekly Standard, 041216)

An anti-Christian hit piece lets Newsweek become the latest big media organization to be debunked by the blogosphere.

NEWSWEEK put Christmas on the cover of its December 13th issue, and the reaction among orthodox Christians was widespread and emphatic. Once again a leading member of the legacy media had produced a hit piece on Christian belief, employing many deceits, including the use of false dilemmas, the employment of only scholars with radical views, and the omission of evidence in support of the Biblical account of the birth of Jesus.

The author, Newsweek managing editor Jon Meacham, didn’t even try very hard to conceal his bias, becoming to religion reporting what Dan Rather has become to political reporting. My favorite line is this gem: “To many minds conditioned by the Enlightenment, shaped by science and all too aware of the Crusades and corruptions of the church, Christmas is a fairy tale.” Meacham goes on to immediately declare that “faith and reason need not be constantly at war,” but makes it clear that this is possible only when faith surrenders pretty much everything that defines it as orthodoxy. No explanation is ever given as to why the Crusades have any bearing on the legitimacy of Luke’s and Matthew’s accounts of the Nativity.

Hit pieces like Meacham’s targeting Christianity have become commonplace in recent years as magazine editors and book publishers have come to understand the size of the market for stories on faith, but find themselves staffed almost exclusively with skeptics of one degree or another—usually extreme skeptics. So the offensive article/book/documentary appears, sales skyrocket, and a few weeks later some

angry letters to the editor follow which are shrugged off as way too little, way too late.

That was then. The blogosphere is now.

Within 10 days of Meacham’s article’s appearance, his credentials had been reviewed for all to see by Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The article itself had been painstakingly—and fairly—sliced and diced by accomplished theologian, pastor, scholar, and author, Dr. Mark D. Roberts, whose double Harvard degrees, including a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, make his careful and complete criticisms of Meacham’s reporting hard to dismiss.

After interviewing both Mohler and Roberts for two hours on the air, I then posted links to the Newsweek piece and their criticisms, and invited bloggers from around the internet to weigh in via a virtual symposium I term a “Vox Blogoli.” Dozens of bloggers accepted the invite, and an astonishing array of piercing reviews of Meacham followed. Among many favorites are the Evangelical Outpost and Tapscott’s Copy Desk, but all of them are well worth the read.

What the blogosphere allowed to happen is the organization of dissent which is focused, credentialed, complete, and—crucially—publicized. No fair reader of Meacham’s piece and the commentaries on it can conclude that Meacham produced good journalism. It is simply too one-sided, too agenda-driven, and too ignorant of serious scholarship to qualify as anything other than a polemic. The exposure of Meacham’s folly doesn’t guarantee that Newsweek won’t stumble again, but it surely must give others in his position pause. The blogosphere has experts and megaphones. As Joe carter of Evangelical Outpost concluded “the mainstream media is only able to retain their influence by convincing the populace they possess special skill and knowledge. But as the Internet continues to fill with . . . debunkers, the media continues to lose credibility, influence, and power.”

As 2004 closes, the calendar is littered with the reputations of previously untouchable media bigs. Jon Meacham is only the most recent recipient of the sort of attention legacy media has never experienced and finds unwelcome. This accountability is long overdue.

Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends Upon It. His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com.

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Newsweek vs. The New Testament (Christian Post, 041215)

With December 25 fast approaching, both TIME and Newsweek are out with special Christmas editions, complete with cover stories featuring beautiful works of Christmas art and articles addressing the nativity narratives from the New Testament. Unfortunately, the content of the articles hardly corresponds to the classical presentations found in the cover artwork. To the contrary—both articles cast doubt upon the historicity of the Christmas story.

Of the two, the Newsweek article is more problematic by far. TIME’s article, “Secrets of the Nativity,” is written by reporter David Van Biema, a skilled writer who often covers religious stories for the magazine. Even as the article opens with questions about the identity of the wise men, the nature of the star, and whether or not Jesus was born in Nazareth, rather than Bethleham. Van Biema goes on to report: “In the debates over the literal truth of the Gospels, just about everyone acknowledges that major conclusions about Jesus’ life are not based on forensic clues. There is no specific physical evidence for the key points of the story.”

Van Biema points to supposed divergences between the narratives found in Matthew and Luke. His article cites liberal scholars such as Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University and James Schaberg of the University of Detroit Mercy, with inadequate corresponding voices from conservative scholarship. Van Biema does cite Professor Paul L. Maier of Western Michigan University, who rejects the idea that the gospels cannot be harmonized. “Radical New Testament critics say it’s a hopeless jumble,” Maier notes. “I myself do not think it’s impossible to harmonize them.”

The TIME article raises serious questions about the Virgin Birth, in terms of both its historicity and its meaning. Schaberg, identified as “an iconoclastic feminist critic,” argues that the virgin birth is about transmuting “a ritually taboo pregnancy into an occasion of glory in the birth of the Holy Child.” In other words, there was no Virgin Birth, and it was simply an invention of the early church.

Throughout the article, Van Biema raises issues concerning the historical truthfulness of the New Testament birth narratives. Lurking in the background of this article is the late Raymond Brown, a Catholic scholar whose scholarly investigation of the birth narratives led him to deny the historicity of many scriptural claims. In Brown’s view, the historicity of the biblical accounts was simply “unresolved.”

In the end, Van Biema assumes that Christians will continue to look to the New Testament accounts for the meaning of Christmas. “Most Christmas worshippers, of course, are not currently focusing tightly on the Gospels’ backstory. In this holiday season, they will be less interested in analyzing Matthew’s message than in celebrating it, less concerned about parsing Luke’s sentiments than in singing them.”

This is mere sentimentality, of course, for if the New Testament accounts are not historically truthful, there is no basis for celebrating Christmas in the first place. If we cannot trust the New Testament to communicate truthfully, accurately, and faithfully what actually happened in the birth and infancy of Jesus, we have no basis for preaching the gospel—or telling anyone anything about Jesus Christ, for that matter.

But, if TIME’s article raises questions about the historical truthfulness of the New Testament, Newsweek goes on to deny many essential biblical truth claims out of hand. In “The Birth of Jesus,” writer Jon Meacham goes right to the heart of the matter, arguing that the infancy and birth narratives were simply invented by the early church in order to answer awkward questions and develop a fully-orbed theology and understanding of Jesus. He argues that “the Nativity narratives are the subject of ongoing scholarly debate over their historical accuracy” and that “almost nothing in Luke’s stories stands up to close historical scrutiny.”

This is not the first time Meacham has attacked the historical accuracy of the Bible. Once identified by The New York Times as Newsweek’s “Young Turk,” the 35-year-old reporter has served as the magazine’s managing editor since he was only 27. Earlier this year, Meacham wrote another cover story for Newsweek, arguing in that story that the passion narratives [accounts of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion] are also untrustworthy as historical accounts. In “Who Killed Jesus?,” the cover story of Newsweek’s February 16 issue, Meacham asserted that the Bible “can be a problematic source.” He went on to argue, “Though countless believers take it as the immutable word of God, Scripture is not always a faithful record of historical events; the Bible is the product of human authors who were writing in particular times and places with particular points to make and visions to advance.” Meacham went on to argue that “overly literal readings” of the New Testament can become the basis for anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice and distortion.

In a “live talk” feature published on the MSNBC website, Meacham responded to critics of his article by arguing, “Many of the Biblical writers had theological points to make with their stories and were understandably influenced by the circumstances of their times. This is not to say that scripture was not divinely inspired or revealed to the authors, but it is to say that to read the Bible as if every word were literally true is to misread the Bible—a view held by many, many Christian denominations and theologians and believers.”

Repeatedly, Meacham asserts his identity as “a believing Episcopalian.” Nevertheless, Meacham redefines what “believing” means when it comes to the Bible. He dismissively argues that we should not read the Bible “as if every word were literally true,” and that to do so is not only wrong-headed, but simplistic and unsophisticated.

In a statement from Newsweek’s editor published in the December 13 edition—the issue with the Christmas cover story—editor Mark Whitaker identifies Meacham as a graduate of the University of the South at Sewanee, “the only Episcopal university in America.” Whitaker goes on to identify a professor who exercised a particular influence on Meacham, teaching him “that there is no inconsistency between belief in Christ and the willingness to question the worldly roots of Scripture.”

Yet, Meacham does not merely question the “roots” of the story. Citing an entire corps of liberal scholars, Meacham subverts the truthfulness of the New Testament text and argues—often through the words of the sources he quotes—that the New Testament is basically untrustworthy as an historical document.

The Virgin Birth is a particular point of issue in Meacham’s article. He passingly acknowledges that the Virgin Birth just might have actually happened, but he quickly dismisses the idea, noting, “It is somewhat odd that there is no memory of it recorded in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry or in the Acts of the Apostles or in the rest of the New Testament.” He proceeds to assume “for the sake of argument,” that the story of the virgin conception of Jesus “is not a fact but an article of faith.” Accordingly, the narratives of Jesus’ virgin conception must be explained in terms of fiction and theological invention.

Like Van Biema, Meacham cites Raymond E. Brown as proposing that Jesus was actually the product of extramarital sex between Mary and some man—perhaps Joseph. If not Joseph, the situation would have been far more problematic. As Meacham suggests, “If Jesus had been conceived by a human father before Joseph and Mary had begun their lives together as husband and wife (either by Joseph himself, a soldier or someone else), then the Holy Ghost would have provided a convenient cover story for the early church.”

Continuing his attack upon the historicity of the Virgin Birth, Meacham explains that “Jesus was such a revolutionary force that both Matthew and Luke sought to make him comprehensible in the context of established Jewish imagery and prophecy.” In an act of astounding arrogance and breathtaking audacity, Meacham corrects Matthew in the interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 arguing that Matthew misunderstood Isaiah’s prophecy and misused the text as he was inventing the cover story of the Virgin Birth.

Meacham makes extensive use of material drawn from liberal forces and biblical scholars who represent the extreme left in American theological scholarship. There is no attempt at balance in this article, and Newsweek’s resident religion expert seems completely unaware that there is an entire world of evangelical biblical scholarship that would be quite ready to provide an answer to his questions and present a scholarly case for the historical accuracy of the New Testament accounts.

As Meacham sees it, Matthew and Luke were “confronted with a literary problem that had to be solved.” As he frames their challenge: “They wanted to tell the story of Jesus’ birth, but apparently had little to work with.”

In other words, Matthew and Luke simply invented their stories, drawing from pagan parallels and casting about for other materials they could use, ranging from Isaiah 7:14 to snippets of ancient mythology.

To top it all off, Meacham argues that we really shouldn’t be concerned about whether the accounts are historic in the first place. In a December 7, 2004 appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” Meacham cited the authority of the second Vatican Council, which, in his words, “says that the scriptures can be true without being accurate.” Christianity, he explains, “is a religion of perplexing contradictions. To live and examine faith, believers have to acknowledge these complexities and engage them, however frustrating it may be.”

It is one thing to confront the challenges, but it is another thing to condescendingly reject the truthfulness of the New Testament, while citing the supposed insights from liberal scholarship as adequate intellectual warrant to correct the Word of God and claim, all the while, to be doing so as a believing Christian. This “true without being accurate” nonsense is an insult to the very concept of truth. If the events claimed in the Bible didn’t happen, or didn’t happen as they were claimed to have happened, the biblical authors are lying.

In Meacham’s view of the matter, Christians should simply grow up and get over a concern with whether or not there is a clear historical basis for Christmas, or for any other aspect of Christianity, for that matter. He clearly believes that something happened, and he does not question that Jesus Christ actually lived on earth, but he does subvert and deny the truthfulness of the Scriptures and suggests that the gospel narratives are largely fictional.

Compare Meacham’s approach to this statement from the Apostle Peter: “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” [2 Peter 1:16] If the biblical accounts are merely “cleverly devised myths,” Christianity falls and the gospel is null and void.

As might be expected, Meacham’s approach to the Bible goes far beyond Christmas, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. In a May 6, 2002 cover story in Newsweek, Meacham argued that Christianity should change its convictions about human sexuality, allowing for the normalization of homosexual acts and the possible goodness of homosexual relationships. “For many of us, faith, like history, is an unfinished story, a running argument,” he argued. Unsurprisingly, Meacham argued that the biblical passages declaring homosexuality to be sinful “are actually not quite so clear and unequivocal” as the church has believed for twenty centuries. He used the same interpretive methodology he applies to the birth narratives in suggesting that the Bible can be read in such a way as to justify homosexuality. Acknowledging that the Bible does appear to condemn homosexual acts as sinful, Meacham explains that “enlightened people have moved on from the world view such passages express.”

Jon Meacham is the classic self-congratulatory theological liberal. He identifies himself as a devoted and believing Episcopalian, even as he assails the historical trustworthiness of the Bible and suggests that much of the faith he claims to believe is simply the product of literary invention and theological construction.

Newsweek should be embarrassed by this one-sided article presented as a serious investigation of the Christmas story. The magazine’s editor may brag about Meacham’s extensive study as a college student, but there can be no justification for the lack of balance and the absence of credible conservative scholarship in this article. This is not a serious and balanced consideration of the Christian truth claim, but a broadside attack packaged as a condescending essay of advice from Newsweek’s very savvy, very sophisticated, very Episcopalian, and very ambitious managing editor.

In his editor’s note, Mark Whitaker indicated that Meacham’s article “also made us realize how little even some of the most committed and educated Christians know about the evolution of their deeply held beliefs and assumptions.”

Here’s the big question for Newsweek: How much do you know about the “evolution” of your own “deeply held beliefs and assumptions?” Those beliefs and assumptions are published in this very article, for all the world to see.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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The Governor vs. the Sun (Weekly Standard, 041220)

[Kwing Hung: Great! This is the way to treat the biased media, to restrain them, and to gain popularity all at the same time.]

Maryland’s governor takes a stand against journalists he doesn’t like.

THE PRESS has always assailed politicians, and politicians have retaliated in various ways. Some feed scoops to the competition. Some make jokes or give nonsensical answers in response to a reporter’s question. President Bush holds his press conferences few and far between and has been known to abruptly end them if he becomes annoyed. In 1962, JFK’s administration asked the New York Times to reassign reporter David Halberstam after his critical coverage of the Vietnam war. Few, though, have retaliated the way Maryland’s Republican governor Robert Ehrlich has.

On November 18, the Ehrlich administration sent a memo to all Maryland state officials in the executive branch banning them from talking to two Baltimore Sun journalists, columnist Michael Olesker and statehouse bureau chief David Nitkin, who Ehrlich claims have been “failing to objectively report” on state issues.

“Do not return calls or comply with requests,” the governor’s press secretary Shareese DeLeaver wrote in the memo.

“We have a grave problem with [the Sun’s] editorial page taking over their news division, and apparently that’s what’s happened,” Greg Massoni, another press secretary, wrote.

The order came after Nitkin wrote a series of articles about a secret deal by the state to sell 836 acres of preserved forestland to a developer. A front-page map, that Nitkin did not produce, accompanied his article and incorrectly showed all 450,000 acres of state preservation land as being sold to the developer. A correction ran inside the paper the following day.

Olesker’s offense is different. In a November 16 column he described the governor’s communications director Paul Schurick as “struggling mightily to keep a straight face” when saying at a hearing that political gain was not a consideration in state tourism commercials that feature the governor. Olesker did not attend the hearing, but said in his defense that the phrase was to be taken metaphorically, not literally. This information was not included in the column.

Ehrlich also pointed to a May 14 column by Olesker which quoted Michael Steele, Maryland’s lieutenant governor. Steele says he never spoke with the columnist. Olesker still insists they did. “It’s taken Steele six months to realize he has retroactive amnesia,” Olesker wrote in his November 24 column.

From the beginning, the editor of the Sun, Timothy A. Franklin, offered to meet with the governor and his press staff to go over their concerns with the paper’s reporting. And from the beginning the governor refused.

On November 22, lawyers for the Tribune Co., which owns the Sun, formally asked the governor to lift the ban calling it “unconstitutional on its face.” The paper also filed a lawsuit against the governor, asking a federal judge to lift the ban.

DeLeaver said the governor’s office received the letter that day, but told reporters that they had no response to the legal points it raised.

Ehrlich also made his first public comments that day on the Chip Franklin Show on WBAL radio. He restated his position that Olesker had made up quotes and accused Nitkin of “halfway reporting.”

“When a series of stories is written with incredibly inaccurate innuendo, with false quotes, made-up quotes, dots that do not connect, gotcha stories, sometimes you just have to draw a line. And that’s exactly what we’ve done here, saying enough is enough.”

Later that week, Ehrlich asked on WBAL radio “At what point does a monopoly newspaper abuse its privilege, its First Amendment privilege, in making things up, in making quotes up, making context up?”

Ehrlich also demanded an apology for a comment in the Sun’s 2002 endorsement of Ehrlich’s gubernatorial opponent, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, in which the Sun described Steele, who is black, as, “bring[ing] little to the team but the color of his skin.” Dianne Donovan, the paper’s editorial page editor, has said the paper will not apologize.

At a lecture at Towson University regarding the dispute Ehrlich said to a class, “I would argue that the elitists [at the Sun] cannot deal with the fact that Michael Steele is an African American and a Republican.”

Former Maryland governor William Donald Schaefer, an Ehrlich ally, who has plenty of experience quarreling with the press, gave Ehrlich some advice on December 1. “You can’t beat a group with barrels of ink. My advice to you, from someone who fought the Sunpapers, is you’ll never win. Invite them down. Say, ‘Fellows it’s Christmastime, let’s all ring bells together.’”

Ehrlich refused to budge though until last Friday when he arranged a closed door meeting with Franklin, the paper’s publisher, the editorial page editor, and two attorneys for the Sun. At the 90-minute meeting, Ehrlich and his staff declined to lift the ban, but provided the paper’s editors with a list of articles that they said contained errors, according to the Sun. The editors have agreed to go through the list, which was not made public, and meet with the governor again.

“We have some more work to do. We have a lot more work to do. But progress was made,” Schurick told the Sun after the meeting.

Franklin said he hopes the ban can be lifted through negotiations and expects attorneys for both sides to work toward ending the dispute. The paper’s lawsuit against Ehrlich, as of Saturday, was still pending.

Rachel DiCarlo is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.

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Honestly Biased: What’s the media’s problem? (National Review Online, 041222)

Liberal media bias has recently begun to get more than the usual brush-off in the establishment press. This promising development is to the credit not only of New York Times gadfly John Tierney — rumored to be in line to replace William Safire as an op-ed columnist — but to Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent.

In a July 25 column Okrent showed that, when it comes to social issues, the Times displays a relentlessly liberal bias not only in its news reporting, but in its entertainment section and even its fashion pages.

Since then, however, in three columns spanning October, November, and December dealing with the Times’s habit of quoting “experts” tendentiously, Okrent has dropped the media-bias ball.

It’s worth figuring out how this happened, because Okrent has fallen into a trap that has to be sprung if the discussion of media bias is to move beyond easily dismissed conspiracy mongering.

Okrent’s first column on journalists’ use of “expert” testimony starts out by acknowledging that sometimes a reporter will quote experts merely “to confirm what the reporter already thinks.” But then Okrent conflates this problem — which is really one of many that go under the heading of media bias — with the question of whether the experts whom journalists quote are honest. Bad reporters, he concludes, are those who lazily quote the hired-gun experts who work for avowed “special interests.” (He assumes, without warrant, that the special interests’ experts for hire don’t really believe what they say.) “Good reporters,” by contrast, manage to find experts “who can be trusted to speak honestly.” Before you know it, Okrent has transformed the question of how to get reporters to stop selecting experts who affirm the reporters’ bias into the question of how to get reporters to quote “truly disinterested” experts who speak what the experts themselves truly believe.

This transfiguration of the issue leads Okrent to suggest that when the facts are obvious, journalists should just tell us what is “undeniably true,” without feeling the need to put it into the mouth of an expert. In subsequent columns, he defends his suggestion by arguing that journalistic objectivity has more to do with truth telling than with balance.

Okrent’s approach is sure to go nowhere, for while it admirably clashes with the chief pretense of modern journalism, it leaves the assumption underlying this pretense untouched.

At the end of the 19th century, growing government power placed more and more complicated questions, such as those raised by economic regulation, onto the political agenda. This required the electorate to master more and more information in order to vote intelligently. Not coincidentally, at the same time the overtly partisan newspapers of the 19th century were replaced by media that, following the lead of the New York Times, prided themselves on being fair to all “legitimate” points of view. The new, nonpartisan media assured conscientious voters that they could understand the complexities of modern politics by trusting journalists to present, as part of “all the news that’s fit to print,” both (1) a balanced account of various partisan arguments, and (2) an objective account of “the facts,” which would allow voters to decide which partisan claims are correct.

The main problem with this model of journalism is not, as Okrent seems to think, whether it leans too heavily toward (1) balancing opinions instead of (2) presenting an objective account of “undeniable” facts. The real difficulty is that neither a true balance of opinions nor an objective reporting of facts is likely if politics is complicated. But the reason people feel the need to turn to “nonpartisan” journalists to help sort out political issues is precisely that-especially since the advent of big government-politics is very complicated indeed.

The new model of journalism solved the problem of complexity only in the sense of wishing it away. The facts about the problems modern governments try to solve would have to be pretty simple if the journalist could make sense of them without himself needing to be an expert. But if the political world that simple, readers would need journalists to sort it out just as little as Okrent thinks journalists need experts. Okrent’s “just the facts, ma’am” approach is based on the same wishful thinking that stood behind the new model of journalism.

In the new model of journalism, reporters need to put their views into the mouths of experts so they can appear to be taking adequate account of the world’s complexity. But the unspoken assumption behind the media’s complacent invocation of expertise is, in reality, that the facts of the political world, when not immediately plain to the reporter, are at least clear to people who make a career of studying them: people who are “experts.” These specialists need only relay their “findings” to the journalist-who, in turn, needs only report them to the public-for the public to gain a clear understanding of the world.

In a world that straightforward, honest experts wouldn’t disagree with each other-which Okrent appears to think is the case. The truth, of course, is that honest experts disagree with each other all the time-which calls into doubt the expertise of some or all of them. When two people disagree, at least one of them must be wrong.

Honest experts’ disagreements are rooted in the very thing to which the new model of journalism pays only lip service: the difficulty of making sense of the modern world. In the face of the world’s complexity, the interpretation offered by a given expert will tend to reflect his theoretical — including ideological — assumptions as much as, or more than, it springs from his direct contact with “undeniable truths.”

The best feature of Okrent’s July column on media bias was his recognition that bias inadvertently informs the way reporters see the world. Liberal bias, Okrent wrote, “has not occurred because of management fiat, but because getting outside one’s own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning.” Why not apply this insight not only to reporters, but to the experts they quote? Then the issue wouldn’t be whether experts are honest; it would be, as it is with reporters, whether experts are likely to be so self-critical that they can get past their own interpretive biases.

There is every reason to think that experts aren’t capable of such inhuman objectivity. Consider the unmentioned elephant in Okrent’s room: the legions of pedigreed academic experts quoted ad nauseam in the media, but who work for no interest group. Daniel Klein of UC Santa Clara has shown that Democrats outnumber Republicans in the humanities and social sciences by roughly seven to one, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the faculties of Harvard and the University of California were the biggest group donors to the Kerry campaign. But measures of Democratic partisanship just scratch the surface, since a professor doesn’t have to advocate voting Democratic in order to inculcate ideas that lead to such a vote as a matter of logic.

It gets worse. Modern reporters almost all have college degrees. This means that they tend to have gotten their interpretive lenses from the very type of professor they end up quoting once they become journalists. This is a point that conservative media-bias critics are reluctant to acknowledge, for it implies that the left-wing views professors teach aren’t so contrary to common sense that their students are immune to being influenced by them. But that’s the way it is, especially when what the professors teach is assumptions rather than conclusions. Biased professors don’t have to deliberately teach a lopsided view of the world for their students to absorb a lopsided bias. All the professors have to do is teach the world as they honestly see it — colored by their own, often-unrecognized ideological lenses.

It’s not lying experts who should worry us, any more than we should fear a vast left-wing conspiracy of journalists deliberately scheming to spread liberal propaganda. The more insidious problem is experts who tell us how they think the world “undeniably” is — and the journalists who credulously quote experts’ opinions as anything more than that.

— Jeffrey Friedman is the editor of Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Culture.

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Gallup: Internet News Growing, Other Media Decline (FreeRepublic, 041223)

The number of Americans who rely on news outlets like NewsMax.com, the Drudge Report and FreeRepublic.com has jumped by 33% in just the last the two years, while virtually every other form of news media has lost readers and viewers, according to a new Gallup survey.

“The only news source to show an increase in daily use from Gallup’s 2002 poll on media usage is the Internet — now at an all-time high,” the polling firm said this week. “Use of public television news, nightly network news, local television news, and National Public Radio has decreased, and the number of Americans who report using nightly network news programs, local TV news, local newspapers, and network newsmagazine shows reached new lows in this year’s poll,” said Gallup.

“Every source has fallen somewhat since 2002, with only news on the Internet gaining, from 15% [of readers] going there every day two years ago to 20% doing so today,” reports Editor & Publisher, in their analysis of the Gallup survey.

“Some sources dropped heavily,” notes E & P. “National newspapers are off 4%, from 11 to 7%; NPR is off 5%; local TV news is down 6%; network news down 7%; and PBS news plunged 8%. In that company, local newspapers are doing fairly well, only dropping 3%. Cable news dropped 2%.”

The Gallup poll found that more than half - 51% - say they get news from local TV every day. 44% saying they get it from local newspapers. Cable news channels edged out network newscasts, 39 to 36%.

One catagory that was conspicuously absent from the Gallup survey - talk radio; a medium that more and more Americans have said they rely on for news in other surveys.

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NBC defends Couric’s ‘anti-Christian’ comments (WorldNetDaily, 041211)

Focus on the Family’s asks for apology after Shepard murder revisted

Prompted by a TV news investigation questioning whether Matthew Shepard’s murder was an “anti-gay hate crime,” the traditional-values group Focus on the Family asked NBC News to apologize for suggesting Bible believers were responsible for creating the “climate” in which the attack took place.

But NBC defended “Today Show” host Katie Couric for her questions in an an Oct. 12, 1998, interview with the then-governor of Wyoming, where the attack took place.

Couric asked the governor whether “conservative political organizations like the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family are contributing to this anti-homosexual atmosphere” by suggesting homosexuals can change their sexual orientation.

“That prompts people to say,” Couric added in her question, “‘If I meet someone who is homosexual, I’m going to take action and try to convince them or try to harm them.’”

Shepard was a 21-year-old homosexual student at the University of Wyoming, whose burned and battered body was found in the snow outside Laramie in October 1998.

NBC News Executive Producer for Broadcast Standards David McCormick defended Couric in a reply to Focus on the Family on Wednesday.

McCormick argued that in the days after the critically injured Shepard was found tied to a fencepost, “there was a great deal of speculation that the crime may have been motivated by hate.”

“If you look closely at the transcript of the interview, you will note that Ms. Couric was quoting ‘gay activists’ who were quite vocal at the time of Mr. Shepard’s death,” McCormick wrote. “She was not making a statement of fact and she was certainly not insinuating that” Christians were responsible for Shepard’s murder.

In a reply Thursday, Focus on the Family President Don Hodel rejected McCormick’s reasoning.

“As we all know, the tone and manner with which a question is posed can convey a great deal of information,” Hodel wrote.

“It was clear six years ago, and remains clear today, that Ms. Couric’s tone and manner were not that of an impartial journalist seeking the truth about a tragedy. It was the tone and manner of an advocate intent on repeating an unfounded accusation disguised as a question.

“She named three Christian organizations (one of them Focus on the Family) and asserted the gay rights activists’ charges of ‘contributing to this anti-homosexual atmosphere’ by having an ad campaign that suggested that gay people might like to change their orientation. It was definitely a ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ type of question.”

Along with Couric, NBC reporter David Gregory raised the same questions in a news piece, saying, “The ads were controversial for portraying gays and lesbians as sinners who had made poor choices, despite the growing belief that homosexuality may be genetic. ... Have the ads fostered a climate of anti-gay hate that leads to incidents like the killing of Matthew Shepard? Gay rights activists say the ads convey a message that gay people are defective.”

Targeted for money?

The exchange this week between Focus on the Family and NBC News came after a Nov. 26 segment on the ABC News program “20/20” which raised the possibility Shepard was targeted for his money, not over his homosexuality.

Shepard, according to the findings of the court, was kidnapped and brutally beaten by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson after he made a sexual advance at one of the two men at a bar. According to McKinney’s then-girlfriend, both men pretended to be homosexual in order to lure Shepard outside and rob him.

Shepard later was found brutally beaten, robbed and tied to a fence. He died five days later of massive head injuries.

His death and the trials of McKinney and Henderson galvanized homosexuals and their supporters across the country, fueling the call for state and federal ‘hate-crime’ legislation.

Henderson and McKinney, both speaking for the first time since being sentenced to double life terms, now deny Shepard’s homosexuality played a role in their decision to murder him. McKinney has been barred from speaking to the press about the crime as a condition of a plea bargain with prosecutors who promised to reward his vow of permanent silence by not seeking the death penalty. Legal experts do not expect prosecutors to pursue re-sentencing now that he has decided to talk.

ABC News said an underground world of methamphetamine use may have contributed to the crime.

That the iconic crime may prove to have been “just” a violent drug-related mugging has caused anger among some homosexuals.

“There is simply no way to ‘de-gay’ the murder of Matthew Shepard,” Michael Adams, education director at Lambda Legal, tells 365Gay.com. “There were the statements of the murders at the time and the defense even argued ‘gay panic’ claiming that Shepard had come onto them.”

By all appearances, concludes Adams, the program “serves no purpose and does a disservice to the memory of Matthew. Sadly Matthew Shepard is no longer here to tell his version of the story.”

“Does it make Aaron McKinney and Russell A. Henderson any less guilty of the crime that they committed? Absolutely not,” says Romain Patterson, one of Shepard’s close friends. “You just don’t kick someone in the crotch over and over again unless you have a real problem with their sexuality,” she says. “To imply otherwise, in my opinion, is irresponsible, and I think it’s irresponsible to be giving a voice to two very guilty men.”

But ABC News defends its investigation. “Exploring and re-examining the facts around that murder in a very thoughtful and in-depth way is the very essence of responsible journalism. This new information in no way diminishes the importance of the national conversation that took place after Matthew Shepard’s murder,” says spokesman Jeffrey Schneider. “The murder of Matthew Shepard was and is a heinous and vicious crime.”

In the wake of Shepard’s death in 1998, then-President Clinton urged passage of a federal hate crimes bill that would include sexual orientation as a protected class. The bill has yet to pass and revelations that Shepard’s death may not have been a hate crime at all will certainly play into the continuing debate.

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TV’s Trouble With Religion (Media Research Center, 041222)

by L. Brent Bozell III

As Christians prepare to celebrate the birth of the Christ child and Jews give thanks and praise to God for sustenance even in alien lands and hostile cultures, it’s a great time to reflect on how the relentlessly secular entertainment industry reflects—in fact, mocks—the religious beliefs of its American audience.

In the arid land of secular orthodoxy, there is no alarm at simple “spirituality” if it is trendy and harmless, and the God-idea is conveniently controlled by the individual, instead of the individual submitting to a sovereign you-know-Who. Even traditional faiths can be tolerated by Hollywood as long as they are kept quiet, muffled behind closed doors. Private prayer is fine, if it helps you. But the minute that traditionalists arrive at the public square to persuade and evangelize, then it’s instantly oppressive and archaic.

America broadly believes in God, and in particular the divinity of Christ. A 2003 Harris poll found 90% believed in God and 80% believed in the resurrection of Jesus. To see how Hollywood reacts to that norm, the Parents Television Council, along with the National Religious Broadcasters, conducted a study of one year of prime-time television treatments of religion on the seven broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, UPN, WB, and Pax – from September 2003 to September 2004.

For an industry that claims to reflect reality, the results are not good. Religion is virtually ignored, and when covered, more often than not it’s attacked.

PTC analyst Caroline Eichenberg found that TV writers were kindest to private expressions of faith, with more than 50% of those lines or scenes positively treated. For a typical example, when the lead character of “JAG” is hospitalized, another character prays for his health. One rare negative treatment was comedian Jimmy Kimmel kicking off his hosting duties at the American Music Awards by mocking award winners: “And finally, this is personal thing: no thanking God. God does not watch television.”

But when TV writers construct a plot with clergy or one discussing church institutions, the portrayals are more than twice as likely to be negative than positive. Indeed, only 11.7% of treatments of religious institutions or doctrines were positive. The clergy were depicted positively only 14.6% of the time. You don’t get much more out of sync with American popular opinion than that.

For example, both ABC’s “The Practice” and CBS’s “Without A Trace” had adulterous-priest plotlines. CBS’s “Cold Case” featured an abusive convent where one of the nuns bore a child out of wedlock. In CBS’s “Judging Amy,” a minister beat a boy with a whip, and on a later episode, a Catholic priest underwent a sex-change operation.

The Catholic Church was singled out for abuse by Tinseltown this past year. Even on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” the reality show and comedian contest, several “Catholic” comics mocked the Pope and the church. Tammy Pescatello joked, “It’s a good time to be Catholic ‘cause we’re grading on a curve. As long as you’re not touching pee pees you got a get-out-of-hell-free card. That poor Pope. If he could stand up, he’d stab those priests with his hat, don’t you think?”

Unsurprisingly, the shows on the Pax network, which Bud Paxson founded to stand apart from the others with a more reverent schedule, were more than 90% positive in their religion treatments, and a small number mixed or neutral, without a single negative exchange on religious issues. Among the more traditional networks, CBS (the “Joan of Arcadia” network) led with the most positive religion portrayals, with 38.3%.

On the other end was NBC, which could only manage to have 4.8% of its religious moments turn out positive. NBC had a shocking ratio of 9.5 negative treatments for every positive one.

NBC spokeswoman Shannon Jacobs tried to argue that “It is never our intention to appear, nor do we accept the notion that we are, anti-religious.” Unfortunately for her, the Associated Press story quoting her also noted a clip from NBC’s Will & Grace featuring a character quipping “let’s go by that historic church and turn it into a gay bar.” It is impossible for NBC to convince very many people that this scene was not mocking religion. Perhaps when NBC states it “reflects the diversity of their audience,” it means giving credibility to those who would insult religion.

Religion continues to serve as a critical element in the lives of most Americans. Hollywood must be challenged to examine its conscience. Ironically, the more often entertainment programs reflect the values and beliefs of Americans, the more it would help Hollywood’s most sacred idea—the bottom line.

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David Bauder, Study: TV Shows Negative Image of Religion (Associated Press, 041216)

NEW YORK - Television entertainment programs mention God more often than they did in the mid-1990s but tend to depict organized religion negatively, a study released Thursday said.

The Parents Television Council watched every hour of prime-time on the broadcast networks during the 2003-04 season and logged 2,344 treatments of religion. They judged 22% of the mentions positive, 24% negative and the rest neutral.

The conservative group’s last study, released in 1997, found far fewer mentions of the topic — an average of once per hour compared to three times per hour last season.

But any mention of a religious institution or member of the clergy was at least twice as likely to be negative than positive, the council said.

“Ninety percent of the American people believes in God,” said Brent Bozell, the council’s president. “It is an important issue to most people. Hollywood is attacking the very thing that they consider important in their own lives. Perhaps Hollywood ought to be changing its world view.”

Negative examples varied widely: from comic Jimmy Kimmel joking on the American Music Awards that winners should resist thanking God, to a Catholic priest admitting on “The Practice” that he had had sex with a woman who was later murdered.

Well-publicized scandals about pedophile priests made Catholics particularly vulnerable, the council found.

“Catholicism is in the bulls-eye of the entertainment medium,” Bozell said.

His group singled out NBC, saying its mentions of religion were nearly 10 time more likely to be negative than positive. “Law & Order” episodes, which tend to have stories ripped from the headlines, helped skew those numbers, the group said.

Bozell noted, however, that one of the negative NBC examples the PTC cited — Karen on “Will & Grace” quipping, “let’s go by that historic church and turn it into a gay bar” — reflected as poorly on the character as on religion.

An NBC spokeswoman, Shannon Jacobs, said the network hadn’t seen the study but rejected its conclusion. NBC’s programming reflects the diversity of its audience, she said.

“It is never our intention to appear, nor do we accept the notion that we are, anti-religious,” she said.

Among the positive examples, the PTC cites a “JAG” episode where a character prays to God to say hello to her dead mother, and an “American Dreams” episode where an actor playing a medical student says a surgery is partially in God’s hands.

Bozell said he’s not suggesting that all television programming “ought to be about St. Teresa” or even be all positive about religion, but that Hollywood should keep in mind the overall picture it presents to viewers.

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Media Moments 2004: It’s been a wacky year (National Review Online, 041230)

Every year I collect Dubious Media Moments from the past twelve months, and 2004 has been particularly rich. Here are some of my favorites:

January: Yet another example that the fascist-boot-in-the-face-of-the-lowly-writer is so often placed there by earnestly leftist magazines: Two years after Lingua Franca folds, its bankruptcy trustee threatens freelance writers who actually managed to collect payment just before the arty academic journal went out of business. If they don’t return the fees, he’ll sue.

February: Naomi Wolf writes a New York Magazine cover story claiming that 20 years ago, when she was a Yale student, professor Harold Bloom put his “heavy, boneless hand” on her thigh, precipitating a “moral crisis” and “spiritual discomfort.” And therefore, she explains, she will no longer accept speaking invitations from her alma mater. Because even though she never complained about Bloom at the time, “the institution is not accountable when it comes to equality of women.”

March: I describe Rick Orlov of the Los Angeles Daily News as “the Dean of City Hall Reporters” in a local alt-weekly piece. This causes another longtime L.A. City Hall reporter, Marc Haefele, who writes for a different alt-weekly, to complain that he, not Orlov, is the Dean of City Hall Reporters, because a local radio host called him the dean three years ago. “I began covering city halls in 1978 for the New Jersey Daily Record,” Haefele insists, “where I reported on municipal venues from Newark to Lake Hopatcong. So unless Rick can unearth another decade of city hall experience, some place, I’m the Dean.”

I explain that I first heard Rick Orlov described as Dean of L.A. CHR ten years ago, so his “title,” for those who care about such things, actually seems to predate Haefele’s — who does, to be fair, have all that experience reporting on municipal venues from Newark to Lake Hopatcong. So how about we call him Dean of L.A. City Hall Reporters Who Have Also Covered New Jersey Politics?

April: The Los Angeles Times prints ten letters to the editor about President Bush’s press conference, every single one of them critical. Now obviously, Bush is not popular in L.A., and the affluent readership of the Times leans markedly towards the limousine liberal side of the political spectrum. Still, how likely do you think it that all the readers who wrote in were entirely of one mind? I don’t care if these are the op-ed pages; this sort of obvious slant spells trouble with a capital “T” and that rhymes with “B” and that stands for bias.

May: I go to a Media Bistro party here in L.A. and get into a conversation about blogs with some guy from KPFK, the lefty Pacifica Radio station. A recent Blogads survey indicates that 80% of blog readers are men. “More women should write blogs!” the KPFK guy exclaims. “Then more women would read them.”

“Should we make women read blogs even if they don’t want to?” I asked. “Should we limit the amount of male blog readers...or prevent more men from starting blogs, since there are already so many?”

“Well...yes.”

“How?”

His argument sort of fizzled out there, as I guess even a loyal KPFK-er isn’t quite willing to enforce Stalinist methods for making All Blogs Equal In a Non-Sexist Blog Paradise.

June: Los Angeles Magazine runs a story about public-radio commentator Sandra Tsing Loh’s problems with the FCC, mentioning that my NRO columns about Sandra “might be the first time National Review Online has taken the lead on a free speech issue.” Well, it might be; and pigs might fly. Even at L.A. Mag they should know that it isn’t the Right that’s enforcing speech codes on college campuses, or destroying press runs of school papers for “offensive” opinion pieces.

July: The magazine the Writers Guild sends out to members, Written By, publishes a strange tribute to Robert Lees, the 91-year-old screenwriter murdered a few weeks before by the crazy homeless Hollywood decapitator. Lees was a blacklisted Communist, and therefore is to Written By not only a victim of a peculiar and horrible random crime but also something of a saint. “The life of the Party is no more,” the magazine observes in an intro to a Q&A one of its interviewers did with Lees before his death, an interview that crosses the line from gently lobbed softballs to outright shilling. Example:

Q: “What do you think of websites that urge audiences to boycott productions with pro-peace actors?”

Lees: “We had that same war against godless Russia. The Great Satan has now been switched to mean the Arabs, and we are on the side of god...”

Evidently, the Guild rethought its insistence on lower-case “god,” especially after upper-case “Satan,” because they changed it in the website version of the article. (“Pro-peace” was also changed to the more conventional “anti-war.”)

August: L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan’s review of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism, blandly reveals the iron fist between the fuzzy liberal mitten. “Perhaps the most disheartening thing about Outfoxed,” Turan writes, “is the realization that, unlike any administration, liberal or conservative, a news organization cannot be voted out of office.”

Yes, he actually said it: If only we had the power to simply get rid of all sources of news we don’t like, just think how much better the world would be. But, alas, we don’t. How disheartening.

September: I get into a conversation with a young friend who never wants to hear how old I am, lest he (as he puts it) freak out, about the Rathergate/fake “type-written” documents. But I have to explain some forgotten lore from the ancient era of typewriters. “See, my mother made me take typing class in school,” I begin, “because then I’d always be able to get a job...”

“What — like a secretary? Are you telling me she wanted you to be a secretary?”

“Well, the idea was that a girl might have to work as a secretary if she didn’t get married right away... Anyway, there was this thing called margin release. The typewriter stopped a few characters before the end of the line.”

“Didn’t the typewriter just take care of that for you?”

“No, typewriters didn’t do word wrap. So another fake thing about that memo is that if it was really written on a typewriter, there’d probably be either word breaks or at least one extra long line on the right margin.”

“So did you ever work as a secretary?”

“In publishing they’re called editorial assistants. And then when I was an AP news clerk I had to change ribbons and paper on the teletype machines and…”

“I would have quit the first day if I had to do that!”

Well, that’s yet another difference between men and women: Women have more tolerance for low-level drudgery. But I’ll bet it’s been so long since Dan Rather had to type anything himself (if he ever did) that he can’t remember what typewriter-written documents looked like.

October: I stop by NR illustrator Roman Genn’s house in South Pasadena to pick up a special election-eve drawing Roman did for an L.A. Press Club party I helped organize. Because he grew up in Moscow, where he once spent three days in jail as a teenager, Roman is unsympathetic to lefty mass emails from friends about the crushing of dissent in Bush’s America. He’s still on the forwarding lists, though: “I tell them, yeah, just as soon as Michael Moore is executed, give me a call,” he shrugs.

November: Even after Bush wins the election, the opening credits of the new WB drama Jack & Bobby — a montage of 20th-century presidents as adolescents and adults — stop with Bill Clinton. Well, what can we expect from a show in which the future president’s mother says of a vagrant she’s befriended: “Jonah was good — and stupid — enough to fight for our country in Viet Nam...”

December: L.A. Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman, describing Michael Crichton’s new book, State of Fear, writes with Humpty-Dumpty assurance that “Crichton’s real genius is to have written the first neo-con novel.” From the plot description, State of Fear sounds like an anti-environmentalist screed in the form of a thriller, which wouldn’t seem to have anything with neoconservatism. But it’s strangely gratifying to see language change, right here in the pages of my favorite newspaper. The definition of neocon among the p.c. set has become so much more than a euphemism for Jew. Now it can also mean any rightwing idea we in polite society especially dislike.

— Catherine Seipp is a writer in California who publishes the weblog Cathy’s World. She is an NRO contributor.

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Prove It (Weekly Standard, 050105)

The Columbia Journalism Review finally confronts CBS News, Rathergate, and the blogosphere. [in a clearly biased way]

THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW has a long, proud history of ignoring the story of the forged documents used by Dan Rather and CBS News. You’ll recall that the scandal first broke on September 9, 2004, when a group of bloggers publicly questioned the validity of the four CBS memos. In the ensuing media scramble to get to the bottom of the story, blogs and big journalistic outfits such as ABC News, the Dallas Morning News, and the Washington Post took turns breaking news about the forgery, and then about the real source of the documents. (For a full history, click here.)

In all of the hubbub, the Columbia Journalism Review—America’s premier media criticism outfit—was notably absent. CJR’s blog did not mention the story until September 14, and then only in passing. Goaded by the blogosphere, they addressed the matter head-on later in the day, when managing editor Steve Lovelady wrote, “. . . we’re not in the business of saying, ‘You may be a bad boy; drink your medicine.’ We’re in the business of saying ‘You are a bad boy; drink your medicine.’ And, as of this moment, despite the flurry of charges and counter-charges, it’s not clear whether CBS has been had by some undercover operative intent on smearing the president, or whether the network itself is the victim of a smear campaign.”

By that point, of course, the matter was nearly settled. Nevertheless, CJR refrained from saying much more about the story. (However Lovelady did send a letter to Jim Romenesko’s media criticism website chiding other journalists for making much ado about nothing: “. . . come on, guys—try to get a grip. It’s not Watergate. It’s not even Rathergate. So far, it’s no more than Fontgate.”)

After CBS disavowed its forged documents and announced that it was conducting an independent investigation into the affair, CJR finally weighed in definitively, declaring that “There’s nothing complicated about any of this. The real story here isn’t political bias on the part of CBS or Rather. It’s that of big news organizations still in the thrall of a scoop mentality that dates back to the 1920’s . . .” And that was that.

BUT NOW CJR’S flagship magazine has waded into the fray, albeit four months late, with a long analysis of the story by Corey Pein.

Pein’s article, “Blog-Gate,” posits, somewhat counterintuitively, that the lesson of CBS’s “forged” documents is that the media are allowing themselves to be manipulated by a throng of right-wing bloggers. Says Pein, “on close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule.”

The case Pein makes against bloggers rests largely on one point: That the CBS documents were not forged. Pein says that the memos “it turns out, were of unknown origin.”

“We don’t know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were ‘apparently bogus,’” Pein says. He adds, “We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof.” (Authentically forged, perhaps?) And finding proof for Pein may well be impossible. “The bottom line,” he says, “which credible document examiners concede, is that copies cannot be authenticated either way with absolute certainty.” Which suggests that, to Pein’s mind, it is actually impossible to prove that the documents are forgeries.

Having erected an insurmountable burden of proof, Pein then goes about trashing anyone who dared reach a conclusion about the memos, beginning with Joseph Newcomer.

One of the fathers of modern electronic typesetting, Newcomer wrote a definitive, 7,000 word explanation of why the memos must necessarily have been forgeries on September 11, 2004, back when CJR was still officially ignoring the story. Four months later, his essay is still considered definitive. By everyone save Corey Pein, that is. Pein labels Newcomer “a self-proclaimed typography expert” and allows that his work “seemed impressive.” Yet Pein dismisses the 7,000 word proof out of hand in two sentences, maintaining that it was based on a “logical error.” (Meryl Yourish has cleared Newcomer of this silly charge.)

PEIN THEN MOVES ON to the inconvenient Bill Burkett, the Texas man who fed the documents to CBS and fibbed about their origins. By the end of last September, Burkett’s credibility was in tatters: He admitted lying to CBS and claimed that he had received the memos from a mysterious woman named “Lucy Ramirez” during a blind hand-off at a livestock show in Houston. He was calling himself “a patsy.” USA Today reporters described their sessions with him: “Burkett’s emotions varied widely in the interviews. One session ended when Burkett suffered a violent seizure and collapsed in his chair.”

But just as he could not be persuaded that the memos were forged, Pein refuses to discount Burkett either. “Dan Rather trusted his producer; his producer trusted her source. And her source? Who knows.” Pein’s sympathies for Burkett go farther:

. . . many suppositions about Burkett are based on standards that were not applied evenly across the board. In November and December the first entry for “Bill Burkett” in Google, the most popular reference tool of the twenty-first century, was on a blog called Fried Man. It classifies Burkett as a member of the “loony left,” based on his Web posts. In these, Burkett says corporations will strip Iraq, obliquely compares Bush to Napoleon and “Adolf,” and calls for the defense of constitutional principles. These supposedly damning rants, alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harper’s or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign. While Burkett doesn’t like the president, many people in America share that opinion, and the sentiment doesn’t make him a forger.

So goes it at the Columbia Journalism Review. The university’s motto may still be “In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen,” but over at the j-school they have a new slogan: You can’t prove anything.

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard. He also runs the blog Galley Slaves.

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Defining Bias Downward? Dan Rather and the Columbia Journalism Review (National Review Online, 050113)

When the election was over and George W. Bush had prevailed despite the tsunami of media-bias debris that washed over him, liberal media critics responded in a predictable way. Quoting my NRO post-election rehash (which insisted that “every anti-Bush angle...was explored with great ferocity”), Columbia Journalism Review executive editor Mike Hoyt could only muster this response in an editorial:

What’s disturbing is not the way that Graham is whining into his champagne but his little two-step away from reality. He and others are defining bias downward, as anything that challenges a GOP point of view.

Mark that down as Hoyt’s First Rule of Media Criticism: If your side wins, then obviously the media weren’t biased and you have no right to complain. The “reality” of the daily media product is somehow dramatically reshaped by the election returns? Wrong. The reality is simple: The media tried very hard to lecture, urge, cajole, beg, plead, and mislead Americans into dumping President Bush, and a majority said, “No thanks, we’ll keep him.”

It’s a common tactic for liberals to insist that conservative media criticism is hypersensitive to anyone’s questioning GOP authority, that the mere voicing of a liberal thought by anyone in a news story is a great offense. The tactic is cute, considering how many news stories overwhelm us with liberal thoughts and sometimes insert a tentative, diplomatic Scott McClellan clip as the only hint of a rebuttal; or how many “balanced” interviews on morning TV pit Democratic Sen. Joe Biden trashing Bush on Iraq against...Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel trashing Bush on Iraq. (That was at one point so common that talk-radio host Laura Ingraham started calling it a “Bagel.”) Or try to think of an Abu Ghraib story you saw where someone said the press was stretching it all out of proportion, or that naked pyramids didn’t compare to Saddam’s mass graves or rape rooms or the Iraqi prisoners who came to Washington without their arms (and received artificial arms from Americans, and were ignored by the press).

Conservatives aren’t “defining bias downward.” There’s way too much media distortion to pretend we’re running out of liberal bias, as the Sierra Club likes to think we’re running out of oil. This would be defining bias downward: complaining that reporters call him “Bush” instead of “President Bush.” Hoyt thinks more conservative victories mean there must be less liberal bias. He doesn’t consider that more conservative victories cause liberal media types to panic and push the accelerator.

The problem in 2004 is that the media kept building the media-bias issue upward: Instead of a lowered level of media partisanship, we had a heightened level. For example, we have just witnessed the final act of a major journalistic scandal: CBS’s “myopic zeal” to defeat Bush caused the network to destroy its own credibility with a story based on “1970s” documents that can be reproduced on Microsoft Word.

“Defining bias downward” is a much better description for what the Columbia Journalism Review tried to do with the Dan Rather bang-bang “TexANG” fiasco. Its current issue features an article titled “Blog-gate” by Corey Pein that, as the headline implies, tries to shift the spotlight of scrutiny to the scrutinizers.

Pein’s very belated attempt to blur the Killian-document claims into an equal-opportunity scandal — oh sure, Dan Rather made a few mistakes, exactly like those Rather-baiting bloggers — avoids the central point. This scandal begins and ends with CBS. Dan Rather is stepping down from his throne and CBS has apologized for airing a segment based on documents it now says it “cannot vouch for journalistically.” CBS should not have aired a story based on documents it could not verify as authentic. The burden of proof does not begin with the bloggers (or CBS’s other debunkers at major newspapers and TV networks).

Pein’s insistence that it was factually sloppy for pundits to declare that the CBS documents were fabricated is akin to insisting it was factually sloppy to assert that George Bush won the election. (Pein even tries to suggest that Bill Burkett isn’t “loony left” for comparing Bush to Hitler, since many liberals use that language.) How something called the “Columbia Journalism Review” can publish such an exercise in excuse-manufacturing on a major journalistic scandal like this only suggests they’re publishing just another liberal spin magazine, not a media-watchdog publication that actually cares about notions like accuracy and fairness and checking things out.

Only one side in the media-bias debate wants to pretend America doesn’t recognize Dan Rather’s arrogance. Only one side wants to believe that America can be persuaded by CBS’s ridiculous claims that “99%” of its stories are “straight down the middle.” Bush fans who watch CBS know that CBS had no Mary Mapes clone spending her days in 2004 preparing to attack John Kerry like a rabid Old Yeller. They know that Mary Mapes was not the exception at CBS News: Mary Mapes is the rule at CBS News. She became a backstage star in the liberal media not through scoops that challenged the powerful, no matter who they are. She became a star through trashing the Republican powerful. That’s why everyone at CBS invested too much trust in the project. Once again, Mapes and Rather were going to lead the entire American press corps through a solid week or even month of Bush-bashing, and at a time when John Kerry boosters felt the urgent need to stop the Bush convention bounce.

As any conservative media critic should acknowledge, an argument can be made that on some days, some stories or events may provoke a bias favorable to conservatives. It’s possible, if not probable. But the media-bias debate should not be fought on vague notions of who’s winning and who’s losing elections, but on the content of the daily media product. It should be incredibly hard to charge that in 2004, the “reality” was that the mainstream media threw everything but the kitchen sink at John Kerry. It’s incredibly easy to charge that the face in the middle of the media bulls-eye belonged to George W. Bush.

— Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and an NRO contributor.

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What they knew they really didn’t (Washington Times, 050113)

In life, we all discover, there are things we just, y’know, know. The next pull of the slot-machine lever will produce a cascade of coins. Never mind stopping for directions; the house we’re looking for is two streets to the right.

There is something of this unconscious certainty at the heart of the Dan Rather/”60 Minutes”/George Bush/phony documents scandal — the scandal that at the start of the week led to a high-profile house cleaning at CBS’ news division.

Click to Visit

This same certainty is of a different cut, nevertheless. It is ideological. The CBS people just knew George W. Bush had sloughed off in the National Guard during Vietnam, as newly discovered documents seemed to prove.

They were wrong. Or, to put it as kindly as possible, such proof as they adduced fell short. Accordingly, they not only are wrong but, now, shamed and out of work. And it’s too bad, I think a journalist has to say, because executing a header as they fled from grace and authority, they showered mud over a profession already well bemired.

The special committee investigating the Rather flap of last fall found the CBSers had been afflicted with “myopic zeal.” They couldn’t have seen an exculpatory explanation for Mr. Bush’s National Guard record had it bitten them. Their “zealous belief in the truth of the segment seems to have led many to disregard some fundamental journalistic principles.” In their “credulity and overenthusiasm,” the CBSers failed to run all their traps or even to cock a quizzical eyebrow at this story, which — courtesy of a Bush-despising ex-National Guard commander in Texas — had landed at their feet. The people who mattered knew the story was true.

Why, though? Why did they just know? Evidently for reasons such as misled dopey Michael Moore last year: The president was a bad guy, and a conservative, if that wasn’t merely a synonym for “bad guy.”

Liberals have this way of believing the worst about conservatives, few of whose beliefs they share or even appear to understand.

The worst effects of this sanguine attitude (“We’re just telling the truth, aren’t we?”) undermine their effectiveness in reporting the news. The news media today are top-heavy with liberals and liberal notions.

The kind of news that gets reported in terms of “World to end Friday” is, often enough, the kind liberals like. The kind of news that gets reported with finger over lips, if reported at all, is, often enough, the kind liberals dislike.

Liberals in the media, especially the East and West Coast media, have over the last 40 years shown repeatedly how they just know nonliberals and nonliberal ideas make no sense. Let the quibbles go, they seem to breathe reassuringly. Trust us.

And get another National Guard documents story rammed down innocent throats? Fat chance.

The liberal problem, in media terms, is that media liberals can’t get away with what they once got away with. There’s too much competition — hooray, hooray. Technology affords some hitherto impossible checks and balances. The Weblog, a k a the “blog” — the online diary/commentary that literally millions of Americans now operate — undercuts pretensions to exclusive custody of the news. It helped undercut the CBS story — as did, it is fair to note, the skepticism, perhaps the competitive instinct, of “old media” outlets like The Washington Post.

CBS almost immediately lost custody of its own story. The news marketplace performed like a true marketplace, with hordes of purveyors scrambling for advantage. CBS’ “myopic zeal” convinced few outside the circle of the already convinced.

One may hate to see Dan Rather, who solemnly vouched for the documents story, go out this way, or the other careless specimens at CBS lose careers. On the other hand, they saw no hand other than the one pointing to what they just knew was true. They got carried away. It couldn’t go on. Happily, for the sake of the glorious old First Amendment, it didn’t.

William Murchison is a nationally syndicated columnist.

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Liar, liar, now you’re fired (Ann Coulter, 050112)

If CNN doesn’t hire them, Dan Rather and his producers can always get a job teaching at the Columbia School of Journalism. The Columbia Journalism Review recently defended the CBS report on George Bush using forged National Guard documents with the Tawana Brawley excuse: The documents might be “fake but accurate.”

Dan Rather and his crack investigative producer Mary Mapes are still not admitting the documents were fakes. Of course, Dan Rather is still not admitting Kerry lost the election or that a woman named Juanita Broaddrick credibly accused Bill Clinton of rape.

Responding to Bill O’Reilly’s question in a May 15, 2001, interview on “The O’Reilly Factor” about why CBS News had mentioned crackpot rumors of George Bush’s drug use on air seven times, but the name “Juanita Broaddrick” had never crossed Dan Rather’s lips (and was only mentioned twice on all of CBS News), Rather replied: “Juanita Broaddrick, to be perfectly honest, I don’t remember all the details of Juanita Broaddrick. But I will say that – and you can castigate me if you like. When the charge has something to do with somebody’s private sex life, I would prefer not to run any of it.”

If only the press had extended that same courtesy to Mike Tyson! Rape has as much to do with “somebody’s private sex life” as Bush’s National Guard service does.

Admittedly, Juanita Broaddrick’s charge against Clinton – that Bill Clinton raped her so brutally that her clothing was torn and her lip was swollen and bleeding, hence his parting words of “you’d better put some ice on that” – was not a story on the order of Augusta National Golf Course’s exclusion of women members. But, unlike the Bush drug-use charge, which remains unsupported to this day, Broaddrick’s allegations had been fully corroborated by NBC News – which then refused to air Lisa Myers’ report until after Clinton’s acquittal in the Senate.

Fortunately for Ms. Mapes, Rather also described Bill Clinton as “honest,” explaining to O’Reilly, “I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.” This must have come as great comfort to Mapes, as she based an entire story about Bush’s outrageous behavior in the National Guard on one Lt. Col. Bill Burkett.

Among the issues that might have raised questions about relying on Burkett as your source before accusing a sitting president of having disobeyed direct military orders are:

* Burkett had a long-standing grudge against the National Guard for failing to pay for his medical treatment for a rare tropical disease he claims he contracted during Guard service in Panama.

* He blamed Bush, who was governor at the time, for the Guard’s denial of medical benefits because, as everyone knows, the Texas governor’s main job is processing medical claims from former National Guard members.

* After leaving the Guard, Burkett suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for depression.

* At the meeting where he was supposed to give Mapes the National Guard documents, Burkett brought “two binders full of depositions and other documents that were apparently from his litigation with the National Guard over health benefits” – apparently he forgot the two shoeboxes full of UFO photos he’d collected over the years.

* He had compared Bush to Hitler – which admittedly could have been just his way of establishing his bona fides to Democrats.

* He had told a number of stories over the years about Bush’s National Guard service, all of which had collapsed under conflicting evidence and even his own contradictory accounts – which is to say the stories were both made up and inaccurate.

* In exchange for the National Guard documents, Burkett demanded money, “relocation assistance” if the story put him or his family in danger (perhaps oceanfront property for a quick getaway) and direct contact with the Kerry campaign.

Even before the story aired, Burkett’s description of his own source for the documents kept changing. He said he received the documents anonymously in the mail. He said he was given the documents by someone who would “know what to do with [the documents] better than” he would. He said his source was Chief Warrant Officer George Conn – amid copious warnings that CBS “should not call Chief Warrant Officer Conn because he would deny it” and further that “Conn was on active duty and could not be reached at his Dallas home.”

Burkett needn’t have worried about crack investigator Mary Mapes getting in touch with his alleged source. Even though a three-second search on Google would have revealed that (1) Burkett was crazy, and (2) he had tried to use Conn as a source before and Conn had vehemently denied Burkett’s claims, Mapes told the investigating committee “she did not consider Chief Warrant Officer Conn’s denial to be reliable.”

It seems Burkett had told Mapes that “Conn was still in the military and that his wife threatened to leave him if he spoke out against President Bush.” That was good enough for Mapes. She concluded that Conn – the only person who could have corroborated Burkett’s story – was not to be trusted. Instead, Mapes placed all her faith in the disgruntled, paranoid nut with a vendetta against Bush, an extensive psychiatric history and an ever-growing enemies list. I’m referring to Bill Burkett here, not Dan Rather.

Finally, Burkett claimed a woman named Lucy Ramirez had passed the documents to him at a livestock show in Houston. It is believed that this account marks the exact day that Burkett’s lithium prescription ran out. Despite the fact that no one at CBS was able to locate Ramirez, CBS ran with the story.

This isn’t a lack of “rigor” in fact-checking, as the CBS report suggests. It’s a total absence of fact-checking. CBS found somebody who told the story they wanted told – and they ran with it, wholly disregarding the facts.

Curiously, though Mapes trusted Burkett implicitly, she was very careful not to reveal his name to anyone at CBS, probably because she would have been laughed out of the room.

Instead, Mapes described Burkett in the abstract as: “solid,” “without bias,” “credible,” “a Texas Republican of a different chromosome,” a “John McCain supporter,” “reliable” and “a maverick” – leaving out only “Burkett is convinced he can communicate with caterpillars” and “his best friend is a coffee table.” His name was not important. It’s not as if he was the sole source for a highly damaging story about the president eight weeks before the election or anything. Oh wait ...

At a meeting with CBS lawyers the day the story would air, Mapes “did not reveal the source’s name or anything negative about the source,” but “expressed ‘enormous confidence’ in her source’s reliability and said that he was solid with no bias or credibility issues.” She described Burkett as a “moralistic stickler.” The subject of UFOs simply never came up.

Mapes trusted Burkett on the basis of the following:

* “Mapes told the panel that she spoke to a mainstream media reporter, who had known Lt. Col. Burkett since 2001, and she stated that he viewed Lt. Col. Burkett as reliable.” At least it wasn’t one of those unreliable bloggers throwing anything up on the Net and ruining reputations!

* “Mapes told the panel that she informed the Burketts that she was worried the documents might be a ‘political dirty trick.’ Mapes said that the Burketts appeared ‘genuinely shocked’ at the suggestion and this reaction gave her comfort.” (You could tell they were really shocked because they had the same look on their faces that Condi Rice had when Richard Clarke first told her about al-Qaida.)

* Mapes really hated George Bush and would do anything to make him lose the election.

Actually, Mapes did not put her last reason in writing, which created a real mystery for the CBS investigating committee. Proving once again how useless “moderate Republicans” are, “The CBS Report” – co-authored by moderate Republican Dick Thornburgh – found no evidence of political bias at CBS.

If Fox News had come out with a defamatory story about Kerry based on forged documents, liberals would be demanding we cut power to the place. (Fortunately, the real documents on Kerry were enough to do the trick.) But the outside investigators hired by CBS could find no political agenda at CBS.

By contrast, the report did not hesitate to accuse the bloggers who exposed the truth about the documents of having “a conservative agenda.” As with liberal attacks on Fox’s “fair and balanced” motto, it is now simply taken for granted that “conservative bias” means “the truth.”

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Bloggers’ counter-revolution (Washington Times, 050114)

What’s the newest word getting into the dictionary for the new year? Miriam Webster’s editors announce it is “blog” — defined as “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.”

So hoist a glass to toast perhaps the most famous “blogger” of 2004 — a brilliant Atlanta lawyer nicknamed “Buckhead.” He’s the pajama-clad fellow, along with a follow-up host of other Internet truth seekers, who struck a telling blow at anchor Dan Rather and his CBS TV “60 Minutes II” by quickly analyzing and questioning the proportionally spaced fonts used in the so-called National Guard records of George W. Bush.

“Buckhead” — who’s real name is Harry MacDougal — spends many a wee hour on his computer surfing the “blogosphere.” The Georgian first challenged CBS in a posting on the FreeRepublic.com Web site. “I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old,” he wrote barely four hours after Mr. Rather’s Sept. 8 show unveiled its “scoop.” Within minutes, other bloggers were using their Internet superhighway to further analyze the typefaces — not known to have been used in 1972 typewriters — to reinforce my friend’s suspicions and to tweak aggressive news outlets into doing some investigative reporting.

A few days later, as establishment media experts were finally weighing in against a smug and defiant Mr. Rather (who apologized 14 days later), one exultant FreeRepublic.com groupie declared in a succinct posting: “Buckhead for the U.S. Supreme Court.”

My friend, though, is a modest man. He later reflected: “As for my part, this tsunami would, without any doubt, have happened w/o me, so it ain’t no big thang I will have a cold one tonight, though.”

Yet it really is a “big thang.”

As the Wall Street Journal later noted editorially, “this is potentially a big cultural moment.” It underscored that the widespread challenge to Mr. Rather — to his “reporting” credibility — “means that the liberal media establishment has ceased to set the U.S. political agenda.”

Is the liberal media dead? Of course not. Peter Jennings and his clones at your local TV stations and newspapers will still seek to spread their version of “the news.” But we’ve come a long way from 1981, when Ted Turner, of all people, openly complained about CBS’ “liberal bias” and unsuccessfully tried to buy the network.

The Internet, for all its faults, turned out in 2004 to be a good friend to the American people when it comes to ferreting out the truth. As a longtime journalist, I often struggled to find “experts” and “insiders” who could help me understand and explain some event. Now the World Wide Web immediately connects us to them all.

Remember that the big media elite scoffed at, and barely reported on, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and its ads regarding presidential candidate John Kerry. That arrogance and mind control flies in the face of what was once taught in Journalism 101— try to get all sides of the story and report the facts to the reader or viewer. But the alternative media, ranging from the bloggers to talk radio, effectively fought back by having an open debate with shared information.

The truly dark side of modern liberalism can be seen in the rise of a “politically correct” news media. It has not been receptive to political conservatives and our traditional Judeo-Christian culture — and it has gone out of its way in recent years to condone and even glorify everything from drug use to same-sex marriage. Since the culturally corrosive Woodstock era, the “old media” led by CBS and the New York Times increasingly mocked traditional values and lifestyles as outmoded, racist and intolerant. Their unofficial motto evolved from that 1969 rock/drug/sex festival — “If it feels good, do it.”

In 2004 the “Buckheads” of America pushed back in a counter-revolution.

Yes, there are objective journalists around our country in the mainstream media who are intellectually honest and who ply their trade well. But they, too, should welcome to their world these new watchdogs. The talented and more enterprising are even developing a loyal following.

So cheers to all those “Buckheads” for getting “blog” into the dictionary. A competitive marketplace of information, opinion, analysis and questioning can only serve the truth and help inform the electorate. And it can do it pretty fast in “the blogosphere.” That is a “big thang.”

Phil Kent is an Atlanta media consultant and author of “The Dark Side of Liberalism.”

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Too Much Liberal News, Too Few Liberals (National Review Online, 050119)

The mainstream media may have to reach out to conservatives.

Jim Geraghty

Reading the reaction of Patrick Ruffini and blogger Ginnyto David von Drehle’s excursion to The Red Sea — red states — in the Washington Post, I began to wonder whether many of the mainstream media’s problems stem from having too many outlets competing for the same readers/viewers.

Look over at Mickey Kaus, who is mocking CNN’s Jonathan Klein for what Kaus finds to be lame ideas about how to catch up with Fox News. (Klein is ditching the debate show Crossfire and pledging more “roll-up-your-sleeves storytelling.”)

It’s interesting that CNN has lagged behind Fox for a couple of years now, and tried a variety of approaches (remember the ads touting Paula Zahn as “a little sexy”?). There’s one approach that CNN hasn’t tried, as far as I know. Nor has CNBC tried it, or MSNBC: Emulating Fox by trying to attract the right-of-center audience.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the results of this year’s presidential election represent the news-watching and news-reading population as a whole. This would mean that 51% or so of the public is right-of-center in one way or another, and 49% is left-of-center in one way or the other.

If you’re a conservative, chances are you prefer Fox News. You often sense that the “mainstream” networks don’t give a fair shake to your leaders, your party, your views, or your beliefs.

If you’re a liberal, maybe you prefer your media to be a little more pugnacious — Air America, or the columns of Paul Krugman or Molly Ivins. But by and large, you find the mainstream media’s tone and coverage choices to be preferable to Fox.

But if you’re a liberal, or at least a non-conservative, your attention is the target of CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and all the major-network news operations — basically, every one except Fox News. Fox will welcome you and tout their fair and balanced approach and their room for such liberal commentators as Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, and Mara Liasson, but by and large they’re well-established as the network of choice for conservatives.

In the print world, the major newsweekly magazines, and almost every major city newspaper is clamoring for your attention if you’re a non-conservative. In fact, most of the coverage is written from, and for, your viewpoint. You can read the New York Times nationally, or the Los Angeles Times, or Reuters wire copy. Both Chicago and Philadelphia have two major papers, neither of which is conservative. At the magazine rack, you have The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, the post-Michael Kelly Atlantic Monthly, and Slate and Salon on the web. (This list isn’t exhaustive, I’m just trying to give a sense of the breadth and depth.)

On the radio dial, you’ve got Air America, as well as much of NPR’s programming.

That’s a lot of media competing for the attention of the 49%.

Meanwhile, on cable, Fox News pretty much has the 51% to itself, unless you want to count Joe Scarborough, Dennis Miller, and about half the Capitol Gang.

It’s a similar situation in print: You have a few conservative magazines, NR, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative, as well as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and some alternative newspapers like the Washington Times, the New York Post, New York Sun, Boston Herald, etc. The radio dial gives you a decent slew of options.

But by and large, the right-of-center “alternative” media outlets are courting the 51%, while the many more mainstream media outlets are courting the 49%.

In light of this, doesn’t it seem likely that the mainstream media will face consolidation in the coming years? And will some news network that’s struggling with one of the smaller fractions of the blue-state audience decide to take on Fox News directly by competing for their red-state audience?

This media-saturation phenomenon also recalls the Onion headline, “Nation’s Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue”:

“For a while, I wanted more fuel for the fire, to really get my blood boiling,” said Madison, WI resident Dorothy Levine, a reproductive-rights activist and former Howard Dean campaign volunteer. “I read the policy papers on the Brookings web site. I subscribed to The Progressive. I clipped cartoons by Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall. I listened to NPR all day. But then, it was like, while I was reading Molly Ivins’ Bushwhacked, eight more must-read anti-Bush books came out. It was overwhelming. By the time they released Fahrenheit 9/11, I was too exhausted to drag myself to the theater.” “It used to be that I would turn on Pacifica Radio and be incensed at the top of every hour,” Levine added. “Now, I could find out that Bush plans to execute every 10th citizen and I’d barely blink an eye, much less raise a finger.”

The saturation of each side’s market also helps explain the changing tone of some media voices. If there are only so many anti-Bush publications and shows that the average liberal is willing to read, watch, or listen to, then the competition for that audience is fierce. One of the ways to stand out is to be the angriest, the shrillest, the most outrageous. (And the same phenomenon is not unheard of on the right.)

One would suspect — based on circulation figures and ratings, as well as voting trends — that the right-of-center alternative media has some room to grow, while the left-of-center audience has more media options than it can support indefinitely.

The mainstream media could attempt to expand its audience by reaching out to conservatives. But if you’re sending a veteran political correspondent to Nebraska and Texas to cover the natives as if they were a bizarre and mysterious foreign culture like the Washington Post just did, then you have essentially written them off as potential readers.

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Four CBS Employees Ousted for ‘Memogate’ (Foxnews, 050110)

NEW YORK — Four CBS News employees, including three executives, have been let go for the parts they played in preparing the controversial “60 Minutes Wednesday” election-season story about President Bush’s National Guard service, CBS announced Monday.

Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; “60 Minutes Wednesday” Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard’s deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy, according to CBS.

The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was terminated, the network said.

Longtime CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who was the correspondent on the September segment, announced his departure as anchor of “CBS Evening News” late last year. His final show will be March 9.

The CBS oustings came with the release of the final report by an independent panel assigned to look into what happened with the CBS Bush National Guard story, which alleged that the president had shirked some of his guard duties and received special treatment during his Vietnam War-era service.

The Sept. 8 CBS report turned out to be based largely on memos whose authenticity could not be proven.

To read the CBS report, click here (pdf).

Top CBS executive Leslie Moonves had appointed former Republican Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, retired president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press, to investigate what went wrong, and they delivered their report last week.

The panel stopped short of saying the CBS story arose out of any political bias on the part of the network or its news coverage.

Instead, the report concluded that the problematic National Guard segment was aired because of “myopic zeal” on the part of CBS to break the story first.

The panel said Mapes had misled her superiors about the documents and the background of her source, retired Texas National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett.

CBS News executives relied too heavily on Mapes, who only months earlier had broken the story about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and had been investigating Bush’s National Guard service since 1999. Howard, who had begun supervising “60 Minutes Wednesday” in June, gave too much deference to her and Rather, the panel said.

Reached at her Dallas home Monday, Mapes said: “I haven’t seen the report yet, so I won’t be saying anything until I do.”

Criticism has swirled about how Rather was handled in the so-called “Memogate” scandal.

Rather, who narrated the National Guard report, was only faulted for “errors of credulity and overenthusiasm” in the panel report.

Rather announced his March resignation on “CBS Evening News” on Nov. 23, saying he was planning to retire soon anyway. He said he was not stepping down over the National Guard story controversy.

“The mistake of Dan Rather is that he said, ‘I don’t make mistakes,’” Jeff Jarvis, who runs the Weblog site Buzzmachine.com, told FOX News on Monday. “There was a lot of buck-passing here.”

CBS thought it had an important scoop with the National Guard story, but critics immediately questioned it, saying at least one memo purportedly written by Bush’s squadron leader in 1973 appeared to have been written on a modern computer using Microsoft Word.

Rather and CBS initially defended the piece. Rather later apologized on Sept. 20, before CBS appointed the investigative panel.

“We made a mistake in judgment,” Rather said, “and for that I am sorry.”

The “60 Minutes Wednesday” segment alleged that Bush refused a direct order to take a required medical examination, and also alleged that Bush asked his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, if he could skip drills in order to work on a political campaign.

The memos used by the network bore the signature of Killian, commander of Bush’s Texas Air National Guard fighter squadron. Bush served in the Guard from 1968 to 1973.

Killian died in 1984. His wife and son took issue with the memos, saying Killian did not keep records like the ones CBS said it had gotten copies of.

The “60 Minutes” report also cited a memo from Col. Walter “Buck” Staudt, former commander of the Texas Air National Guard, that allegedly pressured another officer to “sugarcoat” Bush’s record.

Staudt appears to have retired before that memo was purportedly written.

Retired Major Gen. Bobby Hodges, who backed up the validity of the memos on the CBS broadcast, later recanted his statements, saying that he stopped believing the memos were real once he got a look at them.

After the CBS segment aired, Bush’s National Guard service became a hot campaign issue during the contentious presidential race for the White House between Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

The Bush camp defended the president’s service and released its own documents in an effort to prove that the allegations and questions about whether he fulfilled his duties were unfounded.

Questions remain whether there was any truth to the allegations about Bush’s military service, despite the unreliability of the CBS memos. Independent reports backing up the CBS segment’s assertions have not been proven.

Although the panel said it couldn’t prove conclusively the documents were forged, it said CBS News failed to authenticate them and falsely claimed an expert had done so when all he had done was authenticate one signature.

“The committee did not find conclusive evidence that the documents were forged,” Paul Burkam, executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, told FOX News. “Something can be true and yet can be forged. What we always look at is, Is it accurate?”

The CBS probe team concluded in its report that the network news organization failed to follow basic journalistic principles in preparing, reporting and following the Bush piece.

CBS News then made matters worse with its “rigid and blind” defense of the “60 Minutes Wednesday” segment, the panel reported.

It found that the news organization should have set the record straight earlier.

“The panel finds that once serious questions were raised, the defense of the segment became more rigid and emphatic, and that virtually no attempt was made to determine whether the questions raised had merit,” the report concluded.

CBS News President Andrew Heyward on Sept. 10 ordered West, one of the ousted executives, to review the opinions of document experts who had seen the disputed memos and unnamed sources which formed the basis for the Bush National Guard story.

That review never took place, the panel’s report said.

“Had this directive been followed promptly, the panel does not believe that ‘60 Minutes Wednesday’ would have publicly defended the segment for another 10 days,” the report said.

Heyward ultimately kept his job. The panel said the CBS News president had explicitly urged caution before the report aired.

The panel made a number of recommendations for changes, according to CBS, including:

— Appoint a “senior standards and practices” executive who would report directly to the president of CBS News and would review all investigative reporting, use of confidential sources and authentication of documents. Other staffers could go to the new executive confidentially with any concerns they might have about a story.

— Foster an atmosphere in which competitive pressure was not allowed to prompt airing of reports before all investigation and vetting is done.

— Allow senior management to know the names of confidential sources as well as all relevant background about the person needed to make news judgments.

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Christians to sue BBC over Springer show ‘blasphemy’ (WorldNetDaily, 050110)

Security has been stepped up at the London theatre staging Jerry Springer: the Opera as the controversy over the BBC’s decision to broadcast the production intensified yesterday.

The move came as Christian Voice, a lobby group that spearheaded a wave of protests against the corporation, announced plans to launch a blasphemy action against the BBC and the West End’s Cambridge Theatre.

Christian protesters

The opera, shown on BBC2 on Saturday night, has as its subject the confrontational American chat show and includes strong language and scenes depicting Jesus, God, Mary and Satan.

Asked about the prospect of being prosecuted for blasphemy, a spokesman for the producer, Avalon, said: “We have yet to receive any legal paperwork and it would be inappropriate for us to comment until we do.”

In turn, the BBC has been consulting police over possible action against Christian Voice, which published home addresses of 15 senior corporation executives and producers. Some households were deluged with hundreds of calls.

A BBC source said one of the calls mentioned “bloodshed” and another warned the recipient that “something bad could happen”.

The corporation said it had been forced to adopt security measures akin to those it had used in the past after programmes dealing with the far Right.

“We are not going to put up with dedicated public servants and their families being abused,” the BBC source added.

The programme attracted an audience of 1.8 million viewers, about 300,000 more than usual for that slot. There had been 47,000 protest calls before and during transmission and 300 afterwards.

Christian Voice remained unrepentant over the tactics it had employed. Stephen Green, the organisation’s national director, said it had brought 1,200 people on to the streets on Saturday night, including 400 to 500 people who protested outside BBC Television Centre at White City, west London.

Admitting that his organisation had published private contact details, Mr Green said: “It reflects that we have no confidence in the current channels of complaint. These people are public figures and the information is in the public domain.

“The BBC would not have done this if it had been Muslims or Sikhs, but because we are Christians we are fair game.”

There was support for Christian groups opposed to the broadcast from the Sikh organisation that forced the closure of Behzti, a play depicting rape and murder inside a temple.

Sewa Singh Mandla, the chairman of the Council of Sikh Gurudwaras in Birmingham, said his organisation was standing “shoulder to shoulder” with the Christian protesters.

“We believe it is the duty of the media to project faith in a positive manner. To hide behind the cloak of fiction is not tolerable,” he said.

The Churches Media Council, an ecumenical group, did not condemn the broadcast. While accepting that a number of Christian groups were concerned about the broadcast, the BBC had gone out of its way to warn viewers that some might find Jerry Springer: the Opera offensive, it said.

A spokesman added: “This is a serious piece of work and does not deserve to be condemned out of hand. It is an excellent modern morality opera.”

The Muslim Council of Great Britain said: “While we understand and sympathise with the huge amount of concern this programme has generated, we would not go along with the personal harassment of the board of the BBC.”

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Fourth estate or fifth column (townhall.com, 050125)

Thomas Sowell

There are still people in the mainstream media who profess bewilderment that they are accused of being biased. But you need to look no further than reporting on the war in Iraq to see the bias staring you in the face, day after day, on the front page of the New York Times and in much of the rest of the media.

If a battle ends with Americans killing a hundred guerrillas and terrorists, while sustaining ten fatalities, that is an American victory. But not in the mainstream media. The headline is more likely to read: “Ten More Americans Killed in Iraq Today.”

This kind of journalism can turn victory into defeat in print or on TV. Kept up long enough, it can even end up with real defeat, when support for the war collapses at home and abroad.

One of the biggest American victories during the Second World War was called “the great Marianas turkey shoot” because American fighter pilots shot down more than 340 Japanese planes over the Marianas islands while losing just 30 American planes. But what if our current reporting practices had been used back then?

The story, as printed and broadcast, could have been: “Today eighteen American pilots were killed and five more severely wounded, as the Japanese blasted more than two dozen American planes out of the sky.” A steady diet of that kind of one-sided reporting and our whole war effort against Japan might have collapsed.

Whether the one-sided reporting of the war in Vietnam was a factor in the American defeat there used to be a matter of controversy. But, in recent years, high officials of the Communist government of Vietnam have themselves admitted that they lost the war on the battlefields but won it in the U.S. media and on the streets of America, where political pressures from the anti-war movement threw away the victory for which thousands of American lives had been sacrificed.

Too many in the media today regard the reporting of the Vietnam war as one of their greatest triumphs. It certainly showed the power of the media — but also its irresponsibility. Some in the media today seem determined to recapture those glory days by the way they report on events in the Iraq war.

First, there is the mainstream media’s almost exclusive focus on American casualties in Iraq, with little or no attention to the often much larger casualties inflicted on the guerrillas and terrorists from inside and outside Iraq.

Since terrorists are pouring into Iraq in response to calls from international terrorist networks, the number of those who are killed is especially important, for these are people who will no longer be around to launch more attacks on American soil. Iraq has become a magnet for enemies of the United States, a place where they can be killed wholesale, thousands of miles away.

With all the turmoil and bloodshed in Iraq, both military and civilian people returning from that country are increasingly expressing amazement at the difference between what they have seen with their own eyes and the far worse, one-sided picture that the media presents to the public here.

Our media cannot even call terrorists terrorists, but instead give these cutthroats the bland name, “insurgents.” You might think that these were like the underground fighters in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.

The most obvious difference is that the underground in Europe did not go around targeting innocent civilians. As for the Nazis, they tried to deny the atrocities they committed. But today the “insurgents” in Iraq are proud of their barbarism, videotape it, and publicize it — often with the help of the Western media.

Real insurgents want to get the occupying power out of their country. But the fastest way to get Americans out of Iraq would be to do the opposite of what these “insurgents” are doing. Just by letting peace and order return, those who want to see American troops gone would speed their departure.

The United States has voluntarily pulled out of conquered territory all around the world, including neighboring Kuwait during the first Gulf war. But the real goal of the guerrillas and terrorists is to prevent democracy from arising in the Middle East.

Still, much of the Western media even cannot call a spade a spade. The Fourth Estate sometimes seems more like a Fifth Column.

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Election news from Iraq (townhall.com, 050126)

Jay Bryant

The Western media in pre-election Iraq, Peter Jennings for example, are doing all they can to aid and abet Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s call for the Iraqi people to stay away from the polls on Sunday. Fortunately for Iraq and the world, there’s not much either of them can do.

Jennings, after all, is hardly a household word in Baghdad, and Zarqawi’s latest rhetorical rant has placed him in clear opposition not just to the American occupation of Iraq, but the Iraqi people as well.

After all, the quickest and surest way to get the Americans out of the country is for an elected government to take over. We don’t even care much if it is a particularly pro-American government, just as long as it takes the country out of the Axis of Evil.

Jennings, et al, are using long faces and pretending to much sorrow as they discuss how unlikely it is that very many Iraqis will bother to vote. Given a choice between interviewing a man-in-the-souk who has been terrorized into staying home on Sunday and one who is ready to defy the dangers, they’ll choose the first every time.

This is taking Bush-hatred to new extremes. It’s one thing to cook the journalistic books before the (US) elections in an attempt to influence the outcome. We’re used to that. But to try to throw a wet blanket on the Iraqi elections is to explicitly side with the beheaders, the car-bombers, and those who, like Zarqawi, will stop at nothing to destroy the “evil principle” of democracy. That is the clear subtext of what is coming out over the airwaves from Iraq.

The media did this in Vietnam too, but there was a difference. Leftist reporters (that is, most reporters) actually believed to some degree in Ho Chi Minh, actually thought Vietnam would be better off under his leadership than that of the South Vietnam leaders on our side. No such ideological commitment motivates the bias in reporting from Iraq today. It’s an arguable point, I guess, but to me, that’s worse, because I’ve got more respect for someone who’s for something, even something I despise, than I do someone who is simply out to destroy things I treasure, no matter what horror ensues.

It would be nice to believe that once Sunday has come and gone, and a new government has been elected, the media will begin covering it fairly and honestly, but they won’t. Count on this: most of what you read about the new government in the coming months will fall into one of two categories. The first will highlight its failures. The second will highlight those aspects of its policy that are most anti-American.

What percentage of Iraqis will vote? I have no idea. Will voters be deterred by the terrorists? Some surely will. But others will not. In Sierra Leone a few years ago, the local terrorists threatened to sever one or more limbs from those who showed up at the polls, and, sickeningly, made their threats good before, during and after election day. But the people voted anyway, and chose a committed democrat (and a Muslim) to be their president. Are Sierra Leoneans braver than Iraqis? I have no reason to believe they are.

An antiwar group called Iraq Body Count has done what it’s name implies, and has put together a more-or-less day-by-day record of deaths due to, as they put it, “the war and occupation.” I went to their database and added up all the reported deaths for calendar year 2004. With reasonable allowances for two entries that covered periods stretching back into 2003, and using their “high” estimates, I came up with a total of 5,914, of which almost half occurred during the Fallujah battle. In the seven months from June to December, I count 2,548, which averages 379 a month. The number appears to include both Iraqis and foreigners, by the way, although it’s somewhat difficult to be sure given the cryptic nature of the entries. One thing I’d be willing to bet on is that the actual number is lower, not higher.

Three hundred and seventy-nine per month is just a little more than ten percent of the number of traffic fatalities in the US each month, and Iraq has about ten percent of the US population. So, on any given day, the likelihood that an Iraqi will be killed by a terrorist is about the same as the likelihood that you will be killed on the highway.

If you think I am trivializing the danger of being in Iraq, I beg to differ, and so would my friends and clients at AAA, who work day after day to prevent deaths just as tragic and often as gruesome as the worst the terrorists have to offer.

The point is, either you should have been a lot more terrified to drive to the polls last November, or Iraqi voters should, on Sunday, be a lot less terrified to vote than the media would have you believe they are.

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Media pessimism loses in Iraq (townhall.com, 050202)

Brent Bozell

Sunday’s elections in Iraq were glorious for Americans who relish the concept of freedom somewhere, anywhere in the Arab world. The televised images were too rich, and emotional and inspirational for the Quagmire Corps in the press to dismiss. The cameras revealed the Iraqi people hiking to the polls in droves, facing down the dangers of terrorist violence to dip their fingers in purple ink and say to the world after 50 years of tyranny that “My voice matters.”

While our national media were for the most part greeting these images with warm words — after all, who wants to look like they oppose elections? — this sudden bubble of idealism was in marked contrast to the daily diet of doom and dread they feed the public from Iraq. Journalists have defended themselves from those objecting to their overwhelming pessimism by saying they’re only reporting “reality,” unlike the president’s supporters, who were mocked as a passel of Pollyannas. But doesn’t the election prove that the Pollyannas were right and the Quagmire Corps were the ones out of touch with “reality”?

For two years, the liberal media have tried to transform Iraq into Vietnam. On the Saturday morning before the elections, there was Todd Purdum in the New York Times: “Nearly two years after the American invasion of Iraq, such comparisons are no longer dismissed in mainstream political discourse as facile and flawed, but are instead bubbling to the top.” It would have been nice to put Todd Purdum’s story at polling places so every voter could smudge some of their purple ink on his pessimistic copy.

Iraq is not Vietnam. It is El Salvador. It is Nicaragua. It is just one more country where, when given the chance, the people turn out in droves to choose a “fledgling democracy” — one that first staggers out of the egg, and then stabilizes from global “hot spot” to a cold spot of calm. It is another country where liberal media pessimists suggested that bellicose American ideologues and their corporate puppet-masters were clueless about the natives. But in the end, who painted the picture all wrong? Once again, it was the New York Times, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel and the rest of the “realists” who put their geopolitical bets on people who shoot at voters who have the egg on their faces.

Let’s take a moment to reconsider the avalanche of media pessimism that aimed to kick the can and postpone all this happiness into a nebulous future somewhere down the road. In November, CBS reporter Kimberly Dozier warned that “Some believe just talking about elections can get them killed.” In December, CBS Sunday anchor Mika Brzezinski was positively despondent: “To the battle for Iraq now, which seems to only worsen as Election Day gets closer and closer,” she said. “Some are now saying there is no way the election deadline can be met.” Who were these “some,” the anonymous stand-ins for every pessimistic media brain cramp?

The numerical predictions could turn out to be quite embarrassing. On “The Chris Matthews Show” in December, the perfectly named Katty Kay of the BBC predicted “five percent” turnout in Mosul. (Mosul’s turnout, while it may end up being comparatively low, was one of the really joyous surprises.) In mid-January, CBS reporter David Hawkins lobbied for electoral delay: “Despite warnings that in some places voter turnout may be less than 10% ... Is there any discussion about delaying the vote?” NBC reporter Jim Maceda warned “only half” of Iraq’s voters would turn out because “as the violence spreads, so does the panic. Election workers are under siege. Candidates are dropping out. An election some call historic, but the fear factor is taking its toll.”

Even on Jan. 25, CBS’s Dozier was back to insult Iraq as “an unlikely place for a free and fair election ... Now many Iraqis say they’re under siege by an unwelcome, sometimes brutal occupier and trapped in a war between those foreign forces and terrorists.” Could we have a more ridiculous example of moral equivalence? She then warned, “Election officials optimistically predict a 50% voter turnout.”

Despite the powerful rebuke they’ve taken from those glorious election pictures, nobody should expect the media’s brief episode of happy talk to last. They’re too invested in the idea that Iraq just has to end up a fiasco. But everyone else should remember Sunday, Jan. 30 as a lasting rebuttal to the myopic zeal behind Bomb of the Day coverage. This vote showed that day after day, while the democracy-hating bombers were getting all the publicity, the Iraqi people and the emerging governing elite were quietly building a civil society, a dream that sensation-obsessed and pessimistic “news” crews haven’t really wanted to admit could be possible.

Brent Bozell is President of Media Research Center, a Townhall.com member group.

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Bush’s Big Mo: The media can feel presidential momentum, but predict its sudden evaporation (National Review Online, 050203)

Like the onset of an infectious winter illness, reporters last night were coming down with a disturbing feeling. Despite their best efforts last year to convince Americans to drop President Bush and mark the Iraq war in the history books as a colossal military and political blunder — and despite pre-State of the Union address clucking that Bush is at a “historic low” in approval ratings — they can sense that the president is on a roll, that he’s beginning to look bold, visionary, even “Churchillian” (to quote David Gergen on PBS last night).

Successful elections in Iraq, which occurred despite months of cynical media speculation that it was foolish not to delay, feel to the media like a rejection of their relentless vision of a hopeless quagmire in the making. (Or as John Podhoretz put it Sunday, the elections were “Ted Kennedy’s Vietnam.”) The touching human moment of Wednesday night’s speech, when a fallen Marine’s mother hugged an Iraqi woman who had voted, only cemented the momentum.

On ABC, usually dismissive Terry Moran gave away too much by calling it a “shattering” moment, one that “crystallizes” what the president has been trying to do. Cokie Roberts said it “leaves you with goose bumps.” On CBS, Dan Rather said it was “the most poignant moment of any State of the Union night we can remember.” Ted Koppel and his Nightline panel universally concluded it was a “grand slam.” On MSNBC, Chris Matthews clumsily tried to conclude that this was a moment about growing the president’s numbers on Social Security reform, which even media liberals like Newsweek’s Jon Meacham dismissed as “absurd.” Trying to suggest the grieving mother hugged the Iraqi voter at some focus group’s urging makes you look like the world’s most oafishly cynical pundit.

Bush supporters watching at home can be forgiven for sensing that the media elite feels that its fortunes are in direct competition with Bush’s. When the president is riding high, they feel panic and hopelessness. Only predicting Bush’s imminent political decline, through unpopularity or “lame duckery,” as Peter Jennings put it last night, gives them confidence. So the conventional-wisdom assembly line insisted that Bush’s second term doesn’t actually last for the four years the voters just gave him, but that it would only last six or nine (or to be most generous, eighteen) months before Bush’s bandwagon turned into a pumpkin. CBS’s incoming interim anchor Bob Schieffer tipped his hand when he said the president has about nine months before all his handiwork will “evaporate,” including the Social Security reforms, if there isn’t success on the ground in Iraq. For the liberal media, the sun will come out tomorrow when Bush loses his effectiveness. But what if he boldly outperforms their predictions again?

Just in case people might think the media were too pro-Bush, ABC also seemed eager to puff up the Democratic response. Jennings hailed the Harry Reid speech as “good stuff” from a speaker some don’t find telegenic. Reporting from Baghdad, ABC reporter Martha Raddatz added, “We went out as well, yesterday, with some people [who] say election hangover is, they’re — they’re getting over that. And they’re talking about, frankly what Nancy Pelosi was talking about, and that is the infrastructure, saying we got to get these programs going.” An “election hangover,” like the vote was a drunken bender? That’s an unfortunate metaphor.

Jennings also predicted the end of sickening euphoria soon: “Everybody’s very euphoric about the fact that Iraqis went to vote on Sunday. When the numbers come in eventually, who did vote and what percentage they voted in, I think it will be clearer that perhaps the enthusiasm for the process is not as great as people here in Washington think.” Translation: Just wait until my pessimism is all the rage again.

The Democrats were treated with typical tenderness. Their hooting down of the president on Social Security was rarely treated as rudeness. On PBS, New York Times reporter Elizabeth Bumiller declared it showed this was “not an auspicious start” for Bush’s second term. Only ABC’s Linda Douglass suggested the Democrats sounded “very shrill” (while she said seconds later the Republicans are “scared, period” on Social Security reform.) NBC’s Brian Williams finished his Barbara Boxer interview by noting the senator played a “key dissenting role” in the Condoleezza Rice confirmation debate, instead of saying she “played a key role in attacking Rice as a liar.” No one seemed to mention that as Nancy Pelosi projected her party’s belief that the American military should remain “second to none,” she was clashing with incoming DNC chair Howard Dean, who claimed last year on the campaign trail that American military superiority would eventually be eclipsed.

But the hard-left “Air America” crowd clearly thought the Democrats weren’t rude enough. On MSNBC, celebrity leftist Janeane Garofalo was very upset that Mike Barnicle would use the term “Animal House” to describe Democratic behavior during the speech: “It wasn’t Animal House behavior, and it was a very short, vocal response. And the inked fingers was [sic] disgusting...The inked fingers and the position of them, which is gonna be a Daily Show photo already, of them signaling in this manner [does the Nazi salute], as if they have solidarity with the Iraqis who braved physical threats against their lives to vote as if somehow these inked-fingered Republicans have something to do with that.” Garofalo sounded almost as ridiculous as when she suggested on the night of the inauguration that “George W. Bush is unelectable, in my opinion.”

After several years of projecting doom in Iraq, it’s odd to see the media attacking the White House for building a sense of urgency about reforming Social Security with the Democrats kicking and screaming behind. The night before last, Ted Koppel concluded with the thought: “Yes, fear is a powerful force, but here’s a lovely sign I saw the other day: ‘Pessimism,’ it read, ‘is a misuse of the imagination.’” How any arrogant liberal media gloom merchant like Koppel can say that without an ounce of introspection on their own recent career is an amazing sign of the hermetically sealed desperation inside the shrinking bubble of liberalism.

— Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and an NRO contributor.

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Media Notes: Two incidents highlight the mainstream media’s defects and biases (Weekly Standard, 050203)

BECAUSE I HAD TO FILE this column before President Bush gave his State of the Union address, I can only hope he called Democrats on their indifference to the medium- and long-term threats to Social Security. The decision by Democrats and their friends in media and blogosphere to downplay the obvious problems with the program is the fiscal equivalent of having a healthcare policy that is indifferent to teenage smoking because the consequences of such a habit are far down the road. The harsh truth is that Democrats prefer to fix the Social Security shortfall with tax hikes—which they cannot obtain from this Congress or president, so kicking the can down the road is their preference. Pretending that there is no problem buys time for the left to try and gain the congressional seats they need to hike payroll taxes.

Calling Joe Camel: There’s work for you with the left.

Even though attention will turn today to the president’s speech to the exclusion of almost everything else, let me underline two recent media events which deserve more scrutiny than they have thus far received.

The first is the genuinely scandalous assertion by CNN’s Eason Jordan, made at the World Economic Forum, that the United States military has targeted and killed a dozen journalists. The account of Jordan’s remarks -including his backpedaling and the crowd’s reactions—is available at ForumBlog. Thus far no major media outlet has demanded an accounting of Jordan, but the idea that a major figure from American media traffics

in such outlandish and outrageous slanders on the American military deserves attention and criticism, not indifference. It is no wonder that anti-American propaganda gains traction in the world when American news executives set fantasies such as this one in motion. If Jordan had no grounds for peddling this grassy-knoll garbage, he should be fired. If he did have even the flimsiest of grounds, he ought to share his evidence and let the public decide whether his judgment is as flawed as it was when he covered for Saddam all those years.

THE SECOND SUBJECT for mulling is John Kerry’s extraordinary interview with Tim Russert last Sunday. There’s a lot to absorb here, including Kerry’s assertion that he did indeed run guns and CIA men into Cambodia on secret missions—and to aid the Khmer Rouge no less!

What is really remarkable is not Kerry’s whoppers—he couldn’t have meant the Khmer Rouge, right?—or his almost certain not-to-be-fulfilled pledge to sign the form 180. It is the set of questions Tim Russert posed.

Russert is generally regarded as the toughest interview in television, and he did bleed Kerry a bit during the campaign; afterwards Kerry never again came close to Russert’s set before November 2.

But if the questions posed by Russert on January 30, 2005—on Kerry’s fantasy life in Cambodia, on the sequestered records, etc.—were legitimate and useful inquiries after the votes have been cast, why then did no one pose them to candidate Kerry when they might have made a difference in the election? The blogosphere and the center-right media were full of such demands from August 1 forward, but not a single reporter from mainstream media bothered to pose even one of the Russert questions prior to the vote.

Why was that?

If the country’s most respected television journalist asks a series of questions after the election that no one asked during the contest, doesn’t that tell us all we need to know about the mainstream media’s coverage of Kerry? Doesn’t that conclusively answer the question of whether the debate moderators really came to the stage prepared to ask the questions that mattered most?

But we knew that, didn’t we? Tim Russert just provided the proof.

The pathetic effort to avoid posing tough questions to Kerry (and by contrast the Mapes-like fanaticism against Bush) highlights the almost lunatic imbalance of ideologies within mainstream media. Tim Russert may have taken aim at Kerry’s Walter Mittyisms, but he hit his journalistic colleagues instead.

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Missing media connection (Washington Times, 050208)

To see a classic example of the divergence between mainstream and alternative media coverage, consider the portrayal of the Saudis this past week.

The “respectable” daily newspapers and news wires have reported that the Saudis, though still subject to some criticism, are finally getting serious about fighting terrorism. The blogosphere — the universe of “blogs,” short for web logs — and talk radio, however, have been buzzing over the murder of a family of Egyptian Christian immigrants in Jersey City and the report on Saudi-funded jihadist propaganda found in American mosques that might help provide some context for that horrible crime.

What most Americans will never know is that last week, the human-rights group Freedom House put out a first-of-its-kind report documenting, in excruciating detail, the poisonous venom found in Saudi-created and funded “religious” materials available at prominent mosques across the United States.

A Lexis-Nexis search uncovered just five — count ‘em, five — news stories in mainstream outlets on the Freedom House report. But the number is actually worse than it looks.

Four of the five are not traditionally part of the mainstream mafia: the Washington Times, the New York Sun (a new conservative paper), the Dallas Morning News (also right-of-center) and the Wall Street Journal (in its “B” section). Somewhat surprisingly, the fifth outlet covering the Freedom House report was The Washington Post.

During the same span, more than 50 stories were written by mainstream outlets on the hurriedly thrown-together international counterterrorism conference that just ended in Riyadh. In these articles, the Saudis were credited with calling for a new international center to combat terrorism and for achieving “substantial progress” in fighting terror.

But while the Saudis were dazzling a pliant press with their good deeds, their true nature was on full display — in mosques inside our borders.

The nonpartisan human- rights group Freedom House — incorrectly referred to by several media outlets as “conservative” — sent Muslim volunteers into more than a dozen prominent mosques across the country, and each was looking specifically for materials produced or sponsored by the Saudi government.

Since most of the documents were in Arabic, the research team spent nearly a year having two independent translators review each one. The results confirm what many Americans have long suspected, but until now did not have tangible proof that such incitement occurred in the United States.

Some highlights from the 67-page report:

m “To be dissociated from the infidels is to hate them for their religion, to leave them, never to rely on them for support, not to admire them, to be on one’s guard against them, never to imitate them and always to oppose them in every way according to Islamic law” (from material found in the Islamic Center of Washington).

• Regarding a man who has heterosexual sex outside of marriage or engages in homosexual activity: “it would be lawful for Muslims to spill his blood and to take his money.” (from Al-Farouq Masjid, Brooklyn, N.Y.)

m Regarding Jews: “They kill Muslims, imprison them, destroy their lands, tear down their mosques, burn their holy book — no, no they have no dignity” (from the Islamic Center of Greater Houston).

Muslim leaders, of course, expressed shock and awe that such materials could have been on display at mosques here in America. But according to the Freedom House report, the materials cited “remain widely available in America, and in some cases dominate mosque library shelves.”

Imams from the mosques mentioned in the Freedom House report have further added that what they preach in their holy houses in no way reflects the venom spewed by the Saudis. Maybe that’s true in some, or perhaps even many, mosques. But certainly not in all.

To the extent the national press has covered the murder of a family of Coptic Christian immigrants from Egypt — which is to say only slightly — it has often been to stress how moderate the Muslims of northern New Jersey are. Most Americans would like to think this true of all American Muslims, but at least in this region, it is a tired cliche.

The former imam at the El-Tawheed Islamic Center in Jersey City, Alaa Al-Sadawi, was convicted in 2003 of attempting to smuggle more than $650,000 to the terrorist organization Global Relief Fund in Egypt.

One of Al-Sadawi’s former spiritual followers murdered in the name of Allah, Alim Hassan, then 31, killed his pregnant wife, her mother and her sister on July 30, 2002. He reportedly stabbed the women more than 20 times each because they refused to convert to Islam. According to reports, Hassan prayed regularly at El-Tawheed.

Radical Islamists may or may not be behind the recent murder of the Armanious family — though the mainstream media’s impulse is to favor the latter scenario. But what is clear is that it would not be surprising, both in light of what’s happened in Jersey City and nationally, as shown by Freedom House.

Just don’t expect the mainstream media to make that connection.

Joel Mowbray writes occasionally for The Washington Times.

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“Rapture” Rapture (Weekly Standard, 050215)

Republicans, the environment, and the Second Coming: The origins of a liberal myth.

ONE OF LIBERALS’ chief motivations these days is fear of the religious right. Ask people on the left to explain their loathing of President Bush or the Republican party, and the answer often comes around to Jerry Falwell, evangelicals, theocracy, and so on. The left’s fear of conservative Christians is fed by a steady stream of news stories. Some are accurate: religious conservatives oppose gay marriage. Some are fanciful: Sponge Bob Square Pants has been accused of being a homosexual. And some are simply false.

The left’s most recent salvo against the religious right was launched by an obscure online environmentalist journal called Grist. In October of last year, Grist published an article titled “The Godly Must Be Crazy,” the thesis of which was that conservative Christians are deliberately bent on despoiling the environment:

Many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future. They believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. They may also believe, along with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed—even hastened—as a sign of the coming Apocalypse.

We are not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. The 231 legislators (all but five of them Republicans) who received an average 80% approval rating or higher from the leading religious-right organizations make up more than 40% of the U.S. Congress.

Grist’s fevered accusation might have languished in the less-traveled corners of the Internet had it not been taken up by a more respectable voice of the left: Bill Moyers. On December 1, 2004, the Center for Health and the Global Environment gave Moyers its “Global Environment Citizen Award.” Moyers’s speech on the occasion cribbed liberally from, and at times quoted verbatim, his “favorite online environmental journal,” Grist. He characterized the Bush administration’s environmental policies as “based on theology” and therefore “delusional.” He repeated Grist’s claim that Republicans, believing that the end of the world is at hand, are deliberately despoiling the environment.

For evidence, Moyers harkened back to the Reagan administration:

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? [Grist] reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn’t know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious.

Here, though, it was Moyers, not James Watt, who was trafficking in delusion and fantasy. For Watt said no such thing. The quote that Moyers attributed to Watt is fictitious. It originated in a 1990 book called Setting Free the Captives by an eccentric former circus ringmaster named Austin Miles. Miles didn’t claim that Watt made the bogus statement to Congress, however; that embellishment was another layer of fabrication, added by Grist and repeated by Moyers.

As it happens, however, Watt did once mention the Second Coming while testifying before Congress. In February 1981, Watt told the House Interior Committee the precise opposite of what Moyers alleged:

That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have, to be steward for the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations.

I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.

Watt’s Congressional testimony is consistent with the approach toward environmental policy that he followed throughout his career. In a letter to President Reagan written in October 1983, Watt said:

[B]ecause of our commitment to good conservation practices, we have set a remarkable record of increasing protection for the fragile and ecologically important conservation lands of the Nation. . . . In 1983 alone, we have, through trade, donations and purchase, added more park and wildlife land to the federal estate than any previous Administration added in a single year since Alaska was purchased in 1867.

Our stewardship commitment extends to preserving for future generations those historic sites and structures that pay tribute to America’s past and the principles upon which our Nation was founded.

Because of our concern for and commitment to stewardship, we have accelerated the efforts to bring about the recovery of . . . endangered plants and animals. By the end of this year, we will have approved or reviewed nearly three times as many recovery plans as were developed in the four-year period 1977 to 1980.

So Moyers didn’t just misquote Watt—he mischaracterized Watt’s entire approach to environmental issues.

THE REST of Moyers’s evidence for the Republicans’ “rapturous” approach to environmental protection was equally flimsy. He cited the popularity of the Left Behind novels, in which the Second Coming is a plot element, but offered no support for the idea—ludicrous on its face—that these works of popular fiction are somehow driving the Bush administration’s environmental policies. He referred to a speech in which Zell Miller quoted the Book of Amos:

“The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land.” He seemed to be relishing the thought.

But Moyers left out the rest of the quote: “Not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord.” And, while Moyers implied that Miller had been talking about the environment, in fact his speech was about Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.

Moyers’s own speech had been reproduced only on the Internet until January 30, 2005, when the Minneapolis Star Tribune printed it as an op-ed. After the Star Tribune article appeared, James Watt contacted Power Line, hoping that we could help him counteract Moyers’s smear. We did. Our post critiquing Moyers’s speech resulted in Moyers apologizing to Watt, and the Star Tribune running a half-hearted correction. The Washington Post, which had repeated the fake James Watt quote, ran a somewhat more gracious correction.

However, while Moyers has admitted propagating a fake quotation, he hasn’t backed off his accusation that Republicans in the grip of “rapture” are working to destroy the environment. In his apology, he repeated the substance of the slur and accused Watt of being a bad Christian. Nor have other media outlets stopped perpetuating the slur. Jon Carroll, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, repeated Moyers’s theme while acknowledging that the fictitious Watt quote was “not verifiable”:

So read the Rapture Index. Consider its implications: One of George Bush’s core constituencies is actively praying for environmental degradation. Its members are in fact praying for the end of the world, because the end of the world is the beginning of the fun part of salvation.

Let’s look at the new budget through this lens, which is (I emphasize) neither fanciful nor satirical. Money for clean water: down.

And so on. The Moyers “rapture” speech has been picked up on countless websites, where it is fast becoming a standard liberal critique of the Bush administration.

All of this has happened without a single conservative, inside or outside of government, having ever drawn any connection, express or implied, between the supposed imminence of the Second Coming and any aspect of environmental policy. Which leaves one wondering which side of the political debate has substituted faith for reason.

John Hinderaker is a contributor to the blog Power Line and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.

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Blogs sound death knell (Washington Times, 050215)

The credibility of the liberal segment of the mainstream press was dealt a mortal blow by the partisan and fabricated attack launched against President Bush by Dan Rather and CBS News. The death knell was just rung because that same liberal wing (meaning the vast majority) deliberately ignored a hugely important story that called into question their very motivations and judgment.

The story revolves around the disgusting — and some would say, treasonous — remarks made by Eason Jordan, CNN’s now former chief news executive. According to a number of sources, including Rep. Barney Frank, and Sen. Christopher Dodd, while at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Jordan let it be known that he believed it was official U.S. military policy for U.S. troops to target and kill journalists.

A jaw-dropping, defamatory accusation to be sure, and yet almost all of the mainstream media deliberately ignored the story. Fortunately, as in the Rather fiasco, numerous bloggers, cable and radio talk-show hosts and columnists, almost immediately jumped all over this grievous insult to our armed forces. So much so, that Mr. Jordan either just resigned on his own, or was more than likely pushed out by the “leadership” of CNN.

I put leadership in quotes, because the conduct of CNN during the last week of this controversy was nothing short of unethical, unprofessional and ultimately damaging to “The Most Trusted Name in News,” the tag-line that, as “journalists,” they have given to themselves. Even though CNN is at the center of the very storm their news president created, they chose to ignore the story. Why? Isn’t the Eason Jordan case “news”? Wouldn’t CNN have covered it if a competing news president had made such irresponsible and inflammatory remarks? In a New York minute.

I have a number of friends at CNN whom I know to be honest, ethical and hard working. I have to believe that they are horrified and ashamed that their own network ignored a major story about their own news president. It is for that reason that the death knell for the liberal mainstream press has been sounded. CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and the major left-leaning newspapers — such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, USA TODAY and many others — made a conscious decision to keep a major news story away from the American people.

Fortunately, the bloggers have once again pulled the curtain back to reveal that the feeble old man controlling the make-believe world of “unbiased” media is a fraud, and a dangerous one at that. The fraud in this particular case being Mr. Jordan. Least anyone forget, this is the same CNN news executive who in April 2003 admitted that he willingly withheld information about the abuses of Saddam Hussein. Mr. Jordan said that Uday Hussein, the crazed and murderous son of Saddam, had personally told him of his plans to kill his two brothers-in-law. The two men were eventually assassinated, and Mr. Jordan, the confidant of Uday, was proven correct.

With his very words, Mr. Jordan indicts himself as someone who aided and abetted the Adolph Hitler of our time. Mr. Jordan may be many things, but journalist is certainly not one of them.

The “eye” of CBS News, and the rest of the liberal mainstream press, has just been replaced by a much more powerful eye. It is the eye of the American people. Through thousands of blogs, they check, analyze and expose the misdeeds of the mainstream press.

And through this eye, we have all just witnessed the passing of the credibility of the left-leaning mainstream press. Let the new era of journalism begin.

Douglas MacKinnon served as press secretary for former Sen. Bob Dole. He is also a former White House and Pentagon official, and an author.

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Attack of the Blogs (Media Research Center, 050215)

by L. Brent Bozell III

The media buzz over the rising power of Internet weblogs (the “blogs”) reached a new crescendo when CNN’s chief of news gathering, Eason Jordan, resigned over sloppy charges he made at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

When Congressman Barney Frank suggested at the conference that journalists dying in Iraq have been “collateral damage,” Jordan objected. On the forum’s own weblog, journalist Rony Abovitz reported that Jordan “asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.”

If these charges were true, they would make Abu Ghraib’s naked pyramids pale by comparison. But they were wild and reckless accusations, which explains Jordan’s subsequent, furious backpedaling and denials. Still, it begs the question: why would a man whose profession and expertise was “news gathering” make such wild charges without evidence? Jordan quickly drew angry objections from fellow panelist Frank, as well as a condemnation from Sen. Chris Dodd. When you’re outraging Frank and Dodd, you’re really putting yourself out on an extreme limb.

But then Jordan and CNN added to the outrage by refusing any attempts to release a transcript or videotape of the off-the-record panel discussion. What a spectacle: a news outlet always championing the public’s “right to know” and crusading for “full disclosure” clamping down like the stereotypical arrogant multinational corporation they like to expose. Richard Nixon, meet Eason Jordan. Does anyone believe that if President Bush (or Vice President Cheney or Secretary Rumsfeld or fill in the blank) claimed in an off-the-record forum overseas that Ted Kennedy was a murderer, that CNN wouldn’t be in the front of the line demanding that the administration release the videotape?

The controversy was deepened by the fact that Jordan already carried heavy baggage on this issue. He admitted to the world in 2003 that CNN kept a lid on news exposing the horror of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime to maintain its access to Iraq and preserve the lives of its staffers there. CNN plays the same shut-up-for-access-to-dictators game with its Havana bureau to this day.

Controversy was also deepened when bloggers like Ed Morrissey (at his blog “Captain’s Quarters”) reported that this was not a one-time gaffe for Jordan. Morrissey said Jordan had also “accused the US military of torturing journalists (November 2004) and the Israeli military of deliberate assassinations (October 2002) at journalistic forums, all overseas and outside the reach of most American media.”

These accusations are stop-the-presses huge. So why didn’t CNN ever produce some evidence for these charges and put them on the air? And if they weren’t true, why wasn’t this man fired long ago?

Amazingly, most of the major “news” media avoided this news – especially CNN. So when Jordan resigned, it made the blogs seem so powerful that liberals started attacking them for recklessly destroying Jordan’s career, even using goofy terms like “cyber-McCarthyism” to denounce it. But what the bloggers did here was deliver information and accountability, the same things the major media purport to be providing – unless it’s one of their own in the hot seat.

But the conservative bloggers aren’t the only game on the Internet. Liberals are delighted by a resignation they pushed, from a White House reporter for a tiny outlet called Talon News who called himself “Jeff Gannon” (real name: James Guckert).

On January 26, Guckert asked President Bush an opinionated question about Sen. Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton being “divorced from reality.” With that, Media Matters for America and other leftists on the Web began frothing at the mouth over “Gannongate.” The “scandal”? Someone was allowed in the White House briefing room who asked softball questions to the president.

David Brock asked Bush press secretary Scott McClellan to revoke Guckert’s weak “day pass” credentials since Talon News was founded by a well-known conservative, making his employees “political activists,” not “actual journalists.” This is when every conservative in America started to laugh. Using this founder’s-keeper logic, Ted Turner’s CNN shouldn’t be allowed within a nautical mile of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It doesn’t take long to recall the left-wing activist journalists laying down activist harangues in the White House briefing room. Forget the “actual journalists” bashing Team Bush for ABC, CBS, and so on. Remember the insufferable Helen Thomas? Briefings have also featured liberal talk-show host Ellen Ratner, and far-left writer Russell Mokhiber, who publishes an anti-corporate newsletter called “Multinational Monitor.” Why doesn’t Brock want their credentials revoked?

Conservatives were also laughing when they remembered the Clinton years. If asking a softball to the president was an offense that should get your press credentials pulled, the White House briefing room in the Clinton years would have been empty.

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Gannons to the Left of Me: Softball reporter questions were routine in the Clinton White House (National Review Online, 050216)

Stunned by the liberal mini-tempest over Talon News reporter “Jeff Gannon” (real name: James Guckert) asking a softball question to President Bush on January 26, leaders of the White House Correspondents Association met with Bush press spokesman Scott McClellan Tuesday to discuss tightening up the press-credentialing process.

Liberal media elitists say they want only “real” journalists, not “partisan operatives,” to be allowed in the White House briefing room. But what they really might wind up accomplishing with their “Gannongate” pounding was the silencing of rare right-leaning voice in the White House press corps. To them, you can only be “authentic” by pounding the president from the left.

At the Columbia Journalism Review blog, Brian Montopoli claims “this isn’t a media bias issue, no matter how hard you spin it...Real journalists, the ones who belong in press conferences, know that access to a president is a rare gift, and they know enough not to squander it. Gannon threw away his opportunity in favor of self-aggrandizing partisan spectacle. He put himself and his agenda ahead of the public good, and he did it in a manner so egregious that he left little doubt of his intentions. If both sides of the debate, blinded by partisan zeal, don’t realize that’s the real reason he had to go, they’ve missed the point.”

Montopoli cannot be serious. If anyone who asked softball questions at the White House “had to go,” the White House briefing room would have almost emptied out in the Clinton years. The problem for Montopoli and other liberals is they seem to think that the need for an adversarial press emerged in 2001, when President Bush was first inaugurated. If we travel back to the Clinton era, it’s not hard to discover a whole chorus of White House reporters who, to use Montopoli’s words, squandered their access to Clinton with helpful softball questions, who put his agenda ahead of the public good and made a partisan spectacle of themselves in front of a large number of Americans who wanted the press to act as a watchdog of President Clinton.

Review the press conference transcript from March 19, 1999 — President Clinton’s first solo press conference in almost a year (blame the Lewinsky scandal) and his first meeting with the press since the impeachment process crumbled in the Senate, and since Juanita Broaddrick charged on the February 24 edition of NBC’s Dateline that Clinton had raped her in 1978.

After some questions about Kosovo and Chinese espionage came what liberals might call Gannon #1, Wolf Blitzer of CNN: “Mr. President, there’s been a lot of people in New York state who’ve spoken with your wife, who seem to be pretty much convinced she wants to run for the Senate seat next year. A, how do you feel about that? Do you think she would be a good senator? And as part of a broader question involving what has happened over the past year, how are the two of you doing in trying to strengthen your relationship, given everything you and she have been through over this past year?” Clinton replied: “Well, on the second question, I think we’re — we’re working hard. We love each other very much, and we’re working on it. On the first question, I don’t have any doubt that she would be a magnificent senator.” That might be a question people would like to hear answered, but it definitely placed the Clintons’ agenda ahead of the public’s agenda.

After that came Gannon #2, batty Sarah McClendon, once the classic poster girl for the loose credentialing process at the White House. Reporters laughed when Clinton went beyond the front row to pick her as she yelled to get his attention. Standing to show her snappy navy-blue beret, McClendon asked: “Sir, will you tell us why you think the people have been so mean to you? Is it a conspiracy? Is it a plan to treat you worse than they treated Abe Lincoln?” That allowed Clinton to make jokes. I don’t remember the Columbia Journalism Review huffing that she “had to go” and her hard pass should be revoked.

Then, the seventh reporter called on, ABC’s Sam Donaldson, finally asked about Broaddrick’s charge of rape, which Clinton circumnavigated and declined to deny. Donaldson followed up: “Can you not simply deny it, sir?” Clinton insisted: “There’s been a — a statement made by my — my attorney. He speaks for me, and I think he spoke quite clearly. Go ahead, Scott.” Scott Pelley of CBS changed the subject back to Kosovo. Using the usual liberal complaint that a Gannon lets down the public when he fails to follow up on a tough question that has not been answered, Pelley and everyone after him failed that test on that day in 1999.

