Tim Graham's blog

CBS interviewed David Axelrod this morning and fixated on the debates, waiting until the last question to ask weakly about the Libya scandal after Wednesday's House hearing. NPR Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep showed up CBS: he conducted a nine-minute interview with Axelrod that never even mentioned Libya. In fact, the online rundown for the show demonstrates they had no Libya story this morning.

Instead, Inskeep wrapped up a series of questions reflecting the dominant liberal angst about Obama's alleged lack of debate aggression by alluding to how Obama might be metaphorically acting like Abraham Lincoln by keeping his anger at Romney to himself:

When Congressman Paul Ryan was named Mitt Romney’s running mate, one of the dominant liberal-media spin lines is that his budget proposal would “slash Medicare.” Everyone knows that Medicare spending is never “slashed,” but there are proposals to slow it from its skyrocketing trend line.

ABC reporter Martha Raddatz, who will moderate Ryan’s debate with Vice President Biden, used exactly this kind of misleading terminology against President Bush on February 4, 2008: "The President’s budget slashes billions of dollars in the growth of federal health care programs. Medicare and Medicaid would be cut by almost $200 billion."

The Associated Press has apologized for its rude picture of Romney with a young girl gaping from behind. That happened the morning after Bill O'Reilly trashed AP on Tuesday night and predicted they would apologize.

"Here is the photo the Associated Press took at the meet and greet, a foolish shot that makes Romney the butt of stupid jokes. Pardon the pun. The picture was taken by photographer Evan Vucci and never should have been published. The Governor doesn't know there is a child behind him. And the child is looking at something else. This is a cheap shot, literally.... So the person who did that at the Associated Press who put that picture out on the wire should be fired, and the Associated Press should put out an apology, in which they will by the way after tonight." Alan Colmes tried to make excuses for AP:

The first part of this Randi Rhodes radio rant on Monday was typical: "But that was a rare admission by the conservative media, that they are world heavyweight champion haters, liars, distorters, and by the way, there is nothing on the Left that is equal, approaching equal, near equal, because even though the Left opines, we actually look at the facts and how we find them is where we go. That's when we start making our opinions!"

Rhodes would claim to be utterly fact-based...and then utterly collapsed by declaring it is a "false premise" to call the murdered late-term abortionist George Tiller a "baby killer," as Bill O'Reilly did.

Feminist sensation Sandra Fluke had her 15 minutes of fame extended by a Washington Post puff piece by reporter David Fahrenthold on Tuesday. “Not done testifying” was the headline. Fluke aspires to be an "independent voice," despite the article displaying she was discovered earlier this year in a Google search by Democrats and has campaigned for Democrats ever since.

The official excuse for this extension of fame was “a debate between [no label!] Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and conservative Bill O’Reilly.” The Fox News star proclaimed Fluke should buy her own birth-control pills:

Emily Friedman of ABC News reported Monday that “Mitt Romney ordered his motorcade to make an abrupt U-turn in rural Virginia today, after zipping by a group of elementary school students waving in the front yard of the school, so he could go back and meet them.” ABC's video shows thrilled grade-schoolers in Fairfield, Virginia. But no nice move goes unpunished by the press.

Check out the AP picture distributed across the country. It's unbelievable. It honestly looks like a little girl is gaping at Romney from behind. This accompanied a snippy AP story by Lynn Elber on how Romney couldn't find time to take questions from kids for a Nickelodeon special. It's not just on Yahoo! (It's also here and here.....) Elber began by lecturing:

Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that at a Chicago speech, CBS correspondent Lara Logan called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. Logan hoped America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

Eleven years later, she said, the terrorists still hate us more than ever. “The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she proclaimed. They’re coming back. “I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated,” Logan added. The lie? That America's military has tamed the Taliban.

Monday's Washington Post highlighted the gay-left Obama supporters at the Human Rights Campaign had their national dinner on Saturday night and honored actress Sally Field. "This was a rich, powerful, savvy crowd, ponying up $400K during the 30-minute live auction to buy commercial time this month in key election states." HRC is fighting defense-of-marriage ballot initiatives in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington state.

The Post account did not report that media companies have taken their liberal side in sponsoring the event. Comcast/NBC Universal was a “Gold Sponsor” of the dinner and Facebook was a “Bronze Sponsor.” Google is a national "corporate partner" of HRC's. Right now, the top of the HRC website advertises the stars of ABC's Modern Family will do an Obama-campaign-style "Modern Family Dinner Date" drawing to raise money for this group. (video below)

One of the first things anyone should know about NPR host Terry Gross is that she deeply loves Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Her almost 40-minute interview on Thursday's Fresh Air with Colbert wrapped up with a gooey valentine about what a comedic patriot he is. (We’ll come back to that.)

She must have loved how Colbert, the one always making conservatives look like idiots who hate books, denounced Romney as a “walking wound” and an “apostate heretic” in a "cult" that shouldn't lead "God's chosen country." It’s just another liberal-pleasing day on the airwaves of your taxpayer-funded network of more than 700 affiliates.

Steven Pearlstein at The Washington Post and Timothy Egan at The New York Times both served as reporters before unleashing their opinions as columnists. Both are passionate liberals. Recently both men wrote arrogant jeremiads. So which article made its author look more like a jerk?

It might depend on which group you sympathize with -- Pearlstein went after Mitt Romney types in finance, while Egan went after the still-undecided voter. In an article titled "I am a job creator: A manifesto for the entitled," Pearlstein used the first person to express arrogant ignorance by his Romney-type:

Supporters of National Public Radio tout the depth and breadth of its foreign reporting from all corners of the globe. But how fair and balanced are those stories? On Monday, NPR aired its latest mockery of its own title when All Things Considered shamelessly sold the wonders of the transgender revolution in Argentina with zero seconds for opposition -- even for sticklers who don't mangle gender pronouns to be politically correct.

Reporter Annie Murphy, who has written for The Nation and studied at the University of Havana, only presented transgender advocates who are thrilled with new laws supported by the leftist Kirchner government, in which the government even pays for "gender reassignment" surgeries: 

Neil Munro of the Daily Caller was attacked by journalists for asking President Obama a question out of turn -- because Obama wasn't offering a turn. He expects to speak without taking questions. On Thursday, Munro once again found himself surrounded by amateur Obama advisers thinly disguised as objective journalists after Obama lost the debate in Denver.

Munro noted several reporters on the 11:15 a.m. phone conference promptly offered questions that bordered on advice. "Axe, I'm not sure you can hear me, David," said NBC's Andrea Mitchell,  "I'm wondering whether the president, whether you have rethought the strategy of not bringing up either women's issues, or the 47 percent or some of the other issues that have worked so well for you in your campaign advertising and in your stump speech?" Other transcripts without the reporter names identified seconded that emotion:

British journalist and historian Tim Stanley is a conservative expert on American politics. He blogged at the Telegraph (U.K.) website that the liberal media lost in the first debate, suffering a "humiliation for an industry that has spent several years setting Obama up as the wisest, most eloquent, most popular politician since FDR."

Stanley found that American media bookers fully expected Obama to dominate Romney, and were amazed with his bizarre theory that Romney would win. Then when Romney won, they called to ask if he would talk about how debates don't matter! He wrote:

Jim Lehrer has granted several post-debate interviews to respond to negative reactions from other journalists. In Saturday's Washington Post, Paul Farhi concluded with this. "One last thing: What was your reaction when Governor Romney said he intended to end funding for PBS? Did it sound to you like he was saying, 'I’ll take the rug right out from under you if I’m president?'"

What? Romney would take away the furniture at PBS stations? Lehrer replied, "He’s said that before. That didn’t bother me or surprise me." Let's assume he meant he was unfazed, not that he was fond of PBS critics. We know better.

In case anyone is in doubt that Liberal Talk Radio-land can display the tendency to all hit the same talking points, many liberal hosts all hit the same post-debate theme on Thursday: Mitt Romney only won because he shamelessly lied his face off. (They find it charming when Clinton does.)

Al Sharpton was outraged, as if he never lied as he was callously spreading the Tawana Brawley racial hoax: “I think there is nothing admirable and applaud-able [?] about a man standing up 90 minutes and making his case by distortion and lies."

For today’s ObamaCare press release, timed nicely for the fall campaign, you could open to the Washington Post Express tabloid for the headline “Study Touts Effects of Free Birth Control.”

An AP story announced: “Free birth control led to dramatically lower rates of abortions and teen births, a large study concluded Thursday. The findings were eagerly anticipated and come as a bitterly contested Obama administration policy is poised to offer similar coverage.” (NBC touted the story as well on Friday’s Today.)

MSNBC folks never stop doing the unintentional comedy routine of saying their network is so much fairer and more balanced than Fox News. In an interview with Marisa Guthrie at The Hollywood Reporter, MSNBC president Phil Griffin started up the laugh track by proclaiming that while every Republican in trouble apparently goes crying to Fox, "We are not going to lay down, do an easy interview, and President Obama knows it. We're not here to be the voice of the administration." They have too much "integrity."

Come to think of it, it's odd that it's been a long time since Obama granted a TV sitdown to Big Ed or Rachel, and especially his pal Al Sharpton. But I don't think Griffin would dare to claim Brian Williams isn't a star on MSNBC from time to time, and he has absolutely provided easy interviews to Obama (complete with "Have a good evening, sir" bow.) Here's how Griffin handled the Fox-opposite question:

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal smelled a conflict-of-interest problem when "The Washington Post Co. said Monday that it has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Celtic Healthcare, a provider of skilled home health-care and hospice services in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions.”

The Post has offset losses in its core journalism businesses with profits from its Kaplan educational business. But federal money is part of the cash flow. A recent story on threatened accreditations noted “A loss of accreditation would mean the Kaplan campuses would no longer be eligible for Title IV loans from the Education Department, the source of nearly 90 percent of Kaplan higher-education revenue.” The Post’s foray into health care will also make the Post more dependent on government revenue:

The obituary pages of Wednesday’s Washington Post displayed a very obvious bias in labeling two political figures. On page B7, the Post honored radical-left ecologist Barry Commoner. The Post’s Matt Schudel began: “Barry Commoner, a visionary scientist and author who helped launch the environmental movement in the United States and whose ideas influenced public thinking about nuclear testing, energy consumption, and recycling, died Sept. 30 at a hospital in New York.”

There was no ideological labeling in the piece. Younger Americans would remember Commoner as the radical who ran for president in 1980 with a radio ad with an actor saying “Bulls--t! Carter, Reagan and Anderson, it's all bulls--t!" That candidacy drew one sentence. Then consider how they “honored” conservative former Arizona congressman Sam Steiger on page B8:

MRC's Christian Robey suggested a letter to the editor on Monday for David Carr's strange column attacking MRC's letter attacking the media for rigging this presidential election by hounding Romney and protecting Obama. Carr wrote Brent Bozell assembled "conservative royalty" to attack "ostensibly tendentious coverage."

Some of us were skeptical that a liberal newspaper would deign to publish a letter from an organization that critiques the media on a daily basis. Every blog post here is a bit of a letter to the editor (or executive producer). But with this advice, Brent Bozell allowed me to draft a letter and we sent it along, and we received notification that they were interested in publishing it. It appears near the bottom of the editorial page Thursday on page A26. The headline is simply "Bias In The Media":

On Wednesday’s Jansing & Co., MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing tried to establish that there is one question “we can all anticipate and not be surprised by,” and that is a question to Mitt Romney about the 47 percent comments, because it had a “very negative effect” on voters. Jim Lehrer must repeat Obama's TV ads in a question?

But what about the “other race speech” video of Obama from 2007? In perfect formation with the DNC line, Jansing asked disgraced CBS anchor Dan Rather if that smacked of Republican desperation: [ video below the break, audio here ]

Mitt Romney recently told CBS’s Scott Pelley that a leader would “say which of those things that you should take out of the budget that are no longer essential,” and when pressed to be specific, Romney nominated "the subsidy for PBS,” and subsidies for Amtrak, the NEA, and the NEH. This raises one obvious question. In moderating tonight's first general election debate of 2012, can longtime PBS star Jim Lehrer be fair to a candidate who wants to zero out the subsidy for PBS?

In his 1992 memoir A Bus of My Own, Lehrer confesses he could sound like a “PBS superpatriot” in lauding his own newscast. For his own career at PBS, Lehrer professed he loved how Watergate “crumbled” Nixon’s plans to “crumble us” in liberal taxpayer-funded broadcasting:

The Washington Post proved on Tuesday that it will promote “Occupy DC” protests as real “news events” no matter how poor the turnout. “About 50 protesters took to the streets waving signs, chanting and singing,” wrote the Post’s Annie Gowen. “They were trailed by a large cadre of D.C. police, in vans, on foot and on Segways, who obligingly shut down streets for them.”

And the Post obligingly awarded the protest with three splashy color photos, two on the front page of Metro, and a large 5-by-8-inch photo on the section’s back page. The paper's headline was “Occupy D.C. plans to stage its Act 2.” And it didn’t matter if this “stage” is sparsely attended, and only 30 people show up for events: 

In Monday’s Washington Post, local editor Vernon Loeb reviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new memoir Total Recall, and retells the amusing tale of Karl Rove telling Arnold he didn’t have a chance of being governor, and then suggested Condoleezza Rice would run in 2006. That didn’t turn out.

But Loeb also predictably pushed the usual button that the GOP is too conservative and needs to be more like Arnold: “His willingness to go his own way as a left-leaning Republican also stands out in this election year, when the GOP has veered hard right.”

From his spot on the Time Ideas blog, the MSNBC anchor Toure admitted "If President Obama had to run against Senator Obama of 2008, he’d probably be crushed. Back then, Obama seemed superhuman; today he is merely mortal. His victory in 2008 was historic, breaking the race barrier in the nation’s highest office."

Guess what came next. Re-electing Obama is a greater test of whether America is racist than it was in 2008: "But an Obama victory in 2012 would say something even more profound about how far our country has come. Granted, Obama’s election (or not) is merely one of many factors that will tell us where we are on race in America. But it is a big one." Toure put Obama into the metaphor of The Matrix: