Can a radio station owner submit an obscene set of call letters for his station and have it approved by the Federal Communications Commission? Brent Bozell's culture column passes along that two prospective stations in Hawaii were granted the call letters KUNT (and KWTF), which the station owner quickly apologized for submitting. But the FCC, for its many millions in expenditures, has no living, breathing human checking to make sure that embarrassing call letters aren't included in their usual online submission process. Brent elaborates:

Original caption:

A CNN crew, including reporter John Roberts, broadcasts from the top the Holiday Inn early Thursday, Aug. 2, 2007, in Minneapolis, the morning after the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed over the Mississippi River during Wednesday's rush hour.

As Sean Penn gushed over despot Hugo Chavez Thursday, a former Miss Venezuela and previous co-star of the activist actor's was telling the Associated Press she hopes Penn "comes to his senses and he realizes that he's being used."

Movie lovers likely remember Maria Conchita Alonso as Robin Williams' girlfriend in "Moscow on the Hudson," and Arnold Schwarzenegger's in "The Running Man."

With that in mind, the Associated Press reported Thursday (emphasis added throughout):

The decline of the Wall Street Journal, which allowed Rupert Murdoch's purchase of it, can be blamed in part on how advertisers “perhaps weren't enthralled” with the newspaper's “vitriolic right-wing attack editorials,” Washington Post op-ed writer David Ignatius contended in a Thursday column. In “The Path That Led to Murdoch,” Ignatius, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has held a variety of top positions at the Post since 1986, asserted that during the 1990s “the Journal's editorial page increasingly did its own reporting, with equal portions of journalistic hustle and ideological spin, and it often overshadowed the news side. I suspect that helped undermine the franchise. Advertisers, in the end, perhaps weren't enthralled with a newspaper distinguished by vitriolic right-wing attack editorials.” (Screen shot is from appearance last year on the Chris Matthews Show.)

Ignatius didn't have anything to say about the impact on the New York Times of its vitriolic left-wing attack editorials and I wouldn't count on members of the mainstream media any time soon pointing to that editorial page as the culprit for declining ad revenue at the Gray Lady.

On Wednesday's The Situation Room, CNN host Wolf Blitzer, while interviewing Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison about his recent trip to Iraq, asked the Congressman about his recent controversial remarks comparing President Bush to Hitler, words that could be interpreted as a suggestion that Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks, and comments that have received little media coverage. Blitzer gave Ellison the chance to "explain exactly what you did mean," and asked if the Congressman agreed that the "comparison of Bush and Hitler" was "inappropriate." (Transcript follows)

On Friday's Countdown, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann charged that the "endless war and endless spending" had "crippled our ability to repair or just check our infrastructure," as he hosted Air America's Rachel Maddow in a discussion blaming the Minneapolis bridge collapse on Iraq war spending and unwillingness by conservatives to raise taxes. Olbermann quoted Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar's charge of "messed up priorities" and New York Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter's labeling of bridge collapse victims as "almost victims of war" because "perpetual war depletes the funds available to maintain our infrastructure." Maddow charged that America is "paying this incredible deadly price for a brand of American conservatism that hates and demeans government." (Transcript follows)

Pajamas Media is reporting that some fireworks broke out Friday morning during the YearlyKos convention in Chicago (h/t NBer Saw the Light).

During a breakout session ironically titled "The Military and Progressives: Are They Really That Different," an as of yet unidentified soldier in uniform stood up to address the panel -- which included Wesley Clark -- to discuss how the surge is going.

According to Pajamas Media (video available here):

When a member of the journalism community is murdered, wouldn't you expect most news agencies to report it?

Well, on Thursday morning, Chauncey Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post, was gunned down by an at that time unknown assailant.

On Friday morning, Oakland police arrested seven people at Your Black Muslim Bakery in connection with Bailey's murder.

Yet, ABC, CBS, and NBC haven't said a word about this shooting, or the connection to Your Black Muslim Bakery. Why?

Kudos go out to CNN for logging three reports on the matter Friday including this one during the 11AM EST "CNN Newsroom":

The high-tech giants of search are attempting to position themselves as successors (or is it heirs?) to Old Media.

Hold the pompoms.

Given the political proclivities and selective indifference to human rights on the part of many of those who run the search giants, it behooves bias-watchers to pay close attention to what these companies are up to, and how they play the news they carry. It appears that The Who's 1970s warning ("Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss") about the results of most "revolutions" applies.

You doubt? Take a look at the disgraceful treatment blogger and syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin received at the hands of Google News in a supposedly "objective, informative" early 2006 report. The sneering condescension is palpable.

Not content to be mere observers, Google's preparation for the 2008 elections has apparently included building an out-of-balance management team in its news division (link requires free registration):

IT’S ALL JUST RELATIVELY NIETZSCHE 

BY LISA RICHARDS

July 28, 2007 

Aren't the MSM and the Dems the "let every vote count" clan? But when the Dems snuff out a GOP win on the House floor in a manner that would send the New York Times into the mother of all snits were the shoe on the other foot, the Gray Lady camouflages the facts, and even manages to place blame on the Republicans.

