NB Staff's blog

The Obama campaign is now spending money in Pennsylvania. Is this a sign of the state becoming closer? Or is this just idle speculation considering the state has often been close but never quite within reach for a Republican presidential candidate?

In Minnesota, polls have been showing a dead-heat for months now. Is the state that prevented Ronald Reagan from having a landslide about to vote Republican? Your call, NBers.

Discuss Hurricane Sandy or whatever else is in the news today on this open thread.

For discussion of the teams and sports of your choice. Play nice though!

At this point in the campaign, most liberal journalists are panicked, but MSNBC's Chris Matthews, well, he's just "delusional," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted on the Thursday edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity. The Media Research Center founder was reacting to a montage that a) showed the Hardball host bullying a college student, insisting that the "Innocence of the Muslims" video was the real spark of the deadly Benghazi attack and b) showed Matthews complaining that conservatives are more interested in turning Obama out of office than destroying al Qaeda, and that that was out of racial animus.

Matthews was being "clearly, clearly dishonest" since he most certainly "knows [the Benghazi attack was] not about a video." As to Matthews's charge about conservatives hating Obama more than al Qaeda [MP3 audio here]:

We're proud to announce that just shortly after noon Eastern on Thursday, NewsBusters surpassed the 1,000,000 "fans" milestone on Facebook. In fact, NewsBusters is the only conservative blog with over 1,000,000 fans. The achievement comes as Americans trust in traditional media has hit an all-time low according to Gallup.

With more than 1,000,000 fans, NewsBusters now finds itself in elite company, joining FoxNews.com, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as one of few conservative media outlets to reach a seven figure fandom on the world’s largest social network. Of that group, NewsBusters often has the highest total fan engagement as measured by Facebook’s  "talking about this" count.The milestone was reached as NewsBusters' September web traffic rose 88% year-over-year. Month-to-date October traffic is up 147% from the same period in 2011. [visit our page at Facebook.com/NewsBusters]

We at NewsBusters are extremely close to a major milestone: surpassing 1 million fans on the Facebook social networking site. With Facebook, we have managed to reach hundreds of thousands of Americans who otherwise might not have been aware of our mission of exposing and combating the liberal media's bias.

If you haven't done so already, please head over to Facebook.com/NewsBusters and click "like" to help us hit 1 million fans on Facebook!

Discuss the news of the day and whatever else you'd like.

NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham appeared on the Fox Business Channel's Varney & Co. earlier this morning to review how the liberal media spun last night's debate, and what to expect over the next two weeks.

Host Stuart Varney suggested media bias could not dislodge the pro-Romney trend now evident in the polls, but Graham offered a warning: "We could see some of the most aggressive bias to date coming in the next two weeks, if they [liberal reporters] really believe Obama is losing." [Video and transcript below the jump.]
 

Will you be tuning in to tonight's presidential debate which starts at 9pm ET? If so, please join fellow NewsBusters readers here for a live chat about the contest.

UPDATEII: Our regular chat server has been having problems today. Please click here to visit our chat room for the night. We've also got a live feed of the debate that you can watch on your computer if you can't watch it on TV for some reason. Our version also allows you to rewind and watch segments again just like a DVR.

MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham appeared on Lou Dobbs Tonight on Friday on the Fox Business Channel to discuss the media’s protective coverage of the Obama administration on the growing Benghazi scandal.

Graham said on the Big Three networks, "We've had 22 stories in the last couple of days about binders full of women and networks skipping out on covering Libya." (Video and transcript below)

Analysts at the Media Research Center -- the parent organization of NewsBusters -- have found that both ABC and NBC continue to cover up President Obama’s lie about Libya during Tuesday night’s debate. In fact, neither network covered Libya at all during their evening broadcasts last night. Instead, both ABC and NBC followed the Obama campaign's theme of the day in emphasizing the effort to win over women voters. ABC touted Barbara Walters' "pointed question" about abortion posed to Ann Romney on The View, while NBC's Andrea Mitchell talked about Mitt Romney's "'binders full of women' stumble in the debate.”

To date, neither ABC World News nor NBC Nightly News has asked the obvious, fundamental questions about this cover-up:

Fox News's Bret Baier quoted NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard on Thursday's Special Report.

In a "Grapevine" segment about Newsweek's announcement that it will be printing its last magazine on December 31, Baier read from the note Newsweek publicists sent Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters from editor Tina Brown in July claiming that this wasn't going to happen (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

According to a Media Research Center (MRC) analysis, NBC and ABC continued to run interference for President Obama last night by participating in the cover-up of his lie regarding the terrorist attack in Benghazi.  On the other hand, CBS Evening News fully exposed this lie and called out moderator Candy Crowley for her endorsement of Obama’s deception.

Here’s how it broke down:

Today's starter topic: In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal, former senator Phil Gramm and Michael Solon wonder if the unusually large amount of money spent on the welfare state by President Obama is what accounts for his ability to have any chance at all in the coming election. Historically speaking, presidents in office under economic conditions similar to the current ones have invariably lost.

On the other hand, it is just as likely that the nearly abject media coverage that Obama has received for more than 5 years from America's so-called mainstream media is the main reason the election is as close as it is. Which do you think is the greater reason that Mitt Romney isn't running the table?

Will you be tuning in to the second presidential debate tonight? If so, please join fellow NewsBusters readers for a running commentary and discussion of the contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The debate starts at 9:00 PM Eastern time. We will also be featuring a livestream video of the debate inside this posting

Note: You will need a browser that has Flash to participate in the chat or to watch the video.

Discuss the news of the day and anything else here. Obviously a lot of pre-gaming before the presidential debate going on today. But many people don't like the townhall format. What is your opinion on townhall versus traditional debate moderation?

For the 100th segment of “Media Mash” on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, Hannity honed in on the vice presidential debate, where moderator Martha Raddatz was constantly interrupting Ryan on budget issues. “She was just awful!” Hannity said perhaps the Republicans should look for moderators who've attended their weddings.

MRC president Brent Bozell replied, “First of all, when will Republicans ever learn to vet moderators before they hire them?” Hannity added, “That’s a good point.” They also mocked NBC News as “slop.” [Transcript and video below]

Longtime Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter died Sunday.

This from the Associated Press:

Will you be tuning in to the vice presidential debate tonight? If so, please join fellow NewsBusters readers for a running commentary and discussion of the contest between current veep Joe Biden and Republican rival Paul Ryan. The debate starts at 9:00 PM Eastern time.

Note: You will need a browser that has Flash to participate in the chat.

The Benghazi fiasco and the ensuing cover-up by the Obama administration got minimal media play before yesterday's congressional hearing, and even with that hearing, the media are still hard at work with their excuse-making for the White House, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Fox Business Network's Stuart Varney on Thursday morning's edition of the Fox Business Network program Varney & Co.

For example, "ABC, last night, Diane Sawyer interviewing Barack Obama, she interviewed him for four minutes, she asked him every question imaginable about his debate performance, she even invited him to say that Mitt Romney was a liar" but she spent "not one second" on Benghazi, the Media Research Center founder told Varney. [watch the entire interview segment in the embedded video below the page break]

Tonight is the big night for Vice President Joe Biden. Or is it? Do veep debates even matter?

Other question: Due to Sarah Palin's presence, the veep debate in 2008 was widely watched. Do you think people will tune in this year?

What's news today? Feel free to discuss it or whatever else you'd like inside this post.

We'd like to thank everyone who helped us out recently by sending in their tax-deductible donations to further our mission here at NewsBusters. As an expression of our gratitude, we sent out a shipment of parody "Journalists for Obama" T-shirts on Friday to everyone who contributed at least $35. You will be receiving them in the mail shortly. These are the same T-shirts that liberals snatched up like hotcakes in Charlotte. Some of them were actual journalists (see photo below) who thought Journalists for Obama was a real group, you know, apart from its unofficial existence in newsrooms all over America.

We still have quite a few shirts left, however, so we decided to extend our T-shirt offer until midnight Eastern of October 11. Just go to www.newsbusters.org/donate/T-shirt to donate or fill out the form you'll find embedded below the page break:

Discuss the news of the day and anything else you'd like on this thread.

UPDATE: C-SPAN2 (not C-SPAN but C-SPAN2) will re-play the MRC’s “25th Anniversary Gala and 2012 DisHononors Awards” which took place last week, Friday night at 10:58 PM PDT. That's early Saturday morning (1:58 AM EDT, 12:58 AM CDT, 11:58 PM Friday night MDT). It lasts just over two-and-a-half hours.

C-SPAN2 first ran it Friday night at 8 PM EDT. NEW: C-SPAN.org has posted its video of the event.

MRC President and NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the October 4 edition of Hannity and exposed the hollowness of the media's argument against covering inflammatory quotes Barack Obama made in a 2007 speech on race, clips aired for the first time earlier this week on Hannity. [Watch the full video after the jump.]

Host Sean Hannity set up the newest "Media Mash" segment: "I just played this tape, 2007. Yeah, the speech was reported on, but they didn't report what happened in this speech. They didn't -- major portions of it where the President is accusing the United States government -- before a predominantly African-American audience -- of not taking care of Katrina victims because of race."

Yes, the media are admitting the patently obvious: Mitt Romney won Wednesday's presidential debate. But, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell observed, the media are still shielding Obama by insisting that the president was merely stylistically off his game, rather than deficient on substance.

"It's all about how Obama was lackluster, how Obama wasn't firing on all cylinders.... No," Bozell told Fox Business Network's Stuart Varney on the Thursday morning Varney & Co. "All those things may be true, but that's just the beginning of it." [watch the video below the page break]