Mike Ciandella's blog

Blame the victim! Twenty-three liberal news operations have taken that strategy about the IRS attack on conservative nonprofits. Fifteen of the 63 members of the left-wing Media Consortium have thrown their support behind the IRS’s investigation. The 15 organizations either wrote or re-posted stories defending the IRS actions.

Another eight liberal outlets, including MSNBC, ran similar stories. Altogether, these outlets have received a combined total of more $14 million dollars from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations since 2000.

The IRS admitted to giving extra scrutiny to applications for nonprofit status from groups with words like “tea party” or “patriot” in their descriptions. After this revelation, at least 25 media outlets ran stories arguing that “The IRS was doing its job,” “the IRS was justified,” and that the only crime the IRS committed was “the sin of political correctness.”

Media Research Center VP for Business and Culture Dan Gainor appeared on Fox Business's Varney & Co. on May 13, to discuss the IRS targetting conservative groups for extra scrutiny. 

Gainor addressed the New York Times Headline "I.R.S. Focus on Conservatives Gives G.O.P. an Issue to Seize on."

"This is the New York Times's take on how to turn something that's Nixonian into something that's 'oh, it's just conservatives turning another issue, making it political.'" Gainor said of The New York Times specifically and the media in general. "They spun it out, trying to take it away from being the awful scandal that it is."

[Video After Break]

The morning and evening news shows of CBS and NBC blamed Congress for sequester-related airport delays nearly three times more than the president on April 23 and 24. Congress was blamed 18 times, compared to just seven for Obama. ABC took a different tact, not pointing fingers but warning that an “airplane apocalypse” of ever increasing delays could be right around the corner.

BMI counted each time someone on one of the morning or evening news shows blamed Obama or Congress for the unpaid furloughs of the 15,000 air traffic controllers due to sequester-related budget cuts. According to The Associated Press, “FAA officials have said they have no choice but to furlough all 47,000 agency employees, including nearly 15,000 controllers. Each employee will lose one day of work every other week.”

[Video Below Break]

Biofuels harm the planet more than fossil fuels, and even lead to greater deforestation, according to areport put out this month by the British think tank Chatham House. The study also said that biofuels are far less cost effective than traditional fuels.

The think tank said that sticking with traditional fossil fuels might actually be better for the environment, since the use of cooking oil as an alternative fuel leads to higher imports of palm oil from Indonesia, a product often grown on deforested land.

“We need to recapture the regulatory ideal. That ideal is that regulation of infrastructure, government intervention, makes free markets and free speech possible.” Susan Crawford said at the National Conference for Media Reform. The gathering of left-wing media activists and media ran from April 5-7 in Denver. The group Free Press, which sponsored the conference, has received over $1.6 million in Soros funding since 2004. 

Crawford, a Bloomberg contributor and former White House Technology Adviser, claimed that “this regulatory ideal unleashes human ingenuity; it's pro-competition, pro-growth, pro-innovation.” (Government – is there anything it can’t do?)

“Greedy Lying Bastards” follows “An Inconvenient Truth” in the climate change alarmism documentary film genre. The difference is this film lacked Al Gore’s name to give it momentum, although it has gotten some help from CNN.

The film is the creation of former eco-terrorist Craig Rosebraugh and actress Daryl Hannah of “Splash,” “Kill Bill” and “Bladerunner” among others. The film made a mere $45,000 its March 8 opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, which rated it the 400th movie of the past 365 days, and the 46th movie its March 8 opening weekend.

New EPA regulations could increase the price of gas by nine cents or more when they take effect in the next four years, American Petroleum Institute (API) scientists say. However, ABC, CBS and NBC  news programs gave little credence to those concerns, and hyped EPA’s claims of “significant health benefits” instead.

ABC was the worst of the three. Diane Sawyer and Jim Avila on the March 29 “World News” spoke of alleged benefits of the new environmental regulations which would further reduce sulfur emissions. Meanwhile, “World News” not only failed to give equal time to opponents of the regulations, they portrayed them as greedy.

Veteran journalist Bill Moyers told his viewers on March 29 that the next time they say the Pledge of Allegiance, they should “remember: it’s a lie. A whopper of a lie.” Bill Moyers’s “Moyers & Company,” which included the snippet, airs on taxpayer funded PBS.

