Actual caption:

White House spokesman Tony Snow laughs as he holds on to reporters tape recorders during the press gaggle aboard Air Force One before landing at O'hare International Airport in Chicago, Thursday, July 6, 2006. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

"I'm draining all the bias out of your soundbites."

"Don't worry, I'll shut these off when we discuss who makes a mess in the bathroom."

Actual caption:

Reporters surround demonstrators in Seoul holding a mock North Korean missile during a protest denouncing North Korea's missile tests. North Korea is threatening to fire more missiles and warned of "all-out countermeasures" if the international community punished the impoverished communist state with new sanctions(AFP/Kim Jae-Hwan)

How about:

"Is that one of those missile thingies? I heard they're not as dangerous as global warming."

On Friday's Washington Week on PBS, taped at the Aspen Ideas Festival (“Inspired Thinking in an Idyllic Setting”), when asked by host Gwen Ifill about hateful speech in politics and directed at journalists -- “Is that polarization real or is it just people blogging?" -- NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell charged that “the kind of hateful speech that we have seen...in a lot of the blogosphere...goes back, in my own experience, to 1989 when the talk radio shows went crazy about the congressional pay raise.” She then reasoned: “The anti-Washington, anti-bureaucrat bias that was built into that debate was then taken up by cable talk hosts as well and that became the kind of really combative conversation that displaced reasoned discussions about controversial issues."

PBS picked six members of the Colorado conference audience to pose questions to the panel. None came from the right and four were clearly from the left, starting with a woman who wondered: “How can we keep religion out of government and politics?" A man complained: “What's the responsibility of government and the press regarding poor people and why do we hear so little about housing crisis, minimum wage, homeless people and low-wage workers?" That pleased James Bennet, a former New York Times White House reporter who is now Editor of The Atlantic magazine: "It's a great question. I've been wondering what happened to the issue of homelessness in America.” (Partial transcripts follow)

Does Norah read NewsBusters? Could it be pure coincidence that Hardball's 'What'd You Say?' audio highlights of the week just happened to select the two items we had highlighted here and here? Who knows?

For the record, the two featured soundbites were Joe Biden's
Indian-7/11 slur, and Cindy Sheehan's pronouncement that she would
rather live under Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez than George Bush.
Panelist Tucker Carlson had the best line: "[Sheehan's] a
pathetic figure. It would be a hard moral call whether or not to have
her on. She's almost like a sideshow figure now." Too true.

MRC intern Chadd Clark found that CNN had the same old pattern of centering the day's big state court decisions on "gay marriage" as a ruling for "proponents" first. This report aired Thursday in the 4 pm hour of "The Situation Room." Perhaps the newspapers were merely copying from the CNN stylebook. Or maybe it's the GLAAD stylebook.

John King: "Moving on, though. Proponents of gay marriage are reeling today from a one-two legal punch. Courts in Georgia and in New York State issued new rulings now having an impact on the culture wars. CNN's Allan Chernoff has more from New York. Hi, Allan."

I read this very interesting article in the local "alternative weekly" and it caused some consternation..... Quite frankly, this guy is a frequent contributor to the paper and this is rather tame...a few quotes:

The American way of life is predicated on a permanent war economy. Our society would collapse without perpetual violence against weaker nations and rape of the natural world.

Perhaps the most dangerous lie of all is the belief that they are "our" troops and that they serve "us."

We civilians pay for the military, but it takes its orders from ExxonMobil, General Electric, Boeing, and a host of other corporations.

Yet ANOTHER piece of evidence of this administrations corruption.

It's like they have a thirst for criminal activity...

Wierd.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Man_indicted_in_election_day_phone_0707.html

Sometimes, NBC’s Today show bombards a viewer with bias. Other days, the spin is sprinkled throughout the show; July 7 fell into the latter catagory. In a segment on the North Korean nuclear standoff that aired at 7:05AM EDT, NBC reporter Jim Miklaszewski discussed that country’s recent missile launches. The piece featured a quote from Joseph Cirincione, who, as an NBC graphic identified, is a "nuclear weapons expert."

Cirincione: "[Kim Jong Il] is demanding that the U.S. negotiate with him, not that we surrender, that we come to the table and cut a deal."

Cirincione isn’t simply a "nuclear weapons expert." For eight years, he was the Director for Non-Proliferation at the liberal Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As the MRC’s Brent Baker reported in a CyberAlert dated October 5th, 2004, he was also a generous donor to the John Kerry campaign. So, in this light, his comments calling for negotiations and reasonable dialogue with the North Korean dictator can be seen in a more honest context. Does anyone believe that Pat Toomey, President of the right-leaning Club for Growth, would ever be labeled as simply an "economics expert" and not have the phrase "conservative" tacked on? It should also be noted that during this segment, NBC, like CBS, didn’t find the time to mention the recent report that the missile North Korea recently launched was aimed at Hawaii.

On Thursday, “The Smoking Gun” website published the Homeland Security manifest, including the June 29 affidavit signed by Rush Limbaugh, concerning the conservative radio host’s customs detention in Palm Beach, Florida, last month (hat tip to Radio Equalizer).

With the headline, “Rush Limbaugh's Dominican Stag Party,” and a sub-headline, “29 Viagra pills, two ‘24’ producers among radio star's all-male crew,” it seems that this is likely to incite more lurid media speculation concerning why Limbaugh had Viagra on an “all boys” trip to the Dominican Republic:

Just as the New York Times firmly centered its coverage of so-called "gay marriage" decisions from state courts on the gay left's horror, The Washington Post report from Amy Goldstein also presented the issue first and foremost as a question of how "gay rights advocates" felt:

The highest courts of New York and Georgia ruled yesterday that same-sex couples are not entitled to marry, delivering a twin blow to gay rights advocates that leaves Massachusetts as the only state in which such unions are legal.

As usual, the story is illustrated by a photo of gay activists, as it almost always is. Gay media theorists used to protest that their problem was "invisibility," but now, it's the social conservative activists that almost never get their picture in the paper when the story is gay "civil rights." Perhaps the most classic Goldstein paragraph is the one where she describes the great ideological battle on this issue, between conservatives and liberals -- oops, make that advocates of "civil rights."

Today's New York Times leads off with a local story with national ramifications, a 4-2 defeat of gay marriage in the Court of Appeals of New York, the state's highest court.

Anemona Hartocollis reports:

"New York's highest court rejected yesterday a broad attempt by gay and lesbian couples across the state to win the right to marry under state law, saying that denying marriage to same-sex couples does not violate the State Constitution.

"By a 4-2 majority, the Court of Appeals found that the State Legislature, in laws dating back nearly 100 years, intended to limit marriage to a union between a man and a woman, and that the Legislature had a rational basis for doing so."

If anyone says Rupert Murdoch's media outlets go easy on conservatives, his New York Post has been willing to run plagiarism challenges brought against Ann Coulter by former University of California, Berkeley professor John Barrie.

Universal Press Syndicate, through which Coulter's columns appear in more than 100 newspapers, said it wants to review a report that detailed instances in which passages of her columns appeared to be lifted from other authors. A plagiarism-detecting software system called iThenticate produced the findings.

"We take allegations of plagiarism seriously. It's something we'd like to investigate further," Universal spokeswoman Kathie Kerr said.

"We'd like to see a copy of the report. We'd like to start looking into it."

For the second day in a row, Harry Smith, co-host of CBS’s "The Early Show" interviewed a guest about North Korea and its missile tests. Today’s analysis came from frequent guest Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. And while Smith once again referred to Kim Jong-Il as a nutcase and even inferred that he is a despot, he was easily amazed at O’Hanlon’s suggestion that he is crafty.