After Pelley came Gannon #3, John F. (for Fawning?) Harris of the Washington Post: “Sir, George Stephanopoulos has written a book that contain — contains some tough and fairly personal criticism of you. Earlier, Dick Morris had written a somewhat similar book. How much pain do these judgments by former aides cause you? And do you consider it a betrayal for people to write books on the history of your administration while you’re still in office?” See how these reporters feel Clinton’s pain? Tightening the press credentials won’t solve the problem of long-established media outlets acting like tender psychoanalysts for liberal presidents.

Then came Gannon #4, Kenneth Walsh of U.S. News & World Report, who followed up on Clinton’s feelings and reflections on his pain: “I understand that you don’t want to speculate about what your opponents might do now, after the impeachment struggle is over, but I wonder what your feelings are, after some period of reflection, on the impeachment process, the — how you were treated and if you feel resentment, relief, and how you think people will deal with this and see it 10 or 20 years from now?” To Walsh, the only question was about Clinton’s opponents and whether the president resented them. He couldn’t even ask whether Clinton considered his presidency or his legacy irreparably damaged by the impeachment.

Gannon #5 was National Public Radio’s Mara Liasson: “Mr. President, your vice president has recently been ridiculed for claiming that he invented the Internet and spent his boyhood plowing steep hillsides in Tennessee. I’m wondering what you think of those claims and what advice you’d give him about how to brag on himself without getting in so much trouble.” This allowed Clinton to say with a smile: “Well, you know, he came a lot closer to inventing the Internet than I did.” He then went into an extended defense of Al Gore’s genuineness.

That’s just one press conference. We could lengthen this sorry list considerably with other examples on other dates. But by the current standards of liberal media critics, at the very least CNN, the Washington Post, U.S. News, and NPR didn’t have “actual journalists” at the White House. The man named “Gannon” is an embarrassment, but that’s no reason to shut out opinion journalists — conservative journalists (even partisans) have every bit as much right to sit in those chairs and ask their own questions as the everyday liberal partisans do.

— Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and an NRO contributor.

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On the take, out of sight (Washington Times, 050216)

There seems to be an epidemic of conservative columnists being paid by the Bush administration to publicize its initiatives “ first Armstrong Williams, then Maggie Gallagher, now Michael McManus.

The facts of these cases are different, but all have been lumped together in media reports. The implication is that conservative columnists are “on the take.” The goal is to simultaneously undermine the Bush administration, its initiatives and the small band of conservatives who appear in the mainstream media.

I suppose I should start with myself. Back in the early 1980s, I did some consulting work for the Agency for International Development to write a study of taxation in developing countries. I worked on the White House staff in the late 1980s and at the Treasury Department during the administration of George H.W. Bush. Since then, I have not gotten a government check for anything except the occasional tax refund.

In short, since I began my column in 1995, I have done no consulting work for the government, either in terms of general public relations, as in the case of Mr. Williams, or for specific products, as with Mrs. Gallagher and Mr. McManus.

However, for full disclosure, I have had a couple of lunches in the White House Mess, courtesy of those with Mess privileges.

Having said that, there is a larger question. Is there any reason to believe Mr. Williams, Mrs. Gallagher or Mr. McManus changed their positions in some way favorable to the administration because of whatever largess they received? The answer, clearly, is no. They supported the initiatives they were paid to work on long before receiving any sort of government contract. And it is highly unlikely they took these positions in the hopes of receiving such contracts, since in each case their positions long predate election of President George W. Bush.

If one could show some evidence of a change in opinion or emphasis before and after receipt of the contract, perhaps there would be a case for dismissal from the community of columnists. But there is no evidence of that. It is clear that in each case, the contract was given precisely because the columnist already supported Mr. Bush’s policies.

The real question is not why a columnist would take money to support what he or she already supported, but why the administration would risk burning one of its very few journalistic supporters? Frankly, the people that should be fired are not the columnists but those who gave them the contracts. It was extraordinarily bad judgment that was certain to become public at some point, thereby embarrassing not only the contract recipients but the president himself.

This being said, there is a heavy element of double standards at work here. The Clinton administration actually put “journalists” like Sid Blumenthal and David Gergen on the White House payroll, mainly to defend everything it did among their former colleagues. No one said this was unethical, even though Mr. Blumenthal virtually campaigned for a White House job by writing fawning praises of Bill Clinton disguised as news reports for his previous employers.

But mainstream journalists who routinely speak before corporations, trade associations and interest groups hoping to influence news coverage practice the greatest double standard. Virtually every major television anchor is listed with one or more speakers’ bureaus, which charge tens of thousands of dollars per appearance. But of course, this also gives business executives plenty of opportunity to explain why their industry or their products are really good for the American people.

In other cases, journalists work for the very businesses they report on. Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post’s media reporter, has a show on CNN. Critics like Slate’s Mickey Kaus have charged that this consistently causes Mr. Kurtz to underplay negative news relating to CNN.

Yet journalists are still quick to assume every politician who takes a $1,000 campaign contribution from a lobbyist has been bought, while self-righteously proclaiming that $100,000 speaking fees cannot buy them. At least the officials have to disclose it, while no one knows how much the journalists make or whom they have been bought by “ sorry, I mean by whom they were paid to speak. If what the journalists are doing is justifiable, why don’t they give government officials the same consideration? The answer is pure hypocrisy, nothing more.

This is not meant as a defense of conservative columnists who got government contracts. They should have enough sense to know there is a double standard and avoid the appearance of impropriety. But mainstream journalists, in effect selling themselves to the biggest corporate bidder, are a much greater scandal that will be ignored because so many are on the take.

Bruce Bartlett is senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis and a nationally syndicated columnist.

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Eason’s Fable (Weekly Standard, 050217)

Bloggers, the old media, and the rise and fall of CNN’s Eason Jordan.

FOR TWO WEEKS Eason Jordan has been engulfed in a blogswarm. During remarks at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the now-former CNN executive accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq for murder. The unleashed fury of the blogosphere eventually overcame a media blackout to force Jordan from his job, discredit the American media, and start a debate on the nature of blogging that derived directly from the mainstream media’s attempt to cast the entire effort as a partisan witch hunt.

But the media has no one but itself to blame—as it stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existence of the controversy, with major national outlets making Eason Jordan’s resignation their very first report of the story. Even worse, the media had the story first, and buried it.

The story started slowly, with a lone entry on the official WEF weblog, Forumblog.com, by Rony Arbovitz on January 28. Rony wrote:

During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.

Rony, an eyewitness to the event, started the ball rolling, but it was slow to pick up speed. Two media outlets covered the story: the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. The Journal’s

Bret Stephens, who also attended the forum, noted the “kerfuffle” (as the paper’s editors have since labeled it) in an e-mailed subscription newsletter on January 28, although not in their print version and not on their web archives. Fox’s Brit Hume included it on his Grapevine segment and blog on Monday, January 31, but no one at Fox News wrote a report for their news service or website.

On Tuesday, February 1, Hugh Hewitt reported Arbovitz’ post on his nationally-syndicated radio show. Within 24 hours, Hewitt had touched off a blogswarm which produced the following revelations about Jordan:

* A former CNN reporter at the WEF forum, Rebecca MacKinnon, came forward to verify Arbovitz’ account on her own blog.

* CNN had never reported on any allegations of deliberate targeting of journalists by American forces.

* A first-person account surfaced of Jordan forcing a CNN reporter to read a prepared statement written by the Iraqi Information Ministry while representing it as a straightforward news piece by CNN in 1993.

* There were two other instances of Jordan alleging the targeting of journalists for death by unspecified military forces, from 1993 (Somalia) and 2002 (Afghanistan).

* Jordan had also accused the Israeli military of deliberately targeting journalists for death in October 2002 during a News Xchange Forum appearance overseas. He referenced the wounding of an unnamed CNN reporter in the occupied territories. It seemed more likely, however, that the reporter, Ben Wedeman, had inadvertently gotten caught in a crossfire between Israeli and Palestinian forces in October 2000 when he was shot—even CNN’s producer stated on air that no one could tell who shot whom.

* Jordan had made similar allegations to the ones he made at Davos less than three months earlier at a News Xchange forum in Portugal, and on the record. The British newspaper the Guardian reported that Jordan told the global news executives assembled there that “Actions speak louder than words. The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the US military, and according to reports I believe to be true journalists have been arrested and tortured by US forces.”

These instances established a pattern of unsubstantiated allegations by the man in charge of news operations at CNN. How did the mainstream media react? National media outlets refused to address the story—except for CNN, which reacted twice, neither on air nor on its website.

ON FEBRUARY 2, CNN sent the following statement to those who had emailed them, as well as some bloggers who hadn’t emailed them at all:

Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan’s remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions. Mr. Jordan was responding to an assertion by Cong. Frank that all 63 journalist victims had been the result of “collateral damage.”

When that statement failed to satisfy the bloggers, Jordan himself released a statement through Carol Platt Liebau, a blogger and journalist who contacted Jordan through intermediaries. His statement echoed the CNN email, with a non-apology for a lack of clarity.

No other national news outlet picked up the story on February 2. Nor did any address the controversy on February 3, when THE DAILY STANDARD published a column by Hugh Hewitt on the Jordan issue. On February 4, only the Washington Times reported the story. In comparison, on February 4, nearly every major media organization reported on remarks made by Lt. General James Mattis, who said he enjoyed killing terrorists. On February 5, the Toledo Blade ran a column by Jack Kelly which referenced the controversy. The next day, the Riverside Press-Enterprise issued an unsigned editorial castigating CNN and Eason Jordan for the remarks. By Monday, February 7, no other national news outlet had touched the story.

Events picked up speed at that point. Michelle Malkin interviewed Senator Chris Dodd, Rep. Barney Frank, and David Gergen, all of whom attended the Davos forum and all of whom confirmed the accounts of Arbovitz and MacKinnon. Several bloggers formed a partnership to pool their resources and created the blog Easongate.

Finally, on February 8, Howard Kurtz addressed the Eason Jordan controversy outside of the op-ed section in the Washington Post. Kurtz reported on the Davos remarks, but failed to report any of the other statements by Jordan which the blogswarm had unearthed. The Boston Globe did much the same with their coverage that day.

Only the New York Sun, alone and almost unnoticed, published a comprehensive news story outlining most of the known issues with Jordan.

Some of the cable news shows did better. On February 9, Brit Hume held a short prime-time debate about the WEF’s refusal to release the videotape of Jordan’s comments. Joe Scarborough called for Jordan’s dismissal if he and CNN failed to release the videotape or back up Jordan’s claims with evidence.

On Thursday, February 10, two national news organizations finally covered the story, but only to declare it overblown. The New York Times posted a wire-service story late in the evening to its Thursday edition, while the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Bret Stephens. While he acknowledged that Jordan had used “defamatory innuendo,” Stephens wound up decrying the bloggers:

There is an Easongate.com Web site, on which more than 1,000 petitioners demand that Mr. Jordan release a transcript of his remarks—made recently in Davos—by Feb. 15 or, in the manner of Saddam Hussein, face serious consequences. Sean Hannity and the usual Internet suspects have all weighed in. So has Michelle Malkin, who sits suspended somewhere between meltdown and release.

There’s a reason the hounds are baying. Already they have feasted on the juicy entrails of Dan Rather. Mr. Jordan, whose previous offenses (other than the general tenor of CNN coverage) include a New York Times op-ed explaining why access is a more important news value than truth, was bound to be their next target. And if Mr. Jordan has now made a defamatory and unsubstantiated allegation against U.S. forces, well then . . . open the gates.

The strange and unexpected turn from the Journal signaled what should have been the end of the story, at least as far as the national media were concerned. The controversy seemed about to fade off the media’s radar screens altogether—until Jordan suddenly resigned his position at CNN around 6:00 p.m. on Friday, February 11.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT sent the national media into a scramble. Excepting the Washington Post and the New York Times, almost no national news outlet had ever covered the story, which put them in the uncomfortable position of announcing the resignation of a major news executive over a two-week-old scandal about which they had not bothered to report. The broadcast networks made their very first mention of Eason Jordan on their news shows, and used the older AP report for their websites.

Howard Kurtz reported on the resignation for the Post:

Gergen said last night that Jordan’s resignation was “really sad” since he had quickly backed off his original comments. “This is too high a price to pay for someone who has given so much of himself over 20 years. And he’s brought down over a single mistake because people beat up on him in the blogosphere? They went after him because he is a symbol of a network seen as too liberal by some. They saw blood in the water.”

Like others, Kurtz failed to mention any of Jordan’s other problems that bloggers had brought to light. That lesson did not pass unnoticed by the rest of the national media. When the Los Angeles Times reported on Jordan to its readers on Saturday (for the first time), it also eliminated any reference to the other allegations he had made over the years. On Monday, the New York Times ran a background piece which focused on the dynamics of the blogswarm. By the time the weekend news cycles finished, the story was no longer about Jordan’s unsubstantiated accusations against the U.S. military, but about out-of-control, bloodthirsty citizen-journalists.

Again, the Wall Street Journal led the way, this time with an unsigned editorial:

By now, everyone on the Good Ship Earth knows that this particular story ended Friday with Mr. Jordan’s abrupt resignation from CNN. This has certain pundits chirping delightedly. It has been a particular satisfaction to the right wing of the so-called “blogosphere,” the community of writers on the Web that has pushed the Eason story relentlessly and sees it as the natural sequel to the Dan Rather fiasco of last year. . . .

[I]t does not speak well of CNN that it apparently allowed itself to be stampeded by this Internet and talk-show crew. Of course the network must be responsive to its audience and ratings. But it has other obligations, too, chief among them to show the good judgment and sense of proportion that distinguishes professional journalism from the enthusiasms and vendettas of amateurs.

No doubt this point of view will get us described as part of the “mainstream media.” But we’ll take that as a compliment since we’ve long believed that these columns do in fact represent the American mainstream. We hope readers buy our newspaper because we make grown-up decisions about what is newsworthy, and what isn’t.

It was on odd sentiment—the unqualified support of Big Media—coming from an editorial board which routinely rejects the same kinds of argument in favor of big government. Then again, nobody likes getting scooped, particularly by pajama-clad geeks with keyboards on their laps and bloodlust in their hearts.

Edward Morrissey runs the blog Captain’s Quarters.

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Bill Maher: Christians have neurological disorder (WorldNetDaily, 050218)

Says parents ‘drill’ religion into kids’ heads using biblical ‘fairy tales’

Television personality Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” says Christians and others who are religious suffer from a neurological disorder that “stops people from thinking.”

Appearing as a guest on MSNBC’s “Scarborough County” this week, Maher told host Joe Scarborough:

“We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think that religion stops people from thinking. I think it justifies crazies. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder. If you look at it logically, it’s something that was drilled into your head when you were a small child. It certainly was drilled into mine at that age. And you really can’t be responsible when you are a kid for what adults put into your head.”

The former host of “Politically Incorrect” said the lack of enlightenment of so many Americans means the nation actually has more in common with its enemies than one might think.

Said Maher: “When you look at beliefs in such things as, do you go to heaven, is there a devil, we have more in common with Turkey and Iran and Syria than we do with European nations and Canada and nations that, yes, I would consider more enlightened than us.”

Maher explained that he was not singling out evangelicals, but was targeting all “religious” people.

“I think the vote in Missouri [rejecting same-sex marriage] and a lot of other states is because people are religious,” Maher said. “They don’t have to be evangelical, but they’re religious. They believe in religion, which as – I think it was Jesse Ventura who had that quote about religion is a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.”

The television host told Scarborough he was convinced evangelicals’ influence will wane.

Said Maher: “When people say to me, ‘You hate America,’ I don’t hate America. I love America. I am just embarrassed that it has been taken over by people like evangelicals, by people who do not believe in science and rationality. It is the 21st century. And I will tell you, my friend. The future does not belong to the evangelicals. The future does not belong to religion.”

Later in the interview, Maher returned to the childhood-religion theme, comparing fairy tales to Bible stories:

“When you were a kid and they were telling you whatever you believe in religion, do you think if they had switched the fairy tales that they read to you in bed with the Bible, you would know the difference?

“Do you think if it was the fairy tale about a man who lived inside of a whale and it was religion that Jack built a beanstalk today, you would know the difference? Why do you believe in one fairy tale and not the other? Just because adults told you it was true and they scared you into believing it, at pain of death, at pain of burning in hell.”

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Tainted media (townhall.com, 050218)

Thomas Sowell

The recent resignation of CNN’s news director, Eason Jordan, after his outrageous remarks about our military at an international forum were reported on the Internet, is only the latest in a series of media scandals, of which Dan Rather’s forged documents were just one. Media bias does not consist in having liberal or conservative opinions but in how you do your job — or don’t do it.

One document whose authenticity is not likely to be questioned by the mainstream media is the honorable discharge on Senator John Kerry’s web site. Yet who in the major media has investigated why that honorable discharge is dated during the Carter administration, when Kerry’s military service ended years earlier?

This is the same media that spent months investigating George W. Bush’s military record and, even after key allegations were revealed to be based on forgeries, continued publicizing rumors and innuendoes. They didn’t stop even after the President signed Form 180, opening all his military records to the public.

But who in the major media has asked why John Kerry would need to be issued an honorable discharge during the Carter administration, years after leaving the navy, unless his original discharge was less than honorable?

One of Jimmy Carter’s first acts as President was to issue an order granting amnesties to draft dodgers who had fled the country during the Vietnam war and also allowing an upgrading of military discharges that had been less than honorable.

There is more to this than simply a strange date on an honorable discharge. The covering memo refers to U.S. Code Title 10, sections 1162 and 1163. Anyone who bothers to read those sections will discover that they are about unusual circumstances for issuing discharges from the military services.

Senator Kerry never signed Form 180 to make all his military records public, as President Bush had done — and the media didn’t press him to do so. Even after Kerry’s widely publicized role as a war hero was challenged by numerous men who had served with him in Vietnam, the media remained totally uninterested in checking out his record.

This gross double standard is the real media scandal, even more than the forged documents, which were after all the responsibility of just one network and one program.

Maybe there is a perfectly innocent explanation for Senator Kerry’s late-dated honorable discharge during the Carter administration. But no explanation has been asked or given, even though there may also be a not so innocent explanation.

What is well known is that, during the Vietnam war, John Kerry went to Paris on his own and engaged in discussions or negotiations with representatives of the country with whom we were at war, even though he was still an officer in the naval reserve.

That raises legal questions about unauthorized personal diplomacy which naval authorities may not have overlooked as generously as the media did, and which could have affected the kind of discharge that Kerry received.

One of the few people in the media who has shown any interest at all in Kerry’s military records has been Tim Russert of “Meet the Press.” He asked Senator Kerry on April 18, 2004 if he would “make all your records public.” Kerry indicated that his records were already public, that people “can come and see them” at his headquarters.

But recently, on January 30, 2005, when Tim Russert again raised that question and asked “Would you sign Form 180?” — the form that Bush had signed to open all his military records — Kerry started off on a tangent before Russert interrupted him to repeat that same question. This time Kerry said, “Yes, I will.”

He will? He had already done so last year, if you believe what he said then. But will the media call him on it if he doesn’t follow through now? Don’t bet on it.

This is not about the past or ultimately even about Kerry or Bush. It is about the future of this country. A gullible public learning only what is filtered to them by a biased media is not a hopeful sign for the future of a democracy.

Some of the public have begun to wake up but more need to do so. Many in the media also need to wake up to what they are doing, or failing to do, when their politics taints their work.

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Egregious leftism (townhall.com, 050217)

Ross Mackenzie

When things began to get really bad, a group called the Media Research Center (MRC) designated itself monitor of the egregious leftism loping around in the mainstream press, mostly on television. Most of the guilty insist they are mere mainstreamers, centrists (“nobody here but us moderates”) - yet surely they know better. They betray themselves when they open their mouths.

(Disclaimer: For several years I served on the MRC panel selecting the year’s most egregious quotations, a role filled more recently - as in December - by a staff colleague.)

So before 2005 tracks too far, herewith a sampler of 2004 remarks by some of the nation’s loftiest pressies. For obvious reasons, many of the quotes (the MRC terms them “Notable Quotables”) reflect a singular bias. . .

NBC’s Tom Brokaw, Aug. 31 during the Republican convention, with Sen. Susan Collins on his MSNBC show “Brokaw in New York”:

You and Olympia Snowe, the other senator from Maine, are known as moderate women. You have no place in this convention. The (Republican Party) platform does not seem to speak to a lot of women in this country. It’s anti-abortion, it does not expand stem cell research, and on other social issues in which women have some interest - for example, gay unions - is formally opposed to that. Do you think that this platform and this party is doing enough to reach out to moderate women across the country?

Former CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, Oct. 29, on CNN’s “Larry King Live”:

I have a feeling that (Osama bin Laden’s new videotape) could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I’m a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, that he probably set up bin Laden to this thing. The advantage to the Republican side is to get rid of - as a principal subject of the campaign right now - get rid of the whole problem of the al-Qaqaa dump, explosive dump. Right now that, the last couple of days, has I think upset the Republican campaign.

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales in a Jan. 21 Style section review of President Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address:

The best reaction shots were those of Ted Kennedy, whose stature seems to grow right along with his nose year after year after year. Kennedy has now reached a grand moment in the life of a senator; he looks like Hollywood itself cast him in the role. Seriously . . . Kennedy looked great, like he was ready to take his place next to Jefferson on Mount Rushmore. He gives off the kind of venerable vibes that some of us got from an Everett Dirksen way back when.

Newsweek Managing Editor Jon Meacham during pre-debate coverage on MSNBC, Sept. 30:

(John Kerry) also could make a virtue, it seems to me, of the so-called flip-flopping. The greatest flip-flop in American history is Lincoln, (who) in his first Inaugural was not for emancipation and then two years later he was. Is that statesmanship or is that a flip-flop?

Former “World News Tonight/Sunday” anchor Carole Simpson, at a Nov. 8 C-SPAN-covered National Press Club forum, on her nationwide travels for ABC News talking to high-schoolers about how to interpret the news:

When you tell me, ‘Let the states decide,’ that scares me - OK? I’ve got a little map here of (the) pre-Civil War (United States), free versus slave states. I wish you could see it in color and large. But if you look at it, the red states are all down in the South, and you have the Nebraska Territories, the New Mexico Territories, and the Kansas Territories. But the Pacific Northwest and California were not slave states. The Northeast was not. It looks like the (Electoral College) map of 2004.

ABC’s Peter Jennings on Dec. 14, 2003 - the day of the announcement of the capture of Saddam Hussein (Jennings said this following the MRC’s compilation for 2003):

There’s not a good deal for Iraqis to be happy about at the moment. Life is still very chaotic, beset by violence in many cases, huge shortages. In some respects, Iraqis keep telling us, life is not as stable for them as it was when Saddam Hussein was in power.

CBS anchor Dan Rather, in a teaser to a report on the “CBS Evening News” on March 31 - the day four American civilians were killed and mutilated in Fallujah:

What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy it may be, for some, the only job they can find.

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan, on June 10 - five days after the death of Ronald Reagan:

Before Reagan, people sleeping in the street were so rare that, outside of skid rows, they were almost a curiosity. After eight years of Reaganomics - and the slashes in low-income housing and social welfare programs that went along with it - they were seemingly everywhere. And America had a new household term: ‘the homeless.’

CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Morley Safer, recalling Reagan June 14 on CNN’s “Larry King Live”:

I don’t think history has any reason to be kind to him.

U.S. News & World Report Editor-at-Large David Gergen during MSNBC’s live coverage following Georgia Democratic Senator Zell Miller’s speech to the Republican Convention, Sept. 2:

Miller’s speech was a speech of hate, it was a speech of venom. This is a man who started his political career with Lester Maddox and last night he imitated Lester Maddox. Lester Maddox, as we all know, was a segregationist, but he was a man of hate. Zell Miller is not a segregationist, not that at all. . . . (But) I grew up in the South. I’ve seen the face of anger. I’ve seen the face of hatred. . . . There are lines in politics and that speech went over the line.

Bill Moyers, March 26, on his PBS show “Now”:

Even if Mr. Bush wins re-election this November, he, too, will eventually be dragged down by the powerful undertow that inevitably accompanies public deception. The public will grow intolerant of partisan predators and crony capitalists indulging in a frenzy of feeding at the troughs in Baghdad and Washington. And there will come a time when the president will have no one to rely on except his most rabid allies in the right-wing media. He will discover too late that you cannot win the hearts and minds of the public at large in a nation polarized and pulverized by endless propaganda in defiance of reality.

NBC White House Reporter David Gregory, Sept. 1 on MSNBC, prior to Vice President Cheney’s address to the Republican Convention:

One of the obstacles for Dick Cheney tonight is the fact that he has become a dark figure. . . . There are those who believe that Dick Cheney has led this administration and this president down a path of recklessness, that maybe his approach, his dark approach to this constant battle against another civilization, is actually the wrong approach for ultimately keeping America safe.

Dan Rather to John Kerry, July 22, on the “CBS Evening News”:

Speaking of angry, have you ever had any anger about President Bush - who spent his time during the Vietnam War in the National Guard - running, in effect, a campaign that does its best to diminish your service in Vietnam? You have to be at least irritated by that - or have you been?

CNN’s Aaron Brown, Nov. 10, on “NewsNight” as he displayed a Stars and Stripes front-page photograph of U.S. troops in Iraq receiving medals:

Look at this picture here, if you can, (and the headline): ‘Troops: Bravery Honored in Iraq.’ These are all Purple Heart winners. Someday, one of them will run for president and someone will say they didn’t earn the Purple Heart. Welcome to America.

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CNN tanking as Fox News surges (WorldNetDaily, 050303)

Double-digit declines reported for Larry King, Wolf Blitzer

The ratings are in for February, and the numbers are not good for CNN which saw steep losses in its viewership, while the Fox News Channel continued its rise.

According to Nielsen Media Research, CNN’s ratings fell by 21% last month in primetime, and 16% overall, reports Variety.

Primetime big-name shows such as “Larry King Live,” “Wolf Blitzer Reports,” “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” “Paula Zahn Now” and “Newsnight With Aaron Brown” all experienced double-digit declines.

Only “Anderson Cooper 360” had a slight increase of 2%.

During President Bush’s State of the Union Address, CNN was soundly beaten by Fox, and even lost the key 25-54 demographic to third-place MSNBC.

In contrast, Fox News was the only news network on cable to see viewership increases in February, as it outpaced all other cable news companies combined for the sixth straight month.

“FNC averaged 1.57 million viewers in primetime, up 18% from the same period last year, while CNN fell 21% to 637,000 viewers from the same time period,” Variety stated.

The growth appeared across the board at Fox News:

# “On the Record With Greta Van Susteren” up 37%;

# “Special Report With Brit Hume” up 20%;

# “Hannity & Colmes” up 19%;

# and “The O’Reilly Factor,” up 9%.

Variety says the dismal performance by CNN’s new president Jonathan Klein has led some at Fox to refer to him as “Jon De-cline.”

CNN wasn’t the only network to plunge last month. MSNBC dropped 15% overall and 14% in primetime. CNBC fell 23% overall and 42% in primetime.

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Is the liberal media dead? (townhall.com, 050303)

Brent Bozell

Have our partisan liberal media evaporated? Are we now in an era when President Bush has as much control of Washington’s journalism output as Vladimir Putin’s defenders assert he does? (The Moscow line, if you haven’t heard, is that Bush ordered the firing of Dan Rather.) These questions are overwrought and self-evidently silly, and yet, the Left is on Orange Alert over its slipping control of the public agenda.

Witness the still-ongoing attempts to inflate the teeny-weeny scandal over James Guckert (a.k.a. “Jeff Gannon”), the former White House reporter and alleged male escort. Here we have the supposedly momentous scandal of a man who was allowed to ask a conservative question to Scott McClellan in the 43rd minute of a 45-minute White House briefing nobody sees on cable news anymore.

As for anyone who thinks it’s a scandal that White House security would let an alleged sex worker into the White House, they ought to remember that these same liberal Guckert-obsessers found no scandal in the Clinton years when the White House was letting in Chinese arms merchants and Miami cocaine dealers for fundraisers — not to mention the intern who was treated like a sex worker.

While many media outlets have largely ignored the left-wing Internet frenzy over “Gannongate,” NBC and MSNBC have not. NBC’s Campbell Brown scored a Guckert interview on the Feb. 24 “Today” show, asking the big question: “You don’t deny you were writing news with a perspective, with a partisan perspective?” They apparently never do that at NBC. When Tom Brokaw raved about Bill Clinton being “Elvis” at the Democratic convention and then described the Republican convention as a hard-right scam, a “con game,” that, apparently, was textbook fairness and balance.

The Guckert outrage is much stranger when it’s shoveled nightly by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC (unofficial motto: “The Network No One Watches”). Not a night has passed by that Keith hasn’t found a new way to inject Guckert into his snarky souffle. It’s a bit difficult to imagine where Olbermann gets the audacity to prance and fuss about “fake reporters,” considering his credentials as an often-fired sportscaster who moonlighted as a pitchman for Boston Chicken. That’s not even addressing the journalistic seriousness of his MSNBC showcase, where he routinely tackles the weighty topics like who’s attending the wedding of Prince Charles and the leaking of Paris Hilton’s cell phone number.

But Olbermann’s show does reflect the liberal media panic that they’re no longer succeeding in telling Americans what they will think and when they will think it. In his interview on MSNBC, liberal Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank agreed with Olbermann as he panicked with crime-syndicate overtones that conservatives were now conducting “the journalistic equivalent of money laundering.” Milbank added to the supposedly criminal mix that Rush Limbaugh was on a tour of Afghanistan (on his own dime, by the way) and syndicated radio star Laura Ingraham had attended a rally last year for John Thune’s successful Senate bid against Tom Daschle.

Forget for a moment that Rush and Laura don’t claim to be “journalists.” They’re critics and analysts of the news. Forget that there’s nothing equivalent to “money laundering” in touring Afghanistan or pumping up a Republican crowd in South Dakota. The bottom line in all this panic is that liberals can’t stand the fact that conservatives can win friends and influence people. They will not only disparage the conservative media, but their audience as well.

When Ingraham brought Milbank on her radio show to defend himself, he explained that he would guess that her media-hating listeners went only to her show for their “news.” Wrong. In 1996, liberal professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson was ignored by the liberal media when she found:

Political talk radio listeners are more likely than non-listeners to consume all news media other than TV news, to be more knowledgeable, and to be involved in political activities. This is true regardless of the ideology of the hosts of the programs to which they listen.

“Gannongate” is merely a symptom of a much larger disease. Liberals are frantically clucking that people are now going to go looking only for “news” that suits their ideology. That was fine with them when the liberals dominated. But now the only ideology they want drained out of the media is conservatism. Today, they’ve aimed to ridicule Talon News out of the news business. Soon other conservative news Web sites won’t be classified by liberals as “news” outlets anymore, and then the Washington Times isn’t “news” anymore, and they already treat Fox News like it’s not a news channel.

Their goal is nothing less than to insist that conservatives are constitutionally incapable of creating a product called “the news.” To them, only the trumped-up liberal TV dinners of their ideology deserve to be described as “the news.”

Brent Bozell is President of Media Research Center, a Townhall.com member group.

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Poisoned culture afflicting CBS? (Washington Times, 050123)

CBS Chairman Les Moonves stated the obvious last Monday when he said, “This is a rude awakening for CBS News, and the CBS News culture has to change.”

However, Mr. Moonves’ solution to delete four key news department employees did not include CBS News President Andrew Heyward. Perhaps it should have, if Mr. Moonves genuinely believes the newsroom’s customs must change.

An independent panel’s report condemning an inaccurate “60 Minutes Wednesday” segment about President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service led to dismissal of segment producer Mary Mapes; the show’s executive producer, Josh Howard; Mr. Howard’s deputy, Mary Murphy; and a news division senior vice president, Betsy West. All were directly involved in producing the deeply flawed piece.

But Mr. Heyward not only was aware of the “culture” that bred the Bush/TexANG debacle, which was underpinned by falsified documents claiming the president’s military record was “sugarcoated” — he enabled such an environment to exist. The proof is in his actions before and after the Sept. 8, 2004, airing of the report, as well as in his history of defending CBS News against outside criticism.

The first indication of Mr. Heyward’s culpability showed up on Sept. 7, when he asked Ms. West “to become more deeply involved,” according to the independent panel’s report. Former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former Associated Press Chief Executive Louis Boccardi, the report’s co-authors, said the unusual move with Miss West “evidenced [Mr. Heyward’s] recognition that this was an important and potentially controversial story.”

Further confirmation Mr. Heyward knew what was to come was revealed in an e-mail to Miss West and Mr. Howard that day, cautioning the two not to be “stampede•” and that “we’re going to have to defend every syllable of this one.” What does this imply? That Mr. Heyward was mindful a “stampede” from Miss Mapes was a possibility, if not a certainty.

Mr. Heyward also appeared to distinguish this story from others, seemingly placing a higher threshold of veracity upon it (“every syllable”). Why?

Was Miss Mapes a purveyor of earlier questionable stories CBS didn’t feel compelled to defend as vigorously? Or did Mr. Heyward realize immediately he was dealing with shaky evidence?

The latter is probably the case. According to the panel report, “West typically did not get involved in the vetting process until the story was ready for a final screening.” On this story, Mr. Heyward required her to participate throughout the last two days of the process, vetting scripts and screenings.

Even though Mr. Heyward considered Miss Mapes capable of a “stampede” to get her story aired, everyone took her at her word about her sources.

Problems existed in the verification of the chain of possession of the falsified documents, yet CBS employees designated to vet Miss Mapes’ sources didn’t pursue their own independent corroboration. Even Miss Mapes herself couldn’t confirm the original source of the documents given to her by Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, an anti-Bush activist.

“It appears to the panel that a crash to air the story was under way without effective consideration of the chain of custody,” Mr. Thornburgh and Mr. Boccardi wrote.

Two days after the Bush story aired, Mr. Heyward, “concerned about mainstream media’s increasingly critical reporting about the segment,” told Miss West to investigate the document examiners’ opinions and the confidential sources for the story.

“Don’t we have to come up with or share more evidence rather than just ‘stand by’ our statement?” he asked Miss West in an e-mail.

However, this instruction was not carried out, and indeed Miss West told another executive producer at CBS, “We’re working on a statement to strongly deny the idea that we’re... conducting an internal investigation.”

CBS continued defending its Bush/TexANG story for another 10 days. That subordinates showed such disdain for Mr. Heyward’s orders, when the organization was under fire, further demonstrates the problems with the “culture” at CBS.

It appears Mr. Heyward was of two minds during the post- Sept. 8 turmoil surrounding the CBS report. While he wanted to defend his employees, he clearly had doubts — from the very beginning — about the material they reported.

Mr. Heyward has become too accustomed to sticking up for the often-embattled news division. In 1998, he defended the decision to air a lethal injection administered by Dr. Jack Kevorkian on “60 Minutes.” He also justified the network’s request for an exclusive interview with Jessica Lynch, which hinted at possible commercial opportunities elsewhere at CBS.

In late 2003, he vigorously backed a two-part “CBS Evening News” report linking home schooling and child abuse, which 33 members of Congress had severely criticized in a letter.

And for years he has continued backing Dan Rather, despite the consistent low ratings for “CBS Evening News” and persistent complaints about the anchorman’s liberalism.

Since 1996, Mr. Heyward has led the network news division down paths that resulted in defending the indefensible. It’s what he has taught his underlings to do.

That policy and practice caused CBS to defend the Bush/TexANG report far longer than it ever should have, as proven in the Thornburgh/Boccardi report.

All the more reason Mr. Heyward is part of the CBS News “culture” that needs to be changed.

Paul Chesser is an associate editor and media analyst for the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, N.C.

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How the Networks Are Handling the Ward Churchill Story (Foxnews, 050214)

How the networks are handling the Ward Churchill story, that is the subject of this evening’s “Talking Points Memo.” For every day folks, the Churchill story’s big. Has emotion, free speech implications, taxpayer involvement, a villain. It’s very interesting on a number of levels, but not for the nightly news broadcasts.

CBS and NBC News both ran just one short report, focusing on the speech angle. Peter Jennings has not reported the story at all.

So here again is the difference between the elite world and the real world. Radical Professor Ward Churchill has insulted thousands of American families who lost loved ones on 9/11. And the guy is being paid nearly $100,000 of taxpayer money by the University of Colorado. And other colleges were paying him to speak as well.

This is not an important story — that a guy who hates America is profiting from thathate and inflicting pain on the 9/11 families? This is not worthy of some exposition? Come on. This goes right to the heart of our liberties, right to the moral fabric of America. This is huge.

But not to the national news TV people on the broadcast side. If ever there was an explanation of why they are a losing audience and FOX News is gaining, this is it.

“Talking Points” has been considering the lack of interest. And I don’t have an answer. Yes, Churchill makes the radical left look stupid. But while the network news generally tilts left, it has little use for radicals.

Howard Dean, for example, was not embraced by the network types. So I don’t think they’re covering up for Churchill. Perhaps the story’s too controversial.

“The New York Times” is covering Churchill, saying it’s the dreaded conservatives that are driving the sentiment against him. Of course, “The Times” does that all the time. And of course, it’s not true. Americans of all political persuasions are condemning Churchill.

The far left Web sites simply don’t know what to do. So some of them are attacking me. One consistently foolish site even posted that if Churchill was fired, it would mean O’Reilly would be running college campuses. Beyond dumb.

“Talking Points” can say two things with certainty: The rantings of Churchill do not help the far left cause in this country at all. And it’s mighty strange that Dan, Peter, and Brian [Williams] have avoided a great story that has all America talking. Beyond that, who knows?

And that’s “The Memo.”

The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day

By the way, I am looking for ridiculous right-wing media stuff, so, if you see any, please send it to us.

But, back to the left, you may remember that liberal “Philadelphia Inquirer” columnist John Grogan chastised me over the Villanova controversy. We then invited Grogan on the program. He sent back this reply: “Thank you for the invite. Unfortunately, I am unable to do this tonight.”

OK. We get rejections like that all the time, and our standard reply is the person is hiding under his or her desk. You’ve heard me say that. Well, Grogan writes today that I was lying, he was not hiding under his desk, he just had something else to do. I’m lying? Another example of a complete distortion by a writer who should know better.

By the way, we’ve invited Grogan on next week. Hopefully, his desk will not be an issue because that would be ridiculous.

This lying stuff is used to marginalize people and try to hurt them, and it’s bad.

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Grim Tales: Want to get scared? Ignore what you see. Believe only what you read. (National Review Online, 050128)

My late grandfather, Claude, distinguished combat veteran of the first World War and a man who could not say the word “France” without first saying “disgusting” or “ridiculous” or “gol-darn” or worse, felt about the press — such as it was in Kansas way back when — the way he felt about France. Once, fed up with a local newspaper, he abridged a half-hour fulmination on the idiocies of the midwestern media by simply picking up the rag, walking over to a window, looking out at a torrential downpour and muttering, “According to the paper, it’s partly cloudy.”

This was in the ‘60s, when creating alternative realities was a chemical enterprise that would soon become a journalistic one. These days, disputing what any fool can plainly see is a sacred calling in the global press, but of course the Europeans do it with a special anti-American panache, fueled by the reelection of George W. Bush. The reality of another four years of Dubya has created in the media a demand for a parallel universe unlike any since a generation of shaggy noggins first nodded out to Surrealistic Pillow. Here are some headlines from a place called lost hope:

Americans Conflicted on 2nd Term

This, it probably goes without saying, is an International Herald Tribune pick-up from the New York Times, where no news is good news — and conversely all news is bad news, especially if the subject is Bush or Iraq. The idea here is as easy as 1-2-3, and it’s been noticed before by others: If the real world happens in a way you don’t like, 1. write the story that comforts you, then 2. make a poll to validate your comfort and then 3. extrapolate a more pleasing reality!

World fears new Bush era

World fears clowns, pit-bulls, and falling skies, too. The people who conducted the global poll before the U.S. election — reported in English here by Deutsche Welle, but trumpeted around the planet — showed Kerry the clear leader over Bush among people who cannot vote. Last week, they were back for a post-election recount, just to make sure they got it right. Sure enough, as the Guardian’s headline above makes plain, Bush really did lose, morally, anyway, and as a result, now we’re all losers too: “The survey also indicated for the first time that dislike of Mr Bush is translating into a dislike of Americans in general.” Not to mention Americans in uniform. Like the previous GlobalScan poll (want to participate in one? Here you go!), the European media loved this story: Here it is in Handelsblatt for the strudel crowd. The subtext of this is simple: If all you care about are stupid numbers, then, sure — Bush won. But as everyone in the media realizes, democracy has nothing to do with numbers. If what you really care about are ideas, the results are different, because, according to experts...

Democracy is dangerous

Leftwing Europeans know democracy is a crackpot notion because it figured prominently in George W. Bush’s inauguration address. Paleolithic Marxist Eric Hobsbawm helpfully explains democracy’s illusory qualities in (yet another) Guardian piece, this one borrowed from Le Monde Diplomatique. When Marxism had a shot, chaps like Hobsbawm were dreaming nightly of a single, global political model — theirs. Now that messy democracy is the planet’s political play, the idea that all people should rule their governments is suddenly ludicrous: “If gas stations, iPods, and computer geeks are the same worldwide, why not political institutions?” Indeed. Hear that, you computer geeks?

Torture in Iraq! Now more than ever!

That’s a paraphrase of a Le Monde headline, but unless you’ve spent the last year in an Iraqi jail getting the styling gel beat out of you, you’ve seen it before. It’s now accepted wisdom in Greater Vermont — and especially in the French and German parts of it — that in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers are keeping themselves busy killing civilians and torturing innocent British booksellers (that is, if this Guardian item resembles anything approaching the truth). Nothing turns reality on its head like huffing your own rhetoric. Use enough of it and you start hallucinating. For example, according to Belgium’s La Libre if you’re the formerly sane Ted Turner, Fox’s Rupert Murdoch is Hitler. And if you’re a George Soros’s favorite like Human Rights Watch, there’s a torturer behind the wheel of every passing Humvee.

Now, last time I was in this space, I made a crack about the “torture” that took place at Abu Ghraib, and my mailbox instantly filled with earnest e-mails wanting to know why I didn’t condemn torture. So here: I hate torture. I just don’t happen to buy the notion that torture is a routine policy of the U.S. government in Iraq or elsewhere. And I also don’t buy the notion that just because HRW reports it, it’s true. “Human Rights Watch reveals human rights abuse” is as compelling as “Greenpeace announces environmental crisis.” There are billions of dollars at stake in the crisis industry and millions of uh...what’s the polite word here? NPR listeners sending in their green. None of them is going to dig very deep when they read, “Greenpeace lauds environmental progress.”

As the BBC reports, this week Human Rights Watch has alleged Iraqi forces have been “systematically” doing nasty things to terrorists. This follows by a few days HRW’s effort to lobby against Alberto Gonzales, as reported by Le Nouvel Observateur, and a charge that bacon-packers are being abused in U.S. meat plants. Imagine if they were Iraqi bacon-packers! Look, if it’s proved that some American official is putting the government’s stamp of approval on actual torture — like, let’s say, the sort of thing Islamic fundamentalists do to their prisoners — then there’ll be hell to pay, no doubt. So far, that isn’t the case, and hysterically yelling “torture!” every day or so won’t make it so. It will take a Michael Moore movie to do that.

Auschwitz adds to U.S.-EU friction

This headline, on a Judy Dempsey item in the International Herald Tribune, is this week’s ultimate in bizarre, out-of-reality reporting. According to Dempsey, “the attendance of Vice President Dick Cheney is a bitter disappointment” to “prominent Poles” — who apparently represent the entire EU — because Cheney is not Bush. After all, writes Dempsey, “The Auschwitz ceremony will include President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Horst Köhler of Germany, President Jacques Chirac of France and President Moshe Katzav of Israel.” As evidence of how “Auschwitz adds to US-EU Friction,” Dempsey quotes “veteran intellectuals,” including MEP Bronislaw Geremek: “I would like to see the president of the United States attend the...Auschwitz commemoration.” Who wouldn’t? But why? Says Geremek, a historian, “[I]t should be said that the Holocaust helped to create the European Union. It was the answer to the totalitarian ideology created on European soil, such as Auschwitz.”

A digression: I admire Prof. Geremek. But it should not be said that the Holocaust helped to create the European Union. In fact, the European Union owes its provenance to Walther Funk and other architects of Hitler’s New Order, not to Auschwitz. Historian Mark Mazower, in Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, claims that the Funk plan “...bore more than a passing resemblance to the post-war Common Market. The ‘New Order’ beloved of the youthful technocrats at the Reich Ministry of Economics involved the economic integration of western Europe and the creation of a tariff-free zone.” Eugen Weber, writing a few years ago in The Atlantic (here, if you’re a subscriber), agrees: “The European Union, its attendant bureaucracy, even the euro, all appear to stem from the Berlin-Vichy collaboration.” To the extent that France did more than its share to fill the concentration camps for their partners, the Germans, and that their mutual hatred of Jews brought them both closer together, Geremek may have a point.

Of course, the real story about Bush, Poland, and the EU was not to be seen in the IHT. It was in Die Zeit, where Poland’s Wladyslaw Bartoszewski explained the reasons for Polish loyalty toward the US, and in Brussels, where, according to Handelsblatt, Polish representatives didn’t take very kindly to leftwing British and German efforts to spare German feelings by attempting to identify Auschwitz as a “Polish camp” in the official EU resolution commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation. The issue blossomed into a Brussels-sized furor, according to the EU Observer. Schroder had to call off his MEPs, who finally agreed to admit that “Nazis” had built the camps.

Meanwhile, Davids Medienkritik has collected a bunch of clips from the German press in which the Auschwitz-Abu Ghraib connection is finally explained. A sample, from TAZ: “The torture scandal of the US army in Abu Ghraib shows that sadism has a place in civilized nations, while Guantánamo Bay proves that the principle of the concentration camp...today is upheld with pride by the leading nation of the civilized world.”

Now there’s an artificial reality any German can uphold with pride.

ITEMS

Romancing the Stone: The mystification surrounding Bush’s upcoming voluntary mortification at the hands of Chirac and Schroder continues to grow. Writing in the IHT, John Vinocur observes Bush’s curious embrace of self-humiliation: “By spending time in Germany with Schroder in February during his trip to Europe, President George W. Bush is offering a sign of consideration that acknowledges both the likelihood of the chancellor’s being around for the long haul and more active German leadership in Europe.”

Whatever exists of an opposition in Germany is running, in a haphazard way, on what might not be described as a pro-American position, but at least the German conservatives are not surviving by promoting the widespread hatred of America, as Schroder has done. On his European fact-finding mission, Thomas Friedman did his reporting from “the Pony Club, a trendy bar/beauty parlor in East Berlin” — well, this is a Times columnist, remember. “There is nothing that the Europeans want to hear from Bush, there is nothing that they will listen to from Bush that will change their minds about him or the Iraq war or U.S. foreign policy,” Friedman writes in the IHT. “Bush is more widely and deeply disliked in Europe than any U.S. president in history.” Of course, that won’t stop Bush doing his best to prop up Gerhard. The theory apparently is that what Bush was able to do in Pennsylvania when he campaigned with Arlen Specter to defeat a conservative Republican will work for him in Germany. Maybe if Chirac comes up with a Title IX for French lady wrestlers, Bush will campaign for him, too.

Goodbye Lisbon. The Lisbon strategy for bringing the EU into competitive parity with the U.S. by 2010, has become as popular as Portuguese folk music, according to a round-up in Eursoc: “If business leaves the EU for friendlier states, it is unlikely to be lured back by the promise of even higher taxes to pay for workers languishing on welfare. As Europe’s population ages and the working population dwindles, companies will not be tempted to invest in economies which must dedicate ever higher proportions of GDP to pension schemes.”

Careful! That pipkin’s loaded! Binge drinking is a big problem in Britain. At closing time, drunkards empty out of the pubs, fill the gutters, fight in the streets, relieve themselves on shrubs and on each other, and break into people’s homes — with impunity, since the Labour government recently ruled that burglars should be protected from violence. The government’s proposal to stem the tide of closing-time drunks is to abolish closing times. The Daily Mail is furious, accusing the government of lunacy. According to the The Publican, a trade paper, landlords aren’t going to tolerate that kind of treatment by the press, so, as they edge their customers toward blind drunkenness, they’ll also be telling them not to read the Mail. Not while they drink. Not even while they drive. The Times’s patron saint of sanctimony, Simon Jenkins, is outraged at their outrage. “The alcohol lobby is Britain’s version of America’s gun lobby,” types Jenkins. That’s exactly the problem, of course.

— Denis Boyles is author of the upcoming Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese.

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It’s No “Kerfuffle”: The Wall Street Journal’s strange performance on the Eason Jordan scandal (National Review Online, 050214)

The Wall Street Journal has a very strange editorial this morning regarding the controversy (which it gently labels a “kerfuffle”) that resulted last Friday night in the resignation of CNN’s chief executive, Eason Jordan. The Journal’s editorial page is generally superb and fearless, so one is reluctant to call this “damage control.” Suffice it to say, though, that the analysis is not up to the paper’s gold standard.

Jordan was evidently pushed out at CNN over what appears to have been an unconscionable assertion that the U.S. military targeted journalists for assassination, uttered at the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. “[A]ppears to have been” is used advisedly here. There is no doubt that Jordan made a remark, but there is great dispute about the context — whether he deliberately intended to leave the impression that our troops were murdering journalists, whether he instead meant that journalists had been harmed recklessly in the course of military operations, and how sincerely, artfully or clumsily Jordan was in “clarifying” his comments upon being challenged by a blogger named Rony Abovitz and Congressman Barney Frank, as well, perhaps, as others.

There should be no dispute about all this because, naturally, there is a tape (or, at least, a verbatim transcript). But, notwithstanding a rising tide of calls for its release since last week — detailed with characteristic thoroughness by NRO’s Jim Geraghty and Michelle Malkin (see) — CNN and Jordan have stonewalled.

This is the most puzzling part of the Journal’s take on the story. The editors are evidently upset that Jordan was torpedoed over “what hardly looks like a hanging offense” — a tempest in a teapot obsessively driven by the whirling dervish combination of the blogosphere and talk media, who, so the Journal’s argument goes, can’t tell a “journalistic felony” like Dan Rather’s phony memos from a “dumb” but forgivable faux pas. Yet, the reason we cannot fix the gravity of the offense with certainty is precisely because the “professional journalis[ts]” — by which the Journal, in an unbecoming display of haughtiness, distinguishes itself “from the enthusiasms and vendettas of amateurs” (i.e., the bloggers) — never demanded that the evidence be released so we could all judge for ourselves.

The Journal never mentions, not once, in its editorial the failure of the mainstream media (of which it pronounces itself a proud member) to press for release of the tape. Instead, the paper launches a solipsistic defense of its news judgment that this just wasn’t much of a story, selectively rehashing its initial reporting: a (mostly) opinion piece by the ordinarily excellent Bret Stephens, whose account and assessment, to be blunt, were way off the mark.

The Journal must realize it blew one here. Jordan made his remarks on January 27. The session was not off the record. Stephens was actually there. He heard the top official of an influential international news conglomerate, which often sneers at suggestions that it is anti-American and anti-military, make an outrageous remark that was anti-American and anti-military. That was news. It may not have been the story of the century, but that is very far from saying it was not newsworthy. It manifestly was. Despite being in the rare (for a journalist) position of being able to give an eyewitness account rather than digging for sources, Stephens filed no report for two weeks.

By the time he and the Journal finally got around to saying something about the story on February 10, it was no longer just about what Jordan had said but also about why what he said had not been reported in the mainstream media. The editors are quite right this morning when they reject gossamer claims that Stephens was compromised by a conflict of interest merely because he is one of 2000 WEF fellows and Jordan sits on one of the WEF boards. But there is a raging conflict of interest in this scenario and the Journal regrettably declines to hold that mirror up to itself: The paper has allowed an error in its subjective news judgment to cloud its analysis of something that, objectively, was news.

Plainly, the Journal has decided that the story mustn’t have been much of a story if Bret Stephens didn’t see it that way. It has not demanded the release of a tape that might well be available. This is a curious lapse — when has a first-rate news organization ever thought less information was better?

But of course, if the tape is as bad as Eason Jordan and CNN must think it is, its release would only highlight that the Journal was derelict in not reporting this event when it first happened. On that score, it is worth observing that (a) Stephens’s February 10 report makes not a single reference to the elementary journalistic fact of when Jordan’s remark was made (i.e., two weeks earlier — not exactly “recently,” as Stephens fuzzily put it), and (b) the report apparently fails to credit Abovitz, a blogger (making him for some reason a bane in the Journal estimation), for being the first to challenge Jordan, thus incorrectly suggesting that that distinction belonged to Rep. Frank. The Journal, moreover, is not enough of a “grown-up,” to borrow its own condescending term, to distinguish — even today after Jordan has stepped down — between the newsworthiness of the catapulting event and the paper’s own performance in covering it.

No doubt owing to this, the Journal, usually nonpareil in assessing the media’s Leftist bias, swings and misses three other times this morning. First and foremost, because it cannot seem to sort out the story from its own appraisal of the story, the paper contends that Jordan was forced out by a blogger and talk-radio stampede. But as the Journal well knows from having been part of the stampede on occasion, a torrent of pressure will generally not force an outcome that the underlying facts don’t compel once everyone has weighed in. If Jordan and CNN thought the facts did not warrant ouster despite the background and position of the person making the inflammatory comments (more on that in a second), their course of action was simple: release the tape, take comfort in the defense waged by the Journal and other influential media outlets, and tough it out. They didn’t do that, and the public can only surmise (since folks like the Journal editors still won’t call for the tape) that the facts must be pretty bad.

Second, the Journal acknowledges that Jordan is a hopeless recidivist when it comes to making indefensible statements, yet bizarrely sees this as helping Jordan’s defense on this occasion. It posits that his Davos libeling of the military pales in comparison to some of Jordan’s prior sins (“including a 2003 New York Times op-ed in which he admitted that CNN had remained silent about Saddam’s atrocities in order to maintain its access in Baghdad”). This, however, misses a commonsense point: a repeat offender should be on a tighter leash than someone with a clean record. For what little it may be worth, I don’t agree with the Journal that what Jordan said in Davos was a comparative trifle. What he said was indefensible, and the position he holds coupled with CNN’s grounds for worry about its reputation make it a hanging offense on its own merit. Surely CNN, which has already bled profuse market-share to Fox News and others, was well within its discretion to see this, in context, as one unforgivable gaffe too many.

Finally, the Journal faults the bloggers for failing to perceive the difference between “Easongate” and “Rathergate.” Leaving aside the annoying lack of imagination that impels the media to attach “-gate” to every scandal, the perception problem here belongs to the editors. The CBS debacle was not a threshold. It was the far margin of disgraceful journalism. If the Journal’s new position is that no incident of shameful media performance is a story unless it achieves Rather-like dimension, the rest of the transparently biased mainstream media should rest a lot easier today. Because, notwithstanding Eason Jordan’s fate, this would mean that the formerly fearsome Wall Street Journal is off the case.

Let’s hope that’s not true.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

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NBC flushes the sacred (townhall.com, 050306)

It was a surprise to NBC in 1992 when “Saturday Night Live” aired pop star Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II and crying “Fight the real enemy!” But now NBC has aired a planned, scripted episode of a sitcom that attacks not the Pope, but Jesus Christ Himself.

The Feb. 22 episode of the painfully unfunny new sitcom “Committed” made a mockery out of the sacrament of the Eucharist. As William Donohue of the Catholic League explained about the show: “By far the most offensive scene occurs when [male characters] Nate and Bowie accidentally flush what they think is the Host down the toilet ...To say that Catholics are angry about this show would be an understatement — the outrage is visceral and intense.”

NBC has encouraged the producers of “Committed” to “push the limits of comedy,” and the producers just pushed comedy off a cliff. Not just Catholics, not just Christians, but anyone who reveres God should be outraged. What’s next for this network as it sinks into fourth place? Having its sitcom characters accidentally use the Old Testament as toilet paper? Mocking God isn’t funny. It’s evil.

If there had been a faithful Catholic anywhere within a mile of the multitude of ignorant producers, directors, actors and writers of this sitcom, this probably never would have happened. The notion that no one connected to this stupid show has ever set foot in a Catholic church looks obvious in every scene.

The NBC show’s funeral mass begins with kneeling, which is wrong. The priest is wearing no vestments for the funeral, just a white robe and a stole, which is wrong. When the non-Catholic characters receive communion without knowing better, that’s wrong. Not only do most people understand what Catholics believe about communion, but priests routinely instruct non-Catholics not to receive the Eucharist during Communion.

The stupid details continue when the funeral is followed by a bar scene. The priest is standing in the bar in his white robe and stole, although it’s opened like a suit jacket to show a white shirt and black tie. Have you ever seen a priest in a bar in a white robe?

The show’s neurotic Jewish lead character, Nick, who took communion but didn’t swallow the Host, is carrying it around, wondering how to get rid of it. He and his friend Bowie try to dispose of it by putting it on a tray of crackers in front of the priest. (Funny, huh?) When that doesn’t work, there’s the aforementioned awful flushing scene. When Nate and Bowie realize they haven’t flushed the Body of Christ down the toilet, they return to watch the priest thoughtlessly grab the Host off the cracker tray. Saying “What the Hell,” he puts it in his mouth and ends the plotline.

This is probably the dumbest detail of all. A Catholic priest not recognizing a communion wafer is about as believable as a plot in which a television writer doesn’t recognize a television.

How is it that when this atrocious idea first bubbled up at NBC, no one saw how incredibly offensive it was? In the Gospel of John, Jesus Christ says “I am the living bread which came down from Heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The Catholic Church calls the sacrament of the Eucharist “the source and summit of the Christian life.” Theologian Peter Kreeft has noted what Hollywood comedians just can’t see: “The greatness of the Eucharist is known only to faith, not to the feelings or the senses or the sciences.”

NBC should have known Catholics across the country would send a flood of outraged complaints. They should have known that the love story of the Gospels, of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, isn’t fodder for punchlines, but goes deep into the hearts of most Americans. It’s shameful that there wasn’t one sentient human being sitting in that long, lame, Tinseltown pipeline wise enough to know they should have stopped the anti-Catholic madness before it got started.

And don’t forget the sponsors. Thank you, Toyota. Thank you, Verizon. Thank you, Disney. Thank you, Johnson and Johnson. Thanks for bankrolling this anti-Catholic bile.

Brent Bozell is President of Media Research Center, a Townhall.com member group.

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Good riddance to Rather (townhall.com, 050311)

Thomas Sowell

Ordinarily, the retirement of a TV newsman would be something to be more or less passed over in silence by friend and foe alike. But the retirement of Dan Rather as anchorman of CBS news has caused so much spin in the media that some of this spin may become “well-known facts” by sheer repetition unless challenged by real facts.

One popular spin is that it is a shame that a long and distinguished career should be judged by one unfortunate error like the forged documents that Rather relied on to question President Bush’s National Guard service.

Those who believe this might dig into the records of the CBS News broadcast of March 27, 1991, when Dan Rather said: “A startling number of American children are in danger of starving” because “one out of eight American children is going hungry tonight.”

This was a crock — but it was a fashionable crock on the left at that time and Dan Rather not only echoed but amplified a ridiculous “study” done by leftist activists. He probably didn’t set out to tell a lie then any more than he did when he relied on forged documents to try to “get” President Bush on the eve of last year’s election.

Neither were either of these or other cases simply a matter of a zealous reporter trying hard to get a story. It was bias — and bias has long been the besetting sin of the mainstream media. That is why Dan Rather’s scandal is bigger than Dan Rather and will justifiably continue to taint much of the media after his recent retirement as CBS anchorman.

If it was just a matter of Dan Rather’s zeal for a story letting him get carried away — another popular spin — then why was this zeal for digging into what George W. Bush did or didn’t do three decades earlier in the Texas National Guard not matched by an equal zeal to dig into John Kerry’s military record?

After all, Kerry himself made his military record the centerpiece of his election campaign. We weren’t supposed to question his two decades of undermining the military and intelligence services because he was a war hero.

With more than a hundred men who served with Kerry in Vietnam challenging his version of what he did there, why no zeal to dig into that story?

With the honorable discharge on Kerry’s own web site dated during the Carter administration, years after his service ended, why no zeal to find out if this was one of the less than honorable discharges retroactively raised to the status of “honorable” under Jimmy Carter’s amnesty programs? Wouldn’t that be quite a story?

Zeal is not bias and bias is not zeal, regardless of what spin is being put out in the media about Dan Rather.

At one time, when the big three broadcast networks had a virtual monopoly, their spin became “facts” for all practical purposes. The way Dan Rather and CBS News tried to stonewall and brazen out the forged document scandal suggests that they didn’t realize the extent to which their monopoly was gone.

With talk radio, Fox News, and the Internet reaching tens of millions of people, no longer could a TV anchorman say “That’s the way it is,” as Walter Cronkite used to say, and have that be taken as the last word.

What is perhaps most revealing about Dan Rather is that his defenders are mostly outside of CBS News, and such CBS News heavyweights as Mike Wallace and Walter Cronkite have recently spoken disparagingly of him in public. Mike Wallace referred to Rather’s “contrived” performances.

“Contrived” is a polite word for phony.

Although Rather is through as anchorman, what he represents is not through, and that is what makes it important to be clear about what he was and what he did, regardless of the spin of those seeking to make excuses for him. We the public need to recognize what is and is not a fact and the media need to recognize the bias and arrogance in Rather’s work — and in their own.

One hopeful sign of changes in recent times is that even liberal media outlets have begun to see a need to have a few token moderate or conservative voices. It’s not much but it’s a move in the right direction. So is the departure of Dan Rather.

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Study Shows U.S. Election Coverage Harder on Bush (WorldNetDaily, 050314)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. media coverage of last year’s election was three times more likely to be negative toward President Bush than Democratic challenger John Kerry, according to a study released Monday.

The annual report by a press watchdog that is affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said that 36% of stories about Bush were negative compared to 12% about Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.

Only 20% were positive toward Bush compared to 30% of stories about Kerry that were positive, according to the report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The study looked at 16 newspapers of varying size across the country, four nightly newscasts, three network morning news shows, nine cable programs and nine Web sites through the course of 2004.

Examining the public perception that coverage of the war in Iraq was decidedly negative, it found evidence did not support that conclusion. The majority of stories had no decided tone, 25% were negative and 20% were positive, it said.

The three network nightly newscasts and public broadcaster PBS tended to be more negative than positive, while Fox News was twice as likely to be positive as negative.

Looking at public perceptions of the media, the report showed that more people thought the media was unfair to both Kerry and Bush than to the candidates four years earlier, but fewer people thought news organizations had too much influence on the outcome of the election.

“It may be that the expectations of the press have sunk enough that they will not sink much further. People are not dismayed by disappointments in the press. They expect them,” the authors of the report said.

The study noted a huge rise in audiences for Internet news, particularly for bloggers whose readers jumped by 58% in six months to 32 million people.

Despite the growing importance of the Web, the report said investment was not keeping pace and some 62% of Internet professionals reported cutbacks in the newsroom in the last three years, even more than the 37% of print, radio and TV journalists who cited cutbacks in their newsrooms.

“For all that the number of outlets has grown, the number of people engaged in collecting original information has not,” the report said, noting that much of the investment was directed at repackaging and presenting information rather than gathering news.

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The Washington Post traitors (WorldNetDaily, 050314)

Should an American newsman be so “objective” he ceases to be an American?

This is one of a series of questions raised in an astonishing interview given by the managing editor of the Washington Post, Philip Bennett, to a “reporter” for China’s official government paper, People’s Daily.

In the interview, Bennett says: “I don’t think U.S. should be the leader of the world.”

He also says he tried to keep opinions out of the news columns of the Post. If that’s true, why is it that most Americans reading the Post knew all along that the paper wants U.S. government officials to consult with foreign leaders and the United Nations before taking actions in the best interests of this country? It’s not just because we read the editorials of the Post – which I don’t and most Americans don’t.

It’s because we read the Washington Post news columns and because those news columns help set the agenda for so much of the establishment, corporate, “mainstream” media elite – which, Bennett admits, is losing its hammerlock of influence on the American people with the advent of the Internet.

For a newspaper that is not supposed to care much about opinions – just the news – this guy sure is opinionated.

* He said, for instance, that he does not see much evidence that the United States is really trying to spread freedom around the world.

* He suggested strongly that the United States is really motivated by old-fashioned colonialism and imperialism.

* He said that even in wartime, his paper takes great pride in telling the world about matters of national security.

* He admitted that his paper and the rest of the elite media are out of touch with America’s religious and patriotic values.

* He seemed concerned that the “American people are more conservative, nationalistic and religious and more closed off to foreign influence than the media.”

* He was quick to instruct his interviewer that his paper never characterizes totalitarian China as a dictatorship.

Just what were Bennett and his paper hoping to achieve by sucking up to the brutes in Beijing, who, even as this interview was being published, were laying the “legal” foundation for a future invasion of Taiwan?

Are they hoping to replace the readership they are losing in the United States with readership in the largest marketplace in the world?

Are they hoping to secure better access to news in the closed society of China by sending a message of solidarity with the communists?

Not since Walter Duranty of the New York Times covered up the crimes against humanity of Josef Stalin in his Pulitzer Prize-winning reports from the old Soviet Union has as American journalist betrayed the aspirations of freedom-loving people on such a massive scale.

The truth is that 1.1 billion people in China are held in bondage and slavery by their military government. Yet, Bennett suggests the situation in China is “complicated.” Never before in the history of the world, he says, have so many people been lifted out of poverty so quickly. That claim sounds reminiscent of those of Duranty – those that overlooked the massive deaths in the gulags, the firing squads, the millions of people who got in the way of this economic “progress.”

What was Bennett thinking when he gave this interview to a “reporter,” who is actually a paid agent of the totalitarian regime in China?

Was that a service to his profession?

Does Bennett view his work as an American journalist as comparable with the propaganda program of the Chinese government? If so, he may not be that far off. In many ways they both serve the same masters.

If America was anything remotely like the America Bennett portrays in his interview with the Chinese government apparatchik posing as a “reporter,” the Washington Post editor would be summarily brought up on treason charges.

Of course, he won’t be.

Because America is nothing like China. America is nothing like the secretive, imperialistic, colonialistic monster he describes.

But just because Bennett and the paper he represents won’t be charged with treason doesn’t make them any less traitors for what they have done and what they do on a daily basis – twisting, distorting and manipulating the news through their prism of moral relativism.

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Poor reflections in the media mirror (townhall.com, 050316)

Cal Thomas

Did you know there is too much opinion and not enough reporting of the facts in the news you’re getting? This shocking information comes from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an affiliate of Columbia University.

The study’s focus on 250 stories mainly looked at the way the cable TV networks and Internet bloggers addressed those stories. It concluded that such outlets represent a “journalism of assertion” that favors the personal opinion of the person delivering the information more than reporting.

The Fox News Channel (where I work and where no one has asked me to write about this survey) is singled out for alleged imbalance on such stories as the Iraq war, where the study finds twice as many “positive” as “negative” stories. Seven out of 10 stories on FNC were said to have included opinions not attributed to reporting.

Reporting on the study, the Los Angeles Times referred to “the model for the mainstream media,” which it said is “taking the time to gather and scrutinize each piece of information.”

But the mainstream public does not perceive that the “mainstream media” takes the time to check facts and eschews opinion in its “reporting.” According to the Pew Center for the People and the Press, only 35% of Americans think the media get the facts right.

It is this distrust and the perception that the so-called “mainstream media” is biased that has fueled the rise of alternative sources of information. It has also fueled the angst of the big media boys, who are being held accountable for their biases for the first time. They don’t like such accountability and so they are reacting by attacking cable TV and Internet bloggers.

Were it not for these alternate sources of information, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth might never have found an avenue to make their voices heard about John Kerry, and Dan Rather might still be sitting in the CBS anchor chair instead of being held accountable for misreporting on President Bush’s National Guard records.

What ought to amuse and amaze many people is the sudden “discovery” of opinion journalism in the media. The Media Research Center (www.mrc.org) has been chronicling liberal bias on the broadcast networks and in newspapers and news magazines for years, but the organization is largely ignored by the big media or dismissed as “conservative” or “right-wing,” implying its work cannot be trusted. (In the interests of full disclosure, I’m serving as unpaid emcee for the Media Research Center’s annual Media DisHonors Awards in April.)

If “opinion journalism” is now regarded as something to be avoided, how about beginning the purge at the broadcast networks. On the CBS Evening News last March 31, Dan Rather suggested that American civilians had volunteered to work in Iraq because “In this economy it may be, for some, the only job they can find.” Is that opinion, or reporting since no source was cited or interview conducted with anyone who said such a thing?

In December, 2003, Peter Jennings told the ABC World News Tonight audience, “Iraqis keep telling us life is not as stable for them as it was when Saddam Hussein is in power.” Viewers might have concluded that Jennings had slipped in his personal opinion because no survey was presented and no person interviewed to justify such a conclusion.

CNN’s Aaron Brown delivered what a fair-minded viewer might have concluded was a personal opinion on his Nov. 10, 2004 “NewsNight” program. He referred to criticism of John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans and whether Kerry deserved the three Purple Hearts and an early out from Vietnam. Brown said, “Look at this picture here (in the Stars and Stripes military newspaper), if you can. ‘Troops’ Bravery Honored in Iraq.’ These are all Purple Heart winners. Some day, one of them will run for president and someone will say they didn’t earn the Purple Heart. Welcome to America.”

Commenting, not reporting, on the number of moderate speakers at last summer’s Republican National Convention in New York, CNN’s Judy Woodruff wondered, “Can the Republicans get away with putting moderate speakers up there?”

During past Republican conventions, the networks have questioned whether Republicans could “get away” with having so many “right-wing” speakers. One might reasonably draw conclusions that for these reporters and anchors, it isn’t the wing, so much as the Republican Party itself that troubles them. They make no similar remarks about the ideology of speakers at the Democratic conventions.

The problem for the mainstream media (which isn’t mainstream anymore) is that its denial of its own biases has caused the rise of bloggers and cable news, especially Fox. If they had been truly reporting and not indoctrinating, there would be no Fox and no bloggers to study.

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Post’s ‘GOP memo’ questioned (WorldNetDaily, 050323)

Paper claimed Republicans exploiting Schiavo case

A media watchdog is questioning the veracity of the Washington Post’s claim that Republicans sent out a memo with the intent of exploiting the Terri Schiavo case for political purposes.

The Post’s Mike Allen reported on the memo, which allegedly called the Schiavo case “a great political issue.”

But Accuracy in Media Editor Cliff Kincaid believes the response of the Post’s Robert Kaiser to questions about the memo raises doubts.

When asked why the memo had not been seen, Kaiser said, “Good question. ... Mike is not here now so I can’t confirm my hunch that his sources read him the memo but didn’t give him a copy. That happens quite often these days.”

Kincaid says the reply is revealing.

“Read him the memo but didn’t give him a copy?” he asked. “And that ‘happens quite often these days?’ It’s no wonder the media get into trouble when they rely on documents in their stories. Is it possible that this anonymous memo is a fraud?”

Kincaid said the political aspects of the purported memo mainly were two sentences:

“This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue. This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats.”

Did anyone notice the memo’s reference to this being “an important moral issue?” Kincaid asked. “The final sentence in the memo stated that, ‘This legislation ensures that individuals like Terri Schiavo are guaranteed the same legal protections as convicted murderers like Ted Bundy.”

Kincaid concludes the memo is based on moral considerations rather than political.

“This is the part of the memo, whatever its origin, that the media didn’t want to quote or examine,” Kincaid said. “Can there be any doubt that the public perception of the case would change if people were informed by our press that Congress was trying to give the same rights to Terri Schiavo that are guaranteed to those on death row?”

Accuracy in Media has sent an e-mail to Allen asking him to confirm or deny authenticity of the memo, but he has yet to respond.

“The memo may have been written by some Republican somewhere,” said Kincaid. “But there’s no independent evidence at this point that it was authorized by a Republican senator or written by a top Republican staffer.”

Kincaid said if the media are “confident that the memo is real, let them produce an actual copy and describe in detail how they verified it. There’s no reason we should accept their claims about this memo at face value.

“Didn’t we learn anything from memogate?” he asked, referring to the bogus documents used by CBS in a story about President Bush’s National Guard service.

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The ABCs of Media Bias (Weekly Standard, 050404)

From the April 4, 2005 issue: A mystery memo, biased reporting, and the usual suspects.

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER BILL FRIST never saw it. Neither did the Senate Republican whip, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The number three Republican in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, didn’t get a copy. Nor did the senator with the closest relationship with President Bush, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. And the senator with the familiar Republican last name, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, didn’t see it or read it. The same is true of Senator Mel Martinez, the rookie Republican from Florida.

Yet the infamous memo that argued Republicans stood to gain politically by saving the life of Terri Schiavo was characterized by ABC News as consisting of “GOP Talking Points.” True, a few paragraphs were of Republican origin. They had been lifted, word for word, from a Martinez press release outlining the provisions of his legislative proposal, “The Incapacitated Person’s Legal Protection Act.” This was the inoffensive part of the memo. The offensive part—it didn’t come from Martinez—left the strong impression that Republicans are callous and cynical in their attempt to save Schiavo’s life, ill-motivated in the extreme.

Two paragraphs were the problem. One contended Republicans should save the disabled Schiavo’s life because “this is a great political issue” that could lead to the defeat of Democratic senator Bill Nelson of Florida in 2006. The other said dwelling on the Schiavo issue would excite pro-lifers, a key Republican constituency.

Supposedly the memo was distributed only to Republicans on the Senate floor. Ergo, it was a Republican document. ABC correspondent Linda Douglass first reported its existence on March 18, saying the network “has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators, explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case.” She mentioned the two offensive passages, and the memo was shown on the screen. The ABC website was explicit about the source of the memo: These were “GOP talking points on Terri Schiavo.” Two days later, the Washington Post referred to it as “an unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators.”

There wasn’t a hint in these reports the memo could have any other source but Republicans. Yet there was no evidence it had come from Republicans. It was unsigned and had no letterhead or date. Nothing indicated it came from the Republican leadership or the House or Senate campaign committee or from the Republican National Committee or even from a stray Republican staffer. The only evidence was of a dirty trick—and there wasn’t much evidence of that. Powerline, the influential blog, found a version of the memo with typos cleaned up on left-wing websites.

The only basis for blaming Republicans was the unsubstantiated allegation that the memo was spread among Republican senators. Yet no senator stepped forward and said, “Yes, I got that memo.” Now consider what would have happened if a damning memo had been distributed to Democratic senators, saying the Schiavo issue could be used politically against Republicans. Would anyone in the mainstream media have jumped on it? I doubt it. Only right-wing bloggers would have.

So rather than an example of aggressive reporting, the memo story turns out to be yet another instance of crude liberal bias, in this case against both Republicans and those who fought to have Schiavo’s feeding tube restored. Naturally the memo had a second life when the story was picked up by other news outlets, pundits, and columnists. How did ABC and others get wind of the memo in the first place? It came from “Democratic aides,” according to the New York Times, who “said it had been distributed to Senate Republicans.” Not exactly a disinterested source.

As the memo flap suggests, media bias against Schiavo’s parents, who led the fight to have her feeding tube restored, and their allies was extensive. The mainstream media failed to report lapses in Terri Schiavo’s medical examination, diagnosis, and treatment. One had to turn to bloggers. To find anything less than favorable about Michael Schiavo, the husband who insisted Terri’s feeding tube be removed, the alternative press was the best bet. The mainstream press, meanwhile, twitted conservatives for hypocritically abandoning states’ rights in the effort to save Terri. Liberals, suddenly champions of states’ rights instead of federal power, got a pass.

Bias seeped into polling. An ABC News poll question said Terri Schiavo was on “life support” and has “no consciousness and her condition is irreversible.” “Do you support . . . the decision to remove Terri’s feeding tube?” A large majority said they did. But Schiavo was not on life support as most people understand the term, may have some consciousness, and some neurologists believe she has a chance of partial recovery. Given those facts, would you want to stay alive? ABC didn’t ask.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

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Dana Milbank and ‘the facts’ (townhall.com, 050331)

Brent Bozell

Can nothing spare us from the arrogance of liberal media figures, still parading around as Guardians of the Facts and Solely Anointed Professional Disseminators of the Truth?

Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank, in what reads like an early April Fools’ prank, has written an article for the Post’s Sunday “Outlook” section presenting himself as an objective reporter. The headline was “My Bias for Mainstream News.” In it, he complains that the “cottage industry” of watchdog groups on the right and left “are devoted almost entirely to attacking the press.”

The most priceless sentence is this: “Regardless of the merits, the pervasive accusations of bias are making it increasingly difficult for the traditional media to play their role of gathering and reporting facts.” Media critics are wrong to criticize, regardless of the merits of their criticism? Well, yes, you see, because Milbank believes their nefarious goal is to “steer readers and viewers toward ideologically driven outlets that will confirm their own views and protect them from disagreeable facts.”

The term “media elite” has its roots in insular thinking like this.

Let’s take a brief look at what those of us on the alleged fact-unfriendly front have reported on Milbank lately. On Feb. 28, the Media Research Center’s Brent Baker noted that Milbank misled Post readers when reporting on Page One that Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld had rudely left a Feb. 16 House hearing when he had “had enough.” Milbank’s whole story was devoted to creating — actually, enhancing — the perception that Rumsfeld is a contemptuous jerk. Congressman Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, which was holding the hearing, wrote a letter to the Post explaining he and Rumsfeld agreed in advance the hearings would last only three hours because he had another hearing commitment before the Senate. “Therefore, the article’s suggestion that he got mad and left did a disservice to the truth and to the secretary.”

The Post didn’t publish the letter or issue a correction. Mr. Milbank, permission to criticize?

In the biggest media controversy of 2004 — Dan Rather’s unverifiable National Guard memos about President Bush — were the mainstream media acting as Guardians of The Facts? Apparently, this is unimportant. Regardless of the merits, it is the critics who blew the whistle on CBS’s fraud who are to be faulted.

When the liberal media establishment circles the wagons and whines about losing their status as the unimpeachable oracles on Mt. Olympus, with nobody caring about The Facts anymore, they’re missing a key point. You can construct a news story with nothing but verifiable facts, and your report can still be unfair, unbalanced and misleading. You could report on the Terri Schiavo case by citing only the facts Michael Schiavo wants to share. You could report from Iraq, citing only the bad news about bombings, and leaving out all the other facts that might lead to hopefulness. And it’s done, constantly, by Mr. Milbank and his peers.

Milbank is absolutely right that I wrote in my book “Weapons of Mass Distortion” that the liberal media’s audience will defect to emerging news outlets more in tune with their perspective on the world. But he can’t live with the notion that those news outlets could have just as much (or more) love for the truth as the Old Media do. He can’t believe there are other facts worth sharing that he never found, or didn’t imagine were worth finding.

The media elite need to come to grips with this fact: You can’t present a trumped-up liberal version of “the facts” and expect everyone to see you as the only authoritative and professional journalists worth reading or watching. The audience is walking away, and the only way to fix it is with more balance and fairness ... and greater care with the facts, too.

Milbank believes the “growing volume and vitriol” of media criticism is a “new and dangerous development.” And yet, last year, when the Washington Post and others were pounding the White House into dust on Abu Ghraib and other issues, he didn’t see the “growing volume and vitriol” of news reporters as a “new and dangerous development.” Why not? Because the media are somehow the quintessential pillars of democracy whose fine brains and large hearts and good intentions must never be questioned, even though they are self-appointed as the official questioners of absolutely everyone and everything else.

In a democracy, every player in the political system is held accountable by someone else. The media also need a check and a balance. If the media think it’s unfair that there’s someone “driving up their negatives” and damaging their credibility, they ought to realize they also live in that democracy. Get used to it.

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Ari’s Bias Briefing (Media Research Center, 050316)

by L. Brent Bozell III

Few have a better understanding of the liberal media elite than Ari Fleischer, who spent several years deflecting the daily barrage of arrogant and accusatory media questions as the first White House press secretary under President Bush. His new book, “Taking Heat,” has been panned by liberals for having no Bush-trashing moments in it. One can also safely conclude they’re the ones who don’t want you to read his chapters exposing the liberal ways of the reporters who baited him in the briefing room for three years.

Liberals looking back on the first Bush term would like you to pretend with them that the White House press corps was – and is – an intimidated pack of puffballs, offering no challenge to Bush as he leads America into that disastrous quagmire presently known as the democratic wave sweeping the Middle East.

Truth is, Fleischer was impressive in the nearly impossible job of keeping the anti-Bush hounds of the press at bay. They were harsh in the first days, when they were bitter about not getting to suck up to President Gore. They were hostile in the last days, as John Kerry’s chances slipped away.

They were even bitter just weeks after September 11. On November 29, 2001, Newsday’s Ken Fireman was already comparing a new Justice Department program for getting anti-terrorist tips to “what totalitarian societies like East Germany and the Soviet Union used to do.” Then there was Helen Thomas, always throwing up bitter questions from the loony left at Fleischer. Before the war, she always tried to underline Bush’s thirst for blood: “You people are acting like this is a conversion to democracy by the sword! How can you, I mean, are you going to kill all these people, to get democracy [in Iraq]?” Fleischer lists a lot of these inflammatory questions in the book to frustrate those delusional oddballs who ask: “What liberal media?”

Some on the left have lamely tried to challenge his charges. In one section, Fleischer notes that the stories he was seeing on partial-birth abortion always located “social conservatives,” but wouldn’t define Planned Parenthood or other abortion advocates as “social liberals.” At the leftist website Salon.com, writer Eric Boehlert protested that if Fleischer had searched Nexis for “U.S. media mentions” of “social liberal” during Fleischer’s days on the job from 2001 to 2003, “he would have seen the 725 matches it retrieved.”

That’s just lazy, sloppy criticism. You don’t disprove liberal bias in the national media by citing a huge Nexis sample with three years of articles in hundreds of news sources, including every newspaper from Lewiston, Idaho to South Bend, Indiana to even little college newspapers like “The Justice” at Brandeis University. You also don’t disprove bias in news reports by citing a sample that includes a lot of editorials and letters to the editor (where conservative writers aren’t hesitant to use the label “social liberal”).

So let’s go back to what Fleischer was talking about – the national media. Take a look at the most influential national media sources in Nexis and see how often they employed the label “social liberal” in the campaign year of 2004 – the year when the socially liberal cause celebre of “gay marriage” took center stage. ABC? Zero. NBC? Zero. PBS’s “NewsHour”? Zero. NPR? One, but only if you count Carol Moseley-Braun calling herself a “social liberal.” NPR reporters weren’t using it. CBS? One, but only when a reporter explained Republicans attempted to tar Kerry with the loathsome label.

Even the major daily newspapers on the left couldn’t bear to use the label in 2004. The Washington Post had only six usages, three in editorials, and three in news stories – and only one of the news stories identified “social liberals” as a fact, as a Kerry constituency. The other two were only GOP attempts to “paint” Democrats as social liberals. Similarly, the New York Times also managed just six usages – two in editorials, two in news stories about GOP accusations, and two admissions that social liberals walk the Earth.

One of the juiciest anecdotes in the book concerns ABC White House reporter Terry Moran, whose sharply opinionated questions make him look like he’s auditioning for the role of the next Helen Thomas. On April 28, 2003, President Bush made a speech to Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, proclaiming his confidence in the ability of the Iraqi people to create a new democracy and his commitment to helping build that vision. The crowd went wild in an emotional response. But ABC only gave the speech two sentences.

Fleischer asked Moran: Why so little coverage? “I couldn’t get it on the air,” Moran tells him, adding: “If they had booed him, it would have led the news.” That’s the national media we see too often. Arrogant, tendentious, partisan, unbalanced, unfair — and in denial.

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The Media’s Catechism (National Review Online, 050408)

Covering a big story, live, is hard, and journalists will make mistakes. When Christiane Amanpour of CNN described John Paul II in the hours after his death as “the first non-Catholic to be elected pope in more than 455 years,” she provided some much-needed levity to the day. Nobody will hold it against her.

What is more problematic is the media’s unconscious tendentiousness in describing the teachings of this pope and his Church. The Pope, nearly everyone said, was a complex man: He was progressive on economics, war, and the death penalty, yet took doctrinaire and divisive positions on moral issues. The media, much less complex, let us know which of these features were laudable and which lamentable — the word “divisive” being one of the most common cues. And journalists have followed this line with a uniformity of thought that no church could ever attain. The resulting depiction of the Catholic Church and John Paul II is full of distortions — not falsifications, but highly misleading exaggerations.

So, for example, the Pope is said to have been a tough critic of capitalism. And there is considerable truth to this claim. The Church does not support an extreme individualism or laissez faire. It worries about materialism and an economy unrestrained by moral values. But under this pope, the Church’s appreciation of free markets grew, and even its criticism began to focus more on the imperative to widen the circle of productive exchange — to bring more people into markets. Nor does the Church’s support for the principle of subsidiarity — that power should be exercised as close to the people as possible — make for an obvious fit with the agendas of social democrats. In Centesimus Annus, the Pope worried about “a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.” All faithful Catholics accept a responsibility to help the poor. But what the precise mix of governmental action, private charity, and individual initiative should be is a matter about which faithful Catholics can differ.

The Pope’s opposition to the Iraq war has also been exaggerated. He said that war represented a failure of statesmen and urged peace. But he did not condemn the war, declare it unjust, or urge Catholic soldiers not to participate in it. Contrast this with his opposition to abortion: He did urge Catholic doctors not to perform abortions. The gravity and definitiveness of the teachings on these issues are not comparable, and a list of the Church’s “positions” — as though it had a political platform — must inevitably obscure this.

Another motif of the coverage has been that this papacy represented a retreat from the “openness” of Vatican II. But Karol Wojtyla was a major figure in Vatican II. His understanding of what it meant was very different from that of liberals who wanted the Church to accommodate itself to modernity (and of conservatives who feared that the Church was doing that). There is a reason that Church liberals typically invoke the “spirit” of Vatican II: They are trying to do to it what the theory of the “living Constitution” has done to America’s Founders.

Finally, the media have kept noting that many Catholics, especially in the West, have flouted the Church’s teachings on abortion, birth control, and sexual morality. This is true; but it should be put in context. Even more Catholics have flouted Church teaching on, say, the universal obligation to love one another and the immorality of lying. The odds that the Church will change its teaching on love or lying are approximately as great as the odds that it will bless abortion and non-marital sex — whatever the church of the television anchors may want. — The Editors

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Old media on Iraq: Good news not newsworthy (townhall.com, 050412)

David Limbaugh

When it comes to reporting on the Iraq War, the Old Media might as well be an appendage of the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party. It is astonishing how little coverage we’ve seen of the positive trend there over the last few months.

I realize many just chalk up the media’s emphasis on bad news as intrinsic to journalism: the attitude that if nothing is going wrong, it’s not really newsworthy. But that just doesn’t wash.

How could anyone seriously contend that a reduction in the anarchy isn’t newsworthy? What could be more important than signs indicating we might have turned the corner on the “insurgency”?

While we heard a daily drumbeat of despair and an ongoing tabulation of American dead when things were looking bleaker — a look, I might add, that was meticulously cultivated by the Old Media — we hear nothing but a thundering silence today.

How can we but conclude that the media simply don’t want to promote the good news out of Iraq? But why? Well, obviously, they suppress good news because it vindicates their nemesis, President Bush, and incriminates them and their liberal comrades.

Do you think that’s unfair? Would you prefer I conclude instead that they downplay positive developments because they abhor the march of democracy in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East? I’m straining for an alternative explanation for their one-sided coverage.

We heard barely a whisper from these naysayers when we witnessed the popular uprising in Lebanon against Syrian occupation. Rather, they chose to highlight counter-protests by Hezbollah-sympathizers — as if the media were rooting against democracy and independence.

They don’t even pretend to be balanced. Remember the early anti-administration reporting that accompanied the beginning of the ground war? There were predictions of quagmire, reports we were being greeted as occupiers and not liberators, exaggerated stories of museum lootings, complaints about our supply lines not keeping pace with our advancing troops and the like.

Don’t forget the media hype over alleged coalition negligence leading to missing explosives in Al Qaqaa, nor the media’s preposterous, relentless quest to pin the Abu Ghraib abuses directly on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The most egregious example of bias involved their conspiratorial joinder with Democrats to smear President Bush as a liar concerning his claims of WMD in Iraq. When we failed to find large WMD stockpiles after deposing Saddam Hussein, they helped Democrats portray a global failure of intelligence (assuming the weapons weren’t there and moved before our invasion), as premeditated deception by President Bush. They’ve all repeated the lie so much now that it has become part of the “conventional wisdom.”

Moving into the present, why aren’t we hearing much today about how we have the terrorists on the run? The Washington Times — decidedly not part of the Old Media — reported that the U.S. Marines almost caught “Abu Musab Zarqawi, the most-wanted terrorist in Iraq,” and he is still being pursued. “He’s going from brush pile to brush pile just like a wet rat,” said Lt. Gen John F. Sattler.

“Big deal,” you say. “It’s only newsworthy if they capture him.” Wrong. It’s newsworthy anyway, but especially if his near capture is more than blind luck. Indeed, it appears that any blind luck involved accrued not to coalition troops, but Zarqawi, who managed to escape only because of poor visibility brought on by bad weather.

Far from serendipitous, our tightening of the noose around Zarqawi was a natural consequence of our earlier military successes. Gen. Sattler told the Times that the “coalition has forced Zarqawi to work ‘independently’ by killing or capturing his first- and second-string lieutenants.” A media at least marginally receptive to good news out of Iraq would be all over this story.

While we don’t want to prematurely “count our chickens,” it would seem that a media interested in reporting, rather than coloring the news would celebrate this story.

Similarly, how about the relative decline in American fatalities? How about reports that Iraqi security forces are maturing and strengthening each day? How about recent hints that if current trends continue we could begin withdrawing substantial numbers of troops toward the end of the year?

Perhaps Gen. Sattler’s declaration in November that our victory in Fallujah had “broken the back of the insurgency” was not an overstatement. Only time will tell. But in the meantime, I suppose we’ll not hear much from the Old Media until the next coalition setback.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not saying the Old Media don’t want good things to happen in Iraq — but just not on President Bush’s watch.

Now that’s newsworthy.

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Tom DeLay vs. media lite (townhall.com, 050421)

Brent Bozell

For years now, liberals have snidely suggested that watching Fox News Channel makes dumb conservatives even dumber. They’ve even produced trumped-up studies trying to prove it. This is in marked contrast to the enlightened viewers of the fusty old news networks, the ones upholding the standards of seriously weighty journalism, you see.

How vague and uninformative can these tired Old Media types be? Take the issue of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. From the vantage point of these news networks, it’s unimportant to debate the substance of liberal attacks on DeLay. The charges don’t even have to be explained. No, the only thing that’s important is to build a vague impression of staggering momentum: DeLay has to go. On Monday morning, April 18, CBS and NBC morning shows picked up the story. Let’s look at the basic elements used to sing the “Hallelujah, Republicans in Trouble” chorus:

1. Set a dark and spooky tone. NBC’s Matt Lauer introduced the story: “Storm clouds are gathering on Capitol Hill, and at the center of the storm is the House Majority Leader, Texas Congressman Tom DeLay.” Lauer overlooked the [natty] point: It is the media themselves who are taping the dark clouds into the metaphorical sky and then “reporting” on that storm. CBS’s Julie Chen armed herself with other cliches: “Under fire for possible ethics violations,” DeLay went to Houston “for some much needed support.”

2. Empower the protesters. Then came the chants and obligatory signs of the left-wing DeLay-haters standing outside the NRA convention in Houston as DeLay spoke. Some signs read “Un-American Radical,” and “Indict Delay now,” and mocking DeLay’s old exterminating business, “The Constitution is not a cockroach.” Why does this little crowd outside, estimated by reporters as at best 150 people, suddenly get anointed as the voice of the people, while thousands cheering DeLay inside are ignored? Because they help the networks build their DeLay-the-crook storyline. CBS added the ridiculous line that some people in the protesters claimed to be conservative Republicans. Yes, and I suppose Dan Rather is a conservative Republican, too.

3. Run the clip of DeLay making a gun joke at the NRA convention. DeLay cracked: “When a man’s in trouble or in a good fight, you want all your friends around them, preferably armed.” It’s fair to wonder if the networks aired this because they thought this joke was sick, not funny. From his Sunday perch on “Face the Nation,” CBS anchor Bob Schieffer demanded that Rep. David Dreier denounce the line as “inflammatory” and asked him to disassociate himself “from these kinds of remarks.” Should Schieffer disassociate himself from CBS’s Julie Chen reporting DeLay was “under fire,” too?

4. Run outraged soundbite from a Democrat denouncing DeLay and ignore that Democrat’s documented unethical behavior. In NBC’s case, we were treated to Rep. Barney Frank disparaging DeLay: “We’re not talking about peccadilloes here. We’re talking about a serious corruption of the public policy process.” NBC knows Barney Frank didn’t care about corruption when the Clintons were in power, and NBC knows Barney Frank is a rich pick to accuse DeLay of corruption, given the revelation in August 1989 that Barney Frank had a male lover running a male prostitution ring out of his house — which NBC thought merited some 30 seconds of anchor dismissal at the time.

5. Speculate like crazy, for the Death Watch is on. NBC highlighted how “some Republicans” are wondering if DeLay is harming the party, and maybe he’ll have a tougher re-election fight. This isn’t the reporting of today’s news. It’s an attempt to influence the next day’s news. On this count, at least CBS noted that even Democrats assume he’s not going anywhere soon. But too much political news is trying to set the stage for what’s next, and too little is based on what’s already established.

What was missing in these “storm cloud” reports was any substance, not even much of a description of what the charges entailed. CBS only cited “three congressional rebukes for alleged ethical lapses ... amid reports he took luxury trips set up by big money lobbyists.” NBC said, “DeLay is under scrutiny for his political fundraising, for his overseas trips and for his connections to lobbyists under federal investigation. All that comes on top of three admonishments by the House Ethics committee last year.”

Are those few seconds really offering enough — for that matter, any information? Does it really explain what happened before the Ethics Committee? Why not compare the charges against DeLay to what Democrats do? Or to what Bill Clinton did to please donors, foreign and domestic? In the final analysis, TV news looks shallow and uninformative. Maybe it’s because it’s the only way to keep the storm brewing.

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Republican Chairman Exerts Pressure on PBS, Alleging Biases (New York Times, 050502)

[Kwing Hung: a left-wing comment on a right turn.]

WASHINGTON, May 1 - The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias, prompting some public broadcasting leaders - including the chief executive of PBS - to object that his actions pose a threat to editorial independence.

Without the knowledge of his board, the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests’ political leanings on one program, “Now With Bill Moyers.”

In late March, on the recommendation of administration officials, Mr. Tomlinson hired the director of the White House Office of Global Communications as a senior staff member, corporation officials said. While she was still on the White House staff, she helped draft guidelines governing the work of two ombudsmen whom the corporation recently appointed to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts.

Mr. Tomlinson also encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast “The Journal Editorial Report,” whose host, Paul Gigot, is editor of the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. And while a search firm has been retained to find a successor for Kathleen A. Cox, the corporation’s president and chief executive, whose contract was not renewed last month, Mr. Tomlinson has made clear to the board that his choice is Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is now an assistant secretary of state.

Mr. Tomlinson said that he was striving for balance and had no desire to impose a political point of view on programming, explaining that his efforts are intended to help public broadcasting distinguish itself in a 500-channel universe and gain financial and political support.

“My goal here is to see programming that satisfies a broad constituency,” he said, adding, “I’m not after removing shows or tampering internally with shows.”

But he has repeatedly criticized public television programs as too liberal overall, and said in the interview, “I frankly feel at PBS headquarters there is a tone deafness to issues of tone and balance.”

Pat Mitchell, president and chief executive of PBS, who has sparred with Mr. Tomlinson privately but till now has not challenged him publicly, disputed the accusation of bias and was critical of some of his actions.

“I believe there has been no chilling effect, but I do think there have been instances of attempts to influence content from a political perspective that I do not consider appropriate,” Ms. Mitchell, who plans to step down when her contract expires next year, said Friday.

Robert Coonrod, who stepped down as corporation president in July 2004, has known Mr. Tomlinson about 20 years and considers him a good friend. “I believe that his motives are exactly what he says they are,” he said. Mr. Tomlinson is “trying to help the people in public broadcasting understand why some people in the conservative movement think PBS is hostile to them and, two, imbue public broadcasting with the notion of balance because he thinks that long term it’s a winner in getting Congressional support.”

“Whether people like the way he goes about it or not is a different issue,” Mr. Coonrod added.

Though PBS’s ratings have stabilized lately after several years of decline, the network has faced criticism that much of its programming - shows like “Antiques Roadshow” and “Masterpiece Theater” - is little different from what can be found on cable television. Though a huge bequest to National Public Radio from the estate of Joan Kroc, widow of the founder of McDonald’s, has furthered the independence of public radio, corporate support and state financing for public television have slipped in recent years, making the nearly $400 million in federal money annually funneled through the corporation increasingly important.

Nor have administration officials and lawmakers been shy about challenging certain programming. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, for example, earlier this year publicly denounced a program featuring a cartoon rabbit named Buster who visited a pair of lesbian parents.

The corporation is a private, nonprofit entity financed by Congress to ensure the vitality of public television and radio. Tension is hardwired into its charter, where its mandate to ensure “objectivity and balance” is accompanied by an exhortation to maintain public broadcasting’s independence. Mr. Tomlinson said that in his view, objectivity and balance meant “a program schedule that’s not skewed in one direction or another.” Some corporation board members say that complaints about ideological pressure are premature.

Beth Courtney, president and chief executive of Louisiana Public Broadcasting and one of three non-Republicans on the nine-member board, said there had been no chilling of journalistic efforts. “What we should look for are the real actions,” she said. “We shouldn’t speculate about people’s motivations.”

But Mr. Tomlinson’s tenure has brought criticism that his chairmanship has been the most polarizing in a generation. Christy Carpenter, a Democratic appointee to the board from 1998 to 2002, said partisanship was “essentially nonexistent” in her first years. But once Mr. Tomlinson, a former editor in chief of Reader’s Digest, joined in September 2000 and President Bush’s election changed the board’s political composition, the tenor changed, she said.

“There was an increasingly and disturbingly aggressive desire to be more involved and to push programming in a more conservative direction,” said Ms. Carpenter, who is now a vice president of the Museum of Television and Radio. One of the more disturbing developments, she added, was a “very vehement dislike for Bill Moyers.”

It is not a shock that Mr. Moyers’s work exercised Mr. Tomlinson. He is a reliable source of agitation for conservatives, who complain that “Now” under Mr. Moyers (who left the show last year and was replaced by David Brancaccio) was consistently critical of Republicans and the Bush administration. Days after the Republicans gained control of the Senate in the 2002 elections, Mr. Moyers - an aide in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and a former newspaper publisher who has been associated with PBS since the 1970’s - said the entire federal government was “united behind a right-wing agenda” that included “the power of the state to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives.”

In December 2003, three months after he was elected chairman, Mr. Tomlinson sent Ms. Mitchell of PBS a letter outlining his concerns. “‘Now With Bill Moyers’ does not contain anything approaching the balance the law requires for public broadcasting,” he wrote.

Shortly after, Mr. Tomlinson hired a consultant to review Mr. Moyers’s program; one three-month contract cost $10,000. The reports Mr. Tomlinson saw placed the program’s guests in categories like “anti-Bush,” “anti-business” and “anti-Tom DeLay,” referring to the House majority leader, corporation officials said. The reports found the guests were overwhelmingly anti-Bush, a conclusion Mr. Moyers disputed.

Mr. Moyers said on Friday that he did not know a content review was undertaken but that he was not surprised. “Tomlinson has waged a surreptitious and relentless campaign against ‘Now’ and me,” he said, dismissing complaints that he is biased. Mr. Moyers left “Now” to write a book but is back on public television as host of the series “Wide Angle.”

Mr. Tomlinson said he conducted the content review on his own, without sending the results to the board or making them public, because he wanted to better understand complaints he was hearing without provoking a storm. “If I wanted to be more destructive to public broadcasting but score political points, I would have come out with this study a year and a half ago,” he said.

Recently, PBS refused for months to sign its latest contract with the corporation governing federal financing of national programming, holding up the release of $26.5 million. For the first time, the corporation argued that PBS’s agreeing to abide by its own journalistic standards was not sufficient, but that it must adhere to the “objectivity and balance” language in the charter. In a January letter to the leaders of the three biggest producing stations, in New York, Boston and Washington, the deputy general counsel of PBS warned that this could give the corporation editorial control, infringing on its First Amendment rights and possibly leading to a demand for balance in each and every show.

The corporation said it had no such plans, and the contract was finally signed about a month ago.

Mr. Tomlinson did help get one program, “The Journal Editorial Report,” on the air as a way of balancing “Now.” Ms. Mitchell backed the program, but public broadcasting officials said Mr. Tomlinson was instrumental in lining up $5 million in corporate financing and pressing PBS to distribute it.

Public television executives noted that Mr. Gigot’s show by design features the members of the conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, while Mr. Moyers’s guests included many conservatives, like Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition; Richard Viguerie, a conservative political strategist; and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

Mr. Tomlinson said that it was his concerns about “objectivity and balance” that led to the creation of a new office of the ombudsman at the corporation to issue reports about public television and radio broadcasts. But the role of a White House official in setting up the office has raised questions among some public broadcasting executives about its independence. In March, after she had been hired by the corporation but was still at the White House as director of the Office of Global Communications, Mary Catherine Andrews helped draft the office’s guiding principles, set up a Web page and prepare a news release about the appointment of the new ombudsmen, officials said.

Ms. Andrews said she undertook the work at the instruction of top officials at the corporation. “I was careful not to work on this project during office hours during my last days at the White House,” she said.

Mr. Tomlinson has also occasionally worked with other White House officials on public broadcasting issues. Last year he enlisted the presidential adviser Karl Rove to help kill a legislative proposal that would change the composition of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s board by requiring the president to fill about half the seats with people who had experience in local radio and television. The proposal was dropped after Mr. Rove and the White House criticized it.

Mr. Tomlinson said he understood the need to reassure liberals that the traditions of public broadcasting, including public affairs programs, were not changing, “that we’re not trying to put a wet blanket on this type of programming.”

But his efforts to sow goodwill have shown that what he says he tries to project is sometimes read in a different way. Last November, members of the Association of Public Television Stations met in Baltimore along with officials from the corporation and PBS. Mr. Tomlinson told them they should make sure their programming better reflected the Republican mandate.

Mr. Tomlinson said that his comment was in jest and that he couldn’t imagine how remarks at “a fun occasion” were taken the wrong way. Others, though, were not amused.

“I was in that room,” said Ms. Mitchell. “I was surprised by the comment. I thought it was inappropriate.”

Stephen Labaton reported from Washington for this article, Lorne Manly from New York and Elizabeth Jensen from Columbus, Ohio.

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Fleischer’s No Spin Zone (townhall.com, 050430)

Loredana Vuoto

Taking Heat: The President, the Press and My Years in the White House - reviewed by Loredana Vuoto

Is the media objective? Not so, says Ari Fleischer, former White House Press Secretary for President George W. Bush in his new book, “Taking Heat: The President, the Press and My Years in the White House.” According to Fleischer, the media’s coverage of events is always more favorable to Democrats than to Republicans. “I think there is an ideological bias,” Fleischer said in a recent interview in The Hill. “Most reporters are Democrats, and I think that’s a problem, and it shows up often in typically subtle ways, particularly on policy issues.”

During his two-and-a-half-year stint as the Bush administration’s spokesperson, Fleischer witnessed first-hand the machinations of the White House press corps. Citing a 1999 poll by the Pew Research Center, Fleischer agrees with two-thirds of the national press corps who believe the distinction between reporting and commentary has been blurred. He notes that the media is too focused on negativity and has a tendency of hyping the news. The result, most often, is reporting that is unsympathetic to the Bush administration and its policies.

Despite his beef with the press, Fleischer acknowledges the importance the media plays in a free and democratic society. He notes, for example, that nations like China do not enjoy freedom of the press. He says in The Hill that when going to China and attending a press conference, “President Jiang not only had the answers written down in front of him, but he had the questions written down in front of him that he would get from the Chinese media. It was state controlled.” He not only believes that Americans tend to take freedom of the press for granted, but that the openness and diversity of the American media is a model for many foreign nations. In fact, it is precisely this freedom that drives the American media, making its members some of the most hardworking journalists in the world.

But Fleischer’s book delves beyond media bias and freedom of the press. He attempts to give insight into what it was like being press secretary during one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history. Despite the media’s portrayal of Bush when he was first told of the September 11 attacks while visiting a Florida classroom, Fleischer contends that the president was in control, fully aware of the magnitude of the crisis. He said the president instantly recognized “this was war,” and that he was determined “to lead our nation in winning it.” He also describes how the president handled the tragedy, comforting and consoling the families of the victims during his first trip to New York a few days after the attacks.

Through personal anecdotes, Fleischer recounts his days at the White House and his interactions with the president. He discusses how he started working for Bush during the 2000 campaign and examines at length the contested Florida recount, his transition into the White House leading up to September 11 and the war in Iraq. Although weapons of mass destruction were never found, he defends the Bush administration’s decision to go to war. Fleischer rightly argues that Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime posed a grave threat to U.S. national security, as well as the stability of the Middle East.

Amidst tragedy, war and taking heat from the press, Fleischer remarks that the most memorable White House moment was when the president invited him to play catch on the South Lawn to warm him up before he threw the first pitch for the Milwaukee Brewers’ new ballpark. It is these personal encounters Fleischer relishes the most. The veteran spokesperson chose to leave his post to pursue a family. He married a woman he met while working for President Bush. They now have a daughter, Liz, who he enjoys spending time with as he runs his own communications firm in New York.

Critics of Fleischer’s book contend it reveals little about the inner workings of the White House or any of the real grist that occurred in the Oval Office. Rather, they say, Fleischer appears to still be championing the Bush administration, singing the praises of the president and touting his policies. His book, similar to his spokesperson persona, is “tendentious,” “glib,” and “on message.” But what these liberal critics fail to grasp is that there simply isn’t anything to spin. Fleischer was proud of his job. He was proud of working for President Bush. And he was proud of serving his country during the first Bush administration. Although the liberal media can’t see beyond the negative, Fleischer has put forth a memoir worthy of his service in the Bush administration. It is clear, concise and forcefully argued. This may be the real reason why liberals dislike it so much.

Loredana Vuoto is a speechwriter for the assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed in the article are solely her own.

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Another Poll Finds Many More See Liberal Than Conservative Bias (Media Research Center, 050504)

Another national survey has determined that more see a media tilt to the left than the right. A poll conducted last year by the Missouri School of Journalism’s Center for Advanced Social Research, but released last week, found that “by 74% to 18%,” those polled “said journalists tend to favor one side over the other in political and social issues. Of the 85% who said they see bias in the news, 48% identified that bias as liberal; 30% identified it as conservative.” That matches how last year more perceived coverage of Bush than of Kerry to be unfair and a 2003 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that “when it comes to describing the press, twice as many say news organizations are ‘liberal’ (51%) than ‘conservative,’ (26%).”

For an April 27 AP article about the survey of 495 adults during June-July, 2004, “Survey: U.S. Trusts the News but Sees Bias,” go to: news.yahoo.com

For the University of Missouri’s rundown of the survey results: www.journalism.missouri.edu

That poll matches public opinion tracked in some earlier surveys summarized in past CyberAlerts:

# November 15, 2004 CyberAlert: In the fourth survey in the past few weeks to have found more of the public perceived the media as biased in John Kerry’s favor over President George W. Bush, a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll, released on Thursday, pegged the percent of voters who believed Bush’s press coverage was “unfair” at nine points higher than for John Kerry while the percent who thought Bush’s coverage was “fair” was lower by the same gap — 9 points. See: www.mediaresearch.org

The three earlier polls:

— By 46% to 42%, those who voted on election day in 12 “battleground” states, believed “that the media’s coverage of this year’s presidential election was biased towards one candidate or party,” a survey conducted by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates determined. Within the 46%, more than twice as many, 32% of the total number of those polled, saw a tilt in favor of Kerry and Democrats than in favor of Bush and Republicans, 14%. By 30% to 12%, independents saw the bias going in Kerry’s direction. Of those who saw bias, 68% perceived more than in past election years. See the November 9 CyberAlert: www.mediaresearch.org

— Two polls released the week before the election found that more people perceive the media tilting coverage in favor of Democrat John Kerry than in favor of Republican President George W. Bush. Gallup determined that 35% think coverage has tilted toward Kerry compared to just 16% who said it favored Bush. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press discovered that “half of voters (50%) say most newspaper and TV reporters would prefer to see John Kerry win the election, compared with just 22% who think that most journalists are pulling for George Bush.” While 27% described Kerry coverage as “unfair,” 37% labeled Bush coverage as “unfair.” Pew also learned that “voters who get most of their election news from CNN favor Kerry over Bush, by 67%-26%.” For details, see the November 1 CyberAlert: www.mediaresearch.org

# September 27, 2004 CyberAlert: New surveys have found that public perception of media credibility has fallen and that by two or three-to-one, more see major networks and newspapers as “biased to help Kerry” over Bush. A Gallup poll “conducted after the CBS News report was questioned but before the network issued a formal apology,” determined that “just 44% of Americans express confidence in the media’s ability to report news stories accurately and fairly,” a “significant drop” from 54% a year ago. In addition, “the poll found that 48% of Americans view the news media as ‘too liberal,’ while 15% viewed it as ‘too conservative.’” Meanwhile, a Rasmussen poll found that many more see ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC as biased in favor of Kerry over Rather with CBS “seen as the most biased — 37% believe that network news team is trying to help the Kerry campaign” compared to just 10% who believe CBS is trying to help Bush. On the print side, Rasmussen discovered a public perception of a similar slant in the New York Times, USA Today and Washington Post with the New York Times “seen as the most biased.” www.mediaresearch.org

# July 14, 2003 CyberAlert: By 2-to-1, Public Sees Liberal Over Conservative Bias. “Most Americans (53%) believe that news organizations are politically biased, while just 29% say they are careful to remove bias from their reports. When it comes to describing the press, twice as many say news organizations are ‘liberal’ (51%) than ‘conservative,’ (26%)” a just-released Pew Research Center for the People and the Press survey discovered. Even a plurality of Democrats see a liberal slant over a conservative one. For details: www.mediaresearch.org

# October 17, 2000 CyberAlert: By two-to-one, registered voters say “most journalists” are “pulling for” Gore over Bush. Even a plurality of Democrats see a pro-Gore slant, a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll determined. And the closer people follow news coverage the more they see a pro-Gore tilt.

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Google money engine for Democrats only (WorldNetDaily, 050506)

Execs, employees gave $463,500 to party, $5,000 to Republicans

WASHINGTON — With the Internet’s No. 1 search engine under fire for playing political favorites with content, a search of Google’s political contributions as recorded by the Federal Elections Commission shows a staggering $463,500 went to Democrats in the last three election cycles with a paltry $5,000 going to Republicans.

Of approximately 200 individual Google employee political contributions to political candidates in 2004, 2002 and 2000, all but six went to Democrats, Democratic Party organizations and Democrat-supporting organizations such as MoveOn.org. One $250 contribution went to Ralph Nader, one went to President Bush’s campaign and three went to Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch’s campaigns.

Google Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt was by far the biggest benefactor, giving $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 2000, $25,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2004, as well as maximum $2,000 contributions to 2004 Democratic presidential candidates Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, Gov. Howard Dean and Rep. Richard Gephardt.

Schmidt also gave $11,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2000, according to records of the FEC, as well as tens of thousands more to a variety of other Democratic candidates including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Besides his cash contributions to Kerry in 2004, Schmidt formally endorsed the Democratic candidate for president after he got the party’s nomination.

Google Products Manager Laura A. Debonis was another big giver to the Democratic cause, offering up $25,000 to the DNC in 2004 and another $10,000 to the New Hampshire Democratic State Committee, though she lives in San Francisco.

David Drummond, a Google executive, also gave $23,000 to the DNC in 2004.

But the most striking thing about the list of Google political activists is the one-sided nature of the giving. From programmers to engineers to scientists to business development staff to general managers, there is near unanimity in support of Democrats and Democrat organizations.

Earlier this week, a conservative political action committee charged Google with bias in its advertising policies when an ad criticizing Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was rejected, though it included the same verbiage as an ad previously posted on Google attacking Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Later, Google explained neither ad should have run.

The group RightMarch.com said after placing the ad taking on Pelosi, the Democratic House minority leader, Google informed the group it “does not permit ad text that advocates against an individual, group or organization” and said the ad had been pulled.

“The internet public relies on Google’s objectivity to produce unbiased results from its search engine, including its AdWords,” claimed Larry Ward, CEO of Interactive Political Media, Inc., the top Internet political advertising agency in Washington. “As the leader and most recognized brand on the Internet, Google has an obligation to its users and investors to provide unbiased content, especially when that content is political in nature.”

Ward said, “It is a sad day for the Internet when we must label search engines like Google as a left wing or right wing.”

Mike Mayzel, a spokesman for Google, said both the anti-Pelosi ad and the anti-DeLay ad are gone.

“Both ads were taken down,” he told WND. “Any assertion to the contrary is false. As soon as an ad is reviewed and found to be in violation of our policies, we take it down as soon as possible. Any suggestion we would leave some ads up longer than others for reasons of political bias is false.”

In addition, earlier this week, WorldNetDaily reported Google has announced it is getting ready to begin ranking news searches by “quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search times,” giving preference to big news agencies such as CNN and the Associated Press – both news organizations that have been criticized for pro-Democrat bias.

Google reported earnings of $1.256 billion for the first quarter of 2005 – up 93 per cent over the equivalent quarter for last year.

A survey of other high-tech companies’ political contributions shows Google is exceptional in its lop-sided contributions to Democrats. Microsoft was the biggest tech donor to political causes and campaigns in 2004 with some $3.1 million political action committee money disbursed – more than half going to Republicans.

Overall, 53% of high-tech industry contributions went to Democrats in 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a liberal group that tracks campaign spending and contributions.

Google has in the past declined to discuss employee campaign contributions. Emails to several company executives went unanswered.

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The blog that ate real journalism (townhall.com, 050511)

Cal Thomas

The Huffington Post, an Internet blog that debuted May 9 after a campaign that would have delighted P.T. Barnum, makes me nostalgic for the good old days of journalism.

It isn’t that its founder, Arianna Huffington (who named it for herself in true Hollywood “enough about me, not what do YOU think about me” fashion) doesn’t have every right to join the increasingly clogged blog superhighway. Rather, this blog has an agenda and speaks mostly to people who already believe what most of its writers say.

Increasingly, we are surrounded by people who write and speak to a single constituency - their own. The left is now trying to gin-up the same level of anger the right has used to propel itself into political power and media heaven by its dominance of talk radio and much of cable TV. It is failing, though, because the left continues to have numerous mainstream outlets for its ideas. The left’s problem is that people are familiar with those ideas and they are rejecting them.

In The Huffington Post, the musical genius Quincy Jones explains that Michael Jackson’s problem is too much fame and too little of God. But director Mike Nichols writes that the Bible is nothing but metaphors and is not to be taken seriously as “fundamentalists” do (Quincy, please call Mike).

Gary Hart(pence) continues his endless campaign to be taken seriously since his alliance on the deliciously named yacht, “Monkey Business.” Hart contributes an essay that asks if the U.S. is building permanent military bases in Iraq. If so, he says, that means we do not intend to withdraw all our troops. Profound, Gary.

Other certified lefties, like Walter Cronkite, Larry David, Democrat Sen. John Corzine of New Jersey, and an occasional right-winger like John Fund of The Wall Street Journal and Joe Scarborough of the low-rated MSNBC, contribute, but most of the blog is leftist and secular.

Director and former “Meathead” Rob Reiner thinks the press is doing a lousy job by not exposing Bush Administration scandals. “Where Have You Gone Woodward and Bernstein?” he asks. To the bank, Rob. They sold their Watergate papers for big bucks to the University of Texas.

The problem with blogs like The Huffington Post is that they divert our attention from real and serious journalism. OK, there hasn’t been much serious journalism for at least 20 years as real journalists have died or gone on to other rewards and the networks have been taken over by people who care only about the bottom line and little about covering news that matters.

When I started in journalism, my superior at NBC told me I would need a college degree and a minimum of five years’ writing experience at a newspaper or wire service to be considered for on-air work. At NBC in those years, every reporter and many producers met or exceeded those requirements. Virtually every journalist wrote his own copy.

Now, none of those things seem to matter. As the quality of stories has diminished and we now fixate on runaway brides, car chases, celebrity trials and other sideshows, serious subjects such as the war and coming conflicts with China and possibly Russia take a back seat.

If the public is unprepared for new threats and challenges, it will largely be the big media’s fault for failing to prepare them. The public will share the blame for fixating on blogs.

Blogs have their place. They played an important role in the last presidential election by contributing to the debate over John Kerry’s experience in Vietnam and George Bush’s National Guard records. But if they replace solid journalistic principles and practices, the public will be ill-served and the profession may suffer a mortal wound from which it might not recover.

With blogs, we do not know if what we read is true. For most blogs, no editor checks for factual errors and no one is restrained from editorializing. The Big Media sometime are guilty of these same shortcomings, but at least with them there is a presumption in favor of accuracy and fairness, plus there’s a way to shame them and occasionally force a correction if they mess up. Blogs have no checks and balances.

I suspect - and hope - that once the bloom is off the blogs, serious people (and they seem to be an endangered species) might still crave real journalism and be able to remember what it looked and sounded like.

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The Christians are at the gates, but they don’t want in (townhall.com, 050513)

Jonah Goldberg

All right, enough already. The Christians aren’t coming to get you.

I can take the somber, frightened “special reports” on National Public Radio, where you can literally hear the correspondents wringing their hands over the possibility that the “Darwin fish” affixed to their Volvos will be banned. I can even handle the dog-whistle shrieks of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd types about the looming Inquisition led by an alliance of the new German (wink, wink) pope and the Kansas Board of Education.

But the most recent episode of NBC’s doddering “Law & Order” series is where I draw the line. The episode tells the story of a racist who committed murder nine years ago but who, in shame and remorse, subsequently found Jesus and was born again. In the nine years since he dedicated himself to Christ, he has led an exemplary life. But his guilt is discovered, and he decides to confess and show true contrition.

So far, so good, right? I’m sure the writers and producers thought they were being eminently fair to all sides. They even showed Jack McCoy (played by Sam Waterston) stunned beyond words that a born-again Christian could be so sincere. In one scene I swear he made the same face my old basset hound would make when I tried to feed him a grape: total and complete incomprehension. His assistant even confessed she goes to church regularly and knows decent born-agains herself.

But this was all grace on the cheap. The rest of the storyline was festooned with nasty - and dishonest - shots. For example, as McCoy and his assistants work to bring the murderer to justice, the shadowy forces of the Christian right seek to have him absolved of all accountability for his crime because he’d accepted Jesus as his personal savior.

I should point out that Christian conservatives have never done anything like this. Indeed, the only remotely similar episode in recent memory concerned Karla Faye Tucker, the white female ax murderer who also happened to be a born-again Christian. Some conservative Christians - and many other anti-death penalty advocates - argued she should be spared the death penalty but not absolved of her crime. George W. Bush - the supposedly theocratic Christian - was the governor of Texas at the time, and was empowered to halt the execution. His response to such requests: No dice. “I have concluded that judgments about the heart and soul of an individual on death row are best left to a higher authority,” he declared. “May God bless Karla Faye Tucker, and God bless her victims and their families.”

