Matthew Sheffield's blog

CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield and HLN anchor Nancy Grace gave eagle-eyed viewers some mild laughs following yesterday's verdict in the Jodi Arias trial as they appeared in a split-screen setup talking via satellite uplink even though they were seated right next to each other.

The Atlantic Wire's Dashiell Bennett and Philip Bump caught the "Anchorman"-esque bit of comedy and documented it with several animated GIF images showing various vehicles passing in the background from each anchor's camera.

The far left hate campaign against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is really quite a sight to behold. The guy clearly is not a conservative but the fact that a political group he founded spent money on a 1-week television ad campaign featuring two senators speaking positively about oil drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline has sent the self-proclaimed merchants of tolerance into a fit of rage.

Not content with manufacturing false allegations of censorship against Zuckerberg and Facebook, extremist groups have now organized a boycott of the social network where they are refusing to purchase ads from the company--for two whole weeks. The threat is pretty absurd on its face but the motivation behind it is no joke. As I wrote last week, the real motive behind the campaign is to intimidate Zuckerberg into bowing down to the jackbooted "progressive" power structure. The recent independence Zuckerberg has demonstrated must not be tolerated.

To normal people, the Fox News Channel is just one cable TV channel among hundreds or thousands on their set-top boxes. To a very tiny minority of Americans, though, FNC is the very apotheosis of evil in America, even “worse than Al Qaeda” as the deranged Keith Olbermann once put it back when he was employed.

For these people, Fox News is something to be not only feared and loathed, it’s also something to make up stories about. The latest lefty to come out with a tall-tale about Fox News is MSNBC contributor and veteran purveyor of conventional group-think Jonathan Alter. The former Newsweek editor claims in an upcoming book that FNC chief Roger Ailes ordered liberal pundit Geraldo Rivera’s microphone silenced during a particularly heated debate last year over the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya:

Despite being largely ignored by the national press, has the murder trial against Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell effected a permanent change on the debate over abortion? Yes, argues Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, one of several major pro-life groups. Now that the gruesome reality of partial birth abortions have been revealed in a court of law by the government itself, things will never be the same, Dannenfelser argues.

“It will be very difficult from here on out to talk about at least post-viability abortions without remembering those images and that there are two sets of rights involved here,” she told NewsBusters in a interview.

Integrity in journalism is not only optional, being dishonest is actually commendable. That was the message sent last night by the American Society of Magazine Editors as it gave one of its highly coveted National Magazine Awards to Mother Jones, the far-left publication which published a surreptitiously recorded video of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaking to a Florida fund-raiser in 2012.

The Romney speech, in which he made his infamous reference to “47 percent” of Americans being willing to support President Obama because of their dependence on the welfare state, was secretly recorded by a hotel bartender and then released subsequently by Mother Jones.

Do you remember when the musician Prince changed his stage name to a symbol as a form of protest against his music label? Since no one could pronounce it, he was generally referred to as “the artist formerly known as Prince”  in the press. 

The immigration debate took a similar absurd turn yesterday thanks to the Los Angeles Times which announced to the world that it would not only cease referring to people who had violated American immigration laws as “illegal immigrants,” it would also refrain from using the latest politically correct term “undocumented” to describe them as well.

A far-left activist group is upset at Facebook because the social network company is blocking it from using Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s image as a means to attack him via his own creation.

CREDO Mobile, a small cellphone operator which uses left-wing activism as a way to promote its business (apparently some corporations are people), has launched a new campaign to condemn Zuckerberg because money which he donated to FWD.us, a political group he helped found, was used to run an ad promoting the Keystone XL pipeline, a project which environmental groups are seeking to block.

Normally, the people who cover the media industry try studiously to avoid mentioning the very obvious fact that America's elite journalists are overwhelmingly liberal and that one can discern this by reviewing their output. This is a logical response considering that said reporters probably do not wish to antagonize potential sources. It's hard to report on the media if no one in the media will speak to you.

In the case of the recent journalist meltdown over gun control, the bias was so overwhelming, even Politico's cautious media reporter Dylan Byers had to admit the obvious:

That pesky Ted Cruz just won’t go away. What is wrong with him?

Welcome to the new refrain in Washington as liberal journalists like the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank are stepping up their smear campaign demonize the junior Republican senator from Texas. Milbank, long known for his acid tongue and fealty to conventional liberal opinion did his part by asking on Thursday: “Is there nobody who can tell Ted Cruz to shut up?

Several posts on what several news organizations have confirmed as the Twitter profile of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev indicate that that the 19-year-old Chechnyan immigrant was a supporter of Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

If that is indeed the case, it does not mean that Obama has any sort of connection with or responsibility for the bombing suspect or his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. It does, however, completely reverse the fantasy that many American liberals were openly hoping for: that the bombing suspects might be revealed as Timothy McVeigh 2.0, someone whose very name they could use to smear and deride anyone who stands against their belief system. In other words, one of those “dog whistles” we keep hearing so much about.

Proving once again that MSNBC is less of a cable news channel and more of a platform for liberal activism, the “Morning Joe” crew today lashed out at members of the U.S. Senate who decided to vote against a gun bill backed by President Obama.

Taking his cue from the fiery and petulant speech the president delivered yesterday, self-described conservative Republican Joe Scarborough lashed out at the “pathetic” vote. His co-host Mika Brzezinski was even more hateful, repeatedly denouncing the senators who voted to support the NRA’s position on the bill as “cowards.” She then ordered producers for the show to put the names and faces of these senators on wanted-style posters in attempt to anger viewers against them.

