Inside the New York Times today, reporter Gardiner Harris reports on how federal regulators have found that all four women who died after taking the RU-486 abortion drug cocktail “suffered from a rare and highly lethal bacterial infection.” This is certainly not a story the major media has shown much interest in. They did major stories (hawking liberal interest groups) warning about fat-free Pringles and taco shells made of genetically engineered corn, but major corporations that make surgery-free abortions possible? The corporate watchdog suddenly is a harmless, quiet pooch.  

Harris reported  “officials from the F.D.A. and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have decided to convene a scientific meeting early next year to discuss this medical mystery, according to two drug agency officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.”

The Associated Press has its problems with religion. Newsbusters has documented many examples of the AP mentioning conservatives’ religious affiliations when they are actually irrelevant to the stories they publish.

Today however, they ran a piece called, Disasters Heighten Habitat's Profile, which dealt with the growing popularity of Habitat for Humanity, a group previously most known for its involvement with former president Jimmy Carter.

A recent NewsMax piece (scroll down to article #2) gave high praise to yours truly. Please excuse the obviously shameless self-promotion, but I’m verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.

“Noel Sheppard isn't pulling any punches these days.

“Sheppard has become an increasingly popular economic guru, and he could well be the political right's answer to noted liberal pundit Paul Krugman of The New York Times.

“Sheppard is widely accessible in cyberspace, and he continues to land haymakers, delivering crushing blows to mainstream media arguments that the American economy is in peril.

“This past weekend, Sheppard took the mainstream media to task for their questionable evaluation of economic news as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’”

"Cheaper gas gets season rolling," trumpets the front page of the November 23 edition of USA Today, in a story that breaks the usual media template on "soaring" or "record" gas prices that the Free Market Project study documented in early November.

USA Today's coverage of dropping gas prices continues on pages 8-9A with "Pump prices dip below $2 in some states; still up from '04," which is complemented by an color-coded county-by-county map of the United States displaying current average gas prices.

[ view map online: Flash plugin required to view]

[see more after jump]

Comments are a wonderful thing and truly one of the best features of blogging. I say that because a particular comment on the CBS News "Public Eye" blog is worth highlighting here at NewsBusters now that axed CBS News producer Mary Mapes has come under increasing fire from her former employer. This raises a question for PE commenter "Neuro-con." (Unfortunately, CBS's software does not allow direct linking to a comment so you'll have to search or scroll a bit.)

Mapes' book was newsworthy, in that it confirmed that she has an extremely distorted notion of truth. CBS is implicated in maintaining such an individual on the payroll for 15 years.

CBS has an ethical obligation to (at least) make public a list of her previous pieces for 60 Minutes, along with transcripts.

The NY Times and The New Republic, when confronted with a pathological liar on the payroll, went back and re-reported every single one of their stories. In both cases, a pattern of behavior was revealed.

Vaughn [Ververs, PE's editor], please answer this question: Why does CBS hold itself to a much lower standard than the NYTimes or The New Republic?

The news media elite are to the left of the public in several policy areas related to the war on terrorism, a poll "of opinion leaders and the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in collaboration with the Council on Foreign Relations," found. While 56 percent of the public believes "efforts to establish a stable democracy" in Iraq will succeed, 63 percent of the news media elite think it will fail; a plurality of 48 percent of the public think going to war in Iraq was correct, but 71 percent of the news media elite consider it a bad decision; the public is split evenly at 44 percent on whether the Iraq war has helped or hurt the war on terrorism, but an overwhelming 68 percent of the news media elite say it has hurt; and 46 percent of the public believe torture of terrorist suspects is often or sometimes "justified," 78 percent of the news media elite contend it is "rarely" or "never" justified. Plus, news media elite approval of Bush's job performance -- at a lowly 21 percent -- is half that of the public's.

ESPN loves to run the clip of NFL coaching legend Vince Lombardi stomping down the sideline, demanding to know "what the hell is going on around here?"

Watching the Today show the last two mornings, one is tempted to ask the same question.

As reported here, Matt Lauer yesterday criticized the Democrats for their lack of a plan for Iraq. This morning, Matt & Co. were, mirabile dictu, back at it again.

Lauer introduced the segment in this surprisingly W-friendly way: "President Bush has taken a beating on Capitol Hill from Democrats unhappy with the way the war is going, but do the president's critics have an exit strategy of their own?"

Norah O'Donnell, who's never been accused of pro-Republican bias, narrated the segment entitled "Do Democrats Have Plan for Iraq?"

