Ken Shepherd's blog

The media can't really deny the economy is doing great. But all good things come to an end,so what the heck, why not float the prospect of a looming recession? That's essentially what The New York Times did in today's paper.

Staff writers Eduardo Porter and Jeremy W. Peters turned to a Clinton economic adviser to suggest that the current economy is driven by a housing bubble similar to the tech bubble that drove the smokin' hot economy of the late 1990s.

“In both situations we had overinvestment, now in housing, then in fiber optics,” the Times reporters quoted Joseph E. Stiglitz, Clinton’s "chief economic adviser from 1995 to 1997."

[I guess those silly 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that have resulted in record tax receipts from a growing economy and its resultant jobs growth have nothing to do with it.]

Porter and Peters persisted in peddling a discredited media meme: it's the housing "bubble" driving the economy, but in fact:

Last week, NewsBusters bloggers Scott Whitlock (here and here) and Mark Finkelstein (here and here) separately addressed "Good Morning America" anchor Diane Sawyer's softball interviews with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

It's a shame it didn't come out before then, but this weekend Parade magazine released its 2007 World's Worst Dictators list. Al-Assad came in at number 10, up 6 slots from the 2006 list.

Oh well, I guess it's helpful to have the next time Sawyer enlarges her carbon footprint by flying around the world just to ask another thug completely innocuous questions while enjoying the touristy trappings of a Potemkin village.

Hey, I'm just the messenger.

Newsweek's Jessica Bennett, Sarah Childress, and Susanna Schrobsdorff offered lucky Web site readers a gem unavailable to grocery aisle readers of Newsweek-on-dead-tree.

In a February 8 Web exclusive, the trio of writers explore "Why Skinny Models Could be Making Us Fat" *

The answer, in part, photoshopped models. And no, I'm not referring to Katie.

...thanks to technology, often not even the models themselves can compare to their portfolios. Increasingly, photos for print are enhanced and perfected to an astonishing degree. Not only are moles, acne and subtle facial hair erased from already pretty faces, but retouchers are routinely asked by editors and advertisers to enlarge eyes, trim normal-size ears, fill in hairlines, straighten teeth and lengthen the already-narrow necks, waists and legs of 18-year-old beauties. "We're always stretching the models' legs and slimming their thighs," says a photo retoucher who works for a high-end Manhattan agency. In some cases, hands, feet or even legs are replaced in photos when the subject’s parts don’t add up to a perfect whole.

But the bigger danger, the Newsweek reporters insist, is that twiggy models are actually leading American women to bulk up:

The City of Brotherly Love could soon become the second major U.S. city to ban trans fats from its eateries, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported today. The new law passed the city council unanimously and awaits Mayor John Street's signature.

So you'd think in a city like Philly you'd have plenty of people who would find such a ban ridiculous, and would not be shy about telling some reporters the same. That may well be the case, but in today's paper, the Inquirer's Patrick Kerkstra and Julie Stoiber only gave readers one critic of the ban, an official at the American Academy of Chefs. In fact:

If you're a regular viewer of network morning news shows -- a practice I don't really recommend, we watch them so you don't have to -- you know that CNN's "American Morning" is particularly concerned about the "epidemic" of childhood obesity.

Indeed, just two weeks ago, CNN's top doc, Sanjay Gupta, lamented a lack of regulation on Internet "advergaming" to children You know, playing Spoons with Snap, Crackle, and Pop, that sort of thing.

But this week, well, the crew at "American Morning" actually found it ridiculous that the makers of M&Ms have agreed to stop advertising to children. Not that they do much of that anyway, they just won't anymore, now that European regulators are breathing down their necks. And today, anchor Soledad O'Brien preached the virtues of moderation as she mocked schools that ban cupcakes. [cont'd...]

This was one of the topics discussed at a conservative bloggers briefing that I attended this afternoon: the media are complaining that Senate Republicans are shutting off a debate on Iraq war policy by, well, voting against shutting off debate.

"What?!" you say. I feel ya. So did Townhall.com blogger Mary Katharine Ham, who argues that reporters guilty of this sin of commission need to get religion and read up on the journalist's bible, the AP Stylebook:

Now, why is Fox the only outlet reporting that the "Democratic majority failed to shut off debate" instead of the Republicans succeeded in blocking debate. I am no parliamentary expert, that's for sure, but I do know cloture ends debate. So, how do Republicans voting against ending debate get accused of ending debate?

It's budget time again, kids. And you know what that means. News stories that hype liberal talking points about President Bush being stingy with our tax dollars.

Were that the case, many fiscal conservatives might say, but you won't find any attention paid them in Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar's February 5 article.

The Times staff writer cited complaints from Democratic Rep. Pete Stark (D), and of course found a squishy Republican, Sen. Gordon Smith (Ore.) to blast the White House.

Smith has a moderately conservative 75 lifetime average ACU rating, but scored only 58 in 2005, the last year for which a rating is available.

[cont'd...]

The MRC's Business & Media Institute (BMI) Director Dan Gainor appeared earlier on "Your World with Neil Cavuto."

Dan talked about the media's one-sided coverage of climate change, and also made an Oscar prediction.

I clipped the best segments, and you can find them at the links below. Total run time: 1:55

Audio (MP3) Video (Real Player) Video (Windows Media)

Every year on February 6, Ronald Reagan's birthday, the owners of Ropewalk Tavern in Baltimore throw a free birthday bash for the late great president complete with jelly beans and drink specials.

It's a bit of a hike from MRC headquarters in Alexandria, Va., but I may go this year. At any rate, it made me wonder how many other bars and restaurants throughout the fruited plain host similar parties.

Feel free to use the comments field to post information about any Reagan birthday bashes in your neck of the woods.

Ann Althouse has an excellent take on how the right images can tug on heartstrings and emotionalize and simplify for news consumers what should be an area for dispassionate, objective inquiry.

In a February 4 post to her blog, she writes:

Here's my question. How many people look at that picture and think the polar bears were living on some ice and it melted around them and now they are stuck?

And, yes, I realize a polar bear can drown... if, say, it's exhausted and swimming over 50 miles. But basically, these things can swim 15 miles easily, at a speed of 6 miles an hour, and they use the edge of an ice floe as a platform from which to hunt. Where's the photograph of the bear chomping down on a cute baby seal?

And, no, I'm not denying that there's global warming, even as I sit here a double pane of glass away from minus 12° air. I'm just amused at human behavior, such as the way it is possible to feel arguments at us. In particular, we are susceptible to argument by animal. We love the animal, if it's pictured right, in a way that pulls our heartstrings.

I just caught this, originally posted on February 1 to the Web page for People's Weekly World. It's from a diatribe against the Fox television program "24" by PWW's John Wojcik.

Notice how the writer goes on to explain just why terrorism is such a bad thing. I mean, Stalin was just so much better at systematically killing people than some rinky dink terrorists. </sarcasm>

MSNBC commentator Keith Oberman [sic] rightly described "24" as "naked brainwashing."

All people of good will, of course, oppose terrorism. The Communist Party USA has often pointed out that terrorism substitutes individual acts of violence for the mass action essential for real progressive change.

Wojcik also cited NewsBusters as evidence of why "24" is an evil neo-conservative/Bush White House agitprop:

It's a few days old now, but still timely given today's release of the IPCC report on global warming. It's CNN's Lou Dobbs conceding that while there are scientists who disagree with the premise that global warming is anthropogenic, he's tired of their voices in the debate. So he's picking a winner. No word on if Lou is on the invite list for Al Gore's Oscar night after-party.

I clipped the relevant portions. Total run time of 0:55

Audio (MP3) | Video (Real Player) | Video (Windows Media Player) (cont'd...)

Yesterday, President Bush became the second sitting president to ever take a stroll on the New York Stock Exchange floor (Ronald Reagan was the first to do so). Bush also gave a speech at Federal Hall in which he defended his tax cuts, as well as No Child Left Behind, and his policy initiatives in general. But his policy remarks got no attention last night on the evening newscasts, which instead hyped his talking points on CEO pay and income inequality, two liberal themes.

I wrote more about that here. Here's an excerpt:

Most media storylines on the economy are predictable. Tax cuts "cost" the government money. The wealthy don't pay their fair share, and, socialized medicine is the only comprehensive way to address health care problems.

That last one's been in vogue lately as Democrats have raised health care as part of their "100 Hours" agenda. So our very own Julia Seymour took a look at the media's push for Big Brother to play doctor to 300 million Americans.

You can find that here.

But then there's the ones that are just patently laughable. Like where the media pick the interests of say fish, over people. Look to none other than our friends at The Washington Post for that one. You can find our writeup on that here.:

[UPDATE, 11:07 EST, 1/30/2007: Audio (MP3) and Video (Real Player) (Windows Media) clips now available.]

If you wake up on Saturday mornings and flip on the telly hoping to catch solid Wall Street analysis or perhaps a roundup of foreign and domestic business headlines that affect your investment portfolio, don't waste your time with CNN's "In the Money."

Rather than looking to help average joes invest wisely and benefit from a strong economy and a resilient stock market, the CNN crew would much rather sound like Heidi Cullen hosting a movie night/slumber party for the Al Gore fan club.

Freelance writer and former BMI intern Rachel Waters has the story here at BusinessandMedia.org.

PBS tonight airs a documentary on the late Milton Friedman, and perhaps surprisingly enough, the taxpayer-funded network did a good job. [check here for local listings]

UPDATE: You know it's gotta be good. NY Times reviewer Ginia Bellafante panned it for being too worshipful of the free market advocate. And yes, your eyes deceive you not, she found a downside to ending the draft (Friedman opposed military conscription, favoring an all-volunteer force).

Below is an excerpt from a review published to the BusinessandMedia.org Web site by Hillsdale political economy professor and BMI advisor Dr. Gary Wolfram.:

It's no secret many in the media feel that global warming is a settled scientific controversy. But even some scientists who agree that humans cause global warming think Gore's all wet when it comes to his dire predictions. Even so, The Washington Post showcased a Seattle-area teacher yesterday who was at a loss when it came to finding critics of Al Gore's brand of climate pseudo-science.

See my article at BusinessandMedia.org for more.

Portraying an angry parent as an enemy of sound science, reporter Blaine Harden shared with Washington Post readers the story of Federal Way, Wash., science teacher Kay Walls and her struggle to show “An Inconvenient Truth” to her students.

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta found another explanation for why Junior is rolling round the family room with a spare tire: food advertising on the Internet.

It gets better. The study he's citing is 6 months old and hails from the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation. What's more, Gupta didn't give any tips for parents about how to regulate their kids Internet use and only gave 6 seconds to an advertising industry spokesman for comment.

Sounds like Dr. Sanjay has a fever, and the only prescription is bigger government.

See my article here.

And no, unlike CBS's Dr. Emily Senay, Gupta avoided the left-wing SpongeBob SquarePants=Joe Camel line.

UPDATE: I put together clips from Gupta's story, as clips from ABC's "World News" and CBS's "The Early Show" that display similar biases. You can find that video here (Windows Media) and here (Real Player).

Energy independence. Cutting the "addiction" to foreign oil.

They're political platitudes shared by pols on both sides of the aisle, but economists and energy experts argue it's not feasible or desirable to be energy independent.

So why do the media uncritically present energy independence not only as a possibility, but a political imperative?

My colleague Julia Seymour wrote about that in an article you can find here. You can get her newsletter stories straight to your e-mail inbox every Wednesday by subscribing to The Balance Sheet here.

On January 18, CBSNews.com posted an interview that "Public Eye" blogger Brian Montopoli conducted with business correspondent Anthony Mason. In the interview, Mason explained how he wound up reporting the business beat and why he thinks the media have a tendency to be critical of business, as well as admitting that the media in general have a liberal bias in story selection. You can find the full blog post with a link to the interview audio here.

I also took the liberty of clipping a few sound bites from his interview. It runs almost two minutes and can be found here.

In January 2006, Mason made similar comments about the media's coverage of American business:

NBC's David Gregory might be a decent reporter when he's not biased, and I know he's a great dancer, but he's no meteorologist. James Spann is, and on the January 22 "Glenn Beck" program on CNN Headline News, Spann explained the many other causes of global warming other than Gregory shuttling via jet from D.C. to New York to substitute-anchor the January 23 "Today" show.

Maybe D-Greg wasn't watching. The next morning he pressed White House press secretary Tony Snow if the president would "concede that humans are responsible for global warming."

But as Spann explained on Beck's program, carbon emissions are "a pop gun compared to" larger natural influences like "volcanic dust in the stratosphere, the position of the sun, the temperature of the sun, the structure of the Earth’s magnetic poles, and ocean currents."

Video of Spann here (Windows Media) and here (Real Player).

You can find more at my article here.

Updated with correction for network name at 6:27 p.m. EST

...both shall fall into the Deitch.

