Blogs

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):

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, the leftist economist during and following the debate over the recent “sequester” debate 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-stimulus 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???”

[UPDATED BELOW] News broke on Thursday that Attorney General Eric Holder approved the Justice Department's seizure of a Fox News reporter's private e-mails. CNN still has yet to report this development, although the network found time to cover Brad Pitt's "face blindness" on Friday.

Host Jake Tapper ripped into the Obama administration on Wednesday for its investigation of Rosen, but on Thursday NBCNews.com reported that Holder personally approved the search warrant, labeling Rosen a "possible co-conspirator" against the Espionage Act. CNN still hasn't reported this, as of Friday afternoon.

Police haven’t pinned responsibility on anyone yet for the alleged “hate crimes” against gays in New York, but “Social Justice Activist” Murray Lipp has already decided who’s to blame for the violence: religion, patriarchal society, and too many straight people.

Come again? 

That’s right.  Writing on the Huffington Post’s “Gay Voices” page, Lipp insisted the blame for violent hate crimes be laid at the door of traditional groups or beliefs he claims “create and fuel homophobia in society.” Catching the crime’s culprits isn’t enough, Lipp protested; it’s time to raze traditional societal structures and rebuild society from the ground up. “Homophobic beliefs drive homophobic conduct,” he opined.

MSNBC’s openly gay daytime host Thomas Roberts has almost daily segments promoting the network’s pro-gay agenda. Over the past several months, one of Roberts’ pet projects has been opposing a long-standing policy by the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) prohibiting openly gay individuals from being members of or leaders in the organizations.

On May 23, the BSA voted to allow openly gay individuals to join troops as of next year, but gay adults would still not be allowed to lead a troop. As a result, on Thursday May 24, Roberts opened his 11:00 a.m. show with the on-screen graphic “Far Enough?” to express his displeasure with the BSA’s decision. Rather than leave it posed as a question, Roberts made pretty clear his view that indeed it didn't go "far enough."

Friday's Good Morning America spent a scant 16 seconds on the newest development in the IRS scandal, the suspension of agency official Lois Lerner who oversaw the division responsible for processing tax-exempt status requests. Lerner headed the division while the IRS gave extra scrutiny to Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status.

As NewsBusters reported, Thursday's World News completely ignored Lerner's move. The MRC's Brent Bozell had predicted that the media would "move on" from the IRS scandal, which explains ABC's paucity of coverage on Thursday and Friday.

Friday's CBS This Morning, unlike NBC's Today, briefly picked up on NBC journalist Michael Isikoff's significant reporting from Thursday that Attorney General Eric Holder's "signed off on a controversial search warrant" against Fox News' James Rosen and "authorized seizure of his private emails." However, unlike their strong "Obama's war on journalism" label of the scandal on Thursday, Gayle King and Bob Schieffer gave a more subdued response to this new detail.

King pointed out that "Holder signed off on allowing an investigation into some reporters' e-mails", but merely wondered if President Obama was in an "awkward position" as a result. Schieffer did assert that "there's no question in my mind this was an outrageous overreach", but didn't call for an investigation into the administration's surveillance of Rosen and the AP [audio available here; video below the jump].

As of Friday morning, NBC News broadcasts had completely ignored an important scoop from the network's own national investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff that Attorney General Eric Holder personally approved the Justice Department's aggressive investigation of Fox News reporter James Rosen. Meanwhile, both CBS News and FNC provided on-air coverage of the new development. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

In an article for NBCNews.com on Thursday, Isikoff reported that Holder "signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a 'possible co-conspirator' in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News."

Corrected from earlier*: On the May 16 Kudlow Report program on Fox Business Network, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell hit the nail on the head, predicting that the media would quickly shift into the "Move On!" mode as they would start attacking Republicans as scandal-obsessed. The same evening on Fox News Channel's Hannity, Bozell noted how former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather was already using the Clinton scandal playbook and grousing that Republicans need to "move on."

Sure enough, a week later when the Media Research Center returned to Hannity for another "Media Mash" segment [watch the video embed below the page break], he had plenty of fresh material from the networks to illustrate how the liberal media are doing precisely that. After watching a montage of journalists complaining that Republicans may be guilty of "overreach" with their dogged pursuit of the IRS investigation, Bozell reminded guest host Eric Bolling that "this is the old game plan, which is":

On Friday morning – six days after the GOP nominating convention – The Washington Post finally visually acknowledged the Virginia Republicans, those alleged Obamaphobic Tea Party racists, nominated a black minister as their candidate for Lieutenant Governor. The first picture of Rev. E.W. Jackson was on the front page, under the headline “An exciting, challenging turn for Va. Republicans.”

But liberals are enjoying who reporters Paul Schwartzman and Errin Whack found to attack Rev. Jackson as “101 Ways to Lose An Election” – former RNC chairman Michael Steele, sounding very much like the MSNBC contributor that he is:

So the Boy Scouts of America have caved, voting on May 23 to allow openly gay Scouts. It was probably inevitable – just as the organization will inevitably be forced to drop its ban on openly gay adult Scout leaders. Cue the sound of popping champagne corks in newsrooms and TV studios up and down the coasts.

When news first broke back in February that the Boy Scouts of America might allow local charters to decide their own policies on including gays as Scouts and leaders, the broadcast networks were exultant. Well they should be, because they and the rest of the media have waged a long campaign against the Scouts on behalf of the gay lobby. 

A pro-Israel media watchdog accused "60 Minutes" of anti-Semitism at CBS's shareholders meeting Thursday.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the complaint stemmed from a segment aired April 22, 2012, called "Christians of the Holy Land" (video follows with partial transcript and commentary).