Last week Time Magazine’s cover story was called The Battle Over Gay Teens and I wrote an article discussing the bias from the writer of the article and also cited examples of where content was intentionally ignored. 

Today I read an article found on The Patriot News website called Gays Win Support On Campus and the article mentions, as its main support, the Time magazine article from last week.

Wednesday's edition of The Oprah Winfrey Show was devoted to a look "Inside the Lives of America's Poor," coming out of the spirit of the reporting from hurricane Katrina. Once again, Oprah was outraged that anyone would disagree that whites would have drawn a better government response. She rambled a bit: "I got a couple of calls from some crazy people saying, and I mean that in the best way [laughter], people saying I was racist because how dare I imply -- and I think it was Lisa Ling who said on the show she couldn't imagine if this was a wealthy suburb -- how dare I imply -- and the woman said, 'Oprah, do you really think that if those were wealthy white Americans that the response time would have been any different? CNN's Anderson Cooper was there on set to reply: "Yeah, well, ask yourself the question, if that convention center in New Orleans had been filled with white suburban soccer moms, would the response have been different? I think it's a valuable question to ask. I think it's a good question to ask."

Spending federal money without raising taxes? Broadcasters have been incredulous at the thought, especially since Hurricane Katrina hit – so much so that 59 percent of their tax-related stories have suggested tax hikes. Reporters turned to everyone from Bill Clinton to the man on the street to fellow journalists to make the case for taxation.

A typical question from a network reporter showed annoyance at the president’s tax policy and implied that anything but raising taxes is irresponsible, sounding something like this: “The last thing in the world that George W. Bush wants to do is raise taxes, but the amount of money that we’re talking about here, we’re talking about many, many, many tens of billions of dollars. Can that be done without raising taxes?” That was ABC’s Ted Koppel following Bush’s address to the nation on September 15.

Journalists made sure the audience didn’t forget several things – namely, that Americans are paying for military operations in Iraq and that the United States has a deficit. As the Free Market Project has shown reporters frequently refer to deficits as if they are inherently bad, though they are actually a small percentage of a multitrillion-dollar economy and should not inspire panic.

Ripped from the headlines: The plot for Wednesday's Law & Order on NBC is inspired by the Schiavo case -- and it looks like one of those fighting to keep the Schiavo-like character alive may also be a murderer since the NBC Web site's description of the episode says that “a car bomb kills the husband of an incapacitated woman shortly before the victim planned to disconnect her feeding tube.” I would caution, however, that L&O plots often first pursue logical suspects before discovering an alternate motivation for the crime.

In a promo aired Tuesday night on NBC, the announcer plugged, "On Law and Order: A comatose woman." Then the video jumped to a man addressing protesters with signs: "The feeding tube will remain in place." Finally, over video of a car exploding, the announcer asserted: "In a case that rocked a nation." The show plot, as listed on NBC's Web page for the show, follows.

CBSNews.com's blog, Public Eye, has a post today on their Early Show viewer demographics, broken down by half-hour block. They show that two-thirds of the audience are women throughout all four half-hour blocks of the show, but that the first half-hour is younger and has more male viewership.

As such, CBSNews officials admit, they tend to stick the hard news in the first half hour, with features dominating the later half hour blocks, but feel they still leave enough hard news scraps to go around in the news briefings in the other half hours:

The first hour is geared more towards the transitional audience, and the second hour includes programming designed for people who are sticking around.

That doesn't mean people who stay at home only want soft features, says Katie Boyle, a senior producer with the CBS "Early Show." She points out that the "Early Show" runs newsblocks on the hour and half-hour, and says that there is a mix of stories so the same topics aren't covered over and over. "In a two hour morning show you want some variety," she says. And the fact that the proportion of women is slightly higher in the second half of the program, she adds, doesn't mean they don't care about hard news. "Women are watching morning television, period, at the beginning and at the end, when there's hard news and soft features," she says. "They want it all."

During the 9:00am hour of the Today show Katie Couric tried to play herself off as a middle-of-the roader. Today invited Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake to promote their new book, What Women Really Want, which included a premise that women agree on 80 percent of the issues. Couric used that as an opportunity to essentially yell, "Me too! I'm everywoman!"

