Tim Graham's blog

CNN host Jake Tapper is announcing he’ll be discussing the Kermit Gosnell trial today on “The Lead.” But earlier, he got angry with a Twitter critic, insisting “that ‘one sentence’ nonsense from Media Research Council is false. We covered it before + we will cover it again.”

I gave Brent Bozell the claim that Tapper only did “one sentence,” and I was wrong (sort of like messing up “Media Research Center”). On March 21, Tapper gave it a brief five-sentence report, 76 words in all. That’s better than everyone else at CNN and the Big Three. But our Matt Hadro reports CNN has given Brad Paisley’s song “Accidental Racist” more than 18 minutes of coverage, compared to CNN’s 24 seconds so far this year on Gosnell:

Friday’s Washington Post is aggressively pushing for the gay Left’s youth agenda, including a front-page Metro section story on a tiny street protest against the local Boy Scout council: “Among the protesters against the Boy Scouts of America’s ban, few have more to risk than a gay Md. teen,” read the headline above a photo. “Honoring his duty, pursuing equality” was the large headline.

The heroic protagonists of the story were Pascal Tessier, a 16-year-old gay activist who wants to be an Eagle Scout, and his gay brother Lucien, 20, who already earned his Eagle. Reporter Theresa Vargas equated the BSA policy with bullying:

Thatcher, Schmatcher. NPR is still obsessing over its loss of leftist Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. On Wednesday's Morning Edition, anchor Steve Inskeep reported from Caracas and interviewed Rory Carroll, a journalist with a new book on Chavez called "Comandante."

Inskeep somehow downplayed Chavez's iron grip on the country's press organs, because hey, the love of the poor people was genuine: "Well, let me ask about ordinary Venezuelans, because this obviously was a man who had the machinery of the government in his control, had a lot of television stations, had a lot of talent in producing propaganda. But isn't it true that he also had genuine, bedrock support, even love, among a lot of Venezuelans?"

Here’s a good definition of what The Washington Post doesn’t find newsworthy. The big headline on the front page of Monday’s Washington Examiner was “Most on D.C. welfare don’t look for work: 22% of able recipients meet job-search rules.”

A quick Nexis search of The Washington Post finds no attempt to report on this sad fact in the last few weeks. Examiner reporter Eric Newcomer explained:

TV writer Duane Dudek at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel caught a little photographic boo-boo by NBC News during Tuesday's Today. Anchor Natalie Morales reported JC Penney ousted their CEO Ron Johnson after just 17 months on the job.

But as you can see, NBC's graphic used a photo of Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, a Tea Party favorite who's had quite a different job in the last two years -- and a better business record:

If anyone was going to dance in the streets when Margaret Thatcher died, you could reliably find a Daily Kos blogger with two turntables and a microphone.

"Ollie Garkey" protested that Thatcher's economic policies were "the greatest case of international larceny in history...far harsher than even Ronald Reagan's economic policies. Thatcher destroyed whole industries in places like Wales and Scotland just to be rid of the unions supported by those industries."

Mollie Hemingway at Get Religion is amazed that people would say the most notable, memorable thing evangelical preacher Rick Warren ever did was give the invocation at President Obama's first Inauguration. Warren's son Matthew committed suicide on Saturday.

"Not having heard of Warren prior to 2008 means that you had to have been in utero (or high school, or something similar) during 2002 or whenever [The] Purpose Driven Life came out and became one of the best selling books in history," Hemingway wrote. But Warren accomplished that massive success inside the Christian world, and the secular national media, especially TV network news, wasn't really paying attention. Check out this snippet of our 2005 Special Report on network TV religion coverage:

It sounded like 2006 all over again: liberals and leftists plan a rally for illegal immigrants gaining an amnesty, and The Washington Post applies the usual liberal formula of pre-protest buildup: it’s going to be massive! And no one who’s organizing this is a liberal!

If the protests are large – and they were in 2006 – some credit should go to the free advertising the Post gives in advance. In this case, it was a story on the front page of Sunday's Metro section with a color photo. “Activists riding a fresh wave of optimism ahead of immigration rally,” promised the headline:

Here's today's sign the Washington Post is a Democrat rag. This story is on A-4: "Health-care law may backfire for some on Medicaid: Expansion threatens to oust thousands in states with generous programs." This story is on A-1: "Democrats seek infusion of new faces."

Paul Kane's front-pager passed along the DCCC's new strategy of finding "problem solvers" that...don't know how to solve problems yet. The central character is Kevin Strouse, a former Army Ranger with no set positions on the issues. "Immigration? Tax policy? 'Certainly I have a lot of research to do,' Strouse acknowledged" as he announced a House run in Pennsylvania. This is the Tea Party takedown?

On Easter Sunday, The Washington Post published a controversial op-ed by twin sisters Charlotte and Harriet Childress titled "White men have much to discuss about mass shootings." As in: white men commit all the mass shootings.

"Nearly all of the mass shootings in this country in recent years, not just Newtown, Aurora, Fort Hood, Tucson and Columbine — have been committed by white men and boys," they claimed. In the Detroit News, liberal Arkansas columnist Gene Lyons, one of the most ardent Clinton defenders in the 1990s, took this op-ed apart, piece by piece:

The national newspaper supplement Parade magazine is championing Chelsea Clinton on its cover on Sunday.  “The former (and potentially future) first daughter on her grandmother’s wisdom, finding her own voice, and the power of making a difference.”

The interviewer/flatterer is former ABC News reporter Lynn Sherr, who eventually makes her way to her usual path, proclaiming the gospel of feminism (and by extension, "extraordinary" Hillary). Chelsea, currently an NBC News staffer -- see "The Misery Continues" -- announced that positively everyone she knows is proud to be a feminist:

Commentary editor John Podhoretz tweeted around an article at Israelhayom.com by his sister, Ruthie Blum, laying into Jon Stewart for hypocrisy. He could come to the support of the Egyptian satirist now being hailed as the "Egyptian Jon Stewart," but... he made fun of conservatives like Sean Hannity last fall for expressing doubts that the Arab Spring might not be so welcoming of freedom of speech.

Bassem Youssef has been charged with insulting Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and with defaming Islam. He turned himself in and was granted bail. Morsi also issued a warrant for Stewart's arrest and demanded his extradition from the U.S. so he could be tried for "blasphemy and fomenting anti-Egyptian sentiment." Blum said Stewart should be glad he's an American:

On The Huffington Post, gay radio host Michelangelo Signorile -- last mentioned here when he told a pro-Romney caller to his show to buy arsenic and drink it -- is angry at the son of Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.). Salmon must either cave and support the LGBT agenda, or the son must reject  his father for being "selfish" and remaining conservative.

All parents should "reconcile their faith" with the LGBT agenda, or be cut off:

Proving that liberalism is moving the entire world of profanity into the realm of supporting what they see as embattled minorities – like the gay F-bomb – several old liberal hands at the Federal Communications Commission now want the word “Redskins” to be treated like an obscenity.  “XXXskin is the most derogatory name a Native American can be called. It is an unequivocal racial slur,” they proclaimed in a letter to Redskins owner Daniel Snyder.

But the Brooks Boliek report in Politico has a major factual omission in it. Men who signed this letter, like former FCC chairman Reed Hundt and former commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, routinely hated identifying anything as indecent on television before deciding the word “Redskins” was.

Late last year, NPR already proved its affinity for publicizing a vicious tale where the Virgin Mary is turned into a bitter atheist who denies the divinity of Jesus and hates the Apostles for trying to spread Christianity. But NPR proved it again....on Good Friday.

The news “hook” is the forthcoming Broadway adaptation, a one-woman monologue, set to open on April 22. So NPR obviously timed the piece to tweak the Christians. All Things Considered anchor Robert Siegel interviewed the actress, Fiona Shaw, and after he heard her read from this Christian-bashing work in an Irish brogue, he compared Jesus to an Irish Republican Army terrorist leader: 

For a long time now, it’s been apparent to social conservatives that the gay-marriage lobby is not a movement of tolerance. It won’t be satisfied with Supreme Court-imposed homo-nuptials in 50 states. If groups like GLAAD are the rule, they work to ban the social conservatives out of the “respectable” circles in the media, and make “homophobia” a hate crime.

But you can’t make this argument at the Daily Kos, where “LeftHandedMan” responded to this argument with a “GFY” and a rant about how conservatives should all bend over and “fist” each other with spiked gloves:  

On the taxpayer-funded radical Pacifica Radio network, the talk program "Democracy Now" celebrated the AP's scrapping the term "illegal immigrant" in news stories. Anchor Juan Gonzalez explained "The move was welcomed by immigrant advocates who argue the term is a dehumanizing slur."

Pacifica's guest was Indian-American activist Rinku Sen of Colorlines.com, who said they've been "calling for news outlets to drop that phraseology for a long time, precisely because of the reason that the Associated Press identified, that it’s an imprecise term that is applied in a blanket way, but discriminatorily really toward people of color, whether they are immigrant, whether they are undocumented or not." On her own Colorlines website, Sen claimed victory in the AP lobbying campaign:

The Associated Press has made news repeatedly in recent months for Stylebook revisions: for example, for both relinquishing the term “homophobia” and welcoming the usage of “his husband” and “her wife.”

On Tuesday, they announced the AP stylebook will no longer welcome the term “illegal immigrant,” preferring instead a more politically-correct mumble about residents “without legal permission”:

ABC wasn’t the only network to turn to atheist on Easter morning for some acidulous religion-bashing. MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry turned to feminist Katha Pollitt to rip apart religions as “all invented by men for men” to repress women.

That came after Harris-Perry somehow compared the morality of abortion as a less weighty matter than access to water in the Third World. Once again, like last weekend, Harris-Perry referred to unborn babies as “things,” in this case “things in your uterus” that you can evacuate: 

Last week, Politico columnist Roger Simon -- formerly an "objective" reporter with the Baltimore Sun and U.S. News & World Report -- began a column attacking the head of the National Rifle Association with this sulfurous sentence: "Wayne LaPierre may have more blood on his hands than Dracula, but — fair is fair — he also has the guts of a burglar."

Compare this to a search of Politico for the horrific abortions committed at the clinic of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, now on trial in Philadelphia: "Your search - kermit gosnell - did not match any documents." No Gosnell stories. Ever. But LaPierre is like a mass murderer:

Here's one example for why network newscasts should have a corrections feature. On Saturday night, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt announced the death of legendary pop music producer Phil Ramone.

He announced he was 72, and his birth year on screen said 1941. They were only wrong by seven years...

The Los Angeles Times theater critic is depressed that playwright David Mamet has stumbled so sadly off a right-wing cliff. In his "Critic's Notebook," Charles McNulty complained from a huge spread on the cover of the Sunday Arts and Books section that rambled on inside. 

Liberal writers adore insulting conservatives as stooping to the sound of “loudmouth talk radio,” and in "The problem with David Mamet," McNulty certainly sounds as “hotheaded” as his subject: