Is there a trick to it? I used to be able to but it hasn't worked for a long time. The link thing is always grayed out. For a while I used to just make the link in word and then paste it over but now that doesn't even work unless I do it in explorer. I just avoid linking anything now.

You know, it's one thing when some government employee sends you an e-mail message claiming that global warming will cause greater snowfall on the planet.

However, it's really something else altogether when a major American newspaper would actually publish an article with the headline:

Global Warming Not Always to Blame for Extreme Winters

No, this wasn't the National Enquirer, or The Star. This was the Christian Science Monitor, which is now on a growing list of press outlets clearly uncomfortable with the winter of 2008 (emphasis added throughout):

Delivering a ridiculous level of vacuous hyperbole, Thursday's CBS Evening News greeted reports of a 0.83 percent 4th quarter foreclosure rate with just under 6 percent of mortgages more than a month past due as proof “the American dream” is “slipping away” since “foreclosures are spreading like cancer.” Those may indeed be unusually high levels, but the American dream is hardly “slipping away” when 99.17 percent are not in foreclosure and 94.18 percent are paying on time or nearly on time.

Anchor Katie Couric at the top of the March 6 CBS Evening News, with "Foreclosure Crisis" on screen:

Good evening, everyone. It's one of the worst things that can happen to a family, but it's happening to more and more in this country. They're losing their homes to foreclosure. The mortgage industry reported today that the foreclosure rate in the final quarter of 2007 hit an all-time high [0.83%]. And the government says, that for the first time ever, lenders own a greater percentage of the average home than the homeowner does. Anthony Mason now on the American dream that's slipping away.

Business & Media Institute Vice President Dan Gainor told viewers of the Fox Business Network that stewardship of the environment "doesn't mean you have to embrace every bit of global warming lunacy that comes down the pike."

In his March 6 appearance, Gainor discussed BMI's new report, "Global Warming Censored," showed that network news shows routinely shut out debate on climate issues, even from scientists' perspectives. In fact, in 80 percent of the stories studied an alternate viewpoint wasn't even mentioned.

And when network news shows did feature dissenting views, those people were often branded as "deniers" or "flat Earthers." Scott Pelley, a reporter for CBS, continued to report on climate change for that network despite his 2006 comparison of global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers.

A couple at the "cross roads" of a "complicated" love story.  That's how Diane Sawyer set up the feature on a transgendered Microsoft executive, his/her wife, and their son in the 8:00 half-hour on "Good Morning America."

The socially progressive bent of GMA was evident in the lack of context or perspective given to the family's story.  No consideration was given to the glaring social issues raised. It was reported as just another human-interest story.

Video (2:00): Windows (7.31 MB), plus MP3 audio (917 kB)

The five-minute feature, reported by Neal Karlinsky, explained the conflict Michael Wallent had with his identification as a male, his decision to become a female and the ramifications of that decision in his workplace and at home. 

Shelley Ross, Executive Producer of The Early Show, has left the position and, the AP's David Bauder reported Thursday afternoon, Rick Kaplan, a long-time Friend of Bill, “will temporarily take over for Ross” while remaining Executive Producer of the CBS Evening News.

Kaplan, a former Executive Producer of ABC's World News Tonight and Nightline who later ran both CNN and MSNBC, has had a long record of friendly relations with former President Bill Clinton, advising Clinton on how to respond to the Gennifer Flowers scandal in 1992 and blocking anti-Clinton stories from appearing on Nightline. Kaplan has also been hostile to conservatives and once even declared that disgraced CBS anchor Dan Rather's “legacy” was “the gold standard journalists today have struggled to live up to.”

"Good Morning America" correspondent Chris Connelly talked with horror novelist, turned religious fiction writer, Anne Rice on Thursday about how friends reacted to her becoming a "Jesus freak." Though the interview was a friendly one, Connelly did ask, in a jovial tone, what it was like when friends said, "'Oh, my gosh. She's out of her mind. Oh, no. Look, she's become a 'Jesus freak.'"

Now, he did attempt to distance himself from the phrase "Jesus freak" by using air quotes, but would any reporter employ a similar term when dealing with a member of another faith? Continuing the over-the-top "conversation" that Connelly assumed people had with her, he imagined, "'She's gone over to the bright side. Where is our empress of vampiric alienation?'"

On Wednesday’s episode of Live With Dan Abrams on MSNBC, Abrams lit into Rush Limbaugh as "un-American" for encouraging Republican voters to cross over and vote for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. In his "Beat the Press" segment, Abrams attacked Limbaugh mocking him for a segment on Monday night’s Abrams show on Limbaugh’s "Far Right Dirty Tricks." On Wednesday, Abrams associated Rush with the "radical right" and attempted to describe a Limbaugh radio show snippet:

He was upset that I said he was perverting the process by encouraging Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton in open primaries in an effort to quote, "bloody up" Obama....When you encourage someone to vote for a candidate that they don't want as president, I believe it is actually un-American, and they are willing to increase the chances of what they consider to be a bad candidate winning in the hope they may slightly increase their candidate's chances? It is shameful.

Just days after the Street of Dreams arsons suspected to be at the hands of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a federal jury found one Briana Waters guilty for her role in a 2001 ELF arson that destroyed the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture.

NewsBusters has noted that the Seattle Times has avoided calling ELF a terrorist or eco-terrorist organization, preferring to call the group simply a "radical environmentalist" organization. Today the paper made some progress as staff writer Mike Carter slapped Waters and her co-conspirators with the label "ecosaboteurs."

But the term sabotage, however, lends the impression of activity engaged in to thwart the military or any commercial enterprise essential to equipping national defense. UW academics studying urban agriculture are fundamentally civilian in nature. Here are some definitions of sabotage available at Answers.com.:

The Denver Post gave us a fine example -- not that they meant to -- of why every year our schools are turning out more semi-literate kids with over inflated egos. To the Post, of course, it's all good news that being poor in the Denver School Districts now qualifies a kid to be placed in the "gifted students" programs. To the Post this new classification "makes things more equitable" in those gifted programs. Why, it's giving minorities a "lift," you see? Of course, there isn't a word out of anyone in Denver if whether or not any of these kids suddenly classified as "gifted" students actually have any gifts that might prove them worthy of their politically motivated status.

In the typically empty fashion so popular among our ideologically left infested school administrations the country over, it's merely a matter of quotas and economic stats by which we measure success, not any true educational achievement. If your program for gifted students doesn't have enough of the right race of children (or the minority du jour) why then it must be obvious that the program is a failure. So, instead of improving the overall education for all students in order to bring minority students up to snuff so as to qualify them for entrance into a gifted program, the Denver Schools are just going to "add points" to the tests for kids merely because they are "poor," or if "English is their second language."

Voila, more "gifted" kids abound in Denver.

Many people have noticed a distinct change in the way that the media cover terrorism. Right after 9/11, the Society of Professional Journalists issued “diversity guidelines,” which are now posted online. No longer confined to the quaint idea of impartially reporting the news, the media were advised to change opinions, engage in public relations and "demystify" Islam and even ask "targeted communities" to "review" coverage and "make suggestions." (ht LGF)

At their 2001 convention, the SPJ urged “tak[ing] steps against racial profiling in [the]coverage of the war on terrorism." It reminded journalists to stop using "inflammatory" language and condescendingly said to “help audiences understand the complexities of the events in Pennsylvania, New York City and Washington, D.C.” Story guidelines are (all bold mine):

— Cover the victims of harassment, murder and other hate crimes as thoroughly as you cover the victims of overt terrorist attacks.

— When writing about terrorism, remember to include white supremacist, radical anti-abortionists and other groups with a history of such activity.

On Thursday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Maggie Rodriguez hyped rising gas prices as she teased an upcoming segment and declared: "Still ahead for us, more pain at the pump. You'll be paying $4 a gallon or even more." Though $4 a gallon may happen, asserting that it will be that high, or higher, in the near future certainly paints an overly dire picture. While introducing the segment, Rodriguez went on to highlight one gas station in California with prices far above the average of $3.17 a gallon across the country: "It may be hard to believe, but seeing is believing. Take a look at that, regular unleaded at $5.19 a gallon at one California station."

Rodriguez talked to analyst Tom Kloza of the Oil Information Price Service and began by asking about the rise in gas prices, and admitting some of her earlier exaggeration: "Luckily nationwide we're not seeing gas at $5.19, but we hit a record high yesterday, $3.17 a gallon, which is 69 cents higher than a year ago. What's going on here?"

Does CNN's Miles O'Brien cherrypick poll data?  Apparently so.  

I thought Newsbusters readers might be interested in an early peek at this forthcoming piece by David Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research (full disclosure: I work there and I'm married to him) in which O'Brien is shown doing just that in the cause of smearing global warming so-called "skeptics" and the conservative Heartland Institute.

Writes David:

CNN's Miles O'Brien recently asserted that the Heartland Institute "desperately wants us to believe" there's a conspiracy to distort information about global warming.

"Good Morning America" co-host Diane Sawyer peppered guest James Carville about the possibility of a "dream solution," an Obama/Clinton or Clinton/Obama presidential ticket. The ABC journalist was so insistent on the subject that she posed the question to the Democratic strategist four times.

Without adding modifiers, such as "so-called or "alleged," Sawyer began the discussion of the two Democratic candidates coming together by cheerfully wondering, "Let me go to the other dream solution." It seems unlikely that members of the media would refer to a McCain/Romney or a McCain/Huckabee (the top GOP vote-getters) as a "dream solution." The GMA host then segued into a question that she would repeat over and over: "Knowing Hillary Clinton, as you know Hillary Clinton, will she ever run for vice president with anyone?" Sawyer insistently followed up by asking, "You think she would do it and you would recommend her to do it?"

The US media seems to think that their job description includes deciding what information is and is not legal to leak and print- never mind that we elect Presidents, Senators and Representatives to do this, not members of the scribbling class. This arrogance and complete lack of care for their fellow Americans was famously demonstrated in the NSA and SWIFT banking exposes by the New York Times resident anti-Americans, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau.

However, these are not the only such cases. Recently, Risen has once again exposed classified data with the aid of hidden law-breakers in the government. In this case, Risen exposed a CIA-Mossad operation to destabilize Iran. Risen has been subpoenaed by a federal court to reveal who gave him this data, but predictably, he sees his mission of aiding America's enemies and assisting said enemies to kill American citizens as more important that assisting the government to uphold laws about leaking sensitive information. And equally predictably, the rest of the mainstream media is rallying to his defense. Haaretz, an Israeli news source, reported on the topic today, casting Risen in the role of victim.

Unless you've been asleep or out of the country for a month, you're well aware of claims by Hillary Clinton and NBC's "Saturday Night Live" that media are totally in the tank for Barack Obama.

On Wednesday, conservative author Ann Coulter was Steve Malzberg's guest on WOR radio, and she couldn't agree more with this assertion about the mainstream media's love affair with the junior senator from Illinois.

After Malzberg mentioned Michelle Obama's recent despicable comments about our country published in The New Yorker magazine and reported by NewsBusters Wednesday, he asked his guest what impact Mrs. Obama might have on the election. Coulter responded (seven-minute audio available here):

Poynter Institute's Scholar for Journalistic Values Bob Steele must not plan on bending an elbow at a British pub anytime soon. Not only did Steele scold the journalists who agreed to keep Prince Harry's Afghanistan deployment secret, he condescendingly dismissed Harry's honorable service to his country (emphasis mine):

But even if one accepts that news reports might heighten a danger, there are other logical challenges to this secrecy about Harry the soldier. To the best of my knowledge, there was no compelling reason for Prince Harry to go to Afghanistan as an army officer. There was nothing essential that he, personally, brought to the battlefield. He had no specific duty or skill that was irreplaceable. Praise him, if you will, for his spirit or his patriotism. But it's certainly not justification for the risks taken or the journalistic principles sacrificed.

One of the biggest concerns of media analysts and press watchers is the brainwashing effect bad reporting has on the public.

No finer example of this propagandist power exists than with the liberal bogeyman known as global warming, for the constant climate alarmism being spewed 24 hours a day, seven days a week has tremendously and demonstrably impacted the views of the citizenry.

Of course, that's the goal.

Consider the following e-mail message I received this morning from someone that appears to work for the government of Ontario, Canada (name and e-mail address withheld, emphasis added):

As conditions in Iraq improve to the point where even adamant Iraq War opponents concede the surge has worked, the press seems less interested in questioning the Bush administration on the war. On the March 6 edition of "Fox and Friends," co-host Brian Kilmeade asked White House press secretary Dana Perino when she last received a question about Iraq. Perino responded that she does not remember "having sustained questions about Iraq...since probably early December," and added "I think that’s as a result of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker in conjunction with the Iraqis really making some progress on the ground."

Does the media only want to report the bad news in Iraq? A recent MRC study suggests just that, noting "their zeal for reporting on Iraq declined as the violence and casualties did." The MRC documented that the number of stories declined in 2007 from 178 in September, 108 in October, to 68 in November.