A new Zogby Poll says that 54 percent of Americans believe Iraq is not a lost cause. However, the mainstram media have so far not managed to report much if anything on the startling new poll.

A majority of Americans - 54% - believe the United States has not lost the war in Iraq, but there is dramatic disagreement on the question between Democrats and Republicans, a new UPI/Zogby Interactive poll shows. While two in three Democrats (66%) said the war effort has already failed, just 9% of Republicans say the same.

Many Democrats, seeing the fact that the surge appears to be working, have realized that their defeatist attitudes and willingness to surrender may cost them dearly in the next election, have changed their tune somewhat, or, like the New York Times, have merely moved the goalposts of what constitutes victory. However, the major media, who have been overwhelmingly in favor of a precipitous defeat seem to be a little slow in reporting that their years of negative reporting and defeatism have not yet managed to dissuade a majority of their countrymen from wanting to win.

Brent Bozell, President of the Media Research Center which runs NewsBusters, appeared Thursday night (August 30) on FNC's Hannity & Colmes to discuss the MRC's study, “Rise and Shine on Democrats: How the ABC, CBS and NBC Morning Shows Are Promoting Democrats on the Road to the White House” (Executive Summary). It found that, from January through July, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning shows devoted nearly twice the time to stories about, and interviews with, Democratic over Republican presidential candidates, avoided placing liberal labels on Democrats and also pushed candidates of both parties from the left: “Of the substantive questions that could be categorized as reflecting a political agenda, more than two-thirds (69%) of the questions to Democrats reflected a liberal premise, and more than four-fifths (82%) of the questions to Republicans came from the same perspective.”

Alan Colmes naturally nitpicked the study, but Sean Hannity praised it as “exhaustive.”

Video clip (5:33): Real (4.2 MB) or Windows Media (3.5 MB), plus MP3 audio (1.9 MB)

NBC on Thursday night became the first broadcast network to air a story on the Clinton presidential campaign scandal over donations from Norman Hsu, a fugitive from a grand theft charge who is also suspected of illegally funneling excess donations through another family. While ABC's World News and the CBS Evening News, as well as the NBC Nightly News, found time for a third straight night of coverage of Larry Craig's travails, only NBC caught up with FNC and CNN and highlighted the fundraising irregularities involving Democrats. Lisa Myers noted how Hsu has “given a quarter of a million dollars to a who's who of Democratic candidates in the last three years. But Hsu is also a fugitive, wanted in California in connection with a 1991 fraud case. The Clinton campaign initially defended Hsu, listed on her campaign honor roll as a man of integrity. Today the Senator said she's giving his $23,000 in donations to charity.”

Over video of a small, lime-colored house in Dale City, California, Myers also relayed how “questions also have been raised about big donations Hsu raised for Senator Clinton from others, some seemingly of modest means. This house in California is one of Clinton's biggest sources of campaign cash. Campaign records indicate that six members of a family listed at this address have given Clinton $45,000 since 2005 and a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates.” Myers concluded by recalling an earlier scandal much of the media were reluctant at the time to pursue: “It resurrects images of campaign finance scandals during her husband's presidency, of Johnny Chung handing over a $50,000 check in the First Lady's office and donors sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom.”

This could be something of a first: a major MSM player admits there's a case to be made that the media is incredibly biased against Republicans.

As I noted here, when Tom DeLay accused the media of bias on this morning's "Today," Matt Lauer stonewalled: "I'm not going to let it, you know, end with that assumption, congressman, because I clearly don't agree with it."

But appearing on this afternoon's Harball, DeLay successfully wangled an admission from host Chris Matthews.

TOM DELAY: If [Craig] has been found guilty of what he's been accused of, then yeah. But I do know that the Republicans will do something about it. I do know that if he were a Democrat they would rally around him and they would not do something about it. I do know that the national media is incredibly biased against Republicans that find themselves [in trouble] --

CHRIS MATTHEWS: That's a charge which I've heard before and I can understand why you make it. You make it a lot. Sometimes you have a case to make. Sometimes.

View video here.