Take the headline from the Times' story on the way in which the Democrat wielding the gavel somehow transformed a 215-213 Republican win into a 214-214 tie resulting in the motion failing: "Partisan Anger Stalls Congress in Final Push." The Times neatly switches the focus away from the Dems' theft of the vote, and onto those angry old Republicans, who are letting their anger stand in the way of progress. To that end, the article worked in a quote from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) [file photo]: “Their party has been hijacked by people who don’t really have an agenda but to stop progress.”

THEY’LL DISTORT; THEY’LL DECIDE

WHY PARTY BOSSES NEVER WENT THE WAY OF THE DODO 

BY LISA RICHARDS

August 1, 2007 

If summer heat and drought were jeopardizing crops in the Midwest, would a climate change obsessed media be having a field day (pun intended) reporting the news whilst connecting it to manmade global warming?

24 hours a day, seven days a week, right? CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC would likely have correspondents in the cornfields giving daily updates about the gravity of the situation.

Yet, further south in Texas, there's a crop very important to Americans in tremendous danger that has gotten almost no attention.

Why? Because abnormally cold summer temperatures are threatening it, and that just doesn't fit the current media agenda. As reported by the Associated Press Friday (h/t NB reader Phillip A. Smith):

If in the run-up to last year's elections a poll identified a three percent approval rating for the way Congress - which was controlled by Republicans at the time in case you forgot - was handling the war in Iraq, do you think you would have heard about it?

Maybe on every morning and evening news program for days, and on the front pages of every newspaper, correct?

Well, on Wednesday, Zogby International released the results of a stunning new poll that got virtually no attention.

Why?

Because it identified that virtually nobody in America thinks Congress - which is now currently controlled by Democrats in case you forgot - is doing a good job concerning Iraq (emphasis added throughout, h/t Glenn Reynolds):

Grilling Cheney, Gushing For Gore

Larry King, best known recently for his scintillating interviews with thinkers such as Paris Hilton, proved that he can still ask tough questions, to conservatives that is. In an interview with Vice President Cheney about Guantanamo, he wondered, "You have to torture them when they’re there?" Former VP Al Gore, on the other hand, received puff questions about Madonna and penguins.

The French Fries of Enduring Love

Speaking of media coddling, "Good Morning America" anchors Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts appeared to be infatuated with the story that 2008 Democratic candidate John Edwards and his wife Elizabeth spend their wedding anniversaries at Wendy’s. Roberts even promoted the former senator by referring to him as "Presidential nominee" John Edwards.

Your chance to talk about everything...including maybe the preseason college football rankings.

On Friday night’s "Inside Washington," panelists trashed Ross Buettner’s story in the New York Times playing up a close relationship between Fox News boss Roger Ailes and GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. Newsweek’s Evan Thomas said "I think this was the New York Times thinking that Ailes is Darth Vader, because they made him out to be this monster who’s given all this time to Giuliani, but the story itself and the graphics supporting it didn’t support the story." Others agreed. "There’s nothing in this story," said columnist Charles Krauthammer. Colby King of the Washington Post scornfully added, "This is exactly why newspapers in trouble," and said they acted like a tabloid. Thomas concluded, "It says more about the paranoia of the New York Times than anything else."

Is it so hard to tell a male human being from a female one? I guess to the AP it is because in a story from the 31st, the tale they told of a male inmate castrating himself with a broken disposable razor blade became the story of a male inmate castrating "herself" with a razor blade. One wonders what the AP Stylebook says about that little gem?

BOISE, Idaho - An inmate who castrated herself with a disposable razor blade after prison officials refused to treat her for gender identity disorder should have female hormone therapy paid for by the state, a federal judge said.

Someone should inform the AP that a female cannot castrate herself. It is a physical impossibility. If'n ya gots something to castrate, you ain't no woman in the first place!

Time magazine veteran Margaret Carlson, now with Bloomberg News and The Week magazine, used the Minnesota bridge collapse tragedy as a fresh excuse to tout how the public really wants a tax hike while she regretted the lack of political “will” to raise taxes and that the government can't find more money for infrastructure but can afford “$4,000 a minute on the Iraq war.” Citing a poll conducted a decade ago when Democrat Ed Rendell was Mayor of Philadelphia, on Friday's Inside Washington aired on the DC PBS station, WETA-TV channel 26, Carlson claimed that “nearly 70 percent of people polled would pay more in taxes to actually know that they could cross the 14th Street bridge safely,” a reference to a bridge between Washington, DC and Virginia. “But,” she fretted, “you can't get the will to do it. I mean, we certainly had the wake-up call in Katrina, everyone knows the situation, but can you really get it done when there's, by the way, very little money left?”