NewsBusters Archive

This one is pretty amazing (hat tip to Drudge). At 8:29AM ET Monday, Reuters reported that 40 people were killed in a Lebanese village by Israeli air strikes. Less than three hours later, the Associated Press reported that the number of casualties had been dropped to one. Here’s the first report:

"An hour ago, a horrific massacre took place in Houla village as a result of the intentional Israeli bombardment that resulted in more than 40 martyrs," Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told an emergency Arab foreign ministers meeting in Beirut.

Residents of Houla said they feared up to 60 people, including many children, had been killed. They said most of the people were shepherds who had refused to flee the fighting.

Here’s the second:

Last week, I mentioned to Michelle Malkin that it was weird that several networks only made a one-day story out of a Muslim shooting up a Jewish community center in Seattle, killing one woman and wounding five, while Mel Gibson's drunken rant was the story that couldn't end. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby did a little counting in Nexis and found the disparity was vast and wide between Gibson's drunk-driving arrest and Naveed Haq's murdering rampage:

In the first six days after his arrest, the media database Nexis logged 888 stories mentioning "Mel Gibson" and "Jews"....Yet after six days, a Nexis search turned up only 236 stories mentioning Haq -- one-fourth the number dealing with Gibson's drunken outburst.

Jacoby said celebrity and "The Passion" subtext aside, the shooting was a much bigger story: 

The hot story in the blog world today is the story of Adnan Hajj, a photographer for the Reuters news service who has been exposed as faking shots in his work, most famously, a photograph of a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon in which he inserted fake smoke into the picture to make it look as though Israel was targeting civilians.

Use this thread to post relevant information about the story from blogs and elsewhere. Note to NB contribs: Email me if you want to get in on editing this thread so you won't have to post updates as comments.

Given the shock by media members over how many Americans still believe Saddam had WMD before the March 2003 invasion as reported here and here, doesn’t it seem odd that there hasn’t been an MSM article scolding folks who still believe George Bush stole the presidential election in 2000? After all, if the Associated Press can suggest that Americans are deluded for not believing its WMD "facts”, shouldn’t it also question the sanity of the people who, despite the number of media outlets that counted the votes for themselves in early 2001, still believe Al Gore carried Florida?

To be sure, sometimes actor, sometimes radio talk show host, and sometimes radical left-wing blogger Alec Baldwin would be part of that group who believes Gore won, and he made that clear in a post at HuffPo on Sunday: “Gore, who limped off of the American political stage after the 2000 election after being gang raped by Dick Cheney, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and James Baker, as well as their election-stealing goons in Washington and Florida, returns to face public gatherings to discuss his unbending assertions about global warming and the urgent need for America to take the lead in combating its causes and, perhaps, its effects.”

Honestly, I love the smell of Alec Baldwin in the morning. Don’t you? From there, Baldwin moved into full global warmingist mode (emphasis mine):

As liberally biased and prone to sniffing out conservative and Republican wrongdoing as many of the larger media organizations are, there actually is a more insane wing of the left-wing media made up of nutjob bloggers and "news" web sites.

This leftist press has been busily humming along the past six years, churning out conspiracy theories wild enough to make saner people's heads spin, ultimately with the objective of getting President Bush impeached should Democrats ever take control of the House in November. This is evidenced by the latest opus penned by the minority members of the House Judiciary Committee which is hardly anything more than a copy and paste job from the angry left media. Writing at NRO, Byron York gives us a peek:

There's a word you won't find in the text of Democratic Rep. John Conyers's new "investigative report" on the Bush administration, "The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance." [Apparently brevity is not the soul of witlessness.] And the word is…impeachment. Yet the 350-page "Constitution in Crisis," released last week, is, more than anything else, a detailed road map for the impeachment of George W. Bush, ready for use should Democrats win control of the House of Representatives this November. [...]

While it's absent in the body of the report, the I-word does appear a few times in Conyers's 1,401 footnotes, which include citations of authorities ranging from the left-wing conspiracy website rawstory.com to the left-wing antiwar sites democracyrising.us and afterdowningstreet.org to the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian to the left-wing magazines The Nation and Mother Jones to the left-wing blogosphere favorite Murray Waas to the New York Times columnists Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Frank Rich to former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh. (Sources for "The Constitution in Crisis" even include one story co-written by the disgraced Internet writer Jason Leopold.)

A price spike 28 times larger than the proportion of global oil production lost? The loss of 0.4% of oil output leading to a 13% price increase?

It's what NBC's Ann Curry imagined on this morning's Today show. 'Soaring Gas Prices' is one of the Today show's longest-running hits. This morning's episode brought us Ann Curry trying to induce CNBC financial reporter Ron Insana to paint the gloomiest possible picture in the wake of the news that BP has shut down an Alaskan oilfield. BP shut the Prudhoe Bay field indefinitely due to the discovery of severe corrosion and a very small spill from a Prudhoe Bay oil transit line. The 400,000 represents 8% of US domestic oil output and about 2.6% of US supply, including imports.

Something amazing happened on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday: Cokie Roberts practically floored host George Stephanopoulos with the political truth that most impartial individuals already know (video to follow). The discussion centered on what it would mean for the Democratic Party if Ned Lamont beat Joe Lieberman in Connecticut next week. Stephanopoulos asked Roberts, “How did this happen?” After a somewhat lengthy explanation, Roberts said, “But it's, I think, a disaster for the Democratic Party, and it's going to be very interesting to see what happens as a result of it.”

Stephanopoulos looked stunned, and asked: “Disaster for the Democratic Party? Why?” Roberts elaborated:

Subbing for reporter/columnist Dana Milbank on the Washington Post's snarky "Zeitgeist Checklist" feature in the Sunday opinion section, Post reporter Michael Grunwald goes on a tear, with every time on the ten-item list having a lame connection to Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic drunk-driving rant. Here's how it starts with the number one issue of the week, the Middle East conflict:

Fighting intensifies in Lebanon, as dozens of innocents die, but President Bush senses a "moment of opportunity." Linguists note that in Chinese, the character for "opportunity" also means "quagmire." And "Hezbollah" means "Party of Mel Gibson."

Dr. Hansen is quoted saying, "When I was 5 or 6, my father read me an article in Science magazine about ozone depletion, which is what causes increased ultraviolet radiation..."

Here's a link to Science. Look at it and tell me a 5-or 6-year-old could understand it.

I'm the mom of three six-year-olds, and not a one of them reads articles in Science about ultraviolet radiation. Lest it be said that my kids are simply below-average, allow me to note that I frequently am with other six-year-olds, and none of them have ever once mentioned Science magazine, radiation, ozone depletion or even Al Gore's movie.