Did anyone catch Lou Dobbs tonight? He was talking with 2 black panelists
about Obama's relationship with his preacher. As you probably know, his preacher
is very outspoken about having a black only church, that focuses on the black
family, black black black........

Lou Dobbs than explains, "If this were a white church the uproar would
be huge! Than again, a white church expressing supremacy is different than a black
church trying to empower its people".

This just blew me away! How the hell does Lou Dobbs know that the
white church isn’t trying to empower its people? Why are white people not
allowed to be empowered? The female panelist explained that she thought it was bigoted
and her church doesn’t have a problem with integration. Well, after the
commercial she was gone and Lou Dobbs declares, "I'm glad we could sit
down and figure out the reality of this preacher, this is a good thing going on
at the church."

What is it with CNN and painting all white people as heartless race robots?

Greased Lightning Bias

Try as I might, the Associated Press's bias is outpacing my best efforts.

No sooner do I extensively examine their weak week that was than I am delivered more media manna from Heaven, on video no less.

[Thank you very much, DaBird -- loved your work with the Celtics.]

Below the fold, the Reporter (a term we use exceedingly loosely) Glen Johnson explosion:

Bowing to pressure from liberal blogs, feminist groups and upper management, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spent the first five minutes of Thursday night’s "Hardball" personally apologizing to Hillary Clinton for insinuating that she owed her political success to sympathy derived from having endured Bill Clinton’s unfaithfulness. At the top of the show Matthews begged for forgiveness:

Some people I respect, politically concerned people like you who watch this show so faithfully every night, people who care about this country think I've been disrespectful for Hillary Clinton, not as a candidate, but as a woman....Was it fair to imply that Hillary's whole career depending on being a victim of an unfaithful husband? No. And that's what it sounded like I was saying. And it hurt people I'd like to think normally like what I say, in fact, normally like me.

The following is Matthews’s full mea culpa to the liberal former First Lady as it occurred on the January 17, "Hardball" (video at right):

In this video on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgw094RnUA

Hillary Clinton finally drops her guard and extols the virtues of Socialism for the middle class.-"If you look out from the Left you will see a strong middle class". She is admitting that she is not a candidate of the centre. This is the real Hillary. She has made a huge political blunder.

American capitalism - it's so great even the Chinese Communist government loves it!

That's sounds like it ought to be a bumper sticker, but the January 16 "NBC Nightly News" advised it is something we should be cautious of.

Foreign investors have been on a buying spree in the U.S. stock markets - as stock prices have fallen with all the skittishness in the wake of the credit crunch.

"So far foreigners buying chunks of Wall Street has not triggered the same political uproar as a Dubai company's ill-fated effort to take over operations of U.S. ports, perhaps because politicians know the alternative could be painful," NBC correspondent Lisa Myers said.

ABC weatherman and liberal environmentalist Sam Champion touted "fair trade" products on Thursday's "Good Morning America," as well as recycled razors that he encouraged viewers to purchase of with this enticing visual: "Consider this to be old yogurt cups."

Champion opened the "Just One Thing" segment, an occasional part of GMA that allows the weatherman to push his environmental agenda, by enthusing, "And this morning, green your morning routine with some toiletries that actually work on fair trade issues and are made from sustainable materials." Champion never bothered to define fair trade or mention that it's a liberal economic policy that encourages inefficiency and the adoption of socialist-style economic policies.

WOULDN'T IT BE GREAT TO TURN ON THE TV AND HEAR ANY U.S. PRESIDENT, DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN, GIVE THE FOLLOWING SPEECH?

My Fellow Americans: As you all know, the defeat of Iraq regime has been completed.

Since congress does not want to spend any more money on this war, our mission in Iraq is complete.

This morning I gave the order for a complete removal of all American forces and U. S. Equipment from Iraq This action will be complete within 30 days. It is now time to begin the reckoning.

Before me, I have two lists. One list contains the names of countries which have stood by our side during the Iraq conflict. This list is short. The United Kingdom , Spain , Bulgaria , Australia , and Poland are some of the countries listed there.

The other list contains everyone not on the first list. Most of the world's nations are on that list. My press secretary will be distributing copies of both lists later this evening.

The Chris Matthews appearance on Jay Leno wasn’t all about the Shi’ite Republican fanatics. Matthews also went into a typical swoon for his favorite presidential candidate, Barack Obama. "If you're actually in the room when he gives one of his speeches, and you don’t cry, you’re not an American." Matthews could not help slipping into a sales job for Barack and his wife Michelle, and he knew it: "they're cool people. They are really cool. They are Jack and Jackie Kennedy when you see them together. They are cool. And they’re great-looking, and they’re cool and they’re young, and they're -- everything seems to be great. I know I'm selling them now. I'm not supposed to sell, okay?...But the fact is, I wouldn't be an honest reporter if I didn't tell you what the spiritual experience is like of being in a Barack Obama rally."

On Wednesday's The Situation Room on CNN, during the roundtable segment, Jack Cafferty charged that Hillary Clinton's recent contention that she would be best prepared to deal with a terrorist attack amounted to "the same boogeyman fearmongering garbage we've had from the Bush administration for the last five years." He added that "it isn't the terrorists that are going to take this country down. We're doing a good job of that all by ourselves." (Transcript follows)

Cafferty also lamented that Republican candidates were talking about issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and the Confederate flag, which he called "the same crap that we hear every election cycle." He went on to recommend both spending cuts and tax increases to improve the economy. Notably, Cafferty's reference to the Confederate flag gave an impression that he saw one of the candidates pushing the issue, when in reality, as reported by CNN's John King at about 4:30 p.m., the discussion of the Confederate flag consisted of a few people protesting outside, and a man in John McCain's town hall meeting audience bringing up the subject and complaining about the Arizona Senator's opposition to the flag's display above South Carolina's state capitol, with McCain defiantly standing by his opposition. Cafferty also neglected to mention that McCain has been talking about fighting against wasteful spending, which is consistent with some of what Cafferty was pushing for.

In a report on the upcoming Nevada caucus, CNN reporter Chris Lawrence highlighted Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s outreach to Latino voters, and while he did mention the issue of "immigration reform," he did not do the elementary thing a reporter should do: explore what the candidates are saying to Latinos about their immigration proposals.

The report, which aired 21 minutes into the 6 am Eastern hour of Thursday’s "American Morning," featured a committed Obama supporter who was once an "undocumented" immigrant (and is described as a "child of immigration reform"), and a Nevada talk radio host who claimed that Hillary Clinton’s experience made her more capable to handle the immigration issue than Obama. But did they talk about amnesty?

Married to a flight attendant, I'm familiar with the unofficial motto of those in her profession: "I'm not here to kiss your ass, I'm here to save it!" When I discovered Hillary Clinton had made news for her impersonation of a flight attendant, I began to think about the former first lady and how she might perform as the nation's flight attendant in chief. It didn't take long for me to conclude she wouldn't save a soul.

Hill Force One, the name the Democrat presidential candidate gave her fictitious airline, would be strapped with many problems if it operated in the same manner as she hopes to run the U.S. government. For instance, HFO passengers would:

"Freakonomics" co-author Stephen Dubner appeared on Thursday's "Good Morning America" to talk about crime and also to repeat his unsubstantiated argument that legalized abortions have resulted in less crime. The journalist and author asserted, "What happened when Roe V. Wade was handed down was that unwanted children are basically at a much greater risk for being born into the circumstances where they're more likely to lead a criminal life. Not every unwanted child by a long stretch, but typically."

In other words, 35 years after the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court decision, "the generation of people around then included fewer unwanted children and therefore fewer criminals." At no point did Roberts question this assertion or mention that it has been repeatedly challenged since Dubner and his economist co-author Steven Levitt made it in their book. In fact, a study by another economist, John Lott, found that legalized abortion actually increased the murder rate by seven percent. However, unimpeded by contradictory arguments, Dubner simply told Roberts, "It's good to know what forces work in society, if for no other reason than to keep doing the right thing." The right thing, one presumes he means, is to keep aborting children.

The economy is so bad that you'll probably lose your job. Just ask "Good Morning America" host Robin Roberts. She reported on ABC January 17 that "countless Americans" are worried their jobs might be at risk.

As proof, Roberts offered a montage of four man-on-the-street-style interviews, in which four expert economists random people expressed concerns about the job market, gas prices and the economy in general.

"The middle class that is suffering the most because you, you're stretched, you know," one woman said. "Every dime of income is to either pay a bill or just to keep a roof and food and gas prices are outrageous as usual."

Another woman complained that "we don't eat out as much, probably, because we're trying to put, you know, more back towards gas money and things like that."

"I think it's a really, really scary time," a third woman poetically declared. "I think that we're only at the precipice

The blogosphere continues to boil with outrage over the Times's front-page story from Sunday on veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan and committing murders, a story immediately discredited by cursory research as journalistically and statistically worthless. The paper's main finding, that 121 veterans either committed a killing in this country or are charged with one, was useless without context, which the Times either couldn't or didn't provide.

The story failed basic journalism, with the Times making no attempt to compare murder rates of veterans to that of the general population. Can one imagine the Times spouting out a raw number of murders committed by, say, illegal immigrants? Without context, the Times' big finding was useless, a single data point floating in space.

Armed Liberal tackled the story on that very point the day it appeared:

CNBC host Jim Cramer acknowledged on the January 17 "Today" show that the media's consistently negative reports about the economy contribute to the possibility of a recession by lowering consumer confidence and spending.

"Today" anchor Matt Lauer told Cramer, "People come up to me and say on the street ... they say, ‘Why don't you stop talking about recession? Because simply by talking about it, you're going to freak out consumers and definitely push us into one.' Is there any logic to that thinking?"

"The answer," Cramer said, "is that we have to point out the positives with the negatives." What a novel concept!

In the first two weeks of 2008, the media have focused heavily on fears of a recession in spite of the fact that two surveys of economists put the chances of recession at less than 50 percent. The media have focused on the likelihood of a recession by a ratio of

Chris Matthews took his sloppy and blabby talk routine to The Tonight Show on Wednesday and after a few minutes trying to dig out with Media Matters and Hillary fans for saying she got where she is through her husband's wild sex life, he compared the Republicans to Iraqi factions. The Laura Ingraham show  played this clip repeatedly today:

Nobody seems to be the leader yet. Nobody's Ronald Reagan. They don't seem to have a -- used to be the Democrats were the disorganized political party. Now, the Republicans are like the -- like the Iraqis. Have you noticed? They got their Shia wing, the fanatics. They've got Huckabee. This where I get into trouble. This is just where I get into trouble. [ Laughter ] Huckabee and Thompson are the Shiites, and the Sunni, the more moderate guys, are McCain, and -- who else they got over there? And uh, Rudy Giuliani. And then they got Romney, the Kurd. I mean, they're all over the place. Who's gonna unite them? 

The AP -- international, institutionalized bias

Tilting Leftward (and Often at Windmills)

The Associated Press (AP) is the Hulking Monster of the news syndication business. 

Formed in May of 1846, The Syndicate has risen to currently consist of 243 news bureaus in 97 countries.  They have over 3,000 journalists on staff.  121 countries avail themselves of what they have to offer.  Their content appears in 1,700 newspapers worldwide.  

But the AP is now far more than merely "Press".  There are additionally 850 AP Radio News audio affiliates, with 5,000 radio and television outlets spanning the globe taking them for and at their word.

Beyond just the majors, it is from where a great many small town American newspapers get most or all of their national and international news stories.  They are a deeply and tremendously dominant and influential force. 

**Update below fold**

Target department stores apparently haven't gotten the memo that dissing the Internet and bloggers can be a dangerous game for a retailer these days. And, Target isn't just dissing blogges and "non-traditional media" they might be claiming they won't even interact with them. All this over a new advertisement that shows a woman in Winter clothing, spread-eagled atop the Target logo, the center of which appears right between the model's spread legs. Just what the "target" here is, can be a pertinent question to ask and several consumer advocates are asking just that question.