Rich Noyes's blog

On Friday’s Good Morning America, ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper blurted out an uncomfortable reality for Democrats, telling co-host George Stephanopoulos that President Obama “can’t run on so many of his major legislative accomplishments” because “they’re not popular.”

That’s why, Tapper explained, the President is attempting to shift the debate from his record to “fairness,” a goal in which he has the cooperation of a compliant media: “These are the issues he wants to talk about, because it’s going to be difficult for him to talk about his record when it comes to his big achievements.”

The camera only showed Tapper as he outlined the “conundrum” facing Obama, so there’s no way of telling exactly how ex-Democratic operative Stephanopoulos reacted. [Audio link here; video after the jump]

Tuesday night, President Obama delivers his third State of the Union address, and his sixth speech to a joint session of Congress since taking office in 2009. But there’s no need to spend a lot of time wondering about what the media will say after The Great One speaks, since — like a gaggle of corporate yes-men — journalists have gushed over every one of these major addresses.

“It was a big and bold speech,” ABC’s Terry Moran applauded on Nightline shortly after Obama’s budget address in February 2009, his first before Congress. “It was his debut and he wowed us,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews enthused the next day on Hardball.

You know liberals are desperate if they’re playing the race card so early in the 2012 campaign cycle. The latest edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables is now out, and this week’s collection was heavy with media quotes attacking both Republican voters and their presidential candidates as racist.

Among the lowlights: NBC’s Ann Curry accusing Newt Gingrich of “intentionally playing the race card” when he talked about President Obama’s dismal economic record, and ex-CNN correspondent Bob Franken nastily asserting that conservative voters harbor “a real resentment against blacks,” and “would love to see us return to the good old days of Jim Crow.”

The worst quotes are below the jump; the full issue can be read at www.MRC.org. (PDF version)

Back in 2008 and 2009, the Media Research Center’s year-end awards for the Best Notable Quotables were dominated by journalists fawning over the greatness of Barack Obama. In 2008, our winner for “Quote of the Year” was Chris Matthews for his on-air exclamation that upon hearing Obama give a speech, “I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”

It's always interesting to see how the several thousand readers who voted in the MRC's "public ballot" differed from the 48 media experts who selected our Best Notable Quotables of 2011 (a panel which included talk radio hosts Mark Levin and Neal Boortz, Human Events editor-in-chief Tom Winter and Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby). This year, there were six categories where our readers and the judges disagreed -- although sometimes the margins were extremely close.

Let's start with the biggest disagreement, in the "Media Millionaires for Higher Taxes Award." By a healthy margin (68 to 53), our judges chose an April 17 quote from CBS's Bob Schieffer, as he was questioning Rep. Paul Ryan on Face the Nation: "Why do these rich people need another tax cut? I mean, they’re already rich....Why cut their taxes some more?"

Assuming he even tried, Brian Williams could not suppress his smirk Tuesday night as he took a shot at a guest who had appeared earlier that day on CNBC. Businessman and Mitt Romney support Ken Langone said that President Obama's anti-business rhetoric and lack of leadership was preventing a true economic recovery from taking hold, exclaiming at one point that "businessmen and fat cats need to feel like they're doing something good, not that they're villains and not that their criminals."

In response, Williams decided to carve out a full minute from from his Nightly News to regale viewers with a sarcastic shot at Langone from the left-wing Gawker.com: "The writer John Cook on the Web site Gawker said, "Why should you make fat cats feel badly about getting fat, while the middle class taxpayers who financed that bailout slide into poverty? They need to be made to feel good about earning record profits!"

On last night's CBS Evening News, correspondent Nancy Cordes listed one and only one sticking point in the failure of the so-called "supercommittee" to reach a deal, and that was, she said, how "Republicans on the supercommittee were pushing to make the Bush-era tax cuts permanent for everyone."

And only one politician, Democratic Senator and supercommitee member John Kerry, was permitted to frame the story for CBS viewers. "This is not a tax cutting committee. This is a deficit reduction committee," Kerry asserted. "And we do not believe that the wealthiest people in America should get another tax cut."

Four years ago, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning shows celebrated the “rock star” Democrats running to replace George W. Bush, and no candidate set journalists’ pulses racing faster than Barack Obama. Now, after three years of high unemployment, trillion dollar deficits and an onerous new health care law, how are those newscasts covering Obama’s re-election campaign and the candidates vying to replace him?