Why take pains to point out that TV fiction doesn’t match reality? Because the original conceit of “Law & Order” was that it tackled the thorny legal and moral issues associated with actual murders “ripped from the headlines.” In its early years, the show handled Tawana Brawley, the Central Park jogger, Bernie Goetz and other real crimes. The show remains a cash cow for the network - what, with more franchises than Pottery Barn - but it’s been unraveling for years. Now that the crime rate has shrunk, and the egos of the producers have expanded, they think they can translate any current controversy into a homicide. This often becomes a very offensive - and stupid -assault on the character of our republic; most of our political contests do not involve murders.

Regardless, the very idea that evangelical Christians would argue that being born again absolves you in this life for the consequences of your crimes is nonsense, plucked whole cloth in a fit of ignorance. But the complete, outrageous implausibility of the episode’s plot wasn’t the most infuriating part. Several times, various characters opine that the Christians’ legal tactics might work given “what’s happening in this country right now.” I half expected Pat Robertson to burst through McCoy’s office spraying holy water screaming, “Exorcist” style, “The power of Christ compels you!”

The complexity of what conservative Christians really believe is lost on the writers of “Law & Order” - not surprising for a Hollywood show about New York that blends both coastal sensibilities perfectly. The fact that more and more headlines are being ripped from “red” America creates challenges for writers - like having to plausibly depict midtown Manhattan as a hotbed of evangelical, anti-abortion fervor (as they have more than once). But such challenges are minor compared to the dilemma of making their paranoia seem real.

I grew up in New York City, I know New York City, and I have this to tell my fellow New Yorkers: You are perfectly safe from the Christians hordes. None of the stuff supposedly “happening in America right now” is actually affecting Dowd or Krugman or the “L&O” writing teams. Pharmacies in New York and L.A. are still filling prescriptions for the “morning after” pill, schools are still teaching evolution, abortion clinics are humming along. And don’t e-mail me in a tizzy about gay marriage bans. Gay marriage didn’t exist under Bill Clinton either.

But that’s how the “paranoid style” works: Abstract or distant offenses are seen as personal threats. And the megalomania of the paranoiacs cannot process the possibility that important things might be happening that do not affect them. Your Darwin fish are safe, my friends.

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Bring It On (American Spectator, 050513)

Unable to leave well enough alone, Democrats are ganging up on Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. According to the Washington Post, ranking Democratic Congressmen on the Energy and Commerce and Appropriation committees are calling for a probe of Tomlinson’s modest effort to bring philosophical balance to PBS.

This harassment of Tomlinson may backfire on the liberals. It invites scrutiny not so much of Tomlinson — that he complained about Bill Moyers and promoted two tame conservative-oriented shows (one with Tucker Carlson, the other with the Wall Street Journal editorial board) will strike most Americans as reasonable and long overdue correctives to obvious bias — but questioning of the liberals’ monopolistic control of PBS. The assumption driving the campaign against Tomlinson is that PBS belongs to liberals by some sort of divine right. Why should this be the case? The real issue isn’t, why is Tomlinson trying to correct PBS’s liberal prejudices, but why someone didn’t do it earlier.

The arrogance of the liberal cabal at PBS is incredible. They complain in proportion to their lost privileges. They automatically assume that Americans should feel happy to pay higher taxes to finance what amounts to PBS infomercials for the Democratic Party and the ideological cultural left.

The media coverage of Tomlinson reflects this arrogance of the aggrieved ruling class pining over its diminution (and minor at that) of power at PBS. Starting with the premise that liberalism is synonymous with editorial neutrality and independence, the media cast Tomlinson as “political” while his liberal critics at PBS are treated as “independent.” This drawing of artificial lines is necessary in order to make the story sound compelling. But the story isn’t alarming in the least if people know that the independent critics here are Democrats and liberals who treat PBS tax dollars as their own personal piggy bank for ideological projects.

Under a picture of Bill Moyers, the Washington Post ran the caption: “Bill Moyers’s PBS program is reported to have been monitored for ‘anti-Bush’ content.” That’s supposed to sound very chilling. But what Tomlinson did sounds responsible once you know that Moyers’s infomercials for the Democrats are financed with tax dollars. Didn’t the same press now getting worked up over Tomlinson complain recently about tax dollars going to pro-Bush content (from Armstrong Williams and the like)? If tax dollars shouldn’t go to pro-Bush journalism, by that same reasoning the press should object to tax dollars going to Bill Moyers for anti-Bush journalism. That Tomlinson objected to Moyers’ anti-Bush content isn’t any more threatening to editorial independence than the press’s legitimate squawking about tax-financed right-wing punditry.

The media’s contrived contest of Tomlinson vs. PBS isn’t politics vs. independence, but politics vs. politics. And Tomlinson’s politics (which consists in this case of simply ensuring that a government agency under George Bush’s control adheres to the philosophical balance the law establishing PBS mandated) is justified. He is, after all, a political appointee. The political maneuvering of PBS staffers isn’t justified. They aren’t political appointees.

Democratic Congressmen John Dingell and David Obey, trying desperately to upend Tomlinson before the liberal monopoly at PBS cracks up, have written to Corporation of Public Broadcasting Inspector General Kenneth Konz: “Recent news reports suggesting that the CPB increasingly is making personnel and funding decisions on the basis of political ideology are extremely troubling.” It wouldn’t occur to them that this is an exact description of what PBS under a liberal monopoly has done for decades. It has funded, hired, and programmed according to a liberal ideology since it started. But Tomlinson, a Bush political appointee, hires another Bush political appointee to do work a reasonable person would expect him to do, and that’s a scandal?

All of this is just empty noise, the usual frenzied mau-mauing of the left after anyone encroaches upon their undeserved fiefdoms. If the Democrats want a renewed debate over PBS, fine. Let’s take a look at PBS President Pat Mitchell’s hiring decisions. Mitchell, accorded the status of a dispassionate critic of Tomlinson by the press, is a former documentarian for Ted Turner. How many Democrats has she hired? And perhaps Congress could hold hearings on that PBS programming decision to run “Postcards from Buster,” a cartoon Mitchell aired earlier this year until Bush political appointees (acting so politically, of course) objected, which depicted a third-grade rabbit named Buster visiting post-Howard Dean, civil-unions Vermont for the spring maple harvest, during which Buster learns to adopt all the proper attitudes about familial diversity from a stay with a lesbian couple and their children.

The PBS Democrats are digging a hole for Tomlinson into which they will one day fall.

George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.

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Newsweek Accused of Spurring Afghan Violence (Foxnews, 050516)

NEW YORK — Pentagon officials reacted angrily to an acknowledgement from Newsweek that it published a flimsy report, accusing the magazine of inflaming anti-American violence in Afghanistan.

In an apology to readers, Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker said that its original source for a story accusing U.S. interrogators of flushing the Koran down the toilet to rattle a detainee later said he or she could not recall where information about the alleged incident came from.

“We believed our story was newsworthy because a U.S. official said government investigators turned up this evidence,” Whitaker wrote. “But we regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.”

Whitaker wrote that the magazine’s information came from “a knowledgeable U.S. government source,” and writers Michael Isikoff and John Barry had sought comment from two Defense Department officials. One declined to respond, and the other challenged another part of the story but did not dispute the Koran charge, Whitaker said.

Whitaker, however, did not say that the allegations in the story were wrong, but that the Newsweek reporters’ source could not pinpoint where the source obtained his or her information. He also implied that the story had no causal effect on the recent riots in Afghanistan, in which 15 people have died and dozens have been injured.

“The riots started and spread across the country, fanned by extremists and unhappiness over the economy,” Whitaker wrote.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the report was demonstrably false, and that investigators at the FBI and the Southern Command have not found any evidence to support it. SouthCom is based in Miami and oversees operations at Guantanamo.

“You can’t go back and undo or retract the damage that has been caused not only to this nation, but to those who have been attacked, injured or killed as a result of these false allegations,” he said.

The White House, said to be outraged over the report, stopped short of demanding a retraction. However, a spokesman implied the magazine should take back the story.

“It’s puzzling. While Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refuse to retract the story,” Scott McClellan said. “I think there’s a certain journalistic standard that should be met. In this instance it was not.

“This was a report based on a single anonymous source that could not substantiate the allegation that was made,” McClellan added. “The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged. I just find it puzzling.”

The allegations by the “knowledgeable U.S. government source” were to be included in an upcoming SouthCom review, Isikoff and Barry said in the May 9 issue.

But on Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told the magazine that a review of the military’s investigation concluded “it was never meant to look into charges of Koran desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them ‘not credible.’”

While Pentagon officials deny uncovering any information about the alleged incident, FOX News has learned that the Newsweek report may be based on a detainee’s statement. In the summer of 2002, a Guantanamo prisoner told an FBI agent that an American official there flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet. The FBI did not confirm the allegation, but passed a report containing the detainee’s statement to the Department of Defense.

Many of the 520 inmates at Guantanamo are Muslims arrested during the U.S.-led war against the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies in Afghanistan.

After Newsweek published the story, demonstrations spread across Afghanistan and Muslims around the world decried the alleged desecration.

In Afghanistan, Islamic scholars and tribal elders called for the punishment of anyone found to have abused the Koran, said Maulawi Abdul Wali Arshad, head of the religious affairs department in Badakhshan province.

Arshad and the provincial police chief said the scholars met in Faizabad, 310 miles northeast of the capital, Kabul, and demanded a “reaction” from U.S. authorities within three days.

Lebanon’s most senior Shiite Muslim cleric on Sunday said the reported desecration of the Koran is part of an American campaign aimed at disrespecting and smearing Islam.

In a statement faxed to The Associated Press, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah called the alleged desecration a “brutal” form of torture and urged Muslims and international human rights organizations “to raise their voices loudly against the American behavior.”

On Saturday, Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, both allies of Washington, demanded an investigation and punishment for those behind the reported desecration of the Koran.

The story also sparked protests in Pakistan, Yemen and the Gaza Strip. The 22-nation Arab League issued a statement saying if the allegations panned out, Washington should apologize to Muslims.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said in an interview on a late night cable news show that the allegations were being investigated “vigorously.”

“If it turns out to be true, obviously we will take action against those responsible,” he said.

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Deadly Mistake: Newsweek’s erroneous report and apology demonstrates journalistic cluelessness. (National Review Online, 050516)

The shakily sourced May 9 Newsweek report that interrogators had desecrated a Koran at Guantanamo Bay is likely to do more damage to the U.S. than the Abu Ghraib prison scandals. What is also deeply disturbing is that the journalists who put the report out seem somewhat clueless about this reality.

Since the story was published there has been outrage and mayhem in much of the Muslim world. Demonstrations erupted in Pakistan after Imran Khan, a former cricket player and now opposition political figure, read sections from the article at a press conference.

Riots broke out throughout Afghanistan, mobs attacked government and aid-organization offices, and 15 people have died so far. Anti-American demonstrations have taken took place from north Africa to Indonesia.

Sheikh Sayed Tantawi, the head of Al-Azhar in Cairo, the major center of Sunni learning, called the purported desecration “a great crime,” while Egypt’s mufti, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, called it “an unforgivable crime” and “aggression” on Islam’s “sacred values.” The Gulf Cooperation Council, a set of American allies, called for the “harshest punishment” so that “the dignity of Muslims” could be preserved. Officials in Gaza and Iran also waded in.

This weekend, Abdul Fatah Fayeq, the senior judicial figure in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province, read out a statement from 300 Muslim clerics stating that President Bush should hand the culprits over to an Islamic country for punishment or else “we will launch a jihad against America.”

Meanwhile, in the face of Pentagon denials, Newsweek has begun backtracking. Newsweek seemed to have had doubts about the report from the beginning, since they ran it not as a straight news story but as a squiblet in the “Periscope” section. Now, in the May 23 issue, editor Mark Whitaker admits that their sourcing was suspect and stated “we regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.” In the same issue, Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas is more forthright, asking “How did NEWSWEEK get its facts wrong?”

Equally disturbing is the fact that Newsweek reporters seemed to have little idea how explosive such a story would be. While noting that, to Muslims, desecrating the Koran “is especially heinous,” Thomas looks for explanations, including “extremist agitators,” of why protest and rioting spread throughout the world, and maintains that it was at Imram Khan’s press conference that “the spark was apparently lit.” He confesses that after “so many gruesome reports of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the vehemence of feeling around this case came as something of a surprise.”

What planet do these people live on that they are surprised by something so entirely predictable? Anybody with a little knowledge could have told them it was likely that people would die as a result of the article. Remember Salman Rushdie?

The spark was lit not by Imram Khan but by Newsweek itself on May 9 when apparently none of its reporters or editors was aware of the effect such a story would have. There seems to have been nobody there that knew that death is the penalty for desecrating a Koran in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Egypt is milder, there one would be sentenced to several years in prison under Article 161 of the penal code for “publicly insulting Islam,” or perhaps Article 98, “inciting sectarian strife”; similar patterns are followed in more moderate Muslim countries.

In Pakistan, Article 295-B of the penal code calls for life imprisonment for desecrating the Koran or any extract from it. Last September, mentally handicapped Shahbaz Masih was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment, convicted of tearing up some leaflets that contained verses from the Koran. In 2003, the same judge sentenced Ranjha Masih (no relation) to life in prison for allegedly throwing a stone at a Muslim signboard with a Koranic verse on it during a bishop’s funeral procession. Dozens of other Pakistanis have met similar fates.

In all of these countries, the greatest danger is not from the courts, but from vigilantes and mobs. In Pakistan in 1997, Shantinagar, a Christian town of some 10,000 people, was burned to the ground after a man there was accused of tearing pages from a Koran. In the Netherlands last fall, the documentary producer Theo Van Gogh was butchered after he produced a documentary Submission featuring Koranic verses on women’s bodies.

Even if Newsweek publishes a full retraction, the damage is done. Much of the Muslim world will regard it merely as a cover-up and feel reconfirmed in the view that America is at war with Islam. It will undercut the U.S., including in Afghanistan and Iraq, far more than Abu Ghraib did. “We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive” Newsweek quotes one Pakistani saying, “But insulting the Qur’an is like torturing all Muslims.”

It would be charitable to think that if Newsweek had known how explosive the story was it may have held off until it had more confirmation. If this is true, it is an indication that the media’s widespread failure to pay careful attention to the complexities of religion not only misleads us about domestic and international affairs but also gets people killed.

— Paul Marshall is senior fellow at Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom and editor of the just released Radical Islam’s Rules: the Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law.

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Newsweek’s double standard (WorldNetDaily, 050518)

As all the world knows, Newsweek’s ace reporters Michael Isikoff and John Barry rushed to print with an unsubstantiated story about the alleged desecration of the Quran by interrogators at Guantanamo. This story has had lethal consequences. And no amount of apologizing will bring back to life those 15 or so Muslims killed in the ensuing protests.

Those who have worked with Newsweek in general, and Isikoff in particular, know that the magazine’s standards are not always quite this loose. Forensic economist Stephen Dresch learned this the hard way. In March of this year, Dresch had received highly convincing information from imprisoned mobster Gregory Scarpa Jr. that a cache of explosives remained hidden in the old house of his jailmate, Terry Nichols of Oklahoma City notoriety.

For four frustrating weeks, Dresch could not get the FBI or the media interested in the story. Even after the FBI finally heeded Dresch’s warning and extracted the explosives on March 31 – conveniently, hours after the death of Terry Schiavo – Isikoff turned a deaf ear to the story. “Isikov [sic] essentially contended that I had to prove to him that the FBI’s recovery of the cache in Herington, KS, was a result of the Scarpa intelligence,” Dresch wrote to me on April 5.

“To add insult to injury,” Dresch continued, “Isikoff demanded that I identify my intel-org-security colleague and his NSC and DHS conduits. In short, I’ve rarely dealt with such a pompous, ludicrous a—hole (if you will excuse my Mongolian).”

This week, Dresch learned just how flexible Isikoff’s standards were. Isikoff and Newsweek had inflamed the Middle East with a reckless bit of anti-American agitprop that had but one unnamed, uncertain source.

“You had named sources who had provided the Scarpa-Nichols intelligence re the Herington explosives cache to the FBI on 1 March 2005,” Dresch wrote to Isikoff on May 17. “You had a “confidential source” who had passed this intelligence to the National Security Council and to the Department of Homeland Security on 22 March 2005, while the FBI failed to act until 31 March-1 April 2005. Yet, you refused to publish anything related to this because you couldn’t get anyone in the FBI (the compromised agency) to confirm this. Even if this saga had been untrue (which it was not), no one would have died as a result of its publication.”

Two years ago, I had had my own close encounter with Isikoff and Newsweek, and it was as unpleasant as Dresch’s I met with Isikoff and his British colleague, Mark Hosenball, in Newsweek’s Washington offices to interest them in the TWA Flight 800 story chronicled in the book Jim Sanders and I had just written called “First Strike.”

Newsweek had much to be unpleasant about. It was Newsweek, after all, that had penned the media’s most stirring defense of the CIA’s now notorious animation, the one that depicts the transformation of a noseless jumbo jet into a soaring rocket, an animation that instantly discredited all eyewitness testimony and ended any real investigation into the plane’s destruction.

The Newsweek piece, dated Dec. 1, 1997, uses a series of nine full-color “CIA PHOTOS” to make the CIA case. The photos show TWA Flight 800’s flaming passenger cabin climbing more than 3,000 feet to 17,000 feet, “creating the streak many witnesses mistake for a missile.”

When I asked how Newsweek could have relied on the CIA for such crucial information, Hosenball replied that certain unnamed Boeing executives had also assured him that the Boeing 747 fuel tank was a veritable accident waiting to happen. What executives? One has to wonder why any executive anywhere would make such incriminating statements to a Newsweek reporter.

Besides, when the CIA animation was first shown, Boeing had publicly dismissed it. “Boeing was not involved in the production of the video shown today, nor have we had the opportunity to obtain a copy or fully understand the data used to create it,” said the company in its immediate response to the animation. “The video’s explanation of the eyewitness observations can be best assessed by the eyewitnesses themselves.”

How did the eyewitnesses feel about the CIA animation? “That’s what I call the cartoon,” said helicopter pilot Maj. Fritz Meyer, “It was totally ludicrous. When that airplane blew up it immediately began falling. It came right out of the sky. From the first moment, it was going down.” Meyer’s perspective was the norm. Not one of the 750 official FBI witnesses had reported seeing the plane ascend after the explosion.

Making little headway, I asked Isikoff to read “First Strike.” He scoffed, “Which three pages?”

“Considering that this is the most important untold story of our time,” I answered, “how about a chapter?”

“Which three pages?” he countered dismissively.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of missile fire and CIA deception, Isikoff informed me that Newsweek was not about to recant. When I asked him what level of proof would be needed to change his mind, he suggested, only half-kidding, that I would have to bring in the guy who pulled the trigger.

Yes, in the protection of a certain legacy, the Newsweek standards could be very high indeed.

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Poll: Newsweek worse than CBS: Media watchdog wants cash for victims to make magazine’s retraction ‘sincere’ (WorldNetDaily, 050519)

As fallout continues from Newsweek’s retracted report about a Quran flushed down a toilet where Muslim terror suspects are held, a new online poll by users of America Online shows most feel the magazine’s story is worse than last year’s fabricated-documents fiasco by CBS News.

With more than 58,000 respondents in the unscientific survey, 60% of AOL users said Newsweek deserves more criticism than CBS, which used phony documents to put President Bush’s National Guard service in a negative light.

Though CBS News management originally stood by the authenticity of its documents, network anchor Dan Rather finally issued an on-air apology for the broadcast, claiming the network had been “misled.”

In the AOL poll, users were asked, “Which organization handled the post-report fallout better?” The answer was nearly split down the middle, with 51% saying CBS, and 49% saying Newsweek.

As far as Newsweek’s post-report response, a large majority – 63% – rated it “poor.” Sixteen percent called it “fair,” 12% said it was “good” and 10% believe it was “excellent.”

“This is just like the CBS scandal,” writes one poll participant in an associated messageboard. “The real question is why the Muslims didn’t get this upset by any of the previous stories telling of desecrations to the Quran. The rest of the media won’t look at that. They’ll feed on the flesh of wounded competition – and America will be less informed because of it.”

Others took direct aim at Michael Isikoff, one of the Newsweek reporters who wrote the blurb about the Quran in the toilet, which sparked violent protests in the Mideast and Asia, leading to at least 15 deaths.

“Writing a story based on lies and innuendo and unproven ‘facts’ is not journalism and is not doing his job,” said Jennifer Combs of Silverton, Ore. “Inciting riots is criminal and he ought to be doing a nice long jail sentence along with his editors who allowed the story to go to press!”

Jeffery S. Richardson, an attorney in Tallahassee, Fla., wrote:

Congress needs to subpoena Mr. Isikoff, and if necessary, raid his offices and put him in the can until we find out his source. The First Amendment gives you the right to say what you will, but it does not relieve you of responsibility for what you say. Neither does the law provide a special ‘reporter’ protection from our common duty to provide testimony and evidence. This is a very important issue and we need to make haste in showing the Muslim world that we have investigated this matter fully. It is also important that Newsweek accept responsibility for [its] error in judgment and its predictable results, and make amends to those people that their error affected.

Others think the news magazine is getting a bad rap.

“Pointing the finger at Newsweek is like blaming the gas-gauge when the car runs out of gas,” wrote a poster from northern Florida. “Who is responsible and who can be confronted, are the ‘better questions.’”

“Newsweek may have erred causing increased Moslem ire,” writes Ron Field, “but what about this administration which erred or lied on [weapons of mass destruction] and which has resulted in an ongoing war that has resulted in the deaths of thousands?”

Isikoff, meanwhile, is vowing to continue digging into the controversy, telling Newsday, “We are continuing to investigate what remains a very murky situation. It’s not like us or them [the Pentagon] have gotten to the bottom of this.”

Referring to the violent protests, Isikoff said, “Things turned out horribly, but it was unforeseen. A very strange set of circumstances led to a very horrible chain of events. And we all feel terrible about it.”

But the veteran journalist, noted for his chronicling of former President Bill Clinton’s sexual affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, is also defending his reporting on the toilet story.

He told Newsday a top Pentagon official did not dispute the Quran charge when shown the story before publication.

“If it was wrong, why didn’t you [Pentagon officials] demand a correction right away?” Isikoff said. “... They didn’t say a word until 11 days after the piece ran, when rioting had begun.”

The AOL poll also asked its users: “Will this cause long-term damage to American-Islamic relations?”

With more than 132,000 people voting on that question, almost three out of four respondents – 73% – said yes.

With that in mind, the media-watchdog group Accuracy in Media is calling on the Washington Post Company, which owns Newsweek, to compensate the victims of the violence caused by its story and help pay to rebuild properties that were destroyed.

“This goodwill gesture would help show that the Newsweek correction, apology and retraction are sincere,” said AIM editor Cliff Kincaid.

AOL also asked to rate the Bush administration’s post-Newsweek report response.

Thirty-five percent voted “poor,” 24% said “good,” 23% called it “excellent” and 18% responded “fair.”

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Newsweak? (townhall.com, 050518)

Thomas Sowell

It was perhaps appropriate that Dan Rather received the prestigious Peabody award in journalism at the same time when Newsweek magazine was finally backing away from its false story about Americans flushing the Koran down the toilet at the Guantanamo prison.

At least Dan Rather’s forged documents didn’t get anybody killed, as the phony Newsweek story did. What is even more revealing — and appalling — about the mainstream media is that they are now circling the wagons around Newsweek, to protect it from criticism, just as they circled the wagons around Dan Rather last year, and now give him an award this year to put the frosting on the cake.

If the forged documents at CBS and the phony story at Newsweek were just isolated mistakes, that would be one thing. But media liberals have made themselves accessories after the fact, by springing to the defense of such indefensible misconduct.

In a sense, that is good. It makes it easier for the public to see that the forged documents and the fake story were not just odd things that happened to a couple of people but were symptomatic of a mindset among many others who sprang to their defense.

Someone referred to the story about George Bush’s National Guard service as “too good to check.” In other words, it fit their vision so well, and scored a point that they wanted to score against President Bush, that it hardly seemed worthwhile to check out the facts.

That is almost certainly what happened with the story about Americans flushing the Koran down the toilet at the Guantanamo prison. It seems unlikely that Newsweek simply made up the story out of whole cloth. But, once they heard it, it was “too good to check.”

All this goes back to a more fundamental problem with the mainstream media. Too many journalists see their work as an opportunity to promote their own pet political notions, rather than a responsibility to inform the public and let their readers and viewers decide for themselves.

It is not a question of being “fair” to this or that side but of being honest with their readers and viewers.

Columnists and editorial writers are expected to offer opinions but reporters are expected to report facts. However, that distinction is increasingly blurred, with the front page of the New York Times often providing classic examples of editorials disguised as news.

What happened to Dan Rather last year and to Newsweek this year is that the disguise fell off when the “news” that they were trying to sell turned out to be fake and all that was left exposed was their animosity toward the Bush administration.

The Peabody award to Dan Rather drives home the point that the mainstream media have learned nothing and are thumbing their noses at their critics — and ultimately at those readers and viewers who are looking for enlightenment, rather than spin.

Abraham Lincoln said that you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. The steady erosion of the audience that watches CBS, ABC, and NBC television news, and the declining circulation of the leading newspapers, all indicate that more and more people are unwilling to be fooled.

The swift rise of talk radio, Fox News and the bloggers all reinforce the conclusion of a growing disillusionment with the mainstream media that once had a monopoly and abused it.

A reader recently suggested this formula: Monopoly plus discretion minus accountability equals corruption. That kind of corruption can be found not only in the mainstream media but also in two of our most important institutions, the public schools and the federal courts.

Both the schools and the courts flatter themselves that their job is to change society. So does much of the media. But what qualifies these people to be world-changers? They are usually poorly informed about science, uninformed about history and misinformed about economics.

And who elected them to change the world while pretending to be doing something else and betraying their trust?

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Newsweek dissembled, Muslims dismembered! (townhall.com, 050518)

Ann Coulter

When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.

When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey’s nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.

When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones’ accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff’s then-employer The Washington Post — which owns Newsweek — decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.

So apparently it’s possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.

Why no pause for reflection when Isikoff had a story about American interrogators at Guantanamo flushing the Quran down the toilet? Why not sit on this story for, say, even half as long as NBC News sat on Lisa Meyers’ highly credible account of Bill Clinton raping Juanita Broaddrick?

Newsweek seems to have very different responses to the same reporter’s scoops. Who’s deciding which of Isikoff’s stories to run and which to hold? I note that the ones that Matt Drudge runs have turned out to be more accurate — and interesting! — than the ones Newsweek runs. Maybe Newsweek should start running everything past Matt Drudge.

Somehow Newsweek missed the story a few weeks ago about Saudi Arabia arresting 40 Christians for “trying to spread their poisonous religious beliefs.” But give the American media a story about American interrogators defacing the Quran, and journalists are so appalled there’s no time for fact-checking — before they dash off to see the latest exhibition of “Piss Christ.”

Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas justified Newsweek’s decision to run the incendiary anti-U.S. story about the Quran, saying that “similar reports from released detainees” had already run in the foreign press — “and in the Arab news agency al-Jazeera.”

Is there an adult on the editorial board of Newsweek? Al-Jazeera also broadcast a TV miniseries last year based on the “Protocols of the Elders Of Zion.” (I didn’t see it, but I hear James Brolin was great!) Al-Jazeera has run programs on the intriguing question, “Is Zionism worse than Nazism?” (Take a wild guess where the consensus was on this one.) It runs viewer comments about Jews being descended from pigs and apes. How about that for a Newsweek cover story, Evan? You’re covered — al-Jazeera has already run similar reports!

Ironically, among the reasons Newsweek gave for killing Isikoff’s Lewinsky bombshell was that Evan Thomas was worried someone might get hurt. It seems that Lewinsky could be heard on tape saying that if the story came out, “I’ll (expletive) kill myself.”

But Newsweek couldn’t wait a moment to run a story that predictably ginned up Islamic savages into murderous riots in Afghanistan, leaving hundreds injured and 16 dead. Who could have seen that coming? These are people who stone rape victims to death because the family “honor” has been violated and who fly planes into American skyscrapers because — wait, why did they do that again?

Come to think of it, I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to hold Newsweek responsible for inciting violence among people who view ancient Buddhist statues as outrageous provocation — though I was really looking forward to finally agreeing with Islamic loonies about something. (Bumper sticker idea for liberals: News magazines don’t kill people, Muslims do.) But then I wouldn’t have sat on the story of the decade because of the empty threats of a drama queen gas-bagging with her friend on the telephone between spoonfuls of Haagen-Dazs.

No matter how I look at it, I can’t grasp the editorial judgment that kills Isikoff’s stories about a sitting president molesting the help and obstructing justice, while running Isikoff’s not particularly newsworthy (or well-sourced) story about Americans desecrating a Quran at Guantanamo.

Even if it were true, why not sit on it? There are a lot of reasons the media withhold even true facts from readers. These include:

* A drama queen nitwit exclaimed she’d kill herself. (Evan Thomas’ reason for holding the Lewinsky story.)

* The need for “more independent reporting.” (Newsweek President Richard Smith explaining why Newsweek sat on the Lewinsky story even though the magazine had Lewinsky on tape describing the affair.)

* “We were in Havana.” (ABC president David Westin explaining why “Nightline” held the Lewinsky story.)

* Unavailable for comment. (Michael Oreskes, New York Times Washington bureau chief, in response to why, the day The Washington Post ran the Lewinsky story, the Times ran a staged photo of Clinton meeting with the Israeli president on its front page.)

* Protecting the privacy of an alleged rape victim even when the accusation turns out to be false.

* Protecting an accused rapist even when the accusation turns out to be true if the perp is a Democratic president most journalists voted for.

* Protecting a reporter’s source.

How about the media adding to the list of reasons not to run a news item: “Protecting the national interest”? If journalists don’t like the ring of that, how about this one: “Protecting ourselves before the American people rise up and lynch us for our relentless anti-American stories.”

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Disgraceful (townhall.com, 050523)

John Leo

It’s official. Conservatives are losing their monopoly on complaints about media bias. In the wake of Newsweek’s bungled report that U.S. military interrogators “flushed a Qur’an down a toilet,” here is Terry Moran, ABC’s White House reporter, in an interview with radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt: “There is, I agree with you, a deep antimilitary bias in the media, one that begins from the premise that the military must be lying and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong.” Moran thinks it’s a hangover from Vietnam. Sure, but the culture of the newsroom is a factor, too. In all my years in journalism, I don’t think I have met more than one or two reporters who have ever served in the military or who even had a friend in the armed forces. Most media hiring today is from universities where a military career is regarded as bizarre and almost any exercise of American power is considered wrongheaded or evil.

Not long ago, memorable comments about press credibility came from two stars at Newsweek: Evan Thomas and Howard Fineman. During the presidential campaign, Thomas said on TV that the news media wanted John Kerry to win. We knew that, but the candor was refreshing. Fineman said during the flap over Dan Rather and CBS’s use of forged documents on the George Bush–National Guard story: “A political party is dying before our eyes—and I don’t mean the Democrats. I’m talking about the ‘mainstream media’ . . . . It’s hard to know now who, if anyone, in the ‘media’ has any credibility.” It’s worth mentioning here that the unrepentant Rather and his colleague Mary Mapes, who was fired for her role in presenting the forged documents, received a major industry award last week, a Peabody, as well as “extended applause” from the journalists in the crowd. (What’s next? A lifetime achievement award for New York Times prevaricator Jayson Blair?)

Instead of trampling Newsweek—the magazine made a mistake and corrected it quickly and honestly—the focus ought to be on whether the news media are predisposed to make certain kinds of mistakes and, if so, what to do about it. The disdain that so many reporters have for the military (or for police, the FBI, conservative Christians, or right-to-lifers) frames the way that errors and bogus stories tend to occur. The antimilitary mentality makes atrocity stories easier to publish, even when they are untrue. The classic example is CNN’s false 1998 story that the U.S. military knowingly dropped nerve gas on Americans during the Vietnam War. On the other hand, brutal treatment of dissenters by Fidel Castro tends to be softened or omitted in the American press because so many journalists still see him as the romanticized figure from their youth in the 1960s. Another example: It’s possible to read newspapers and newsmagazines carefully and never see anything about the liberal indoctrination now taking place at major universities. This has something to do with the fact that the universities are mostly institutions of the left and that newsrooms tend to hire from the left and from the universities in question.

I once complained to an important news executive that he ignored certain kinds of stories. He said that he would like to do them but that his staff wouldn’t let him. He admitted his staff had been assembled from one side—guess which?—of the political spectrum. This conversation hardened my conviction that the biggest flaw in mainstream journalism today is the lack of diversity.

Remember the sensational New York Times report on the 380 tons of explosives missing in Iraq? It was a questionable and weekly sourced story put on page one eight days before the election in a transparent attempt to defeat George Bush. Wouldn’t it have been good for journalism if a single person at the Times editorial conference had been able to muster enough “diversity” to stand up and say, ‘Great newspapers don’t do things like this.’

Much of what journalists turn out is very good. But when they omit or mess up stories, run badly skewed polls, or publish disgraceful front-page editorials posing as news stories, nobody seems to notice because groupthink is so strong.

Time is running out on the newsroom monoculture. The public has many options now—as well as plenty of media watchdogs, both professional and amateur. So the press takes its lumps and loses readers. In March, a report on the state of the media by the Project for Excellence in Journalism said that in the past 17 years, Americans have “come to see the press as less professional, less moral, more inaccurate, and less caring about the interests of the country.” According to the report, fewer than half of Americans think of the press as highly professional (49%, down from 72% 17 years ago). Another finding was that coverage of George Bush during the presidential campaign was three times as negative as coverage of John Kerry (36% to 12%). If the press is that much out of sync with the country, its future looks very uncertain. Something has to change.

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Liberal Media Reformers Call for ‘Truth’ Over ‘Balance’ (CNS News, 050603)

(CNSNews.com) - Claiming that conservative bias is a “major crisis in the U.S. media,” a panel of liberal journalists and media analysts said news organizations should promote “truth” over “balance.”

“The conservatives have got us, as a country, now believing that balance — giving both sides — is the same as truth, and there are some things that are just false,” said Linda Foley, president of The Newspaper Guild, during a panel discussion on media reform at the “Take Back America” conference in Washington, D.C.

“The discussion that we have to have balanced reports is kind of crazy” when a story is false, she added.

Take global warming, said Josh Silver, another panelist and executive director of the Fair Press media reform organization.

Silver said the United States is the only developed, industrialized country that still debates in the mainstream media whether or not global warming is happening. No need to give the other side on that topic, he was suggesting, since global warming is the truth.

An audience member wondered how the press should have dealt with attacks on the military record of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign.

Panelist Paul Waldman, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a group dedicated to exposing “conservative misinformation” in the media, said something similar probably will happen in the 2008 campaign.

“We don’t know exactly what form it will take because we don’t know who the candidate will be, but there will be something similar,” he predicted. According to Waldman, “Democrats could raise George Patton from the grave and he’d be attacked as weak and unpatriotic.”

While noting that many media outlets did the right thing regarding the Swift Boat Veterans’ claims, Waldman said “they did it too late.

“After the story had already been circulating around and was in hundreds of newspapers and TV shows, I think both the New York Times and the Washington Post did extensive investigations on the charges,” he said. “But by the time they got around to doing it, the charges had already had their effect.”

Waldman added that if newspapers had told the public they were investigating the Swift Boat claims, “conservatives would have charged that they were trying to hide this because of their liberal conspiracy to get Kerry elected.”

Waldman also noted the impulse to “get it first.” Once something becomes a story, he said, the fact that people are talking about it makes it newsworthy. “I don’t know if there’s a cure for that disease.”

‘Vile stew of bile’

Media Matters for America describes its mission as “monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” but it also has another goal, Waldman said. The group also aims to “discredit the right-wing media,” he said.

According to Waldman, the “right-wing” media “gains the bulk of its real power when stories leap from programs hosted by conservatives like “Rush Limbaugh and his imitators” to the mainstream press.

Waldman said he doesn’t believe most reporters listen to Limbaugh’s radio show. “If they did, they would be appalled at the vile stew of bile” aired on his broadcast every weekday.

Some audience members asked how the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio can be “protected from political bias.”

“This is another one of those cases where no one had really thought of injecting this kind of political bias before the Bush administration did,” Waldman replied.

“One of their greatest political strengths is audacity,” he added, noting that in a different administration, “someone would have said, ‘We really shouldn’t do that. We’re going to get criticized.’ And their response is: ‘Who cares? We’re going to do it anyway.’

“So now, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is financing secret studies on [retired PBS broadcaster] Bill Moyers and putting pressure to politicize CPB to ‘turn’ PBS and NPR,” Waldman stated.

To help counter such efforts, he suggested people visit handsoffpublicbroadcasting.org, a sister site to Media Matters, or express their views to their local public broadcasting station or elected officials.

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Penn and Teller trash Mother Teresa (townhall.com, 050603)

Brent Bozell

A year ago, I attended the Viacom shareholders meeting in New York. When an investor questioned the propriety of this media behemoth launching a gay cable television network, Chairman Sumner Redstone virtually leapt at the opportunity to defend Viacom’s commitment to tolerance and diversity.

But not for Catholics. Viacom has no problem whatever insulting Catholics.

The Catholic League’s William Donohue is America’s leading watchdog of all things anti-Catholic in the media and the culture. In 12 years at the helm he’s seen a lot of bashing and trashing and believes there’s been nothing as outrageous as the May 23 edition of the professional magician duo Penn and Teller’s aptly titled show “B.S.” [spelled out] on Viacom’s pay-cable channel Showtime.

While the episode titled “Holier Than Thou” ends with a few smacks at Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, Penn Jillette mostly savaged the world’s most beloved woman of the 20th century by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The woman beatified by Pope John Paul II and surely to be declared a saint was known as Mother Teresa. On this Viacom/Showtime program she is called “Mother F—ing Teresa.”

The show features notoriously vicious anti-Catholics like Christopher Hitchens and Aroup Chatterjee. Viewers are told that she intentionally let the poor suffer, providing neither beds nor bathroom facilities. “She had the f—king coin and pissed it away on nunneries,” says Penn Jillette.

Donohue said it did not bother him they called him “Catholic Boy” on the show, and not even when they referred to him with the F word since he could “only see good in her.” But when they mocked the Catholic Church’s teaching on the meaning of suffering; when the nuns who worked with Mother Teresa in the Missionaries of Charity were referred to with the F-word and the offensive C-word for female genitalia; and when they said of the poor that “They had to suffer so that Mother [F-word] Teresa could be enlightened,” he protested. “They are behaved like monsters ... It turned into hate speech.”

This anti-Catholicism is no accident. The Showtime website actually boasts about the aching anti-religious bigotry behind the show. “By their own admission, Penn & Teller have been dying to do a show like this. Confirmed skeptics and pro-science atheists (they call God an ‘imaginary friend’), these magicians are big fans of the art of debunking.” The Showtime booster copy continues: “As our increasingly anti-intellectual, anti-science culture moves on each day to new crackpot subject matters, Penn & Teller are there to aggressively shoot down whack-jobs and fuzzy thinkers, no matter where they originate.”

Isn’t Showtime a piece of work? This junkyard of “edgy” programming was the final resting place of “The Reagans,” the canceled CBS TV-movie making up vile charges against a man on his deathbed. It has two regular dramatic series celebrating the gay lifestyle, “Queer as Folk” for the men, and “The L Word” for the women. It recently began airing the original movie “Our Fathers,” a movie on the Boston pedophile-priest scandals, which even the Washington Post called “Showtime’s Unholy Mess.” Four years ago at this time, Showtime was airing the original film “Sister Mary Explains It All,” starring Diane Keaton as a vicious nun who ruined the lives of schoolchildren.

Now it has the two smart-aleck magicians reviling, with F bombs, the holiest women walking the face of the Earth while attacking the entire concept of holiness as a racket for “whack jobs and fuzzy thinkers.”

The Catholic League protested outside this year’s shareholders meeting of Viacom in New York, but tight-lipped Showtime could only remark on this inflammatory show by patting itself on the back as a haven for free speech. They claim they’re “in the unique position to give artists the creative freedom to express their views,” unlike other broadcast and cable networks who avoid “controversial subject matter.” Sadly, and predictably, the TV writers who’ve happened upon the Penn and Teller show haven’t exactly criticized their shtick. Associated Press reporter Frazier Moore praised the duo as “sassy secularists in a priesthood of knaves.”

Didn’t anyone involved in the making of this trash — the writers, director, producers and the like — see the wretched ugliness of the product? What of the Showtime front office — the programming executives, the public relations/marketing staff? In fact, they all saw it and approved it. What of the Viacom leadership, the board of directors? One presumes they didn’t see it, so busy are they giving speeches about corporate commitments to diversity and tolerance.

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Searching for the Definition of ‘Mainstream’ (Foxnews, 050620)

WASHINGTON — Political candidates hoping to get elected or judicial nominees vying for the federal bench would do well to be in the “mainstream” these days, though the media may try to distance themselves from the designation.

That’s because the “mainstream media” is a club increasingly loathed by the both the political right and left while “mainstream America” is regarded as the group that engenders today’s values.

But the determination of what is mainstream and where the it is located has been so overplayed or misstated lately that several political experts agree the term “mainstream” has become the latest casualty of political language that was once sharp and appropriate but is now devoid of clear meaning for anyone.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so is the meaning of ‘mainstream’ these days,” Chuck Muth, president of the Washington, D.C, think tank Citizen Outreach, said.

“I think years ago, [‘in the mainstream’] may have been a more substantive comment, but I think it’s evolved into a more trite comment today,” Republican pollster Dave Winston said, adding that the mainstream is as muddy as it is popular.

Entering the phrase “in the mainstream” into a Google Web search yields an estimated 811,000 results in the last three months, with 818 hits appearing in news reports during that time.

“If you could get 10 people together to try and agree on the definition of mainstream, I bet you would have considerable trouble doing it,” Terry Madonna, professor of public affairs at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, said.

On Capitol Hill, where it is important to be considered in the mainstream, most experts who spoke to FOXNews.com described it loosely — as being “moderate” or having views that appeal to both Republican and Democratic sensibilities. As a result, those in the mainstream are able to bring about bipartisan support on a given issue.

Mainstream is also used to describe a lawmakers’ appeal to a wide swath of voters. Mainstream America is the political equivalent of the socially and economically attractive “Main Street U.S.A.”

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia said the mainstream is a desirable place because it represents commonality or normalcy.

“Usually people are attracted to ‘mainstream.’ Virtually everyone wants to think they are within the mainstream,” Sabato said.

“It’s a way to try and center yourself in hopes that it will give you some appeal,” Bruce Gronbeck, professor of communications at the University of Iowa, said.

Gronbeck credits former President Clinton with making the mainstream popular political real estate in the 1990s.

“Bill Clinton: Here you had a social liberal and [an] economic conservative,” Gronbeck said.

“He didn’t fit the political definitions and it drove both parties crazy. We began there to talk about the mainstream.”

Since the Clinton era, both parties are trying to claim the political mainstream for partisan advantage. Recently, Democrats accused President Bush’s nominees for federal judgeships of being outside the mainstream, which meant painting those at the center of the recent filibuster debate as too extreme in their beliefs to be effective on the bench.

The day the Senate voted to confirm Justice Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called Brown “so far out of the mainstream that she makes [conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia look like a liberal.”

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., also attempted to toss Brown out of the mainstream, saying he hoped the California Supreme Court judge wasn’t getting “a pass” because she is a black woman.

“I hope we’ve arrived at a point in our country’s history where black folks can be criticized when they hold views that are out of the mainstream,” Obama said.

Despite the outcry against the judicial nominees, in a deal arranged by the “Gang of 14,” made up mostly of moderate senators from both sides of the aisle, Brown, Justices Priscilla Owen and William Pryor were all deemed mainstream enough and were confirmed by the Senate for the federal bench. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., considered one of the more conservative members of the chamber, threw the Democrats’ words back at them, hailing the confirmation of Brown as a victory for the mainstream.

“If some in the minority were as insightful as they claim to be about ‘mainstream America’ they would not be in the minority. The fact is, many of these three nominees’ fiercest critics neither understand nor agree with mainstream America on many issues,” Coburn said in a release.

“Mainstream Americans are sick and tired of judicial activism, which is why President Bush will continue to nominate diverse judges who will interpret the law, not invent new laws and precedents from the bench,” he added.

Declaring ownership of the term mainstream will ultimately lead most voters to translate it in a way favorable to the owner, Winston said: “Obviously I’m right, they’re wrong and therefore they aren’t in the mainstream.”

But the dilution of the expression through overuse like other “in vogue” terms will only lessen the meaning with every usage, Madonna said.

“I tend to use ‘moderate’ rather than mainstream. ... To me, it has some meaning,” Madonna said. “It may be someone who is pro-choice on abortion, but against partial birth abortion.”

Unlike the political middle, being mainstream is an unpopular place when applied to the media. Originally coined by conservatives as MSM, the mainstream media is maligned by both ends of the political spectrum as biased, lazy and agenda-driven. The reference invariably includes major newspapers and broadcast media.

“The media has become an object of derision,” Sabato said. “MSM has become an acronym that is widely recognized. It would be difficult to change.”

With such a handy target, lawmakers in both parties have taken to kicking the mainstream media at frequent intervals.

In a May interview with the Washington Post, Eric Ueland, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., spoke of the senator’s efforts to try to do the right thing in the face of a “ferocious mainstream media onslaught.”

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Curse of the language corrupters (townhall.com, 050713)

Michelle Malkin

Across the pond, the British Broadcasting Corporation is taking well-deserved lumps for whitewashing the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London. Editors have reportedly expunged the word “terrorist” from the BBC website and substituted the sanitized “bomber” to describe the killers.

Next: “Burglars” will be “takers.” “Child molesters” will be “ticklers.” “Rapists” will be “unplanned lovers.”

High-minded BBC guidelines admonish employees against using words like “terrorist” that “carry emotional or value judgments.” Yet, employing a reporter, Barbara Plett, who told viewers she bawled her eyes out when an ailing Yasser Arafat was whisked off to France in November 2004, is model objectivity.

But bashing the terror-coddling BBC is too easy. Let us turn to our own language corrupters.

Nearly four years after the 9/11 attacks, the White House and the press still use the empty phrase “War on Terror” to describe the global battle against radical Islamist throat-slitters, suicide bombers and hijackers who incinerate children on their way to Disneyland. And in the wake of the London terrorist attacks, we Americans continue to bow to an unwritten editorial policy of invoking sanitized phrases and bloodless bluster as a substitute for concrete action.

How many times have you heard some cable TV talking head or political hack urging us to be on “heightened alert” — without having the courage to spell out exactly what that means?

How many times has this been followed by a furrowed-brow precaution from some civil rights lawyer or human rights activist urging us to avoid an “anti-Muslim backlash”?

I’d have an easier time cheering the “We will not yield” and “We are not afraid” sloganeering if just one of our tough talkers in Washington would get brutally specific about how they will show vigilance, courage, alertness and refusal to yield to radical Islamic terror. Allow me:

— A true state of “heightened alert” would mean barring any new religious visas for Muslim clerics and ending all visa-free travel, which means scrapping the anachronistic and insecure Transit Without a Visa program and the dangerously lax Visa Waiver Program.

— A true state of “heightened alert” would mean a targeted visa moratorium for terror-sponsoring and terror-friendly nations. The Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 placed such a ban on temporary visitor visas for individuals from the seven official state sponsors of terrorism. The list should be expanded and revisited if and when intelligence points to new al Qaeda breeding grounds. And yes, that means tourists from Egypt, Yemen, Syria and the Philippines might be denied a Grand Canyon vacation the next five years. Tough noogies.

At this point, despite all the grand rhetoric from both political parties about increased information-sharing and cooperation, I have limited confidence that our consular offices abroad are capable of stopping the next Mohammed Atta or Hani Hanjour from getting a temporary visa. The fewer applications from danger spots they have to deal with, the better.

— A true state of “heightened alert” would mean killing off the idiotic Diversity Visa Lottery Program once and for all and scouring the H1-B visa program for Islamist exploitation.

— A true state of “heightened alert” would mean unapologetic government monitoring of Arab and Muslim foreign students on temporary visas, Muslim chaplains and soldiers serving in the military and in prisons, and Arab and Muslim pilots and flight students.

— A true state of “heightened alert” would mean immediate deportation of illegal aliens from terror-sponsoring and terror-supporting nations, increased National Guard dispatches on both the northern and southern borders, aggressive police-federal cooperation to catch illegal border crossers and overstayers on the interior, and vigorous encouragement of volunteer border security efforts like the Minuteman Project.

It’s precisely these kinds of national security profiling and targeted immigration enforcement measures that obstructionists characterize as an “anti-Muslim backlash,” which is why no one will talk about them despite all the “heightened alert” posturing.

In London, “terrorists” are “bombers.” In the U.S., citizen watchdogs are “vigilantes.”

The Ministry of Truth would be pleased.

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An End to Liberal Media? (Foxnews, 050429)

This is a partial transcript of “The Big Story With John Gibson,” April 28, 2005, that has been edited for clarity.

ANDREW NAPOLITANO, GUEST HOST: A new survey by the Missouri School of Journalism shows that most Americans think the news is biased — no surprise there. Of those, 48% say that the bias is liberal; 30% say it’s conservative.

But our next guest says the era of liberal dominance and political correctness in the media is coming to an end. Brian Anderson is author of “South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias.”

Brian, that’s today’s big question: Are liberals finally losing the media culture war?

BRIAN ANDERSON, AUTHOR, “SOUTH PARK CONSERVATIVES”: Well, I think losing is probably too much to say. But it is the case that they’re no longer winning.

NAPOLITANO: All right.

ANDERSON: There’s been a huge transformation in our media landscape over the last five or six years really and liberals are now fighting a battle.

NAPOLITANO: Tell us about that transformation. And then I want to ask you about how the liberals are fighting back.

ANDERSON: Sure. The three big mediums are talk radio, cable news and now the Internet and the blogosphere. Huge, huge numbers of Americans are moving over to these new media. The average age of a CBS News watcher or any of the network news watcher is now 60.

NAPOLITANO: Average age, 60?

ANDERSON: That’s the average age. So, if you look at the commercials, they’re for things like Mylanta and Viagra.

NAPOLITANO: All right.

ANDERSON: Kids and younger Americans are moving over to the new media. And in each of these new media, conservatives, right-of-center voices, do very well.

NAPOLITANO: What’s the average age for FOX News, for cable in general, for talk radio, for the bloggers?

ANDERSON: Talk radio is a little older. Bloggers are the youngest, no question about it.

The blogger audience is almost exactly inverse to the CBS News audience. Put it that way. So, you can see the horizon of the future there. And cable news generally attracts a younger demographic as well.

NAPOLITANO: Do Americans still trust journalists?

ANDERSON: I think not. And you just cited one poll. And that’s only the latest in about five or six major polls that have come out over the last few years, which say, “No way. We don’t trust journalists at all.” And there have been a lot of reasons for that. The Dan Rather incident...

(CROSSTALK)

NAPOLITANO: Right. When did all of this begin to unravel for the liberal media dominance?

ANDERSON: It started with Rush Limbaugh and the rise of talk radio in the early ‘90s. Then you had the emergence of cable news and FOX News in particular in the mid-’90s.

And now, with the blogs, really only in the last five years, I would say we have seen this big shift. And you’ve got now 12% of Americans reading political blogs. That’s 26 million people reading a medium that didn’t exist five years ago. It’s an amazing shift.

NAPOLITANO: All right.

ANDERSON: And it’s something I think is very healthy for our political debate.

NAPOLITANO: Are the liberals fighting back?

ANDERSON: Yes, no question. They’ve launched Air America over the last year and it’s not been very successful. I’ve been, in fact, writing about this over the last few weeks. Their ratings are pretty low right now.

And you’ve got Al Gore TV coming up pretty soon, although it was interesting that Al Gore — when he announced his new station — said this wasn’t going to be Air America goes TV.

NAPOLITANO: Right.

ANDERSON: An indication that maybe people are a little worried about.

NAPOLITANO: He is actually going to come out now with a television network that he will either own, manage, control or be on the board of directors on.

ANDERSON: Yes. Yes. That’s exactly right.

(CROSSTALK)

NAPOLITANO: And what are they going to do? What can we expect to see on there?

ANDERSON: He’s aiming at a younger audience. And I think you’ll see a pretty liberal slant in its news delivery.

But, you know, it’s still a shifting landscape and I think right-of- center voices still have some way to go before they draw even.

(CROSSTALK)

NAPOLITANO: We only have a few seconds left. I’ve got to ask you about your book.

ANDERSON: Sure.

NAPOLITANO: What are “South Park” conservatives?

ANDERSON: Well, another theme in the book is the emergence of what I call anti-liberal humor or “South Park” conservatism.

It’s a characteristic you see a lot among students on campus now. They may not be traditionally conservative, but they hate political correctness and really reject the Nancy Pelosi left, let’s say. And “South Park” itself is a very irreverent, very offensive TV show.

NAPOLITANO: Right.

ANDERSON: But it often makes fun of liberals. That’s something new.

NAPOLITANO: Brian Anderson, author of “South Park Conservatives.” Thank you very much.

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BBC edits out the word terrorist (Daily Telegraph, 050712)

The BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings to avoid labelling the perpetrators as “terrorists”, it was disclosed yesterday.

Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC’s website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as “bombers”.

The BBC’s guidelines state that its credibility is undermined by the “careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments”.

Consequently, “the word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding” and its use should be “avoided”, the guidelines say.

Rod Liddle, a former editor of the Today programme, has accused the BBC of “institutionalised political correctness” in its coverage of British Muslims.

A BBC spokesman said last night: “The word terrorist is not banned from the BBC.”

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Raising the bar (Townhall.com, 050805)

Matt Towery

This column won’t be popular with most journalists. But in case they’ve missed it, poll after poll shows journalists aren’t all that popular with the American people. So I’m sure the thick-skinned in media are used to taking these things in stride.

There’s a concerted movement at play that seeks to create a sort of protective shield for reporters who do not want to reveal their confidential sources to law enforcement or the courts.

Language in the proposed laws to shield journalists may or may not constitute true immunity from revealing sources; their true extent remains to be seen. Regardless, the spirit of this legislation warrants serious scrutiny.

This has come about because of the jailing or threatened jailing of reporters who have refused to reveal confidential sources to law enforcement investigators and grand juries looking into criminal matters. In each case, the reporter’s information and its source were considered critical to the investigation.

I admire professionals who stick to their guns in defending and upholding the ethics of their trade. For that matter, I admire and respect journalists as a whole. I know plenty of them, and most are talented, industrious and committed.

However that may be, it seems the world of media — somewhat self-righteous at its worst — is in a bit of a philosophical pickle on this one.

For starters, many of the supporters of the notion to protect anonymous sources are the same publishers, editors and broadcasters who helped make this the year of “open government” and “open records.”

When Congress or various state legislatures have moved to make certain government information unavailable to the public because they said it could trigger some dire circumstance, the journalism community has emphatically and immediately declared that the public has a “right to know,” consequences be damned.

Not really. Not unless I missed that part of the U.S. Constitution when I studied it in law school.

My recollection is that the Bill of Rights confers on the media and everybody else the right to free speech. But I don’t recall the so-called “fourth estate” actually having been referenced in the Constitution. Nor do I remember any amendment giving the public a blanket right to know each and every detail of their government’s operation.

Let’s turn the tables on this extra-constitutional “right” that so many journalism students today accept as a given. They seem to believe reporters should be able to demand from government the disclosure to them of documents, verbal information and virtually any other discoverable material because the public has an inalienable right to see and hear all.

But when a court, grand jury or law enforcement agency needs information that might be critical in the pursuit constitutionally sanctioned justice — criminal or civil — that version of the right to know must suddenly take a back seat to the journalists’ need to protect confidential sources.

After all, forcing journalists to disclose might have a “chilling effect” on someone’s willingness to whisper stories into the ear of the man or woman who dreams of being the next Bob Woodward.

I believe in open records. In compiling and holding records, the government is acting as an agent of the people, of which I am one. So I should have access to those records, at least under most circumstances.

That’s not the same as allowing me the newspaper columnist to tell a federal judge to stuff it because I have some special privilege.

Yes, being compelled by law to reveal a source might make prospective new sources less likely to talk.

But non-journalists’ relationships, personal and professional, can also be damaged by their having to yield sensitive information to law enforcement or courts. And yet they face serious punishment if they don’t fess up. That’s life.

Here’s a proposal that might justify a shield for journalists. It comes from the legal field, which has attorney-client privilege.

Why not require everyone that writes, broadcasts or publishes to attend three years of graduate school and then pass a communications equivalency to the bar exam?

Society could then drop the laws that protect people from libel and slander because it would be holding journalists to a higher standard, as it does doctors and lawyers.

I wonder how many in media would be willing to pay that price for their shield law.

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AP retracts false Blair quotes on Israel (WorldNetDaily, 050711)

2nd time wire service wrongly linked Jewish state to blasts

JERUSALEM – The Associated Press yesterday retracted a story falsely claiming British Prime Minister Tony Blair blamed the London terror attacks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It was the second time in the past few days the media agency falsely linked Israel to the deadly bombings.

On Saturday, the AP published a story claiming Blair explained in a BBC Radio interview that to prevent future attacks against London the Israeli-Palestinian conflict needed to be resolved.

According to the AP, while discussing the “very deep roots” of terrorism, Blair said “that meant boosting understanding between people of different religions, helping people in the Middle East see a path to democracy and easing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”

But, as the Committee for Accuracy for Middle East Reporting in America pointed out, Blair said no such thing.

According to a BBC Radio transcript, the prime minister stated only that terrorism must be “pulled up by the roots.” After being further questioned by the interviewer, Blair continued he meant that radical Islam must be confronted and defeated in the Middle East.

The AP quickly released a statement retracting its false reporting: “The Associated Press erroneously reported that he spoke of easing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Blair did not specifically mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.”

The original AP article briefly ignited a political firestorm.

Israeli President Moshe Katsav and other Israeli officials blasted Blair’s quotes.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that Blair had “touched reality and spoke strategically of the need to deal with the problems of this region.”

The error marked the second time since last week’s deadly bombings the AP issued a false report about Israel.

Immediately following the attacks, an Associated Press story claimed British intelligence told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday’s explosions it had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city.

The AP wrote it was told by a senior foreign ministry official that just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy and said warnings of possible attacks had been received. The embassy then allegedly told Israeli Finance Minister Netanyahu to stay in his hotel room and not attend an economic conference he was scheduled to address near the site of one of the bomb blasts.

Setting the record straight in an interview with WorldNetDaily Netanyahu said, “When the first bomb went off, we were departing our hotel. While we were on our way out, the security people said there was an explosion near the area I was scheduled to speak. They asked us to go back and stay put in our hotel.”

Israel last week quickly denied the AP story.

“I can tell you unequivocally the reports are false. Israel, including our representatives in London, did not receive any prior notice of pending terror attacks,” Mark Regev, senior spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, told WND after the report. “The only alert we received was a call to our British embassy immediately following the first explosion. That call was routine, and was also placed to other foreign embassies in London.”

Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom also denied the story, saying, “There was no early information.”

The AP quickly replaced the original article with another headlined, “Israel ‘not warned’ about London attacks.”

Scores of media outlets are still reporting the early warning as factual.

Canada’s National Post, relying on the withdrawn AP account, still has on its website an article claiming, “British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before today’s explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city.”

An India Daily article says, “Israel knew and warned [the] United Kingdom of possible terror plots to disrupt life in London. But British authorities failed to respond accordingly to deter the attacks, according to an unconfirmed rumor circulating in intelligence circles. Israel is keeping quiet for the time being with a lot of pressure on the Internet bloggers also are hatching conspiracy theories based on the now discredited accounts.”

An antiwar.com writer argues the Netanyahu terror tip-off is accurate.

“This isn’t the first time that Israeli foreknowledge of a terrorist attack against the West has been raised by a reputable source. One has to wonder: why is it that these reports of Israeli foreknowledge come up with such metronomic regularity? With all that smoke, is there really no fire?” asks blogger Justin Raimondo.

A Stratford Consulting Intelligence Agency account states, “Contrary to original claims that Israel was warned ‘minutes before’ the first attack, unconfirmed rumors in intelligence circles indicate that the Israeli government actually warned London of the attacks ‘a couple of days’ previous. Israel has apparently given other warnings about possible attacks that turned out to be aborted operations. The British government did not want to disrupt the G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, or call off visits by foreign dignitaries to London, hoping this would be another false alarm.”

For some, the reports are eerily reminiscent of claims made immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Scores of Internet bloggers and several media accounts claimed Jews received advanced knowledge of the World Trade Center attacks, prompting hundreds to stay home from work. The false reports were widely attributed with fueling anti-Semitic theories that the Mossad carried out the 9-11 terror attacks.

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Omitting Air America (townhall.com, 050817)

Brent Bozell

Which side of the talk radio wars do you suppose our “mainstream” media outlets favor? If you have to ask, then just look at the news coverage of talk radio scandals.

When Rush Limbaugh acknowledged an addiction to painkillers in 2003, the news media couldn’t get enough of his misfortune. The Newsweek cover story by Evan Thomas called Rush “a childless, twice-divorced, thrice-married schlub whose idea of a good time is to lie on his couch and watch football endlessly.” CNN anchorman Aaron Brown confessed that “the subject is Rush, made worse no doubt by the permanent smirk that seems to be attached to my face.”

Or what about radio and TV talker Bill O’Reilly? When ex-producer Andrea Mackris sued him for sexual harassment last fall, the networks and other media outlets pounced with glee. ABC and NBC were so excited to put O’Reilly’s accuser on the air with her lawyer that they gave them seven- and eight-minute interviews — an eternity in TV land — almost as many minutes as those networks devoted to covering and analyzing the final presidential debate that morning.

On July 26, bloggers busted open a brand-new talk radio scandal, and the hypocrisy was juicy: The ultraliberal Air America radio network, the folks who would call themselves Compassion for the Poor Radio, had taken $875,000 from a children’s charity as a “loan” that it hasn’t paid back. An Air America executive that also served as development director for the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club of the Bronx made a “diversion” of funds for the struggling leftists.

Air America is no small potato in the eyes of “mainstream” media outlets. After all, when the network launched last year with its six paltry stations, the coverage was massive. Al Franken was its rock star. So with Air America embroiled in scandal, there would be a media feeding frenzy, right? All I can hear are the crickets. Let’s compare the coverage, then and now.

The New York Times put Air America’s debut on the front page, and published a huge cover story on Al Franken in the New York Times Magazine. In June, they promoted Al Franken for the U.S. Senate. And this is a New York City scandal, right?

But it took the Times two and a half weeks to publish one bland story, inside the local-news section with a lead that focused on the troubled charity, not Air America’s scandalous participation. That’s still better than nothing — which was what the Times’ national edition carried.

The Washington Post published a breezy front-page article plugging Air America’s 2004 debut, not to mention an even larger profile on the front of the Sunday Style section. They lavished more than 7,000 words on Air America host Randi Rhodes last September in a Washington Post Magazine cover story. Current scandal coverage? Post-watching blogger Christopher Fotos found an AP dispatch (also two weeks delayed) on the Post website, but noted it didn’t make the actual newspaper.

Newsweek hyped the debut in a big three-page spread, featuring a Bush-mocking “photo illustration” of Franken standing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit. Scandal coverage? Nada.

Time writer Richard Corliss could only give a page to the network’s debut, ending with the plea: “America needs Air America.” In April of 2005, Corliss hyped the network’s first anniversary: “The story has a happy ending for liberals — or at least a promising second act.” Scandal coverage? No way.

ABC gave the Air America debut a morning news story, an evening news story and an entire broadcast of “Nightline.” Coverage of their scandal? None.

CBS promoted the launch in brief anchor mentions, and then aired a long profile of Air America star Al Franken on “Sunday Morning.” Scandal coverage? Zip.

NBC highlighted the launch with a Franken interview in the morning, and an evening news story. Scandal coverage? Nothing.

NPR promoted the launch on their talk show “Talk of the Nation,” as well as their evening news show “All Things Considered,” but then aired a critique of their programming on the same show a few weeks later from Michael Harrison. Scandal coverage? Zero.

Then there’s CNN, which aired Air America start-up stories in heavy rotation on the weekend before the network debut, as well as promotional stories across their prime-time lineup on Debut Day. A few days after the scandal broke, CNN’s blog reporter noted in the afternoon that bloggers Brian Maloney and Michelle Malkin were pushing this story. But CNN has had no story of its own.

That’s rich, because in October of 2003, when “NewsNight” anchor Aaron Brown was announcing his smirk over Rush’s troubles, he brought on his guest — ready for this? — Al Franken, who sneered Limbaugh could never recover, because then he’d have “nothing left” for radio.

Al Franken will never need to recover from media scrutiny.

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The Establishment Media vs. Conservatives (Free Congress Foundation, 050317)

The opening sentence was among those not startling to read in The Washington Times. “The press produced three times more negative stories about President Bush than about Senator John Kerry during the 2004 campaign…” Conservatives certainly know that; plenty of The Washington Times columnists have written about the establishment news media’s bias in reporting. By virtue of its uncommon status as a conservative newspaper, the Times does not shy away from reporting this.

What is unexpected is the source.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism and Princeton Survey Research Associates International in conjunction with several journalism schools and media institutes conducted a study that analyzed news coverage in sixteen newspapers, the nightly newscasts, morning news shows, cable news and on websites.

The report’s “overview” section has a chapter on “content analysis,” which makes a startling admission. Stating the war’s coverage last year was slightly more negative than positive, the report assesses the coverage of the campaign. “When it came to the campaign, on the other hand, the criticism that George Bush got worse coverage than John Kerry is supported by the data,” the report declares.

The analysis found that coverage of President Bush less likely was to be neutral. “Looking across all media [examined by the report], campaign coverage that focused on Bush was three times as negative as coverage of Kerry (36% versus 12%). It was also less likely to be positive (20% positive Bush stories, 30% for Kerry). That also meant Bush coverage was less likely to be neutral (44% of Bush stories, 58% for Kerry),” the analysis determined.

There it is in black and white for all to see. The news media demonstrated bias against a conservative president. What we have long known to be true was just confirmed. It is not just President George W. Bush who has been the target of the news media’s negativism. President Reagan experienced it. President Bush’s father experienced it when he served in the White House. At times it appeared that Jesse Helms (R-NC), during his years in the Senate, was not being covered by a reporter but the editorial page’s cartoonist because the news stories and features so often caricatured him as a villain who stood for conservative beliefs.

The report is certainly no shill for conservatives; the establishment viewpoint of its authors is evident throughout. Nor do conservative outlets always do well in the analysis. Fox News is considered to be more one-sided in its news reporting than other cable news, the journalists faulted for their willingness to “offer their opinions, without attribution to any reporting, in seven out of ten stories.” CNN reporters are said to do that in only ten percent of their stories. What needs to be admitted is that the selection of stories can demonstrate an act of bias. Think how rarely religion has been covered in recent decades in any serious, meaningful way.

There is also the sense that we have entered a new media era. The State of the News Media reminds us that the network television nightly news programs are approaching a moment of truth because their audience has shrunk and new anchors have taken over.

CBS Evening News was discredited for its flawed reporting of President Bush’s service in the National Guard. The report reminds us that CBS is actually rethinking the network news program in its entirety. That the audience of the CBS Evening News was diminished during Rather’s twenty-four-years as anchor is not damning. Other networks experienced declines, too. But none are as heavy as the CBS Evening News. Then, of course, there is the black eye suffered by the network this fall for its shoddy reporting.

The report makes clear that journalism must change. No doubt this partially is driven by the rise of new online technology, which is not proving to be a lucrative investment. In previous decades reports that aired on the CBS Evening News or were printed in The New York Times enjoyed the complete trust of most Americans. That changed in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Now, in the wake of scandals such as last fall’s Rathergate and the falsifications of Times reporter Jayson Blair it may be imperative for news organizations to demonstrate the same transparency that they demand from the institutions they cover. “They may have to document their reporting process more openly so that audiences can decide for themselves whether to trust it.” That would be a welcome development - and long overdue.

Steve Lilienthal is a policy analyst with the Free Congress Foundation.

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Networks Paint Bush Economy As Bleak No Matter What The Facts Really Say (Media Research Center, 050817)

Media’s bad news bears deliver negative news 62% of the time despite economic expansion.

* Economic news heavily negative: Coverage of economic news on the three broadcast networks was negative 62% of the time, despite ongoing good news of more jobs, low unemployment and economic growth.

* Good news undermined: Even when good news made it to viewers, journalists undermined it with bad news 45% of the time.

* Negative stories given more air time: Good news stories were relegated to briefs roughly two thirds of the time. Negative news received longer stories and outnumbered positive stories by almost 4-to-1 in that category.

Which do you want first – the good news or the bad?

The good news is that the economy is strong and growing. The bad news is the news about the economy.

The federal deficit is shrinking, unemployment has fallen, and America has seen more than two straight years of job growth. But broadcasters have been describing the economy as “dicey,” “volatile” and “slow.” A Free Market Project analysis of economic stories on network evening news shows since President George W. Bush’s second inauguration showed negative news prevailing 62% of the time (71 out of 115 stories). That number was deceiving, however, because even good news often was portrayed as bad. In 40 stories classified as good economic news, journalists undermined the good news with bad 45% of the time.

Good news was relegated to short reports, or briefs, 68% of the time, while bad news was treated with full stories. When briefs on both sides were excluded, the comparison of full-length news stories showed an overwhelming ratio: negative stories outnumbered positive ones almost 4-to-1.

NBC’s “Nightly News” illustrated the reporting trend with a glaring disparity between its Aug. 15 stories. Anchor Brian Williams took about 25 seconds to tell the brief good news of the federal deficit reduction, which he admitted was due to “higher-than-expected revenues and a steadily growing economy.” Immediately, however, he led into another story warning of “financial hardship” for all, coming from rising gas prices – and that story went on for more than two and a half minutes. Reporter Martin Savidge asked, “How long ‘til the economy as a whole feels it?”

Journalists weren’t consistent from one report to the next. On the April 26 “CBS Evening News,” Bob Schieffer said, “Americans are getting a little concerned about where the economy is headed.” That was just before he reported that new homes were selling “at the fastest pace on record.”

Amidst the confusion, network news has been devoting far more time to gloomy and often unfounded predictions than to real news that is positive. ABC’s Betsy Stark went so far as to predict a slowdown in the economy three days before a jobs report that delivered 270,000 new jobs, coming in far above projections.

On the July 20 “CBS Evening News,” Trish Regan found a voice for the media’s economic deathwatch mentality. She went to the streets, where, as she put it, “reality trumps forecasts.” Her man in the street articulated the news shows’ recurring view of the economy: “It’s very tenuous. It could fall apart at any moment. One bad piece of news, one additional terrorist attack, one negative corporate earnings, and it goes right down again.”

Regan’s report was supposed to be about Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s comments on the economy. Greenspan had said the U.S. outlook was “one of sustained economic growth.” Regan acknowledged that Greenspan said “the economy is doing fine,” but she devoted her entire story to undermining his statement. She and anchor John Roberts worried together about “potential threats to this economic growth,” including job loss, energy costs and the housing “bubble.”

The study

The Free Market Project looked at all NBC, CBS, and ABC evening news stories related to the word “economy” between Jan. 20 and Aug. 5, 2005. The study explored news items that the media explicitly tied to the health of the economy. The study’s 115 stories addressed topics like oil prices, the “housing bubble,” monthly unemployment reports, and other government reports on the state of the economy. Each of those topics gave rise to other similar stories, but this analysis focused solely on those the media directly linked to the economy.

Stories were classified as negative news if the main thrust of the report was negative; for example, layoffs at a particular plant. Likewise, positive stories focused on news such as a strong job growth report. It was also noted if a story’s direction changed from positive to negative or vice versa, and stories were classified as briefs or full reports. Briefs were short one-person reports, typically delivered by news anchors.

News flash: when stocks drop, it could mean expansion

Journalists failed to explain key economic concepts that could put the news in context. On March 22, as the Fed raised interest rates because of the expanding economy, ABC’s Betsy Stark couched the news with worry: “It might stamp out inflation as it does that, but it also might slow the economy down too much. So we’re looking ahead with, with a little bit of concern.”

On NBC that same night, Anne Thompson said investors were “nervous” and that the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen “to its lowest levels since the end of January,” without explaining that the stocks’ downturn was normal for the situation.

What does a ‘growing’ economy look like?

A growing economy is characterized by job creation, wage growth, steady growth in gross domestic product, and slowly increasing inflation. In response to a strong unemployment report or the news of inflation, the stock market will drop in the short term due to fears of inflation.

Dr. Gary Wolfram, the George Munson professor of political economy at Hillsdale College, explained that the Federal Reserve Bank increases interest rates to stem the tide of inflation. Wolfram said if investors think the Fed is going to respond to an increase in jobs by restricting the supply of money, stocks are likely to fall. A rate increase causes a slight uptick in credit card rates, mortgage rates, and interest rates paid into savings accounts. Also, with more employed workers paying income taxes and sales taxes, government revenues are expected to rise.

All of those things, to a varying extent, have occurred since the inauguration on January 20. Over the last six months, 1.8 million jobs have been created, pushing the unemployment rate down from 5.2 to 5.0%. GDP has grown an average of 3.2% over the last two financial quarters, and the federal deficit has narrowed from $412 billion to $331 billion.

So how’s the news?

In spite of strong economic growth, reports since the inauguration have focused on negative events in the economy, such as individual companies’ layoffs. Natural free-market occurrences, such as consumers’ shift away from buying American cars and rising prices for housing and gas, have been portrayed as apocalyptic. Good news was relegated to brief status 68% of the time, while negative news was only briefed 28% of the time, a ratio of more than 2-to-1. That meant negative news was far more likely to be treated with full reports, including correspondents and interviews.

Coverage was filled with economic errors and misstatements such as these highlights:

Oops!: On May 3, ABC had two dreary economic reports. Charles Gibson introduced one about “the hit from higher gas prices” and “grim” auto sales figures. And Betsy Stark looked toward the coming jobs report with pessimism: “the next jobs report on Friday should tell us about how much the economy slowed down, Charlie.”

Just three days later, her tone changed. When the jobs report came out May 6, it showed “unexpectedly strong” growth, Elizabeth Vargas said, and Stark added, “Today’s report was reassuring evidence that the nation’s job market and economy are on solid ground.”

Bad bubble predictions: The media have been foretelling a massive bust in housing prices for months now. On May 19, ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas cited “major concerns today that the housing bubble in the country’s about to burst.” She piled on: “The run up in housing prices is now beginning to look something like the boom in Internet stocks, and we know what happened there.” Housing is not like the stock market in that home values won’t drop to zero. Such a “burst” has yet to occur three months after Vargas’ prediction.

Turning good to bad: No matter how good the news, someone had to rain on the parade. A March 4 story on ABC’s “World News Tonight” was the perfect example. The story related strong new jobs growth. But at the end of the upbeat report, Dean Reynolds countered, “But, Peter, while job growth is up, wage growth is not. And the question now is how long consumers will keep spending and fueling the economy without a raise in pay.”

Looking at the February Employment Situation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Reynolds might have seen that wages had held steady in the previous month. But had he looked closer, he would have seen that over the year, hourly earnings had grown by 2.5% and weekly earnings by 2.2%. To say that wages weren’t growing was misleading to the audience.

Overblown and incomplete: The June 5 “CBS Evening News” lamented auto factory closings, including an interview with analyst David Cole, who predicted “a financial crisis for the country that is way beyond what we saw during the S&L crisis a number of years ago.” Reporter Mika Brzezinski said consumer shifts away from American automakers were “forcing secure, high-paying jobs with full health and pension benefits to go the way of the Oldsmobile – into oblivion.”

The story mentioned the United Auto Workers contract with General Motors but did not explore how the union’s demands contributed to the company’s rising health care and pension costs. It also failed to note that the American companies must be competitive to stay in business – profits are not guaranteed, though union pensions are expected to be.

Buyer beware: Reporters sometimes acted like homebuyers should buy only from what journalists considered pure motives, such as needing shelter. On ABC’s May 19 broadcast, Betsy Stark cited a National Association of Realtors study to say that 23% of houses (hardly a majority) are bought by “investors, looking to make a quick profit. In the process, they’ve driven prices to record levels for those other home buyers, looking for a place to live.”

America’s free market allows people to buy whatever they can afford for any reason or no reason at all. The free market fosters personal investment and the growth of wealth – and real estate is one way people invest. The media tended to look at the stock market as “volatile,” as Stark put it on April 21, but then they berated people for making what could be considered a stable investment in real estate. The consumer can’t win.

Blaming the free market: On the May 13 “Evening News,” CBS reporter Bill Whittaker brought a report about the need for individual retirement savings. Despite the acknowledgement of personal responsibility that comes with such a topic, Whittaker overtly criticized the free market, even blaming it for economic woes: “Deregulation, globalization and intensified competition have made for a much more volatile economy.” He cast the need for personal responsibility in a negative light, warning viewers that their employers wouldn’t be there to bail them out.

Memo to Congress: lower my costs!: When it came to gas prices, journalists repeatedly flogged President George W. Bush and the energy bill for not lowering consumers’ costs. John Seigenthaler opened an April 24 “NBC Nightly News” report: “President Bush is also facing growing pressure from an American consumer who wants him to do something about the high price of gasoline in this country.” Likewise, Betsy Stark on ABC’s “World News Tonight” April 21: “One thing about the House energy bill almost everyone agrees on, including the president, is that consumers looking for immediate relief from high energy prices are likely to be disappointed.”

Reports like those worked from the assumption that the government could and should somehow intervene in pricing – a concept unseen in stories on prices of everything from movie tickets to automobiles. Journalists failed to explain how the market determines prices based on demand for gas and the available supply.

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Today Show: US Soldier in Iraq Zaps Media - “I’d be Depressed Too if I got my News from the Newspapers” (newsbusters.org, 050817)

When the Today show sprung a surprise this morning — an unannounced trip to Iraq by Matt Lauer — one US soldier had a little surprise of his own for Today and the media at large.

Lauer interviewed a group of soldiers at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, and at one point asked about the state of morale. After getting two responses to the effect that morale was good, Lauer had this to say:

“Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re probably telling the truth, but there might be a lot of people at home wondering how that could be possible with the conditions you’re facing and with the insurgent attacks you’re facing. “ (video available: Windows Media and Real Media)

If Lauer was the advocate for the anti-war case, he then made the cardinal mistake that no advocate should make: asking a question to which you don’t know the answer.

Asked Lauer: “What would you say to those people who are doubtful that morale could be that high?”

Captain Sherman Powell nailed Lauer, the MSM and the anti-war crowd with this beauty:

“Well sir, I’d tell you, if I got my news from the newspapers also I’d be pretty depressed as well!”

Bada-bing!

Powell went on to add that, while acknowledging the difficulties the media face in getting out into the field in Iraq,

“For those of us who have actually had a chance to get out and meet the Iraqi Army and Iraqi police and go on patrols with them, we are very satisfied with the way things are going here and we are confident that if we are allowed to finish the job we started we’ll be very proud of it and our country will be proud of us for doing it!”

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AP running with skewed poll results (newsbusters.org, 050815)

The main political headline from the AP today is the results of an AP-Ipsos poll taken a week ago.

Bush Approval a Low for Recent 2-Termers reports that President Bush’s job approval is down to 42% with 55% disapproving. That certainly sounds disturbing, or at least it would if he were running for anything again. But looking at it again, something suspicious jumps out.

The partisan divide for Bush is stark — 80% of Democrats disapprove of his overall performance while nearly 90% of Republicans approve.

For the past several years, the conventional wisdom has been of a “50-50” America, a country divided evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans have beaten Democrats at the National level in the last several election cycles. If the numbers are fairly close, and the Republican approval rating is higher than the Democratic disapproval rating, how can his approval rating be that bad? If 38% of the sample is Democratic, and 38% is Republican, then he’d have to have a 0% approval rating among independents to have an overall 42%, and that’s not realistic. So I went digging around the Ipsos web site, and found the topline results. What they’ve got is a sample of adults, rather than registered voters. And they’ve sampled 39% Republicans and 49% Democrats. So that 42% approval rating that they’re flouting is a fake number, a number that doesn’t represent political reality. But it certainly sounds bad for the President, which seems to be the AP’s raison d’etre...

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Trashing our history: troops in Iraq (Townhall.com, 050810)

Thomas Sowell

Back in June, this column pointed out that it is impossible to fight a war without heroism — but that you would never know that from the mainstream media. Nothing heroic done by American troops in Iraq is likely to make headlines in the New York Times or be featured on the big three broadcast network news programs.

That fact has now been belatedly recognized in a New York Times opinion piece, but with a strange twist.

After briefly mentioning a few acts of bravery in Iraq — including a Marine who smothered an enemy grenade with his own body, saving the lives of his fellow Marines at the cost of his own — the Times’ writer said, “the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II.”

Think about that spin: The reason we don’t hear about such things is because of the Pentagon, Bush and “the culture at large.”

Neither the Pentagon, the White House or “the culture at large” can stop the newspapers or the televisions networks from publicizing whatever they want to publicize. They all have reporters on the scene but what they choose to feature in their reports are all the negative things they can find.

The very issue of the New York Times in which this essay appeared — August 7th — featured a front-page picture of a funeral for a Marine killed in Iraq. If you judged by the front page of this and many other newspapers, our troops in Iraq don’t do anything except get killed.

The plain fact is that the mainstream media have been too busy depicting our troops as victims to have much time left to tell about the heroic things they have done, the far greater casualties which they have inflicted on their enemies, or their attempts to restore some basic services and basic decencies to this country that has been torn apart for years by internal and external wars — even before the first American troops arrived on the scene.

The unrelenting quest for stories depicting American troops as victims — including even front-page stories about the financial problems of some National Guardsmen called to active duty — has created a virtual reality in the media that has no place for heroes.

Senator John Kerry has called the activation of reservists and National Guardsmen “a backdoor draft,” as if joining the reserves or the National Guard is supposed to mean an exemption from ever having to fight. The theme of troops as victims has been a steady drumbeat in the media, because of the way the media have chosen to filter the news, filtering out heroes, among other things.

This virtual reality can become more important than any facts. Even a young lady interviewer on Fox News Channel — of all places — recently asked a guest how long the American people will be able to continue supporting the war in Iraq with all the casualties.

All the American deaths in Iraq since the war began are not even half of the deaths of U.S. Marines taking the one island of Iwo Jima in a couple of months of fighting. And Iwo Jima was just one battle in a war that was raging on other fronts around the world simultaneously and continuing for nearly four long years.

It is not the casualties which are unprecedented but the media filtering and the gullibility of those who accept the virtual reality created by the media.

This is a re-creation of the media’s role in the Vietnam war, where American victories on the battlefield were turned into defeat on the home front by the filtering and spin of the media.

Even the current Communist rulers of Vietnam have admitted that they lost militarily in Vietnam but hung on because they expected to win politically in the United States — as they did, with the help of the Jane Fondas, the Walter Cronkhites and a cast of thousands in the streets and on campuses across the country.

The very people who have been anti-military for years, who filter out American heroes in battle, are now proclaiming that they are “honoring” our troops by publicizing every death by name, day in and day out.

Has the dumbed-down education in our schools left us so ill-equipped that we cannot see through even the most blatant hypocrisy?

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Sex (and significance) is in the eye of the beholder (townhall.com, 050926)

Jennifer Roback Morse

Last week, I got an object lesson on how preconceptions color our interpretation of the news. I was visiting Washington D.C., as the guest of Wilberforce Forum, giving some lectures on my new book, Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, which argues that marriage is the most appropriate context for sex. Friday morning, my friend who was escorting me around DC, asked me if I had seen the headline. I had barely found my way out of the hotel, so naturally, I hadn’t seen the headline.

“Married Americans remaining faithful,” announced the front page of The Washington Times. How nice, I thought to myself. I scanned the article as we zipped through traffic on our way to breakfast. I discovered that the claim was based on a data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

We arrived at our breakfast appointment, an informal gathering of policy-makers interested in my topic. After I was introduced as an expert on marriage and sexuality, one of them burst out, “did you see the new study showing that more teens are engaging in oral sex than ever before?” No, says I, wondering which left field that information flew out of.

So he showed me the newspaper headline, “Half of all Teens Have Had Oral Sex.” I scanned the story, and found the same institution had published this study: the National Center for Health Statistics. Then I noticed, I was reading The Washington Post, the more liberal beltway paper.

I could hardly contain myself: I just about knocked the orange juice out of the waitress’s hands. “I bet this is the same study. Same data, different headline.” I made a mental note to check this out when I got home to California later that day.

There is was, on the web, looking exactly as my friend had showed it to me in the Dead Tree version of the Washington Times. More than 90% of married Americans said they were faithful to their spouses in 2002. And there was the Post story as well: half of all teens between the ages of 15 and 19 have had oral sex. The proportion increases to 70% of the older teens between 18 and 19.

I did a bit of Googling and found the original study on the CDC website. I printed it out and carried it around, and read it when I got a chance: a few minutes at lunch, spread out on the kitchen table, or while hiding in the private room with plumbing, the only peaceful place in a household with kids.

So what did this study actually say? Well, with 56 pages and 29 tables, it said a lot. Everything reported in the two Washington papers was accurate, but each reporter picked out results they found particularly significant. In fairness to the Washington Post, the press release on the study did emphasize teen participation in oral sex. An increasing number of teens appear to be using oral sex as a birth control method. Experts quoted by the Post are rethinking their “safe sex” messages since oral sex spreads some sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, herpes, an the human papillomavirus.

Kudos to Cheryl Wetzstein, the author of the Washington Times article: she must have actually opened the study and not just the press releases. I found the basis of her headline right in Tables 1 and 2. 92% of currently married males and 94% of currently married females had just one sexual partner in the last year. You can interpret this to say mean that marriage is a public health measure because it reduces the number of sex partners people have. Partner reduction has to be part of any sensible program to control the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

What interests me about this study is the competing definitions of homosexuality. It is difficult to pin down the commonly-held belief that 10% of the population is gay. Do we define homosexuality as attraction to persons of the same sex, or as same sex behaviors? Do we define a person as gay because the person defines themselves as gay? This study asked participants all these questions, and finds the same ambiguities as previous studies.

If we ask men how they describe their own sexual orientation, 90% describe themselves as heterosexual, 2.3% as homosexual, 1.8% as bisexual, with the remainder describing themselves as “something else” or not reporting. Do these numbers mean 2.3% are gay, or that only 90% are straight, with all others either gay or lying? We get a slightly different picture if we look at how people describe their sexual attraction. Of those who describe themselves as being attracted “only to the opposite sex,” only 94% describe themselves as heterosexual, with the largest portion of the remainder, 3.4% describing themselves as “something else.”

Behavior tells a still different picture. Six percent of men and 11% of women report ever having had any sexual contact with a same sex partner in their lifetime. However, in Table 17, we learn that only 2.9% of men have had any same sex partners in the last 12 months, while only 1.6% had exclusively same sex partners in the last 12 months. So who counts as gay?

The proper definition of gay depends on the question we are asking. The epidemiologists favor behavioral definitions, while psychologists look at sexual attraction. Political activists want to know how people define themselves. These are each legitimate questions, which generate different answers and different interpretations of what is important in the data.

Meanwhile, on the Left Coast the LA Times tells us what it found significant in the report. “Study finds big rise in female gay sex.” I rest my case.

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse is a Senior Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and the author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, available from Spence Publishing.

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The big picture (townhall.com, 050926)

Michael Barone

It’s often hard to keep the big picture in focus. Television news tends to center on bombs going off in Iraq and has mostly ignored several million people voting in Afghanistan. We see footage of angry Palestinians, but not much about the ongoing progress toward democracy in Egypt. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in turn have dominated the news and have made it difficult to get a sense of what is happening in the world.

A world spinning out of control: That is what the old-line broadcast networks seem to be showing us. But I see other patterns. George W. Bush has consistently asserted that one reason for removing Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was to advance freedom and democracy in the Middle East. In spite of the improvised explosive devices, that seems to be happening. Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution was as inspiring an example of people power as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Libya has dismantled its weapons of mass destruction. Egypt, by far the largest Arab nation, had its first contested election this month, and, as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius writes from Cairo, “the power of the reform movement in the Arab world today ... is potent because it’s coming from the Arab societies themselves and not just from democracy enthusiasts in Washington.” Which is evidence that Bush was right: Muslims and Arabs, like people everywhere, want liberty and self-rule. Afghanistan has just voted, and Iraq is about to vote a second time this year. Violence continues, but the more important story is that democracy and freedom are advancing.

True, the news is not positive everywhere. Iran seems determined not to give up its nuclear weapons programs, and the efforts of the British, French and Germans have not stopped them. The good news is that the British, French and Germans appear to recognize this. North Korea also, despite initialing a draft agreement, seems bent on building more nukes. The bright side is that China, the one country with leverage over Kim Jong Il, seems more inclined to use it.

The problem here is evil regimes against which we have no real military options. The best hope for a solution is peaceful regime change, of the kind endorsed by Michael Ledeen on the right and Peter Ackerman on the left.

Polls show that most Americans think the economy is in dreadful shape, even though almost all the numbers are good: Inflation and unemployment are low, and growth is robust despite the exogenous shocks of Sept. 11, Enron and Katrina. After a generation of almost constant low-inflation economic growth, perhaps we Americans are only satisfied when we have bubble growth, as in the late 1990s, and are unimpressed when the American economy proves once again to be amazingly resilient. This is all the more astonishing when you consider that we are going through a time of increased competition and change, as China and India, with 37% of the world’s population, are transforming their economies from Third World to First World. Such a large proportion of mankind moving rapidly upward: This has never happened before and will never happen again.

Couple this with the facts that Japan seems to be growing again, after 15 years of deflation, that East Asia and Eastern Europe continue to grow robustly, and that major Latin countries like Mexico and Brazil are growing as well, and the economic picture around the world looks pretty good, despite sclerotic non-growth in western Europe and continued poverty in Africa.

But even if things are going well, isn’t America hated around the world? By the elites and chattering classes of many countries, yes, and by much of the American elite and chattering class as well. But we are not competing in a popularity contest. In a unipolar world, the single superpower will always arouse envy and dislike. The relevant question is if we can live safely in the world; the French may dislike us, but we can live comfortably with France. The recent Pew Trust polls showing diminishing support for Islamist terrorism in Muslim countries indicate things are moving in the right direction. The increasing interweaving of China into the international economy suggests China may not be a military threat. A world spinning out of control? No, it is more like a world moving, with some backward steps, in the direction we want.

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TV’s gloomy take on Iraq (townhall.com, 051020)

by Brent Bozell

On Saturday, millions of Iraqis walked with determination to the polls to vote for a new constitution. The turnout was high. The violence was down dramatically from the triumphant elections of January. But the network found all this boring. On the night before the historic vote, ABC led with bird-flu panic. CBS imagined Karl Rove in a prison jumpsuit. NBC hyped inflation.

They say that news is a man-bites-dog story. In the Middle East, how common is a constitutional referendum? Have they had one in Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Syria? Jordan? Until the last few years, the phrase “Arab constitutional democracy” sounded like a pipe dream or an oxymoron. But today, the reporters can only kvetch. NBC’s Richard Engel growled online that the new constitution was “a deeply flawed document, peppered with religious slogans, and leaves plenty of room for Shiites and Kurds to govern themselves.” Engel says Iraqis disagree on the constitution, but “with the daily pressures of the insurgency, power cuts and lawlessness, there might not be enough time to start over before this country and the people lose hope — along with many of their lives.”

Does Engel wear black everywhere he goes? The news pattern from Iraq has that familiar gloom to it. The process of building a constitutional democracy has been a story made in sessions of boring political blather, in a language Americans can’t understand. Bombs blowing people up — now that’s action, great television, it doesn’t require an interpreter. That’s news.

A massive new study by Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center reviews every Iraq story on the evening news programs of ABC, CBS and NBC from January through September of 2005. That’s 1,388 news stories. He titled it “The Bad News Brigade,” because 61% of the stories were negative or pessimistic, while only 15% of the stories were positive or optimistic — a four-to-one ratio. The trend in coverage has also become increasingly negative during 2005, with pessimistic stories rising to nearly three-fourths of all Iraq news by August and September, with a 10-to-one ratio of negative stories over positive ones.

Terrorists are the real assignment editors of American TV news from Iraq. Two out of every five network evening news stories (564 stories this year) featured car bombings, assassinations, kidnappings or other attacks launched by the terrorists against the Iraqi people or coalition forces, more than any other topic. That’s an average of two stories every night between the three shows.

Even the evolution of democracy in Iraq is presented in more negative than positive terms. More stories (124) focused on shortcomings in Iraq’s political process — the danger of bloodshed during the January elections, political infighting, and fears that the new Iraqi constitution might spur more violence — than on the positive side of democracy-building (92 stories). And then there’s this: One-third of those optimistic stories (32) appeared on just two nights — Jan. 30 and 31, just after Iraq’s first successful elections. You can see how people who watch the news regularly would ask where the good news can be located.

That’s especially true when the subject of the story is the American soldier. In the most upsetting part of the study, Noyes found that 79 stories focused primarily on allegations of wrongdoing by American forces in Iraq, including this year’s Abu Ghraib hangover stories, compared to only eight that focused on the heroism of American soldiers. Is that still a story? Sure. But what about positive stories about the military? There were only eight stories that focused on the heroism of American soldiers, and only nine on soldier acts of kindness or generosity. The TV news titans not only suggest the mission in Iraq is a waste of money and lives, they are painting our soldiers as a big problem there, not a part of the solution.

The natural rebuttal the media’s defenders would offer to this study came from one defensive blogger at the Washington Post website: “An objective press is not supposed to ‘embrace’ anything. It is supposed to report the facts.” But while the news from Iraq can be utterly factual, but in the selection of facts, be utterly biased. The overwhelming picture TV viewers get day in and day out, through this selectivity, is that Iraq is packed with chaos, a “mess.”

Viewers should sense a political mission in the gloom. Demoralization over the “mess” in Iraq drags down Bush’s approval rating, drives the numbers up when the network pollsters ask constantly whether the war is “worth the cost,” and seems to revise history toward the Howard Dean view that deposing Saddam Hussein was a colossal mistake. They are right to assume that when reporters watch the Iraqis stream to the polls, they see sad puppets of the American president trying to put a happy-faced Post-It note on a disaster scene.

==============================

The media: They’re not with us (WorldNetDaily, 051021)

Now we know why so many journalists were hot under the collar when President Bush declared: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”

It’s increasingly clear that a sizable number of “journalists” in the old-line liberal news media aren’t with us.

No matter what, they seem to keep hoping for failure in Iraq, having given up that the success in Afghanistan will end. With each success in Iraq, they offer the lament that failure will surely be around the corner. Do they hate the Bush administration so much that they wish to see Americans lose in the war against terrorism? Or do they just hate their own country that much?

Ever since the main combat operations began, the media has been cheering on the insurgency. They spent weeks preparing for the death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq to reach 1,000. Now, they’re busy blowing up the balloons and hanging the party streamers for when the count reaches 2,000.

Perhaps they can use the appetizers leftover from the “10,000 Dead From Hurricane Because of Republican Policies” party in September. The crowd left that party early when it became clear that despite their hype, the loss of life in New Orleans was more than 90% less than they had breathlessly predicted.

Fortunately for Americans, things in Iraq just won’t go badly enough no matter how much the press wishes otherwise.

First, they insisted the Jan. 30, 2005, elections could not take place. They championed U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan’s skepticism and criticisms of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and his dire predictions of failure for the Americans.

The media – along with Kofi and his crooked partners at the U.N. – ended up with egg on their faces. Millions of Iraqis gave the “Coalition Hoping for Failure in Iraq” the purple middle finger to show them just how wrong they were.

Undeterred, the media insisted that the electoral success would never be repeated. But, of course, that’s exactly what happened this past weekend when millions of Iraqis again went to the polls and defied the conventional wisdom of the liberal journalist brain trust.

This time, the old-line media had a caveat: Even if the elections do take place with relative peace and order, it still wouldn’t matter because the Sunnis would vote overwhelmingly against the draft constitution on the ballot.

Initial election results indicate that voters actually approved the constitution in at least 50% of the Sunni-dominated provinces. So, now the media is insisting the election was rigged – just like Florida. The left really can’t stand losing at the polls.

The media cannot allow for the possibility that things are going better than they report in Iraq, because they’re stuck on the record declaring the situation there to be a complete failure.

A little more than one week before the election in Iraq, a California newspaper began an editorial on the elections with the enthusiastic refrain of, “As if things weren’t already bad enough in Iraq …”

One of the gray ladies of the liberal media establishment, the New York Times, ran stories hyping up the violence of the day and the poor turnout. This was despite the fact that the elections were remarkably peaceful and turnout was high.

Writing under the headline “Turnout is Mixed as Iraqis Cast Vote on Constitution,” Times reporters cried with sadness at the failure to defeat the constitution:

“But the Sunni turnout – high in some cities like Mosul, low in others like Ramadi – appeared to be insufficient to defeat the new charter. …”

Interesting way to put it, don’t you think?

I guess they just took the language from their 2004 election coverage, which easily could have read:

“But the turnout of liberal voters – high in some cities like New York and San Francisco, low in others like Indianapolis and Nashville – appeared to be insufficient to defeat George Bush. …”

Well, don’t be too sad, liberal journalists. In just a few days time the focus will shift to the trial of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen. This will provide the media ample opportunities to rewrite history and tell us all how Hussein wasn’t really that bad of a guy after all.

In the war against terrorism, the old-line liberal media has dedicated plenty of column inches telling us how President Bush has done everything wrong in Iraq.

With Saddam’s trial approaching, it’d be nice if the liberal journalists could take just one or two week’s of vacation from the Bush-bashing and America-bashing and realize that in the war on terrorism, it’s intellectually and morally dishonest to be “against us” and defending the “other side.”

Melanie Morgan is chairman of the conservative, pro-troop non-profit organization Move America Forward and is co-host of the “Lee Rodgers & Melanie Morgan Show” on KSFO 560 AM in San Francisco.

==============================

The news from Iraq that’s not fit to print (townhall.com, 051103)

by Jeff Jacoby

What was the most important news out of Iraq last week?

That depends on what you consider “important.” Do you see the war against radical Islam and Ba’athist fascism as the most urgent conflict of our time? Do you believe that replacing tyranny with democratic self-government is ultimately the only antidote to the poison that has made the Middle East so dangerous and violent? If so, you’ll have no trouble identifying the most significant development in Iraq last week: the landslide victory of the new Iraqi Constitution.

The announcement on Oct. 25 that the first genuinely democratic national charter in Arab history had been approved by 79% of Iraqis was a major piece of good news. It confirmed the courage of Iraq’s people and their hunger for freedom and decent governance. It advanced the US campaign to democratize a country that for 25 years had been misruled by a mass-murdering sociopath. It underscored the decision by Iraq’s Sunnis, who had boycotted the parliamentary elections in January, to pursue their goals through ballots, not bullets. And it dealt a humiliating blow to the bombers and beheaders — to the likes of Islamist butcher Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who earlier this year declared “a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy” and threatened to kill anyone who took part in the elections.

No question: If you think that defeating Islamofascism, extending liberty, and transforming the Middle East are important, it’s safe to say you saw the ratification of the new constitution as the Iraqi news story of the week.

But that isn’t how the mainstream media saw it.

Consider The Washington Post. On the morning after the results of the Iraqi referendum were announced, the Post’s front page was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, Lieutenant Colonel Leon James II, who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined “Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq” and “Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of US Deaths.” A nearby graphic — “The Toll” — divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service — active duty, National Guard, and Reserves.

From Page 1, the stories jumped to a two-page spread inside, where they were illustrated with more photographs, a series of drawings depicting roadside attacks, and a large US map showing where each fallen soldier was from. On a third inside page, meanwhile, another story was headlined “2,000th Death Marked by Silence and a Vow.” It began: “Washington marked the 2,000th American fatality of the Iraq war with a moment of silence in the Senate, the reading of the names of the fallen from the House floor, new protests, and a solemn vow from President Bush not to ‘rest or tire until the war on terror is won.’ “ Two photos appeared alongside, one of Bush and another of antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan. And to give the body count a local focus, there was yet another story (“War’s Toll Leaves Baltimore in Mourning”) plus four pictures of troops killed in Iraq.

The Post didn’t ignore the Iraqi election results. A story appeared on Page A13 (“Sunnis Failed to Defeat Iraq Constitution”), along with a map breaking down the vote by province. But like other leading newspapers, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times, it devoted vastly more attention to the 2,000-death “milestone,” a statistic with no unique significance apart from the fact that it ends in round numbers.

Every death in Iraq is heartbreaking. The 2,000th fatality was neither more nor less meaningful than the 1,999 that preceded it. But if anything makes the death toll remarkable, it is how historically low it is. Considering what the war has accomplished so far — the destruction of the region’s bloodiest dictatorship, the liberation of 25 million Iraqis, the emergence of democratic politics, the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, the abandonment by Libya of its nuclear weapons program — it is hard to disagree with Norman Podhoretz, who notes in the current Commentary that these achievements have been “purchased at an astonishingly low cost in American blood when measured by the standards of every other war we have ever fought.”

But that isn’t a message Big Media cares to emphasize. Hostile to the war and to the administration conducting it, the nation’s leading news outlets harp on the negative and pessimistic, consistently underplaying all that is going right in Iraq. Their fixation on the number of troops who have died outweighs their interest in the cause for which those fallen heroes fought — a cause that advanced with the ratification of the new constitution.

Poll after poll confirms the public’s low level of confidence in mainstream media news. Gallup recently measured that confidence at 28%, an all-time low. Why such mistrust? The media’s slanted coverage of Iraq provides a pretty good clue.

==============================

Pushing bad news (townhall.com, 051128)

by John Leo

In a burst of anti-war triumphalism, Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post wrote last week that President Bush and the Bushies have run out of “elitists whom they can demonize.” Hmm. That is a problem. Where will we find the punching bags of tomorrow? Wait! I have it. How about the elite news media? Will they do?

Meyerson celebrated Cindy Sheehan “whose down the line dovishness is more than offset by her standing as the mother of,” etc. etc. Actually, Sheehan was more or less a summer-long anti-Bush media construct, kept aloft by withholding the news that she regards “insurgents” in Iraq as “freedom fighters,” hates her country (America “is not worth dying for”) and thinks Lynne Stewart, the lawyer convicted of aiding terrorists, is a real-life Atticus Finch, the heroic attorney of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” She’s a loony Michael Moore clone, protected by the media’s “bereaved mom” image.

The major papers pulled all of our string with stories, mostly played big on page one, about the 2000th American soldier killed in Iraq. Every military death is a tragedy, but more than 58,000 died in Vietnam and almost 7,000 in a single World War II battle, Iwo Jima, all without front-page anti-war articles posing as compassionate news stories. The modern front-page editorial is easy to find these days. On November 21, the NY Times felt it had to run FOUR, page one photos of Bush trying to exit a Beijing meeting though a locked door. What a doofus! First he doesn’t listen to us, now he doesn’t even know how to leave a room!

President Bush deserves heavy blame for his current predicament, but it is impossible to watch network news or read the elite newspapers and not conclude that anti-Bush and anti-war reporters are pushing things along. Reporters keep citing the switcheroo argument (that Bush premised the Iraq invasion on WMDs, then switched to other reasons when those weapons weren’t found) without mentioning that Bush and the administration cited other reasons many times. The war resolution that all those Democrats voted on (and apparently forgot) mentioned seven or eight strong reasons.

The media are fond of citing Condoleeza Rice’s “mushroom cloud” statement as an example of unwarranted hype about non-existent WMDs. Her full sentence, however, was a reasonable one: “There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly (Saddam) can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Another favorite press chestnut is Vice President Cheney’s statement on Meet the Press that Iraq has reconstituted nuclear weapons. Yes, he said that, but several other times on that program he talked more carefully about the possibility of Iraq reconstituting such weapons. Whether that one “reconstituted” was a verbal slip, I can’t say. But he retracted it on another edition of Meet the Press (alas, six months later). The retraction usually goes unmentioned.

When President Bush belatedly y responded to his critics, the Washington Post ran the story as “Bush Spars with Critics of the War; Exchanges with Democrats Take Campaign-Style Tone.” The Power Line blog got it right: “a non-partisan paper would headline the story of Bush’s defense of the integrity of his administration by saying something like “Bush responds to critics’”…But the Washington Post isn’t non-partisan…So it tries to make the president sound like he’s engaging in partisan quibbling rather than finally responding to charges which, in their strongest form, cast him as one of the great villains in American history.”

Or take Rep. Jeanne Schmidt’s “coward” outburst about Rep. John Murtha. Her statement was well over the top. But it was followed by typical media overkill. Schmidt, who apologized immediately, was pounded for days. (‘Mean Jean’ Goes to Washington and Invites a Firestorm, said an alleged news article in the NY Times.) Meanwhile, Murtha, who few people had ever heard of, emerged as an astonishingly important congressman. His call for immediate withdrawal of troops was spun by Democrats as something more moderate and nuanced, and the media went along. The resolution for immediate withdrawal, defeated in a House vote of 403-3, was denounced by Nancy Pelosi as “a disgrace,” though the text of it was almost exactly the same as Murtha’s.

The story was not played as a defeat for Murtha. In fact, the defeat was glossed over as somehow irrelevant, buried in some major papers beneath “uproar in the House” reports. If the vote had gone Murtha’s way, you can bet that the press corps would not have played the “uproar” angle as more important.

Can it be that many national reporters are so afflicted by Bush hatred that they can’t let go long enough to report stories straight? Could be. Consider the entire backward-looking thrust of so much reportage, focusing sharply on what happened in 2002 and 2003, less on the stake we have in prevailing in Iraq. If we lose in Iraq, it will be the first great victory for global jihad, with tremendous consequences for the U.S. Can the media get over their obsession with Bush and focus on that?

==============================

War, lies and media on the left (Washington Times, 051130)

Politics is politics and ratings are ratings. But at what point does the non-stop antiwar Iraq rhetoric by many Democrats and many in the media cross the line and morph into outright falsehoods, personal vendettas against the president, and become utterly demoralizing to our troops on the ground in Iraq? I would submit that that line was deliberately and gleefully crossed quite a while ago.

Why? If you are a liberal in the Democratic Party or in the media, there are several reasons why you would twist the facts, try to rewrite history and privately state that “the end justifies the means.” First, and maybe still most importantly, for many on the left, they have never considered George W. Bush a legitimate president. They have an irrational hatred for him and wrongfully feel, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Mr. Bush somehow stole the 2000 election.

Second, many don’t really care if the Bush administration is right or wrong about Iraq. Because of the constant, pointed and shaded attacks against this president and “his” war, they see his presidency as a wounded animal looking for a place to hide and heal. Because there are important elections coming up in 2006 and 2008, they have no intention of giving up the chase. They mean to kill the animal before it recovers and can fight back. Lastly, and most troubling, is that many liberals in the Democratic Party or the media have an ingrained contempt for our military and the role it must play in the world.

What is most disturbing in this game by the Democrats to cripple this presidency and enhance their chances in the 2006 and 2008 elections is the suspect role some in the media are willing and most anxious to play.

Politics is politics and it’s no surprise that some Democrats are shading the truth to influence the American people. Some Republicans are no better and, as we get closer to the elections, they will shame themselves and our party as well. But in the meantime, journalists are paid to be unbiased reporters of fact. Not to carry water for the Democrats or to insert their own personal bias.

Not only do they incessantly pound the American people with negative story after negative story on the war in Iraq, but when their unfair coverage reaches a crescendo, they themselves “poll” the American people to ask them if they support Mr. Bush and “his” war in Iraq.

They do this and conveniently forget some of that history that they and some of the Democrats are trying to rewrite. History, for instance, that states that in 1998, Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the Iraq Liberation Act, an act that stated, “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” In December 1998, after ordering military action in response to Saddam Hussein’s decision to expel the U.N. weapon inspectors, Mr. Clinton said, “Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference; he has used them... The international community had little doubt then, and I have no doubt today, that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.”

Leaving the words of Mr. Clinton aside, many in the media seem to have completely or deliberately forgotten about U.N. Resolution 1441 — a resolution that was unanimously passed by the Security Council and ordered Saddam Hussein to make a “full accounting of his WMD program and to cooperate with inspectors.” Further, the resolution warned that there would be no more tolerance for concealment or obstruction — something David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, found Saddam was doing on a regular basis.

OK, if some in the media will turn their backs on this verifiable history, then I have no doubt that they will also seek to squash or ignore the testimony of those who would remind the American people of the valid reasons for going to war in Iraq — even testimony by Democrats.

How many in the media who oppose this war will report the words of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, when, in speaking recently in opposition to a date certain for withdrawal, said: “It is no surprise to my colleagues that I strongly supported the war in Iraq... we had in our national interest to remove Saddam Hussein from power... He was a ticking time bomb that if we did not remove him, I am convinced would have blown up, metaphorically speaking, in America’s face... The international intelligence community believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

Politics is politics, ratings are ratings, but lies are lies. While some Democrats may twist the truth to win the upcoming elections, the media has a solemn obligation to report the facts. And it is on that score that some have failed themselves, our nation, our troops, and the people of Iraq.

Douglas MacKinnon served as press secretary to former Sen. Bob Dole. He is also a former White House and Pentagon official, and an author.

==============================

Conventional Wisdom: The mainstream media still has the power. (Weekly Standard, 051201)

CONSERVATIVES are justifiably proud of the alternative they’ve created to the mainstream media—the Washington Times, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, big regional papers, TV networks, and the national news magazine. Last year, conservative talk radio, websites, and bloggers forced the Swift Boats vets story onto the national media agenda and instantly destroyed 60 Minutes’s case against President Bush and his Texas Air National Guard service. But conservatives shouldn’t get triumphal. The mainstream media still rules.

We see this every day. Consider the case of Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, who recently called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. The mainstream media treated this as a shot out of the blue by a defense hawk who suddenly concluded that the war was unwinnable. Conservatives knew better—namely that Murtha had been criticizing the war for many months and that his call for withdrawal was utterly irresponsible.

The mainstream media view prevailed. Murtha was treated as a pro-war hawk who had reluctantly—and more in sorrow than in anger—turned against the intervention in Iraq. Newsweek’s Conventional Wisdom Watch gave him an “up” arrow, and indeed that reflected media opinion about Murtha and opposition to the war in Iraq. The dissent by the conservative media barely registered.

Despite all the good done by the alternative media, the mainstream media is still able to impose its interpretation on news events. It has no qualms about creating out of whole cloth national figures it likes. And the mainstream media continues to hold to a double standard, one for Democrats and liberals, another for Bush and Republicans.

I don’t mean to diminish the alternative media. It’s simply that the mainstream media is far bigger and much, much stronger—and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Talk radio, websites and bloggers don’t report. They can only react to the reporting of the mainstream media.

FOX NEWS has dozens of reporters. It’s not really part of the alternative media. True, it’s far more welcoming to conservative commentators (I’m one of them) than any of the mainstream broadcast outlets and this gives Fox a conservative tilt. But Fox also has many liberal commentators. And its reporters, in my view, are fairer and less partisan than most mainstream media reporters.

A GOOD EXAMPLE of the mainstream media’s power is Cindy Sheehan, the left-wing mother of a soldier slain in Iraq. She showed up in Texas last summer demanding to see the president, who was on vacation at his ranch. The mainstream media elevated her stardom, rarely mentioning that she had already met once with Bush and had allied herself with far-left activists.

Cindy Sheehan was created out of whole cloth. Having talked to Bush in person since her son was killed, she had no special claim on his time. Nor, as an antiwar protester, was she representative of parents of slain GI’s—quite the contrary. But the media embraced her. Sadly for Sheehan, her protest near Bush’s ranch over Thanksgiving was a flop. Why? Because the mainstream media had moved on, presumably without informing her.

The conservative alternative media has vigorously challenged the mainstream media’s take on many stories, but has rarely changed it. Consider the CIA leak case. The conventional story line is that the Bush White House sought to punish a brave whistleblower, Joseph Wilson, for publicly refuting a Bush claim about Iraq by outing his wife, a CIA agent. In truth, the Bush White House merely sought to knock down Wilson’s story because it was false.

The mainstream media line has survived. We see it repeated endlessly. The alternative media has cataloged Wilson’s numerous lies—with little effect. When Wilson appeared recently on 60 Minutes, he was treated a man who spoke truth to power and suffered for it.

On Iraq, the mainstream media have been relentlessly negative. And this has had a clear impact on the public, whose support for the president’s Iraq policy has nosedived. The alternative media has played up the many examples of good news and optimistic assessments of Iraq. It’s not difficult to see who has been the dominant force on that issue.

Last year, the mainstream media went into a frenzy after the president was accused of being AWOL during his National Guard duty. But the same media was uninterested when scored of Swift Boat veterans who served with John Kerry challenged his heroic account of his Vietnam service. And when it finally took up the Kerry story, the mainstream media’s focus was primarily on discrediting the vets, not Kerry.

This year, the same double standard applies to the Democrats’ attempt to market the story that the president lied about Iraq intelligence before war. With rare exceptions, Democrats are not required to justify their charge with evidence. Bush, though, is being called on to defend his innocence.

On top of all that, the mainstream media likes to throw its weight around, often at Bush’s expense. When he attended the Summit of the Americas in Argentina earlier this month, Bush met with American reporters to answer a few questions. The first four (of five) were about whether he would fire senior aide Karl Rove, apologize to the American people, combat the notion he’s untrustworthy, or try to give his presidency a fresh start. Only one dealt with his policy toward Latin America.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

==============================

The Ultimate Question About Comparative Exposure in the Mainline Media (townhall.com, 051201)

by Ross Mackenzie ( bio | archive )

Answer: Sam Johnson; 29 years in the Air Force - seven of them as a POW in Hanoi.

Question: Who gave the most powerful speech in the House of Representatives during a raucous Nov. 18 debate culminating in a 403-3 vote against pulling troops out of Iraq?

Answer: Texas (3rd District); Republican. Indeed, former speaker of the Texas House.

Question: What are Johnson’s state and party?

Answer: That’s the whole point.

Question: Why have so few heard of Johnson? Why has he received so little exposure?

Answer: Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania (12th District); 37 years in the Marines - including two tours in Vietnam.

Question: Who is the Congressman who got so much exposure with a proposal to start pulling American troops out of Iraq?

Answer: Thank you. You’ve asked the ultimate question.

Question: Why did Murtha receive so much exposure, and Johnson so little?

XXX

We have at hand yet another example of selective coverage. Murtha was a Page One poster boy for close to a week. Johnson remains practically unheard of. What goes similarly unreferenced is this: Murtha voted with the majority (not in the three-vote minority) on the House pull out resolution.

Some related queries:

Why the plaudits for minority pols as long as they are Democrats (Illinois Senator Barack Obama and all the members of the Congressional Black Caucus) - but heaven help them if they are Republicans, such as Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele of Maryland, Congressman Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, or former Congressman J.C. Watts of Oklahoma?

Why are “moderates” so often described in terms of how they deviate leftward from the accepted Republican line (Senators Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe), but not in terms of how they deviate rightward from the accepted Democratic line (Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut)? Are there no liberals among the Republicans but only conservatives and moderates, and no moderates among the Democrats - just liberals and conservatives?

XXX

Why is Sen. John McCain championed as the media’s favorite Republican “maverick” when he deviates from Republican (or administration) orthodoxy, while his support for increasing U.S. forces in Iraq goes almost ignored?

Why, in coverage of calls for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, is the public rarely reminded that many of those so vociferous in their withdrawal demands now, in fact voted to remove Saddam Hussein and urged acting before he employed his weapons of mass destruction against the West and its allies?

Why is the government applauded for investigating the tax status of conservative evangelical churches that signify for Republican administrations, while the government is deplored for investigating the tax status of liberal mainline churches - such as Pasadena’s All Saints Episcopal - that signify against them?

And why does the public hear ceaselessly about Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq and who demands immediate withdrawal of American forces now, yet hardly a word about (for instance) Virginians Sallie Stubenhofer and Rhonda Winfield - two mothers of sons killed in Iraq, who insist that immediate withdrawal is not the appropriate avenue out?

XXX

NBC’S Brian Williams said of Congressman Murtha: “When one Congressman out of 435 members of Congress speaks out against the war in Iraq, it normally wouldn’t be news. But it was today, because of who he is.” Neither Williams nor many others in the mainline media have noted that two years ago “hawk” Murtha urged the firing of Pentagon leaders who misled him into voting for the Iraq enterprise.

Here are the abbreviated comments of “one Congressman out of 435” - Sam Johnson of Texas - on the floor of the House two weeks ago:

I spent 29 years in the Air Force - served in Korea and Vietnam and spent seven years as a POW in Vietnam, more than half of that time in solitary confinement.

When I was a POW, I was scared to death when our Congress talked about pulling the plug that I would be left there forever. I know what it does to morale. I know what it does to the mission. And so help me God, I will never, ever, let our nation make those mistakes again. Never.

Our men and women in uniform need our full support.

They need to have full faith that a few naysayers in Washington won’t cut and run - and leave them high and dry. They need to know these things because that’s mandatory for mission success and troop morale.

Mr. Speaker, we’re making great progress in Iraq. And our work is paying off.

It’s going to take time, but our guys on the ground are working with other nations to make inroads to create leadership and inspire democracy in a country that has known only hate, fear and death from a ruler.

However sadly, some here want to embolden the enemy by saying we just cut and run. That’s just irresponsible and unconscionable.

In case people have forgotten, this is the same thing that happened in Vietnam. Peaceniks and people in Congress - and America - started saying bad things about what was going on over there. Let me tell you what it did for troop morale. It’s a real downer.

Withdrawal is not an option!

XXX

Johnson’s side carried the day, 403-3. So, again, the ultimate question: Why so much exposure, visibility and coverage for the anti-war Congressman Murtha, and so little - practically none - for Congressman Johnson, who seeks to see the mission through?

==============================

Is the U.S. Casualty Rate Higher Because of the AP? (townhall.com, 051208)

by Todd Manzi ( bio | archive )

The Associated Press has caused some U.S. soldiers to lose their lives. The terrorists know they cannot defeat us militarily. They understand the only way they can win is if our military withdraws because the American people stop supporting the war.

Terrorists are trying to get their message across to us, but instead of issuing press releases, they are killing our troops.

We know how important the will of the American people is regarding the war. Doesn’t the will of the terrorists matter also? If their cause looks lost, they will attack less. If they think they have a chance to win, they will attack more. The irresponsible, antiwar-biased reporting from the Associated Press over the last four months can only have encouraged our enemy to keep trying. Terrorists may have been given the false hope that all is not lost for them.

The facts:

The Rasmussen Poll taken July 13th and 14th indicated 44% of Americans thought the U.S. was winning the War on Terror.

Meantime, the AP’s August coverage of Cindy Sheehan had an extreme antiwar bias. AP reporters propped up Sheehan and issued dispatches that looked more like editorial commentary than news. Like the terrorists, the antiwar movement was motivated to act based on the prospect of getting press coverage. The AP and the mainstream media claimed people rallied to support Sheehan, but they actually scampered down to Crawford because they knew receptive reporters were waiting to greet them. A news cycle friendly to the antiwar movement was in place, and like moths to a flame, the antiwar zealots flew to Camp Casey.

The antiwar campaign worked. The Rasmussen Poll taken August 10th and 11th indicated a 6% drop down to 38% of respondents who thought we were winning the war. Knowing he had to respond, the president planned an aggressive push for his message. Unfortunately, the hurricanes blew the news cycle in a different direction, and President Bush was forced to wait to make his case.

The president’s speech on October 6th at the National Endowment for Democracy marked the beginning of the administration’s attempt to counter the damage caused by antiwar reporting in August. The speech was followed by the release of an intercepted letter from our enemy’s leadership. A couple of days later, on October 13th, President Bush had a video teleconference with troops in Iraq. The AP did not report anything of substance about the message contained in these three events. Instead, they created a false news cycle regarding the supposed staging of the teleconference.

