|
“Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Tim Graham's blogOn PBS, Mark Shields Mocks President Bush: 'Avoided Military Service'?As PBS contemplated the role John McCain's military heroism might play in the 2008 campaign just before 9 pm Eastern time, liberal PBS pundit Mark Shields noted that a military record hasn't been an electoral advantage since the end of the Cold War, but he swatted at President Bush, joking he'd fought "the Battle of Amarillo in the Texas Air National Guard," but he also characterized that time as how Bush "avoided military service." Shields played the role of modern historian: "So we had four elections in a row where the candidate who avoided military service won over the candidate who had gone to the field of combat. Clinton defeated Bush. Clinton defeated Dole..." Then came the Bush-bashing; "In 2000, George W. Bush, who fought the Battle of Amarillo in the Texas Air National Guard, beat Al Gore, who’d actually gone to Vietnam, and beat John Kerry, wearer of the Silver Star in Vietnam." Shields apparently didn’t think it was "military service" to serve in the National Guard. He could say Bush avoided combat in Vietnam, but he didn’t avoid military service. Shields also misleads the PBS viewer into assuming that Al Gore was a combat veteran, instead of a journalist with Stars and Stripes who stayed away from the front lines. Stay Classy, Stephanie Miller: Jokes McCain Picked Palin 'To Look At Her Ass'Out in the snarkiest swamps of liberal talk radio is the Stephanie Miller show, which is very low on policy talk and very high on toilet humor and sex jokes. At the end of the show's first hour on Tuesday, Miller aired a clip of McCain's Friday unveiling of Sarah Palin: "Here is Grampy McSame [McCain] introducing his trophy VP before he stepped back to check out her ass for twenty minutes." As McCain spoke, the show's official impressionist, Jim Ward, began impersonating McCain: "My next trophy wife...The middle part of Alaska is ass...and she's got a terrific one, my friends." Miller lamely added: "She puts the ass in Al-ass-ka." Miller read critical quotes from Paul Begala, Peggy Noonan, and Joe Conason, and said the choice was incredibly desperate. Then Ward piped up again in his McCain voice: "Desperation, and a desire to look at her ass for hours and hours, my friends." Miller wrapped the segment: "We better have fun, Jim, because she may be out by the end of this show." WaPo's Shales: Palin's Great, But Stop the Anti-Media 'Demagoguery'Like most liberal-media reviewers, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales was forced by events to concede Sarah Palin wowed the crowd last night. It was "the night that John McCain’s brilliantly screwy choice for a running mate changed from laughingstock to national star." But Shales also lamented the "demagoguery" of mocking the liberal media, especially the idea that President Reagan was attacked by the media, when he enjoyed "a virtual love affair with the press." A long MRC rebuttal is here. To Shales:
Will Newsweek Eat This Headline? 'Why Sarah Palin Is Likely to Belly-Flop'When athletes trash-talk their opponents before a big game, their comments often go up in the opponents’ locker room for motivation. Something tells me Jonathan Alter’s trash-talking in Newsweek is in Sarah Barracuda’s locker. The piece was headlined "Why Sarah Palin is Likely to Belly-Flop." (It doesn’t have that title online, but that was the header yesterday on Newsweek's list of most-read stories.) Alter is looking forward to Palin being "grilled," as if she was going on with the mooseburgers:
I imagine Alter might be sweating as he rereads this after her crowd-thrilling Wednesday night speech. They gave her perfect tens for nailing the dive. PBS 'Conservative' David Brooks Rips Into 'Hard Right' Romney, 'Biting, Belittling' Limbaugh
UPDATE: On the Charlie Rose show, Brooks grew even wilder, saying of Romney's speech: "I thought it was borderline insane," and proclaiming Palin was "not ideological in a Rush Limbaugh sense." Ferraro on ABC: 'We’ll Be Looking' to Monitor Sexist Palin Coverage
Ferraro did lament it briefly, but went on to warn the media: “A lot of those PUMA [Party Unity My A--] people and I will be watching very carefully to make sure that you treat her just like anybody else. Go to her, her qualifications, go to her experience. Go to whatever you want to. But make sure it's done on a basis where she's treated like a guy by the media. No sexism. Because we'll be looking.” The Palin video is an interview from March by Newsweek's Karen Breslau. If I was picking clips from that session, it might be this exchange: 'Commander In Chief' Creator: Idea of Palin Facing Down Russians Is 'Idiotic'Rod Lurie, the liberal creator of the President-Hillary-imagining ABC TV series "Commander in Chief," thinks the Sarah Palin pick makes him look prescient. "I think Geena [Davis] and I need to be paid royalties by the Republicans." In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he went on to slam Palin as unprepared:
This wouldn't be the first time Lurie abandoned his female-President dreams, even if he still thinks Hillary is wildly qualified, unlike Palin. He wrote about his support for Obama on The Huffington Post in February: Obama Booked On O'Reilly; McCain Aide Trashes Media's Palin FrenzyWashington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz broke two stories on Wednesday morning. Barack Obama held a secret meeting with Fox News Channel three months ago, and he will appear on The O'Reilly Factor on Thursday night, the night John McCain accepts the Republican nomination. (And people worried McCain would ruin Obama's big night by leaking Palin!) The second bigger, newer story was McCain strategist Steve Schmidt accusing the news media of being on "a mission to destroy" Sarah Palin by displaying a level of viciousness and scurrilousness" in pursuing the personal lives of the Palin family.
PBS's Shields Slams Palin for Choosing Ambition Over Her Daughter
Brooks suggested we don't know enough to judge the Palin family values, and even suggested that the children of vice presidents have had problems, and that the media that usually lays off the children are covering this story in a "big massive way." Shields began by suggesting that people in both parties can agree that making an issue out of candidates' children is "really out of bounds." He then turned around and made the mother's allegedly unseemly ambition an issue: Newsweek Editor: Obama 'Can't Write an Ineloquent Check'
Palin's 'Militantly Anti-Choice,' Slammed as Women's 'Colonel Sanders' by the LeftAs Clay Waters underlined over at our Times Watch project, The New York Times website featured a blog post from former reporter Timothy Egan publicly expressing worry over McCain's selection of Gov. Sarah Palin, who would support "removing abortion protections" from the law: "Militantly anti-choice and evangelical, the 44-year-old gave birth to her last child five months ago." To liberals, that birth – to a child with Down syndrome, a diagnosis that in today’s America tragically and routinely leads to abortion – is not a sign of compassion, and a dedication of one’s whole life to raising a disabled child. It is a negative, a sign of frightening religious fervor and conservative extremism. There was more than just an ideological imbalance in the overall coverage. There was a sense that a real woman doesn’t deny other women the right to abort their babies. Abortion professionals were boiling over with rage. Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards sent supporters an E-mail headlined "Truly stunning: a woman who doesn’t trust other women." She insisted the army of abortion advocates should "tell every woman you meet that McCain and Palin are the most anti-choice, anti-women pair imaginable." Public Service or Bias? Reporter Helps Protesters With No Sense of DirectionRepublicans may have largely suspended their convention on Monday, but the radical-left protesters outside the convention didn’t feel the need to be sensitive and postpone their march. They did, however, threaten to get lost. (Let’s hope they weren’t carrying signs about Bush-Cheney incompetence.) Who came to the rescue? A reporter from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, as the paper itself lightly noted as a moment for "public service journalism." Police weren’t worried about the main group, but worried about a small faction wearing black masks.
