In an address in Oklahoma Thursday, Al "Balance Is Bias" Gore repeated his reference made at a "media ethics" seminar in Tennessee, that "a survey of 636 articles in the 'popular press' showed that 53 percent of the stories contended that it was still unproved."  But Al Gore isn't really relying on a scientific study of media coverage. This matches an article by Jules and Maxwell Boykoff titled "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias. " They didn't read all national newspaper articles on global warming in a certain time frame. They picked a "random sample" instead of the full spectrum of coverage.

But wait, it gets funnier. The Boykoff brothers urge that it's unethical to allow experts skeptical of global warming into news stories. But when you turn to Jules Boykoff's college biography page, you discover that much of his writing is devoted to protesting the "suppression of dissent" in America, including by...the mass media. (His 2006 book is titled The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements.)  Is he against squelching dissenters -- or only in favor of it when he sees a "climate crisis" for Al Gore and other liberals to prevent? 

I seem to be detecting a trend. There's a current in the MSM that fears Rudy Giuliani, perhaps sensing he might be best positioned to defeat the Dem candidate. Such folks console themselves by clinging to the belief that the GOP won't nominate Rudy, or at least won't avidly support him if he is the candidate, given his liberal positions on some issues.

This evening's Hardball offered a perfect example of the phenomenon in the person of Craig Crawford. Time and again, the MSNBC analyst returned to the theme:

View video here.

• "Getting onto the social conservative stuff: abortion, gay rights, etc., [Rudy at CPAC] did make the case that I'm 80% with you, better than most marriages, a pretty good line, but at the end of the day, they're important issues to these people, and I just really wonder, the more they learn about him, and just how liberal he really is on those issues, I think it's going to matter to them."
• "Maybe I've just covered these social conservatives and these Republican races for too long to believe they're suddenly going to forget about that stuff, no matter how much they like Giuliani otherwise."
• "I think if Giuliani wins this nomination, and he well could, social conservative voters are not going to play in the general election, and that's going to help Democrats."
• "I really do believe a lot of these [socially conservative] voters and a lot of these groups are losing interest in politics."
• "I don't think they've heard all the details of his personal life, and the judges [the liberal ones in NYC Rudy appointed] we're talking about."

Jim Vandehei, ex of WaPo, now with Politico.com, was dubious of Crawford's notion: "I think that the conventional wisdom must be wrong, this idea that once conservatives get to know Giuliani's record. I mean, how can they not know his record? Everybody's talking about it."

Checking in on Friday's CBS Evening News with how the administration is reacting to the Walter Reed scandal, White House correspondent Jim Axelrod gratuitously brought up Katrina as he asserted that “the White House is well aware of the PR nightmare that it faces. The last thing this administration can afford is another Katrina.”

Following the lead story on how Secretary of Defense Gates forced the resignation of Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey, and then replaced Harvey's choice to take over as commander of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, in the wake of controversy over dilapidated conditions in an outpatient housing building, Couric went to Axelrod on the White House lawn. He delivered a brief report:

“A former Pentagon official close to the situation says the President's so angry, quote, 'his hair is on fire.' Mr. Bush learned about the resignation of the Secretary of the Army this morning at 8:35 in the White House Situation Room. He was told by Secretary Gates. On the day this story broke, he told Gates to quote, 'fix it.' But the decision to fire the Secretary of the Army was apparently made by Gates, not the President. Still, Katie, the White House is well aware of the PR nightmare that it faces. The last thing this administration can afford is another Katrina.”

MRC Director of Media Analysis and NewsBusters Senior Editor Tim Graham appeared on the March 2 Your World with Neil Cavuto. Graham discussed how former Vice President Al Gore insists that presenting a balanced debate on global warming is actually biased.

Video clip (2:46): Real (2.05 MB) or Windows (1.70 MB), plus MP3 (803 KB).

The MRC's Business & Media Institute (BMI) recently issued a new Web page, "Climate of Bias," that links to previous MRC, BMI, and CNSNews.com coverage on the media's biased reporting on climate change.

Perhaps you spotted the pro-universal health care story on today’s New York Times front page, but what you likely didn’t read speaks volumes about the Times.

The article was an example of selective reporting based on a NY Times/CBS News poll which included loaded questions and only provided liberal answers for respondents to pick from.

One of the most loaded questions asked, “How serious a problem is it for the U.S. that many Americans do not have health insurance – very serious, somewhat serious, not too serious, or not at all serious?” Not surprisingly, 70 percent of respondents chose “very serious.” 

On February 22, Tongsun Park became "the first person convicted by a jury in the United Nations Oil for Food
scandal," noted CBS "Primary Source" blogger Phil Hirschkorn in a February 24 blog post. Park, who "once acted as a secret backchannel between Saddam Hussein and the United Nations" was sentenced to five years in a federal prison.