The effect of AP’s antiwar emphasis showed up in the Rasmussen Poll taken October 15th and 16th. There was only a 1% recovery in the numbers: 39% of Americans thought we were winning the war. In early August, Sheehan’s antiwar message was packaged for maximum impact, and poll numbers went down. In early October, the president’s message was not reported and poll numbers stayed down.

In the coming months, the message of congressional Democrats and the antiwar movement were given maximum media attention. The Senate shutdown, Rep. John Murtha’s comments, and constant updates of the U.S. death toll, etc. were touted. Conversely, the AP stifled the president’s message. President Bush’s October 25th speech, approval of the Iraqi constitution, President Bush’s Veterans Day speech, Congress’ vote against Murtha, Sen. Lieberman’s positive reports from Iraq, etc. were ignored or reported with negative antiwar-bias.

In total, a false impression, a much more negative impression, of American support for the war was conveyed to our enemy. The truth, which could not be ignored, is reflected in President Bush’s powerful speech on November 30th. What did the AP think of the speech? “[The] speech did not break new ground or present a new strategy.” What did the American people think of the speech? The Rasmussen Poll taken November 30th and December 1st indicates 48% of Americans now believe the U.S. is winning the war. The best explanation for the nine-point bounce from the October poll is clearly that the speech provided new information to a large portion of the population.

Anyone who looks at the events, the news coverage and the Rasmussen polling information must conclude the American people were misinformed about the war. Ironically, if another industry were to under deliver to this extent, it would be news. The AP would be all over it and newspapers would print it.

Newspapers are in a position to hold the AP accountable to objectivity. Even if they are rooting for the terrorists to win, you think they would at least be concerned about the credibility of their product. For some reason, the newspaper industry does not care that the AP is biased. Newspaper editors are like ostriches with their heads in the sand.

I asked Scott Bosley, the executive director of American Society of Newspaper Editors, what he thought about the Associated Press’ antiwar bias. Bosely’s opinion:

“The AP is not biased. It covers stories episodically, attempting to put them in context.”

The consequence of the AP’s coverage of the War on Terror: they have allowed themselves to become a pawn of our enemy. The terrorists are as cunning as they are evil, and they have incorporated media coverage as part of their strategy to win the war. Intuitively, the AP and the rest of the mainstream media understand that the promise or hope for press coverage influences behavior. After all, every year the public relations industry spends billions of dollars hoping to position their clients’ message in the media.

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The media’s war (townhall.com, 051213)

by Thomas Sowell

The media seem to have come up with a formula that would make any war in history unwinnable and unbearable: They simply emphasize the enemy’s victories and our losses.

Losses suffered by the enemy are not news, no matter how large, how persistent, or how clearly they indicate the enemy’s declining strength.

What are the enemy’s victories in Iraq? The killing of Americans and the killing of Iraqi civilians. Both are big news in the mainstream media, day in and day out, around the clock.

Has anyone ever believed that any war could be fought without deaths on both sides? Every death is a tragedy to the individual killed and to his loved ones. But is there anything about American casualty rates in Iraq that makes them more severe than casualty rates in any other war we have fought?

On the contrary, the American deaths in Iraqi are a fraction of what they have been in other wars in our history. The media have made a big production about the cumulative fatalities in Iraq, hyping the thousandth death with multiple full-page features in the New York Times and comparable coverage on TV.

The two-thousandth death was similarly anticipated almost impatiently in the media and then made another big splash. But does media hype make 2,000 wartime fatalities in more than two years unusual?

The Marines lost more than 5,000 men taking one island in the Pacific during a three-month period in World War II. In the Civil War, the Confederates lost 5,000 men in one battle in one day.

Yet there was Jim Lehrer on the “News Hour” last week earnestly asking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the ten Americans killed that day. It is hard to imagine anybody in any previous war asking any such question of anyone responsible for fighting a war.

We have lost more men than that in our most overwhelming and one-sided victories in previous wars. During an aerial battle over the Mariannas islands in World War II, Americans shot down hundreds of Japanese planes while losing about 30 of their own.

If the media of that era had been reporting the way the media report today, all we would have heard about would have been that more than two dozen Americans were killed that day.

Neither our troops nor the terrorists are in Iraq just to be killed. Both have objectives. But any objectives we achieve get short shrift in the mainstream media, if they are mentioned at all.

Our troops can kill ten times as many of the enemy as they kill and it just isn’t news worth featuring, if it is mentioned at all, in much of the media. No matter how many towns are wrested from the control of the terrorists by American or Iraqi troops, it just isn’t front-page news like the casualty reports or even the doom-saying of some politicians.

The fact that these doom-saying politicians have been proved wrong, again and again, does not keep their latest outcries from overshadowing the hard-won victories of American troops on the ground in Iraq.

The doom-sayers claimed that terrorist attacks would make it impossible to hold the elections last January because so many Iraqis would be afraid to go vote. The doom-sayers urged that the elections be postponed.

But a higher percentage of Iraqis voted in that election — and in a subsequent election — than the percentage of Americans who voted in last year’s Presidential elections.

Utter ignorance of history enables any war with any casualties to be depicted in the media as an unmitigated disaster.

Even after Nazi Germany surrendered at the end of World War II, die-hard Nazi guerrilla units terrorized and assassinated both German officials and German civilians who cooperated with Allied occupation authorities.

But nobody suggested that we abandon the country. Nobody was foolish enough to think that you could say in advance when you would pull out or that you should encourage your enemies by announcing a timetable.

There has never been the slightest doubt that we would begin pulling troops out of Iraq when it was feasible. Only time and circumstances can tell when that will be. And only irresponsible politicians and the media think otherwise.

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Newsweek’s Bush-in-the-Bubble cover (townhall.com, 051214)

by Brent Bozell

They call the magazine “Newsweek,” but in today’s 24-hour news cycle, a weekly magazine that is seen as a recycler of old news is courting a death wish. To avoid this, Newsweek gives us haughty pieces of attitude, not only in the cover stories, but on the cover itself. Remember the cover on Iraq with the words “Bush’s $87 Million Mess”?

This week’s edition is the latest in a series of let-’er-rip Bush-bashing covers. It pictures President Bush floating encapsulated in a bubble with the headline “Bush’s World. The Isolated President: Can He Change?” The headline on the cover story inside is “Bush In A Bubble.” They worry that Bush is possibly “the most isolated president in modern history.”

The story by Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe begins with a “baffled” John Murtha not understanding why the White House won’t call him. Let’s see … Murtha’s publicly proclaimed the Iraq war can’t be won with Bush’s current approach, for which the liberal media have carried him around on their shoulders like a decorated matador, and he expects friendly consultation after that? They claim Bush has an “admirable” disdain for pundits, but inattention to Murtha, a “rock-solid patriot, suggests a level of indifference, if not denial, that is dangerous for a president who seeks to transform the world.”

First of all, this critique is just as easily turned around on the liberal media. When is the last time Newsweek’s top editors called the Media Research Center for advice? (Try never. Maybe we could have talked them out of biting on that dangerously insular piece suggesting American soldiers flush Korans for fun.)

But there’s something else going on here, too. It’s not just Murtha, but the media themselves who are feeling un-consulted. One of the things know-it-all reporters like to do is advise the powerful. A politician can attract good press by taking his press corps and pretending to make them his corps of advisers, noodling over their grand ideas for governance. Look no further than John McCain. Back in 1999, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter professed love for McCain because he returned calls: “Reporters can be bought cheap with a little cooperation when we need it. For years, McCain has reliably returned press calls with a candid line or two.” McCain indulged their pushy adviser impulses, as Slate’s Jacob Weisberg praised McCain’s willingness to listen to his school-voucher ideas: “When McCain flatters you, it doesn’t feel automatic or calculated. He truly likes us journalists.” In the end, however, all it got McCain was loving articles. Bush became president.

There’s still more. Newsweek’s reporters are actually indifferent to the actual foreign-policy records of the presidents they’re touting as role models of consultation. They are conducting the ultimate exercise in Washington insider-dom. They are all about The Process. It doesn’t matter if you succeed; it only that you make the right phone calls.

Early in the article, Thomas and Wolffe hang the hats of bipartisanship on their Bubble-Boy critique by noting Sen. Richard Lugar “cited Bill Clinton as the model” of consultation with the other party. And what in blazes did that accomplish? Did Clinton consult before his Wag-the-Dog two-day wars? Did Clinton get Osama bin Laden? Or did Clinton follow Murtha’s actual advice to him and withdraw from Somalia and embolden Osama? They also cite John F. Kennedy, whose consultation skills didn’t exactly help at the Bay of Pigs.

The same goes for domestic political consultation. Thomas and Wolffe hail Daddy Bush as a Murtha-consulting role model. The Thomas-Wolffe story ends by citing Daddy Bush’s heroic tax increase as “doing the right thing.” He consulted with Democrats and raised taxes. And spending went through the roof, the deficit rising to all-time highs. But he talked it out, slapped some backs, shook some hands. He moved left, and he lost.

In the end, this is about wanting the current President Bush to be moderate . His fault isn’t just insularity, it’s his occasional outbursts of conservatism. They cite that even Ronald Reagan reached out in his troubled second term to moderate old hand Howard Baker as his chief of staff. But Fred Barnes noted on Fox what Newsweek left out: Newsweek pulled this same attack on Reagan in 1981, with a story that fall on “A Disengaged Presidency.”

Maybe one of the lessons Bush learned from his father is that trying to please liberal reporters is not a path to political success. Being “disengaged” from their agenda for your presidency is the smarter move.

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How reporters create Grinches (townhall.com, 051215)

by Marvin Olasky

Last week, I wrote about the racism of the liberal media’s Katrina coverage — but that’s only half the story. As I’ve been assessing press accounts of what was clearly the story of the year for 2005, it’s become clear that press hysteria delayed rescues, prodded some politicians into making mega-billion dollar promises and may have created a long-term backlash.

How bad was the reporting? You probably saw and heard stories of mayhem at the Superdome and the Convention Center, and on the streets of New Orleans. You may have missed the admissions weeks later by NBC, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times that, as the Baltimore Sun noted, stories about “murders, rapes and beatings have turned out to be false.”

“Hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people” inside the Dome — never happened. “Thirty or 40 bodies” stored in a Convention Center freezer — not one. Rampaging “armed mobs” — none. “Bands of rapists, going block to block” — never happened. Geraldo Rivera’s “scene of terror, chaos, confusion, anarchy, violence, rapes, murders, dead babies” — well, that’s Geraldo Rivera.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said four murders occurred in the entire city during the week after Katrina hit, making it a typical week in a city averaging 200 homicides per year. Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, a Superdome patroller, described press reports as “99% (expletive).” The Superdome had one shooting: a Louisiana National Guardsman accidentally shot himself in the leg. New Orleans Coroner Frank Minyard said he had seen only seven gunshot victims during hurricane week: “Seven gunshots isn’t even a good Saturday night in New Orleans.”

Why the hype? Official sources like the mayor and the police chief were hysterical, and some reporters merely became megaphones for them. Crying and yelling made for better ratings than calm assessments of damage. Network stars wanted to display what passed as compassion. Since few reporters knew what was happening, a pack mentality kicked in, as reporters congregated in places of safety.

Politics also played a role, with liberals framing the story as one of rich people not caring about poor people and whites not caring about blacks.

But media exaggeration was not a victimless crime. It delayed the arrival of responders who, relying on press reports, had to plan their missions as military rather than philanthropic endeavors. New Orleans police stopped their search-and-rescue operations and turned their attention to the imagined mobs of rapists. Two patients apparently died while waiting for evacuation helicopters grounded for a day by false reports of sniper fire. Buses were slow to get to the worst place, the Convention Center.

Bush-bashing, of course, came to the fore, with the typical mainstream media view voiced well by former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines: “The churchgoing cultural populism of George Bush” means that “the poor drown in their attics.” MSNBC, ABC, NPR and Newsweek journalists were among the multitude using calamity as an opportunity to campaign overtly for higher taxes and bigger government.

And yet, as the truth about the hyping of disaster trickled out during the fall, the momentum desired by the left disappeared and a backlash emerged. “We’ve had a stunning reversal,” complained Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal advocacy group in Washington. But whose fault was that?

There’s precedent here: Propaganda about German atrocities in Belgium fueled sentiment for the United States to become involved in World War I, but when the truth came out Americans felt bamboozled and moved toward the isolationism that allowed for the rise of Hitler. British and French populaces also distrusted what seemed in the 1930s to be more scare stories about the Germans — the larger effect of World War I propaganda may have been to bring about World War II.

The long-term effect of Katrina propaganda will probably be more cynicism. Reporters who lie or exaggerate create grinches.

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A War Without Heroes? Only if you’re reading the mainstream media. (Weekly Standard, 051226)

DO YOU KNOW WHO PAUL Ray Smith is? If not, don’t feel bad. Most Americans aren’t familiar with Paul Ray Smith. He is the first and only soldier awarded the Medal of Honor for extraordinary courage in the war in Iraq. Five days before Baghdad fell in April 2003, Sergeant Smith and his men were building a makeshift jail for captured Iraqi troops.

Surprised by 100 of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards, Smith and his men, some of them wounded, were pinned down and in danger of being overrun. Smith manned a 50-caliber machine gun atop a damaged armored vehicle. Exposed to enemy fire, he singlehandedly repelled the attack, allowing his men to scramble to safety. He killed as many as 50 of Saddam’s elite soldiers and saved more than 100 American troops. Paul Ray Smith, 33, was killed by a shot to the head.

The war in Iraq is a war without heroes. There are no men—or women, for that matter—known to most Americans for their bravery in combat. There are no household names like Audie Murphy or Sgt. York or Arthur MacArthur or even Don Holleder, the West Point football star killed in Vietnam. When President Bush held a White House ceremony to award the Medal of Honor to Smith, posthumously, the TV networks and big newspapers reported the story. The coverage lasted one day. The story didn’t have legs.

Instead of heroes, there are victims. The two most famous soldiers in the war are Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman (in Afghanistan). Lynch was captured by Saddam’s troops after her truck crashed. Stories of her heroism in a gun battle with Iraqis turned out to be false. She was rescued later from an Iraqi hospital. Tillman, who gave up a pro football career to join the Army, was killed by friendly fire. “The press made that a negative story, a scandal almost,” says a Pentagon official.

It gets worse. In a study of over 1,300 reports broadcast on network news programs from January to September of this year, Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found only eight stories of heroism or valor by American troops and nine of soldiers helping the Iraqi people. But there were 79 stories, Noyes said, “focused on allegations of combat mistakes or outright misconduct on the part of U.S. military personnel.”

Who is responsible for the lack of heroes? The Pentagon bears some of the blame. “We could do a better job,” says Larry Di Rita, deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. But the fault lies mostly with the media. With the striking exception of CBS News, the media aren’t interested in stories of heroism by Americans in Iraq.

And even when the media take an interest, it isn’t always respectful. When CNN took up the medal awarded to Smith the day after the ceremony at the White House, here’s how anchor Paula Zahn presented it:

“Time now for all of you to choose your favorite person of the day. Every day, you can vote on our website, cnn.com/paula. Today’s choices: the mourners pouring into Rome, spending hours in line to pay their respects to the pope; Medal of Honor winner Sgt. Paul Smith for giving his life to save so many of his fellow soldiers in Iraq. And British prime minister Tony Blair, calling for a new election, even though his party has lost support in the polls.”

At least Smith won. Zahn went on to describe his heroic act and call up soundbites from the president and Smith’s widow. “His actions in that courtyard saved the lives of more than 100 American soldiers. Scripture tells us . . . that a man has no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.”

The New York Times took an odd approach to the Paul Ray Smith case. The nearer the awarding of the Medal of Honor came, the less coverage the Smith case got. It was as if the Times didn’t want President Bush to get any credit for honoring Smith.

The day after the White House event, the Times put a picture of Smith on page A16 with a brief caption. True, the Times had run two earlier stories about Smith, one in 2003, the other earlier this year. The first was headlined: “The Struggle for Iraq: Casualties; Medals for His Valor, Ashes for His Wife.” The second said Smith would get the Medal of Honor.

The back-page treatment of the award ceremony infuriated the White House. “We keep hearing how the people opposed to the war are not against the troops but only against the president,” an official said. “Man wins the highest medal this nation offers—and you know how rare that is—and the Times does not think that is worth a full story and on page one. The Medal of Honor is not about the president. It is about the troops.”

The media have no excuse for ignoring heroism. “There’s no dearth of opportunity there,” says Di Rita. In Iraq and Afghanistan, American Marines alone have been awarded 8 Navy Crosses, 35 Silver Stars, 617 Bronze Stars with “V,” 1,126 Bronze Stars, and 5,197 Purple Hearts.

For its part, the White House has made an effort to play up heroes. In his speeches on Iraq, the president frequently singles out soldiers and sailors. Last month in Annapolis, Bush cited Marine Corporal Jeff Starr, who had been killed in Ramadi. He left behind a message on his laptop and the president read a portion of it. “If you’re reading this, then I’ve died in Iraq,” he wrote. “I don’t regret going. Everybody dies, but few get to do it for something as important as freedom.”

Last July 4, Bush spoke at West Virginia University and mentioned two men who’d served in Iraq with the state’s National Guard. One of them, Lieutenant James McCormick, had just written him a letter. “If needed, all of us would return and continue the mission,” McCormick wrote. “It’s a just and much needed fight.”

Bill McGurn, the chief White House speechwriter, says the stories of heroism are easy to find. “There are gazillions of them,” he says. “It’s like dipping your hand in a barrel and pulling one out.” And when the president mentions a brave American service man or woman, that person tends to get some press coverage, if only in a hometown paper.

There is an exception to the rule on heroes. Beginning in May 2004, CBS News began running a short feature on “fallen heroes” on its evening news show—every night. A few sentences touched on the life and death of a deceased soldier. Despite the name, however, these stories did not focus on heroism. Then on December 5, 2005, CBS revamped the feature and began calling it “American Heroes.” The segment was expanded to include, as anchor Bob Schieffer put it, “not only those killed in the war zones, but also those who display exceptional courage on the battlefield and beyond.”

On December 8, the hero was Gary Villalobos. He and his lieutenant were ambushed during a house-to-house hunt for enemy soldiers. The lieutenant was killed. Villalobos didn’t retreat. He fought off insurgents and risked his life to protect a fellow soldier. In all, the CBS segment consisted of only 67 words—but words rarely spoken by the media.

The CBS feature, as admirable as it is, won’t create national heroes. The segments are too short and involve a different person each night. For a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan to achieve national renown—to become a celebrity even—the media would have to dwell on his heroism. That didn’t happen with Paul Ray Smith. So don’t get your hopes up.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

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Subordinating the truth (townhall.com, 051220)

by David Limbaugh

As I was watching President Bush’s latest news conference, I was again struck by the thought of how different the news climate and public mood would be if the mainstream media (MSM) were truly as unbiased as they pretend to be.

If the MSM were indeed objective and animated by an investigative impulse and a nonpartisan, government-watchdog instinct, they might thoroughly cover and inquire into the following:

— Why Joe Wilson appears to have lied when he denied that his wife, Valerie Plame, recommended him to the CIA to investigate the claim that Saddam Hussein sought uranium yellowcake from Niger, manifestly unqualified though he was. They might also examine Wilson’s bragging about debunking certain forged documents on his trip that were not even discovered until eight months later.

— Senator Durbin’s unconscionable likening of America’s treatment of terrorist detainees to the treatment of prisoners by Pol Pot, the Nazi regime and the Soviet Gulags.

— Why one of its own standard bearers, the vaunted New York Times, sat on the surveillance “scandal” story until the week Congress was debating reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

— Where Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid gets off demanding an independent investigation about this NSA surveillance — a practice that essentially began under President Clinton and about which Reid and his colleagues were privy to a dozen briefings.

— How Democratic leaders have continually accused President Bush of lying to get us into war when they had access to the same WMD intelligence as President Bush and voted to authorize him to attack Iraq.

— Why only a handful of Democrat senators availed themselves of their access to certain detailed reports on Iraqi WMD.

— Why Democratic leaders claim their plainly unconditional authorization to attack Iraq was based on further conditions.

— Upon what evidence the Democrats base their slanderous allegation that the Bush administration, as a matter of policy, engages in the systematic torture of terrorist detainees.

— How Democratic leaders could justify their irresponsible call for a specific withdrawal timetable for Iraq without playing into the terrorists’ hands.

— Why most of those Democrats, when Republicans called their bluff, were afraid to back up their destructive rhetoric with their vote.

— The Democrats’ conspicuous inability or unwillingness to offer a single alternative plan for Iraq, though they ceaselessly condemn President Bush’s policies on it.

— Why senators who voted for the Patriot Act are now refusing to reauthorize it despite the lack of a credible case that the administration has abused its authority or compromised civil liberties.

— How Democrat Senators can complain about the government’s failure to connect the dots concerning the terrorists’ 9/11 plot and at the same time take action that will virtually guaranty our inability to connect future dots.

— On what basis Sen. Harry Reid charges that the present Congress is “the most corrupt in history.”

— The remarkable progress in Iraq of the training of Iraqi security forces and the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure.

— The positive morale of the American troops in Iraq despite the endless distortions of the MSM and Democratic politicians.

— The robustness and resilience of the American economy under President Bush.

The MSM has been largely silent or slanted on these stories, along with many others that don’t support their preferred template.

Yet, in the face of this evidence, the MSM mostly deny their bias. What’s scary is that many of them actually believe they aren’t biased, which is as much a result of self-deception as deception of others.

This is because they operate in the type of stifling bubble they believe envelops President Bush. They surround themselves only with people who share their decidedly leftist, secular worldview. They harbor a myopic arrogance that regards contrary opinion as aberrant, perverse and evil. They oppose at all costs anything that advances that worldview, including the dissemination of the truth.

Thus, their professed allegiance to the truth must yield to their jaded perception of the higher good. Their pretense toward objectivity must be subordinated to their desired political ends.

This explains their concerted suppression of the undeniable historic significance of the Iraqi elections in favor of their timed release of the story on the surveillance scandal. It explains CBS’s John Roberts’ obliviousness to how he embarrassed himself in asking President Bush — on the heels of this remarkable news about the burgeoning Iraqi government — to confess his worst mistake in office.

While I am mindful and appreciative of the profound counterbalancing impact of the New Media in the interest of truth, we must remember that the MSM are still alive and kicking and hellbent on shaping the news and public opinion in conformity with their worldview.

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A Christmas bombing (Washington Times, 051221)

By Tony Blankley

As we approach Christmas, I am reminded of Mexican President Gen. Porfirio Diaz’s lamentation after the Mexican-American War: “Pobre Mexico! Tan lejos de Dios, y tan cerca los Estados Unidos (Poor Mexico! So far from God, and so close to the United States.”) While I am glad President Polk fought and won that war for America’s manifest destiny, I can sympathize with President Diaz’s regret that the harsh realities of man’s politics overwhelm his quest for spiritual peace and truth.

Now, just days before we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, I am struck that His promise that the meek shall inherit the Earth is seemingly no closer to realization today than it was 2,000 years ago when the mailed fist and iron sword of the Roman legionnaires harshly enforced Roman rule of the Western world.

Today, whether it is the murderous plans and actions of the Islamist terrorists, or merely the unrelenting verbal assaults of Washington politics, there is scant time to pause and bring central to our minds His teachings, by which we aspire to live our lives.

Pity our president, who after a summer and fall of unremitting war, disaster and political strife, surely was looking forward to the strength-renewing solace of a brief Christmas break. By long Washington tradition, these are the weeks when the politicians and media lay down our (figurative) swords, brass knuckles, slings and arrows, sniper rifles and bazookas and toast each other across the partisan and professional divide over convivial spirits at Christmas parties from one end of K Street to the other. In the middle ages such a moment was known as the Truce of God.

Only last Thursday the president and his gracious First Lady opened the White House to the brutes of the press — offering up groaning tables of delectables, seasonal libations and a ready smile and photograph with each and every member of that brazen horde (and the line was long with the many takers of that photo opportunity.)

But just a week before Christmas the New York Times, Democratic (and a few Republican) senators and the rest of the ever-willing-to-be brutal media launched their Christmas bombing of the Bush White House.

Atleastwhen President Nixon ordered the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong between Dec. 18 and Dec. 30, 1972, by 700 B-52s, he was attacking the enemy.

But in case the Democrats, the media and its flagship, the New York Times, haven’t noticed, the president of the United States is not the enemy of the people of the United States. And, whatever the policy differences between Americans may be, both the timing and the ferocity of their Christmas attack on the president is an appalling breach of decency.

The New York Times, which fiercely criticized President Nixon for bombing our enemy, North Vietnam, starting on Dec. 18 (so close to Christmas), claims it had the NSA story for a year and chose to release it on Dec. 16.

The media immediately has drawn from their shop-worn cupboard their predictable heroes and villains for the story. I was on “Hardball” on MSNBC this week when the guest hostess called the NSA officials who feloniously released the highly classified information “whistleblowers.” By that logic, Benedict Arnold was America’s first whistleblower.

I suppose from the perspective of King George III, revealing George Washington’s war plans was whistleblowing. Arnold is more commonly remembered by most Americans as our first traitor — though clearly not our last.

I have appeared on several radio and television shows with prominent journalists who manifest a perfect ignorance of even the most basic principles of constitutional law — even as they pronounce with self-consciously weighty judgment the unconstitutionality of the president’s actions.

However, the most basic constitutional principle is that in war time, the constitutionality of government intrusion into peace time civil liberties must be proportional to the magnitude, likelihood and exigency of the threat or danger to be prevented.

Until one has measured the threat, one cannot rationally judge the constitutionality of the intrusion into civil liberties of the executive action. The president’s critics simply ignore — or are oblivious to — the threat.

They rarely, if ever, even mention the palpable threat of Islamist terrorist (very possibly WMD) attack on our home soil in their analysis.

They ought to re-run regularly (if only in the privacy of their living rooms) the video of our fellow Americans leaping out of the 90th story windows of the Twin Towers.

The Supreme Court may eventually judge this matter. And, keeping in mind that, as Justice Robert Jackson once observed, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, I would expect the president’s actions to be upheld.

But, however it is finally decided, it is beyond any reasonable doubt that the president has been motivated in his actions by an earnest commitment and a passionate sense of high duty to protect us from the genocidal intentions of our Islamist terrorist enemies.

For this burden that he carries for us all as he performs his sacred and possibly sacrificial duties, California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and iconic Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis raised the prospect, as Christmas approaches, of the impeachment of our president.

How far we poor creatures find ourselves from His spirit this Christmas 2005, anno Domini.

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The media’s shabbiest moments (townhall.com, 051221)

by Brent Bozell

The year 2005 is ending as it began, with another successful election in Iraq and a liberal media still flapping around trying to find other controversies to submerge it. It does not matter to them that a Gallup poll found that 74% of Americans express confidence in their military, but only 28% express confidence in their newspapers or TV news outlets. The “mainstream” media excels in excoriating the performance of nearly everyone else, but acts as if nothing they do should be held up as ineffective, inaccurate or just plain absurd.

That’s why the Media Research Center and a panel of more than 50 judges have compiled an annual “Best Notable Quotables,” a collection of the media’s greatest stinkers in the past 12 months. The utterances speak volumes about our supposedly ideologically detached press corps.

In August, NBC’s “Today” show was in Iraq, and Specialist Steven Chitterer told co-host Matt Lauer that “Morale is always high. Soldiers know they have a mission. They like taking on new objectives and taking on the new challenges.” Lauer won the “Good Morning Morons Award” for interjecting: “Don’t get me wrong here, I think you are probably telling me the truth, but a lot of people at home are wondering how that could be possible with the conditions you’re facing and with the attacks you’re facing. What would you say to those people who are doubtful that morale can be that high?” Capt. Sherman Powell unloaded a quote for the ages: “Sir, if I got my news from the newspapers also, I’d be pretty depressed as well.”

The networks specialize in moral equivalence, that we in America need to be held to the highest standard, but what that really meant in 2005 was that our leaders and our troops were to be constantly presented as nearly identical to terrorists. The more extreme example of this came from NBC anchor Brian Williams, who won the “Slam Uncle Sam Award.” He tried to dismiss concerns that the new radical Muslim leader of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, might have been a holder of American hostages in Iran in 1979-80 thusly: “What would it all matter if proven true? Someone brought up today the first several U.S. presidents were certainly revolutionaries and might have been called terrorists at the time by the British Crown, after all.” The father of our country, a terrorist? Why, yes, said Williams, according to some.

Some quotes were shorter and yet even dumber. The “Politics of Meaninglessness Award for the Silliest Analysis” went to CNN weekend anchor Carol Lin. She was so politically correct she couldn’t be factually correct. Riots in Paris centered on the deaths of two black French citizens of Tunisian heritage. What did she report on national television? “It’s been 11 days since two African-American teenagers were killed, electrocuted during a police chase, which prompted all of this.”

Some of the awards were predictable. David Gergen of U.S. News won the “Media Hero Award” for sucking up to someone who might be the next president, oozing on CNN that uber-feminist Hillary Clinton has “always had strong religious faith. She’s been a strong Methodist. She does have conservative social values on many issues.”

Speaking of journalistic apple-polishers, the “Crazy Chris Award for Matthews’ Left-Wing Lunacy” was a real contest. He swooned over Jane Fonda’s Vietnam views. But the winning quote came on the night Matthews fawned over Cindy Sheehan for being so bright she should run for Congress: “I have to tell you, you sound more informed than most U.S. congresspeople, so maybe you should run.”

But the media’s biggest losers continue to be the die-hards who went down on the “60 Minutes 2” ship that tried to destroy President Bush with phony National Guard documents. Dan Rather remained “Captain Dan the Forgery Man” by boasting to old colleague Marvin Kalb on C-SPAN that “To this day no one has proven whether it was what it purported to be or not. . . . You know, I didn’t give up on my people, our people. I didn’t and I won’t.” Kalb replied: “I believe you just said that you think the story is accurate.” Rather affirmed: “The story is accurate.”

He’s still clueless. And so is his comrade in concoction, former CBS producer Mary Mapes, who won “Quote of the Year” honors for her interview with ABC’s Brian Ross. Ross was stunned when Mapes claimed she would retract her story if anyone could disprove it. “But isn’t it the other way around? Don’t you have to prove they’re authentic? . . . Isn’t that really what journalists do?” Replied Mapes: “No, I don’t think that’s the standard.”

And they wonder why only one in four Americans trust their work.

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Micro Economics: Why people are doing well, but think the economy is doing poorly. (Weekly Standard, 051222)

THE WHITE HOUSE regularly bemoans the fact that the economy is humming along impressively but the public doesn’t recognize it. Just last week, President Bush told NBC News anchor Brian Williams that he’s “a little bit” frustrated by the public’s negative attitude. “I also think it’s important to understand why people don’t see or don’t feel the improved economy,” Bush said. But he didn’t offer an explanation.

In truth, there are two explanations. One is the media, which dwells on bad economic news at the expense of good. As gasoline prices soared past $3.00 a gallon, the press couldn’t say enough about this ugly trend. More recently as prices plummeted, the media was far less interested in touting the dramatic reversal.

The second explanation involves the Bush administration itself. Al Hubbard, the head of the White House’s national economic council, conceded in a session with reporters this week that the administration hadn’t spread the word effectively about the strong economy. He said it’s “so easy in the White House to get caught up” in daily events and “forget about the importance of communications.” Indeed, the administration has done an inadequate job of trumpeting dramatic economic gains in 2005 and earlier.

How do we know the media has poisoned the public’s view of the economy? It’s really very simple. Opinion polls show basically that people believe overwhelming that they’re doing well financially but the country isn’t. And they know for sure their own economic condition. They experience it personally on a daily basis. On the other hand, what they know about the broader national economy comes largely from the media.

And this leads to a sharp dichotomy in the public’s take on the economy. In a Gallup poll, 85% of Americans expressed satisfaction with the ways things are going in their own lives. But in another Gallup survey, 50% said they believe the economy will worsen, not stay the same or get better. And by a roughly two-to-one margin—64% to 33% in a new AP survey—Americans have consistently agreed that the country is headed in the wrong direction. The wrong track number isn’t an exact proxy for negative feelings about the economy, but it is at least a partial reflection.

Now, what about the administration? The problem is chiefly that it has emphasized the macro and not the micro. While the macro economic numbers—overall economic growth, the jobless rate, and so on—are astonishingly favorable, I’m afraid the average citizen doesn’t identify with those figures. And Democrats insist it’s the micro numbers that are important: how individuals and households are faring. Naturally, Democrats argue that these show average Americans aren’t doing well in the pocketbooks.

President Bush came to the Rose Garden on December 2 to tout good economic news and he instantly fell into the macro trap. Here’s what he said:

“Our economy added 215,000 jobs for the month of November. We’ve added nearly 4.5 million new jobs in the last two-and-a-half years. Third-quarter growth of this year was 4.3%. That’s in spite of the fact that we had hurricanes and high gasoline prices. The unemployment rate is 5%. And that’s lower than the average for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.”

You’ll notice there wasn’t a micro number in the bunch. Nor did he put the national numbers in terms of individuals. It was as if he were aiming his remarks at a room full of economists, money managers, and investment bankers. No doubt they would have been thrilled. Average folks would have drawn a blank.

Yet there’s a strong case Bush and his aides can make for impressive economic gains at the individual level. True, rising healthcare costs have cut into the gains, but tax reductions have helped. By citing micro numbers or fleshing out macro numbers, the administration would convey this message: it’s not just you who’s doing well. Most Americans are. The country is.

For instance, there’s the growth in per capita disposable personal income from $26,424 in 2003 to $27,001 in 2004 and $27,365 in 2005. That’s not all. In November, hourly wages were up 3.2%. And people are able to spend more. Real personal consumption spending has risen nearly 3% in the past year. True, these last two numbers are macro, but they’re ones people can understand.

Home ownership figures are also conducive to being highlighted through individual examples. Records have been set in 2005 on overall and minority home ownership. Why not mention some specific examples of people who never thought they’d become home owners but have?

The public’s assessment of the economy is a lagging indicator. In other words, it takes a long time—years—before the fact of a strong economic recovery dawns on people. But the lag time doesn’t have to be as long as it has been. Indeed, that would happen if the media toned down its bad news bias and the Bush administration improved the way it markets good economic news.

Fred Barns is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

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Media myths debunked (Washington Times, 051223)

Since September 11, it is assumed we are at war. As such, you would think politicians and the media would take a few things seriously, including a minimal effort to collect facts, analyze them carefully and justify one’s conclusions. Celebrity and vice could be excused from such deliberations, but not matters of war and peace. Alas, such is not the case. Myth is portrayed as fact, prejudice as sound judgment and partisanship as statesmanship.

Let’s start with terrorism. Some of the September 11 hijackers were in the country on expired visas, but law enforcement was unable to access the information even while stopping them for traffic violations. We did not connect the dots. The post-September 11 congressional resolution gave the president more power to do so. Since our president takes his responsibility to protect America seriously, we have intercepted conversations between terrorists overseas and their agents here at home. The judiciary and members of Congress were notified.

But the media, intent on a story and not the facts, run reckless stories of wiretapping “thousands” of American citizens. The myth — that the administration, like all conservatives, must be putting together a police state — must be kept alive. The result is also a delay in the Patriot Act on the day it comes up for extension, followed by a fundraising letter sent out by one political party afterhavingboastedthatit “killed” the legislation. How serious can these people be? We are told the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq is really about greed for oil—apipelineacross Afghanistan and gaining control of the Iraqi oil fields. Didn’t the president and vice president work for “big oil”? But Iraq’s oil would flow much freer without sanctions and war and the Afghani pipeline talks ended nearly a decade ago.

But despite these facts, the enduring myth must be pushed — that the United States consumes too much of the “world’s resources,” thus this greed (and the war) has to be stopped. Thus, oil exploration has been blocked in a territory known as Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with upwards of 20 billion barrels of oil. The result? We will punish our own people by making America more dependent on imported oil, driving prices higher, and give our enemy (think Iran and Venezuela) more power over our economy.

The opponents of economic liberty, having camouflaged their goals behind a smokescreen of concern over alleged “environmental” harm that will come to the frozen tundra of ANWR, give us the very result they warn us about — a dependence on overseas oil for which they say we went to war. Boy, are these people serious? President Reagan knew how to defeat totalitarianism: The U.S. economy had to be strong. His pursuit of lowered tax rates, welfare reform and crime control created America’s 43 million new jobs and began the reversal of creeping socialism that was threatening to undermine our economy. Is any of this referenced by the media mavens that cling so closely to the opponents of these achievements? Of course not.

For myth number three is equally important to these folks. We are repeatedly told “the American dream is a fraud”:Jobs are not available, those that are pay some 1/400th of chief-executive salaries, (a figure recently dreamed up by comparing compensation extended over years to annual wages of part-time workers in low-paying employment fields), while the criminal-justice system is unfair and racist. They complain that despite the major cut in crime, the “prisons are full.”

Serious people would understand that a strong U.S. economy is critical to a secure America, to say nothing of our friends around the world. But the myth of “no opportunity” in America has to be sustained. For only with such an enduring myth can socialism seek to expand. Thus, the U.S. combined economic growth, employment and low inflation, while the best in the industrialized world, is not deemed newsworthy by the myth-keepers in our midst.

Of course, if we are unable to explore for new sources of energy — see above — we must do with less. But this is not really a bad thing, because reducing the emissions from the use of energy will save the planet from “global warming,” and who can be against that? And so we are bombarded daily with calls to enact “Kyoto,” the treaty proposed to deal with our overconsumption.

But here again, the mythmakers want nothing to do with the facts. Kyoto will at best reduce average temperatures some 6/10ths of one degree centigrade over the next few decades. Whoopee! In so doing we will end up slamming the breaks on the U.S. economy and with it jobs and wealth creation upon which our ability to provide for our security depends. How this helps is beyond me. But I forgot. These are not serious people.

Peter Huessy is president of GeoStrategic Analysis.

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The New York Times vs. America (townhall.com, 051228)

by Michelle Malkin

2005 was a banner year for the nation’s Idiotarian newspaper of record, The New York Times.

What’s “Idiotarian”? Popular warblogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Pajamas Media coined the useful term to describe stubborn blame-America ideologues hopelessly stuck in a pre-September 11 mindset. The Times crusaded tirelessly this year for the cut-and-run, troop-undermining, Bush-bashing, reality-denying cause. Let’s review:

On July 6, Army reserve officer Phillip Carter authored a freelance op-ed for the Times calling on President Bush to promote military recruitment efforts. The next day, the paper was forced to admit that one of its editors had inserted misleading language into the piece against Carter’s wishes. The “correction”:

“The Op-Ed page in some copies yesterday carried an incorrect version of an article about military recruitment. The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, ‘Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday,’ nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a ‘surprise tour of Iraq.’ That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error.”

Carter told Times ombudsman Byron Calame: “Those were not words I would have said. It left the impression that I was conscripted” when, in fact, Carter volunteered for active duty.

Funny how the “production errors” of the Times’ truth doctors always put the Bush administration and the war in the worst light.

Not content to meddle with the words of a living soldier, the Times published a disgraceful distortion of a fallen soldier’s last words on Oct. 26. As reported in this column and in the news pages of the New York Post, Times reporter James Dao unapologetically abused the late Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr, whose letter to his girlfriend in case of death in Iraq was selectively edited to convey a bogus sense of “fatalism” for a massive piece marking the anti-war movement’s “2,000 dead in Iraq” campaign. The Times added insult to injury by ignoring President Bush’s tribute to Starr on Nov. 30 during his Naval Academy speech defending the war in Iraq.

After Starr died, Bush said, “a letter was found on his laptop computer. Here’s what he wrote. He said, ‘[I]f you’re reading this, then I’ve died in Iraq. I don’t regret going. Everybody dies, but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we’re in Iraq; it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people so they can live the way we live, not to have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. Others have died for my freedom; now this is my mark.’”

Stirring words deemed unfit to print by the Times.

The Times did find space to print the year’s most insipid op-ed piece by paranoid Harvard student Fatina Abdrabboh, who praised Al Gore for overcoming America’s allegedly rampant anti-Muslim bias by picking up her car keys, which she dropped while running on a gym treadmill:

“ . . . Mr. Gore’s act represented all that I yearned for — acceptance and acknowledgment. . . . I left the gym with a renewed sense of spirit, reassured that I belong to America and that America belongs to me.”

I kid you not.

In June, Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, pilot of downed American Airlines Flight 77, blew the whistle on plans by civil liberties zealots to turn Ground Zero in New York into a Blame America monument. On July 29, the Times editorial page, stocked with liberals who snort and stamp whenever their patriotism is questioned, slammed Burlingame and her supporters at Take Back the Memorial as “un-American” — for exercising their free speech rights.

Yes, “un-American.” This from a newspaper that smeared female interrogators at Guantanamo Bay as “sex workers,” sympathetically portrayed military deserters as “un-volunteers,” apologized for terror suspects and illegal aliens at every turn, enabled the Bush Derangement Syndrome-driven crusade of the lying Joe Wilson, and recklessly endangered national security by publishing illegally obtained information about classified counterterrorism programs.

So, which side is The New York Times on? Let 2005 go down as the year the Gray Lady wrapped herself permanently in a White Flag.

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NBC’s ‘Book of Daniel’ Sparks Fire-and-Brimstone Reaction (Foxnews, 051228)

NEW YORK — Conservative Christians are gearing up for a holy war of sorts over NBC’s forthcoming show “The Book of Daniel,” airing the first week of 2006.

The American Family Association (AFA), a leading group in the Christian right movement, has called for a boycott of the series about a self-medicating Episcopalian priest whose son is gay, whose daughter deals pot and whose wife is a midday martini-lover.

The program “is an example of that network’s anti-Christian bigotry,” said the AFA in a press release widely distributed on Wednesday. The group claims that the network has received more than 400,000 e-mails complaining about the show.

NBC executives could not immediately be reached to confirm that statistic or respond to the AFA’s threat of a boycott and characterization of “The Book of Daniel.”

A day earlier, “Book of Daniel” star Aidan Quinn — who plays the Rev. Daniel Webster — called the series “a pretty down-the-middle, wholesome show.”

“I honestly don’t think it’s going to be nearly as controversial as some people may now be afraid of,” Quinn told The Associated Press. “It just has the courage to deal with some of the real issues that go in on people’s lives.”

Webster is shown having visions of and conversations with Jesus Christ in the flesh and has such a bizarro extended family that his priesthood and parish are in jeopardy of forging a relationship with the mafia.

“I’m an Episcopalian priest who struggles with a little self-medication problem, and I have a 23-year-old son who’s gay, and a 16-year-old daughter who’s caught dealing pot, and another son who’s jumping on every high school girl he sees, and a wife who’s very loving but also likes her martinis,” Quinn told the AP.

“I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘Hey, that sounds like my family.’”

The AFA begs to differ, blasting NBC and the show.

“The decision by NBC to air the series reflects the anti-Christian bias which exists at the highest levels of the network,” AFA chairman Donald Wildmon said in the press release. “Christian-bashing is in style at NBC.”

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Over the Line: Are Christians ‘Boobs’? (townhall.com, 060105)

by Chuck Colson

The New York Times ushered in the new year with a nice gift for Christians—one it did not give to anyone else: a slap in the face.

The slap came in the form of a piece written by Thomas Vinciguerra. It was titled, “The Pre-Blogger: Find Mencken at nature-abhors-a-moron.com.” Sixty years ago, H. L. Mencken was one of America’s most acerbic social critics, and the Times was speculating on whether Mencken would have become a blogger. Vinciguerra then offered entries from a hypothetical Mencken blog—entries that were indicative of both the bigotry and ignorance of the New York Times.

One entry read: “Sanity has triumphed in Dover, Pennsylvania, where the boobs who tried to foist intelligent design on the local lyceums have been soundly thrashed . . . Would that this victory were permanent. It will take more than jurisprudence to retire the forces of ignorance. Meanwhile, we can only hope they engage in less egregious forms of buncombe—like installing the Ten Commandments in public squares, or speaking in tongues.”

Ha, ha, ha. Very funny.

Of course, Mencken referred to Christians as “rustic ignoramuses” when he wasn’t calling us worse things. But he also had insulting things to say about women, Blacks, and Jews—comments that today we recognize as both ignorant and offensive. To its credit, the Times would never dream of trying to be funny by calling Blacks and women mentally inferior, or by imitating Mencken’s viciously anti-Semitic comments. But when it comes to Christians, all bets are off. And like any bigot, the newspaper that celebrates itself for politically correct tolerance and exquisite sensitivity can’t seem to recognize its own blind prejudice.

The Times also exposed its ignorance of the kind of people who espouse intelligent design. Does it realize it is calling Albert Einstein a boob? Einstein once said: “God does not play dice with the cosmos”—he found design in the universe. Scientist Fritz Schaefer—four times nominated for a Nobel Prize—is another “boob” who believes in the intelligent design theory. So does Professor Michael Behe, the Lehigh biochemist who has proven the “irreducible complexity” of the human cell structure. And then there is Oxford Professor Antony Flew, the famous British philosopher. Throughout his long career, Flew argued that there was a “presumption of atheism”—that is, the existence of a creator could not be proved. Intelligent design caused Flew, at the age of 81, to reverse himself and acknowledge God as creator. Flew is “ignorant”?

For Christians, being attacked is one of the realities of life. The secular world, and the New York Times in particular, detest us because we stand for absolute truth. But our response to attacks like this is to overcome evil with good. For all of its faults, the Times now and then expresses grudging admiration for the human rights work evangelicals perform in the trenches. We need to strengthen our witness there and continue defending the truth.

We also ought to keep a sense of humor when we are attacked like this. After all, Mencken once observed, “All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else”—not my idea of good sport, but there it is.

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Game Theory and Media Bias (townhall.com, 060105)

by Todd Manzi

Democrats like Senator Harry Reid understand—and manipulate—the bias of the mainstream media. They realize it is their most powerful political weapon, and they wield it with masterful skill. Democrats control the news cycle, because they apply an advanced level of game theory as they use the press to gain an edge over their political opponents.

In 2005, Thomas Schelling received the Nobel Prize in economics. Schelling won the award because of the way he applied the principles of game theory to help manage the U.S. nuclear standoff with the Soviets. Reid has demonstrated his mastery of this discipline by soundly trouncing the Republicans in the press.

People who understand game theory will contemplate the other player’s likely move and incorporate it into a more complex strategy. Poker is an apt analogy. At the surface, the strategy of poker is to bet if you have the best hand. At a deeper level, a good move can be made that violates surface strategy by bluffing. At an expert level, players intensely watch their opponents, so they know who to bluff, who not to bluff, when to bluff and when not to bluff. A strategy of the game is developed that looks nothing like beginning strategy, because it relies more on the behavior of the other players than the fundamentals of the game.

It used to be that the press would report the happenings of politics. Somewhere along the line, the process became perverted, and politicians began playing to the press and engaging in behavior that was motivated solely because of the prospect of media coverage. The tail wagged the dog, and politicians learned they could manipulate the press. Today, the message of politics is delivered through a liberally biased prism. Not only do Reid and the Democrats make moves designed to get media coverage, they take full advantage of the premise that the people reporting the news are predisposed to liberal ideology.

Reid knows that President Bush did not mislead the public, lie or “cherry pick” intelligence as he made his case to go to war in Iraq. Reid remembers the first debate in 2002 was about whether the president had the authority to go to war. He must appreciate the solid political move President Bush made as he slapped the issue back to the Democrats and forced Congress to authorize the war. It was an uncomfortable vote for Democrats in an election year. Reid is aware that he and the rest of his party included many reasons in the 2002 resolution authorizing the war that had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. They included these reasons to provide themselves political cover with their base, but now say they were tricked into voting for the war, because President Bush gave them faulty intelligence about nuclear weapons.

With his understanding of game theory, Senator Reid is confident the mainstream media is not inclined to report the facts objectively. There is no doubt in his mind that liberal reporters and editors will give him cover as he lies and rewrites history. He won’t be exposed for telling his big lie that President Bush lied.

Harry Reid is smart enough to know the indictments of Scooter Libby were about obstruction of justice and nothing more. Libby may have been attempting to influence the news cycle, but his actions had nothing to do with the dissemination of intelligence leading up to the war. On the deepest level, Reid understands that fact. He is also acutely aware of how he took advantage of the opportunity to misconstrue the indictment and use it as a platform to promote his erroneous claim about President Bush.

Senator Reid wasn’t pleased when the news cycle started to move away from pre-war intelligence and indictments. It looked as if the news was heading in a direction that would favor President Bush. In a masterful moment of applying game theory, the Minority Leader shut down the Senate. Ostensibly, his reason was the need for answers about pre-war intelligence, but since he already knew the answers, the real reason Reid made the move was to control the news cycle and bring back a political liability for Republicans.

Partly because of the ineptitude of Senator Frist, Senator Reid’s ploy worked. Frist made a spectacle of himself by launching into an angry tirade regarding Reid’s move. Perhaps if Frist could have disengaged himself, he would have realized that Reid’s behavior had nothing to do with the Senate and everything to do with making headlines. Frist did not understand the game and played right into Reid’s hand. The media loved it. Democrats loved it. Republicans lost ground.

When Congressman Jack Murtha grabbed the news cycle, House Republicans made the best game theory move of the year for their side of the isle. On the same day Murtha’s position was printed in almost every newspaper in the country, Republicans forced the House to vote on the congressman’s proposal. Everyone knew the vote wasn’t about Murtha’s proposed resolution. Republicans forced their opponents to vote on that day’s news coverage. Democrats lost that one.

The disingenuous behavior of the House Republicans gave them one media victory compared with dozens of victories scored by Reid and the Democrats last year. Some will argue that Republicans should not stoop to using devious tactics like the ones the Democrats do. Some (including me) will spend time and effort whining about how unfairly media bias affects conservative ideology. But, facts are facts, and the situation is what it is. The choice for Republicans is to get their heads in the game and use every tactic they can to fight the Democrats, or take the high road and lose at the ballot box.

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Advertisers drop ‘Book of Daniel’: Protests continue against NBC show about ‘Christian’ family (WorldNetDaily, 060110)

Three of the five national advertisers that had commercials run during the debut airing of NBC’s controversial “Book of Daniel” will no longer advertise on the program, states the organization leading the protest against the show.

According to American Family Association, just five advertisers ran spots during the program’s two-hour premier on Friday night – and at least one of those got bargain-basement rates for the commercials the day before.

“Three of the five companies whose ads placed on the show said they would refrain from future episodes,” said a statement from AFA. “Chattem (Gold Bond, Icy Hot), Combe Inc. (Just For Men) and H&R Block said they would no longer advertise on the program.”

AFA says the five companies, which also include Mazda and Burlington Coat Factory, came under fire from consumers who believe the content of “Book of Daniel” is “disrespectful to people of the Christian faith.”

As WorldNetDaily reported, “The Book of Daniel,” written by a homosexual, is being promoted as the only show on television in which Jesus appears as a recurring character and the only network prime-time drama series with a regular male “gay” character, a 23-year-old Republican son. The main character, Daniel Webster, is a troubled, pill-popping Episcopal priest.

Touted as the riskiest show of the year, it includes a wife who relies on mid-day martinis, a 16-year-old daughter who is a drug dealer and a 16-year-old adopted son who is having sex with the bishop’s daughter. At the office, the priest’s lesbian secretary is sleeping with his sister-in-law.

“NBC lost a lot of money on this show that got a dismal 2.7 Nielson rating,” said Randy Sharp, director of special projects for AFA. “To mainstream corporate advertisers, this show clearly has leprosy written all over it. The healthy thing to do is avoid it.”

After last week’s public outcry, two NBC affiliates said they would not air the program, WTWO in Terre Haute, Ind., and KARK in Little Rock, Ark.

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The target audience of media bias (townhall.com, 060111)

by Todd Manzi

Conservatives don’t have a level playing field because our country suffers from a liberally biased news media. Some people think media bias is not a fact, but merely a debatable opinion. These people are quick to point out that conservatives have venues for their ideas: talk radio, the Internet, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

Looking at the issue from a marketing prospective helps debunk the absurd claim that there is some sort of parity in the media for liberals and conservatives. Consider three target audiences: passionate liberals, passionate conservatives and normal people who vote. Those of us who fall in one of the first two groups, battle for market share of the third group. We want our ideas embraced. We want our candidates elected.

Paradoxically, the primary target audience for those of us passionate about politics is voters who are disengaged from politics. How do you reach this group? How do they form their opinions? Talk radio and the rest of the new media doesn’t reach these people or sway their opinions. The primary audience of talk radio is those of us who are passionate about politics and are committed to a political ideology. We are not normal.

Normal people don’t care as much about politics or liberal versus conservative ideology as they care about sports, hobbies, their jobs, family activities, etc. They are not interested in taking the time to understand issues on a deep level. They want sound bites and headlines. They want to glean information efficiently, form quick opinions and move onto something else more enjoyable.

The target audience - people who swing elections and influence policy because of their answers to public opinion polls - is reached through the mainstream media. These people spend a few minutes with the newspaper and catch their local news on television. The claim that media bias is not a problem because conservatives now have a voice in the media misses the big picture perspective.

Advertising types make decisions regarding getting their message out based on gross rating points (GRPs). Yes, the total GRPs from talk radio, the Internet and the rest of the conservative media, is huge. In fact, advertisers understand that for products disproportionately purchased by conservatives, they have attractive and efficient advertising opportunities. Although the reach of the conservative media is staggering when looked at on its own, it is tiny when compared to the reach of the mainstream media.

Total all of the GRPs from news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC and their hundreds of affiliates across the country. Then add in the circulation of all of the nation’s newspapers and you have a Goliath that makes the audience of the conservative media look like a David. More importantly, the mainstream media reaches the audience that drives policy and swings elections, while the new media is preaching to the choir.

Associated Press Writer Deb Riechmann has more influence over public opinion polls than Rush Limbaugh does. Riechmann’s dispatches are printed in tens of millions of newspapers throughout the country and because she covers President Bush, her stories often get television coverage as well.

Liberally biased Riechmann is pawned off as news, but it is understood that conservatively biased Limbaugh is presenting commentary. When Riechmann packaged Cindy Sheehan sympathetically, and covered President Bush harshly, it made an impact with the primary target audience that influences public opinion polls. Limbaugh’s excellent commentary on the subject helps those of us who want to dig deep into important stories understand why we have the opinions we do. Limbaugh doesn’t change our opinion as much as he solidifies them. Riechmann, on the other hand, serves it up to those looking for the fast food equivalent of the issues of the day. The opinions of the people she reaches are more easily swayed than the opinions of Limbaugh’s more thoughtful audience.

The new media led by Limbaugh has been a wonderful development for conservatives. None of us would want to go back to the dark ages of the 1980’s. But, just because conservatives have a voice, it doesn’t mean the media is balanced. Liberal bias in the mainstream media is a huge problem in this country. Like other topics, those of us who take the time, understand the ramifications of media bias. Those who stay at the surface level of thinking, dismiss media bias as a non-issue.

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NBC’s desperate Episcopalians (townhall.com, 060113)

by Brent Bozell

Just as the 12 days of Christmas were ending, as millions of Christians celebrated the sacred mysteries of the virgin birth of a messiah, NBC was preparing for a birth of an opposite kind: a new TV series mocking Jesus as just another amusingly clueless televised sidekick.

The new show is called “The Book of Daniel,” which is first and foremost a tired carbon copy of the outrageously dysfunctional suburban family shtick, but with the twist that this time, the Fool is played by Our Lord. Episcopal minister Daniel Webster is hooked on Vicodin and sees Jesus Christ regularly. His wife is an alcoholic. His son is gay. His daughter sells marijuana. His adopted Chinese son is a teenage sex machine. His female bishop, who asks him for one of his “Canadian headache pills” for the codeine, and later raids his office for more, is having an adulterous relationship with his father, who’s also an Episcopal bishop, whose wife has Alzheimer’s and keeps talking about penises.

Are there enough ridiculous, plastic characters in this spectacle yet? No, apparently not. Daniel’s brother-in-law escapes town with the church treasury, but his wife and the church secretary have gone from a menage a trois to a saucy lesbian relationship. To find said brother-in-law, Daniel seeks out “Father Frank,” an Italian Catholic priest who (no stereotypes here?) uses his Mafia contacts to hunt down the missing money, so the mob can compromise Daniel.

It’s obvious that today’s TV scribes have thoroughly rejected reality. Today’s trend is to create plots that are utterly buffoonish, spinning so many dizzying plates of dysfunctionality that the viewer gets too tired to flip channels. Nearly every TV critic sees ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” and HBO’s “Six Feet Under” in the show’s DNA. The Washington Post suggested it be titled “Desperate Holiness.”

It’s a sad descent for NBC on Fridays. They’ve cancelled “Three Wishes,” the uplifting show NBC premiered on Fridays this fall, with gospel singer Amy Grant going to small towns and working little miracles, after weak promotion and critical sniffs at its goody-goody nature. That show was doing positive things in the real world, not tearing down religion in a desperate attempt to grab eyeballs — and who wants that?

The American Family Association (AFA) is campaigning against “Daniel” as a mockery of Christianity, but series creator Jack Kenny blithely insists in every interview that there’s no mockery intended. He told the TV critics last summer, “I recognize there are going to be people who have an issue with a gay man writing about Jesus. I’m not making fun of Jesus. I never want to poke fun at religion or at Jesus. These characters are very spiritual people. They believe in God, they believe in Christ as their savior, and I think that’s wonderful.” Perhaps we’ve got the show all

wrong: It’s Kenny who’s the amusingly clueless sidekick.

Perhaps the most puzzling response to the series is the Episcopalian officials who are coming to the show’s defense. The Episcopal Diocese of Washington put up a supportive weblog called the “Blog of Daniel”

boosting the show. After Kenny wrote in to thank them for their support, they begged Kenny to join his “life partner” in signing up.

The AFA is right that this show is anti-Christian, in the most fundamental way. It mocks God, and the Word of God, period. Daniel’s sermon before credits roll in the premiere begins, “Temptation. Is it really a bad thing? I don’t think so.” He concludes, “if temptation corners us, maybe we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for giving into it. And maybe we shouldn’t ask for forgiveness from a church, or God, or from Jesus, or from anyone, until we can first learn to forgive ourselves.”

That’s not Christianity. That’s the gospel of Hollywood.

The most serious mockery in the show is the Jesus character.

It’s not that he’s unlikable. It’s just that he’s clearly not God. He tells Daniel He doesn’t know the future: “Hey, I’m not a fortuneteller.” He sees the lesbians through the window, chuckles and says, “Boy, you never know, do ya?”

Some have tried to say this Jesus is just a ghost in Daniel’s druggy dreams, but Kenny insists he’s the real Jesus, having a personal relationship with the minister. This matches Kenny’s comment that he believes in Jesus — not as God, but as a cool dude: “I think he was a great teacher and a wonderful philosopher.” He says he’s in “Catholic recovery”

and is exploring Buddhism instead.

The difference here, as “entertainment” emanates from the dens of “spirituality” in hot-tub Hollywood, is that no one will be making that wacky dramedy about the Buddhists or the Muslims any time soon. Only that sickening apple-pie thing called Christianity gets singled out as a comedic PR stunt. But it’s not bigotry.

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“The Book of Daniel”—Is This a Satire on Liberal Christianity? (Mohler, 060113)

“The Book of Daniel” premiered last Friday with a two-hour special that arrived with much publicity but garnered a third-place showing in the ratings. NBC’s new series was one of the most-hyped new programs of recent years, complete with effusive media coverage and much sought-after controversy.

The premise of the show is the reason for the controversy. “The Book of Daniel” features a liberal Episcopalian priest and his family who, along with various others in the cast, are involved in almost every form of sin imaginable. As if all this were not enough, the show also features an actor playing the part of Jesus, who appears as the very essence of liberal toleration, complete with therapeutic aphorisms and transcendent nonjudgmentalism.

Last Friday’s two-hour premiere of the program introduced the concept and the show’s central characters.

The Episcopal priest, known as Daniel Webster, is played by actor Aidan Quinn. The Reverend Webster is a liberal churchman serving a wealthy suburban parish in Westchester County, New York. The sins, temptations, foibles, and syndromes experienced by this priest, along with his family and his flock, are those common to affluent American suburbia. Viewers of the program may well imagine that the creators have simply channeled all of the real and imagined sins of Westchester County into one family and a single congregation. Reverend Webster is an indulgent parent and an extremely tolerant preacher, who is far less concerned with sin than with self-forgiveness. His wife, a wealthy heiress played by Susanna Thompson, is as hapless as her husband. The family also includes Peter, the Websters’ homosexual son, along with Grace, his sister, and Adam, the Websters’ adopted Asian son.

This priest and his family are poster children for postmodern times. Their gay son is at peace with his homosexuality, even as his parents suggest that he should look for just the right male partner, perhaps a male nurse or a doctor. Daughter Grace is selling drugs which she smuggles into the community by stuffing them into teddy bears. Adam adds his part to the family’s catalogue of vices by flaunting his sexual promiscuity and engaging in sex with the church warden’s daughter.

And it doesn’t stop there. Reverend Webster’s father is a bishop who is committing adultery with another bishop (a woman), even as his wife is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Just about everyone on this program is comfortable with sin—including the character presented as Jesus, played by Garret Dillahunt. The appearance of Jesus as a character in a television soap opera is problematic enough, but Dillahunt’s Jesus looks like a refugee from the Hippies, offering therapeutic words of assurance that sin is really not such a big deal. When one character reveals a lesbian relationship, Jesus quips, “Boy, you never know, do you?” Jesus excuses Reverend Webster’s adulterous father by telling the son: “He’s a good man, Daniel. Everybody’s different.” When the Webster’s fifteen-year-old son is caught having sex with the daughter of a church member, Jesus simply responds, “A kid has to be a kid.”

Indeed, Jesus appears to notice sin only when it takes the form of Reverend Webster’s addiction to Vicodin, a prescription painkiller. Riding along in Reverend Webster’s car, Jesus takes note of the priest popping a pill. “I thought you were cutting back on those,” Jesus observes. The minister explains that he takes the pills only “occasionally” in order to deal with back pain. Jesus doesn’t accept this for a moment. “Right . . . ,” he responds. For once, Reverend Webster is taken aback. “Could you fit more judgment into that ‘Right’?” Jesus responds: “Actually, yes, I could.” Both characters then laugh.

The show has something to offend almost everyone—at least, one would suppose that liberal Christians might be offended by the hyperbolic satire this show must surely represent. Conservative Christians will be rightly concerned about the portrayal of Jesus Christ. The fictionalization of Jesus is an inexcusable act of sacrilege that appears as nothing less than a calculated effort to offend the faith of sincere believers. Of course, this sacrilege is compounded by the portrayal of Jesus as a long-haired surfer dude who apparently just wants humans to get over their hang-ups about sin—except for the sin of popping pills, of course.

What I can’t understand is why liberal Christians are not crying foul. After all, the portrayal of liberal Christianity on this program is so satirical that it approaches parody.

Take Reverend Webster’s opening sermon, for example. Preached just after the Websters’ daughter was caught attempting to sell marijuana, the sermon is an almost perfect distillation of liberal theology expressed as mind-numbing toleration.

Just consider this section from the pastor’s sermon: “Temptation. Is it really a bad thing? I don’t think so. What I mean is, if there were no temptation, how could there be redemption? If we never did anything bad, how could we repent and be stronger for our weaknesses? Doesn’t good need evil in order to be good? Now obviously I’m not suggesting that we should go looking for temptation, but, my brothers and sisters, if temptation corners us, maybe we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for giving in to it. And maybe, maybe we shouldn’t ask for forgiveness from a church, or from God, or from Jesus, or from anyone until we can first learn to forgive ourselves.”

Yes, Virginia, there really are preachers who preach such nonsense. As a matter of fact, the Apostle Paul countered such fatuous arguments in his letters, and the New Testament clearly rejects the kind of self-forgiving theology that is the very essence of Reverend Webster’s gospel. Reverend Webster’s embrace of temptation as liberation is rooted in his certainty that we are “stronger for our weaknesses.” Those who may hear a weak refrain of the Apostle Paul in the background of Reverend Webster’s sly comment would do well to remember that Paul wasn’t talking about his sin in this respect.

One might fairly expect that the leaders of liberal Protestant denominations would be calling their attorneys and rallying their dwindling memberships to protest this portrayal of a liberal Episcopal priest. Are we really to believe that one family and one congregation can get into this much trouble in two hours? And note this—the embezzling of funds and various other peccadilloes must be added to the picture. Is this an honest and accurate portrayal of liberal Christianity? Are liberal preachers really this mindlessly tolerant? Apparently, some are.

Reporter Matea Gold of the Los Angeles Times informed her readers that “some Episcopal priests are urging their congregants to watch the program, saying that it offers a refreshingly candid portrayal of religious leaders and showcases the Episcopal Church as a tolerant denomination.” According to Gold, “the Episcopal Diocese of Washington has even launched the Blog of Daniel . . . a website designed to spur discussion about issues raised on the program.”

Reverend Susan Russell, Senior Associate for Parish Life at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, where the show’s initial episode was filmed, is enthusiastic about the show’s portrayal of Episcopal ministers. “I think it’s a realistic portrayal of a faithful man facing 21st century challenges,” she explains.

Reverend Russell urged her congregation to watch the program and explained in a letter to her church members that she believes the show could actually attract new members to the Episcopal Church.

Some Christians are organizing letter-writing campaigns and similar protests against “The Book of Daniel.” I take offense at this show’s portrayal of Jesus Christ, but this program’s approach is so clumsy and unbelievable that I harbor few fears of viewers believing that this character is anything like Jesus Christ the Lord.

I agree with critic Tom Shales of the Washington Post, who believes that the program will fail because it is simply lousy television. “I cannot recall a series in which a greater number of characters seemed so desperately detestable—a series with a larger population of loathsome dolts,” Shales observes. “There ought to be a worse punishment than cancellation for a show that tries this hard to be offensive and, even at that crass task, manages to fail.”

In his criticism of the program, Shales sees through the satire. “Perhaps realizing they’ve created a crop of characters who are irredeemably mean, venal and idiotic, the writers try to tell us these people are really sweethearts—not by depicting good qualities through action but simply by having them primitively vouch for one another. ‘He’s a good boy,’ Mom says of the cautious and confused Peter. ‘You’re a good man,’ the priest is told by a golf crony. ‘She’s a good girl,’ Jesus says of Grace even after she’s arrested for selling marijuana, and later, of the priest’s bigoted, oafish father: ‘He’s a good man, Daniel.’”

If nothing else, the show may succeed in accomplishing what it almost surely does not aim to do—demonstrate where liberal theology inevitably leads. The “tolerant” approach to sin so prosaically demonstrated in Reverend Webster’s sermon leaves the church with no coherent understanding of sin or of the human condition. Accordingly, there is no need for salvation, no place for the Cross, and no fear of judgment. If this is all one believes, why not engage in all the various sins depicted on this program? All the characters of “The Book of Daniel” fear is embarrassment, and they seem to get over that very fast.

By all accounts, “The Book of Daniel” will be a spectacular failure where the networks care most—in the ratings. These actors would be unwise to plan a career based on this program. Nevertheless, so long as the wretched episodes of this excruciating soap opera are part of our national conversation, Christians should take the opportunity to point to the theological lessons of the program and its plot. Beyond this, believers should seize the opportunity to distinguish between the false theology of “The Book of Daniel” and the orthodox theology of the church. After all, the genuine gospel is far more interesting and exciting—and it saves.

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The Book of Daniel: A Form of Godliness, But Denying the Power (Christian Post, 060113)

From his sermon advocating that temptation can be good — his use of the Lord’s name in vain — his addiction to pain killers — his embracing of his son’s homosexuality — his drug-dealing daughter — his brother-in-law who stole $3.5 million dollars of the church’s funds — his sister-in-law who had a ménage a trios to spice up her marriage — to his complicit attitude and support for premarital sex — Daniel, the Episcopal priest of NBC’s new television show, The Book of Daniel, depicts clergy, the Church, and Christianity in an incredibly disappointing fashion.

Wrapped in the garb of professed good intentions — picturing people of faith having the same problems as everyone else and that religion can help with these issues — the program is really a slight on genuine faith in Christ. It highlights and emphasizes “a form of godliness,” but denies the power of the Gospel to transform a life. “From such,” the apostle Paul warned, “turn away.” (2 Tim. 3:5) In this case, the apostle would have said, “Turn the channel.”

The worst sin of this new broadcast is that it fails to acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Instead, Christ is portrayed as a “buddy” or “pal” who is available to everyone, but offers no solution to life’s problems based on absolute principles of right and wrong and only gives advice if one wants it. Christ is presented as many want to see Him and not as He really is — the Lord of life.

Jesus is not simply “a great teacher of morality,” as Joseph Klausner contended. Neither is He, as Ernest Renan said, just an “inexhaustible principle of moral regeneration.” Instead, Jesus is God! It is this fact that gives His teachings their authority, makes obedience to His commandments imperative, and faith in Him mandatory for salvation.

According to Religion News Service, Jack Kenny, the program’s writer, says: “I’m not making fun of Jesus. I never want to poke fun at religion nor Jesus.” The characters in this program “believe in God, they believe in Christ as their savior,” he says. But the God portrayed in The Book of Daniel winks at the grossest of sins and one can only wonder what the Jesus of this TV series saves people from. To refer to Christ as the savior of the program’s characters is to make Him a laughingstock.

Another egregious fault in this program is its failure to demonstrate any fear of God. To “fear God” means to display a reverential respect and awe for Him. Repeatedly, the Bible teaches the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Yet, in The Book of Daniel’s pilot episode, Jesus actually caricaturizes Himself in suggested self-help book titles such as “Jesus’ Guide to a Comfortable Life” and “My Tuesdays with Jesus.” What is more, it’s hard to take seriously a Jesus who constantly dispenses wisecracks.

Certainly there is no fear of God’s judgment for sin depicted in NBC’s controversial new series. It may come as a surprise to many, but Christ actually spoke more often about hell than he did heaven. He lovingly and tenderly called upon people to repent of their wicked ways and graphically warned of the horrors of perdition if they didn’t. The Book of Daniel, however, depicts Daniel performing his priestly functions over the grave of his thieving and adulterous brother-in-law, saying: “Life is hard. It’s hard for everyone. That’s why there’s such a nice reward at the end of it.” One can only assume Daniel must be a Universalist — someone who believes all people are ultimately saved, a doctrinal position clearly refuted by Holy Scripture.

Not long ago, Religion News Service interviewed two experts who watch religious trends on television and have written on them. In that interview, Jana K. Reiss, author of the book, What Would Buffy Do? A Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide, said: “Millions of Americans ... park themselves in a church ... every weekend, but there’s a clear shift toward non-institutional religion .... Whether television writers are reflecting this change or contributing to it is an interesting question. I think it’s both.” Teresa Blythe, who also contributed to the interview and wrote two books — Meeting God in Virtual Reality: Using Spiritual Practices with Media and Watching What We Watch: Prime Time Television Through the Eyes of Faith — concurred, noting: “On television, spirituality is portrayed as helpful while organized religion is either neutral or ineffectual. Churches have contributed to that image.”

Indeed they have! And perhaps that’s the very reason Jack Kenny represents the clergy, the Church, and Christianity in such a disparaging light — it’s the only light the Church at large has given him. It’s the light of a wimpy and powerless Jesus, not the King of Kings and Lord of Lords — a Gospel that fails to hold people accountable for their transgressions and transforms them from sinners to Saints; a God who doesn’t need to be feared and would never display His wrath. Unfortunately, the religion put forward by most of the institutionalized Church today is as counterfeit and impotent to change lives as that portrayed in The Book of Daniel.

Episcopalians ought to be incensed with this new television show. Moreover, every Christian denomination, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, etc., should be incensed with themselves, incensed at their failure to present to the nation the Gospel that is so desperately needed — the real one that literally and spiritually raises the dead.

This article originally appeared on January 12, 2006.

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Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

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Media’s coverage of scandal exposes bias (townhall.com, 060124)

by Bruce Bartlett

One of the things that drives Republicans crazy is the media’s enormous double-standard in how it covers various scandals. While day after day we read on the front pages about how awful it was that a Republican congressman played golf with some lobbyist—as if that is the epitome of unethical behavior—cases of actual criminality by Democrats are buried on the back pages.

For example, on Jan. 12, the New York Times ran yet another article on page one linking Rep. Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, and convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, along with two columns about Abramoff on the inside pages. There was absolutely nothing new in any of these articles.

That same day, however, there was real news about a former aide to Rep. William Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, who pleaded guilty the day before to bribing the congressman. The aide, Brett Pfeffer, said that his former boss had demanded a stake in Pfeffer’s business in return for his support. He also alleged that Jefferson had insisted that two of his relatives be put on Pfeffer’s payroll.

Apparently, the FBI has been investigating Jefferson for some time. It has raided his home and wired conversations with him in a sting operation.

So how did the Times handle this hot news? It appeared on page 28. Moreover, the Times couldn’t even be bothered to have one of its own reporters look into the case and instead ran Associated Press wire copy.

Also on Jan. 12, on page five of the second section, the Times reported that a state assemblyman who had formerly headed the Brooklyn Democratic Party was sentenced to jail a day earlier for receiving illegal contributions. The assemblyman, Clarence Norman Jr., faces other charges as well.

On Jan. 23, the Times reported that former Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell is on trial for receiving payoffs of $150,000 from companies doing business with the city, as well as $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions and other gratuities. This article appeared on page 12.

Nowhere in the article was Mr. Campbell’s political affiliation mentioned. I had to do an Internet search to discover that he is a Democrat. Yet the article had plenty of space to discuss at some length what a great mayor Campbell had been.

I’m not saying that these stories should necessarily have been front-page news. But it does seem suspicious when news about Democratic corruption is systematically buried on the back pages, while the front page carries yet another rehash of the DeLay/Abramoff connection containing nothing new.

Ever since Watergate, a key media template has been that the Republican Party is the party of corruption. Thus every wrongdoing of any Republican tends to get page one treatment, while Democratic corruption is treated as routine and buried on the back pages, mentioned once and then forgotten.

Yet any objective study of comparative party corruption would have to conclude that Democrats are far more likely to be caught engaging in it than Republicans. For example, a review of misconduct cases in the House of Representatives since Watergate shows many more cases involving Democrats than Republicans.

Skeptics can go to the web site of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, popularly known as the House Ethics Committee. Click on “historical documents” and go to a publication called “Historical Summary of Conduct Cases in the House of Representatives.” The document was last updated on November 9, 2004 and lists every ethics case since 1798, when Rep. Roger Griswold of Connecticut attacked Rep. Matthew Lyon of Vermont with a “stout cane” and Lyon responded with a pair of fireplace tongs.

By my count, there have been 70 different members of the House who have been investigated for serious offenses over the last 30 years, including many involving actual criminality and jail time. Of these, only 15 involved Republicans, with the remaining 55 involving Democrats.

I have no doubt that any poll of the American people asking which party had more frequently been the subject of House ethics investigations would show an overwhelming majority naming the Republicans, when the truth is that Democrats, historically, have been far more likely to have been investigated.

The reason is that the liberal media harp on Republican misdeeds monotonously because to them the subject never gets boring. By contrast, Democratic wrongdoing tends to be treated in a perfunctory manner with no follow-up. This imbalance of coverage, which is unrelated to the seriousness of the charges, naturally tends to make people think Republicans are more corrupt, when a reasonable person reviewing all the evidence would have to conclude that Democrats are much more likely to be corrupt.

Of course, another explanation for the disparate treatment may be that Democratic corruption is so commonplace that it really isn’t “news.” Democrats should consider that possibility before launching a campaign against Republican corruption.

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NBC pulls the plug on ‘Book of Daniel’: Creator tells fans controversial show yanked from Friday night schedule (WorldNetDaily, 060123)

[KH: count another one to the WIN column.]

NBC’s “The Book of Daniel” may have launched to great controversy and hoopla.

But, today, the show ended with a whimper – pulled unceremoniously from NBC’s Friday night schedule, effective immediately, with no more of an announcement than an entry on an NBC blog by creator Jack Kenny.

“Unfortunately, due to many reasons, ‘The Book of Daniel’ will no longer be aired on NBC on Friday nights,” he wrote to fans. “I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ to all of you who supported the show. There were many wonderful, talented people who contributed to its success – and I do mean success. Whatever the outcome, I feel that I accomplished what I set out to do: A solid family drama, with lots of humor, that honestly explored the lives of the Webster family. Good, flawed people, who loved each other no matter what ... and there was always a lot of ‘what’! I remain proud of our product, proud of my association with Sony, NBC Universal, and NBC, who all took a chance on a project that spoke to them, and proud to have made an impact on so many of your lives.”

Aidan Quinn as Episcopal priest with Garret Dillahunt as ‘Jesus’ in NBC’s ‘Book of Daniel’

As WorldNetDaily first reported, “The Book of Daniel,” written by a homosexual, was promoted as the only show on television in which Jesus appeared as a recurring character and the only network prime-time drama series with a regular male “gay” character, a 23-year-old Republican son. The main character, Daniel Webster, was a troubled, pill-popping Episcopal priest.

Touted as the riskiest show of the year, it included a wife who relied on midday martinis, a 16-year-old daughter who was a drug dealer and a 16-year-old adopted son who was having sex with the bishop’s daughter. At the office, the priest’s lesbian secretary was sleeping with his sister-in-law.

One NBC affiliate after another dropped the show. Advertisers ran from it. And, apparently, despite all the controversy it generated, so did viewers.

Nashville’s WSMV-TV General Manager Elden Hale, Jr. said: “Based on a review of the first three episodes and the clearly voiced concerns from our viewers, we have determined that the program ‘The Book of Daniel’ is not appropriate for broadcast television in this community.”

After the first three episodes, only Burlington Coat Factory was left as a national sponsor.

The heat began to generate for the show following WND’s first story. Shortly afterward, the American Family Association launched a national boycott, citing WND’s story.

Besides Nashville, other NBC affiliates across the nation either never aired the show or stopped broadcasting it. They included Hattiesburg, Miss.; Meridian, Miss.; Jackson, Miss.; Amarillo, Texas; Wichita, Kan.; Beaumont, Texas; and Terre Haute, Ind.

Only six episodes of the “Book of Daniel” were shot. Kevin Reilly, NBC Entertainment president, said the network’s reluctance to order more episodes had more to do with the series’ sluggish ratings performance than controversy.

“We’re going to continue to put on creative programming, regardless of any possible controversy,” Reilly said last week. Earlier, he announced the cancellation of “West Wing.”

The network has slated an episode of “Law and Order” in place of “Daniel” for this Friday at 10 p.m. Eastern.

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‘Book Of Daniel’ Cancellation Sends Message to Hollywood: End Christian-Bashing (Christian Post, 060126)

WASHINGTON – Public outcry against NBC’s short-lived drama called the “Book of Daniel” should send a powerful message to Hollywood: Stop the Christian-bashing!

As I watched the first two-hour episode of this show, it was clear that this was so over-the-top in its bashing of Christianity that it became absurd.

Advertisers were rightly worried about the Christian backlash to this show. A few companies did advertise, but several quickly backed out of sponsorship. The show ran with an unusually large number of NBC promos. Moreover, several local NBC affiliates around the U.S. refused to air the program. They were wise to distance themselves from this shameless attack on Christianity. Advertisers and NBC affiliates saw the danger of promoting anti-Christian bigotry to their bottom lines. Maybe after this latest disaster Hollywood and the networks may finally learn that it doesn’t pay to bash Christians or Christianity. [KH: not likely]

All the characters in this drama were clearly dysfunctional. Jack Kenny, the writer/producer and open homosexual, was the brains behind this disaster. With a personal agenda driving him, he went to great lengths to discredit Christianity but ended up just looking foolish. The main character, an Episcopal priest was addicted to drugs; he had an alcoholic wife, a drug dealing daughter, and two sons who were sexually active (one is a homosexual). In addition, a female bishop was having an affair with the priest’s father who is also a member of the clergy. The sister-in-law was a bisexual. And, let’s not forget the priest’s friend who was a Catholic priest linked to the mob. I’ve never encountered a family this messed up.

The character who played Jesus is a hip, permissive dude who urges the priest to be tolerant of his children’s excesses. This isn’t the Jesus of the Bible.

Why does Hollywood continue to believe it can ridicule Christians and Christianity in this way? Would Hollywood produce a similar kind of drama featuring a Rabbi or a Muslim Imam with the same dysfunctional family situations? I doubt it. In fact, if producers did create such a show, the outcry from the Anti-Defamation League and the Council for American Islamic Relations would be so loud that the show never would have gone into production. The producers would probably have been charged with “hate speech” for vilifying Judaism or Islam and driven from their jobs.

Here’s a unique idea for Hollywood: How about treating Christians with the same respect you treat Muslims and Jews in your programming? After all, if these producers truly believe in tolerance, acceptance, love and inclusiveness, then they should include Christians. The refusal to do so can be costly—as NBC just learned.

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Mrs. Andrea Sheldon Lafferty, a former Reagan Administration official, is Executive Director of Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) and directs the day-to-day lobbying in Washington.

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AWOL in the War of Ideas (townhall.com, 060126)

by Clifford D. May

It is one thing to tell the truth even when it damages your friends. It’s another to tell untruths in order not to offend your enemies. It’s one thing to give the devil his due. It’s another to do the devil’s public relations.

How else to explain a dispatch from the Associated Press referring to Osama bin Laden as “an exiled Saudi dissident”? Such spin may not be inaccurate but it’s like calling Jeffery Dahmer an “eccentric gourmet.” It rather misses the point, don’t you think?

Similarly, a recent report on National Public Radio discussed how dangerous Iraq is for journalists. The blame was placed on “the nature of this war” and “the security situation.” No criticism of Militant Islamist cut-throats and car bombers was voiced.

And, of course, Reuters, the British wire service, has decreed that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” In Reuters corporate eyes, even the attacks on the World Trade Center can not be called terrorism.

Such relativism is common in academia as well as in journalism. The other day, on a BBC radio show, I debated Dr. Hooshang Amirahmadi, a professor from Rutgers University. His argument: The way to settle the conflict with Iran is for the U.S. to re-open full diplomatic relations. If President Bush would only reach out to the regime in Tehran, he’d find there have been misunderstandings, that both sides have made mistakes, and that there is ample room for compromise.

In response, I began to read verbatim quotes form Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Iranian rulers about their lethal intentions toward the U.S., their genocidal plans for Israel, their hostility toward “Anglo-Saxon civilization.”

Professor Amirahmadi objected that scholars and journalists must not take such remarks seriously. He suggested it was either unsophisticated or unfair of me (maybe both) to repeat such statements on the air.

It’s tempting to dismiss such attitudes as simply the foolishness of the chattering classes. But the West is in the middle of a World War of Ideas — a conflict as consequential as the war of arms. For intellectuals to retreat to a Switzerland-of-the-mind will have consequences. And their declaration of neutrality comes at a time when the enemies of the Free World are bringing out the big guns.

Take, for example, al-Manar, an elaborate Lebanon-based satellite television station owned by Hezbollah (the terrorist organization second only to al-Qaeda in number of Americans it has killed) and financed by the Militant Islamists of Iran. Every day, al-Manar blatantly incites terrorism against Americans, Israelis and Jews.

As one al-Manar official was candid enough to tell terrorism expert Avi Jorisch, the station attempts to “help people on the way to commit what you in the West call a suicide mission.”

A concerted effort by the Coalition Against Terrorist Media (CATM), an association of Muslim, Christian, Jewish and secular groups, working in partnership with the U.S. and European governments, has succeeded in removing al-Manar from eight satellite providers — ending its broadcasting to North America, South America, Asia, Australia and parts of Africa, all regions where Hezbollah terror cells are known to have a strong presence.

But two satellite providers continue to broadcast al-Manar to Europe and throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa. One is owned by the Egyptian government — the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. aid. A second satellite company has as its largest shareholder the Saudi government — which spends millions of dollars to run television ads in the U.S. proclaiming itself America’s “ally against terrorism.”

Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group backed by Iran, also is launching its own television station, one that is meant eventually to reach target audiences around the globe. And Qatar-based al-Jazeera – moderate by contrast to al-Manar but always the first to broadcast al-Qaeda’s messages – is now employing such media stars as Dave Marash, until recently a regular on ABC News’ Nightline, and the veteran British journalist, David Frost. Marash and Frost are lending their credibility to the cause of Militant Islamism – whether they admit that or not, whether they understand that or not.

“If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me.’”

It wasn’t George Bush who said that. It was George Orwell.

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The tennis tempest at ABC (townhall.com, 060201)

by Brent Bozell

If you thought Teddy Kennedy’s pratfall over Samuel Alito’s membership in a conservative Princeton alumni group was embarrassing (quoting magazine satire articles as if they were real), you should see what ABC’s “Nightline” tried to pull last week.

The subject was the ethics of judicial travel. As investigative reporter Brian Ross explained in the middle of the piece, “Justices at all ends of the political spectrum take plenty of these trips to lots of nice places, all paid for by somebody else.”

But this was no expose on justices “at all ends of the political spectrum.” It was a shameless hit piece on conservatives, complete with hidden-camera cheap shots.

Only conservative justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were featured, and roasted, by ABC. Ross noted Scalia was being pampered by a “conservative activist” group, the Federalist Society, and the story’s main ethical scold, law professor Stephen Gillers, was labeled merely as a “recognized expert on legal ethics.” ABC didn’t tell its viewers that Gillers is a hardened leftist who has written for the Nation magazine about the “nightmare” of conservatives controlling the government.

The show began with the moral lesson on screen: “High Court, High Living,” it read. Anchor Cynthia McFadden lectured: “This Supreme Court justice playing tennis at a resort as the president swears in his new boss.” Did ABC follow Scalia to Colorado to catch him in the heinous act of pick-up tennis? Or did someone else with a political agenda provide the footage to ABC? ABC should have been forthcoming on that key point, but wasn’t.

Brian Ross underlined ABC’s gotcha point: “Scalia’s apparent snub of the Chief Justice was one thing. But some legal ethics experts say his presence at the resort raises even larger questions about what critics call judicial junkets.”

The Federalist Society complained bitterly in a letter to ABC News pointing to numerous facts that the Society made known to ABC beforehand, but which “Nightline” ignored. While Ross did acknowledge (quickly) that Scalia taught a “10-hour course,” he didn’t note the tennis-playing was only two hours, which makes it preposterous to cast the trip as a “junket” payoff. Scalia received no honorarium, and this lecture, which was scheduled long before Roberts was even nominated, was no little speaking gig: Scalia had charged the judges attending his class to read a 481-page packet he assembled specifically for this presentation.

When the Federalist Society complained to ABC News in a letter, Kerry Smith, “senior vice president for editorial quality,” made comical claims in reply. First, he said the story met ABC standards for balance. Second, he claimed “we did not characterize it as a junket.” Does the viewer at home think ABC didn’t call it a junket by saying “what critics call judicial junkets”?

ABC showed its sometimes grainy, supposedly incriminating candid-camera footage of Scalia on the tennis court, in the gift shop, and chatting with guests, but never showed him teaching. How’s that for a balanced video presentation? Isn’t it funny that supposedly substantive ABC chose to focus here on a tabloidy issue — watch Scalia in shorts on the tennis court — and ignored the intellectual substance of what Scalia taught? But that’s the National Enquirer nature of TV “news” today, even on “Nightline.”

After several minutes of Scalia-pounding, Ross moved on to attack Justice Thomas for receiving an “$800 leather jacket from NASCAR, as well as a $1,200 set of tires. And from one Texas conservative activist, a vacation trip by private jet and a rare Bible, valued at $19,000.” Ross said “documents obtained by ABC News” proved all this. Hokum. Readers of the Los Angeles Times might remember that reporters Richard Serrano and David Savage reported all this on Dec. 31, 2004.

Unlike ABC, the Times also publicized what other justices reported receiving. Sandra Day O’Connor reported an $18,000 award in 2003 from the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, “but listed it as income.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg “has received a number of large monetary awards since joining the court in 1993, which she reported giving to charity.” In 1996, she received $100,000 from the philanthropic Kaul Foundation and gave money to 26 charities and nonprofits, including “women’s organizations.” What? Has Justice Ginsburg used this foundation money to fund feminist groups like NOW on the sly? ABC doesn’t care.

Others have noticed Stephen Breyer attending the posh Clintonista “Renaissance Weekends” in Charleston. Golf (at specially discounted rates) is listed on the program. Where’s the hidden camera? Breyer’s even on the advisory board.

Compare Tennis-gate to other stories. In 1999, Juanita Broaddrick charged through tears on NBC that President Clinton violently raped her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1978. “Nightline” never investigated that. In fact, “Juanita Broaddrick” is a name “Nightline” has never uttered. Their idea of a scandal is Scalia playing tennis?

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Myth of the conservative Wall Street Journal (WorldNetDaily, 020625)

Much has been written about the New York Times’ pro-homosexual agenda. On any given day, about three-fourths of the people deciding what’s on the front page of the venerable newspaper are homosexuals – thanks to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who opened up the newsroom to gays and even offered their “partners” benefits, after succeeding his father at the Times’ helm in 1992.

That’s not much of a shock, given the paper’s leftist stance on issues.

But did you know that liberal homosexuals for years have helped decide what goes on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, commonly cited as a bastion of conservatism?

Readers first got a peek into the Journal’s gay closet in 1996, when a page one features editor penned a first-person account of his battle with AIDS. David Sanford, who contracted the disease during an anonymous “sexual encounter” at a Manhattan bathhouse, shared his improving medical progress, in full detail, under a regimen of new drugs called protease inhibitors – the so-called “AIDS cocktail.”

Most remarkable wasn’t that the Journal let him write a first-person essay on the news pages. Or that it ran a large graphic charting the monthly levels of Sanford’s T4 white-blood-cell count from 1989 to 1996.

Rather, it was that the otherwise serious paper made Sanford’s essay its lead story on page one that day. His boss, John Brecher, OK’d it. Brecher, a former Miami Herald editor, replaced James B. Stewart as the Journal’s prestigious page-one editor in 1992. Just two months before Sanford’s AIDS tale came out, Stewart spoke at the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Convention luncheon in Miami. Topic: Covering the subject of AIDS. (Not long after, the Journal ran a page-one feature eulogizing a young gay man who died of AIDS. His claim to fame? Appearing on an MTV show.)

Sanford also had the OK of Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, a Yale University and Los Angeles Times alumnus, who hires gay journalists to look “progressive,” according to staffers.

Sanford, one-time managing editor of the New Republic, hasn’t succumbed to AIDS and still works for the Journal. But some of his colleagues with AIDS have not been so lucky.

“I wasn’t afraid that the Wall Street Journal would fire me for being HIV positive,” Sanford wrote in his long piece. “The company had been good to employees with serious medical conditions, including the two people I knew of who had died of AIDS.”

The Journal also employs prominent lesbians, such as reporter Kara Swisher, who last year got into trouble for writing glowingly about Internet firms that financially back a Web site founded by her “wife.” Swisher is another of Steiger’s hires.

Journal editors were so proud of Sanford’s personal medical report that they sent it to Columbia University for review by Pulitzer Prize judges. It won – along with nine other major Journal stories about treatments for AIDS, a sexually transmitted disease that affects a tiny fraction of the population and provides a limited market for drug companies.

North and South Korea

But wait a minute. Isn’t the Journal’s editor, Robert Bartley, a Reagan conservative?

Yes, and this is how the myth of the conservative Wall Street Journal survives. Bartley may have “editor” as his title, but he has virtually no say in news coverage nor role in setting the news agenda at the paper. That falls to Steiger. Bartley controls the opinion side of the paper – the editorial pages – and is otherwise a figurehead for the paper.

In fact, Bartley and Steiger work in separate parts of the Journal’s Manhattan building (temporarily vacated because of damage suffered from the World Trade Center attacks). At most papers, editorial and news editors work together in the same newsroom. Yet Bartley and his crew of conservative, free-market editorial writers are in one department, and Steiger and his crew of supposedly “objective” news reporters are in another.

And they despise each other.

According to former Journal staffers, Steiger’s reporters commonly refer to Bartley’s writers as “Nazis” or, more charitably, “kookie right-wingers,” and won’t have anything to do with them. The two departments are so separate that former Journal Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine, a Clinton Democrat and one-time managing editor, didn’t even have security access to the editorial-page offices.

Fact is, the Journal’s news and editorial departments are as politically polarized as North and South Korea. The result is “schizophrenic” coverage, said University of Texas journalism professor Marvin Olasky.

That became plain during the last administration. The news side was guardedly pro-Clinton, while the editorial side was rabidly anti-Clinton.

News scoops about Clinton corruption and personal abuses cowered like neglected children on the Journal’s editorial pages.

The Journal was the first to tell Juanita Broaddrick’s story of being raped by Bill Clinton. It got an exclusive interview with her in January 1999. It was hard news.

But it was buried on the back pages alongside editorials and columns, apparently too radioactive for Steiger’s pages – or too damaging to Clinton, coming as it did in the middle of his Senate impeachment trial.

Micah Morrison, an editorial page writer, broke news about Whitewater and Filegate. None of it made the Journal’s news pages.

“Editorial page writers like Micah Morrison consistently have broken news the rest of the national media has been forced to follow,” Journal publisher Peter Kann boasted in a 1997 letter to readers, apparently oblivious that the “rest of the national media” included his own front page.

In fact, Steiger’s reporters routinely shunned solid information dug up by Bartley’s crew.

For example, at the bottom of a Jan. 30, 1997, news piece about Clinton’s IRS chief Margaret Milner Richardson stepping down, Journal reporters David Wessel and Jacob Schlesinger finally got around to writing that “the IRS has been hit by the accusation that it is targeting Clinton antagonists,” such as the conservative Heritage Foundation and National Rifle Association. They ended their story by quoting a former IRS official who argued that there probably were just as many audits of liberal organizations under Clinton.

But the reporters completely ignored what their own paper had found out just the day before. Journal editorial writers had called liberal organizations and quoted them saying that they had not been audited.

The Journal’s liberal Washington bureau chief Al Hunt, and his hand-picked successor Allan Murray, both Clinton apologists, assigned other Clinton apologists to the Clinton scandal-news beat.

One notable punch-puller was Viveca Novak, who right from the start dismissed Whitewater as “a dead-end,” despite the investigation convicting more than a dozen Clinton cronies. She also tapped liberal Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe to pooh-pooh the legal merits of Paula Jones’ sexual-harassment lawsuit against Clinton – one that led to a nearly seven-figure settlement and his impeachment for lying to a judge about a material witness in the case.

Novak, now with Time, got her start writing for liberal Common Cause Magazine.

Meanwhile, Bartley, the editor, kept defending his pages’ coverage of Whitewater. “It’s news, stupid,” he kept telling critics (among them his own news reporters).

“The question is not why we’re covering it on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal,” he said. “The real question is why the mainstream press isn’t covering it far more extensively than it has.”

The man directing the Journal’s political coverage from 1983 to 1993 was Hunt. He stepped aside as Washington bureau chief to write a column and co-host CNN’s “Capital Gang.” But he remains in the Journal’s bureau as executive Washington editor.

Hunt is known throughout the capital as a “knee-jerk liberal” and an unabashed advocate for Democrats and their causes. In fact, he and his wife – CNN “Inside Politics” anchor Judy Woodruff – have had Hillary Clinton over to their Washington home for dinner.

The Hunts met while covering Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976.

Walt Riker, a veteran of Washington politics and press affairs, says that the Journal’s bureau is filled with a “bunch of Hunt clones – all knee-jerk liberals.”

As former Sen. Bob Dole’s press secretary, Riker had many interviews with Hunt’s staffers, who he said “openly derided the editorial writers” of the Journal in New York. (In fact, one conservative writer, John Fund, is so uncomfortable in the bureau that he works out of the offices of Americans for Tax Reform whenever he’s in Washington.)

Riker says the reporters in the Journal’s Washington bureau cleverly knitted their anti-Republican bias into stories about Dole and other Republicans.

“They know all the facts,” Riker said. “But you give them the interview, and it comes out all skewed and wrong in the story.”

Here’s yet another example of the Journal’s schizo coverage: On the same day in 1994, reporting on the same subject – the Clinton budget – the Washington bureau produced a page-one story under the headline, “Exercise in Restraint,” while the editorial department concluded Clinton wanted to “Spend Like an Egyptian.”

Anti-business bias

The Journal is also at odds with itself in its coverage of business and finance, its bread and butter.

That’s right. The news pages of the Journal, contrary to popular belief, are decidedly anti-business and skeptical of markets, while Bartley’s pages are staunchly pro-business and in awe of markets.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Kent MacDougall, a closet Marxist who left the Journal only to brag about planting leftist propaganda in his page one news stories for years.

MacDougall, who also wrote for the Los Angeles Times, confessed in the socialist rag, Monthly Review, in 1989 that he had used the news pages of the “the bourgeois press” to “popularize radical ideas.”

As a reporter for the Journal, he said he had “helped popularize radical ideas with lengthy, sympathetic profiles of Marxist economists,” and “made sure to seek out experts whose opinions I knew in advance would support my thesis.” At the same time, he cleverly “sought out mainstream authorities to confer recognition and respectability on radical views I sought to popularize.”

Perhaps more surprising is that his page-one editors let him get away with it.

Former page-one editor Stewart, author of “Den of Thieves,” supervised many of the investigative stories about Wall Street insider-trading scandals during the ‘80s, and is largely credited with popularizing the notion that the Reagan decade was one of runaway “greed.” (He also penned the book, “Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries,” which studiously avoided connecting the galaxy of dots involving the Clintons and Whitewater corruption.)

Journal reporters tend to be overly eager to bash business and paint executives as greedy and flint-hearted, say executives who have dealt with them. And despite their vaunted reputation, their knowledge of business and finance lacks sophistication, they say.

According to an executive with broker Raymond James & Associates, for one, Journal reporters showed a poor understanding of basic finance when he met with them last decade regarding quarterly performance rankings.

“They didn’t have a clue about markets,” he said. “They hardly knew the difference between PE (price-earnings ratio) and EPS (earnings per share).”

“They were unsophisticated,” he said, “and seemed to have little respect for markets.”

The Journal was punished in 1997 after a reporter went gunning for a Houston-based securities firm. In a 1993 story, Laura Jereski characterized MMAR Group Inc. as shady and reckless, so the firm sued for libel and won a record $223 million award (most of which was later struck down by a federal judge).

Jurors’ confidence in the Journal was reportedly high when the case began. But it quickly eroded as Jereski’s sources testified they were misquoted, and jurors found out that she had failed to read key financial documents that would have shot down a core allegation she made against the company. Jurors also heard evidence that Journal editors arrogantly ignored letters and phone calls complaining that key elements of Jereski’s story were false.

An MMAR flack contended that Jereski, who he described as a “collectivist,” juiced the story to make the company, and securities firms in general, look bad.

Scalping Safeway

In 1990, the Journal ran a page-one story painting Safeway Stores Inc. as nothing short of evil for laying off workers after a leveraged buy-out and restructuring.

Reporter Susan Faludi trotted out a few extreme sob stories – such as the Safeway trucker who “blew his brains out” a year after getting a pink slip – to prove the callousness of management. Then she juxtaposed the “human costs” with the “robber baron”-style enrichment of management after Safeway’s LBO put it back on the road to profits (and allowed it to re-employ most of its employees).

Faludi won a Pulitzer for what Safeway analysts called a hatchet job.

Within just a few years of her prize, Safeway had turned around its fortunes to such a degree that it had become the industry leader and had more employees than ever.

Yet there was no follow-up story from Faludi or the Journal.

The veiled leftist agenda of the Journal’s news department is dangerous precisely because it’s not transparent, allowing critics of capitalism to hold up Journal news stories critical of capitalism as highly credible. They can argue: Why else would the “conservative” Journal print it if it weren’t the truth?

Market-bashing politicians know how to work this muddy picture to their advantage in fooling the masses into thinking they’re getting objective information about business and economics from the Journal.

Take the first 1996 presidential debate. Clinton pointed to a Journal news story about how Dole supported a loophole-closing tax hike in the ‘80s in an effort to blunt Dole’s jab that Clinton signed a record tax hike. Regarding the source of his information, the Journal, Clinton noted that it’s “hardly a friend of this Democratic administration” – as if the paper’s news department is full of rock-ribbed Republicans who suddenly turned objective and threw him an honest bone to use in the debate.

A closer and broader look at the Journal, beyond its editorials, reveals that it is, in fact, not conservative. And its most influential component – news-reporting, under the pretense of objectivity – is really anti-business and pro-homosexual.

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Append to original story

Last month, NBC debuted “Book of Daniel,” a series about a dysfunctional Christian family led by a pill-popping Episcopal priest. The show eventually was pulled after WND first broke the story and a campaign against it was launched.

The network also came under fire after it was learned an episode of “Will & Grace” would include pop star Britney Spears playing the conservative Christian host of a cooking segment called “Cruci-fixin’s.” NBC later canceled the episode.

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New journalistic standards coming (townhall.com, 060209)

by Marvin Olasky

Sometimes philosophical debates are just word-flinging. At other times, though, material change allows innovators to put new ideas into practice quickly. This is such a time for journalism.

For nearly two decades, I’ve been writing now and then about the shortcomings of the conventional journalistic definition of “objectivity” as purportedly value-free neutrality. I’ve noted its philosophical and practical limitations, and proposed a counter-standard, biblical objectivity: Since God knows the real nature of things and we do not, we should as much as possible — given our position as fallen sinners — to try to see everything through the lens of the Bible.

Two books of mine from the ‘80s and ‘90s that are now online, “Prodigal Press” and “Telling the Truth”, lay out that analysis. Some Christian journalists subscribe to it, but others remain wedded to conventional objectivity, arguing that the 20th century doctrine is our best bet for getting mostly factual information to the most people. Now, though, the Internet is chopping away at that rationale.

Think of how we get news and views. Say a half-dozen people watch the State of the Union Address. They all agree on the who, what, when and where, but they differ on the significance and meaning of what they’ve heard. You don’t expect each to offer, in carefully tailored tones, a “balanced” account. You expect each to tell you what he thinks is important. You’ll evaluate the perspectives, taking into account both the specific detail offered and the reliability of each analyst, and then arrive at your own conclusions.

Conventional doctrines of objectivity gained traction because newspaper readers could not hear directly those half-dozen accounts. Few people subscribed to more than one newspaper (now, few cities have more than one), so it made sense to argue that the newspaper should report two or more different viewpoints neutrally. The odds of getting at the truth would be lessened if we heard only one subjective account and not the other five, so it made sense to give the reporter the role of evaluator and presenter, and demand that he not take sides.

One-source reliance is rapidly becoming outmoded. Prior to the Internet Age, I would have had to subscribe to a dozen newspapers, flip through all of them and buy a hundred birdcages to give the pages appropriate final resting places. Now, I check the news every morning by quickly hitting a variety of websites and blogs. Millions of others also are trading in old, one-stop information-shopping for the freedom to read for themselves multiple perspectives.

This new freedom also allows journalists to present their own perspectives with the knowledge that readers can readily access opposing views. Similarly, the “fairness doctrine” in broadcasting is outmoded: It’s not unfair or socially irresponsible to present one point of view when viewers or listeners can instantly move to dozens of others.

This doesn’t mean that journalists should ignore opposing views, because their stories will be stronger if they fairly cover and quote opponents. It does mean that publications can and should honestly say where they’re coming from, instead of pretending not to have opinions. As newspaper publishers increasingly perform holding actions with their paper products and throw their new investment dollars into websites and blogs, this move toward transparency should pick up speed.

The speed with which the Web captures advertisers will determine how soon newspaper deaths bury the doctrine of conventional objectivity. Already, more classified advertising is going electronic, as Craig’s List and others become popular. Local department stores and supermarkets now buoy newspaper revenues and allow publishers to keep the sales price well below the paper- and gasoline-driven cost of production and distribution. But as those costs rise and ad revenues decrease, the dinosaurs will give way to the Internet mammals.

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Christians blamed for ‘gay’-bar rampage: Leading activist group points to Dobson, Robertson, others (National Review Online, 060210)

A leading homosexual activist group is blaming a deranged teenager’s violent rampage through a “gay” bar in Massachusetts on “hatred and loathing” fueled by Christian groups and leaders such as James Dobson.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Executive Director Matt Foreman noted the Feb. 2 attack by 18-year-old Jacob Robida in a press release that day. Robida – who sports a swastika tattoo and had Neo-Nazi and white supremecist materials in his home – was charged with attempted murder for a hatchet and gun attack that left three men wounded in New Bedford, Mass.

“The hatred and loathing fueling this morning’s vicious attack on gay men in New Bedford is not innate, it is learned,” Foreman contended. “And who is teaching it? Leaders of the so-called Christian right, that’s who. Individuals like James Dobson of Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, the Rev. Pat Robertson and their ilk are obsessed with homosexuality.”

Foreman asserted these leaders “use their vast resources, media networks and affiliated pulpits to blame lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people for all the ills of society.”

“They disguise their hatred as ‘deeply held religious beliefs,’” he claimed.

Foreman also complained of “vicious” opposition to homosexual-rights activists and “hate-filled rantings” by the leaders of two Massachusetts groups, Brian Camenker of the Article 8 Alliance and Ed Pawlick of MassNews.

“The blood spilled this morning is on their hands,” Foreman charged.

Article 8 Alliance responded: “It’s now becoming clear that homosexual activist groups intend to use this incident as a springboard for a vicious and cowardly series of attacks on anyone who publicly criticizes the homosexual movement – similar to what happened after the Matthew Shepard incident.”

“Today” show anchor Katie Couric famously brought up Dobson’s Focus on the Family in an Oct. 12, 1998, interview with then-Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer about Shepard, whose murder was believed to be an “anti-gay” hate crime – a charge recently debunked in an investigation by ABC’s “20/20.”

Couric asked whether “conservative political organizations like the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family are contributing to this anti-homosexual atmosphere” by suggesting homosexuals can change their sexual orientation. “That prompts people to say,” Couric added in her question, “‘If I meet someone who is homosexual, I’m going to take action and try to convince them or try to harm them.’” [KH: openly biased]

After the Nov. 26, 2004, “20/20” show, Focus on the Family sent a letter to NBC News President Neal Shapiro requesting an apology “on behalf of Christians maligned by Couric” but was rebuffed.

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The Imperial Press: Sanctimony and frenzy. (National Review Online, 060217)

Let’s stipulate that hunting accidents are bad things. Let’s further stipulate that Vice President Dick Cheney should have immediately made public his accidental shooting of a friend while quail hunting, rather than waiting roughly 18 hours — the missing 1,080 minutes of the shooting scandal. None of that can account for the raving lunacy that has seized the Washington press corps in its treatment of the incident.

If the press is supposed to be adversarial, does that mean that it has to froth at the mouth? It is often said that President Bush has brought a return of the Imperial Presidency of the Nixon years. But the more enduring creation of Watergate was the Imperial Press, bloated with its own self-importance and fond of the taste of blood after bringing down a president. The qualities attributed to Cheney — arrogant, out of touch, consumed with a dark, paranoiac worldview — all belong to the Imperial Press in its self-regarding glory.

Leave it to the Washington press corps to make a story about what could have been an awful personal tragedy and was still wrenching — with Harry Wittington’s life in jeopardy, and Cheney burdened with the guilt of having shot a friend — all about themselves. Instead of learning of the story Saturday night, they had to wait until Sunday afternoon, and that ignited their rage. Worse, the story broke in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Wrong Times. The Corpus Christi paper doesn’t belong to The Club and doesn’t, like the other Times, employ a host of reporters reflexively hostile to the Bush administration and obsessed with the latest Beltway minutia.

The media need to clue into the fact that no one cares about press management as much as they do. In polls asking what issues matter to it, the public has never said, “Whether David Gregory of NBC News gets his information on his preferred timetable.” Still less does it care if Gregory has a tizzy at the White House briefing, an event considered so momentous by his media brethren during the Cheney brouhaha that it caused an avalanche of coverage.

There was an incoherence in the media’s response to the accident — was it an occasion for jokes scorning Cheney, or a deadly serious business that the vice president’s office had taken too lightly? It could be either, or both, as long as Cheney was excoriated. There clearly was an element of revenge to the coverage. Everyone knows that Cheney doesn’t like the press, and here was an opportunity for the press to demonstrate that the feeling is quite mutual. For all the media’s sanctimony about their commitment to the facts, dark-conspiracy theorizing quickly took hold about the circumstances of the shooting — had Cheney been drunk?

Amidst this unseemly maelstrom, the one who seemed to maintain some equilibrium was Cheney himself, who expressed in a Fox News interview deep-felt regret for what happened on what he called “one of the worst days of my life.” He took all the responsibility for the mishap — so much for the idea that his office was “blaming the victim,” as critics said — noting that he was the one who pulled the trigger and shot his friend. The normal reaction to all of this wouldn’t be the glee that characterized so much of the commentary about the accident, but to feel at least a twinge of sympathy for Cheney. Even Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid, in his initial statement after the shooting, remarked on how accidents sometimes happen. Subsequently, he apparently suppressed his natural human feelings after they had verged dangerously toward sympathy for Cheney, and picked up the media’s outraged story line of a scandalous cover-up.

Cheney’s drubbing will continue apace — the peril of crossing the Imperial Press.

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

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Comparing Islamic Fascists to Christian Conservatives (Christian Post, 060214)

[KH: examples of anti-Christian media]

It has become a world crisis. Cartoons printed by a Danish newspaper depict the Prophet Muhammad in a way that Muslims say is blasphemous. In retaliation, Muslims are violently protesting by burning flags, attacking embassies in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. Riots have broken out in Beirut, Indonesia, the Palestinian territory, and Afghanistan. Muslim clerics continue to stir the flames of Islamic indignation, calling upon Muhammad’s followers to enforce respect for the prophet’s name with their own blood. People are being seriously injured and killed.

The media has often compared Christian conservatives in America to violent Islamic radicals. Bob Norman in the New Times Broward-Palm Beach once wrote: “The underbelly of the Christian right is as scary as anything that ever dwelled in a Tora Bora cave.” Robyn E. Blumner in the St. Petersburg Times, once compared conservative Christians with the Taliban saying: “The religious right has spent more than 20 years chipping away at the wall of separation between church and state, trying in Taliban-like ways to inject religion into public schools and the operations of government.”

Drew Pierce with E-volve Now has argued: “I agree with Bill Clinton when he said, ‘Our number-one threat abroad is fundamentalism, absolutism. Terror is their tactic, but it is their ideas, their hatred, their absolute certainty that they are so right that they can kill people who disagree with them — that is our enemy.’ ...How true. This is not rocket science. But what about this same terrorism, fundamentalism, and absolutist mentality as a threat from within here at home? I suggest that the threat from within created by a stampede of millions of fundamentalist Christians is far more dangerous than a handful of terrorists.” Even former President Jimmy Carter has alluded to comparisons between fundamentalist Christians and Islamic fundamentalism in his latest book, Our Endangered Values. [KH: an enemy of evangelicals]

Such comparisons are common today by those on the left, but nothing less than asinine — and recent events on the world stage prove it.

In 2001, The Brooklyn Museum featured Yo Mama’s Last Supper, a color photograph by Renee Cox, which depicted 12 black men and a nude woman at Christ’s Last Supper. Cox posed as the woman, who was supposed to represent Jesus Christ. Yet there were no riots by offended Bible-believing Christians — no burning of the Brooklyn Museum with fire bombs. There were lawful protests, but people weren’t being killed — no placards saying “Butcher those who insult Christ,” or “Behead those who blaspheme the Savior.”

Piss Christ, by American photographer Andres Serrano, has been around since 1987. It’s a close-up photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. It’s been the subject of much controversy. Christian people have deplored its support by the National Endowment for the Arts. But there have never been any riots by fundamentalist Christians over the matter.

What about when New York Performance Works, a downtown New York theatre that staged 12 performances of Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, which portrayed the Virgin Mary as a prostitute? The play was advertised with postcards containing an illustration of the Holy Mother with the Immaculate Heart and the inscription “Tis a Pity She’s a Whore,” written across her. Did conservative Catholics violently storm the theatres? Were Catholic Priests whipping up a frenzy of hatred and violence against the play’s performers and sponsorships? They were rightly incensed, but expressions of opposition were non-violent.

Planned Parenthood has been promoting “Choice on Earth” Christmas cards for four years. The cards, whose inscription is a play on words taken from the Gospel of Luke 2:13,14, have degraded the Christmas message of God’s sending a redeemer for man’s sin to an argument for the murder of millions of innocent pre-born children. Have pro-life Christians essentially called for a jihad — a literal holy war on Planned Parenthood? No, they have used their lawful rights to try and stop the violence perpetrated and celebrated by such organizations — they have not incited violence on them or anyone else.

Countless are the depictions of Jesus in the movies and on television that are incredibly offensive to conservative Evangelicals. From Martin Scorsese’s film, The Last Temptation of Christ, where Jesus explains that he makes crosses for the Romans so his fellow Jews will be crucified and God will hate him; to NBC’s failed TV drama, The Book of Daniel, where the Lord was essentially portrayed as a powerless wise-cracker. Yet no conservative Christian organization, group of churches, or Christian activists have led their faithful to attack movie studios or destroy the broadcasting towers of NBC affiliates! No producers of such programming have been killed or beaten.

In fact, what we are witnessing at this hour is a clear presentation of the vast differences between Christianity and true Islam. Granted, there have been exceptions to the case, where some misguided individual or group that, in the name of Christ, performed some atrocity on those who disagreed with them. But such is an exception to the rule at best and never in line with the commands of Christ.

Nevertheless, Muslims around the world are now obeying Muhammad through violence.

Randall Terry, president of the Society for Truth and Justice, has spent considerable time studying Islam, beginning with his Arabic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in doing research in Islamic primary sources for a lengthy project comparing Christ and Mohammed,. Terry notes: “If we are going to understand the Islamic mind, we must study the life of Muhammad. ‘What would Muhammad do?’ needs to be the grid through which we view Islamic culture, law, and acts of terrorism .... Muslims who attack or threaten death to those who mock Muhammad are following in the footsteps of Muhammad himself.” Terry goes on to point out that Muhammad ordered the assassination or execution of individuals who satirized him, and this is the basis for why its a criminal offense in Islamic law to belittle the prophet.

One of the controversial cartoons of the prophet shows Muhammad with a lit bomb in is turban. In an insightful editorial, Culture Clash Over Cartoons, columnists Monte Kuligowski muses: “I wonder what the Christian equivalent (cartoon) would look like. In the present case, a cartoonist apparently believed that because Muhammad was a man of war, Islam has evolved (or always has been terroristic) into its present state of suicidal/homicidal terrorism. With Christianity, Jesus walked the earth healing the sick and feeding the hungry. What might a cartoonist place in Christ’s turban? Maybe a hospital or a loaf of bread?”

Indeed, as J. Grant Swank, Jr., argues in his recent piece, Cartoon Protests: Messenger = Message, it is the sword that rules in Islam. “In Christianity,” he says, “there is the cross not the sword. The cross is where the sinless sacrifice, Jesus, offered Himself to satisfy the justice of eternity. All repentant souls may find forgiveness through that sacrifice. Their eternity is forever bliss and holiness in heaven. In the meantime, Jesus calls His own to live the Good Samaritan example — love your neighbor as yourself. Muhammad calls his own to slaughter: ‘Fighting is prescribed for you ... it is good for you. Koran 2:216.’ Slowly the free countries are coming to realize this horror.”

Let’s hope and pray that they do realize it. Moreover, let’s hope some in the American media will realize it, too, and stop erroneously comparing conservative Christians to Islamic fascists. To do so is like comparing Billy Graham and Mother Teresa to Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein! All the James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy and Don Wildmon types in America would never be lowered to the reprehensible moral equivalent of the reaction we see by Muslims around the globe to a bunch of cartoons.

_________________________________________________

Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

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A&E’s faith problem (townhall.com, 060222)

by Mark Joseph (bio | archive | contact )

My wife and I sat riveted the other night, watching Larry King Live as he showed clips from A&E’s made-for-TV version of the events of September 11th on board flight #93. Among King’s guests was Lisa Jefferson, the Verizon operator who stayed on the phone with one of the flight’s heroes, Todd Beamer. It was Jefferson who documented Beamer’s last words, which, depending on the account, included either “Help me God, help me Jesus,” or “Help me Jesus.”

The actors on the show made a point of telling King how accurate and true to the transcripts this movie was, so I was curious to hear how they handled Beamer’s last moments. As I suspected would happen, Beamer’s final prayer to his God was excised. Although A&E did allow the two to repeat the Lord’s Prayer together, when it came time for Beamer’s fateful appeal to God, it dropped Beamer’s sectarian prayer.

What exactly did Beamer say? Just to be sure, I checked with Snopes.com, a site I turn to often to debunk internet myths. No organ of the religious right, Snopes concluded the following:

“Jesus help me,” Beamer said. He recited the 23d Psalm. Then Jefferson heard him say: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”

The question is, why did A&E skip over those last words? Were the producers afraid of inflaming religious tensions by allowing the battle to be cast as Allah vs. Jesus? Was it just another example of the discomfort that many secularists have with faith-based public displays of affection? Or was it merely a reflection of their lack of understanding that, for millions of Americans, Beamer’s appeal to God and the strength he derived from it, was central to the actions he took?

A&E’s omission reminded me of a commercial that used to play in Southern California in areas serviced by one of the nation’s most respected daily newspapers, The Los Angeles Times.

As a group of young professionals sat around a table during their lunch break, each discussing their passion for the Times weekend edition, emphasizing how the paper was the highlight of their day. One in particular, portrayed by an Asian-American actor, added this line: “Sunday is my day off, and I don’t move an inch out of my house. I work on the newspaper all day.”

Seven people discussing their weekend habits and the importance of the Sunday Times, but none mentioned anything about attending a religious service of any kind, which if polls are to be believed, are attended each week by around half of the population. Either the Times had no interest in selling subscriptions to half of the population or their marketing executives were so removed from the daily lives of average Americans that they forgot how half the population spent their Sundays.

Author Peggy Noonan once confessed that she too had made the same mistake. Before joining the Reagan administration, Noonan was an assistant to Dan Rather of CBS News. A free-spirited New Yorker with a great career, lots of money and free time on the weekends, Noonan enthusiastically plunged into big city life, and before long had lost touch with the way many Americans lived their lives and spent their Sundays.

“Once I wrote a radio script in which I led into a story by saying, ‘this Sunday morning you’ll probably be home reading the papers or out at brunch with friends, but Joe Smith will be [. . .]’ “ Noonan wrote in her book What I Saw At The Revolution.

“A middle aged editor listened as he walked by the studio and approached me afterward. ‘Peggy, a small point, but maybe not so insignificant; this Sunday morning most Americans will be at church.’ He was, of course, correct, but I forgot. I wasn’t at church on Sunday mornings, I was in a restaurant on Columbus Avenue eating mushroom omelets and reading the arts and leisure section of the New York Times.”

What Noonan experienced and was honest enough to share with her readers is a problem that afflicts the mass media culture in a far greater way than other professions. Many reporters, editors, broadcasters, recording artists and yes, TV producers are either uncomfortable with, ignorant of the importance of or intentionally disparaging of expressions of faith in the public square. Sometimes this leads them to say silly things about religious people and at other times to sanitize stories that contain faith-based heroism. In the case of A&E’s retelling of this historic event, the channel and the program’s producers owe viewers an explanation as to why their faithfulness to the transcripts they had access to stopped cold the moment one of the flight’s heroes paid tribute to his God in a very personal way and denied its viewers crucial information that would have provided a window into his motivation and an understanding of how he acquired the courage to do what he had to do.

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CBS Does Denmark: But doesn’t bother to get the story right. (Weekly Standard, 060227)

Copenhagen

When 60 Minutes shows up on your doorstep, you have reason to fear for your good name and reputation. The Danes learned this last week, when reporter Bob Simon and his team of cameramen descended on the country to pass judgment in the controversy over the Muhammad cartoons. The result of their labors was a 12-minute segment that displayed all the customary 60 Minutes arrogance and superficiality. In the report, the respected Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, which originally printed the cartoons, came across as a publication hellbent on gratuitously offending millions of Muslims around the world, while the Danes themselves were portrayed as naive, full of themselves, xenophobic, and way too blonde for their own good. Did we forget provincial? Add that to the list of Danish foibles, too.

