Have you heard about the young Muslim man who was forced to change his shirt at JFK Airport because it said "We Will Not Be Silent" in English and Arabic? Here's a piece of the story from Newsday...

An Arab human rights activist says he was prevented from boarding a plane at Kennedy Airport while wearing a T-shirt that said "We will not be silent" in English and Arabic. The incident happened Aug. 12 when Raed Jarrar, 28, was preparing to board a JetBlue flight from Kennedy to Oakland, Calif. Four officials from JetBlue or from a government agency stopped him at the gate and told him he couldn't get on the plane wearing his shirt, Jarrar said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Do you remember the scene in The Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen, as police detective Frank Drebin, pretends to be a major league baseball umpire in order to be able to search the players to see who might be the assassin?

The very first pitch is dead over the heart of the plate, but Frank hesitates before finally, timidly, calling 'strike.'  The crowd roars in approval.  Frank gets a taste for the positive feedback, and by the third strike is bellowing out his calls, making flamboyant hand gestures, even doing a moonwalk.

A similar phenomenon might be occuring with Keith Olbermann.  As noted here, in a closing 'Special Comment' on last night's show, he accused the Bush administration of representing "a new type of fascism."  Daily Kos and Democratic Underground exploded in paroxysms of joy, and deluged the show with thousands of approving emails. 

On Thursday night, CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, anchored by Kitty Pilgrim, featured a full story on the MRC's study by Tim Graham released on Monday, “Election In the Streets: How the Broadcast Networks Promote Illegal Immigration.” Pilgrim announced that “this nation's major newscasts are being accused of being blatantly sympathetic to illegal aliens.” Reporter Casey Wian explained how “a study released this week by the conservative Media Research Center...claims ABC, CBS, and NBC News have been promoting illegal immigration." After a soundbite from Graham, Wian relayed how “the study examined network news coverage of the issue from March 24th through May 31st. Among the findings, illegal alien amnesty advocates appeared in about twice as many soundbites as supporters of border security.” In addition, “networks routinely ignored polls showing the vast majority of Americans favor stronger border security. And the study concluded: 'The networks seemed to offer honorary citizenship to anyone crossing the border.'” (Transcript follows)

Video of the story (2:28): Real (4.2 MB) or Windows Media (4.8 MB), plus MP3 audio (1 MB)

At a recent journalists convention in Israel, the assembled representatives of the world's elite media realized that press's coverage of the recent war in Lebanon has been flawed. And that it was Israel's fault. See NRO's Media blog for details, then read the rest of this article (h/t LGF):

In short, much of the most incendiary media coverage of this war seems to have been either staged or fabricated. The big question is why the western media would perpetrate such institutionalised mendacity. Many ancillary reasons come to mind. There is the reliance upon corrupted news and picture agencies which employ Arab propagandists as stringers and cameramen. There is the herd mentality of the media which decides collectively what the story is. There is the journalists’ fear for their personal safety if they report the truth about terrorist outfits. There is the difficulty of discovering the truth from undemocratic regimes and terrorist organisations. There is the language barrier; there is professional laziness; there is the naïve inability to acknowledge the depths of human evil and depravity; there is the moral inversion of the left which believes that western truth-tellers automatically tell lies, while third world liars automatically tell the truth.

But the big answer is that the western media transmit the lies of Hezbollah because they want to believe them. And that’s because the Big Lie these media tell — and have themselves been told — about Israel and its place in history and in the world today has achieved the status of unchallengeable truth. The plain fact is that western journalists were sent to cover the war being waged against Israel from Lebanon as a war being waged by Israel against Lebanon. And that’s because that’s how editors think of the Middle East: that the whole ghastly mess is driven by Israel’s actions, and that therefore it is only Israel’s aggression which is the story to be covered.

One might think that with an American media so attuned to listening to what our friends, allies and even enemies in the International community have to say, we'd see more than a handful of Google News references to a recent exchange between a radio show caller and the Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

"There is a section, a small section of the Islamic population, and I say a small section, which is very resistant to integration."

"Fully integrating means accepting Australian values, it means learning as rapidly as you can the English language if you don't already speak it," ...

"And it means understanding that in certain areas, such as the equality of men and women ... people who come from societies where women are treated in an inferior fashion have got to learn very quickly that that is not the case in Australia."

At the end of Thursday's CBS Evening News, with a slap on her arm Bob Schieffer greeted incoming anchor Katie Couric in front of the new set, which Schieffer said he couldn't show “because it's not quite finished yet.” Before viewers saw a pre-taped tribute to Schieffer narrated by Couric, she gushed: “I can't imagine following in the footsteps of a kinder, more gracious person.” Following the tribute, which ended with Schieffer choking up while thanking his parents and his wife, Schieffer got what Dan Rather did not on his last night: Handshakes at the side of the studio from CBS executives. For Schieffer, CBS News President Sean McManus and CBS President Les Moonves -- at least it looked like them in the crowd of applauding staffers and family members..

Video clip of Schieffer greeting Couric (43 seconds): Real (1.3 MB) or Windows Media (1.5 MB), plus MP3 audio (250 KB)

Stung by criticism that he appeared unprofessional in his recent interview with President Bush, NBC's Brian Williams took the unusual step of trying to defend himself in his personal blog. This particular edition of The Daily Nightly aka The Daily Dully stands in sharp contrast to the usual banal Happy Face platitudes expressed on his blog. Here is Brian Williams defending his interview with President Bush:

We'll run another new (to our audience) portion of our conversation with the President on tonight's broadcast. I returned from New Orleans to find thousands of emails (I often ask that they be printed out so that I can take them home, travel with them and go through them quickly, while sticking to my vow to read them all) neatly divided into two main categories: our Katrina coverage (overwhelmingly positive) and our interview with President Bush.

Harry's finally catching on:

CBS News veteran Harry Smith finally confessed something that the Business
& Media Institute (BMI) have reported for a while and his
colleagues elsewhere in the media have already picked up on: gas prices
are on a downward trend.

"It seems like a month ago we were all screaming with our hair on fire
about the price of gas going over $3, no end in sight. And now it looks
like it's dropping like a stone," CBS’s Harry Smith marveled on the
August 31 edition of "The Early Show."

Sitting in the CNN green room in Washington today and staring at the tube during "Live From" at about 2:10, I noticed a promo for a big show this weekend starring President Bill Clinton. On Saturday and Sunday night at 8 PM Eastern, CNN will air a special edition of "CNN Presents" hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. It's titled "The Poverty Trap: A Conversation With President Clinton." The Turner press release is headlined "CNN and President Clinton Search for Solutions To Global Poverty." How chummy. The release continued:

From Detroit, Michigan to Mexico and rural Arkansas to Rwanda, CNN explores poverty in communities around the world in places where the statistics are staggering and on the rise. In THE POVERTY TRAP: A CONVERSATION WITH PRESIDENT CLINTON, Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks to former President Bill Clinton about how these communities and others can break out of the poverty trap.

"I spent three years hyperventilating about Valerie Plame and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." So says most of the Washington media establishment. But one particular ideologue is not ready to throw in the towel just yet, CNN reporter Jeff Greenfield.

To conservatives, this Armitage disclosure is proof that there never was any effort to smear Joseph Wilson, or to injure Valerie Plame. The Wall Street Journal editorial page Wednesday pointedly asked why Armitage never let Fitzgerald know of his role. The National Review says the whole controversy was much ado about nothing.

But does this put an end to the mater? Liberal bloggers say maybe not. Maybe others were out to punish Wilson and his wife even if Armitage's talk with Novak was wholly innocent.

Did "voting irregularities" help George Bush steal the 2004 election in Ohio? Reporter Ian Urbina helps keep hope alive for conspiracists in Thursday's "Ohio, Facing Suit, to Delay Destroying Ballots From 2004 Election."

