Matthew Sheffield's blog

With no manufactured outrage to hammer Mitt Romney at the moment, liberal journalists are now eagerly touting a series of polls which appear to show President Obama pulling away from the GOP nominee in several key states.

Unfortunately, these polls are relying on sample sizes which are skewed tremendously leftward with far more Democrats than Republicans and as such, they are unlikely to be good predictors of actual Election Day turnout. Do the pollsters themselves actually believe in their own sample sizes though? At least one appears not to.

CBS News, current employer of the reporter caught coordinating attack questions against Mitt Romney and former employer of the disgraced Dan Rather, is actually not biased. So says its current president David Rhodes.

Now that you've had your guffaw, let's get into the specifics. According to Rhodes, his news team is actually "constantly diligent" to avoid being accused of bias. Those who do so are simply trying to affix "labels" to what is actually objective reporting.

Responding to a week of non-stop attacks on his speech to the Republican National Convention last Thursday, Hollywood superstar Clint Eastwood blasted his critics, saying they were “obviously on the left” and that they couldn’t bear to hear him tell the truth about their hero, President Barack Obama.

“President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Eastwood told the Carmel Pine Cone, the local newspaper in his hometown of Carmel, California. “Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know. I may have irritated a lot of the lefties, but I was aiming for people in the middle.”

Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes, it's just as strange. Who knew that just a few days after our colleagues at MRCTV attracted a mob at the DNC passing out t-shirts bearing the phrase "Journalists for Obama" that we'd see a report of journalists actually trying to do the very same thing?

But then again, this is the press that has so overwhelmingly favored Barack Obama since he began his candidacy for president in 2007 that it isn't exactly surprising.

After being dropped by CNN in 2007, former top political correspondent Bob Franken has gone on to market himself as a political pundit, revealing the inner liberal that more close observers of his supposedly “impartial” reporting long suspected was there.

Appearing over the weekend on the MSNBC program hosted by liberal college professor Melissa Harris-Perry, former top CNN correspondent Bob Franken appeared to endorse the far left notion of a maximum income. “How many vacation homes do you need?” Franken asked during a hotly disputed discussion which also featured a preposterous rant by the host. Video and transcript below the fold.

Just hours after a producer for deranged MSNBC host Chris Matthews was accused of physically assaulting Republicans outside the party’s national convention last night, Matthews himself has admitted to verbally confronting several GOP delegates at a restaurant in Tampa, Florida calling them a “douchebag convention.”

According to The Hill newspaper, the perpetually angry liberal television host confronted the delegates early Friday morning following taunting questions they asked about whether he felt “thrilled” following GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech.

Over the past several years, even as the circulation and influence of traditional media has declined, there has been an explosion in the numbers of journalists producing sois-disant "fact-checking" pieces. As the god that failed (the media) has become tarnished, a new one ("fact-checking") has been set up.

Unfortunately, as our friends at IBD note today, such attempts to hold politicians accountable, often leave much to be desired:

Speaking with NewsBusters at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer reacted strongly to the offensive joke made by ousted Yahoo News Washington bureau chief David Chalian that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his wife Ann.

"It baffles me that somebody like that could even be hired in the first place," Fleischer said.

Notorious PBS liberal Gwen Ifill took to Twitter to defend David Chalian, the former Yahoo Washington bureau chief who was fired for claiming that Mitt and Ann Romney are "happy to have a party with black people drowning," claiming that he was unjustly fired. Her defense was markedly over-the-top:

"One mistake does not change this. @DavidChalian is God's gift to political journalism. #IStandwithDavid"

Yahoo has fired its Washington bureau chief David Chalian after NewsBusters exclusively revealed his offensive remarks that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his wife Ann were "happy to have a party with black people drowning."

Chalian made the comment during a live webcast of the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Here is Yahoo's statement:

During live coverage of the Republican National Convention here in Tampa, Yahoo News Washington bureau chief David Chalian provided the perfect example of the pervasive anti-Republican bias Mitt Romney faces in his bid to unseat President Barack Obama.

In video broadcast Monday night by ABC and Yahoo over the Internet, Chalian can be heard claiming that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his wife Ann are unconcerned about the fate of residents of the New Orleans area who are currently being hit by Hurricane Isaac.

Given the extreme media interest in the subject of abortion of late and the press's imaginary link between views of a Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin and Republican GOP hopeful Mitt Romney, it's worth considering the actual position of President Barack Obama on the issue.

Doing so shows who the real extremist on the subject of abortion is. The candidate whose positions are further removed from the majority of Americans is Barack Obama, something the media will almost certainly never tell voters.

While some sectors of the American economy have changed allegiances this presidential cycle in terms of their donations to the major political parties, one industry that hasn't changed its allegiances is media.

That probably doesn't come as a surprise to readers of this site but the numbers are still interesting nonetheless:

After expanding their nightly coverage of the major political party conventions in 2008, the nation’s broadcast networks have decided to cut back this year. As a result, Ann Romney, wife of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, will be completely ignored when she speaks at the GOP convention next Monday in Tampa, Florida.

Between them, the broadcast nets still attract a significant plurality of American television viewers. While online news consumption has grown drastically, the vast majority of video, 94 percent, consumed by Americans is via their television sets, meaning that Romney will have a harder time introducing himself to non-political voters than President Barack Obama did four years ago.

Young Americans, who were a key component of candidate Barack Obama's election strategy in 2008, have been having an awful time of it lately. According to two separate surveys, many young adults 18 to 29 are stuck in the awful employment market. The majority have a bachelor's degree but are not in jobs that require a college degree.

Interestingly enough, the jobs which traditionally had been filled by recent college graduates have been going to older Americans, meaning that many are stuck in underemployment:

Sometimes, the decisions made by government bureaucrats are so stupid, it's hard to believe that they're real. Today's case in point: The Department of Justice has decided to make an effort to find attorneys with "severe intellectual" and "psychiatric disabilities."

Considering that this is the same agency that brought us the ill-conceived Fast and Furious and its subsequent cover-up, perhaps the severely intellectually disabled lawyers have already started work.

Now that the normally loyal White House press corps has stopped continually carrying water for President Obama (they only do it 90 percent of the time now), the Administration is resorting to a new tactic of going to local media for interviews while at the same time setting specific questions for them to ask about.

Instead of being asked to account for ridiculous statements from his campaign staff and the outrageous claims of Harry Reid, President Obama is using hand-picked local journalists and requiring them to ask about the budget deal he signed with Republicans a year ago which requires automatic budget cuts called sequestration in the event no official budget is signed. Many of these cuts will be to the military, something that the Obama White House is keen on letting swing state voters know about.

For just forty years now, the world has officially been doomed to destruction. Sure, we've always had religious cult leaders pronouncing the death of civilization due to the sin-of-the-moment but 1972 represented a different kind of doom and gloom: a wholly secular kind pretending to be scientific.

Today the intellectual descendants of the people who produced the book The Limits to Growth are still given credibility. It's fun taking a look at what they predicted:

The controversy surrounding Vice President Joe Biden’s offensive claim that Republicans want to enslave black Americans has become such a concern to the Obama White House that the veep’s staff have resorted to trying to directly censor the news coverage about him.

In what is widely believed to be an unprecedented move, the Biden press shop has severely restricted access to vice president and begun telling journalists what they should write about his activities as they write them up.

Over at the opinion page of Investor's Business Daily, the editors noticed an all-too-common trend in American journalism: blaming Republicans for "negative" campaigns and not Democrats.

If you've ever wondered why you don't see Republicans punch as hard as Democrats in their rhetoric or in their advertising, this is why:

The bias of the nation's top political reporters in favor of President Barack Obama is so obvious that just 18 percent of the American public believe that journalists are favoring his challenger, Republican Mitt Romney.

In a poll conducted by Rasmussen Research, a significant majority (59 percent) of those surveyed said the media have treated Obama better than Romney. The rest were not sure.

Now that Mitt Romney has named Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as his running-mate on the Republican ticket, dishonest liberals are dusting off their old standby of "Mediscare," making false accusations that conservatives want to completely dismantle Medicare and Social Security simply because they wish to make some changes in order to preserve them. Democrats, it is implied, would never dare to change such programs.

Unfortunately for this argument, there is one prominent liberal Democrat who has not only reduced Medicare spending growth, he's even touted his willingness to do the same to Social Security.

Tonight, I'm trying out a slightly modified Disqus look for the site. What do you think?

There are a few differences including the fonts. It is now easier to see discussions taking place in other NB comment threads by clicking the "Discussion" tab in the comments below. One other addition: the comments now live update as they are made.

The far left has already started a campaign to misinform the public about Paul Ryan's views about Medicare and how he supposedly wants to destroy the program. (The irony, of course, is that President Obama actually reduced funding of the program by $700 billion as part of his healthcare law.)

Be that as it may, for those wondering what Ryan actually says about Medicare, National Review provides a helpful primer on the congressman's views, noting particularly that the newest Medicare proposal he's touting actually is quite a bit different from his older one:

Seven years ago today we launched NewsBusters! Thanks for reading us and helping spread the good word. We couldn't have done it without you!

And speaking of birthdays, NB's parent organization, the Media Research Center, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. You can join us for the celebration by clicking here. Please use this as today's open thread as well.