Today a Harvard-based advocacy group, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC), launched a salvo against "Shrek the Third," the latest sequel in the animated Mike Myers franchise.

CCFC's beef: The title character is being enlisted by Uncle Sam to encourage kids to exercise, although Shrek has been used to hawk fast food to kids as well.

It's certainly of interest to parents and educators, I suppose, but CCFC is hardly the moderate "child advocacy group" that media outlets such as USA Today are blandly describing it to be.

As I wrote for the MRC's Business & Media Institute (BMI) last August, a review of CCFC's Web site makes clear the group's liberal, pro-regulation agenda (my emphasis in bold):

It’s conceivable that years from now, America’s media will be reporting one of the biggest frauds in history: the idea that a wealthy person, for instance, soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore, can purchase “carbon credits” to offset his lavish lifestyle making him quote “carbon neutral.”

Given the media’s love affair with the former vice president as well as advancing man-made global warming hysteria, few American press members have dared to expose this hoax for what it is.

However, on Wednesday, an impeccably reputable publication, the Financial Times, published an article that is a deliciously inconvenient truth for folks like Gore, Laurie David, Sheryl Crow, and all the rest of the alarmists that are actively involved in what years from now will be considered one of the biggest scams ever (emphasis added throughout):

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

Feeling their oats after taking down a second rate anti-war shock jock, Media Matters launches a very lame attack on Fox's John Gibson:

Fox's Gibson: U.S. invasion "unmasked" Iraqis as "knuckle-dragging savages from the 10th century"

CALLER 2: -- when you say that we're not responsible for the chaos in Iraq. I mean, who was it that disbanded their security forces and left that country in an unstable state?

GIBSON: Look, good point. The Bremer period is going to take the fall on the Iraq story -- dismantling the Baathist organization, not letting anybody who was a Baathist run the electric system or the sewage system or the garbage pickup or any of that stuff. They're going to take the hit on it. And the Bremer period where they disbanded the army, that's going to take the hit on it -- I guarantee you.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared past the 13,000 level on Wednesday, but the CBS and ABC evening newscasts reported the good news in the media's all-too-frequent “yes, but” framework. CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric fretted that “even as investors are making money in the market, Anthony Mason reports there are concerns tonight about the rest of the U.S. economy.” Mason talked with a celebrating stock trader before turning downbeat: “But Wall Street and Main Street appear to be headed in different directions. While the stock market's been racing ahead, the economy has been slowing down. Housing is mired in a slump.” Liz Ann Sonders of Charles Schwab confirmed bad news for the overall economy, citing how “we have seen economic growth get cut in about half in the last year, so clearly the economy is not as strong as it was a year ago.” Mason ominously warned: “Rising gas prices, up 70 cents already this year, could slow the economy even more.”

ABC anchor Charles Gibson teased World News: “Tonight, the Dow moves into uncharted territory, zooming past 13,000 for the first time. But is the economy as hot as the market?” Gibson set up his lead story by contrasting how “the rise in recent months has been steep, despite less-than-inspiring news on the economy overall.” Betsy Stark featured pleased investors before cautioning how “there were fresh signs today of trouble in the housing market” and “oil prices shot up another dollar today, which will only add to consumers' woes at the pump.” Gibson stayed on the negative, proposing to Stark: “We've had four years of a straight bull market. Doesn't just the timing of this suggest that there might be a correction?” Stark agreed: “By historical standards, Charlie, we're actually overdue for a correction.”

This dovetails well with what my colleague Scott Whitlock reported on NewsBusters two days ago:

ABC Graphic: "Will Dow Hit 13,000 Today? Is Unstoppable Market Good or Bad?"

The graphic ran underneath co-host Diane Sawyer and GMA financial contributor Mellody Hobson’s discussion over whether or not the Dow, which has been breaking records recently, is headed for a downturn.

Today the Dow Jones closed above 13,000 for the first time in history.

Of course ABCNews.com had to sow seeds of worry about the economy (see screencap to the right).

You can see how ABC and other media outlets have consistently taken a sour view of the economy here.

The Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute has more on the media's generally gloomy take of the economy here and here and here.

Anyone see this last night? Almost 20 minutes of the half hour show was McCain and Stewart. It will re-air one more time tonight at 8 eastern, 7 central. Please watch and tell me what you think.

During a roundtable conversation on the April 22 edition of "This Week," veteran ABC journalists Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson echoed boilerplate liberal positions on two separate issues. Discussing the recent Supreme Court decision upholding a congressional ban on partial-birth-abortion, Roberts said she found it "offensive as a woman."

But first, George Will spoke about the Virginia Tech massacre and the fact that armed individuals have prevented slaughters in the past. Roberts derisively responded, "Well, I don't want the shootout at the OK Corral going on at any college campus..."

Later in the program, Will again described how Americans defend themselves with guns. Donaldson rejected the idea by suggesting Americans might shoot their paperboy:

On Tuesday night's O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly revealed that Bill Moyers seems to have a faulty memory about some harsh anti-FNC comments I noted here from a Rolling Stone interview. He sent out Jesse Watters to conduct an ambush interview like the one with that left-wing troop-hating Washington Post blogger Bill Arkin. Is Bill Moyers lying on purpose to mislead us into the quagmire of watching his programs? Or is he merely incompetent at remembering his own statements? You be the judge.

O'REILLY: Moyers, who is not only a commentator but an active financial supporter of far left causes, is using me and some other people he doesn't like to promote his program. He has repeatedly bashed me and refuses to come on "The Factor" to talk with me face-to-face. So our policy now is to confront these kinds of attacks, which we did last weekend when "Factor" producer Jesse Watters caught up with Moyers in New York City.

WATTERS: Why are you attacking Bill?

MOYERS: I'm not attacking Bill.

Fanning the flames of class warfare, ABC "World News with Charles Gibson" focused on hedge fund managers' pay on April 24.

"Some of them made a lot, I mean really a lot," said anchor Charles Gibson.

While the report by John Berman focused on the high pay -- the top fund manager James Simons made $1.7 billion last year -- but left out reasons for high compensation as well as the high taxes that certainly accompany such incomes.

Together the top 25 hedge fund managers earned a combined $14 billion last year according to Alpha magazine. Berman compared the figure to teachers pay saying it was "enough to pay New York City's 80,000 teachers for 3 years." Sure, at a tax rate of 100 percent.

Following the tragedy at Virginia Tech, the media found someone other than Seing-Hui Cho to blame -- legal businesses like Roanoke Firearms, Glock and eBay.

Roanoke Firearms' owner John Markell was treated as an accomplice to the horrific crime by ABC's Brian Ross:

“The Roanoke Firearms store where Seing-Hui Cho bought his murder weapon has a history of selling guns involved in murders. It is the fifth time a gun sold in this store has been used in a homicide, according to gun shop owner, John Markell,” said Ross on the April 18 “Good Morning America.”

If PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers wanted to cultivate an appearance of fairness and balance, he's not doing a very good job of it. On the PBS talk show Tavis Smiley on Monday night, Moyers compared Team Bush to a "burglar in the basement" that the watchdog media didn't bark at, or if you prefer, the media was the fire department, and Team Bush was the "arsonist." In fact, he charged "the press was in cahoots with the arsonist."

When Smiley pressed Moyers on whether his show is fair and balanced, he slammed Fox News Channel: "Fox News has so poisoned the meaning of fair and balanced that I can't even understand those terms anymore, but anybody who watches this documentary will see that we lay out the evidence." Smiley also catered to Moyers by asking him if the Bush adminstration was the most secretive in American history.

On the June 7, 2005 edition of "The View," as documented by the Media Research Center, Rosie O’Donnell guest co-hosted the daytime chat show where she offered an omen to what the would later come true. Rosie verbally beat up on guest Sean Hannity where she exclaimed President Bush "should be tried at the Hague,"accused the United States of "torturing prisoners," and called Hannity "delusional." She even suggested Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is Cheney’s twin brother in disguise.

At the end of the interview Rosie made a comment that in hindsight, was a sign of events that would later unfold.

"This is why I don't have my own show anymore because I would do this every day and people would get mad."

No one ever mistook Harvard for a right-wing, neocon bastion so the fact that Marvin Kalb, a left-wing, former CBSer professor there just released an extensive report documenting how the Western media play right into the hands of Islamic terrorists comes as quite of a shock.

The report goes beyond that, however, and mentions how that the Western media has become transformed "from an objective observer to fiery advocate" for groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. Here's an excerpt:

For 34 days in the summer of 2006, the world’s attention was once again riveted on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. There, in Lebanon, a lovely country of cedar trees and sectarian strife, a bloody war erupted between Hezbollah and Israel.

It quickly became apparent that this was not the traditional war between Israel and an Arab state; it was rather an asymmetrical war, the new prototype of Middle East conflict, between a state (Israel) and a militant, secretive, religiously fundamentalist sect or faction, such as, in the case of Lebanon, Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” often referred to as a “state within a state,” or, in the case of the Gaza strip, Hamas, the radical wing of the Palestinian movement that refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist as an independent nation.[...]

Y'all need to read this opinion letter in the NC Central University newspaper:

http://www.campusech...

Go there and look on the left for opinions. Then got to "Death to all Rapist." This one will really make you mad. The writer Solomon Burnette is not squeaky clean. I work for the NCDOC so I looked his record up.He robbed 2 DUKE students several ago. Beside that he has charges for Possession of Schedule IV and Forgery.

Talk about being a racist.

-- So, you think NBC shouldn’t have aired that Cho Seung-Hui video, do you?

-- NBC has a new definition for its initials: the Narcissism Broadcasting Company. How fitting it is that their logo is a peacock. It’s bad enough that this monster gunned down 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech. But in between murder sprees this vicious, calculating killer calmly went to the post office and sent an Express Mail package of his self-glorifying pictures and videos to NBC News in between killings – and NBC News rushed this killer’s propaganda on NBC and MSNBC within hours of receiving this bundle of psychosis.

-- So what’s your complaint? The timing – airing the video when nerves were at their most raw – or airing it at all?

-- Let’s start with the timing. Usually, after a school shooting, network news divisions mourn with the families, and comfort them on their shocking losses. In this case, NBC took their wounds and shoveled salt into them. Outraged families canceled their planned NBC interviews because their pain in no way balanced out NBC’s naked desire to stick it to their competitors. NBC News President Steve Capus implausibly claimed they were handling the exploitation with "great sensitivity" to the grieving, but the idea that they have any corporate compassion was completely lost to anyone who watched their frenzied programming.

In an April 25 post, CBS's "Public Eye" editor Brian Montopoli worries that the media are not doing enough reporting on gun control, lamenting that the media are waiting for political players to gin up the issue.

There were reasons not to take up larger issues and assign blame in the immediate wake of the shootings – those first few days needed to be about how people were dealing with the horror of what had taken place. But some time has now passed, and I'm hard pressed to think of a better time for the media to focus on a huge issue that isn't going away anytime soon.

Where has Montopoli been? Not only have the media been focusing on the gun control angle to the story, they've heavily leaned in favor of more gun control, including featurin gun control advocates in both broadcast and print coverage. While there were a few exceptions, most media coverage has cheerleaded the notion of enacting new gun control laws. Here's a refresher for Montopoli, a list of some of our coverage over the past nine days:

On the April 25 edition of "The View," the same day Rosie O’Donnell announced she is leaving in June, Barbara Walters proclaimed she is "not crazy" about President Bush. Why? His motorcade temporarily disrupted her walk home. Walters is apparently so lost in the celebrity world, that the slightest inconvenience sets her off. A shocked Rose O’Donnell inquired "did they recognize you?" as if Barbara is more important than the others waiting for the motorcade to pass. Walters than exclaimed "[Bush] is the president, he is not a king." And Barbara Walters is a journalist, not a queen.

Rosie joked adding her normal left wing talking points into the mix.

What a rare bit of good news to report. Finally a member of the media has apologized to the falsely smeared Duke men's lacrosse team. Ruth Sheehan, staff writer at the Raleigh News Observer, offers this apology in Monday's edition:

Members of the men's Duke lacrosse team: I am sorry.

Surely by now you know I am sorry. I am writing these words now, and in this form, as a bookend to 13 months of Duke lacrosse coverage, my role in which started with a March 27 column that began:

"Members of the men's Duke lacrosse team: You know. We know you know."

That was when Durham police and District Attorney Mike Nifong were describing a "wall of silence" among the men who attended the now-vaunted lacrosse party at 610 Buchanan Blvd. Nifong, now described by the state attorney general as a "rogue prosecutor," was widely respected as solid, even understated.

YouTube video update at bottom of post.

New York Times political reporter Adam Nagourney is typically hyper-sensitive to any hint of a Republican "attack" on a Democrat (not so much the other way around). So it was refreshing to read him actually having a little fun needling Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards on Friday as "The Breck Girl" for his preening over his hair and looks when he thinks he's off-camera (most notoriously in a widely seen YouTube video set to "I Feel Pretty")

Nagourney on Friday wrote about the mini-flap over Edwards' two $400 haircuts and brought up the YouTube video while suggesting a perception of hypocrisy.

"John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat, announced on Thursday that he was reimbursing his campaign $800 to cover what his aides said was the cost of two haircuts -- yes, you read that correctly -- by a Beverly Hills barber, though, perhaps, the word stylist is more applicable….Mr. Edwards has presented himself in the Democratic field as an advocate of working-class Americans, lamenting the nation’s growing economic disparity."

One of CNN's favorite people during the month of April is leftist presidential candidate extraordinaire Dennis Kucinich. His appearance on Wednesday's "American Morning" was the culmination of three straight days of coverage of the Ohio congressman's impeachment proposal against Vice President Cheney. Despite the amount of coverage he has been given, not just in the past three days, but also earlier in April, "American Morning" co-host John Roberts was the first to specifically mention Kucinich's 1 percent standing in the last CNN poll. So why all the free CNN publicity?

Monday's "The Situation Room" was the first to report that Kucinich was seeking the impeachment of Dick Cheney. Host Wolf Blitzer reported that the Ohio congressman scheduled a news conference where he would announce his articles of impeachment against the Vice President.

As we've noted in an earlier post, Rosie O'Donnell and ABC couldn't work out a contract renewal for her slot on "The View." But when I read the "exclusive" story this morning by ABC News's Monica Nista, I noticed the reporter left out any mention of Rosie's numerous controversies such as her 9/11 conspiracy theories, her suggestion that the British hostage crisis in Iran was a conspiracy, her "ching-chong" gaffe, or her swipe at "radical Christians" being just as dangerous as "radical Muslims" like Osama bin Laden. Instead Nista focused on an a feud with rival network NBC's "Apprentice" host Donald Trump:

Update at bottom of post: Other bloggers react to Rosie announcement.

Controversial daytime television host Rosie O'Donnell just confirmed rumors on "The View" today that she will be leaving the show.

"I can't come to terms," O'Donnell said, referring to an ongoing contract dispute that she had been having with ABC, the owner of the show.

Despite her departure, O'Donnell will be a "frequent guest host," she said. "View&