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ABC's Charles Gibson fretted Thursday night over the likely impending demise of the “landmark” immigration deal as George Stephanopoulos blamed conservatives and on NBC Chip Reid faulted “extremes on the left and the right.” Gibson teased World News: “Tonight, the landmark compromise on immigration is in big trouble on Capitol Hill. Some Senators saying if we can't pass this, we can't pass anything.” Gibson proceeded to assert that the bill “was considered the best hope for doing something on immigration.” After a story from Jake Tapper on the debate in the Senate, Gibson expressed frustration to George Stephanopoulos: “What's so counterintuitive to me, George, is that a lot of the Senators who think and say most strongly that something has to be done to reform immigration are the ones who are voting for these killer amendments.” Stephanopoulos held conservatives responsible: “They are getting a lot of cross pressures, Charlie, particularly on the conservative side.”

Meanwhile, on the NBC Nightly News, Chip Reid described how Democrats are opposed to the temporary worker program because of how it may take jobs from Americans and Republicans are opposed to what they consider “amnesty” for illegals -- both mainstream views in the two parties. Yet Reid applied an “extreme” tag: “You've got the extremes on the left and the right trying to kill the entire bill, rather than except the provisions they detest.”

A tipster reports that the New York Daily News has a style guide on its internal computer system with a very typical liberal-media template for its reporters on how to handle abortion labeling: Guidelines regarding stories and headlines on abortion: 1. Call those who oppose abortions abortion foes or abortion opponents or (in tight-count heads) abort foes. Avoid the phrases pro-life or pro-lifers, except in direct quotations. 2. Those who favor a woman's right to an abortion are abortion rights activists or pro-abortion rights or pro-choice. Avoid pro-abortion. 3. Also avoid the phrase "when the life of the mother is at stake." Make it "... life of the woman ..." Don't call the fetus an unborn child, and don't refer to the unborn in headlines. 4. You can use abortion clinic or abort clinic in tight-count headlines.

On tonight's Hardball Chris Matthews invited on actor Ben Affleck to pontificate on the 2008 presidential race and while the liberal actor stuck to safe, conventional wisdom observations on the likes of Rudy, Hillary and Barack he couldn't resist a pointed jab at the current administration. When Matthews recited an emailer’s question about impeaching President Bush, Affleck reasoned it wasn’t necessary since Bush and Cheney are "going to go down in history as having presided over one of the worst administrations in American history."

The following is the full exchange as it occurred on the June 7th edition of MSNBC’s Hardball:

Chris Matthews: "Scott Trent of North Carolina: 'Mr. Affleck, what is your opinion on the possibility of impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney? Do you support impeachment for the crimes of the administration?' That's Trent, Scott Trent of North Carolina."

(h/t NB's Rich Noyes)

The title and an excerpt from the first two paragraphs make the bias abundantly clear.

"Did the U.S. Incite Iran's Crackdown?"

The article, published June 5, 2007, suggests that American efforts at supporting dissidents within Iran make the U.S. morally culpable for their harsh treatment:

...sources tell TIME that several key Iranian reformers had repeatedly warned U.S. officials through back channels that the pro-democracy program was bound to expose them as vulnerable targets for a government crackdown whether they took Washington's funds or not.

Iranian civil rights activists contacted by TIME say that the cases against the Iranian

MRC intern Michael Lanza caught a passing reference on the June 6 "Paula Zahn Now" to a June 5 blog entry by NB editor Brent Baker. (See transcript below the fold)

Video (0:35): Real (1.57 MB) or Windows (1.10 MB), plus MP3 (156 kB).

In "NBC's Williams Showcases Obama Blaming Bush for Black Despair Going Back to 1991," Baker noted that NBC's June 5 "Nightly News" ran excerpts of an Obama speech before running a story on the Democratic candidates and religious faith.

Excerpted below is the relevant portion of the blog, with the portion Zahn quoted shown in bold.:

On Thursday’s “Good Morning America,” reporter Claire Shipman portrayed the simmering tensions between Russia and the United States as a replay of the Cold War and also took President Bush, who is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at this week’s G8 summit, to task for missing a “critical diplomatic opportunity” to cooperate with the Russians over the placing of a proposed missile defense system in Poland.

Additionally, Shipman, while noting Putin’s rollback of democracy, contended that Russia’s president is “wildly popular at home” and hyperbolically claimed that “everybody is very happy with Vladimir Putin there.” While it’s true that Putin’s autocratic nature appears to have done him no harm in the polls, it’s quite silly to say that “everybody” is happy in a country where journalists and spies continue to die mysteriously.

For those that have been following the G-8 summit in Germany, a formal declaration from the group has just been released (h/t Benny Peiser; section dealing with climate change begins on page 14, emphasis added throughout):

Since we met in Gleneagles, science has more clearly demonstrated that climate change is a long term challenge that has the potential to seriously damage our natural environment and the global economy. We firmly agree that resolute and concerted international action is urgently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and increase energy security.

Given the media’s global warming alarmist tendencies, a rather obvious question is raised: How will the press cover this declaration this evening and in tomorrow’s papers? In the end, as this is a joint statement with backing by the United States, it seems rather predictable that the media's take will be something like this:

Joshua Levy and Micah L. Sifry have a June 4 article at techPresident noting that among the major presidential candidates, only Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has taken advantage of new software on the Facebook social networking site to broaden his Web presence. (Portions in bold are my emphasis):

TechPresident’s Alan Rosenblatt took an early look at the new feature and the Obama application, which allows Facebook members to see new videos and messages from the campaign and share them with their Facebook friends, on the day it went public, and he was impressed. As Rick Klau of Feedburner pointed out in a contemporaneous post, the app adds a significant amount of value to the Obama campaign. “If you’re interested in exposing your network of friends to info about Barack, the campaign is making it a one-click affair that greatly simplifies the redistribution of campaign info,” he wrote.

But when Platform launched, Obama was the only candidate with an application. Why didn’t John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Ron Paul, or anyone else get in on the possibility of reaching 20 million or more Facebook users and potential voters? [...]

The mainstream media can't get enough of the sectarian violence between the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds in Iraq. But one kind of sectarian violence that has consistently been under-reported since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the persecution of Iraq's native Christian population. A Catholic News Agency story from June 6th reported:

According to the AINA news agency, two churches were attacked in the Baghdad district of Dora. At St. John the Baptist's in Hay Al-Athoriyeen, several security guards who protect the church were killed, and St. Jacob's in Hay al Asya was vandalized and forcibly turned into a mosque. St. Jacob's had previously been attacked in October of 2004.

The raids on the two churches coincided with a funeral Mass for a priest and three deacons that were assassinated in Mosul on June 3rd. A Google News search revealed that there were only 4 articles about the raids, none of them from mainstream media sources . Besides the assassinations and the raids, a Chaldean Catholic priest in Baghdad was abducted on June 6th and Shiite terrorists occupied a Chaldean Catholic convent in Baghdad on May 31st.

Color me pleasantly surprised, given the media's past treatment of the issue. The June 7 Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today all gave prominent play to news of a stem cell breakthrough that may make moot the embryonic stem cell ethical dilemma.

I don't have a hard copy of the LA Times, but I know the other papers featured the story on their front pages.

Of course, it appears that the New York Times couldn't let the good news go without a separate Debbie Downer article as counterbalance. Here's an excerpt, portion in bold is my emphasis:

For general discussion on topics of your choosing...

On May 18, NewsBusters introduced you to Kristen Byrnes, the fabulous fifteen-year-old from Maine who had torn apart many of the myths purported by the Global Warmingist-in-Chief, soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore, in his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Now, the Precocious Ponderer from Portland is taking on the scientist that Gore relied on for much of his misinformation, James Hansen of NASA.

In her recent report entitled “Houston, We Have a Problem,” Byrnes identified a serious concern with this so-called scientist that many anthropogenic global warming skeptics have been addressing for years (emphasis added throughout):

I know. The first thing you thought was, "well, DUH!" Of course Keith Olbermann "overstates". He is a raving lunatic, for Heaven's sake. But, it took long enough for the left leaning MSM to catch on and Public Eye is gently -- and I DO mean gently -- trying to get their truthiest of truthers back on track, apparently. After all, they don't want to hurt his widdle feelings, or nuthin'.

Public Eye's Matthew Felling starts by buttering up Olby's fragile ego with an estimate on how much "media capital" he's "earned" with his show, but soon wonders why he went to far into tin-foil hat territory with his rant that Bush was really responsible for the recent JFK Airport terror plot.

Here’s an inconvenient truth the media aren’t likely to share with citizens as they continue to spread global warming alarmism: schemes currently being debated to reduce CO2 emissions likely will destroy the airline industry while diminishing new job creation.

So suggested a Seattle Times article Wednesday (h/t Chris Horner, emphasis added):

European airlines claimed say the European Union' plan for a mandatory greenhouse-gas cap and trading system would cripple the industry with extra costs of $5.4 billion a year.

Low-cost airlines such as Ryanair joined major carriers such as British Airways and Lufthansa in saying the plan would diminish mobility, hurt the overall economy and cut off remote areas from tourist traffic, citing a report that the airlines commissioned from global accounting group Ernst & Young and air transport consultants York Aviation.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? However, the news is even worse according to an Associated Press article also published Wednesday (h/t Benny Peiser, emphasis added):

There has been a certain amount of MSM coverage of the fact that Sunni tribal chiefs have begun encouraging men in their areas to volunteer for the Iraqi police force [file photo]. But I haven't seen MSM stories on the way that increased police presence may have translated into a more normal day-to-day life for the people of Anbar -- the large, Sunni-dominated province of western Iraq that contains such former hotspots as Fallujah and Ramadi.

So that was the question on my mind when I had the chance to participate yesterday in a blogger conference call with Brigadier General David D. Phillips [pictured below], the Deputy Commanding General of CPATT, the entity responsible for the training of the new Iraqi police force. Here's the general's response to my question as to the effect of the presence of Iraqi police on life in cities in Anbar.

In an almost surreal but sympathetic account of radical leftist protesters of the Group of Eight Summit in Germany, Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock is forwarding the protester’s outrage of the moment: German police have taken "scent samples" of protest organizers for police dogs to locate them in a crowd. For those of you who suspect protesters are easily smelled at 50 feet, Whitlock explained:

The German government has spared no expense -- spending upward of $100 million -- to safeguard this week's summit, which brings together leaders of the industrial countries known as the Group of Eight. German authorities have taken an offensive-minded approach, using a variety of tactics that critics say conjure bad memories of the country's totalitarian past.

Well, it didn't take long for the MSM to start their attacks on Fred Thompson now that he is in the race. We are seeing more and more of them each day. Here on Newsbusters, Mark Finkelstein was curious what the line of attack would be and I found a few this week myself. Today, we find the next MSM attack line of the day being Thompson's supposed "lack of experience" for the office. Or in the phrasing by Jennifer Rubin of the New York Observer; Thompson is "Like Reagan Without the New Ideas." And, since Thompson supporters are warm to the idea that Fred is "like Reagan" it seems likely the MSM will delight in trying to paint Thompson as a faux Reagan because they know that this particular line of attack would harm him the most were his supporters to begin to believe it.

Just get a load of Rubin's first Republican-slamming paragraph:

On Wednesday's The Situation Room on CNN, during his regular "Cafferty File" segment, Jack Cafferty quoted Mikhail Gorbachev's recent attack on the Bush Administration in which the former Soviet leader accused the U.S. of "arrogance" and of having "lost credibility" in response to President Bush's plans to deploy a missile defense system in Europe. Cafferty asked viewers to email him with a response to the question of whether Bush was "reigniting the Cold War with Russia." Cafferty: "This is just swell, don't you think? We've got trouble with Russia now, which we haven't had for a number of years. The question is this: Is President Bush reigniting the Cold War with Russia?" (Transcript follows)

A really marvelous video was posted at YouTube today depicting a somewhat fictional press outlet – the People’s News Network – reporting on the American invasion at Normandy as if it happened today with the present antiwar media.

Lots of fun moments for those possessing a sense of humor (video available here, h/t NBer Bender).

I don't know who created it, but it marvelously captures how today's media would have reported events 63 years ago.

Discussing the G-8 summit with CBS's Jim Axelrod, Katie Couric on Wednesday night portrayed an “adamant” President George Bush as the antagonist causing Russian President Vladimir Putin to be “annoyed” about NATO plans to install a missile shield in Poland, a controversy, she fretted, that is distracting attention from global warming. “Economic issues and climate change were supposed to be the main topics,” Couric asserted on the CBS Evening News, “but they're being overshadowed by the dispute between President Bush and Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, over NATO plans to install a defensive missile shield in Eastern Europe,” a shield designed to protect Europe from missiles launched by rogue states.

Referring to Putin's threat to aim missiles at Europe, Couric pressed Axelrod, who was on scene in Rostock, Germany: “Putin is annoyed about this missile defense system. Why is President Bush so adamant about this?” Couric's next question displayed concern about the impact on an agreement on global warming: “I know that global warming was at the top of the agenda. Has that fallen off the radar screen, given all this chatter?”

Radio host and blogger Brian Maloney has an excellent takedown of liberal bloggers who accused Bill O'Reilly of recently lying about the New York Times's coverage of the JFK Airport terror plot.

[NewsBusters sister publication TimesWatch.org dealt with the Times downplaying the terror plot here and here.]

Below is the relevant excerpt from Maloney's blog, "Radio Equalizer," portions in bold are my emphasis:

After Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and other hosts lambasted the Sunday New York Times for burying news of the JFK terror plot bust, Think Progress, News Hounds and other lefties accused them of lying.

By claiming the story actually was covered on page one and even asserting that O'Reilly intentionally misled viewers by showing only the top part of the page on camera, these smear sites were truly pulling a fast one.

When is nothing better than something? When it's a limited health insurance policy, according to the USA Today.

The June 6 story by Julie Appleby emphasized problems with such insurance and questioned "whether such policies provide a false sense of security."

Critics beat out supporters in the story by a ratio of 2:1. Appleby cited two experts from different pro-universal health care advocacy groups and two unsatisfied customers.

Both advocacy groups took a hostile stance toward the health insurance industry, but Appleby gave readers no sense of the organizations' liberal positions - which included an affiliation with the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation.

This is not the first time Appleby has provided viewers with a one-sided view of health care issues. In August 2005, she wrote a story complaining about the expense of health care. But she buried the major reason for high costs: medical progress that saves more lives than ever before.

John Tierney was once an iconoclast libertarian columnist for the New York Times who now writes for the Tuesday Science section every two weeks. But yesterday, Tierney stepped back into politics and made a powerful political point by taking on the sainted Rachel Carson, the author of the infamous proto-environmental book "Silent Spring," a book that has become required reading in school for the last generation, and was indirectly responsible for the banning of the pesticide DDT in poor countries, with deadly consequences.

"For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school -- and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it."

Story after story about Rupert Murdoch’s purchase offer for Dow Jones & Company, which owns The Wall Street Journal, has criticized the prospect as a threat to journalism, questioned the media mogul’s “editorial integrity” and attacked his character.

Journalists, media critics and the union representing the Journal were up in arms.

“[P]robably not quite as frightening as the day we learned Kim Jong Il has the bomb, but close … very close. It could be worse. We might have discovered, for example, that Saddam Hussein had stashed all those missing weapons of mass destruction in a Pasadena storage locker rented to Osama bin Laden,” said a Los Angeles Times column.

Who would have thought that chivalry would still be alive at the liberal Associated Press? Yet in its story on the split between Larry and Laurie David, the venerable wire agency states the age, 59, of the creator of Seinfeld, but not that of his activist wife, producer of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth."

Isn't the feminist AP the home of strong women, proud of every wrinkle?

For the record, Laurie hits the half-century mark next March . . . unless of course a global-warming catastrophe stops the clock for all of us before then.

As people who are following the G-8 summit in Germany are well aware, it is highly doubtful that any meaningful accord will be reached at this meeting concerning CO2 emissions. In fact, reports out of Europe and Asia for many weeks leading up to this event have made this eventuality quite clear.

Yet, this didn’t prevent the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein for blaming the lack of such an agreement on President George W. Bush.

In an op-ed published Wednesday entitled “Don't Sugarcoat Climate Change; Calling out Bush's intransigence on emissions caps may be the best way for other G-8 countries to get the U.S. to budge on global warming,” Brownstein chose to ignore all of the facts surrounding this issue, and instead pointed an accusatory finger at the media’s favorite target (emphasis added throughout):

As the negotiations about whether to sell the Wall Street Journal's parent company appear to be moving along between Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the Bancroft family, owners of a special class of stock which gives them control over Dow Jones.

Whenever Murdoch is going hard for a media asset, it inevitably sets off concerns among those on the left (such as the employee unions at Dow Jones) that the purchase of an outlet by News Corp. will somehow comprimise its editorial integrity since Murdoch is a very active manager in his properties. Those concerns seem to be less about editorial process and more about political considerations since Murdoch is far from the only active media mogul.

In an editorial today, the Journal pointed out that Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger is heavily involved in managing the New York Times:

[T]he Bancrofts are unique in their hands-off ownership. They are often compared as family newspaper proprietors to the Grahams at the Washington Post or the Sulzbergers at the New York Times. But members of those families run those newspapers, exerting influence over the news and opinion operations. In that sense, those newspapers are hardly "independent" of those families.

With no shortage of items documenting how the American media are liberally biased, it’s often easy to forget how the European media are so much more dominated by the hard left. In his cover story on the war in Afghanistan in the June 11 Weekly Standard, Michael Fumento recounted his experience embedded with the U.S. military at Forward Operating Base Lagman in the Zabul province of Afghanistan.

Fumento was assigned quarters with two Spaniards working for the Associated Press. One of them seems to be in a mind-meld with Rosie O’Donnell (“he believes 9/11 was a Bush administration conspiracy hung on al Qaeda”) while the other reporter “never takes off his Che Guevera T-shirt.”

No wonder the European press thinks our media are just a bunch of Bush administration cheerleaders!

In the spirit of Noel Sheppard's earlier D-Day remembrance post, I thought I'd share with you some kind words a Marine stationed in Iraq sent me via Facebook*:

I've really enjoyed NB over the last couple of months while stuck in Iraq. I've gotten a couple of laughs at the idiots in the MSM and those laughs go a long way to make the time behind this desk pass quickly. Pass my thanks along to the rest of the NB crew? God bless and Semper Fi.

I should also mention the writer, Cpl. Marcus Penn, blogs over at A Soldier's Perspective.

Check out his blog when you get the chance, his byline is "Cpl M."

*Corporal Penn is also a member of our Facebook group, "NewsBusters.org Readers."

During Tuesday night’s Republican debate, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer attempted to goad Representative Duncan Hunter into agreeing that the national GOP should be "following that Arnold Schwarzenegger example" in California. This is the fourth time since the 2006 midterms that Blitzer, host of CNN's "Situation Room," has lobbied for the GOP to adopt the liberal policies of the Republican governor.

During the preamble to his question, Blitzer noted how "popular" Schwarzenegger is with moderates and approved of how the former actor attempts to "forge a consensus."

CNN’s cheerleading for Schwarzenegger’s brand of Republicanism began shortly after the midterm election. On November 9, Bill Schneider, a reporter for Blitzer's "Situation Room," wondered about the GOP's future: