Tim Graham's blog

NPR legal correspondent Carrie Johnson reported on the IRS scandal on Tuesday’s Morning Edition displaying an urgent need to spread some Bush administration into the story. First she mentioned a 2004 FBI probe that improperly acquired phone records from New York Times and Washington Post reporters without going through proper channels.

Then she concluded with how the last secret subpoena for a reporter’s phone records came in 2001. But it involved Clinton-appointed U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White – who just became Obama’s appointee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission:

NPR political director Ron Elving wrote a wistful blog post on Tuesday night headlined “Goodbye, Again, To Obama's Most Audacious Hope.”

“The sudden eruption of second-term scandals in his administration will have many costs for President Obama, but surely the most grievous will be the lost opportunity to transcend the partisan wars of Washington,” Elving mourned. “That aspiration was his fondest dream for his second term, much as it was for his first. Now it seems destined to be dashed once again.”

When the Obama scandals pile up and Obama's image of integrity starts to enter the shredder, what do the most partisan reporters do to fend off the bad publicity? Try to portray the conservatives as "nutso" impeachers. At The Daily Beast, there was this headline Monday: "The Coming Attempt to Impeach Obama: The idea of impeaching Obama is industrial-strength insane. Republicans will probably try anyway, predicts Michael Tomasky."

Tomasky portrays conservatives as "crazy" and Obama as the most clueless of presidents: he knew absolutely nothing about the Benghazi talking points? Then who elected him expecting a competent executive? Tomasky leads with his heart, with his fervent Obama-loving hope that history does not record these scandals as significant:

On Monday, NPR Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep expressed -- in the face of all the evidence of Fast and Furious, Solyndra, MF Global, and so on -- that the first term of Obama's presidency was "remarkably scandal-free." When I challenged him on the factual inaccuracy of this, he tweeted in reply , "Hm, did I say it was scandal-free or that it 'has been described' as such?"

However passively Inskeep expressed it, he certainly agreed with it. Inskeep asked Cokie Roberts, "This administration has been described -- I don't even know how many times- - as remarkably scandal-free. But when you get into the second term of an administration, there's often some dirty laundry that comes out. Is that what's happening now?" Roberts agreed:

How enthusiastic can NPR be in avoiding the emerging Obama scandals? Try this: So-called “All Things Considered” aired no features on Benghazi or the IRS on Saturday or Sunday. (This excludes on-the-hour news updates.) But they found time for six minutes on the trade in rhino horns.

It was more ridiculous on “Weekend Edition” Saturday and Sunday – they also skipped both. NPR correspondent Michele Kelemen reported on Secretary of State John Kerry for 4 minutes and 22 seconds without a single word about Libya. Somehow the State Department’s Benghazi fiasco wasn’t listed as a “thorny issue” in the Middle East:

Both NPR and PBS skipped over the Obama-IRS scandal on Friday night’s “week in review” segments. Both led instead by wondering about whether conservatives would ruin immigration “reform” and then briefly touched on Benghazi.

 On the PBS Newshour, all the outrage was saved for the end, as Mark Shields railed against Congressman-elect Mark Sanford as an unforgivable “jerk” for having his mistress with him at his special-election victory party next to his sons, and then trashed the GOP voters who elected him:

On the supermarket stands, InTouch magazine touts the possibility of an “$8 Million Tell-All” book for former Today show co-host Ann Curry. “An insider tells In Touch that Ann Curry...is being courted by top publishers to pen a tell-all book.”

“The publishing industry is just dying to get their hands on Ann’s side of the story, and the figures being batted around are enormous,” claimed the source. But an NBC representative insisted Curry “is not writing any book.” New York Times TV writer Brian Stelter told the magazine this NBC Curry debacle is still hot a year later because “it was so mismanaged. There are so many unanswered questions.”

ABC and the Washington Post are happy to join the war on the Boy Scouts, pushing every church in America that sponsors a Scout troop to alter their Bibles for the gay agenda. The Post headline on Saturday was "Poll: Most Americans support lifting ban on gay Boy Scouts."

The pollsters did not ask if Americans would also like ending the "bans" in other American social organizations and faith groups. Why can't avid barbecuers join PETA? Freedom of association -- whoever said that was an American principle?

The new Natalie Maines record is continuing to spur music writers to slam the "cowardice" of the country-music industry and the stuffiness of the country-music audience in the aftermath of Maines trashing President Bush at a London concert on the eve of the Iraq war. 

On the NPR show "Fresh Air" on Wednesday, music critic Ken Tucker insisted Maines was just ahead of where the majority would arrive on Bush's wrong-headedness:

Today’s proof that National Public Radio is your taxpayer-funded rip-and-read press-release service for the Left: a Morning Edition story summarized as “College Divestment Campaigns Creating Passionate Environmentalists.”

Reporter Elizabeth Shogren compared Brown University's anti-coal campaign to anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s: “Students at more than 300 colleges in the United States are asking their school's endowment fund to distance themselves from any coal-producing companies.” NPR’s chasing after Rolling Stone and The Nation magazine in promoting the fight to stop "climate change" from baking Earth:

The New York Post reports ABC News producer Don Ennis walked into his Manhattan office on Friday in a "little black dress" and a brunette wig and “announced to colleagues that from now on, he would like to be known as Dawn.”

Naturally, at the Sam Champion Network, Ennis “brought a cake and glitter in to work on Friday. Co-workers left flowers on her desk, and ABC News President Ben Sherwood wrote her a note of support. Ennis is currently shopping a book deal.”

Predictions of the demise of Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio are a dime a dozen. That liberal wish has been a repeated incantation. But it’s more amusing when the demise talk comes from .... “Newsweek.”

Come again? Who’s yesterday’s news? John Avlon of the Daily Beast asserts Rush Limbaugh “Bleeds Millions From His Carriers as Toxic Talk Slumps.” Ahem, nobody’s bought Rush’s show for a dollar, like someone bought Newsweek. Avlon finds some guy whose newsletter has a Facebook page with nine Likes to insult Limbaugh’s audience as “all wearing Depends” – when he graduated college in 1968.

The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Johnson reports CNN has made a deal with liberal actor Robert Redford to produce a eight-episode reality show in 2014 called “Chicagoland.”

CNN and Redford aren’t filming in a red state or a hick town – it’s Obama’s adopted hometown: “One of the attractions to Chicago, CNN made clear, is the president being from here and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s high profile.” Jeff Zucker's CNN is just offering more liberal boosterism in a different wineskin. Johnson warned:

The Washington Post Twitter account pushed this strange thought: "Who's tweeting about Benghazi? Rich, middle-aged men and Chick-fil-A lovers." It links to the Post Politics blog, where Caitlin Dewey wrote a blog post with the same headline.

Dewey turned to a Twitter analysis firm called Demographics Pro to see who's using the #Benghazi hashtag and "helping disseminate, and even steer, the divisive political narrative of what happened that night." The answer seems to be rich white male fans of "hate chicken" restaurants:

Politico media writer Dylan Byers sought to add context to Paul Farhi’s “glowing profile” of CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson in Wednesday’s Washington Post.

Byers suggested Farhi painted it as a David and Goliath story with Team Obama as Goliath. But there’s another Goliath, he wrote: CBS News executives who aren’t happy with Attkisson’s “Benghazi campaign” that’s “wading dangerously close” to advocacy:

The Washington Post reported Mark Sanford’s “easy victory” in a special-election vote for Congress to replace now-Sen. Tim Scott. This had to be disappointing for columnist Dana Milbank, who predicted just last Thursday that “South Carolinians, asked to cross the line with Sanford on Tuesday, are likely to tell him to take a hike.”

The Post tried to paint Sanford as a goner. The only time his race made the front page in the last month was a Karen Tumulty story on April 18 headlined “Trespassing case, GOP's pullout rattle Sanford's bid.” You could smell the morning toast:

The Washington Post and reporter Dan Zak returned to bowing before the radical-left  “Prophets of Oak Ridge” as their trial began Tuesday. The protesters broke into a nuclear-weapons production facility last July and hammered a wall and vandalized it with human blood. The headline at the top of Wednesday’s Style section was “Protest and protocol vie in anti-nuclear activists’ Tenn. trial.”

Zak began by putting the leftists on the side of “morality and conscience” and the national-security apparatus on the side of “protocol and budgets.” That’s funny, we could have put our nation’s defenders on the side of “morality and conscience,” and these radicals on the side of “vandalism and political exhibitionism” (or just “breaking and entering”):

Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever is not a fan of the new PBS show on the Constitution starring NPR game-show host Peter Sagal. He adores a saleswoman who says to Sagal, “You are so conceited.” The article's title is "The right to remain just a little too cute."

Stuever found the man from NPR didn’t fit well in the red states like Montana. “At a point where he couldn’t possibly sound more nasally, effete and urban, Sagal asks: ‘I say this as a man who owns six bicycles, but why does a man need to own so many rifles?’”

Patrick Gavin at Politico captured the host of NPR’s “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” game show lamely trying to claim it’s unfair and silly that they have a leftist image, so Republicans won’t come on his show for a few laughs (unlike both Bill Clinton and Al Gore). Peter Sagal was not asked whether he repeatedly earned his reputation with “jokes” like smearing George W. Bush as a White House drunk and mocking Mitt Romney with doggy-car-carrier and zombie gibes.

This Saturday, almost as if he was starting a campaign to book Republicans, Sagal mocked liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman for being extremely wrong in predicting the Internet’s future:

In 2005, USA Today uncovered the scandal that black columnist Armstrong Williams was paid to promote Bush’s Education Department initiatives. In 2013, it’s never a scandal when MSNBC anchors promote Obama’s Education Department initiatives. It’s another Great Leap Forward for government-media synchronicity.

Today at 4 pm, after her daily on-air hour is up, MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall is serving as moderator of a Google-Plus “hangout” at Howard University for the Education Department on “A Legacy of Excellence: Celebrating African American Teachers in our Classrooms.”

The Sunday Outlook section of The Washington Post offered a list of “Spring Cleaning” items, “things to toss out.” Some were light topics: Jonathan Capehart picked summer “Flip-flops.” But former Post defense reporter Thomas Ricks suggested we toss Texas out of the USA. “I’m just sick of ‘em and all their BS,” he proclaimed.

“For decades, Texans have been clamoring about leaving the Union. Letting the Lone Star State secede would set a bad precedent. (See the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.) But what about expelling it instead? There is promise in that.” It’s because they’re conservative:

The Washington Post put a poll it doesn’t like on the front of Sunday’s paper: Six months before Election Day in the Virginia gubernatorial race, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli “has a slender 46 to 41 percent edge over [Terry] McAuliffe (D) among all Virginia voters and a significant 51 to 41 percent lead among those who say they’re certain to cast ballots in November.”

The Post has tried for years to demonize Cuccinelli, so it can’t quite believe it. “But those numbers may change before then: The poll found that barely 10 percent say they are following the campaign ‘very closely’ and that nearly half of the electorate says they’re either undecided or could change their minds.” But Republicans are hardly undecided:

Leftists (like say, Chris Hayes) are uncomfortable with calling our fallen American soldiers “heroes” because they seem like pawns of a military-industrial complex. The Washington Post put the Left’s idea of a hero on the cover of Sunday’s Washington Post magazine: "The Protester," an old leftist crank who’s sat across from the White House for thirty years for “peace.”

Concepcion Picciotto does not win this prize because she is sane, exactly: the "little old woman with the wig glued to her helmet" tells Post writer Catilin Gibson that she wears a helmet because “the government, she says gravely, is aiming electromagnetic waves at her head.” Despite that, the Post wanted to devote 11 pages to her, with quotes comparing her to Mother Teresa and Gandhi.

In this year's Virginia governor’s race, both party nominees are airing warm ads about family right now. GOP Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has been accused of lacking warmth. But that’s nothing next to what Buzzfeed dug up in former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe’s 2007 memoir “What A Party!”

Andrew Kaczynski offered a story where McAuliffe went to a Washington Post party while his wife was in the hospital preparing to have a baby. Somehow, this slipped past the Post itself when it reviewed the book in 2007: