http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051114-1.html

Setting the Record Straight: Senator Levin on Iraq
Sen. Levin (D-MI) Tries To Separate Iraq From The War On Terror. SEN. LEVIN: "But before the war, the President was saying that you cannot distinguish between Saddam Hussein and Iraq. As a matter of fact, he said that so often that he tried to connect Saddam Hussein with the attackers on us, on 9/11, so often, so frequently and so successfully, even though it was wrong, that the American people overwhelmingly thought, because of the President's misstatements that as a matter of fact, Saddam Hussein had participated in the attack on us on 9/11. That was a deception. That was clearly misinformation. It had a huge effect on the American people." (CNN's "American Morning," 11/14/05)

As Ted Koppel approaches his last Nightline, scheduled for next Tuesday, he's making a series of interview appearances in which he's been generally reticent about revealing too much about his political feelings. But he let a glimpse slip through Friday night on the Late Show with David Letterman, when asked about Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Koppel suggested that “if Karl Rove is involved in this, you know, do you naturally conclude at some point or another that the Vice President and possibly even the President may have known that this happened?" Letterman displayed the common public view of those uninformed about Joe Wilson's shenanigans as he offered this description of Libby's actions: "It suggests a level of pettiness heretofore unconsidered, doesn't it though?" Koppel then delivered a quip with serious undertones: "It suggests that a lot of people in the administration suffer from Irish Alzheimers -- you forget everything but the grudges."

Video excerpt: Real or Windows Media. (Transcript of the exchange follows.)

I hope you understand my precautions concerning my situation.  The better attys I had, both believed and professed the family court system is not to the legal standards I had hoped.  Mr. Kalicki advised me to walk away from everything; the estate, my property and my life.  Mr. Springgate suggested I accept a certain amount of corruption.  The time I’ve been involved in this has affirmed I need to stand for my family and myself.  I find I cannot stand for the degradation & slander to the character & moral fiber I have worked my life to create. 

From Reuters:

Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry threatened legal action on Monday against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who wins laughs by portraying the central Asian state as a country populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a sport.

Baron Cohen, who portrays a spoof Kazakh television presenter Borat in his "Da Ali G Show", has won fame ridiculing Kazakhstan, the world's ninth largest country yet still little known to many in the West.

Baron Cohen appears to have drawn official Kazakh ire after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards show in Lisbon earlier this month as Borat, who arrived in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.

The national media worked overtime last week insisting that Democratic victories in governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia were huge setbacks for the Bush administration and national Republican party. Apparently, the liberal media spin was enough to hoodwink an unsuspecting headline writer at the Albany Herald in Albany, Georgia.

The Free Market Project's Dan Gainor has critiqued the Fox News Channel special, "The Heat is On," a one-hour, one-sided special featuring environmental activists/celebrities Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Laurie David, wife of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David.

Gainor noted in his review that Fox News coverage of global warming and climate change stories had heretofore been the most balanced of all the broadcast outlets surveyed by the Free Market Project:

"The Heat is On" was a quite a departure for Fox. A Nov. 8, 2004, Free Market Project (FMP) study found Fox News the best of all five major TV networks in its news stories about global warming and the Kyoto Protocol. FMP analyzed news coverage from Jan. 20, 2001, until Sept. 30, 2004, and found "The Fox News Channel delivered better and more balanced reporting on global warming."

Gainor then documented host Rick Folbaum's lengthy disclaimer which excused the channel's one-sided coverage:

Are overtly liberal media ventures like Air America or Al Gore's Current TV doomed to failure? Yes, according to NBC Universal president Bob Wright.

The media exec ventured this opinion during an interview with his MSNBC employee Tucker Carlson at a media symposium. Broadcasting & Cable gives this account:

Carlson made a suggestion: Why not start a channel that overtly caters to liberals? "There's tons of liberals out there," Carlson said.

Going after a lefty audience would be futile, Wright said. "For some strange, probably genetic, reasons"—we're pretty sure that was a joke—"they don't listen to a lot of radio and they don't watch a lot of television."

Another disincentive: Despite all the media attention given to cable-news programming—from Bill O'Reilly's histrionics on Fox to Anderson Cooper's exhibitionistic empathy at CNN—American viewers are not all that interested. Wright pointed out that the cable-news networks combined draw fewer unique viewers all night long than a single half-hour of NBC Nightly News.

"You'd think it would be 25 million people. It's smaller than that, it's 5 million-6 million," Wright said. "It's not a very large group."

Unsaid by Wright was that programs hosted by outspoken and overtly liberal talking heads are going after a market that's already saturated with shows hosted by people who won't admit they're liberal.

CBS’s Thalia Assuras did a piece on “The Early Show” this morning (video link to follow) about President Bush’s falling poll numbers. In it, she took a snippet out of an interview that Bob Schieffer did with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) yesterday on “Face The Nation” to indicate that the senator was “concerned” about these polls and what they are currently suggesting. However, the sentences after this fragment that were not included in Assuras’s report qualified McCain’s concerns.

For example, Assuras stated, “The latest poll shows his support remains at its lowest ever, and that’s causing concern in his own party.” Then came McCain’s quote: “As a loyal Republican and a person who’s loyal to this president I am of course concerned. These numbers are not good.”

However, what CBS chose not to show the viewer were McCain’s next sentences (from caption dump):

The News-Times (Conn.) is no different from any other newspaper, except that they just got busted doing what journalists often do behind the curtain; make fun of the religious.

News-Times ran a photo online of the Immaculate High School girls' soccer team after scoring a winning goal. Unfortunately for them, they forgot to change the caption from "celebrating a teammate's decision to come out of the closet as a lesbian."

This wasn't some lowly intern that did this, it was the copy editor; the last line of journalistic principle at a newspaper.

The copy editor, who was "goofing around" was not identified. Do you think newspapers would let a government employee who made a mistake like this get away with not being identified?

No, they wouldn't.

As financial scandal was breaking at the left-wing radio network Air America (in the blogosphere at least) this summer, the Times could spare just one weak Metro-section story on the network "borrowing" $875,000 from a Bronx Boys and Girls Club, despite the easily exploitable hypocrisy angle (liberals taking money from poor kids!).

Times Public Editor Barney Calame even made the unusual step (online, anyway) of actually chiding his paper for being slow on the uptake.

Well, at last the Times has another Air America story -- but it's a puff piece on the network's female "rising star" hosts Randi Rhodes and Rachel Maddow.

Susan Brenna's story for Sunday's Arts & Leisure is headlined: "They Look Nothing Like Rush Limbaugh -- As women and lefties, Air America's rising stars are rarities in talk radio. But perhaps not for long."

We realize Tim Russert only got his job at NBC because of Russert’s then boss Senator Patrick Moynihan’s friendship with the then head of NBC News. But Russert regularly goes beyond the call of duty to his DNC overlords.

Behold this lead into a question for GOP head, Ken Mehlman on today’s (November 13th) installment of Meet The Press: cannot be .

MR. RUSSERT: "On solid intelligence." And then 15 months later, the secretary of state came on this program and said this.

(Videotape, May 16, 2004):

SEC’Y POWELL: But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed, and I regret it.

Setting the Record Straight: The Washington Post On Pre-War Intelligence

The Washington Post Implies That The Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) Was Superior To The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) Given To Congress. "But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country." (Dana Milbank And Walter Pincus, "Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument," The Washington Post, 11/12/05)

After a week of vacation, I still want to catch up on the newspapers. Here's a front-page headline from Thursday's Washington Post: "Down Syndrome Now Detectable In 1st Trimester: Earlier Diagnosis Allows More Time for Decisions." Why couldn't the Post be precise: earlier diagnosis allows more time for abortion decisions?

Reporter Rob Stein says a new test combining blood screening and ultrasound "can pinpoint many fetuses with the common genetic disorder 11 weeks after conception. That allows women to decide sooner whether to undergo the riskier follow-up testing needed to confirm the diagnosis." Then in paragraph four, the A-word finally appears: "Screening women before the second trimester allows those who might opt to terminate a pregnancy to make that decision when doctors say an abortion is safer and less traumatic." Safer for whom?

In a very atypical article, New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick (the man usually designated to report on that strange anthropological sample known as conservatives) writes up a story on plans for anti-Alito ads by liberal groups which actually calls them "liberal groups." How refreshing. A little balance. As in the Roberts nomination, reporters have played less of their usual games in disguising liberal groups as "women's groups," "civil rights groups," "environmentalists," "public interest groups," and other positive-sounding, nonpartisan-sounding words.

Don't be too alarmed. Kirkpatrick still typically labels Roe v. Wade as a "landmark" court decision (try finding a conservative precedent they call a "landmark"), noting liberal groups cite polls showing people don't want Roe overturned. See this for a reminder of how people answer abortion poll questions. He also remarked that White House spokesman Steve Schmidt condemned the planned liberal ads "Even before seeing the commercials." But the shorthand here does suggest they'll be loaded:

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.

Click here for instructions on running Gaggle daily on your own site. There's also an archive of previous toons available here.

I challenge everyone on this site to send MRC's website link to 5 new family members or friends. Encourage your friends and family to committ to you to send it to five other family or friends of their own who do not know about MRC. We must continue to fight the lunacy and hypocrisy of the Liberal Media before it destroys our great Nation. It absolutely amazes me how many people are not even able to identify bias or slant in a news story.  Write back to me and tell me what type of responses you get from your friends and family about seeing MRC for the first time. It is very encouraging as they see more bias and problems then they originally thought. 

"The curse of the wiseman who stays out of politics, is to be governed by fools."