Blogs

NY Times Nashville-based reporter Theo Emery has a story on those poor, persecuted Democratic country-music songwriters in Saturday's "In Nashville, Sounds of Political Uprising From the Left."

"Country music videos flashed on a television set at the Idle Hour, a Music Row bar where a Crock-Pot of beef stew simmered for hungry musicians.

"Sitting at a table in early August, Bobby Braddock, the longtime songwriter, lamented the conservatism of the country music industry that was demonstrated when the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks became a target of fury three years ago after saying she was ashamed that her band and President Bush shared the same home state.

At a White House press conference this morning, veteran reporter Helen Thomas once again--as Tony Snow famously said--presented "the Hezbollah view" and asked the President why he gives Israel "a pass" and only focuses on Hezbollah's rocket attacks against Israel.

Video available here.

But as President Bush went on to remind Thomas, "this never would have happened had a terrorist organization...not launched attacks on a sovereign nation."

San Diego talk-radio host Mark Larson blogs on a typical newspaper fumble on religious sensitivities with the San Diego Union-Tribune. They ran an advertisement for the "GLAAD-Award-Winning Masterpiece" play called "Southern Baptist Sissies" (starring Delta Burke!) The ad features a photo of a man in some kind of skimpy black underwear with his arms outstretched in front of a cross. Might that offend a few Christians? The Union-Tribune issued a statement that they would review the decision to accept the ad. Here's the latest from Larson:  

This past Friday, on PBS’s "Washington Week," NBC’s Andrea Mitchell noted that Hezbollah is winning the PR war around the world:

"And, I have to say, if you look at the mainstream media around the world everywhere other than in the United States, it is remarkably pro-Hezbollah. Hezbollah at this point is being described in most places now as a social service organization and a legitimate part of the Lebanese government, not as a terror group.

Was she critical of the world press for covering Hezbollah in this light, or critical of the American press for not being Hezbollah boosters? Her own comments about Hezbollah may provide some insight. As mentioned in Brent Baker’s July 18 CyberAlert, Mitchell praised Hezbollah as a group that provides social services and it’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as a populist:

Let's be clear: The press does not want you to think about current events. They want you to "feel" them. By doing so, they control your entire thought process on what you're reading, and what you're seeing. This series of photographs, to me, is one of the basest examples of propaganda I've ever seen. There's no logical reason for a photograph like this—it contains no information, but merely reduces the entire argument over the war to base emotions. And, as we all have learned over time, information transmitted by raw emotion can only be referred to as one word:—Propaganda! Check out some of the latest examples of raw, context-free emotion. If anyone can come up with a reasonable explanation for this kind of photograph, that excludes the possibility of the wires merely distributing propaganda, please be sure to let me know or leave a comment!

This week is shaping up as the MSM's kick-off of its Hillary for President campaign. Using Time Magazine's 10th cover of Hillary as a springboard, this morning's Today show convened a liberal coffee klatsch on Clinton's political future. Dem pollster Peter Hart summed up the segment's zeitgest nicely: "I think Americans are ready for a female president. I think they are definitely ready for Hillary Clinton."

Not a discouraging word was to be heard, as 'Today' found it unnecessary to invite to the party anyone who might have a negative view of Hillary

Those warm-hearted, feeling, sensitive souls of the liberal media are at it again. In a cartoon that this morning's Los Angeles Times found fit for publication, Jeff Danziger indulges his fantasy of a group of police and military unleashing a fusillade at Ann Coulter, who is shown screaming, presumably in fear. Danziger even manages to work in a bit of catty sexism, suggesting that the object of his apparent hatred is a bottle blonde.

Let's play one of our favorite games: 'Imagine.' Imagine that a conservative columnist had drawn a cartoon depicting a liberal woman icon as the target of a hail of police and military bullets.

Near the end of the CBS broadcast of the PGA tournament Sunday night, CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz promoted the forthcoming "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric," with a very typical serving of historical boilerplate about the "CBS Evening News" tradition, starting with Douglas Edwards, and including Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer, and now Couric.

The untrained viewer might think from the list that Egbert Murrow (sorry, that's the name he was born with) was an anchorman of the "CBS Evening News," which he never was. Too bad they didn't illustrate it with Katie standing next to Hillary in the sky-blue Mao suit.

Nine days after Sen. George Allen's less-than-monumental "Macaca" moment happened in southwest Virginia, The Washington Post is still flogging the story hard. In Sunday's paper, the article sprawled across the top of the Metro section is headlined "For One Group, 'Macaca' Recalls Slurs After 9/11." The subheadline is "Many Indian Americans Are Disturbed by Allen's Remarks, but Some See a Chance to Strengthen an Alliance." (It should not surprise you that the less disturbed aren't on the front page.) The story by Michael Shear and Leef Smith began:

Word of Sen. George Allen's controversial comments flashed across the country last week, but nowhere more rapidly than in Virginia's Indian American community, where frustration over ethnic stereotypes has intensified since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Amazing what you can find with a little digging and an intense desire to find out what really happened...

Remember the AP congratulatory memo to the staff about the pictures taken at Qana? Here's a portion of that memo...

"Rumors surfaced early Sunday morning that an Israeli airstrike had flattened a house in the southern Lebanese village of Qana. The number of deaths wasn’t immediately known, but the seriousness of the incident was clear. Beirut-based photographer Hussein Malla immediately called AP photographers Nasser Nasser, Lefteris Pitarakis and stringer Mohammed Zaatari and advised them to rush to the scene."

One of Zaatari's pictures from Qana 2 was the one of a dressed down Mr. Green Helmet holding the little female victim outside of the ambulance.(caution - GRAPHIC!!)

Mohammed Zaatari is quite a busy fellow. Not only is he a stringer for the AP, he is a Lebanese Red Cross Volunteer. From Newsweek...

"Many of the Red Cross volunteers at the bomb site on Sunday sat quietly and looked at the rubble. Mohammad Zaatar, 32, had seen this kind of scene before..."

Breaking news from the New York Times: tobacco is bad for you!  Of course you didn't know that.  Rubes like you [probably the same kind of people dumb enough to have voted for Republicans over the years] likely think tobacco has roughly the same the health impact of bean sprouts washed down with OJ.  That's because you've fallen victim to the tobacco industry's "half-century of deception."  And the Times is plenty mad about it.

In Tobacco Racketeers Get Off Easy, the Times stamps its editorial feet this morning, frustrated by the judge's rulings in a suit accusing Big Tobacco under racketeering statutes.  The judge had earlier denied the $280 billion penalty originally sought, and has now turned thumbs down on "the modest billions sought by prosecutors."

Fulminates the Times: "The prospects for reining in this rogue industry seem limited unless Congress finds the gumption to crack down — or top tobacco executives develop a conscience and decide to get out of the death-dealing business."

Ah, a government crack-down on business. Enough to warm the cockles a of big-government liberal's heart. Yesterday it was Robert Kuttner over at the Times-owned Boston Globe, militating for a crack-down on that threat to all things good - Walmart.  Today it's the Times' turn vis a vis the tobacco industry.

Well, MSNBC and Joe Scarborough have clearly figured out how to get their show mentioned in a liberal newspaper. Inside Sunday's Washington Post, reporter Peter Baker wrote an article about conservative disillusionment with Bush on Iraq headlined "Pundits Renounce the President: Among Conservative Voices, Discord." Baker began:

For 10 minutes, the talk show host grilled his guests about whether "George Bush's mental weakness is damaging America's credibility at home and abroad." For 10 minutes, the caption across the bottom of the television screen read, "IS BUSH AN 'IDIOT'?"

If the loony MSM were viewing Joe Lieberman's primary loss to leftist, Ned Lamont, in any more a convoluted manner, they would be crosseyed, tonguetied, and hogtied. I mean, the backflips they are making to explain this story are so magnificent that it'd make any Circ de Soleil acrobatic clown green with envy.

Our intrepid Time/CNN political analyst, Mike Allen, has tried on his colorful leotards to spin Joe's loss into the newest GOP dirty campaign trick for the 2006 midterms in his titled, "Why the Republicans Are Loving the Lieberman Loss".

