Many times the bias in the mainstream press shows itself in just the stories it chooses to run. The homeless disappeared from the press when a Democrat was in the White House, President Clinton's vacations were never a big story the way that Reagan's and Bush's have been. Well, another story has crossed the wire tonight that falls, I believe, into the same category. Of All Gas Consumers, Bush May Be Biggest

Getting President Bush from here to there consumes an enormous amount of fuel, whether he's aboard Air Force One, riding in a helicopter or on the ground in a heavily armored limousine. The bill gets steeper every day as the White House is rocked by the same energy prices as regular drivers. Taxpayers still foot the bill.

        It was almost too easy. Up until this morning (August 24, 2005), I had never heard the Stephanie Miller Show on Air America's outlet, KTLK, in Los Angeles. Within 45 seconds (I swear), in a discussion on the media coverage of the recent incendiary remarks by televangelist Pat Robertson, I heard Miller mislead her audience by suggesting that there has been only modest coverage of this story! [link to audio (about 10 minutes in)]

MILLER: Can you even imagine: If any left-winger in this country had said anything even vaguely like that [Robertson's remark], this would have been everywhere!

CO-HOST ("Chris"?): Yup. Fox News would have covered it!

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The elephant in the room, so to speak, in the Cindy Sheehan story is why she is demanding a meeting with President Bush to discuss her son's death in Iraq when she already had an opportunity to meet the President in June, 2004, and walked away from the meeting not only neglecting to ask him why he "killed" her son, but praising him.

In the Associated Press report, "Peace Mom Returns to Texas War Protest,"  reporter Angela K. Brown attempts to justify this contradition by rewriting the history of the Iraq War. 

In an otherwise nondescript article, in the last paragraph offers her explanation;

"Sheehan and other grieving families met with Bush about two months after her son died last year, before reports of faulty prewar intelligence surfaced and caused her to become a vocal opponent of the war."

On his MSNBC Countdown show on Wednesday night, Keith Olbermann, who described the Fox News Channel as “just a brand name, not a description,” named FNC's Brit Hume his “runner-up” in his daily “Worst Person in the World” gimmick. What riled Olbermann? Hume daring to criticize as “'excessive' the TV coverage of Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela because, he said, Robertson has 'no influence.'” Olbermann sarcastically added: “Probably why Fox has had Robertson on their network ten times in the last year.” By that reasoning, Olbermann would have to consider influential the parade of lawyers, family friends and other hangers-on brought out many times a day on FNC and MSNBC to talk about the Natalee Holloway case.

In fact, Hume never said Robertson has "no influence." Hume suggested that Robertson's "political influence may have been declining since he came in second in the Iowa Republican caucuses 17 years ago and he may have no clout with the Bush administration" and that CNN's Bill Schneider had decided that Robertson has "little influence." (Nor did Hume say "no influence" during a later panel segment on Robertson.)

Links to Hume's original words and a full transcript of Olbermann's "worser” reasoning for Hume follows.

In a Monday posting, Greg Mitchell, the Editor of the leading newspaper industry magazine, Editor & Publisher, urged newspapers to editorialize about getting the U.S. out of Iraq. The up top summary below the "Tipping Point on Iraq" headline over his August 22 piece: "At this critical moment, it's time for newspapers -- many of which helped get us into this war -- to use their editorial pages as platforms to help get us out of it. So far, few have done much more than wring their hands. Now, it's literally do-or-die time." FNC's Brit Hume, in his "Grapevine" segment on Tuesday, picked up on Mitchell's advocacy which Romenesko had highlighted.

Call him a protectionist or just call him “the Dan Rather of financial journalism,” as one conservative critic referred to CNN’s Lou Dobbs. No matter what you call him, the truth is he’s one of the biggest opponents of free trade anywhere. Dobbs, who anchors “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” is a veteran business reporter who spends his time these days giving industry the business. The worst part of it is that viewers are missing the real story. Ninety-four percent of the show’s reports about trade over a four-month period blamed free trade for horrors ranging from “destroying” the U.S. middle class to leaving a “legacy of environmental degradation, lost jobs, and increased illegal immigration.” A defense of free trade never received a fair hearing. CNN has promoted the show as “news, debate and opinion.” But it’s hard to tell the difference between the three the way Dobbs delivers them. This is all part of a new analysis by The Media Research Center’s Free Market Project.

CNN's American Morning was all about "Troubling News for President Bush." On the top of the list, a new poll showing a 40% approval rating and, of course, Cindy Sheehan. President Bush is in Idaho meeting with military families.

CNN Anchor, Bob Franken: "The audience will be family members of people who have been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. The president will be meeting with a group of them afterwards. Of course the one he's already met with who he has heeded the call for another meeting, Cindy Sheehan. She's coming back to Crawford, Texas today. As the president arrives. She is sort of the symbol of a growing unrest in the United States, as reflected in that poll. Unrest in the U.S. that is showing dissatisfaction with the Iraq policy the president is now assertively defending. And when it comes to talking about Cindy Sheehan, he has to walk a very fine line between sensitivity and an aggressive defense."

I wrote a week and a half ago that the AP was acting as a PR firm for Cindy Sheehan. It doesn't appear that anything's changed. At all. If anything, it has gotten worse. They're still refusing to run with any of the controversial statements that she's made. They've not reported her comments on Hardball that "we should have gone after al Qaeda and maybe not after the country of Afghanistan." She told Chris Matthews that the purpose of her visit to Crawford "is actually to hold [the President] accountable for things he has already said," but no one in the "tough, skeptical" mainstream press has done anything to hold her accountable for the things that she's said.