Associated Press reporter David Bauder wrote a story on the new MRC study on the wide and deep disparity of morning TV news coverage of the presidential candidates in 2007. It's fair and balanced. But for us, obviously, the most entertaining part was hearing the network producers respond to the charges. They said it's all the Republicans' fault for being so shy with interview requests, and declared the Democratic race was so stuffed with historic firsts, it just demands blockbuster coverage:

You've got a former first lady and a black senator fighting for the nomination," said Jim Bell, executive producer of NBC's "Today" show. "That's historic. We're not going to make apologies for covering that."

Stories about the cancer relapse of Democrat John Edwards' wife Elizabeth were also counted in the total. It's unfair to count a personal story like that in a tally that suggests bias, said Jim Murphy, executive producer of ABC's "Good Morning America."

USA Today is furthering an ideal that’s more socialist than American – penalize the executives because they make more than everyone else.

“To say the pay gap between Wall Street’s top titans and average Americans is widening would be an understatement,” wrote Adam Shell in the August 30 USA Today.

The USA Today article was about a study by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and United for a Fair Economy criticizing the compensation of private-equity and hedge-fund manager executives.

As an MRC study has proven, liberal broadcast media has a strong record of skewed coverage of illegal immigration. Print coverage in major metropolitan broadsheets in no different. In her August 30 article, Washington Post staff writer Pamela Constable featured English-speaking illegal immigrants lamenting "hateful talk against immigrants."

"Many have no legal documents," Constable conceded of the day laborers waiting at 5:30 a.m. outside a Gaithersburg, Md., work center operated by "the nonprofit CASA de Maryland." Constable failed to note anywhere in her article the pro-illegal immigration, pro-amnesty stance CASA consistently promotes.

Indeed, Constable's mission was not to report both sides of the immigration debate, but rather to paint a stark, emotional account full of loaded language, including comparing the plight of illegal immigrants to Jews hiding from Nazi persecution:

You know, if you saw this at some small time newspaper, or a blog without multiple levels of editors, you'd be quite forgiving.

But when the supposedly most respected newspaper on the face of the planet, with a large office building filled with writers, editors, and staffers, mistakes a key phrase from the Declaration of Independence as a "constitutional right," one has to wonder what's going on with the Old Gray Lady.

Such is doubly the case when this mistake is made in an editorial (h/t Glenn Reynolds, emphasis added):

Impressing CNN “American Morning” co-host Kiran Chetry is apparently a fairly easy feat to accomplish.

Pretend to urinate on produce in a stock room, smack your brother in the crotch with a beet, open and lick the contents of a container on the shelf or stand with a banana sticking out of your boxer shorts and that’ll land you a segment on “American Morning.”

“All right, so now you guys – by the way it was pretty good editing,” said Chetry in an interview with Mark and Matt D’Avella, creators of the “Produce Paradise” video.

On Thursday’s "Good Morning America," guest host George Stephanopoulos’s close ties to the Clinton administration were again on display. The ABC anchor interviewed the ex-boyfriend of Chelsea Clinton about his new book on the subject of teaching American history in Iraq. Just last month, Stephanopoulos, a former top aide to Bill Clinton, gave a softball interview to Kristin Gore, the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore.

In that segment, the GMA substitute host misleadingly characterized the drug arrest of Albert Gore III as getting "in trouble speeding." The Vice President’s daughter also joked that she modeled a character in her new novel about Washington politics after Stephanopoulos. During the August 30 piece, the network anchor introduced author Ian Klaus by glowingly announcing, "...Some people might be watching today and saying, 'You know, I've seen him somewhere before. I've heard his name before.' And that's because you were actually dating Chelsea Clinton when you went to Iraq."

MRC president and NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the August 29 "Glenn Beck Live" on CNN Headline News. He discussed the Washington Post's decision to censor the August 26 edition of Berkeley Breathed's "Opus" cartoon mocking radical Islamists.

Earlier that day, Bozell appeared on FNC's "Fox & Friends" to discuss the Post's double standards on religious sensitivity. You can find video of that at this NB post.

Video (2:54): Real (2.14 MB) and Windows (1.79 MB), plus MP3 audio (1.31 MB)

Thompson will announce today.

RS: For all who have waited for this for months -- here you go.

Rumor has it that the announcement will be made at 4:30.

Sen Clinton the heat is on.

UPDATE:

RS: I sat in on the conference call, and I'm here to tell ya Fred intends to be the next President of the United States, and he means to tell the FEC exactly that on September 6, 2007. At that time, the testing the waters phase will end, and an aggressive campaign will commence...offical and legal-like.

Fred will tell US about his plans, and explain just what he has in mind for this country via Web cast on that day as well. ...

Mr Thompson's site, I'm With Fred will provide further information as it becomes available.

JDW

Where are the moderate Muslims who willingly speak out against the Islamist agenda, and why are their voices not heard in the mainstream media?

These questions are explored in a documentary that is receiving national exposure over the next several weeks via an Oregon affiliate of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Producers and advisors with WETA, the Washington D.C. affiliate of PBS, had previously denied airing the film as part of the "America at a Crossroads Series."

That Hillary Clinton -- what a card!

According to an email I've received from her campaign, the intrepid Hillary is venturing into the lion's den, with TV appearances scheduled tonight on Letterman and September 4 on the Ellen DeGeneres show. Daring stuff!

In any case, according to the email:

Ellen is soliciting questions from her viewers to ask of Hillary, and we want to turn it around on her. So if you have a question for Hillary to ask Ellen, submit it here.

The Drudge Report has a front-page headline about the good news from the economy this morning. The headline links to an extensive story in Bloomberg News covering the economic news in detail. But it seems that for the majority of the media, this is not news that they wish to highlight.
While the New York Times did not appear to consider this news as important as the report on the Viriginia Tech shootings, it did place a link to a short summary of the news on the front page in the 'Other News' section. On the other hand, CNN has so far not even mentioned the good economic news. ABC News has the Chinese toy-recall story placed prominently on their main page, but also seems to have missed the economic news as of 0825 hours Pacific time.

On Tuesday, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration announced that "Greenhouse gases likely accounted for more than half of the widespread warmth across the continental United States last year."

Yet, NOAA ignored the fact that the primary GHG global warming alarmists point to as the cause for rising temperatures, carbon dioxide emissions, actually declined in 2006.

How did they miss that little detail?

Regardless, let's first look at the announcement from NOAA (emphasis added):

Liberal journalist Nina Burleigh, famous for her 1998 statement that she'd happily fellate President Clinton for "keeping abortion legal," complained in an August 30 Huffington Post blog entry that conservative Republicans are sexually repressed, homophobic, and intolerant.

The rockier the rib, the more likely you'll find pink lingerie under the trousers or a bullwhip and manacles in the bedside drawer. You can bet those Beltway dominatrices, madams and escorts (gay and straight) have been able to buy second homes -- maybe even in Sun Valley! -- with their haul during W's reign.

Oh, it gets better. According to Burleigh, gay-baiting and the Amish vote were keys to Bush's 2004 re-election victory:

In this week's Weekly Standard, writer Noemie Emery gives an excellent look into the mindset of the fearful left, so angry at President Bush for "scaring" the public into Iraq and yet so eager to be scared itself:

"It Can Happen Here," says Joe Conason, in his book of the same name, and in fact it already has started: George W. Bush and his coterie are the very picture of the pious and scheming homegrown fascisti that Sinclair Lewis described in his 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here." Similarities abound. In Lewis's novel, "Buzz Windrip" (Bush), an illiterate dweeb with sleazy charm and low animal cunning, backed by Lee Sarason (Karl Rove), a smooth and duplicitous political mastermind, becomes president, cooks up a fake war to extend his own power, cows Congress, corrupts the courts, bankrupts the country, and all but destroys the free press. The core of his power is a sinister nexus of theocrats joined at the hip to corporate interests, and you can tell how evil they are by their proclaimed love of country, and their incessant talk about God. In their endeavors, they are backed by the Hearst newspaper empire (Fox News), the only one left after all other outlets have been shut down.