Couric to Conway and Lake: "You know we were talking earlier and basically what you were saying is that women in this country are a much more cohesive unit than you might think hearing all the jazz about red states versus blue states. You say something that I've actually said in the past, we're really all purple..."

No, Katie you're all blue, stop trying to hide it.

Byron Pitts did a story on last night’s “CBS Evening News” called “Nuevo New Orleans.” In it, Pitts reported a wave of legal and illegal immigrants coming into New Orleans seeking employment.

At a town hall meeting with small business owners, Mayor Ray Nagin said on camera: “How do I make sure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?”

Given the recent outcry concerning statements made by Bill Bennett, one has to wonder why there is no similar outrage over Nagin’s remarks.  Or, how about the way Pitts finishes the segment: “The worry here: Will it look like the old New Orleans when it's over?”

What follows is a full transcript of this report along with a video link.

For two days, all parts of the American press have been reporting a "constitutional compromise" which has "gained the support of a main Sunni political party." With this compromise, it is expected that upwards of half the Sunnis (a 20% minority in Iraq) will support its new Constitution, and it will be ratified in the vote on Saturday.

All well and good. But hasn't anyone in the press recalled certain adventures of James Madison? (He was in all the papers.) We in the United States have been through exactly the same process. But NO ONE in the American press has, so far, remembered and mentioned that fact.

There was a bitter fight between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists in Philadelphia in 1787, whether we would have a new Constitution. And if so, what would be the powers of the new federal government. When the Constitution was submitted to Congress for its review, and afterwards to the states for their ratification, that same fight spilled out to the state capitols.

Describing a brief interview NBC's Matt Lauer had with President Bush and the First Lady in front of a Habitat for Humanity construction project yesterday, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank was so obsessed with the President's body language that everything else he wrote about the interview got lost in his frenzied descriptions. For instance, regarding a question about prosecutors' interest in Rove, Milbank described the President's response as:

"Bush blinks twice. He touches his tongue to his lips. He blinks twice more. He starts to answer, but he stops himself. 'I'm not going to talk about the case,' Bush finally says after a three-second pause that, in television time, feels like a commercial break."

The New York Times breaks its weird silence on reporter Judy Miller, with David Johnston's article (a page A16 piece that lacks even a front-page blurb) marking her testimony today to the grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's name.

But the story contains little news, just a run-down of the complicated story of C.I.A. operative Plame and her husband, disgraced anti-Bush diplomat Joseph Wilson, plus a defense from the paper's executive editor as to why the paper can't run a real story on Miller just yet.

Further downplaying the Times connection is the accompanying photo, which features not Miller but another player in the investigation, Dick Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby.

Johnston quotes Executive Editor Bill Keller's explanation for the silence at the Times: "In his statement to the staff on Tuesday, Mr. Keller said the contempt order under which Ms. Miller had been jailed still remained in effect, meaning that she 'is not yet clear of legal jeopardy.'

When Media Matters took out of context a statement Bill Bennett made on his radio show, the mainstream media were more than willing to comply and show outrage over his remarks.

But another radio host made comments even more explosive, and even elicited a response from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.

NewsBusters contributor Dave Pierre noted that on Sept. 21, Air America host Randi Rhodes compared the evacuation of refugees in New Orleans to the Nazi transportation of Jews to concentration camps.

A caller was troubled that when they bused people out of the Superdome, they "wouldn't tell them where they were going." Rhodes responded that it "reminds me of a little visit I made to the Holocaust Museum, and I saw these cattle cars." She added, "So, what are you supposed to do? Just do a 'faith-based evacuation'? 'I'm sure he wouldn't send me to Auschwitz,'" Rhodes said, mimicking a New Orleans resident.

The book by disgraced former CBS producer Mary Mapes, Truth and Duty : The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power, has finally been put back on Amazon.com. But this time the excerpt from the book has been removed.

Last month the publisher, St. Martin's Press, proudly displayed the book on Amazon and included a lengthy excerpt. After realizing that Mary Mapes' own words from the excerpt were outrageous and factually inaccurate, the publisher panicked and had the book completely delisted from the online vendor, excerpt and all.