The 12 cartoons were commissioned last fall when the editors of the Jyllands-Posten, feeling that a note of fear and self-censorship had crept into the Danish public discussion of matters Islamic, decided to test whether this was true. (Specifically, a writer of children’s books had reported difficulty in finding an illustrator for a life-of-Muhammad volume.)

After an initial flap when the cartoons came out in the paper’s September 30, 2005, edition, nothing much happened for months. Then a delegation of fundamentalist imams from Denmark decided to tour the Middle East, stirring up hatred. Unsure that the original, rather lame cartoons would be sufficiently incendiary, the imams added three crude images to the portfolio, including one purportedly of the prophet Muhammad disguised as a pig. (It

turned out to be a photocopied picture of a man in a pig mask from a rural French hog-calling contest.) That certainly did the trick. The Danes were suddenly the most hated people on Earth, with their embassies under attack, their flag being burned, and their consciousness being raised by lectures on religious tolerance from Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other beacons of enlightenment.

Among the participants in the 60 Minutes trashing of Denmark was Ahmed Abu-Laban, a Palestinian refugee and self-appointed spokesman of Danish Muslims, who instigated the tour of the Middle East and whose name has been linked to some very unpleasant groups and individuals in the Middle East. But rather than explore Laban’s background and grill him in depth on the question of the added cartoons, CBS treated him with kid gloves as an aggrieved individual. Not a word about his contacts, nor of the fact that he has been speaking with a forked tongue, urging dialogue in his Friday prayers in Denmark, while inciting confrontation and boycott when talking to Middle Eastern audiences. All this is easily obtainable information, which CBS chose to ignore.

Unfortunately, the editors of the Jyllands-Posten, having received a forewarning about the likely drift of the program and reportedly in a state of shellshock after weeks of criticism, chose not to appear on the show. With death-threats and fatwas issued against the cartoonists, the paper had thrown in the towel and issued public regrets for having offended Muslims.

With the main players not being on hand to defend the rights of a free press, this task was left to Tøger Seidenfaden, editor in chief of a rival paper, the liberal Politiken, which has been in the forefront of condemning the publication of the cartoons and whose endorsement of the principle of freedom of speech was accordingly less than ringing. Some suggest that the problem with Jyllands-Posten is that, not being left-wing, it is not perceived to merit the kind of unqualified support from Seidenfaden and his colleagues in the Danish press that Salman Rushdie received when the fatwa was issued against him by the mullahs in Tehran back in 1989 over his novel The Satanic Verses.

Having condemned the editors of Jyllands-Posten as irresponsible and cowardly to boot for not showing up for public chastisement, it was now time for 60 Minutes to turn to the rest of the country. As evidence of its general xenophobia, Simon pointed to Denmark’s strict policies on immigration, which he called the toughest in Europe and which have earned criticism from all the same organizations that habitually find fault with America: the U.N., the European Commission on Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, etc.

To understand Denmark’s current stance on immigration, you need to know how these policies came about. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Denmark had an open door policy towards asylum-seekers from the Third World and the Middle East, Palestinians in particular, often without sufficient background checks being made. It was naively believed that if you gave people a nice home, public benefits, access to free hospital care and free schools, and freedom from persecution, they would turn into nice Social Democrats.

After two decades of this policy, whose costs in terms of taxes have been colossal, the Danes, like the Dutch, the British, and the French, realized to their horror that integration was not working. Instead, multiculturalist dogma had led to the development of parallel societies, in which people chose to carry on the fights of their countries of origin, while turning their backs on the country that had let them in. Thus fundamentalist hate groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, which has called openly for its members to kill Jews, have been increasingly

vocal in Denmark. The organization is banned in Germany and in Sweden, but so far there has been no attempt to shut it down in Denmark.

Trying belatedly to get a handle on the situation, the center-right government of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, which came into office in 2001, imposed strict limits on immigration, urged on by its parliamentary supporters, the Danish People’s party, which was the first party in Denmark to insist that there was an immigration problem. On 60 Minutes, this party was labeled “ultra right-wing,” suggesting strapping fascist youths roaming the streets in search of defenseless Muslims. For anybody even vaguely familiar with Danish politics, this is a ludicrous caricature. The party consists mainly of middle-aged former Social Democrats who were disenchanted with that party’s refusal to tackle the issue.

In its handling of immigration issues, it is instructive to compare Denmark with neighboring Sweden, which faces exactly the same kind of problems. The difference between the Swedes and the Danes is that the Swedes have suppressed all debate on immigration, while the Danes insist on carrying on an open and frank discussion. The result is that Sweden has had some really nasty episodes of racist violence, in which people have gotten killed; Denmark so far has had none.

There are two roads the Danes can take. One is to cave in to international pressure, loosen up on immigration, and try in general not to give offense. This is bound to fail, as it is not within the power of the Danes to decide who chooses to be offended. It is the Islamists who pick these fights. If it had not been the caricatures, it would have been something else.

The other is to continue to pursue the course Prime Minister Rasmussen is currently on, seeking to establish bonds with moderate Muslims, while trying to integrate those who are already here rather than adding new ones. Here it might be a good idea for the Danes to quit worrying overly how they are viewed abroad. And indeed, to some Danes, there are worse things than seeing their flag burned together with the American Stars and Stripes. At least they are in excellent company.

To describe a small nation under international pressure would have been an excellent journalistic undertaking. To do so, though, you have to know something of the country you describe. Too bad the 60 Minutes reporters—whose quaint liberal fables of ethnic victimization haven’t been updated since the 1960s—couldn’t be bothered.

Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.

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Pro-military mom silenced by mainstream media (Townhall.com, 060302)

by Todd Manzi

A grieving mother of a soldier killed in Iraq wants to voice her opinion. She has a message about the war in Iraq and feels the American people need to hear what she has to say.

Her name is Merrilee Carlson and her story is compelling and newsworthy. Unlike another mother of a fallen soldier, Carlson is not a household name. Her message is exactly opposite of the over-exposed message of the well-known protesting mom.

Regarding the war in Iraq, Carlson says, “We have to take a step back and look at what we have asked our military to do. We have asked them to do a job. It doesn’t matter how we got there. The fact is we are there and we have a job to finish.”

Carlson began trying to get her message out last August and September. She didn’t like what was coming out of Crawford and felt the need to correct the record.

In the last couple of weeks the organization that Carlson chairs, Minnesota Families United, has been in the center of a controversy that, by any objective reasoning, should have made national news.

Minnesota Families United teamed with Progress for America Voter Fund and produced two television spots. Minnesota was used as a test market for the spots and PFA made a rather large statewide television buy. The ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities market, KSTP, refused to air the spots.

The decision not to air the first MFU commercial was made by Rob Hubbard, General Manager. His objection was over two lines in the spot:

1) The media only reports the bad news, but American troops are making real progress

2) You would never know it from the news reports, but our enemy in Iraq is Al Qaeda.

Hubbard’s position was that those lines did not apply to his television station; therefore, he would not allow the spot to run. Hubbard says he would have run the spot if they edited it to make it clear they were talking about the media in general, but not KSTP specifically.

It is certainly understandable that Hubbard is worried his viewers might get the wrong impression. After all, the reason these spots were produced in the first place is that these families of our fallen heroes believe millions have gotten the wrong impression regarding the progress our soldiers have made in Iraq. Still, the question remains: Do these families deserve to have their voices heard, or should they be stifled?

This debate is not happening, because this story never made national news. To recap: In an election year, a group used Minnesota as a test market for a possible national buy and one of the prominent stations took the position that the spot should not air. Maybe this didn’t become news because of the hypocrisy of the industry. They often try their best to protect themselves from the type of stories they inflict on others.

The news hook gets better.

On Thursday, February 16th, the Chair of the Democrat Party in Minnesota called on all TV stations to pull the ad. The top Democrats in Minnesota want to suppress the message of Carlson’s group.

Merrilee Carlson was born and raised a Democrat. She doesn’t like politics and she wants to make it clear that her group is non-political. So, the Democrats in Minnesota are trying to suppress the message from mainstream families who have suffered the loss of their children from the war in Iraq. Why is this not news?

That other mom was a full-time, anti-war protester for more than a year before she came up with the PR stunt to go to Crawford during the president’s vacation. The media accepted the stunt and gave her message enormous coverage. This prompted Carlson to take action for her message. Now Carlson is in the middle of legitimate news and the media is silent.

Have we come to the point where it takes a stunt to make news? Merrilee Carlson is thoughtful, sincere, professional and respectful of those who disagree with her. Not only does she have the exact opposite message from the spectacle in Crawford last summer, she has the exact opposite approach. Regarding the efforts of her group she said, “This isn’t about us. We are not looking to be that public figure; we have stepped out because of the need. This is not about us, it is about our children.”

Obviously, the mainstream media is going to do everything they can to avoid Carlson. They are not interested in balancing her view against the anti-war view they have so heavily promoted. We already knew the media was liberally biased. Now it’s apparent they are also biased against ordinary people as well. The foaming-at-the-mouth fanatical fringe gets news coverage and the people who portray the best qualities of us are ignored.

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Media ethics: An oxymoron? (Townhall.com, 060303)

by Paul Greenberg

CONWAY, Ark. - What a pleasure to be back in school again, this time at the University of Central Arkansas. Maybe this time I’ll get it right.

I’m here to talk at a program called High Table, which has a nice Oxbridge ring to it. In the dining halls at Oxford and Cambridge, the students in their scholars’ gowns would sit at long tables in the dining hall, while the master and fellows of the college were served at a raised table at one end of the hall, or the High Table.

Happily, things are a good deal less formal at UCA, where students gather ‘round in a large, homey den. There’s a chess game going on over to one side, and I wish I could play the winner instead of having to listen to myself talk about, of all things, Media Ethics.

The phrase has the sound of an oxymoron. Like military intelligence. Any time a prefix is tacked onto ethics, as in congressional ethics or bioethics . . . watch it! Specializing ethics risks losing contact with ethics in general.

By now I’ve read a lot of articles in journalism reviews about Media Ethics, but they tend to have more to do with media than ethics.

Except when they’re used for decorative purposes, I don’t recall seeing many if any references in those articles to Aristotle’s “Ethics,” or Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” or the teachings of Confucius or Bonhoeffer . . . .

Or to my own favorite guide, “Pirke Avot,” the talmudic tractate on ethics. It contains a useful, three-part admonition for today’s journalists, even if it was meant for interpreters of the law a few millennia ago:

1. Love creative work.

2. Do not seek domination over others.

And, last and most useful of all:

3. Avoid intimacy with the ruling authorities.

The big problem with reading articles about the professional ethics of journalism is that, no matter what they say in journalism schools, we’re not a profession - which is a darned good thing. That way, we’re not licensed by the state, and therefore cannot be disbarred by same.

Thank goodness and the First Amendment, anybody can commit journalism in this country.

Despite our occasional demands for special treatment, freedom of the press doesn’t belong just to the press. And the more the press insists on being above the law, the more trouble awaits. That’s no way to win friends and influence people.

And neither is calling ourselves a profession. When the word is applied to inky wretches, it has an unavoidably counterfeit feel to it. I’d rather be just a newspaperman. Even the title Journalist sounds a little hoity-toity to me. I always picture somebody who writes for a quarterly, smokes a pipe and thinks a galley proof is a nautical term.

George Bernard Shaw once said every profession is a conspiracy against the laity; at its best journalism is a conspiracy on behalf of the laity.

The first ethical rule of political commentators, I tell the students, is: Know thyself.

Yes, I know that’s not original advice. But it still holds. The opinionator should know what his convictions are, so he won’t be blown this way and that by changing fashion. When he finds it necessary to alter or refine or deepen or abandon a conviction - the process is called growth - he should at least be aware of what he’s doing, and maybe even why.

That’s why he - or she - needs a liberal education, so he’ll keep his bearings in the great whirlwind of just a little wheat and a whole lot of chaff that we call the news. So he can separate it out for the reader. (Adlai Stevenson once said a journalist is someone who carefully separates the wheat from the chaff, then prints the chaff. God, the truth hurts.)

Readers don’t need to have their own mercurial feelings mirrored and magnified every morning, much as we all enjoy the experience. For a little while. Then it grows boring. And we begin to crave opinions other than our own, and search for insights that compel - instead of platitudes that just comfort.

A lapsed editorial writer here at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette named Chris Battle - he’s now managing a gubernatorial candidate’s campaign in Arkansas - once told me a story about his grandfather. It seems that, as a young sophisticate, he was once explaining to the old man that not all issues are black and white, that there are different shades of gray, that there’s not always a right and wrong, yadda-yadda . . . .

To which his grandfather replied, “Son, there’s always a right and wrong. You just have to find it.”

Even if it takes time and effort. That’s ethics. In and out of journalism.

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Isaac Hayes quits ‘South Park’ after spoof on Scientologists: Creator says ‘he’s cashed plenty of checks with our show making fun of Christians’ (WorldNetDaily, 060314)

Outspoken Scientologist Isaac Hayes, an Oscar-winning singer heard by millions in recent years as the “Chef” character on “South Park,” has quit the cartoon four months after an episode spoofing Scientology.

“There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins,” the 63-year-old soul singer said in a statement.

“Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored,” he continued, never mentioning the Scientology episode, but citing the recent controversy over cartoon depictions of the prophet Muhammad. “As a civil-rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.”

In an interview with the Associated Press, “South Park” co-creator Matt Stone responded sharply, saying, “This is 100% having to do with his faith of Scientology. ... He has no problem – and he’s cashed plenty of checks – with our show making fun of Christians.”

He said he and co-creator Trey Parker “never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin.”

In a previous interview published by ContactMusic.com, Parker said they avoided animated shows about Scientology for years because they didn’t wish to upset Hayes, who gained fame in the 1970s with his song, “Shaft,” from the movie of the same name.

“To be honest, what kept us from doing it before was Isaac Hayes. We knew he was a Scientologist and he’s an awesome guy. We’re like, ‘Let’s just avoid that for now,’” Parker said. “Finally, we just had to tell Isaac, ‘Dude, we totally love working with you, and this is nothing personal, it’s just we’re South Park, and if we don’t do this, we’re belittling everything else we’ve ripped on.’”

The episode that focused on Scientology originally aired on Comedy Central in November, and did not include Hayes’ name in the end credits.

It featured a cartoon boy on the show being mistaken for L. Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction writer who founded the religion. A portion of the show had Scientologists explaining the basic beliefs of the faith, including aliens populating the Earth, with a statement that flashed on screen reading, “This is what Scientologists actually believe.”

The faith has been featured prominently in the media in recent years, with high-profile members including John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Fox News Channel host Greta Van Susteren.

“South Park” became an instant hit after its original animated short in the late 1990s depicted Jesus in a fierce battle against Santa Claus over the meaning of Christmas.

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ABC News Standards And Practices (Townhall.Com, 060404)

By Cal Thomas

Abc news has suspended for one month without pay john green, executive producer of the weekend edition of “good morning america,” because of an e-mail he wrote. I say “an” e-mail, even though green wrote at least two that have recently come to light. More about the second e-mail in a moment.

The first e-mail, published on the drudge report web site, was written by green to a colleague during the first 2004 presidential debate. It said: “are you watching this? Bush makes me sick. If he uses the ‘mixed messages’ line one more time, i’m going to puke.”

When that e-mail became public, green said, “...i regret the embarrassment this story causes abc. It was an inappropriate thing to say and i’m deeply sorry.” Green also apologized to white house communications director nicolle wallace.

The second e-mail was leaked to the new york post and printed last week. In that one, green said former secretary of state madeleine albright should not be booked on the show because “albright has jew shame.” Albright was raised roman catholic, but has a jewish heritage. Green added, “she hates us anyway because she says we promised her five minutes (of air time) and only gave her two... I do not like her.”

For people who believe the broadcast networks are biased and employ mostly people who favor liberal democrats and oppose conservative republicans, abc’s reaction to these e-mails provides additional confirmation. Notice abc did not suspend green after his critical remarks about president bush were published. It acted only after his madeleine albright e-mail surfaced. There appears to be a double standard at abc: one for those who bash conservatives and christians who are republicans and another for those who bash democrats with a jewish heritage.

Last thursday, i served as the unpaid master of ceremonies for the media research center’s “dishonors awards” dinner in washington. The annual event highlights the most outrageous statements by media heavies about republicans, the bush administration, terrorism and other subjects. To see these sound bites presented one after another focuses the mind as nothing else does on the opinionated news that so much broadcast journalism has become.

There was msnbc’s chris matthews praising jane fonda for saying about the vietnam war that it was like states west of the mississippi river attacking states east of the mississippi river and would we like that? Matthews responded, “how do you step out of being an american to make such an objective judgment?”

There was npr’s nina totenberg saying, “it is the first time in my life i have been ashamed of my country,” for what she judged was mistreatment of suspected terrorist prisoners at undisclosed detention centers.

That some hurricane katrina victims had gone to live temporarily with good-hearted, church-going families raised the concern of cbs’s harry smith. Apparently seeking to reach the atheist demographic, smith asked pastor and best-selling author, rick warren, “do i need to be concerned that i’m going to go live with a church family, are they going to proselytize me, are they going to say, ‘you better come to church with me or else, i’m, you know, you’re not going to get your breakfast this morning’?”

Cnn founder ted turner said on his old network that he believes north korea’s despotic leader kim jong-il when he promises not to build nuclear weapons and that while he hasn’t met kim, he’s seen his picture and “he didn’t look too much different than most other people i’ve met.”

An incredulous wolf blitzer noted the way kim treats his own people, which included letting many starve to death. Turner responded, “well, hey, listen. I saw a lot of people over there. They were thin and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars, but—”. The full list of award winners may be found at at mrc.org. It’s worth the visit, especially for those in denial about mainstream media bias.

John green should be reinstated. He and other members of the big media should be encouraged to say what they think, loudly and proudly. Like those labels on bottles, packages and cans at the supermarket, which inform shoppers about their contents, encouraging big media workers to label their ideological insides will benefit news consumers.

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Stylish Washington Post Bias (Townhall.Com, 060405)

By Brent Bozell

The washington post isn’t very good at hiding its feelings about abortion when it lets its political reporters profile the washington elite in their style section. The latest example was a star turn for cecile richards, the new leader of planned parenthood. By gum, she’s a lovable, open, down-to-earth girl, the perfect soccer mom — who also just happens to run a chain of abortion factories.

A few weeks back, reporter darragh johnson began her profile of the new ceo of the nation’s leading abortion provider with sympathy for her personal life. Her mother, former texas gov. Ann richards (the one who taunted president bush in 1988, and then lost to his son in 1994), is undergoing cancer treatment, but she still had advice for her granddaughter’s attire for an interview with cbs for a summer internship. She needs a “new spring suit.” But mom said she would just buy her a new shirt. Johnson also makes sure to mention she’s following the ncaa basketball tournament so she can talk brackets with her husband.

The puff piece ends with richards in a planned parenthood shelter for teenagers in the poor northeastern section of d.c., talking with girls as they make collages out of magazine pictures, and then “playing a serious game of foosball.” The last sentence on cecile: “‘ok,’ she said, still leaning intently over the game, ‘we’ll do one more, then i’m going home to feed my kids.’”

There was no space in this article for critics of richards, or of planned parenthood.

It read a lot like a january post profile of kate michelman, the retiring naral pro-choice america boss and new author. Reporter linton weeks recounted michelman’s standard story of spousal abandonment and how it inspired her hard-left career. Weeks played up her hobbies (cooking “authentically,” and she loves doing the dishes) and her great compassion. As a teen, “her idea of fun, she said, was organizing a christmas tree sale to benefit mexican farm workers in her community.”

There were no critics, just former clinton secretary of state madeleine albright bizarrely claiming that michelman had provided “a voice for those who didn’t have a voice and a brain for those who didn’t have a brain.” It’s probably not a good idea to tout someone who favors an annual assembly line of hundreds of thousands of abortions as speaking for the “voiceless.”

Now, contrast this fawning with the contempt shown on a regular basis by the post for pro-lifers. About 11 months ago, on april 18, 2005, washington post reporter marc leibovich profiled conservative republican sen. Rick santorum of pennsylvania by lining up an army of democrats to say nasty things about him: “bob kerrey once wondered whether santorum is ‘latin for [anus].’ teresa heinz kerry called him ‘forrest gump with an attitude.’ howard dean called him a liar.”

Leibovich’s profile routinely judged santorum with disdain. “santorum’s voice acquires an exaggerated whine,” his anti-clinton antics on the senate floor show an “egregious informality,” and he has the “careening manner of a hyperactive boy.” Leibovich found “santorum’s voice assumes a taunting edge,” even as he protested he was unfairly caricatured as a “sort of nasty, mean, ideological kind of guy.”

How predictable. If the public policy leader is a conservative, and even worse, pro-life, he must be by definition a nasty, mean, ideological kind of guy. But what about liberals who are pro-abortion?

Let’s go back to that cecile richards piece for the answer. She was pitched as a plucky, sympathetic underdog, stuck in a “south dakota bubble,” as the plains state tries to outlaw abortion. If she’s combative, that’s a positive: “she is a veteran democratic political operative with annie lennox hair and a steely, strategic core.”

How does the post navigate around the essence of something as controversial, and in the minds of so many millions, utterly offensive as planned parenthood? Easy. Ignore it. There is no mention of the $265 million (2003-2004) it drew from the federal government for its operation. The paper also ignored the primary focus of this conglomerate’s business: their annual report admits performing 244,628 surgical abortions in that year — compared to issuing 1,774 adoption referrals. (so much for making abortion safe, legal, and rare.)

Most egregiously, post reporter darragh johnson couldn’t even mention that seven women have died from the use of the ru-486 abortion-drug cocktail, four of them at planned parenthood clinics, as they spurned food and drug administration orders on how to administer the drugs properly.

I guess the post needed the room for those heart-warming foosball-before-dinner stories.

Post readers surely enjoy a well-written sketch of washington figures, but these style profiles go beyond the pale, abusing the privilege of artistic license. Ultimately, and sadly, they expose only a media elite that can find cuddliness in a culture of death.

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Why politicians lie, and why we believe them (WorldNetDaily, 060410)

In “The Marketing of Evil” I expose many powerful manipulation techniques used to alter Americans’ attitudes on the vital issues of the day. But there’s one technique that reigns supreme as the king of all propaganda weapons – lying. To make bad stuff look good – and good appear bad – you have to lie about it.

However, there’s much more power inherent in lying – especially in a “big lie” – than we may realize, so let’s take a closer look.

For the current “big lie,” check out Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s blustering accusation that President Bush “leaked” classified information. The administration, Reid insisted Friday, must “tell the American people whether President Bush’s Oval Office is a place where the buck stops or the leaks start.”

The Nevada Democrat was referring, of course, to documents released last week by prosecutors in a CIA leak case which included a statement by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s former chief of staff, that Bush had approved the release of previously classified information in 2003 to bolster the case for the Iraq War.

But now, a whole chorus of Democrats and media personalities are accusing the president – who in the past has come down hard on “leakers” in his administration – of himself “leaking” secret stuff to the press and the public!

In reality, as everyone knows, Bush did nothing whatsoever wrong. More than any other human being, the president of the United States has the power and the right to declassify U.S. government information, which he did – and then authorized its release, first to the New York Times, and then a few days later to the general public. There is simply no rational case to be made that he did anything wrong – presidents do this all the time.

But the tone and innuendo of the accusations against the president make it feel and sound as though Bush “leaked classified information” to the press.

As a result, many people will believe the allegations and the president’s approval ratings will drop a couple more notches.

This latest lie, of course, is an extension of the much larger, ongoing campaign of Democrats claiming the president hyped pre-war intelligence and “lied us into war.” Democrats crave, more than anything in this world or the next, a return to power in the White House and Congress (they already own the courts). And with congressional elections just a few months away, public support for the Iraq War waning and casualties mounting, the Democrats take every opportunity to bash Bush over the war. However, many Democrats – and virtually all of their leaders – enthusiastically supported going to war. So, what to do?

Solution: Claim Bush lied about pre-war intelligence and thus misled them into supporting the invasion.

But there’s a slight problem: The Democrats who are now claiming Bush lied had access to essentially the same intelligence the president did, and they voted to depose Saddam Hussein militarily. So what we’re witnessing is a flagrant attempt at rewriting history. That involves lying.

As U.S. News & World Report’s Michael Barone wrote recently:

Bush, Cheney, and the administration have the truth on their side. Exhaustive and authoritative examinations of the prewar intelligence, by the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004, by the Silberman-Robb commission in 2005, and by the British commission headed by Lord Butler, have established that U.S. intelligence agencies, and the intelligence organizations of leading countries like Britain, France, and Germany, believed that Saddam Hussein’s regime was in possession of or developing weapons of mass destruction – chemical and biological weapons, which the regime had used before, and nuclear weapons, which it was working on in the 1980s.

To the charges that Bush “cherry-picked” intelligence, the commission co-chaired by former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb found that the intelligence available to Bush but not to Congress was even more alarming than the intelligence Congress had. The Silberman-Robb panel also concluded, after a detailed investigation, that in no instance did Bush administration authorities pressure intelligence officials to alter their findings. Much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. But Bush didn’t lie about it.

If Bush didn’t lie, why do his opponents keep saying – over and over and over – that he did?

There’s a tremendous power in lying – much more than most of us comprehend. But the power is not in the little “white lies” that are part of the fabric of most of our lives. It’s in the big lies. It’s a stunningly paradoxical truth, but we’re more likely to believe big lies than small ones.

How can this be? Wouldn’t the big, outrageous lie be more easily discerned and resisted than the small, less consequential lie? You’d think so, but you’d be wrong.

There’s a dark magic in boldly lying, in telling a big lie – repeatedly, with a straight face and with confidence and authority.

One of the greatest liars of the last century – Adolph Hitler – taught that the bigger the lie, the more believable it was.

During WWII, the U.S. government’s Office of Strategic Services – a precursor to today’s CIA – assessed Hitler’s methods this way:

“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”(emphasis added)

In his 1925 autobiography “Mein Kampf,” Hitler – who actually did lie his country into war, and a whole lot more – explained with remarkable insight the fantastic power of lying:

… [I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes. ...

Let’s bring this explanation down to earth with another example: Suppose, right before an election, one candidate accuses his opponent of immoral or illegal behavior. Even if the charges are totally false, and even if the accused answers the charges credibly and effectively, “the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it.” Which means, no matter how effectively the accused candidate answers the charges, some people will still believe he’s guilty, and many others will still retain varying degrees of doubt and uncertainty regarding the accused, who may well lose the election due to the cloud hanging over his head. This, as Hitler said, is the magic of lying that “is known to all expert liars in this world …”

Hitler’s principle is exactly what prominent Democrats, who qualify as some of the “expert liars in this world,” are constantly banking on every time they insist the president of the United States lied America into war.

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Bias to bigotry: CBS in a free-fall (townhall.com, 060419)

by Carey Roberts ( bio | archive )

No matter how you slice it, we have a new contestant in the How-much-can-you-slant-the-news-and-keep-a-straight-face sweepstakes.

Her name is Katie Couric, and in a few short weeks she will sashay into the anchor seat at CBS News. You may remember, she was the first host of a morning talk show to ever broadcast her own colonoscopy.

Whether the issue is abortion, the gender wage gap, or daycare, Couric has always crooned in harmony with the feminist looney-tunes. She credited Madeleine Albright as being a “rock star” and hailed Nancy Pelosi’s ascension to the House leadership with a “you go, girl!”

Or consider a June 2, 1994 interview with Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism?. When Sommers explained that football does not provoke male viewers into a wife-beating frenzy, Katie offered this response: “Let’s say, if one accepts your thesis, that these statistics are inflated or used incorrectly. Aren’t you worried about throwing the baby out with the bath water?. . . Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to be dismissing the problem all together if you refute that, or if you constantly criticize that?”

So Katie let the cat out of the bag – when feminists make their grandiose claims about brutish patriarchs and downtrodden women, they don’t believe a single word of what they’re saying. It’s just that telling the truth would be tantamount to “dismissing the problem all together.”

In 1991, Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court. When feminist Anita Hill switched her testimony, senator Arlen Specter remarked on her lack of credibility. Nine years later, Katie was still seething.

So on March 6, 2000 she invited Specter to her program and then proceeded to rake him over the coals: “You know you, you angered a lot of feminists when you accused Anita Hill. In fact, you detailed how she changed her testimony during questioning, during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. And you accused of her publicly, quote, ‘Flat out perjury.’ Any regrets?”

Always on the look-out to find sexism where none exists, Ms. Couric invited Time magazine managing editor Jim Kelly to her show on December 22, 2003. Waving the magazine’s Person of the Year issue, Kate demanded, “Tell me why you all decided to honor the American soldier? Wondering why there’s no woman on the cover, too?”

When Kelly pointed out the uniformed woman on the front, Couric began to trot out her pre-scripted answer, only to realize too late that she had goofed: “Oh, there you go….oh sorry....I couldn’t tell because of her helmet.”

But it was a segment she did on February 8 last year that most exposed her feminist-socialist leanings. The piece featured a taped interview with Gloria Steinem, the godmother of radical feminism.

This was Couric’s best line: “While nearly as many women are now in the workforce as men, they are still paid less. About 76 cents for every dollar a man makes.” Of course Couric was raking in $13 million that year, plus incentive provisions and syndication fees. Yes, Katie knows all about the oppression of women in the workplace.

Katie is not just a perky cheerleader for the latest feminist cause-de-jour; she has a history of being an unrepentant gender bigot.

In a November 1997 interview of Nicole Contos, the cast-off bride of Tasos Michael, Couric asked Contos, “Have you considered castration as an option?”

Katie, I know of women who have gotten cold feet at the last minute. So will you be asking their jilted bridegrooms, “Have you considered vulvectomy as an option?”

Just a month later on December 15, Couric reported that commercials directed at men are simple-minded, compared to those aimed at women. That’s because women are capable of more complex thought, according to Katie.

But above all, Katie Couric is the lead pom-pom girl for team Hillary. After Mrs. Clinton released her book in 2003, Couric ran a five-part series to commemorate the event. When Hillary invented the story about daughter Chelsea barely escaping a firey death in Battery Park on 9/11, Katie sympathized, “At that moment, she was not just a senator, but a concerned parent.”

Tissue, please.

So as Katie Couric takes over at CBS News and Hillary revs up her presidential campaign, get ready for more fawning interviews, tear-jerker stories, and good ol’ fashioned tall tales.

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The political Pulitzers (townhall.com, 060426)

by Brent Bozell

The recent unveiling of the Pulitzer Prizes had more of the same politicized whiff that the Oscars oozed earlier this year. Merit is taking a back seat now to “edginess” in both the news and entertainment media. “Speaking truth to power” is in vogue, even if it’s not true and even if it’s not in the public interest.

The roster of Pulitzer winners had an unmistakable get-Bush smell to them, especially Dana Priest’s exposing secret prisons in Europe for terrorists in the Washington Post, and James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s NSA-surveillance exposure in the New York Times. The Pulitzers have a prize for Public Service, but these leaks in the War on Terror might better deserve an award for Public Endangerment. As Bill Bennett put it, many Americans think it’s odd that on these stories, “the leaker can be prosecuted, but the person who wrote it down, told every citizen about it, and told every enemy of every citizen of this country gets a Pulitzer Prize.”

There were other awards. The Washington Post won for exposing the offenses of lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Nothing wrong with that except for this: Notice that Post reporters like Susan Schmidt, whose work on the Abramoff beat won an award this year, never won a Pulitzer for dogged investigations and scoops they unearthed in the Clinton years.

In fact, if you look back through the eight years of the Clintons, you’d be incredibly hard-pressed to find more than one Pulitzer awarded for exposing the ever-bubbling Clinton scandals. In 1999, a New York Times team (including ace investigator Jeff Gerth) won for disclosing the “corporate sale of American technology to China, with U.S. government approval.” Columnist Maureen Dowd won that year for her Lewinsky-era columns, but they attacked all sides with equal vigor. She railed against Ken Starr for “dragging us down to the point where we have to hear the sex secrets of crepuscular Republican swamp life” like Rep. Dan Burton.

Even the lesser Pulitzer prizes this year carried a political tinge. Feature photography winner Todd Heisler of the Rocky Mountain News won for “his haunting, behind-the-scenes look at funerals for Colorado Marines who return from Iraq in caskets,” it being too difficult, I suppose, to capture visuals of dramatic, front-line scenes of Colorado Marines performing acts of heroism.

Editorial cartooning winner Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution won for “simple but piercing” cartoons like Bush and Cheney saying, “we’ve turned the corner” in Iraq — from “Incompetence” to “Fantasy,” and another with Bush telling Daffy Duck he’s doing a “heckuva job” with bird-flu planning. One had Cheney writing Virginia that yes, there is a Santa Claus, and she’s an “unpatriotic, @#$!$* liar for questioning it!”

Another knee-slapper cartoon pictured the American bus being tail-down in the water with all the whites in the top of the bus breathing air, and the “back of the bus” under water, full of drowning blacks. Socially liberal sketches mocking the Catholic Church and “intelligent design” advocates were also in the packet of honored cartoons. Not one mocked a Democrat.

Perhaps the most audacious award for conservative-bashing-over-merit is the Criticism prize for Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan, who tried to turn heart patient Dick Cheney’s wearing a parka to an Auschwitz ceremony into an international incident. She also demeaned the family outfits of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts when his nomination was announced. “His wife and children stood before the cameras, groomed and glossy in pastel hues — like a trio of Easter eggs, a handful of Jelly Bellies, three little Necco wafers.” Little wafers? If the Roberts family were not white, that line would have started a major ruckus over “dehumanizing” portrayals.

Meanwhile, when it came to assessing Saddam Hussein’s courtroom suits, she glossed right over the 148 deaths he admitted and talked about how he was in danger of looking “jaunty and rakish” like Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin, a Las Vegas lounge act. There’s a great word for this kind of politicized fashion criticism: shallow. It doesn’t deserve prizes. It deserves to be fish wrap.

The Pulitzer judges are not measuring the degree of talent in the journalistic means, but only the political ends they accomplish. Bush-haters are still trying to ride the NSA-surveillance story to the impeachment of the president they despise. After years like these, Americans shouldn’t see the Pulitzer Prizes as awards for merit. They should be seen as merely the media’s endorsements of fashionable left-wing political causes and outcomes, where the rightness of the stories matters less than the rightness of the target selection.

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Tehran’s useful idiots? (Washington Times, 060605)

During its 20th-century struggles for world domination, international communism periodically benefited from the naivete and willful ignorance of some in the Western media, who foolishly portrayed totalitarians as agrarian reformers and social democrats. During the 1930s, for example, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles falsely depicting Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as a reformer while ignoring his responsibility for the murders of tens of millions of people. Similarly, beginning in the late 1950s, New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews made then-Cuban guerrilla leader Fidel Castro out to be an advocate of democracy; Matthews persisted in depicting Mr. Castro this way even after it became apparent that he was a Marxist-Leninist intent on becoming a dictator.

Judging from some of the recent front-page coverage of Iran’s Holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the NYT and The Washington Post, the specter of Durantyism is alive and well. Last Sunday, for example, the Times’ page one, above-the-fold story by Michael Slackman suggested that the Iranian leader has been misunderstood: His real concerns are coming to grips with “a system of conservative clerical rule that has lost credibility with the public”; negotiating with the United States; and fighting “wealthy people” who are making life difficult for “poor people” inside Iran. And never mind all that negative reporting elsewhere in the press about the regime’s insistence that women wear the veil, or the vigilante harassment they are subject to if they are thought to be “immodestly” dressed. Mr. Ahmadinejad is in the vanguard of the fight for social equality, opposing the vigilantes and fighting to permit women to enter stadiums.

To be sure, Mr. Ahmadinejad has a few eccentricities, according to the Times: He apparently became so upset that jokes about his personal hygiene were being exchanged via text messages on cellphones that he decided to “punish” cellphone system managers for permitting this to happen. And there is his preoccupation with Jews. But not to worry, the Times reminds us, this is just a part of his campaign to create a “new identity” for his countrymen. As one Iranian pol put it: “Being against Jews and Zionists is an essential part of this new identity.”

If anything, Karl Vick of The Washington Post was even more sycophantic in a front-page piece about the Iranian president that ran two days ago. Mr. Vick pointed out that the Jews (among them the backward-thinking Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert) believe Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments about wiping out the Jewish state suggest he is a very dangerous man. The rest of the article is largely devoted to rebutting Mr. Olmert by showing, as Mr. Vick puts it, that Mr. Ahmadinejad is a “caring” person who works 17-hour days looking for ways to help the Iranian people obtain better housing and assist the mentally disabled.

As the Iranian nuclear crisis worsens, look for more of the same from the mainstream media.

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Help for Americans (townhall.com, 060607)

by Walter E. Williams

John Stossel, ABC’s “20/20” anchorman, has a recently released book about the various untruths we accept, many from the media and academic elite. The book is appropriately titled “Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity.”

Being a longtime media insider, Stossel is well positioned to talk about the media’s gross lack of understanding that often becomes part of the conventional wisdom. Stossel gives many examples; let’s look at a few.

We’re sometimes presented with television scenes of starving people, and it’s often blamed on overpopulation. Ted Turner warned, “There are lots of problems in the world caused by too many people.” News articles warn of “the population bomb” and the “tidal wave of humanity,” and people call for subsidies for birth control.

Stossel says that one writer, worrying about Niger, said that birthrates must be reduced drastically or the world will face permanent famine. Viewers and readers are left with the idea that the problem is the number of people, but that’s nonsense. Niger’s population density is nine people per square kilometer; however, population density in the United States is 28 per square kilometer, Japan 340, the Netherlands 484, and Hong Kong 6,621. One would have to be brain-dead to argue that high population density causes poverty and starvation. A better argument is oppressive and corrupt governments.

Click to learn more...

Outsourcing destroys good jobs, and the new jobs created are inferior hamburger-flipping jobs. This myth is created by the likes of CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who said, “This country has lost the ability to feed and to clothe itself, to build its own automobiles, to provide its appliances, its electronics, its computers.” CNN correspondent Lisa Sylvester chimes, “The United States has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs.”

First, since 1992 there’s been a loss of 391 million jobs; however, during those years, America created 411 million new jobs, for a net gain of 20 million. A Dartmouth University Tuck School of Business study found that companies that send jobs abroad ended up hiring twice as many workers at home. Most new jobs created are higher-paid.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that two-thirds of the 30 fastest-growing occupations require high-skilled workers such as environmental engineers, software engineers, and service jobs in education and health care. As to the gripe about the loss of manufacturing jobs, I wonder how many textile workers ever wished to themselves, “I hope my little girl grows up to be a sewing machine operator”? I’m guessing their wish is their little girl becomes a nurse, a teacher or an accountant, all service jobs.

Hardly a day goes by without some kind of warning that mankind’s use of fossil fuels, especially in the U.S., is causing global warming. Stossel looks at the numbers. Half of this century’s global warming happened between 1900 and 1945. Stossel asks, “If man is responsible, why wasn’t there much more warming in the second half of the century? We burned much more fuel during that time.”

By the way, if there’s global warming, it might be a godsend. According to Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, added carbon dioxide helps plants grow. Warmer winters give farmers a longer growing season, and the warming might end the droughts in the Sahara desert.

There’s another consideration. For the past 800,000 years, there have been periods of approximately 100,000 years called Ice Ages, followed by a period of 10,000 years, a period called Interglacial, followed by another Ice Age. We’re about 10,500 years into the present Interglacial period, namely, we’re 500 years overdue for another Ice Age. If indeed mankind’s activity contributes to the planet’s warming, we might postpone the coming Ice Age.

John Stossel’s “Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity” exposes the false basis for the public fright often caused by an uninformed media and academic elite. Exposure is precisely what’s needed because politicians use public fright as a means to gain greater control over our lives.

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Explosive facts (townhall.com, 060607)

by Thomas Sowell

Each year about this time, some parents write in to ask for suggestions of things for their children to read during the summer, in order to counteract the steady diet of liberal-left indoctrination they have been getting in schools and colleges.

This year there is a new book that is almost tailor-made for that purpose. Its title is “Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies” by Gregory Jackson. In it, all sorts of political and media spin are shot to pieces by hard facts.

If you think that the Constitution of the United States provides for “separation of church and state,” that George W. Bush is not as smart as either Al Gore or John Kerry, or that the big-money donors to political campaigns give more to the Republicans than to the Democrats, this book provides documented facts showing the opposite.

The book goes literally from A to Z, with 26 chapters covering subjects from abortion to zealots who are terrorists.

Some of the facts cited are historical facts and some are statistical. Among the historical facts is that there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution about a “separation of church and state,” despite how often that phrase has been repeated in the media, in politics, and even in courts of law.

Over the years, liberal judges have twisted the First Amendment’s phrase about “free exercise of religion” to mean the opposite — that you are not free to exercise your religion if atheists or members of non-Christian religions say that they are offended.

Whatever the best social policy might be as regards Christmas displays or the use of vouchers in parochial schools, none of this is banned by the Constitution. Some judges, however, use the Constitution as a blank check, authorizing them to ban whatever they don’t like and call it Constitutional law.

President Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him and innumerable others who are out of favor among liberals, has repeatedly been depicted as such a mental lightweight that he is not in the same league with brilliant guys like Al Gore and John Kerry.

The fact is that George W. Bush and John Kerry both went to Yale, where Bush had a higher grade-point average. Bush also scored higher than Kerry on intelligence tests that both took in the military. Gore went to Harvard, where he finished in the bottom fifth of his class two years in a row.

Grades and test scores are not everything. But they are something — and those who are convinced that their guys are way smarter have no hard facts at all to back up this widely and fervently believed notion.

The cold fact is that anyone who spouts the liberal line is likely to be depicted as sophisticated, if not brilliant, and anyone who opposes it is likely to be considered dull, if not stupid, in the liberal media.

The grand political fallacy of the age is that the Republicans are the party of wealth, while the Democrats are the party of compassion for the little guy. This is something that has been assumed and repeated so often that it has become a “well-known fact” without any hard evidence being asked for or given.

In the 2000 elections, the counties that voted for Bush had a smaller percentage of their population with annual incomes over $100,000 than the counties that voted for Gore. The Bush counties also had a higher percentage of their population earning under $30,000 a year.

It has become axiomatic in the liberal media that big-money donors give most of that big money to the Republicans. But the hard data show that the top ten donors to political campaigns gave far more to the Democrats, with the lone exception being the National Association of Realtors, who gave 50% to the Democrats and 49% to the Republicans.

“Racism” is the trump card in the indictment of Republicans. But the cold fact is that the whole Jim Crow era in the South was dominated by Democrats. A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for civil rights legislation.

Bill Clinton’s cabinet consisted overwhelmingly of white males while Bush’s cabinet has been the most ethnically diverse in history.

But who cares about facts any more?

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What economic boom? (townhall.com, 060607)

by Brent Bozell

In Washington these days, all eyes are directed to the White House as literally the center of the political universe. President Bush’s job approval rating is the benchmark by which the left measures his clout — and by contrast, its own. When he is brought low, it means they are having a good year.

This is especially true for the national news media, which can barely refrain from a collective self-satisfied smirk these days. But here’s the funny thing. Nobody looks at their approval rating. A Harris poll in February found that only 25% said they have a “great deal of confidence” in the White House — but only 19% had great confidence in TV news, and only 14% for “the press” in general.

Why is this so? Perhaps the smirk is more noticeable than they thought. The public can’t help but see the media bend and shape the “news” like Play-Doh into whatever bizarre shapes please them most.

Take the economy, which is performing superbly. The objective truth about economic performance must be obscured. It might help Bush’s approval rating. For the last several months, the economy has been measured not by gross national product, unemployment, productivity or inflation in general — all of them traditional litmus tests. It’s been driven by the price of a single well-advertised commodity: gasoline. Between April 12 and May 2, we counted a stunning 183 news stories on gas prices aired on ABC, CBS and NBC.

Some media outlets have made a spectacle of themselves (even in liberal media circles) for greeting good economic news with petulant denial, like kindergarteners singing playground songs at full volume with their index fingers in their ears. Exhibit A is CBS, and not just because they have specialized in stories about how “skyrocketing” gas prices are going to cost senior citizens their Meals on Wheels. There’s more.

As June arrived, the government announced that the unemployment rate had fallen a tenth of a point to 4.6%, the lowest level since July 2001. Substitute anchor Russ Mitchell was sent forth to declare the awful news: “There are new signs this evening that the economy is slowing down.” Reporter Anthony Mason added that “rising interest rates and rising gas prices are beginning to put the brakes on the U.S. economy.”

Mason wasn’t reporting facts. He was rubbing a crystal ball. He didn’t find time to report that this was the 33rd consecutive month in which the economy has added jobs, with 730,000 net new jobs created since the start of the year. His conclusion was even gloomier: “One major builder reported a nearly 30% drop in new orders for the past two months. Now that ripples right through the economy. Buying slows, then building slows, then hiring slows. And that, Russ, is why the economy is slowing.” Notice he didn’t say economic growth was slowing. He said the economy was slowing, which suggests a recession to the audience.

But wait. Didn’t the government just readjust its estimate of economic growth in the first quarter to a raging 5.3%, the fastest growth rate in a two and a half years? That announcement came on May 25. CBS’s evening newscast didn’t find any time for that number. CBS began with the Enron guilty verdicts; veterans’ identity theft; the allegations of Marine malfeasance at Haditha; the congressional fuss over the search of corrupt Congressman Bill Jefferson’s (D-La.) office; Pope Benedict in Poland; and finally, people who travel the highways in an RV.

Six days after that glaring omission, CBS White House reporter Jim Axelrod finally mentioned the 5.3% growth rate, but he treated the number as just more ineffective White House happy talk. In a report on new Treasury Secretary designate Henry Paulson, Axelrod said the Bush team needed a salesman for the economy: “No matter how much they trumpet 5.3% economic growth in the first quarter, 5.2 million more jobs since August 2003, or unemployment down to 4.7%, there’s another number to contend with. In the most recent CBS News poll, just 34% approved of the president’s handling of the economy.”

Axelrod didn’t have the talent for introspection to wonder if CBS’s pattern of hyping the bad news and excluding the good news may play a role in that approval rating. He could only wonder, in celebration of the networks’ bad-news thumbscrews, why anyone would want the treasury secretary’s job in this struggling administration. (He also didn’t wonder out loud why anyone would want to be a White House reporter covering a lame-duck president for a third-place evening newscast.)

CBS’s reporting on the economy shows why Americans are correct when they don’t place a “great deal of confidence” in the “news” manufacturers. When it comes to the economy, more trust could be placed in Ken Lay and Enron.

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Protest rally targets N.Y. Times Building: Groundswell of anger at paper’s exposure of secret anti-terror program (WorldNetDaily, 060704)

More than a half-dozen groups are leading a rally at the New York Times headquarters to protest the newspaper’s publishing of stories exposing national security intelligence programs.

The demonstration Monday at West 43rd Street in New York City is sponsored by Caucus for America, Free Republic, Congress for Racial Equality, Protest Warriors, New York Young Republican Club, Brownstone Republican Club and others.

As WND reported, the D.C. Chapter of the popular web forum FreeRepublic.com and watchdog Accuracy in Media were at the paper’s Washington bureau yesterday calling for the prosecution of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Executive Editor Bill Keller and reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau for “giving aid and comfort to al-Qaida.”

The organizers of Monday’s rally ask Americans, “Do you want our national security to be in the hands of a bunch of smug New York Times egotists?”

“If you cherish our freedoms of press and speech and are sick of New York Times editors acting as if they’re the unelected leaders of America, show up and let them hear you!”

Despite pleadings from the federal government and Democrat and Republican members of the 9-11 Commission, the Times recently published a report detailing lawful surveillance of international banking transactions that was employed to prevent terror attacks.

The report followed the Times’ publication last year exposing the federal government’s National Security Agency surveillance of international-based phone and electronic communications aimed at preventing terror attacks. The Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the story.

U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., has called for the New York Times and other newspapers to be indicted for their reports on the secret financial-monitoring program.

“We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,” King told the Associated Press.

King, who serves as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he would contact Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging him to “begin an investigation and prosecution of the New York Times – the reporters, the editors and the publisher.”

Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, said at the time that editors listened to the government’s argument for withholding the information, but “remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told AP the paper acted responsibly, both in last week’s report and the December wiretap issue.

“Its pretty clear to me that in this story and in the story last December that the New York Times did not act recklessly. They try to do whatever they can to take into account whatever security concerns the government has and they try to behave responsibly,” Dalglish said. “I think in years to come that this is a story American citizens are going to be glad they had, however this plays out.”

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Biased reporting (townhall.com, 060712)

By Thomas Sowell

The same newspapers and television news programs that are constantly reminding us that some people under indictment “are innocent until proven guilty” are nevertheless hyping the story of American troops accused of rape in Iraq, day in and day out, even though these troops have yet to be proven guilty of anything.

What about all the civilian rapes that are charged — and even proven — in the United States? None of them gets this 24/7 coverage in the mainstream media.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example of media hype of unproven charges against American troops. While military action was still raging in the early days of the Iraq war, there was media condemnation of our troops for not adequately protecting an Iraqi museum from which various items were missing.

When the smoke of battle cleared, it turned out that members of the museum staff had hidden these items for safekeeping during the fighting.

Then there was the incident when a Marine shot a terrorist who was pretending to be asleep and the media turned that into a big scandal until an investigation revealed how these and other tricks used by terrorists had cost the lives of American troops in Iraq.

None of the brutal beheadings of innocent hostages taken by terrorists in Iraq — and videotaped for distribution throughout the Middle East — has aroused half the outrage in the mainstream media as unsubstantiated charges made by terrorists imprisoned in Guantanamo.

Nor have most of the media become any more skeptical about charges made by these cutthroats in Guantanamo after the claim that copies of the Koran had been flushed down the toilet at that prison turned out to be a lie.

The idea of trying to flush any book down a toilet ought to have raised suspicions but much of the media treats statements by terrorists and their supporters as true and any denials of wrongdoing by American troops as false and “a coverup.”

These are the same liberal media people who claim to be “honoring our troops” when they hype every casualty and make a big production of each landmark death, such as the 1000th American killed in Iraq and then the 2000th.

The multiple-page spread in the New York Times and similarly elaborate coverage of these landmark deaths on liberal television programs show that they had been preparing for these particular deaths for some time.

They may well be disappointed if we don’t reach the 3000th American death, since the terrorists have shifted their attacks and now target primarily Iraqi civilians.

We all need to understand the fraudulence of the claim that these media liberals who have been against the military for decades and who have missed no opportunity to smear the military in Iraq are now in the forefront of “honoring” our troops by rubbing our noses in their deaths, day in and day out.

Troops who have won medals for bravery in battle — including one soldier who won a Congressional Medal of Honor at the cost of his life — go unmentioned in most of the mainstream media that is focused on our troops as casualties that they can exploit.

A recent study by the Media Research Center found that the three big broadcast news networks — CBS, ABC, and NBC — ran 99 stories in 3 and 1/2 hours about the investigation of charges against Marines in the death of Iraqi civilians in Haditha last November.

These remain unproven charges in a country where people on the side of the terrorists include civilian women and children who set off bombs to kill American troops and who can set off lies to discredit those that they do not kill.

But the same networks that lavished 3 and 1/2 hours of coverage of these unproven charges gave less than one hour of coverage of all the American troops who have won medals for bravery under fire.

Every newspaper and every television commentator has a right to criticize any aspect of the war in Iraq or anywhere else. But when they claim to be reporting the news, that does not mean filtering out whatever goes against their editorial views and hyping unsubstantiated claims that discredit the troops.

Those troops deserve the presumption of innocence at least as much as anyone else.

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N.Y. Times: Better dead than read (Townhall.com, 060713)

By Ann Coulter

When I told a New York Observer reporter that my only regret was that Timothy McVeigh didn’t hit The New York Times building, I knew many would agree with me — but I didn’t expect that to include The New York Times. And yet, the Times is doing everything in its power to help the terrorists launch another attack on New York City.

As with forced school busing, liberals seem to believe that the consequences of their insane ideas can be confined to the outer boroughs.

Last year, the Times revealed a top secret program tracking phone calls connected to numbers found in Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s cell phone. How much more probable cause do you need, folks? Shall we do this as a diagram? How about in the form of an SAT question — or is that a touchy subject for the publisher of the Times? “9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is to terrorist attacks as ...”?

Their reaction to al-Zarqawi’s death was to lower the U.S. flag at the Times building to half-staff. (Ha ha — just kidding! Everybody knows there aren’t any American flags at The New York Times.)

And most recently, ignoring the pleas of the administration, 9/11 commissioners and even certifiable liberal Rep. Jack Murtha, the Times revealed another top secret program that had allowed the Treasury Department to track terrorists’ financial transactions.

We’re in a battle for our survival and we don’t even know who the enemy is. As liberals are constantly reminding us, Islam is a “Religion of Peace.” One very promising method of distinguishing the “Religion of Peace” Muslims from the “Slit Their Throats” Muslims is by following the al-Qaida money trail.

But now we’ve lost that ability — thanks to The New York Times.

People have gotten so inured to ridiculous behavior on the left that they are no longer capable of appropriate outrage when something truly treasonous happens. It is rather like the rape accusation against Bill Clinton losing its impact because of the steady stream of perjury, obstruction of justice, treason, adultery and general sociopathic behavior coming from that administration.

This is a phenomenon known in the self-help community as “Clinton fatigue” (not to be confused with the lower back pain associated with excessive sexual activity known as “Clinton back”).

In December 1972, Ronald Reagan called President Richard Nixon after watching Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the Vietnam War on “CBS News,” telling Nixon that “under World War II circumstances, the network would have been charged with treason.”

No treason charges were brought, but we still have to hear liberals carrying on about Nixon’s monstrous persecution of the press — which was so ungrateful of him, considering how nicely the press treated him.

Today, Times editors and columnists are doing what liberals always do when they’re caught red-handed committing treason: They scream that they’re being “intimidated” before hurling more invective. This is getting to be like listening to the Soviet Union complaining about the intimidation coming from Finland.

Liberals are always play-acting that they are under some monstrous attack from the right wing as they insouciantly place all Americans in danger. Their default position is umbrage, bordering on high dudgeon.

We’ve had to listen to them whine for 50 years about the brute Joe McCarthy, whose name liberals blackened while sheltering Soviet spies.

In 1985, Times columnist Anthony Lewis accused the Reagan administration of trying to “intimidate the press.” Channeling Anthony Lewis this week, Frank Rich claims the Bush administration has “manufactured and milked this controversy to reboot its intimidation of the press, hoping journalists will pull punches in an election year.”

Rich’s evidence of the brutal crackdown on the press was the statement of San Francisco radio host Melanie Morgan — who, by the way, is part of the press — proposing the gas chamber for the editor of the Times if he were found guilty of treason, which happens to be the punishment prescribed by law. (Once again Frank Rich finds himself in over his head when not writing about gay cowboy movies.)

I prefer a firing squad, but I’m open to a debate on the method of execution. A conviction for treason would be assured under any sensible legal system.

But however many Americans agree with Reagan on prosecuting treason, we can’t even get President Bush to stop building up the liberal media by appearing on their low-rated TV shows — in the process, dissing TV hosts who support him and command much larger TV audiences. American consumers keep driving CNN’s ratings down, and then Bush drives them back up again. So I wouldn’t count on any treason charges emanating from this administration.

This is how Bush “intimidates” the press? The level of intimidation I had in mind is more along the lines of how President Dwight D. Eisenhower “intimidated” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg at 8 in the morning, June 19, 1953.

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Speak Out or Give In? (Christian Post, 060801)

By Chuck Colson

There they go again. The liberal media, it seems, likes nothing better than to play up what they see (or create) as divisions in the evangelical ranks. This Sunday’s NEW YORK TIMES featured a front-page story about Gregory Boyd, an evangelical pastor in Minnesota who is highly critical of the religious right and refuses to talk about abortion or other cultural war issues from his pulpit.

The article paints him in heroic terms, willing to stand against the tide. It quotes other Christian leaders who support him, but none of those who might give the other point of view. It seems if you want to get into the NEW YORK TIMES these days, all you’ve got to do is bash conservative evangelicals.

The NEW YORK TIMES quotes [KH: liberal] Pastor Boyd attacking “the ‘hypocrisy and pettiness’ of Christians who focus on ‘sexual issues’ like homosexuality, abortion, or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl” two years ago. “These are buttons,” he said, “you push if you want to get Christians to act.”

Sadly, a lot of evangelicals believe this kind of propaganda. And since we are acquiring this negative image, we ought to abandon moral issues and adopt Boyd’s position. Particularly some younger evangelicals are suggesting that we stay away from divisive issues like abortion and homosexuality altogether and just go back and be like the first-century Church — stay out of politics, tend to our spiritual knitting.

I wonder what early Church they are talking about. Take just the issue of abortion. The early Church was outspokenly pro-life right from the beginning just as the Jews had been. In the second chapter of the DIDACHE, one of the first discipleship books for young Christians written in the first century, was this stern injunction: “Thou shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.” Justin Martyr wrote about this in his first apology. And in the second century, Athenagoras wrote a plea to Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “We say that women that use drugs to bring abortion commit murder and will have to give an account to God for the abortion.” And you can be sure that that was not a hot-button issue then.

Note that the early Church was not afraid to call abortion murder. Tony Snow, the president’s press secretary, got roughed up badly last week for doing just that.

Now, Boyd is a good scholar. I was impressed with a book he wrote some years ago when he was on the Bethel Seminary faculty - although I took sharp issue with his embrace of open theology. But I think he ought to go back and refresh himself on the early history of his own church.

And as for his argument that we like these hot-button issues to gain support, let the record show that Christians did not bring these issues into public life. All the culture war issues today stem back to ROE v. WADE when the Supreme Court, by the stroke of a pen, invalidated all of the state laws in America that had been worked out through deliberate democratic debate.

Life issues, you see, go to the very heart of the Gospel, which is why the first-century Church cared so passionately. And we can do no less today. The Church does not just have the right to speak about it; it has the duty to do so.

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Open letter to the mainstream media (townhall.com, 060809)

By Ben Shapiro

Dear mainstream media,

I understand why you report as you do in both the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and the larger war on terror. You believe journalism requires a sort of elegant moral relativism, that telling “both sides of the story” is a necessary prerequisite to “objective” journalism. You don’t believe that there can be an objective right or wrong; if you were reporting World War II today, you’d feel obligated to speak to front-line Japanese and Nazi soldiers and discuss the Allies’ disproportionate response to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Poland.

Since you don’t believe in right and wrong, you also don’t believe in a bright-line distinction between truth and falsehood. Terrorists are just as believable as American and Israeli officials. Everyone has an equally valid perspective on the truth. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that terrorists are more than willing to fabricate juicy stories you can print on page one. “Terrorist Kills Civilians” simply doesn’t have the same shock value as “American Soldiers Murder Family,” even if the second headline is a complete and utter canard. It’s easier to win a Pulitzer when you use the fertile imagination of terrorists as reliable sources.

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to offer some advice. It is quite obvious that you do not understand some basic concepts with regard to war. It is also obvious that you do not understand some basic concepts with regard to the state of the world. If you take any of this advice to heart, you may lose your shot at a Pulitzer — but you may restore your own usefulness.

Lesson #1: In a war, civilians die and civilian property is destroyed. Since the days of Napoleon, armies have routinely drawn support from civilian populations. There is no way to win a war without also devastating a certain amount of the civilian population. The more popular the enemy force, the more devastation is necessary. We didn’t simply defeat the Japanese military in World War II — we absolutely devastated Japan’s ability to make war.

Lesson #2: Terrorists are not fools. They recognize that you are unwilling to accept Lesson #1. They therefore melt into the civilian population, knowing that humane forces (read: American and Israeli) will attempt to avoid civilian casualties. If, however, humane forces have no choice but to kill civilians in order to kill terrorists, terrorists can rely on your sympathy.

Lesson #3: Islamists dissemble. You may love the stories Islamists tell, but don’t rely on their truthfulness. You made complete fools of yourselves at Qana after listening to the Syrian-run Lebanese government and Hezbollah terrorists. You made fools of yourselves in Jenin in 2002 after listening to Palestinian Arabs complain of a nonexistent massacre by Israeli forces. “War is deceit,” Mohammed stated. Take him at his word.

Lesson #4: Don’t expect Muslim journalists from the Middle East to objectively report about Israel or America. Verify first. Trust later. Adnan Hajj is Lebanese, yet Reuters had him taking photos of the current conflict. They were shocked — shocked! — to learn he had blatantly altered those photos to make Israel’s campaign look more brutal. Charles Johnson, who exposed Hajj’s falsifications, received a death threat from another Reuters employee, who used the e-mail address “zionistpig”: “I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut.” I’m willing to give odds the sender is Muslim. Any takers?

Lesson #5: Terrorists can read. When you reveal national security secrets during a time of war, assume that you are probably getting American soldiers and American civilians killed.

Lesson #6: War is not about proportionality. Knitting is about proportionality. War is about winning.

Lesson #7: Hatred is not a synonym for justification. Don’t pretend that because Islamists hate us, they are justified in that hatred. Yes, Islamists hate America and Israel. So what? Nazis weren’t particularly fond of Jews. Just because one group hates another group doesn’t mean the first group is justified in its hatred.

I hope you take some of this advice to heart. Now that would be front-page news.

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The Reuterization of war journalism (townhall.com, 060809)

By Michelle Malkin

“What’s the big deal over a little faked smoke?” That seems to be the prevailing attitude among media pooh-bahs irked by bloggers who exposed the crude Photoshoppery of a Reuters photographer over the weekend. The cameraman, prolific Lebanese stringer and chronicler of Hizballah Adnan Hajj, was fired.

But the black cloud of truth-distorting photo fakery, jihadi-sympathizing news staging and sloppy photo captioning in the Middle East hangs over American journalism thicker than anything Hajj could conjure.

Charles Johnson of littlegreenfootballs.com, who was instrumental in debunking the faked National Guard memos that disgraced CBS News and Dan Rather during the 2004 presidential election, led an Army of Myth Busters who exposed Hajj’s digital cloning of smoke clouds over a Beirut bombing scene. The Jawa Report (mypetjawa.mu.nu), another War on Terror blog, dissected a second Hajj photo of cloned flare smoke in an image of an Israeli F-16 fighter jet over the skies of Lebanon. A Reuters caption falsely identified the manipulated flares as “missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh.” My video news site, HotAir.com, continues to track the latest developments.

The Internet graphics expert brigade zeroed in on an obvious Photoshop technique used in the billows of Hajj’s smoke known as the clone stamp tool. It’s also known as the rubber stamp tool, fitting for a news service that seems to have made its mark rubber stamping pro-Hizballah propaganda. Indeed, the day after Reuters ‘fessed up to the doctored photos, the wire service falsely blamed the Israeli Defense Forces for bombing a funeral procession, according to Arutz Sheva.

Hajj provided perhaps the lamest excuse in photojournalistic history for his image manipulation since Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” rationalization — telling his bosses that he was quote trying to “remove dust marks and that he made mistakes due to the bad lighting conditions he was working under.” Among his many other dubious shots: several Hizballah-embedded images, an artfully burning Koran and an iconic photo of a dead child paraded around Qana by unknown handlers.

Watch now for braying, rationalizing and messenger-shooting from the journalistic elite. You will hear them complain about the bloodthirsty blog mob. You will see MSM editors rally around Reuters and dismiss this debacle as a lone event. Adnan Hajj, the new international Jayson Blair/Mike Barnicle/Janet Cooke/Mary Mapes/Walter Duranty, will end up with a book contract and a job at Al Jazeera. Media veterans will hope that their professional apathy will snuff out probing questions like baking soda on a pan fire. After all, it’s “old news” already.

In a sense, they are right. Whether from sloppiness, laziness, incompetence or ideological bias, American journalists have played dupes or worse to jihadi propagandists for decades. Just a few weeks ago, a New York Times photography editor raved over her photographer Joao Silva’s image of an al-Sadr army sniper posing in a window firing at U.S. troops. “Incredible courage,” she panted. It’s not clear whether she was talking about the photographer or the terrorist. The Associated Press has failed to respond to my repeated questions about one of its Iraqi stringers, Bilal Hussein, who was detained by the U.S. military in April after being captured in a Ramadi building with a cache of weapons, according to my sources. Hussein was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photography team.

From the fake “massacre” in Jenin, to the false accusations against Israel in the shooting of Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura, to the dissemination of “Pallywood” terrorist video productions, to the false labeling of executed Shiite fishermen in a Haditha sports stadium as victims of U.S. Marines, the Reuterization of war journalism goes far beyond Reuters.

Reuters can kill a few pictures, but it does not kill persistent doubts about the American media’s ability to cover this war through anything but a distorted lens. The blogosphere can help clear the bogus smoke. Only the Old Media itself can stamp out the toxic fire.

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Reuters Admits Faking Photos, Still in Denial (townhall.com, 060809)

By Rusty Shackleford

This weekend was not a good one for Reuters.

First, it was revealed by Charles Johnson of the Little Green Footballs blog that a photo showing bomb damage in Beirut by a local Muslim stringer, Adnan Hajj, was doctored. Reuters promptly recalled the image and fired the reporter.

Since the original unaltered photo revealed that there really was a large explosion being documented by Hajj, Reuters accepted his excuse that the picture was only altered to “remove some dust marks”.

Accusations that the photo was “sexed-up” to make Israeli damage of Beirut seem worse were dismissed. The photo was treated as an isolated incident by Reuters. It wasn’t.

Prompted by Charles Johnson’s expose, a reader led me to another Reuters photo taken by Adnan Hajj. The photo purported to be of an Israeli F-16 firing “missiles” at a Lebanese village.

That photo was also a fake. The original photo actually showed an Israeli plane firing a defensive flare. The flare had been labeled a “missile” by the reporter and then duplicated several times using computer software to make it seem that multiple “missiles” were being “fired” on a Lebanese “village”.

In other words, the F-16 which Reuters purports to show firing missiles at a Lebanese village, was taking defensive measures.

This time the “dust marks” excuse could not fly.

When confronted by a second obvious forgery, Reuters was forced to retract all 920 photos produced by Hajj.

But Reuters is still in denial about several things.

First, Reuters retraction order makes it seem as if the second photo was discovered by an internal investigation. An internal discovery of a second faked photo makes it appear that Reuters is a responsible and objective news organization which takes seriously accusations of impropriety. It is not.

Second, and more importantly, Reuters is in denial that there is an overtly anti-Israeli bias in its reports and their accompanying photos.

Why is it that no one at Reuters caught these two obvious forgeries? It doesn’t seem too far fetched to suggest that editors do not scrutinize closely those things that they already believe to be true about Israel. The photos showed what Reuters already knew— namely, that it is Israel that is responsible for so much death and damage in the present Middle East conflict.

Which is why Reuters is still in denial about many other photos which are not outright forgeries, but which appear to be staged?

Such as photos of Korans burning. Such as the bodies of children being paraded before reporters for hours.

What Reuters and others in the mainstream media do not disclose about all of their photos from Southern Lebanon is that no reporter is allowed in the area without Hezbollah approval. Even worse, many of the photos of Israeli “atrocities” are actually taken at organized tours put on by Hezbollah.

The images are real, but the photos are neither spontaneous nor do they tell the entire story.

Without the two forgeries it would be tempting to characterize the reporters at these staged events as victims of Hezbollah censorship. With the forgeries, it is now clear that many of these reporters are participants in a Hezbollah propaganda campaign against Israel.

Without the forgeries it would be hard to swallow the notion that the local Arab reporters employed by the larger news organizations were neutral and unbiased in this war. With the forgeries, it is clear that at least some are actually combatants and partisans on the propaganda front.

Reuters won’t see this. Reuters can’t see this. To the editors at Reuters, Israel is the cause of the miserable condition innocent Lebanese civilians find themselves in. Photos showing what they already believe to be true will not be scrutinized.

We seldom question that which we already believe.

So, while Reuters is frantically implementing new procedures meant to separate forged photos from authentic ones, do not expect to see much change in the content of those photos. We will still see the bodies of children. We will still see captions blaming Israeli aggression for their deaths.

Reuters does not need a new editorial process. What Reuters needs is moral clarity. Given their track record, don’t hold your breath that it will come any time soon.

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More Evidence Of The Need For Media Morality (Free Congress Foundation, 060411)

By Stephen M. Lilienthal

Recent research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finds the more that teens watch programs and listen to songs with heavy sexual content the more likely they are to be sexually promiscuous at an early age. The study is printed in the April issue of PEDIATRICS, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. “The unique part of this study is, we’re finding this effect not only for television, but for all four media content - TV, movies, music and magazines,” FORBES quoted Jane D. Brown, James L. Knight Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“Kids who have a heavier sexual media diet when they are 12 to 14 years old are twice as likely as kids who have a lighter sexual media diet to have had sexual intercourse by the time they are 16,” explained Brown.

Brown shies away from ascribing a direct cause and effect from the media. Common sense would suggest that teens growing up in homes with poor parenting would be more likely to fall prey to the temptations of early sex, influenced by what they see and hear in the media but also because they lack strong anchors in their home lives. In such cases, the media becomes what Professor Brown terms a “sexual ‘super peer.’”

The sum total of Hollywood is not friendly to the values once considered mainstream. Unfortunately, the prevailing culture of Hollywood is not to produce products that help to uplift young Americans. Occasionally Hollywood does produce a movie which puts a new twist upon old-fashioned values. Those products deserve to be welcomed.

One such product is a movie recently released, “Take the Lead,” based upon the work conducted by a well-known dance teacher, Pierre Dulaine. It describes the genesis of the ballroom dancing program in New York City public schools as featured in the documentary “Mad Hot Ballroom.”

“Take the Lead” begins with Dulaine’s encountering on the street a young man destroying a car window. Dulaine learns that the car belongs to a high school principal and visits with the principal. Even before Dulaine enters the principal’s office he displays the importance of good manners to surprised students and administrators. Surprisingly, he volunteers to oversee students in detention, dismissed by many of the school’s teachers and administrators as misfits. The students groove to hip-hop but come to develop a greater appreciation for ballroom dancing and even Dulaine’s Old World manners. It’s not a perfect alliance but thanks to Dulaine the kids have learned some valuable lessons.

A key scene in the movie features Dulaine telling parents the benefits of ballroom dancing. Not only do they learn discipline in terms of dance moves, they learn good manners and restraint. Young women may appear to be submissive in classical dancing but it is they who give young men the permission to lead. Young men learn to demonstrate respect for their dance partner. It’s more than merely the learning of dance steps, it’s civility.

American popular culture once promoted virtue. Such lessons only infrequently now are displayed in books, movies, songs and videos. When so displayed they often are promoted in media selections aimed at a Christian market. There is nothing unacceptable about that but it would be useful if there were more books, movies and television promoting virtues but not aimed solely or preponderantly at the religious marketplace. Radio programs such as “Calvacade of America,” sponsored by the DuPont Company, promoted virtuous conduct among younger Americans, stressing hard work, family and perseverance in the face of adversity. In Calvacade, if memory serves me correctly, the perseverance usually was on behalf of an invention, a career, not a new wife.

Recently, Ralph Frasca, Professor of Mass Communications at Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia, examined Benjamin Franklin’s work in establishing a network of printers throughout the Eastern Seaboard to promote virtue in the citizenry of the American colonies. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S PRINTING NETWORK: DISSEMINATING VIRTUE IN EARLY AMERICA. Not only would the printers distribute POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK but they would distribute articles in newspapers which also emphasized the importance of virtue. Frasca concedes that Franklin had flaws but he was a Christian whose private writings express a rather pessimistic view of human nature. That view led him to promote the importance of virtue in his ALMANACK and newspaper network, the members of which were picked based upon their good character. “Using humor,” Frasca explained, “he encouraged people to be industrious, frugal, and temperate, and to adhere to the commandment, ‘Love thy neighbor as yourself.’”

Conservatives have succeeded in establishing an effective counterweight to the “mainstream” news media, thanks to vehicles such as Fox News and savvy users of the web such as National Review Online, Human Events and CNS News.com. That in itself is not enough. The next challenge is to encourage entertainment programs and publications which seek to reach all Americans in promoting the virtues.

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Cheap shot journalism (Townhall.com, 060912)

By Thomas Sowell

Recently one of those increasingly familiar New York Times editorials disguised as news stories was headlined “Conservatives Help Wal-Mart, and Vice Versa.”

There was a chart with photos of people from conservative think tanks saying things favorable to Wal-Mart’s side of the controversies surrounding that company, along with dollar amounts over them and their statements, indicating how much Wal-Mart had donated to the think tanks where these individuals work.

Buried deep inside the story, near the end, there was a passing comment that “labor unions have financed organizations that have been critical of Wal-Mart.” But there were no people or statements singled out with dollar amounts over them.

The double standard was evident in another way: The damning charge was that these conservative think tanks and the scholars who work there “have consistently failed to disclose their ties” to Wal-Mart.

There was no charge that liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution, or the scholars there, “failed to disclose their ties” to their donors.

It is very doubtful if most of the scholars at either liberal or conservative think tanks know who all the many donors to these institutions are — or care.

For one thing, there is money coming from all points of the political compass and from a whole spectrum of special interest groups. You can say whatever you feel like and, if it doesn’t suit one think tank, it will suit another.

It so happens that I work for a think tank, though not one mentioned in this New York Times “news” story, and I could not name five donors to the Hoover Institution if my life depended on it, though I am sure that there are far more than five.

For all I know, I may have defended some of those unknown donors — or I may have bitten the hand that feeds me by attacking them in this column.

It is by no means unknown for different scholars at the Hoover Institution to come out publicly on opposite sides of controversies. Nor is that unknown at other think tanks, liberal or conservative.

Why then should we “disclose” — even if we knew — who the donors are, as if we were delivering commercials for our sponsors?

Why do conservative donors contribute money to conservative think tanks or liberal donors contribute money to liberal think tanks? Is it rocket science that people are more likely to contribute money to those they agree with?

Or is it something sinister, as the New York Times implies — at least when the think tank is conservative?

Such cheap-shot journalism tells us more about the people who engage in it, and the constituency to which they appeal, than it tells us about those they write about.

What it tells us is that there are people so narrow and shallow that they cannot understand how anyone else could possibly disagree with what they believe without having sold out.

Somehow such journalists, or those that they appeal to, believe that they are so iron-clad right that no one could even mistakenly disagree with them without being bought and paid for by the bad guys.

Are we talking world-class chutzpa or what?

The self-infatuated idea that nobody could disagree with you for honest and informed reasons is far more dangerous than any influence that donors’ money may exercise.

Far more is involved here than cheap-shot journalism. It is the audience for such journalism that is the real concern.

Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence.

The implications of having so many people so incapable of confronting opposing arguments with anything besides ad hominem responses reach far beyond Wal-Mart or think tanks. It is in fact the Achilles heel of this generation of our society and of Western civilization.

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‘Noise is bigger’ when GOP fails morally: Analyst says ‘more is expected, more ought to be expected’ (WorldNetDaily, 061004)

The “noise is bigger” when someone in the Republican Party fails morally, because they have in recent history been the party of faith and values, according to an administrator within the Reagan Administration.

“This sort of thing shouldn’t happen to the party that claims to take a more righteous stand on ethics and morality,” Peter Schramm, the director of the Center for International Education under Reagan, told WND yesterday.

“More is expected of them. More ought to be expected,” he said.

Schramm, now the executive director of the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs and a professor of political science at Ashland University, was talking about the resignation last week of former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla.

He quit after explicitly sexual electronic messages he exchanged with underage U.S. House pages were revealed by ABC and others.

The revelations, which a WND report has found may have been staged at this time by gay activists, have left the GOP in disarray only a few weeks before the critical mid-term elections.

“This is very bad,” Schramm told WND. “It is huge.”

He said Democrats have been looking for a “wave” of publicity that would crest just prior to the election, giving them ammunition in their political agenda. He believes that nothing prior to this point had had enough political weight actually to change the course of the voting.

“Now this stupidity, this extraordinary thing (involving) this Foley character,” he said, with the possibility of a cover-up.

“I hope not, but on the other hand, judgments are going to come quickly, before justice is served,” he said. “What if these bosses knew something and hid it?”

Schramm, who also served as president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy in Claremont, Calif., said Foley’s actions were wrong in themselves, but the damage will go much further.

“This one may (affect the election) because it’s a moral issue. There’s a concreteness about it. It’s tacky,” he said.

“Even in an immoral universe, there’s a remnant of morality in the hearts and minds of citizens. They’ll say this is really bad stuff,” he said.

He said as far as the election goes, never before did he believe Democrats had a coherent plan to take control of the U.S. House or Senate, where they now hold the minorities.

“Now they are running around in the stench of scandal demanding to know from the leadership and the White House, ‘What did you know and how long have you known it.’ This stench will likely linger throughout the rest of the campaign.”

The Ashbrook Center is a political science think tank at Ashland University. For more than two decades, the center has taught the meaning and significance of America by providing an academic forum for research, study and discussion about government and politics.

Schramm also has edited, co-edited and contributed to books including “Natural Right and Political Right,” “Lessons of the Bush Defeat,” “Consequences of the Clinton Victory,” “Separation of Powers and Good Government,” “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution,” and others.

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BBC confesses bias on religion, politics: Internal memo reveals execs saying Bible tossed in trash OK, not Quran (WorldNetDaily, 061023)

An internal British Broadcasting Corporation memo reveals senior figures admitted the national news agency was guilty of promoting left-wing views and anti-Christian sentiment.

News of the memo, reported by British media, comes as the BBC continues to struggle against claims of biased reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and distorted coverage of the global fight against terror, reports the Israeli YnetNews.com.

The admissions of bias were made at a recent “impartiality” summit the BBC held. Most executives admitted the corporation’s representation of homosexuals and ethnic minorities was unbalanced and disproportionate, YnetNews.com said. The British news agency, the report said, leaned too strongly towards political correctness, the overt promotion of multiculturalism, anti-Americanism and discrimination against the countryside.

At the summit, executives were given a fictitious scenario in which they were asked to make a judgment.

In the illustration, Jewish comedian Sasha Baron Cohen would participate in a studio program in which guests were allowed to symbolically throw in a garbage bin things they hated.

What would you do, the executives were asked, if Cohen decided to throw kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bible and the Quran in the trash.

Everything would be allowed, the executives said, except for the Quran, for fear of offending the British Muslim community.

The BBC also revealed its executives favored interviewing terrorist leader Osama bin Laden if the opportunity arose, the Washington Times reported.

The executives were presented with a current hot-button issue in Britain, the wearing of Muslim veils. Should a veiled woman be allowed to present the news, they were asked. The BBC’s diversity editor said yes, since news anchors were allowed to wear crosses.

A senior BBC executive admitted to the British paper Daily Express, “There was a widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness. Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC’s culture, that it is very hard to change it.”

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This is CNN (Washington Times, 061024)

A new Hollywood movie about the battle of Iwo Jima opened last week right about the time CNN began airing footage it obtained from terrorists showing U.S. soldiers being killed with sniper fire. It is a fitting contrast. The movie tells the story of the three surviving GIs who were immortalized on film raising the flag over Mt. Suribachi. The CNN tape shows the exact opposite: Instead of heroism, we see unsuspecting American soldiers being dropped one by one. No flag raising, no glory; just another dead U.S. soldier.

Of course the Mt. Suribachi photograph is a distortion. The United States did win the battle, but long after the flag had been raised. In fact, three of the flag raisers would never leave the island alive. In 36 days of fighting, there were more than 25,000 U.S. casualties — one out of every three men — of which nearly 7,000 were killed. By comparison, in the Iraq war’s 1,680 days, the United States has lost 2,800 troops. Yet that single photograph further roused Americans to keep confidence in final victory.

Which brings us to Sen. John Kerry’s defense of CNN’s decision to air the terrorist footage: “As painful as the images of war are, it’s important to understand what soldiers go through.” If there had been a CNN equivalent in 1945, would it have been important to air footage of Japanese machine guns mowing down GIs as they waded ashore? Imagine watching hundreds of Americans being killed in one day of battle. Japan’s imperial government couldn’t have asked for a better propaganda weapon. The impact on a war-weary America would certainly have been emotionally crushing for those with sons and husbands still in battle, and might well have played in to antiwar sentiment. But it is much more damaging today when the nation is not as fully united as it was during World War II.

But let’s take Mr. Kerry and CNN at their word and assume that this type of footage has journalistic merit. It follows that CNN should also have shown its hours of footage from September 11. We’re talking about the people trapped in the World Trade Center who decided to jump and the other grisly images most Americans have never seen. Or what about the tape showing Iraqi terrorists beheading Nick Berg? CNN has kept this footage locked away out of some faux sensitivity for Americans’ fragile spines. The only way one can see the full horror of September 11 and other terrorist carnage is by downloading amateur videos off the Internet.

In a mind-numbing article on Sunday, Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi also defended CNN’s decision, because, as she understands it, Americans are too dim to appreciate the reality of war. “Without a draft, it is easy for the rest of the country to tune out casualties,” she wrote. “Much of what is seen on television makes war feel as bloodless as a video game.”

This sort of forced logic does a poor job of masking CNN’s and its defenders’ real motives. Their goal here is to undermine the war effort, even if that means being a mouthpiece for terrorist propaganda.

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CNN, Stenographer to terror (townhall.com, 061025)

By Brent Bozell III

Our news media have long lectured us that their role is not to be “stenographers to power.” Theirs is the pursuit of truth, we are told. But when it comes to networks like CNN, those ethical rules are crumpled and tossed into the nearest trash bin.

Editorial writers at The Washington Post and elsewhere have raged against the Pentagon placing positive stories in Iraqi newspapers, thus violating the journalistic sacristy of objectivity. But they have no rage at all for CNN placing glorifying publicity from terrorists on a global television network.

On the Oct. 18 edition of “Anderson Cooper 360,” CNN aired a story by reporter Michael Ware, an Australian correspondent renowned for his contacts with terrorist groups. The story showed video filmed by terrorists calling themselves the Islamic Army of Iraq. From the very start, the viewer sees this for what it is: enemy propaganda. The grainy video shows Islamic terrorist snipers time and again shooting and presumably killing American boys.

(CNN, bless its heart, cut the footage just before each bullet found its mark, but not before the sound of the rifle fire that launched it.)

Here’s what CNN also aired, without editorial comment of any sort, as “news”: The translator has the terrorists saying they should wait to shoot the American soldier, since there are innocent “people” around. Later in the report, the shooter claims to be trying to target an American soldier, not Iraqis. Since when have these insurgent murderers cared about killing Iraqi soldiers or civilians? They’ve massacred thousands with remorseless regularity.

The video is sickening. Imagine being the mother or father, sister, brother, wife or child of that American soldier murdered so brutally.

So why did CNN air something that cannot be defended as newsworthy? That video was given to CNN by terrorists in order to demoralize the American people about the hopelessness of Iraq just before midterm elections. And CNN did exactly what the terrorists wanted, and CNN knows it. In his introduction that night, Anderson Cooper said, “Insurgents” — never terrorists, mind you, always “insurgents” — were “delivering a deadly message, aiming for a global audience.” CNN is the terrorist’s messenger service, FedEx for the fanatics who want us dead.

It’s part of a long and increasingly shameful history. CNN first came to prominence as a tyrant’s bootlicker in the first Gulf War in 1991, when the network agreed to allow Saddam Hussein to edit its reports in return for preferential access in Baghdad. Once entrenched, the perpetually embarrassing Peter Arnett reported on the Allied bombing of baby-milk factories — that weren’t baby-milk factories. CNN didn’t fire Arnett. They retained him even after his atrocious 1998 CNN-Time documentary asserting that Americans gassed their own soldiers in Laos, another story that fell apart under scrutiny. Sense a trend? CNN seems eager to pounce on stories that make Americans look evil and/or lethally incompetent. Whether they are true is irrelevant.

The story of evil in a foreign land was easily crumpled by CNN in a slavish desire for access. In April 2003, days after Saddam Hussein fell, CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan wrote an op-ed in The New York Times admitting he had scrapped stories from Iraq out of fear of violence from Saddam’s regime. He struggled to keep CNN’s Baghdad bureau open, but couldn’t seem to report vital news, even news that his own producers were subjected to electroshock torture. His career at CNN didn’t end until he recklessly claimed American soldiers were targeting reporters for assassination in Iraq.

This isn’t even the first occasion of CNN being used as a terrorist sock puppet this year. In July, CNN’s Nic Robertson traveled into a heavily damaged Beirut neighborhood to decry Israel for bombing civilian areas. It also transpired that all along, he was being escorted by and taking instructions from the terrorist organization Hezbollah. The Hezbollah “press officer” even instructed the CNN camera: “Just look. Shoot. Look at this building. Is it a military base? Is it a military base, or just civilians living in this building?” Robertson later claimed Hezbollah had “very, very sophisticated” press operations and the terrorist group “had control of the situation.” Hezbollah had control of CNN.

It’s also not the first terrorist video distributed by Michael Ware. In 2004, when Ware was a Time reporter, he was handed an insurgent videotape of the killing of American contractors in Fallujah. Ware confessed, like Robertson, to losing control of the situation with terrorists: “I certainly go out there and expose myself. I’ve been to the safe houses. I surrender myself to their control. I’ve sat in living rooms face-to-face with these men,” he said.

He surrenders himself to terrorist control. This from the man who works for CNN — the network whose role is not to be a “stenographer to power.”

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The Left-Wing Press and the Terrorists in Iraq Have Something in Common (Foxnews, 061025)

By Bill O’Reilly

As we predicted, the Iraqi insurgents are killing as many people as possible in the days before the American election. The terrorists want to damage the Bush administration. And so does the left-wing press. They are pounding the Iraq mess furiously so Americans will vote for the Democrats.

Now there’s no question that analysis is true, but I don’t want anyone to think that the left-wing press is on the side of the terrorists. They are not. But both groups do despise President Bush. No question. And the Bush administration bears some responsibility for that.

After three and a half years, Iraq’s more dangerous than ever. We’ve spent billions. Thousands of soldiers have died. More than 10,000 have been injured. And what do we have to show for it? Chaos, that’s what.

So how should Americans process all this? Well, we can’t be happy about the Iraq situation. And at this point, only the Iraqis can save themselves. We simply cannot control 26 million people with 150,000 troops.

If the Iraqis do not demand and fight for justice and freedom, they’re not going to get it. But it’s vital to remember that the USA is not the bad guy here. Our intent was noble to establish a democracy in Iraq that would help us fight the worldwide jihad.

Now the far left is not going to admit that and that angers me. They continue to say the Bush administration lied and deceived. You can make an argument the Bush administration is not competent, but calling it evil as many of these loons do is simply irresponsible.

Finally, I asked David Letterman last night if he wanted the USA to win in Iraq. He wouldn’t answer. That’s the same thing that happened when I put the same question to Rosie O’Donnell. Talking Points simply cannot figure that out. A stable Iraq helps everyone in the world and badly damages the terrorists and Iraq. That’s why the killers are blowing stuff up. They don’t want a stable Iraq.

But we should want a stable Iraq, even though it may be impossible. I hope not.

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Vote: Against an unethical media (Townhall.com, 061030)

By Douglas MacKinnon

To my fellow conservatives, Republicans, and even independents, who are so frustrated with some in the GOP for abandoning the principles of our party, that you plan to sit out this election, I implore you to change your mind. While I share your anger and disappointment, I am still eagerly going to vote on November 7th for one simple reason. To stop those in the mainstream media trying to hijack this election.

I would submit that never in the history of modern American campaigning, has the media displayed such an unethical, unprofessional, and gleeful bias, as they have with this midterm election. Many members of the left-of-center mainstream media are deliberately trying to dictate, manipulate, and deliver the vote of the American electorate to the Democratic column, and for them to say otherwise is to deny the obvious.

To offer up proof, is as easy as predicting the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning, or that the press will ignore the ethical lapses of Democratic politicians. While this media disinformation campaign has been going on for much longer, just go back the last two weeks and look at the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, USA Today, or any of the other liberal newspapers in the nation, and gaze upon the hundreds of the above the fold stories of how the Democrats are all but certain to cruise to victory on election day.

Don’t have time to do all that research? Okay. Just look at the recent covers of Time and Newsweek with their either shamefully fawning cover photos of Democrats, or the dark, foreboding cover shot of an elephant’s backside receding into oblivion, or the latest Time cover with President Bush alone and deserted by his Party.

Don’t like to read? No problem. Watch NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, as either their anchors, or their openly partisan guests, breathlessly predict a “Democratic tsunami,” “Democratic title wave,” or the “banishment of the Republicans to the minority,” to millions of viewers and – potential voters.

Now, after you give all this material even a cursory once over, go back to October of 1994 and look at these same “news” organizations, and how they “reported” on the impending historic Republican victory of that midterm election. Not surprisingly, said coverage was lacking, well, coverage. Next, among the minute reporting they begrudgingly offered, you will find none of the enthusiasm, superlatives, cheerleading, or banner headlines that today’s left-of-center media have delivered to their masters in the Democratic party.

For me, this is honestly not a partisan issue. It’s about reporters doing their jobs and not carrying water for any political party.

Evidence of that being that when Howard Dean lost out on his Party’s nomination to John Kerry in 2004, I wrote a column coming to Dean’s defense. In the piece, I outlined how this same media systematically sabotaged the Dean campaign. Why would these “unbiased journalists” do such a thing? Because they didn’t think Dean could beat Bush in the general election, and their hatred of the President trumped the ethics of not torpedoing Dean in favor of someone they thought could win.

Make no mistake, as Republicans or conservatives, if we don’t vote in this election, we are giving voice to those in the media who willingly betray their noble profession to manufacture a desired outcome. We would be making it easier for them to do something that is not only un-American, but purposely circumvents the will of our Founders.

In trampling the Constitution, these left of center “journalists,” see no problem inventing “facts” to further their partisan agenda. Such as, instead of the 30,000 to 60,000 civilian deaths in Iraq estimated by even some Democrat leaning studies, they tell the voters it’s really 650,000 dead and dare the Administration to knock down the lie.

In case that doesn’t do the trick, these partisan “journalists” think nothing of taking a truly evil video gift wrapped and handed to them by Islamist terrorists that shows American soldiers being murdered by sniper fire, and putting it on the air. Hitler’s propaganda minister surely smiling from Hell as the tape rolls.

Point being, the liberals in the media masquerading as journalists, will do anything to undermine those who don’t bow to their opinion and will. To counter such hubris and totalitarian thinking, we need to vote.

Think of it, not as a vote for those Republicans who have let us down, but rather, a vote in defense of democracy, and against those with unchecked power who seek to weaken that which our soldiers fight to preserve and bestow.

On election day, vote to honor liberty while sending a message to a media that has forgotten its sacred mission.

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Under the Influence of Liberalism (townhall.com, 061106)

By Nathan Tabor

I find it interesting that, in today’s maniacal media world, conservatives are taken to task for every syllable they utter, but liberals are given a pass.

A GOP gaffe will be replayed ad nauseam on news broadcasts, news magazine programs, and comedy shows. Then, it may get a second round of play on liberal talk radio and ripped-from-the-headlines TV dramas.

But when a liberal makes a rhetorical blunder, he or she is excused because, after all, he or she really didn’t mean to say it. The guilty party is too erudite or too compassionate for the remark to be taken at face-value.

Sen. John Kerry is the latest case in point. Kerry indicated this week that if you’re a student who does not study hard and do your homework, you will end up “stuck in Iraq.” It should be evident to every American that this is an insult to the fine men and women who have put their lives on the line to try to rebuild Iraq and keep us safe from Iraqi-sponsored terrorism.

But a number of journalistas are telling us that no, the Democrat from Massachusetts couldn’t possibly have meant what he said, given the fact that he himself is a veteran of war. No, we’re told, he just botched a joke. After all, Kerry is no David Letterman.

It seems to me that a more likely excuse is that he was speaking under the influence of liberalism.

I wonder where these apologists were when actor Mel Gibson, while drunk, blamed the Jewish people for the wars in the world. When the report of Gibson’s inebriated gaffe first emerged, television viewers were told that alcohol had enabled Gibson to reveal his true, disturbing feelings about people of Jewish descent. In other words, being drunk was no excuse. Gibson also apologized, but certain members of the media still wouldn’t let the matter rest. They suggested that his apology wasn’t good enough—that he had to back up his words with concrete action.

What about Kerry? Is it enough for him to say he’s sorry? Or should he be made to take an active role in supporting the Iraq war effort—something that I seriously doubt he would do. If Kerry isn’t required to make amends, doesn’t that mean that the media are engaging in a double-standard, lambasting conservatives for ill-chosen words, but quickly forgiving verbal mistakes from the liberal side of the political spectrum?

Yet another example from recent headlines is the Michael J. Fox-Rush Limbaugh fiasco. Rush said that Fox’s movements in a political ad indicated that he was either acting or off his meds for Parkinson’s disease. Fox said he was actually over-medicated; Rush admitted he was wrong. Yet, we see Rush’s imitation of Fox’s TV performance replayed on the tube over and over again. But Fox, whose liberal, pro-embryonic stem cell research stance is beloved by many major media, is not taken to task for the fact that he hasn’t even read the Missouri ballot issue he favors.

In the same vein, we see so many sympathetic media profiles of the Dixie Chicks in the aftermath of an unfortunate comment criticizing President George W. Bush. Those who refused to buy the group’s CDs in light of the incident are portrayed as backward and unforgiving, rather than as patriotic and proud of the Commander-in-Chief.

Free speech is, indeed, priceless. But when it is misused, the costs can be high for our democracy and our security. It’s one thing for a radio talk show host to spout off—it’s quite another for a Senator to criticize our troops in wartime.

The media should at least hold Senator Kerry to as high a standard as they reserve for Gibson and Rush.

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Cast of Characters: Part IV (townhall.com, 061106)

By Thomas Sowell

This year’s elections are not only contests between Democrats and Republicans, they are contests in which the mainstream media are not simply observers and reporters but active partisans.

Remember how the media carried on for weeks about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident? How a Time magazine reporter had a temper tantrum at a White House press briefing because the news wasn’t released soon enough — as if this hunting accident had any significance for the nation, beyond those in the media who were frustrated at being deprived of a Sunday talk show feeding frenzy?

Remember how long we were told that the Bush administration had committed a crime by revealing the identity of a CIA “agent” as revenge for her husband’s having attacked administration policy? Indignant editorials in print and on the air practically salivated at the prospect of seeing Vice President Cheney, or at least Republican strategist Karl Rove, frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.

It was a terrible crime, as portrayed in the media, when they thought it would discredit the Bush administration. Now, very belatedly, it turns out that the leak did not originate in the Bush administration after all, but with a critic of that administration, Richard Armitage.

Suddenly it was no longer a scandal, a crime or anything, as far as the media were concerned. There were no cries that Armitage should be frog-marched anywhere in handcuffs. Some in the media belatedly acknowledged that it was never a crime because the CIA “agent” was actually someone sitting behind a desk in Virginia.

It all depends on whose ox is gored.

Remember how absolutely certain the mainstream media were that Terry Schiavo was for all practical purposes already dead because she had been classified as being in a “vegetative” state?

Just recently a woman in a “vegetative” state was discovered by scientists to be able to respond to statements. But have you heard anything about it, much less anything about its relevance to Terry Schiavo?

If the media had been on the opposite side of this issue, it would have been front page news across the country and on TV 24-7.

Reporting the news is very different from filtering the news or spinning the news. Too many people in the mainstream media have become filterers and spinners, especially during an election year.

While Senator Kerry’s recent controversial remarks have been spun in the media to mean something different — and better — than what he plainly said, talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s recent remarks about actor Michael J. Fox have been spun to mean something different — and much worse — than what he plainly said.

After seeing a political ad by Michael J. Fox, urging support for a candidate who favored embryonic stem cell research, Rush noted that Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease, looked to be more visibly suffering from that disease than he has in other appearances that were not political.

Rush then surmised that either Fox was not taking his medication or was acting for political effect. It turned out that Rush was right, that this was very different from the way Michael J. Fox was in other public appearances. Moreover, Fox admitted that he had avoided taking his medication when appearing before Congress.

The fact that Rush’s surmise proved to be correct cut no ice with the mainstream media, where he has been roundly denounced by Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, who said that Rush Limbaugh “attacks a scandal-free actor who has a terrible disease,” as if that makes Michael J. Fox exempt from criticism.

Diane Sawyer of ABC News said “If you have Parkinson’s disease and you believe embryonic stem cell research is the answer, a possible answer, a possible cure, don’t you have a right to speak up?”

This is unbelievable confusion, even for Diane Sawyer. Neither Rush Limbaugh nor anybody else has ever said that Michael J. Fox has no right to speak up. The question is whether nobody else has a right to reply.

These are the media filterers and spinners who are seeking to affect the outcome of this election. Heaven help us if they succeed.

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‘CNN, Al-Jazeera coverage of Iraq war equally biased’: Government leader tells visiting families negative reports made him fear to return (WorldNetDaily, 061107)

A government leader in Iraq’s Kurdistan region has told Gold Star Families visiting U.S. troops in the Mideast that the news media’s coverage of the situation in Iraq is terribly biased.

“CNN International and Al Jazeera are equally bad in their coverage of the situation in Iraq,” said Nerchivan Barzani, the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan.

“When I was in the United States recently and read the negative news in the Washington Post, New York Times and in the network TV broadcasts, I even wondered if things had gotten so bad since I had left that I shouldn’t return,” he said.

Barzani’s comments came during meetings with the delegation of Gold Star Families on a historic trip to Iraq. These families each lost a child in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and they now are traveling in Iraq to see the land and people for whom their loved ones gave their lives.

Organizer Move America Forward said, to its knowledge, no other such trip to Iraq by families of fallen troops had ever taken place.

Group members also had an hour-long meeting with Iraqi Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani, who related emotional stories about those whose lives were lost at the hands of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The Gold Star Families shared their accounts of lives loss, too.

“It was a huge honor for us to be able to speak with the prime minister and president of Iraqi Kurdistan. They were extraordinarily gracious and warm,” said Debra Argel Bastian, whose son, Derek, died in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“We’ve been treated so well by everyone. During our meeting with President Barzani he pulled down a tapestry framed from his wall and gave it to us. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate the kindness and generosity of these people,” she said.

There also was an emotional experience for Joe and Jan Johnson, of Rome, Ga., who lost son Justin during combat in Sadr City, Iraq, just a few days after Justin’s close friend, Casey Sheehan, died in combat in the same city. Sheehan was the son of anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan.

Theirs are the lives and stories of heroism profiled in the newly released book “American Mourning”, a WND book by Catherine Moy and Melanie Morgan, founder of Move America Forward.

The families were visiting U.S. troops when a man who had been stationed with Justin Johnson approached. He had gone out on a mission to rescue Justin, but the soldiers did not arrive in time to save Justin’s life.

He never had thought he would be able to meet Justin’s parents, and was overwhelmed by the experience.

Jan Johnson’s audio account of the meeting is available at Move America Forward’s website.

The families also joined the people of Iraq over the weekend in celebrating the guilty verdict handed down against the murderous former dictator, according to officials for the two-year-old troop support organization.

The American families are on a 10-day trip to see the land their children died to free.

The delegation includes Joseph Williams, whose son, Marine Lance Cpl. Michael Williams, died in 2003; John Holley, whose son, Army Spc. Matthew Holley, died in 2005; Mike Anderson, whose son, Marine Corps Cpl. Michael Anderson Jr., died in 2004, Debra and Todd Bastian, whose son, Air Force Capt. Derek Argel, died in 2005; and Janet and Joseph Johnson, whose son, Justin, died in 2004 and is the subject of “American Mourning;”

The book contrasts the Johnsons with the family of Justin’s war buddy, Casey Sheehan, and tells how John Kerry tried to recruit the Johnsons at their sons’ funeral to speak out against President Bush and his Iraq policy.

Move America Forward said it is providing updated accounts of the trip, with photographs, audio and video on its website.

The trip, planned for more than a year, is being financed by the contributions of thousands of Americans, the group said. No government money has been used.

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‘POISON PRESS: How the big media’s death throes are heralding a stunning information revolution’ (WorldNetDaily, 061107)

“This amazing issue on the news media literally begins where other exposes of the press leave off,” said Joseph Farah, founder and editor of WorldNetDaily and Whistleblower.

“POISON PRESS” unplugs the media matrix program and helps readers view the world through fresh eyes, and not those of agenda-driven manipulators in the major media.

But that’s only part of what’s contained in this special Whistleblower edition dedicated to the news media.

Contents of “POISON PRESS” include:

* “The collapse of America’s media elite” by Hugh Hewitt, an upbeat, inspiring and fact-based piece on how the Internet is causing a true journalism revolution.

* “The media matrix” by David Kupelian, a groundbreaking look at how the press creates a virtual-reality world most people think of as real.

* “Impartial” editor blasts pro-lifers” – about how a Reuters editor lashed out at National Right to Life after receiving a routine press release from the pro-life organization.

* “Hillary’s enemy list” by best-selling author Richard Poe, a revealing, behind-the-scenes look at how Hillary Clinton led a “secret war” against Internet journalists, one of the central and most persecuted figures being WND’s own Joseph Farah.

* … and much more.

“I guarantee, no matter what you’ve read about the news media, you’ve never read anything like what’s in this issue of Whistleblower,” said Farah. “This is Whistleblower at its best – so insightful and thought-provoking that it literally changes the way you see the world.”

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Hollywood’s four-letter word: God (townhall.com, 061229)

By Brent Bozell III

Atheist activist Sam Harris recently proclaimed on National Public Radio that America needed a lot more mockery of religious belief. “I think the criticism of irrationality just has to come from 100 sides all at once,” he declared. “In the entertainment community, maybe you’ll just have people making jokes that are funny enough and true enough so as to put religious certainty in a bad light.”

Harris said he’s been trying hard to make contacts among the mind-benders in the news and entertainment media to find those God-scorning people who feel “a profound sense of relief that comes with hearing somebody call a spade a spade.”

Why does taxpayer-funded NPR, or anyone else for that matter, care what atheists like Sam Harris think? They are squarely in opposition to public opinion. According to a recent Zogby/American Bible Society poll, 84% of adults are not offended when they hear references to God or the Bible on network television shows, and 51% say entertainment networks should develop shows with positive messages — and even specifically refer to God and the Bible.

So who is paying attention to Sam Harris? The entertainment television industry.

After Mel Gibson’s “The Passion” box office tsunami two years ago, the conventional wisdom had it that Hollywood finally had accepted the marketability of faith-based programming. Not so. The Parents Television Council has completed its seventh study of the treatment of religion on primetime network television, evaluating TV shows during the 2005-2006 season, and the numbers are stunning.

From a quantitative standpoint, the total number of treatments of religion has been reduced by 50% in the past year alone. And when religion is part of the storyline, more often than not it is not a positive thing: Television today regularly mocks the clergy, religious laity, church doctrines and religious institutions.

Religious people are often portrayed as frauds or the world’s biggest sinners. NBC’s “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” featured a nun who kicked a black man in the face after calling him the N-word. ABC’s “Boston Legal” had the man who had sex with a cow protesting he was a church deacon.

Or take an episode of ABC’s “Desperate Housewives,” where Gabi, one of the titled housewives, had sex with a teenage boy, who told her: “Me and my friend Justin had this bet to see who could lose their virginity first this summer at Bible camp. Guess I beat him to the punch.” Why Bible camp? Why not?

Then there was this disgusting plotline in a different episode. This same dreadful woman, Gabi, lied during confession, telling a priest that a certain nun was having an affair with her husband. After gloating at her success getting the nun transferred to Alaska, she slapped the nun, then pushed her into a rack of candles, setting her on fire. And you thought parish life was dull.

Fox is now the Hollywood champion of God-mocking, the Atheist’s Favorite. The Sunday night cartoon block is a strong contributor, ridiculing God on what even the Fox folks must know — (SET ITAL) like, Sunday? (END ITAL) — is His day. “The Family Guy” routinely mocks the sacred. One episode featured the teenaged son, who upon discovering God looks like Angelina Jolie, asks to “see your boobs.” “God” agrees, but warns him about the impressive “Rack of Infinite Wisdom.”

In another episode, Jesus Christ is depicted as a teenager arguing with St. Joseph: “Up yours, Joseph! You’re not my real dad!” Jesus phones Heaven, where God the Father answers while lying in bed with a woman. God hangs up on Jesus and leers at the woman, who holds up a condom. God responds: “Oh, come on, baby. It’s my birthday.” In yet another episode, God is shown passing gas and lighting the gas on fire. The show’s father character explains that this is how God created the universe.

When you look at these and so many other revolting examples, it becomes clear that a tiny atheist minority controls the creative cards in Hollywood. You think I exaggerate? Consider this study finding: Roughly six out of 10 of the portrayals of religion on reality-based — which is to say, unscripted — TV shows were positive. That still doesn’t reflect public opinion, but it’s close. Unscripted shows were responsible for only 4.5% of the negative portrayals this study team found. The other 95.5% came from Hollywood’s professionals, who are at their most comfortable attacking that which you and I and most Americans hold sacred.

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NY Times admits to a blatant lie: How Much Longer Can the Grey Lady Get Away With Sloppy Journalism (townhall.com, 070104)

By Janice Shaw Crouse

A major journalistic scandal was finally acknowledged during the long news hole leading up to the New Year’s celebrations when the headlines were consumed by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s execution and the funeral of former U.S. President Gerald Ford. It was revealed last week that in April 2006 The New York Times Magazine published a long cover story that hinged on a blatant lie.

The facts of the case came to light in November through the efforts of a pro-life Web site, LifeSiteNews.com. At first, The Times editors stonewalled over the facts, then they covered up the reporter’s biased sources and denied unethical journalistic practices. Finally, the newspaper’s ombudsman, Byron Calame, wrote a column on December 31, 2006 detailing the newspaper’s malpractice in the April 9 story. Amazingly, but not surprisingly, the newspaper’s editors saw no reason to “doubt the accuracy” of the story, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So, no retraction, no recriminations and no firings.

This incident is reminiscent of the case in 1992 when Rigoberta Menchu was awarded the Nobel Prize for a fabricated autobiography of her life in the 1987 book I, Rigoberta Menchu. Hearing of the fraud, the New York Times sent one of its investigative reporters to Guatemala with the purpose of verifying Ms. Menchu’s claims in the supposed “autobiography” Ms. Menchu’s defenders still claim that the dishonesty of her account is of no consequence, because her words are “metaphorically true;” she remains a hero to the left.

Likewise, fabrications in support of radical causes apparently are considered legitimate today by The New York Times –– the ends justify the means, as the facts of the Climaco case illustrate. In April 2006, The New York Times Magazine published a nearly 8,000 word cover story about the problems in El Salvador resulting from laws treating abortion as a crime. The story featured a young woman, Carmen Climaco, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for supposedly aborting an 18-week-old unborn baby. The truth is that Ms. Climaco gave birth to a full-term baby that she strangled to death. A panel of judges found her guilty of “aggravated homicide.”

Jack Hitt, author of the piece, is a freelance writer for numerous elite left-wing publications. He used a local translator associated with Ipas, an abortion advocacy group in El Salvador who later used the story to raise money. No one at The Times bothered to check his work. No one asked to see the court documents related to the case. In fact, normal procedures were neglected by The New York Times standards editor, Craig Whitney, The New York Times Magazine editor, Gerald Marzorati, and Sarah H. Smith, the magazine’s editorial manager.

At the end of November, LifeSiteNews.com, a pro-life Web site, reported the truth: Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy ended in a live birth. The Web site asked readers to contact The Times. At that point, The Times began an elaborate cover-up. Two assistant managing editors stated, “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion.”

On December 31, 2006, The New York Times public editor, Byron Calame, wrote an essay about the incident, “Truth, Justice, Abortion and The Times Magazine.” After detailing the facts and circumstances about the writing of the article, Calame concluded, “Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect.” Further, Mr. Calame said, “The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn’t meet the magazine’s normal standards.”

In spite of Mr. Calame’s assessment, The Times has yet to print a retraction or to penalize any of the participants in the journalistic scandal. Mr. Calame’s article provides solid evidence for his conclusions about journalistic malfeasance.

Calame notes that the caption under Ms. Climaco’s picture in The Times article “stated flatly” that she “was given 30 years for an abortion that was ruled a homicide.” Calame noted that the court findings were unequivocal that the pregnancy ended in a “full-term birth” with the baby “breathing at birth, this confirms that we are dealing with an independent life.”

Mr. Calame admitted that Ipas planned to use The Times’ account of Ms. Climaco’s sentence to seek donations on its Web site for “identifying lawyers who could appeal her case” and to help the organization “continue critical advocacy work across Central America for women who are suffering under extreme abortion laws.”

Calame was also disappointed in The Times’ handling of reader complaints. Even after the facts were ascertained, the editors argued that the article was “as accurate as it could have been at the time it was written.” Further, the standards editor was unwilling to “order up a correction.”

These points are clear: Ms. Climaco gave birth to a live baby. She was found guilty of murdering her baby. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison for murder, not abortion.

Further, the following facts are also clear. The Times claims that it is not part of any campaign to promote abortion, yet neglected to follow routine fact-checking procedures even though it was known that Hitt used translators associated with an abortion rights advocacy group.

While it is nice that The New York Times ombudsman, Mr. Calame, played the “good guy” and laid out the facts and the lies for all to see, no one at The New York Times has come clean as the “bad guy” and admitted the necessity for a correction or accountability for sloppy, unprofessional journalism at the “newspaper of record.”

Once again, if a story is “metaphorically true,” if it fits The Times’ leftist ideology, then there’s no need to verify it. So much for The Times being the “paper of record.” When a paper’s credibility is suspect, what is left? Little wonder that circulation, revenues, and the value of The New York Times (as based on the price of their stock) continues to decline.

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the think tank for Concerned Women for America, is a recognized authority on domestic issues, the United Nations, cultural and women’s concerns.

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Bill Moyers returns to public broadcasting with a message for his adoring left-wing viewers. (Weekly Standard, 070123)

Last week, with neither hype nor headlines, Ken Tomlinson asked the president not to resubmit his name for another term as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (though he will serve until a successor is confirmed). His departure will mark the end of a long and valorous career in public broadcasting that began in 1982, when he took the helm at Voice of America. Besides the BBG, his service during the Bush administration included time as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

From the beginning, he was the target of a relentless and dishonest smear campaign led by Democratic members of Congress, the public broadcasting establishment, and liberals inside both CPB and BBG. As Tomlinson sought to strengthen America’s image throughout the world, investigators in Washington pored over his email and phone records in a desperate search for signs of malfeasance. Tomlinson’s political enemies instigated the inquiries and cheered from the sidelines.

The irony: These members of the so-called “peace party” thwarted the efforts of a Bush appointee whose job was to carry out exactly the kind of public diplomacy in the Middle East that liberals tell us can be so effective in preventing wars.

Tomlinson earned the enmity of the left because he took his job seriously. If American taxpayers are going to fund public broadcasting—at home and abroad—the programming should reflect basic American values. He recognized the overwhelming liberal bias of NPR and PBS and had the audacity to do something about it.

For this, he was attacked relentlessly as his critics played dumb: Bias? What bias?

As if to provide an answer, PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers announced last week his return to public broadcasting. He attacked the mainstream media as slaves on a plantation, captive of the “neoconservatives” and the “war party.” He seems actually to believe this. Moyers announced a new documentary called “Buying the War,” but made no mention of the vast wealth he has made over a lifetime sucking from the public television teat. Speaking to an audience of the fringe left, ever humble, he cast his return to television as a solemn duty [prepare to gag]:

I ‘m coming back, because it’s what I do best. Because I believe television can still signify, and I don’t want you to feel so alone. I’ll keep an eye on your work. You are to America what the abolition movement was, and the suffragette movement, and the civil rights movement. You touch the soul of democracy. It’s not assured you will succeed in this fight. The armies of the Lord are up against mighty hosts. But as the spiritual sojourner Thomas Merton wrote to an activist grown weary and discouraged protesting the Vietnam war, “Do not depend on the hope of results. Concentrate on the value and the truth of the work itself.”

While Moyers and his comrades congratulate each other, Tomlinson is undertaking a valuable new project. In his January 9 letter to the president, he said he had decided “it would be far more constructive to write a book on my experiences rather than to seek to continue government service.” There is much to say and an urgent need for the country to hear it. THE SCRAPBOOK has one piece of advice for Tomlinson: Write quickly.

Great Moments in Voir Dire

As reported January 18 by National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez: “A newsroom source relays this bit of news from the Scooter Libby trial: As jury selection continues, five of six questioned today have been excused. One of them was a young female Washington Post reporter (Arts section). She reportedly announced: ‘I feel VP Cheney puts his business priorities over the good of the country,’ and ‘I don’t trust him or anybody associated with him, and anyone associated with him would have to jump over a hurdle for me to think he was ever telling the truth.’”

Repeat after us: There is no such thing as media bias. There is no such thing as media bias. There is .. .

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All the “News”? (townhall.com, 070206)

By Thomas Sowell

The latest in a long line of New York Times editorials disguised as “news” stories was a recent article suggesting that most American women today do not have husbands. Partly this was based on census data — but much more so on creative definitions.

The Times defined “women” to include females as young as 16 and counted widows, who of course could not be widows unless they had once had a husband. Wives whose husbands were away in the military, or in prison, were also counted among women not living with a husband.

With such creative definitions, it turned out that 51% of “women” were not living with a husband. That made it “most” women and created a “news” story suggesting that these women were not married. In reality, only one fourth of women have never married, even when you count girls as young as 16.

While the data quoted in the New York Times story were about women who were not living with a husband, there were quotes in the story about women who rejected marriage.

What was the point? To show that marriage is a thing of the past. As a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle put it: “Women See Less Need for Ol’ Ball and Chain.”

In other words, marriage is like a prison sentence, complete with the old-fashioned leg irons with a chain connected to a heavy metal ball, so that the prisoner cannot escape.

This picture of marriage and a family as a burden is not peculiar to the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle. It is common among the intelligentsia of the left.

Negative depictions of marriage and family are common not only in our newspapers but also wherever the left is concentrated, whether in our schools and colleges or on television or in the movies — most famously, in the “Murphy Brown” TV program that Vice President Dan Quayle criticized, provoking a fierce counterattack from the left.

The New York Times was not the first outlet of the left to play fast and loose with statistics in order to depict marriage as a relic of the past. Innumerable sources have quoted a statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce — another conclusion based on creative manipulation of words, rather than on hard facts.

The fact that there may be half as many divorces in a given year as there are marriages in that year does not mean that half of all marriages end in divorce.

It is completely misleading to compare all the divorces in one year — from marriages begun years and even decades earlier — with the number of marriages begun in that one year.

Why these desperate twistings of words and numbers by the left, in order to discredit marriage?

Partly it is because marriage is a fundamental component of a social order that the left opposes. Moreover, marriage is seen as one of the social restrictions on individual free choice.

These are not new ideas, even though they may be more pervasive than in the past, simply because the intelligentsia is larger and more vocal today.

As far back as the 18th century, Rousseau said that man is born free but is everywhere in chains. In other words, the social restrictions essential to a civilized society were seen as unnecessary hindrances to each individual’s freedom.

It never seems to occur to those who think this way that if everyone were free of all social restrictions, only the strongest and most ruthless would in fact be free, and all the others would be subject to their dictates or destruction.

Marriage and family are also barriers to the left’s desire to create a society built to their own specifications. Friedrich Engels’ first draft of the Communist Manifesto proclaimed the end of families but Karl Marx thought better of it and took that out.

In one way or another, however, the left has for more than two centuries tried to undermine families — including today redefining the words “marriage” and “family” to include whatever kind of people want to live together in whatever way for whatever reason.

If “marriage” can mean anything, then it means nothing.

The New York Times’ long-standing motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” should be changed to reflect today’s reality: “Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.”

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Yellowcake and yellow journalism (townhall.com, 070207)

By Ann Coulter

To see how liberal history is created, you need to tune into the nut-cable stations and watch their coverage of the Scooter Libby trial. On MSNBC they’re covering the trial like it’s the Normandy Invasion, starring Elvis Presley, as told by Joseph Goebbels.

MSNBC’s “reportage” consists of endless repetition of arbitrary assertions, half-truths and thoroughly debunked canards. No one else cares about the trial — except presumably Scooter Libby — so the passionate left is allowed to invent a liberal fable without correction.

Night after night, it is blithely asserted on “Hardball” that Wilson’s trip to Niger debunked the claim that Saddam Hussein had been seeking enriched uranium from Niger.

As David Shuster reported last week: “Wilson goes and finds out that the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger is not accurate.”

There have been massive investigations into this particular claim of “Ambassador” Joe Wilson, both here and in Britain. Nearly three years ago, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that this was not merely untrue, it was the opposite of the truth: Wilson’s report actually bolstered the belief that Saddam was seeking uranium from Niger.

“The panel found,” as The Washington Post reported on July 10, “that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts.” So you can see how a seasoned newsman like David Shuster might come to the exact opposite conclusion and then repeat this false conclusion on TV every night.

Wilson’s unwritten “report” to a few CIA agents supported the suspicion that Saddam was seeking enriched uranium from Niger because, according to Wilson, the former prime minister of Niger told him that in 1999 Saddam had sent a delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” with Niger. The only thing Niger has to trade is yellowcake. If Saddam was seeking to expand commercial relations with Niger, we can be fairly certain he wasn’t trying to buy designer jeans, ready-to-assemble furniture or commemorative plates. He was seeking enriched uranium.

But Wilson simply accepted the assurances of the former prime minister of Niger that selling yellowcake to Saddam was the farthest thing from his mind. I give you my word as an African head of state.

Chris Matthews also repeatedly says that Bush’s famous “16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address — which liberals say was a LIE! a LIE! a despicable LIE! — consisted of the claim that British intelligence said there was a “deal” for Saddam Hussein to buy enriched uranium from Niger.

Matthews huffily wonders aloud why Wilson’s incorrect report didn’t get into Bush’s State of the Union address “rather than the president’s claim of British intelligence that said there was a deal to buy uranium, which of course became one of the underpinnings of this administration’s argument that we had to go to war with Iraq.”

Considering how hysterical liberals were about Bush’s “16 words,” you’d think they’d have a vague recollection of what those words were and that they did not include the word “deal.” What Bush said was: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Even if the British had been wrong, what Bush said was factually correct: In 2003, the British government believed that Saddam sought yellowcake from Niger. (Not “MSNBC factual,” mind you. I mean “real factual.”)

But in fact, the British were right and Wilson was wrong. By now, everyone believes Saddam was seeking yellowcake from Niger — the CIA, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, Lord Butler’s report in Britain, even the French believe it.

But at MSNBC, it’s not even an open question: That network alone has determined that Saddam Hussein was not trying to acquire enriched uranium from Niger. Actually one other person may still agree with MSNBC: a discredited, washed-up State Department hack who used his CIA flunky wife’s petty influence to scrape up pity assignments. But even he won’t say it on TV anymore.

Shuster excitedly reported: “We’ve already gotten testimony that, in fact, that Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger was based on forgeries that were so obvious that they were forgeries that officials said it would have only taken a few days for anybody to realize they were forgeries.”

This is so wrong it’s not even wrong. It’s not 180 degrees off the truth — it’s more like 3 times 8, carry the 2, 540 degrees from the truth. Shuster has twisted Wilson’s original lie into some Frankenstein monster lie you’d need Ross Perot with a handful of flow charts to map out in full.

During Wilson’s massive media tour, he began telling reporters that he knew Saddam was not seeking yellowcake from Niger because the documents allegedly proving a deal were obvious forgeries.