PBS Fans Insist White Men -- A 'Herd of Bulls' -- Can't Do NewsPBS Ombudsman Michael Getler is pleased as punch in his "Ombudsman's Mailbag" to note that PBS was the only place on broadcast TV for people to enjoy three hours of prime time devoted to the Democratic convention. But even though many PBS fans naturally loved that, some remained in a highly agitated left-wing state that too many white males were ruining the stew. It's one thing to complain about the need for more minorities, but some of these letters to Getler were simply...bigoted:
Top WaPo Editor Celebrates 'Conservative' Author -- Or Is He?Robert Kaiser, an associate editor of The Washington Post (and the former managing editor, the vice president of the Post editorial lineup), demonstrated just how much some deep thinkers at the top of the Post think like Code Pink and MoveOn.org in a Sunday Book World review of Andrew Bacevich’s book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. Kaiser's rave review touted Bacevich as a "self-described conservative," but that description stretches credulity when an author is the darling of the radical-left media, as Bacevich is right now. Kaiser’s review very neatly describes how much Bacevich’s argument sounds just like standard left-wing media boilerplate. 1. The American people are a herd of shopping sheep. Their patriotism is shallow and enables reckless wars. Kaiser summarized: Jon Alter's Biased Parade: Conservatives vs. 'Change-Hungry Voters'Parade, the nationally distributed Sunday newspaper supplement, handed its in-between-conventions political coverage to liberal Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. The editors actually kept the editorializing down in a story on how both campaigns are exciting voters and reaching independents. But you could still see the traditional labeling imbalance when describing the campaigns: John McCain "had little support with the conservative base that has dominated the Republican Party for nearly half a century." What? I don't think any conservative alive for half a century would agree with that. Thirty years maybe, but not 50. Get a load of how Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton: "But change hungry-voters made up their own minds and flocked to Obama, who won 11 straight contests in February...Throughout the campaign season, supporters of both Democrats sent a clear message: We decide, not the insiders." It would have been much more accurate for Alter to describe how Obama won over the "liberal base that had dominated the Democratic Party for nearly half a century." The article was headlined "Why The 2008 Election Is Bringing Power to the People!" GOP's Greek-Column Ridicule Of Obama -- Racist?When the Republicans mocked Barack Obama's decision to speak in an outdoor stadium with Greek columns as an opportunity for Obama to descend to speak to "mere mortals," Washington Post essayist and apparent psychic Philip Kennicott didn't see mockery of hubris. His mind-reading exposed white Republican racists resenting a black man appropriating Greek culture, with its "white temples, white statues, white marble."
WaPo's Obvious Palin-Biden Contrasts on Page 1The Washington Post's Palin/Biden contrast is also reliably stark. This Saturday's headline: "McCain Picks Alaska Governor; Palin First Woman on GOP Ticket: Democrats Insist Running Mate Lacks Experience." Last Saturday's headline was all what Democrats preferred: "Obama Calls His Pick, Biden, Both a Statesman and Fighter." (No subhead for what Republicans said.) The captions under the pictures? For Palin: "Sen. John McCain said Sarah Palin, a conservative with strong antiabortion views, could best help him 'shake up Washington.'" For Biden: "Barack and Michelle Obama, along with Jill and Joseph Biden, on the steps of the old statehouse in Springfield." Labels in the front-page copy? Once again, for Palin: "The self-described 'hockey mom' brings a blue-collar conservatism and strong antiabortion views to the ticket and appeals to a party base somewhat suspicious of McCain." But not for Biden: He "brought an infusion of experience and aggressiveness to the Democratic ticket....Biden, 65, a sharp-witted and energetic foreign policy expert who has held two of the most critical Senate chairmanships, bounded out onto the stage just after 2 p.m. Central time." Whoopi Whining: Brave Hillary Survived 'Femophobic' Assault
PBS Hosts Gore-Won and Obama-Christ TalkLiberal attitudes emerged on the PBS convention set in the runup to Obama's acceptance speech on Thursday night. When right-leaning pundit David Brooks suggested after Al Gore's remarks that it was too bad Gore ruined his chance to be president in 2000 by listening too much to consultants, Mark Shields snippily suggested Gore really won: "Al Gore is a remarkable figure. I'm not sure why he blew his chance. He did get half a million more votes, of course, in a popular election than the man who eventually became president by the Supreme Court decision." A while later, the PBS historians panel discussed convention history, and Peniel Joseph suggested the Hillary delegates had decided to come to the Messiah: "What we saw last night was Hillary Clinton herself putting Obama over the top and many of these delegates who vowed never to vote for Obama publicly came to Jesus, so to speak, and said they were going to vote for Obama now." We're Not In Recession? ABC Finds It Hard to Swallow
Scott Whitlock noted ABC's insistent "Recession Rescue" coverage earlier in our non-recession. Plouffe Your Pillow? Nets Go Easy On Obama Campaign Manager
| |