Blogs

On Friday, March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens, Winston Moseley murdered Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, in Queens. In a March 10, 2014 column (HT Instapundit) in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann reviewed two recently published books on the murder and its aftermath, one by Catherine Pelonero and the other by Kevin Cook.

Lemann writes that the murder "became an American obsession ... (due) to the influence of one man, A. M. Rosenthal, of the New York Times." It's worth reading the whole article to see how one newspaper five decades ago was able to shape a national narrative with no resistance. Excerpts pointing to how the Times manipulated the circumstances to cast aspersions on ordinary citizens follow the jump:

ABC's World News named Rico Roman, a member of Team U.S.A. in the Sochi Paralympics, its 'Person of the Week' on Friday. Roman, an Iraq War veteran who lost his left leg after his Humvee struck an IED, is now the "the star forward of the U.S. Paralympic hockey team." Amy Robach spotlighted how the Oregon native "discovered sled hockey – an outlet from the confines of a hospital room."

The correspondent also pointed out how a significant percentage of the American Paralympics team come from the military: [video below the jump]

"Just 11 percent of young African-Americans say that life is better for them under Obama. You know what that means? Young African-Americans are racist!" snarked NewsBusted host Jodi Miller in the March 14 edition of the NewsBusters comedy original. Hey, Jodi, don't give MSNBC any ideas!

National Public Radio, pot-smoking Californians, and the city of Detroit are other targets of NewsBusted's Jodi Miller in the latest edition of the NewsBusters comedy original. [watch the video below the page break]

In a late Friday afternoon release, the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced its intent "to transition key Internet domain name functions to the global multistakeholder community." The statement is full of the kind of dense bureaucratic language one tends to see when the agency is doing something really important but controversial.

Stating the situation more clearly, TheDomains.com calls it "the Offical Statement Of The US Giving Up Control Over ICANN" (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Americans for Limited Government has issued a press release "blasting the Obama Commerce Department for turning over control of the Internet to United Nations International Telecommunication Union." The one story in the press as of 7:30 p.m. was at the Politico, whose Erin Mershon appears to have caught wind of the news ahead of NTIA's release. Mershon takes eight paragraphs to tell readers to whom the functions are to be transitioned — and I don't think her dallying is mere sloppiness (bolds are mine):

Tonight’s (March 14) Blue Bloods on CBS (10 PM EDT/PDT) will center a plot around the “knockout game,” in which assailants whack people on the back of the head to knock them unconscious and then rob them, a crime which MSNBC and the left have mocked the Fox News Channel for covering. The CBS drama stars Tom Selleck, as New York City Police Commissioner “Frank Reagan,” and Donnie Wahlberg, as his son, “Detective Danny Reagan.”

Video after the jump of the promo, for the March 14 episode, “Knockout Game,” run at the end of last Friday’s episode.

Radio libtalker and MSNBC action hero Ed Schultz used to be conservative, as he'll occasionally remind his audience. Earlier this week on his radio show, he lapsed back.

The occasion was a discussion with a caller over President Obama's apparent support for the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact that would involve the U.S., Canada, Mexico and nine other nations in South America and Asia. (Audio after the jump)

In his March 13 Daily Beast piece lamenting that "the GOP can't take a joke," comedian Dean Obeidallah demonstrated he doesn't read NewsBusters closely and/or that he lacks proper reading comprehension skills.

Here's how Obeidallah described a March 12 story by my colleague Jeffrey Meyer:

An annoyed Rachel Maddow on Thursday lectured ABC News for daring to question Barack Obama's appearance earlier this week on an internet comedy show. After playing a clip of reporter Jim Avila quizzing Jay Carney on whether the chat program damaged the "the dignity of the office," Maddow labeled this contention "completely and totally wrong." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

She mocked "capital V, capital S, very serious pundit David Gergen" for this tweet: "Unimaginable that Truman, Ike, JFK, Reagan would appear on 'Between Two Ferns.' They carefully projected majesty of their office." According to Maddow, there is precedent because Ronald Reagan appeared on a Bob Hope birthday show and Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh-In. The examples hardly compare. 

The Washington Post might want to just call themselves The Washington Pot. Once again, on Friday, they adorned their front page with a pro-pot article, this one a Holly Yeager article headlined “Congress hears a new cannabis pitch: It's just good business.”

On Sunday, February 23, they splashed all-caps  “MARIJUANA’S MOMENT?” across the top of the front page. Inside were two full pages of promotional copy with the headline “Social, fiscal forces raise pot’s acceptance.” Marc Fisher wrote 4,500 words on it. On March 3 came a 2398-word front-pager from Ariana Eunjung Cha titled “'Mommy lobby' pushes for medical marijuana.”

Washington Post "Fact Checker" blogger Glenn Kessler has given "Four Pinocchios" ("a whopper") to a pro-Democratic group's political ad opposing the U.S. Senate candidacy of Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy. The claim: The Koch Brothers, who are prominent financial supporters of the pro-GOP group Americans for Prosperity, want to protect, in the ad's words, “tax cuts for companies that ship our jobs overseas.”

Unfortunately, I have been told that Kessler's post did not make the paper's print edition; to no one's surprise, the Post has a tendency to give Kessler posts which fact-check Republicans greater print edition visibility. Additionally, at least one other Post writer and career race-baiter Al Sharpton have praised the anti-Koch ad and the strategy behind it. The likelihood that either will acknowledge Kessler's debunking is extremely low. Here are the key paragraphs from Kessler's work (bolds are mine throughout this post):

NBC, ABC, and CBS marked the one-year anniversary of Pope Francis being elected leader of the Catholic Church with positive stories about the Pontiff's personal style while impatiently pleading for him to reject the moral values he swore to uphold. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

On Thursday's NBC Today, correspondent Anne Thompson summed up a discussion she had with a group of students at Loyola University by proclaiming: "Now, these young Catholics don't expect change on the divisive issues of contraception, gay marriage, or abortion. But they are thrilled that that's not all the Pope talks about." She added that they were happy avoiding such social issues and "getting back to the original message of Jesus Christ."

On Wednesday’s edition of The Arsenio Hall Show, the host mocked Fox News for a graphics error and slammed: “Then again when does Fox News ever get anything right?”

The hit on Fox News may have been a signal to Brian Williams (who Hall has been trying to get on his show ever since the NBC Nightly News anchor apologized for snubbing him) that he will be given a cozy spot on the interview couch from the fellow liberal. [Video after the jump]

MSNBC continues to fail to take the IRS targeting scandal seriously. On Thursday’s NOW with Alex Wagner, Ms. Wagner and her guest, Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post, showed their utter disdain for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and his committee’s ongoing investigation into the scandal. [Video below. MP3 audio here.]

Wagner took particular offense to Issa’s move to hold IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress, dismissing it as an attempt to “gum up the government works.” Mocking Issa and his fellow House Republicans, Wagner screeched:

"The U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine of the country's 55,000 electric-transmission substations on a scorching summer day, according to a previously unreported federal analysis," the Wall Street Journal's Rebecca Smith reported on the front page of Thursday's paper. A set of "coordinated attacks in each of the nations' three separate electric systems could cause the entire power network to collapse," Smith noted, citing "people familiar with the [Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] research."

A development like this is quite newsworthy and a topic that makes for good TV news, yet the broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, and NBC -- completely ignored the item both on the March 13 evening newscasts and the March 14 morning news programs. By contrast, they found air time for rather frivolous stories such as:

A clearly worried Chris Matthews attempted to rally the Democratic Party to avoid a midterm massacre, openly suggesting that the party's goals should be "angering" voters with "scary" Republicans. On Thursday morning, the MSNBC anchor conceded that the U.S. Senate will go Republican in November. By Thursday night, he pivoted, lecturing Democrats: "...You can give the angry voter out there something really scary to vote against, a direction to really direct his or her anger." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] "Time to attack," roared Matthews. 

Jumping from issue to terrifying issue, the Hardball host hyperventilated, "Want something else to fear? If the Republicans get the upper hand this fall, women's health care, Roe v. Wade, which that Florida Republican who just won plans to repeal." Matthews suggested, "You can warn people what the Republicans will do if they really clench power, how they're hell bent on cutting entitlements." 

Being a liberal press outlet may mean never having to say you’re sorry, but sometimes, you do have to print a “correction.”

The AP provided a correction to a story yesterday by Philip Elliott that falsely claimed that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-UT, were “calling their opponents Satan worshippers and savages” during the Susan B. Anthony Campaign for Life Summit in Washington, D.C. on March 12. The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, U.S. News and World Report and several other organizations published the AP story, although exclusive video provided by the Media Research Center’s Culture and Media Institute showed otherwise.

Once again, all the news networks are rushing to assist the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association raise funds in their annual "Headlines and Headliners" fundraiser in New York City. The host of the soiree this year is ABC anchor Amy Robach.

The NLGJA president is currently CNN producer Jen Christensen. The group is journalists "working from within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of LGBT issues." That's code for "one-sided and very politically correct coverage of LGBT issues." There's a long list of socially liberal media elites attending, including the usual Fox News contingent. Some are wondering if Shepard Smith's attendance will come with an acknowledgment of the rumors he is gay:

In response to commenter demand, an open thread for your Friday. First topic -- what happens when the media starts eating itself, metaphorically?

At the beginning of the Lewinsky scandal, it took three days for the media to start bashing itself. Things may be truly getting awful for Obama when you see Matt Bai, formerly of Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, whacking "TV pundits" for daring to question Obama's "interview" with comedian Zack Galifianakis for the Will Ferrell website Funny or Die:

Longtime CBS reporter Bill Plante gave an interview to Steve Johnson at his hometown Chicago Tribune and discussed how we face a “state-run media” in recent years. It began under Bush, he suggested.

“He was neither as stupid or as disconnected as people thought, not at all. If he saw somebody leaking he didn't like it,” Plante said. “And this president doesn't like it any more than that.” He said it’s “just a lot harder” to get information now from squabbling camps inside the White House staff. So Plante made waves last year when he said Obama was undercutting the First Amendment and defining what the news was:

During a brief visit to Washington, D.C., Deborah Turness – the president of NBC News – is slated to discuss the fate of the network's Sunday morning program with host David Gregory and executive producer Rob Yarin regarding possible changes to the format of Meet the Press, which recently saw its ratings tumble to their lowest point since the third quarter of 1992.

According to Dylan Byers, a columnist at the Politico website, the gathering is “part of Turness's ongoing effort” to improve the long-running news and interview show, which ended 2013 behind both ABC's This Week and CBS's Face the Nation.

MSNBC's Ronan Farrow marked the one-year anniversary of the election of Pope Francis on Thursday by browbeating the Catholic Church for supposedly thwarting the fight against AIDS in the developing world, and for the Church's apparent lack of action in stopping genocide. Farrow played up how "Church social policies often fly in the face of skyrocketing HIV rates," and bemoaned how "the Church does still ban contraception in those places. Is that costing lives?"

The neophyte TV host asked one of his priest guests, "You don't think that it's irresponsible, given the emphasis on mercy and the preservation of life, that there's not more leeway on that doctrine?" He also played up how "brutal conflicts in countries with significant Catholic populations demand attention that some say the Church is failing to provide," and faulted the Church for its apparent inaction during the genocide in Rwanda almost 20 years ago: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]

Apparently, Ed Schultz doesn't mean it when he says "get your tapes rolling at home." The MSNBC anchor on Wednesday attempted to rewrite his bogus, boastful prediction about ObamaCare. As noted by the Washington Post, on December 11, 2013, Schultz prognosticated: "I'm going to make a prediction tonight. It's going to hit five million by March 1st. That's right. Five million people signed up by March 1st. Get your tapes rolling at home folks 'cause it's going to be a big 'I told you so.'" 

The just-released ObamaCare numbers for the end of February state that 4.2 million Americans have enrolled. Talking to Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, Schultz whitewashed his prediction, announcing, "Well, I predicted five million people are going to sign up by the end of this month. We're closing on it on that number." [See video below for a contrast of the two quotes. MP3 audio here.]

February's retail sales as reported may have been expectations of a 0.2 percent seasonally adjusted rise, but the 0.3 percent increase turned in was still far from impressive, especially after considering that the Census Bureau revised January's result down to -0.6 percent from an originally reported -0.4 percent.

Naturally, that didn't stop the Associated Press's Josh Boak and his story's headline writer from celebrating the news as a "rebound." Even more absurdly, Boak claimed that "Last month's rebound almost brought retail spending back to its December levels." Excerpts follow the jump:

In a conflict that pits two politically correct minority "victim" classes against one another, which one will win out? That's a fun parlor game to play, and today across the Pond it seems the answer is observant Muslims when the conflict involves the aforementioned and gays, even if the gay person in question is, himself, a Muslim.

Breitbart London managing editor Raheem Kassam has the story of how BBC Three refused to entertain discussion of a gay Muslim drag queen's question -- "[W]hen will it be right to be Muslim and gay?" -- during a forum for the program entitled, I kid you not,  Free Speech (emphasis mine):

You know how Chris Matthews gets a thrill up his leg when Obama's rhetoric soars to unprecedented heights from the television monitors at MSNBC? Seth Meyers undergoes a full-body thrill whenever Rachel Maddow is in the same zip code.

Maddow appeared on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" Tuesday for an interview that quickly degenerated into Meyers essentially revealing he's a lesbian trapped in a man's body and that he and Maddow would make a wonderful couple, they really really would. (Video after the jump)

The co-hosts of The View brought on Republican strategist Nicolle Wallace, Thursday, to give the Republican view on politics. But instead of offering the loyal opposition, the former top aide to John McCain gushed over the Clintons. 

Asked by Jenny McCarthy if Bill Clinton's personal problems will be an issue in 2016, Wallace blurted, "No. That's baked in the cake. I mean, to know Bill is to love Bill, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]