NewsBusters Archive

So, let’s assume that you’re giving the commencement address to political management graduates of a major university. Would you use this as an opportunity to bash journalists? If you were White House advisor Karl Rove, the answer would definitely be “Yes!”

As reported by the Associated Press Saturday:

"Some decry the professional role of politics, they would like to see it disappear," Rove told graduating students at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management. "Some argue political professionals are ruining American politics _ trapping candidates in daily competition for the news cycle instead of long-term strategic thinking in the best interest of the country."

"It's odd to me that most of these critics are journalists and columnists," he said. "Perhaps they don't like sharing the field of play. Perhaps they want to draw attention away from the corrosive role their coverage has played focusing attention on process and not substance."

Rove then seemed to be taking a whack at the liberal media modus operandi:

The unborn children of teenage mothers who don't want them are better off dead. I don't see any other way to intepret the Boston Globe's editorial of this morning Pregnant and Frightened. The editorial was prompted by a recently-passed Senate bill prohibiting the transport of minors across state lines for purposes of an abortion in violation of parental consent or notification laws.

In the course of condemning the legislation, the Globe wrote:

"It is hard to see how forcing a frightened 15-year-old to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term will improve the life of the teen or her child."

On two occasions, here and here, this column has taken Good Morning America's Kate Snow to task. Fairness thus behooves us to recognize that Kate gave Howard Dean a fair-'n-balanced going over on this morning's show.

Snow got things off to a frosty start: "We mentioned the president's approval rating. It's about 38% in our last poll. Not so good. In another recent poll, the Democrats' positive [rating was] just 32%. To be blunt, are you blowing an opportunity here? Are you not capitalizing on the president's weakness?"

Later, Snow dumped on Dean's freezing-cold relationship with Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman who heads up the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and with whom Dean notoriously clashed over the spending of campaign funds.

During an appearance on Friday's Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on CBS, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann acknowledged accusations of liberal bias, but denied they were true, preferring to describe himself politically as "correct" and "neutral," without a "rooting interest" in who wins elections. Ignoring criticism from the MRC that, among other instances of bias during the 1998 Monica Lewinsky scandal, he once compared former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to Nazi war criminal Heinrich Himmler, Olbermann claimed that he was never accused of liberal bias while covering the scandal. Olbermann: "I've been accused of being a liberal, which is interesting because the last time I was on doing the news in the late 90s, I did 218 consecutive shows about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. And no one accused me of being a liberal then. It's very interesting the way you can be sort of pigeonholed. I like to think of myself politically as 'correct.'" (Transcript follows)

Video clip (1:20): Real (2.3 MB) or Windows Media (2.6 MB), plus MP3 audio (475 KB)

Jeffrey Lord writes in the American Spectator that the extreme partisanship of CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite is what created Fox News. For decades, CBS led all the others in being the most actvist network, and the sheer brazenness of that activism is what spawned the Fox News Channel.

Physicist Fritjof Capra, in his bestseller The Tao of Physics, writes that "by the very act of focusing our attention on any one concept we create its opposite." In other words, to use the language of physics, when Mr. Cronkite's very focused liberal world view blinked into the American consciousness, its conservative polar opposite blinked into existence along with it. The problem with Cronkite and his fellow "cultural artists" is that over time there emerged what seemed to many Americans as a very, very conscious decision to shut out the conservative world view altogether or, if forced to give it air time, to misrepresent it.

Thus Barry Goldwater found himself being portrayed on the CBS News as a Nazi sympathizer. A Republican Senate move to broaden the authority of the Senate Watergate Committee to investigate not just the 1972 presidential campaign but reports of Democratic malfeasance in the presidential campaigns of 1968 and 1964 was not simply defeated in the Democratic Senate but uninvestigated completely by Cronkite's CBS.

Blame the U.S. for a lack of diplomacy in its support of Israel is the theme of Friday’s “news analysis” by reporter Helene Cooper, “2 Steps Back: Rice’s Careful Diplomacy Falters Under Renewed Assertiveness by the U.S.”

Along the way, Cooper states as fact the usual misleading clichés about Bush’s “go-it-alone approach” to diplomacy and war.

“For the past year, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has worked assiduously to resurrect the importance of traditional diplomacy and building consensus among world leaders after America’s go-it-alone approach to Iraq.”

Already Arabic channel Al Jazeera wants to start an English version to run in the U.S., with a TV studio in Washington. It will be TNN, the Terrorist News Network, competing against CNN.

But now another America hater, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, wants to launch a channel in the U.S.

Reports the AP:

CARACAS, Venezuela Telesur has expanded to 17 Latin American countries in its first year on the air. Now officials with the TV network financed by Venezuela and four other nations is eyeing U-S markets.

Telesur today marked its first anniversary.

For your viewing pleasure, MSNBC decided to add to the Friday Night Fights series with a special Thursday edition. However, as "Hardball's" producers must have believed the challenger in the left corner, host Chris Matthews, was going to be outmatched by the challenger in the right corner, they decided to film the segment with an audience conveniently stocked with Ann Coulter haters. As a result, the fight turned more into a tag-team wrestling match than traditional mono-a-mono boxing.

It was quite evident from the onset that this was going to be a team effort by Matthews and his audience when he began:

Now, I want to know right off the front -- we`re going to use our audience in a very profane way. Who loves Ann Coulter? (APPLAUSE) Who vomits at the mention of her name? (APPLAUSE)

Nice way to introduce your guest, Chris. It seems impossible to imagine you introducing someone like Al Franken in such a fashion. Yet, Matthews wasn’t done. His next uppercut came only seconds later when he asked Coulter, “Do you have a soul?” This was followed a bit later with a right hook when Matthews said Ann was "All brain, no heart."

With that as pretext, this is a melee that must be watched to be fully appreciated. Here is the video. Pay particular attention to the people standing behind Coulter strategically placed to always be shaking their heads in disgust on virtually every one of her words. And, make sure that you have no drinking vessels around when Matthews asks Coulter to elaborate on the position she recently espoused concerning a former president’s sexual preference. (Transcript follows).

(Update: For those interested, here is a video of the beginning of the interview, as well as another part of this segment.)