Actor Woody Harrelson, appearing on Tuesday’s Late Show with David Letterman, denounced “this oil-garchy that calls itself our executive branch” and complained about the “petrochemical industry taking over the world." Then viewers saw a clip of him playing a lawyer in a new movie, North Country, in which his character paints Anita Hill as a maligned victim as he warns a sexual harassment victim about how she’ll be characterized in court as a “nut” or a “slut” since “right has nothing to do with the real world. Look at Anita Hill, because she's you.” That movie, opening next week, is based on a book by former Newsweek White House reporter Clara Bingham, Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law.

The Internet Movie Database's plot summary for the film: "A fictionalized account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the United States -- Jenson vs. Eveleth Mines, where a woman who endured a range of abuse while working as a miner filed and won the landmark 1984 lawsuit." That would place the lawsuit filing seven years before anyone heard of Anita Hill. (More of what Harrelson told Letterman follows.)

Does the MSM sense blood in the Bush administration water? That seems to be the case, judging from the breathtaking accusation that Katie Couric just leveled at it.

The context was Couric's interview of Chris Matthews on the subject of the investigation by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into possible leaks in the Valerie Plame affair.

Matthews was hostile enough, musing whether the Bush administration "in defending themselves against the charge we went to war for a corrupt or bogus reason, that there wasn't any weaponry, a deal with nuclear weapons, did they break the law?"

But even that was insufficiently venomous for Katie's taste. She cut Matthews off peremptorily, interjecting:

"Yeah, and Chris isn't it more than just Iraq, doesn't it speak about the way this White House possibly operates?" Couric risibly sought a fig leaf of cover from what was clearly her own opinion by tacking on at the end of her question "in the minds of some."

At Get Religion, Terry Mattingly notes that Gov. Jeb Bush is catching flak from the atheist lobby for encouraging Florida children to read "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe." Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is typically wheezing over anyone encouraging stories with Christian metaphors. (Actually, Lynn's claiming C.S. Lewis is "retelling the story of Christ," but I don't remember the Gospels saying Jesus was a lion, not a human.) Palm Beach Post reporter S.V. Date is scandalized at how Bush’s "Just Read, Florida" effort is funded by Walden Media, producers of the Narnia movie, which the Post notes is run by Philip Anschutz, a big Republican contributor. Walden makes family films, and its latest film was "Because of Winn-Dixie."

Remember all those media predictions about the toxic nature of the floodwaters in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina?  Well, it appears that much like their prognostications of casualties, how long it was going to take to drain the city, and the likely devastation to America’s economy, this too was an extraordinary exaggeration.

Here’s a sampling of the press opinions concerning this water made shortly after Katrina hit:

• ABC News reported on September 6: "Thousands of hurricane survivors who spent hours trapped in or wading through floodwaters likely exposed themselves to a wide range of bacteria and other contaminants.”
• Reuters reported on September 7: “The brew of chemicals and human waste in the New Orleans floodwaters will have to be pumped into the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain, raising the specter of an environmental disaster on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, experts say.”
• The Christian Science Monitor reported on September 8: “Chemicals leaking from cars and factories will cause one of costliest environmental cleanups ever.” 

Yet, today:

On Tuesday's Today, Matt Lauer interviewed President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush at a house building zone for those who were affected by Katrina to live in, in which the President is contributing too. Lauer immediately accused Bush of using this as a photo-op situation.

Lauer continues the interview by asking President Bush why we are "making" Louisiana residents pay back the money they are borrowing for Katrina relief efforts, yet are not making the citizens pay back the money we spent in Iraq. Matt obviously has not learned the difference between asking to borrow and giving.

Video and Transcript follows.

Sharyn Alfonsi did a story on “The CBS Evening News” tonight that brought me to tears.  Now, I don’t know whether the intention was to stoke anti-war sentiment, or just to show how children at Fort Benning, Georgia are coping with their parents being deployed to Iraq. 

Frankly, I don’t care, for this was an absolutely heartrending segment that I think all Americans regardless of political leaning should watch.