What do Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter all have in common, aside from the fact that history will judge them to be among the most successful people in their respective fields? Why, they're right-wing extremists, of course, and although one of them is no longer with us, he's still regarded with as much contempt as any living conservative, by people like Dan Rather and Ted Kennedy.

Funny how the most popular conservatives are always labeled extremists by left-wingers and their lapdogs in the "mainstream" media. Apparently in the minds of liberals, if the majority of people find you to be bright, articulate, charismatic, talented, and well informed, you must be evil incarnate.

Indeed, if you've been voted the 'Greatest American' (1) of all time in a national poll by millions of your fellow citizens, created the most popular program (2) in the history of talk radio, or written 5 consecutive non-fiction bestsellers (3), you deserve nothing but ridicule from those enlightened few who, for some inexplicable reason, have a popularity rating on par with brussel sprouts.

What do Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter all have in common, aside from the fact that history will judge them to be among the most successful people in their respective fields? Why, they're right-wing extremists, of course, and although one of them is no longer with us, he's still regarded with as much contempt as any living conservative, by people like Dan Rather and Ted Kennedy.

Funny how the most popular conservatives are always labeled extremists by left-wingers and their lapdogs in the "mainstream" media. Apparently in the minds of liberals, if the majority of people find you to be bright, articulate, charismatic, talented, and well informed, you must be evil incarnate.

Indeed, if you've been voted the 'Greatest American' (1) of all time in a national poll by millions of your fellow citizens, created the most popular program (2) in the history of talk radio, or written 5 consecutive non-fiction bestsellers (3), you deserve nothing but ridicule from those enlightened few who, for some inexplicable reason, have a popularity rating on par with brussel sprouts.

Check out this movie. You wll be interested within the first 5 minutes. There is a video clip of JFK being shot that 100% proves it wasn't 1 person. Watch the whole thing and learn how our CIA is involved in bringing in billions in drugs.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8797525979024486145&q=mike+ruppert

Watch then write...

Fox News's Geraldo Rivera came to Dan Rather’s defense on last night’s syndicated "Geraldo At Large." Teasing an upcoming report on the Rather firing, Rivera let CBS have it: "Still ahead, shame on them. CBS kicks Dan Rather out on the street after 44 years of usually wonderful work." Thankfully, later in the show, Rivera's colleague Laurie Dhue reminded viewers of the reason for Rather's axing: "CBS has agreed to let Dan Rather go after 44 years at the network. The 74-year-old newsman has not been on the air much since he stopped anchoring the 'Evening News' a year ago, six months after running a later-discredited story about President Bush's military service."

You know the media are overreaching when they start to portray teenagers hunkered over schoolbooks while downing iced lattes at a coffee shop as an alarming thing:

For my full story, click here. For a similar item on the biased coverage ABC brewed up just two days earlier, click here.

The kids aren’t alright. An epidemic is sweeping the nation as teenagers down the addictive brew by the pint. Underage alcohol consumption? No, coffee.

As anti-food industry advocacy groups like Center for Science in the Public Interest sharpen their legal knives against Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX), the media are brewing up alarmist reports on teenage caffeine consumption.

During her much hyped June 20 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, actress Angelina Jolie expressed a view that may shock many of her liberal Hollywood friends:

Just because someone’s Republican doesn’t mean that they don’t also, you know, have the capacity to understand or care about children...

This backhanded compliment was in response to Cooper’s adoring praise of activist Jolie’s "non-partisan" efforts to "affect change" in the world. If by non-partisan Cooper meant indirectly attacking the Bush administration and the Iraq war, then Jolie certainly is "non-partisan."

You can certainly see that the amount of money being spent at war, and the amount of money we are not spending in countries and dealing with situations that could end up in conflict if left unassisted, and then cause war. So, so our priorities are quite strange. So we’re not–we’re missing a lot of opportunities to do a lot of the good that America is used to doing, has a history of doing. And we’re not able to be as generous.