You gotta love network blogs, if for nothing more they bring out those hidden gems of bias you otherwise wouldn't get from the people behind the camera. Like Ed Deitch, one of the men behind the curtain as it were.

Deitch, a senior producer for the NBC "Nightly News" expressed bemusement recently on the NBC News "Daily Nightly" blog at the notion that there's opposition to a Bangor, Maine, ban on smoking in cars with children.

I wrote more about that here at MRC's BusinessandMedia.org Web site. Deitch also expressed concern about the so-called obesity epidemic in a prior blog posting.

UPDATE 2: Full video (3:18) posted at the BMI Audio/Video Vault. What's linked in the first update is the highlight reel, as it were.

UPDATE 1: Video posted. Dan's segment aired at 4:50 EST.

Video (Windows Media format)

Video (Real Player format)

Dan Gainor of the MRC's Business & Media Institute will be on "Your World with Neil Cavuto" today at approx. 4:40 p.m. EST to talk about the Depression/Recession of 2006.

On January 4, 2007, Consumer Reports released what the media considered a damning report that found that many infant car seats are unsafe at 38 mph side-impact crashes. In other words, small children were a car crash away from a grave injury or fatality.

The next morning, ABC, NBC, and CBS's morning programs played up the report, featuring the story prominently. CBS's Hannah Storm even used a newborn baby in a car seat as a prop during an interview.

Well, two weeks and a federal government study later, Consumer Reports issued a retraction. Turns out the laboratory they hired basically performed crash tests that simulated a side impact at 70 mph, a speed at which you are very lucky to come out alive regardless of your age or whether or not you're restrained in a car seat.

Of course, industry insiders felt this was coming, and one even said so on the January 5 "American Morning." But you didn't hear any of that two weeks ago on "Today," "Good Morning America," or "The Early Show." [full story here]

Is there any industry that elite liberals in the media don't want to regulate? Perhaps it's a little tongue-in-cheek, but The Washington Post's Robin Givhan opened her fashion column in the January 19 Style section thusly:

"If anyone ever needed evidence of why industries should not be allowed to police themselves, the Council of Fashion Designers of American just provided it."

You know we've progressed as a society when our modern-day Upton Sinclair is a clothing critic concerned about models strutting down the catwalk rather than the slaughterhouses that produce the hamburgers they won't touch with a 10-foot pole.

Until today, I just thought Zoolander was a funny movie with a hilarious gasoline fight scene. But now I realize that was just one clarion call for OSHA regulation.

My boss wrote more at our BusinessandMedia.org Web site, right here.

U.S. cancer deaths declined for the second year in a row. It's great news, but network reporters and in-house doctors used the news to argue for more federal spending on cancer research.

Of course they failed to mention the massive private investment into cancer drugs done by the pharmaceutical industry.

Fill your prescription here.

This is just a free sample:

ABC’s Dr. Timothy Johnson leveled the harshest criticism, telling anchor Charles Gibson that President Bush was "misleading" about his government medical research, which he lamented had actually been "cut" last year.

Johnson’s liberal complaint about inadequate spending isn’t surprising. The Business & Media Institute (BMI) has previously documented Johnson’s advocacy of government-run health care and higher tobacco taxes.

She practically blamed Mel Gibson* for why diet supplements are not regulated as drugs by the FDA and attempted to scare viewers with the extreme case of a woman's nose falling off, but Sharyn Alfonsi's hit pieces on nutrition supplement makers weren't biased enough for CBS's in-house blogger-cum-media critic Brian Montopoli.:

 

"The real problem is that any topical product such as the one described in this section of Mr. Hurley's book is not a dietary supplement, and cannot be legally sold as one in the United States. By law such products are drugs. If either Mr. Hurley or his editors had bothered to look at the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, they could have avoided this fundamental mistake," wrote Marc S.Ullman, a New York attorney who represents clients "in the dietary supplement/natural products industry."

"The 'Evening News' gave us two sides of the argument, but it didn't tell us which one was right," complained PublicEye blog Editor Brian Montopoli, formerly of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Gas prices and oil prices have been slipping lately, just not at the same rate. And that's a "real scandal" to some liberal, self-styled consumer advocates like Judy Dugan of The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights. That's all well and good, of course, except when the media parrot the complaint and don't explain the group's biases.

That's exactly what we found from USA Today's front page treatment of sliding oil prices in its January 16 edition.

You can fill up here or read below the jump to top off the tank: