Brent Baker's blog

President Barack Obama continues to benefit from a fawning media of which past Presidents could only dream, yet on Sunday’s This Week two journalists fretted he’s not getting enough credit for his accomplishments, a lack of recognition they blamed on his staff’s poor public relations efforts.

Since he’s taken office, FBN’s Liz Claman asserted, “almost every sector in the S&P is up double digit percentages” and “this is also the President under whom we got Osama bin Laden. Those two things are not getting him any gravitas at the moment.” So, she despaired, “whoever’s running PR for him needs to work on that part of it.” (video below)

CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, filling in on Face the Nation, just couldn’t comprehend how a candidate espousing true conservative views could possibly capture the White House. Referring to Rick Perry, she demanded: “Can the Republican Party elect someone President who doesn't believe in global warming?”

She described Perry’s fairly conventional conservative assessment of Social Security as “controversial,” citing how in his book he described the program as “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal,” a “bad disease” and that “it was set up like a, quote ‘illegal Ponzi scheme.’” Repeating her earlier formulation, O’Donnell wondered: “Can you elect a Republican to the White House who thinks Social Security is a bad disease?”

Another entry in my semi-regular series of Saturday night humor postings for NewsBusters drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he and his staff usually select from video montages picked up off the late night comedy shows.

Tonight, a fresh one from Friday night’s program which comes from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central in which Stephen Colbert contrasted Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s safari adventures with what excited Barack Obama during a stop at a store during his bus trip.

Prompted by Newsweek’s Michele Bachmann cover picture choice, in his weekly Friday column, USA Today founder Al Neuharth, a pretty consistent liberal, recognized the magazine’s political agenda.

“When Newsweek was owned by the Washington Post, it was predictably left-wing, but it was accurate,” Neuharth observed before slamming the new owner/editor who picked a picture to make Bachmann look crazy: “Under Tina Brown, it is an inaccurate and unfair left-wing propaganda machine.”

Just as criticism builds over President Barack Obama’s plan to spend the next week-and-a-half on Martha’s Vineyard while the economy flounders, the CBS Evening News came to his defense, suggesting he’s been a workaholic compared to his Republican predecessors.

While “Obama has taken 61 days of vacation so far,” anchor Scott Pelley noted over a photo montage of those he cited, “at this point in their presidencies, George W. Bush had spent 180 days at his ranch, where staff often joined him for meetings, and Ronald Reagan 112 days at his ranch. Among recent Presidents, Bill Clinton took the least time off -- 28 days.”  

“Republican presidential contender Rick Perry rustles up a controversy when he appears to threaten the head of the Federal Reserve,” CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley teased Tuesday night in taking literally Perry’s remarks about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. CBS then played a clip of Perry: “We would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”

Brian Williams teased the NBC Nightly News by promoting President Obama’s scolding, in a CNN interview, of Perry: “On the broadcast tonight, fighting words. Rick Perry comes out swinging and talking and the White House tells him to watch what he says.”

“Billionaires on notice,” ABC anchor Diane Sawyer teased Monday’s World News in trumpeting, as did CBS and NBC, a New York Times op-ed by liberal billionaire Warren Buffett. Sawyer heralded Buffett’s quest: “Is it time for the mega-rich to pay at least the same tax rate as their secretaries? And if they did pay their fair share, would it fix America's schools or roads?”

Sawyer soon ludicrously asserted “working men and women,” meaning the non-wealthy, “pay the most taxes.” In fact, as detailed by the Tax Foundation, “America's wealthiest taxpayers are paying a disproportionate share of the income tax burden” while half of all households pay no income taxes.

“I think there's a lot of time on radio and television and on the Web that actually is conservative points of view. There's not a lot of time for the left,” long-time CNN executive David Bohrman, the new President of Current TV, the channel co-founded by Al Gore which is Keith Olbermann’s new home, laughably claimed late Sunday morning in a live interview on CNN’s Reliable Sources.
 
Bohrman, who worked at ABC News and NBC News before joining CNN in the mid-1990s, admitted he “outed” himself as a liberal by jumping to Current TV, proclaimed “I also think that the left needs to recapture patriotism and not let the right own the flag and own patriotism” and even saw MSNBC’s prime time as too balanced.

Asked how Iowans view President Barack Obama, Michael Gartner, the President of NBC News from 1988 to 1993, insisted on this weekend’s Bloomberg TV’s Political Capital: “I think people have a fondness for him and I don’t think people blame him for anything that’s wrong in this country,” except, that is, “the far-right of the Republican Party.”

Another entry in my semi-regular series of Saturday night humor postings for NewsBusters drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he and his staff usually select from video montages picked up off the late night comedy shows.

With few to draw on from the past week since Iowa coverage meant Baier only ran a humor clip on a couple of nights, for this one a jump back to mid-July for a clip which got a lot of Web play at the time, but if you didn’t see it then here’s your chance to watch a TV anchor dealing with putting the wrong guest on air.

Friday night’s CBS Evening News examined Rick Perry’s record in Texas, citing his claims his policies led to job creation but then pivoting to how “Perry's bedrock pledge to never raise taxes also had a reckoning this year.”

Reporter Wyatt Andrews relayed liberal claims that “with taxes not an option, the state cut deeply into health care and so deeply into education, some 49,000 teachers are being laid off.” He prompted a teacher: “Do you see a Texas miracle?” She retorted, “No, I see a Texas tragedy” as Andrews related that she “calls her layoff the cost of low taxes.”

ABC’s Jake Tapper on Thursday night scolded Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for a “gaffe” over his assertion that “corporations are people” since “everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people.”

That common sense observation came in reaction to a bunch of hecklers, from a left-wing activist group, who confronted Romney in Iowa, yet neither ABC or CBS acknowledged their agenda. The CBS Evening News, in fact, put “Voter Anger” on screen over one of the screaming leftists as anchor Scott Pelley declared “voters are angry about the economy.”

With outrage from right to left over Newsweek’s “Queen of Rage” cover story photo of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann in which she looks crazy, or at least empty-headed, a look back at how during the last campaign the magazine, under previous ownership, made sure candidate Barack Obama always looked presidential.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who the week before last cited “the debt ceiling, which rational people agree needs to be raised,” on Monday evening again seemed to take a shot at Tea Party members of Congress as he urged President Barack Obama to fulfill a “leadership moment” in order “to force Congress into a sudden breakout of sanity.”

TV Newser just posted the news that David Bohrman, the long-time Washington Bureau Chief for CNN, has been hired by Al Gore’s Current TV, the cable home of Keith Olbermann which is transforming itself into a far-left news service. In Current TV’s press release, Gore trumpeted how Bohrman shares the “vision” to create a “progressive voice in the news and political commentary arena.”

The press release touted how Bohrman “will also work closely with Current’s Chief News Officer Keith Olbermann, who is host of Current’s centerpiece program, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, as the network expands its primetime line-up and election coverage.”

Back in late June I introduced a new series of Saturday night humor postings for NewsBusters drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he selects from video montages picked up from the late night comedy shows. Well, vacations and busy news weekends sidetracked me, but here’s a fresh one, my first in about a month.

From Baier’s Wednesday night (August 3) program, a clip from Comedy Central’s Colbert Report making fun of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for musing about missing the pomegranate and fig trees at his home in Nevada.

A reminder this week Hollywood moguls aren’t just enthralled with Barack Obama. They are also ideological liberals who have disgust for conservatives and are especially enraged by the Tea Party’s success.

Explaining his $2 million donation to a left-wing political action committee, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told USA Today he was motivated by how “outside Republican spending in 2010 led to the election of ‘Republican extremists.’”

Running through the findings of a new CBS News/New York Times poll, on Thursday’s CBS Evening News Chip Reid highlighted how, after weeks of media hostility the Tea Party has lost popularity, as he also located people to illustrate how more wanted, and still want, taxes raised over spending cuts alone.

Reid ignored, however, how far more – Republicans, independents, and even Democrats – believe the spending cuts “didn’t go far enough” over “went too far.”

Framing a shortcoming in the debt deal as a liberal would and does, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley on Tuesday night regretted the how “the last time the President and the Congress compromised on a major spending bill, Republicans got tax cuts and Mr. Obama won an extension of unemployment benefits,” but this time “there are only budget cuts and no relief for those suffering in this economy.”

Remarkable uniformity amongst some major national newspapers on Tuesday as they simultaneously worried about how the supposed spending “cuts” in the debt-ceiling deal will harm the economy.

As USA Today put it the top of the “cover story” for the “Money” section: “Spending cuts could further weaken economy.”

Two network anchors, 24 hours apart, cued up House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to despair from the left how the debt ceiling deal, presumably because of some future potential slight reductions in the projected rate of spending increases, will “hurt real people” as NBC’s Brian Williams asked her to confirm her “fear” that “the poor are gonna get hurt and the rich are gonna get by without harm.”

On Monday’s World News, ABC’s Diane Sawyer inquired (video below): “You think this is really going to hurt real people?”

Three noteworthy spins, charges and/or claims made on the Sunday morning interview shows.

> ABC’s This Week, with “ALL CUTS, NO TAXES?” on screen: George Stephanopoulos hit White House senior adviser David Plouffe from the left on how “this enforcement mechanism would not include revenue increases, would be just across the board spending cuts.” He fretted the deal “all but guarantee that the final product is all spending cuts and not the balanced approach the President wants.” Christiane Amanpour despaired President Obama “has moved all of the way to the language and the ideals that the Republicans espouse.”

> CBS’s Face the Nation: Bob Schieffer insisted “some people say that the Republican Party has been held hostage by the Tea Party” and he discerned “some truth” in an allegation he saw on Facebook that allowing House freshmen “‘to control this debate’” is “‘like letting the teenager in the family run the family budget.’”

The broadcast network evening newscasts on Friday night noted the very anemic second quarter GDP growth rate at 1.3 percent, but instead of stressing how it showed the weak economic state well before the debt ceiling showdown, they submerged it into warnings of how the delay in getting a deal is hurting the economy.

On ABC’s World News, Bianna Golodryga, aka Mrs. Peter Orszag, the wife of Obama’s former OMB Director, helped her husband’s ex-employer by failing to even mention the worst news of the day: the revision of the first quarter GDP down to a flat line 0.4 percent from the original 1.9 percent estimate. At least CBS and NBC considered that newsworthy.

Running a brief excerpt from his Sunday night Dateline special, “Taking the Hill: Inside Congress,” Brian Williams on Thursday evening showcased one and only one question he posed to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He demanded: “Why shouldn't rich folks pay more?”

Williams insisted on NBC Nightly News that’s “a hot topic, no tax increase in any of these plans being discussed” in “what has become a big charge from the left that in any of these debt ceiling deals the poor are likely to get hit while the rich are likely to get a pass.”

Acting as if he were trying out for a MSNBC gig, Piers Morgan used his half hour of CNN’s prime time, following President Barack Obama’s 9 PM EDT speech on the debt ceiling and House Speaker John Boehner’s response, to hit his guests from the left, presuming Obama holds the reasoned moral high ground while Boehner represents an obstinate and selfish position. 

“A lot of people blame the financial crisis on Bush tax cuts and expensive wars,” Morgan told GOP Senator Rob Portman of Ohio in repeating a liberal talking point, demanding: “Isn't it time you guys took one for the team, the team being America?”

Adopting the spin of President Barack Obama -- who on Friday insisted “one of the questions that the Republican Party is going to have to ask itself is: Can they say yes to anything?” – on Sunday’s Face the Nation CBS’s Bob Schieffer demanded of Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl: “Is there a problem for Republicans that might emerge as just the party of no? The party that can't say yes to anything?”

House Republicans have a budget-cutting proposal that stands no chance of getting by President Obama while some Senators have a big tax-hiking plan which stands no chance of passage in the House, but CBS, in illustrating the larger media take, framed the conservative plan as a distracting waste of time while cheerleading the Senate’s “Gang of 33” plan in the name of “bi-partisanship.”

Barf. “We sometimes forget just how in the tank much of the press is for Obama,” the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto observed last week in catching an effusive, to put it mildly, love letter to Barack Obama published in the August edition of Hearst’s Esquire magazine.

“2011 is the summer of Obama,” gushed Stephen Marche, genuflecting “‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy.” More sophistry: “Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.”