Blogs

Paging Dr. Ephraim Goodweather! Paging Dr. Ephraim Goodweather!

I know you are in the middle of a family counseling session in order to gain custody of your son but we have an extreme emergency. No, not a virus outbreak on a plane that killed most of the passengers and crew. This outbreak of "The Strain" is much worse since it is real life. What makes it particularly dangerous is that most of the media has shirked its responsibility and has meekly accepted the severe restrictions placed upon it by the federal government, including agreeing not to question medical personnel.

Telemundo anchor José Díaz-Balart lauded his brand new MSNBC show as being “for you,” “for all of us” and “for all people”on Monday. Of course, by “all of us”José Díaz-Balart meant MSNBC’s usual target audience, liberals.

Díaz-Balart invited MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell on to the show to discuss what The Last Word host described as the outrageous Republican rhetoric that “this presidency is out of control.” Without offering any rebuttal, Díaz-Balart allowed the Lean Forward left winger to dismiss Obama’s overreach in altering legislation as the president merely “changing some dates.” [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]

Jordan Zakarin at The Wrap reported that Fox News host Elisabeth Hasselback shot back at Joy Behar – a hand-written note on Instagram! – after Behar accused her of a “below-the-belt attack” on Rosie O’Donnell when she accused Rosie of “spitting in the face of our military.” Rosie suggested our soldiers were the real terrorists. How that’s not spit is anyone’s guess.

It began when Hasselbeck, speaking on “Fox and Friends,” charged O'Donnell with being anti-military, and Behar called that a “really kind of below-the-belt” remark on CNN, which led to Hasselbeck's late Thursday Instagram post.

Echoing past media defenses of Jimmy Carter, Good Morning America's Martha Raddatz on Monday indicated that there are simply too many international flare-ups for John Kerry and the Obama administration to effectively focus on just one. Referring to the ongoing violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Raddatz lamented, "But diplomats really only so much bandwidth when they're dealing with things. They have to prioritize." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

The journalist sympathized, adding that such prioritization is "very, very difficult right now with what's going on in the world." Explaining why it's so hard for the administration to handle these problems, Raddatz reminded, "But there really are so many crises that he's dealing with right now. You've got Afghanistan. You've got Iraq." 

CNN’s Chris Cuomo was shocked that the death toll from the latest violence between Israel and Hamas was disproportionately on the Palestinian side. On the July 14 edition of New Day, the host implied that the perception was bad for Israel because they are causing high levels of casualties among Palestinian civilians, while the Israelis have suffered comparatively less.

In an interview with CNN Middle East analyst Michael Oren, Cuomo posed this question: “To the United States audience, they see this: strong Israel killing civilians in Gaza. We most often see the human toll on the Palestinian side. What do you offer as perspective as to who is being attacked here and what is continuing the cycle of violence?” [MP3 audio here; video below]

Now online: the July 14 edition of Notable Quotables, MRC’s bi-weekly compilation of the latest outrageous quotes in the liberal media. This week, former ABC News political director Mark Halperin blurts the truth about the media's neglect of the IRS scandal: "With a different administration, one that was a Republican administration, this story would be a national obsession."

But two days later, NBC News political director Chuck Todd suggested it was all a Republican ploy: "Are there any actual real victims?" while a longtime White House correspondent insists the press corps "would be galloping after" the IRS story if there was only "proof of a crime." Highlights are posted after the jump; the entire issue is posted online, with 20 quotes at www.MRC.org.

Team Hillary is staring daggers at New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, the one journalist who actually won a Pulitzer (for commentary) on a Clinton scandal (Lewinsky).

Dowd had the audacity to knock Chelsea Clinton for giving speeches for $75,000 a pop, even if it went to the Clinton Foundation, which is designed for the further aggrandizement of the Clinton reputation. It began:

Well, this explains a lot.

A Justin Lynch column ("Wartime Press") originally posted at the Weekly Wonk and republished at Time.com with a more foreboding title ("Bloggers, Surveillance and Obama’s Orwellian State") really ends up being an attempted justification by those Lynch quoted for having a close alliance between the government and "journalists" with "professional standards." Thom Shanker, the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, gets the award for the most Orwellian quote in the litter, which will come after the jump. Its prelude is his belief that "The government really needs to get its message out to the American people, and it knows that the best way to do that is by using the American news media." Excerpts follow.

NPR’s absentee ethics watchdog/ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos is ending his three-year term (with three items in the the first six months of 2014, one of them insisting on a ban of the word “Redskins.”) NPR is looking for someone who has a “diplomatic style that will earn the respect and trust of the public and the NPR staff and other NPR managers.”

In reality, they’re not looking for someone who makes sure all taxpayers get a fair shake from the media outlet they’re subsidizing. They’re looking for someone to please NPR staff and the hard-core lefties known as the NPR “public.”

National Review contributing editor Jonah Goldberg had some harsh words for the media’s lack of outrage over press restrictions detention facilities for illegal immigrants. 

