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Code Pink's Media Benjamin managed to break into another presidential event on Thursday, namely Barack Obama's speech at the National Defense University. The topic was "U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy," meaning that the administration's aversion to the T-word seems to be diminishing as the damaging scandal-related news continues to pour in.

Readers will see that Benjamin was relatively civil towards Obama. In fact, Kathleen Hennessey and Christi Parsons at the Los Angeles Times wrote the following: "Rather than dismiss Benjamin as a heckler, the president engaged her, asking her to let him explain but also pausing to listen as she continued to talk while security closed in around her." That behavior is in direct contrast to how she behaved last decade during the Bush administration -- something never mentioned in any coverage of Thursday's speech I found. The full exchange with Obama followed by a recounting of what made Benjamin an overnight sensation in Sepetmber 2002, follow the jump.

The perilously liberal Rolling Stone contributing editor and Buzzfeed reporter Michael Hastings on Saturday accused MSNBC analyst Perry Bacon Jr. of echoing “talking points from the White House."

Such occurred on MSNBC’s Up during a discussion about President Obama’s recent national security speech (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Occasionally, we sometimes hear from people who believe that liberal media bias isn’t really that big of an issue because most people don’t really trust reporters to tell the truth. This is a false perception because the media do actually have the ability to shape public opinion, even unintentionally.

A perfect case in point is the notion popularized by environmental alarmist Al Gore that the Earth is experiencing more severe weather events supposedly caused by “climate change.” Like his earlier debunked claims that global temperatures were increasing, this statement is also false. But many people are simply unaware of the facts.

In Thursday and Friday posts at the "Politico 44: A Living Diary of the Obama Presidency," Jennifer Epstein relayed the announcement that President Barack Obama has nominated Victoria Nuland as the next assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

In other words, the President is defiantly giving the person who was integrally involved in altering the Benghazi talking points until they bore no resemblance to what really happened a promotion. In her first item, Epstein acted as if Republicans are the only ones who might have a problem with this. In her second item, she found two usual-suspect GOP senators who said they'd be okay being walked over. Excerpts follow the jump.

If you have any lingering doubts about which way MSNBC "leans," you don't need to look any farther than the cable channel's coverage of President Obama's speech on Thursday regarding foreign relations and national security.

At times, it seemed that each MSNBC host or contributor was trying to outdo the other with fawning cheers over the latest address from the Democratic occupant of the White House, ranging from "momentous" to "remarkable."

“Liberal media bias is an old complaint,” the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto noted in his “Best of the Web Today” column this past Monday on responses to the Obama scandals, before warning: “The Obama presidency has given it a new and dangerous form. Never has the prevailing bias of the media been so closely aligned with the ideological aims and political interests of the party in power.”

He recognized “the American media remain free and independent, or you would not be reading this column,” but zinged, “to a large extent they have functioned for the past few years as if they were under state control.”

Tina Brown's Daily Beast knows how to rally around Obama and dismiss the IRS scandal. They posted an article headlined "Former NPR CEO Ken Stern: The IRS Had the Right Idea." In other words, State-Subsidized Media Vet Sounds Like State-Run Media.

Stern, dumped in 2008 after 18 months as NPR's CEO, argued the IRS is way too toothless with nonprofits: "In the haste to trigger the next administration-crippling 'gate,' these analyses have largely ignored one of the most surprising aspects of this entire episode — that the IRS was actually trying to do its job."

Fox News senior White House correspondent Ed Henry said Friday that when he used to grill George W. Bush press secretaries Dana Perino and the late Tony Snow when he was working for CNN, his colleagues cheered him on in private.

"Then when I was at Fox covering the Obama administration," he told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, "it can get a little bit lonely sometimes" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MSNBC anchors have itching for fresh federal gun control legislation long before the Newtown shooting last December, but the network went into overdrive with the push and hasn't looked back. Although the president's push for gun control is on the administration's back burner at the moment, the network is still feverishly seeking to keep gun control at the forefront of the national discussion, even and especially if it means using kids as props to do so.  

Take Thomas Roberts, who on the May 24 edition of his 11 a.m. MSNBC Live program interviewed 7-year old Myles Nelson who imaginatively "came up with an idea for using chocolate bullets instead of real ones in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting." 

UPDATE: The photo has been changed to a University of Hawaii logo.

For outrageous and tasteless photo placement, it's hard to top the one accompanying an article in the Modesto Press about top college football prospect Aaron Zwahlen.

Despite the availability of many photos of the player, at least a few of which are likely public domain, the Press chose to use the following photo accompanying a report that Zwahlen is choosing to do two years of missionary work with his church before he begins his collegiate career at the University of Hawaii (HT to a NewsBusters tipster):

If you were looking for righty-bashing blog posts related to the Moore, Oklahoma disaster, Daily Kos was the place to be this past Wednesday.
 
Ian Reifowitz argued that conservatives' childish hostility to government regulation boosted the tornado's death toll because neither state nor local law requires safe rooms or shelters, and that absent a mandate, such life-saving structures quite often won't get built.  Reifowitz wrote (emphasis added):

Usually movie makers strive to stay ahead of the cultural curve. It makes them “visionaries,” who are “cutting edge,” because they “push the envelope.” Two years ago, “Occupy Wall Street” was the hot fad, stoking the usual left-wing outrage at bankers and the finance industry, who were portrayed as greedheads never held accountable for their crimes. Businessmen just twirl their mustaches and laugh evil laughs.

But that was two years ago. Time for something fresh – and edgy. A new movie suggests that movement was for sissies. It’s time for someone to start a new campaign: Assassinate Wall Street.

On his own website, liberal Rep. Ed Markey boasts he “continues to be one public broadcasting’s most ardent supporters, fighting to fight to protect one of our most precious landmarks on the entire media landscape.”

So it wasn’t surprising when NPR reporter Tovia Smith filed a sympathetic story on Friday’s Morning Edition whacking away at Markey’s Republican opponent in the special election to replace Sen. John Kerry. She tilted the story toward Democrats who called Gabriel Gomez “immature” and using language that “has no place in public life.” He called Markey "pond scum."

Generally speaking, we try to avoid mentioning shrill leftist New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, not because he makes no absurd statements but because he makes so many of them. An exception to this rule must be made, however, thanks to an excellent piece by economist Robert P. Murphy in the American Conservative headlined “Heads Krugman Wins, Tails ‘Austerity’ Loses.”

In the past several years, during and following the recent “sequester” debate the leftist economist predicted utter disaster if it went through. According to Krugman, America was almost guaranteed to enter another recession on account of the supposed fact that miniscule cuts in the rate of the federal budget’s growth would have an anti-stimulative effect on the economy. A funny thing happened on the way to Armegeddon though: the U.S. economy actually seems to be doing better since the sequester went into effect.

A Google News search on "Sweden riots" done tonight at 10 PM ET (not in quotes, sorted by date, with duplicates) returned 314 items. Adding the word "Muslim" to the search reduced the number of results to nine. Fewer than a handful are from establishment press outlets, and one of those only appeared in the search results because a commenter and not the story's writer used the M-word.

That pretty much tells you all you need to know about the determined denial of reality in which the worldwide press is engaged in reporting riots in the suburbs of Stockholm, which have entered their fifth day. The Associated Press, as would be expected, is a willing participant in that exercise, as the following headline which could have been (any maybe was) written by an Occupy movement member and the accompanying excerpt from a Thursday afternoon story filed by the wire service's Malin Rising demonstrates (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Fox News boss Roger Ailes wrote a pep-rally memo to his employees in the wake of the James Rosen investigation news. Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple called it a "masterpiece."

"For all those who wonder what it is about Ailes that endears his people to him — and that makes him such a good interviewee for any media reporter lucky enough to get an audience with him — just read this," he wrote:

Appearing as a guest on Thursday's PoliticsNation on MSNBC, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank mocked South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley as someone who has "reached out to a minority" in the form of white supremacists since they are a "minority," as he reacted to accusations that a member of her reelection committee is a white supremacist. Milbank:

"Pay attention to Senator Cruz because he is the unsmiling, contemptuous face of the wild, nasty, hard-right fringe of a Party that once competed with the Democrats to be the country’s governing Party."

So said MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Friday's Hardball (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On his May 23 program, the Rev. Al Sharpton’s PoliticsNation panel turned to the thorny issue of race in politics. As could be expected, it was not a balanced discussion as Sharpton’s panel was an Amen pew of liberal pundits: the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and left-wing XM Radio host Joe Madison.

For his part, Milbank snarked that the GOP is made up of “a coalition of white southern men,” but even more outrageously, Madison railed that Republican leaders “really don’t know people who look different than they are.” Sharpton, a Baptist minister, did not rebuke his guests for bearing false witness.

Touting the Boy Scouts' "landmark" and "historic" decision to allow openly-gay members, CBS, ABC, and NBC gave supporters of the decision three times as many quotes as their opponents got on Friday morning's news stories.

The networks gave 10 soundbites to supporters of the new Scouts policy and only three to its opponents. Supporters included President Obama, gay scout Pascal Tessier, and former den leader Jennifer Tyrell.

News broke late Thursday afternoon that President Obama had made his selection for the appointee to the position of Assistant Secretary of State to Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland. Normally, that's a snoozer of a nomination unworthy of national media coverage but in this case, it should have garnered media attention. 

If the name vaguely rings a bell, it is because Nuland was the spokeswoman for the Department of the State during the Benghazi attacks, and was at the center of the controversy surrounding the watering-down of the administration’s talking points concerning the attack. But it seems that of national television media outlets, only Fox News devoted a significant amount of time to the reporting of this story. 

Liberal media members love to demonize any politician who stands in the way of their notion of progress, and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has planted himself squarely in the path of the current immigration reform train. It was no surprise, then, that ABC News opted to berate him in an interview posted online to the network’s Power Players blog. [Read the post and watch the video here.]

Even the headline accompanying the blog entry -- “Sen. Jeff Sessions Almost Single-Handedly Trying to Derail ‘Gang of Eight’ Immigration Bill” -- was clearly intended to isolate and demonize Sessions. ABC senior national correspondent Jim Avila, who conducted the interview, put Sessions on the defensive right from his opening question (which was not really a question):

In an interview with Chris Christie on Friday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer grilled the New Jersey Governor on his skepticism that man-made climate change caused Superstorm Sandy: "You said you don't think there's been any proof thus far that Sandy was caused by climate change. Several experts I've heard from say the destruction, though, from Sandy, was probably more severe because of elements of climate change, including rising sea levels." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Lauer began to ask: "Are you not willing to say that's from-" Christie cut him off: "No, I'm not....this is their business, they study it, and they say, 'probably,' 'maybe.' All I said was, I haven't been shown any definitive proof yet that that's what caused it. And this is just – listen, this is distraction. I've got a place to rebuild here and people want to talk to me about esoteric theories."

Despite HBO's Real Time being off for the Memorial Day weekend, host Bill Maher felt it was necessary to offend a conservative without the aid of television.

So he took to his blog Friday to attack Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) writing, "[H]e's got Newt Gingrich's ambition and ego mixed with the steely-eyed focus of a serial killer":

In a way you have to hand it to Krystal Ball. The former Democratic congressional candidate-turned-MSNBC co-host is always hard at work spinning for the Obama administration, come what may. Appearing on Thursday's Politics Nation, the co-host of MSNBC’s The Cycle raved about President Obama’s May 23 national security speech, claiming the president is “reining in his own power,” a “remarkable and incredibly unusual” move.

Ball fawned over the president’s speech to host Al Sharpton, claiming he “put the steps in place” to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, before offering this proclamation about Obama’s executive power:

A well-known phrase states that “you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.” That concept was very much in play on Wednesday, when Piers Morgan -- the Britain-born host of a weeknight program on CNN -- banished conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch from his show for being “glib” about the grisly beheading of a London soldier.

The conflict began when Loesch, who has clashed with Morgan in the past, joked about his crusade to ban guns by tweeting: “Was the guy with the machete a member of the NRA?” Venting his anger over the gruesome murder in his native country, Morgan replied: “You think the beheading of a soldier is something to be glib about???”