The text box: "A group of critics says it has found signs of widespread voting irregularities." The phrase "far-left critics" would have been more accurate, but there's not a single label to be found in Urbina's story.

Imagine the following film being made during Bill Clinton's presidency:

This is the dramatic moment when President George Bush is gunned down by a sniper after a public address at a hotel, in a gripping new docudrama soon to be aired on TV.

Set around October 2007, President Bush is assassinated as he leaves the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago.

Death of a President, shot in the style of a retrospective documentary, looks at the effect the assassination of Bush has on America in light of its 'War on Terror'.

The 90 minutes feature explores who could have planned the murder, with a Syrian-born man wrongly put in the frame.

New Drama: US President George Bush 'Assassinated'

24Dash

Channel 4 is wading into controversy with a new drama shot in the style of a retrospective documentary in
which US President George Bush is assassinated by a sniper.

Death Of A President uses the fictional murder to explore the effects of the War on Terror on the US.

The 90-minute film will be shown at the Toronto film festival and go out on Channel 4's digital channel More4...

The bottom seems to be infinite. Imagine a movie focusing on a sitting president's assassination. Obvious print and television media have not been effective, how can reality be distorted any further than this?

I think it's safe to say that Kyra Phillips's bathroom break embarrassment was not entirely her fault. But you do have to wonder why it took so long for someone to cut off her mic. On his radio show yesterday, Rush Limbaugh wondered if perhaps the whole affair was due to someone not liking the CNN anchor:

What was the techie at the CNN control booth doing for 90 seconds? It's obvious they weren't listening to the Bush speech. It's obvious that nobody at CNN was listening to this. Somebody caught her. Oh, the anchor that was on, Daryn was on, and she finally, when this conversation finally started getting into sisters and brothers and control freaks and so forth, while Bush was speaking, "And you're listening to President Bush, who is talking from New Orleans today," and then apparently Kyra came back, she's going to take over at one o'clock, Daryn is still sitting there and she comes back and her mic is still live when she approaches the set, because she says, "Well, I'm here. I'm ready," and that went out.

It got me to thinking. Does somebody there not like Kyra Phillips? I mean how does this just happen? How in the world can audio and video go out when nobody intends for it to? But then when it does, you can imagine... I mean, look, I know broadcasting and broadcasting is me, and these accidents can happen. Somebody can bump into a switch. But for 90 seconds nobody knew it in the control booth at CNN, which means they we were the listening to what was on their own, quote, unquote, air, which was a Bush speech. I mean Kyra Phillips is innocent in this. I mean, she just had her whole personal conversation in a bathroom broadcast all over cable news yesterday afternoon for a minute and a half.

New York Times reporter David Leonhardt had to make an about-face on the economy in today's New York Times:

What a difference three days make. 72 little hours.

In that time, a New York Times reporter went from tolling the death knell of real wage growth to reporting a 7-percent wage jump over last year after inflation.

"[T]he current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages," The New York Times’ David Leonhardt and Steven Greenhouse somberly noted in their page A6 article in the August 28 edition.

Greenhouse and Leonhardt added a political spin to data showing the "median hourly wage" dipping "2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation."

"That situation is adding to fears among Republicans that the economy will hurt vulnerable incumbents in this year’s midterm elections," the correspondents argued before remarking that "wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product."

But new data released on August 30 pushed Leonhardt to admit the death of wage growth he wrote about earlier might be greatly exaggerated.

Brian Maloney at Radio Equalizer has reported exclusively that Air America "is apparently so broke that it is now struggling just to pay for basic news services"!

Reports Maloney:

Air America Radio is apparently so broke that it is now struggling just to pay for basic news services, the Radio Equalizer has exclusively learned.

Locked into a contract for Associated Press wire services until next year, the much- hyped but floundering liberal talk radio network has recently attempted to negotiate for revised terms, including temporarily disconnecting certain elements of its AP coverage until it can theoretically resume full payments in 2007.

Discuss topics not covered on other postings here.

Mike Hornbrook, a CBC journalist on the ground in Lebanon, has popped in over at Snapped Shot, and informs us that from on the ground in Lebanon, that there are no indications that Hezbullah is handing out counterfeit money:

With all respect to bloggers who sometimes discover things missed by mainstream media, this story about Hezbollah handing out counterfeit $100 bills is completely insane!

Unlike any of them, I am on the ground in Beirut reporting for CBC News and have checked it out. We could not find a single person complaining about phony money. Furthermore, the very idea shows a profound ignorance of Lebanon and Hezbollah. Lebanon is a major banking center, every bank has counterfeit scanners and other tools for detecting counterfeits. Not just the banks either, every money-changer and supermarket also has a scanner next to the cash register. From personal experience I can tell you they check out $100 USD bills very very carefully, phonies would be detected in an instant. This would bring outraged complaints from people in desperate circumstances that would be a huge embarassment to Hezbollah. No such scandal has emerged because the phony money story is itself phony. The people circulating the story are doing it for their own reasons, but as a journalist I can tell you they are absolutely, totally wrong.

Details are still brewing over at Snapped Shot!

It can be hard for people working in journalism to publicly talk about the bias that they see in their co-workers every day. There are a number of risks involved when you take sides against the overwhelming majority of people in your industry.

Take a look at this interview with Daniel Hernandez, staff writer for LA Weekly and formerly a journalist at the LA Times. It is an insightful peek behind the curtain of MSM. The LA Times isn't going to be able to write this one off as a crazed conservative. Daniel is an independent thinker and his breadth of writing toes no conservative line.

Forced liberal pity is a common pitfall in well-intentioned journalism, patting your subjects upon the head, regarding others as provincial. I find this highly disrespectful.

I owe The Times lots. They taught me so much. But The Times has a very clear, very rigid tradition on how to report the news.

Shortly after I got there, I started having these long, tortured thought sessions with myself about my participation in the MSM. I saw how the people and places the paper chose to cover were automatically political decisions because for every thing you chose to cover there is something you chose to not cover. I started realizing that the mainstream style on reporting the news that most papers employ is not really concerned with depicting the truth, but concerned primarily with balancing lots of competing agendas and offending the least amount of interests as possible.

I saw how so much was looked at from certain assumptions and subtexts, and a very narrow cultural view. When I raised questions about such things, I was told we were writing for a "mainstream reader," which I quickly figured out is basically a euphemism for a middle-aged, middle-class white registered Democrat homeowner in the Valley. From where I stand today, I had very little in common with this "mainstream reader" and I didn't care to be in this person's service.

On page A-12 of Thursday's Washington Post, they report on "More Immigration Demonstrations Planned." Reporter Karin Brulliard tells her entire story without ever finding anyone to describe as "liberal" in it. She began: "After four months of relative quiet, immigration reform advocates are mobilizing a new round of protests in Washington and other cities to put pressure on a returning Congress and reinvigorate a Latino movement that awakened in massive demonstrations this spring." One of the first marches will be directed straight at the office of Republican House leader Dennis Hastert, which apparently doesn't make you hostile to Republicans.

Liberal groups like the Center for Community Change and CASA de Maryland were cited, but not labeled. Bruillard also exaggerates the spontaneity a little when she writes: "Local organizers said they are improving on spring rallies that were hastily planned amid a spontaneous groundswell of activism."

If 'Today' were ever to air the opinions of a think tank co-founded, say, by a former Reagan administration official and free-market economist Milton Friedman, and funded by large corporations, it's inconceivable that the show would fail to identify the organization's conservative leanings.

Yet Today didn't feel the need to do the obverse when relying extensively - for purposes of talking down the economy - on a liberal think tank founded by a former Clinton official and far-left economists and largely funded by Big Labor.

From a New York Times editorial to a Boston Globe political cartoon, the MSM has been beating the drum this week to talk down the economy in the face of more good economic news. The liberal theme du jour has been that wages haven't risen along with corporate profits.