A March 29 article published by the Free Market Project addressed the recent full-court press by the media to advance the concept that global warming is an imminent threat to our planet. From television reports, to lead articles at major magazines, March was a month filled with madness not just on the basketball court.

Yet, a recent Gallup poll reported by Editor & Publisher indicated that Americans aren’t buying into the insanity: “Contrary to what one might expect, Gallup found that while public concern is higher than in 2004, it is ‘no higher than it has been at several points in the past.’ In fact, Americans are more worried about water pollution, air pollution, and toxic waste than global warming.”

Do you mean that Americans are starting to ignore media propaganda? It appears so:

The Bush administration and all Americans got great news on the economic front Friday when the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 211,000 jobs were added in March while the unemployment rate fell to 4.7 percent, the lowest level in four-and-a-half years. Yet NBC didn't see a booming economy. “President Bush used the jobs numbers as a starting point for a new push to try to convince Americans that the economy is, in fact, on a roll,” NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams noted before adding a “but,” as in: "But as NBC News chief financial correspondent Anne Thompson tells us tonight, the economic picture is a bit more complicated." Thompson highlighted how “a new poll out today shows 59 percent of Americans disapprove of the President's handling of the economy." After relaying how Bush blames Iraq for that, Thompson ran a soundbite from an economist who blamed slow wage growth before she recited her own litany: “Also dragging down attitudes, rising health care costs and gas prices. The nation has a negative savings rate, and household debt...is at record levels and could squeeze already strapped family budgets as interest rates continue to rise.” Thompson ended her piece with a quick look at a Massachusetts computer company which is hiring.

At least NBC gave its viewers the basic numbers of the day before trying to discount them. Friday's CBS Evening News didn't utter a syllable about the jobs/unemployment numbers, yet Bob Schieffer's show found time for a second night of coverage of how Bush “authorized leaking classified information” and for a piece on an orphanage in Kenya for elephants -- and that was even before two fluff “Assignment America” segments. ABC's World News Tonight allocated 25 seconds to the unemployment/jobs numbers as anchor Elizabeth Vargas pointed out the 31 consecutive months of job growth. (Transcript of NBC's story follows.)

'VIEW' EYES 'RAYMOND' STAR
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...Insiders say "Everybody Loves Raymond" star Patricia Heaton will step in for Vieira. And to help boost viewership among Latinos, the young, Argentine-born Marianela Pereyra, a veejay on Fuse TV, will be added - perhaps booting the hapless Elizabeth Hassleback.

"Patty Heaton is a Republican, so they won't need [Republican] Elizabeth any more," said our insider. "And Elizabeth doesn't really add much. Marianela will bring in the young Latina viewers - which is important," said one source.

Heaton and Pereyra were considered because both are in talks with syndicator Buena Vista to have their own talk shows. ABC and Buena Vista are owned by Disney and often have a synergistic relationship. ...

Let’s see if I have this correct: According to Katie Couric, the future anchor of the CBS Evening News, a town with Catholic themed values is bad, but Al Jazeera is a "voice of reform?" The April 7 edition of NBC's Today featured Couric’s skewed take on a new English version of the network:

Couric: "Analysts claim that unlike most media in the Arab world, Al-Jazeera is a voice of reform, offering uncensored political dissent and debate."

Now, don’t forget, this is the network best known for carrying long videos of bin Laden and grisly images of murdered American soldiers.

During his final commentary segment, in which Geraldo Rivera praised the role of the Catholic Church in the immigration debate, the sometime boxer took a swing at CNN's Lou Dobbs.

"Now as Congress approaches a compromise that rejects the severe and mean-spirited sanctions advocated by people like the shrill CNN commentator Lou Dobbs, instead choosing a path to legalization for the 11 million the role of the Catholic Church has played will go far to restore its own tattered image..."

The following is Rivera's full commentary:

Geraldo Rivera: "Of all the hot button domestic issues currently igniting impassioned debate in our country the hottest of all is immigration. When that draconian legislation was proposed in Congress that would’ve made felons of the 11 million men, women and children living here illegally several dramatic things happened. First then most visibly hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets of cities all across the country to express outrage over the mean-spirited proposal. But of all the gathering forces on both sides of this incendiary issue none has been as potent or potentially influential as the U.S. Roman Catholic Church. The Church has boldly stepped forward to advocate for moderation, reason and compassion. This is Father Larry Dowling yesterday in suburban Chicago."

At 9:15am on CNN’s American Morning, senior political analyst Bill Schneider reported that President Bush declassified national security information in order to discredit a critic of the administration. In doing so, he promoted Democratic attacks against the President for being "hypocritical" in "leaking" information from the National Intelligence Estimate [NIE]. Schneider did acknowledge that it was legal for the President to declassify this information, but then took this shot at him:

Bill Schneider: "Well, the White House doesn't really want to get into a discussion of this issue. For one thing, it makes the President look a little, well, shall we say, hypocritical?...It was not a crime for the President to do that because, as the attorney in the White House said, anything he authorizes is instantly declassified. But it does make the President look a little foolish and deceptive, because this leak was authorized, again, according to Mr. Libby, to discredit a political critic of the administration. It was authorized for political reasons, and that’s a little bit embarrassing."

On Wednesday, NPR's "Fresh Air With Terry Gross," which airs on hundreds of NPR stations across America, interviewed long-time New York Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer on his new book, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq." To Kinzer, every American intervention is a nightmare, one he compared to child abuse:

These interventions abroad, these overthrows of foreign governments, not only plunge whole regions of the world into instability and turn them into places from which undreamed threats emerge years later, but they undermine American security. They are not just bad for the countries where we intervene. You cannot violently overthrow a foreign regime and then expect that that won't have any long-term effect. It's like beating your child every day. You cannot expect that that child is going to grow up normal.

As the Meredith Vieira incident shows us, network anchors and talk show hosts can display their biases off the air by where they go and speak...or march. At the tail end of "Hardball" Thursday night, MRC's Geoff Dickens found MSNBC host Chris Matthews promoted Rosie O'Donnell and her new HBO documentary on her gay-family cruises. But the real eye-opening part for media watchdogs was Matthews admitting he spoke at an event for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay-left lobbying group, in Philadelphia. (Sure enough, here's a picture, with the Matthews mane in a frostier phase. And wow! See another media speaker, NPR "Fresh Air" hostess Terry Gross, whose show originates from Philly.) Matthews explained:

Today the New York Times finally corrects a left-wing myth perpetrated in its pages as fact.

“An article on Feb. 9 about the military's recruitment of Hispanics referred incompletely to the belief of some critics that Hispanics in the Iraq war and blacks in the Vietnam War accounted for a disproportionate number of casualties. Statistics do not support the belief. Hispanics, who are about 14 percent of the population, accounted for about 11 percent of the military deaths in Iraq through Dec. 3, 2005. About 12.5 percent of the military dead in Vietnam were African-Americans, who made up about 13.5 percent of the general population during the war years.”

But that milquetoast correction doesn’t hint at the charged nature of what reporter Lizette Alvarez wrote in the Feb. 9 edition, which simply restated left-wing paranoia as fact:

A Democratic member of Congress assaults a police officer, whips up racial animosity, and then is forced to retract the allegations. The newspaper article on that would surely be a painful read for the politician.

Unless the pol is Cynthia McKinney and the paper is The New York Times. The article – which the representative’s staff is surely framing right now – sets up the left-wing congresswoman as “a brilliant and gutsy crusader for the disenfranchised.”

This is how Sheryl Gay Stolberg opens the article, headlined “After Accusing Police of Racism, Congresswoman Apologizes”:

USA Today omitted any reference to incoming Today host Meredith Vieira's anti-war activism in Peter Johnson's April 7 Life section article, even as a brief, indirect allusion to NewsBusters.org coverage of the controversy was included in an online filing posted the evening of April 6:

Conservative bloggers pounced on NBC's choice, saying Vieira has a long record on The View as an anti-war liberal. But Vieira said that on The View, which she expects to leave in May, she was paid to express her opinions. "There is nothing I have ever said that I am ashamed of," she said, but on Today, her opinions "have no place. It's a different animal."

As the MRC's Brent Baker posted to NewsBusters.org shortly after noon on April 6:

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne had a hard time hiding his glee about current difficulties facing the right in an op-ed published today entitled “Run-Down Republicans; Where Is The GOP’s Agenda?” In it, Dionne blamed all of America’s problems on Republicans without referring to any of the good news or the responsibility the minority party has for the bad: “No, the most important development is the collapse of purpose in the Republican Party and the sense of exhaustion at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.”

After suggesting Republicans had no fresh ideas, Dionne used health savings accounts as an example: “Virtually no one other than the president -- oh, and perhaps a few ideologues and insurance companies -- sees HSAs as anything approaching a comprehensive solution to the nation's growing health-care problem.” Well, E.J., isn’t that really your view inasmuch as you won’t be happy with anything less than a universal healthcare plan fully funded by taxpayers?

That aside, Dionne concluded by stating unequivocally that conservatism is on its last legs:

NBC's Dateline featured a researcher who makes a controversial claim: Mohammad was not really a proph--

No, that's not the controversial claim the researcher made, although it is just as inflammatory. The one Michael Baigent told to NBC was that Jesus did not die on the cross, a belief that undermines one of the central tenets of Christianity. After NBC Dateline's failed attempt at finding "redneck" NASCAR fans who would persecute fans in Muslim outfits, those at Dateline demonstrate that they themselves have succeeded in persecuting a religion.

Correspondent Sara James reports that Michael Baigent alleges a coverup.

A cover up, he contends, because his clues point to a radical conclusion: that Jesus did not die on the cross.

The Washington Post "Style" section has several pieces on liberal blacks today. Fashion writer Robin Givhan devotes much ado to Cynthia McKinney's hairdo, panning both the new version and the old ("The braids made her look as though she should be hiking up the Alps wearing a gingham dress and carrying two milk pails.") She also gets in the usual liberal digs -- talking about "ugly" talk from conservative blogs: "A black woman's hair is an easy, timeworn source of racist mockery." And: "Indeed, plenty of black folks see all kinds of dire race-traitor undertones in Condoleezza Rice's smooth, controlled cap of hair."

B. Duane Cross writes at NASCAR.com that NBC was unable to find people in the racing stands who would persecute their "plants" wearing Middle Eastern clothing. Also, the NBC crew did not do a good job of concealing themselves.

NBC News baited the hook, but netted nothing in its "sting" attempt to find anti-Muslim sentiments during the Martinsville race weekend....

The inference is that NASCAR fans are bigots, and NBC News was hoping to bait fans into making insensitive remarks to the Muslim / Arab people it had planted at the track.

Ramsey Poston, NASCAR's managing director of corporate communications, said Wednesday that no instances of unrest were reported. "No one bothered them," Poston said.

That didn't take long! Back in the MSM's Watergate heyday, it took a while for a steady drumbeat of revelations, stories and allegations to gather sufficient momentum. The pace has apparently quickened in the modern liberal-media world. On this morning's Today show, speaking of the allegation that President Bush authorized the disclosure of information by Scooter Libby, Matt Lauer asked Chris Matthews: "scale of 1 to 10, [where] 10 is a deal-ender, where does this fall?"

Matthews didn't hesitate: "heading to 10."

Even Lauer seemed taken aback: "Really, that big?"

For good measure, Matthews later analogized VP Cheney to Henry II having put out a hit leading to the murder of a dissenter in his administration.

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Like the cable networks during the day, the three broadcast networks on Thursday night were hyperbolic over the revelation that Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, testified that in July of 2003 President Bush had authorized the leaking of parts of a classified pre-war report on Iraq in order to correct misinformation being spread by Joe Wilson. All the newscasts led with the allegation and stressed Bush's hypocrisy in denouncing leaks while leaking material himself, but NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was the most dramatic in employing the most nefarious language. He intoned: “There is an allegation tonight that President Bush authorized the leak of government information -- sensitive, classified information about Iraq -- in order to get back at a critic of his administration and the build-up to war.” Referring to Libby's charge, Williams asserted: “If what he is saying is true, it would mean he was used, in effect, by the President and Vice President to leak secrets. It is a story of much intrigue, big names, and potentially very high stakes.”

Bob Schieffer teased the CBS Evening News: “President Bush has long made clear he despises leaks and leakers. But tonight, he is accused of authorizing a leak of classified intelligence." ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas asked: “Did the White House practice the opposite of what it preached?" White House correspondent Martha Raddatz equated Bush's supposed divulging of a pre-war assessment of a regime which no longer existed with those who disclosed ongoing operational information about the efforts to prevent terrorist attacks: “The Bush administration has vigorously pursued investigations of those who leaked documents pertaining to the secret domestic spying program, and to disclosures of secret prisons run overseas." (Partial transcripts follow.)