Tim Graham's blog

Reuters media blogger Jack Shafer has no use for year-end "Best of the Year" lists. "Lined up, one-by-one, the best-of-year-in-review packages resemble the floats gliding down wide boulevards during a New Year’s Day parade: colorful, big, but pointless."

Shafer then picked on the New York Times best-of-books list for complete inconsistency (without commenting on its obviously liberal and pro-Obama tilt):

CBS Face the Nation anchor Bob Schieffer may be thrilled that he landed actor Ben Affleck for his Sunday show, but he didn't have to mangle his resume for effect. On Thursday's CBS This Morning, Schieffer gushed, "He's a very committed – a very serious person. You know, he went to Harvard and majored in Middle Eastern studies."

Wrong! The average CBS watcher might have thought the actor had a Harvard degree in Middle Eastern studies. Affleck not only didn't go to Harvard, he barely went to college.

Michael Bloomberg's "Mayors Against Illegal Guns" campaign uploaded one of those liberal celebrity YouTube videos in dramatic black and white to "Demand a Plan" for new gun control laws.

But the shock sets in at about 17 seconds, where religion-trashing leftist Sarah Silverman asks "How many more houses of faith" must have a shooting tragedy. Excuse me? Sarah Silverman, who pretended to have a one-night stand with God, and then threw Him out of her bed and kneed Him in the groin? This is how it unfolded (video and transcript below):

Why would a liberal PBS star, producing a show in liberal New York City, try to get away with not paying the interns? The New York Times reports "Charlie Rose and his production company have agreed to pay as much as $250,000 to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by a former unpaid intern who claimed minimum-wage violations."

Of course, Rose (now the co-host of CBS This Morning) isn't admitting any wrongdoing by settling. He ended up sounding like Ebenezer Scrooge:

If today's gun control debate seems a bit stale to you, you're not wrong. Twelve years ago, MRC's Geoffrey Dickens wrote a Special Report on network coverage of gun controversies over a two-year period from July 1997 to June 1999.

ABC, CBS, and NBC harped on several major themes in their coverage of gun policy stories. The arguments most commonly advanced by the network stars had one thought in common: guns are the problem. Check out just how similar yesterday's complaints were to today's:

Here's a sign of how much The Washington Post can never get the Nixon-hating DNA out of its reporting. In a front-page obituary on Thursday on  former federal judge and rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, the Post's Al Kamen and Matt Schudel begin: "Robert H. Bork, the conservative jurist who fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the 'Saturday Night Massacre' in 1973," and yada yada, "enduring schism" over failed nomination to the High Court.

In the immediate aftermath of a real massacre, couldn't the Post back off its ancient ideological hissy fits and acknowledge that firing a special prosecutor -- and the resignation of several officials who didn't want to do the firing -- is not comparable to Adam Lanza mowing down first-graders? Could there be a one-week grace period on overheated Watergate metaphors? Apparently not. When liberal justices die, do they discuss the actual "massacre" of American abortion they legalized? No:

On Tuesday morning, the taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio network broadcast a Friday night speech from leftist filmmaker Michael Moore trashing America just  hours after the Newtown school shooting. He began by trashing our warlike culture, and then claimed "all the wrong people are in prison in this country."

"Democracy Now" anchor Amy Goodman found zero irony in the fact that Moore spoke at a "Bring Leonard Peltier Home 2012 event" at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. Peltier was convicted of shooting two FBI agents dead in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. (Hollywood lefties have long claimed the trial was unfair. Peltier acknowledged in a 1999 memoir that he shot at the agents, but claimed he didn't kill them.)

Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine is a media writer with a flaw. He wrote about Fox News without seeming to think he had to watch it. On Monday night, he wrote an article hotly claiming that Fox News hosts were ordered not to talk about gun control after the Newtown shooting (except for  Fox News Sunday).

Jeff Poor at The Daily Caller unloaded a painful box of facts on Sherman about all the examples of gun-control talk over the weekend. Sherman’s report was anonymously sourced and loose on the facts:

In one of its last print issues, Newsweek mocks Bill O’Reilly in an article titled “The War On Christmas Is Over: Christmas Won.” Christian groups are pleased that retailers have mostly gone back to using “Christmas” instead of the more neutral “Holiday” patter. Religion reporter David Sessions asked: “How did this cultural flash point slide into oblivion, with Bill O’Reilly virtually the last person continuing to fight?”

Here’s where the magazine is doubling down on stupid. This brief article appears in the December 17 issue – which features a cover story by agnostic leftist scholar Bart Ehrman titled "The Myths of Jesus." He's clearly fighting the Christmas story as un-historical.

On Thursday night, when UN Ambassador Susan Rice withdrew her name from consideration to be Secretary of State, the nation’s broadcast network struggled again with the facts: Rice lied on five Sunday shows in stark contrast with reality that there was no premeditated terrorist attack on the consulate in Benghazi. Instead, they insisted the truth was only something Republicans claimed.

Take NPR anchor Audie Cornish: “Rice had long been a leading contender to succeed Hillary Clinton who has said she would like to step down early next year. But a chorus of Republican senators who believe Rice misled the nation about the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya made clear they would fight her nomination.”  They believe she misled?? Cornish wasn't alone:

In Friday's Washington Post, gossips Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts reported that Sarah Palin's eldest child Track is divorcing his wife after a little more than a year of marriage. "She keeps her jewelry; he keeps his guns" in the settlement, they joked from the TMZ report.

But in June of 2010, when Al Gore's eldest child Karenna was divorcing, she was a "crisis management" role model like Dear Old Mom and Dad. Check out the difference. Here's Friday's Palin announcement:

National Public Radio always knows which party funds it, and which party would rather shut it down. On Thursday night’s All Things Considered, their top story was “On Fiscal Cliff, Majority of Public Sides with Democrats, Pew Poll Says.”

The NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll may say that 46 percent wanted Congress to "take the lead role in setting policy for the country," compared to only 40 percent wanting the President to take the lead, and then in a follow-up, 25 percent said they meant House Republicans should take a lead role, compared to just 7 percent saying Senate Democrats. NPR prefers to start its night with Pew’s Andy Kohut announcing that the public somehow finds Obama is making a much more serious effort to reduce the deficit:

ABCNews.com doesn’t know how to use quote marks for this headline: “Obama: More Moderate Republican Than Socialist.” Obama told a Miami interviewer that "The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican."

Lloyd Bentsen impressions are mandatory: I knew moderate Republicans in the Eighties. Moderate Republicans in the Eighties were friends of mine. Obama is no moderate Republican from the Eighties. But Jordan Fabian of ABCNews.com aggressively pushed links that Obama has agreement on the left:

NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos has demonstrated he's not interested in the argument that NPR has a liberal bias. But he has repeatedly addressed listeners who are angry NPR favors Republicans too much, or fails to pounce immediately on leftist PR stunts like Occupy Wall Street.

On Wednesday, his post began: "Arthur Price of New York City asked this provocative question: 'Is it my imagination or is NPR featuring an excessive number of Republican voices when it comes to the so-called 'fiscal cliff'?' I didn't know, but I loved the issue he raised." Their internal count of stories from November 7 to December 6 said yes, Republicans were more quoted:

Patrick Moran – the same embarrassing son of liberal Democrat Congressman Jim Moran who drew some national attention in October for being caught on camera by Project Veritas encouraging voter registration fraud – has now brutalized his girlfriend in an alcoholic rage.

A police officer saw “Moran grab a woman by the back of her head and slam it into a trash can about 1:23 a.m. in front of the Getaway nightclub in Columbia Heights.” Moran was initially charged with felony assault. Girlfriend Kelly Hofmann was found bleeding “heavily” from her nose, according to court records, and her nose and right eye were “extremely” swollen. Guess where the Washington Post placed this “war on women” story?

The Washington Post today indicted America’s media for failing to notice a Spanish-language star until she died in a plane crash: “Mainstream media’s belated discovery of Jenni Rivera stirs some anger among Hispanic Americans.”

Media reporter Paul Farhi only spotlighted one angry California journalist, Gustavo Arellano, who writes a column called “Ask A Mexican,” and Farhi must not have asked him skeptical questions like oh, how he expects everyone to know the reality-show stars on the “Mun2" channel:

On NPR’s All Things Considered on Friday, the network devoted a segment to "Answering Your Questions On the Fiscal Cliff." Audie Cornish declared: “It turns out many of you are confounded as well by a debate that has quickly devolved into a jumble of numbers and half truths.”

It also turns out "many of you" were liberals, and none were conservative. The listener questions that NPR picked tilted left, obsessing about taxing the “top two percent” and insisting that Social Security and Medicare be left off the table:

On Saturday, The Washington Post published several letters from readers who were upset by Philip Rucker's report last week on how Mitt Romney was tending his loser wounds in his "moneyed and pristine enclave of San Diego." Even when Republicans crawl away and stop criticizing Heroic Barack, they can't lay off. On Sunday, Washington Post humorist (and former Style section editor) Gene Weingarten penned a nasty column in which his feminist friend Gina Barreca ripped into Romney for creeping out single women voters, who preferred Obama.

Romney, we're told, is a "terrible, terrible date" who would be "abusive to the busboy" and grow petulant is you didn't order what he urged you to try. "I would sooner go out with Gilbert Gottfried," she insisted. As if a feminist who sizes you up as a creep from afar is a dream date? It was a rant, and it wasn't funny -- unless you're a Romney-hater:

NPR talk show host Diane Rehm mentioned listening to Rush Limbaugh on Friday -- this is a bit of a shock, since she's written several editorials against Limbaugh and other "hot button" commercial radio hosts. The subject was Sen. Jim DeMint leaving the Senate to run the Heritage Foundation.

Rehm, of course, chose to imply this might mean that the Tea Party is "losing its power" in Washington:

While  Speaker John Boehner has been sharply criticized from the right over the last week, it might not be as sharp or as personal as the leftists on the radio.

Try bile-spewing Mike Malloy, who claimed Boehner was drunk most of the time he's on Capitol Hill, and he should just "drown himself in a vat of wine" and "gurgle himself right into the great bar in the sky":