To find out, the MRC’s Geoff Dickens and I (with a huge assist from Scott Whitlock, Kyle Drennen and Matthew Balan) examined all 723 campaign segments, including 101 interviews, which aired on the three broadcast network weekday morning programs from January 1 to October 31, 2011, using the same methodology we employed to study campaign coverage on those same programs for the same time period in 2007. Excerpts following the jump; read the full report here. (or download the printer-friendly PDF version)
 

The liberal media have spent the month of October enthusing over the left-wing “Occupy” protests, richly rewarding the anti-capitalist movement with the oxygen of national publicity. The broadcast networks, in particular, have boosted the protests as “growing” and “resonating,” and cast the participants as more than just a radical fringe group, but drawn “from all walks of life, young and old, male and female.”

The MRC has pulled together quotes showing these trends, as documented in the October 17 and October 31 editions of our Notable Quotables newsletter (available in full at www.MRC.org). The most obnoxious examples:

The national media have certainly NOT been giving Barack Obama a rougher ride than the GOP candidates, but a new study by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism is fueling the myth that, as Politico’s Keach Hagey put it this morning, “Obama has received the most unremittingly negative press of any of the presidential candidates.”

To be sure, Hagey is repeating exactly what Pew is claiming, but there are at least three major problems with using their study to conclude that the media have an anti-Obama bias. First, they didn’t study what most people would consider “the media.” Second, their definition of “positive” and “negative” press doesn’t match what media experts consider “favorable” or “unfavorable” coverage. (More after the jump)

A study by the Media Research Center finds that the three broadcast networks are providing virtually no coverage of the Solyndra scandal, a solar energy firm that went bankrupt after getting more than $500 million in taxpayer money from the Obama administration. This is not the approach the networks took after the collapse of Enron, an energy company with Republican ties. In just the first two months of 2002, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts cranked out 198 stories on the Enron debacle, compared to just eight so far on Solyndra, a 24-to-1 disparity. Details after the jump.

Both ABC and NBC on Wednesday used a new Pew Research Center poll of military veterans to claim that, as ABC news reader Josh Elliot put it, “one-third of those who’ve served in Afghanistan and Iraq now say the wars were not worth fighting,” while NBC’s Tamron Hall told viewers “one-third of U.S. veterans believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting.”

But that’s not really what the poll found. Pew surveyed 1,853 veterans, including 712 whose service took place after September 11, 2001. They found 50% of the post 9/11 veterans thought the war in Afghanistan was worth it, and 44% who supported the war in Iraq — percentages significantly higher than both the general public and veterans who served in earlier conflicts or pre-9/11.

American Spectator senior editor Quin Hillyer appeared on the Fox News Channel’s America’s News Headquarters program on Sunday to highlight the media’s continued silence about the Obama administration’s use of liberal ideology as a criterion in hiring lawyers for career Justice Department positions, even though the media leaped on similar accusations during the Bush years.

While Bush’s DOJ was subjected to media condemnation and an official investigation over it’s hiring practices, Hillyer recounted, “cut forward to the Obama administration and they are doing not just the same thing, but to the Nth degree. They are doing it far worse than the Bush administration ever did, without any, any attention until now, certainly from the big newspapers.”

Details and video below the jump

For most Americans, the 2012 presidential campaign will be experienced on television, and voters will evaluate the candidates based on their performances at televised debates, daily news coverage, and in long-form interviews. Even with all of the changes in the media landscape over past several years, the most-watched regular forums for candidate interviews are the broadcast network morning news programs — NBC’s Today, ABC’s Good Morning America, and CBS’s The Early Show, with a combined weekday audience of more than 13 million as of the second quarter of 2011.

Just as they did right after the killing of Osama bin Laden back in May, NBC's Brian Williams and Richard Engel interrupted Sunday morning's ceremonies marking the tenth annivesary of the 9/11 attacks to pontificate against the war in Iraq.

At about 9:30am on Sunday, during live coverage of the events at Ground Zero, Williams instructed the audience: "Iraq had nothing do with this." Correspondent Richard Engel quickly echoed: "Iraq had nothing to do with this," before complaining: "And that message is still lost today." (Video and transcript after the jump; h/t Gerardo)

Ten years after the attacks of September 11, it’s worth recalling how the immediate reaction of some on the far Left was to blame the United States foreign policy for instigating the attacks, and how various Hollywood celebrities spent the remainder of the decade trashing the War on Terror and likening the United States to some sort of Nazi regime or police state. Some even promoted wild conspiracies that the United States government had participated in the attacks themselves, or was sheltering terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

Here, culled from the MRC’s vast archives, are 25 blood-boiling quotes showcasing the Hollywood Left’s outrageous take on the War on Terror over the past ten years, with links to several videos:

Dick Cheney has begun a media tour to promote his memoir, "In My Time," with excerpts of his NBC "Dateline" interview showing up on Wednesday’s "Nightly News" and Thursday’s "Today." If history is a guide, Cheney will face a liberal media that has been stunningly hostile and derisive in their coverage of the former Vice President.

Prior to his selection as George W. Bush’s running mate in the summer of 2000, the liberal networks generally treated Cheney — who served as White House chief of staff, Congressman and Secretary of Defense — as a respected Republican leader. But the media turned on Cheney as soon as he joined the Republican ticket, portraying him as an extremist who was “anti-equal rights” and “against education” — even distorting his vote on a non-binding resolution as a vote “against releasing Nelson Mandela from prison,” as if the U.S. House had such power.

[video and audio excerpts follow the page break]

Like clockwork, as soon as Rick Perry joined the GOP presidential field, the liberal media started slashing at the Texas Governor, impugning him as a “name-calling,” “human tornado,” “anti-science” racist —just “Bull Connor with a smile,” according to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Plus, Perry’s best-in-the-nation record on job creation is really a myth — not a “Texas miracle” but a “Texas tragedy,” according to CBS News.

As for Barack Obama, CNN shows they play no favorites, holding the President’s feet to the fire in a grueling interview: “The last time you were elected, you got Sasha and Malia a cute little puppy, Bo. What are you going to get them the next time, if you’re re-elected?” These quotes, plus many more, in the latest edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables (best quotes after the jump; full issue posted here at MRC.org).

This year’s crop of GOP presidential candidates includes strong conservatives, just like the top Democratic candidates four years ago — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards — were all staunch liberals. But a major, glaring difference between today’s campaign coverage and the early coverage of the 2007 Democratic nomination race is the impulse of journalists to repeatedly brand the 2012 GOP candidates as “conservative” despite offering extremely few “liberal” labels four years ago.

Media Research Center analysts reviewed the ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news programs from January 1 through July 31 and found 62 “conservative” labels for Republican candidates or those talked about as potential candidates. A check of the same broadcasts for the same time period in 2007 found a paltry three “liberal” labels for the Democrats running that year, a greater than 20-to-1 disparity.

MRC has just posted the latest edition of Notable Quotables, our bi-weekly compilation of the latest outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media. This week, NQ is chock full of quotes from journalists slashing the Tea Party as the Republican Party’s “Hezbollah faction,” who have “strapped explosives to the Capitol” and “waged jihad on the American people.”

Oh, and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd disparaging the “Tea Party budget slashers” as “cannibals,” “zombies,” and “vampires, draining the country’s reputation, credit rating and compassion.” So much for civility.

The full package is available at www.MRC.org; here are some of the best quotes:

For the past month, as the debt talks slogged on in Washington, the so-called mainstream media unleashed increasingly hysterical attacks on the Tea Party and anti-tax hike conservatives — epitomizing the liberal elite’s supreme annoyance at the push to curb federal spending and contain the size of government.

The media’s disdainful language has ranged from the merely condescending (wondering whether the Tea Partiers in Congress actually knew how things worked, or referring to them as children), to outright hostile (likening the Tea Party to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups). Here are some of the choicer examples MRC has collected over the past 30 days:

This week’s Notable Quotables, MRC’s bi-weekly newsletter documenting the most outrageous quotes in the liberal media, showcases the media’s slanted coverage of the debt ceiling debate. Over the past two weeks, network reporters touted Barack Obama as “the debt slayer,” impugned the “cut, cap and balance” option as “just wasting time,” smeared Republicans as “hostage-takers” and said they were guilty of “terrorism,” and insisted that “meaningful reform” was impossible without hiking taxes.

At one point, the tax debate lurched to outright Marxism, with one “news” anchor wondering: “Why do you think the top 2 percent of America has a chokehold on the other 98 percent?”

Here are highlights from this week’s edition; full text and several videos are posted at www.MRC.org:

Is this, sadly, going to be the second campaign in a row where the so-called mainstream media will make a fetish of fact-checking the Republican candidates while ignoring the misstatements and gaffes of the Democratic candidates — of which there is now just one, President Barack Obama?

Last week, as both Newsbusters and the MRC documented, the New York Times (Kevin Sack) published a lengthy piece on how the White House “declined to challenge” a new book by ex-Times reporter Janny Scott that documents how Obama “mischaracterized a central anecdote about his mother’s deathbed dispute with her insurance company.”

Here are a couple of examples, caught by the eagle-eyed Brent Baker, of MSNBC's supposedly more-restrained "news" anchors mouthing the kind of left-wing rhetoric that's a staple of their prime time hosts.

Immediately after President Obama's press conference earlier today, 11am ET anchor Thomas Roberts framed a question about tax policy thusly: "Why do you think the top 2 percent of America has a chokehold on the other 98 percent?"

A few minutes later, after the top of the hour, 12pm ET anchor Contessa Brewer disparaged the Republican position against raising tax rates:

The Media Research Center has just released the latest edition of Notable Quotables, our bi-weekly compilation of the latest outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media. [here's the link to the formatted PDF version]

Highlights from this issue include: journalists suggesting it’s somehow radical to think the Constitution “was intended to limit the federal government” or to expect the government to do nothing outside the “powers granted to them in the Constitution;” ABC News veteran Barbara Walters hoping disgraced Congressman Anthony stays in Congress and winds up like the “beloved” Bill Clinton; and top editors admitting that “not any single reporter” thinks Sarah Palin “should be President,” and how “most journalists would recoil in horror from the idea.”

A sample of the best quotes from the June 27 edition are after the jump; you can read the entire issue online at www.mrc.org.

Investor’s Business Daily is out this morning with an editorial slamming the decision last week to award ABC News with an “Edward R. Murrow Award” for the network’s investigation into the sudden acceleration of Toyota vehicles, despite ABC using a staged shot of a tachometer revving to 6000 rpm (the footage came from a parked car, not one suddenly accelerating).

Months after ABC’s hyped coverage, federal investigators with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and NASA reported no evidence of problems with Toyota’s systems.

IBD points out:

In his June 19 appearance on Fox News Sunday, Comedy Central's Daily Show host Jon Stewart fiercely denounced the Fox News Channel as uniquely biased, and slammed those who watch Fox News as "the most consistently misinformed media viewers....Consistently -- every poll."

Unfortunately for Stewart, he was relying on a methodologically-flawed survey from the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) that in December trumpeted how "those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe...." and then listed a series of supposedly false statements.

But many of the study's supposedly false statements of fact were actually opinions that liberals don't share.

The June 13 edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables has now been posted over at www.MRC.org, showcasing the most outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes from the liberal media over the past two weeks. This edition features: CNN’s Piers Morgan snootily slamming the Tea Party as “not the brightest” and perhaps similar to the mobs Hitler and Mussolini employed in the 1930s; MSNBC’s Martin Bashir seriously arguing that Sarah Palin is a criminal because of the American flag painted on the side of her tour bus; and news reporters fretting over Weinergate, worried that President Obama might lose a “very important" left-wing critic now that a “rising star” of the Left has become tainted by scandal.

The entire package (including four videos) is posted at www.MRC.org (click here for the nicely-formatted three-page PDF);  here are some of the highlights:

For the third time in as many weeknights, the NBC Nightly News has devoted airtime to the fuss over Sarah Palin’s recounting of Paul Revere’s ride at the onset of the Revolutionary War. This time, the newscast featured a full report by correspondent Lee Cowan showcasing how both Palin supporters and detractors have been attempting to edit the Wikipedia page about Revere.

That’s the same issue that bothered anchor Brian Williams on Monday night (Williams was off on Tuesday, with Lester Holt substituting). On the June 6 broadcast, Williams noted that “a political web site reported today Palin supporters have attempted to change the story of Revere's ride on Wikipedia to reflect her version of events.”

But with Wiki’s Paul Revere page now locked and presumably scrubbed of the unwanted submissions of the Palinites, the account seems to back pretty much everything Palin said. And, throughout all of their coverage, which began Friday night, NBC has — with minor exceptions — carefully avoided saying exactly what Palin has said that is supposedly incorrect.