In a taped interview aired Monday night on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor, Mike Wallace of CBS’s 60 Minutes, agreed that the Bush National Guard story should not have aired if the memos could not be authenticated “beyond a reasonable doubt,” revealed that the weekend Mapes and her colleagues were putting the story together “was chaos” inside the 60 Minutes offices and that Dan Rather has “acknowledged to me that he did not see the finished piece before it went on the air.” Contradicting earlier reports that he and Rather got into an argument at a urinal, Wallace maintained that “I had a pleasant, sensible discussion with Dan. I said everybody who was involved with you in this thing, everybody got fired. Why didn't you go with them?” Wallace soon resisted Bill O’Reilly’s characterization of the Memogate story as a “fiasco.”

Moving on to Iraq, Wallace contended that “Iraq is becoming a kind of Vietnam” and asserted that “we should never have gone into Iraq. We were sold a bill of goods.” Wallace, however, suggested Bush may not really have been in charge and thus may not be to blame: “Now, whether the President was sold a bill of goods or whether Dick Cheney was sitting in the chair at that time, I don't know.” (Transcript follows, as well as a look back at Wallace’s May of 2004 attack on Bush and the war.)

It appears the Sudanese government doesn't much like being considered a state that sponsors terrorism. In fact, the Minister of Information and Communication, Alzahwi Ibrahim Malik, is blaming the international media for being biased against them:

He said a good example of this distortion was the inclusion of Sudan in the infamous list of countries supporting terrorism, or countries which discriminate against other religions and minorities.

"These allegations are far from the truth. We in Sudan live as equal citizens and we do not discriminate between people because of their religion, colour or ethnic origin.

"We are a multi-colour, multi-cultural and multi-religious society, but we are equal citizens who have the same rights and obligations," he said.... "

The military community is made up of active duty personnel, veterans, retire military and their families. While it is a constitutional truth that every American has the right of free speech, including members of the MSM, there is no segment of our population that is more deserving of that right than the men, women and family members who sacrificed themselves through separation, immense hardship, pain, blood and loss of lives on our behalf. These are some of their words about the War on Terror and the conduct of those at home.

Lieutenant General E.G. “Buck” Shuler, Jr. commanded the Strategic Air Command’s Eighth Air Force for three years and two months. He participated in Operation Just Cause in Panama, plus Desert Shield and Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf. His 32-year military career included 23 years in SAC. The general is now retired and lives in Lake Martin, Alabama.

George Korda, a columnist for the Knoxville News Sentinel, today memorializes former Southern Baptist Convention president Adrian Rogers, who passed away Nov. 15. Rogers helped to achieve a "Conservative Resurgence" in the denomination in the 1980s, but Korda says the MSM portrayed his life work in political terms rather than as one committed to his faith:

The New York Times wrote that Dr. Rogers "helped revive the fundamentalist Christian message that the Bible is to be regarded as literally true."

The New York Times says such a message required reviving. That undoubtedly comes as a surprise to many millions of Christians.

Robyn Blumner, former ACLU Director and current St. Petersburg Times columnist retreads this old leftist tire:

Fox News gives its audience what it wants, too. That's why, in 2003, a survey from the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 67 percent of its loyal viewers believed the fallacy that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Qaida, whereas only 40 percent of those who relied on print media were confused on that point. Welcome to the "informed" electorate of a newspaper-free world. It's already starting to give us the government we deserve.

(Notice that people who watch Fox are fallacious believers, while the people who consume her product and don't agree with her are simply "confused".)

Saddam connected to al-Qaida? That's a weird wild thought. Where on Earth would Fox News and this "informed electorate" get that "fallacious" idea? Let's see, maybe...

State of the Union Address January 28, 2003: "Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody, reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaida."

BBC Profile: "It is during this period that Zarqawi is thought to have renewed his acquaintance with al-Qaeda. He is believed to have fled to Iraq in 2001 after a US missile strike on his Afghan base, though the report that he lost a leg in the attack has not been verified. US officials argue that it was at al-Qaeda's behest that he moved to Iraq and established links with Ansar al-Islam - a group of Kurdish Islamists from the north of the country. He is thought to have remained with them for a while - feeling at home in mountainous northern Iraq."

The websites of many major media organizations (including USA Today, MSNBC, ABC News, and CNN) aren't wasting any time reporting the guilty plea by California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a Republican who admitted taking $2.4 million in bribes. They all are placing his story high on their homepages. That alone isn't bias, as corruption by public officials should always be at the top of the news headlines.

However, I'm guessing that few who hear about Cunningham have ever heard of former U.S. Rep. Frank Ballance, a Democrat who as a North Carolina state senator used his official position to channel public funds into a private nonprofit that he operated. He received a four-year sentence in federal prison on Oct. 12 after admitting guilt to redirecting taxpayer dollars for his private use. He had resigned his congressional seat last year.

Strong "Black Friday" showings across America were given short shrift by the Washington Post this "Cyber Monday" which buried the story in a four-paragraph blurb on page A10 in the District and Maryland home edition.

But not only were the numbers good in comparison to last year, they far surprassed the expectations of the National Retail Federation (NRF), the industry group which analyzes and forecasts the performance of the American retail industry.

[see more after jump]

MRC analyst Michael Rule reports CBS presented the Saddam Hussein trial on "The Early Show" as a spectacle pretty much controlled by the old dictator:  

Co-host Harry Smith: "Kim from what you can tell and where you are in Baghdad, are people paying attention to this, is this important to the Iraqi people?"

In an interview with Broadcasting & Cable, Bill Moyers claims that while he was at the helm of PBS's Now, the show was guilty of "aggressive reporting," but not liberal bias. (Hat tip: Romenesko.)

Following is the relevant portion of the interview. The questioner is B&C's John Eggerton.

You are the exemplar of liberal PBS bias, according to Ken Tomlinson. Was your show liberally biased?

A Monday New York Times editorial, "Public Broadcasting's Enemy Within," goes way over the top in its rhetorical assault on Kenneth Tomlinson, the former Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman who had the audacity to attempt to bring some political balance to PBS, which has long used tax money to fund liberal programming:

"As chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson proved to be a disastrous zealot. Internal investigators found he repeatedly broke federal law and ethics rules in overreaching his authority and packing the payroll with Republican ideologues."

Reuters reports:

The British Broadcasting Corporation has upheld a complaint against one of its journalists who said in a radio report she cried when a dying Yasser Arafat was flown from the West Bank in 2004.

Barbara Plett made the remark in a dispatch for the "From Our Own Correspondent" program describing how she felt when a helicopter carrying Arafat, who was gravely ill, took off from his compound, according to a BBC Web site.

"When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose from his ruined compound, I started to cry," she said in the 30 October, 2004 broadcast.

Plett was punished because she "breached the requirements of due impartiality."

On the BBC's website, Helen Boaden, the director of news, says Barbara Plett "unintentionally gave the impression of over-identifying with Yasser Arafat and his cause".

I recently returned from a cruise to the southern Caribbean and the only news available on the ship was CNN International.  If you think CNN is bad you should see International.  It was like Al-Jazeera, completely anti-American, anti-Bush.  They never had any content that was positive about the U.S. I have never seen anything like it.  My wife finally made me quit watching because I would get so upset with their bias.

Anyone who believes the Bush administration could appease the MSM and their political allies on the left via a major troop withdrawal from Iraq need look no further than this morning's Today show to be disabused of the notion.

Shades of Bush Sr.'s "read my lips" debacle, in which the very same Democrats who wheedled him into raising taxes turned immediately around and condemned him for breaking his promise.

For there was Katie Couric, questioning the wisdom of withdrawal and painting a bleak picture of a post-withdrawal Iraq.

Her guests were retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey and Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Katie's first question: "what are some of the problems about reducing the troop levels in terms of the state of Iraq? Are you worried about that?"

The grand purpose of Newsbusters is to present examples of provable factual bias in the mainstream media (MSM). This article does not do that. Instead, it presents an example of the MSM, specifically MSNBC, running a program on illegal immigration, which is scrupulously honest, fair and balanced.

I almost did not watch “Crossing the Line? The Battle at America’s Borders” because I thought this documentary, hosted by Lester Holt, would be the usual “pity the (illegal) immigrants and let them all in because they just want jobs” pabulum that the press usually generates. Five minutes in, it was clearly no such thing.

I watched to the end, expecting it to degenerate into that biased approach eventually. Except for one obvious factual error near the end, it never did that. (The quotes are taken from a TiVo of the program watched repeatedly to get the right. The transcript is not yet on the MSNBC website.)

Anti-American left wing lunatic Ted Rall was not content with depicting the US military as rapists, pedophiles and idiots. In his latest piece of artwork, Rall portrays Iraq War Veterans as torturers and domestic abusers. The cartoon, Sex Lives of Iraq War Vets, published on November 26, 2005, shows the veterans torturing their girlfriends and the girlfriend's parents Abu-Ghraib style. The final frame shows a vet dropping bombs on his girlfriend's home in response to a break-up.

This latest attempt to undermine our military comes on the heels of Rall's cartoon depicting US soliders in Iraq as rapists and pedophiles.Ted Rall's drawings and his hate Bush rants are distributed by Universal Press Syndicates. Rall's work is distributed to over 140 media outlets including the New York Times, the LA Times and the San Jose Mercury News. Yahoo.com also publishes Rall's editorials as part of its opinion section. There is no mention of Al-Jazeerah being a subscriber to Rall's far left editorials.

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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