It is amazing how every article about politics seem to start with the emotional underpinning that the Republicans are somehow merely scheming, or are just capitalizers, dirty tricksters or looking for "weapons" to get votes. Could it be that a Republican here or there might actually be serving his true principles by highlighting an issue? Nah, don't be ridiculous. It's sure to be just some kind of angle or trick!

In the wake of the recent NSA surveillance ruling by judge Anna Diggs Taylor, two noteworthy and purportedly professional sources of anti-Bush rhetoric, the New York Times Editorial Page and blogger Glenn Greenwald, revealed themselves to be little more than shallow-thinking, un-democratic outcomes-based demagogues, as opposed to political commentators interested in good law, or objective truth.

via Instapundit: ADAM LIPTAK in the New York Times: "Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge’s conclusion on Thursday that a National Security Agency surveillance program is unlawful were distancing themselves from the decision’s reasoning and rhetoric yesterday. . . . Discomfort with the quality of the decision is almost universal, said Howard J. Bashman, a Pennsylvania lawyer whose Web log provides comprehensive and nonpartisan reports on legal developments."

Did the MSM get together and decide this would be Bad Economics Saturday?  As I noted here, the New York Times emitted an editorial this morning grimly imagining a downturn despite the good economic news.

Over at the Boston Globe, Robert Kuttner has chipped in with More than Wal-Mart.  While applauding the efforts of Dem politicians to go after the country's biggest retailer, Kuttner claims that isn't nearly enough.  He wants much more government regulation of the economy, and higher taxes for the 'rich'.

Annotated excerpts:

"[Wal-Mart's] wages and health benefits are dismal.  Wal-Mart batters down wages."

From Mediacrity:

The Palestinian kidnapping of Fox news correspondent Steve Centanni and camerman Olaf Wing is now in its fifth day, and it's interesting to note the flabby response from both the media and so-called journalism "protection" organizations -- which are usually quick to condemn Israel and the U.S. authorities in Iraq. The usually garrulous Committee to Protect Journalists issued a tepid statement expressing "concern," and the media generally has kept its distance. The New York Times, typically, buried a tiny reference to the kidnapping in a news roundup two days later. Obviously the Times was hoping that Centanni would be swiftly released, and delayed mentioning the kidnapping in the hope that it could report news of his release at the same time. Mustn't upset the myth of Palestinian moderation!

Read the rest.

Caption:... Hezbollah members began distributing US$12,000 in crisp cash bills Friday to those who lost their homes in the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) Now that Hezbullah has suddenly morphed into a philanthropic organization, we learn from this photograph that they are distributing approximately US$12,000 to the needy in areas destroyed by Israel. Of course, what is our intrepid photographer obviously not curious enough to know? Well, that Hezbullah has already been dinged for counterfeiting U.S. currency:

One of the most prominent and influential members of the Hizballah terrorist organization, along with two of his companies, was designated by the Treasury Department today under Executive Order 13224. Assad Ahmad Barakat has close ties with Hizballah leadership and has worked closely with numerous Islamic extremists and suspected Hizballah associates in South America's tri-border area (TBA), made up of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. . . .

Once again, it's left to the Blogosphere to ask the questions the media isn't interested in asking. UPDATE 11:59 EST: I've collected some photographs of what's proving to be the world's newest charity. They are quite amusing. UPDATE 13:35 EST: Ok, just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, we're now being introduced to Hezbullah Engineering, presumably the only company in the world that can deal with those nasty Zionist craters. The transparency of the anti-American, anti-Israeli press is really starting to shine. UPDATE 19-AUG-2006 11:50 EST: MechEng has pointed out that $100 bills should have a security seal embedded in them roughly where the Treasury seal is on the front, yet on the wires, we see the silhouette of a bill that does not appear to have such a thread. While not 100% conclusive, I'd say it definitely raises the possibility that these are, quote, "Phonier than a New York politician!"

When the New York Times originally broke the story of the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program, the rest of the media leapt to the bandwagon, and immediately began referring to President Bush's "Domestic Surveillance Program." One of the forums where this has been particularly egregious is CBS' The Early Show. Well, the last 7 months and all of the discussion has done nothing to change the view of the program held by CBS. There were two separate comments in a 30-second news snippet from Tracy Smith that were either inaccurate or incomplete, and, of course, they were inaccurate or incomplete in a manner that made the program sound worse than it is.

The first was the continued mis-labeling. The program is not, despite the mainstream press' continued insistence, a "domestic" surveillance program. The NSA is not monitoring American's domestic calls without warrants, or at least, if they are, that has not been made public. That's not what the program being talked about covers. The NSA is monitoring overseas communications of suspected terrorists and terrorism supporters. If some of those communications are into the United States, they're continuing to monitor. That doesn't make the conversations "domestic."

Talk about your party pooper! Like a disgruntled waiter spitting in the champagne back in the pantry, The NY Times editorial this morning, Hold the Champagne, approaches parody status in its attempt to find the cloud on the silver lining of the economy's good performance.

The Times began by comically scolding investors for "almost certainly overreact[ing], pushing up stocks and bonds as if all was right with the economy" in reaction to the news that inflation had been lower than expected. And if anyone should know about stocks going down, it's the folks at the NY Times who have watched the Times' own share price droop steadily downward over the last year.

After devoting two front-page stories this week making a mountain out of the molehill of Sen. George Allen joshing with fellow Republicans about a Democrat opposition researcher's haircut, calling him "Macaca," the Washington Post put the story back on top of the front page Saturday with the headline "Allen Flap May Give A Boost to Webb: Reenergized Va. Democrats Gain Support."

Could we be any more transparent in using our front page as an advertising vehicle for the Democrats? The headline is a little incomplete. It could read: "Allen Flap May Give A Boost to Webb: We're Certainly Trying Hard to Make It So." And the subheadline could be "A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes."

Original caption:

Women journalists (L) attend a news conference in Riyadh in this October 27, 2002 file photo. They are few in number but determined to make their mark - women journalists in Saudi Arabia have fought hard to get where they are and say they have more than proved themselves the equal of men. To match feature MEDIA SAUDI WOMEN REUTERS/Ali Jarekji/Files (SAUDI ARABIA)

In his Best of the Web column Friday, Opinion Journal's James Taranto had fun with AP writer Dennis Conrad as he committed yet another cuddly piece on Sen. Barack Obama, a favorite media teddy bear:

In his 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama recalled his first trip to Africa, when, in his late 20s, he cried as he sat between the graves of his father and grandfather. Obama hardly knew his father. His parents divorced early in their marriage.

Taranto dead-panned: "That's very unusual. Although many couples get divorced nowadays, the vast majority do not do so until late in the marriage."

On last night’s "News Hour" on PBS, reporter Jeffrey Brown conducted a segment on media bias as it pertains to the coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. As his guests, Brown talked with Timothy McNulty, public editor of the Chicago Tribune, Andrew Kohut, President of the Pew Research Center, and Lee Ross, professor of social psychology at Stanford University. Surprisingly, not a media critic among them. The panel attempted to portray the media as fair, pointing to a Pew Poll that showed that 61% of Americans believed the media coverage of the Middle East was fair. But the PBS newscast is selective in publicizing Pew polls. PBS did not report the new Pew Center finding, as reported by Brent Baker in the August 9, 2006 Cyber Alert:

From a post of mine at BusinessandMedia.org.

“Food marketing to children is a $10-billion-a-year industry, and some parents’ advocates and lawyers are saying it’s out of control,” noted NBC reporter Stone Phillips as he opened his August 18 story.

To lend scientific authority to these claims, Phillips turned to Harvard psychologist Susan Linn, whom he merely described as “the author of ‘Consuming Kids.’ She says brand names are among toddlers’ first words and logos among the first images they recognize.”

“Kids are requesting brands as soon as they can talk,” Linn told Phillips.

As odd as it sounds that children would say “Cocoa Puffs” before “mommy,” Phillips didn’t question Linn’s assertion. Instead, Phillips went on to show clips of NBC’s Hoda Kotb conducting an experiment with a group of preschoolers and toddlers as she asked them to identify corporate logos.

Even then, Phillips conceded, “they didn’t get” every logo right, even though they “came pretty close.”

But Linn is a dispassionate researcher and neutral scientist, right?

Wrong.

Editors' note: This post is the beginning of a new NB feature, the weekly recap, a way of summarizing some of the hottest and most-read postings for the week.

It has been quite a diverse week in bias. Newsbusters Executive Editor Matthew Sheffield noted that a popular cartoonist took a racist swipe at Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, portraying him as the slave of colleague Antonin Scalia.

The MRC's Tim Graham covered every aspect of "The Washington Post" and their effort to sink Senator George Allen with "Macaca-gate." You can read more here and here. And for a theory about their excessive coverage, click here.

Regarding the war on terror, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann wondered if the recent arrests in London were timed for political reasons.

Have you heard the news of the latest celebrity political pronouncement?

For those living in a cave, Bernie Mac, Nicole Kidman, Michael Douglas, Danny De Vito, Bruce Willis, and a host of other celebs recently signed an issue ad taking a stand…against terrorism.

Didn't hear about it? That's no surprise. According to Nexis, not a single American news organization other than Fox News Channel has covered it.

Say what you will about celebs "shutting up and singing," but the fact that this isn't getting nearly the coverage given to anti-Bush and anti-American rants of lesser lights like the Dixie Chicks or Michael Moore is a yet another nail in the coffin that the media in this country is sorely lacking in political diversity. (Full text and signers here.)

Is the more than 100-year-old profession of photojournalism going to be destroyed in just a few short weeks?

David D. Perlmutter, journalism professor and author of "Visions of War, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy," writes in Editor and Publisher that he is alarmed by what is happening to his beloved profession.

In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks on the people who take news pictures and on the basic premise that nonfiction news photo- and videography is possible.

Perlmutter doesn't exactly know what's happening.

I'm not sure, however, if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both.

Here at NewsBusters, we often bring you irrational rants from paranoid lefties who are certain that Chimpy Bush McHitler is trying to become dictator of America, enslave anyone to the left of Pat Robertson, and personally assasinate Pinch Sulzberger.

Now, for a change of pace, here's Val Prieto on some real journalists who actually are living in a totalitarian government. Here's an excerpt but the entire piece is very well worth reading:

Right now there remain at least two dozen independent journalists incarcerated in Cuba simply because they dared speak the truth. Some have been locked away since 2003, still in the infancy of their 15 or 20 year sentences. Truth has made them suffer beatings, torture and malnutrition. Truth has mocked, ridiculed, and subjected them to abject horrors and indignity.

All because they bear witness to the world around them and dare describe it nakedly and without their government’s official veil.

There are many journalists from around the world in Havana. CNN is there. Reuters, the AP. They live comfortably in hotel rooms and work in comfortable in air-conditioned offices full of amenities. They have the copy machine. They have the faxes and computers and printers and scanners. They have staff and editors. What they don’t have is the security to report the truth.

CNN is so exceptional with its shows and journalists, so there must be some other reason why Fox News is ahead. Thus writes Jon Friedman in his "Media Web" commentary at MarketWatch.com.

Friedman rattles off a whole litany of reasons why CNN is exceptional.

CNN, a unit of Time Warner, has invested a lot of its parent's dough to assemble a first-rate global reporting and production staff. It features such reliable and charismatic on-air stars as Nic Robertson and Christiane Amanpour abroad. Peter Bergen is rapidly becoming the most compelling voice when it comes to analyzing the ongoing worldwide terrorism story.

In the U.S., CNN has a very deep bench, too. John King, its long-time top White House reporter (and now a senior national correspondent), stands out in what I've regarded for many years to be television's finest Washington bureau. Fortune's Andy Serwer, who appears regularly on CNN's breakfast-hour show, is the most analytical business-news commentator around -- and the same goes for the New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin, when the topic turns to legal matters. Further, the lively "Reliable Sources," anchored by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, is an hour-long look at journalism's weekly hits and (mostly) misses. The show stands out for its consistent excellence even though it faces stiff competition on Sunday mornings.