Again, thanks to endless investigations, we now know that Wilson was lying: He never saw the forged documents. (Not only that, but Bush’s statement was not based on the forged documents because no one ever believed them.)

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report notes that Wilson was asked how he “could have come to the conclusion that the ‘dates were wrong and the names were wrong’ when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.” Indeed, the United States didn’t even receive the “obviously forged” documents until eight months after Wilson’s trip to Niger!

Wilson admitted to the committee that he had “misspoken” to reporters about having seen the forged documents. Similarly, Cain “misspoke” when God inquired as to the whereabouts of his dead brother, Abel.

But on “Hardball,” the forged documents that no one in the U.S. government saw until eight months after Wilson’s trip now form the very impetus for the trip. A perfectly plausible theory, provided you have a working time machine at your disposal.

If you wonder how it came to be generally acknowledged “fact,” accepted by all men of good will, that Joe McCarthy was a monster, that Alger Hiss was innocent, that mankind is causing global warming and that we’re losing the war in Iraq, try watching the rewriting of history nightly on MSNBC. Don’t forget to bring your time machine.

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ABC, Apple-Polisher for Autocrats (townhall.com, 070208)

By Brent Bozell III

Never try to say ABC anchor Diane Sawyer hasn’t been tough on oppressors. In one interview in 1998, she stared one in the face and said: “You’ve been compared to Saddam Hussein. Nero. To Torquemada, who was head of the Inquisition.”

Oh, forgive me. That wasn’t a dictator she was questioning. It was Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel investigating Bill Clinton’s lying under oath. This was a common practice for ABC at the time. Their Website had an infamous instant poll asking if there was an “Ig-Nobel” prize, who should win it? The choices were Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden and ... Linda Tripp.

So how do ABC news anchors like Sawyer perform when they land “exclusive” interviews with actual dictators? The rings of international thugs are kissed for the privilege. Their obvious lack of respect for the concept of democracy is politely skimmed over. The real threat they pose to America is downplayed — or ignored.

Last fall, Diane Sawyer traveled to North Korea and interviewed a general in the world’s harshest communist tyranny. She was an incredibly passive transmission belt, relating back to her American audience that the general insisted President Bush should be blamed for any nuclear weapons testing in North Korea, and added that “the general said to us, he does want peace. And he also said, again, reiterated, North Korea will not be the first to use a nuclear weapon.”

From there, Sawyer produced a very strange piece about regimented, yet refreshing North Korean schoolchildren, “a world away from the unruly individualism of any American school.” Proclaimed a student, no doubt surrounded by minders watching her every word, “We are the happiest children in the world!”

Last week, ABC and Sawyer were at it again. Another continent, another ruthless anti-American dictator, but the same results. This time, Sawyer flew to Syria, following in the footsteps of Sen. John Kerry, who warmly announced a few weeks back that dictator Bashar Assad is ready to work with the United States. That was exactly Sawyer’s message, too, on the Feb. 5 “Good Morning America.” Sawyer diplomatically awarded Assad the title of “president,” although no one elected him there. Dictatorship was handed down as the family business, but she called him “Your Excellency.”

She lamely suggested to Assad in the first day’s interview that “Americans would say they voted” in Iraq, that there’s a democracy. Assad shot back, “What is the benefit of democracy if you’re dead?” Sawyer didn’t challenge him about, say, his father Hafez Assad’s massacre at Hama of more than 10,000 people. She moved on, instead, to discuss gently how a peace process with America would work.

But the truly maddening part was Sawyer trying to take this dictator and turn him into a sympathetic human being. “You like video games? ... Do you have an iPod?” Obviously, she was slavishly toeing a PR line some Syrian functionary spoon-fed her. “You’re a country music fan. Faith Hill? Shania Twain?” Assad laughed and said, “Is it considered an ad?” Sawyer played along: “Yes, that’s true. They get free advertising.” Yippee!

The problem here is the free advertising ABC is handing the dictator of Syria. Can we imagine that if Hitler were alive and still ruling Germany with an iron fist, Sawyer would be asking him about his iPod, too?

On the second day, Feb. 6, Sawyer asked the more serious questions, about political prisoners in Syria, about Syria’s role in assassinating Lebanese political leaders, its support for the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas. But Sawyer had an odd tic throughout all of this, and it’s one that drives this writer mad. It was always “Americans say” or “human rights groups say” that Syria is unfree and supports terror, etc. Can’t the glorious fact-checkers at ABC News determine for themselves if Syria is oppressive? Or is an obsequious tone before dictators more important than giving American viewers the impression you have a firm grasp on hard facts?

Then, once again, after a few of those questions about democracy and terror, Sawyer went back to humanizing the Assads, not just the dictator, but the “elegant, athletic” dictator’s wife, Asma, the “31-year-old former career girl” who once lived in New York. What followed was a pathetic trail of ooze about the “amazing” work this woman is doing for women’s and children’s rights — in the middle of this dictatorship. We’re told the Assads “famously live in a modest home,” and drive the kids to school, and bike together.

ABC famously forbids its reporters to wear flag pins, lest they be seen as tools of the U.S. government. But once again, in their frantic desperation to be “independent” of America, they look instead like enthusiastic apple-polishing tools for every dictatorial enemy America faces in the world.

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The Film P.B.S. Doesn’t Want you to See (Townhall.com, 070412)

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

For decades, conservatives have been among the taxpayers whose money has been made available in immense quantities to underwrite public broadcasting. Over the years, they have justifiably felt considerable resentment about the fact that very little of that funding – by some estimates as much as $2.5 billion per year – has been expended on projects that warrant their support.

In fact, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and its flagship stations (including Washington’s WETA) have frequently allowed the public airwaves to be used to promote a variety of agendas with which as much as half the population strongly disagreed. These have included many hour-long documentaries and other programs featuring vitriolic critiques of our government and its leaders, disparaging portrayals of our country’s policies and values and flattering portrayals, if not effusive endorsements, of those who share such sentiments.

To its credit, the leadership of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) launched an initiative several years ago to diversify the sources of documentary films in the hope of bringing different perspectives to the PBS audience about some of the most critical issues of our time. Thus was born the $20 million “America at a Crossroads” series which will begin airing on the PBS network in eleven prime-time segments starting on Sunday night.

Unfortunately, the original vision of the CPB sponsors of the Crossroads series suffered at the hands of PBS and WETA when the project was turned over last year to the latter organizations to execute. To be sure, a few films about or by people perceived to be “conservatives” were among the 20 selected out of 440 proposals originally submitted as part of a rigorous competition. These included, notably ones featuring former Defense Department official Richard Perle and an outspoken critic of Islamofascism, Irshad Manji.

The rest are mostly from the usual suspects – “Frontline,” the New York Times (which recently published a very friendly review of the series) and various PBS-related organizations. Among these is a film about Muslims in America by MacNeil-Lehrer Productions, in which the host of “Crossroads,” Robert MacNeil, is a partner. Interestingly, MacNeil’s film was not in the original competition; it was added on by PBS and WETA and assigned one of the eleven prized slots in the initial line-up.

As it happens, I was involved in making a film for the “America at a Crossroads” series that also focused on, among others, several American Muslims. Unlike Mr. MacNeil’s, however, this 52-minute documentary entitled “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center,” was selected through the competitive process and was originally designated by CPB to be aired in the first Crossroads increment.

Also unlike Mr. MacNeil’s film, “Islam vs. Islamists” focuses on the courageous Muslims in the United States, Canada and Western Europe who are challenging the power structure in virtually every democracy that has been established largely with Saudi money to advance worldwide the insidious ideology known as Islamofascism. In fact, thanks to the MacNeil-Lehrer film, the PBS audience will shortly be treated to an apparently fawning portrait of one of the most worrisome manifestations of that Saudi-backed organizational infrastructure in America: the Muslim Student Association (MSA). The MSA’s efforts to recruit and radicalize students and suppress dissenting views on American campuses is a matter of record and alarming in the extreme.

In an exchange with me aired on National Public Radio last week, however, Robert MacNeil explained why he and his team had refused to air “Islam vs. Islamists,” describing it as “alarmist” and “extremely one-sided.” In other words, a documentary that compellingly portrays what happens to moderate Muslims when they dare to speak up for and participate in democracy, thus defying the Islamists and their champions, is not fit for public airwaves – even in a series specifically created to bring alternative perspectives to their audience.

The MacNeil criticism was merely the latest of myriad efforts over the past year made by WETA and PBS to suppress the message of “Islam vs. Islamists.” These included: insisting that yours truly be removed as one of the film’s executive producers; allowing a series producer with family ties to a British Islamist to insist on sweeping changes to its “structure and context,” changes that would have assured more favorable treatment of those who are portrayed vilifying and, in some cases, threatening our anti-Islamist protagonists; and hiring as an advisor to help select the final films an avowed admirer of the Nation of Islam – an organization whose receipt of a million dollars from the Saudis to open black Wahhabi mosques is a feature of our documentary. The gravity of this conflict of interest was underscored when the latter showed an early version of our film to Nation of Islam representatives, an action that seemed scarcely to trouble those responsible for the “Crossroads” series at WETA and PBS.

At this writing, the question of whether PBS will get away with suppressing this film remains an open one. The decision rests with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose vision and support for “Islam vs. Islamists” in the face of sustained hostility for it exhibited by PBS and its friends has made this documentary possible. Unless and until a way is found to translate into widespread distribution CPB’s stated assessment that ours is a powerful and important film, though, the intention of the “Crossroads” series to diminish, if not end, the tyranny of the public airwaves by the Left, will be substantially unfulfilled. And “Islam vs. Islamists” will remain the film PBS does not want you to see – and can keep you from doing so.

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Bias by Story Selection (townhall.com, 070307)

By Brent Bozell III

Most liberal media outlets can’t be bothered to visit, let alone cover, the Conservative Political Action Conference every winter. But this year’s event drew a large amount of publicity. CPAC hasn’t been this notorious since reporter-fabricator Stephen Glass made up stories of wild sexual antics and drug use at CPAC hotel rooms and bathrooms 10 years ago for The New Republic.

The furor surrounded author and columnist Ann Coulter, who cracked that she would like to comment on John Edwards, but “you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot.’” Coulter’s joke was based on ABC’s intense blitz recently to press “Grey’s Anatomy” star Isaiah Washington into rehab after he used the new F-word at the Golden Globes. The word used to be coarse and insulting, but liberals are now elevating it into a profanity, which is odd, considering they’re constantly desensitizing the culture to all the historic profanities.

But the most fascinating thing about this is how effectively it demonstrates how media outlets practice bias by story selection. Some stories are big. Some stories are small. Some stories are not only omitted, but smothered to death with a pillow. It all depends on who suffers.

Clearly, the Coulter joke story had newsworthy elements: the reaction of the Edwards presidential campaign and the negative reaction of organizing conservative bloggers are among them. But other stories that would balance out left and right, or Edwards and Coulter, are not being mentioned by our eternally calculating liberal media elite.

Let’s start with Edwards, who hired two foul-mouthed feminist bloggers to attack some 250 million Americans who believe in God and the Bible. The feminists called them “Christofascists” and believers in woman-hating “mythology.” How can our “objective” media highlight Ann Coulter and then say nothing about Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan? And how could they ignored Edwards’ performance? First, rumors said Edwards fired them; then, he defended them and insisted their more hateful blogs would not appear on his Website; and then, they mysteriously quit on their own, or so we’re supposed to believe.

Since then, Edwards has made the rounds of network television, yet ABC’s Terry Moran, CBS’s Bob Schieffer and NBC’s Meredith Vieira completely skipped asking him about this scandal. As far as all these networks were concerned, there was no controversy.

Kudos to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, who was the only “mainstream” media interviewer who seemed to greet Edwards without talcum powder and a pacifier. That’s not to say it was a grilling. He merely glanced over the controversy by asking Edwards what these employment choices said about his campaign and what lessons he learned. Edwards repeated his Pablum line that they promised to be good girls for him, but then departed for “personal reasons” because of the aggression of the “far right.”

Edwards reacted to Coulter by saying, “I think it is important that we not reward hateful, selfish, childish behavior with attention.” But the media would let you believe that Edwards never had “hateful, selfish, childish” people on his communications team that would render his anti-”hate” talk hypocritical.

Second, look at leftist talk-show host Bill Maher. In the same weekend as CPAC, Maher grew upset on his HBO show that Arianna Huffington was such an enemy of free speech that she eliminated comments on her blog from people who regretted that an Afghan suicide bomber hadn’t killed Vice President Cheney. “That’s a funny joke,” he said. “If this isn’t China, shouldn’t you be able to say that?” Maher wants to make the world safe for assassinate-our-top-leaders humor.

Maher then dug his ditch deeper. Even liberal Rep. Barney Frank wanted nothing to do with Maher’s poison and tried to guide him back across the line of decency, noting that Maher’s show selects which speech they’re going to allow. Maher continued to defend the kill-Cheney commenters: “But I have no doubt that if Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow.” Joe Scarborough joined Frank in trying to get him to denounce kill-Cheney speech, but Maher still wouldn’t budge: “I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live.”

So why isn’t Maher side by side with Coulter — no, trumping Coulter — if the big story is outrageous remarks about top politicians? Most media outlets like CNN and The Washington Post poured outrage all over Coulter and didn’t mention Maher’s foot-in-mouth disease.

By selecting the story the liberals want reported, and ignoring the stories conservatives want reported, it’s clear that the media elite aren’t in the “news” business. They’re in the liberal publicity business.

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Americans see media aiding moral decline (Washington Times, 070308)

Most Americans think culture is becoming more immoral, and they view the media — both entertainment and news — as prime culprits, according to a new survey.

If the media continue to “singularly promote” secular values while undermining orthodox faith and values, it will be very difficult to reverse America’s moral decline, said the National Cultural Values Survey, released yesterday by the Culture and Media Institute (CMI) of the Media Research Center.

“Americans who care about the nation’s moral condition should insist that the media strive to more fairly represent all views, including those of the orthodox,” the report stated.

The survey of 2,000 American adults shows that the nation’s culture war is grounded in disagreements over religious issues, such as God’s role in life and whether religious belief is essential for a good and moral life, CMI Director Robert H. Knight said.

About 31% of Americans, regardless of political stripe, are “orthodox” — faithful Bible-believers who strive to live by “God’s teachings and principles,” see “a clear set of right and wrong behaviors” in every issue and believe government should be allowed to follow religious principles.

Seventeen percent of Americans, again regardless of political affiliation, are at the “progressive” end of the religious spectrum — many believe in God, but they strongly disagree that religion is “the most important factor” in forming their values or that religion is “the most essential ingredient” of a good, moral life. Progressives don’t want the government to follow religious principles and don’t believe that people “should always live by God’s teachings and principles.”

The largest group of Americans — 46% who described themselves as “independents” — do not fully identify with either of the other groups. However, they tend to align with the orthodox regarding belief in God, sexual morality and spiritual issues. They reject, for instance, progressive efforts to replace “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” — but side with progressives about using personal principles, not “God’s teachings,” to make certain moral decisions.

The culture war, according to the CMI report, occurs because the “morally absolutist” orthodox Americans are fighting to uphold values such as honesty, personal responsibility, sexual restraint and “classical character virtues.”

Progressives, with their secular views and “situational ethics,” collide with the orthodox over some of these issues, and both groups work to attract independents to their side, the report stated. This makes independents the main battlefield in the culture war, it added.

Surprisingly, all three religious groups are likely to see the media as negative influences on America’s moral culture.

Separately, author and Hoover Institution fellow Dinesh D’Souza argues in his new book, “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11,” that the “cultural left” in America is the primary cause of Islamic anger toward America.

The cultural left, which includes members of both major political parties and their allies in the press, academia and the nonprofit sector, has “fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world, that are being overwhelmed with this culture,” Mr. D’Souza writes on his Web site.

“What angers religious Muslims is not the American Constitution but the scandalous sexual mores they see on American movies and television,” he writes. “What disgusts them are not free elections but the sights of hundreds of homosexuals kissing each other and taking marriage vows. The person that horrifies them the most is not [free market philosopher] John Locke but Hillary Clinton.”

One solution, Mr. D’Souza says, is for cultural conservatives to join with Muslims and others in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced by liberal values and work to halt the spread of such things.

“As conservatives, we should export our America ... and stop exporting the cultural left’s America,” he says.

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Partisan Press Parity? The new media world. (National Review Online, 070313)

By Bruce Bartlett

For most of my lifetime, criticism of media bias was largely confined to those on the right side of the political spectrum. When I first moved to Washington in the mid-1970s, conservatives called the Washington Post “Pravda on the Potomac” for its uncompromising liberalism and disdain for all things conservative, which spread far beyond the editorial page and permeated its news coverage, as well.

Today, the situation has changed a great deal. While conservatives still believe that the major media are biased against them, one hears more and more criticism coming from the left. Indeed, judging by what one reads on the left-wing blogs, there are many liberals out there who truly believe that the major media now have a conservative bias.

In my view, the media did have a strong left-wing tilt for many years. But over the last 20 years or so, I think that has mostly disappeared. Major newspapers like the Post and New York Times are now fairly evenhanded in their news coverage. Their editorial pages are still pretty liberal, of course, but the Post in particular is far less liberal in its editorial positions than it was in the 1970s.

If, as I believe, the major media tilted left and have moved toward the center, then this means they moved to the right. It is this movement that the left has picked up on and is complaining about. But the idea that the media now tilt toward conservatives is absurd.

However, I do think that in some ways conservatives have become better at using the media, taking advantage of its institutional biases to spin stories in conservative directions. Contrary to what the left thinks, this is not something nefarious, but simply the application of good public-relations skills.

Journalist Michael Wolff — someone who is hardly sympathetic to conservative thinking — explains how Republicans have learned to use PR to their advantage in the April issue of Vanity Fair. One simple technique is that Republicans make themselves available to reporters, while Democrats often don’t.

“The one constant I’ve observed, in 27 years as an on-again, off-again political reporter, is that Republicans return reporters’ calls and Democrats don’t,” Wolff observes.

When I first began dealing with the media as a congressional aide 30 years ago, we were taught that Republicans had to try harder to get our message out in order to combat the media’s liberal bias. One thing we were told was to always return reporters’ calls promptly and politely.

Many conservatives resisted the advice — they felt that they were just playing into their enemy’s hands. But Republican PR people correctly explained that talking to reporters, even hostile ones, at least gave you a chance to give your side. Over time, if you were straight with a reporter, gave them what they needed, helped them meet their deadlines and so on, they might warm to you and at least give you a fair break.

This was very good advice, which I have always followed. There have been a number of occasions where I think I was able to talk a reporter out of some incorrect line that he had been given from a liberal source. I’ve even gotten a few favorable stories by giving a reporter solid facts and analyses that supported some point I was making.

Over the course of many years, I think I’ve earned the trust of a few top reporters at papers considered by conservatives to have a strong liberal bias. They will now take my word for things because I’ve never steered them wrong. These reporters have also told me of other people on both sides of the political spectrum that they will never trust or give a break to because they have lied or intentionally misled them.

The problem for those on the left these days is that during the long period when there was a pronounced liberal bias in the media, they got lazy. They just assumed that the major media would automatically take their side, do hit jobs on conservatives and basically do their job for them. By contrast, conservatives have always had to contend with an adversarial media and thus learned better media skills and techniques in order to compensate.

I would advise my liberal friends to stop whining about media bias. You had a free ride for a long time, and now it’s over. Get used to it, and learn how to use the media. Take a page from the conservative handbook and go around it. Figure out why talk radio works for conservatives and why it has been a dismal failure for liberals. Learn how to marshal facts and make cogent arguments instead of haranguing people and using ad hominem attacks to smear those who disagree. It’s got to work better than what you are doing now.

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The Soft Bigotry of The New York Times Magazine: Another Mother of all scandals. (National Review Online, 070327)

By Mark Hemingway

Two weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine’s cover story told the tale of six-year Navy veteran, Amorita Randall. Randall told Sara Corbett, a contributing writer for the Magazine, that she had been raped twice in the Navy, and that while stationed in Iraq in 2004 she was the victim of an improvised explosive device attack that left her with a brain injury.

The trouble is that according to an editor’s note in this past Sunday’s Times Magazine, Navy records report that in 2004 Randall was in Guam, not Iraq. And, by the way, she was never in Iraq. Further, there are no records that back up Randall’s claims she was raped. While lots of traumatized women don’t report rapes, unfortunately her claim that she was in Iraq certainly casts doubt on everything Randall says.

For their part, according to an article in the Navy Times, the Navy is understandably “annoyed,” particularly because a Times Magazine fact-checker didn’t contact them until three days before the story went to press — not enough time to verify much of the article.

The tone of the original article doesn’t help much either — even the writer seemed to be hedging her bets as to the veracity of her subject. As Randall recalls her fictional IED attack, Times Magazine writer Corbett cautioned: “It was difficult to know what had traumatized Randall: whether she had in fact been in combat or whether she was reacting to some more generalized recollection of powerlessness.” Now here’s a fun experiment: Corral the nearest veteran and ask them if they’re sympathetic to a “generalized recollection of powerlessness” from a person who lied about a brain injury as a result of a nonexistent combat record. You’re almost guaranteed to provoke a response that makes R. Lee Ermey sound like Fred Rogers.

This comes on the heels of another, criminally ignored scandal at The New York Times Magazine last year. Jack Hitt’s cover story on April 9, 2006, centered on abortion restrictions in El Salvador, relaying the story of a woman named Carmen Climaco who had been sentenced to a 30-year jail term for aborting a fetus at 18 weeks, or as Hitt put it: “Something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. It’s just that she’d had an abortion in El Salvador.”

After Hitt’s article, pro-life groups howled in protest. Climaco had not, in fact, been sentenced to 30 years for an abortion; she’d been convicted of strangling an infant that had already been born. It turned out that Hitt had received much of his information about Climaco’s case from a translator with close ties to an abortion-advocacy group — one which immediately used the Times Magazine piece in an online fundraising appeal. The claim that she’d had an abortion at 18 weeks came from an estimate submitted by a doctor at Climaco’s trial who hadn’t seen the infant. That report was found by the judges in the case to be flawed, and was totally at odds with the report of the doctor who performed the infant’s autopsy.

Remarkably, the Times Magazine didn’t issue a correction to the Hitt piece. Only after being queried by the Office of the Publisher at the Times about a possible error, did the Magazine respond. “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion,” said a note by the paper’s standards editor Craig Whitney and approved by Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati.

On December 31, 2006, the New York Times public editor Bryon Calame finally devoted an entire column to eviscerating Hitt’s story. With the help of a Times stringer in El Salvador, Calame was able to locate a copy of the relevant court documents which clearly contradict Hitt’s story. In the column, Calame stopped just shy of directly challenging the Times standards editor, who still said he was “not ready ... to order up a correction or Editors’ Note at this point,” even after an English translation of the damning court documents had been made available. “Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect,” Calame concluded.

Finally, a week after Calame’s column, and almost exactly eight months after the story ran, an “Editor’s Note” was appended to the original story on the Times website.

Now aside from the breathtaking failure of The New York Times Magazine to enforce any sort of journalistic standards in either of these cases, you might ask yourself what both of these stories have in common. It’s admittedly something of a tenuous link, but perhaps worth mentioning if only to make a point.

After I read the about the Times Magazine’s problem over the weekend I immediately Googled “Sara Corbett” in conjunction with “Mother Jones.” Sure enough, Corbett has written for the ballyhooed liberal bimonthly. As had Jack Hitt. Further, while there were no problems found with the article per se, another recent Times Magazine article on abortion rankled quite a few people; Emily Bazelon questioned whether women who’ve had abortions suffer as a result, titled “Is There a Post Abortion Syndrome?” Bazelon is, not improbably, Betty Friedan’s cousin and previously had written a skeptical article about the group Feminists for Life for — you guessed it — Mother Jones.

Now, I’m not advocating a political-neutrality litmus test for magazine writers, nor do I even think that because you’ve written for Mother Jones you necessarily must subscribe to whatever brand of watered-down socialism the magazine is currently selling. Further, there’s plenty of good journalism to be had at Mother Jones, which is why it’s an incubator for The New York Times Magazine which, accuracy-issues aside, is usually full of good writing.

But clearly there’s a pattern here with the Times Magazine. From the outside looking in, it seems as if the Times Magazine is fond of hiring writers normally aligned with liberal publications and foundations. They then are given a long leash to write on contentious issues and end up making major distortions of the truth that would seem to reflect a strong liberal bias.

Not that the journalistic establishment is likely to see it that way.

When recently discussing the Hitt scandal recently with a journalist I respect who regularly contributes to such liberal-journalistic tent poles as Harper’s and Rolling Stone, I was told that “noting errors of some of its reporters (Hitt) and the giant blind spots of others (Bazelon), Mother Jones publishes and develops better reporters than the conservative magazines.”

Obviously, I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I think that next time editors at The New York Times Magazine want to assign an article about abortion or the war they might try taking a look at the masthead of National Review, The Weekly Standard, or even Reason, where there is a tremendous amount of under-recognized journalistic talent. If nothing else, they can’t do much worse than their ideological and error-prone stable from Mother Jones.

— Mark Hemingway is a writer in Washington, D.C.

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U.S. newsrooms infiltrated: Trace dots on bias machine: Pressure groups shaping press coverage exposed (WorldNetDaily, 070410)

ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore said he doesn’t “like the word ‘balance’ much at all” when it comes to global warming.

“After extensive searches, ABC News has found no (scientific) debate” on whether the planet is warming as a result of man’s activity, he said in his network report Aug. 30.

But just how extensive was that search?

A few months later, in an appearance before the Society for Environmental Journalists, Blakemore said there is no need for reporters to seek balance in stories about the topic of global warming.

“It was very lazy of us for 10 years when we were asked for balance from the spinners,” he said. “We just gave up and said, ‘OK, OK – I will put the other side on; OK, are you happy now?’ And it saves us from the trouble of having to check out the fact that these other sides were the proverbial flat earth society.”

Blakemore, says a new book by Joseph Farah, founder of WND and a former editor in chief of major-market daily newspapers, is an example the organized social and political activists who have invaded America’s newsrooms, subverting long-established guidelines and ethics codes calling for accuracy, fairness, balance and the avoidance of conflict of interest in journalism.

“If you really want to understand how America’s great and unique institution of a free press has been deliberately undermined by radical activists masquerading as journalists, backed by big business and encouraged by big government, you have to examine this phenomenon,” says Farah, author of “Stop the Presses: The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution,” hitting the nation’s bookstores for official release today.

The Society for Environmental Journalists is one of the “activist pressure groups” Farah cites as working within the press to promote a political agenda under the guise of reporting the news.

The agenda for the next national conference, to be held in Stanford, Calif., in September, doesn’t leave much doubt about where the organization stands on global warming. The topics include:

* Changing with Climate Change: Can Industries, Investors and Insurers Adapt?

* Nature Out of Sync: Why Are Trees Flowering in January?

* Feverish Temperatures: Human Health on a Warmer Planet

* Climate Change Policy: Spinning, Sinking or Swimming?

“Journalists are supposed to be skeptics,” Farah reminds. “They are supposed to ask tough questions. They are supposed to seek the truth, not accept what passes for conventional wisdom. We might as well just get our environmental news from the Sierra Club as get it from an official, controlled press operating under the watchful eyes and ears of the Society of Environmental Journalists. And this is just one of several activist groups, heavily funded by corporate America, that police what we read, hear and see about the great issues of our time.”

The Society of Environmental Journalists is supported by, among others, the Turner Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Hearst Corp, HBO, Knight Ridder, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy Newspapers and Turner Broadcasting Service.

Another example of an extremist pressure group controlling press coverage, according to Farah, is the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

“Not only is the organization successful at working inside the media to ensure favorable coverage of homosexuals and their political agenda, it even persuades the corporate press barons to pay their freight,” exclaims Farah.

Like the Society of Environmental Journalists, the NLGJA is well-funded, with support coming from the Hearst Corp., Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, Bloomberg, Knight-Ridder, the New York Times, Newsweek, NBC News, Time, ABC, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Network, Washington Post, Newsweek, Newsday, the Ford Foundation, General Motors, Allstate, jetBlue, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Verizon and HBO.

Also, like speakers at the SEJ conference, some members of the NLGJA have suggested “getting the other side” on issues involving homosexuality is not necessary and probably not a good idea.

“At the group’s 2000 national conference in San Francisco, the big debate was over whether journalists should even bother getting other points of view on homosexuals’ issues and stories – whether such viewpoints should even be permitted,” says Farah.

CBS correspondent and NLJGA member Jeffrey Kofman made the point: “The argument (is): Why do we constantly see in coverage of gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues the homophobes and the fag-haters quoted in stories when, of course, we don’t do that with Jews, blacks, et cetera?”

Paula Madison, vice president of diversity at NBC and news director for the NBC’s New York City affiliate WNBC, added: “I agree with him. I don’t see why we would seek out ... the absurd, inane point of view just to get another point of view.”

Kofman rejoined: “All of us have seen and continue to see a lot of coverage that includes perspectives on gay issues that include people who just simply are intolerant and perhaps not qualified as well.”

Farah says this kind of observation is exactly why activists should be prohibited from the newsroom – not in control of it.

“I wrote ‘Stop the Presses!’ as a unique effort to explain the institutional problems we see in the establishment press today from the perspective of an insider – someone who witnessed this takeover of America’s newsrooms,” says Farah. “But I also witnessed and participated in the antidote – the New Media, with all of its increased competition and the many fresh voices it welcomes to the national debate.”

Many others have addressed issues of media bias before, says Farah. But few other insiders have blown the whistle on the problem. And no one else has exposed the tactics of pressure groups within the press.

Farah says the activists within the media, whether they realize it or not, are mapping a route to their own self-destruction and disfranchisement through the increasingly intolerant and close-minded way they practice their profession.

“Stop the Presses!” explores this issue and many others, including:

* Farah’s first-hand account of his efforts at launching WorldNetDaily.com, the largest independent news source on the Internet;

* His battle for survival during the Clinton administration, which audited his news agency and used taxpayer funds to maintain dossiers on him.

* A brief history of the free press that explains what a uniquely American concept it is;

* A look at the role of Google, a search engine company Farah deems to be “evil”;

* The impact of Matt Drudge and the way he and those who have followed him have changed the media forever;

* The key role WND played in defeating Al Gore’s presidential ambitions in 2000;

* The Middle East as a case study in international media distortion.

The book debuts today with major front-of-store promotional display in Barnes & Noble, as the selection of two major monthly book clubs and with the endorsement of Farah’s friends, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

Limbaugh said: “Joseph Farah was not just ‘present at the creation’ of the new media revolution, he helped instigate it. ‘Stop the Presses!’ is a fascinating and freewheeling look at how a harmonic convergence of politics, personalities and technology has forever changed the way Americans interact with their government, their fellow citizens, and the world.”

Coulter weighed in: “WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah is uniquely qualified to tell the real story of the ‘new media revolution.’ After all, he helped start it. This Patrick Henry of the Internet will have you hoisting a Sam Adams in celebration.”

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Who’s afraid of the big, bad Fox? (townhall.com, 070416)

By Austin Hill

As Congress and the White House continue to spar over Iraq war policy, a dramatic policy reversal has transpired here on the domestic front.

After plans were set for a debate in September among the Democratic presidential hopefuls, former Senator John Edwards changed his mind and decided that he wouldn’t participate after all.

Shortly thereafter, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Barack Obama changed their respective minds, as well, and announced that they would not participate in the debate either.

Why did this happen? Why the abrupt and seemingly counter-productive change of plans for three of the nation’s top presidential candidates?

It’s difficult to imagine that anybody who is serious about being President would NOT want to debate their opponents — especially when a noteworthy organization like the Congressional Black Caucus has put together the event, and plans are already set.

It’s even more difficult to understand why a serious presidential candidate would not want a good sixty minutes or more of free “facetime” on American television (isn’t this “earned media” at it’s best?), especially when America’s most popular and most watched cable news channel is set to televise the event.

But these days, America’s most watched cable news outlet happens to be The Fox Newschannel. And that seems to be the problem.

To be certain, The Fox Newschannel is quite an interesting phenomenon. “We Report, You Decide” is their familiar tagline that repeatedly and implicitly affirms what many Americans have sensed intuitively —the notion that for far too long, many American reporters and news agencies have been draping themselves in the cloak of journalistic objectivity, while skewing the story to meet their own personal and political sensibilities.

While deploying this strategy — and without mentioning its competitor by name — The Fox Newschannel has over the past decade successfully conquered the heritage cable news outlet, while at the same time endearing itself to a marketplace of increasingly sophisticated and cynical media consumers.

But all this success has apparently frightened the fringe left-wing of America, so much so that they have for the past several years regarded The Foxnewschannel as a “conservative” or “Republican” media outlet.

And what does the far left-wing do with a successful media outlet that they perceive to be “conservative?” Confront it? Infiltrate it? Oh, no, nothing of the sort.

For them, appearing on America’s #1 cable news channel is tantamount to “sleeping with enemy.” And in the case of September’s presidential debate, left-wing activists applied serious political pressure, even to the point of threatening political “damage,” so as to ensure that their candidates didn’t get anywhere near “the enemy.”

Now, let’s be sure that we’re connecting the dots correctly: the same far-left political contingency that seemed to be fine with House Speaker Pelosi’s “diplomatic” visit to the known terrorist-state of Syria, was willing to cannibalize its own candidates had they stuck with their original decisions to appear on the “wrong” TV channel.

The silliness and lack of logic among the ranks of these activists is both laughable, and seriously troubling.

But the greatest concern here lies in the fact that three presidential candidates — two sitting United States Senators, and a former Senator and Vice Presidential candidate — acquiesced to this nonsense.

To be fair, Edwards, Clinton and Obama are all smart enough to understand the priceless nature of the Fox Newschannel opportunity. But their respective choices point to a very serious question: should one of these individuals be elected President, how might they lead the entire United States in confronting its real enemies?

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Free Speech at Risk: A Free Congress Forum on the Fairness Doctrine (townhall.com, 070417)

By Paul Weyrich

Conservatism survives and continues to evolve no matter who holds the majority in Congress or lives in the White House. Our essays and panel discussions on “The New Conservatism” have been honing the finer points of theory and practice for several years. However, if the current Congress gets its way over the next few months or if the President in the next term is a Democrat it will be nearly impossible for us to get the word out on radio anymore.

As I wrote in my Notable News Commentary of February 5, 2007, the Majority Leadership is threatening to enact into law the so-called Fairness Doctrine. And even if they do not succeed in Congress, the next President simply could “persuade” the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to issue a regulation which would accomplish the same thing. Thus there may be two bites at the apple.

For those who don’t really understand what this means, the Fairness Doctrine is an antiquated rule left over from the days of the “Big three” television networks and a limited number of radio stations. It was repealed by the FCC in 1987. Now the liberals want it back so they can have equal radio time - free equal radio time - to take on commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Unable to compete on a level playing field they have fallen back on their old standby plan of regulating. If you can’t compete, they reason, cry foul and force popular radio programs that make a profit to give you equal time. If the Fairness Doctrine were imposed liberals would finally have their dreams come true: they would have control of all media, from the majority of the nation’s newspapers to the television networks to cable television and the Internet and radio. Conservative talk radio, which has been so successful the past 20 years, would be a thing of the past.

On a recent Friday the 13th, Rightalk held an on-air panel discussion of this imminent threat, appropriately enough on radio. Moderated by Free Congress Foundation analyst and military historian William S. Lind, the panel included well-known conservative activist and editor of Accuracy in Media Cliff Kincaid; the former Secretary of the State of Ohio, Ken Blackwell; libertarian personality and host of the radio show “Battle Line,” Alan Nathan, and the irrepressible political consultant and longtime media commentator Dick Morris. It was interesting to hear each man speak to the issue and remind us of the history of the Fairness Doctrine and why it would be a pointless and purely political move to reinstate it.

Opening the discussion, conservative businessman, educator and diplomat Ken Blackwell suggested that liberals should stick to making ice cream and writing entertaining television shows inasmuch as this is what they do best. Radio is just not their medium, he stated. Dick Morris related several of his experiences with former President William J. Clinton and his wife and current presidential hopeful, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and their feelings about people such as Rush Limbaugh, whom the Clintons believe is guilty of “hate speech.” Cliff Kincaid reminded the audience that “hate speech” is the way liberals have come to define all words and theories with which they disagree. Free speech, he warned, as defined by the current majority in Congress, means you must agree with the concept of political correctness. If you don’t buy that, then free speech doesn’t apply to you. Kincaid also predicted that the recent uproar and subsequent firing of radio personality Don Imus, for using crude language about a women’s basketball team consisting mostly of young black women, might be used as a blueprint for the future firings of conservative radio personalities.

Moderator Bill Lind agreed with Kincaid. He further stated that the theory of “cultural Marxism” has been applied to many aspects of our society and that fairness applies only to the traditional “one world” viewpoint. Lind also suggested the Fairness Doctrine be re-christened as the “Unfairness Doctrine.” Finally, radio personality Alan Nathan, who “battles the left and the right” as a libertarian, had some thoughts on why the Fairness Doctrine wouldn’t work, would be impossible to enforce and wasn’t needed. All in all, it was a lively discussion of an issue we all thought long dead, but which, like the Equal Rights Amendment, may soon be given new life in the laboratory of some obsessed - though no doubt politically correct — mad scientist of the left.

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There Are “Lies,” and Then There Are Lies (townhall.com, 070427)

By David Limbaugh

As someone who has criticized the Bush Administration for not fighting back enough against relentless Democrat attacks and disinformation, I was delighted by Vice President Cheney’s overdue dress-down of the Peter-principled and unprincipled Senate majority leader, Harry Reid.

If the mainstream media (MSM) gave as much credence to stories of real deception by Democrats as they do to phony allegations of Republican deception, the political landscape would look dramatically different. But no, I’m not holding my breath.

The MSM dutifully reports as fact the Democrats’ false allegation that Bush lied about Iraqi WMD, when at worst it was a mistake, since Bush was properly relying on the virtually unanimous opinion of all major intelligence agencies in the United States and the world. To lie is to say something you know at the time to be false.

In fairness, though, it was not President Bush’s mistake, but the intelligence agencies. If you insist on saying Bush made a mistake, so did the Democrats who voted along with him — with access to the same intelligence, though they’ve lied in denying that as well.

Though Bush clearly hadn’t lied, we wondered why Democrats were all of a sudden bothered by lying, since they habitually defended a habitual liar of their party who previously occupied the Oval Office.

That’s simple, they said. Clinton was lying only about sex. If you lie about sex, even under oath, you should come nearer receiving a Nobel Peace Prize than being punished for it. Of course, Clinton lied about much more than sex, but I digress.

President Bush, they say, lied us into war — about decisions that would affect lives and our national security. I certainly agree that for a public official actually to lie about such grave matters is inexcusable, which brings us to Dick Cheney’s verbal laceration of Harry Reid.

Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, the rest of the Democratic leadership and their MSM echo-puppets are portraying Cheney’s remarks as petty partisan politics. In the words of Reid, Cheney is the administration’s “attack dog.” It’s more accurate to say that he has been one of the Democrats’ favorite scapegoats.

But here we go again. When Democrats assassinate Cheney’s character with absurd lies, like “war for oil,” the MSM reports it matter of factly as “VP under fire.” When Cheney hits Democratic leader Reid squarely in the eye with truthful charges of his lies and inconsistencies, Cheney is portrayed as a vicious partisan hit man. All the while, the sober and self-evident truth of those allegations is downplayed or ignored. But we must not miss the substance of Cheney’s pointed remarks.

The occasion for Cheney’s statement on Reid was the Senate majority leader’s regrettable declaration that we have lost the war in Iraq. Cheney decided to set the record straight on Reid’s opportunistic oscillation on Iraq.

Cheney noted that in just five months Reid has taken three distinctly different positions on the war: “from pledging full funding for the military, then full funding but with conditions, and then a cutoff of funding … on the most important foreign policy question facing the nation and our troops.” Are you with me on this? We’re not talking about sex here, but “the most important foreign policy question facing the nation and our troops.” Reid has not only changed his position on the pivotal issue of Iraq, but flagrantly lied about it — and Cheney caught him dead to rights.

Cheney pointed out that Reid falsely stated the troop surge was against the recommendations of the Iraq Surrender Group (ISG), which is “plainly false.” The ISG report “was explicitly favorable toward a troop surge to secure Baghdad.” This surge, in the opinion of the general in command, is critical to our victory in Iraq, and Reid is lying about the ISG’s recommendation on it. So this lie conceivably could affect the very outcome of the war and, thus, our national security.

Cheney said that Reid chided Bush for not participating in a regional conference on Iraq, yet we’re scheduled to participate in one next week. Reid said Democrats aren’t given the opportunity for real substantive meetings with the White House. But just last week, said Cheney, Reid emerged from a meeting at the White House and said, “It was a good exchange; everyone voiced their considered opinion about the war in Iraq.”

Checkmate!

If Reid is going to continue this pattern of prevarication, he’s going to have to cover his tracks better.

Call Cheney a counterattack dog if you wish. But at least he’s counterattacking on behalf of truth and America’s national security. More power to him.

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Back to Bias Basics at PBS (townhall.com, 070502)

By Brent Bozell III

A few years ago, the left pulled several muscles exerting itself with the strange theory that the Public Broadcasting Service was lurching dangerously to the right. When Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson had the audacity not only to speak internal profanities (“fairness” and “balance”), but to try to build on them, it became clear to them that he was out of control and needed to be stopped.

Tomlinson made several small but significant steps toward balance on our taxpayer-subsidized airwaves, nudging the creation of two right-leaning talk programs — “Tucker Carlson Unfiltered” and “The Journal Editorial Report” — and both suffered from the TV equivalent of crib death.

Liberals really erupted when they learned Tomlinson secretly hired someone to assess the political balance of some PBS and NPR programs. This initiative was doomed, not only because the internal bureaucracy would never tolerate it, but because proving liberal bias at PBS is beyond easy. It’s like proving Rosie O’Donnell has a liberal bias — is it really necessary to conduct a study?

The left maintains an iron grip on PBS with all the maturity and sophistication that a 4-year-old hangs on to a Happy Meal toy. The motto of its public and private campaign against Tomlinson’s alleged transgressions should have been: “Mine! Mine! All Mine!”

Tomlinson is long gone, and Democrats now control Congress. But another step was necessary for the re-emergence of classic PBS propaganda: the return of Bill Moyers. He was back to full-time fulminating duties on April 25, with a special titled “Buying the War.” The entire thesis of this 90-minute taxpayer-funded lecture? The national media were willing cogs in the neoconservative machine that took America to war.

How is this for PBS balance: Moyers didn’t allow a single conservative, neo- or otherwise, to challenge this ludicrous idea. Oh, there were assorted clips of conservatives (yours truly included) speaking in the months after 9/11, but only to “prove” his case for a noxious “patriotism police” that would not allow dissent.

He did invite far-left media critics like Eric Boehlert and Norman Solomon to echo his conspiracy theory that the major media were stuffed with sticky pro-Bush saps. But then, Moyers also added major media players, from disgraced CBS anchor Dan Rather to former CNN boss Walter Isaacson, to agree with him that they were all woefully lacking in antiwar fervor.

In the same week, defense expert Frank Gaffney was telling a far different story — in fact, the opposite story. Unlike Moyers, Gaffney had proof. Back in the Tomlinson era, CPB pursued the idea of a broad-based documentary series on how America would respond to the post-9/11 world. Gaffney’s documentary proposal on “Islam vs. Islamism,” focusing on moderate Muslims’ efforts to challenge Islamofascists, was given a green light as one installment in the 11-part series called “America at the Crossroads.”

But once Tomlinson was out, the permanent liberal bureaucracy kicked into gear. The series was shipped to PBS Washington, D.C., superstation WETA. It promptly expressed horror that anyone would allow Gaffney anywhere near a PBS production because of his “day job” with a conservative advocacy group. They wanted Gaffney fired as an executive producer. When that didn’t happen, they censored the film, refusing to air it.

This is a clear double standard. Take Moyers as Exhibit A. Even as he constantly produces PBS programming, he has an advocacy-group job, as well, as president of the leftist Schumann Center for Media and Democracy — and no one inside PBS has ever cared.

There was one “neo-con” film that did air in the series, titled “The Case for War,” which starred conservative theorist Richard Perle. The PBS ombudsman, Michael Getler — who, to be fair, has occasionally faulted shows for a liberal tilt — came unglued that Perle was allowed so much access to PBS viewers.

“I personally find the decision to produce this film, as it has turned out, to be a stunning avoidance of the real crossroad that we are at and an abdication of journalistic principal (sic) on the most crucial issue of our time and our future,” Getler protested on the PBS Website. “This was not the subject or the time, in my opinion, on which to have a ‘point of view’ film controlled by an advocate.” Getler added that the film had a “propaganda tone,” and “it is structured so that Perle always has the last word and controls the flow.”

To Getler, it is an abdication of journalism to allow antiquated and disproven conservative arguments on PBS. But how could Getler watch the Moyers propaganda special and not see how that spectacle was obviously structured so that Moyers always had the last word — the only word!

There is only one journalistic principle and one standard for the liberals who dominate PBS. It’s mine. It’s not yours.

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A Rare Rose: Undercover double standards. (National Review Online, 070516)

By Michelle Malkin

Here is a tale of two breeds of undercover journalists. One has been celebrated by the national media and journalism organizations. The other has been shunned. One has champions in Congress. The other is facing litigation.

Both engaged in sting operations with secret cameras catching their targets on videotape. Both were deceptive about their true identities and life circumstances. Both exposed their targets’ aggressive methods and law-subverting recruitment tactics. But you’ve probably only heard of the efforts of one of these breeds. You’ll know why in a moment.

Over the past several years, local and national news outlets have conducted stings on military recruiters. Last week, a Tennessee station in Nashville set up hidden cameras and reported that it had caught Army recruiters telling an undercover producer posing as a recruit that taking medication for depression would not disqualify a recruit from serving. The Democrat chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee is now urging an Army probe of recruiting practices and the mentally ill based on the TV station’s report.

Last fall, ABC News and New York affiliate WABC enlisted students to help them in a similar gotcha game with recruiters. They armed the kids with hidden video cameras for visits to ten Army recruitment offices in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The journalists accused the recruiters of misleading the students to get them to enlist. The ABC News sting came on the heels of a Colorado student’s undercover operation in Denver in 2005. David McSwane, a high-school honors student, posed as a dropout and druggie. “I wanted to do something cool, go undercover and do something unusual,” he told the Rocky Mountain News. McSwane deliberately failed a high-school equivalency test, caught recruiters on tape driving him to purchase a detox kit, and reported that they urged him to obtain a phony diploma. A local CBS station picked up the story — prompting the Army to shut down its recruiting stations nationwide for ethics training.

McSwane earned a “laurel” from the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review “for conduct most becoming” and announced he was headed to journalism school. His reporting garnered attention from the New York Times to Editor and Publisher — and spawned copycats like those at ABC News.

No such laurels have been awarded to Lila Rose, however. And none will be forthcoming, I predict. Rose is an 18-year-old student journalist at UCLA. Like McSwane and his breed of undercover reporters, she surreptitiously infiltrated a massive organization that enlists young people. Like McSwane and his breed of undercover reporters, Rose exposed deceptive practices. Rose posed as a 15-year-old seeking the services and advice of her target. Like McSwane and his breed of undercover reporters, she caught her targets urging her to lie and evade the law in order to sign her up.

But Rose’s target was the Left’s beloved Planned Parenthood, not the military. And that has made all the difference in the nonexistent national coverage of her undercover journalism. Rose edits The Advocate, a pro-life campus publication of the student group Live Action. She posed as a minor impregnated by a 23-year-old boyfriend and caught a Planned Parenthood employee advising her to lie about her age to relieve the abortion provider from a legal obligation to report statutory rape to the police.

“If you’re 15, we have to report it,” the staffer told Rose in a secretly taped video. “If you’re not, if you’re older than that, then we don’t need to.” “OK, but if I just say I’m not 15, then it’s different?” Rose queried. “You could say 16,” the worker helpfully suggested. “Just figure out a birth date that works. And I don’t know anything.” Other than coverage from a few pro-life groups and conservative websites, Rose’s stunning revelations have received virtually no mainstream media attention. And no calls from lawmakers for investigations of Planned Parenthood’s predatory tactics and practices — which have been also caught on tape in other states by undercover citizen investigators.

Instead, Rose faces threats of a lawsuit by Planned Parenthood, which sent her a cease-and-desist letter and had the appalling nerve this week to lecture Rose about the need “to be more respectful of California laws,” according to the conservative Cybercast News Service.

Where are the muckraking champions when you need them? Intrepid Lila Rose has learned the hard way: Not all undercover journalists are equal.

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Defeat in the “Information Battle Space”: The Western media, wittingly or not, are aiding our enemies. (National Review Online, 070517)

By Jonathan Foreman

Islamabad — The week I was in Afghanistan this winter, two big stories hit the international press. The first involved the publication of photographs of German NATO troops apparently “desecrating” the remains of dead Afghans. The second was about the accidental killing of up to two hundred Afghan civilians in an allied airstrike. Both stories were sensational, unfairly reported, and illustrative of one of the most intractable difficulties that face the NATO-led ISAF Coalition in Afghanistan — and, indeed, the West generally in the “war on terror.”

The photographs of the Bundeswehr squad posing with shiny, white skulls and bones were immediately said to reveal an “atrocity.” More than two years old when they first surfaced in Germany at the end of October, the photos provoked a predictably anguished debate, both there and in other NATO states, about the brutalization of war, the foolishness of the mission in Afghanistan, and so forth.

Jumping to Conclusions

The accusation that 21st-century German soldiers were desecrating Muslim graves was a possibility transmuted into fact by a media that all too often — consciously or unconsciously — assumes the worst of Coalition forces and their mission in Afghanistan.

First of all, it was far from clear from the photos and initial reports whether the bones in question had been dug up by the soldiers or merely found on the ground. It is not hard to find skulls littering the rocky earth in the Konduz area where the Germans have their main base. The wrecked vehicles scattered about Konduz bear witness to the many battles fought in this part of Afghanistan over the years. Indeed, though the Northern Alliance battled the Taliban on a number of occasions here, it is most likely that any skulls the Germans found were actually those of Soviet troops — the mujahedeen did not usually trouble themselves to bury the bodies of their slain enemies. In other words, the remains that the Germans posed with were probably neither Muslim nor obtained by grave robbing, but had been bleaching under the sun for up to two decades before they inspired a juvenile digital photo-op.

The damage, however, was done. Though the “atrocity” might one day be refuted — most likely in some little-publicized investigation that takes months to unfold — the news had flashed around the world that German Coalition troops were treating Muslim corpses with contempt. The Western journalists who reported the story with such concerned relish may not have realized that by treating the photographs as prima facie evidence of a genuine scandal they were undermining the Coalition in Afghanistan, supporting the myth of “Islamophobia,” and fomenting anti-Western hatred. They probably thought they were just doing their jobs in the normal, “neutral” fashion.

Selective Skepticism

The second story is even more illustrative of the nearly impossible task faced by the Coalition — and the way the media make it even more difficult. In the last week of October, British and Canadian troops fighting the Taliban in Kandahar province were attacked near the Sperwan Ghar patrol base. As night fell on October 24, the NATO troops called in close air support against Taliban positions. According to local chiefs, a large number of civilians were killed in the bombing. Over the next couple of days the claims of civilian fatalities ranged from 20 to 200 — a telling discrepancy, and one that probably reflects the tendency of predominantly oral cultures like that of rural Afghanistan to foster rumor and exaggeration. ISAF spokesmen admitted that, of an estimated total 70 fatalities, some civilians might have been killed in the strike out (four wounded civilians were taken to Kandahar airbase for treatment). They doubted the “at least 89” number quoted by most media outlets, which was usually followed by the point that this was the largest number of civilian deaths in a single incident since 2002.

As NATO officers privately complained, no one could be sure of the truth in the immediate aftermath of the air strike. Because of the Muslim practice of burying the dead within 24 hours, there are often no bodies to be found in incidents like this. Moreover it is the standard operating procedure of the Taliban to “sanitize” or remove weapons from the corpses of any slain or wounded members they don’t take away — so you can be sure that a civilian fatality really is a civilian only if the corpse is that of a small child or a woman.

A knowledgeable, thoughtful, and clear-eyed reporter might also consider that local civilians in areas dominated by the Taliban almost always claim that there are no Taliban, and have never been any Taliban, in their area. They make this claim out of either fear or loyalty. During fierce fighting in September in the same Panjwayi area, the local elders also claimed, absurdly, that there were no Taliban around, even though more than 500 of them were killed in pitched battles there and the area is at the center of the movement’s heartland.

More important, it is standard operating procedure of the Islamists in Afghanistan — as it is in Lebanon and Gaza and Iraq — to claim that all casualties on their side are civilians. Indeed, the Taliban would be grossly incompetant at asymmetric and information warfare if they didn’t make that claim. (Just as al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers would be foolish if they did not cry “torture” when detained at Gitmo or elsewhere.)

After all, it would be a huge propaganda victory for the Taliban and their allies to create the impression that Coalition troops routinely or increasingly kill large numbers of civilians. Once established as a media “fact,” such an impression would not only undermine the Afghan government and ISAF, but it could also affect the strategic, and very real, battle for hearts and minds in Europe and the United States.

Make no mistake, the Taliban and their allies, like the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, know perfectly well that they don’t have to defeat the Coalition militarily; all they have to do is undermine the political will of the Western electorates.

You might expect journalists to take some note of these practices and of the propaganda element of the war, and accordingly to exercise a little caution, if not skepticism, before they unquestioningly parrot an allegation of mass civilian deaths. (Surely they must be aware that reports of an atrocity can have enormous real world effects? Surely they have some sense that various Afghan players might lie in order to advance their cause?) Generally, however, they do not. For the most part, Taliban claims are assumed to be true. Statements by Coalition spokesmen, on the other hand, are a different matter. Such officials are said to make “claims,” and they are essentially assumed to be propagandists, if not flat out liars, by many correspondents (who won’t say as much in print, of course, but ask them about it over a drink).

It is one of the ironies of our time that members of the media are so hypersensitive to being used or manipulated by any official person from their own society — military officials, government spokesmen, etc. — but can be as naïve as children when it comes to voices from other cultures. This would almost be laughable, if it weren’t so pathetic — and so poisonous. For instance, the BBC loves to quote Iraqi doctors about Coalition-inflicted casualties, apparently oblivious of the fact that the Iraqi medical profession was open almost exclusively to Baathists, is predominantly Sunni, and did extremely well under Saddam.

There is sometimes a strange, sentimental, inverted racism at work in this: Surely such simple, ardent, technologically unsophisticated people — like the mullah who speaks for the village, or the weeping mother who swears her slain son was a good boy and would never have shot at the soldiers — wouldn’t tell lies? While there is no justification for reverting to Edwardian-era bigotry and assuming that all Orientals, especially South Asians, are compulsive liars, it would be equally wrong to assume the opposite or to ignore the role of rumor and the likelihood of deceit in a place like Afghanistan.

Where’s the Competence?

In general the mainstream media have taken even longer to understand asymmetric warfare in the instant-information age than the U.S. military. Their understanding of traditional military concepts is abysmal enough. It is a painful fact that many contemporary war correspondents know virtually nothing of military ranks, weapons, and tactics. Someone who calls the dropping of a single JDAM “carpet bombing” and who doesn’t know if a company is larger or smaller than a battalion is hardly likely to be able to tell the difference between genuine “collateral damage” — the unwitting, and in some cases avoidable, killing of non-combatants — and a deliberate massacre.

Nor do many reporters get that the U.S. and its allies are fighting an enemy that thinks nothing of using ambulances to ferry troops and ammunition (as the Marines discovered to their cost in Fallujah; when they eventually fired on the ambulance/troop carriers, the BBC accused them of war crimes.) It is an enemy that routinely employs hospitals, museums, schools, and mosques as firing positions, and exploits Western sensibilities and legal norms by using women and children as human shields. Such tactics inevitably lead to civilian casualties (which is why they are illegal under the laws of war). But they make total, terrible sense if you are al Qaeda or Hezbollah.

You are more likely to win on the ground if the Americans or Brits or Israelis refrain from firing on your ambulance/mosque/school packed with fighters; and if they do fire on you, you win in the propaganda battle. The pictures on al Jazeera and CNN of a smoking ambulance or corpse of a child are worth the deaths of the fighters and their civilian shields.

Much reporting from the field fails to take into account the fact that the traditional legal distinction between civilian and non-civilian has little bearing on the reality of war in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. A more relevant and sensible distinction might be between combatant and non-combatant. After all, the Taliban, like their insurgent cousins in Iraq, are civilians in arms who don’t wear uniforms — thus putting civilian non-combatants in jeopardy and breaching the Geneva Convention. Moreover, more than a few of the attacks against Coalition and Afghan army forces are carried out by civilian Pashtuns who are not even members of the Taliban, but mere opportunists — indebted farmers, unemployed youths — who have been paid well to take a potshot or two at a passing patrol.

Communication Failure

The U.S. military information-apparatus has so far failed to make Western publics or the press understand the implications of all this. It is a failure that has strategic implications. Unfortunately it may be impossible for allied spokesmen to overcome the naïveté, faux or otherwise, of the mainstream media. Too many establishment journalists live in a mental world dominated by the reporting tropes of the later Vietnam War: “five o’clock follies,” lame attempts at censorship, demoralized draftees “fragging” officers, exaggerated body counts, Pentagon lies, and virtuous Viet Cong patriots. Too few of them have a genuine understanding of either military culture or the third-world cultures of areas in which our wars are taking place.

At the end of my visit to Afghanistan, I sat in on at a press conference at the huge Bagram airbase where the local representatives of the international media pressed General James L. Jones, then supreme commander of NATO, about the latest news in the war. “Isn’t it true that the civilian casualties and the skulls incident have undermined NATO’s efforts to win hearts and minds,” asked one reporter for a top news agency. The assumption behind his question was that these stories had already reached small, rural villages and that such stories have the power to undermine the building of roads and schools. More tellingly, the question treated the existence of the stories and the impressions they created as something uncontrollable and inevitable, rather than something for which he and his colleagues bore responsibility. The general calmly pointed out that the enemy uses civilians as human shields and likes to spread lies about the Coalition — points that made no impact on the assembled press — then personally apologized for any civilian deaths and, rightly, promised a full investigation.

It may turn out that the reports were accurate, that allied airmen did indeed kill a large number of civilians because of faulty intelligence or some other aspect of the fog of war. But if the 90 to 200 so-called civilian deaths were either mythical or primarily composed of Taliban warriors, the press that was so sure of allied guilt will have acted once again as an unwitting ally of some very nasty people.

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Capturing the Language to Assure Liberal Dominance (townhall.com, 070523)

By Michael Medved

A misleading recent headline in the New York Times demonstrated the way that the left abuses the language to cement its continued control of our public discourse.

Under the banner “EVOLUTION OPPONENT IS IN LINE FOR SCHOOLS POST” reporter Cornelia Dean declared: “The National Association of State Boards of Education will elect officers in July, and for one office, president-elect, there is only one candidate: a member of the Kansas school board who supported its efforts against the teaching of evolution.”

The headline and the lead sentence conjure up the image of a prairie populist, perhaps bearing pitchfork and clad in Bib overalls, denying the existence of dinosaurs and opposing any suggestion that the work of creation required more than six literal days. The sophisticates who read America’s Journal of Record no doubt scanned this alarming article with considerable head-shaking and tsk-tsking at the knuckle-dragging yahoos who populate Red State flyover country.

If anyone bothered to read the article in its entirety, however, they ultimately would discover that Kenneth R. Willard, the school official in question, in no way qualified as “an evolution opponent.”

During his service on the Kansas school board he and his conservative colleagues merely fought “to change the state’s science standards to allow inclusion of intelligent design” by local school districts. Voters later rejected the conservative majority, but neither Mr. Willard nor the other members of his faction ever attempted to block schools or school districts from educating students about Darwinism. Contrary to the newspaper’s alarming report, they in no way launched “efforts against the teaching of evolution.”

As he explained later in the same article, the embattled candidate for president of the National Association of State Boards of Education merely “thought students should be taught about challenges to the theory of evolution, like intelligent design…’Some people are mindless about their attacks on anyone questioning anything Darwin might have said.’”

The use of loaded phrases like “evolution opponent” and “efforts against the teaching of evolution” deliberately conjure up scary images of the Scopes Trial, “Inherit the Wind,” and religious fanatics who want to keep young minds ignorant and pliable. The Scopes controversy of 1924 actually involved a government ban on any mention of evolution in the classroom; ironically, liberals today desire a government ban on any questioning of evolution in the classroom. It’s leftists, not conservatives, who mirror the Tennessee fundamentalists of eighty years ago by attempting to stifle a teacher’s freedom of speech.

The deployment of explosive and dishonest language has become an increasingly common tactic in today’s most polarizing cultural and political battles.

Whenever conservatives work for state or federal constitutional amendments to reinforce the existing definition of male-female marriage, for instance, leading newspapers and TV networks describe such efforts as “gay marriage bans.” A simple declaration affirming marriage as “a union between one man and one woman” bans no private behavior whatever, but rather underlines the policy under which government grants its strongest endorsement to one specific type of relationship. A restatement of the traditional basis for marriage amounts to a “gay marriage ban” no more than existing marriage laws constitute an “incest ban” or a “ban on interspecies relationships.” Defining one sort of union as uniquely approved doesn’t mean that another sort of connection is specifically forbidden, or banned.

In a similar vein, nearly all major press outlets have stopped using the phrases “pro life” or “pro choice” to describe the opposing positions on the abortion issue. The most common phraseology now centers on “abortion rights” — as in, “Rudy Giuliani offends GOP orthodoxy with his support for abortion rights” or “Mitt Romney once supported, but now opposes, abortion rights.” Such outrageously unfair language ignores the fact that no pro life candidate or advocate would ever say “I oppose abortion rights” – since they don’t believe that abortion constitutes a genuine “right” in any sense.

If a newspaper suggested that Senator Chuck Schumer opposed “Second Amendment rights” or “gun owners’ rights” the New York Democrat would have legitimate grounds for complaint: he describes himself as “pro gun control” not “anti gun rights.” If those who favor more restrictions on firearms generally avoid designation as opponents of any sort of rights, why is it appropriate to characterize pro-lifers as foes of “abortion rights”? After all, gun rights actually appear, explicitly, in the text of the Constitution whereas “abortion rights” rely on the famous (and gaseous) “emanations of penumbras” that Justice William O. Douglas first conjured out of his fertile imagination in 1965.

The cunning and consistent employment of various misleading phrases (“evolution opponent”, “gay marriage ban”, “opponent of gay rights,” “opponent of hate crimes protection,” “foe of stem cell research,” “opponent of abortion rights”) help to tip the scales in ongoing debates. So do the glowing terms frequently trotted out to encourage many items on the liberal agenda, such as “universal health care” (how could anyone oppose such a worthy concept?), “fighting global warming” (the alternative seems to be either doing nothing or actually encouraging this horror) or even “the fairness doctrine.” (Why would cranky conservatives object to the idea of “fairness”?).

On every issue, language matters. Yes, it makes a difference whether you describe the Bush tax changes of 2003 as “across the board cuts” or “tax cuts for the rich.” By the same token, “affirmative action” or “diversity guidelines” always prove more popular than “quotas” or “race-based preferences” – though all four phrases describe virtually the same thing. No one likes the idea of “death taxes,” but “inheritance taxes” sound far more appropriate. “Welfare” sounds suspect and wasteful but “social service safety net” has a reassuring, compassionate ring. And of course no one in the current debate on illegal immigration seems to endorse “amnesty” while even many conservatives believe that “earned legalization” remains the most just and sensible course.

In a sense, the new press tendency to invoke biased, left-leaning terminology reflects the work of Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, who has argued for years that “progressives” (a much better word than “liberals”) must take control of the language in order to roll back the ideological victories for the right. He pointed to the way that conservatives used phrases like “tax relief” (implying that taxes are indeed a burden, rather than a privilege or a duty) and “partial birth abortion” (emphasizing that the child is half born in the process of its termination) to bring the public in line with their point of view. According to numerous reports, the top national strategists who helped the Democrats sweep the Congressional elections of 2006 took careful note of Lakoff’s theories and recommendations.

Conservatives should consider a similar re-evaluation of our phraseology to reinvigorate our side of ongoing debates, at the same time that we contest manifestly slanted descriptions like “pro” and “anti abortion rights.”

Even when it comes to a minor controversy over an insignificant position like “President of the National Association of State Boards of Education,” we suffer when the nation’s leading newspaper to characterize, without protest, an advocate of open classroom discussion as an “evolution opponent.” If right-wingers allow themselves to be characterized in such forbidding, Jurassic terms then we, too, run the risk of permanent extinction.

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Report: Media Skewing Religion with Dominant Conservative Voices (Christian Post, 070530)

WASHINGTON – Evangelical and other faith leaders are increasingly expressing concern over the frequent media coverage that the religious right gets while the more progressive voices are “left behind.”

A new research report titled “Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in the Major News Media” found that conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

“Progressive voices are at a distinct disadvantage when compared to conservative access to print and TV representation,” according to the Rev. Dr. Jim Forbes, senior pastor of The Riverside Church in New York City

The new report, released by Media Matters for America – a progressive media watchdog – found 3.3 appearances by conservative religious leaders for every one appearance by a progressive when being quoted or interviewed in major news print and TV media. Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council, was the most quoted, interviewed and mentioned religious leader, followed by Jim Wallis, best-selling author and president of Sojourners, and evangelist Franklin Graham.

“I have long felt that the media has given Americans a distorted view of what people of faith believe,” said Edgar, one of the more popular progressive media-go-tos, during a press conference on Tuesday. “This research from Media Matters proves that.”

Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, believes today’s popular culture equates fundamentalism and religious authenticity.

“The overwhelming presence in the news media of conservative religious voices leads to the false implication that to be religious is to be conservative, and worse, that to be progressive is to lack faith or even be against faith. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Research on media coverage of religious perspectives began after the 2004 election when “moral values” became the most important issue on which Americans based their vote. The report counted the number of times each person (10 conservatives and 10 progressives) was interviewed, quoted and mentioned until Dec. 31, 2006.

“Left Behind” is now being released weeks after the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who represented the religious right for many Americans, died and in turn placed increasing attention on a shift in evangelical focus among younger evangelicals.

Names like Falwell, Pat Robertson of Christian Broadcasting Network and Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family represent an “outgoing” and “aging” tide, said the Rev. Brian McLaren, best-selling author and a leader of the emerging church.

McLaren is convinced that a broader conversation is emerging even among evangelicals and that the number of progressive issues - including the genocide in Darfur, global climate change, fair trade, the gap between the rich and poor, and healthcare - is going to rise in importance.

“I’m certain that a new spirit is in the air,” he said.

Still, conservative issues like abortion are not going to go away. The Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, told The New York Times that the issue is going to “continue to be a unifying factor among evangelicals and Catholics.”

Nevertheless, only 11% of Americans identify with the religious right political movement and only 7%, the religious left political movement, according to a 2006 Pew Forum survey. Meanwhile, 32% of all Christians identify themselves as liberal or progressive and 38% as born-again or evangelical Christians. And among evangelicals, 36% also describe themselves as liberal or progressive Christians.

Edgar called the media to seek a more balanced approach when covering issues of religion and to cover what the majority of faithful Americans are doing.

Today’s American churches are hearing more about hunger, poverty, Iraq, and the environment from the pulpit, the 2006 Pew Forum survey revealed.

And while progressives have not shown cohesive answers to specific issues as conservatives have done, Forbes says progressive Christians have an “openness to new insight.”

“It is good news that progressives are mobilizing for vigorous and effective use of the media and ensuring that the public will have access to perspectives they may not have received in the last few years,” said Forbes.

Other findings in the “Left Behind” report included separate studies on “the celebrities” such as conservatives Falwell and Dobson as well as progressives Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. These leaders are frequently quoted and would outrank other leaders in their respective ideological categories, according to the report. The study found Jackson and Sharpton appear most often in the American media followed by the conservatives in this specific study.

Influential religious leaders, including megapastors Rick Warren, T.D. Jakes and Joel Osteen, were also absent from the final report as all three seem to avoid being associated with a political ideology and have messages that are too ambiguous to label them as simply “conservative,” the report stated. If they were included in the main study, Warren would have placed fourth, Jakes sixth and Osteen seventh among the most quoted, interviewed, or mentioned conservative leaders.

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CNN’s Double Time for Democrats (Townhall.com, 070613)

By Brent Bozell III

CNN hosted three presidential debates last week, two for the Democrats and one for the Republicans. Democratic candidates were awarded twice as much airtime in a three-day period. CNN has its work cut out for it if it wants to be seen as impartial in the upcoming presidential election.

What tilted the schedule in the Democrats’ favor? Both Sunday’s and Tuesday’s two-hour traditional debates in New Hampshire with each party were hosted by Wolf Blitzer. But on Monday, CNN devoted an hour to the top three Democrat contenders, hosted by the religious-left group Sojourners. Each received 15 minutes of airtime. When that hour was over, CNN awarded most of the “second tier” — four more Democratic contenders — more time to discuss their faith in individual interviews on “Paula Zahn Now.” That’s almost another two hours for the Democrats.

The Sojourners forum was not a debate, but a series of three individual interviews with (in order) John Edwards, Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton, all of whom were given long, flowing chunks of free airtime to impress the public with an image of devout faith and compassionate wonkery. Edwards was asked nine questions, but Obama and Clinton were asked only five in their 15-minute periods. Of these 19 queries, 11 came from CNN and eight were entreaties from liberal Sojourners-selected questioners.

Here’s the most generous example of answer time. Obama talked about new solutions to foil poverty for about five and a half minutes before CNN moderator Soledad O’Brien broke in, but only to say soothingly, “You’ve got 15 minutes, and you can spend them any way you’d like, but we’ve got a lot of questions.” Obama continued for another 90 seconds before O’Brien moved to a wrap-up question.

Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, is a prominent opponent of the religious right who believes liberals and Democrats should be seen as every bit as Christian (and probably more so) than the conservatives. At the event’s end, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien underlined that the event let the candidates show “how much of a role faith plays” in their lives and politics, and: “It’s very important. I think where the Democrats have learned a lesson, really, is in embracing and talking much more about their faith.”

So how on Earth does this not sound like DNC-TV?

The puffery continued on other networks the next day. Take CBS’s Harry Smith the next morning: “The top three Democratic presidential candidates met last night at a forum on religion, a very familiar subject to Sen. Hillary Clinton. Faith has always been a huge part of her life.”

So how does CNN balance itself now? O’Brien claimed at the show’s end that it would eventually be balanced out with “a similar forum on faith and politics with Republican candidates.” Wallis, pretending to be nonpartisan, said he would like to host a Republican event. That better not be the “balance” CNN is talking about.

If it ever materializes, a Republican forum on faith and politics on CNN must be hosted by a group that is just as friendly to the Republicans as the leftists at Sojourners are to the Democrats. Each candidate was greeted with stage-shaking ovations and screams during the Democrats’ affair — the same setting should be established for the Republicans.

But CNN wasn’t only offering free airtime to the Democrats. It was providing a big whopping present to Wallis and his group’s fortunes. This was the central event of the annual Sojourners “Pentecost” conference, used to attract hundreds of conference bookings and add glitz and glamour and the image of great political influence to Wallis.

Wallis was very busy hitting up his supporters for donations after the CNN event: “Click here to make a donation of $50, $100 or more to support the work of Sojourners/Call to Renewal as we raise a prophetic voice in the 2008 election campaign. ... In the 36 years since we founded Sojourners, I cannot remember a moment of opportunity as tangible as this.” CNN is offering “tangible moments of opportunity” for left-wing fund-raisers.

If CNN really wants to balance this event out, it needs to partner with a religious-conservative group — for example, the Family Research Council is holding a Values Voters Summit in October — and let a group like FRC have every tangible opportunity CNN just handed to the left-wingers.

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CBS blames sexism for bad ratings (Financial Times, 070612)

Leslie Moonves, CBS chief executive, on Tuesday suggested that sexist attitudes were partly to blame for the faltering performance of [KH: openly liberal] Katie Couric, the news anchor he recruited to the network with a $15m annual pay package.

“I’m sort of surprised by the vitriol against her. The number of people who don’t want news from a woman was startling,” Mr Moonves said of the audience’s reaction to Ms Couric, who this month brought ratings for the CBS Evening News to a 20-year low.

He reiterated, however, that he was committed to Ms Couric and that he believed her programme would succeed in spite of its last place standing behind rivals ABC and NBC.

Ms Couric’s gender has been a central issue since CBS poached her from NBC’s Today show a year ago and made her the first woman to solo anchor a network newscast, filling the seat of such legends as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

CBS was hoping to draw younger, female viewers to a US television institution whose audience has halved in the past 25 years.

Ms Couric has managed a 2 per cent increase in women age 18 to 49 since her September debut. However, that has been more than offset by an 11 per cent decline among men over 55, who still constitute the bulk of the evening news’ audience.

Mr Moonves has previously chided critics for scrutinising Ms Couric’s wardrobe and personal life. However, his latest remarks, made during a breakfast sponsored by Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Communications, were his most explicit about gender bias.

They come at a time when New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is testing whether Americans are willing to accept a woman in another authority position – as president.

Linda Mason, head of standards at CBS News, last month told the network’s Public Eye blog: “I had no idea that a woman delivering the news would be a handicap,” and that the public seemed to “prefer the news from white guys”.

In the absence of specific research, some analysts took issue with that argument. “People get news from women all the time – on local news, on morning shows. I’m sceptical of his discovery of sexism,” said Andrew Tyndall, whose Tyndall Report monitors newscasts. He and others have criticised the style of Ms Couric’s newscast, which emphasised soft features over hard news – something CBS seemed to acknowledge this year when it replaced the producer.

“Some of our changes didn’t work,” Mr Moonves said on Tuesday. But he added: “If TV news doesn’t want to go the way of the newspapers, which are declining rapidly, then we have to try change.”

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CNN Rebuked for Biased Christian ‘Warriors’ Program (Christian Post, 070828)

Criticisms are mounting against what some call bias reporting for the Christian segment of last week’s three-part CNN special “God’s Warriors.”

Viewers of the Aug. 21-23 mini-series, which re-aired Aug. 24-26, were allegedly pounded by the special’s producer and anchor Christiane Amanpour with slanted messages of Christian extremism.

“By lumping Christian religious conservatives into a series that began with a focus on terrorism, it creates an impression of guilt by associations,” said Dr. Gary Cass, chairman and CEO of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission and former head of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, according to OneNewsNow.

The segment shown prior to the Christian installment reported on Islamic terrorists like the Taliban and suicide bombers.

“It seems as if there may be a problem of moral equivalency stating that what we do peacefully and lawfully, in trying to bring change to the culture, is in any way related to what violent fundamentalists and other religions do in the name of their religion,” Cass said.

Liberty University, for example, was said to be raising a generation of “pit bulls” to attack secular culture. Though Amanpour was citing a past quote from the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Liberty University’s founder, it was said in a way that cast Falwell as a radical leader building an army of young Christian warriors.

Viewers were introduced to Liberty University’s new law school which has a replica of the U.S. Supreme Court room. The special portrayed the school as plotting to raise conservative Christian lawyers who would take over the nation’s highest court of law in the future. It also zoomed in on the ten commandment carved outside of a classroom at the Christian law school.

“Really, what our vision is is to raise a new generation of people that understands the rule of law that are taught that in our Christian tradition and worldview,” clarified Mathew Staver, dean of Liberty University’s law school, when Amanpour questioned him on raising a new generation of “pit bull” lawyers.

Also included in the special were clips of fatal bombings of abortion clinics by Christian fanatics and a Christian Zionist pastor who believes in protecting Israel at all costs, including a military attack on Iran.

“[The CNN series] is false in its basic premise, established in the opening scene in which Jewish (and Christian) religious fervency is equated with that of Muslims heard endorsing ‘martyrdom,’ or suicide murder,” stated the report by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

“There is, of course, no counterpart among Jews and Christians to the violent jihadist Muslim campaigns under way across the globe,” it added.

Not all the reporting for the Christian installment was criticized, however. Christian figures and ministries more accurately portrayed on the episode included the Rev. Rich Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals and Ron Luce of Teen Mania ministry and Battle Cry.

Part 3 of the series also included a May 8 interview with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, which turned out to be his last interview with a television journalist before he died on May 15, 2007.

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Fairness Doctrine, R.I.P.: Stay tuned for the real fight over media regulation. (National Review Online, 070705)

By James L. Gattuso

Victory was fast and shockingly easy. The battle over the Fairness Doctrine ended last week when the House of Representatives voted 309-115 against allowing the Federal Communications Commission to re-impose the regulation on broadcasters. The vote almost certainly means that the long-dead rule will not be revived anytime soon. That’s good news. But the celebrations should be tempered: the real battle over media regulation is still to come, and won’t involve the words “Fairness Doctrine.”

The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to air contrasting points of view on controversial issues. It was repealed some 20 years ago, after the commission concluded that the rule was actually stifling, rather than fostering, coverage of disputatious issues.

And history proved the FCC right. The years following repeal saw the birth of modern talk radio, a phenomenon that brings brash public debate into the homes of America daily.

Not all have been pleased with this development. The greatest successes in talk radio have been unapologetically conservative voices. And that has made talk radio made a thorn in the side of the left.

Not surprising, then, that almost immediately after liberals regained power in Congress, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio) called for restoring the long-dead Fairness Doctrine. The “idea of uninhibited exchange of ideas in the marketplace” he said, “needs to be looked at in the era of media consolidation”.

Kucinich’s call attracted much media attention, and more than a little criticism, but little was actually done to advance the idea legislatively. It probably would still be on the back burner were it not for — of all things — illegal immigration. During the acrimonious debate over immigration reform, “AM armies” roused by conservative talk-show hosts proved to be a powerful — and to many legislators, unwelcome — force.

Angered by this, a number of amnesty opponents — from both sides of the aisle lashed out against talk radio. Liberal leaders seized the moment to call for the Fairness Doctrine’s return.

It was a political mistake of the first order. Conservative radio-talk-show hosts from Rush Limbaugh to the smallest local personality hit back hard against the idea. It seemed near impossible to turn on your car radio without hearing about the issue. But it wasn’t just incensed conservative talkers who quashed the idea. No one seemed to like it. Even the normally liberal-leaning blogosphere produced few defenders of a Fairness Doctrine revival. It was just too obviously an attempt to stifle speech.

In the end, it was the rule’s opponents — not its supporters — who took the offensive. Led by Rep. Mike Pence (R., Ind.), a former radio talker himself, regulation opponents proposed an amendment to the FCC’s appropriations bill banning the agency from using any funds to adopt a fairness rule. The vote was decisive: a majority of Democrats joined with a unanimous Republican caucus to forestall efforts to revive the failed doctrine.

Politically, this seems to end any short-term possibility that Congress might reimpose a Fairness Doctrine. With so many members now on record opposing the rule, it would take a political Frankenstein to raise the doctrine from the regulatory grave in this Congress.

To forestall future reimposition, Pence — along with over 100 cosponsors — has introduced legislation to permanently eliminate the FCC’s authority to impose the regulation. Similar legislation has been introduced in the Senate.

So is it time for conservatives to celebrate? Not quite yet. The real battle over American media has hardly begun.

The odd Dennis Kucinich aside, few on the Left ever seriously thought the Fairness Doctrine could be reinstituted. Last week’s win was mostly over undefended ground. But the Left has been very active in promoting a number of much more subtle “reforms” meant to alter what broadcasters do and say.

These approaches were detailed in report jointly released last month by the liberal advocacy groups Free Press and the Center for American Progress. Entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Talk Radio,” many conservative commentators mistakenly assumed the report endorsed the Fairness Doctrine. Far from it: The authors dismiss the doctrine as “ineffective.”

Instead, they propose an alternative agenda, including:

o Strengthened limits on how many radio stations on firm can own, locally and nationally;

o Shortening broadcast license terms;

o Requiring radio broadcasters to regularly show they are operating in the “public interest;”

Imposing a fee on broadcasters who fail to meet these “public interest obligations” with the funding to go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The goal of the reforms is the same as the Fairness Doctrine: to reduce the influence of conservative talk radio. Limiting ownership, the authors believe, will eliminate many of the owners who favor conservative causes. Public interest requirements can be defined almost any way a regulator wants — up to and perhaps even beyond that required by the old Fairness Doctrine. And the proposed fee provides regulators with a quite effective stick to compel compliance — as well as to direct funds to more ideologically compatible public broadcasters.

Free speech and free markets enjoyed a great victory last week in the defeat of the Fairness Doctrine. But the real fight to protect the media from government interference is just beginning.

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See No Muslims: The NY Times Ignores the Obvious (townhall.com, 070706)

By Joel Mowbray

In what must have come as a shock to its readers, the New York Times reported that the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London brought “home to Britain fears of homegrown terrorist attacks among its disenfranchised South Asian population.”

Imagine the surprise of many to learn that Britain is now under attack from “disenfranchised South Asian” people, not those who murder in the name of their Islamic faith.

Cruelly ironic is that in the course of attempting to avoid offending Muslims, the Times managed to defame two larger groups of people—all in a single sentence.

And that’s setting aside the fact that the deadliest 7/7 bomber was not even “South Asian.” Germaine Maurice Lindsay, who changed his name to Abdullah Shaheed Jamal after converting to Islam at age 15, moved to the UK from Jamaica.

A plain reading of the silly Times sentence would suggest that the British discussions of terrorism for the past two years have revolved, in large part, around fears of Indian Hindus, the single largest South Asian demographic in the United Kingdom. (According to the last UK census, immigrants who trace their ancestry to India, over 80% of whom are Hindu, are the only population of South Asian descendants topping one million in the country.)

Presumably, the Times was seeking a gentle way of pointing the finger at ethnic Pakistani Muslims, or perhaps even Muslims hailing from Bangladesh. But the self-proclaimed “paper of record” couldn’t bring itself to write anything more specific than “South Asian population.”

Perhaps the Times assumed that its sophisticated readers would read between the lines, just sort of figuring out that reporters Alan Cowell and Raymond Bonner were really talking about Muslims, but couldn’t write as much out of politeness.

In a 1,600 word story about homegrown terrorism inside the UK, it took roughly 1,400 words before Cowell and Bonner mentioned “Muslims.” “Islam” is nowhere to be found.

But the Times’s absurd rhetorical acrobatics insulted not only the broad “South Asian” population, but also Britain itself.

Notice the clever phrasing about the object of Brits’ fears: the “disenfranchised South Asian population.” Disenfranchised is a victims’ tag that mostly sullies the aggressors who have committed the disenfranchising, in this case implying that Britain has “deprived” this population group “of the rights of citizenship.”

Brits have done no such thing.

Remember that Muslims, er, “South Asians,” have long been welcomed into British society, from employment through politics. 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan, for example, used to work for Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry.

To the extent that Muslims live and function outside of British society, it is largely by choice. British imams, for example, have told their followers not to contribute to the “infidel” economy and instead suck off its government by collecting welfare checks. And no one who’s seen the photos needs reminding of the outrageous British Muslim protests calling for the blood of Islam’s critics.

Perhaps the Times feels no remorse insulting large groups that the paper doesn’t consider to be minorities. And perhaps the Times finds no shame in ignoring the religion of people hellbent on murdering in the name of that religion.

But is the Times even slightly concerned when the paper’s sensibilities trump the facts?

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What’s Fair About the Fairness Doctrine? (townhall.com, 070706)

By Burt Prelutsky

Lately, I’ve been hearing rumors that prominent liberal politicians, the very same people who are always proclaiming themselves passionate advocates for free speech, are looking into ways to muzzle conservative radio talk show hosts. They apparently believe that they can employ the FCC’s fairness doctrine to silence those who do not share their desire that the next occupant of the Oval Office have a (D) after his or her last name.

Although I appreciate irony as much as the next guy, I have an extremely low tolerance for hypocrisy. To illustrate what I mean, I’ll relate a conversation I had with an old college chum not too long ago. Although we’ve known each other for over 40 years, and were both Democrats way back when, we have since gone our separate ways, politically speaking. He went to Washington as a U.S. congressman while I stayed home and came to my senses.

On this occasion, he told me he was going to be investigating right-wing bias at Fox News. I told him that was fine with me. (Although I couldn’t really see the point of it, I figured that compared to most of the mischief Congress gets into, this wouldn’t cost us too much money.) However, he blanched when I wondered if he would next investigate left-wing bias at the NY Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and the three major networks. I was actually looking forward to the grilling of Katie Couric. I couldn’t wait to see them wipe that smile off her face.

But, seriously, as they say, the problem with determining what constitutes objective reporting is that liberals labor under the delusion that what they believe is factual, whereas what conservatives believe is simply propaganda.

While on the subject of fairness, I’d like to go on record as stating there’s nothing fair about American taxpayers being made to foot the bill for illegal aliens. It’s like rewarding people who butt in line at the movies with free popcorn, candy and sodas, once they get inside the theater.

What’s more, I think it’s high time we not only stopped funding the U.N., as corrupt an organization as exists anywhere in the world, but cut off foreign aid altogether.

While I wouldn’t object to offering low-interest loans to our allies, I resent my tax dollars going to Islamic regimes which would like nothing better than to see us vanish off the face of the earth. It really strikes me as absurd that we go to great lengths to prevent American Muslims from funding Islamic terrorism, and then our government turns right around and sends billions of dollars to the Palestinians.

While on the subject of misplaced governmental largesse, I have nothing against rock stars staging concerts to raise money for Africa, but I fail to see any compelling reason why America should always be so eager to bail out that dysfunctional continent.

Colonialism and apartheid are distant memories, but the U.S., which had nothing to do with fostering either, keeps sending guilt money to countries none of us can even find on a map. I mean, if I wish to support a ne’er-do-well relative — a shiftless brother-in-law, say, or a 45-year-old cousin who still lives at home with his parents — that’s my business. But it’s certainly not the business of every other taxpayer in America.

What do we think about when we think about the Dark Continent? Well, aside from “Tarzan” movies, it’s generally tribal warfare, widespread AIDS, drought, genocide, Islamic tyrannies, female mutilation and modern day slavery, that come to mind. Now, really, why would any sane person wish to throw good money after bad down that abominable sinkhole?

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Airwave ‘diversity’ ambush (Washington Times, 070706)

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

At first the liberal Democrats were coy about reports they wanted to impose government control on talk radio. When it was reported New York’s Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had discussed the matter with California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer, both denied it. That is characteristic. They lied to the public.

Now the Democrats admit to this assault on the First Amendment. There was no point in continuing to lie when it was time to take action against the Rush Limbaughs of this world. Washington’s energetic newspaper covering the federal government, the Hill, has quoted Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin as saying: “It’s time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they’re in a better position to make a decision.”

Well, at least he admits he is old-fashioned. Unfortunately for him, history really has moved on. The so-called Fairness Doctrine, used for years to keep diversity off the airways, was instituted when all we had in the communications system was radio and fledgling television. Perhaps in those days it was admissible to believe there were only two sides to a “story,” as Mr. Durbin puts it. Today there are many sides to stories, and no government body is equipped to judge what should be on the broadcast media and what is too marginal.

In other words, government ought not to decide what the sides are in a debate. That is anathema to free debate. Moreover, we now have cable television, AM and FM radio, Internet sites, blogs, satellite radio, and more communications systems oncoming. Does Mr. Durbin really envisage a government regulatory agency that could fairly monitor all these sources, all these voices, and not become totalitarian?

I have said for years that American liberals live in a bubble, an exalted state of megalomania that does not allow them access to the world as it is or to people who disagree with them. The consequence has been a historic slide in liberalism’s place in America. It has been losing the political battle for four decades. Now it is slowly losing the cultural battle.

The cultural losses have been slower because the culture is under the control of mandarins, not the people as a whole. Wherever democracy — or the economic equivalent of democracy, markets — holds sway, liberalism usually loses.

This effort by liberals to limit free speech by imposing government control over radio and presumably over television reveals just how out of touch the liberals are — and how impatient they are with a free society. They would use the so-called Fairness Doctrine to order talk radio to balance conservative talkers whom listeners have voted for by tuning them in with presumed liberal talkers, whom listeners have usually voted against by tuning them out.

Air America, the liberal alternative to conservative talkers, endowed by millions of dollars from liberal investors, went belly up last fall because not enough listeners wanted to listen. Now Mr. Durbin and his ilk will force listeners to listen, or at least will force talk radio to carry these money-losing talkers.

So our liberal bullies are going to coerce free speech and free markets. Now who doubts they are the enemies of freedom in America?

I suspect a large number of Americans will be roused against this blatant act of coercion. Conservatives who number in the millions have already voted for conservative talk radio and will not want to lose their voices on radio or their right to tune in whom they chose.

Independents will recognize the harshness of the liberal politician’s expedience and the assault on the First Amendment. Perhaps some liberals, too, will recognize the threat to traditional American freedoms.

The fact is history’s wheel has ground on. There are so many outlets for free expression. No government agency ought to be put in control. Let the people decide, the listeners, the viewers, the bloggers too.

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CNN airs ‘one of the most distorted programs’ ever: Documentary compares Jews, Christians to Muslim terrorists (WorldNetDaily, 070823)

By Aaron Klein

JERUSALEM – A CNN special series airing this week entitled “God’s Warriors” – produced and anchored by the network’s chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour – is “one of the most grossly distorted programs” ever aired on mainstream American television, according to a media watchdog report.

“God’s Warriors” takes up six prime-time hours on CNN this week, airing in three parts at 9 p.m. EST. It started Tuesday and concludes tonight.

The first part of the series, “God’s Jewish Warriors,” compared Jewish and Christian “radicals” to Muslim supporters of suicide terror, presented anti-Israel commentators with no counterbalance, falsely labeled the West Bank as Palestinian land, and minimized Jewish rights to the Temple Mount – Judaism’s holiest site, the critics said.

During Tuesday’s program, Amanpour also conducted a friendly interview about Israel with former President Jimmy Carter, whose most recent book, “Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid,” criticized the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians. The book was slammed for a series of falsehoods and was widely labeled anti-Israeli by multiple media critics.

“[The CNN series] is false in its basic premise, established in the opening scene in which Jewish (and Christian) religious fervency is equated with that of Muslims heard endorsing ‘martyrdom,’ or suicide-murder. There is, of course, no counterpart among Jews and Christians to the violent jihadist Muslim campaigns under way across the globe,” stated the report by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

Amanpour’s CNN documentary “God’s Warriors” describes itself as focusing on religious fundamentalism among Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Tuesday’s segment started off comparing “Jewish terrorists” to that of Muslims, specifically focusing on the few instances of violence or attempted violence by religiously motivated Jews against Muslims. It told the story of Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Israeli physician who killed 29 Arabs in the West Bank city of Hebron in 1994. Goldstein’s actions were widely condemned by Israelis and worldwide Jewry. The organization he was a part of was outlawed in Israel.

States the CAMERA report: “While in reality Jewish ‘terrorism’ is virtually non-existent, the program magnifies at length the few instances of [Jewish] violence” comparing it to “violent jihadist Muslim campaigns” when indeed there is no such comparison “either in numbers of perpetrators engaged or in the magnitude of death and destruction wrought.”

Amanpour: Martyrdom ‘quite noble’

While discussing Islamic suicide attacks, Amanpour painted “martyrdom” as “quite noble.”

“To the West, martyrdom has a really bad connotation because of suicide bombers who call themselves martyrs,” Amanpour stated. “Really, martyrdom is actually something that historically was quite noble, because it was about standing up and rejecting tyranny, rejecting injustice and rejecting oppression and, if necessary, dying for that.”

Amanpour’s feature moved on to interviews with critics of Israel without providing pro-Israeli voices.

The feature repeatedly falsely referred to the West Bank as “Palestinian territory.”

“It is also Palestinian land. The West Bank – it’s west of the Jordan River – was designated by the United Nations to be the largest part of an Arab state,” stated Amanpour.

The West Bank contains some of Judaism’s holiest sites and biblical Jewish cities, including Hebron, home to the oldest Jewish community in the world. The territory was recaptured by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War after Jordan, which controlled the West Bank, ignored Israeli advice to stay out of the conflict.

The U.N. labels the West Bank as “disputed,” not Palestinian territory.

‘Pro-Israel lobbies against U.S. interests’

Several guests, including former Sen. Charles Percy and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, who co-authored Carter’s book on Israel, state in Amanpour’s documentary pro-Israel lobbies in Washington force American lawmakers to support Jewish expansion in the West Bank and promote causes contrary to U.S. interests.

Carter is interviewed claiming no American politician could survive politically while calling for cuts in aid to Israel unless the Jewish state ceases expanding West Bank Jewish communities.

“There’s no way that a member of Congress would ever vote for that and hope to be re-elected,” stated Carter.

Contradicting Carter’s sentiments, CAMERA notes critics of Israel’s West Bank policies have thrived politically, including Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd and Reps. James Trafficante, Dana Rohrabacher, Nick Smith, Fortney Pete Stark, Neil Abercrombie, David E. Bonior, John Conyers Jr, John D. Dingell, Earl F. Hilliard, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, George Miller, Jim Moran, David R. Obey, Ron Paul and Nick J. Rahall II, among others.

Amanpour suggests West Bank settlements are the cause of Arab anger.

“The Jewish settlements have inflamed much of the Arab world,” she says.

Multiple guests describe West Bank settlements as being the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But CAMERA points out multiple Arab wars and acts of violence were waged against Israel long before the settlements were first established in 1967.

“The Arab world was just as anti-Israel (actually more so) before the settlements were built,” stated the CAMERA report.

Documentary misrepresents Ronald Reagan

Amanpour claims all U.S. presidents since 1967, including Ronald Reagan, deemed Israeli settlements “illegal.”

But U.S. policy did not deem settlements illegal.

Amanpour quoted Reagan as stating, “the United States will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements.”

But the documentary failed to produce the rest of Reagan’s quotes, in which the late president stated West Bank settlements are not illegal.

“As to the West Bank, I believe the settlements there – they’re not illegal,” stated Reagan.

Amanpour minimizes Jewish rights to Temple Mount

Amanpour moves on to holy sites in Jerusalem, where she minimizes Jewish rights to the Temple Mount – Judaism’s holiest site – and exaggerates Islamic claims, critics said. Muslims say the Mount it is their third holiest site.

“It was from here [the Temple Mount], according to Muslim scripture, that the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven around the year 630. But Hebrew scripture puts the ancient Jewish Temple in the same location, destroyed by the Romans in the year 70.”

The Quran doesn’t once mention Jerusalem. Islamic tradition states Mohammed took a journey in a single night from “a sacred mosque” – believed to be in Mecca in southern Saudi Arabia – to “the farthest mosque” and from a rock there ascended to heaven. The farthest mosque later became associated with the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

The Jewish Temple is described throughout biblical sources as the center of religious Jewish worship. The Temple Mount compound has remained a focal point for Jewish services over the millennia. Prayers for a return to Jerusalem have been uttered by Jews since the Second Temple was destroyed, according to Jewish tradition. Jews worldwide pray facing toward the Western Wall, a portion of an outer courtyard of the Temple left intact.

Amanpour interviews the Muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who offers an Islamic perspective on the importance of the Temple Mount and Al Aqsa Mosque to Muslims, but no Jewish religious figure is presented to discuss the paramount religious importance of the Mount to Jews, noted CAMERA.

The media watchdog report concludes: “Whether wittingly or not, Amanpour’s program, with its reliance on pejorative labeling, generalities, testimonials, and a stacked lineup of guests, is a perfect illustration of classical propaganda techniques. Unfortunately propaganda is the opposite of journalism, the profession Amanpour is supposed to practice.”

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CNN’s God’s Christian Warriors Leaves Viewers… Scared (townhall.com, 070827)

By Robert Knight

One of these days, CNN will have to dispense with the ominous music it uses for Christian documentaries and go for the full effect, using the Jaws soundtrack.

Last night, in the third segment of a six-hour series called God’s Warriors, CNN served up a two-hour, heady brew of fear, distortion and manipulative media techniques to paint a scary picture of conservative Christians in America. The first two segments, featuring Muslims and Jews, reportedly racked up just over two million viewers per night. All three segments will air again late Saturday and Sunday evenings.

Reporter Christiane Amanpour generally effects the air of a National Geographic anthropologist trying to appear open-minded while exploring a slightly disturbing culture. However, she can’t quite conceal her hostility, making loaded statements in the guise of questions, such as this line to youth leader Ron Luce. Luce had just explained his group’s standards for girls’ modest dress. To his credit, Luce, who directs Teen Mania, keeps his cool.

AMANPOUR: But Ron, that’s what the Taliban said. They kept women in their house because men couldn’t be trusted around them.

LUCE: Well, there’s extremists, and you came to our event and can see we’re not extremists. The kids are normal. They have fun. And they wear normal clothes. They have not adapted. They haven’t adopted the dress code for sexualization that’s happened in our culture.

Perhaps Amanpour was asking the straw man question to allow Luce to knock it out of the park, which he did. In fact, the segment on Teen Mania and its Battle Cry rallies portrays the Christian kids as normal, if emotionally overwrought, and gives some crucial and damaging airtime to San Francisco protesters who scream epithets and accuse the Christian kids of hate, bigotry, etc. One man dressed in a nun’s habit and Kabuki-like makeup gets an up-close moment to exclaim, “This city is about joy, not about hate.” Well, okay. Who would you want your kid hanging around with, the freshly scrubbed teens singing worship music or the guy with the spiky blue Mohawk?

Similarly, the opening segments filmed at Liberty University with the late Jerry Falwell and Liberty Law School Dean Mat Staver come off without too much liberal angst, as do portions featuring Fairfield Christian Church Ohio activist pastor Russell Johnson and Seattle-area Christian political activist Danielle Turissini. That’s because Falwell, Staver, Johnson and Turissini handle several loaded questions with ease. Turissini especially shines as sincere, savvy and guileless. Despite the presence of much flag-waving footage of an emotional rally, the clips featuring Israel advoate Pastor John Hagee generally allow him to make his case that Christians are sincere in their defense of Israel.

It’s in the domestic political issue sections that Amanpour gives vent to her liberal bias.

To wit. she features:

1) Former President Jimmy Carter, who gives a radically one-sided picture of the Southern Baptist Convention’s political stances and its resolution about the role of women in the church. Carter mangles Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” letter to the Danbury Baptists, and accuses the Southern Baptists of creating a (gasp) “creed” that must be followed by all pastors. No one from the Southern Baptists is allowed any response.

2) Rich Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, who claims, absurdly, that that his fellow conservative Christians reject global warming because they reject science itself out of fear of evolution. Amanpour seizes the opportunity to take a swipe at Intelligent Design, crudely characterizing it without anyone to defend it. Cizik, it seems, is the Only Reasonable Christian Leader.

3) Greg Boyd, a self-described conservative pastor in Minnesota who has earned media plaudits as a “heretic” by trashing his fellow Christians for being politically influential. Boyd helpfully notes: “I am very concerned about the extent to which what’s called the kingdom of the world, the politics of the world, is being fused with our faith. In some cases almost like a Taliban, Islamic state. Where, you know, it’s like we want to run a Christian society and enforce Christian law. And my concern is that is very damaging for the church.” Wonder if Boyd thinks comparing some Christians to the Taliban does any damage to the church? And, by the way, he is considered a heretic by some not because of his political views but because of his open-ended theology.

The message at times is so ham-handed during the political segments that anyone with even the slightest skepticism of CNN’s motives should see through it. Ominous music, weird camera angles and one-sided portrayals of key issues are standard fare.

Rich Scarborough of Vision America comes across as intelligent in the interview portions, but God’s Warriors uses footage of some of his more emotional calls to arms, and freeze-frames on Scarborough with his face distorted, as scary music rises to let us know we should Fear This Man.

In the legal portion, Amanpour introduces the segment by declaring that “the Supreme Court is ground zero in the combat between law and religion.” Catch that?. Amanpour implies that evangelicals are somehow either “against” the law, or are trying to conquer it. Note to Christiane: in a democratic society, all people, even those you disagree with, are allowed to try to write their values into law. That said, the practical agenda of “God’s Christian Warriors” is not to rewrite the law, but to restore the interpretations of the law commonly held before liberalism corrupted American jurisprudence.

To her credit, Amanpour acknowledges that the Supreme Court itself sits in the presence of an image of Moses and the Ten Commandments. The stone visage of Moses graces the Court every day from the frieze overlooking the justices’ dais.

AMANPOUR: I went there with CNN Senior Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin. So here is this phenomenal bastion of jurisprudence. Inside are the Ten Commandments.

TOOBIN: Including very prominently on the ceiling of the courtroom.

AMANPOUR: How do the Ten Commandments get onto the Supreme Court building?

TOOBIN: The Constitution has never been interpreted to mean that you could have no reference to God anywhere. Many courtrooms say, “In God We Trust.”

AMANPOUR: “In God We Trust” is part of the American dialogue and yet the Religious Right would have you believe there’s no mention of God anywhere in our public sphere. (Author’s note: They would? I’ve never heard anyone make that claim.) It’s on the currency.

TOOBIN: It’s on the currency and they say because it’s on the currency there’s nothing wrong with it being in the schools or in the courthouses or in the capitol.

AMANPOUR: But they also play the victim somewhat. Are they victimized?

TOOBIN: They feel like they’re losing the culture wars. They feel like it’s an increasingly secular society and keeping prayer out of the schools, keeping the Ten Commandments out of the courthouses is part of how they’re being victimized.

Not bad for a man who once described the ban on partial birth abortion as a threat to the health of the “mother and the fetus.”

The next segment features two Liberty University sisters, Mandy and Megan Chapman. Megan had been a class chaplain at her Kentucky high school, and had been warned not to recite the Lord’s Prayer at her graduation ceremony. So the entire senior class stands in defiance and recites the prayer, to thunderous applause from the audience. It is very striking footage, and proves the students’ point that it’s the courts, not the people, who seem obsessed with wiping out any public religious observance.

But CNN then goes right back into the scare business again.

The creepiest moment comes when U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, accompanied by sinister music right out of Fox’s ‘24’ counter-terrorist series, walk down a set of marble steps.

Toobin ticks off the awful (to liberals) things that will happen if liberal justices John Paul Stephens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are replaced by more judges like Roberts and Alito:

TOOBIN: You’re going to have abortion illegal in large parts of the country. You’re going to have schools allowing a lot more religious observance within them.

AMANPOUR: That is music to Mat Staver’s ears and a division of America that he and his students would embrace. The answer to their prayers.

Egad. If all this comes to pass, the public schools might have to start admitting that they break for “Christmas” in December, and stop teaching kids that promiscuous sex is inevitable and as wholesome for them as Cheerios.

Amanpour devotes much of the program to grassroots Christian political activism, leaving the impression that conservative Christianity is all about politics. In fact, politics is a side issue to most Christian believers. At one point, she opines: “God’s Christian warriors know where they want the country to go. And they’re not going to stop fighting until their battle is won.”

The takeaway message? Secular-minded Americans, you had better do something, because these Christian warriors are power-hungry and coming for your freedoms.

Scary, indeed.

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Media Bias on Transgenders Raising Concerns (Christian Post, 070523)

Growing media coverage and portrayals of the transgendered life have led some Christians to raise the red flag on a movement beginning to go more public much like the homosexual one already has.

The popular and Golden Globe-winning television show Ugly Betty recently added a “revolutionary character” to its cast - Alex “Alexis” Meade, who is a transwoman.

“I’ve never seen anything like it on prime-time network television,” said Rebecca Romijn, who plays Alexis, on ABC News. “It’s a whole ... group of people that’s trying to make it into mainstream consciousness and I feel like with our show, in this light comedic format, it helps people understand this community of people that still has yet to find a voice really.”

Transgenders have recently begun to find a voice in the American public with major media outlets like ABC’s 20/20 and Newsweek magazine – which recently published a cover story on “Rethinking Gender” – telling the stories of kids and adults who are either struggling with Gender Identity Disorder or have already made a transition to the opposite sex.

“They’re (media) trying to normalize transgender existence. There’s no question about that,” said Dr. Robert Gagnon, associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

Not only are some Christians concerned about the normalizing of the transgendered life, but one pro-family activist noted mainstream media bias on the controversial issue.

Pete LaBarbera, executive director of Americans for Truth, told One News Now that the American media is justifying its biased reporting on the transgender movement in the name of compassion.

Echoing LaBarbera’s concerns, Gagnon said the media is “trying to present a case where they are able to demonstrate that these persons cannot help themselves, [that] this is not something they asked for. [And] if you don’t allow them to become transgender, they’ll probably kill themselves.”

While media may be drawing more sympathetic hearts toward the transgender community, it’s still hard to say when or whether transgenders will be fully accepted in American society, says Debra Rosenberg, assistant managing editor at Newsweek who wrote “Rethinking Gender.”

“With more anti-discrimination laws being passed, though, it does seem like things are moving in that direction,” she adds.

Federal legislation on expanding hate crimes to include violent attacks against individuals on the basis of “gender, sexual orientation and gender identity” is currently being reviewed by the Senate. Christians have strongly voiced opposition to the expansion, arguing that the bill could silence believers who view homosexuality as sinful. That also applies to the transgender.

Alluding to Scripture (1 Corinthians 6:9-10), Gagnon quoted Apostle Paul listing persons who will “not inherit the kingdom of God.” The list includes the “effeminate” or “soft men,” which is essentially the closest thing to transgenderism, Gagnon pointed out.

But, as Gagnon mentioned, many argue that this is not something transgenders have asked for. Studies have shown that a transwoman (male-to-female) tends to have a female-sized BSTc (central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis) in the brain.

“The argument basically is that that particular portion of the brain that has to do with sexual identity is more female-like in males who become transgendered and more male-like in females who go from a female to male,” said Gagnon, who has debated on the transgender issue. “In a sense, you’re saying because of one minute portion of the brain, but not the total brain, [that] will be the decisive factor in overriding one’s sex. And that’s the problem.

“What I’m arguing is that being male is more than just that portion of the brain,” he added. “The change of this part of the brain is neither a necessary nor sufficient element for transgenderism. It may create a risk factor but it’s not a deterministic model.”

Moreover, Gagnon explained the “whole package” that goes into being a male or a female. “It involves anatomy, physiology and personal psychology,” he noted.

“We’re talking about only one small portion of their maleness (in the case of a transwoman) being problematized by a female quality. The whole rest of them remains male.”

“Alexis” Meade revealed her transgender identity in the fourteenth episode, titled “I’m Coming Out,” of ABC’s Ugly Betty, which aired Feb. 1. She revealed she had gender-reassignment surgery and is now a woman.

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MTV to Air Controversial Bisexual Dating Reality Series (Christian Post, 070913)

MTV has given the green light for a new reality show starring a bisexual woman dubbed “the Madonna of MySpace.”

“A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila” is another dating competition series but with a controversial twist. The competitors vying for internet sensation Tila Tequila, a 25-year-old entertainer whose real last name is Nguyen, are 16 straight men and 16 lesbians. The 32 “suitors” will live in Tila’s house and compete to impress her as the competition narrows each week.

The bisexual dating show is a first for a network that doesn’t specifically target the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) crowd. It’s slated to premiere Oct. 9.

“The show is a roller-coaster ride of drama, conflict and emotion, busting stereotypes and challenging the norm,” said MTV executive Tony DiSanto, according to Reuters.

MTV is one of the most watched networks by teens and its staggering levels sexual imagery, foul language and violence already have parents and evangelicals concerned.

Warning that a whole generation of young people will be lost to MTV culture, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Kobia, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, commented earlier this year that “the majority of the youth are biblically illiterate but well-informed about the latest MTV programs,” even in countries where the majority of the population is Christian.

But the addition of a bisexual reality series has raised more concern that it might create confusion in the area of sex and relationships.

“Men and women are made in the image of God, and our masculinity and femininity reflect something of his wonder and glory. So it’s no wonder the enemy attacks this area and works to create confusion, brokenness and lust,” said Jeff Johnston, gender issues analyst for Focus on the Family, according to Citizen Link, a publication of the pro-family organization.

“It’s sad that MTV is cooperating so readily with our adversary. Especially since they just learned that what makes young men and women happy is time with their families and with God, not sexual brokenness and confusion,” added Johnston, alluding to a recent survey by The Associated Press and MTV that revealed spending time with family makes America’s young people happiest.

The upcoming TV series centers around a woman who is said to be the most popular girl in the history of MySpace with some 2 million “friends” and counting. Tila Tequila built her celebrity status “from the ground up on MySpace,” fan by fan, as Time magazine reported. With racy photos and videos, Tila merchandise and singles, Tequila says her online persona as a singer-model-actress-blogger is her profession.

“Tila Tequila made a name for herself by doing things her way, captivating legions of fans online, both men and women,” said MTV executive Tony DiSanto, according to AP. “Now she is taking that attitude and sex appeal to her own TV series where she is looking for a mate ... by again, captivating a group of both men and women.”

“A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila” comes months after ABC casted Rebecca Romijn as a transwoman on its popular television show Ugly Betty. The transgender character, Alex “Alexis” Meade, is said to be the first on prime-time network television.

Dr. Robert Gagnon, associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, has raised concerns that the media, after trying to normalize the gay lifestyle, is now trying to do the same with the transgender existence.

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Tony Snow: Reporters more liberal than average Americans (WorldNetDaily, 070917)

They’re not crusaders, the departing White House press secretary says, but their outlook makes it harder for GOP administrations to communicate.

Monitor Breakfast host Dave Cook discusses departing White House Press Secretary Tony Snow’s appearance at Friday’s breakfast.

On his final day as assistant to the president and press secretary, Tony Snow was the guest at Friday’s Monitor breakfast.

Mr. Snow and his assistant, Ed Buckley, walked the two blocks from the White House to the Sofitel Hotel ballroom where some 30 reporters had gathered.

Snow is leaving the high profile position after 16 months on the job. “I want to fight cancer and spend time with my family,” he said at the breakfast.

Through the years, nine White House press secretaries have met with the breakfast group, starting with the late George Reedy, who worked for President Johnson.

That was a very different time in the media world. In a taped Oval Office conversation excerpted by USA Today, President Johnson once told Reedy that poor grooming was keeping the president from naming him to an even loftier post.

“I want to do it, but you’ve got to help yourself,” LBJ said. “You come in with a wrinkled suit and you come in with a dirty shirt; you come in with your tie screwed up. I want you to look real nice. Get yourself a corset if you have to.”

Snow, on the other hand, is the very model of an impeccably dressed, intellectually nimble presidential spokesperson, optimally prepared for the YouTube age.

There are lots of reasons for the press corps’ affection for Snow. My list would include his grace in the face of adversity and his unfailing courtesy to those of us who sit in the White House briefing room’s cheap seats.

Since Snow announced his departure, some critics have said there was a disconnect between the Bush administration policies he defended and the details of Snow’s personal experience.

“Snow’s own life in many ways symbolizes the downside of the ownership society – and suggests how much a government role in health and retirement benefits is necessary,” opined a Sept. 4 essay in Slate. While touting policies that encouraged workers to fund their own retirements, Snow failed to take out his own 401(k) plan, it alleged. While advocating health-savings accounts and high-deductible medical plans as a solution to healthcare, Snow relied on the comprehensive medical insurance available to White House workers, it pointed out.

Asked about the essay at the breakfast, Snow replied that some facts were wrong. For example, he did have a 401(k) plan when he worked as a radio host but not when he belonged to a union as a Fox News TV host. “Please call the person you are writing about before trying to comment sagely about their life and times,” he quipped.

And on the health-insurance issue, Snow said, “It is a mistake to confuse high government expenditure with compassion, which is the embedded assumption there.”

One of Snow’s most interesting responses concerned how the nature of White House press coverage has changed. Here is an extended excerpt of what he said on that topic:

“Something very interesting and somewhat troubling is taking place, which is that the advent of 24-hour cable has everybody so eager to get the scoop – by scoop it means some new piece of information that hasn’t been reported in the previous hour – that you see a change in the approach of many reporters to what is going on.

“Rather than having some in depth and thoughtful analysis pieces, you’ve got process, process, process. And a lot of times you have people doing the process piece as opposed to trying to sort of get into the guts of the thing. It is difficult. News organizations don’t have the resources they used to have to set people free to do a lot of those long investigative pieces and series that they used to do. But it doesn’t change my thinking that the profession is poorer for it. So I do think a lot of times, if I have a frustration, it is that ... I love working with the White House press corps and sometimes we do end up speaking different languages.

“I do think there is something to the fact that, in general terms, members of the press tend to be more liberal. That’s just the way it is. If you doubt it, just look around and think how many people in this room voted for a Republican the last time around. On the other hand, it is not something where reporters get into the business to be anti-Republican crusaders. I don’t think that is true at all. I just think that sometimes there is, to quote Cool Hand Luke, ‘a failure to communicate.’

“And it is incumbent on those who work in Republican White Houses to try to bridge that gap by trying to talk about things in a way that allows reporters to understand intellectually the underpinnings of what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how we think it is going to play out. And I think if there is a shortcoming, sometimes it is a shortcoming on our part.

“But again, in overall terms, I think the one thing that maybe is most frustrating is sometimes everybody swoops in on the process questions and never gets to the deeper questions.”

Snow lingered after the session chatting with reporters and said he is considering writing two books. It is clear that the soon-to-be-former press secretary intends to stay active in political life. One goal, he says, is to “play some constructive role in lowering the temperature” of the country’s political dialogue.

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Do the Facts Matter When the Subject Is Rush Limbaugh? (townhall.com, 071002)

By Carrie Lukas

A frustrating part of political discourse is the inability of both sides to agree on the facts. The effects of a new tax policy on the economy or the costs of a potential government program are often in dispute. But in the current dust-up about Rush Limbaugh’s so-called “phony soldier” comments, there cannot be a dispute about the facts. There is a transcript.

The transcript shows to whom Rush was referring when the phony solider comment was made. The conversation began with a caller complaining that the media never talks to “real soldiers” to which Rush says “The phony soldiers.” Moments later, he moves on to an example of a phony soldier—”Army Ranger Jesse MacBeth”—who had claimed to witness atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq. It turns out Jesse MacBeth wasn’t an Army Ranger at all. As Rush described:

In one gruesome account, translated into Arabic and spread widely across the Internet, Army Ranger Jesse MacBeth describes the horrors this way: “We would burn their bodies. We would hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque.”

Now, recently, Jesse MacBeth, poster boy for the anti-war left, had his day in court. And you know what? He was sentenced to five months in jail and three years probation for falsifying a Department of Veterans Affairs claim and his Army discharge record. He was in the Army. Jesse MacBeth was in the Army, folks, briefly. Forty-four days before he washed out of boot camp. Jesse MacBeth isn’t an Army Ranger, never was. He isn’t a corporal, never was. He never won the Purple Heart, and he was never in combat to witness the horrors he claimed to have seen.

Surely it isn’t out of bounds to describe someone who lied about his service a “phony soldier.”

Few people who hear the clip from Rush’s show in the media get to the part about Jesse MacBeth. They only hear the first short exchange between Rush and the caller. The caller says: “No, it’s not. And what’s really funny is they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media.” And Rush responds “The phony soldiers.”

Who is Rush referring to here? Arguably, it isn’t clear. It is clarified later when Rush discusses Jesse MacBeth, but even if you takes this clip in isolation, it is a gigantic leap to assume that Rush is referring to “our men and women in uniform who oppose the war,” as Senator Harry Reid has chosen to assume. The caller wasn’t talking about soldiers who oppose the war and Rush didn’t continue to talk about those who oppose the war, only to those who lie about their military service.

Yet the Democrats have used this exchange in an attempt to manufacture a scandal. Senator Reid is collecting signatures to urge Rush to apologize to the soldiers (for something he did not say). Senator Harkin in a speech on the Senator floor, not only accuse Rush of tarring soldiers in uniform, but assigns Rush the motive of greed: “Now what’s most despicable is that Mr. Limbaugh says these provocative things to make more money. So he castigates our soldiers, this makes more news, more people tune in, he makes more money.” For good measure Senator Harkin speculates that Rush might be “high on his drugs again.”

It is breathtakingly irresponsible behavior for a Senator to attack a private citizen like this on the Senate floor.

If we are in the business of assigning motives, let’s speculate about the Democrats’ motives for smearing to tar Rush. A few weeks ago Moveon.org ran a tasteless ad smearing a military general for “betraying” the country. The leaders of Democrats were uncomfortably silent about this attack on a public servant and soldier. Democrats have also just had the disappointing task of acknowledging that the American war effort is going better than they expected. Their push for an immediate pullout of Iraq has been stalled. Tarring Rush Limbaugh as anti-American soldier helps with both problems: it satisfies their base, who has been disappointed with Congress’s inability to exit Iraq, and gives them an opportunity to say that they support the military in spite of the attacks on General Patraeus.

It’s politics at its worst. The media has taken the Democrats’ bait and are covering this as a controversy, as if there is a question about the validity of the Democrats’ charges. There is no question. The facts are clear.

Certainly someone needs to apologize—but it isn’t Rush Limbaugh.

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When Blasphemous Gays Rip into Christians the MSM says Diddly Squat. (townhall.com, 070929)

By Doug Giles

Can you imagine if a group of Christians got together and made a photograph advertising their upcoming rally, and in that photo they deliberately went out of their way to tick off homosexuals?

What do you think would happen? Do you think the mainstream media would cover it? Do you think Katie Couric, Chris Matthews, Swill Maher and the other liberal curmudgeons would wade in and condemn the Christians and call ‘em haters…meanies…or…or…something?

You and I both know these darling duplicitous Christophobic thugs would be on their TV shows screaming anathemas at Christians louder than Yoko Ono would yell if she accidentally knelt on her own breast. They would be on the church like a dog on a June bug. Like Rosie on a case of Twinkies. Like Bill Clinton on Hustler’s 2007 Chunky Intern Issue. We would never hear the end of it.

However, what does the Main Stream Media do when the tables are turned and the queer crowd spits on the Christian community by showing a bunch of S&M/B&D mooks as Christ and his disciples in an advertisement for the foul end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it Folsom Street Fair this weekend? Probably nothing.

Yep, the MSM will, most likely, defend Folsom’s unwholesome flotsam as freedom of expression, artistic creativity and a progressive step away from the puritanical social mores that have for too, too long frowned upon their dream of an annual Tommy and Timmy Testicle Pageant.

For the uninitiated, what exactly did the way-too-creepy gay crew at Folsom do? Here’s the poop (literally).

You remember Da Vinci’s painting of Christ, The Last Supper, don’t cha? Well the Wizards of Odd, yes the marketing crew at Freaks-R-Us, decided it would be cool to market their “Street Fair” by replacing Jesus with some black/gay/S&M dude and then…then…swap the disciples out for a bunch of randy bondage boys and…and…(they weren’t finished)…switch the bread and wine—which represents Christ’s sacrificial body and blood given as a ransom for man’s sin—with a bunch of rubber-fisted dildos, together with a broad selection of other fetish crap made only for the fetid critter.

Unreal stuff, right here folks.

Y’know…even in my drunkest and drugged-out partying pre-Christ days when I was a very bad guy, I was always afraid, as messed up as I was, of personally attacking God, Christ and sincere Christians. But that was just me. Hardcore blasphemy doesn’t seem to bother this gay bunch much. But I digress.

Back to the media.

As stated, I seriously doubt anti-Christian MSM and their squawking heads will hold the queer nation’s fingers to flame for this. Why, you ask? They love it. Look, anything that will whiz on Christ, goof on God and barf on Christians is completely cool with them. Yes, my friend with Mellow Stream Media, as far as Christians go … there is no closed season and no bag limit for these buggers.

However, if anyone picks on, makes fun of, or tells the truth about a group the Left has decided to love, well you better buckle up, boy, because it’s going to get rough. I hope you have tough skin.

But this is nothing new. Everyone who loves traditional values and has a lick of common sense can see the biased, hypocritical, nonstop sputum that regularly flows from these loudmouths’ cake holes. That’s why their ratings are tanking and their newspaper sales are plummeting. Matter of fact, it’s been reported that 90% of those who purchase liberal newspapers now are parrot owners who use their rags only to catch Polly’s runny white sunflower-laden liquid stool.