But a search of CBS News in Nexis turns up no stories on Park's sentence on February 22, nor anytime since then. Anchor Katie Couric did, however, find time on February 22 to air a minute-and-a-half story by correspondent Kelly Cobiella on the custody hearing held to determine who would get to bury Anna Nicole Smith.

Reuters reporter William Maclean wrote in his article, "Gaddafi says fear drives world economic system", that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was shunned by the international community for much of his rule because the West "accused him of terrorism."

In the article, Maclean glossed over one Gaddafi linked terrorist act--the 1986 bombing of a passenger plane over Lockerbie, Scotland.  He neglected to report that there were 270 deaths involved in the attack though.

Gaddafi wasn't just "accused of terrorism".  He has been linked to terrorists and terrorism for more than 30 years.

Original caption:

In this photo provided by CBS, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger arrives to appear on CBS's 'Face the Nation' in Washington, Sunday, Feb. 25, 2007.

The ABC News web site currently features a dramatic picture of a nuclear bomb blast (a cropped version of which appears at right) along with a story blurb that matches Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim that the U.S. is hypocritical to seek to prevent nations like Iran and North Korea from getting the bomb while we still preserve our nuclear arsenal.

The headline: "You Can't Build Nukes. But We Can" followed by this short story tease: "A decision has been made to update and redesign America's aging stockpile of nuclear weapons, even as the U.S. demands that Iran and North Korea not build up their own arsenals."

When you click on the actual AP report, written by Scott Lindlaw, readers see a much more neutral headline, "Bush Administration Picks Lawrence Livermore Warhead Design," and the story mainly focuses on the technical reasons for updating the country's nuclear technology. Deep in the story, however, Lindlaw cited critics who thought the U.S. was sending the "wrong signal" to the world's rogue regimes.

It is only March, 2007, but for what I coin "Election Bowl 2008", I predict the winner already, Rudy Giuliani....................

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic.

NB's Matt Sheffield was featured in a panel discussion at the CPAC conference today about "Conservative Victories with New Media."

What impact will conservative bloggers have in the next two years in furthering conservative ideas on the 2008 campaign trail by holding the candidates to account for their policy stances? To what extent with conservative bloggers and vloggers break news about 2008 candidates that the mainstream media ignore or underreport?

The Washington Post lovingly remembered liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr in Friday’s editions, including a front-page obituary by Adam Bernstein. But the most notable line came in the Linton Weeks appreciation on the front of the Style section, where his article carried the gooey headline "A Historian Who Made the Ivory Tower Glisten." Weeks declared the historian had an air of timelessness: "He was, in a way, frozen in time, like Austin Powers – International Man of History!" (Exclamation point is the writer’s.) He added: "This analogy came to me in late November 2000" after Schlesinger was "quietly outrageous" in a lunch meeting with the reporter. Yes, he used it in that article, too, right down to the "yeah, baby!"

Unlike Bernstein, who didn’t mention Schlesinger was a liberal until paragraph 19 (although his lede noted he was JFK’s "court philosopher"), Weeks was up front with a royal We: "Seeing him with his bow tie and his Harvard University credentials, we had the reassuring feeling that a smart guy was doing some heavy thinking about this country’s most serious problems. He was an unapologetic liberal, able to articulate the lefty perspective as the country move more and more to the right."

CBS News "PublicEye" editor Brian Montopoli suggested in a recent blog post that conservatives are unfairly attacking liberal Web sites for comments posted by readers that lament that a terrorists attack in Afghanistan did not succeed in killing Vice President Cheney.

Montopoli says that both right and left-wing sites have their share of nutty commenters, which, to some degree is a fair point. There are fring loonies and flamers on the Internet on both sides of the aisle.

What Montopoli seems to miss then is that the objection conservatives like Sean Hannity have raised is not so much the sin of commission by nasty commenters but the sin of omission by Web site administrators and editors.

It's a legitimate question to ask why people wishing for the assassination of the Vice President of the United States are not banned from a politically-oriented site.

The CBS blogger also has skewed the matter by comparing this controversy with the Ward Churchill row from a few years ago:

In January, when Barack Obama made the mere announcement of a presidential exploratory committee, the Los Angeles Times trumpeted the news with a headline, color photo, and text box on the top of its front page. (See the image here.)

So how did the Times cover Sen. John McCain's big announcement Wednesday night (2/28/07) on David Letterman's Late Show? The announcement was buried the next day on the bottom of page A14 within a modest, 485-word article about McCain's fundraising. The article is called, "California titans join McCain's campaign team" (Thu. March 1, 2007), and the "coverage" of the announcement covers a measly 31 words.

Two days ago a NewsBusters reader alerted me to some missing comments on a February 26 blog post by Evening News anchor Katie Couric at CBSNews.com.:

When I first saw this post on Couric's website last night (around 10:30 PM ET), I thought it was great that there were *12 pages* of comments appended to her post -- with every single one criticizing her and Al Gore for being limousine liberals and attacking the mistakes in her post. But when I looked at it again today (11:00 AM ET), all the comments have disappeared.

CBS's Greg Kandra addressed concerns about the missing comments in this February 28 post to "Couric & Co.":

As NewsBusters reported here, here, and here, there are huge dollars to be made from global warming alarmism. However, conceivably no one is better positioned to financially benefit from this scam than Dr. Global Warming himself, former Vice President Al Gore, a fact that the media will surely not share with Americans any time soon.

Yet, if America’s press would take some time out of their busy schedules covering the earth-shattering details surrounding Anna Nicole Smith’s demise, they might find a deliciously inconvenient truth about the soon-to-be-Dr. Gore that is significantly more fascinating and diabolical than anything likely to emerge from that courtroom in Broward County, Florida.

As reported by Dan Riehl (emphasis mine throughout):

I'm not in the "know" on inside job stuff so I'm asking the experts. Which makes me wonder if they're so intune with inside jobs, could it be they are part of the inside job circle and are merely using NB's as a means to discover who may be on to them? Anywho...

We’ve all heard the “official conspiracy theory” of the Death Star
attack. We all know about Luke Skywalker and his ragtag bunch of
rebels, how they mounted a foolhardy attack on the most powerful, well-
defended battle station ever built. And we’ve all seen the video over,
and over, and over, of the one-in-a-million shot that resulted in a
massive chain reaction that not just damaged, but completely
obliterated that massive technological wonder.

Like many Americans, I was fed this story when I was growing up. But

The New York Times has done an interesting job of presenting the softer side of Iranian President President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Most recently they ratcheted up the spin machine in their attempts to seed doubt with the American governments contention that Iran is fueling the terrorist lead insurgency in Iraq with weapons and support.

Not content with planting the seeds of doubt with words alone, the Times storytellers have dug deep into the bucket of visual manipulation by presenting a flattering portrait like image of Ahmadinejad to accompany their story on the reported summit between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Note the deep thoughtful stare that is accentuated by the wistful shadows and subtle filter blur. The only thing missing is the brandy glass.

How slow was the news this morning? Bianca Solorzano, the CBS reporter covering the Anna Nicole Smith funeral in Nassau, the Bahamas was reduced to chatting with a local florist. Turns out Anna's favorite color was pink. Who knew? Solorzano also scored an exclusive with a fellow supervising the placing of crowd control barricades at the cemetery.

But along the way, co-host Tracy Smith [who normally works the weekend show], did pose a pertinent question when Obama tried to sneak an answer by her that was so disingenuous it might have made Bill Clinton blush. Smith mentioned that this weekend, both Obama and Hillary will go to Selma, Alabama for the commemoration of the civil rights marches of 1965. Barack actually had the chutzpah to claim "well, I think this weekend is actually not about politics. To me, it represents some of the best moments in American history where ordinary people stood up to injustice."

"The View’s" Joy Behar demonstrated again this week that the ladies of the ABC program are committed leftists, determined to spread propaganda. Co-host Behar made this point clear when she slandered the Bush administration as "murderers."

On the Al Gore front, "Today" co-anchor Meredith Vieira proclaimed the former Vice President to be the "coolest guy" at last Sunday’s Oscars. "The Washington Post," meanwhile, one-upped the NBC host and wondered if the potential 2008 candidate is "America’s coolest ex-Vice President ever." [Emphasis added]

"CBS Evening News" anchor Katie Couric blogged on the subject of Gore, referring to him as a "secular saint."

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

Despite growing into a massive network, National Public Radio still demonstrates signs of being the same countercultural liberal listening post that came of age in the Vietnam era. On Thursday’s Morning Edition, NPR covered war and post-traumatic stress disorder in a trendy liberal way: as an opportunity to sell combat veterans on the mystical healing power of yoga.

Government-subsidized yoga for veterans? NPR reporter Allan Coukell (sounded like "Cockle") suggested it’s the government-funded wave of the future: "So far, most of the veterans have been paying for the sessions themselves, but [Tom] Boyle hopes the Veterans Affairs system will start to offer yoga nationwide. He already sees PTSD and other symptoms of battle stress in troops back from Iraq — and he knows thousands more are still to come."

Obama's white ancestors owned slaves. So says the research of William Addams Reitwiesner, "who works at the Library of Congress and practices genealogy in his spare time", and who is featured in this morning's edition of the Baltimore Sun.

Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas.

But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now: it appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and Census records.

While reading this, my very first thought had me wondering how well this will sit with the Obama-isn't-black-enough contingent?

It didn't take long in the story to get the issue addressed.