Fox News' Bill O'Reilly has been busy recently zapping major newspapers for publishing misleading or false information.

        Last week, O'Reilly correctly noted that the Baltimore Sun, in this August 10, 2005, article, which called on President Bush to meet with Cindy Sheehan, failed to mention the fact that the President had already met with her before, in June 2004! (By the way, this August 6, 2005, CBSNews/AP article and this August 7, 2005, New York Times article did the similar thing by not mentioning that Sheehan had already met with the President.)

The majority of Americans charge the Bush Administration is not prosecuting the war effectively. The mainstream media, however, use this polling information to advance anti-Bush, anti-war positions.

An example of this can be seen in an August 14 Knight Ridder article. Under a headline reading “Majority of public opposes Iraq war” is a lengthy article generally summarized in one paragraph which reads, “New polls report that for the first time a majority of Americans reject President Bush’s contention that the war over there is making us safer over here. Indeed, baring major immediate progress in Iraq, 2005 may well be remembered as the year when public opinion went south and never came back…”

Though thinking people realize polls only reflect how people feel about specific questions at that brief moment in time, they are rarely reported as such. This is but one of the several ways our media present opinion as fact. When generalized polls are reported as hard news, when bombs and body counts are the lead stories on radio and television news shows, when a small band of war protesters are presented as “growing” sentiment against the conflict in Iraq, the poisoning of American resolve must be the intended outcome.

In his live chat today, Washington Post reporter/Master of the Snarky Arts Dana Milbank lowered himself to answering a conservative complaint that Cindy Sheehan is lamely attempting to achieve a second "do over" meeting with the President. Milbank replied: "No doubt the request for a second meeting is contrived. It's not as if Sheehan really believes she would change the president's mind. But that's just a vehicle that allows her to set up this camp in Crawford."

But this "contrived...vehicle" has been presented by Milbank and other reporters as a grand political problem for President Bush. Not as a publicity stunt, but as the grand reemergence of the Anti-War Movement. The rest of his answer really lays out his liberal view of the matter:

I came across this otherwise obscure item via a Google search that I have which updates me on CBS News developments. Ex-CNNer Jason Bellini is joining a "gay and lesbian issues" news program on the Logo network, a network launched in late June 2005 by CBS parent company Viacom geared to gays and lesbians.

Former CNN correspondent Jason Bellini will anchor a new gay issue news program in Viacom’s Logo cable network. The show will focus on regular news updates on topics related to gay and lesbian issues, and is a co-production with sister organization CBS News.

The reports will consist of three-to-five-minute news segments airing across Logo's schedule. Bellini will be based in New York. Court Passant of CBS News will oversee the CBS News On Logo unit.
"Jason is an experienced journalist who will use his reporting skills and range of knowledge to relay the news stories of interest to our audience," said Eileen Opatut, Senior Vice President, Original Programming, Logo.

Surprise: Barney Calame wakes up and smells the scandal at the left-wing radio network.

Yes, the Times ombudsman and loyal company man (who to date has made his predecessor Daniel Okrent look like a profile in courage) finally finds something to criticize his paper about in his latest web journal entry: The paper's almost nonexistent Air America coverage.

Calame admits: "Readers of The Times were poorly served by the paper's slowness to cover official investigations into questionable financial transactions involving Air America, the liberal radio network. The Times's first article on the investigations finally appeared last Friday after weeks of articles by other newspapers in New York and elsewhere. The Times's recent slowness stands in contrast to its flurry of articles about Air America in the spring of 2004, when the network was launched."

Calame makes the same points on double-standards in coverage that conservatives have made: "Yet The Times was silent as other publications reported that city and state investigators were looking into whether the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx had made improper loans of as much as $875,000 to Air America."

On Wednesday night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann labeled Rush Limbaugh as the day's "Worst Person in the World!" in a segment that airs regularly on his 8pm EDT Countdown show. He normally introduces three nominees for the dishonor -- tagged as "worse," "worser," and "worst." Olbermann took Limbaugh out of context in highlighting the Limbaugh quote promoted by a far-left group: “Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real." Olbermann snidely quipped: "I guess she made up that dead-son-in-Iraq business." He also gratuitously speculated that "painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics." (Video available Windows Media or Real Media)

But on his radio show on Wednesday, Limbaugh had already discussed the fact that his comments had been taken out of context by others, explaining that the media see both Sheehan and Burkett as "an opportunity" to exploit and that "it doesn't matter what the specifics of Cindy Sheehan's case are."

Full CyberAlert item follows. For all the articles in today's MRC CyberAlert.

The Boston Globe this morning leads with a large picture, first column, above the fold, of a group of candle-holding protestors in a "vigil" to show solidarity with Cindy Sheehan. It's a lovely shot, taken on a beach at sundown, and the people look like nice people. It is also framed in such a way that the crowd looks like it might have been much bigger than it actually was.

In a stunning example of how the mainstream press manipulates public opinion, as well as a clear explanation as to why the majority of the American people believes that the economy is doing poorly despite mountains of statistical evidence to the contrary, the press today decided to largely ignore one of the biggest one-day declines in energy prices in many months.

As I reported here yesterday, oil prices at the NYMEX dropped by almost three dollars per barrel, with gas prices declining by almost ten cents. Yet, after scaring the American public with regular predictions of economic gloom and doom concerning inflationary fears tied to escalating energy prices the past few weeks, America's two most prominent newspapers -- the New York Times and the Washington Post -- must have decided that good news on the energy front wasn’t deserving of the public’s attention.  (cont'd...)

CBS News has not reported this week on Janet Napolitano and Bill Richardson---Democratic governors facing reelection in 2006 in Arizona and New Mexico, respectively-- declaring states of emergency stemming from US-Mexico border security issues. Neither The Early Show nor the CBS Evening News have touched the story. Yet on Sunday, the day after Richardson issued his state of emergency declaration, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer pitched a softball which DNC chairman hit out of the park to slam Republicans as "scapegoating" immigrants for the upcoming 2006 midterm elections:

The economy is doing well -- the federal deficit is shrinking, unemployment has fallen to 5.0%, and America has enjoyed more than two straight years of job growth and 3.5 million new jobs. That hasn't stopped the media from describing the economy as “dicey,” “volatile” and “slow.” The Media Research Center's Free Market Project analyzed all of the broadcast network's economic stories since the start of President Bush's second term, and we found that a big majority (62%) cast the economy in negative terms.

Even when good news made it to viewers, journalists undermined it with bad news 45 percent of the time. For example, on World News Tonight back on March 4, Dean Reynolds presented an upbeat report about strong job growth, but stuck a knife in at the end: "While job growth is up, wage growth is not. And the question now is how long consumers will keep spending and fueling the economy without a raise in pay.”

In the eyes of the MSM, Pope Benedict XVI has a problem. He's too darn . . . Catholic.

As the Pope begins World Youth Day in his native Germany, Today took the occasion to invite in Newsweek's Christopher Dickey for an oh-so-effete critique of Benedict XVI.

Interviewed by Katie Couric, Dickey first claimed that Europeans view Benedict "with some skepticism right now. People are looking at this Pope and saying what does he want to do by re-Christianizing Europe?"

Gee, and here I thought that was a Pope's job.

Dickey then added, with breathtaking condescension, "on the other hand he isn't creating the kinds of problems people thought he would. There was a lot of suspicion that he would be so emphasizing Christianity that it would alienate Muslims, that it would alienate Jews in Europe."

Filmmaker Michael Tucker spent two months with the 2/3 Field Artillery unit, otherwise known as “The Gunners.” The film he made, Gunner Palace: Some Stories Will Never Make the Nightly News, detailed a troop unit stationed in a former palace of Uday Hussein (nicknamed Gunner Palace).

In May Tucker was invited by the Directors Guild of America to screen parts of the flick along with other films dealing with the war. Also included, according to the documentary’s website, were “clips from Iraq themed episodes of ‘JAG’ and ‘ER’ and the first episode of Steven Bochco's ‘Over There,’” an FX Network series dealing with the fictional lives of troops in Iraq.

NewsBusters interviewed Tucker about the general perception of what’s happening in Iraq and the behavior of NBC’s Matt Lauer, who was skeptical when troops in Iraq told the anchor their morale was high.

The New York Times is reporting on a series of Pew Research Studies that indicate that a majority of Americans think that news organizations are biased in their reporting:

The share of Americans who believe that news organizations are "politically biased in their reporting" increased to 60 percent in 2005, up from 45 percent in 1985, according to polls by the Pew Research Center.

Many people also believe that biased reporting influences who wins or loses elections. A new study by Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Ethan Kaplan of the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, however, casts doubt on this view. Specifically, the economists ask whether the advent of the Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch's cable television network, affected voter behavior. They found that Fox had no detectable effect on which party people voted for, or whether they voted at all.

Just how desperate is CBS brass to extricate their “Evening News” program from its perpetual place in the cellar of TV ratings? Apparently not desperate enough, though they are getting closer.

In Wednesday’s New York Observer, we learn that Andrew Heyward, the CBS News president responsible for nearly ten years of failure, has turned to his interns for ideas on how to “revamp” the “Evening News.”

The panel was the culmination of a summer-long project that divided CBS News’ nearly 100 college-age interns into small groups to come up with strategies to attract younger viewers to the network’s third-ranking evening newscast.

“Basically the assignment was to come up with a presentation and concept for how you would revamp the evening news, to captivate a younger demographic,” said one intern who participated in the program. “They are not getting the audience that they want.” [...]

Interns said they were encouraged to brainstorm freely, suggesting changes to the show’s anchor lineup, its news content, set design, marketing techniques and any other aspect of the newscast. One ground rule: The 6:30 time slot had to stay the same.

It's certainly true that CBS isn't getting the audience it needs. But turning to inexperienced interns with no corporate standing to say what they think isn't going to be the best source of advice, especially since for most people under 30, early evening news will always be irrelevant.

Instead, CBS should be turning to the people who do watch news and ask their opinion. The phenomenal growth of cable's Fox News Channel proves irrefutably that there is a tremendous television audience out there that wasn't being served by the existing media structure.