Harlingen, Texas August 24, 2005: The saga of Cindy Sheehan continues with online postings and traditional outlets of both print and electronic media chanting an unending anti-war mantra.

The web page publication Yahoo News, on August 21, 2005, ran a banner headline reading “Cindy Sheehan Stirs Up Long Overdue Anti-War Movement”. The text of the article reads “She is no glamour girl, and yet she has a throng of admirers who have been nursing inside themselves, for the last two years and more, the secrets she implicitly reveals.”

The article identifies her as “The Gold Star Mother of the Iraq War” and later in the text charges …”Cindy Sheehan’s lightning effect on the country is that she has been saying – with her actions, gestures and intonations, if not exactly in words – what has been left deliberately unsaid in America until now…That the war in Iraq is useless.”

Where was the indignation when liberal radio suggested that the POTUS should be assassinated? I don't recall seeing that on ABC/CBS/NBC the night after it STARTED happening. They even had audio with machine gun fire.

Oh, that wasn't a stupid Christian source....

St. Petersburg Times reporter David Adams talks about his Natalee Holloway story. Note to David: The best way to start an interview is probably not to lie.

The last time I got such a big response was in the days before email and the Internet. I wrote a story about Hurricane Andrew for a British newspaper, a first person account of what you do when a hurricane hits your house, and I wrote that I evacuated my house with my wife and we left the cat behind. And I got so many outraged letters about "how I could do such a thing?" As it turned out, by the way, my wife did take the cat at the last minute, after I filed my story.

Let me just see if I have this straight. You were writing a story about what to do when a hurricane hits your house, but it was before a hurricane hit your house? No. You were writing the story while you were evacuating and the facts changed in the minutes between turning in the story and leaving the house? Wait. You wrote that you had evacuated your house and left your cat, but you obviously hadn't because if you had, you would have known your wife grabbed the cat on the way out. Aren't you not supposed to write about things that haven't happened yet? Or is it more likely that something was made up, either then or now?

Pat Robertson is predictably lambasted in the New York Times for suggesting the U.S. "go ahead" and assassinate Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez

Reporter Laurie Goodstein opens with a loaded rundown of Robertson's greatest hits before getting to the newest controversy: "Pat Robertson, the conservative Christian broadcaster, has attracted attention over the ears for lambasting feminists, 'activist' judges, the United Nations and Disneyland."

She helpfully reminds us: "Mr. Robertson, who is 75, ran for president as a Republican in 1988. He has often used his show and the political advocacy group he founded, the Christian Coalition, to support President Bush."

Goodstein is trying to tie Robertson to Bush. But how close are they? A Google search of "Pat Robertson" and "Bush" finds that the story involving the two men that last interested the media was pre-election controversy between them over casualties in Iraq.

New York Times reporter Anthony DePalma today perfectly demonstrates the mantra of much of the modern press: Never pass up an opportunity to bash Bush.

In his front-page story entitled “9 States in Plan to Cut Emissions by Power Plants,” Mr. DePalma adroitly accomplishes this credo in paragraph two:

The cooperative action, the first of its kind in the nation, came after the Bush administration decided not to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

The beauty of this sentence is its derision without specificity. For instance, Mr. DePalma doesn’t elaborate on how Bush blocked such environmental regulations until the second page of the story buried inside the main section in paragraph 23:

The Bush administration's rejection of the Kyoto Protocols has caused deep divisions nationwide, with many local governments attempting to force the administration to taking action by passing their own carbon dioxide rules.

OF COURSE! This is about KYOTO!

More CNN Hypocrisy From Drudge:

President Jonathan Klein implies ratings news leader FOXNEWS is mired in coverage of "meaningless nonsense," claiming: "Fourteen Americans dead, and they
have Natalee Holloway on," Klein says.

"And they're supposedly America's news channel.""It's easy and it's brainless," Klein charges in a telephone interview set for publication at the NEW YORK TIMES, explaining why cable news outlets are gravitating to the Aruba story. "They're looking for an ongoing drama" along the lines of the NBC crime show "Law & Order," he said, adding, "Except 'Law & Order' doesn't do the same plot every night."

"There are an awful lot of things you can cover if you don't have people tied up with
this meaningless nonsense," Klein says.

On Tuesday evening's Hardball, Chris Matthews joined the pack in identifying Pat Robertson as a Republican leader: "Otherwise, it will look like a major leader in the Republican Party on the conservative side of things...who won the Iowa caucuses back in ‘88, by the way...for president, is out to get this guy (Hugo Chavez)."

There's a problem with this analysis: Pat Robertson didn't win the 1988 Iowa caucuses.

Winning one primary (Washington State) almost 20 years ago makes Mr. Robertson neither a major leader nor spokesman for the Republican Party.

In an utterly disgraceful (even for them) grab for another anti-war family dustup, the Associated Press today unleashed a story called, “Troops' Gravestones Have Pentagon Slogans.”

They begin: “Unlike earlier wars, nearly all Arlington National Cemetery gravestones for troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are inscribed with the slogan-like operation names the Pentagon selected to promote public support for the conflicts.”

These “slogan-like” names are simply the operational titles given to “Enduring Freedom,” for Afghanistan and “Iraqi Freedom” for those killed there. Apparently, the folks at AP are miffed at what they even admit is a voluntary choice of inscription: