"We feel the mainstream media,” she tells Newsmax, "is focusing on the negative stories coming out of Iraq and very rarely highlighting the good news.”

WHAT??? American journalists, lying about a war? I've never heard of such a thing, except in Vietnam, Lebanon, Desert Storm, Iraqi war. Yeah...except for those wars, I've never heard of such a thing!

Free Market Project's Charles Simpson has just published a detailed fisking of Washington Post reporter Jonathan Weisman's partisan and skewed accounting of the success of the Bush tax cuts, particularly dividend tax cuts.

Of particular interest, Simpson notes that Weisman fell hook, line, and sinker for a flawed study by a handful of Federal Reserve economists. Portions in bold are my emphasis:

Weisman hyped a flawed report from the Federal Reserve Board to draw the conclusion that the earlier dividend tax cut package “had no real impact on the stock market and prompted ‘only muted gain in total corporate payouts.’

After a month of hounding President Bush for low poll numbers, Thursday’s “Early Show” on CBS ignored their own network's poll showing President Bush’s approval rating has improved by five points over the last month. But a month ago, when a CBS poll found lower ratings for the President, the “Early Show” mentioned it two days in a row.  CBS’s Bill Plante was quick to point out that among modern Presidents; only Richard Nixon was lower at this point in his second term.  The next day, Thalia Assuras touted how “the President’s poll numbers are defining a new low.”  However, CBS's polling partner, the “New York Times”, found President Bush’s rising poll numbers important enough to put  on their front page above the fold Thursday morning under a headline reading “Economy Lifts Bush’s Support in Latest Poll,” and the poll was also featured on last night's "CBS Evening News” with Bob Schieffer.

"They
hoped that by shutting down all avenues of accountability, they could
establish a permanent stranglehold on our government where they would
be insulated from any consequences for betraying the public trust... Think
of that friend or that member of your family who has been hurt, or even
just outraged by what the Republicans have done to our country -- is
there anything they want more than to help restore decency to our
government?... all
Americans, because it will "bring us closer to ending the radical
agenda of George Bush and his Republican Cover-Up Congress." - Pelosi/CNS

CNN decided to try an original take on news of Ann Coulter being heckled by liberal students at the University of Connecticut.

The AP headline that originally said "Hecklers Cause Coulter to Cut UConn Speech" was turned into "Ann Coulter to audience: You're stupider than I am."

In response to the heckling, Coulter had said, "I love to engage in repartee with people who are stupider than I am."

Her remark was seized upon to make it appear Coulter was the one at fault for the incident. Not only that, the loaded CNN headline makes it look like she insulted the entire audience, not just the few enlightened progressives making a fuss.

Jim Romenesko picks up on this morning's Boston Globe interview with 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace. Highlights follow; the questioner is the Globe's Suzanne C. Ryan.

Q. President George W. Bush has declined to be interviewed by you. What would you ask him if you had the chance?

A. What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn't want to travel. You knew very little about the military. . . . The governor of Texas doesn't have the kind of power that some governors have. . . . Why do you think they nominated you? . . . Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?

Thursday's news, filtered here as you like it.

As the Christmas season arrives and weather gets colder across the United States, Christian temperatures always heat up to the boiling point. Across the country those who practice their Faith find themselves making written and verbal cries about the multitude of attacks on this treasured holiday. This year, though the attacks on Christmas seem to have escalated, the pleadings of hurt voices have turned to roars of anger.

Television has been filled with pundits proclaiming, as in the case of Fox news Channel’s John Gibson, the “War on Christmas”. The same channel’s Bill O’Reilly continues a nightly dialog on his observation of anti-Christian attacks. There was event a media commentator who equated the push toward removing religion from the season to geography.

He made two very interesting observations. The first was that those who live in “Jesusland” or the “flyover” red states of America are course, crass, and really not very bright. They need religious symbols to give them a sense of direction. His second observation was those in the blue states have more heart and have a greater caring nature. He said this could be proven by the simple fact that those who live in the blue states have more “safety net programs” and pay far more taxes than those bumpkins in the red states who are tight with their dollars.

The new December issue of American Journalism Review includes an article by New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Brian Thevenot titled "Myth-Making In New Orleans." Thevenot was one of the Times-Picayune reporters who ended up feeling the need to correct the wildest stories emerging from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He doesn't spare anyone in the piece, quoting Fox News hyperbole (and knocking conservative media-critic sites like ChronWatch). But the story's worth reading. The most interesting part is how Thevenot and his colleagues were treated on TV. CNN's Paula Zahn looks especially interested in steering around blaming the media for their mistakes.

We came away with differing assessments of how the television media had handled the revision. Meeks and Perlstein felt Zahn, in the live interview, had tried to pile the entirety of the blame at the foot of the New Orleans mayor and police chief, fully exonerating the media and street-level sources.

Has Katie Couric watched too many westerns? You know, the kind where the sheriff shoots the gun out of the bad guy's hand?

You'd think so, given the repeated questions she posed to a former air marshal in the wake of yesterday's shooting of a frantic passenger claiming to have a bomb aboard an American Airlines flight .

Katie's guest was former air marshal Tony Kuklinski, who stated that "by all accounts I've seen, what [the air marshals] did was necessary."

Katie wasn't so sure:

"Do they always shoot to kill, Tony? In other words, I guess the average person hearing this [on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Katie?] might think: isn't there a way where they could have shot this person and not killed him? Wounded him or incapacitated him in some way without killing him?"

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.