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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.

CBS News has lately been running ads touting their new Evening News anchor Scott Pelley as bringing “the world class original reporting of 60 Minutes, now every weeknight.” If so, those who hoped CBS would finally shift towards a more fair-and-balanced approach to the news may again be disappointed.

Last year, MRC news analysts reviewed “the world class reporting” on 60 Minutes and found a lopsided agenda that strongly favored liberals. In the previous five years, 60 Minutes aired 35 interviews with liberal leaders and celebrities, most of which (69%) were friendly and unchallenging. In contrast, only five of the 17 conservative segments (29%) were soft, a huge tilt both in the amount and the tone of CBS’s coverage.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams seemed to take smug delight Friday night in pointing out how Sarah Palin’s off-the-cuff recounting of Paul Revere’s ride was at odds with the correct history, smirking that Palin’s version “already has tongues wagging.”

Williams interest was unique — neither the CBS Evening News, anchored by Harry Smith, nor ABC’s World News, with ex-Democratic spin doctor George Stephanopoulos filling in for Diane Sawyer, thought Palin’s error was worth even mentioning. And Williams himself — even though he generally works with a pre-written script, in contrast to Palin’s impromptu remarks in Boston — has had his own problems with historical accuracy over the years (details below the fold).

Williams attention to Palin’s mistake is also in contrast to how his newscast never reported the bizarre gaffe made by then-candidate Barack Obama in 2007, when on March 4 of that year Obama, in a speech saluting the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, claimed his parents “got together” because of “what happened in Selma.”

It’s Memorial Day, but the MRC is out with its latest edition of Notable Quotables, a re-cap of the most outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes from the liberal media over the past two weeks.

This edition: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell insists that Republicans just lack the “guts” to raise taxes; David Gregory suggests it’s “racially-tinged” for Newt Gingrich to try and spotlight President Obama’s poor economic record, and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria first admits to advising the President on foreign policy, then hails Obama’s speech on Middle East policy a few days later. Oh, and Ed Schultz.

The entire package is posted at www.MRC.org; here are some of the highlights.

Yet another case study in how the liberal media never stop pushing their own interpretation of events: In a May 22 This Week roundtable about the arrest of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn for the alleged sexual assault of a female hotel worker, two journalists endorsed it as France’s “Anita Hill moment,” referring to the last-minute claims raised against conservative Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas nearly 20 years ago.

But Hill never alleged that Thomas did anything either violent or criminal —  and polls taken at the time (USA Today, October 14, 1991) showed the public sided with Clarence Thomas over Hill by a nearly two-to-one margin (47% to 24%). Despite the public’s verdict, journalists have never cast the Hill case as that of a politically-motivated accuser engaged in a high-profile act of character assassination.

Tomorrow marks Katie Couric’s last night at the anchor desk of the CBS Evening News. Five years ago, CBS executives were so excited about the Today show star taking over, her September 5, 2006 debut was preceded by a massive publicity campaign. Outgoing interim anchor Bob Schieffer vouched for his replacement: “She’s tough, she’s fair, she’s a straight shooter....Just watch.”  Long-retired anchorman Walter Cronkite even lent his voice to a new opening segment, announcing: “This is the CBS Evening News, with Katie Couric.”

Intrigued by the publicity, more than 13 million Americans tuned into that first night, according to Nielsen research, but Couric’s honeymoon was brief. CBS had been in third place for years under Dan Rather and Schieffer, but the slide worsened after Couric took over. By August 2010, the CBS Evening News was recording its lowest ratings ever — fewer than 5 million viewers. (A review of Couric's worst bias, with video, after the jump.)

Rounding out the news of the past couple of weeks, the media elite struck two contradictory themes — with journalists saluting the “courage,”“guts” and “cool hand” of Barack Obama in ordering the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, even as the liberal media were “repelled” and “appalled” by the “vulgar” and “idiotic” celebrations of everyday Americans to the news of the terrorist leader’s demise.

The latest edition (PDF) of MRC’s bi-weekly Notable Quotables newsletter captures the flavor of liberal media coverage since bin Laden’s death, including the bitterness of some on the far left, including the left-wing journalist who griped that it “was not justice” but rather “one killer [the United States] killing another.”

Here are some of the best quotes from the issue; for the entire edition, visit www.MRC.org:

CNN is finally vindicated, sort of. Nearly nine years ago, the network emphatically declared of Osama bin Laden: "Experts Agree: Al Qaeda Leader Is Dead or Alive."

Which would pretty much cover all of the available possibilities. Now we know -- he was alive back then, and he's dead today.

Here's the item from the September 4, 2002 CyberAlert (as written at the time by MRC's Brent Baker) referring to the story from the previous day's "Live From..." newscast:

Today, the news is all about the U.S. military’s successful elimination of Osama bin Laden (go USA!), but for much of the last two weeks the media have preoccupied themselves with demanding higher taxes and scorning proposed Republican budget cuts as mean-spirited attacks on the poor.

The worst of these quotes have been documented in this week’s Notable Quotables newsletter, now posted at www.mrc.org with seven video clips. (PDF) Here’s a sample of the most outrageous quotes:
 

This week’s edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter is chock full of liberal media quotes showing reporters’ slanted approach to the tax and budget issues now at center stage. In fact, there’s so much bad material, we had to add an extra page to our usually three-page newsletter (you can view/download the PDF here).

The whole issue is up over at www.MRC.org. Here’s a baker’s dozen of the worst quotes (including two video clips), all collected in the last couple of weeks:

Reporters are eagerly anticipating President Obama’s budget speech this afternoon, with NBC’s Chuck Todd assuring viewers of Wednesday’s Today show that now, finally, “the President’s going to add his voice to this, debate, essentially, over what to do about the ever-growing deficit and debt.”

But over and over again over the past two years, the media have painted Obama as a leader committed to “slashing” the deficit, only to have the absurdity of such spin later revealed by the administration’s actual policies.

Let’s start the trip down memory lane with coverage of President Obama’s first budget speech in February 2009, which reporters claimed would include steps to aggressively reduce the deficit. ABC’s David Muir began the February 21, 2009 World News by pitching how the President was “slashing the deficit by at least 50 percent by raising taxes on the wealthy, people making $250,000 and above, and cutting war spending by bringing troops home from Iraq.”

Prior to this week, President Obama had been so detached from the budget debate that some in his own party have openly criticized him. Obama, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin declared in early March, has “failed to lead this debate or offer a serious proposal for spending and cuts that he would be willing to fight for.”

Yet when the President chose to parachute into the budget talks earlier this week, most of the mainstream media neglected to remember his long absence, but instead acted like White House stenographers in praising his “adult” and “grown-up” approach — conveying the obvious implication that House Republicans and/or the Tea Party have been acting like children.

A video compilation of some of the more noteworthy these comments appears below the fold; a link to audio of remarks by CBS’s Chip Reid, CNN’s Gloria Borger and CNN’s Eliot Spitzer, all from April 5, is here.

AP’s Dave Bauder reported this morning that CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric would be leaving that post. An exact departure date was not announced, but Couric’s contract with CBS News is set to expire on June 4, 2011, although Bauder suggested that if Couric strikes a deal with CBS for a syndicated daytime talk show, she might stay on temporarily if there was “an extended search for her successor.”

The Media Research Center has just updated our “Profile in Bias” recounting the liberal slant that Couric promoted as CBS Evening News anchor. (An earlier report covered the bias she conveyed as a longtime co-host of NBC’s Today). Here are some of the choicer examples from her disastrous tenure at CBS:

Tea Party = “Moderate Republicans” an “Endangered Species”

“The party crashers. Big primary victories by fringe candidates open a rift in the GOP....After big victories this week by candidates of the Tea Party, the Grand Old Party is in turmoil....Does this mean moderate Republicans are becoming an endangered species?”
— Katie Couric on the September 16, 2010 CBS Evening News.

The Obama administration launched its air war against Moammar Qaddafi’s Libya after a vote of the UN Security Council, but without any congressional authorization — and apparently not even very much consultation with congressional leaders. A review of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from Friday night through Monday night finds virtually no network interest in Obama’s bypassing of Congress — an attitude in stark contrast to their approach to the Bush administration during the run-up to the Iraq war in late 2002. (Video montage below jump.)