Frankly, I don’t care if you Folsom guys have a good laugh at God’s expense. Personally I’d like to thank you for showing us all, once again, who you truly are. And in regard to me defending God, well, He’s big enough to take care of himself. He’ll sort things out, eternally, in the end. So…if you’re cool with mocking Christ, his sacrifice and his disciples, I’m cool with it too. Wasn’t that easy? Proceed on.

Oh, by the way—for my fellow beer drinking buddies who are equally fed up with egregious attacks on traditional values—you can hammer these guys and their sponsors right in their wallets by not buying Miller beer, one of the sponsors of the Folsom Street Fair. I say, given their attack on Jesus that we officially never purchase another Miller beer ever again until Christ returns to kick butt and take names. Does that sound cool?

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The Real Media Matters: David Brock’s political operation. (National Review Online, 071004)

By Byron York

Editor’s note: The controversy over Rush Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” remark has brought new prominence to Media Matters for America, the left-wing media watchdog founded by former right-wing media star David Brock. Media Matters is an avowedly political institution, part of a group of institutions the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, and others that have become increasingly important in Democratic politics. In 2004, Byron York revealed the origins of Media Matters and the big Democratic party donors who helped Brock bring it to life.

Susie Tompkins Buell was very, very impressed with David Brock. A California businesswoman who co-founded the fashion giant Esprit and went on to become a major donor to Democratic causes, Buell was in Washington last fall attending a meeting of friends and supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton when she met Brock, the self-described former “right-wing hit man.” Buell listened as Brock, now a defector to “progressive” causes, presented plans for Media Matters for America, his new Internet-based project to monitor and criticize conservative media. In a short time, she was sold.

“It just made so much sense to me,” Buell recalls. “All this garbage that’s coming out of the Right is like the worst contamination of this country. . . . He brought so much understanding of what goes on over there. He’s very articulate, and very, very bright.”

After Brock’s presentation, Buell introduced herself and offered to hold a fundraiser for him at her home in San Francisco. Brock accepted, and at that gathering Buell introduced him to other potential contributors, whose donations would become part of the more than $2 million Brock has so far raised for Media Matters.

Launched in early May, the organization says its purpose is to keep an eye on “conservative misinformation” in the American media. “Conservative misinformation,” according to the group’s mission statement, is defined as “news or commentary presented in the media that is not accurate, reliable, or credible, and that forwards the conservative agenda.” While in its first few weeks of operation Media Matters published attacks on the usual targets — Fox News, for example — Brock seems to be devoting particular energy to what he calls an “aggressive ad campaign” against radio host Rush Limbaugh.

In addition to a series of critiques on the group’s website, Brock has produced a television commercial attacking Limbaugh for comments he made about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal. Media Matters spent $100,000 to air the spot on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and a few other television outlets. Brock also commissioned Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin to conduct a survey on a variety of media issues, including perceptions of Limbaugh. Among other things, Garin found that a majority of those surveyed believe Limbaugh often presents views that are biased, “rather than impartial and balanced.” Garin also found that a large part of Limbaugh’s audience is politically conservative.

Conservatives — anyone, actually — might question whether such insights are worth whatever Brock paid for them, but the poll, together with Brock’s anti-Limbaugh television ad campaign, suggests that Media Matters is much more than a traditional media watchdog group. Indeed, it is probably more accurate to view Media Matters as part of the constellation of groups — the so-called “527” organizations, the voter-turnout group America Coming Together, John Podesta’s liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, liberal talk radio, and others — that have come together on the left in the last year or so, all aimed at electing a Democratic president this November.

Certainly some of Brock’s donors see it that way. Leo Hindery Jr., a cable-television executive who contributes to Democratic causes, says he sees Media Matters as part of a coordinated action on the left. “I thought this was a piece of the puzzle,” Hindery says. “There are people like Mike Lux [a Democratic consultant who runs an important ad agency], who are into the strategy point of view, there’s Podesta, who’s into the think tank/intellectual side, and I think the third part of the triangle is David’s initiative.”

Brock’s donors read like a Who’s Who of those who have financed the new, activist Left. Besides Buell and Hindery, donors to Media Matters include Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Corp., who has contributed more than $7 million to the 527s in partnership with his friend, the financier George Soros. There is Democratic activist Bren Simon, wife of shopping-mall tycoon Mel Simon, New York psychologist and donor Gail Furman, California philanthropist James Hormel, and others. Two anti-Bush organizations, the New Democratic Network and MoveOn.org, have also contributed to Brock’s project.

In addition to his donor list, Brock’s staff at times resembles that of a political campaign. In the group’s K Street offices, there are a number of veterans of Democratic causes. One Brock aide did opposition research for the recent presidential campaign of Sen. John Edwards; another did the same thing for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; yet another worked on the Wesley Clark presidential campaign; another worked for Massachusetts Democratic representative Barney Frank, and so on.

Given all that, it seems fair to say that Media Matters is only partly about the media. It is also very much about defeating George W. Bush.

Whatever its political orientation, Media Matters is what is known as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, meaning it is tax-exempt and can accept tax-exempt contributions (similar tax-exempt strategies are used by groups on both the left and the right). But since Media Matters has just been formed, it does not yet have the formal structure in place to accept tax-deductible donations, so, like other new charitable organizations, it has had to form a “fiscal sponsorship” relationship with an existing charity, which is already set up to accept such contributions. For that, Brock turned to the Tides Foundation, a wealthy but little-known institution that funds a variety of left-wing causes.

Finally, the creation of Brock’s new organization happens to coincide with his drive to publicize his new book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. The book purports to tell Americans that the “verbal brownshirts” of the Right are far more dangerous than many believe. In Brock’s telling, conservatism is close to an all-powerful political movement, while liberalism, once formidable, now “seems a fringe dispensation of a few aging professors and Hollywood celebrities.”

The right wing is so dominant, Brock writes, that even if Democrats win the presidency this year “they still face the prospect of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a way that will make governing exceedingly difficult.” The brutal conservative noise machine will keep going, Brock warns, “until its capacities to spread filth are somehow eradicated.”

Hyperbole aside, it should be said that some of Brock’s supporters genuinely believe such things. But at least so far, their faith in Brock does not appear to be shared by the mainstream press. Other than a friendly interview by the Today show’s Katie Couric, Brock has received far less attention for his new project than he received in 2002 when he published Blinded by the Right, the book in which he confessed to having lied in some of the stories he wrote for conservative publications in the 1990s.

The book did what many — even those on the left who share Brock’s contempt for conservatives — consider fatal damage to Brock’s credibility. When Blinded by the Right appeared, Timothy Noah, the liberal “Chatterbox” columnist for Slate, wrote that “Chatterbox yields to no one in his eagerness to believe the awful things Brock is now saying about himself and the conservative movement in America. But the more Brock insists that he has lied, and lied, and then lied again, the more one begins to suspect Brock of being, well, a liar.”

Now that same David Brock is trying on a new role as guardian of accuracy in media. It all seems, well, a little much. But in this year of 527s, mega-donors, and Democrats determined to “fight back,” it appears that anything is possible.

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Media Matters: We’re Not Political: That’s what they say. But a look at the record shows otherwise. (National Review Online, 071008)

By Byron York

Last week, covering the Rush Limbaugh “phony soldiers” controversy, I described Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog group, as an “avowedly political institution.” Media Matters quickly took issue; a few hours after my article appeared on National Review Online, a posting on the group’s website declared, “Media Matters is not, as the National Review claims, ‘an avowedly political institution,’ but a nonpartisan, progressive nonprofit that is unaffiliated with any political party or candidate.”

Indeed, Media Matters has to be nonpartisan, if not nonpolitical. It is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable institution, meaning it is tax exempt and that contributions made to Media Matters are fully tax deductible. In a feature of the tax code that benefits groups on both the left and right, a contribution to Media Matters is as tax deductible as a contribution to the Salvation Army or the Red Cross.

But how removed from politics is Media Matters? Whatever the organization says today, statements made by founder David Brock in 2004, shortly after Media Matters was formed, suggest that Brock’s intention in creating Media Matters was frankly political, with a specific electoral result in mind: to defeat Republicans and elect Democrats.

On June 15, 2004, Brock appeared at a Washington bookstore, Politics & Prose, to discuss his just-published book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. Media Matters was still in its early stages at that point, and Brock explained to the audience what he hoped to accomplish. It was an unquestionably political plan.

The conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, Brock told the small group, had “poison[ed]” the minds of swing voters, who are key to any election victory. The problem was not just people who listened to Limbaugh, Brock argued, but people who talked to people who listened to Limbaugh. “There is a viral effect of this noise machine that is difficult to quantify,” he said. “But the bottom line is that if you’ve got an office, and you’ve got ten people in an office, and just one of those people is listening to Rush Limbaugh and repeating false stories at the water cooler, you are corrupting and poisoning that entire office.”

Sooner or later, Brock said, that has an effect at the polls. “Although I think many liberals are in denial about the effect of all this,” he explained, “there are moderate, persuadable, independent and swing voters who are being systematically lied to every day.” The beneficiary was the Republican party.

Brock delivered a similar message several days earlier, on June 3, when he appeared at a panel discussion as part of the “Take Back America” conference sponsored by the liberal activist group Campaign for America’s Future. The topic was “Message and Media,” and Brock appeared with, among others, John Podesta, the former Clinton White House and founder of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. Podesta had helped Brock start Media Matters, lending him office space and introducing him to key Democratic donors.

At the panel discussion, Brock spoke about his new organization in openly political terms. “They’re confusing voters,” Brock said of the right. “I know exactly how it works.” And again, the goal was change on election day. “There are moderate, persuadable swing voters in those audiences for the Fox News Channel,” he said. “What we hope to do is be able to educate people.”

As its educators, Media Matters hires veterans of Democratic political campaigns. Those working on the group’s current campaign against Limbaugh include one staffer who worked for the Kerry campaign, MoveOn.org, and the Democratic turnout organization America Coming Together; another who worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; and a third who worked for the Howard Dean campaign. Such backgrounds are common at Media Matters.

Despite its political strategy, and its political orientation, it’s entirely possible that Brock and Media Matters are operating entirely within the laws that govern such institutions. Those laws have been used, and exploited, for many years by groups on both sides of the political divide. But is Media Matters, as it claims, not political? Not by a long shot.

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All the Bad News That’s Fit to Print (townhall.com, 071014)

By Robert Bluey

The U.S. budget deficit fell to the lowest level in five years last week, but three of America’s leading newspapers — the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times — couldn’t find the space to mention the dramatic drop.

Journalists who have spent years trashing President Bush’s tax cuts appeared to suddenly lose interest when the budget picture brightened. That’s not surprising, however, considering that mainstream reporters frequently ignore upbeat economic news.

For 49 straight months, dating back to August 2003, the U.S. economy has added jobs. More than 8 million, in fact. Yet the only time economic news seems to hit the front page is when there’s something bad to report. No wonder Bush gets little credit.

A study by the Business and Media Institute last month revealed the “past four years of media coverage on jobs have been marred by pessimistic predictions, omissions, lack of economic context and focus on job losses instead of gains.” One of the biggest offenders was Katie Couric of the “CBS Evening News,” but she’s hardly alone.

Despite the pessimistic attitude of the press, the U.S. economy keeps ticking. Last week’s encouraging news about the deficit was another indication that the economy is prospering thanks to Bush’s tax cuts, which encouraged economic growth and, as a result, brought in higher revenues to the federal treasury.

The deficit now stands at $163 billion or 1.2% of the economy. That’s half of the 40-year average of 2.4% of gross domestic product (GDP). By comparison, during former President Ronald Reagan’s administration, the deficit averaged 4.2% of GDP.

For three consecutive years under Bush, the deficit has fallen by $250 billion, putting the federal treasury on course for a surplus in 2012. Keep in mind this is being accomplished at a time when the United States has invested billions to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, boosted defense spending to make up for shortfalls in the 1990s under former President Bill Clinton, and put more money into protecting the homeland.

The challenge moving forward will be battling back the tax increases that Democrats have proposed to fund new entitlement programs, expand existing ones and pay for pork-barrel projects back home.

Since taking control of Congress, Democrats have proposed spending $205 billion more than Bush has requested for the next five years. How will liberals pay for all that additional government spending? Tax increases, of course. Democrats want to raise taxes by an astonishing $400 billion — the largest amount in history.

What’s most shameful is the failure of liberals in Congress to take seriously the threat posed by the big three entitlements — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They will grow uncontrollably once Baby Boomers start collecting benefits, yet lawmakers appear content to pass the problem off for another day.

Bush tried to reform Social Security in 2005, only to be thwarted at every turn by Democrats. Now, in an effort to kick the ball down the court, groups on the right and left are working their way across America to educate citizens — and especially reporters — about the country’s long-term financial condition. The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour is intended to do just what the name implies — wake up Americans to the realities of the country’s growing fiscal imbalance.

As entitlement spending continues to grow, Americans will be left with a choice between higher taxes proposed by liberals or free-market solutions offered by conservatives. As the declining deficit and economic growth have shown, Bush’s policies have proven effective. Of course, don’t expect to read about it in the New York Times, Washington Post or Los Angeles Times.

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Real American Heroes (townhall.com, 071026)

By Oliver North

WASHINGTON — Quick: Name a movie star, a noted celebrity, a great athlete and a radio or TV personality. When I posed these queries to some nice Americans this week, I got answers such as: “Russell Crowe,” “Paris Hilton,” “Britney Spears,” “quarterback Tom Brady,” “Curt Schilling of the Red Sox,” “Tiger Woods” and “Rush Limbaugh.”

Now: Can you name a contemporary American hero? Only two of the dozen or so people I challenged came up with, “Navy SEAL Michael Murphy.” That says a lot about what our mainstream media thinks is important.

Last month, during a prime-time telecast of the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards, actor James Spader and actress Sally Field were honored for their “dramatic portrayals” of fictional characters. In December, the 30th Annual Kennedy Center Honors will be broadcast on prime-time TV so we can pay tribute to “daring” entertainers such as Steve Martin, Diana Ross and Martin Scorsese. Then there are the Country Music Association Awards, the Tony Awards and, of course, the Oscars. Even the best television commercials are celebrated with the ultimate recognition of appreciation — prime-time network television coverage and front-page newsprint. This week, in her daily “Katie’s Notebook” radio broadcast, Katie Couric described those who get colonoscopies as her heroes.

Katie is wrong. Heroes are people who put themselves at risk for the benefit of others. They are selfless. Talented actors, movie stars, Hollywood celebs and winning athletes might make great entertainment, but for people who are really dramatic, people who accomplish real feats of daring, try the names Paul Ray Smith, Jason Dunham and Michael Murphy.

Thanks to our mainstream media, most Americans haven’t the foggiest idea who these remarkable men were, what they did or where they did it. The word “were” is important because each of these men is dead. They were all in the prime of life when they died fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each of them has a story that would make a blockbuster Hollywood film, which most likely will never be made. Each of them lost his life trying to save the lives of others. Each of them is a real American hero — honored for “gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty” with the highest tribute and most prestigious decoration that our nation’s military can bestow on an individual: the Medal of Honor. Sadly, few outside their families and a small circle of friends know who they were and what they did.

Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith was 33 when he was mortally wounded on April 4, 2003, near Baghdad International Airport. “In total disregard for his own life,” Smith braved “withering enemy fire” to repel an attack by more than 100 heavily armed fedayeens and saved the lives of scores of his soldiers.

Cpl. Jason Dunham was a 22-year-old squad leader in Karabilah, Iraq. On April 14, 2004, while grappling with a suspected insurgent after an ambush, the terrorist released a hand grenade. “Without hesitation, Cpl. Dunham covered the grenade with his helmet and body.” His ultimate and selfless act of bravery “saved the lives of at least two fellow Marines.”

Lt. Michael Murphy was 29, a Navy SEAL, leading a four-man team in the mountains of Afghanistan’s Kunar province on June 28, 2005. When they were surrounded and engaged by more than 30 Taliban terrorists, every man was gravely wounded during a two-hour-long gunfight. Yet “in the face of almost certain death,” Murphy fought his way to an exposed position to radio for help and then fought on until he was mortally wounded.

After presenting the Medal of Honor to Murphy’s parents at the White House this week, President Bush said, “With this medal, we acknowledge a debt that will not diminish with time — and can never be repaid.” Unfortunately, thanks to our mainstream media, most Americans don’t even know about this debt or the heroes to which it is owed. Though Michael Murphy was a native of Long Island, N.Y., The New York Times, which proudly boasts “all the news that’s fit to print,” gave limited coverage to the award.

In this war, courage isn’t the only thing that doesn’t get the coverage it deserves. The potentates of the press virtually ignored this week’s announcement from Baghdad by Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno and Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abboud Qanbar that since June, terrorist attacks have dropped by 59%; that casualties from improvised explosive devices are down 80%; that sectarian violence is off by 72%; that there has been an 81% drop in Iraqi civilians killed.

Last week, there were no coalition casualties — Iraqi or American — in Anbar province. Just a year ago, this was the main base for al-Qaida and the bloodiest place in Mesopotamia. Having spent six of my eight trips to Iraq in Anbar, this is great news. But what am I thinking? Good news from Iraq or Afghanistan — or about heroes like Paul Ray Smith, Jason Dunham and Michael Murphy who fight there — is no news.

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Lies and Deceits (townhall.com, 071101)

By Emmett Tyrrell

WASHINGTON — The other day while laying down my thoughts on the 40 years of conservative journalism that I have undergone so painlessly since perpetrating my first published wisecrack in the autumn of 1967, I rang up El Rushbo for his collaboration. That would be Rush Limbaugh for the benighted; for the millions in his daily radio audience, he is El Rushbo. Rush recalled the liberal media monopoly that existed in the late 1960s and that now is sorely pressed by the emergence of talk radio, of various conservative journals and newspapers and by the rise of FOX News Channel. He noted how arrogant the liberal media always have been and mentioned their “lies and deceits.”

Hang on, Rush. Whom do you think you are talking about, Dan Rather, the heir to Walter Cronkite’s ermine robes? Are you referring to such revered institutions as The New York Times or The New Republic? Have you no respect for CNN, CBS, NBC or The Boston Globe? OK, OK, each of these revered institutions of the liberal orthodoxy has had its embarrassing pratfalls into plagiarism and bogus news stories, but how about us conservatives, El Rushbo?

Actually, in looking back over the past 40 years of conservative journalism, no similar scandals shimmy and strut before my mind’s eye. In fact, conservatives have had no Jayson Blairs or Stephen Glasses. And now there is The New Republic’s discredited “Baghdad Diarist,” one Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who fabricated tales of American military misconduct in the Iraq war and whose fabrications the editors of The New Republic hope will disappear behind the smog of their pious pifflings. Let us call that a hoax heaped upon a hoax.

The fault of conservative journalists is, if you listen to our critics, that we have political opinions of a conservative nature. In fact, journalists of the liberal persuasion (or should I say faith) have informed me over the years that because of my conservative point of view, I cannot really be considered a journalist. Precisely what they mean by that I cannot tell you. Though now, after reviewing the comparative innocence of conservative journalism these past four decades as compared with the scores of blemishes on the mainstream media’s record, I guess it could mean that I have not plagiarized or written bogus stories. Since the late 1980s, I have kept a file on the frauds committed by journalists at major media organizations, and it makes for grisly reading.

In fact, in reading over my files on plagiarism and fraud, both by journalists and by scholars, I felt a pang of sadness for some of the perpetrators — an unusual emotion for me, I admit, but there you have it. I shall not remind readers of the identity of one of my favorite plagiarists, a New York Times writer (a Pulitzer Prize winner) whose report on an alleged plagiarism in Boston contained … yes, you guessed it, plagiarism. And I do not want to identify the famed columnists who have been caught making up stories. They have moved on in life. That Washington Post writer from the early 1980s who copped a Pulitzer for a bogus story — let us forget his/her name, too.

Yet why not remind readers of Dan Rather’s aspersions on President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas National Guard? Rather’s evidence obviously was faked, yet Rather is still claiming some sort of Higher Accuracy. Or how about the CNN-Time story from the late 1990s claiming on doubtful evidence that U.S. forces used nerve gas in Laos? A president of NBC News resigned after admitting in 1993 that his “Dateline” report of an exploding General Motors truck was a hoax, and four years later a Pulitzer was conferred on him for, of all things, editorial writing. Perhaps some journalist statute of limitations had passed.

The New York Times, however, deserves special mention for the likes of Jayson Blair, who both plagiarized and fabricated a whole string of stories before being fired in 2003 along with two editors. A year earlier, the paper had to fire a New York Times Magazine writer after the magazine published the writer’s phony story. And just weeks after Blair’s departure, the Times’ Rick Bragg, another Pulitzer winner, left after being suspended for using another reporter’s work as his own. In the summer of 2003, The Villager, a small newspaper in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan, charged the Times with basing stories for three years on Villager stories and even using the same people The Villager used in their stories.

All of which brings me back to El Rushbo and his observance of the passing liberal monopoly in media. Perhaps as conservatives continue to break the liberal monopoly, the liberals will raise their journalistic standards. Or maybe they will get worse; most of the aforementioned plagiarisms and hoked up stories took place in recent years.

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Hollywood Out on Strike? Don’t Hurry Back (townhall.com, 071106)

By Brian Fitzpatrick

It feels like morning in America again.

The Culture and Media Institute doesn’t usually go in for labor strikes, but in Hollywood’s case we’re happy to make an exception. It isn’t every day the industry spearheading the destruction of the culture shuts itself down.

Yes, destroying the culture. According to CMI’s National Cultural Values Survey, 73% of Americans believe Hollywood is harming America’s moral values. A Hollywood strike is good news, like finding out the neighborhood mugger just got thrown in the clink.

This strike provides a wonderful opportunity for Americans to reflect on what they’ve been dumping into their minds in the name of entertainment. Just look at this season’s CMI headlines about the fruits of Hollywood’s creative genius:

* Blasphemy as ‘Satire’: Sarah Silverman portrays God as an arrogant, pot-smoking, foul-mouthed boyfriend she can’t wait to dump.

* Boston Legal Writers Attack ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy: ABC delivers leftwing propaganda in the guise of entertainment.

* Tila Tequila: the Latest in MTV Sexploitation: Like all reality shows, this one suffers from noticeable scripting, which must have been done by drooling old men in raincoats.

* ABC Takes ‘Big Shots’ at Traditional Values: New “dramedy” normalizes irresponsible sexual behavior, depicts grown men as eternal adolescents.

* A Modern-Day Stoning!?! Cold Case Smears Christian Kids: CBS’s entertainment division portrays devout teens as murderers and hypocrites and their youth pastor as a pervert, while taking cheap shots at abstinence education.

* CBS’s Cold Case Adds Insult to Injury: One Sunday they savage evangelical Christians. The next week, one year after the Lancaster County schoolhouse massacre, they poke fingers in the eyes of the Amish.

* ‘Dr. 90210’ – or Dr. Crotch? What compels anyone at the E! network, from the CEO to the lowliest of interns, to associate himself with this product?

* The World According to the TV Critics: Showtime’s new series, Californication, blatantly and obscenely blasphemes Christianity and insults the Catholic Church – and not a single major media critic even notices.

A steady diet of this poison is bound to affect the way people think. CMI’s special report, The Media Assault on American Values, found a striking contrast between people who watch less than one hour of television per evening and people who watch four hours or more. Heavy TV watchers are less likely to volunteer or make charitable contributions, less likely to attend church regularly, less committed to virtues like honesty and personal responsibility, more permissive about sex and more likely to turn to government to meet their needs rather than relying on themselves.

We’re optimistic about the Hollywood writers walking off the job, because we expect that people will watch less TV as a result. In January, the networks reportedly will run out of fresh scripts for their sitcoms and dramas. When the heart of entertainment programming is forced into reruns, people will watch even less TV. Maybe they’ll realize how much time they’ve been wasting, and they’ll discover how much more rewarding it is to spend that time with friends and loved ones, or volunteering for charity.

Here’s another piece of good news: A new Census Bureau report says more American parents are limiting TV and reading to their kids. Perhaps this is a response to the violence, sex and profanity those Hollywood writers have been pouring into the family hour. According to the Parents Television Council, violent content is up nearly 53% in the 8:00 hour since 2001, sexual content is up 22%, and foul language now shows up in more than 75% of the programs.

According to a Bloomberg report, a Los Angeles economist warns “The big thing for the networks is the erosion of their audience. This is a real concern for them.” We can only hope.

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Media Silence: Islamic Terrorism Case Ignored (townhall.com, 071115)

By Joel Mowbray

In the terrorism case of two young Egyptian nationals and University of South Florida students arrested August 4 in South Carolina, fascinating twists and turns abound.

There’s a secret recording of the defendants discussing strategy shortly after their arrest. There’s a You Tube video in which one of the defendants gave instructions in Arabic on converting a remote-control toy into a bomb detonator, which one defendant allegedly told police was made to help people in Arab countries “defend themselves against the infidels invading their countries,” specifically “against those who fought for the United States.”

That’s not all. The father of one of the defendants, Youssef Megahed, all but pointed the finger at the co-defendant, Ahmed Mohamed, as the sole culprit, thus implying that his son was ignorant or duped.

And for good measure, Mohamed had stayed at a house formerly rented by convicted terrorism supporter and former USF professor Sami al-Arian.

Yet this compelling drama has drawn scant attention from the mainstream media. And while apologists might attempt to write off the paucity of coverage for various reasons, a slew of other terrorism cases since 9/11 have been met with the same media disinterest.

Following the arrests of Mohamed and Megahed on Aug. 4 with explosives in the trunk of their car—just seven miles from a naval weapons base in Goose Creek, SC—the Washington Post and New York Times made fleeting references. Each paper ran a brief overview from the Associated Press, with no independent reporting.

After the federal government indicted the two defendants on explosives charges and Mohamed on terrorism-related charges, the Times published not even 500 words—on page 14, no less. That was actually more aggressive than the Post, which discussed the indictment, but only in the context of the revelation of the You Tube video, which included a discussion on what might happen to the Internet giant.

Neither highly esteemed outlet reported the contents in the trunk of the vehicle the pair was driving: a box of .22-caliber bullets, gun powder, several gallons of gasoline, 20 feet of fuse, PVC piping and a drill.

Neither paper even mentioned perhaps the most amusing part of the case: the conversation between the two defendants in the back of the police car after the arrest. Not knowing an audio recorder was capturing their words, the two had the following exchange:

“Did you tell them there is something in them?” Mohamed asked, presumably referring to the PVC pipes.

“Water,” Megahed said.

“Water! Right? The black water is in the Pepsi.”

Barely explored by any mainstream media outlet is the possible connection between Mohamed and convicted terror supporter al-Arian. A week after the arrest, authorities searched a Florida home where Mohamed had been staying.

Only meaningfully investigated by bloggers, such as Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston, is that the searched residence was leased in the 1990’s by the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE). Could this be coincidence? Of course. But it could also be more than that, and some digging could reveal far stronger connections between the men.

Even if the connections between Mohamed and al-Arian turn out to be attenuated, the search itself was noteworthy. Local TV stations captured video of authorities removing from the house PVC piping, something also found in the trunk of the suspects’ car.

Also left unreported by the Post and the Times was that Mohamed’s computer contained a file named “Bomb Shock,” which contained detailed information on TNT and C-4, a military-grade plastic explosive.

The prestigious papers further ignored the apparent animus that Mohamed harbors for the U.S. military. According to a court document, Mohamed “considered American troops, and those military forces fighting with the American military, to be invaders of Arab countries.”

When someone with seething anger toward the U.S. soldiers drives a car filled with explosive materials two states away to a naval station, how is that not major news?

Contrast that to the coverage afforded the recent mistrial in the government’s case against Holy Land Foundation, an alleged front for Hamas.

The mistrial was spun by most mainstream media outlets as a major defeat to U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The New York Times dedicated over 1,200 words in a page one story. The Washington Post was a bit more restrained, putting its coverage on page three, but the editorial page ran a stinging criticism by Georgetown professor David Cole of supposed government overreach.

Defenders of high-profile treatment of the Holy Land mistrial likely would assert the connection to 9/11, as the Islamic charity was shut down with great fanfare in October 2001.

But what about the case of Ali al-Timimi, a Muslim cleric who convicted in 2005 for urging his followers shortly after 9/11 to wage jihad against the U.S. The Times ran its coverage of the April 2005 conviction on page 12. The life sentence Timimi received that July was bumped back to page 21.

At least the Post placed the story about Timimi’s conviction on the front page. This might have owed to the local angle, though, as Timimi taught at an adult Islamic education center in Northern Virginia.

Yet three months later, the Post editorialized against Timimi’s life sentence, under the headline, “Sentenced for Speaking.” Stressing that none of his followers had actually waged successful jihad, the Post lamented, “[he] has been sentenced to life in prison for words that had little effect.”

So success is the barometer for importance? Does this mean continued media avoidance of thwarted terrorism on our soil until the government fails to stop an attack?

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NYT: An undocumented newspaper (townhall.com, 071128)

By Ann Coulter

Last week, in an article titled “Walking a Tightrope on Immigration,” The New York Times made the fact-defying claim that the illegal immigration issue poses a risk for Republicans who appeal to voters “angry” about illegal immigration. (This is as opposed to voters “angry” that they spent good money buying a copy of The New York Times.)

In support of this assertion, the Times was required not only to ignore the stunning defeat of this year’s amnesty bill, but also to proffer provably absurd evidence. I dearly hope Democratic politicians continue to look to the Times as an accurate barometer of voter sentiment.

In addition to secret polls showing that “the majority of Americans” support “a path to citizenship for immigrants here illegally,” the Times cited election results from 1994 and 2006 that directly contradict this thesis.

First, the Times raised former California Gov. Pete Wilson’s “precipitous slide” in the polls after he supported Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied most taxpayer-supported services to illegal immigrants.

The problem with this example is that Proposition 187 was wildly popular with California voters.

Times reporter Michael Luo seems to be referring to the Times’ own prediction of catastrophe for Proposition 187 — not actual election results.

One week before Californians voted on Proposition 187 in 1994, B. Drummond Ayres Jr. reported in the Times that there had been “a sharp falloff in support for the proposition.”

He said Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans and African-American ministers were coming out strongly against Proposition 187 and that “this outcry, along with the increasing opposition being voiced by liberals, civil libertarians and assorted national political figures” was having an effect.

And then Californians voted.

Proposition 187 passed in a landslide with a nearly 20-point margin — a larger margin than Wilson got, incidentally. It was supported by two-thirds of white voters, half of black and Asian voters, and even one-third of Hispanic voters. It passed in every area of California, except San Francisco, a city where intoxicated gay men dressed as nuns performing sex acts on city streets is not considered unusual. In heavily Latino Los Angeles County, Proposition 187 passed with a 12-point margin.

I’m no campaign consultant, but I think Wilson’s support for an off-the-charts popular initiative probably didn’t hurt him.

In fact, here on planet Earth, about the safest thing a California politician could do would be to wildly, vocally support Proposition 187. But in New York Times-speak, politicians are walking a dangerous “tightrope” if they dare to defy a slight majority of San Francisco voters!

The initiative went to Carter-appointed U.S. District Court Judge Mariana Pfaelzer, who issued a permanent injunction and then, in a series of decisions, found the initiative unconstitutional. Her rulings were still on appeal when Democrat Gray Davis became governor and dropped the appeals. Everyone remembers how popular Gray Davis was! (First governor in California history to be recalled.)

The crown jewel of the Times’ pathetic attempt to marshal evidence for its thesis that Americans want more, not fewer, illegal aliens choking our roads, schools and hospitals also included this gem: “J.D. Hayworth, a hard-line incumbent Republican representative in Arizona, lost his race in 2006, as did Randy Graf, a member of the border-enforcing Minuteman group, who also ran in Arizona.”

How many times do we have to disprove this canard?

As with Hillary’s position on driver’s licenses for illegals — and B. Hussein Obama’s entire campaign — the Hayworth-Graf example works better when no follow-up questions are allowed. For example:

Q: Did Hayworth’s and Graf’s opponents campaign against them on illegal immigration?

A: No.

Q: Were there any other issues on the ballot that year that might tell us if it was Hayworth’s and Graf’s positions on illegals that led to their defeats?

A: Si! Oops, I mean, yes — why, yes there were! The very election that the Times cites as proof that anti-illegal sentiment is a loser at the ballot box also included four measures that passed overwhelmingly: (1) a measure to deny bail to illegal aliens, (2) a measure that would bar illegals from being awarded punitive damages, (3) a measure that would prohibit illegals from receiving state subsidies for education or child care, and (4) a measure to declare English the state’s official language.

Whatever Arizona voters didn’t like about Hayworth and Graf, it wasn’t that they were too tough on illegals.

My theory is that Hayworth and Graf lost because the multitudes of Times reporters losing their jobs due to the Newspaper of Record’s plummeting circulation have recently moved to Hayworth’s and Graf’s districts. (This is what’s known as a “brain drain” in those districts.)

My theory — like the Times’ theory — is supported by no evidence. But unlike the Times’ theory, mine is not specifically disproved by other evidence such as common sense, an everyday observation of my fellow man, and also those four anti-illegal immigrant measures passing in landslides in the very same election.

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The (Un)Fairness Doctrine (townhall.com, 071129)

By Rebecca Hagelin

Who should decide what you hear over the radio and on TV? You? Or policymakers in Washington?

If freedom of speech appeals to you — if you think we need robust debate to keep democracy alive and well — the answer should be clear.

Unfortunately, it’s not so clear to certain liberal lawmakers. The rest of us hear, say, Rush Limbaugh on our lunch hours and tune into Bill O’Reilly in the evening and enjoy the lively give-and-take that erupts over the issues of the day. But those liberals aren’t so happy. They don’t like it when Rush or Bill (or Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and other noteworthy and entertaining pundits) shines a spotlight on our elected leaders and all their foibles.

That’s why liberals are dusting off the so-called “Fairness Doctrine.”

The Fairness Doctrine, despite its name, gives Americans a raw deal. The Federal Communications Commission created it in 1949 to require broadcasters to present both sides of any controversial issue that they touched on. Sounds … well, fair, right? Except for two major problems.

One is practical — it makes for boring radio and TV. Why? Because broadcasters responded to the Fairness Doctrine predictably: Realizing that it would be extraordinarily difficult to ensure that each issue was treated in perfect balance, they opted in large measure to steer clear of controversial topics. After all, there’s only one way to guarantee that no one is offended by what you say … and that’s to say nothing.

The other problem is a little something known as the First Amendment. Where, pray tell, is it written in the Constitution that we must exercise our free speech in a “balanced” way? Sorry, but the kind of robust debate that our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution — indeed, the kind of debate that led to the founding of this nation — can’t be hemmed in with parliamentary demands that we carefully include “the other side” every time we speak. Like it or not, democracy’s messy.

So the FCC, in 1985, finally began to overturn the Fairness Doctrine, and President Reagan vetoed every attempt to bring it back. It didn’t take long for the phenomenon of talk radio — as we know it today — to arise. “When Rush Limbaugh began his career,” writes Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., in the latest issue of American Legion magazine, “there were 125 talk-radio stations. Today there are 2,000.” And no, they’re not all conservative. “While Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative giants dominate the national syndicated market,” Pence adds, “many moderate and liberal programs succeed admirably at the local level.”

Regardless, many politicians don’t like talk radio and its televised equivalent. After all, Americans who listen to pundits with strong opinions tend to become, gee, informed about the issues of the day. Instead of minding their own business, they learn things. Then they call and write their representatives in Washington, demanding action. We can’t have that!

Of course, the case against an unregulated marketplace of ideas is so flimsy, it requires deception. Consider the liberal attack on Rush Limbaugh over his “phony soldiers” remark. Rush, in fact, had made a perfectly legitimate argument. If a soldier who had been kicked out of boot camp, then claimed to have witnessed fellow soldiers committing atrocities in Iraq isn’t a “phony,” who is? But the truth didn’t matter to many liberals. They tried to accuse Rush, of all people, of being anti-patriotic! It was so absurd, the charge didn’t stick. But that didn’t stop liberal lawmakers from threatening to revive the Fairness Doctrine.

That’s why Pence has introduced the “Broadcaster Freedom Act” — to ensure that no future president can regulate the airwaves of America without an act of Congress. “America is a nation of freedom and strong opinion,” he says. “Our government must not be afraid to entrust our good people with all the facts and opinions necessary to make choices as an informed electorate. That is what democracy is all about.”

It’s not just Republicans who think so. As President John F. Kennedy once said, “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

So let’s ask those who champion the Fairness Doctrine: What are you afraid of?

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The Bad News Is The Good News Is Ignored (townhall.com, 071129)

By Herb London

More than a decade ago Ben Wattenberg wrote a book with the marvelous title, The Good News Is The Bad News Is Wrong. If that book were republished today I would change the title to The Bad News Is The Good News Is Ignored.

It isn’t surprising that in the world of media reportage only bad news counts. The problem with this condition is that it feeds a generally one dimensional view of politics, a misperception of the world that promotes weltschmerz and despair.

Most of the reports about Iraq, for example, emphasize sectarian violence, failed policy and tactical errors. Overlooked, with rare exceptions, is that the “surge” and an emphasis on counterinsurgency have had a profound effect on the war effort. Civilian deaths have fallen 77% year over year, while military fatalities have declined by 64%.

Needless to say, nirvana has not been achieved, nor is it appropriate to declare victory, but the trend line is clear. Al Qaeda is in retreat. Even many Sunni leaders who had provided sanctuary for Al Qaeda terrorists have turned against them. Recently the Washington Post and the BBC finally admitted that violence in Iraq is abating, but these stories appeared well into the third stage of the campaign and remain aberrational in media coverage of the war.

Second, it is noteworthy that Democratic candidates for president have placed a great emphasis on income disparity in the nation. The quasi Marxist contention is that the rich grow richer and the poor, poorer. Yet the evidence provides a somewhat different picture.

The middle class has more disposable wealth than ever before and the lowest quintile has actually improved its annual income. Moreover, the numbers overlook the extraordinary mobility of one group rising and some falling back. But perhaps the most significant finding is that the percentage of those who are poor had declined slightly and the percentage of those who earn above $150,000 per annum has increased (controlling for inflation).

Needless to say, this condition may not attract the attention of “two Americas” speech-makers since the reality is much less provocative than assertions of economic exploitation. But surely there should be space somewhere in television land where the nuanced story of class income can be described.

Last, it is often said by the panjandrums of television news that most Americans are dissatisfied with their jobs. Presumably workers are distressed by dreary dead-end positions. Yet recent polls tell a different story with more than two thirds arguing that they are satisfied or very satisfied with their present positions.

It should also be noted that most Americans between the ages of 25 and 45 change jobs multiple times indicating that there are several opportunities to find employment satisfaction. In a society that has made the transition from an industrial base to an information structured economy, those who obtain skills can dictate to the employment market. This may be the first time in history that labor influences management more than the reverse.

These largely undisclosed, or should I say non-publicized, accounts are part of a consistent media view. In the 1960’s it was argued, due in part to Paul Erhich’s book The Population Bomb, that the world’s population would double in every subsequent decade. Of course, that hasn’t happened, but the recantation hasn’t either. It was argued four years ago that several islands in the Pacific would have to be evacuated because the ocean would rise due to global warming. But the devastation of these atolls has not occurred and the media organs responsible for the initial accounts are silent.

The drum of beat of negativism is unrelenting. There may be some good news stories on t.v. and in newspapers, but it is simply hard to find them. I wonder what kind of effect s steady diet of negative news has on the public. No, I need not wonder; I see it in the mind set of nihilists who preach despair and the end of the American experiment.

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This Is CNN: Republicans were reluctant to participate in Wednesday’s debate, and CNN proved them right. (National Review Online, 071130)

By The Editors

Shortly before Wednesday night’s CNN/YouTube Republican debate, host Anderson Cooper defended the innovative format in which “ordinary citizens” were invited to submit their own questions by uploading videos to the Internet.

“Obviously people are cautious about any type of new technology,” Cooper told The Politico. “But this is not that new. This whole Internet thing has been around for a while, if I understand. I think the candidate that rejects it looks out of touch and foolish.”

The day after the debate, it was revealed that at least six of the questioners were Democratic activists rather than typical voters, whose opinions and concerns were supposed to be represented. The question for CNN — which was solely responsible for selecting the questions — is: Who looks foolish now?

In the most telling incident, openly gay retired brigadier general Keith Kerr, who is part of Hillary Clinton’s “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered for Hillary Steering Committee,” was allowed to ask whether the candidates supported the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. After several of the candidates said that they respected Kerr’s service but didn’t believe the military needed to change its policy, CNN host Cooper asked Kerr — who was present in the live audience — whether he’d gotten an answer. He thought he hadn’t. All in all, the episode took nearly five minutes.

Kerr told CNN he had not done work for the Clinton campaign, but he was listed on Clinton’s website as part of the LGBT steering committee. On the website of Campaigns and Elections magazine, he is listed as one of almost 50 co-chairmen of a group called “Veterans and Military Retirees for Hillary.” He was also on the steering committee of “Veterans for Kerry.”

CNN later issued an apology. “We regret this incident. CNN would not have used the general’s question had we known that he was connected to any presidential candidate,” said David Bohrman, a CNN executive and the producer of the debate. But it wouldn’t have been hard to find out. Has CNN ever heard of Google? (Hint: it’s an Internet search-engine. Another hint: It owns YouTube.) Within minutes of Kerr’s question, a reader e-mailed National Review Online to inform us of his affiliation. It was the subsequent NRO “Corner” post that brought the connection to CNN’s attention.

Other questions came from declared supporters of John Edwards, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, someone working on legislation with a Democratic senator, and a prominent union activist also supporting the Edwards campaign. The conceit of the YouTube debate was that it empowered ordinary citizens, but CNN managed to empower Democratic activists instead — and at a Republican debate!

Overall, even the questions not asked by Democratic activists were embarrassing — vapid, stupid, irrelevant, or all three. The conservative questioners were straight out of liberal caricature. One man who asked about Second Amendment rights ended his video by having someone off camera toss him a (presumably) loaded shotgun; he then pumped it and chambered a round to drive his point home. Another questioner asked whether the candidates believed “every word of this book” — while waving a Bible at the camera. Obviously, this is what CNN thinks conservatives are.

Also worth noting is what questions CNN didn’t ask. There was not a single question about education or health care, for example. But CNN did make sure viewers heard about the Trilateral Commission and a mission to Mars. This passes for editorial judgment?

Republicans were reluctant to participate in last night’s debate, and CNN proved them right. Both they and the viewers had to endure two hours of inanity and stilted questioning. We learned a little something about the candidates in the exchanges Wednesday night, but we learned much more about CNN.

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CNN: Not an honest broker (townhall.com, 071205)

By Brent Bozell III

Is CNN capable and professional enough to host presidential debates? After last week’s CNN-YouTube debate fiasco, even Tim Rutten, a media writer for the left-leaning Los Angeles Times, was giving CNN a big fat F for failure: “In fact, this most recent debacle masquerading as a presidential debate raises serious questions about whether CNN is ethically or professionally suitable” to host debates. CNN had the opportunity to perform a journalistic swan dive. Instead, it produced an enormous belly flop. It’s far worse when you realize this mess of a production was the highest-rated primary presidential debate in history.

Back in May, after the Democrats stiff-armed the Fox News Channel invitation to debate,many conservatives believed the Republicans should return the favor with CNN and its proposed CNN-YouTube debate. I disagreed. I suggested in this space that Republicans should accept debates on CNN but be more forceful in setting the terms and selecting the hosts. It seemed correct to assume at the time that CNN would attempt to be more fair and balanced simply because so much was riding on the outcome, namely CNN’s very credibility as an impartial observer of the political process.

Anchor Anderson Cooper began the debate by telling the viewers at home “all the questions tonight come from you.” An ombudsman should have interrupted at that point, with a clarification along the lines of a Hertz commercial: “There’s CNN, and there’s not exactly.” CNN wanted viewers to think the whole process emerged from the bottom up. Instead, it was CNN discarding 99.5% of entries at the top and deciding what finally would air. And as the debate unfolded, viewers discovered the depths of CNN’s dishonesty about their alleged questions from the vox populi.

Standing up in the audience after being flown in by the debate organizers, retired general Keith Kerr threw a hardball question at the Republican contenders about the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward gays in the military. He listed his military credentials and proclaimed he was gay and then said, “I want to know why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians.” After several candidate answers, Kerr interrupted and began lecturing the Republicans on how insensitive they are to gays in the military, as if he’d been granted a 30-second attack ad by CNN.

Within minutes, conservative bloggers and media critics discovered through simple Googling that Kerr was a Hillary Clinton supporter — and not just a supporter but a man whose name was listed as part of the Clinton campaign’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Steering Committee.

How could CNN have missed this? CNN claims it had no idea. We are asked to place ourselves in a state of suspended disbelief here. No one, absolutely no one, at CNN knew of his identity? Shades of the Dan Rather Memogate story. CBS also claimed no one, absolutely no one, knew the memos to be false — never mind that they had months to discover the truth that conservatives were able to unearth in minutes.

A simple Google search would have revealed this man’s political identity. Even better, the Great Vetting Machine at CNN needed only to do a search of www.cnn.com — he’s been a guest on the network, actively promoting this agenda.

It’s a lose-lose for CNN. If somehow we were to accept that no one, absolutely no one, at CNN knew this man’s political identity, what does this say about the professionalism of CNN? To believe that CNN didn’t know is to conclude that CNN is an incompetent news organization.

On CNN’s Sunday show “Reliable Sources,” CNN Washington bureau chief David Bohrman embarrassed the network even further. Bohrman admitted to host Howard Kurtz that CNN has its own version of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” CNN never asked Kerr if he was affiliated with a candidate. “Here’s why we stopped making sure that he was a real general and making sure that he hadn’t contributed to a campaign. His question was great. All right?” Ask a “great question,” and then CNN doesn’t care if you’re on someone’s campaign stationery.

When former ABC reporter Linda Douglass suggested that from now on, every single person asking a debate question on national TV should be required to answer that question, Bohrman had the gall to disagree: “I’d love to agree, but I don’t. Candidates meet all sorts of people, and there should not be the complete bio of everyone who asks a question.”

Oddly, CNN wants to start a media-ethics debate, where critics demand full disclosure and CNN boldly advocates the cause of ignorance. To them, surprising Republicans with questions from unidentified Hillary backers and John Edwards fans is just a delightful evening of dirty tricks.

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No Conservatives!!! (Townhall.com, 080103)

By Harry Stein

Here is just a tiny, tiny sample of the reaction on the Huffington Post to the announcement that William Kristol will be writing a weekly column in the New York Times:

* “William ‘the Bloody’ Kristol is a beady eyed warmonger.”

* “Worthless suck up Kristol should be cleaning toilets in public restrooms for his GOP ‘friends.’”

* “I will never, ever, buy another issue of the newspaper, I will never again be a subscriber to your newspaper and I will do my level best to avoid any purchases from any NY Times advertiser.”

* “If the New York Times is going to hire a liar and a racist like Bill Kristol then they might as well hire Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, and Ari Fleischer.”

* “Kristol is an arrogant warmongering prick. I can’t stand the sight of him.”

* “Listening to Kristol, that war mongering crater face, is worse than listening to Bush, Cheney, and Richard Pearle all rolled up in one . . . I hate that decision and I will do everything I can to discredit this decision until they finally flush him down the toilet like the turd he is.”

And so it went, on this and dozens of other left-of-center sites. Sputtering fury. Vicious name-calling. Denunciations of the Times for this unspeakable act. Threats to cancel subscriptions and otherwise exact revenge.

For conservatives, long accustomed to self-serving liberal pieties about tolerance, the orgy of outrage at having to face an alien point of view was wonderful to behold, and no one enjoyed it more than the man at the storm’s center. As Kristol put it to Politico.com, with the obvious relish of the skinny guy on the beach who gets the girl in the fourth panel, “I was flattered watching blogosphere heads explode.” (This provoked a new round of outrage: “Lawd, this is one son of a bitch I detest,” a typical posting hissed. “Smarmy prick. I’m sure that amuses him even more.”)

In fact, about the only one seemingly surprised that Times readers would respond with such vehemence was the man most responsible for the appointment: editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal. Noting that he had trouble understanding “this weird fear of opposing views,” Rosenthal observed in an interview that Kristol “is a serious, respected conservative intellectual—and somehow that’s a bad thing. How intolerant is that?” There’s something almost touching in the naivety behind those words. Can Rosenthal truly be so unaware of the character of his own core readership? Does he actually believe that they’re open to challenge, or even reasonable back-and-forth? Doesn’t he read his own paper’s letters page? “David Brooks can write the mildest column in the world,” Bernard Goldberg observes, “and the letters to the editor act like he’s Hitler.” Now, to their horror, letter-writers face the prospect of regularly waking up to a leading exemplar of a far more aggressive conservatism—a muscular supporter of the war who has characterized the Times itself as “irredeemable.”

According to The Nation’s Katha Pollitt, “What this hire demonstrates is how successfully the right has intimidated the mainstream media. Their constant demonizing of the New York Times as the tool of the liberal elite worked.” What the appointment really suggests, however, is a degree of desperation at the Times that only its worst enemies have wished on that venerable institution. Always remarkable for the arrogance with which it brushed aside criticism, the paper has long cast itself as the unimpeachable arbiter of reality; and no one has proven less inclined to admit error (or give conservatives a fair shake) than that determinedly leftist child of the sixties, publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger. Yet after plummeting ad sales and circulation cut the stock price steeply enough to put even a family-controlled board on edge, Sulzberger was moved to do the hitherto unthinkable in a belated effort to broaden the paper’s appeal and reclaim its once-vaunted reputation for balance.

Will it work? Don’t count on it. Dramatic as the gesture is, it is as unlikely to impress those on the right hostile to the paper as it has those up in arms on the left. Perhaps the most amusing reaction to the news was posted by Web pundit Steve Boriss, who speculated that Kristol would serve as a Trojan horse for his Weekly Standard boss, Rupert Murdoch, weakening reader commitment to the Times and so helping Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. “Murdoch may understand Times readers better than the Times does,” Boriss wrote, “recognizing it is contrary to human nature for audiences to enjoy columns written by those with whom they disagree. . . . for Times readers who can easily avoid daily exposure to conservative views, Bill Kristol will not only seem wrong, but also selfish, mean-spirited, and morally deficient.”

Kristol’s arrival may have a bigger impact on morale in-house, since in their political sensibilities Times staffers are pretty much a microcosm of the Upper West Side. Already there had been much newsroom grousing about the ideological transgressions of the gentlemanly Brooks and Book Review and now Week in Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, who has opened up the book coverage somewhat to conservative thought. As Brooks once wryly put it, “Being the house conservative at the New York Times is like being the chief rabbi in Mecca.”

The conservative website TheNoseOnYourFace.com offered an inspired take by imagining Sulzberger sending his staff a memo detailing the paper’s newly instituted “Neo-Con Sensitivity Training Program.” It read in part:

* Like you and I, Bill Kristol puts his pants on one leg at a time—he’s just thinking about dead Iraqi babies, single malt Scotch, and his Haliburton dividends checks while he’s doing it. My point is that we should try to view him as just another staff member, and try to find common ground and mutual respect. Also, as a general rule, try to avoid startling him and limit direct eye contact to less than two seconds.

* Mr. Kristol is a neo-con, as in neo-conservative. Your NCSTP training will offer a more in-depth explanation of the difference between a standard-grade conservative and neo-con, but for now, imagine the difference between a really bad case of the flu and full-blown AIDS.

Perhaps most telling in the response to Kristol’s hiring, almost no one seems to have taken it the way that Rosenthal hoped—as a chance to engage with an alternative point of view. In a liberal universe where the other side is wrong—evil—by definition, that’s simply not how things are done. Over and over on the Web, one found variations on the following: “I never read William Saphire [sic], and I never read David Brooks. I will take great pleasure in never reading Bill Kristol!”

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NBC Show Criticized for Portraying Christians as Violent ‘Bible Thumpers’ (Christian Post, 080114)

A recent “Law & Order” show portraying a leader in a college Christian ministry as anti-homosexual and Christians as “Bible thumpers” is drawing ire from a watchdog group for anti-Christian bigotry.

In the opening of the NBC show’s episode last week, a leader in a college Christian ministry, who opposed homosexuality, was portrayed as being guilty of making death threats against a professor studying the “gay gene.” The lead detective also refers to Christians as “Bible thumpers.”

There is a relentless attempt by the media to stereotype Christians as prone to violence, said Dr. Gary Cass, chairman and CEO of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, as he criticized the producers as insensitive.

“There’s a tendency on the side of the media to make what I call a ‘moral equivalency’: If you are a fundamentalist Muslim, you are violent. If you are a fundamentalist Christian, you are violent,” he told The Christian Post.

Contrary to the media’s portrayal, Christians are often the victims of violence and not the perpetrators, said Cass. He noted that there are rare reports from around the world of Christians murdering a Muslim or a Hindu but frequent news on Hindus murdering Christians.

He added that it is negative portrayals of Christians like that featured in “Law & Order” that “legitimates violence against Christians.”

The Christian leader was also stereotyped as being anti-homosexual, which reflects a common perception among young adults, according to a recent study.

A Barna Group survey last September reported that the most common perception among people between 16-29 years old is that present-day Christianity is “anti-homosexual.” Around 91% of young non-Christians and 80% of young churchgoers say this phrase describes Christianity. A majority from both categories also believe that Christians show excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards gays and lesbians.

Fundamentalist Christians aside, Christians often distinguish the difference between homosexuality as a sin denounced by the Bible and homosexuals as people who should be treated with the love of God.

When asked whether real situations in which Christians exhibit hostility toward homosexuals are possibly reflected in the show, Cass said such instances are “very exceptional.”

“Every once in a while, some nutjob Christians will do something stupid,” acknowledged the CADC head.

He emphasized that acts of violence against homosexuals or any other groups are “always condemned by Christians.”

“Christians don’t condone violence,” he noted.

Also denouncing the media’s use of “Bible thumpers,” Cass said the label is an attempt to depict people who take the Bible seriously as ignorant.

Cass further noted that the show’s coverage on the “gay gene” was misleading because the idea was portrayed as a fact.

“There is no such thing as a gay gene,” he said.

He urged Christians to contact NBC and the show’s executive producer, Dick Wolf, and tell them to stop bashing Christians.

They should do the show in a way “that is accurate,” making it clear that the character’s violent act is not representative of Christians, said Cass.

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Obama, Thomas and Liberal Bias (townhall.com, 080211)

By Janet M. LaRue

Sen. Barack Obama is highly intelligent, likeable, articulate (no racism intended), dynamic, well-educated and witty. He is receiving virtually worshipful coverage from the news media.

Now imagine the Republican presidential front runner is a highly intelligent, likeable, articulate, dynamic, well-educated and witty conservative. He is also black and formerly liberal. His name is Clarence Thomas.

What would be missing from the picture? The adoring mainstream media, for one. What would we find? The rank racist comments, cartoons, editorials, speeches, etc., reserved for black conservatives by liberals of all colors.

Obama and Thomas are about as far apart politically as it gets. If they were cities, you’d need satellite tracking to pinpoint both, and they wouldn’t be in Georgia.

But there are important similarities. Both were deserted by their fathers and were primarily reared by their grandparents. And both have written an autobiography.

The New York Review of Books provides some background on Obama:

He is the son of a Harvard-trained Kenyan economist and a white mother from Kansas, and he was raised in Hawaii mostly by his white maternal grandparents. His father returned to Kenya when he was two years old, and his parents divorced; he lived for a time with his mother, moving to Indonesia with her for five formative years, from age six to ten, when she married an Indonesian man. He returned to Hawaii with his mother, and now a little sister, and they lived together for three years as his mother pursued her master’s degree. But when she returned to Indonesia to do her fieldwork, young “Barry,” as he was often called then, chose to stay behind with his grandparents. He attended a private high school and, though his grandparents were far from rich, he had a life of relative comfort.

In his book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, he tells his boyhood search for identity and the rage he felt as a young black man:

“We were always playing on the white man’s court … by the white man’s rules,” he writes. “If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher … wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the power and you didn’t. … The only thing you could choose was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage. And the final irony: should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors … they would have a name for that too. Paranoid. Militant.

You’d also need GPS technology to find any criticism of Obama’s “rage” or lashing out in the rave reviews of his book by the MSM:

All men live in the shadow of their fathers—the more distant the father, the deeper the shadow. Barack Obama describes his confrontation with this shadow in his provocative autobiography, Dreams from My Father, and he also persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither. —New York Times Book Review

Fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race. —Washington Post Book World.

Many American reviews of Dreams From My Father singled out the exceptional grace of Obama’s prose, its honesty and freshness. Consciously or not, Obama has placed his book in a literary tradition of political prose that goes back to another master of the American language: Abraham Lincoln (Obama is the senator from Illinois, Lincoln’s home state). —UK Guardian

Thomas’s autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, begins at his birth into the extreme poverty and hunger of tiny Pinpoint, Ga., and ends in “the American dream: a poor black child from the segregated South [grows] up to become a Supreme Court Justice.”

After his father moved north, leaving his young mother to raise him and his siblings on the $10. a week she earned as a maid, she sent him and his brother, with all of their belongings “stuffed into a pair of grocery bags,” to live with her father and step-mother in their modest home in Savannah, Ga. The boys worked 12 hour days on their grandparents’ farm when other kids enjoyed the lazy days of summer.

His grandparents taught them the virtues of hard work, love of God and country, self-reliance, honesty, and the importance of a good education. Thomas’s hard work and excellent grades earned him a scholarship to Holy Cross University and a law degree from Yale, after he declined Harvard’s offer.

Thomas dedicated the book to his mother, “who gave me life,” and his grandparents, “who taught me how to live.”

Thomas also shares his transformation from liberal to conservative, which included intense interaction with Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and other conservatives, black and white. Thomas also makes his case against those who would confine black Americans to liberal orthodoxy, as he did at his contentious confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

He provides the ultimate insider’s view of his confirmation ordeal in the last chapter. Although I watched the hearing and have read extensively about it, I hadn’t nearly appreciated the impact of what he suffered until learning about his life’s journey from obscure poverty in the segregated south.

Black journalist Juan Williams denounced the viciousness directed at Thomas’s nomination in an op-ed in The Washington Post:

Here is indiscriminate, mean-spirited mudslinging supported by the so-called champions of fairness: liberal politicians, unions, civil rights groups and women’s organizations. They have been mindlessly led into mob action against one man by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. … In pursuit of abuses by a conservative president the liberals have become abusive monsters. Thomas, p. 274.

Other than an objective review by Jan Crawford Greenburg, author of Supreme Conflict, other MSM reviews focus on a “sullen, angry man” who’s “evening the score”:

The Justice Looks Back and Settles Old Scores. … Justice Thomas, recounting his years in government, adopts a defensive crouch, lashing out at his enemies, reopening old wounds and itemizing insults that should be forgotten. —William Grimes, The New York Times

Justice Thomas Lashes Out in Memoir: Book Attacks Liberals and the Media, Breaks Near-Silence on Anita Hill. … Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid forthcoming memoir, scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the “mob” of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated his life. —Robert Barnes, Michael A. Fletcher and Kevin Merida, The Washington Post

Jeffrey Toobin, author of a recent book about the Supreme Court, describes in a review published in The New Yorker how Thomas’s career looks like a model of how affirmative action is supposed to work, but that isn’t how Thomas sees it.” The review, entitled “Unforgiven: Why is Clarence Thomas so angry?,” is accompanied by one of The New Yorker’s famous illustrations. This one: a caricature of a “seething” Thomas. (See analysis by Scott Douglas Gerber.)

The Supreme Court justice lambastes liberals and those who challenged his confirmation. … Thomas is “the most polarizing justice” and has written “a polarizing memoir” that is a “furious assault on liberalism.” —Edward Lazarus, The Los Angeles Times

Thomas certainly expresses his anger, but most of it is directed not at individuals, but at failed policies and practices that have harmed him and other minorities. If he didn’t express some anger, his critics would undoubtedly accuse him of dishonesty about his true feelings. If you assassinate a man’s character, call him a liar, accuse him of violating the law he was charged to enforce, you should expect some heat. But Lazarus misses the forgiveness Thomas has expressed for those who aroused his anger and his confession of pride.

I had the privilege of meeting Justice Thomas at the White House swearing-in ceremony of Justice Samuel Alito on Feb. 1, 2006. A gregarious spirit, infectious smile, and booming laugh are rarely the traits of an “angry, sullen man.”

After finishing his book, I felt an even greater appreciation for the man who wears well the mantle of great accomplishment. It is an intensely personal revelation of tragedy and triumph, sin and repentance, and personal accountability. And when he took the time to write me a personal letter on the occasion of my retirement, he confirmed my belief that he cares about common people.

Sen. Obama has won Democratic primary races in states that are primarily white. I think that says something very good about the decline of racism in America. When he spoke in Kansas about the white side of his family, thankfully, there were no cries of “Oreo” or other racial slurs. On Super Tuesday, he won the primary in Kansas.

Won’t it be wonderful when racism declines to the point that a black conservative has an equal chance to achieve the American dream without experiencing a nightmare at the hands of “abusive monsters?

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‘Supporting the Troops’ (townhall.com, 080219)

By Thomas Sowell

The Berkeley city council has made national news by telling Marine Corps recruiters that they are unwelcome in that bastion of the academic left.

It is a shame that Berkeley is not on some island in the South Pacific, because then they could be given their independence and left to defend themselves.

As it is, members of our armed forces who put their lives on the line to defend America are also defending people like too many in Berkeley for whom the very word America, and the American flag, bring only sneers.

Unfortunately, Berkeley is not unique. A professor at Harvard who put an American flag on his car after 9-11 provoked looks of astonishment from his colleagues. They wondered what was wrong with him.

All across the country, there are professors who push for keeping military recruiters off campus and for banning ROTC. Apparently if they don’t like the military, then other people — such as students — should not be allowed to make up their own minds whether they want to join or not.

Liberals in general, and academics in particular, like to boast of their open-mindedness and acceptance of non-conformity. But they mean not conforming to the norms of society at large.

They have little or no tolerance to those who do not conform to the norms of academic political correctness. Nowhere else in America is free speech so restricted as on academic campuses with speech codes.

In Berkeley, as elsewhere, the left has learned to cloak their anti-military intolerance with the magic words, “We support the troops.” The liberal media use the same line when they undermine the military.

In this, as in other things, the flagship of the media is the New York Times. Unsubstantiated charges against American troops in Iraq are front page news but incredible acts of heroism in battle are seldom reported there, if at all.

Although things go wrong in every war, things that went wrong in Iraq — whether large or small — have been front page news in the New York Times. But when the military surge was followed by things going right, the Iraq war was suddenly no longer front page news.

Back during the Vietnam war, the media criticized the American military for their emphasis on enemy casualties or “body count.” Today the media have been fixated on American body count.

What has been accomplished by the troops who lost their lives in battle has been of no interest to those who claim to be “supporting the troops.”

That thousands of Iraqis who fled the country during the height of the violence and turmoil are now returning is no big deal to the media.

Those in the military who made this possible by putting their own lives on the line are not heroes to the media. Indeed, one of the consistent patterns in the liberal media has been to depict the troops not as heroes but as victims.

The financial problems of some reservists who were called away from their civilian jobs were front page news in the New York Times. So were sorrowful goodbyes from family and friends.

All these things made the troops victims. So does body count.

Just last month, the New York Times found yet another way to portray the troops as victims. They ran a very long article, beginning on the front page of the January 13th issue, about killings in the United States by combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“In many of those cases,” it said, “combat trauma and the stress of deployment” were among the factors which “appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.”

As with so many other things said by liberals, the big question that was not asked was: Compared to what?

As the New York Post reported a couple of days later, the murder rate among returning military combat veterans is one-fifth that of civilians in the same age brackets.

So much for “supporting the troops” by depicting them as victims.

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Google Quietly Reinstates Work of News Organization Critical of U.N. (Foxnews, 080220)

NEW YORK — Google News quietly reinstated Tuesday the articles of a news service that routinely exposes U.N. corruption, a day after FOXNews.com ran a story about the Internet giant’s decision to remove Inner City Press from its search engine.

Inner City Press returned to the Google News search late in the day, but much sooner than the “couple weeks” a Google representative had promised. The week of stories the news service ran since Google News dropped it on Feb. 13 were not restored.

The news outlet, run by journalist Matthew Lee, has been critical of the U.N. and internal corruption within the organization. Lee was informed that Google News would drop his organization in a Feb. 8 e-mail.

Someone complained to Google early this month that Inner City Press was a one-man operation, violating the Google News ground rule that news organizations listed must have two or more employees, according to Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman.

Lee, who insists his organization has appropriate staff, believes someone within the U.N. pressured Google to drop him. The U.N. denies the charges.

Speaking at a press briefing Tuesday, Marie Okabe, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General said, “The Secretary-General has often spoken out in favor of press freedom and will continue to do so, but that insinuating that he, or his staff, is linked to the decision taken by Google News to de-list Inner City Press is blatantly false and misleading.”

Since 2005, Lee’s been focusing almost entirely on stories that deal with internal corruption inside the U.N., posting several stories online almost daily.

He’s been especially interested in the inner workings of what could be called the practical-applications arm of the international organization, the United Nations Development Programme.

Google said the “de-listing” was due to a misunderstanding and agreed to restore Inner City Press stories to the Google News service.

The reaction to the de-listing, however temporary, had been furious. The non-profit Government Accountability Project lambasted the company, calling Inner City Press “the most effective and important media organization for U.N. whistleblowers.”

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Democrats Outraged by MSNBC! (townhall.com, 080221)

By Larry Elder

Outrage!

MSNBC’s David Shuster, sitting in for Tucker Carlson, criticized the use by Sen. Clinton of her daughter, Chelsea. Shuster said, “Doesn’t it seem like Chelsea is being pimped out in some weird sort of way?”

Well!!!

Clinton’s communications director, Howard Wolfson, threatened to pull out from a planned debate. MSNBC quickly offered an on-air apology, and suspended Shuster for his bizarre comment. Wolfson called Shuster’s remark one of a “pattern” on that network. (A few weeks earlier, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews suggested that Sen. Clinton’s rise to power stemmed from her sympathetic portrayal as a woman wronged by her husband. Outraged feminists demanded an apology — and got one.)

But NBC’s cadre of pundits masquerading as journalists — or journalists masquerading as pundits — routinely pound, demean and belittle Republicans. So, how about a few apologies for the constant, incessant, mean-spirited, Republican/Bush bashing?

— Chris Matthews, on NBC’s “Today” show, Nov. 14, 2006, said to co-host Matt Lauer, “How many more casualties will we take in what looks to be a losing war? It’s just like Vietnam. We could have cut the same deal in ‘68 that we cut eventually in ‘73. I think the American people are going to see that.”

— Chris Matthews, at the 10th anniversary celebration of his MSNBC show, accused the Bush administration of “trying to silence him over the years,” and then crowed that the Bush White House had “finally been caught in their criminality.” The remark presumably referred to the perjury conviction of “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former aide. And this outburst came days before a GOP debate. The moderator? Chris Matthews.

— MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, on Sept. 25, 2006: “For the five years, one month and two weeks, the current administration and in particular the president has been given the greatest pass for incompetence and malfeasance in American history. … As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him by proxy.”

— Olbermann delivered a “Special Comment” on Valentine’s Day this year. He spoke about the Bush administration’s wish to provide immunity to telecommunications companies when they cooperate with government-requested surveillance: “If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it! There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend. You’re a fascist! Get them to print you a T-shirt with fascist on it! What else is this but fascism? … And if there’s one thing we know about Big Brother, Mr. Bush, it’s that he — well, you — are a liar. … You said that ‘the lives of countless Americans depend’ on you getting your way. This is crap. And you sling it with an audacity and a speed unrivaled even by the greatest political felons of our history.”

— NBC’s veteran sportscaster Bob Costas, also a “Today” show and “Nightly News” contributor, said on his syndicated radio show: “I think it is now overwhelmingly evident. If you’re honest about it. Even if you’re a conservative Republican — if you’re honest about it — this is a failed administration. And no honest conservative would say that George W. Bush was among the 500 most qualified people to be President of the United States. That’s not based on political leaning. If a liberal, and I tend to be liberal, disagrees with a conservative, they can still respect that person’s competence and the integrity of their point of view. … This administration can be rightly criticized by a fair-minded person who’s smack in the middle of the political spectrum on a hundred different counts, and by now they’re all self-evident.”

— On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” a “reporter,” Erin Burnett, covered French President Sarkozy’s visit to China. With videotape rolling of President Bush flanked by Sarkozy to his left and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to his right, the reporter gushed, “Who could not have a man-crush on that man? I’m not talking about the monkey, either. I’m talking about the other one.” Questioned by the show’s host, “Who’s the monkey?” the reporter clarified, “The monkey in the middle” — meaning President Bush. She later apologized.

If Republicans decline to debate on a network whose pundits/journalists cross the fairness line, they’d never debate in front of these lefty “journalists.”

Come to think of it — not a bad idea.

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Sex Scandal At The New York Times (townhall.com, 080225)

By Dinesh D’Souza

Imagine reading an article that began like this: “The New York Times has been rocked by reports that its coverage of the 2008 election has been sorely compromised by an alleged homosexual relationship between executive editor Bill Keller and liberal columnist Paul Krugman.

“Waves of anxiety have swept through Times staffers who have been concerned about Krugman routinely showing up by Keller’s side. Convinced that the relationship had become romantic, some senior staff at the paper have been trying to keep the two apart. These staffers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they warned Keller not to keep his office door closed especially when Krugman was inside.

“Concerns that Krugman’s strong support for the Democrats have shaped New York Times coverage of the upcoming election underscore a paradox. The newspaper is widely suspected of tailoring its news coverage to support its political ideology—’all the news that fits’—even though the Times likes to portray itself as objective: ‘all the news that’s fit to print.’

“Both Keller and Krugman have denied the allegations although such denials are to be expected in such situations. Now some staffers are worried that Keller’s coverage of the election may be influenced by his feelings for Krugman. ‘We’re worried that Krugman is threatening to break it off,’ one reporter noted, ‘if Keller doesn’t give favorable treatment to his candidate and stick it to the Republicans.’”

Incredible? Absurd? Actually, this fictitious article is very, very similar to the actual article that the New York Times ran on John McCain. The key phrases in my made-up account are directly lifted from the Times’ actual account. In that story, the newspaper alleged that McCain was having an affair with a 40-year-old lobbyist, naming her as Vicki Iseman. The Times also suggested that McCain gave special treatment to Iseman’s clients.

What evidence that the newspaper produce for these explosive allegations? None, and this is after months of investigation by a whole team of reporters. It cited unnamed McCain staffers who said they had become concerned about appearances of impropriety. (None alleged any actual impropriety.) It cited two former McCain staffers who were by their own admission disenchanted with McCain, although even they refused to give their names.

Stung by criticism that followed this irresponsible piece, Keller told the public editor of The Times, “If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members. But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.”

I can testify from personal experience that this sort of weasel-behavior is entirely in keeping with the way the New York Times does business. Note that in the episode that follows I am giving actual names and not citing any anonymous sources.

Several years ago one of the paper’s leading reporters Fox Butterfield did an article on The Dartmouth Review, which I edited as an undergraduate in the early 1980s. Seeking to discredit me, Butterfield quoted me as having written in the paper, “The question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth. The question is whether women should be educated at all.”

A witty line, perhaps, only I didn’t write it. The line was actually written by another student, Keeney Jones. When I called Butterfield to point this out, the man insisted, “No, you wrote it.” So I demanded, “Where did I write it?” Butterfield pointed out that I had written an article about the Dartmouth Review in another magazine where I had quoted the line. I protested, “But I was merely citing controversial lines that had appeared in the student paper. How can you say I wrote that line when I made it very clear that Jones wrote it?”

To this Butterfield responded, “But by quoting it you have made it your line.” I was dumbstruck. The best I could say to him was, “And I guess that since you have now quoted the line yourself, it has now become your line.” The important point here is that we are dealing not with some dimwit but with a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter for America’s leading newspaper. Yet apparently such dishonesty is the way they operate at the Times.

Some critics have been calling for Keller to be fired but I suspect that a much wider fumigation is required to clean house over there. The Times has long become a liberal rag and as incidents like these pile up, more and more people will recognize that the New York Times is no longer the great newspaper it once was.

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Liberalism, the Times, and the Sliming of John McCain (townhall.com, 080228)

By Ross Mackenzie

Well, that didn’t take long.

The New York Times accomplished almost overnight a consolidation of his Republican base that John McCain was encountering considerable difficulty doing. Some social conservatives were distinctly chilly toward him, with but a few reluctantly warming. Along came The Times with its slime job, and just about all the conservatives hotted up.

That’s what the ideologically chi-chi Times does - or can do. It roils conservative/moderate blood.

Hollywood writer David Kahane wonders in dismay what The Times was thinking, running that half-sourced farrago of a Barbra Streisand hit-job on John McCain that snarked and sneered and amounted to . . . what? That eight years ago a sitting senator spent some time with a lobbyist who bore an uncanny resemblance to his wife . . . and you just know, deep down, that there was some canoodling going on, don’t you? Come on, admit it. Even though we can’t really prove it.’

As it ditched Hillary Clinton for the nebulous, platitudinous- and scary - Barack Obama, The Times chose to move McCain from his status as the left’s favorite conservative to its most detested (and feared) Republican. None of what it said about his behavior rang true, and apparently none of it was.

With North Vietnam’s finest shacklers and ropesmen having failed to break McCain over five years, this pea-shooter effort by the Times’ best bounced off him like sleet. He denied it all calmly yet firmly, sent out his fundraisers, raked in buckets, and welcomed wavering conservatives home.

The Times should have foreseen the outcome of its McCain hit-job. But of course, blinkered as it is by ideology, it could not; just as neither it nor the mainline press for which it sets the agenda has been able to see perhaps a fundamental reason for the collapsing confidence with which it desperately is trying to deal.

The mainline press has produced a lot of reasons to explain its tanking circulation over three decades, with circulation decline translating into slumping advertising lineage, diminishing revenues, layoffs, buyouts and plummeting stock prices.

Among the offered reasons: the Internet, flight to the suburbs, transience, meism, changes in the use of leisure time, soaring percentages of women in the workforce, a shift from blue-collar to white-collar jobs (with a corresponding shift from afternoon to morning newspapers), the decline of reading in an increasingly video world.

Yet rarely cited in such litanies by newspaper people is the devout liberalism long infusing the press. It’s the liberalism that the (now) late William Buckley first saw so clearly and, with such devastating eloquence, warred against.

It’s the liberalism documented in the 90% of the Washington press corps telling pollsters they supported kook-left George McGovern for president in 1972.

It’s the liberalism evident in the April 1980 preference poll of 500 of the nation’s top editors, wherein just 2% said they wanted Ronald Reagan to be their next president, when Reagan was rolling undefeated through the Republican primaries.

It’s the liberalism so smack-you-in-the-face obvious in the Pulitzer Prizes the press showers upon its ideologically favored own.

The Times’ executive editor, Bill Keller, like those in the mainline press for whom he and his newspaper set the ideological agenda, denies any agenda exists. As he told Britain’s Guardian in November:

“We are agnostic as to where a story may lead; we do not go into a story with an agenda or a pre-conceived notion. We do not manipulate or hide facts to advance an agenda. We strive to preserve our independence from political and economic interests, including our own advertisers. We do not work in the service of a party, or an industry, or even a country. When there are competing views of a situation, we aim to reflect them as clearly and fairly as we can.”

Yet he and the mainline press do indeed work in the service of the liberalism that has driven many away from the mainline media. And such liberalism may explain why the McCain story got page-1, above-the-fold play but only a tiny headline (‘McCain Disputes Article’) showing above the page-1 fold directing readers to the page-20 next-day story on McCain’s response.

We are in for one of the great conservative-liberal presidential battles. The very leftist Times has fired an early salvo, a backfire, really, to the conservative side’s benefit.

Conservatives and Republicans know The Times and the mainline press will continue toiling on the Democratic side, whether for Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton. The joint effort will be made to draw John McCain as leading the nation to Bush 3: Eli Pariser, executive director of Obama-supporting MoveOn.org, terms McCain “more Bush than Bush.” Sen. Clinton, recalling the 2004 devastating reaction to Dan Rather’s Times-like effort to sink George Bush, says, “I won’t let anyone swiftboat this country’s future.”

POWs who, with John McCain, prevailed against the worst the North Vietnamese ropesters could dish out, were integral to the post-Rather “swiftboat” enterprise that raised questions about the character of John Kerry and so helped sink him instead. As its liberalism may have helped drive down newspaper circulation, so the liberalism of The Times—with its sliming of John McCain—may have galvanized conservatives and Republicans to prevail against the Democrats in the fall.

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Mainstream Media Oblivious to Relevancy of Many Obama-gates (townhall.com, 080418)

By David Limbaugh

The dirty little secret about Barack Obama’s indictment of flyover country is that he said what liberals, including Hillary Clinton, believe. Sufficient proof of this can be found in the liberal outrage at Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, where Obama was pressed both by the moderators and Clinton to explain Bitter-gate, Wright-gate, Ayers-gate and Flag pin-gate.

Consider the uncannily similar reactions of columnists Tom Shales and Stephen Silver.

Shales expressed indignation that ABC News moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos would dare ask Obama to justify his insulting remarks about small-town Americans and his relationships with certain anti-American people.

Shale’s fumed, “For the first 52 minutes … Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.”

Shales was particularly perturbed that Stephanopoulos “came up with such tired tripe as a charge that Obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist.”

He was equally peeved at Gibson for bringing up, “yet again, the controversial ravings of the pastor at a church attended by Obama.”

Columnist Silver is annoyed that Gibson and Stephanopoulos “asked shamefully superficial and gotcha-oriented questions” and for the first half of the debate dwelt only on “rehashes of the nonsense non-stories of the past month — it was all-Wright, all-’bitter,’ all-Bosnia sniper fire, all flag pin all the time.” These were all, wrote Silver, “questions about nothing.”

Silver characterized the recent stories about Obama’s association with unrepentant terrorist William Ayers as “the sort of stuff that only right-wing bloggers and e-mail forwarders care about.”

Excuse the quotes, but nothing captures the sneering condescension of media liberals better than their own words.

What do the assessments of these two fairly typical liberal columnists have in common? Well, quite simply their agreement that reports about Obama’s pastor, his terrorist friend and his obvious contempt for small-town Americans are superficial distractions that are irrelevant to Obama’s suitability for the highest office in the land.

The mainstream media’s trivialization of this string of damning stories on Obama brings into sharp relief the ever-widening worldview chasm that separates liberals from conservatives. For them to let Obama get away with brushing off his elitist, contemptuous remarks about small-town Americans as a mistake or as a mere “mangling of words” proves they not only don’t understand the gravity of the insult but also probably agree with it.

It is impossible to spin Obama’s statement as misspeak. As witnessed by his “typical white person” remark, Obama liberally engages in the type of stereotypical thinking he so readily condemns in others. If a conservative had offered such stereotyping, it would be off with his small-town head.

The Obama stories are anything but superficial and couldn’t be more relevant. Obama has revealed more about himself by advertising his obvious misapprehension of what makes small-town Americans tick and his voluntary associations with a racist, anti-American, obscenity-spewing pastor and an unrepentant terrorist than we could ever learn through rote repetition of his policy preferences.

It’s astonishing that a man who is nearly deified by his admirers and personality-cultist groupies as a “post-racial” unifier displays such disrespect for his fellow Americans. How could so-called small-town Americans warm to the candidacy of a man who presumes they attend church, own guns and oppose illegal immigration because of bitterness and bigotry? What indescribable arrogance and elitism.

When someone is so fundamentally wrong about such fundamental things, he clearly does not have the requisite judgment to be president of the United States. For the mainstream media to be wholly oblivious to the hyper-relevance of these stories demonstrates they are on the left side of that chasm that separates Americans according to their worldviews. They are so eaten up with their own self-assurance, superiority and elitism that they are blinded to their own bias.

If Hillary weren’t so widely disliked, the Obama stories might be devastating to his candidacy. But the media don’t get this either, thinking that Obama’s failure to plummet in the polls is because Americans don’t care about these stories. There’s nothing there; let’s move on.

If they’re right — that Americans don’t care that this presidential candidate looks down on them based on categorical assumptions by which he has sized them up, thinks he knows better than they do about what motivates them, what’s in their best interests and that government largesse is their only salvation — we’re in worse shape than I thought.

If I’m right, these are big stories that won’t — and by all means shouldn’t — be ignored.

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PBS, Bill Moyers and the Rev. Wright (townhall.com, 080429)

By Dennis Prager

When Air America, the left-wing talk radio network, began, I predicted that it would not succeed. One of the main reasons I gave was that liberals already had their views expressed in the mainstream news media — the major networks, PBS and NPR (National Public Radio), and just about every major city newspaper. Therefore, the need liberals have for liberal talk radio is nowhere near the need conservatives have for conservative talk radio.

To its credit, The New York Times — through its public editor — has acknowledged that the Times is liberal; and anyone intellectually honest understands this is true regarding virtually all of the news media. But for those still needing proof, Bill Moyers supplied it on PBS this past weekend during his interview of one of the most radically polarizing figures in America today, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s mentor and pastor for 20 years.

The Rev. Wright’s decision to allow himself to be interviewed by Bill Moyers was, from his perspective, an excellent one. It is difficult to imagine a less challenging, more fawning, interview.

How bad was it?

Given that one of the most egregious of the Rev. Wright’s statements was his charge that the American government developed the AIDS virus and inflicted it on black Americans, one assumed that the first major reporter to interview Wright since the comments were made public would ask him about it. Not Bill Moyers. Beyond mentioning in the opening introduction, “Wright repeating the canard heard often in black communities that the U.S. government spread HIV in those communities,” the subject was never raised.

But Moyers did ask Wright tough questions like these:

“When did you hear the call to ministry? How did it come?”

“What does the church service on Sunday morning mean in general to the black community?”

Instead of challenging Wright’s un-Christian, anti-American and immoral “God damn America, God damn America” statement, Moyers asked three questions about it:

Here they are (I could not make up such puffball questions):

1. “One of the most controversial sermons that you preach is the sermon you preach that ended up being that sound bite about God damn America.”

Wright’s response was to deliver a 300-word indictment of America for its violence against the world.

And how then does Moyers respond? With another killer question:

2. “What did you mean when you said that?”

So Wright then delivered another, 174-word, indictment of America for its evils.

But instead of challenging Wright or defending America, Moyers’ third question was:

3. “Well, you can be almost crucified for saying what you’ve said here in this country.”

Moyers changes Wright’s “God damn America” to “Poor Rev. Wright.”

And why not? It is soon clear that Moyers essentially agrees with Wright about America:

“What is your notion of why so many Americans seem not to want to hear the full Monty — they don’t want to seem to acknowledge that a nation capable of greatness is also capable of cruelty?”

For the many Americans who suspect that most Americans on the left silently agree with nearly all of Wright’s views of America, Moyers provided proof.

Nevertheless, Moyers’ total failure to confront the America-hating, race-preoccupied mentor of a man who may be the next president of the United States does not mean the interview was worthless. Any time Wright speaks publicly, even with the most sympathetic of questioners, we learn more about the two motivators of his thinking: race and contempt for America.

Here is Wright in his sermon the Sunday after 9-11 as replayed during the Moyers interview:

“Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hardworking fathers. We bombed Gadafi’s home and killed his child. ‘Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against a rock!’ We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hardworking people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians — not soldiers — people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America’s chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism.”

To which Moyers offered another lacerating response:

“You preached that sermon on the Sunday after 9-11, almost seven years ago. When people saw the sound bites from it this year, they were upset because you seemed to be blaming America. Did you somehow fail to communicate?”

Finally, as regards the Rev. Wright’s Africa-centric form of Christianity, this was Wright’s explanation to his young church members as shown during the PBS interview:

“We wanted our stained-glass windows to tell the story of the centrality of Africans in the role of Christianity from its inception up until the present day. We play some interesting games educationally with the kids to help kids understand — ‘Can you name the seven continents?’ As a kid, you learn that in school. All right, on what continent did everything in the Bible from Genesis to Malachi take place?”

And, of course, the Reverend and his church’s answer is: Africa.

Now, as it happens, the Middle East is not Africa. It is Asia Minor, or Southwest Asia, if one must have an identifying continent. And Jesus was not black, nor were the apostles. It’s all racial pride. And not true. Africa in the Bible is overwhelmingly Egypt, which was not black and not a moral model.

In sum: PBS has done some wonderful programming. But when it comes to the news or anything controversial, it is as politically correct and liberal as the rest of the news media. As for Bill Moyers, had Mrs. Wright interviewed the Rev. Wright, the questions and reactions could not have been less challenging or even supportive. And as regards the Rev. Wright, the more he talks, the more one worries about Barack Obama’s values.

==============================

Only His Hair Dresser Knows For Sure (townhall.com, 080806)

by Ann Coulter

The mainstream media’s reaction to the National Enquirer’s reports on John Edwards’ “love child” scandal has been reminiscent of the Soviet press. Edwards’ name has simply been completely whitewashed out of the news. Say, why isn’t anyone talking about John Edwards for vice president anymore? No, seriously — hey! Why are we going to a commercial break?

I suspect that if I tried to look up coverage of the Democratic primaries in Nexis news archives, Edwards’ name will have disappeared from the debates. By next week, Edwards won’t have been John Kerry’s running mate in 2004.

Do you know what this means? At this precise moment in time, I could call Edwards a name that would send me to rehab, and the media wouldn’t be able to report it!

A Washington Post reporter defended the total blackout on the National Enquirer’s John Edwards’ love child story, telling the Times of London: “Edwards is no longer an elected official and he is not running for office now. Don’t expect wall-to-wall coverage.” This was the perfect guy to talk to because if there’s one thing they’re careful about in London, it’s tabloid excess.

Isn’t there some level of coverage between “wall-to-wall” and “double-secret probation, delta-force level total news blackout” when it comes to a sex scandal involving a current Democratic vice presidential and Cabinet prospect?

Hey, what sort of “elected official” was Ted Haggard again? He was the Christian minister no one outside of his own parish had ever heard of until he was caught in a gay sex scandal last year. Then he suddenly became the Pope of the Protestants. And yet, despite the fact that Haggard was not an “elected official,” the Post gave that story wall-to-wall coverage. And what sort of “elected officials” were Mel Gibson, Rush Limbaugh and Bill Bennett?

The MSM justify banner coverage of the smallest malfeasance by any Christian or conservative, with or without independent verification, with the lame excuse of “hypocrisy.” Hey, why didn’t you say so! If all it takes to get the Edwards story into the establishment press is a little hypocrisy, boy, have I got a story for you!

Based on information currently saturating the Internet: (1) The entire schmaltzy Edwards campaign consisted of this self-professed moralist telling us how much he loved the poor and loved his cancer-stricken wife; (2) the following was Edwards’ response to CBS News anchor Katie Couric’s question about whether voters should care if a presidential candidate is faithful to his spouse:

“Of course. I mean, for a lot of Americans — including the family that I grew up with, I mean, it’s fundamental to how you judge people and human character — whether you keep your word, whether you keep what is your ultimate word, which is that you love your spouse, and you’ll stay with them. ... I think the most important qualities in a president in today’s world are trustworthiness — sincerity, honesty, strength of leadership. And — and certainly that goes to a part of that.”

There you have it, boys: Go to town, MSM!

Moreover, the National Enquirer reports that Edwards is paying Rielle Hunter — the former “Lisa Druck” — $15,000 a month in “hush money.” Shouldn’t the IRS be investigating whether Edwards is deducting those payments as a “business expense”?

Maybe The Washington Post didn’t hear about the Enquirer catching Edwards in a hotel with his mistress and love child since it happened way out in the sleepy little burg of Los Angeles near the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards — you know, the middle of nowhere. But surely the public can count on the Los Angeles Times to report on a tabloid scandal occurring under its very nose.

Kausfiles produced this e-mail from an L.A. Times editor to its bloggers soon after the Enquirer’s stakeout of Edwards visiting the alleged mistress and love child at the Beverly Hilton:

From: “Pierce, Tony”

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Keep rockin,

Tony

Hey, I have a story idea I think the L.A. Times might like: How about something on the glorious workers’ revolution that will restore the means of production to the people and create a workers’ paradise right here on Earth, free of the shackles of capitalism?

I assume it would be jejune to point out that the MSM would be taking the wall-to-wall approach, rather than the total blackout approach, to the love child story if it were a story about Mitt Romney’s love child or, indeed, Larry Craig’s love child. They’d bring Ted Koppel out of retirement to cover that. Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson would be anchoring the evening news from Romney’s front yard. They might even get Dan Rather to produce some forged documents for the occasion.

But with a Democrat sex scandal, the L.A. Times is in a nail-biting competition with The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC, NBC and CBS for the Pulitzer for “Best Suppressed Story.”

==============================

Major Media Decide - Vote Obama (townhall.com, 080828)

by Larry Elder

Lawyers call this a “declaration against interest.”

Washington Post ombudsperson Deborah Howell wrote a column in her own newspaper comparing the paper’s front-page coverage of Democratic nominee Barack Obama with that of Republican nominee John McCain.

Her findings? Examining stories from June 4, when Obama became the presumptive nominee, until Aug. 15, the Post ran 142 political stories about Obama, compared with 96 about McCain. As to front-page stories, Obama was 35 to McCain’s 13.

What about photographs? The Post ran, during this time, 143 pics of Obama versus 100 of McCain.

The paper’s assistant managing editor for politics explained the discrepancy this way: “We make our own decisions about what we consider newsworthy. We are not garment workers measuring our product every day to fulfill somebody’s quota.” In other words, Obama makes good copy, and this is, after all, a business. Fair enough. (But what’s he got against garment workers?)

But why, then — when the Post’s Howell pointed out the discrepancy in photographs — did the disparity disappear over the next two weeks? Howell writes that since she first pointed out the lopsided nature of the photo coverage: “Editors have run almost the same number of photos — 21 of Obama and 22 of McCain — since they realized the disparity. McCain is almost even with Obama in Page 1 photos — 10 to 9.”

Wait a sec. If the Post assumed that photographs of Obama drive sales, then what happened? The likely explanation is that the Post considers itself a “news” organization, and was embarrassed when one of its own columnists revealed its blatant partisanship.

As for Obama’s popularity — the basis for printing more stories about Obama — take a look at the recent polls. A Reuters/Zogby poll, for example, gives McCain a 5-point lead among likely voters, with most of the major pollsters considering the race a dead heat. Does this not make McCain and Obama at least equally good copy?

But many of these same people who defend the Post’s right to make a profit also demand the reimposition of the so-called Fairness Doctrine — to force radio station programmers to “balance” popular conservative hosts with liberal ones. But “fairness” proponents show no concern when avowed Bush-haters, such as NBC/MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, put on their “journalist” hats and “cover” primaries, debates and political conventions.

How bad is it?

Take the recent studies by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpartisan, non-ideological and nonpolitical research organization. PEJ finds that from June 9 through Aug. 17, Obama received significantly more coverage than McCain — even during Obama’s Hawaii vacation. During the not-particularly-memorable week of June 23 to June 29, Obama received more than twice the coverage of McCain — 82% to 40%.

And it’s not just Obama. Last year, Harvard and PEJ studied presidential campaign stories from January through May in print, TV, radio and Internet outlets. Surprise, surprise, it turns out Democrats got more stories (49%) than Republicans (31%). Also, the tone of the coverage was more positive for Democrats (35%) than for Republicans (26%).

“Not only did the Republicans receive less coverage overall,” the Harvard study authors say, “the attention they did get tended to be more negative than that of Democrats. And in some specific media genres, the difference is particularly striking.” For example, 59% of front-page stories about Democrats in 11 newspapers had a “clear, positive message vs. 11% that carried a negative tone.”

Obama’s coverage was 70% positive and 9% negative. Hillary Clinton’s was 61% positive and 13% negative. Yet only 26% of the stories on Republican candidates were positive, and 40% were negative.

On TV, evening network newscasts gave Democrats 49% of their campaign coverage and Republicans 28%. As for tone, 39.5% of the Democratic coverage was positive and 17.1% negative, while 18.6% of the Republican coverage was positive versus 37.2% negative.

This brings us to one of McCain’s follies: McCain-Feingold. The act prohibits so-called soft money donations to national party committees, places restrictions on political ads that specifically name federal candidates 60 days prior to general elections, and prohibits any ads paid for by corporations or nonprofit “issue organizations,” such as Right to Life.

Opponents of McCain-Feingold know something that apparently John McCain did not. The Democratic message — hostility toward “the rich,” the supposed “right” to health care, the general disdain toward the Bush administration — gets an airing in our mainstream media … for free.

There’s a line between journalism and advocacy. “Journalists” crossed it a long time ago.

==============================

Stunning proof of mainstream bias: Magazine smears Sarah Palin, unabashedly praises Obama (WorldNetDaily 080903)

Is Us Weekly showing its bias?

This week’s issue of the celebrity magazine features a photo of John McCain’s vice presidential running mate holding baby Trig with the screaming headline: “John McCain’s Vice President Sarah Palin: Babies, Lies & Scandal.” [As Foxnews found out directly from the publisher, “Lies” here do not refer to lies by Palin but to lies by others against her. But any casual reader will certainly be fooled by the headline.]

The magazine, founded by New York Times Company and owned by Obama campaign contributor Jann Wenner, rips Palin with cover teasers that publicize her teen daughter’s pregnancy, an alleged firing of Palin’s sister’s ex-husband and promises “new embarrassing surprises.” The website URL for the Palin story reads, “sarah-palin-very-difficult-to-work-with.”

The September feature states:

Mom-of-five Palin is antiabortion (even in cases of rape) and opposed to sex-education classes (she believes in abstinence instruction for teens).

In the wake of the announcement about Bristol, questions have begun to arise about the governor’s candor and McCain’s judgment (The New York Times reported that McCain’s camp vetted Palin only the day before her selection was announced.)

“It’s conceivable a 17-year-old girl just screwed the GOP,” Democratic strategist George Lakoff tells Us Weekly.

A June issue of the same celebrity magazine featured Barack and Michelle Obama embracing on the cover with the headline, “Michelle Obama: Why Barack Loves Her.” The teaser reads, “She shops at Target, loved ‘Sex in the City’ and never misses the girls’ recitals. The untold romance between a down-to-earth mom and the man who calls her ‘my rock.’” The website URL states, “exclusive-barack-obama-michelle-is-an-extraordinary-mother.”

The Obama issue focused on Michelle Obama’s “strong sense of family” and genuine personality.

According to a Daily Standard report, Wenner has contributed $5,300 to the Obama campaign since 2007. In a March Rolling Stone article, he praised the senator: “[A]long comes Barack Obama, with the kinds of gifts that appear in politics but once every few generations. There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline. It’s not just that he is eloquent – with that ability to speak both to you and to speak for you – it’s that he has a quality of thinking and intellectual and emotional honesty that is extraordinary.”

Bloggers have unleashed a firestorm of criticism against Us Weekly for its Palin cover. The following are a few comments on the magazine’s website:

* Wow, what a disgusting cover. You won’t find this trashy magazine in my house ever again

* This Magazine is garbage. … [W]hy don’t you talk to the 80% of Alaska who approves of Sarah. But keep up the good work of making up lies and the undecided voter that I was will support Mccain/Palin to the end. Thanks for making up my mind.

* Why not a story on Bho’s black father leaving him when he was a baby or how Bho supports killing innocent babies! Scumbags!

* It is extremely easy, when comparing the “Obama” cover and the “Palin” cover, to see that your magazine is in the tank for Obama, just as the rest of the media is in it for Obama. You are going after Palin’s family with impunity while turning a blind eye to Obama’s sketchy past and associations. I find it completely dis-hearting and disgusting.

==============================

MSNBC Takes Incendiary Hosts From Anchor Seat (New York Times, 080908)

[KH: Even NY Times reports the liberal bias; it must be bad.]

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.

Executives at the channel’s parent company, NBC Universal, had high hopes for MSNBC’s coverage of the political conventions. Instead, the coverage frequently descended into on-air squabbles between the anchors, embarrassing some workers at NBC’s news division, and quite possibly alienating viewers. Although MSNBC nearly doubled its total audience compared with the 2004 conventions, its competitive position did not improve, as it remained in last place among the broadcast and cable news networks. In prime time, the channel averaged 2.2 million viewers during the Democratic convention and 1.7 million viewers during the Republican convention.

The success of the Fox News Channel in the past decade along with the growth of political blogs have convinced many media companies that provocative commentary attracts viewers and lures Web browsers more than straight news delivered dispassionately.

“In a rapidly changing media environment, this is the great philosophical debate,” Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, said in a telephone interview Saturday. Fighting the ratings game, he added, “the bottom line is that we’re experiencing incredible success.”

But as the past two weeks have shown, that success has a downside. When the vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin lamented media bias during her speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.”

In interviews, 10 current and former staff members said that long-simmering tensions between MSNBC and NBC reached a boiling point during the conventions. “MSNBC is behaving like a heroin addict,” one senior staff member observed. “They’re living from fix to fix and swearing they’ll go into rehab the next week.”

The employee, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because the network does not permit it people to speak to the media without authorization. (The New York Times and NBC News have a content-sharing arrangement exclusively for political coverage.)

Mr. Olbermann, a 49-year-old former sportscaster, has become the face of the more aggressive MSNBC, and the lightning rod for much of the criticism. His program “Countdown,” now a liberal institution, was created by Mr. Olbermann in 2003 but it found its voice in his gnawing dissent regarding the Bush administration, often in the form of “special comment” segments.

As Mr. Olbermann raised his voice, his ratings rose as well, and he now reaches more than one million viewers a night, a higher television rating than any other show in the troubled 12-year history of the network. As a result, his identity largely defines MSNBC. “They have banked the entirety of the network on Keith Olbermann,” one employee said.

In January, Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews, the host of “Hardball,” began co-anchoring primary night coverage, drawing an audience that enjoyed the pair’s “SportsCenter”-style show. While some critics argued that the assignment was akin to having the Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly anchor on election night — something that has never happened — MSNBC insisted that Mr. Olbermann knew the difference between news and commentary.

But in the past two weeks, that line has been blurred. On the final night of the Republican convention, after MSNBC televised the party’s video “tribute to the victims of 9/11,” including graphic footage of the World Trade Center attacks, Mr. Olbermann abruptly took off his journalistic hat.

“I’m sorry, it’s necessary to say this,” he began. After saying that the video had exploited the memories of the dead, he directly apologized to viewers who were offended. Then, sounding like a network executive, he said it was “probably not appropriate to be shown.”

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Olbermann said that moment — and the perception that he is “not utterly neutral” — restarted months-old conversations about his role on political nights.

“I found it ironic and instructive that I could have easily said exactly what I did say, exactly when I did say it, if I had been wearing a different hat, and nobody would have taken any issue,” he said.

“Countdown” will still be shown before the three fall debates and a second edition will be shown sometime afterwards, following the program anchored by Mr. Gregory.

The change casts new doubt on what some staff members believe is an effective programming strategy: prime-time talk of a liberal sort. A like-minded talk show will now follow “Countdown” at 9 p.m.: “The Rachel Maddow Show,” hosted by the liberal radio host, begins Monday.

Mr. Griffin, MSNBC’s president, denies that it has an ideology. “I think ideology means we think one way, and we don’t,” he said. Rather than label MSNBC’s prime time as left-leaning, he says it has passion and point of view.

But MSNBC is the cable arm of NBC News, the dispassionate news division of NBC Universal. MSNBC, “Today” and “NBC Nightly News” share some staff members, workspace and content. And some critics are claiming they also share a political affiliation.

The McCain campaign has filed letters of complaint to the news division about its coverage and openly tied MSNBC to it. Tension between the network and the campaign hit an apex the day Mr. McCain announced Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. MSNBC had reported Friday morning that Ms. Palin’s plane was enroute to the announcement and she was likely the pick. But McCain campaign officials warned the network off, with one official going so far as to say that all of the candidates on the short list were on their way — which MSNBC then reported.

“The fact that it was reported in real time was very embarrassing,” said a senior MSNBC official. “We were told, ‘No, it’s not Sarah Palin and you don’t know who it is.’ “

Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams, the past and present anchors of “NBC Nightly News,” have told friends and colleagues that they are finding it tougher and tougher to defend the cable arm of the news division, even while they anchored daytime hours of convention coverage on MSNBC and contributed commentary each evening.

Mr. Williams did not respond to a request for comment and Mr. Brokaw declined to comment. At a panel discussion in Denver, Mr. Brokaw acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews had “gone too far” at times, but emphasized they were “not the only voices” on MSNBC, according to The Washington Post.

Al Hunt, the executive Washington bureau chief of Bloomberg News, said that the entire news division was being singled out by Republicans because of the work of partisans like Mr. Olbermann. “To go and tar the whole news network and Brokaw and Mitchell is grossly unfair,” he said, referring to the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

Some tensions have spilled out on-screen. On the first night in Denver, as the fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough talked about the resurgence of the McCain campaign, Mr. Olbermann dismissed it by saying: “Jesus, Joe, why don’t you get a shovel?”

The following night, Mr. Olbermann and his co-anchor for convention coverage, Mr. Matthews, had their own squabble after Mr. Olbermann observed that Mr. Matthews had talked too long.

Some staff members said the tension led to the network’s decision to keep Mr. Olbermann in New York for the Republican convention, after he ran the desk in Denver during the Democratic convention. MSNBC said that he stayed in New York to anchor coverage of Hurricane Gustav. But some workers say there were other reasons — namely, that Mr. Olbermann was concerned about his safety in St. Paul, given the loud crowds at MSNBC’s set in Denver.

NBC Universal executives are also known to be concerned about the perception that MSNBC’s partisan tilt in prime time is bleeding into the rest of the programming day. On a recent Friday afternoon, a graphic labeled “Breaking News” asked: “How many houses does Palin add to the Republican ticket?” Mr. Griffin called the graphic “an embarrassment.”

According to three staff members, Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, president of NBC News, considered flying to the Republican convention in Minnesota last week to address the lingering tensions.

Up to now, the company’s public support for MSNBC’s strategy has been enthusiastic. At an anniversary party for Mr. Olbermann in April, Mr. Zucker called “Countdown” “one of the signature brands of the entire company.”

Just last year, Mr. Olbermann signed a four-year, $4-million-a-year contract with MSNBC. NBC is close to supplementing that contract with Mr. Olbermann, extending his deal through 2013 — and ensuring that he will be on MSNBC through the next election.

==============================

MSNBC ‘smears’ Palin from very 1st moment: O’Reilly: ‘One of the most outrageous things I’ve ever seen in my 35 years in journalism’ (WorldNetDaily, 080831)

From the very first moment that John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin for his Republican running mate was announced, the MSNBC news network was engaged in a deliberate attempt to smear the Alaska governor, according to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.

During Friday night’s edition of “The O’Reilly Factor,” the Fox anchor displayed MSNBC’s “breaking news” graphic, which ran the message, “How many houses does Palin add to the Republican ticket?”

The comment was a reference to John McCain’s recent difficulty answering how many houses he owned.

“This is under a breaking news headline,” said O’Reilly. “It’s not commentary. It’s not their left-wing loons at night. It’s not that. It’s NBC News’ version of hard news coverage of the presidential campaign. ... I am just almost sick that this is going on.”

O’Reilly called the message “snide” and “corrupt,” and said it was “one of the most outrageous things that I’ve ever seen in my 35 years in journalism.”

O’Reilly was interviewing radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham, who spent “a lot of years” working at MSNBC.

“Let me say that it’s sad and it’s disappointing, but right now, is it really surprising?” Ingraham said. “What’s clear is that this is a left-wing network with a left-wing agenda. It’s completely dishonest.”

“I think women across the country should be insulted and look at what’s going on at MSNBC very carefully because we’re gonna see a lot more of this in the coming weeks and months, and that is a sad commentary,” she added.

Ingraham said she felt sorry for NBC broadcast anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw due to the MSNBC’s pro-Barack Obama bias, but O’Reilly said both were part of the problem.

“I think if Williams and Brokaw had any courage at all, which they don’t,” O’Reilly said, “they’d go into [General Electric CEO Jeff] Immelt and they would say, ‘You gotta stop this. You gotta stop it. You’re ruining our reputation.’ But those people, Brokaw and Williams, they’re in it for the money, Laura. They don’t care about the country. They don’t care about the corruption. They care about themselves.”

O’Reilly isn’t the only media person ripping MSNBC.

HBO’s Bill Maher, himself well-known for his left-leaning stances, commented on MSNBC’s coverage following Obama’s Thursday night speech after he accepted the Democratic nomination.

“The coverage after, that I was watching, from MSNBC, I mean these guys were ready to have sex with him,” Maher said.

As WND previously reported, a comprehensive analysis of every evening news report by the NBC, ABC and CBS television networks on Barack Obama since he came to national prominence concludes coverage of the Illinois senator has “bordered on giddy celebration of a political ‘rock star’ rather than objective newsgathering.”

==============================

MSNBC’s Doomed ‘Experiment’ (townhall.com, 080911)

by Brent Bozell III

The executive suite at MSNBC is the last hardened corner of America to concede that maybe Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews are nowhere close to the textbook definition of detached, “straight news” anchor. Their decision to abandon what was tenderly called their anchoring “experiment” only acknowledges that the idea was a bust: MSNBC was regularly coming in dead last among the commercial cable-news and broadcast-news network covering the conventions.

NBC News is coming to the realization that Olbermann and Matthews aren’t only suppressing MSNBC’s ratings on election and convention nights, they’re ruining whatever credibility NBC’s brand retained. When the boos really kicked in during Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech in St. Paul, the delegates started chanting “NBC! NBC!” as the foremost example of partisan excess from an “objective” source. It’s gotten so bad that old NBC warhorse Tom Brokaw is decrying how these men have “gone too far.” This is shocking stuff coming from an anchorman who gave a Reagan-trashing interview to Mother Jones magazine in his Eighties heyday.

It’s important to note that in the day-to-day flow of anti-Republican acid at MSNBC, this announcement means very little. It’s not like their shows were canceled, like poor Tucker Carlson. Matthews and Olbermann still retain their regular hours of fulmination. In fact, the network brass made it very clear in their statement that abandoning the anchorman experiment would enable the two liberal agitators “to offer more candid analysis during live coverage.” Translation: We don’t think these blabby, childish embarrassments to journalism are animated enough.

The convention coverage wasn’t embarrassing enough, apparently.

Start with Olbermann coming typically unglued because the Republicans dared to show a video in remembrance of Sept. 11. It was about three minutes long. It contained allegedly controversial themes like jihadists have wanted to kill Americans for decades. They still want to kill Americans. We say never again. No more attacks like Sept. 11. So what?

Sounding like he was trying to choke down tears, or maybe vomit, Olbermann declared the video was inappropriate, and that if his network showed this much 9/11 footage, “we would be rightly eviscerated at all quarters, perhaps by the Republican Party itself, for exploiting the memories of the dead and perhaps even for trying to evoke that pain again.” This is ludicrous, considering how much Matthews and Olbermann boosted the Kerry-endorsing “Jersey Girls” in 2004 and their crusade to charge President Bush with the crime of 9/11.

The day after the Republican convention ended, Olbermann named John McCain the “Worst Person in the World.” Olbermann lamented that when McCain suggested to Time magazine that Iraq is now a “peaceful and stable country,” he revealed “a man suffering from at least one actual delusion, to say nothing of an utter disrespect for the meaning of the loss of life. It is not funny. It is shameful.”

And MSNBC wants more “candid analysis.”

After Barack Obama concluded his Athenian oration from Invesco Field in Denver, Olbermann and Matthews weren’t glum. They were absolutely giddy. Olbermann was wowed: “For 42 minutes, not a sour note and spellbinding throughout in a way usually reserved for the creations of fiction. An extraordinary political statement.” Matthews found a way to top that, and thumb conservatives in the eye: “You know, I’ve been criticized for saying he inspires me, and to Hell with my critics! ... In the Bible, they talk about Jesus serving the good wine last. I think the Democrats did the same.”

The goo flowed like lava from a volcano over Barack’s historic acceptance address. Restraining his thrilled leg, Matthews also announced: “It is an iconic night in history: We’ll all remember this night as long as we live.” Olbermann oozed that Obama was both Mandela and Gorbachev: “it happens as suddenly in some respects as the Soviet Union crumbled or apartheid was beaten in South Africa.”

Outside of special events coverage, MSNBC’s executives haven’t really seen the light about how their Obamaholics Unanimous lineup is bad for ratings. Even as they yank Matthews and Olbermann away from the anchor desk, MSNBC’s adding hard-left Air America radio host Rachel Maddow to consolidate the “progressive” carpet-bombing after dark. They think they’re the Genius Channel. In a gooey Boston Globe puff piece on Maddow, MSNBC prime-time boss Bill Wolff declared his network is a brand for “high-powered intellects ... I’m not saying we’re NPR, but there is an appetite for really smart discussion of the news.”

And these people think John McCain is suffering from a delusion.

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TIME Gives Distorted View of McCain’s, Obama’s Character (townhall.com, 080917)

by Brian Fitzpatrick

In TIME magazine’s perspective, John McCain is a master manipulator and Barack Obama is a victim. Or at least that’s what the editors want you to think.

TIME’s two lead campaign stories on the Web site Monday morning are marvelously contrasting in their tones. The Arizona senator gets a punch in the snoot: “McCain’s Outraged and Outrageous Campaign.” The Illinois senator gets a sympathetic cuddle: “For Obama, Race Remains Elephant in the Room.”

The first story, by Michael Scherer, accuses the GOP presidential nominee of manipulating voters’ emotions, and media coverage, by using false indignation as a political tactic. McCain “baited the outrage hook” primarily by taking umbrage at the “alleged mistreatment that the press and the Obama campaign were heaping on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.”

A glance at TIME’s own Web site suggests strongly that the McCain campaign has legitimate grounds for complaint. On Sept. 2, TIME posted the shameful “Searching for Palin’s ‘Hot Photos’”; Sept. 9, “Skeletons in Palin’s Closet?”; Sept. 10, “Sarah Palin’s Myth of America”; Sept. 11, “How Did Palin Do? Two Views [both critical of Palin]; and Sept. 11, “Palin and Troopergate: A Primer.”

What “outrageous” act has McCain committed, in Scherer’s eyes? He “compared Obama to Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and even Moses, mocking Obama’s ‘celebrity’ in a way that was both controversial and certain to grab lots of free airtime.” Pretty thin gruel, but Scherer gets an assist from kneejerk TIME leftie Joe Klein. In his Sept. 10 blog, “Apology Not Accepted,” Klein huffs that McCain’s ad grilling Obama for supporting comprehensive sex ed for kindergartners is “one of the sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen in presidential politics, so sleazy that I won’t abet its spread by linking to it.”

TIME’s Karen Tumulty asks in a blog, “Why doesn’t Obama hit back harder?” She points to the second lead story, Michael Grunwald’s “For Obama, Race Remains Elephant in the Room.” Grunwald suggests that Obama is being victimized by America’s racism: “So Obama is probably wise to ignore the liberals who keep begging him to drop his air of unflappability and start taking Republican scalps. White America already embraces black celebrities, even ‘flashy’ ones. But it has never really warmed up to an angry one.”

What campaign are Tumulty and Grunwald watching? This “Saint” Obama they describe lacks even a fleeting resemblance to reality. The truth is, Obama is attacking much more aggressively than McCain ever has. Just look at a few of Monday’s headlines: “New Obama Ad Questions McCain’s Honor” (Breitbart); “Biden: McCain is Ex-reformer Turned Rove Disciple” (AP); “Obama: McCain Shows ‘Lack of Interest’ in Issues” (The Hill); and a tag team assault based on a single statement taken out of context, “McCain Says Economic ‘Fundamentals’ Strong, Obama Attacks (AFP) and “Biden Lashes Into McCain for ‘Fundamentals Are Strong’ Remark” (The Hill). Even the liberal Washington Post gave Obama “three Pinocchios” for “significant factual errors” Tuesday morning, for running an ad implying falsely that some of McCain’s advisors are currently working as D.C. lobbyists.

Scherer suggests Obama’s aggressiveness began in earnest only “last week,” with Obama’s attack on McCain for being so old he doesn’t know how to use a computer. But Scherer himself acknowledges that fully a month ago, Obama was attacking McCain for not knowing how many houses his wife owns. Obama jumped all over his first opportunity to play the class warfare card.

Also, The Wall Street Journal reports that two weeks ago, Obama “airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers” into Alaska, to “dig into Palin’s record and background.” This onslaught must have been planned well in advance, because the “first wave arrived in Anchorage less than 24 hours” after McCain chose Palin on August 29.

Barack Obama was clearly willing to and intent on taking the low road, ridiculing McCain and compiling a dossier on Palin even before the Alaska governor profoundly changed the presidential race. Yet TIME portrays him as if his hands are clean. If anyone has displayed great skill in manipulating the media, it’s Obama. If anybody has been victimized, it’s McCain and Palin.

Without doubt, TIME is providing a distorted view of the character of the two major party presidential tickets (for one possible explanation why, see CMI’s report on the liberal partisan overseeing TIME’s campaign coverage, “TIME’s Religious Democratic Crusader”). Unfortunately, TIME is not alone. A self-described Hollywood director and visual effects specialist, unwilling to give his name for fear of reprisals, has written a fascinating article alleging that ABC used “camera trickery” to make Palin look like “weak prey” in her interviews with Charlie Gibson. On the American Thinker Web site, Cecil Turner has exposed serious errors in AP’s reporting of Sarah Palin’s supposed attempts to censor library books. Atlantic Monthly is reportedly about to apologize for photos retouched to ridicule the GOP ticket.

CMI has no objection to tough investigative reporting and negative campaigning. Done properly, such criticism sheds a great deal of light on the character and values of the candidates, so we’d like to see more of it. Much of the campaign reporting this election season, however, is not being done properly. Many reporters are so biased they seem blind to what’s happening right before their eyes. Others appear willing to deliberately deceive their viewers. News consumers need to take what they’re reading, and even what they’re seeing, with a grain of salt.

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Stupid or Malicious? The Washington Post distorts Palin on page one. (Weekly Standard, 080912)

by William Kristol

Here are the headline and the first two paragraphs from an article posted online that apparently will be on the front page of Friday’s Washington Post:

“Palin Links Iraq to 9/11, A View Discarded by Bush”

By Anne E. Kornblut  Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, September 12, 2008; A01

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 — Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

The idea that Iraq shared responsibility with al-Qaeda for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. On any other day, Palin’s statement would almost certainly have drawn a sharp rebuke from Democrats, but both parties had declared a halt to partisan activities to mark Thursday’s anniversary.”

Kornblut’s interpretation of what Palin said is either stupid or malicious. Palin is evidently saying that American soldiers are going to Iraq to defend innocent Iraqis from al Qaeda in Iraq, a group that is related to al Qaeda, which did plan and carry out the Sept. 11 attacks. It makes no sense for Kornblut to claim that Palin is arguing here that Saddam Hussein’s regime carried out 9/11—obviously Palin isn’t saying that our soldiers are now going over to Iraq to fight Saddam’s regime. Palin isn’t linking Saddam to 9/11.

She’s linking al Qaeda in Iraq to al Qaeda.

People can debate how intimate that connection is, and how much of the fight in Iraq is now against al Qaeda in Iraq—but it’s simply the case that Palin is not saying what Kornblut says she is, and that the Washington Post is, right now, leading its paper with a clear distortion of what Palin said.

Update [Ed. Note by John McCormack]: It appears the Washington Post has tried to (partially) walk back Kornblut’s distortion that Palin tied responsibility for 9/11 to Saddam Hussein’s regime. The second paragraph of this story, as noted above, originally read:

It now reads:

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

The Post still ascribes an idea to Palin that she evidently wasn’t promoting. It’s nice that the Post threw in the sentence: “But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.”

But the Post still does not acknowledge that that linkage between al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq is precisely what Palin was referring to.

==============================

Those Who Forget the Past (American Spectator, 080917)

By Lisa Fabrizio

At a small party over the weekend, the subject of our presidential election arose. Living as I do in Connecticut, I was prepared for the typical onslaught a conservative is sure to endure from liberals in social situations in our state. I was, of course, not disappointed.

The insults, name-calling and foul language — staples of most liberal conversations—directed at my fiance’ and me were to be expected, as we were the only representatives of a party that our fellow guests said “makes them sick.” Once again we witnessed the phenomenon where otherwise perfectly nice people were transformed into fire-breathing attack dogs at the mere mention of the GOP.

And the name most frequently offered up for hatred and derision was: Karl Rove. Yes, that Karl Rove, who ostensibly stepped down from public affairs over a year ago. But that didn’t stop three angry women from blaming the dimming of their star on the wily Rove. Just as frat-boy George W. Bush wasn’t capable of winning the White House without the dastardly dealings of his Texas cabal, so they are convinced that Barack Obama cannot lose unless Republican dirty work is afoot. They told me they wished the Democrats would “fight back” once in a while against right-wing media bias. Some things never change.

The media in this country has, for some time, demonstrated its own agenda — witness Walter Cronkite’s false assertion that the Tet Offensive was a success and the Vietnam War was “unwinnable” — yet they kept it pretty much under wraps. But this all seemed to change during and after the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Although driven from office, Richard Nixon escaped the ignominy that befell the man from Hope; an unthinkable injustice in the eyes of the press. Someone had to pay.

Even before George W. Bush was “selected” by the Supreme Court, the liberal media despised this man and sought at all costs to ensure his defeat. No gaffe went unreported, no misspeak was ignored and no scurrilous rumor went uninvestigated. And nowhere was this more apparent than the coverage of the 2000 election.

In August of that year, Al Gore’s son was arrested for reckless driving in North Carolina, which resulted in the loss of his driving privileges there. Typical of the kind of scant coverage this received was this story on the younger Gore’s arrest last year on drug charges. After reporting the details, ABC goes on to devote six paragraphs to the Bush Twins’ troubles. Yet, at the time, the reckless driving arrest was barely reported and certainly not the subject of countless Sunday morning panels and sordid speculation. Democratic candidates’ families, at least, were off-limits.

LIKEWISE IN 2004, the endless calls for every scrap of paper from Bush’s Air National Guard days did not suffice to quench the media’s thirst for GOP blood; notwithstanding that John Kerry saw fit to release virtually no information from his time in Vietnam. This treatment no doubt led the American people to give credence to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, but liberals never learn. Today’s disgusting attacks on John McCain’s health, physical and otherwise — MoveOn.org is calling for more info on his bout with cancer — are pretty rich coming from worshipers of Bill Clinton, who has yet to release his medical records.

And can you imagine if a Republican called Obama an “African-American who is articulate, bright and clean”? He’d be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail like George Allen; but coming as they did from the mouth of a man who seems to have arrived in Washington with Pierre L’Enfant, he was rewarded with the number two spot on the “change” ticket.

In the bad old days before Fox News and the Internet, this kind of hypocrisy went mostly unnoticed by the American people whose attention span was short. Now, when liberal media outlets revel in Sarah Palin’s “Troopergate,” it will only remind us of Bill Clinton’s scandal of the same name, which ended with a contempt of court citation, suspension of his Arkansas law license, and a hefty $850,000 out of court settlement. And when they question Palin’s experience, it will only serve to remind us of the lack of same at the top of their ticket.

But, unmindful of the fact that their relentless attacks have only served to get George W. Bush elected twice, and still confident that they can keep this country’s citizens under their former fog of liberal indoctrination, the media don’t show any signs of slowing down. They will continue to parrot left-wing talking points, denigrate people of faith, and talk down to the majority of the American people. And they don’t need Karl Rove to do it.

