Jennifer Harper, Washington Times reporter and friend of Newsbusters, gives us a revealing look at how far left our taxpayer funded National Public Radio network has gotten itself these days. Even when they try to go a little toward the conservative side of the debate, they get lambasted by their audience, angered that they had the temerity to air conservative views. Of course, the only reason they would get such a rude reception from their own audience is because they have garnered only a far left listenership as a result of their far left programming. After all, if they had a balanced listenership they wouldn't get deluged by angry emails when they aired conservative content.

Apparently, at the end of February, the NPR program "Morning Edition" took the unusual move of airing four consecutive days of interviews with conservative thinkers in a segment they dubbed "Conversations with Conservatives."

On Sunday's Meet the Press, this exchange stuck out for me, where Hillary Clinton endorser Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, expressed anxiety that Barack Obama could win the big states that lead to an Electoral College win. But wait, didn't Hillary favor abolishing the Electoral College in 2000? Yes, she did, at least grudgingly. Here's today's exchange:

MR. RUSSERT: Governor Rendell, if, in fact, Barack Obama goes to the convention in Colorado in August with the most elected delegates, having won more contests and a higher popular vote, the cumulative vote, could he be denied the nomination?

GOV. RENDELL: Well, sure, Tim, because, number one, Hillary Clinton has won states with about 260 electoral votes. Barack Obama has won states with about 190. And we decide the presidency not by a popular vote, we decide it by the electoral vote. And the traditional role of the superdelegates is to determine who's going to be our strongest candidate.

.... and in 24 Hours, with No Credible Support

In a report from the presidential campaign trail in Wyoming early Saturday morning, Sara Kugler of the Associated Press picked up on an economic meme created out of whole cloth by one of her colleagues, and treated it as an undisputed fact -- all in the name of creating support for campaign rhetoric coming from one of the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates.

The meme got its start on Friday morning shortly after Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly Employment Situation Report, when AP's Jeannine Aversa offered up the following (bold is mine):

The Labor Department's report, released Friday, also showed that the nation's unemployment rate dipped to 4.8 percent as hundreds of thousands of people — perhaps discouraged by their prospects — left the civilian labor force. The jobless rate was 4.9 percent in January.

In Sunday’s Washington Post Book World, senior editor Alan Cooperman reviewed four new political books in brief, including a new book from Media Matters for America titled Free Ride: John McCain and the Media by David Brock and Paul Waldman. Cooperman concluded that, oops, the title doesn’t match the rough reporting coming out from newspapers on McCain’s alleged hypocrisy (and adultery?) with lobbyists. We also appreciate the mention of our Hillary-bias book:

Late last year the folks who run the Media Research Center, an outfit dedicated to unmasking liberal bias, came out with Whitewash, a book about how the mainstream media have shamelessly "shilled" for Hillary Clinton.

Now the people who run Media Matters for America, which is dedicated to unmasking conservative misinformation, are offering Free Ride, a book about how the mainstream media give John McCain "a positive spin for nearly everything he does."

One of the truly disgraceful media fixations since America invaded Iraq five years ago has been to blame all the world's problems on energy contractor Halliburton while making it clear that Vice President Dick Cheney used to be its Chief Executive Officer.

Despite it being almost eight years since Cheney resigned his position with the contracting giant and sold all of his stock, Halliburton-obsessed press members continue to implicate the Vice President in any bad news concerning his former company.

On Sunday, the Associated Press made such a nefarious connection in the very first paragraph of its article concerning water problems in Iraq (h/t NBer FastEd):

Look for NOW to be setting up picket lines outside Rush's Southern Command, protesting the way Limbaugh has demeaned mature women, writing them off as the "hot-flash cohort."

Outrageous! When will these right-wing men realize we will no longer tolerate their misogynist --

What? It wasn't Rush? It was that avatar of elite liberal thought Tina Brown, writing in Newsweek?

Never mind.

Here's how Brown put it in Hillary and the Invisible Women [emphasis added]:

With political pundits across the fruited plain believing that NBC's "Saturday Night Live" transformed the Democrat presidential campaign by exposing media's love affair with Barack Obama as well as their apparent disdain for Hillary Clinton, one has to wonder just how far the program's producers and writers are willing to go to advance their candidate of choice.

After all, for the third week in a row, "SNL" began with a skit highly favorable to Clinton, and this time made Obama look like an incompetent, inexperienced fool.

In this week's opening sketch, Hillary, played by Amy Poehler, introduced a campaign advertisement depicting a frightened President Obama calling a sleeping Senator Clinton at 3:00 in the morning:

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking points:

• How much did "Saturday Night Live" effect the Democrat presidential campaign as well as media's coverage of Barack Obama? Did the show have an impact on voters in Ohio and Texas as well as on the press? Is it a sad state of affairs in our nation when media need to be chided by a comedy show in order to actually do their jobs?
• How much of a gift to McCain was Hillary's victories on Tuesday? It's estimated that she will spend $7 million in the next six weeks bashing Barack Obama in Pennsylvania. Now that her kitchen sink strategy worked, will all of this mud being slung in the next three to five months make it much easier for McCain to win in November?

On Wednesday, NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard noted the following comments by Michelle Obama in her recent New Yorker Magazine profile by Lauren Collins:

Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we're a divided country, we're a country that is "just downright mean," we are "guided by fear," we're a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. "We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day," she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. "Folks are just jammed up, and it's gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I'm young. Forty-four!"

Sheppard said that "Given how (the) media made excuses for her comments in Wisconsin (She said, "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country." -- Ed.), it will be quite interesting to see just how much of (the) interview ..... will be reported in the next 24 hours."

Well, Noel, I looked at the next 72 hours, and the answer is, with one enjoyable exception, "precious little":

Sleepy-eyed people inside the Beltway may see L. Brent Bozell at the top of the Sunday Outlook section in The Washington Post and think the world's turned upside down. But the Post asked Brent to write a message to John McCain from conservatives. Message: "Think real conservatives will vote for John McCain? Don't count on it." It means don't take us for granted.

But on the Post website Sunday morning, a slightly different version emerged on the home page, as if Brent said McCain was toast: "If you think real conservatives will vote for John McCain, think again." Here's the thesis of Brent's article:

I know the conservative movement. I've been in the trenches fighting for an alphabet soup of conservative causes for 30 years. I've raised hundreds of millions of dollars for it. And I earnestly hope that McCain isn't listening to the advice he's getting from these folks. Their thinking betrays a fundamental misreading of the conservative pulse in America today.

Ads like Hillary's "it's 3 AM" work--and that's a problem. At least in the view of David Wright it is. As I described here, the ABC reporter doesn't work particularly hard to keep his Obama light under a basket.

Wright-the-ABC-Obamacan was back at it today. GMA ran a segment featuring Casey Knowles, whose image as an eight-year old was used in Hillary's ad. Knowles has since grown up to be an active, 17-year old Obama supporter. To set up the interview with Knowles by Bill Weir and Juju Chang, Wright narrated a segment about the ad itself.

Wright spoke as a brief clip of the ad played in the background.

On Wednesday's The Situation Room, CNN's Jack Cafferty suggested that blame for high oil prices rests not only with Bush administration policies, but also with its "relationship with the oil companies." During a discussion of John McCain and President Bush's recent meeting, Cafferty, who once pushed the liberal conspiracy theory that Big Oil deliberately lowered gas prices before the 2006 elections to help Republicans get elected, once again demonstrated his lack of understanding of the world oil market as he suggested that a "relationship" with oil companies could impact world oil prices: "Oil was $28 a barrel when George Bush was sworn in. It's $104 right now and could go to $120 soon. Now, why do you suppose that is? It wouldn't have to do with the policies of the Bush administration or the relationship they have with the oil companies, would it? Come on." (Transcript follows)