Tuesday's CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News blamed Republican presidential candidate John McCain's reduced fundraising and low rank in the polls, which led two top advisers to leave the campaign, on McCain's view that U.S. troops must stay in Iraq -- not on how out of step he is with conservatives on the immigration bill he crafted with Ted Kennedy. CBS anchor Katie Couric declared: “No public figure has supported the President's Iraq policy more than Senator John McCain, and he's paid a heavy price for that. His presidential campaign is struggling and today, Jeff Greenfield reports, there was a big shakeup.” Greenfield, at least, paired Couric's spin with the immigration issue: “Money woes are only part of the problem. His Iraq views are at odds with more and more in his own party and McCain's a sponsor of the dead for now immigration reform bill that has incensed many conservatives.”

Over on NBC, in a story about the political fight over whether to withdraw troops from Iraq, David Gregory framed McCain's Tuesday morning Senate floor comments around how his stance on Iraq is what has “undermined” his campaign: “Just back from Iraq, Senator John McCain, whose presidential campaign has been undermined by his support for the war, gave the President a big boost.”

You know it's summer when your favorite shows start reruns, but most people don't expect reruns of television news. Yet ABC news looked like one on July 9.

ABC "World News with Charles Gibson" followed up it's July 8 hit piece on bottled water, with a second hit piece the next evening.

"There are billions and billions and billions of these [water bottles] that end up in landfills every year," correspondent Ryan Owens said to an unidentified man.

Owens report beat up bottled water using the same points as the earlier report: that it is environmentally damaging because the bottles end up in landfills and plastic is created using fossil fuels. He quoted the mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah - one city that has banned the bottle.

Over on his blog, "The News Hole," Keith Olbermann's staff posted an item on Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who has admitted patronizing the erotic services of a call girl agency.

Olbermann (or a staffer who blogs for him), closed the July 10 entry "The Vitter End" with a not-so-subtle "ha, another hypocrite gets what's coming to him" snark:

And...from Sen. David Vitter's website:

For his work in Congress, David has received numerous awards from leading organizations such as Americans for Tax Reform, the 60 + Association, and the Family Research Council.

Mr. Vitter has some 'splainin to do.

Wow, that's really clever and original, Olbie. How quickly he forgets, I dunno, Bill Clinton and the staunch defense he received from NOW, even well after his history of sexual misconduct with employees was apparent.

At the end of the 7 PM Eastern hour of CNN’s The Situation Room on Monday night, reporter Jeanne Moos did one of her light "Moost Unusual" stories on Katie Couric’s producer-slapping incident – which prominently included a screen shot of Tim Graham’s Monday morning NewsBusters blog post on "Slap Happy Katie." (No mention of Tim or the blog.) Brian Stelter at TV Newser reported the third most popular video this afternoon on the CNN Video website. It unfolded like this:

JEANNE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): First we couldn't stop calling her perky. And now, we're perking up our ears because Katie Couric supposedly slapped someone?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, my god.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wow, that is so unlike Katie Couric.

MOOS: It's more like what Zsa Zsa Gabor might do to a cop or what one Czech politician did to another. Politicians are one thing, but Slap Happy Katie? [NB screen shot]

Kristin Gore, daughter of former Vice President Al Gore and author of a new political satire set in Washington, appeared on the Tuesday editions of "Good Morning America" and "The Early Show." Both shows only gingerly addressed the subject of Kristin’s brother, Albert Gore III., and his arrest for marijuana and prescription-drug possession after being pulled over last week in California. GMA guest host George Stephanopoulos misleadingly characterized the incident as getting "in trouble speeding." "Early Show" host Harry Smith didn’t mention the drug angle at all.

Stephanopoulos, a former top Clinton aide who worked in the same White House as Al Gore, conducted an extraordinarily cozy interview with the former Vice President’s daughter. Apparently completely oblivious to any conflict of interest, he hyped "Sammy’s House," calling it "very funny." The ABC anchor even joked with Kristin Gore about whether the main character, Sammy Joyce, was based on him:

Kristin Gore: "Have you recognized yourself yet? ‘Cause I should come clean and let you know you’re Sammy."

Joseph D’Aleo is likely not a household name.

However his bona fides when it comes to meteorology are such that when he suggests that “a [small] cadre of agenda-driven scientists and statesmen” inside the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provided a “more alarmist interpretation” of the facts concerning manmade global warming, and “the media took the most extreme of the messages to hype them further,” people should pay heed.

With that in mind, this former Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel, and current Executive Director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, published an article at Energy Tribune Monday that should be required reading for all actually interested in the facts surrounding this controversial subject (emphasis added throughout):

Pity the journalist who dares accuse Michael Moore of “fudging” facts.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta offered a “SiCKO” reality check for CNN viewers, and CNN brought Michael Moore on “The Situation Room” to rebut the segment.

“That report was so biased, I can’t imagine what pharmaceutical company ads coming up right after our break here,” Moore lashed out against Wolf Blitzer on July 9.

Apparently in Moore’s vocabulary, biased means it doesn’t agree with Moore’s views.

Video (1:33): Real (2.54 MB) or Windows (2.87 MB), plus MP3 audio (702 kB).