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Democrats and Double Standards: Obama’s not-so-secret weapon: the media. (Weekly Standard, 080929)

by Stephen F. Hayes

When Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007, he promised to change the practice of American politics.

This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice—to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not.

Obama told the crowd on that chilly day that he was running “not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation.” He was particularly concerned with the way politicians run for office. He decried “the smallness of our politics” and “the chronic avoidance of tough decisions” and politicians who win by “scoring cheap political points.” All of this, he said, had led voters to look away in “disillusionment and frustration.”

“The time for that politics is over,” Obama said.

Or maybe not.

This past week at a campaign rally, Obama told his supporters to challenge Republicans and independents skeptical of his candidacy. “I want you to argue with them and get in their face,” he said.

This is the newer, tougher Obama. The avatar of a new American politics of hope is gone, replaced by a no-nonsense practitioner of the old politics. His campaign is now less the vehicle of your hopes and your dreams than a vehicle of your frustration and your anger.

You might think that this walking, talking contradiction would be the focus of intense media scrutiny—hypocrisy being a staple of modern political reportage—but you’d be wrong.

The media line on the new Obama is simple: It’s John McCain’s fault. Barack Obama would like to win the presidency the right way but McCain won’t let him.

According to the press, in recent weeks, the McCain campaign has so distorted Obama’s record and campaign proposals that the young senator has had no choice but to fight back with old-school tactics. “McCain’s tactics are drawing the scorn of many in the media and organizations tasked with fact-checking the truthfulness of campaigns,” wrote Politico’s Jonathan Martin. “In recent weeks, Team McCain has been described as dishonorable, disingenuous and downright cynical.”

And so while McCain’s every utterance is factchecked and factchecked again in an attempt to shame him from challenging Obama too aggressively, Obama gets a pass.

Consider two examples.

On August 16, Pastor Rick Warren asked John McCain how much money someone would have to make to be considered rich. McCain didn’t answer directly. “I think that rich should be defined by a home, a good job, an education and the ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one that we inherited,” he said.

Then he made a joke: “So, I think if you are just talking about income, how about $5 million?”

The audience laughed, immediately understanding that McCain was being facetious. Just in case there were any doubts McCain started his next comment by saying “seriously,” to underscore the joke. Then he made a prediction.

“I’m sure that comment will be distorted,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders.

And it has been. “It should come as no surprise that John McCain believes the cutoff for the rich begins at $5 million,” Barack Obama’s campaign said in a statement. “It may explain why his tax plan gives a $600,000 tax cut to the richest 0.1% of earners.” At a campaign appearance two days after McCain made the comments, Obama himself mocked McCain. “I guess if you’re making $3 million a year, you’re middle class,” Obama said.

Some news accounts noted that McCain was joking and others even reported that McCain predicted his words would be twisted and used against him. In an August 18 article in the Los Angeles Times, Greg Miller actually did both and noted that McCain aides had made clear their boss was joking. “Even so,” Miller wrote, “the remark highlighted the candidates’ disparate outlooks. Analysts who study income distribution said the answers appeared to reflect shifting political calculations more than economic reality.”

So Miller, writing under the headline, “Who’s Rich? McCain and Obama have very different definitions,” used McCain’s facetious answer as if he had meant it. (Miller also speculated that Cindy McCain’s family money may have shaped McCain’s views of what constitutes rich.) Not only was Obama not called on his misuse of McCain’s comment, reporters piled on. Is it any wonder that the line has made regular appearances in Obama speeches over the past month?

“Now, I don’t believe that Senator McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of Americans,” Obama said in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. “I just think he doesn’t know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under $5 million a year?”

Then there are the absurd lengths to which some reporters are willing to go to protect Obama and attack McCain. Last week, the McCain campaign released an ad accusing Obama of being too close to Fannie Mae executives. In particular, it claims Obama took advice on housing and finance issues from former Fannie Mae chairman Franklin Raines. The Obama campaign protested, saying that Raines was not an adviser and had not given Obama counsel in any capacity. The McCain campaign defended the claim by citing an article that ran in the Washington Post on July 16, 2008. That article noted that Raines had “taken calls from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.”

Last Friday, the Washington Post “factchecked” the McCain ad and concluded that the campaign had been “clearly exaggerating wildly” in order to link Obama to Raines and that the “latest McCain attack is particularly dubious.”

Factchecker Michael Dobbs wrote that McCain’s evidence that Raines had advised Obama was “pretty flimsy”—not a description that probably endeared him to Anita Huslin, the reporter who wrote the story this summer. But Dobbs did talk to Huslin. Here is his account of their conversation:

Since this has now become a campaign issue, I asked Huslin to provide the exact circumstances of the quote. She explained that she was chatting with Raines during the photo shoot, and asked “if he was engaged at all with the Democrats’ quest for the White House. He said that he had gotten a couple of calls from the Obama campaign. I asked him about what, and he said ‘oh, general housing, economy issues.’ (‘Not mortgage/foreclosure meltdown or Fannie-specific,’ I asked, and he said ‘no.’)”

By Raines’s own account, he took a couple of calls from someone on the Obama campaign, and they had some general discussions about economic issues.

Got that? Huslin stands by her reporting—that Raines had given advice to the Obama campaign about mortgage and housing policy matters—and yet the McCain campaign is faulted by the Washington Post for relying on information that comes from the Washington Post.

More amusing, though, is that in the rush to accuse the McCain campaign of lying, Dobbs glosses over a major discrepancy between the story that appeared in his paper and that of the Obama campaign. Obama spokesman Bill Burton claims that the campaign “neither sought nor received” advice from Raines “on any matter.” It is possible, of course, that Raines simply made up the conversations he described to the Post reporter. But it seems more likely, given the toxicity of Raines, that the Obama campaign would simply prefer that those conversations had never taken place.

Dobbs concludes: “I have asked both Raines and the Obama people for more details on these calls and will let you know if I receive a reply.”

That’s reassuring, since Dobbs has already decided that the McCain campaign has been dishonest. Two things are clear with six weeks left in the presidential race. Barack Obama will practice the old-style politics that he lamented throughout the Democratic primary. And the media will give him a pass.

==============================

Obama’s fan club (World Magazine, 081227)

Politics: Press bias shifted into high gear during ‘08 campaign | Marvin Olasky

The Nov. 6 Reuters headline, “Media bias largely unseen in U.S. presidential race,” was laughable because almost everyone saw it. American voters by an 8-1 margin said they witnessed a pro-Obama press, and even Time’s Mark Halperin said the “extreme pro-Obama coverage” represented a “disgusting failure of people in our business.”

Sadly funny examples galore make up the evidence. The most famous was MSNBC’s Chris Matthews saying on Feb. 12 that when Obama spoke, “I felt this thrill going up my leg.” But during 2008 other journalists fell in love:

New York Times reporter Michael Powell in January: “He has that close-cropped hair and the high-school-smooth face with that deep saxophone of a voice. His . . . words mine a vein of American history that leaves more than a few listeners misty-eyed.”

CNN’s David Gergen in August: “It was less a speech than a symphony. It moved quickly, it had high tempo, at times inspiring, then it became more intimate. . . . It was a masterpiece.”

Time’s Nancy Gibbs in November: “Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope. . . . He won because at a very dangerous moment in the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken before came together to try to save it.”

The idea of Obama as savior of America, or redeemer, played out often, as in an Associated Press article about his Berlin speech: “Obama has raised expectations of a chance for the nation to redeem itself in a role that—at various times through history—Europe has loved, respected, and relied upon.” One silver lining in the Obama victory was that it showed the inaccuracy of press assumptions like this one in an ABC question to Obama: “What do you think the bigger obstacle is for you in becoming president, the Clinton campaign machine or America’s inherent racism?”

Meanwhile, just about every major news organization lost readers or viewers and announced substantial layoffs. Internet growth is the major cause, but a second reason is that journalists often did not ask hard questions. CNN’s John Roberts sat down with Obama and said, “I want to stipulate at the beginning of this interview, we are declaring a Reverend Wright-free zone today. So, no questions about Reverend Wright. . . . Is that OK with you?” Obama replied, “Fair enough. That sounds just fine.”

==============================

More Boos Than Balls (Ann Coulter, 090121)

It will not be easy for President B. Hussein Obama. More than half the country voted for him, and yet our newspapers are brimming with snippy remarks at every little aspect of his inauguration.

Here’s a small sampling of the churlishness in just The New York Times:

— The American public is bemused by the tasteless show-biz extravaganza surrounding Barack Obama’s inauguration today.

— There is something to be said for some showiness in an inauguration. But one felt discomfited all the same.

— This is an inauguration, not a coronation.

— Is there a parallel between Mrs. Obama’s jewel-toned outfit and somebody else’s glass slippers? Why limousines and not shank’s mare?

— It is still unclear whether we are supposed to shout “Whoopee!” or “Shame!” about the new elegance the Obamas are bringing to Washington.

Boy, talk about raining on somebody’s parade! These were not, of course, comments about the inauguration of the angel Obama; they are (slightly edited) comments about the inauguration of another historic president, Ronald Reagan, in January 1981.

Obama’s inaugural address tracked much of Reagan’s first inaugural address — minus the substance — the main difference being that Obama did not invoke God as stoutly or frequently, restricting his heavenly references to a few liberal focus-grouped phrases, such as “God-given” and “God’s grace.”

Obama was also not as fulsome in his praise of his predecessor as Reagan was. To appreciate how remarkable this is, recall that Reagan’s predecessor was Jimmy Carter.

Under Carter, more than 50 Americans were held hostage by a two-bit terrorist Iranian regime for 444 days — released the day of Reagan’s inauguration. Under Bush, there has not been another terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2001.

But I gather that if Obama had uttered anything more than the briefest allusion to Bush, that would have provoked yet more booing from the Hope-and-Change crowd, which moments earlier had showered Bush with boos when he walked onto the stage. That must be the new tone we’ve been hearing so much about.

So maybe liberals can stop acting as if the entire nation could at last come together in a “unity of purpose” if only conservatives would stop fomenting “conflict and discord” — as Obama suggested in his inaugural address. We’re not the ones who booed a departing president.

It is a liberal trope to insult conservatives by asking them meaningless questions, such as the one repeatedly asked of Bush throughout his presidency about whether he had made any mistakes. All humans make mistakes — what is the point of that question other than to give insult?

When will the first reporter ask President Obama to admit that he has made mistakes? Try: Never.

No, that question will disappear for the next four years. It will be replaced by the new question for conservatives on every liberal’s lips these days: Do you want Obama to succeed as president?

Answer: Of course we do. We live here, too.

But merely to ask the question is to imply that the 60 million Americans who did not vote for Obama are being unpatriotic if they do not wholeheartedly endorse his liberal agenda.

I guess it depends on the meaning of “succeed.” If Obama “succeeds” in pushing through big-government, terrorist-appeasing policies, he will not have “succeeded” at being a good president. If we didn’t think conservative principles of small government and strong national defense weren’t better for the country, we wouldn’t be conservatives.

And why was that question never asked of liberals producing assassination books and movies about President Bush for the last eight years?

Say, did liberals want Pastor Rick Warren to succeed delivering a meaningful invocation at the inaugural?

The way I remember it, the Hope-and-Change crowd viciously denounced the Christian pastor, stamped their feet and demanded that Obama withdraw the invitation — all because Rick Warren agrees with Obama’s stated position on gay marriage, which also happens to be the position of a vast majority of Americans every time they have been allowed to vote on the matter.

Liberals always have to play the victim, acting as if they merely want to bring the nation together in hope and unity in the face of petulant, stick-in-the-mud conservatives. Meanwhile, they are the ones booing, heckling and publicly fantasizing about the assassination of those who disagree with them on policy matters.

Hope and unity, apparently, can only be achieved if conservatives would just go away — and perhaps have the decency to kill themselves.

Republicans are not the ones who need to be told that “the time has come to set aside childish things” — as Obama said of his own assumption of the presidency. Remember? We’re the ones who managed to gaze upon Carter at the conclusion of his abomination of a presidency without booing.

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A bad dream (Ann Coulter, 081230)

Last night, I had a horrible dream... and no, this isn’t the famous “I Had a Dream” speech. Frankly, I think that one could use a rest.

No, in my dream it was 12 noon, so naturally I tuned in for my daily dose of conservative news and commentary from the greatest political talk show host in the history of radio.

As I imagined one half of a giant brain being tied behind a familiar back, just to make it fair, the familiar bass notes from “My City Was Gone” throbbed, and the announcer’s voice boomed...

“Ladies and gentleman... in accordance with Fairness Doctrine broadcasting regulations... here’s AL FRANKEN!”

I woke up screaming. But then I realized it was just a bad dream.

Or was it?

The next big “bailout” planned by Obama, Reid, Pelosi and pals is... THE BAILOUT OF LIBERAL TALK RADIO.

Conservative talk radio drives liberals crazy — or, rather, it drives them crazier. They think it’s unfair that more people want to listen to conservative talk radio than to liberal talk radio.

Sure, conservative radio hosts have a built-in audience unavailable to liberals: people in cars on their way to some sort of job. We “crazy right-wingers” call that a competitive environment. Liberals hate that kind of environment - because they lose.

Enter the “Fairness Doctrine,” the most Orwellian name since “Barack Obama’s Department Of Defense.”

What do they mean by “fairness?”

To liberals, “fairness” means that the government will require radio stations that broadcast popular talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity Mike Gallagher and Mark Levin to also carry unpopular talk show hosts, known as “liberals.”

As I write in my new book, “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America

By requiring that any political views disseminated over the airwaves be counterbalanced by the opposing view, the Fairness Doctrine not only requires radio stations to give boring crackpots airtime, but it creates a conceptual and administrative nightmare. What is fair? There are conservative and liberal views — but there are also libertarian, Green party, Federalist and Marxist views. (Though the liberals will tend to have the Marxist arguments covered.) The problem isn’t just the paperwork stations have to fill out. It’s also that radio stations would have to start balancing three hours of Rush Limbaugh (20 million listeners) with three hours of Randi Rhodes (6 listeners) every day. Re-implementation of the Fairness Doctrine spells the end of talk radio.

This is how liberals “compete” - they outlaw competition.

In case you’re wondering, “fairness” does not mean I get equal time with Whoopi Goldberg on The View. Or that Brit Hume gets equal time to rebut the imbecilic Bill Moyers on PBS.

No. Liberals believe the government is required to enforce “fairness” only in the case of talk radio. The TV networks, movie studios, newspapers, news magazines and book publishing houses would continue to be dominated by liberals. I guess 90% liberal control is “fair.”

By contrast, “fairness” is sorely lacking in the vastly competitive medium such as radio, where conservatives triumph solely because of the free choice of the consumer. Monopolistic industries dominated by liberals do not need to be made more “fair” by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

What can you do now...

What can you do to help fight this shameless assault on the radio programs we cherish?

Thankfully, my colleagues at Human Events special investigative report entitled “The ‘Unfairness Doctrine’: The Frightening Liberal Attempt to Silence Conservative America them distribute this special report to activists, leaders, opinion shapers across the country... and to do so quickly!

Human Events will deliver the report to policy shapers on Capitol Hill, opinion makers at major media outlets, student leaders on college campuses, and to Americans who need to know the truth about this liberal threat to our First Amendment rights.

But we need your help to cover the costs of sounding the alarm, and in doing the ongoing editorial work that sets Human Events apart from other publications.

The folks at Human Events such battles before. Against “Hillarycare,” wasteful spending, and amnesty for illegal immigrants - and much more. And with your help, they’ve won.

And believe me, this is as big as any of those battles. Unless we defeat the Fairness Doctrine, conservative speech may be finished in America. There will be no alternative voice to the Democratic White House, Senate and House of Representatives. The pendulum may never swing back.

We can’t wait until inauguration day to take up the fight. It will be too late. When Time magazine responded to Obama’s election by comparing him to Jesus Christ, we got a taste of how the “watchdog” media intended to watch the next president: Far from watchdogs, they’re more like love struck puppies.

The mainstream media won’t mention the “Fairness Doctrine” - they would prefer to slip it by us in the dark of night.

If you believe talk radio is vital to free and open political speech in a world of liberal-dominated news media...

If you believe that Democrat control of Washington does not bestow the right to replace Rush Limbaugh with Al Franken...

Then I urge you to join up with HUMAN EVENTS against this threat. They can’t win this fight without your help.

Best Regards,

Ann Coulter

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U.S. Supreme court upholds TV ban on F-word (Paris, International Herald, 090428)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has upheld a U.S. government crackdown on profanity on television, a policy that subjects broadcasters to fines for airing a single expletive blurted out on a live show.

In its first ruling on broadcast indecency standards in more than 30 years, the high court handed a victory to the Federal Communications Commission, which adopted the crackdown against the one-time use of profanity on live television when children are likely to be watching.

The case stemmed from an FCC ruling in 2006 that found News Corp’s Fox television network violated decency rules when singer Cher blurted out an expletive during the 2002 Billboard Music Awards broadcast and actress Nicole Richie used two expletives during the 2003 awards.

No fines were imposed, but Fox challenged the decision and a U.S. appeals court in New York struck down the new policy as as “arbitrary and capricious” and sent the case back to the FCC for a more reasoned explanation of its policy.

The FCC, under the administration of President George W. Bush, had embarked on a crackdown of indecent content on broadcast TV and radio after pop star Janet Jackson briefly exposed her bare breast during the 2004 broadcast of the Super Bowl halftime show.

Before 2004, the FCC did not ordinarily enforce prohibitions against indecency unless there were repeated occurrences.

By a 5-4 vote and splitting along conservative-liberal lines, the justices overturned the ruling by the appeals court and said the FCC’s new policy and its findings in the two cases were neither arbitrary nor capricious.

“The agency’s reasons for expanding its enforcement activity, moreover, were entirely rational,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in summarizing the court’s majority ruling from the bench.

“Even when used as an expletive, the F-word’s power to insult and offend derives from its sexual meaning,” he said.

Government lawyers in the case have said the policy covered so-called “fleeting expletives,” such as the “F-word” and the “S-word” that denote “sexual or excretory activities,” respectively.

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Conservatives Hail High Court’s ‘Fleeting Expletives’ Ruling (Christian Post, 090430)

“Today’s Supreme Court decision in Fox v. FCC is a huge victory for American families,” cheered Penny Young Nance, former policy advisor to the FCC on indecency issues and current board member of Concerned Women for America.

“American families understand that the public airwaves, like public parks, are owned by all of us. The networks do not have the right to pollute the airwaves with the ‘F-word’ at will,” she added.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court reversed the ruling of a federal appeals court in New York that said the FCC “failed to articulate a reasoned basis” for the change in policy.

The new policy, voted on by the FCC in 2006, states that “unscripted” profanity slips count as indecency and was established after the “F-word” and the “S-word” were used during Fox’s 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards shows.

While broadcasters argued that such regulations hamper their First Amendment rights, the FCC contended that it has the authority to ensure a certain level of decency is maintained in broadcast standards. That includes enforcing federal restrictions on the broadcast of “any obscene, indecent, or profane language,” even speech that is “unscripted.”

“Today’s decision does not say that the FCC can or should punish the utterance of every expletive in broadcasting,” explained Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media, in a statement Tuesday.

But he said it does uphold FCC authority to punish a broadcaster in appropriate cases.

“Historically, the FCC has applied a ‘nuisance rationale’ in determining whether content is ‘indecent;’ and as the Supreme Court observed in a 1978 case, the nuisance concept ‘requires consideration of a host of variables,’ including time of day, nature of the audience, program content, etc.,” Peters stated.

“It doesn’t take much imagination to think what some broadcasters would do if they had an absolute ‘right’ to curse at least once in every program.”

While the Supreme Court determined that the FCC’s new enforcement policy is neither “arbitrary” nor “capricious,” as a court of appeals earlier found it to be, it refused to pass judgment on whether the FCC’s “fleeting expletives” policy is in line with First Amendment guarantees of free speech, saying a federal appeals court should weigh the constitutionality of the policy.

“This Court ... is one of final review, ‘not of first view,’” the high court explained in its majority opinion.

“[W]hether it is unconstitutional, will be determined soon enough, perhaps in this very case,” it added.

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High Court Orders Appeals Court to Review ‘Wardrobe Malfunction’ Ruling (Christian Post, 090505)

The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered a federal court of appeals to review its ruling last year against the fine imposed by the FCC on CBS for the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.

“The judgment is vacated and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit for further consideration in light of FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc.,” the high court stated Monday.

The FCC v. Fox case, which also centered on “fleeting” indecency on public television, was ruled on last week by the Supreme Court, which found that FCC’s prohibitions against indecent speech on public television was neither “arbitrary” nor “capricious,” as a court of appeals earlier found it to be.

“It would be arbitrary or capricious to ignore such matters,” it stated in its majority opinion.

The high court’s 5-4 decision effectively reversed the ruling of a federal appeals court in New York and presents the Third Circuit Court of Appeals new reason to review its similar decision against the FCC.

The Court of Appeals had ruled last July that CBS wasn’t liable for the “wardrobe malfunction” incident that left Janet Jackson’s bared breast for 90 million viewers to see because the material appeared to be “unscripted.” The court also ruled that the exposure was too brief to violate FCC rules designed to keep children from seeing indecent material broadcast between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

The FCC had “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” in penalizing the network for a “fleeting image of nudity,” the three-judge panel decided.

The ruling was strongly criticized by pro-family conservatives, including Tim Winters, president of the Parents Television Council, who said the court’s decision went “beyond judicial activism.”

“[I]t borders on judicial stupidity,” he stated. “If a striptease during the Super Bowl in front of 90 million people-including millions of children-doesn’t fit the parameters of broadcast indecency, then what does?”

Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, similarly commented, “Apparently, exposing oneself no longer qualifies as broadcast indecency.”

Following the order Monday, the PTC praised the Supreme Court for “siding not only with families, but with Congress and the overwhelming will of the American people.”

“Last year’s decision by the Third Circuit Court was simply preposterous,” Winters expressed in a statement.

“We are grateful that the Supreme Court is asking the lower court to take another look at its ruling. If broadcasters are going to use the publicly owned airwaves for free, then they must agree to abide by the terms of their licenses and by the broadcast decency law, rather than fight it at every turn. We call on the FCC to act quickly on the backlog of broadcast indecency complaints filed by the public,” he concluded.

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Dow Closes Above 10,000 for First Time in Over a Year (Paris, International Herald, 091014)

[KH: Thi is just one good news among many bad ones, including record high unemployment, extremely weak dollar, etc. This report would not have happed in Bush’s presidency. Look at the last paragraph, see how they report a 0.06% increase in yield, as if it is big news.]

The Dow Jones industrial average, one of the most watched barometers of the financial world, closed above 10,000 points on Wednesday, a milestone of the stock market’s recovery from the depths of the financial crisis.

Baseball caps declaring “Dow 10,000 2.0” circulated on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and CNBC scheduled a special report to commemorate a level that Wall Street had not reached for a year, after the Dow fell below five digits last October as Washington rushed to head off an all-out collapse of the financial system.

“The last time we saw 10,000, we were going the wrong way,” said Doreen Mogavero, president of the brokerage Mogavero, Lee & Company, who was on the trading floor Wednesday afternoon. “This is a little bit nicer feeling.”

The Dow has recovered about 3,450 points since bottoming out in early March. But it and other major stock indexes are still shadows of their former selves, and many investors are a long way from whole. The Dow is some 4,000 points off its record high, and broader measures of the market are down 30% from their peaks. And the companies that constitute the stock indexes are still grappling with shaky revenues, credit losses and huge uncertainties about the American economy’s long-term growth.

In Washington, the market move became political fodder. Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, played down the gains and said more Americans were concerned with jobs and “putting food on the table,” NBC reported.

On Wednesday, shares pushed higher after JPMorgan Chase reported a $3.6 billion third-quarter profit, earnings rose at the chip maker Intel and retail sales held up better than expected.

Investors went on a buying spree after the reports, lifting stock markets from London to New York to Mexico City.

The Dow gained 144.80 points or 1.5%, to end at 10,015.86, while the broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 18.83 points, or 1.75%, to 1,092.02, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 32.34 points, or 1.5%, 2,172.23.

“Each time it crosses one of these levels, more of the bears get flushed out,” said Cleve Rueckert, research analyst at Birinyi Associates. “They’re more apt to change their tune. It makes it that much more clear that the market is pushing higher.”

The Dow first closed above 10,000 in March 1999. It retreated in the years after the dot-com bubble deflated, then retook 10,000 in late 2003 and peaked above 14,000 in October 2007.

Still, many investment specialists dismiss the significance of such big, round benchmark numbers, and say that no sophisticated investors or hedge funds make investment decisions based on whether a stock index’s total value can be measured in four or five digits.

“It’s psychological,” said Tom Fitzpatrick, chief technical analyst at Citigroup Capital Markets.

The major stock indexes have rebounded by 50% or more in a scorching rally that began in early March and galloped higher through the summer and early autumn, as the economy stabilized and once-bleeding companies began to report better profits and rising revenue.

Investors rushed to take positions in companies and commodities that could benefit from a broad upturn in the global economy. Crude oil prices hit their highest levels since last October, topping $75 a barrel. Safety bets like the dollar and government bonds got clobbered.

Financial stocks surged after JPMorgan Chase announced a third-quarter profit that outstripped expectations. JPMorgan was the first major financial company to announce earnings for last quarter, and the sight of rising revenue and stabilizing losses at one of the most powerful banks lifted expectations that the financial sector was again back on its feet, a year after its near-implosion.

Shares of JPMorgan climbed 3.3%, and its rising tide lifted shares of other banks like Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citigroup, which are all scheduled to report their own quarterly results in the days ahead.

Investors swept up shares of computer companies, search engines and software makers after Intel reported profits that surpassed Wall Street’s expectations. Shares of Intel, which issued its earnings report after markets closed on Tuesday, rose 1.7%.

The Treasury’s 10-year note fell 18/32, to 101 24/32. The yield rose to 3.41%, from 3.35% late Tuesday.

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Americans believe Internet news most reliable (WorldNetDaily, 090615)

Only 1 in 200 expect newspapers to be dominant source in 2014

A new poll reveals that more Americans would choose the Internet as their only news source than TV, radio and newspapers combined, and Internet reports are considered much more reliable that other media.

It also shows only 1 in 200 people surveyed believes newspapers will be a dominant source of information in 2014.

The poll by Zogby International said as broadcast newscasts continue to lose viewers and newspapers struggle to stay alive, “the Internet is by far the preferred source for information, and … it is considered the most reliable source as well.”

The survey discovered 56% of adults nationwide would pick the Internet if they were allowed just one source for their news, while television, newspapers and radio earned the support of 41% – together.

Among Republicans, 56% would choose the Internet for their news, while among Democrats that figure was 50%. Seventeen percent of Democrats said they would prefer newspapers as their only news source while 5% of Republicans made that choice.

The survey, which contacted more than 3,000 people and has a margin of error of 1.8%, revealed 38% believe news from the Internet is the most reliable, followed by television at less than half that figure – 17%. Newspapers were in third at 16% and 13% chose radio.

Since a full 84% of American adults report having Internet access, the poll “reinforces the idea that the efforts by established newspapers, television and radio outlets to push their consumers to their respective websites is working.”

The poll said 49% of all respondents said national newspaper websites were very important and 43% said national television websites were important to them as a key source of news.

A total of 41% said local newspaper websites were important sources while 34% said local television stations were the same.

“That the websites of traditional news outlets are seen by a wide margin as more important than blog sites – most of which are repositories of opinion devoid of actual reportage – could be seen as an encouraging development for the media at large,” the report said.

And forget Facebook and Twitter: Just 10% consider Facebook as important for news while 4% said the same of Twitter.

Eighty-two percent said they believe five years from now the Internet will be the most dominant information course. Television was second, at 13%. The survey showed that only one-half of one percent – 0.5% – said they thought newspapers would be the most dominant source of news in five years.

It was only a few weeks ago when WND reported its own 12th anniversary.

WND began with the vision of its founders to create an Internet news source that would employ the highest standards and practices of the traditional American press in the world of the New Media.

That commitment is still reflected a dozen years later in WND’s mission statement: “WorldNetDaily.com Inc. is an independent news company dedicated to uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the role of the free press as a guardian of liberty. We remain faithful to the traditional and central role of a free press in a free society – as a light exposing wrongdoing, corruption and abuse of power.

“We also seek to stimulate a free-and-open debate about the great moral and political ideas facing the world and to promote freedom and self-government by encouraging personal virtue and good character.”

The ambitious undertaking was inspired by founder Joseph Farah’s 25-year career in the newspaper business – a career that provided him with the opportunity to experience virtually every job one can do in that industry.

In 1987, Farah got his first opportunity to serve as editor in chief of a daily newspaper in Glendale, Calif. For the next two years, he ran the News-Press and a small chain of suburban weeklies with a combined circulation of 250,000.

In 1990, Farah was recruited to be editor of the historic Sacramento Union, the oldest daily west of the Mississippi and the first newspaper to hire Mark Twain – then known as Samuel Clemens. Among its other notable alumni were Bret Harte and Herb Caen.

It was during his time in northern California that Farah became fascinated with new technologies emerging in the Silicon Valley during the pre-Internet era.

“My work in competitive newspaper markets had left me frustrated with the inherent inefficiency of delivery methods, the high cost of newsprint and the growing dominance of a few monopoly media corporations strangling out alternative voices,” he said. “The idea of an ‘electronic newspaper’ – one that could eliminate the heavy machinery and expensive supplies needed to be in the daily print world – was increasingly exciting to me. I had seen the future of news long before the Internet came along.”

Inspired by the success of the DrudgeReport, the Farahs decided in the spring of 1997 the time to act had arrived. After experiments with less-ambitious websites that didn’t require daily updates, WorldNetDaily was launched, without fanfare, May 4, 1997.

The news site quickly emerged as one of the most popular in the world – voted so, in fact, every week for nearly two years running between 1999 and 2001 on the independent, European-based Global100.com.

Since then, WND – as it is becoming known to its millions of unique visitors – has broken some of the biggest, most significant and most notable investigative and enterprising stories in recent years.

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Obama Blasts Fox News: ‘I’ve Got One Television Station that is Entirely Devoted to Attacking (WorldNetDaily, 090616)

You can’t be loved and adored by everybody, but if you’re President Barack Obama and it concerns the media, you can come awfully close.

In an interview on CNBC’s June 16 “Closing Bell” with the network Washington correspondent John Harwood, Obama reflected on the media coverage he has received to date. Harwood asked the president to respond to the claim that lack of media criticism has allowed him to “hurt” the country.

“When you and I spoke in January, you said, I observed that you haven’t gotten much bad press,” Harwood said. “You said, ‘It’s coming.’ Media critics would say not only has it not come, but that you’ve gotten such favorable press either because of bias or because you’re good box office that it’s hurting the country because you’re not sufficiently being held accountable for your policies. Assess that.”

Obama dismissed that assertion and claimed one station was devoted to “attacking” the Obama administration:

“It’s very hard for me to swallow that one,” Obama said. “First of all, I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,” he added, chuckling.

“I assume you’re talking about Fox,” Harwood replied.

“Well, that’s a pretty big megaphone and you’d be hard-pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front,” Obama said.

However, it hasn’t gone completely unnoticed by Obama to date. Earlier this year at the White House Correspondents Dinner, he had joked about his coverage - that of Fox News and the rest of the media.

“Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me,” Obama quipped on May 9. “Apologies to the Fox table.”

According to the president, he has made a tremendous effort to be accessible in the wake of some of the decisions his administration has made running the country.

“I think that ultimately my responsibility is to provide the best possible decision making on behalf of the American people at a time where we’ve got a lot of big problems,” Obama said. “And, you know - we welcome people who are asking us some tough questions and I think that I’ve been probably as accessible as any president in the first six months - press conferences, taking questions from reporters, being held accountable, being transparent about what it is we’re trying to do.”

In fact, Obama has been so accessible he is allowing ABC News to broadcast its flagship news program, “World News with Charles Gibson,” from the Blue Room of the White House on June 24 in addition to a primetime special “Prescription for America” originating from the East Room. Obama credited that accessibility for the “generally positive” coverage he has gotten from journalists.

“I think that actually the reason that people have been generally positive about what we’ve tried to do is they feel as if I’m available and willing to answer questions and we haven’t been trying to hide the ball,” Obama said. “I do think that we can’t be complacent and that as long as we’ve got these tough problems in place that not only journalists, but the American people are going to keep on asking whether or not we’re delivering and they understand it’s not going to take us just a few months to get out of the hole that we’re in.”

However, the president predicted he would face tougher coverage “as time goes on.”

“But, you know I suspect as time goes on, with high unemployment, the economy’s still slow - that you know people are going to be continuing to expect results and I welcome that,” Obama said. “That’s why I took the job.”

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PBS agrees to ban new religious TV shows (Washington Post, 090617)

Compromise ends threat to stations that already broadcast church services

The Public Broadcasting Service agreed yesterday to ban its member stations from airing new religious TV programs, but permitted the handful of stations that already carry “sectarian” shows to continue doing so.

The vote by PBS’s board was a compromise from a proposed ban on all religious programming. Such a ban would have forced a few stations around the country to give up their PBS affiliation if they continued to broadcast local church services and religious lectures.

Until now, PBS stations have been required to present programming that is noncommercial, nonpartisan and nonsectarian. But the definition of “nonsectarian” programming was always loosely interpreted, and the rule had never been strictly enforced. PBS began reviewing the definition and application of those rules last year in light of the transition to digital TV and with many stations streaming programs over their Web sites. The definition doesn’t cover journalistic programs about religion or discussion programs that don’t favor a particular religious point of view.

The vote at PBS’s headquarters in Arlington was good news for five PBS member stations that carry religious programs. Among them are KBYU in Salt Lake City, which is operated by an affiliate of the Mormon Church; KMBH in Harlingen, Tex., operated by the local Catholic diocese; and WLAE in New Orleans, operated by a Catholic lay organization.

The vote also means that WHUT, operated by Howard University in the District, won’t be required to drop its telecasts of “Mass for Shut-Ins,” a weekly Catholic Mass that has aired on the station since 1996 and locally in Washington for more than 50 years.

But, warned by PBS of the upcoming review, WHUT put the program’s producer, the Archdiocese of Washington, on notice that it would drop the program if the PBS board voted to ban religious programs. The archdiocese then made alternative arrangements, negotiating a contract with WDCW (Channel 50) to pick up the half-hour program on Sunday mornings.

Moving the program, which is broadcast free by WHUT, will be disruptive to viewers, said Susan Gibbs, the archdiocese’s spokeswoman, and expensive — the contract with WDCW will cost $60,000 per year.

“I think we were good for WHUT because we brought a committed and dedicated audience to their channel,” she said. “It would have been nice for us to continue being there, but I think we were good for them, too.” Gibbs was unsure whether the contract could be broken.

WHUT General Manager Jennifer Lawson said yesterday she didn’t know where the program would end up. “It’s not a question of taking them back,” said Lawson, who chaired the PBS committee that recommended the policies adopted by PBS’s 27-member board yesterday. “It’s my understanding they made a decision to move to Channel 50 because they found some advantages. The decision is for them to make.”

PBS’s board also voted yesterday to allow PBS stations to air religious programs on digital TV channels and Web sites they operate as long as these channels don’t include PBS programs or brand identification. This could open the way for cash-strapped PBS stations to lease unused digital TV channels to religious broadcasters, as station KOCE in Orange County, Calif., has already done.

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Turning Point: Couric Rips Obama (Newsmax, 091129)

Katie Couric may be best known for her unflattering interview with Sarah Palin. But her nightly news broadcast this past Monday night may be an indicator that the big liberal media are now turning their guns on Obama.

Couric said on “CBS Evening News” that Americans are growing “disenchanted” with Obama and are openly questioning his credibility.

“Is the honeymoon over?” anchor Couric said at the beginning of her correspondent’s report.

“Although President Obama has been in office less than a year, many Americans are growing disenchanted with his handling of the enormous problems he and the country are facing, from healthcare to unemployment to Afghanistan.

“His poll numbers are sliding, and at least one poll shows his job approval rating has fallen, for the first time, below 50%.”

Correspondent Chris Reid chimed in: “The president is getting battered on everything from the economy to foreign policy. Some polls show Americans are increasingly questioning his credibility.”

The report asserted that while Obama talks about dealing with unemployment, which is over 10% and expected to rise, he has developed “no new ideas” for dealing with the problem.

CBS also cited a poll showing that only 14% of Americans believe Obama’s claim that healthcare reform won’t add to the budget deficit, and only 7% believe that the stimulus has created any jobs at all.

The report also criticized the president for being “indecisive” on Afghanistan, and for returning from his recent Asian trip “with little to show for it.”

An expert was quoted as describing his trip as the “amateur hour,” as he did not line up agreements with foreign countries before venturing abroad.

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A Disturbing Double Standard (Foxnews, 100111)

By Cal Thomas

Now it’s Harry Reid’s turn to be washed in the absolution of his fellow liberals.

That a double standard exists for Republicans, for religion, for even whites and blacks and what they say on race and other subjects is a given. The media treat such comments differently depending on the policies of those who utter them. In fact, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia can utter the phrase “white nigger” and it barely raises an eyebrow in liberal circles. Rarely is Byrd’s background as a former leader in the Ku Klux Klan mentioned in polite liberal company. As long as the speech offender is a liberal who favors the social and political policies of the liberal media elite, he (or she) gets a pass.

And so then-Senator and future vice president Joe Biden can describe then-senator Barack Obama as “clean and articulate” and it’s not a problem. That’s because Byrd and Biden “vote right.” Jesse Jackson can refer to New York City as “Hymietown” and he keeps a TV show he had on CNN at the time and his newspaper column. Al Sharpton signs on to defend a young African-American girl who claims she was raped by a gang of white men, including a police officer and prosecutor, and when a grand jury determines that she had created an elaborate hoax, that does not diminish Sharpton in the eyes of his fellow liberals because he pushes for policies with which they agree.

Now it’s Harry Reid’s turn to be washed in the absolution of his fellow liberals. In their new book, “Game Change,” Mark Halperin and John Heilemann quote Reid as referring to Obama as a “light-skinned black man with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.”

Reid belongs to the Mormon church, which waited until 1978 to announce a “revelation” that black people were welcome in that denomination. That is mostly ignored by the media, though reporters kept bringing up Mitt Romney’s Mormon beliefs — even questioning what undergarments he wore — during the last presidential campaign.

On Sunday, “60 Minutes”ignored all of this in its interview with the authors of “Game Change.” If a Republican had said what Reid said it would have been the first question.

Virginia Governor-elect Bob McDonnell’s faith was a big deal to The Washington Post which kept mentioning that he attended and wrote a thesis for Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

More importantly, Reid’s remark again shows what African-Americans are worth to the Democratic Party. They are votes, not individuals with value. White liberals have built a political culture that is little different from the plantations of another generation. African-Americans are given just enough to help them survive, but not opportunity which will allow them to escape and become independent of government programs.

More than words, this is the greater offense. When will African-Americans realize they have been used and begin to pry themselves loose from the paternalistic grip of white liberal — and some fellow African-American Democrats?

Senator Trent Lott was forced out as GOP Majority Leader when he joked that the country might have been better off had Strom Thurmond been elected president. Don’t look for Harry Reid to resign his post for saying worse.

Double standard.

But that aside, what ought to disgust most of us is that these people who are supposed to serve us are playing a game of verbal volleyball that serves only themselves. When will they get serious and behave like adults and real public servants?

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Is Brit Hume “Too Christian” for TV? (Liberty Alert, 100122)

Chip Wood

Holy mackerel, what a tempest in a teapot Fox News commentator Brit Hume unleashed when he made a pro-Christian comment on national TV. Judging by the hysterical outcry from the left, you would think he had publicly advocated devil-worship.

Come to think of it, had Hume instead advocated giving Satan a chance I’m sure the reaction would have been far friendlier. He would have been hailed for his open-mindedness and applauded for being so non-judgmental.

In case you missed the beginning of this controversy, here’s how it started: Appearing on a panel on Fox News Sunday, Hume was asked what advice he would give the embattled Tiger Woods, in an effort to end the controversy that has besmirched the reputation (and flattened the bank account) of the superstar golfer.

Hume began by saying that, while Tiger’s golf game would eventually recover, if he wanted to overcome the guilt and shame of his repeated infidelities he should turn from Buddhism to Christianity.

Hume then observed, “The extent to which he can recover, it seems to me, depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.’”

Needless to say, the loony left went absolutely ballistic over Hume’s pro-Christian comments. Keith Olbermann, MSNBC’s bile-filled poster boy for intolerance, berated Hume for trying to “threaten Tiger Woods into becoming a Christian.”

Really? I hope someone asks Olbermann by what stretch of imagination he could find a threat in Hume’s remarks. They sounded very conciliatory to me… perhaps even overly optimistic in the promise of “total recovery.”

But Olbermann wasn’t finished. He went on to compare Fox News to Islamic extremists, for allowing Hume to promote Christianity on national TV. He then invited Dan Savage, a homosexual extremist, on his show. Savage promptly lambasted Hume as a “lunatic” for his remarks. Olbermann nodded approvingly.

Jon Stewart, the smirking liberal who hosts The Daily Show, played clips of Hume’s comments to the amusement of his audience.

Tom Shales, the TV critic at The Washington Post, mocked the idea that Christians should “run around trying to drum up new business.” What Hume did was outrageous, Shales insisted—unless you were so backward as to believe that “every Christian by mandate must proselytize.”

Actually, as you no doubt know, many Christians believe exactly that. But I doubt if my more evangelical friends would give Brit Hume high marks for calling Tiger (or anyone else) to account. What he said was a long, long way from an altar call. But the blogosphere responded as though Hume’s remarks were the most glaring example of bigotry, bias and downright stupidity ever uttered outside The Jerry Springer Show.

David Shuster, Olbermann’s colleague on MSNBC, lambasted Hume for violating “the separation of church and television.” I think he confused that principle with another one that’s just as phony—the so-called “separation of church and state,” which is also nowhere in the Constitution.

One of the strangest criticisms of all came from Dan Savage, the homosexual activist I mentioned above. He roared indignantly that Hume was claiming Christianity “offers the best deal—it gives you the get-out-of-adultery free card that other religions just can’t.”

Excuse me, but isn’t that exactly what Christianity promises? As Ann Coulter put it, “God sent his only Son to get the crap beaten out of him, die for our sins and rise from the dead. If you believe that, you’re in. Your sins are washed away from you—sins even worse than adultery!—because of the cross.”

And then the acerbic columnist and commentator added the following: “Surely you remember the cross, liberals—the symbol banned by ACLU lawsuits from public property throughout the land?”

To my surprise, I found one of the most reasonable comments about the whole affair in a column in The New York Times, when Ross Douthat wrote, “This doesn’t mean that we need to welcome real bigotry into our public discourse. But what Hume said wasn’t bigoted: Indeed, his claim about the difference between Buddhism and Christianity was perfectly defensible. Christians believe in a personal God who forgives sin. Buddhists, as a rule, do not. And it’s at least plausible that Tiger Woods might welcome the possibility that there’s someone out there capable of forgiving him, even if Elin Nordegren and his corporate sponsors do not.”

Yes, as many observers have noted, Christianity is the best deal in the universe. There is no other faith of which I’m aware that promises your sins will be forgiven.

Of course to the intellectual elite, there is no such thing as “sin.” We are supposed to tolerate anything and everything, from serial infidelities to the most blatant perversions.

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, no one can be persecuted for his or her beliefs anymore. Unless, of course, they are so old-fashioned and intolerant as to believe that sin exists… that sinners will be punished… and that redemption can only be found at the foot of the Cross.

Brit, I’m sure glad you no longer get your paycheck from one of our so-called “fair-minded” networks. Because if you did, I have no doubt they’d require you to grovel an abject apology—right before they threw you out the door.

Until next time, keep some powder dry.

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Deficit-Enabling Media (townhall.com, 100303)

by Brent Bozell

The deficit for last year was $1.4 trillion. The deficit rose as a share of the gross domestic product from 3.1% in 2008 to 9.9% in 2009, the highest deficit as a share of GDP since 1945. The projected deficit for the fiscal year that ends in September is another $1.3 trillion.

So much for all that fiscal sanity blather from Team Obama in ‘08. How dishonest. Even worse, there’s a good reason to stay pessimistic about deficits as far as the eye can see. It’s called the “news” media.

Legislators who want to get re-elected will clearly want to avoid any spending decision that will create bad national publicity, and our news media, the manufacturers of bad national publicity, will send crying victims down the assembly line at the slightest thought of a social spending cut or freeze.

Exhibit A is Sen. Jim Bunning, a man who is not seeking re-election, which is obvious from his brash, outside-the-Beltway behavior. Bunning pushed the stop button on the perpetual federal spending machine by holding up a $10 billion package to extend (yet again) unemployment benefits and keep cash flowing to the highway trust fund. Mirabile dictu, he insisted that the Congress should find the money to pay for this — for example, in unspent “stimulus” money — instead of just adding another multibillion-dollar layer to the deficit lasagna.

Break out the smelling salts. The network nightly news crews tried to manufacture instant outrage, earning their reputation as the enablers of incessant and unrestrained deficit-building.

ABC’s Diane Sawyer sent her reporter to expose this mean old man: “One man’s stand. A single Senator stops the whole Congress, denying thousands of people unemployment benefits. We confront him to ask why.” No spin there. Sawyer framed it as Bunning simply blocking “life support for the unemployed,” as if he were standing on someone’s oxygen hose.

ABC reporter Jon Karl and his producer physically blocked Bunning’s elevator while playing victim’s advocate against this alleged victimizer: “We wanted to ask the Senator why he is blocking a vote that would extend unemployment benefits to more than 340,000 Americans, including Brenda Wood, a teacher in Austin, Texas who has been out of work for two years.”

Wood lamented her plight: “I’ve done a lot without and drained my savings, so pretty much my daughter’s been helping out, so — I don’t know what I’ll do.” Karl added numbers on screen: “Bunning is also blocking money for highway construction. So across the country today, 41 construction projects ground to a halt, thousands of workers furloughed without pay.”

On CBS, Katie Couric blamed Bunning for “one of the stranger episodes on Capitol Hill” before reporter Nancy Cordes warned: “Because the bill didn’t pass by today, 2,000 federal transportation workers had to be furloughed without pay, 400,000 Americans risk losing their unemployment benefits over the next seven to ten days.”

NBC anchor Brian Williams decried how Bunning “had angry words with and an obscene gesture for a reporter on Capitol Hill. A sign, perhaps, that public pressure on him is building over his controversial decision to block a short-term spending bill in the U.S. Senate.” Reporter Kelly O’Donnell added the same numbers about the transportation furloughs and delayed unemployment checks.

Bunning was right to say if the Congress can’t find any place in the federal budget to trim away a measly $10 billion, they won’t stop spending anywhere. But the media on this story aren’t really on the side of the taxpayers (and debt payers). They’re on the side of Team Obama and the debt builders.

Here’s what Bunning should have said to Karl and his pushy producer: “If you want to pressure someone who’s savagely causing unemployment, why don’t you go break into your own boss’s offices?” ABC News plans to offer buyouts (and then layoffs) of 400 Americans. Does anyone point a microphone in ABC News President David Westin’s face and ask him why he’s cutting off “life support”?

CBS is laying off about 100 people as they still pay Katie Couric $14 million annually. Why don’t some reporters break into Couric’s next public appearance and ask her why she’s so heartless, not trying to “save or create” a few jobs inside CBS? Would Brian Williams publicly shame her if she brushed that off with a “no comment” or an obscene gesture?

Bunning isn’t proposing job cuts — or even spending cuts. He’s using a hold and demanding that legislators of both parties put up or shut up when they declare they’re for “pay as you go” budgeting. When it comes to massive deficits, the media are useless as part of a solution. They are a very loud and propagandistic part of the problem.

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No Politics at the Oscars, Please (townhall.com, 100313)

by Bill O’Reilly

For the first time that I can remember, there were no politically charged comments at the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday. And I was ready. We had left-wing bomb throwers like George Clooney, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand and co-host Alec Baldwin all lined up in the “let it fly” zone. But the show turned out to be the silence of the lambs.

What’s going on?

The answer to that question is money, pure and simple.

The rise of the machines has dislocated entertainment all over the country. Now you can program your life on your computer and endlessly amuse yourself with iPods, DS games and BlackBerry phones. No longer do you have to drive to a movie theater to see something interesting.

Therefore, the pool of movies, recordings, books and other forms of entertainment is becoming shallow. For the most part, companies are not throwing around big dollars to actors and singers anymore. Now you have to earn your bread by selling product. And alienating potential customers is not a good business model.

You may remember Clooney, for example, saying the federal government under President Bush was run like “The Sopranos.” That was in 2003. Since that time, Clooney has pulled back from provocative political statements. I am guessing commerce has something to do with it.

Baldwin continues to toss grenades at the right, but even he has tempered his commentary. Back in 2002, old Alec told a Florida audience that George W. Bush’s victory in 2000 did as much damage to America as the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Last Sunday night, he was like your hip uncle, a few wisecracks and then off to the bar.

Even Penn, as rabid a left-winger as can be imagined, refrained from blasting anyone. A few days earlier, however, he did say that he hoped his critics died “screaming from rectal cancer.” I guess it’s comforting to know that some things never change.

Streisand continues her political website, but what used to be bombs-away prose has turned surprisingly mild. Streisand has resumed touring and recording, so again, marketing may be in play.

Mass-market entertainers simply cannot survive by alienating much of the country. Polls show that 40% of Americans currently identify themselves as conservative. As Streisand well knows, people need people to buy their records and see their movies. That’s the way we were and continue to be — with apologies to everyone for those lines.

I kind of miss the embarrassing Oscar moments, where some celebrity would bash his or her country or call out a right-wing politician. Yes, those were cringe-worthy experiences, but they broke the tedium of the long-winded Academy Award telecast.

Next year we should have a retrospective of the crazy stuff said during past Academy Award programs. Michael Moore could host it.

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Squandering what’s left of their credibility (National Post, 100410)

The New York Times’ coverage of The Vatican shows why Americans flock to Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter [KH: confusing main point]

Conrad Black, National Post

During the debate over Ann Coulter’s recent trip to Canada, there was much commentary about how strident conservatives have developed such large followings in the United States. To many Canadians and Americans, the prominence of Rush Limbaugh and the others is taken as evidence that the United States is becoming a society of extremists, racists and heartless reactionaries.

That is not, as I wrote last week, a fair description of Ms. Coulter; nor of the other prominent conservatives on the American airwaves — even that tedious Fox News blowhard, Bill O’Reilly, the relentlessly partisan Sean Hannity, or Michael Savage, a quasi-learned eccentric whom the British have insanely banned as an undesirable (not that he has the slightest wish to go there).

The large gorilla lurching around the room is that all these people are in successful revolt against the traditional U.S. mainstream national media. Apart from Henry Ford’s popularization of the automobile, it has been the most successful American revolution since Paul Revere’s ride.

The average American talk-radio devotee, or Ann Coulter admirer, would probably not articulate in detail the reasons for his disaffection with the traditional media, beyond imputing to them a few attitudes deemed to be unpatriotic, over-indulgent of the welfare-dependent and of antagonistic foreigners, and scornful of civic, religious and cultural traditions embraced by the majority of Americans.

Forty years ago, there were William F. Buckley, an amiable, brilliant, patrician gadfly, personally friendly with the liberal elites, and Paul Harvey, a Chicago traditionalist only slightly to the right of the mainstream of the country. There were a few others, but nothing like the sharply dissentient figures who now evoke and express the anger and disillusionment of tens of millions of otherwise, mainly reasonable, Americans.

Three contemporary events triggered this schism: Vietnam, Watergate and the press’ self-commendation for its handling of both those events.

In the case of Vietnam, Richard Nixon believed that the South Vietnamese army’s victory in the fierce struggles of April and May 1972, with no U.S. ground support, but very heavy air support, indicated that a non-Communist regime in Saigon might survive if the United States was prepared to enforce the peace agreement with air power in the event of violations. Although the Senate ratified the agreement, it quickly assured that there would be no further significant support of South Vietnam, with the encouragement of the national media. Of course, we will never know, but there is a chance that Nixon was correct, and that the Saigon government might have survived the 15 years until international communism collapsed and American air interdiction became insuperably accurate, if the U.S. simply had honoured its pledges to Saigon.

As Vietnam was being progressively abandoned, Nixon was driven from office over the nonsensical Watergate affair. There were improprieties, and Nixon’s handling of the incident was incomprehensibly and uncharacteristically inept. But his presidency had been one of the most successful in the country’s history; it is not at all clear that he had committed any illegalities; the actual counts of impeachment were bunk; the extent of the president’s national security prerogative has never been constitutionally established, and driving him from office when more proportionate measures were available was not justified.

For their key role in these humiliations, the national media proclaimed themselves the saviours of American democracy, and for decades almost all journalists professed to be investigative journalists, which usually meant malicious myth-makers who were the enemies of almost anyone who was actually trying to accomplish anything. It was unutterably irritating, and millions of Americans knew intuitively that they had been disserved.

Instead of screaming epithets, looking down their professional noses and trying to quarantine and marginalize Rush Limbaugh and his fellow travellers, the traditional media of 2010 should try to regain the public’s trust. They could do this. There is certainly plenty to take issue with in what Rush and the rest put in their shop windows every day.

But most of these venerable media outlets have continued to adhere to the techniques that alienated so many of their readers and viewers. In the controversy over abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clergy, The New York Times, on March 25, produced a story accusing the present Pope of preventing any disciplining of a Wisconsin priest who apparently molested a large number of deaf boys between 1962 and 1974. The Times asserted that the clergyman was “never tried or disciplined,” and that the effort to do so “came to a sudden halt when he appealed” for leniency to then Cardinal Ratzinger.

In fact, the misconduct led to an absolute prohibition on the priest celebrating any sacraments in public or having any unsupervised access to minors or involvement in education. The Holy See published a direct rebuttal of almost unprecedented force and promptness the next day.

Cardinal Ratzinger changed the procedure in such cases from trials to an administrative process, reopened cases, and imposed accountability throughout the Church, and has met with groups of victims. His conduct has been reformist and well within the area of a man doing his best to deal with a very difficult problem, essentially of determining where the Church’s belief in the recoverability of human souls from sinful misconduct gives way to the obligation to hand over criminal cases to secular authorities. The Church has made many mistakes, apart from these horrible incidents themselves, and the Pope may have made mistakes, but he was doing his best in a very difficult position and there was no hint of the media-imputed official unconcern, or dishonesty.

But for The New York Times — the almost unapologetic employer of Walter Duranty, Stalin’s most useful idiot in the Western media, now surviving financially on a loan-shark’s lifeline from the less than impeccable Mexican businessman Carlos Slim — for an instant it was like looking for and excitedly producing the Watergate “smoking gun.” They reflexively and maliciously threw muck at the Pope and elicited a withering rebuke within a few hours. In setting out to destroy the moral authority of the world’s premier religious leader, they did savage violence to what was left of their own.

This is the sort of abuse of the public’s trust that, in addition to their own talents, keeps tens of millions of Americans listening to Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Ernest Canadian critics of these pundits are attacking a consequence, a symptom, and not so bad a symptom, of what is a very serious problem.

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NBC Becomes New Gay Advocate (Culture and Media Institute, 100414)

Partnership with gay magazine raises questions about coverage.

If anyone at NBC News has a sense of irony, they hide it well. Ironic is about the best you can say about a supposedly reputable, unbiased news organization taking up with a magazine called The Advocate. But there was NBC last month, announcing with a straight face (pardon the pun) a new partnership with The Advocate, a gay-oriented magazine.

According to Media Bistro, “The magazine’s online home, Advocate.com, will use NBC resources to produce daily news segments that will run online and on air via “The Advocate On-Air. NBC News, in turn, may use content and writers from The Advocate to report on issues relating to the LGBT community.”

In a statement, NBC News Channel president Bob Horner expressed optimism about the partnership:

The NBC News Channel prides itself on supporting the client’s mission. We respect the commitment Here Media [parent company of The Advocate] has to its community and we look forward to assisting The Advocate in its coverage of the issues important to the LGBT community.

NBC News Channel is the network’s version of a wire service.

Accuracy in Media raised concern about the partnership and content NBC could receive from the magazine, asking if someone will “vet the segments for accuracy” and warned, “otherwise, it will turn into a soapbox for The Advocate’s editors to tout what they see are the benefits of the LGBT lifestyle and omit the risks thereof.”

AIM is right to be concerned. NBC already has a history of promoting gay rights on its news programs.

“Today,” the network’s morning show, couldn’t find space in its four-hour length to report the day after the 2009 election about Maine citizens voting to uphold the definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. NBC correspondent Lee Cowan implied that proponents of same-sex marriage are the only ones “still willing to fight for the institution” of marriage in a June 2009 that questioned the relevance of marriage.

NBC has also been decidedly biased in its coverage “don’t ask, don’t tell.” An October 2009 “Today” report featured five sound bites from opponents of the policy and none from those in favor of it. NBC “Nightly News” followed the same script in July 2008, giving four sound bites to opponents of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and only one to proponents.

CMI reported in August 2008, NBC Universal expressed its support of the gay community at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention in a full page ad that read, “Your victories are our victories.” NBC Universal was also a “diamond sponsor” of the association’s annual “Headlines and Headliners” fundraiser in March 2010.

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Few Pulitzers On the Right Side (townhall.com, 100415)

by Diana West

Just as the Pulitzer Prizes come around every year, a conservative columnist comes around after them, dusting off the hard fact, as measured in an ever-expanding set of tally marks, that conservatives rarely get to pop a champagne cork over one of their own.

Take the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Since George F. Will won in 1977, William Safire (1978), Vermont Royster (1984), Charles Krauthammer (1987), Paul Gigot (2000), and Dorothy Rabinowitz (2001) have won as well, and good for them. But that’s six conservative columnists in 33 years. This year’s winner, Kathleen Parker, is sometimes seen as Rightish, but, with a penchant for smacking down social conservatives, she is perhaps too enlightened, Pulitzer-ainly speaking, to count. As Parker herself put it: “It’s only because I’m a conservative-basher that I’m now recognized after 23 years of toiling in the fields, right?”

Hard to say. But it fits the Pulitzer pattern. The best to way to win a Pulitzer still seems to be by “pleasing liberals with stories that advance their agenda,” as L. Brent Bozell III wrote in 2007. The chosen winners “demonstrate again the stranglehold that liberals and leftists enjoy when it comes to garnering recognition,” as George Shadroui put it in Frontpagemag.com in 2004. It is “the main business of the Pulitzer committees to hand out the Prizes to other liberals, both in the press and in the arts,” noted the New Criterion in 1992. And the conservative grumbling goes back farther than that.

With good reason. According to the conditions set by press baron Joseph Pulitzer himself when he created his eponymous awards a century ago, it turns out that we — meaning we conservatives — was (stet) robbed. That is, according to Pulitzer’s intentions, these prizes should really be going to conservatives.

I stumbled onto this scoop quite by chance after first leafing through an old essay by the great American writer Kenneth Roberts, author of a remarkable series of historical novels including “Northwest Passage” and “Oliver Wiswell.” Roberts was discussing what was already in the early 1930s an enduring mystery to him: why the Pulitzer Prize for novels (later fiction) was consistently awarded to books “that would have seriously affected Mr. Pulitzer’s blood pressure if he were still alive.”

Intrigued, I continued reading. According to the World Almanac Roberts consulted (a Pulitzer property, he notes), Pulitzer wanted to honor “the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” Wholesome? High American standards? Writing at a time of proletarian chic, Roberts went on to list a series of prize-winning books that had little wholesome or even American about them.

I found that the original playwriting criteria were similar. According to a 1918 New York Times report on early Pulitzer winners, the drama prize was meant for the New York-produced play that “shall best represent the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standard of good morals, good taste and good manners.”

The current Pulitzer Web site makes some note of its board “growing less conservative over the years in matters of taste,” adding: “In 1963 the drama jury nominated Edward Albee’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,’ but the board found the script insufficiently ‘uplifting,’ a complaint that related to arguments over sexual permissiveness and rough dialogue. In 1993 the prize went to Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America: Millennium Approaches,’ a play that dealt with problems of homosexuality and AIDS and whose script was replete with obscenities.”

Well, as long as it was “replete.”

Regarding editorial writing (the commentary prize didn’t kick in until later), the original criteria were more nebulous — “the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction.”

Maybe some of the first Prize winners, a pair of 1917 editorials from the Louisville Courier-Journal, can clue us in to what that “right direction” was. Written in support of U.S. involvement in World War I, one is called “Vae Victis” — Woe to the Vanquished — and the other, “War Has Its Compensations.”

I think it’s safe to say the Pulitzer Prize wasn’t dreamed up for Lefties.

Meanwhile, Kenneth Roberts somehow garnered his well-deserved Pulitzer — two months before he died in 1957.

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Beware of trusting the polls (National Post, 100611)

Scott Stinson

If there is one number that demonstrates the folly of putting too much stock in public opinion polling outside an election campaign, it is this: 61%.

Eight years ago this month, a national poll found that 61% of Canadians would vote for a Liberal party headed by Paul Martin.

He was not, however, leading the party at the time, nor was he even in Cabinet. In June, 2002, the long-time finance minister’s rivalry with prime minister Jean Chrétien was blown wide open. Mr. Martin returned to the back benches, and supporters who had lobbied for Mr. Chrétien’s resignation in private were now doing so in public.

That poll, incidentally, also suggested that Mr. Chrétien would easily win a fourth majority government as Liberal leader (with 42% support) if an election were held at that time. But, 61%! It was enough to send Liberal hearts aflutter at the dizzying prospect of a victory that would sweep the entire country, save perhaps that pesky Alberta. How many seats would Mr. Martin win? 200? 250? 300?

More like 135, it turned out. His share of the vote in the 2004 election: 36.7%, a tidy 20 points below his popularity among respondents when he was not, in fact, leader.

At the end of one of the stranger weeks in recent memory for the federal Liberals — rumours of merger with the NDP, calls from party members to formally endorse the prospect of a coalition, dismissals from leader Michael Ignatieff that such talk is “ridiculous” — questions are again being raised about how the party that has historically found it easiest to hold power in this country has made such a hash of it over the past decade.

The reasons are many, but in a broad sense the party in opposition has been one of great impatience. Liberals talk about the need to rebuild, but no one shows much appetite for it, focusing instead on finding the right moment to topple the minority Conservative government. And informing that impatience, right back to the point at which party members agitated a three-term prime minister out the door, has been polling data. Polls that gave Liberals hope for some future leader, or concern about the present one. Polls that told them they should force an election, or that they should try to avoid one.

But if that one number — 61% — says anything, it’s that running your party with an eye to what might happen is no way to run your party at all.

If there was one point at which the Liberals seemed to finally throw off the shackles of perceived public opinion, it was with the selection of Stéphane Dion as leader. Here was a guy who, relative to his rivals in the 2006 leadership race, was not front-runner material. But the party went through a proper contest and convention, and its members chose someone who quite plainly did not represent a short path to electoral victory. It was, some unnamed members told reporters that December, “not a disaster.” Mr. Dion might end up being the right guy in the long run, they said.

But a scant two weeks later, polls were reporting that the shiny-new Liberal leader was ahead of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. “NDP losing support to environment-friendly Liberals,” one headline noted.

Almost immediately, the ubiquitous “Liberal insiders” were quoted in media reports musing that Mr. Dion should consider moving quickly to bring down the Conservative government in order to capitalize on his honeymoon with voters. All that business about building a platform and taking the long view was already outdated thinking. Why bother when the brass ring was in reach?

Mr. Dion had no such plans, and set about doing those things one does when taking over a party: bringing on a staff, selecting a shadow Cabinet, developing policy.

Two months later, the polls delivered a new narrative, best encapsulated by this headline from February, 2007: “Dion’s sinking fortunes.” Mr. Harper was consistently polling ahead of the Liberal leader, thanks in part to Conservative attack ads. Now the unnamed Liberal insiders were giving mixed signals. Bring down the government before the numbers get worse, some said. Others argued that Mr. Dion was now forced to wait until the numbers improved. So it was throughout his leadership: the polls ebbed and flowed, and the entire period was a guessing game as to when Mr. Dion would get around to forcing an election. Whenever the numbers were right, his people said.

He never did, of course. Mr. Harper brought the government down himself in the fall of 2008, setting off a chain of events — election, coalition, prorogation — that resulted in Michael Ignatieff’s virtual acclamation as Liberal leader that December.

The guessing game began anew. Strike fast, some Liberals argued. Give the new guy some time, others insisted. Within six months, the polls were again giving hope. “Tories and Liberals in dead heat,” one headline said. That story, in mid-August, 2009, noted that Mr. Ignatieff was even polling only a few points behind Mr. Harper on the question of who would make the best prime minister.

Mr. Ignatieff must have believed the polling data, because he soon signalled his intent to bring down the government — his infamous “Mr. Harper, your time is up” moment. Again the positive polling numbers proved to be a mirage: by mid-September, the Tories had opened up a double-digit lead over the Liberals.

The election never happened, and there has been little serious talk of one since. Today’s polls that have sparked calls for change within the once-again restive Liberal ranks do not suggest that Mr. Ignatieff should force a vote. They suggest a coalition, or even a merger. They suggest greater promise under a new, hypothetical leader: Bob Rae, or even Jack Layton.

But Liberals might want to consider one other national polling number, this one from June, 1998, which suggested 45% support — more than Mr. Chrétien ever needed to win three majorities — for a man who was not even leader at the time of his party, the Progressive Conservatives. That man was Joe Clark. He shortly thereafter won the PC leadership back, and we all know how that turned out.

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Mainstream Media’s “Flotilla” Fraud (townhall.com, 100603)

by Joel Mowbray

While the diplomatic fallout from the botched raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla this week will not be known for some time, the mainstream media already has suffered a serious blow to its credibility. As the mainstream media told the story, a freedom-loving band of peace activists were stormed by armed Israeli commandos, resulting in the deaths of at least nine passengers.

What this narrative ignores, however, is the nature of the organizers and the mission itself. The people behind the so-called “Freedom Flotilla” have a long history with terrorists, including al Qaeda. One of the primary sponsors, the Turkish IHH, were identified by the CIA as far back as 1996 as a terrorist-tied entity with links to Iran, and French magistrate Jean-Louis Brougiere testified that IHH played an “important role” in the failed “millennium plot” in the U.S. in late 1999.

Also missing from the mainstream media coverage was that supplies from the flotilla could have been transported from an Israeli port by truck, after inspection, but that offer was flatly rejected. The reasoning was transparent, considering that flotilla spokeswoman Greta Berlin announced last week to the Agence France Press, “This mission is not about delivering humanitarian supplies, it’s about breaking Israel’s siege.”

Most tellingly, flotilla passengers were seen on Al-Jazeera last week chanting, “Khyber, Khyber,” a favorite chant of jihadists because it recalls a battle where Mohammed’s army is said to have killed large numbers of Jews.

Had the mainstream media been truly brave, outlets could have given full context, namely that the blockade of Gaza targets the Hamas government and is a joint enterprise of both Israel and Egypt.

There is no “humanitarian crisis,” as claimed by the flotilla’s propaganda, given that approximately 100 aid trucks enter Gaza every day. “Throughout the last few months,” according to the Israel Defense Forces website, “More than 1,200 tons of medicine and medical equipment, 155 tons of food, 2,900 tons of shoes and clothing and 17 million liters of diesel fuel were transferred in to the Gaza Strip.”

The “crisis” that is brewing in Gaza is Hamas’ failing political status. Worsening economic conditions—a direct result of the Israeli-Egyptian blockade—have seriously undermined Hamas’ standing. Media reports out of Gaza in recent months indicate that Hamas can’t meet its government payroll, and ordinary Gazans are on edge.

But not surprisingly, few of these facts found their way into the mainstream media’s coverage.

In a report that could well have been written by the flotilla organizers themselves, the Associated Press wrote of the “violent takeover” and “bloody predawn confrontation” that was “yet another blow to Israel’s international image, already tarnished by war crimes accusations in Gaza and its 3-year-old blockade of the impoverished Palestinian territory.”

Not until the fifth paragraph does the AP even mention that the “impoverished Palestinian territory” is controlled by the “militant Hamas group.”

At least the AP acknowledged that the blockade is not a solo Israeli effort, but rather something the Jewish state has done in conjunction with its Arab neighbor Egypt. The Washington Post yesterday referred to various governments who have “demanded that Israel end its Gaza blockade.” Even though Egypt was mentioned in the story, the Post reporter neglected to note that the Arab state had been a full partner in targeting Hamas with the blockade.

Not to be outdone by others in the mainstream media, though, the New York Times spent considerable time on its website comparing the terrorist-tied angry mob that ambushed and attacked Israeli soldiers to the Holocaust survivors on the Exodus 1947 ship, who were seeking refuge in the Holy Land.

As biased as the media coverage has been, however, it is clear that Israel contributed to the advancement of the flotilla organizers’ propaganda.

No other nation wears a target on its back the way the Jewish state does. Israeli officials know their every action will be scrutinized and dissected under the media microscope, which makes their failure to plan for angry mobs greeting their soldiers as they boarded the boat simply mystifying. Even most Israelis believe that the situation should have been handled differently.

Israel’s inability to deal effectively with a double standard, however, does not excuse the existence of that double standard.

Much like the narrative of Israel’s “peace-loving” enemies, the story of the mainstream media’s downfall is pretty straightforward. As the news titans have continued to disregard the truth, the general public has likewise decided to disregard them.

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Why the Helen Thomas Case Makes Me Nervous (townhall.com, 100609)

by David Harsanyi

A few months ago, a picture appeared in The Denver Post. On a local college campus — an alleged stronghold of free inquiry and debate — a leftist student, protesting some perceived injustice, was holding a sign that argued:

“Hate speech is not free speech!”

Perhaps this earnest 20-something had not fully thought through her illiberal position on “tolerable” political speech. Perhaps she was part of that broader movement that sees “hate” everywhere among its ideological opponents. Either way, it’s tragic that so many young people misunderstand the idea of open debate — or simply devalue liberty.

Some people accept that certain things cannot — rather than should not — be said. Beyond the worrisome assaults on free speech (fairness doctrines, higher education, etc.) there is a slipperier concern. Which brings me to Helen Thomas’ now infamous and career-ending comment, in which she helpfully suggested that the Jews get “the hell out of Palestine.”

True, I find some comfort in knowing that this unprofessional crackpot never will haunt a president, common sense or the public again. But I wince at the rapidity of her demise. And I feel a nagging anxiety about a journalist’s losing her job over nothing more than a controversial statement.

“She should lose her job over this,” former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said before Thomas gave in to a forced retirement. “As someone who is Jewish and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling.”

Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former roving reporter for Hearst (which syndicated Thomas’ column), in a letter urged the company “strenuously” to “cut all ties” with Thomas “as quickly as possible.”

It seems an odd reaction, especially for conservatives, who are accused regularly of thought crimes and hate speech by outfits like Media Matters, which are in the business of smearing and discrediting those who disagree with them.

But an opinion — in Thomas’ case, an ugly opinion that in all probability is more common than some people might believe — is no more than the strength of the logic behind it. As a regular defender of the moral right of Israel to fight the theocrats and fascists whom Thomas embraces, I never thought she was very credible or articulate on the topic, and she is unworthy of the over-the-top reactions of critics.

Nevertheless, at this point in her career, the 89-year-old was still a columnist for Hearst newspapers. A columnist offers provocative views. You don’t have to like Thomas, and you don’t have to read her columns, but having a disdain for Jews in general or Israel in particular is hardly the most offensive thought that’s kicking around.

Though I don’t hold an earthly stake in debates over God, Bill Maher’s ludicrous anti-Catholic rants or a tome from a polemist like Christopher Hitchens (who condemns all religion as a dangerous farce) might be “appalling” to rather large swaths of the public. Are certain topics off the table?

Of course, I am not suggesting that Thomas has a birthright to sit in the front row at a White House news conference (a situation that hasn’t made sense for at least three decades) or that anyone has an inalienable right to pontificate about the world for a newspaper chain or anyone else.

And no, I can’t mourn the loss of Helen Thomas’ detestable opinions. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel some trepidation about the ease in which some voices — in this case, one voice that is probably more honest than others of similar ideological disposition — can be expelled from the conversation simply for offending.

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Bathing in the Rubicon: Truth Versus the Polls (Christian Post, 100621)

By Chuck Colson

According to a new survey by the Gallup organization, for the first time a majority of Americans—53%—believe that gay and lesbian relationships are morally acceptable. Only 43% of Americans call these relationships morally wrong.

This is a dramatic change from the beginning of the millennium. In 2001, only 40% of those surveyed called same-sex relationships “morally acceptable” while 53% called them “morally wrong.”

According to Gallup, the “gradual increase in public acceptance of gay relations” is “almost exclusively” a result of changing attitudes among males towards homosexuality. This is especially the case among men under the age of 50.

The change in attitudes has happened despite little, if any change, in beliefs about the causes of same-sex attraction. Americans are evenly divided on the “nature versus nurture” explanation, and have been for a long while.

The only good news from the survey results is that 53% of those polled are against same-sex “marriage,” which is “down slightly” from last year.

Not surprisingly, gay-rights activists are ecstatic over the results. At the Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan called the results a cultural “Rubicon” and rejoiced in the failure of those he labels “Christianists”—a nice backhanded comparison to “Islamists.”

Christian commentator Rod Dreher, while he completely disagrees with Sullivan on the issue, agrees that the tide has turned.

But these results were to be expected-given the relentless barrage of pro-gay media coverage and the overwhelmingly positive depiction of same-sex relationships in popular culture.

A recent New York Times article noted that people are “starting not to notice” when celebrities come out of the closet. The Times lamented that what was “once seen as a defiant and courageous act of such social and political significance” has “has lost some of its potency.”

I wonder why? Could it be that, if your perception of the world is shaped by pop culture, you expect a lot of people to be gay? Could it be that after years of being told by elite media, like the Times, that being gay is “no big deal,” people treat the news that someone is gay as “no big deal”?

The elite molders of opinion have done their job well. We live in a world where moral qualms about homosexuality are regarded as bigotry. Today it requires more courage, as well as strength, to swim against the cultural tide and express any reservation about homosexual relationships.

But swim we must. What is true has never been a question to be decided by polls or popular opinion. Truth isn’t “democratic”—it’s something that God has written into the very fabric of nature.

Of course, that idea is even less popular than our beliefs about same-sex relationships. We in the West have elevated autonomy, which literally means “self law” into our highest value. Now listen to me folks, this is going to be a wake-up call. The tide has turned against Christian in the culture because we haven’t been doing our job in the church. Culture matters. Politics follows culture. That’s why we’ve got to start making a better case. You can come to the Colson Center and get all kinds of resources to winsomely present our arguments.

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Liberal Journalists Plotted to Protect Obama From Rev. Wright Scandal, Online Mag Says (Foxnews, 100720)

A group of liberal journalists in 2008 sought to sweep under the rug the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal that threatened to derail then-Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller, an online publication founded by Tucker Carlson, a conservative contributor for Fox News.

The documents offer evidence to conservative critics who have long held that the mainstream media were in the tank for Obama, and bolsters the argument that reporters with major news outlets are biased in their coverage.

Journalists working for Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic expressed outrage over the tough questioning Obama received from ABC anchors Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos at a debate and some of them plotted to protect Obama from the swirling controversy, according to the Daily Caller.

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent pressed his fellow journalists to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by shifting topics to one of Obama’s conservative critics, the Daily Caller reported.

“Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists,” Ackerman wrote.

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, urged his fellow members of Journolist, a private listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, to do “what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have.”

“This isn’t about defending Obama,” he wrote. “This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

The Journolist members went as far as issuing a statement – one that was shaped with the help of Jared Bernstein who went on to become Vice President Biden’s top economist — calling the debate “a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world.”

Journolist was shut down last month after leaks exposing member Dave Wiegel’s scornful remarks of conservatives led to his resignation at the Washington Post as a blogger covering the conservative movement.

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The Times, the Mosque and Islam — No Moral Nuance (townhall.com, 100914)

Dennis Prager

One of the most common self-assessments of the left is that conservatives rarely see nuances in moral questions, while liberals always do.

That this is a false conceit can be demonstrated with regard to almost any position held by the left. There is no nuance in liberal positions on abortion, race-based affirmative action, capital punishment, embryonic stem cell research or just about any other social issue.

Two such issues are the current Cordoba House Islamic center controversy and Americans’ perceptions of Islam.

To liberals commenting on these issues, all that needs to be said are two things: First, Islam is a religion of peace and even the most sophisticated questioning of that claim is an expression of nativism, bigotry, xenophobia and Islamophobia. Second, the Muslim imam in New York City has a right to build his $100-million Islamic center two blocks from the spot where thousands of Americans were incinerated by 19 Muslims in the name of Islam. That no conservative spokesman has challenged the imam’s right to build the center, only the rightness of the act, is ignored whenever The New York Times, for example, discusses the issue.

The truth is that the Right’s views of Muslims, the Cordoba House, and Islam are considerably more nuanced than those of the Left.

Remember — we are comparing elite with elite, not the elite left with dregs like the Gainesville “pastor” of a “50-member church” who planned an “International Quran Burning Day” and who was universally dismissed on the right as a publicity seeking jackass.

The elite right — the leading conservative columnists, editorial pages and vast majority of major talk-show hosts — readily and regularly distinguish between jihadists and their American Muslim neighbor across the street.

But the left rarely distinguishes between bigoted haters and Americans who have questions about contemporary Islam and oppose the building of a $100 million Islamic center two blocks from ground zero.

This past Sunday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offered another example of left-wing nuance-free attacks on Americans who have any moral reservations about the world of Islam today.

Kristof began his column with an attack on the “venomous and debased discourse about Islam” in America.

He gives one example: New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, a rather thoughtful lifelong liberal, who actually had the temerity to raise moral concerns about Islam in a recent article. Peretz asked, for example, “Is not western society, imperfect as it may be ... immensely more liberal than the domains of Islam?”

And this: “This intense epidemic of (Islamic) slaughter has been going on for nearly a decade and a half...without protest, without anything. And it has been going for decades and centuries before that.”

Kristof ignores every issue raised by Peretz and quotes one sentence to cite Peretz’s article as an example of the “venomous and debased the discourse about Islam” permeating America. To The New York Times and the rest of the left, the question here is not whether what Peretz wrote is true — because when it comes to the right, the left is concerned with finding bigotry, not truth.

“Nativists are back on the warpath,” Kristof went on to write.

Question: Can Kristof name any opponents of the Cordoba center or anyone else who vocalizes any questions about the moral state of the contemporary Muslim world whom he does not consider a nativist or bigot?

Kristof: “In America, bigoted comments about Islam often seem to come from people who have never visited a mosque and know few if any Muslims.”

Question: Would Kristof agree that those on the left who declare that “Islam is a religion of peace” and who claim to see no moral differences between the contemporary Muslim world and the contemporary Christian, Jewish and Buddhist worlds, also have “never visited a mosque and know few if any Muslims?”

Kristof: “In their ignorance, they mirror the anti-Semitism that I hear in Muslim countries from people who have never met a Jew.”

That is about as non-nuanced, as unsophisticated a statement as one can make on this is or any issue. In many Muslim countries, the media are saturated with “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” type Jew-hatred, with popular TV shows depicting Jews as killing Muslim children for their blood, and calls for extermination of the Jewish state. Nowhere in America is there anything regarding Muslims remotely analogous to the anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.

Another lack of nuance:

Kristof: “One American university professor wrote to me that ‘every Muslim in the world’ believes that the proposed Manhattan Islamic center would symbolize triumph over America. That reminded me of Pakistanis who used to tell me that ‘every Jew’ knew of 9/11 in advance, so that none died in the World Trade Center.”

Here is the (nuanced) truth: Vast numbers of Muslims believe that Jews stayed away from the World Trade Center on 9/11. That is a lie — not one Jew on earth knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance. But it is not a lie that there are millions of Muslims who believe that a giant Islamic center and mosque near ground zero would be a sign of Muslim victory.

The same day Kristof’s simplistic view of the mosque issue was published, AOL News reported on a demonstration against the mosque. It quoted a man named Ron Silverados, identified as “a 57-year-old road striper from Long Island:” “I’m tired of saying this but this isn’t a religious issue ... it is a moral issue.”

There was more moral nuance in the road striper’s comment than in all the liberal columns and editorials of The New York Times.

If the left were primarily concerned with bigotry, it would be preoccupied with the most bigoted places on earth — many Islamic nations. But in general, the left hates the right more than it hates bigotry. And that leads to a world devoid of moral nuance.

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NPR Finally Finds An Excuse To Fire Juan Williams (townhall.com, 101021)

Guy Benson

Mere moments before he uttered the words that ended his long and distinguished career at National Public Radio, Juan Williams foretold his own demise:

“I think political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality.”

Williams proceeded to address reality:

“When I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

That he spent the balance of the segment drawing important distinctions between Islam and its radical adherents was, evidently, immaterial to the powers-that-be at NPR. Williams had already committed the unpardonable sin of breaking liberal orthodoxy and dealing honestly with a controversial subject. Worse, did so on Fox News.

Many people have written, and will continue to write, far more eloquently about the implications of this disgraceful episode than I, but it’s important to note that this kerfuffle says far more about NPR than it does about Juan Williams. (Disclosure: I have met Juan on several occasions and find him to be a kind, thoughtful, and serious person, even though we often disagree politically).

The truth is that NPR has been fishing for a pretext to terminate Williams for some time. In February of 2009, Williams — again appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor” — had the temerity to offer unflattering analysis of Michelle Obama as a political liability. This set off a firestorm among (literally) dozens of the bien pensants who populate NPR’s boardroom and listening audience. In a melodramatic column, the radio network’s ombudsman — excuse me, ombudswoman — chided Williams for his tendency to “speak one way on NPR and another on Fox.” As I wrote at the time, tailoring one’s style to his intended audience is Media 101. The network ultimately directed Williams to drop all on-screen mentions of their precious brand name during future “O’Reilly” appearances.

One of the more troubling elements of the 2009 flare-up was the weight NPR seemed to assign to a relatively insignificant number of listener complaints. At the time, NPR ombudsperson Alicia Shepard wrote the following hand-wringing paragraph in her column addressing the matter:

Last year, 378 listeners emailed me complaints and frustrations about things Williams said on Fox. The listener themes are similar: Williams “dishonors NPR.” He’s an “embarrassment to NPR.” “NPR should severe (sic) their relationship with him.”

The latest flap involves Williams’ comment on Fox about First Lady Michelle Obama. To date, I’ve received 56 angry emails.

Now that her network has delivered a politically-correct coup de grace against Williams, Shepard is trotting out these same statistics in an apparent effort to justify the firing. From today’s New York Times:

Alicia C. Shepard, the NPR ombudswoman, said at the time that Mr. Williams was a “lightning rod” for the public radio organization in part because he “tends to speak one way on NPR and another on Fox.”

Ms. Shepard said she had received 378 listener e-mails in 2008 listing complaints and frustrations about Mr. Williams.

That averages out to about one complaint per day. Is that all it takes to achieve “lightning rod” status at NPR? Given this preposterously low bar, might conservatives undertake a campaign to inundate NPR with “complaints and frustrations” against, say, Ombudsperson Alicia Shepard? We might even manage to produce two grievances per day, if we really try.

Such an effort would prove fruitless, of course, unless its target colored outside socially-permissible lines, as defined by the Left. In a chilling new twist, the Left-wing hacks at Media Matters — who helped drive this meme — are now calling on NPR to “address” commentator Mara Liasson’s “association” with Fox. One scalp is never enough for the Thought Police.

Juan Williams is not a bigot; he merely articulated on national television a sentiment shared by countless Americans, before defending peaceable Muslims against broad-brush stereotypes. Williams’ broader context and motivation were immaterial; this was NPR’s opportunity to rid itself of an ideologically unpredictable free thinker, so his fate was sealed. Williams says NPR executive Ellen Weiss “abruptly” dismissed him over the phone and denied him even the courtesy of an in-person meeting to discuss the controversial TV segment. She reportedly told him, “There’s nothing you can say that will change my mind.” Liberalism, distilled.

I suspect that Juan Williams will be better off now that he’s free from NPR’s ponderous hand, but the reverse isn’t true. National Public Radio has foolishly purged one of its most respected analysts, and in the process, has laid bare its perverse values and priorities. NPR has again proven itself unworthy of our tax dollars, to which it owes its very existence. If the network would prefer to go all-in and become National Soros Radio, that’s their prerogative. But as long as it’s subsidized by American Taxpayers and bears the name National Public Radio, we the public should demand that it either radically alter its course, or go private.

Shame on NPR.

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NPR firing assists the fatwa on free speech (National Post, 101023)

Rex Murphy

Commentator Juan Williams got fired from a 10-year stint with National Public Radio this week for saying “When I get on [a] plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

What Mr. Williams described might be an eccentric reaction; it might be commonplace. But, after the Twin Towers, after the Pentagon, after London and Madrid and all the rest, Mr. Williams’ response here isn’t irrational. Nor can it be confused with a blanket attack on all Muslims. In post-9/11 America, thanks mainly to Islamist terrorist Osama bin Laden and 19 Muslim hijackers, there is for many people a frisson of anxiety surrounding the subject of Muslims, airports and airplanes. Mr. Williams’ crime was to mention its existence.

Juan Williams is a long-time liberal commentator and pundit, an acknowledged authority on the civil rights moments and as decent a personality as one can hope for in present-day journalism. To smear him as a bigot, which in effect NPR has done, is a testament to how twisted the public conversation can become under the Kafkaesque impulses of political correctness.

How do PC codes operate? For a perceived offence against Islam by a non-Muslim, as in the Williams case, the response is swift and terrible: The “guilty” party loses his job. Opponents of the Cordoba mosque near the site of 9/11, to take another current instance, are slandered as monsters of intolerance.

Meanwhile, this hypersensitivity has its inverted mirror. Even as certain public bodies such as NPR strain themselves to root out the mere scent of intolerance toward Islam, Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris, who idly proposed a “Let’s Draw Mohammed Day” (and later withdrew all association with that project and apologized), is now in hiding after being declared a “prime target for death” in a fatwa. Have we heard as much about her and her plight — more drastic by far than the state of Juan Williams’ nerves at an airport — as about the NPR flap? Is her story not more news-worthy? Yet, the threat to kill a citizen in a democracy because she is alleged to have “offended” Islam is almost treated as normative. No hot and pressing edicts from NPR on that fatwa.

The seminal moment in all of this, as most people know, was the publication of The Satanic Verses and the fatwa against its author, Salman Rushdie. Here in the West — despite a considerable wave of opprobrium and condemnation for the barbarism of seeking Rushdie’s life over something he wrote — the full insolence of that moment was never fully appreciated.

But time and events must have taught us something. By the emergence of the now infamous Danish cartoons, too many in the West had learned that deference and cowardice, masquerading under the convenient lingo of sensitivity, was the easier path. On “sensitivity to religion” grounds, 99% of the West’s broadcasters and newspapers did not print those innocuous cartoons.

Years later, a terrorist shoots up an army base in Fort Hood yelling allah akbar, and to this day some mainline publications confess to having no idea about the motives behind his killings. Reality cannot be abridged or ignored to this degree without eventual cost.

What does NPR’s firing of Williams tell us? It tells us most shamefully that NPR long ago abandoned the ideals of real free speech and a real free press when they come into the slightest clash with the superior imperatives of political correctness. And NPR is far from alone is this dereliction. These days, too many genuflect where others once stood and fought.

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Fox News Makes You Stupid? (townhall.com, 101228)

Brent Bozell

There is nothing the left believes in more robotically than the stupidity of conservatives. Otherwise, they would not be conservatives. When liberals get routed in an election, they do not question themselves. The first — and for most, only — verdict is that the American people were disastrously flooded by a tsunami of stupidity and misinformation.

So it’s not surprising that left-wing bloggers would rejoice when they can write the headline “New Study Proves That Fox News Makes You Stupid.” That’s the Daily Kos headline. According to them, Fox News is “deliberately misinforming their viewers” to help Republicans, who “benefited from the ignorance Fox News helped to proliferate,” as voters “based their decisions on demonstrably false information.”

The liberal pranksters masquerading as pollsters at the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) are at it again. In a new survey, they claim that those who watched Fox News Channel on a daily basis were significantly more likely to believe in “misinformation.” But how is that word defined? Look at the details and you will be floored by the misinformation — coming from the pollsters themselves.

Here’s Exhibit A: Fox viewers were more likely to believe “Among economists who have estimated the effect of the health reform law on the federal budget deficit over the next ten years, more think it will increase the deficit.”

That is misinformation? This question is not about facts at all. It’s about the opinions of economists looking into a crystal ball, and PIPA’s “economists” estimate that herding 35 million uninsured Americans into a new federal entitlement program is going to reduce the deficit. This assertion by liberals that ObamaCare would cut deficits isn’t technically a “lie” — yet. It is merely a patently ridiculous claim that doesn’t acknowledge the real world. But somehow, Fox News viewers are tagged as the “misinformed” dummies, because their opinions are grounded in logic.

Here’s Exhibit B: Fox viewers were more likely to believe “Most economists who have studied it estimate that the stimulus legislation saved or created a few jobs or caused job losses.” Once again, this isn’t about facts, but about economists and their estimation. The idea that there is “misinformation” afoot, and it’s not about the incredibly nebulous and politicized notion of “saving or creating” jobs — something so nebulous it can never be factually verified — shows you the bias of the PIPA pollsters.

Let’s go all the way back to the drawing board on this poll. Is it fair — whether the pollsters are liberals or conservatives — to expect the American people to identify correctly the estimates made by a panel of economists organized by news editors of The Wall Street Journal? In a random polling sample, how many memorizing Journal subscribers are you going to find?

There is a more serious polling problem here for PIPA. The poll was done from Nov. 6-15, 2010, with a sample size of 848 respondents, for a margin of error of 3.4%. Given that an average primetime audience of Fox News is 2.2 million out of a nation of more than 300 million people, that’s 0.7%. Out of 848 poll respondents, 0.7% would give us total of about six Fox viewers. In their own polling breakdown, PIPA says 17% said they were almost-daily Fox viewers, or about 145 people. Even that is simply not high enough to test in a serious poll.

That is why this survey wasn’t food for the national media, but scraps left for craven bloggers who know nothing about facts and care less about the truth.

Almost every piece of “misinformation” the PIPA people floated to measure how conservatives misunderstood Obama involved blatant spinning about Obama’s role in the auto bailout or the TARP program, or how the “stimulus” included tax cuts, or even Obama’s birth certificate.

They’re not alone in trying to nail Fox. In August 2009, an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reported 72% of self-identified Fox News viewers believed the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% believed it will lead to a government takeover, 69% thought it would use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believed that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.

Sadly for NBC, this “misinformation” is already coming true: On Christmas, The New York Times reported “death panels” are back in the ObamaCare regulations, and we knew by midsummer that states were funding abortions through ObamaCare.

These polls identify the real liberal fear: that someone will trust Fox News to tell them things the liberal media try to crush and bury.

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Cultural Winners and Losers, 2010 (townhall.com, 101231)

Brent Bozell

2010 may have been an encouraging year for political conservatives, but it wasn’t so rosy for America’s culture. The most depressing result was the Second Circuit Court of Appeals granting our television networks the right to employ the nastiest curse words in front of children at any hour of the broadcast day.

In her opinion, Judge Rosemary Pooler insisted that the TV networks weren’t pushing the envelope like “a petulant teenager angling for a later curfew”; they were good people with a “a good faith desire to comply with the FCC’s indecency regime.” The judge should win some sort of Alice-in-Wonderland prize for declaring the absolute opposite of all the evidence right in front of her face. Here are my other choices for other cultural winners and losers this year:

Loser: Perhaps inspired by Pooler, CBS put out a sitcom with the title “(Bleep) My Dad Says.” Critics were bored. Viewers flushed it.

Winner: Tim Tebow. The quarterback’s heartwarming pro-life ad with his mother during the Super Bowl was so winning, and so un-political, you could see why CBS would allow it.

Losers: The radical feminists who protested this ad as a vicious sermon without seeing it. How embarrassing. Let’s add Chicago-based sports marketer John Rowady, who sneered Tebow was ruining his career in Advertising Age magazine: “His promotion of his ‘belief system’ has built a perception throughout the league that he has a long way to mature from a business perspective, especially in the fast lane of the NFL.”

Tebow wasn’t harmed: He was drafted in the first round by the Denver Broncos, and at year’s end, he was starting and leading the Broncos to victory.

Winner: Sandra Bullock. Defying the Hollywood odds, she won an Oscar for her heartfelt portrayal of Leigh Ann Touhy, whose Memphis family adopted a black teen named Michael Oher and loved him into college and then a starting job with the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens. Critics hated the film, but America loved it. One reviewer found it “contrived, storybook-sweet, credulity-straining and — um, true.”

Loser: Fox’s “Family Guy” is always looking for a new low in sick jokes. They found one when baby Stewie and his dog, Brian, were accidentally locked in a bank vault. The baby orders the dog to eat the contents of his diaper. When the dog actually eats the baby feces, the baby vomits and then says, “Got some dessert for you.” The dog then eats the vomit. The dog also licked the baby’s rear end clean, so Stewie could boast to the otherwise empty vault that the dog “French-kissed my bottom clean.”

Earth to Judge Pooler: Networks never “push the envelope”? Millions of children are exposed to this garbage.

Loser: Garry Trudeau, who scheduled a comic strip on Christmas Day that spewed hate at God. A female soldier said her chaplain “yells at God a lot.” A female social worker replied: “He deserves it. In my extremely humble opinion.”

Winner: Charlie Daniels. His blazing violin graced an ad for Geico, and his new album, “Land That I Love,” underlined the strong emphasis on patriotism in his music. That’s a snapshot of his career, a love affair with his country that he has expressed in song, both here and everywhere our military serves, for more than a half-century.

Loser: Louis CK, promoted by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” as “one of my favorite comedians.” As they were joking about being bleeped by censors, Louis said, “I was going to say that the Pope f—ed boys and I didn’t have time.” After sick laughs, he insisted he was serious: “I do think he does. Can I defend that before we go away? ... Well here’s the thing. He lets other people do it,” and you are either outraged, or you are participating in it. Oddly, Stewart later held a “Rally for Sanity” to condemn vicious insults.

Winner: family films. Studio heads were shocked again by surprise hits like the remake of “The Karate Kid,” which grossed more than $175 million. None of the top 15 movies received an “R” rating. Six of the top 15 movies were animated, and at No. 1 in box-office receipts (with more than $415 million) was G-rated “Toy Story 3.” A St. Petersburg Times critic suggested it wasn’t just the best film of the summer; it could be Best Picture of 2010. Quality doesn’t have to equal perversity.

Children are good at nagging and dragging their parents to the cineplex. Someone in Tinseltown should just wake up and smell the popcorn.

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Parents Group Petitions Congress, Attorney General to Investigate MTV for Child Pornography in ‘Skins’ Series (Foxnews, 110120)

Is MTV a purveyor of kiddie porn?

The Parents Television Council wants to find out.

The media watchdog group called on lawmakers and law enforcement officials Thursday to open an investigation regarding possible child pornography and exploitation on the cable network’s new series “Skins.”

“On January 17, the Viacom-owned cable network MTV aired a teenager-based drama, ‘Skins.’ The episode included all manner of foul language, illegal drug use, illegal activity as well as thoroughly pervasive sexual content,” PTC President Tim Winter said in a letter sent to the chairmen of the U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committees and the Department of Justice. “Many of the actors appearing in the show are below the age of 18. It is clear that Viacom has knowingly produced material that may well be in violation of [several] federal statutes.”

“Since it is not necessary for Viacom or MTV to distribute the material in order to be in violation of the law, we call upon your committees to immediately investigate Viacom and MTV for the production of this material,” Winter said in the statement. “Furthermore, we urge you in the strongest possible terms to compel the attorney general to mount an investigation by the Department of Justice into whether the production of ‘Skins’ has violated federal law meant to protect minors from exploitation.”

The controversial British import series “Skins” made its debut on the cable network last Monday, causing uproar for its frank depiction of teenage sex and drug use. But unlike MTV’s envelope-pushing shows of the past, “Skins” features underage actors engaged in sexual situations. The youngest star of the show is 15.

“Putting aside whether it is socially acceptable, I certainly believe that MTV is unnecessarily tempting fate,” Ian Friedman, an attorney specializing in computer-based sex offenses, told FOX411.

“It is not clear as to whether MTV is in violation of federal or state child pornography laws, but that does not mean that they won’t end up defending themselves somewhere in the United States,” Friedman said, noting that attitudes toward nudity and sexuality are far more lax in the show’s native England.

According to The New York Times, a series of panicked meetings took place at MTV headquarters in New York on Tuesday, where one executive allegedly even discussed the possibility of criminal charges and jail time. Reportedly, nervous execs forced producers to edit out some of the more explicit content from future episodes.

But even if potentially damaging footage is edited out, that may not be enough to protect MTV from legal repercussions, said Friedman.

“While the images that are portrayed on television may be considered legal, that may not be the case for the edited footage,” Friedman said, echoing the view of the PTC in their statement. “If that actor is underage and under the age of consent, possessing that raw footage may be problematic.”

With “Skins,” MTV execs knew that they had a controversial show on their hands, but one that they hoped would be a hit, a source close to the network told FOX411.

“When (MTV programming president) Tony DiSanto and (senior VP of series development) Liz Gateley landed ‘Skins,’ everyone at MTV couldn’t stop congratulating each other,” the MTV insider said. “They acquired a show that became a cult favorite in the UK, and they knew that casting actual teens doing what teens actually do was going to be controversial, ground-breaking — and a huge hit for them.”

But was it worth it? “This situation presents a minefield of legal issues that may not have been considered prior to filming,” Friedman said. “In the event that some of the footage does constitute child pornography or obscene material, MTV will face the dilemma of what to do with the material. To discard it now may raise another host of legal issues pertaining to the destruction of evidence.”

MTV defended its show in a statement released Thursday: “‘Skins’ is a show that addresses real-world issues confronting teens in a frank way. We review all of our shows and work with all of our producers on an ongoing basis to ensure our shows comply with laws and community standards. We are confident that the episodes of ‘Skins’ will not only comply with all applicable legal requirements, but also with our responsibilities to our viewers. We also have taken numerous steps to alert viewers to the strong subject matter so that they can choose for themselves whether it is appropriate.”

“Skins” is rated TV-MA. According to tvguidelines.org, a TV-MA rating signifies that the program “is specifically designed to be viewed by adults and therefore may be unsuitable for children under 17.”

Nielsen ratings for the premiere, which was heavily promoted during MTV’s TV-14 hit “Jersey Shore,” show that it drew 1.2 million people younger than 18, or more than a third of its total audience.

“If MTV were my client, I would advise them to scale it back some,” Friedman said. “I do not see any benefit here except maybe an initial boost in ratings. The question may become whether it was worth it in the end.”

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By the Skins of Their Teeth – Is a New MTV Series Child Pornography? (Christian Post, 110126)

By R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

MTV turns 30 this year, and it is wasting no time as it rushes headlong into a mid-life crisis. The cable network, first known as Music Television, pioneered the music video as constant entertainment and, from the beginning, it pushed the boundaries of morality and taste. Indeed, it pushed far past those boundaries.

The network, now older than many of its young viewers, first flaunted parental concerns with music videos that featured explicit sexuality. Later, it added racy programming to its mix, effectively competing against more traditional networks for viewers. The programs brought more viewers - and plenty of controversy as well.

In recent years, the network has been less controversial, but this says far more about a shift in social standards than about MTV itself. Once a transgression goes commercial, it loses some of its shock value.

Until now, that is. In recent days, news reports indicate that MTV is having second thoughts about one of its prized new programs, “Skins.” The MTV product is modeled after a popular program of the same name in Britain. Nothing quite like it has ever been seen on U.S. television screens.

The problem? MTV is evidently worried that its prized new product might violate laws against child pornography. Here is how Brian Stelter of The New York Times reported the issue:

Child pornography is defined by the United States as any visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. In some cases, “a picture of a naked child may constitute illegal child pornography if it is sufficiently sexually suggestive,” according to the Justice Department’s legal guidance. Anyone younger than 18 is considered to be a minor. The youngest cast member on “Skins” is 15.

The sex acts portrayed on “Skins” pretty much cover the waterfront of modern sexuality. There is no question that MTV will draw an audience. The big question confronted by the network is whether the show will draw child pornography charges as well.

David Carr, author of “The Media Equation” column at the Times, explained that “the series is meant to provoke.” He suggests, plausibly enough, that MTV executives did not “set out to make child pornography,” but they clearly did not set out not to make child pornography, either.

Evidently, the concerns are rather urgent at MTV’s headquarters. As Brian Stelter reported last week:

It is unclear when MTV first realized that the show may be vulnerable to child pornography charges. On Tuesday, a flurry of meetings took place at the network’s headquarters in New York, according to an executive who attended some of the meetings and spoke only on the condition of anonymity. In one of the meetings, the executives wondered aloud who could possibly face criminal prosecution and jail time if the episodes were broadcast without changes.

It should tell you just about everything you need to know that MTV executives “wondered aloud” if they might do jail time for child pornography by broadcasting the series. Have you ever worried about that at your office or place of work?

It is at this point that David Carr levels his most serious argument. “In a cluttered programming era, controversy is oxygen, so MTV was undoubtedly happy with the tsk-tsking the show incited in advance. But objectifying teenage pathology, along with teenage bodies, is a complicated business - and the business that MTV is in.”

Objectifying parental nightmares is indeed “the business that MTV is in.” And, as Carr - the father of a 14-year-old daughter - suggests, “since its inception, MTV has pushed this boundary as hard as any major media company ever has and may finally have crossed a line that will be hard to scramble back across.”

MTV is owned by media giant Viacom, and that conglomerate is now complicit in this mess. MTV executives may or may not change the upcoming third episode of the series (the episode of greatest current concern), but they appear determined to stand behind their product. The series may or may not draw criminal child pornography charges, but the fact that executives worry about this possibility reveals the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the enterprise.

And, as is so often the case, MTV may even find a way to benefit from this very controversy. After all, “controversy is oxygen.” As with all pornography, the market runs by supply and demand. In a fallen world, the distortions of sexuality always seem to draw an audience. In this case, the audience is mostly made up of young people who are told that the drugs and sex on “Skins” are “realistic.”

Sadly enough, in far too many cases, this series might actually be realistic. That should break our hearts, but not our resolve to protect our children - and as many young people as we can reach - from this kind of “realism.”

Does “Skins” cross the legal line of criminal child pornography? Just imagine the moral culpability of a network whose executives even have to ask the question.

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Dear Mainstream Media Reporter Who Wasted My Time (townhall.com, 110210)

Email Ann Coulter

I’ve been finishing my next book and only able to catch bits and pieces of the news this month, but, based on what I’ve heard from the mainstream media, I’m pretty sure the conservative movement is now being led either by Jared Loughner or GOProud’s president, Chris Barron.

In honor of the gays who have come out of the closet as Republicans to be one of the 140 sponsors of CPAC 2011, I thought I’d run one of the interviews I gave before speaking to GOProud last September, which the reporter never ran after wasting my time.

This is also in honor of The New York Times reporter who wasted my time by writing an article — or at least a headline, which is as far as I got — on my speech to the gays that specifically required knowing absolutely nothing about me.

Moreover, I’m feeling like the tea party is stealing my thunder again this week, so it’s time to suck up to the gays! (That’s from the Times’ headline.) * * *

Hi, Ann. I’m a feature writer for (a mainstream media publication), e-mailing per Chris Barron. Doing a story on the “new” gay left and “new” gay right (Get Equal, GOProud). Questions below my signature. Happy to talk on the phone if you like. Otherwise, feel free to respond via e-mail as tersely or verbosely as you like. My deadline is 6 p.m. tomorrow. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

(1) How often do you give speeches?

Constantly. And whenever someone cuts me off in traffic I usually have some extemporaneous remarks. But if you mean in front of an audience, about a dozen times a year.

(2) Have you ever spoken to an LGBT group or attended an LGBT event before?

Yes. I call them “Ann Coulter book signings.” You have no idea how many of my fans are gay.

(3) Can you give me a general preview of what you plan to say at Homocon?

I usually start with my version of “Over the Rainbow,” then I take it from there.

(4) (I’m told) you yourself came up with the “right-wing Judy Garland” line; why’d you describe yourself like that?

It was in answer to Grover Norquist’s e-mail telling me I was by far GOProud’s No. 1 choice as their first speaker. I said: “Duh. I’m the right-wing Judy Garland.” (I wanted to be the right-wing Patti LaBelle, but Ken Mehlman beat me to it.)

(4b) Do you plan to sing? Honestly, it depends on the money. We’ll pass the hat and let the chips fall where they may.

(5) Can you lay out your stance on marriage equality (Prop 8, DOMA) and DADT?

I’m against gay marriage, but that’s no offense to gays. It is just in defense of a crucial linchpin of civilization that’s already hanging by a thread.

(6) Are gay rights part and parcel with basic conservatism? If so, why are so many elected Republicans so skittish/unsupportive about the subject? If not, tell me why.

No, we don’t generally care for identity politics of any sort, much less hearing about people’s sex lives, even Nino Scalia’s. (And judging by the number of children he has, it’s pretty active.) Conservatives believe in individual rights, low tax rates, fighting terrorism and punishing criminals — so do gays! They also happen to believe Judy Garland was the most underappreciated and misunderstood person in the history of show business. I don’t think most gays care about gay marriage; they like going to the gay marriage meeting because it’s a good way to meet other gays.

(7) Why attend and speak at Homocon?

Why lie? I’m in the market for a new hair stylist.

(7b) Is it just another gig, or are you hoping to make a larger point?

I plan to forge the conservative/gay peace of Westphalia! Conservatives will: (1) Stop treating gay sex any differently from premarital sex; (2) stop blaming nice, conservative gays for the hateful, angry, leftist gays pushing fisting on kindergartners; and (3) agree to do something about their hair. Gays will drop this business about gay marriage and pushing PC rules on the military. WE WILL BE A FORCE THAT CANNOT BE STOPPED! (And stylish!)

(8) Do you have thoughts on what GOProud is doing and what they stand for, versus the Log Cabin Republicans, HRC and Get Equal?

The national Log Cabin Republicans are ridiculous. They’re not conservative at all. I don’t even think they’re gay — they’re bi (partisan). GOProud is comprised of real conservatives who happen to be gay. (Same with the Texas LCRs, for whom I’ve been signing books for years.)

(9) Plan on telling any good gay jokes during the speech? LOTS! Gays LOVE gay jokes. Christian/conservative audiences generally don’t laugh at my gay jokes because they feel like they’re being mean. It’s really sweet. They don’t like gay marriage, but they want to be nice to gays.

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Atheist Scholar Hosts BBC’s New Bible Series (Christian Post, 110308)

The BBC has chosen an atheist Hebrew scholar as the presenter of its new series on the Bible.

In “The Bible’s Buried Secrets,” Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou will guide viewers through some of the latest archaeological discoveries in the Middle East and consider how these may shape the world’s understanding of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Some of the topics to be explored by the program include the origins of the story of the Garden of Eden and the historical context of King David and his kingdom.

According to The Telegraph, Stavrakopoulou makes a number of assertions in the program, notably about Eve.

“Eve, particularly in the Christian tradition, has been very unfairly maligned as the troublesome wife who brought about the Fall,” said Stavrakopoulou, a senior lecturer in the Hebrew Bible at the University of Exeter.

“Don’t forget that the biblical writers are male and it’s a very male-dominated world. Women were second-class citizens, seen as property.”

In an interview with the Radio Times, Stavrakopoulou said she did not think the Bible could be used as a reliable historical source and said that as an academic “you leave your faith at the door.”

She said: “I’m aware that there are some who find it hard to understand why an atheist could possibly be interested in the Bible, and I think that does a massive disservice to a fantastic collection of ancient texts.

“The Bible is a work of religious and social literature that has a huge impact on Western culture, and for that reason it’s important that programs like these are made.”

Andrew Graystone, director of the Church and Media Network, does not think Christians should worry about an atheist presenting a program on the Bible.

“Within the broader mix of programs on the BBC, the personal convictions of the presenters don’t matter so much. What matters is whether or not they are an expert in the subject of the program and are a good presenter,” he said.

“Impartiality is always important but we can’t expect presenters to be completely impartial. Jeremy Clarkson isn’t impartial about cars, Gary Lineker isn’t impartial about football. What matters is that the presenters are intelligent and sensible and that the viewers are equally intelligent and sensible.”

Graystone said he did not see Stavrakopoulou’s appointment as a sign that the BBC was being unfair in its handling of the Christian faith.

“Some headlines have described Dr. Stavrakopoulou as the BBC’s ‘new face of religion’ and I think that’s over rigging it a bit because the BBC has many faces of religion. It doesn’t have a single face of religion,” he said.

“It’s hard to make the case that the BBC is being unfair to Christians when they just had a four-part prime time series on Jesus at Christmas and Radio 4 dedicated a whole day to reading the King James Bible.”

He advised Christians to withhold judgement on the program until it airs.

“We haven’t seen it yet so let’s see what it’s actually like. It might be great, it might be terrible but if it’s terrible it won’t be terrible because it wasn’t presented by a Christian.”

The first of the three-part series airs on March 15 at 9pm (local time) on BBC Two.

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AFA Threatens Boycott if ABC Airs ‘Good Christian B*tches’ (Christian Post, 110310)

A conservative pro-family group is threatening a boycott if the ABC network actually airs a new prime-time program that is said to portray Christian women as catty, two-faced gossipers.

The American Family Association, which has a long history of organizing protests against companies that it feels are anti-family or anti-Christian, says that it will rally a consumer boycott against all businesses that advertise during the show “Good Christian B*tches” if the pilot is broadcasted.

Although AFA has yet to contact ABC, the group’s director of Special Projects Randy Sharp says AFA hopes to present a consumer petition to the network’s executives soon asking them to not air the show under any circumstance.

“If a company feels that this kind of degradation of people of faith is worthy of advertising dollars, they don’t deserve the business of the faith community,” states Sharp.

Sharp denounces the controversial show based on a fictional book of the same name as insulting to Christians. He says AFA staffs were “just appalled, insulted” and “shocked” when they found out about the show.

ABC reportedly picked up the Darren Star production of the Kim Gatlin book during a bidding war for new programming. The book is billed on Gatlin’s website as a fun tale of the heroine – a recently divorced, single mother of two – who is the target of the gossiping, botoxed “Christian” women in her affluent Dallas community. Leslie Bibb of the movies “Iron Man” and “Iron Man 2” will play the lead role.

According to Spoiler TV, which broke the news, networks ABC, NBC and CBS all tried to secure the project. Reportedly, ABC’s new chief Paul Lee considers a television remake of Gatlin’s book a great fit for its brand. ABC already airs the show “Desperate Housewives” and the network reportedly is thinking of changing the show’s name “Good Christian B*tches” to “Desperate Housewives in Dallas.”

But AFA’s Sharp says the show under any name would still be offensive.

“Whether it be under the current title or under a different less offensive title, we know the content is going to be very offensive, very disturbing to the Christian community,” he says.

Sharp expressed disappointment at the thought of the networks contending for a show that would portray Christianity in such a negative light. “It’s part of a long history,” he concludes. “They just don’t portray people of faith in a good light.”

AFA President Tim Wildmon says the networks are also guilty of religious bigotry towards Christians.

“There’s no chance ABC would approve a series entitled ‘Good Muslim B*tches,’ or ‘Good Jewish B*tches,’ or ‘Good Black B*tches.’ This is just more proof that Christians alone can now be targeted for the most offensive kind of bigoted discrimination, with approval from the very people who see themselves as paragons of tolerance,” says Wildmon in a statement.

The Christian Post contacted ABC to confirm details about the show and for comments about AFA’s assertions, but the network did not respond by the close of the business day.

AFA has led numerous consumer boycotts in the past, including against companies that do not acknowledge Christmas. AFA has led successful boycott campaigns against Gap Inc. and Dick’s Sporting Good. Also, AFA had gathered 500,000 pledges from people to boycott Home Depot for its stance on marriage.

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National Pathetic Radio (townhall.com, 110315)

Cal Thomas

If the resignations at National Public Radio continue at last week’s pace, there may be no need for Congress to defund the aging dinosaur, because there will be no one left there to turn the lights on.

The latest is Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional giving. Conservative activist James O’Keefe secretly recorded phone conversations between Liley and a man masquerading as a potential donor from a fictitious group called the Muslim Education Action Center, which the man said had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The fake donor said his group was worried about a government audit. Liley told him that a $5 million contribution might not have to be reported to the IRS. Liley has been placed on administrative leave.

This incident followed the resignation of Vivian Schiller, NPR’s president and CEO, and Ronald Schiller (no relation), another NPR fund-raiser, who was caught on video calling tea party members “seriously racist.” Ronald Schiller also said, “Speaking of Zionist influence at NPR: I don’t actually find it at NPR. ... No. I mean it’s there in those who own newspapers, obviously; but no one owns NPR.”

All of this is damning enough, but it begs the larger question of whether in a multimedia age the federal government should subsidize a network that could stand on its own if it wanted to. The same people who are quick to allege bias when it comes to Fox News and talk radio are just as quick to defend NPR from liberal bias, claiming NPR is, to borrow a phrase, “fair and balanced.”

The problem for NPR and other media is not only bias, but also blindness. Large numbers of Americans believe NPR and the broadcast networks are hostile to their beliefs. Rather than address that justified perception, the media deny what to their conservative critics is obvious.

NPR’s interim CEO, Joyce Slocum, told the Associated Press, “I think if anyone believes that NPR’s coverage is biased in one direction or another, all they need to do to correct that misperception is turn on their radio or log onto their computer and listen or read for an hour or two. What they will find is balanced journalism that brings all relevant points of view to an issue and covers it in depth so that people understand the subtlety and the nuance.”

If that were true, would the ultra-liberal George Soros have contributed $1.8 million to NPR to, according to Fox News, “hire 100 new reporters for 50 of its member stations”?

Space keeps me from listing all the examples of NPR’s left-wing bias. Here are a few, courtesy of the Media Research Center (www.mrc.org). Rebutting the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union address, “NPR’s John Ydstie tried to claim both conservative and liberal economists disagreed with Paul Ryan on the notion there was a ‘failed stimulus.’ “ That’s called picking only those economists who reinforce your point of view and not naming them. It’s like reporting, “some people say...”

Also according to the MRC, “The NPR weekend game show, ‘Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me!’ did a mock interview using George W. Bush soundbites from his book tour to present him as a drunk in the White House.” And, “NPR’s Neda Ulaby set out to criticize conservative critics of the National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek” exhibit of LGBT art, and included zero conservatives in her piece.”

There is much more, including the reliably liberal Nina Totenberg. In her “reporting” on Elena’s Kagan’s nomination for the Supreme Court, Totenberg presented Kagan “as a modern-day Superman.” Why not Wonder Woman?

In 1993, I wrote a column about comments made by Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf, who claimed that evangelicals were “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” When some of them flooded the newspaper with their educational and professional bona fides, Weisskopf said he meant to say that “most” evangelicals were “poor, uneducated and easy to command.” That triggered more protests. The Post ombudsman at the time, Joann Byrd, tried to defend Weisskopf, saying that readers needed to understand most journalists don’t know any of “these people.”

And the big media wonder why they are losing audience, money and credibility.

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NY Times: Fraught Nexus of Lies, Stupidity, and Bigotry (Townhall.com, 110622)

Ann Coulter

Perhaps instead of taking potshots at me in its Book Review section, The New York Times could consider reviewing one of my books. With only one review — not in the Book Review — after eight New York Times best-sellers, the editors can rest assured that I know they don’t like me.

Reviewing a book about the 1989 rape of the Central Park jogger last week, the reviewer sniped that “coarser pundits like Ann Coulter continue to exploit the case whenever possible.”

My chapter on the Central Park rape in my recently released, smash New York Times best-seller, “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America,” evidently “exploits” the case by citing facts. Based on those facts, I argue that the real trials reached more believable verdicts than the show trial held by the Left 13 years later.

On April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old investment banker went for a run through Central Park, whereupon she was attacked by a violent mob, savagely beaten, raped and left for dead. By the time the police found her at 1:30 a.m. that night, she was beaten so badly, she had lost three-fourths of her blood and the police couldn’t tell if she was male or female. The homicide unit of the Manhattan D.A.’s office initially took the case because not one of her doctors believed she would be alive in the morning.

Confessions were obtained in accordance with the law, with the defendants’ parents present at all police interrogations. All but one of the confessions was videotaped. After a six-week hearing solely on the admissibility of the confessions, a judge ruled them lawful.

At the trials, evidence was ruled on by the judge and tested in court. Witnesses were presented for both sides and subjected to cross-examination.

One witness, for example, an acquaintance of one of the defendants, testified that when she talked to him in jail after the arrests, he told her that he hadn’t raped the jogger, he “only held her legs down while (another defendant) f—ked her.” (That’s enough for a rape conviction.)

In the opposite of a “rush to judgment,” two multi-ethnic juries deliberated for 10 days and 11 days, respectively, before unanimously finding the defendants guilty of most crimes charged — though innocent of others. The convictions were later upheld on appeal.

The only way liberals could get those convictions overturned was to change venues from a courtroom to a newsroom. So that’s what they did.

The convictions were vacated based not on a new trial or on new evidence, but solely on the “confession” of Matias Reyes.

Coincidentally, this serial rapist and murderer had nothing to lose by confessing to the rape — and much to gain by claiming that he had acted alone, including a highly desirable prison transfer.

As with the tribunals during the French Revolution, the show trials were based on a lie, to wit, that Reyes’ confession constituted “new evidence” that might have led to a different verdict at trial.

In fact, Reyes’ admission that he had raped the jogger changed nothing about the evidence presented in the actual trials. It was always known that others had participated in the attack on the jogger. It was always known that none of the defendants’ DNA — a primitive science back in 1989 — was found on the jogger.

This is why prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer said in her summation to the jury: “Others who were not caught raped her and got away.”

The only new information Reyes provided was that he was one of those who “got away.”

But 13 years later, the show trial was re-litigated in the backrooms of law offices and newsrooms by a remarkably undiverse group of Irish and Jewish, college-educated New Yorkers. They lied about the evidence in order to vindicate a mob and destroy trust in the judicial system.

Liberals despise the rule of law because it interferes with their ability to rule by mob. They love to portray themselves as the weak taking on the powerful. But it is the least powerful who suffer the most once the rule of law is gone. (Dominique Strauss-Kahn is about to discover that the most defenseless, penniless immigrant has the same legal rights as he, in an American court.)

Liberals’ relentless attack on the judicial system is yet another example of their Jacobin lunacy in opposition to calm order. You will note that they never ask: Who did what in this case? All they want to know is which class of people are on trial. Social justice is the only justice that interests the Left because it’s the only justice that can be delivered by the political agitation of a mob.

Thus, the book about the Central Park rape warmly reviewed in the Times was described as raising the “fraught nexus of race, class and gender.” It was said to take a “tour through America’s violently racist past and present.”

What on earth does any of that have to do with the evidence in this particular case?

Another way of determining the guilt or innocence of the convicted rapists would be to look at the facts of the case — the confessions, the corroborating evidence, the state of DNA testing in 1989, the jury verdicts and Reyes’ advantageously timed confession 13 years later.

But looking at actual facts in a criminal trial, as I did, apparently constitutes a coarse exploitation of the case.

I suppose writers who recount truthful facts about the Holocaust coarsely “exploit” that crime, too. Rather than reciting gruesome facts about the Holocaust, I gather the Times would prefer a book that examines the general characteristics of Jews and Germans from 1850 to 1933 — a study of the “fraught nexus” of race, religion and nationality — before deciding whether the Jews deserved it.

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N.Y. Times: Fraught Nexus Of Lies, Stupidity And Bigotry (Ann Coulter, 110622)