NewsBusters Archive

Liberal nanny-state advocate Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is at it again: suing the makers of 7-Up for false advertising by tagging its new incarnation of the lemon-lime flavored drink as "7-Up Natural."

Picking up on the story, ABC's "World News Tonight" on May 11 presented CSPI as merely a non-profit group concerned with truth-in-advertising. But the group is far more concerned with what you eat and drink than what is printed on the label:

Recently, CSPI pulled an anti-soda lawsuit filed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts only after a settlement with soft drink manufacturers brokered by former President Bill Clinton.

On Friday, Good Morning America devoted its first three stories to the collection of phone numbers by the National Security Agency. GMA reporters portrayed the news as creating a "firestorm of controversy" and as hitting Capitol Hill "like a ton of bricks." Yet the white-hot criticism was all coming from liberal Democrats during an election year. And as an ABC poll found, by two to one Americans think the program is justified.

Diane Sawyer introduced the first story, "But let's begin now with those 200 million Americans who may have had their phone calls tracked by the NSA. It has touched off a firestorm of controversy in Washington, pitting privacy against the war on terror. But ABC's Kate Snow and George Stephanopoulos have been covering this story from all angles for us. And we begin with Kate, who's in our Time Square studios here."

Tony Snow is starting out his new job as press secretary, and Bill Sammon writes in the Washington Examiner that after writing pieces criticizing five different news outlets, it's clear "he will be more aggressive than his mild-mannered predecessor, Scott McClellan."

All of the write-ups, entitled "Setting the Record Straight," can be viewed on the White House website.

The most recent two were about the Washington Post and who really gets tax relief, and the AP about military recruiting.

Attacking the Washington Post:

Setting the Record Straight: President Bush's Tax Relief Benefits All Taxpayers

Apparently it's old news week at the broadcast networks. After hyping the year-old revelation about the NSA's telephone record program, CBS has invited the Dixie Chicks, the formerly popular country music group whose penchant for spouting liberal platitudes alienated their fan base, to talk about death threats they received in 2003.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the Chicks' appearance on "60 Minutes" this Sunday is to promote a new album, but the lead of CBS's online promotional piece about the interview focuses entirely on three-year-old threats.There's apparently an effort to "make news" here most likely, but it's so feeble as to be laughable.

Any person who cuts even a slightly bigger-than-average public profile has received death threats. Doing a story on them is of questionable value; doing one on threats received in 2003 can only be attributed to the fact that the Dixie Chicks are liberal. Much-reviled conservative women like Linda Tripp or Katherine Harris both received many death threats but were never granted interviews with "60 Minutes" to talk about their experiences in a sympathetic manner.

One thing is certain: the people within the government leaking the existence of secret anti-terror programs to the press are trying to hurt the president politically. Chris Matthews believes they have been more successful in achieving that goal with the recent leak of the phone data collection program than they were with the terrorist surveillance program leak.

On this morning's Today show, Matt Lauer asked Matthews: "Will there be a huge political fallout? Americans are evenly split on the domestic program [i.e., the terrorist surveillance progam]. Do you see this as the same situation?"

Matthews:

"No. Nobody can imagine being on the telephone with an Al Qaeda agent but they can imagine privacy matters.

World Net Daily points out that the Associated Press drove by a Swedish study that finds lesbians react differently to sex hormones than heterosexual women. Evidently, the desire of the AP was to claim that homosexuality is genetic, that it can't be helped. This, presumably, would make homosexuals a protected class affording special legal protections. Specifically, the AP made claims like "the findings add weight to the idea that homosexuality has a physical basis and is not learned behavior."

The problem is that the study says no such thing. In fact, Dr. Ivanka Savic of the Stockholm Brain Institute and the author of the study said: "This is incorrect and not stated in the paper."

As WorldNet points out, "the Swedish study merely found that lesbians respond differently, not that their brains were hardwired that way before any sexual activity."

It is unknown whether the lesbian nose is trained or bred, at least to everybody except the AP.

You'd think that any reasonable person would be glad that we are not suffering the kind of turbulent times on American campuses experienced during the '60s and early '70s. Campus buildings sacked and put to the torch, student union buildings occupied by armed militants, academic careers and lives disrupted, and the ultimate tragedy of four young people killed at Kent State.

Could it be that Chris Matthews isn't reasonable? On this evening's Hardball, Matthews wasn't glad - he was galled, seeming to express nostalgia for that riotous past.

His guest was author Tom Wolfe, who back in the day had written of radical chic, and most recently wrote the disturbing tale of amoral campus life "I Am Charlotte Simmons". Wolfe spoke of having recently attended a reunion of 1969 Stanford campus radicals, recalling "that's when they blew up buildings and everything else."