One week after ABC anchor Charles Gibson made a special point about how bad the situation in Iraq remained while media attention focused on the Israel-Hezbollah war, specifically noting how “more U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq these past two weeks than Israeli soldiers have died in their conflict,” Gibson on Monday night -- uniquely on the broadcast network evening newscasts -- highlighted some good news: How U.S. military deaths are falling in Iraq. Gibson read this short item on the July 31 World News: “One item to mention from Iraq tonight. The U.S. military death toll in Iraq fell in July, for the third-straight month, despite the rising sectarian violence. As of yesterday, 44 U.S. forces had been killed in July. And that's the third-lowest monthly death toll in two years.” An accompanying on-screen chart showed the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq declining from 76 in April to 69 in May to 61 in June and 44 in July.

Which party controls the U.S. House? Who is the current Secretary of State? Who is the president of Russia?

If you know all three questions, you could be a Rush Limbaugh listener. According to a new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Rush Limbaugh listeners place second in the category of "high knowledge." This is above the pretentious New Yorker, the almost as pretentious NPR, news magazines like Time, the "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," and cable news outlets.

Doesn't "acting" smart count for something? It only does in New York socials and in "An Inconvenient Truth."

Weekly Standard/New Republic: 50%
Rush Limbaugh: 48%
New Yorker/Atlantic: 44%
O’Reilly Factor: 42%
News magazines 41%
Online news (daily): 41%
NPR: 39%

You’d hardly know that all of Israel is under siege. The networks would rather you stay tuned to their pictures from Lebanon. According to ABC-TV, CNN and other “Friends of Hezbollah”, never mind who started this, and forget the million and a half Israelis who’ve been made homeless.

As usual, NPR Radio is serving as propaganda minister for terror and, also as usual, Israel is at war with the press.

Or rather, the press is at war with Israel.

Any mention of the 200 bombs falling on Israel from day to night? Hardly. What about the thousands of Israelis wounded in flesh and in spirit – meaning shell-shocked today and perhaps for the rest of their lives? No, there’s no time for this. Forget Haifa’s Rambam Hospital. The pictures from Lebanon are better, much better than pictures from Meron, Israel, where seven-year-old Omer Pesachov was murdered along with his grandmother as the result of Hezbollah missiles.

Fresh from his most recent trip to the Middle East, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman returned to offer his latest rationale for Bush hatred. Appearing on yesterday's Meet the Press Friedman theorized: "What this administration has done, is actually stolen something from people. Whether it's an African or a European or an Arab or Israeli, it's that idea of an optimistic America out there. People really need that idea, and the, the sort of dark nature of the Cheneys and the Bushes and the Rices, this, this sort of relentless pessimism about the world, this exporting of fear, not hope, has really left people feeling that the idea of America has been stolen from them."

Just a week ago Friedman, right before his departure to the Mideast, sat down with NBC's Russert to espouse the miraculous benefits of a gas tax. Friedman returned just in time, to the still warm seat across from Russert, to the following welcome from the Meet the Press host:

On Sunday morning, no less, comes New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein with a favorable front-page profile of a Minnesota pastor by the name of Greg Boyd who is proudly alienating his conservative membership: “Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock.”

NBC reporter Richard Engel sure has some severely selective sources. On the one hand, he's overflowing with information reinforcing the image of Hezbollah as a kindly humanitarian organization that was providing "supplies and relief" to the residents of Qana. On the other hand, he has "no evidence" that Hezbollah was using Qana residents as human shields for purposes of launching rockets.

Engel reported live from Tyre in southern Lebanon during this afternoon's 'The Most' on MSNBC, with host Alison Stewart. Speaking of events in Qana, Engel claimed:

"I got no indication [the people of Qana] were being held against their will. Just the opposite, it seemed Hezbollah was helping these people, providing them with food and water. These were some of the [poorest] people in the town, those with money had already left. They were staying in this section of town because there was food and water. Hezbollah were giving them supplies and relief."

Since the inception of NewsBusters, there have been many posts dealing with photographers that appear to be “posing” the individuals that are their subjects. On Monday, a British blog named EU Referendum posted a series of pictures and captions taken by various photographers at the devastation in Qana, Lebanon (hat tip to Rush Limbaugh).

What becomes apparent is that the same “rescue worker” is in all of these pictures, and that it appears he is involved in “posing” victims of this unfortunate incident. Furthermore, it is possible that this same individual has been doing this for some years, as a picture is shown of the same man involved in similar activities back in 1996.

As this is all too complicated to chronicle accurately without just copying this blogger’s entire post, I recommend interested readers go here and here. However, please be advised that these pictures are graphic in nature. Furthermore, this post is in no way designed to diminish the horror of this unfortunate event, but, instead, bring attention to the possibility that someone – maybe even an operative of Hezbollah – might be assisting photographers in this region to more graphically depict what is occurring.

Yesterday, on CBS’s "Sunday Morning" reporter Martha Teichner narrated a piece sympathetic to Hispanic immigrants, and in particular, illegal immigrants. She profiled three Hispanic people, two of whom initially came to the country illegally. One illegal immigrant she profiled was defiant of his status, and sounded almost threatening when he said:

Alex Vega, Illegal Immigrant. (Pictured): "In 20 years, we are going to run the country. Right now we're running the cities. So little by little, we're running the show. Little by little. So this sleeping giant is already awakened."

And, as noted by Ms. Teichner, the strategy for illegal immigrants is:

Al Franken's thinly disguised campaign for the U.S. Senate came through in a Greg Gordon piece I saw in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on vacation: his Midwest Values PAC is already plunking some impressive bucks for Democratic House challengers in the Gopher State, starting with the opponent of conservative Congressman Gil Gutknecht in the state's southeast corner:

Democrat Tim Walz's biggest donor has been Franken, a likely 2008 Minnesota Senate candidate who is distributing money to Midwestern Democrats through his own PAC. Besides a $10,000 PAC check, Franken and his wife each gave Walz the maximum $4,200.

Franken's PAC also gave 10 grand to former Time magazine Person of the Year /retired FBI agent Colleen Rowley, who's running against GOP Rep. John Kline. But the PAC isn't all Franken's money. AP noted a number of celebs gave money to FrankenPAC. Franken's not even alone among famous Minnesota liberals.

U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont got a boost ahead of next week's Democratic primary in Connecticut against Sen. Joseph Lieberman with an endorsement in Sunday’s New York Times.

Some reasons the Times (and left-wing bloggers) dislike Sen. Lieberman:

“He has shown no interest in prodding his Republican friends into investigating how the administration misled the nation about Iraq’s weapons….If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.”

On Yesterday's CNN "Late Edition," host Wolf Blitzer interviewed Syrian Cabinet Minister Bouthaina Shaaban. Greg Tinti at Outside the Beltway reports that Wolf allowed Shaaban "to get away with rhetorical murder without ever bothering to challenge her B.S."

After warning Wolf that the world needs to stop Israel now before it takes this conflict beyond the Middle East, Shaaban tells Wolf to "remember" that, "Nazi Germany was claiming that it was fighting terrorism and then the whole world had to stop that. We are fighting something very similar to what happened as a result of the actions of Nazi Germany against civilians."

Notice that there’s absolutely no follow-up from Blitzer. Nothing. He just moves on to the next question as if Shaaban had said that the sky is blue. Unbelievable. When anyone–especially someone of Shaaban’s status–equates the actions of Israel today to those of the Nazi Germany, he should be challenged and made to look like the fool that he is.

When the Washington Post tries to condemn other newspapers as tabloid journalists, there’s always today’s paper for rebuttal. Reporter Anthony Shadid’s front-page story on the deaths of women and children at Qana carried this emotionally manipulative headline, quoting Khalil Burji, a man watching recovery efforts, after the jump on page A8, all across the page:  

‘The Child Who Choked to Death, What Was His Sin?’

Normally, people expect that a media outlet with an unadmitted agenda will keep its political views to its news and opinion pages. This usually isn't the case, though, as today's New York Times demonstrates.

Inside the arts section is a 1400-word article about how the cultural scene of Beirut has been damaged by Israel in the course of the war between Lebanon and the Jewish state.

There's no denying that such destruction is unfortunate, but the fact that the Times doesn't even bother to mention similar problems created by the war for Israelis doesn't even rise to the low standard of moral equivalence.

Hat tip: Mediacrity.

For nearly all of his presidency, George W. Bush has been on the receiving end of mainly negative — sometimes highly negative — coverage from the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts, according to a new report from the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA), a nonpartisan research group. The only time the TV networks gave Bush mostly (63%) positive coverage was during the three months following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and even then nearly four-in-ten on-air evaluations (37%) of the President were critical.

The findings are included in the latest issue of CMPA’s Media Monitor newsletter, which reached my (snail) mailbox on Friday. So far, it has yet to be posted on CMPA’s Web site, which appears to make this NewsBusters posting a World Wide Web exclusive.

Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi noticed with the new Woody Allen flick "Scoop" the obvious trend in movies featuring journalists: the print specialists get all the plum roles, and the TV journalists get the pits:

As a general rule, when a story calls for a journalist to do something serious or important -- solve a murder, expose wrongdoing, spring an innocent man, etc. -- you can count on seeing a print reporter at the center of the story, not a TV journalist, says Joe Saltzman, a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.

Saltzman, himself a former TV journalist, has done enough reporting to say this with authority. He's director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project at USC, which maintains a database of some 46,000 items (films, TV shows, books, etc.) about fictional journalists.

There was a feeling of surreality this morning in watching the segment on Good Morning America. There was Chris Cuomo [son of Dem ex-NYS Gov. Mario, brother of Andrew, current Dem candidate for NYS Attorney General] chatting with former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos.

Was this an ABC 'news' interview between two of its employees - or had I mistakenly tuned to a CSPAN broadcast of a DNC coffee klatsch?

Cuomo had a fine line to walk. With brother Andy running for office in New York, being too critical of Israel could be impolitic. Chris focused on what came naturally: accusing the Bush administration of 'failure.'

Cuomo's opening question for Stephanopoulos: "The Secretary [of State Condi Rice] is in the air and she's heading to the U.N. Was this situation a failure for her and what needs to change when she hits the ground?"

The more I see about the timeline in Qana, the more I doubt the story being told to us by the world's media. Katherine Shrader and Kathy Gannon of AP make the strike and its effect seem immediate:

A three-story house on the outskirts of Qana was leveled when a missile crashed into it at 1 a.m. Red Cross officials said 56 were killed and police said 34 children and 12 adult women were among the dead. It was worst single strike since Israel's campaign in Lebanon began on July 12 when Hezbollah militants crossed the border into Israel and abducted two soldiers.

But we know that the immediacy of the collapse given in this timeline to be a false construct. Many hours before this AP story was released, the IDF had already reported that the building did not collapse until 8 A.M.

The bleeding heart of the Boston Globe is on vivid display in its editorial of this morning, Boa Vinda a Framingham! The focus is massive illegal Brazilian immigration that has tranformed the city of Framingham, MA. Annotated excerpts:

"Rizoli [a candidate for state representative] is part of a small, controversial group that opposes illegal immigration." In the Globe's mind, what's 'controversial' isn't lawbreaking on a massive scale. It's opposition to the law-breaking.

"Framingham, like the rest of Massachusetts, needs immigrants to help fuel the economy." Globe doesn't bother to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants.

The disease of Leftist bias knows no bounds and infects all manner of print medium, it seems.  My latest encounter with the plague happened today while perusing an issue of Runner’s World, of all things.

 

David Willey, the editor-in-chief of this magazine, asks in the title, “Do You Feel It?”  This being the August issue, and with much material inside dedicated to the dangers of running unprepared in the heat of that torrid month, I firmly expected to read some wisdom concerning this topic.  More knowledge on this front can never hurt; I do run, and that is why I buy the magazine.  However, he just has to start out the “Editor’s Letter” section this way:

"When Immigrants Become Humans" is an interesting, if not acerbic, title of a recent L. A. Times piece on the latest episode of Morgan Spurlock’s TV show, "30 days".

The Times obviously is of the opinion that the Minutemen, the organization that has taken upon itself the job of patrolling our borders, don't think that immigrants are human if the story is any indication. In fact, the Times is saying that those against illegal immigration "...too often compare a class of mostly decent human beings (illegal immigrants) to rodents or insects."

Funny, but I have never seen any official Minuteman communication that does this at all. In fact, there are very few people in these activist organizations that have said such things publicly.

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

The headline had me laughing before I even read the article:

"Michael Moore says gets lots of Republican hugs"

I'm thinking it must be a slow news day. But then I read the article and realize that the entire article reads like a press release for Moore, himself.

Michael Moore -- gadfly filmmaker, liberal activist and political lightning rod -- says he finds himself being hugged by a lot of Republicans these days.

So who are these Republicans he speaks of? Does the article identify any?

...the Oscar-winning director says he is approached all the time by conservatives ready to make peace.

Ok, so who are they? Names? Descriptions? Anything....?

Some in solidly Republican northern Michigan and elsewhere now believe that they made a "colossal mistake" in initially supporting the war in Iraq, Moore said, and they have let him know it in chance encounters on the streets of Traverse City, a resort town where he has relocated from New York.

On the CBS News "Public Eye" site, CBS Evening News producer Ward Sloane was interviewed in the "Ten Plus One" feature. The Public Eye team asked ten questions, and then added one from an outsider, who asked about media watchdog groups: "There is always a lot of criticism, particularly in the realm of political reporting, about journalists being biased against liberals or conservatives. There are organizations that exist primarily to highlight instances of such bias. How do you think that climate affects political coverage, if at all?" Sloane said all the media-bias talk was just fundraising hucksterism: 

I do not believe that honest journalists worry about what such organizations say about their stories and pieces. Of course, political stories I’ve worked on have been picked up by both conservative and liberal organizations as being “unfair.” But for these folks, “unfair” is anything that doesn’t promote their agenda. And it is my belief, though I don’t have any evidence of this, that a lot of the howling about media bias is primarily a vehicle to raise money.

Do I think these organizations can be helpful? Not really; I think they just want to use journalists and their media outlets for their own purposes. People who read or subscribe to those organizations are going to think the media is biased anyway. Once in a blue moon, it may be that they do serve the purpose of poking a stick in my eye and asking, hey, did I slant that item?