Is PBS still making money off a discredited documentary that they know is filled with untruths, misquotes, and lies? It would seem so.

In 2003 PBS aired a show titled "Einstein's Wife" that attempted to prove that Albert Einstein's world changing theories of physics were a result of a hidden collaboration with his first wife, Mileva Maric. This documentary claimed that Maric’s work on the theory of relativity was lied about and hidden away all these years by Einstein, his biographies and history. Imagine the implications if the work of what must be the smartest woman on earth was hidden by those evil, greedy men who don't want to share credit with a woman. It's a feminist's dream story promulgated by PBS.

Unfortunately it isn't true. Not only is it not true, but also so many historians have since complained to PBS that they surely know the real truth by now, even if their original airing was a result of their honestly just not knowing the truth then. Yet, this faux documentary still has a PBS sponsored webpage and was recently aired by Australian broadcasters. PBS is also still selling DVDs and attempting to make money off a film hat has been discredited by dozens of historians and even attacked by the scientists in the film who were misquoted and misrepresented by the film's producers.

A friend emailed me a pic the other day, courtesy of David W Gilmore Jnr, and it should be front page news everywhere.

It's Air Force Chief Master Sgt. John Gebhardt of the 332nd Expeditionary Unit at Balad Iraq, asleep in a hospital chair, with a little girl, Fatima, of 2 or 3 years old, asleep on his chest. Her entire family was killed, and she was shot in the head and left to die.

She has been treated and is recovering, but cries and moans most of the time and nurses say that Sgt. John Gebhardt is the only one who can calm her down. He'd spent "the last several nights" with her in the hospital, so she could sleep.

It's a beautiful picture. He's big, tough and tired. She's tiny, and has scars in her head, but they are both asleep.

Have you seen it?

One can get an idea of just how far severe Bush Derangement Syndrome has spread in the MSM by reading this blog posted by Charles Feldman, a CNN correspondent from 1983 to 2004. Now freed from the constraints of pretending to be unbiased in public, Feldman lets his BDS hang out for all to see in The Feldman Blog edition of August 17, Hurricane Dean: God’s Wrath For President Bush?

Hurricane Dean, soon to be up graded to a full blown Category 5 hurricane, is taking aim at Texas…the state that gave us George W. Bush. In fact,this could be a second punishing blow to the Tex-assians. Flash flooding from Tropical Storm Erin has already swept away people in the San Antonio area.

    It seems that, while the MSM has all the time in the world to report on soldiers who have something disparaging to say about the US armed services, they collectively turn yet another blind eye to positive young men and women serving their country. 

     Marine Corp Staff Sgt Lawrence E. Dean II, stage name "Life", posted a video to YouTube recently of himself performing an inspiring and patriotic slam poem, which he wrote.  The poem, which was posted ten monthes ago, recieved a surge of hits, to the tune of almost 400,000 in just two days earlier this week.  Yet, only FOXNews.com seemed to feel that this warranted attention.  I guess only soldiers who tow the liberal line merit MSM attention.

Some stories that did make MSM homepages:

     New Bride Happily Ruins $800 Wedding Dress

     Naked People Pose on Swiss Glacier

     Lindsey Lohan's Parents Settle Divorce

It seems that, while the MSM has all the time in the world to report on soldiers who have something disparaging to say about the US armed services, they collectively turn yet another blind eye to positive young men and women serving their country.

Marine Corp Staff Sgt Lawrence E. Dean II, stage name "Life", posted a video to YouTube recently of himself performing an inspiring and patriotic slam poem, which he wrote. The poem, which was posted ten monthes ago, recieved a surge of hits, to the tune of almost 400,000 in just two days earlier this week. Yet, only FOXNews.com seemed to feel that this warranted attention. I guess only soldiers who tow the liberal line merit MSM attention.

Some stories that did make MSM homepages:

New Bride Happily Ruins $800 Wedding Dress

Naked People Pose on Swiss Glacier

Lindsey Lohan's Parents Settle Divorce

Here's a headline you'd never expect to see:

Global Warming Watchdog Invests in Oil, Coal, Utilities

Making the issue that much more delicious, it was the leading front-page story in Saturday's San Francisco Chronicle (emphasis added throughout):

I know we're Monday morning quarterbacking here, but. . . 

I've heard it proposed more than a few times that the War on Terror would have been better fought had we used private mercenary companies or smaller Special Forces units (Navy SEALs, Delta, etc.).  I've heard this brought up on the MSM and from some NB members' links; one of the latest popping up yesterday. 

I'm on the fence about this one and I'm looking for the strongest objective argument.  I'll read any links and am always open to the more reputable source.  I only ask that the hyperbole and subjective rhetoric be kept to a minimum.  

I do support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but if someone can prove to me that we could have had better progress through some type of more efficient use of manpower. . .now's the time to make your case.

Original caption:

Rutgers University students watch Kia Vaughn of the Rutgers University women's basketball team as she appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Vaughn sued Don Imus and CBS on Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2007, claiming the radio personality's sexist and racist comments about the team on April 4, 2007 damaged her reputation.

See incredible Roberts double-standard Update at foot.

Michael Vick, victim. That's how Selena Roberts's article in today's New York Times largely portrays the NFL QB accused of involvement with dogfighting. The article's headline sets the tone: Vick Is Trapped in His Circle of Friends.

Excerpts:

• The crooked circle Michael Vick drew around himself has tripped and squeezed him.
• The first to fail Vick was Davon Boddie, a cousin and personal chef. His marijuana possession charge in April led police to a white house with black buildings behind it on Moonlight Road in Surry County, Va. [Darn that Davon. If only he hadn't been busted on the pot charge, Vick might have been able to continue -- allegedly -- killing dogs that didn't make the grade.]

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Take a look here for another example of the media's Fred Thompson-is-lazy meme. Without much else to criticize about him, many are taking his slow approach to announce and anything else they can to label him as lazy, such as using a golf cart instead of walking at the fair. Notice how it is pointed out that he is the "only presidential candidate" to do this. Do these petty things really matter?

I think going after the designer shoes was a definite cheap shot. You tell me, do the shoes make the man? Is this Fox News Channel's idea of "fair and balanced?"

There are times when I hate being a media analyst, for I am often forced to view and review television reports and newspaper articles that literally make me nauseated while undermining my faith in journalists as a whole as well as my fellow citizens.

The following video is a perfect example, a virtual piece of detritus that unfortunately is likely to offend so many viewers on so many levels that it's almost unimaginable a highly-regarded American journalist was responsible for its content.

Alas, Bill Moyers was at it again Friday evening closing out his Bill Moyers Journal program on PBS with a monologue about President George W. Bush and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove that is guaranteed to sicken you as much as it did me.

In fact, my disgust over this abomination is so great that I care not to excerpt or highlight any of its contents in fear of ruining my weekend. As such, what follows is a partial transcript of this disgraceful refuse for your reading displeasure (video available here, h/t NBer mattm):

Over at the Counterterrorism Blog, Steve Emerson has a great post detailing the New York Times's latest attempt to burnish the image of the pseudo-moderate Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR):

In what has become practically a routine, whenever bad publicity for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) surfaces, in an almost Pavlovian response, the New York Times leaps to its defense.

As I wrote about last March in The New Republic, when CAIR had befallen several embarrassing public setbacks, including the rescinding of an award from Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office and public opposition on Capitol Hill for the use of a room to host a CAIR event, the Times dispatched its reporter, Neil MacFarquhar, to resuscitate CAIR’s image.

Some extraordinary statements concerning global warming have been made in the past couple of days by a key member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum that could signal the end of the Kyoto Protocol as we know it.

Of course, you likely didn't hear about this, for even though America is part of APEC, our media seemed thoroughly disinterested.

However, as this is indeed quite important news for folks on both sides of the anthropogenic global warming debate, the following was reported by the Associated Press via the International Herald Tribune Friday (emphasis added throughout, h/t Benny Peiser):

The powerful "manufacturing is in decline" meme won't go away soon, but it should.

It apparently isn't enough that the Institute for Supply Management's Manufacturing Index has read "expansion" in 48 of the past 50 months. It has become an article of faith among reporters and opportunistic politicians that American manufacturing has been, and continues to be, in a long-term decline.

The fact is that government reports also show the exact opposite. Why apparently no one, including the sector's supporters, has done, or at least published, the simple math involved to debunk the myth of "deindustrialization" is indeed a mystery.

There has been support by anecdote. For example, on August 6, Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal ("The Myth of Deindustrialization"; link requires subscription). His column led as follows:

Chris, How Do You Really Feel?

Cable host Chris Matthews reacted to the resignation of top Bush aide Karl Rove by calling the political operative a "bum" and speculating as to whether he would tell all in an autobiography. Matthews sneeringly wondered if "you have to pay to get the truth from Karl Rove." In general, he contributed to the media frothing by hungering for the scalp of the Bush aide.

MSNBC: Liberal and Unbalanced

Dan Abrams, MSNBC host and general manager of that cable network, continued the political savaging by labeling Rove the "Constitutional Crippler." Abrams went on to slam Rove for "hypocrisy. He also asserted that he wouldn’t "shed a tear at his farewell bash." (I wouldn’t expect an invitation.) The Rove rage wasn’t limited to MSNBC, however. ABC managed to inaccurately blame the Bush operative for the 2004 Swift Boat ads.

They just can't get it right. Yesterday on ABC News' Political Radar, senior political reporter Rick Klein wrote of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards calling conservative author Ann Coulter a "she-devil." Part of the background Klein provided:

In June, Coulter went on ABC's "Good Morning America" and said she had learned her lesson after being blasted for suggesting in a joke before the Conservative Political Action Conference that Edwards was a "faggot." "If I'm gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot," Coulter said.

As Noel Sheppard pointed out in his June 26, 2007 NewsBusters item, the complete Ann Coulter quote was:

For general discussion and debate on a beautiful Saturday morning...

As covered by NewsBusters managing editor Ken Shepherd in his post last Wednesday, Seattle Times executive editor David Boardman scolded his staffers for cheering when news of Karl Rove's resignation from the White House was announced. Now one of those cheering staffers has issued an apology...of sorts.  In a column reeking with self-righteousness while at the same time attacking bloggers for bringing down the level of  journalism,  staff columnist Nicole Brodeur writes:

That was me.

I was one of the people who cheered in The Seattle Times news meeting Monday when it was announced that presidential adviser Karl Rove had resigned.

Last week, I described Gail Collins' condescension to what she sees as the bumpkins of Middle America. The New York Times columnist is back at it again this morning, suggesting that illegal immigration is not so much a problem as an issue exploited by Republican candidates to stir the passions of gullible Republican rubes. And yes, to Collins' ear, "sanctuary city" has a nice ring.

The jumping-off point for Collins' [p.p.v.] Of Mitt, Monks, and Mowers is the criticism Mitt Romney has levelled at Rudy Giuliani for the latter's embrace of New York's status as a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants when he was Big Apple mayor. Note that Rudy has since toughened his stance, vowing to end illegal immigration.

In Collins' eyes, telling police and others to ignore the fact that people they encounter in the course of their duties are in the country illegally is "a perfectly rational position."

So, as you all know, the news comes out that Jose Padilla has been convicted of being a terrorist by a US Court, yet the AP wants to focus more on what it feels the government did wrong than what Padilla did. I guess the AP thinks the US government is more guilty than is a convicted terrorist.

Even after his conviction, the AP fills their report with "supposedly," "possible," and other mitigating verbiage to describe Padilla and the other terror suspects in the news. But even as they want to give Padilla a pass they cast the Bush Administration's efforts as their "zeal to stop homegrown terror." The story makes Padilla seem put upon and mistreated while the Bush Administration is cast as the overwrought party. This AP story gives a lot of space to Padilla's defense and little to the government's proven case. Apparently they just cannot make themselves believe that Padilla is really guilty of any thing.

After listening to Rush today, I did some news searching on exactly why someone would come to the U.S. from Canada for the most important of all healthcare..... premature babies.

In one article on the widely popular story of the Canadian couple that came to the U.S. to have their quadruplets, the Great Falls Tribune (rather local for me) comes up with this...

"But on Friday, the couple came to Great Falls after searching unsuccessfully for a Canadian hospital that would have room to host four premature babies.

"They phoned all across Canada," J.P. said of the doctors at home. "They phoned down here and Dr. Key said they had space."