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales also has a regular column in Television Week magazine, and now he's coming to the aid and support of disgraced (Shales calls her "highly respected") CBS producer Mary Mapes. The article chides CBS "uber-boss" Les Moonves for his hostility toward CBS News, since Mapes claims Moonves once "half-jokingly" said he'd like to "bomb the whole building." He brings up the George Clooney CBS-glorifying hatchet job "Good Night and Good News" to claim that maybe today, Congress will reopen the case not to investigate Joseph McCarthy, but to "lambaste 'the media' and how they covered the story." This is where it gets interesting. Shales complains about Vanity Fair being mean to Mapes:

On MSNBC's Countdown show on Tuesday night, host Keith Olbermann brought aboard actress and Air America radio host Janeane Garofalo to discuss conservative columnist Robert Novak's latest problems after he was involved in a scuffle with an airplane passenger. The segment turned out to be the Air America host's latest opportunity to rant against conservatives, FNC, and what she sees as a "right-wing" media. Notably, Olbermann voiced agreement with attacks she made against conservative columnist Ann Coulter and FNC's Fox and Friends.

After Olbermann reported on Novak's airplane scuffle and showed a puppet show reenactment of it for fun, then came the segment with Garofalo, which was presumably intended to poke more fun at Novak. Garofalo was soon on the attack against conservatives as she contended that Novak and other "right-wing partisan hacks ... are always on the verge of punching somebody or always, they always behave as if they've just been cut off in traffic" and "they have an anger management problem that, that, then they just pretend is Republican or conservative politics." She later suggested that Novak might find punishment by being forced to appear on FNC's Fox and Friends, which she described as "akin to waterboarding" and as "a really, really unpleasant place to be." To which Olbermann quipped, "Punishment is watching Fox and Friends."

Apparently my recent Newsbusters article about Muhammad Ali ruffled some feathers. Last week USA Today sports writer Jon Saraceno wrote a puff piece about Ali and the Medal of Freedom, in which he couldn't resist taking a jab at me for bringing up Ali's treason during Vietnam. In classic left-leaning media manner, he copied and pasted one sentence out of the context of the entire article condemning Ali. I expected as much; this is the MSM, after all. But what was inexcusable was the fact that he provided no link to the article or even to my website so that his readers could judge for themselves what was actually written.

Look, I wrote then and will do so again now that Ali was indeed a gifted boxer and athlete. But that does not now nor will it ever make him a hero. He has everything he does because there were men in the past who knew there were things out there bigger and more important than themselves, and they were willing to seal that belief with their youth, their time, and even their lives. THAT is a hero. Ali took what this country had to give, but when asked to help others gain the same freedoms, his answer was a resounding "Not I." Like the selfish barnyard animals who refused to help the hen sew the wheat to make the flour to bake the bread, Ali was only too willing to take a piece of what he was NOT willing to help create.

As reported by NewsBusters here, the media’s current fascination with Rep. John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) completely ignores the decade of the ’90s when the congressman was a leading pork-barrel spender. Yet, maybe more curious, this love affair is thoroughly dismissing some rather recent earmarking that made the papers before Mr. Murtha became the media’s favorite anti-war spokesman.

Not the least of these articles was a front-page, 2,200 word expose in the June 13, 2005 Los Angeles Times by Ken Silverstein and Richard Simon. The headline set the tone: “Lobbyist's Brother Guided House Bill; A family member's ties to special interests raise questions in the case of Democrat John Murtha.” The crux of the article is that Murtha’s brother is a senior partner in a company called KSA Consulting. Said consulting firm received $20.8 million in defense contracts in 2004 (Times link expired):

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.

Dana Milbank's snarky "Washington Sketch" column in the Washington Post Tuesday employs a bad, even mildly offensive, analogy in comparing Bush and Cheney to the last two Popes: "As vice president, Cheney has always played the hard-line Cardinal Ratzinger to Bush's sunny John Paul II. Before the war, Cheney asserted that Iraq had 'reconstituted nuclear weapons.' Since the invasion, he has gone further than others in the administration in asserting Iraq's ties to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He caused a stir when he directed an obscenity at a Democrat on the Senate floor, and he has sparred with senators in both parties in his bid to block a ban on torture."

As much as I may admire the president and vice president, comparing them to holy men that millions of Catholics believe were chosen by God to lead the worldwide church of Jesus Christ is just wrong -- starting with Cheney the Ratzinger telling Sen. Patrick Leahy to go (love) himself. Milbank was so pleased with the analogy he used it within seconds on MSNBC with Keith Olbermann Monday night, that Cheney and the Holy Father were both "dour hardliners." This is a caricature of both men. But secular reporters also focus only on where the Pope draws a line on hot-button social issues, and not on his love and care for the church and its members and its traditions.