Goldberg appeared on the Fox News show Media Buzz on Sunday and proclaimed to be “shocked that the press isn’t protesting more the rules at these detention centers.” [See video below.] 

David Gregory sat down with Anita Hill on Meet the Press Press Pass on Sunday, July 13 and treated his guest to a softball filled interview that would have made his predecessor Tim Russert sick to his stomach. 

The interview was intended to promote Ms. Hill’s new documentary entitled “Anita: Speaking Truth To Power” and Gregory made sure his viewers knew that more than 20 years later the liberal media, including himself, sympathized with a woman who nearly brought down the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas. [See video below.] 

The Huffington Post happily ran an Associated Press analysis by Josh Lederman that simply regurgitated Obama’s latest stump-speech complaint that the other side represents cynicism, but he still represents hope. The headline was "How 'hope' became Obama's fight against cynicism." Lederman never acknowledges the sorry state of Obama’s polling – that this is the lament of a man who’s lost all his shiny pre-presidential media gloss.

“With a mix of alarm and dismay, Obama has started musing about the dangers of cynicism in nearly every major public appearance,” Lederman warned. “The cautionary note has showed up in speeches to students and civil rights groups, at Democratic fundraisers — even in his meeting with Pope Francis.”

Meet the Press moderator David Gregory spoke to Congressman Mike Rogers (R-MI) on Sunday, July 13 and used the opportunity to harass his guest on the subject of immigration in the wake of the ongoing crisis at the border. 

During his interview with the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the NBC host took a swipe at the Republican Party by asking “do you lament the Republican Party’s stand on immigration reform?” [See video below.] 

"A Damaging Distance," Ethan Bronner's news analysis for the New York Times Sunday Review, blamed the "growing human distance between Israelis and Palestinians" not on Palestinian terrorist attacks against civilians, but Israel's security measures to stop it.

Bronner's tenure as Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the Times was marked by pro-Palestinian bias, including slanted labeling, calling hard-line Israeli supporters "extreme right" without bestowing similar labels on the hard-left of Israel. He also helped spread the truly dehumanizing characterization of Jewish settlers as "rampaging" during protests. He left a consolation card for the Palestinian cause upon his departure in March 2012.

Via Breitbart, we learned that on Tuesday night’s “Watch What Happens Live” talk show on Bravo, host Andy Cohen and co-guest Nicole Richie enjoyed it when MSNBC star Rachel Maddow compared ABC’s "The View" to...a pig sty.

It came in a viewer question Cohen relayed asking for Maddow’s thoughts about Rosie O’Donnell returning to The View and “Would that have been a forum that you would have ever been interested in?”

Bret Baier ended his Special Report show Friday night on FNC with a comedy clip from CBS’s Late Show inspired by President Barack Obama’s trip, earlier in the week, to Colorado where marijuana is legal.

Baier noted how Obama “was greeted by a man wearing a horse head and the President was offered marijuana. Speaking of which, one late night show noticed something odd from the President’s speech there.”

"A recent poll shows Americans think President Obama is the worst president since World War II. And when he heard the news, Jimmy Carter totally gave himself a high five."

To subscribe to NewsBusted via email, sign up here. To watch the Friday July 11 edition, click play on the embed below the page break. To subscribe at YouTube, visit the NewsBusted channel here.

At the Associated Press on Friday afternoon, Andrew Taylor, who it should be noted covers Congress and is not routinely on the economics or business beat, relayed an Obama administration prediction that economic growth in 2014 will come in at 2.6 percent.

Taylor noted that this estimate, lowered from 3.3 percent, came about because of "the unexpected 2.9 percent drop in gross domestic product in the first quarter of this year when unusually severe weather dinged the economy." Besides failing to note that the contraction was an annualized drop (the actual contraction was about 0.7 percent), he didn't tell readers how absurdly strong growth will have to be during the rest of the year to hit that 2.6 percent target; it works out to an annualized 4.5 percent during each of this year's remaining unreported quarters. Perhaps the AP reporter isn't economically astute enough to recognize how unlikely that is — or worse, he recognized it and let it pass unchallenged.

If you think Michelle's Well-Toned Arms is a tired cliche, you're not in delirious love like The Washington Post. On the front page of Saturday's Style section was a frothy feature from Post food critic Tom Sietsema. The headline was "Dinner with the first lady, at well-sculpted arm's length: When a food critic is seated near Michelle Obama, more than the meal is reviewed."

It's a publicity coup for the new restaurant Barcelona in downtown Washington, now that the Post says "it's already received Obama buzz." But that was nothing compared to how the Postie poured clumps of clotted-creamy praise all over Mrs. Obama's bod. It began:

The very same National Public Radio that highlighted the fringy "extremism" of the 1964 Republican convention on Thursday night spent Thursday morning boosting the idea of a socialist President of the United States. Their online headline was "Could a Socialist Senator Become a National Brand?"

Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep introduced a promotional story on Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont by noting "this socialist barely got two percent of the vote when he first ran for office in the 1970s. Now he's thinking of running for president." Reporter Ailsa Chang boosted the mainstream appeal of Sanders-style socialism:

For a few brief seconds on Friday night, Bill Maher made sense. Maher, who could be described as a “useless Obama hack” – after all, he’s a big donor to Obama and a constant defender of him who chalks up any and all criticism of Obama to racism – condemned liberals, on one subject at least, as “useless Obama hacks without a shred of intellectual honesty.”

What prompted this brief trip into reality? A report on how the NSA intercepted and stored “useless” online conversations that were “intimate” and “voyeuristic.” Maher asserted: “I just want to say, if this was happening under Bush, liberals would be apoplectic.”

On Friday, The Washington Post reported what may be obvious. On his own website, disgraced former CBS anchor Dan Rather is thrilled someone’s making a Rathergate movie based on a book by his producer Mary Mapes, the Bonnie to his Clod. It's sad the Hollywood Left is handing money over to Mapes for trying to dig out of that journalistic fiasco.

“A long life has taught me that he who lives by the crystal ball learns to eat a lot of broken glass; so who knows if the movie will actually get made,” Rather wrote. “I do know that Mary Mapes wrote a great book and that Redford and Cate Blanchett (who is to play Mapes) are incredible talents.”

One of the reasons President Barack Obama and the left can continue to make their cherished "budget stalemate" arguments against conservatives and Republicans is that the establishment press has memory-holed tax increases, including "the largest tax increase in the past two decades," which have already taken place. It now acts as if taxes on "the wealthy," which are really taxes on "high-income earners," have never been increased during Dear Leader's administration.

Josh Boak's coverage of the June budget surplus yesterday at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, is a case in point. After regaling readers with the administration-manipulated recent history of budget deficits (without mentioning the manipulation, of course), Boak uncritically relayed the Democrats' version of the argument that the standoff between the White House and the House of Representatives is over "sharp cuts on needed government programs" versus "higher taxes on the wealthy." Excerpts follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post; numbered tags are mine):

It wasn't supposed to go this way. Or so CNN's Don Lemon must have thought when he had Mexican-American comedian Paul Rodriguez on his CNN Tonight show on Wednesday.

Perhaps Lemon was expecting the standard liberal answers from Rodriguez about what to do with the illegal children flooding across the border from Central American countries. Instead, Rodriguez shocked him as in can see in this video (and after the jump) with an answer that took him completely by surprise.

There were 937 of them.

Some 937 souls fleeing their native country - fleeing for their lives. They made it across an ocean and were refused - by Cuba. Next, they sailed to the Unites States. So close were they to the shores of Florida that it was said they could see the lights of Miami. Desperately, a cable was sent to the President of the United States. He never responded. Instead, what these terrified human beings received was an answering cable from the US State Department. The passengers, the cable warned sternly, must:

Dinesh D’Souza shocked the movie world in 2012 with his anti-Obama documentary "2016," which became the second highest-grossing documentary in U.S. movie history. On July 2, he unveiled his new documentary called "America: Imagine the World Without Her." It has already grossed $5 million in its first week.. One fictional competitor, the abortion-promoting comedy “Obvious Child,” barely grossed $2 million in its first month.

But there’s a more dramatic contrast. Film critics are supposed to judge art, but their liberal politics are smeared all over their reviews. Metacritic.com collects and analyzes movie reviews. “Obvious Child” drew a high Metacritic.com score of 75 (out of 100). For D’Souza’s “America,” it was a ridiculously low score of 14.

Obamacare is succeeding, declared American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman on Thursday, and he predicts that ongoing development will bifurcate Republicans’ approaches to their 2014 congressional campaigns. Waldman thinks that purple-state GOP candidates will refrain from bashing the Affordable Care Act, but red-state candidates will discuss it in “apocalyptic terms” in order to agitate “voters [who] will still get angry every time the word [‘Obamacare’] is spoken.”

Waldman sees that split as part of a “larger Republican dilemma” caused by “the interests of the national GOP [being] at odds with the interests of the bulk of the party's officeholders,” who have to answer to the base. One result of this dilemma, he added, will be that in 2016, the eventual Republican presidential nominee “will face two dramatically different electorates; [i]t's as though they'll be running in Mississippi in the primaries, then in Ohio in the general election.”

On Friday's Hardball, Chris Matthews and Howard Dean slammed the supposedly "lunatic" Republican Party for opposing President Obama's $3.7 billion request to deal with the ongoing crisis at the U.S-Mexico border. Dean likened the political stalemate over this issue and in general in Washington to McCarthyism in the 1950s: "It reminds me of the 'who lost China' debate...where one side is frothing at the mouth and finding communists under every bed; and the other side – including some reasonable Republicans...actually trying to run the country."

Matthews endorsed the former Vermont governor's take, and targeted fiscal conservatives/the Tea Party as somehow akin to Mao's Red Guards: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]