“We coax it from the mouths of babes for the same reason our politicians wear those flag pins in their lapels – it makes the hypocrisy go down easier, the way aspirin helps a headache go away.”

In a flurry of finger pointing, Moyers called out former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as former Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan and the company Halliburton for obstructing justice and trampling on the less fortunate.

(video below jump)

Bloomberg Businessweek ran a front-page attack on the NRA for its March 18-25 edition. Much of the story was spent interviewing the owners of the Mossberg gun factory from New Haven, Conn., who find the NRA’s position “ill timed and graceless.”

According to the article, not all gun makers take as strong of a position on gun control regulation as the NRA does, but those who disagree are afraid of speaking up. Businessweek claims that fear of NRA instigated consumer boycotts and the prospect of sales from those concerned about stricter gun control laws keep gun manufacturers in line.

“Who’s afraid of the NRA? Gun makers, that’s who,” the Businessweek article, written by Assistant Managing Editor and Senior Writer Paul M. Barrett, declared. The cover reads “DON’T TREAD ON THE NRA” with pictures of bullet holes tearing through it.

The celebrity anti-hydraulic fracturing group, Artists Against Fracking, may be in legal trouble, according to Associated Press. The group has so far failed to register with the State of New York, despite laws requiring lobbyists groups spending over $5,000 to register.

“The group hasn't filed lobbying reports, so the amount it has spent and what it was spent on isn't known publicly. Experts in Albany say the website and public events appear to have cost well over $5,000,” AP reported on March 18.

The group is made up of celebrities including Sean Lennon, Yoko Ono, Mark Ruffalo, Alec Baldwin, Hugh Jackman and Zooey Deschanel. They have campaigned specifically in New York state, holding a recent anti-fracking event in Albany.

Two food bloggers have launched an attack against Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, referring to an outdated study, and ABC and NBC have been quick to rush to their aid.

ABC’s “Good Morning America” and NBC’s “Nightly News” both ran stories promoting the crusade. The bloggers claim Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 food dyes used in Kraft Macaroni and Cheese can lead to hyperactivity and other health problems in children. They are petitioning Kraft to stop using the dyes in their products.

Both dyes have been approved by the FDA, though they have been banned in the small nations of Norway and Austria.

It is well-established that the broadcasts networks covered rising gas prices different under President George W. Bush’s administration than they did President Barack Obama, in tone and even the amount of coverage.

In addition to fueling discontent with many gas price reports, one of the networks’ frequent suggestions for lowering gas prices during the Bush years was for the federal government to release oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), a 727 million barrel emergency supply of oil stored in salt caverns in the Gulf states. These same media outlets have been much less insistent about Obama releasing oil from the SPR, and were quicker to praise him when he did.

The Beltway news operation National Journal attacked Virginia Attorney General and gubernatorial hopeful Ken Cuccinelli for his stance on political issues, particularly global warming. In a March 2 article entitled “Can Climate-Change Denier Ken Cuccinelli Win a Swing State?” National Journal asked how “[i]n storm-battered Virginia, the Republican candidate for governor still doubts the science.” The story was illustrated with a flood picture to underscore the point.

Throughout the story, Cuccinelli was depicted in negative terms: “partisan firebrand,” “extremist” and “hard-right.”

The liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the crew of the “Sea Shepherd,” a group of anti-whaling protesters, were modern-day pirates. The February 25 decision reversed a district court decision in Washington State.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the star of Emmy-nominated “Whale Wars” on Animal Planet, uses its small fleet of ships to harass would-be whalers. “[H]ell bent on stopping the whaling industry for nearly a decade,” according to their official Animal Planet bio, Sea Shepherd, led by Paul Watson, had long pushed the envelope as to what constitutes a legal protest.

Watson has used such direct tactics in the past, arguing that “There's nothing wrong with being a terrorist so long as you win.” He claimed in a 2008 New Yorker interview to have sunk as many as 10 whaling boats.

All three major networks were awash in water bottle coverage, devoting time in both morning and evening shows to discuss Sen. Marco Rubio drinking out of a water bottle during his response to President Obama’s State of the Union address on February 12.

ABC’s “Good Morning America” and World News,” CBS’s “This Morning” and “Evening News,” and NBC’s “Today” and “Nightly News” all talked about the water bottle, and the attention that it was receiving. Six stories covered the non-issue in the day following Obama’s speech. All three evening news shows ran the instant replay.

CBS “This Morning” cited an optimistic article about the economy in its “This Morning’s Headlines” roundup of newspaper headlines on February 11, but ignored a pessimistic one from the Wall Street Journal. 

The USA Today article cited was a front page story, concisely labeled “Economists Gain Optimism. The Wall Street Journal ran a contradictory front page story that same day entitled “Companies Fret Over Uncertain Outlook,” which was completely ignored. Instead, the Wall Street Journal article that CBS did cite was one entitled “Lonely Hearts Give Flirting 101 a Try” from page A15. 

(Video Below)

Raising fuel prices across the board is the only way to lessen the future impact of the forthcoming, and unavoidable, global warming disaster, according to Ellie Whitney, guest opinion columnist for The Times of Trenton. Ironically, she said this as New Jersey, along with much of the northeast, is prepping for a major winter storm that includes blizzard warnings.

Citing the worst of the past year’s weather (although apparently not this week’s weather) as evidence for global warming, Whitney claimed that the rate of climate change is happening too fast to prevent disaster. Then she suggested that the best way to lessen the damage was to “collect a fee from all fossil fuels at their points of entry into our economy from wells, mines, ports and pipelines.” To “make foreign trade fair,” she also recommended that foreign countries pay a fine for any carbon emitted during the transportation of goods into the U.S.

Whitney’s analysis of global weather was dire. “Climate scientists predicted the oceans would warm and turn acidic, polar ice and permafrost would melt, sea levels would rise and extreme weather events would become ever more violent and frequent. But no one foresaw how rapidly these changes would take place.” According to Whitney, carbon dioxide levels are at “a concentration higher than at any time during the last 800,000 years.” Which was a bit before the time we started monitoring such things.

Marking the hundredth anniversary of the 16th amendment which made way for the federal income tax, MRC Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor appeared on The Blaze TV's "Wilkow!" to discuss wealthy journalists who push for higher taxes.

"Ten million, fifteen million they make, you know, a couple million ... and I'm OK with it, that's the free market. But then don't turn around and use the platform that you get making that money, to try to make you and me to pay more taxes," Gainor said.

(Video Below)

Two of the broadcast networks conveniently noted upward revisions to past months job gains on Feb. 1st, as the January jobs report was released. ABC didn’t mention that day’s jobs report at all that night.

The evening news shows on NBC and CBS reported the 157,000 job increase as well as the uptick in unemployment to 7.9 percent. But both the “Evening News” and “Nightly News” also mentioned the positive revisions to past months, something the same networks ignored during the Bush years.

The January jobs report showed 422,000 more jobs had been created in the last two months of 2012 that previously announced. CBS “Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley was very upbeat about the jobs report, noting that the stock market “was giving a big thumbs up” to the jobs report. “While unemployment did tick up a tenth of a point to 7.9 percent, a separate survey of employers shows that they added 157,000 new jobs.” 

For Al Gore, the perfect future is one in which democracy and capitalism as we know them have ceased to exist, conservatives have stopped promoting their smaller government agenda, and there is more regulation. 

“Capitalism, like democracy, must also be reformed,” the former vice president argued in his latest book “The Future,” which was released Jan. 30. 

MRC Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor appeared on CNBC's Kudlow Report on January 28, to discuss Steve Kroft's "60 Minutes" interview with President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Kudlow asked Gainor to comment on the interview. He told Kudlow, "I did a tally and there were 15 questions, and 11 of them were complete and utter softballs. I wrote a piece for Fox and said that if CBS had a team, they should sign him. And the four tougher questions, two of them were very quick about Hillary's health, and he really didn't press her on that, and then two nominal questions where he really let Obama get away with just awful claims including that things had gone well in Egypt.

"We've got Morsi there coming out--we've found out that he's bigoted and anti-Semitic. We, now we're sending him jets. The Arab Spring has been a disaster, we didn't talk about Iran, we didn't talk about expansionist plans from China. I mean, it was like he didn't read the international page before he asked his questions," Gainor said.

(Video Below)

Former Vice President Al Gore is at it again, pushing the eco- agenda in his latest book entitled “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.” In this installment, he defended his sale of Current TV to the terror-friendly Al Jazeera network, while pushing his perpetual campaign to prevent the climate change apocalypse.

Gore’s “six drivers” include Global Economy, Instant Communication, Shifts in Power, Growth, Genetic Manipulation and Humans & the Ecosystem. From the looks of the promotional video, the book is a typical Al Gore “humans are killing the earth” rant. “Consumption of good has also grown beyond the capacity of the earth’s resources like water and topsoil to sustain that growth.”

It’s easy to miss $14 trillion dollars if nobody reports on it. The World Economic Forum called for $14 trillion in environmental initiatives, yet none of the three major networks even mentioned it in their evening news segments from January 22, or their morning news segments from January 23. They even failed to mention that there was a conference at all.

Matt Damon’s much hyped anti-fracking film “Promised Land” has failed to make the impact that its producers and environmental groups had hoped for. As of January 20, “Promised Land” has raked in a whopping total of $7,542,000 since it opened on December 28, according to Box Office Mojo. According to The Hill, the movie cost $15 million to make. Box Office Mojo ranked it 139 out of all movies from Jan. 23, 2012 to Jan. 21, 2013.

Matt Damon said that he didn’t make a biased movie and claimed to have just wanted to start a conversation on the subject. “Nobody wants to go see a movie where they get a message at the end. That really wasn't our intent. It was just to show this moment in time in our country, and what happens when big money collides with real people, people who are struggling on the back end of a recession.” he told The Morning Call, a Lehigh Valley, Pa., newspaper. Apparently Damon was right about nobody wanting to go see his movie.

CBSNews.com promoted a restaurant attack by the pro-regulatory food police group the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) Jan. 16, without noting the agenda of the group or providing other points of view.

The online story that regurgitated CSPI’s annual “Xtreme Eating” report released that day, favorably called the group a “watchdog” and essentially ran the group’s entire report with no industry response. The CBS article included a slideshow (with CSPI’s own images) depicting each food item that CSPI criticized, with its nutritional content. Both the article and the slideshow linked back to the original CSPI report. 

CSPI’s director Michael F. Jacobson accused the chains of intentionally making people obese or diabetic. "It's as if IHOP, The Cheesecake Factory, Maggiano's Little Italy, and other major restaurant chains are scientifically engineering these extreme meals with the express purpose of promoting obesity, diabetes, and heart disease," said Jacobson. (Emphasis added) 

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell appeared on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report” on January 3, to discuss Al Gore’s sale of his Current TV network to Al-Jazeera.

“He’d be uncomfortable giving Glenn Beck the network,” Bozell said of Gore’s rebuff to Beck’s purchase inquiries. “He was not uncomfortable giving a pro-terrorist news operation a network. I can’t get around that one.”

America has a debt problem, driven in part by huge entitlements. The liberal solution? Make them bigger. “An expansion of Social Security not only would be good for America's retirees, it also would be good for the broader macroeconomy” argued New America Foundation political writer Steven Hill, in an article for “The Atlantic.”

According to Hill, the problem with Social Security is not the lack of money going into the system, but rather that there aren’t enough benefits coming out of it. “The bigger problem is that Social Security's payouts are so meager -- far too low for the program's new role as America's de facto national retirement system. It only replaces about 33 to 40 percent of a retiree's average final wage, which is simply not enough money to live on.”

When University of California at Santa Barbara professor Nelson Lichtenstein came onto CNBC to discuss bribery allegations against Wal-Mart De Mexico (a subsidiary of Wal-Mart), he got more than he bargained for.

Kenneth Langone, an investor who helped found Home Depot, had joined Maria Bartiromo for the full hour of “Closing Bell” on Dec. 18. Langone, who is also the CEO of Geeknet and has a net worth of $1.6 billion, challenged Lichtenstein fiercely, demanding to hear facts from him. When he found out the news source Lichtenstein was citing as proof, Langone took a jab at The New York Times as well.

Lichtenstein argued that the accusations against Wal-Mart were just the “tip of the iceberg” of a “larger pattern for the company” of the company moving into an area of finding local ways of doing things and imposing “its own business model, regardless, on these countries and on the communities there.” (See CNBC video)