During the panel segment on Wednesday’s Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC, Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke criticized and ridiculed the questions posed by the White House press corps during the morning’s presidential press conference in the Rose Garden. Kondracke pointed out how “there was hardly any question, critical question from the right,” such as about how Bush was following a misguided Clintonite path on Iran or how not enough troops are being allocated to securing Baghdad.

Barnes proposed: “These questions tell you what reporters are interested in and not what is really important or what the American people would like to hear about.” Barnes mockingly recited what upset him: “The President just went on a trip to Iraq to demonstrate that he's not pulling out the troops right away. If you couldn't realize that that's what that trip was partially about, you're an idiot. And yet the first question was about a troop pullout. The second question was about getting out of Guantanamo. I mean, it just went on and on. Two questions about Karl Rove. Karl Rove has just been vindicated, and these questions were, 'Mr. President, now really, now he may not be indicted but he really did bad stuff, right? Tell us about it.' Come on. This is, these are obsessions of reporters that don't match the feelings of the American people." Barnes also zeroed in on “preening by some reporter with a gotcha question. Ridiculous." (Transcript from Hume’s show, and of several of the questions posed in the Rose Garden, follow.)

I feel Ann went over the top with the assault on the widows. No one or persons deserve this kind of attack after an atrocity like 911.Condemnation of this diatribe is in order as is an apology by  Ms. Coulter

Talk radio show host Michael Smerconish appeared on tonight's Scarborough Country to promote his suggestion, set forth in this column, Cut Coulter Loose, that the GOP disavow Ann Coulter for the statements in her most recent book, 'Godless', about the 9/11 Jersey Girl widows .

Smerconish told Scarborough that the Republican party needs to "make clear" that Coulter's comments are "appalling."

Scarborough sympathized, saying that Coulter's Jersey Girl comments "need to be condemned."  He complained that when you do criticize Coulter, "conservatives accuse people like us of being traitors."

Using language which painted Karl Rove as a guilty party who succeeded at avoiding capture by authorities, not proving his innocence, in his NBC Nightly News story on Wednesday (also carried at the top of MSNBC’s Countdown) about President George W. Bush’s morning Rose Garden press conference, David Gregory asserted: “Mr. Bush dodged several questions about Karl Rove eluding prosecution in the CIA leak case.” Viewers then saw this clip of Bush: “And obviously, along with others in the White House, took a sigh of relief when he made the decision he made and now we’re going to move forward.” The Oxford Concise Dictionary, built into the Corel WordPerfect I’m using to write this, defines “elude” as “evade or escape adroitly from.” Dictionary.com offers: “To evade or escape from, as by daring, cleverness, or skill.” Their illustrative example in a sentence: “The suspect continues to elude the police.”

Though no doubt irritated by the practice, most Americans pretty much put up with the number of businesses and public utilities providing services in both English and Spanish, often with the interloping tongue regularly showcased as the primary mode of speech offered.

However, as speakers of English let the good manners and propriety, for which the land their own language originated from is renowned, to take precedence and keep their mouths shut, there will come a day when the advocates of the invading culture will seize predominance and refuse to grant the same degree of verbal acceptance those now being conquered have been duped into extending.

A caller to the June 9, 2006 broadcast of The Chris Core Show on 630 AM WMAL in Washington, DC contacted the program to relay an experience he had in a Metropolitan Area Home Depot.

James Taranto at Opinion Journal's "Best of the Web Today" reports that CBS just has to slant its poll reporting:

Here's a lovely example of liberal media bias: A CBS poll finds that 60% of Americans say it's likely "that the United States will ultimately find success in Iraq," and more than 50% say "Iraq will eventually become a stable democracy."

So is the headline, "Majority of Americans Foresee Success in Iraq"? Nope, it's "Poll: Zarqawi Death Has Little Impact." [Subhead: "Despite Zarqawi Death, Most Americans Say War's Going Badly."] CBS chose to play up this finding:

By now i'm sure most of you have seen the 5 frame "video" that the gov't released showing "something" hitting the pentagon. Well, I'm sure we can all agree that what is on that video is NOT a boeing 757! Here is a link to the original release from the pentagon.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/flight77.shtml

Now, here is a DOCTORED, (yes that means its fake) video of what the video SHOULD have shown...

http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/editorials/signs20060518_WhatthePentagonVideoShouldHaveShown.php

After being off the last two days, Harry Smith returned to CBS’s "Early Show" this morning and apparently he didn’t forget the bias. Today Smith interviewed Dan Bartlett, a counselor to President Bush. While Smith set up Senator Joe Biden on June 5 to go on the offensive against the war, he tried his best to keep Bartlett on the defensive while downplaying President Bush’s surprise visit to Iraq yesterday.

Smith began the questioning:

"Well, the Iraqis now have a constitution. Now they actually have a government as well. What they don't have in Baghdad is day-to-day security or even electricity. How does the president's visit change that?"

Earlier this week, the Media Research Center released a new study documenting the fairly heavy coverage ABC, CBS and NBC have provided of yet-unproved claims that U.S. Marines engaged in a “massacre” in Haditha, Iraq last year. The study found those same networks have provided relatively paltry coverage of the select group of American heroes who’ve been given the military’s highest honors: the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, the Air Force and the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Today’s Washington Times (Jennifer Harper) has a nice summary of our study’s key findings, plus some reaction from the multi-national force in Iraq. Excerpts from her article, “‘Bad News’ Rife in military coverage”:

Don Kaplan of the New York Post has a great column today about the failing cable station MSNBC, and quite appropriately asks why we need it (hat tip to TV Newser):

“‘It's really running third in a two-horse race,’ says Reese Schoenfeld, who co-founded CNN.

“He questions whether MSNBC is even in the same league as Fox News Channel and CNN. ‘Everybody compares MSNBC to Fox and CNN - when its real competition is [CNN's] Headline News,’ he says.”

Yikes. In the sports world, that’s like saying the Yankees’ real competition is the Devil Rays. Kaplan continued:

You'd think that President Bush's surprise visit to Iraq would warrant a big front-page headline in one of the country's largest newspapers. Yet today's print edition of the Los Angeles Times (Wednesday, June 14, 2006) blares the headline, "Crackdown Underway in Baghdad." A reference to the surprise visit is relegated to the sub-headline, and only a tiny 1.75" x 2" photo of President Bush and Prime Minister Minister Maliki occupies the page. The far-more appropriate title is platooned to the continuation of the story on page A24: "Bush Visits Iraq Ahead of Major Sweep."

The Times appears to be continuing its practice of downplaying good news for the Bush administration (here and here are just a couple of many examples; see also this).

Apparently, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann doesn’t play well with others – color me shocked.

According to Lloyd Grove of the New York Daily News (hat tip to TV Newser), MSNBC’s Olbermann sent an e-mail message to one of his three fans that aren’t related to him that included a rather derogatory comment about his colleague, Rita Cosby:

“‘Rita's nice,’ Olbermann wrote to a fan from his MSNBC E-mail account, ‘but dumber than a suitcase of rocks.’ Yesterday Cosby retorted: ‘Keith got it wrong. I'm not that nice.’"

That wasn’t the only co-worker Olbermann dissed:

Outgoing CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer is a man who's never been ashamed to portray himself as not always the first guy to get the news -- or stay with the news as it happens. (Remember how he took a nap as Trent Lott destroyed his career? It's the last quote here.) MRC's Brian Boyd reports it happened again this morning on the Imus simulcast on MSNBC at 7:42 AM EDT:

Don Imus: “Hey, how about Hillary Clinton getting booed at this liberal gathering in New York for her stance on Iraq. Did you hear about that?”

Bob Schieffer: “No, I haven’t. Tell me about it.”

As a Jew, I try to tread lightly when it comes to discussing matters Christian. But I think I can say with confidence that if you're a traditional Christian who is not offended by Jim Rigby's column at the Huffington Post, Christians Who Want Democracy Must Stop Bowing to a Dictator Christ, you're not reading carefully.

Rigby is the pastor at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX. He has gotten into hot water for conducting ceremonies for homosexual couples. His church has also admitted a professed atheist as a member.

Lashawn Barber writes at Townhall.com that the Duke lacrosse rape story was just too good for the mainstream media to ignore: privileged white college students having their way with a poor black single mother.

When a black stripper claimed three white Duke University lacrosse players gang-raped her at a party, I knew instinctively it was a lie. The tale reeked of Tawana Brawley-like fabrications. At 15, Brawley claimed that six white men abducted and raped her, smeared her with feces and wrote racial epithets on her body. The media loved it.

It turned out that Brawley lied to get out of trouble for skipping school to see a jailbird ex-boyfriend. The media glommed on to the Duke rape story in a similar man-bites-dog fashion. Since news accounts of black-on-white crimes are rather commonplace, journalists jumped at the chance to exploit a fresh angle.

The blog Sweetness & Light has done excellent legwork exposing Time magazine's reporting on the Haditha incident. Sweetness & Light wants to know why it took so long for the incident to be reported by the media (four months) and who were the shadowy figures who gave the material to Time.

The Washington Times wrote an excellent summary of the work done by Sweetness & Light.

Time first broke the story on Haditha in March, four months after the incident -- a delay which too few of the Marines' more ardent accusers (such as Rep. John Murtha) failed to question. One of Time's key sources who had taken footage of the aftermath was represented only as a "journalism student." It has since been learned that this eyewitness was Taher Thabet al Hadithi.

Here's how Time reporter Aparisim Ghosh described Mr. Hadithi: "[H]e's a young local man ... He brought the tape to Hammurabi Human Rights... and they brought it to us once they found out that we were inquiring about this."

NY Times editorial writer Adam Cohen was on the Las Vegas junket attending the left-wing blog gathering of DailyKos fans in Las Vegas (“The Yearly Kos”), along with political reporter Adam Nagourney and columnist Maureen Dowd. Cohen plugs it in a starry-eyed editorial today, “Could a 15-Year-Old With a Laptop Be the New Campaign Media Guru?”

(The guru in question is one Ava Lowery from Alabama.)

In response to the latest news that Ward Churchill has been recommended for firing, the following article was written on February 11th when Churchill first was recognized for his poor taste...

Do you get it now, Ward?

"I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

           

Patrick Quinn, Chief of Southeast Europe News for the Associated Press, says President Bush's trip to Iraq was a complete failure. With a trip this bad, it's a wonder the White House even planned it.

Many Sunnis and even some Shiite political parties dismissed President Bush's visit to Baghdad on Tuesday as merely an attempt to associate himself with positive developments in Iraq – formation of the new government and last week's killing of the country's most feared terrorist.

Since he could find "many" Suunis and "some" Shiites who didn't like the visit, couldn't he also find "many" Sunnis and "some" Shiites to praise the visit? Apparently not, as every source cited in the article plays down the trip.

An aide to Muqtada al-Sadr denounced the visit, as well as a Baghdad University professor.

In America, people are innocent until proven guilty, unless of course they are Republican.

No finer example of such legal relativism has occurred in recent memory than the case of President Bush’s top advisor, Karl Rove. For months, virtually every mainstream media outlet proclaimed his guilt regarding the Valerie Plame Wilson affair, or what has been not so affectionately named the CIA-leak case.

Take for example the media’s excitement over pending indictments for Rove. This hit a fevered pitch last fall as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, after almost two years of research, depositions, and grand jury testimonies, was about to announce his findings on October 28.

Sadly for the drive-by media, no indictments were handed down for Rove that day.

As a result, restaurateurs and bar owners around the country were likely forced to give back millions of dollars in deposits for all the “Rove is Going to Jail” parties that ended up being cancelled by disappointed Democrats coast to coast.

However, hope – which some ironically claim springs eternal – reemerged in late April when Rove appeared in front of a grand jury for the fifth time to answer more of Fitzgerald’s questions. This re-ignited a media firestorm of enthusiasm

This isn’t the kind of news that a seasoned newsman wants to hear: your ratings stink!

Yet, that appears to be the case for ABC’s “World News Tonight” since Charles Gibson was officially announced as the new anchor.

According to TV Newser:

“Charles Gibson isn't having a positive impact on World News Tonight's ratings, at least not yet. NBC Nightly News was #1 in all categories last week.

"'Gibson's second week in the anchor chair marked ABC World News Tonight's lowest delivery since at least the start of people meters (September, 1987),’ NBC notes.”

Sorry, Charlie. For those interested, here is the full data for the week of June 5:

PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose returned to his set on Monday night after some weeks off for heart surgery. While he was out, PBS used a rotating set of liberal-media stars as hosts, including Barbara Walters, Brian Williams, and CNBC's Maria Bartiromo. Just last week, MRC intern Chadd Clark found some typical liberal thoughts coming from guest hosts.

On June 5, former CNN anchor Judy Woodruff interviewed Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and she echoed Charlie Gibson's lame idea that public opinion on so-called "gay marriage" is a 50-50 polling proposition:

The United States Senate today, spending the day debating an amendment to the US Constitution to ban gay marriage.  President Bush lobbying hard for it.  The polls show the American people almost split down the middle. You've written a letter urging members of the Senate to vote for the ban.  Why?"