With Libya, only the NBC Nightly News has even mentioned the controversy over the Obama administration’s decision to cut Congress out of the decision-making. On the March 20 Nightly News, White House correspondent Chuck Todd offered one sentence taking note of John Boehner’s objections in a laundry list of other congressional complaints:

The Media Research Center is out with another edition of our bi-weekly Notable Quotables newsletter, a compilation of the latest outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media. Highlights from this issue include: Network reporters contrasting left-wing union protests in Wisconsin with recent uprisings against brutal Middle Eastern dictators, and journalists suggesting a “coordinated” Republican “assault on unions,” with MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski badgering Governor Scott Walker: “How this is not an attempt to crush the unions.”

In other NQ news, we think we’ve finally fixed the problems that have plagued MRC’s e-mail newsletters over the past few weeks, so if you’d like to subscribe (or unsubscribe) to Notable Quotables or any of the MRC’s other fine newsletters, click here.

Now, here’s a sample of our best quotes from the past two weeks, including six video clips — for the full edition (Web page or full-color, printer-friendly PDF), visit www.MRC.org.

Loud protests by Wisconsin public employee unions against a budget reform proposal from new Governor Scott Walker have drawn considerable national network news attention since Thursday, the day Democratic state senators fled the state in a last-ditch gambit to prevent the bill from becoming law. A story-by-story analysis by the Media Research Center shows the Wisconsin protests are a perfect case study in the media’s longstanding double standard favoring left-wing causes while demonstrating much more hostility to the Tea Party and conservative protest.

Last March, as thousands protested on Capitol Hill in the days before the passage of ObamaCare, CBS’s Nancy Cordes slammed it as “a weekend filled with incivility,” while World News anchor Diane Sawyer painted the Tea Party as a violent gang, with “protesters roaming Washington, some of them increasingly emotional, yelling slurs and epithets.” In August 2009, ABC anchor Charles Gibson complained how “protesters brought pictures of President Obama with a Hitler-style mustache to a town hall meeting,” failing to mention that the signs were produced by Lyndon LaRouche’s wacky fringe movement, not the Tea Party or conservatives.

On Saturday morning, TVNewser summarized the news networks’ plans for covering former President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday tomorrow — Fox News plans a documentary for Sunday night, CNN will have live programming Sunday afternoon and NBC’s Meet the Press will originate from the Reagan library with guests including James Baker, Reagan’s first White House chief of staff.

The effort seems a bit modest for the most successful conservative president of the 20th century, who re-invigorated the American economy and helped bring the Soviet Union’s communist empire to its knees. The best contrast is with late January 1982, when the towering liberal president of the 20th century, Franklin D. Roosevelt, reached his 100th milestone.

For that anniversary, NBC carved out an hour of primetime on Sunday, January 24, for a documentary narrated by newsman John Hart: “Nothing to Fear — The Legacy of FDR.” And ABC worked up a three-hour documentary, "FDR," which aired on Friday, January 29, 1982, the day before Roosevelt’s actual birthday.

Every two weeks, the Media Research Center compiles the most outrageous liberal media quotes for our Notable Quotables newsletter. For the issue dated Monday, January 24, it’s a special edition, “Conservatives in the Crosshairs,” documenting the smarmy attempt by the liberal media to link conservatives — especially Sarah Palin, talk radio and the Tea Party — to the horrific shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords that left six others dead.

After the jump, you'll find some of the choicer quotes we’ve uncovered, including three video clips. The full issue will be is now available at www.MRC.org by 9am Monday:

Almost immediately after the shooting in Tucson that killed six people and left Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords severely wounded, the media establishment linked the attack with a debate about “civility,” suggesting an association between Jared Loughner’s rampage and the words and phrases used in national political debates.

Many of these network news stories offered ambiguous references to, as CBS’s Bob Schieffer put it on the January 9 edition of Sunday Morning, “the mean and hateful tone that now marks our modern politics.” Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, in a soundbite on NBC’s Today the next morning, pointed his finger at “the left and the right” as contributing to what he termed “the climate of violence.”

There’s certainly no shortage of instances of the Left deploying violent rhetoric, but how evenly did the media divide the blame during the first few days of this national debate about civility? MRC analysts reviewed all 55 broadcast network stories or segments discussing the discourse from just after the shooting (January 8) through the evening of the national memorial service on January 12, reviewing the ABC, CBS and NBC morning, evening and Sunday talk shows.

Three days after a mentally-deranged man — whose backyard in Arizona featured a bizarre shrine decorated with a human skull and rotted oranges — killed six people and severely wounded Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the liberal media continue to cynically link Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and mainstream conservatives with the crime.

There is, of course, absolutely no evidence that “heated rhetoric” in any way motivated Jarred Loughner’s shooting spree, but the media’s repeated association of political speech with the attack suggests an attempt to exploit the tragedy to discredit mainstream conservatives by smearing them as somehow culpable.

As scornful as the media were of conservatives last year, they were just as adoring of top liberals, as documented by the MRC's Best Notable Quotables of 2010. Topping the MRC's annual "Media Hero Award," ABC's World News anchor Diane Sawyer fawned over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after the passage of ObamaCare in March:

“All agree she gets credit for locking up this vote, one of the biggest since Medicare in the 1960s. And she’s said to have done it with an epic blend of persuasion, muscle and will, even when half the town said it couldn’t be done....Their indefatigable, unwavering almost 70-year-old Speaker, mother of five, grandmother of seven....[to Pelosi] What do you think your dad and your mom would have said about this moment?”

The liberal press likes to scold what it sees as lapses in civil rhetoric, usually from conservatives who fail to properly respect the icons of the Left. But as documented by the MRC's Best Notable Quotables of 2010, the media elite itself lurched into some pretty uncivil rhetoric this year — especially when the targets were Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party and other conservatives.

PBS's Tavis Smiley won MRC's "Poison Tea Pot Award for Smearing the Anti-Obama Rabble" (and was runner-up for "Quote of the Year") for arguing with author Ayaan Hirsi Ali that everyday Christians and the Tea Party were just as dangerous as radical Muslims.

Condemning everyday Americans as racist, anti-immigrant Islamophobes was a favorite media theme in 2010, as documented by the Media Research Center's year-end Best Notable Quotables of 2010. Polls showed most Americans supported Arizona's effort to curb illegal immigration and opposed building an Islamic center near the site of the destroyed World Trade Center towers — but on both scores the media elite stacked their coverage against the public.

Winning the "Hazing Arizona Award for Denigrating Immigration Enforcement" was longtime New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who summoned images of resistance to Nazi occupation in an April 27 op-ed hoping for protests of the "police state" she claimed Arizona had become for trying to protect itself from illegal immigration.

Every year, the Media Research Center invites a distinguished panel of expert judges to sift through the dopiest, wackiest quotes of the year, and every year it seems the honor roll of idiocy gets longer and longer.

This year, top honors in the MRC's "Audacity of Dopes Award for the Wackiest Analysis of the Year" went to the Boston Globe Magazine's Charles Pierce, for a January 10 column he addressed to Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown just days before the Massachusetts special election. In Pierce's highly-esteemed opinion, Brown's cause was hopeless:

Even as the public grew increasingly disenchanted with Washington's full-throated liberal policies in 2010, the media elite's partisanship remained on full display. The Media Research Center's Best Notable Quotables of 2010 captured the highlights, as journalists continued to blame America's misfortunes on George W. Bush, even as they also insisted that Barack Obama deserved more credit for his amazing accomplishments.

In the MRC's "They Don't Miss Him Yet Award for Still Bashing Bush," Time's Joe Klein took the prize for insisting that the April 2010 Gulf oil spill was really Bush's fault: "This is more Bush’s second Katrina than Obama’s first,” Klein lamely insisted on The Chris Matthews Show. Klein made his crack on May 30, nearly 500 days after Bush left the Oval Office.

Late last week, CNN announced its plan to team up with the Tea Party Express to co-sponsor a Republican presidential debate in September. While this creates the possibility that Republican candidates will actually face questions of interest to Republican primary voters (as opposed to the typical liberal media agenda), it’s also probably the first time a media organization will partner with a group that its on-air correspondents and commentators have trashed over the past two years.

CNN’s liberal commentators have been savage to the Tea Party. Back in 2009, longtime CNN house liberal Paul Begala slammed the Tea Party as “a bunch of wimpy, whiny, weasels who don’t love their country.” A couple of weeks before this year’s election, CNN’s 8pm ET co-host Eliot Spitzer said the Tea Party was “vapid” and leading America “down a dangerous road....They’re going to destroy our country.”

But CNN’s supposedly objective correspondents and anchors have showcased a similar hostility to the Tea Party, attacking them as racist, extremist, pawns of Fox News, or using the vulgar “tea-bagging” nickname favored by left-wing activists to disparage the group. A few of the choicer examples from the MRC’s archive (including video):