More from the two hour Cooper-Jolie lovefest is behind the cut:

While I’m on the subject of MRC interns wanting to pluck their eyeballs out watching Al-Gorey screeds about our impending planetary doom, MRC intern Chadd Clark sat through the entire Matt Lauer "Countdown to Doomsday" special on the Sci-Fi Channel that aired on June 14. The transcripts are so full of hyperbole it reads more like the the aforementioned Science Fiction in the usual rotation on that channel than an alleged documentary hosted by an NBC News anchor. Chadd lined up a long list of wild predictions of how we may all be dead tomorrow.

9:03 PM, Lauer on the threat of extinction: "Today, some of our greatest scientific minds are warning that we could be on the brink of another terrible extinction, only this one, is our own."

Alan Caruba writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the media never reported on the supporting arguments Ann Coulter used in her criticism of the 9-11 "Jersey Girls." To attack someone's statements, but neglecting to address how the person backs them up, is a classic media technique for delegitimizing or even dehumanizing an opponent.

Coulter noted, as she does in her book, that these "Jersey Girls," after receiving huge amounts in compensation for their losses, then went public blaming President Bush for having failed to anticipate and prevent the 9/11 attacks. The mainstream media made much of them while ignoring some very key factors that undermined their views. Coulter, of course, did not.

Michelle Malkin has the latest on the Haditha military "coverup."

So the leakers are now telling the Los Angeles Times:

The general charged with investigating whether Marines tried to cover up the killing of 24 civilians in Haditha has completed his report, finding that Marine officers failed to ask the right questions, an official close to the investigation said Friday.

Nothing in the report points to a "knowing cover-up" of the facts by the officers supervising the Marines involved in the November incident, the official said. Rather, he said, officers from the company level through the staff of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force in Baghdad failed to demand "a thorough explanation" of what happened in Haditha.

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Back from a break for heart surgery, PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose devoted his entire hour-long show Monday night to Al Gore, promoting his doom-documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Rose pressed Gore comfortably from the left: if the president has an "intellectually dishonest" position ignoring the facts, and why no one is having an "enlightened conversation" with President Bush on global warming. Once Rose shifted to Iraq, he laughed at Gore when they discussed whether Bush knew he would invade Iraq as he campaigned in 2000: "I don’t think Dick Cheney had told him yet that he was going to invade Iraq.” This, after Gore said he was trying to convey a "textured and subtle" foreign policy mindset.

In ending the June edition of his Real Sports news magazine show Tuesday night on HBO by urging Americans to watch and appreciate World Cup soccer, Bryant Gumbel slipped in a personal/political slam: “I know that in soccer they score about as often as Ann Coulter makes sense.” Back in February, Gumbel used a commentary, about how he would not watch the Winter Olympic games, to denounce Republicans over race as he condescendingly suggested viewers "try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention." (Dave Pierre's NewsBusters item on that, with video)

Video clip of Gumbel's slap at Coulter (18 seconds): Real (600 KB) or Windows Media (700 KB), plus MP3 audio (95 KB)

The media reporting on Enron was aggressive from day one. As well it should be. But another huge corporate scandal rife with political connections has been virtually ignored by the media: the $40 billion Fannie Mae fiasco, presided over by Clinton alumni like Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick. Today the Washington Times ran an op-ed by the MRC's Business & Media Institute Director Dan Gainor about the media's double standard. Dan's piece is on page A18 of the print edition, and available on the Web here.

Here's a taste:

When most people hear the word "Enron," they mentally complete the phrase by adding the word "scandal." As reporter Lester Holt of NBC's "Today" put it in a Jan. 1 story, "Enron has been the poster child, if you will, of corporate scandals."

Borking Sgt. York?

Sgt. Alvin York, hero of the First World War, is the ostensible subject of France-based reporter Craig Smith’s “Revisiting Sgt. York and a Time When Heroes Stood Tall.” Do they not stand tall anymore?

Smith then wonders, apparently without irony, why it’s so hard to be a hero these days in the mainstream media.

Rachel Sklar, formerly of Mediabistro's FishbowlNY blog and now the "Eat the Press" specialist at the Huffington Post (no "Green Acres" accents required), reports on what she calls a "cheap but hilarious" shot at congressional Republicans on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." It's apparently funny to blame Republican softball players for the floods in New Orleans, as fake-reporter Dan Bakkedahl put it:

The Daily Show's Dan Bakkedahl reported last night on the crisis gripping Congressional-league softball in D.C. this season after the Republican players split off into their own league in response to more inclusive regulations proposed by Democrats. According to the Wall Street Journal (and The Daily Show), the Republicans "seceded" from the league after the Democratic commissioner, Gary Caruso, permitted below-average teams to compete in the playoffs. The WSJ and Daily Show cited several emails accusing the league of being "all about Softball Welfare" and accusing Caruso of "punishing success and rewarding failure - He's a Democrat. Waddya' expect?"

In a chock-filled first half-hour of Today, the family of one the soldiers murdered in Iraq shared their grief and pride, Andrea Mitchell got it all wrong about conservative discontent, and White House spokesman Dan Bartlett declined to rise to Matt Lauer's bait.

Although the appropriateness of publicizing the grief of bereaved families is often debated, their dignity is a frequent source of inspiration. Here, the father of PFC Thomas Tucker of Oregon, reportedly tortured and murdered by the new al-Qaeda leader in Iraq in retaliation for the killing of Zarqawi, spoke with simple eloquence:

"We don't understand the big political picture. We understand what has happened. Our son has died for the freedom of everybody in the United States. We are very proud of our son."

Tom Shales, on Dan Rather's final departure from CBS:

As most of those who follow such events know, Rather was removed as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" a year short of his 25th anniversary after the airing of an apparently flawed "60 Minutes II" report on George W. Bush's alleged special treatment while in the Texas National Guard. Rather was the correspondent on that report. One producer lost her job, others are suing.

Emphasis added.

Look, we don't need to rehash that day when we all watched update after update attach to the bottom of the Sixty-First Minute.  This report wasn't "apparently flawed," it wa a piece of hack journalism that failed because the story was too good to check out.

New York Times reporter Jason DeParle (an alumnus of the liberal Washington Monthly magazine, one of many in the major media over the years) is now the man the Times assigns to cover the caveman, er, conservative beat. In Wednesday's paper, he does that nicely by covering the new Encyclopedia of Conservatism by ISI Books. It's not completely without balance, as he does poke at ISI's Jeffrey Nelson about the book going easy on George Wallace, and brings in liberal author Dan Carter for comment. But this is the kind of story that explores conservatism, and doesn't just gasp in horror at it.

Click here for instructions on running Gaggle daily on your own site. There's also an archive of previous toons available here.

The Vice President of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, has the solution to the problem of MASSIVE declining newspaper circulation all figured out:

LEHRER: Do you think that the newspapers, faced with this decline in circulation, should reexamine what they're doing?
BRADLEE: They're examining, reexamining it. Boy, that's topic A. Every, every paper you go to, they've just had a meeting and they're discussing what to do about falling circulation. And there's one word is the answer.
LEHRER: What is it?
BRADLEE: Stories.
LEHRER: Stories?
BRADLEE: Good stories.
LEHRER: So, when you say stories, what stories are they not doing, kinds of stories that they're not doing?
BRADLEE: Well, I mean, they're just well written stories, some story that makes you, you know, say I'll be damned, that's a good story.

Actually, the average newspaper story already makes me say "I'll be damned" but probably not for the reason Ben is talking about. Here's a suggestion for all you newspaper VP's. Why don't you get rid of the bias, the America-hating columnists, the socialist editorials, and the reporters pushing a gay/lesbian/transgendered/illegal alien/pro-abortion/anti-God/anti-gun agenda?

Ever thought of that in one of your falling circulation meetings? No. Probably not.