On Friday's CBS Evening News, correspondent Lee Cowan filed a story on Congressman Tom DeLay's appearance in a Texas courtroom, which on some counts was balanced, but which glaringly highlighted a Replublican critic of Tom DeLay who referred to him as a "hog." Although Fort Bend Star publisher Beverly Carter has been a longtime critic of DeLay who even endorsed his opponent in last year's election, Cowan simply referred to her as a "Republican precinct chairwoman," thus giving her credibility as a typical local Republican leader.

The story began with Cowan relaying DeLay's criticisms of Judge Bob Perkins for links to the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, followed by a soundbite of DeLay accusing prosecutor Ronnie Earle of abusing his power. Cowan then proceeded to highlight "some Republicans who aren't buying it" and showed a couple of soundbites from Carter
without conveying her anti-DeLay history to provide context. Notably, according to an article in the New York Times that ran on April 17 of this year, Carter admitted to having "got crosswise" with DeLay eight years earlier over his involvement in a local election for sheriff. Cowan did at least provide some balance by next highlighting a woman who "runs a neighborhood program for foster children that DeLay and his wife started years ago" and noted that he is "still plenty popular" in the district. Still, the failure to properly identify Carter gives an impression of greater Republican division in the district than perhaps really exists. A complete transcript of the Friday October 21 story, anchored by Bob Schieffer, follows:

Lee Cowan did a report on the "CBS Evening News" tonight concerning Rep. Tom DeLay’s (R-Tex) first day in court. To demonstrate that even people on the right don’t like the embattled congressman, Cowan interviewed Beverly Carter, the Republican precinct chairwoman of Fort Bend County, Texas:

“I've not heard of any Republicans that are supporting Tom at this point win, lose or draw. Whether he's guilty or not guilty, they've kind of had it with him. Pigs get fatter but hogs get slaughtered, and Tom has been a hog.”

Cowan interjected with: “And that's coming from a Republican precinct chairwoman in his home district.”

The problem is that Carter has been an outspoken foe of DeLay’s for quite some time. John Judis of the New Republic wrote of this in May:

Based on these internal e-mails, it looks like some editors at the Washington Post dead tree edition aren't very happy that the web version of the Post is doing well.

The web version, apparently, is outside their control. It's also growing -- one editor frets it has more readers than the paper version -- and is making money, besides.

More info on the angst is available here.

          I’m sick of always saying "my Muslim contact," so from now on I will refer to him as “Alex.”  It’s vague enough to keep him protected from the wrath of Islam, and given what he continues to tell the non-Islam world about Islam intentions, he needs protecting.

            Alex doesn’t live in America.  His observations come from a childhood raised in Islam, carefully studying us from a distant vantage point and applying a genius-level IQ to define what he sees; and what he sees is a nation on the brink, and an enemy ready to shove.

Media Matters, the liberal organization whose stated objective is in "monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation," chided the New York Times (in this post) for failing to identify a "heckler" at a Senate hearing as a former U.S. diplomat. Mary Ann Wright, the former diplomat, reportedly stood up from the audience at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday (October 19, 2005) and shouted at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Media Matters innocently indicated that Wright was a former senior diplomat and former Army colonel who resigned in protest from her diplomat job in 2003 over the Iraq war.

Wright's identity, however, extends well beyond that of a former official in forceful disagreement with the Bush administration. In August 2005, Mary Ann Wright was the "main coordinator" of Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan's high-profile demonstration outside President Bush's Crawford ranch. In an interview on the far-left show Democracy Now, Wright described setting up "field operations" for the protest, a reference to her days in the Army. "Longtime diplomat Ann Wright is running Camp Casey," reported the show's web site.

Friday's Washington Post provided quite a juxtaposition of biased headlines, stressing how many dislike the Republican gubernatorial candidate while the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor is emphasizing positive issues, over two stories about November's Virginia elections which the paper placed on the front page of the “Metro” section. “Kilgore's Record May Polarize Voters in Va.” declared the headline about Republican Jerry Kilgore which ran across the top of the “Metro” section in the Virginia edition of the newspaper. At the bottom of the same page, readers saw this headline over a look at liberal Democrat Leslie Byrne: “'Kitchen Table' Issues at Heart of Byrne's Lt. Gov. Campaign.” The Post's online posting, which located the article on page B-5, instead of B-1 where it appeared in the hard copy of the Virginia edition, carried this slightly different headline, “'Kitchen Table' Issues Are Byrne's Focus,” followed by this unctuous sub-head: “Lt. Governor Candidate's Pitch: Help for Head Start, Small-Business Health Insurance.” The lead to that article follows.

NBC’s Katie Couric had a pediatrician and a teen psychologist on the “Today Show” this morning (video link to follow) to discuss the results of a recent study concerning teenage sexual activity. The conclusion of this study by the Centers for Disease Control is that more than 42 percent of teenagers 16 years of age and under have engaged in oral sex.

Couric asked her guests: “Why do you think that is the case? Do you think it is because this notion of being obsessed with technical virginity? In other words, all the lectures about safe sex and STD's may have resulted in this and staying away from intercourse?”

The introductory spread for the lead story in U.S. News & World Report’s October 24 issue could serve as bulletin-board or even wall-poster fodder for fans of the media’s things-just-keep-getting-worse-and-worse-for-President-Bush narrative. Against a black background, a striking mustard-yellow headline and white subhead read, “FACING THE MUSIC/It started with the New Orleans blues. Now it’s sounding like a real dirge.”

After the momentous elections in Iraq that approved the constitution and produced a higher voter turnout than in America, you'd think the media would want to give the events more coverage.... Actually, at this point I'm not surprised, nor are many regular readers at NewsBusters.

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review that with no bad news to report from Iraq, the "race riot" in Toledo was needed to keep bad news in front of the public. And what better bad news than neo-Nazis causing outraged "civil rights activists" to steal TVs?

According to Hanson, the events in Toledo looked "more like Iraq than Iraq" to MSM newsmakers.

"Something must be going on when the cable-news outlets could not whet their appetite for carnival-like violence and pyrotechnics in Iraq, and so diverted their attention to Toledo, where live streams of American looting and arson seemed to be more like Iraq than Iraq."

Fernando Díaz Villanueva in the Spain Herald came up with a mock news story that seems strangly familiar.

Around three hundred French civilians were murdered yesterday and an undetermined number were injured during the first hours of the American invasion of continental Europe. Most of the French victims were due to artillery shots coming from the American fleet that was trying to hit German fortifications on the coast before thousands of soldiers proceeded to land on several of the beaches. According to sources in the improvised hospital in the town of Saint Mere Eglise, the slaughter was worse than French and Germans anticipated. “We are dropping like flies” said an eye witness who preferred to remain anonymous. “The Americans came in killing like mad men, I never thought I would say this, but life was better with Adolf Hitler”......

"Unofficial sources connected to the Roosevelt administration admit the harshness of the intervention, which they say was based on information provided by Albert Einstien, a German scientist who sent a letter to the President in order to warn him of the possibility of the Nazis developing the ultimate weapon known as the “atom bomb.” The effect such weapon would be terrible and cause an unheard of number of victims. Just one explosion would kill thousands and devastate the atmosphere. Hitler has, on many occasions, denied having this “bomb,” something international inspectors confirmed while traveling in the Reich for two weeks.

"Shortly after the invasion started, cases of abuse against German soldiers captured after the landing have been reported. These abuses violate the Geneva Agreement on prisoners of war. In the meantime, rumors persist about supposed mistreatment the Germans are inflicting on the Central European Jews in the so-called “concentration camps,” but nothing has been proved yet."

NYT movie critic Manohla Dargis has mostly praise for the new movie "North Country," starring an un-prettified Charlize Theron, though Dargis admits it's an "old-fashioned liberal weepie" (albeit one "with heart") based on a true story of a class-action sexual harasment suit at a Minnesota mining company.

"For every woman who has been grabbed and groped against her wishes, hounded and worse, told to shut up and smile, told to shut up and take it like a man, told to shut up if you know what's good for you, the new film 'North Country' will induce a shiver of recognition and maybe a blast of rage. A wobbly fiction about a real pioneering sex-discrimination case, the film is an unabashed vehicle for its modestly de-glammed star, Charlize Theron, but, much like George Clooney's 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' it's also a star vehicle with heart -- an old-fashioned liberal weepie about truth and justice."

David Gergen was questioned this morning during a CBS segment concerning the possibility of indictments to White House chief aide Karl Rove and Dick Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby.  The “Early Show's” Bill Plante mentioned that the White House is behaving like it’s business as usual. Gergen responded: “Bill, I was in the Nixon White House during Watergate, and we pretended that we were all about business as usual. And we had a president who was talking to the portraits. It was not business as usual, but you have to say it.”

Gergen later in the interview said: “This is a presidency that has almost collapsed.”

What follows is a full transcript of this report, and a video link.

In his column for the Chicago Sun-Times, Mark Steyn notes that reporters seemed a bit allergic to mentioning that "militants" in Russia (after the latest violence in Nalchik) and elsewhere could be described more clearly as "Islamic militants," but that wasn't something they wanted to underline:

Ah, "Islamic militants." So that's what the rebels were insurging over. In the geopolitical Hogwart's, Islamic "militants" are the new Voldemort, the enemy whose name it's best never to utter. In fairness to the New York Times, they did use the I-word in paragraph seven. And Agence France Presse got around to mentioning Islam in paragraph 22. And NPR's "All Things Considered" had one of those bland interviews between one of its unperturbable anchorettes and some Russian geopolitical academic type in which they chitchatted through every conceivable aspect of the situation and finally got around to kinda sorta revealing the identity of the perpetrators in the very last word of the geopolitical expert's very last sentence.

Over at the letters page of Romenesko, former New York Times U.N. Bureau Chief Barbara Crossette complains about the conservative, anti-Kofi Annan agenda of Judith Miller:

Over the last year or so, Judith Miller also wrote a series of damaging reports on the "oil for food" scandal at the United Nations -- in particular, personally damaging to Secretary General Kofi Annan because the reports were frequently based on half-truths or hearsay peddled on Capitol Hill by people determined to force Annan out of office. At the UN, this was interpreted as payback for the UN's refusal to back the US war in Iraq. As a former NYT UN bureau chief [now retired] I have been asked repeatedly by diplomats, former US government officials, journalists still reporting from the organization and others why Times editors did not step in to question some of this reporting -- a lot of it proved wrong by the recent report by Paul Volcker -- or why the paper seemed to be on a vendetta against the UN. The Times answered that question Sunday in its page one report on the Miller affair. Ms. Run Amok had at least one very highly placed friend at the paper, and many Timespeople were afraid to tangle with her because of that.

The Associated Press’s Laurie Kellman clearly had a very difficult time hiding her disappointment that newly indicted Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex) wasn’t frowning in his mugshot taken at his arrest yesterday afternoon in Texas. In fact, even the headline of her article, “DeLay Smile May Foil Democrat Campaign Ads,” couldn’t cover up her frustration:

“Why is Tom DeLay smiling? After all, he's been indicted. Forced out of his job as House majority leader. And called into court for fingerprinting and a mugshot like a common criminal.”

Kellman continued with no semblance of concern that her lack of objectivity would be apparent to even the most uninformed readers:

Gaggle is a daily comic strip about the Washington press corps and Larry the press secretary. Larry deals with the shenanigans of reporters who couldn't imagine anyone voting for a Republican.

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