Moore’s rant continued for more than 10 minutes – and at some points he was practically shouting at Blitzer:

Of late, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been arguing that the mainstream media persistently exercise the "management" of the news. That is to say, aside from slanted and biased reporting on the news of the day, they frame news developments in a way that manage events to fit a preconceived meme or storyline.

The media's coverage of Army recruiting numbers is no exception.

Bear in mind these facts included in some of the stories I cite below but usually well after the lede:

• The Army is nonetheless ahead of its year-to-date recruiting goal
• July, August, and September are traditionally the best months for recruiting
• Many potential enlistees are turned away from being overweight or lacking a high school diploma
• Some experts, such as former Defense undersecretary Edwin Dorn, marvel that "the big surprise is that Army recruiting has remained as healthy as it has been" given the Iraq war's falling support in the polls.

Nope, instead the lede is two straight months of numbers that aren't up to par and immediately Iraq is blamed.

Voila! A "trend" story waiting to happen for a media bent on managing the news.

Let's take a look at some major news outlets.

From Media Bistro:

That's less than 20 million (19,940,000) for all three combined, and a 5.4% drop from the low-water mark of a year ago. The 25-54 demo for all three nets was under 6 million (5,920,000), and their combined 25-54 demo ratings of 4.9/21 are down 14% and 19% from last year's 5.7/26. Ouch.

You don't suppose that almost 20 years of Media Research Center truth-telling about the relentless bias in the nets' evening news shows might have something to do with the ongoing decline? Nah, can't be (/sarcasm).

Previous related posts are here (NB), here (NB), and here (BizzyBlog).

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

As the Business and Media Institute reported, ABC’s “World News” on Sunday castigated people for drinking bottled water.

Yet, it seems the folks at ABC weren’t aware that environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., actually owns a – wait for it! – bottled water company (h/t to NBers lumberjack and dscott).

As BMI’s Jeff Poor reported Monday:

“With every sip are you actually hurting the environment?” teased anchor Dan Harris.

Deliciously, the New York Times reported on June 3, 1999, the formation of a new venture by Kennedy (emphasis added):

As the American northeast swelters in the summer heat, it seems a metaphysical certitude that press representatives will use the occasion to increase hysteria over manmade global warming.

Yet, these media minions will completely ignore extreme cold conditions and record snowstorms occurring at the same time in the southern hemisphere.

For instance, last week’s freak snows in South Africa went totally ignored, as likely will the first appearance of the white fluffy stuff in parts of South America since Woodrow Wilson was president.

As reported by BBC.com Tuesday:

For general discussion and debate.

Picking up where last night's Nightly News left off, NBC's Today show continued the "tipping point" line of attack on pushing for troop withdrawal from Iraq. Opening this morning's Today show, NBC's Matt Lauer greeted viewers with the following question: "Good morning, if not now, when? The White House says it's not considering pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq right now but with sinking approval ratings and defections from his own party is it just a matter of time before the President changes course?" Then, teasing an interview with White House press secretary Tony Snow, Lauer all but declared defeat:

Here is the link to an article that appeared on Carolinajournal.com that exposes the further hypocracy of the Edwards.

http://www.carolinaj...

It is written by John Hood president of the Johne Locke Foundation.

Dan Rather might have left CBS under a cloud, but his star still shines brightly -- at least among some on the distaff side of the NBC networks.

Rather was a scheduled guest on today's "Morning Joe," and neither Erin Burnett, reporting in from CNBC, nor MSNBC newsreader Mika Brzezinski, could curb her enthusiasm.

Burnett was first to confess.

CNBC'S ERIN BURNETT: You know who I had a crush on? . . . Don't you have Dan Rather coming on in a couple of minutes? Alright, so, when I was little, I thought I was going to marry Dan Rather. I watched the news every night, I blew him a kiss every night.

View video here.

Rebecca Traister at left-wing Salon.com (yes, endure the leftists' commercial) brings the feminist scolding to Katie Couric for granting a whiny, bitter interview to New York magazine, including the odd detail that she slaps male producers for using medical terms for lung mucus. Traister wants to see a "mofo" in action:

Suddenly, the woman who used to refuse to talk to reporters about her astronomical salary and hard-bargaining skills, who unapologetically drove the high rate of turnover among "Today" show producers, and who radiated a steely self-confidence, cannot shut up about everything that's gone wrong since she left NBC for CBS! Oh, girlfriend: Get a grip....

Slam a table; grow a pair; be the mean motherf---er we know you can be.

Does NBC have some inside dope? Is John McCain, till now one of the staunchest supporters of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, about to bug out? An unusual question from Matt Lauer to Tony Snow this morning raised that possibility.

Here's the exchange that came on this morning's "Today" at 7:08 A.M. EDT, toward the end of Lauer's interview of White House press secretary Snow:

TODAY CO-HOST MATT LAUER: If, and you hate hypotheticals, I know, so hate me later, but if John McCain comes back [from his current Iraq trip] and joins the ranks of those other Republicans who say it's time to rethink this strategy, how big a blow is that to the President, considering how supportive John McCain has been to the strategy?

WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY TONY SNOW: You've got to understand that for the President, although politics is clearly important in building public support, succeeding is the most important thing of all. If we fail in Iraq, and this is something [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq] Ryan Crocker was pointing out as well, if you have failure in Iraq, you are going to see consequences that are going to be extraordinarily dire in the region, throughout the world and for the United States.

View video here.

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