As noted, Harry Smith’s first question to O’Hanlon in essence described who Kim Jong-Il truly is:

"Before we talk about missiles I want to talk about Kim Jong-Il for a minute. It's not too extreme, I don't think, to say this guy is nuts. He has nukes. He runs a ruthless regime in North Korea where people routinely don't have enough to eat. This guy is the wild card of all wild cards. What else can we know about this guy?"

As NewsBuster Mark Finkelstein pointed out on Friday, there is quite a double-standard in the media concerning what’s acceptable for a Democrat to say versus a Republican. With that in mind, as captured by C-SPAN, Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) recently made some comments concerning folks from India that were not at all flattering. As of yet, there appears to be no media outrage.

Here’s what Biden said:

“In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7/11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”

Our friend Ian at Expose the Left has the video so that you can watch for yourself to gauge the seriousness of these statements, and what might have happened if a Republican had said the same thing.

The FBI "scrambling" to pick up suspects stopped a terror plot by jihadists trying to blow up the Holland Tunnel, flooding Manhattan.

Counterterrorism officials are alarmed by the "lone wolf" terror plot because they allegedly got a pledge of financial and tactical support from Jordanian associates of top terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before he was killed in Iraq, a counterterrorism source told The News.

It's not clear, however, if any cash or assistance was delivered.

No, and it probably will never be clear again. Thanks, New York Times.

A Republican senator who makes a remark with insensitive racial connotations? Toast. Ask Trent Lott. A Democrat? Hey, no problem! Then again, woe betide the Republican senator who offers an awkward description of the workings of the internet. It will 'haunt' him.

That's the world according to Wonkette-turned-Time columnist Ana Marie Cox, who appeared on last evening's Scarborough Country. For those who might have missed the Biden flap, on a recent campaign swing to New Hampshire, Biden told an Indian political activist: “You cannot go into a Dunkin Donuts or a 7-Eleven unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

Where are all the peace-nazis when North Korea is attempting to shoot a missile at Hawaii?

Last time I checked Hawaii was a blue state!

Are they waiting until this story is not such a hot topic so they can resume their attacks on our troops and our President?

No one is noticing the celebs attempt at a hunger strike anyway.  When Rosey-O-Doughnut stops looking like Shamoo and starts looking like Cindy "Bitch in the ditch" Sheehan I still won't care.

I am waiting for the peace-nick SUICIDE PROTEST!!! I will support that!!! I'll go and carry a sign for that! 'Please put your WHOLE HEAD in front of the SHOTGUN!!!'

InfoJunkie

It's one thing for Keith Olbermann to take snide shots at President Bush. He doesn't hold himself out as an objective journalist, after all. But Dana Milbank is, in theory, not a partisan commentator but a national political reporter, repeat, reporter, for the Washington Post. Milbank is a man who has written that his only bias is for 'mainstream news' and that he is sees his role as 'gathering and reporting facts.'

Yet in his interview on last night's Countdown, it was Milbank [shown in an NB file photo] taking some of the nastier jibes at W on the occasion of the latter's 60th birthday.

Olbermann rather benevolently remarked that Pres. Bush "does not look 60. He does not seem to have aged as much as a lot of other presidents have during their time in office. Do we attribute that to something in particular? His physical fitness regimen, the strength of his convictions? Not having sleepless nights?"

When he asked "why doesn't he look at bad as other presidents who have been through the mill for five years?", Milbank shot back snidely:

"It probably wasn't his clean living in the 1970'S."

There was more:

New York Times TV writer Alessandra Stanley reviewed George and Laura Bush's Thursday night interview on CNN's "Larry King Live" as a desperately needed chance for a softball interview. "The standoff with North Korea over its missile tests, the war in Iraq and ever-sliding ratings in the polls have given the president little reason to celebrate. Mr. King gave the president a chance to defend his policies without risk of interruption or follow-up."

This adjective, "ever-sliding," may be what Miss Stanley wishes and hopes for, but it could not be described as accurate. Bush fans would look silly to describe Bush's poll ratings as good. But they have been creeping upward since the killing of Iraqi al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The PollingReport.com summary shows that several polls have him up a bit since a low point in early May:

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