Not even their liberal media colleagues are buying ABC’s May 24 hit piece on House Speaker Denny Hastert in which Brian Ross insisted that “federal officials tell us the congressional bribery investigation now includes the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert,” and "Justice Department officials describe the 64-year-old Illinois Republican as very much in the mix of the corruption investigation.” On Inside Washington aired Friday night on Washington, DC’s PBS affiliate WETA-TV channel 26, NPR reporter Nina Totenberg declared: "That seems to have been a bogus story. It really does seem to have been a bogus story." Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek, proposed that the ABC News “investigative unit sometimes goes a beat too," presumably “far,” but another panelist talked over him.

A week after ignoring the announcement of a roaring 5.3 percent GDP growth rate in the first quarter, and on the day unemployment fell a tenth of a point to 4.6 percent -- the lowest level since July of 2001 -- the CBS Evening News decided to lead Friday with how, as anchor Russ Mitchell put it: “There are new signs this evening that the economy is slowing down.” Reporter Anthony Mason asserted that “rising interest rates and rising gas prices are beginning to put the brakes on the U.S. economy." Mason laid out the bad news: "The newest numbers, just 75,000 jobs were added to the economy last month, well below forecasts. Manufacturing lost 14,000 jobs. But retail took the biggest hit, losing more than 27,000" and “the other hammer to the economy came from the once-booming construction sector. It came to a standstill in May.” Mason concluded with his own domino theory: "One major builder reported a nearly 30 percent drop in new orders for the past two months. Now that ripples right through the economy. Buying slows, then building slows, then hiring slows. And that, Russ, is why the economy is slowing."

On NBC, in contrast, Anne Thompson noted how “cuts on factory floors and at the country's retailers held back job gains for the second straight month,” but she characterized those as “signs analysts say of an economy that is slowing but not in trouble." Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, then emphasized how the economy “is throttling back from very rapid growth earlier in the year, but it is still a very strong economy, an economy that will perform well going forward." (Transcripts follow)

It was bound to happen again, but it has been quite a long time. Amazingly, I agree with some journalists on something!

"LONDON (Reuters) - The union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company's reported actions in China."

I have been angered about this issue for some time. Both Yahoo and Google have been party to Chinese oppression just so they can continue to serve the Communist dictatorship without a crimp in their profits in that oppressed land. (See story, Click here)

These are the kinds of actions that make leftists seem spot on when they claim that corporations don't care about people. The two internet giants have been responsible for shutting down websites in China that question the Chinese government and have helped that government to block access to the web for the average Chinese citizen.

Original caption to this AP photo: "President Bush answers a reporter's question during his meeting with Rwanda's President Paul Kagame in the Oval Office of the White House Wednesday, May 31, 2006 in Washington."

The host might be different, but the partisan bias is the same.

Norah O'Donnell sat in for Chris Matthews on this evening's Hardball. The first half hour was devoted to a discussion of Haditha, with Norah making frequent allusions to a "failure of leadership" and wondering why President Bush didn't know the facts and disclose them to the press sooner.

But speaking of disclosure . . . Norah didn't find it necessary to disclose to viewers that two of her three guests were partisan Democrats.

Paul Hackett, shown in the first photo, was the Democratic candidate for Congress from Ohio's 2nd District, and later sought the Democratic senatorial nomination. But Norah introduced him only as "a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq and also ran for office in Ohio." Unsuspecting viewers might well have thought that, if anything, the Marine vet was a Republican.

On this Morning’s Early Show, co-host Harry Smith turned himself into a one man anti-war protest by delivering a two minute commentary on the loss of life in Iraq and the lack of progress being made. His statement may have been intended as an expression of grief over the losses suffered by CBS, the deaths of crew members James Brolan and Paul Douglas, and the injuries sustained by CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier, but it was clear that Smith and CBS are now firmly against the war in Iraq and believe the cost of the war is too high. It was Harry Smith’s "Walter Cronkite moment." For those who do not understand the reference, it refers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite">Walter Cronkite’s statement on the "CBS Evening News" on February 27, 1968 that the US was stuck in a stalemate in Vietnam. Today, Smith began his diatribe against the war in Iraq implying that death is so common in Iraq that we are desensitized to it:

This just in from Reuters, dateline Las Vegas: "Addressing the annual convention of CBS affiliates, [Katie] Couric predicted that the 'pretentious era' of the evening-news anchor is going to be a thing of the past." The headline, at least on the New York Times website, is "Couric Hopes to End 'Pretentious Era' in News."

Um, a peek at an online dictionary says "pretentious" is defined as "Making or marked by an extravagant outward show; ostentatious. See Synonyms at showy." Didn't this woman just sit at the center of a wildly extravagant three-hour tribute to her greatness on Wednesday morning? And to get up the next day, and say this?

The good news: The unemployment rate of 4.6% is the lowest since June 2001.

The not-as-good news: The jobs increase of 75,000 is even smaller than indicated by May's figure alone, as March and April were revised downward by 25,000 and 12,000, respectively. So the net increase in the number of people working is at the end of May is 38,000 than what was originally reported at the end of April.

I don't even have to tell you whether the business press is focusing more energy on the reduction in the unemployment rate or the mediocre jobs number, do I? Typical is MSNBC headlining an FT.com report: "US Employment Growth Stalls in May." (New Media's Drudge, by contrast, has focused on the positive with a simple headline "4.6%" since the BLS release until the time of this post.)

So how about some perspective? Let's take a look at those who aren't working for a moment. This is from the full Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement today:

"Marines to Face Charges in Iraqi's Death", trumpets The Guardian this morning.

No, this is not related to the Haditha story. This is a new development. It tells the story of an alleged murder on April 26 in Hamandiya, complete with allegations of a frame and cover up plot. And, of course there is talk of 'motive'; or the lack of it.

When the Pentagon announced it was investigating the death it provided no details about the incident other than to say that "several service members'' from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment were suspected of involvement. The servicemen were "removed from operations'' and sent back to the U.S. pending the results of the criminal investigation, it said.

Sullivan said the eight men are being held in solitary confinement.

"There's concern about the publicity of Haditha having a detrimental impact on the case,'' he said. "My concern is the whole politics of this. There's an assumption that these guys are guilty before there's been an opportunity for a thorough, impartial investigation.''

And then there is "US probes new Iraq massacre claim" video also fresh in this morning. Again, talk is of "rounding up and deliberately shooting 11 people in the house, [in Ishaqi], including five children and four women, before blowing up the building". We also learn, that "the pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces. It has been cross-checked with other images taken at the time of events and is believed to be genuine".

I can just hear the editors the world over screaming their heads off: "GET ME ANOTHER MARINE MURDER STORY IN IRAQ. I DON'T CARE WHERE YOU GET IT, JUST GET IT."

Friday’s New York Times profile of NPR star Garrison Keillor (well, American Public Media, to be exact, but heard on many NPR stations) underlines how public broadcasting can be a very lucrative business. On the cusp of Keillor’s "Prairie Home Companion" movie coming out in a week, Times writer Joyce Wadler traveled to St. Paul to do the feature "At Home with Garrison Keillor," which truly underlines the Keillor wealth.

Keillor, to put it in a Midwesterner’s terms, is a lutefisk-and-lefse limousine liberal. His latest political book, Homegrown Democrat, proclaims his love for the Donkey Party and was summed up by one critic as "a masterful diatribe against the Republican party and narcissistic, greed-driven, mean-spirited ‘conservatism.’" (Brent Bozell pegged Keillor’s odd mix of socialist theorizing and capitalist merchandising here.) Minnesota Public Radio, the parent company of American Public Media, hasn’t been a pioneer in disclosing financial particulars, but Wadler brings it into some focus:

Iran is blocking news from leaking out about the current student unrests and bloody riots on University campuses throughout the country. This however is no excuse for the Western media, who have shamefully ignored the tens if thousands of Iranians protesting against the regime. We should take note:

Iranian security forces fired live bullets, and shots were fired at homes outside the university. One of the students told Rooz: "The university campus is on fire, raids are being conducted throughout the campus, and the students are in fear and anxiety... Gunfire is heard from all directions... There is blood everywhere". The university's telephone lines were reported to have been cut.

Iran Press Service (IPS) reports, that "the new wave of students unrests started a month ago when, on the proposal of Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad [our Thug-In-Chief of course], the government decided to burry remains of “martyrs” of the Iraq-Iran War in the campuses of universities across the nation."

The "enemy", for the Iranian ruling officials is, besides the "Great American Satan" the dynamic, active, prosperous Iranian Diaspora with which Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad, on advises [sic] from the leader, is trying to cut all links.

This isn't just a small band of unruly students. As soon as you are talking about 75% of the entire student body participating in the protests, you have some credible momentum.

The full headline deck to Friday's lead story from Baghdad by Richard Oppel Jr. is certainly provocative:

"Iraqi Accuses U.S. Of 'Daily' Attacks Against Civilians -- Premier Assails Troops -- New Government Vows Its Own Inquiry in Deaths of 24 in Haditha."

Oppel begins:

"Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki lashed out at the American military on Thursday, denouncing what he characterized as habitual attacks by troops against Iraqi civilians.

"As outrage over reports that American marines killed 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha last year continued to shake the new government, the country's senior leaders said that they would demand that American officials turn over their investigative files on the killings and that the Iraqi government would conduct its own inquiry.

Quick, name the two Congressmen who were convicted of corruption this year and sent to the slammer.  Bet you came up with Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.) like a shot.  But who was the other one?

My friend John Fogle, a fine writer, ran an eye-opening comparison in the Hendersonville Times-News today.  It names the other crooked Congressman.  The other one, who now resides in the same federal penitentiary as Cunningham, is Rep. Frank Ballance (D-NC).  Here's the comparison of the national press coverage of these two convicts:

 A Web search for articles containing the three words Cunningham, congressman and jail results in 156,000 hits. But, replace Cunningham with Ballance and you get only 890 hits. So the liberal press produced not twice as many, not 10 times as many, but 175 times as many articles describing a Republican going to jail as those describing a Democrat in the same predicament.

Medill School of Journalism has concluded a survey that attempts to get some benchmarks on bad journalism. While thousands of examples have been documented by MRC and Newsbusters on a daily basis, the report tells us that we don't know the half of it.

...how much internal misconduct [can] a paper reasonably be asked to uncover on its own... maybe 50 percent.

The report, “Newspaper Reporter and Editor Attitudes Toward Credibility, Errors and Ethics,” claims that reporters are in denial.

assistant dean Ellen Shearer... told Helfrich the journalists complained about Jayson Blair, TV news, and “agenda-driven media,” saying they undermined public confidence in their papers’ credibility. But most felt unethical behavior was “not an actual problem at their newspapers—it’s more other people,” she went on. “That’s a little concerning to me.”

My pal Henry Payne has the definitive cartoon on the Al Gore movie.

Reviewing "An Inconvenient Truth" for the American Spectator, James Bowman doesn't really discuss the film as film, but does scold Gore for making no attempt to engage the public on the question of how much drastic emission-limiting regulations could help, and how much they would cost:

As to how much of a difference we can make, he gives us none of the science on that point. Bjorn Lomborg's calculation that the implementation of the Kyoto accords, the great shibboleth of the global-warming lobby, would at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars a year only postpone the temperature rise over the next century by six years may be wrong, but Mr. Gore never mentions that calculation, let alone demonstrates its error...

CNN reporter Ben Wedeman got to spend some quality time with terrorists who get their kicks trying to kill Israeli children as he spent the day hanging out at a rocket factory. Nowhere in the story will you read a derogatory word about the terrorists, or even the word "terrorist" at all, and he closes the piece by calling it "a good story."

You might think, as an American or even as a decent human being, that if you knew people who knew bomb-making terrorists, or you had the means to get to where the bombs are being made, you would tell authorities. Not CNN reporters. They bend over backwards to protect these murderers:

I got to the rocket makers through an old acquaintance in Gaza. To protect his identity, I'll call him Majid. A journalist, Majid has the numbers of all Gaza's factions, parties, politicians, warlords, thugs, crooks and freelance gunmen... I didn't mention what I was trying to arrange to anyone -- not CNN's assignment editors, not our Jerusalem bureau, not even Adil, my cameraman who was hoping for a day off after two weeks in Gaza covering clashes and chaos. Gaza is crawling with informants, collaborators and spies, so the less anyone knows about your plans, the better.

First it was pajamas. Now it's degenerated into underpants. Perhaps he thinks Underpants Media should be a new blogger compendium.

Washington Post humor writer and journalist Gene Weingarten, who writes a regular commentary called Below the Beltway, gave a commencement speech to graduating journalism students at the University of Maryland.

In today's world, he says, it's getting tougher for journalism majors to find jobs, especially when "the public appears more and more willing to receive its 'news' online from nincompoops ranting in their underpants."

The BBC has an article out today claiming they have a “new Iraqi massacre tape“. The most curious thing about this article is not the massacre claim itself, but a line buried 15 paragraphs into the 16 paragraph article:

The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.

That’s like interviewing Hitler for his take on life at a concentration camp. Who needs fact-checking when you have such unbiased and trustworthy sources?

Not only are the sources questionable, but so is the motive for re-running this story now... a story that's several months old. The motive is pretty obvious based on what the BBC chose to include above the fold:

Washington Post film critic Desson Thomson respectfully endorsed Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" Friday, even if he saw it as more a movie about Gore's reinvention that the planet's doom. While he admitted the film was "hagiographic," Gore wasn't wooden, he claimed: "If all college courses had presentations this evocative and sophisticated, no universities would hurt for enrollment."

No, the real Post film critic going goo-goo for Gore was Michael O'Sullivan, who was granted an interview/shoeshine with Gore for the Post's Friday Weekend section:

I begin by reading aloud from an e-mail sent out by the office of Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), who sits on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, in response to a letter from a concerned constituent (and film critic pal of mine), urging her senator to support "green" legislation.

The Associated Press headline proudly proclaims "San Franciscans honor those touched by AIDS" and goes on to regale us all about how AIDS activists "honored" the lives of San Franciscans who have died of AIDS since 1981. (See story by clicking here)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Clasping purple irises, calling out names and clapping to a gospel beat, San Francisco paid tribute Thursday to the thousands of residents who died from AIDS in the last 25 years and honored the thousands more still living with the HIV virus

The report glowed on about how politicians and religious leaders "honored" and "celebrated" AIDS victims at the gathering in the performing arts center this week. The gay men's chorus performed and 40 members of the audience came to the stage and sang "We shall overcome".

In a Thursday night update on the CBS Evening News on the condition of Kimberly Dozier, the CBS News correspondent seriously injured Monday in Baghdad, Sheila MacVicar reported that a soldier at the U.S. military hospital in Germany, where Dozier is recovering, gave her his Purple Heart. From Landstuhl, MacVicar related:

“Something happened that surprised and moved all of us this afternoon. A young American soldier came up to Kimberly's brother, Michael, and told him that he'd met Kimberly in Iraq two years ago after he'd been wounded with shrapnel in his arm. The soldier had his Purple Heart with him, and he told Michael that he'd now like Kimberly to have it because, he said, she suffered as much as any soldiers. That Purple Heart is now beside Kimberly's bed.”