NewsBusters Archive

NPR has a seriously bad habit of running “news” stories that are stuffed with liberals...who then aren’t called liberals. On Thursday’s All Things Considered, NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner reported on how Team Obama is queasy about letting girls under 15 – middle-school girls -- get access to “emergency contraceptives,” even after a federal judge mandated they be sold to all ages. 

As Rovner put it, “the administration's decision to appeal that ruling has outraged many of the president's allies in the women's health community.” That’s what they call the aggressively “sex-positive” feminists. The only “conservative” view in this story was...Obama! Well, that's not fair. The Obama quotes they used were liberal-pleasers, too. Everyone else wanted to make America safe for sixth-grade sex.

To many, Jason Collins's coming-out was a major sociocultural breakthrough. To one Kossack, however, true progress will wait for the day when an NFL franchise fields "an entire team of ass-kicking gays" who defeat homophobia one touchdown at a time.
 
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

Coming up next on MSNBC, further evidence of the link between global warming and the National Rifle Association, which the gun lobby inexplicably continues to deny ...

How reassuring it is for liberals to trot out their various all-purpose boogeymen to blame for whatever frustrates liberals at any given moment.

The staunchly pro-gun control Chris Matthews on Friday sneered that the National Rifle Association is doing a "dance of death" in celebration of their victory over Barack Obama. Regarding senators who voted with the gun group, the Hardball host mocked, "These are the guys who took the easiest vote in American political history. They backed the NRA." He added that "it was almost a religious experience for these clowns." (Couldn't that last part be said of journalists in relation to Obama?)

Regarding speakers at the NRA conference in Texas, Matthews snarled, "I think it might be a dance of death over the President's political grave, is what it really is. " [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Former Democratic governor Ed Rendell appeared on the program and blamed the organization for future horrors: "Imagine the blood on the hands of the people who voted against this common sense bill."

On Thursday's The Last Word, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell attacked the owners of the gun maker Crickett as "merchants of death" after a five-year-old boy in Kentucky, without adult supervision, used one of their guns to kill his younger sister: "The names I want you to know are the merchants of death, the merchants of this death, the guys who made and sold the rifle that killed this two-year-old girl. "

CNN's Christiane Amanpour and Jeffrey Toobin continued to push for Guantanamo Bay to be closed on Thursday's 10 p.m. ET hour of Anderson Cooper 360. "It's just not American," Amanpour insisted.

Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent, knocked the "roughty-toughty Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided no Geneva Conventions" for the detainees. Toobin, CNN's senior legal analyst, challenged the law passed by Congress mandating that Guantanamo be kept open. "That doesn't mean it was right," he said of its bipartisan passage. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Good Morning America's Jeff Zeleny on Friday hyped a Senator being "slammed" by pro-gun control voices at a town hall. Yet, the same network back in 2009 worried about Tea Party town halls "getting ugly." Highlighting a New Hampshire event with Republican Kelly Ayotte, Zeleny featured multiple snippets of Americans impacted by gun violence and summerized that they are "trying to understand how so many senators voted against something eight in ten Americans support."

In comparison, on the August 7, 2009 edition of World News, Charles Gibson lectured the Tea Party: "...In meeting after meeting, there's been a pattern of disruption - opponents of change shouting at members of Congress so loud that at times police are called in." He fretted, "White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said today, 'We can discuss these issues without being uncivilized. It's the same thing I tell my six-year-old.'"

The Washington Post tiptoed gently on Friday around Joe Biden’s hopes of being elected president in 2016. “For Biden, dreams vs. realities” is the story’s headline, but at the very top of Page One, it says “At the top of his political game, the vice president shines as Obama’s personable No. 2. But events may conspire against a 2016 promotion.”

Post reporter Philip Rucker rather comically took 30 paragraphs to establish one series of “events” that threaten Biden are gaffes. The front page says Biden is a “long shot at best,” but insists he’s seen as “genuine, down-to-earth, rock solid on the issues" and “clearly has the experience and gravitas to ascend to the presidency.”

The New York Times's Julia Preston watched parades on May Day for evidence that the fight for amnesty for illegal immigrants was at last gathering public support in "Showing Grass-Roots Support for Immigration Overhaul." Preston hit the jackpot when a protester quoted her back the same line she and the Times have been using for years about illegal immigrants: "I think it is time that we come out of the shadows...."

Preston did her part by helping spin away the small size of rallies held by amnesty supporters; supposedly the turnout was lower because they wanted "more local supporters:"