Under pressure from pro-life websites and writers, several national news outlets have reluctantly began covering the trial of ghastly abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Beyond that, a handful of liberal media figures are finally beginning to ask the important question of why such a sensational trial--if it bleeds, it supposedly leads--received almost no attention whatsoever in the national press.

In a scathing piece, Washington Post blogger Melinda Henneberger, a rare pro-life liberal journalist, rounds up some excuses from her colleagues about why they think the media ignored the Gosnell case. One of her co-workers responded that the story of the abortionist’s alleged crimes seemed more of a local news story than a national one. Of course, local crime stories such as the disappearance of Natalee Holloway or the case against Andrea Yates, are routinely covered by nationwide news outlets.

Rapper Armando Pérez, better known by his stage name Pitbull, used the recent dust-up over liberal celebrities Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and Beyoncé Knowles traveling to Cuba to call attention to the awful conditions faced by people in his homeland.

Responding to an earlier “open letter” by Carter in which he defended his trip to the communist dictatorship, Pérez did not condemn the musical couple. Instead, he called attention to the suffering of the Cuban people and how so many have died trying to come to freedom in America.

While most people have never heard of Roger Ailes, they have heard of his famous creation, the Fox News Channel. As basically the sole national mainstream news entity which is not operated on a left-of-center paradigm, Fox News has become almost public enemy number-one to the far left. For many of today’s illiberal liberals, the mere existence of Fox News is enough to induce spittle-flecked rants calling for its forceful closure by the government.

The sheer hatred leveled against Ailes and Fox News was why I was very interested to interview Zev Chafets, about his new biography, Roger Ailes Off Camera.

Thirty years ago tomorrow, president Ronald Reagan unveiled his Strategic Defense Initiative, a military program designed to change the paradigm from the old notion of “mutually assured destruction” to one in which nuclear weapons would become obsolete thanks to SDI’s missile defense system.

The program was an enormous shock to the USSR even though the Soviets had begun developing their own missile defense system. Accordingly, they began opposing SDI officially and also via American anti-anti-communists. Domestic opponents tried ardently to state that it was scientifically impossible to create a system that could work effectively, creating a pattern of deception that is now being used again today against hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” another technology that can significantly change the world but is being opposed by the Left.

In a new report released today, the Republican National Committee owned up to a number of mistakes made during the 2012 election cycle. While the central party admitted there were too many presidential debates, it only barely touched on the role that unfair media moderators played in both the nominating process and in the general election.

Despite its reluctance to criticize media impartiality, the RNC report did open the door to the creation of a new organization that would be assigned to create and host the debates apart from the media.

Keith Olbermann, the whiney, deranged former MSNBC anchor has settled a lawsuit he had filed against his former employer Current TV, taking home far less than he had been asking for.

According to the New York Post, Olbermann and attorneys representing the former owners of Current TV, which was sold to the Qatari-government-owned Al Jazeera network earlier this year, reached a deal to give him a $5 million payout instead of the $50 million he had sued for.

For decades, members of the elite media have told Americans to trust that their political coverage is objective and fair. A new poll released today indicates that most of the people simply do not believe that.

The good news is that 46 percent of Americans agree with the correct statement that the media are “excessively sympathetic” to President Obama and that only 17 percent believe the media are fair. The bad news is that 28 percent maintain the delusion that the press “deliberately tries to hurt Obama.”

While being ignorant of the facts is not as bad for a journalist as deliberately suppressing them, not knowing what you’re talking about can be far more embarrassing—and amusing.

Soledad O’Brien, the soon-to-be-former host of CNN’s “Starting Point,” proved that point definitively yesterday when she revealed that she had basically no knowledge of the new favorite story among left-of-center journalists, the supposed racism of Fox News president Roger Ailes.

Lefty Fox News analyst Juan Williams is in hot water after it was discovered that a column he’d written for a political insider publication contained plagiarized material.

According to a report by Salon.com, a Feb. 18 piece that Williams wrote for The Hill newspaper copied almost word-for-word from a study by the far-left Center for American Progress on the subject of immigration and Social Security.

During the Wednesday edition of her CNN program “Outfront,” host Erin Burnett and her producers just could not stop themselves from deriding Kentucky Republican Rand Paul’s filibuster effort to block a Senate vote on John Brennan, President Obama's choice for CIA director.

While the show did give some serious discussion to the substance of Paul’s concern on behalf of Americans’ civil liberties, during the introduction of the segment, Burnett treated the matter rather flippantly and featured a graphic of the senator entitled “Sen. Paul Drones On… And On…”

Compared to the Reagan years when there were literally four conservative publications: the Washington Times, Human Events, the American Spectator, and National Review—the media environment on the right has exploded in size.

While there are more right-leaning publications than before, given the left’s still overwhelming dominance of the mainstream media, have things really changed that much since Reagan’s day?

Unless he had just eaten a bad cup of Jell-O pudding, it would appear that actor and comedian Bill Cosby seems to really, really hate Republicans.

The veteran entertainer made that very clear Monday morning when he claimed that Republicans not applauding President Obama’s State of the Union address in unison with Democrats were “as bad as the people who were against any kind of desegregation.” He also wondered aloud about whether or not Republicans today are upset that slavery is no longer legal.

The short film  “Innocence of the Muslims” may not have provoked attacks on American interests in Libya but it does continue to rankle Islamic extremists around the world. In the latest development, a cyberterrorist group is now threatening to attack U.S. banks unless YouTube forcibly deletes the clip from its servers.

As PC World reported: