Ken Shepherd's blog

[Note: Link to YouTube video showing Capitol spray-paint at bottom of post.]

In her March 18 article, the Washington Post's Brigid Schulte informed readers about why Gathering of Eagles counter-protesters set out to guard the Vietnam War Memorial on March 17 during the scheduled anti-war protests:

At a Jan. 27 antiwar rally, some protesters spray-painted the pavement on a Capitol terrace. Others crowned the Lone Sailor statue at the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue with a pink tiara that had "Women for Peace" written across it.

Word of those incidents ricocheted around the Internet.

“That was the real catalyst, right there,” said Navy veteran Larry Bailey. “They showed they were willing to desecrate something that's sacred to the American soul.”

Yet a review of major newspapers in Nexis found few mentions of anarchist anti-war protesters who spray-painted the U.S. Capitol steps in late January. In fact, the New York Times yielded no reporting on the defacement, while the Washington Post only ran a brief item on page B2 three days after the fact.

Here's the 170-word squib from the Post’s Elissa Silverman in the January 30 paper:

A reader of the Washington Post wrote the paper today to tell editors they need to brush up on their military jargon:

Regarding the March 13 Metro section headline "City Council Considers Slavery Apology, Cadet Case":

Former Navy quarterback Lamar S. Owens Jr. is not a "cadet." He and all students at the U.S. Naval Academy are midshipmen. Midshipman is a rank in the Navy. Students at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., are cadets.

I would expect The Post to know this, given that the Naval Academy is in your back yard.

-- Tom Eversole

Alexandria

On the one hand, I have to give the Washington Post credit for frontpaging today's story on longtime Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe's campaign of police thuggery against opposition leaders.

Yet when I looked through the article, I found no mention that Mugabe is a socialist or leftist, nor was he labeled a dictator.

In fact, the only dictator reference came in a graph that noted that the latest high-profile victim of Mugabe's violence, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, has himself been accused by political rivals of having "dictatorial tendencies."

[more after the drop]

Before I started as NewsBusters managing editor, I finished up a study of the media's bias when it comes to reporting on prescription drugs. The study was released on March 14.

After the page break are some findings from the executive summary. Here's a link to the PDF version of the study.

Even when one new drug was hailed as a “major advance in combating breast cancer” and a “major medical breakthrough,” its manufacturer was given only a passing mention on one network. BMI looked at 132 stories on prescription or over-the-counter drugs from the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts between January 1 and Sept. 30, 2006.

Among the findings:

CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen seems to indirectly respond to my March 14 blog post with a March 15 salvo over at CBS's "Couric & Co." blog. [Scroll below for a NYT story from March 1993 that noted that it was unusual for the AG to be involved in the holdover resignation process]

Some cyber folks, trying to attack the credibility of eminent professors Stanley Katz and Stanley Kutler, took the time to research their campaign contributions. I do not know, and don’t necessarily care, where the two professors I interviewed choose to spend their money.

Cohen may not care what their political leanings are, but the point is that he was citing these "eminent professors" to give an air of scholarly detachment to a decidedly antagonistic view of the attorney general. As such, it's legitimate to see if those sources are relatively non-partisan scholars dedicated solely to integrity and excellence in the legal profession, or if their political leanings might color their analysis. [continued...]

From a March 14 Washington Post live chat with Post associate editor Robert Kaiser (h/t Howard Mortman of extrememortman.com). Portions in bold are my emphasis:

Washington: How is the lobbying system not legalized bribery, and wouldn't ending lobbying by the rich empower the rest of us and revitalize our democracy?

Robert G. Kaiser: How would you end it? Isn't lobbying a form of speech? Isn't speech protected by the First Amendment?

And keep in mind, though many lobbyists do represent rich corporations, there are also many representing labor unions, teachers, non-profits, environmental groups, civil liberties advocates and so on. Even newspapers have lobbyists.

CBS legal pundit Andrew Cohen is back at it again with a new blog post at Katie's e-sandbox, "Couric & Co.":

As always, thank you for taking the time to read my post and to write a response. The more dialogue and discussion and debate we have on this topic the better. It is true that Janet Reno, as her predecessors before her had done, asked for the resignations of U.S. Attorneys. This is standard operating procedure designed to allow the President to have in place his own federal prosecutors. What is different about this current episode is that a Republican White House sought to replace Republican-appointed federal prosecutors mid-stream who were by all accounts doing precisely what they had been asked to do. We now know, from last week’s testimony, why in some cases this was so and the answers we got make it clear that the reasons were not high-minded or lofty.

Thomas Sowell, are you reading? I've got a new chapter for your book "The Vision of the Anointed: Self Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy."

Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy condescended to the great unwashed of the District of Columbia in his March 14 column as he dismissed the desire to exercise one's 2nd Amendment rights as lethal childishness. Milloy was reacting to a federal court ruling that invalidated D.C.'s gun ban on Friday.:

Perhaps it's my inner child, but a part of me secretly cheers the libertarian. Especially those wild and crazy guys at the Cato Institute. The Washington think tank thinks government ought not try to stop people from using whatever drugs they want -- cocaine, heroin, alcohol, cigarettes, you name it -- or from gambling or watching porn online.

And now it's won its argument to let you keep a handgun in your home in the District, one of the most violent cities in the nation.

In a stunning news conference in August 2004, then-Governor Jim McGreevey (D-NJ) acknowledged that he was "a gay American" and announced he was stepping down as chief executive of the Garden State. At the time McGreevey had some dark clouds hanging over his governorship, but the gay subplot distracted media attention from his ethically-plagued tenure.

Standing by his side throughout the press conference was the wife and mother of his child, Dina Matos.

Now McGreevey wants his wife to pony up child support. You just can't pass up a story like that, so the Associated Press filed a story.

Yet curiously, McGreevey's party affiliation went unmentioned. Also left out of the article, McGreevey's sexual advances on aide Golan Cipel, an Israeli citizen, was hardly scratching the surface of the scandal. Rather than a simple case of sexual harassment at the very least, Cipel's hire for a key homeland security post was inadvisable from the start. Cipel, it turns out, was granted the security-sensitive post without the proper scrutiny. Indeed, Cipel, an Israel citizen, didn't even have an FBI clearance.

CBS legal expert Andrew Cohen took to the "Couric & Co." blog to blast Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a Bush toadie, then turned to law scholars with a history of donating to liberal Democratic candidates to back up his claims.

We’ve indeed got trouble. Few attorneys general in recent history have been more beholden to their President than Gonzales is to President George W. Bush. In fact, two years ago, when asked by the Academy of Achievement to list his role models, Gonzales listed his mother, his father, and the President as the three people to whom he owed the most. This would be more charming if the Attorney General had during the past two years stood up to his hero-- on domestic surveillance, on Guantanamo Bay, on protecting good federal prosecutors—instead of simply defending or justifying White House policies and practices.

So, in essence, Cohen asserted that Gonzales has no independent thought on his own because Gonzales failed to act how Cohen thinks he should have. That is, Gonzales is at fault for doing his job: crafting and implementing the president's legal strategy for the war on terror.

Not content to leave his gripe with Gonzales as a matter of personal opinion, Cohen brought in two ostensibly politically neutral legal experts to lend credence to his attack on the attorney general's performance in office: Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin and Stanley Katz of Princeton University.

Cohen was particularly enamored with Katz, quoting him as he closed his March 13 blog post:

...among other format changes under the new Rick Kaplan era.

PublicEye editor Brian Montopoli passed along the usual talking points senior management in broadcast news outlets always give when they are trying to save a sinking ship. You know the drill. "This time, more hard news. We swear!"

Unfortunately Montopoli left out some hard news in his own March 12 blog post:

NewsBusters previously reported that the AP, NBC's "Today," and ABC's "Good Morning America" reported as a curiosity some Mayan priests who complain that President Bush brought evil spirits with him to Guatemala.

Well, CBS's Peter Maer didn't want to be left out apparently. He wrote up a little something at "Couric & Co.," Katie Couric's e-sandbox on CBS's Web site.

Maer's account, like the others mentioned, seems to leave out two key facts for their readers.

1) Just how bloody ancient Mayan rituals were in the bad old days.

Now, as a lifelong resident of the Free State, I can attest that Maryland is a fairly liberal state and it spends at the state and county levels in a fairly liberal manner. Today's Washington Post characterized Democratic Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett's first budget proposal as detrimental to the county's public schools.

"Leggett to Offer Cautious Budget: 6% Increase Would Shrink School Request," read the headline to Miranda S. Spivack's Metro section front pager.

What makes the Leggett budget so cautious compared to the last one sought by his predecessor, former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Doug Duncan?

Perhaps because Duncan's last budget, Spivack noted, increased county spending by 9 percent. Of course both 6 and 9 percent growth rates for county spending well outpace the growth in the U.S. gross domestic product.

In the March 11 Washington Post, staff writers Elissa Silverman and Allison Klein took a look at the men and women behind a legal challenge to the Washington, D.C., handgun ban. But in doing so, it seems they buried the lede.

Information on one plaintiff came near the end of Silverman and Klein's 25-paragraph story:

Dick Heller, 65, said he became involved in the firearms debate in 1997 after he read a news story about a burglary in the District in which the homeowner shot the intruder -- and the homeowner was charged with a crime.

"That's what made us really livid," said Heller, who lives with his wife in Capitol Hill. "After that, I knew we had to be proactive."

That's the heart and soul of the case right there. The ban criminalizes law-abiding citizens who have a natural right to protect themselves, yet find that right severely undercut by District law which takes away a significant means of self defense: private ownership of a firearm.

But how crucial is Heller to the case? Without him, the case might well have been thrown out already:

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," Sigmund Freud is purported to have once said, cautioning that not everything has a deeper, hidden meaning to it. Well, sometimes a blockbuster blood-soaked action flick is just that, a blood-soaked, special effects-laden action flick.

Just try telling that to cynical, left-wing European journalists.

According to Entertainment Weekly, everyone from gay interest groups to foreign journalists have engaged in armchair psychoanalysis of director Zack Snyder's screen adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel "300.":

UPDATE (01:15 EST): Law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh addresses factual errors in reporting in the New York Times and Washington Post (h/t Instapundit).

How are your local TV news shows covering today's federal court decision overturning the D.C. handgun ban?

I live just outside Washington, D.C., and the station I most often watch for local news deployed a few typical media bias tricks: stacking the deck with sources aligned on one side (4 pro-ban, one anti-ban) and focusing on emotional aspects of a debate (highlighting emotional reactions to the court ruling rather than dealing with the legal merits).

Tonight's episode of NBC's "Las Vegas" apparently has an Iraq sub-plot that, at least the abstract below suggests, may carry an anti-war message.

SEASON FINALE-- Mike finds out that Sam has been kidnapped by one of her whales. Meanwhile, Danny takes drastic measures to help a friend avoid being deployed to Iraq. Elsewhere, Delinda learns life-altering news for she and Danny. James Caan and Nikki Cox also stars in this unpredictable and explosive season four finale. TV-14

In a previous season of "Las Vegas," actor Josh Duhamel's character (Danny McCoy) suffered post-traumatic stress disorder following a harrowing tour of duty with the Marines in Iraq.

Vegas co-star Molly Sims (Delinda) and creator Gary Scott Thompson will participate in a live chat at NBC.com following the program's 9 p.m Eastern (8 p.m. Central) airing. [continued after page break]

Nothing biased really, just a curious headline from NBC anchor Brian Williams's latest blog post.

"Let's Launch This Fokker!" read the header to a March 8 Daily Nightly blog entry.

No, the "Nightly News" anchor is not making a sequel to a Ben Stiller comedy. He was blogging about a flight aboard "Jessica," an NBC-chartered Dutch-built Fokker jet.

Fokker, by the way, went bankrupt over 10 years ago.

From the March 8 edition of James Taranto's Best of the Web. (H/t: Nathan Burchfiel):

Another Man's Victim?

Reuters has a cute little human interest story about funny people from Vermont holding "town meetings" where they call for President Bush's impeachment. What caught our eye was not the darling little Vermonters, though, but something in this paragraph:

UPDATE (March 9 | 13:35 EST):  A very reliable source sent along an updated list that reflects 19 additional Gore critics within the scientific community. I've uploaded that new list to the media server. It's in Microsoft Excel format (29.5 KB).

On the March 5 "Hannity & Colmes," the conservative co-host ran a scroll of nearly 80 scientists who say Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is misleading hysteria. My colleague Dan Gainor wrote about that here and here.

Well, yesterday a reader sent along a comprehensive listing of those 76 experts and after checking into it, decided to pass it along to you.

UPDATE (10:46 EST): Kaplan is, of course, an old Bill Clinton buddy. But beyond that, he defended former CBS "Evening News" anchor Dan Rather well after the Memogate scandal as a "balanced and accurate" journalist.

Noted MRC Vice President and NewsBusters Editor Brent Baker in his Oct. 4, 2005, "CyberAlert":

Notes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

When she began taking antidepressants, O'Donnell, 44, said she began yoga and "inversion therapy," in which she hangs upside down by a swing for 15 to 30 minutes a day. She demonstrates it on "The View."

That doesn't explain Joy Behar, though.

UPDATE (3/8/2007| 10:06 EST): NewsBusters regular Jack Bauer has his take here. And while we're at it, I was hoping Fox News Channel "Red Eye" host Greg Gutfeld would have something snarky about this on his Daily Gut blog along the lines of what he said about Rosie on "The Big Story" yesterday. But alas, he hasn't. Even so, Daily Gut is a good read.

I know print publications tend to move slower than online outlets, but this is ridiculous.

On March 6, The Washington Post featured a story by staff writer Darryl Fears entitled "In Diversity Push, Top Universities Enrolling More Black Immigrants." Fears found critics who complain that some university admissions diversity policies end up drawing in more foreign black students at the expense of accepting more black American students for admission.

That's old news to Cybercast News Service correspondent Nathan Burchfiel, who beat Fears to the story not by a day or a week, but one month.

See for yourself. An excerpt is posted after the page break. [cont'd...]

The same day the MRC's Culture and Media Institute (CMI) released its study [pdf available here] dealing with the media's preference for "secular progressive" values over those of those of orthodox religious faiths, evangelical magazine Christianity Today noticed that many newspapers are losing their religion [sections].

The CMI study concluded that:

Americans have clearly identified the media as primary culprits in the nation’s moral decline. If the media continue to singularly promote Progressive values and a secular worldview, while undermining Orthodox faith and values, reversing America’s moral decline will be very difficult.

In her March 7 article, writer Sarah Pulliam noticed a mixed bag on the media's handling of religion coverage. Apparently even as many newspapers end or severely restrict religion coverage in print, religion news-oriented newspaper blogs prove popular with readers:

A reader with a Taiwanese IP address writes us with a tip about bias from the AP regarding a particular candidate in the presidential election on the island nation, Annette Lu:

The opening paragraph of this news article uses the phrase "whom China has called 'insane' and the 'scum of the nation'".

What does Lu have anything to do with PRC (mainland China) and deserve to be called insane and scum in supposedly "objective" news?

[continued...]

Alright, class. Imagine you're a reporter in the mainstream media and you want to write a formulaic profile of a conservative legislator but don't know how.

It's easy if you follow the simple steps I've written down below. For our purposes today, I'm illustrating from the March 6 Politico profile of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

First, start with some praise about said leader's legislative prowess:

"Ugh, now the Democrats like tax cuts too!"

That's essentially the tone of a March 5 Los Angeles Times article* that took Democrats to task for their plans for what President Clinton was fond of calling "targeted tax cuts." Apparently they just "cost" the government too much of our money:

WASHINGTON // After years of claiming that Republicans were cluttering the tax code with provisions that enriched the wealthy, leading Democrats in Congress want to add more tax credits and deductions to benefit narrow groups of largely middle-class constituents.

Among potential beneficiaries: people with elderly parents in nursing homes, new parents, college students, volunteer firefighters and organ donors.

But all these goodies are raising questions about how the Democrats can give away tax revenues while keeping their pledge not to deepen the government's deficit.

But wait, there's more...

It's a good thing I wasn't sipping my coffee when I saw this on the front page of the Baltimore Sun in Starbucks this afternoon.

"Checks, balances rule Md. capital: Democratic leaders split on key issues, how to raise money."

Reporter Andrew Green began his March 5 article by conceding that "in ways large and small, Annapolis is showing signs of a leftward tilt" ever since Gov. Martin O'Malley took the helm on the second floor of the State House. But relax, Green continued, competing egos in the state government ensure that the legislative track isn't laden with runaway trains.

Maybe so, but all the freight the Maryland General Assembly is steaming into the station is filled with liberal goodies:

CBS blogger Brian Montopoli took a swipe at conservative CPAC attendees in his entry on Ann Coulter today, blaming them for her "faggot" crack about presidential candidate and former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.). Montopoli described Coulter's audience as a "gathering of right-wing true believers."

As the Skeptic's Dictionary notes, "True-believer syndrome is an expression coined by M. Lamar Keene to describe an apparent cognitive disorder characterized by believing in the reality of paranormal or supernatural events after one has been presented overwhelming evidence that the event was fraudulently staged."

So conservative activists are superstitious adherents to an ideology disproven by overwhelming evidence?

[continues after jump]