Blogs

Washington Post journalist Howard Kurtz analyzes media issues on his CNN show “Reliable Sources.” But he created a media issue of his own by propping up the false story pushed by the many in the media that Fox censored actress Sally Field during her Emmy acceptance speech for making an anti-war statement.

However, that's not what happened. Instead, as the orchestra signaled her time was up, Fox cut Field's sound after she uttered “G******.” Fox also censored two other speakers for obscenity.

Kurtz was a guest on the September 18 Glenn Beck show to discuss infotainment drowning out hard news in the media. Then Kurtz claimed the story became legitimate once Fox censored what he falsely labeled as Fox silencing Field's anti-war comment (my emphasis):

KURTZ: Well, it's a non-story that became a story because of FOX pulling the plug on her anti-war sentiment. But look, the...

Was the left-wing student who tried to shout out extremist questions to senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) before being forcibly removed by police just pulling a publicity stunt?

That allegation is coming out as police reports of the Kerry speech say that the tasered student seemed to have his eye out for publicity:

The Florida Division of Law Enforcement will investigate Monday's arrest of Andrew Meyer, said University of Florida President J. Bernard Machen. Machen called the incident "regretful for us." [...]

"You will take my question because I have been listening to your crap for two hours," Meyer told Kerry, according to the police report of the incident.

He then turned to a woman and said "Are you taping this? Do you have this? You ready?" the report said. [...]

The Washington Post’s favoritism toward Democrats is obvious in Wednesday’s paper. When Democrats abandon efforts to force a troop pullout from Iraq, the Post puts the story on A3 with the headline "Democrats’ Iraq Push on Hold." Reporter Shailagh Murray says the Democrats are "abandoning a bipartisan effort" for pullout. That’s amusing, since just words before, she says this move is because most Republicans don’t want to be counted in that "bipartisan" effort.

But on page A1, the Republicans are still the ones in political danger, with the story "Debate No-Shows Worry GOP Leaders." Reporter Perry Bacon Jr asserted that GOP presidential contenders turning down debates hosted by Hispanic liberals and black liberals could cause "a backlash that could further erode the party's standing with black and Latino voters." Bacon front-loaded the story with loud lamentations from Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich about failing to stand before Tavis Smiley on PBS and get attacked from the left.

Today brings a mixed bag for aficionados of the New York Times. The good news, assuming you enjoy reading the musings of Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks et al., is that the Times' house columnists have been freed from behind the paid-subscription firewall of "Times Select."

On the other hand, Paul Krugman has decided that his column isn't enough to contain his wisdom, and that he will henceforth be inflicting his blog on us. He entitles it "The Conscience of a Liberal," which as he notes is also the title of his recent book.

Give Krugman credit for giving us fair warning. He does let us know that "the politics and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central to many of the blog posts." And sure enough, central to today's blog is the chart pictured here, which depicts the percentage of the country's total income earned by the top 10%.

Every now and then you read something that is accepted in the MSM, or better yet, perpetrated upon its readers that literally leaves you speechless. The Gawker Jew bashing articles were my most recent examples. Until now.

The Washington Post has gone on a fact bashing mission over a stump speech that Presidential candidate Fred Thompson made in Iowa. The anonymous writer of 'the claim' zeros in on the following statement made by Thompson.

"You know, you look back over our history, and it doesn't take you long to realize that our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world.''

On Sept. 13th, Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw announced in a speech to the North Texas Crime Commission that Texas authorities had apprehended terrorist suspects who were sneaking across the Mexico/U.S. border. Shouldn't such a report be running through the MSM like wildfire? Yet, the MSM seems to be ignoring this explosive report with only local Texas news sources, a few Jihad watchers and bloggers having picked up the Director's statements.

The AP did have a report, shockingly enough, but few other MSM services seem to have found it as of yet... even though the story is about a week old.

DALLAS - Texas' top homeland security official said Wednesday that terrorists with ties to Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaida have been arrested crossing the Texas border with Mexico in recent years.

The media's global warming hysteria is clearly becoming unhinged.

First, ABC News published a photo essay at its website Friday prominently displaying computer generated images of U.S. cities drowned by climate change raised seas.

Then, on Monday's "Nightly News," NBC's environmental correspondent Anne Thompson, reporting from Greenland, cautioned viewers that the "summer thaw, picking up dangerous speed 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle...could ignite worldwide disaster."

How pleasant, wouldn't you agree? I sincerely hope few Americans were watching this abomination while they were eating dinner. After all, Thompson ominously began her report (video available here, h/t Marc Morano):

Bill Maher gave an unsatirizable interview on Tuesday evening’s "The Situation Room" on CNN, spending a large portion of his ten-minute interview attacking, among others, General David Petraeus, Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, labeling them "stooges" for President Bush. When host Wolf Blitzer asked about the recent congressional testimony of the general and the ambassador, Maher parroted the MoveOn.org line. "Well, it was a White House-written report. We know that. Bush has an interesting little scam going. He also quoted in his speech on Thursday night, Maliki. And he said basically that the Iraqi leadership is asking us to stay. So, in other words, he puts words into his stooges' mouths, and then, he quotes them."

Video (1:17): Real (2.12 MB) or Windows (1.8 MB), plus MP3 (601 KB)

Upset that a University of Florida student was tasered by campus police at a John Kerry event, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, on Tuesday's, "Hardball" feared it was a result of the "fascistic notion" of American troops "forcing" democracy on Iraqis at "gunpoint", filtering back home.

Chris Matthews: "You know when we walk into those, every night on television you watch pictures of American soldiers risking their lives to break into homes in Baghdad, at gunpoint, telling people to go along with the government that we've set up over there. Democracy at gunpoint. I wonder if it's filtered back here at home. I wonder if it's drift back home? The idea that democracy is something you do at gunpoint. ‘Either you behave and do it this way and show up by putting your fingers in the ink and doing it this way or you're an insurgent, therefore, we can round you up and if you resist we can kill you.' That notion it's a bit fascist and it's certainly a fascistic notion of democracy we're forcing, forcing on people over there. They didn't invited us into Iraq and I wonder now whether we are picking up some of the bad habits of the war front?"

Video and additional transcript below the fold.

Since he became pontiff, the biased secular media have relished using harsh, loaded language like "ruthless" and "medieval" to describe Pope Benedict XVI. Blogger Mark Shea noticed those words appearing 126- and 169,000 times, respectively in a Google search.

But even worse, Shea argues, is how the media betray their utter lack of understanding of religious subjects when reporters start prattling on about how Benedict is "growing" during his papacy (h/t The Anchoress), when in reality they're just now discovering the clarity of what he's preached and taught all along:

On Tuesday morning’s Early Show, CBS anchor Harry Smith led into a Hillary Clinton interview with a poll that sounded like it had been commissioned by the Clinton team: "In a new CBS News poll, 66 percent of voters said her health care experience in Bill Clinton’s administration is actually a strength for her. As we know, her efforts in the 1990s failed; 52 percent of those questioned said it wasn’t her fault."

But dig into the CBS poll, and see what Smith left out: when respondents asked if they were confident in "Hillary’s ability to make the right decisions about health care, or are you uneasy about her approach," more people (48 percent) said they were uneasy about Hillary’s health agenda, compared to 42 percent who said they were confident about her health care decision-making.

In a September 18 entry on the Washington Post's Maryland Moment blog, two of the paper's writers spend most of their digital ink criticizing Tuesday's Maryland Court of Appeals ruling upholding the state’s marriage law.

Even the opening sentence reflects the Post’s bias, describing Maryland’s marriage law as “the state’s ban on gay marriage” and “the controversial law.”

For starters, the marriage law is not controversial, at least outside homosexual activist circles. All 50 states have laws defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman (even Massachusetts, which has no business issuing same-sex marriage licenses without a change in the law). What is controversial is the lower court ruling in January by Baltimore Circuit Court Judge M. Brooke Murdock striking the law down.And what about the Post describing Maryland’s marriage law as “the state’s ban on gay marriage?”

On Tuesday’s "Good Morning America," ABC anchors and reporters spun the editing of Sally Field’s profanity laced anti-war rant at Sunday’s Emmys as an example of political censorship by Fox, a right-wing network. Reporter Dan Harris ominously observed, "Some say the Fox network, owned by well known conservative Rupert Murdoch, was engaged in political censorship."

However, during the ceremony, "Sopranos" creator David Chase, extolled the values of gangsters. In a halting speech, he asserted, "And hell, let’s face it, if the world and this nation was run by gangsters-- [Pause] Maybe it is." Mr. Chase’s political statement was not censored, nor were any of the numerous anti-Bush and Republican-slamming jokes that aired on the awards show. But rather than accept the explanation that Field’s comments were cut because she used an expletive, Harris claimed, "...It’s the Sally Field case that is provoking the real cries of political censorship because Fox cut off not only her expletive but also her entire thought." The argument is somewhat self defeating because, as Harris noted, Fox also censored comedian Ray Romano’s off-color joke. In fact, the ACLU is attacking the edit on the grounds of vulgarity, not politics.

On to promote his new book, "Letters From Nuremberg," about his father's experiences at the Nuremberg trials Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Chris Dodd, prompted by NBC "Today" co-host Ann Curry, accused the Bush administration of supporting torture at Guantanamo Bay on Tuesday's "Today" show.

After Curry spoke to the senator about the book and the trial of Nazis after World War II, she pushed Dodd to contrast the fairness of the Nuremberg trials compared to the Bush administration's support of "tortures" at Guantanamo Bay. The following exchange occurred on the September 18 "Today" show:

Matt Lauer may have approached Hillary Clinton from the left (as if she were a centrist) on health care on Tuesday’s Today, but Lauer was the only morning show host to ask the former First Lady about her campaign-finance scandal surrounding the crook Norman Hsu. ABC, CBS, and CNN all whistled past her campaign’s decision to refund $850,000 in contributions that Hsu “bundled” to her campaign. Granted, Lauer simply asked “How to you respond?” But in a follow-up Lauer also tweaked her campaign’s claim that they used an “abundance of caution” in returning the money, asking if there was perhaps not so much caution in the original fundraising.

Lauer did not remind the audience that the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996 was riddled with illegal foreign contributions that were returned -- but only after the news media started reporting on it. Geoff Dickens did the transcript:

New York Times reporter Katharine Seelye reviewed the third in a series of "betrayal" themed ads from the radical leftists at MoveOn.org, the group recently notorious for its infantile "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" ad in the Times that embarrassed even many Democrats.

Seelye found the latest MoveOn.org ad simply boffo, raving in Tuesday's "Giuliani's Exit from The Iraq Study Group in 2006 Draws Criticism" that:

NewsBusters reported Sunday that infamous netrooter Jane Hamsher lambasted Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards, for having the nerve to come down on MoveOn's disgraceful "General Betray Us" ad.

On Monday, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly took issue with Hamsher's "threat," as did his guests Kirsten Powers and Tammy Bruce.

After reading portions of Hamsher's letter to Edwards, which was posted at Firedoglake Saturday, O'Reilly said (video available at Gateway Pundit, h/t Glenn Reynolds):

Howard Kurtz, the longtime Washington Post media reporter and CNN media-show host, inadvertently defined exactly what’s wrong with our political culture when he was asked in an online chat about actress Sally Field blurting out in her Emmy victory speech that if women ruled the world, there’d be no [expletive deleted] wars. Kurtz said awards shows might not be the best slot for political analysis, "but she said it at a live news event, so in a way Fox was censoring the news."

This is "news"? Sally Field’s incoherent rant, delivered after a series of stammers, is somehow on par as newsworthy with what your average senior diplomat, military officer, professor, public policy expert or congressman has to say on the subject of war?

Still smarting from his Memogate spanking, disgraced former "CBS Evening News" anchor Dan Rather is trying to reclaim journalistic glory by trumpeting the claims of a supposed Boeing whistleblower. Paul at Wizbang sees an all-too-familiar scenario:

Stop me if you're heard this one....

A has-been anchorman, trying to reclaim past [false] glory tries to destroy a person or an institution by using accusations from a dubious source back-up by documents of dubious credibility. A big blogosphere welcome back to Dan Rather.

This time his target is Boeing but his reportage skills are about the same. Even without benefit of seeing the report (it airs tonight) there are already problems with it.

What problems? Well apparently the Seattle Times has found that the would-be whistleblower, Vince Weldon, has credibility issues:

So her skeletal "plan" is out. At the same time, there's a story in a "progressive" publication claiming that Mrs. Clinton really didn't have much to do with what came to be known as Hillarycare in 1993-1994.

In what should henceforth be known as a Hillary Howler, Paul Starr, co-editor of the American Prospect, tries to convince us that Hillary was, in essence, a figurehead (bolds are mine):

Though the media scarcely registered it at the time, (Bill) Clinton had described this approach in a speech and referred to it in the presidential debates. Moreover, he saw health-care reform through the prism of economic policy, believed that reducing the long-term growth in health costs was a national imperative, and insisted that even while making coverage universal, health-care reform had to bring down future costs below current projections for both the government and the private economy. Among Clinton's close advisors, Ira Magaziner championed the view that these aims were achievable. When he became the director of the health-reform effort and Hillary the chair, their job was not to choose a policy, but to develop the one that the president had already adopted.

Today's Chicago Tribune includes the editorial, "Protect us from Sally Field?" The Tribune is displeased that Ms. Field, who pretty much exhausted her acting ability 40 years ago with "The Flying Nun," was censored by the Fox Network.

In an acceptance speech on Sunday's Emmy Awards program, Sally shared her wisdom: "If the mothers ruled the world, there would be no god-damned wars in the first place." Fox cut out the last half of her sentence. Concluded the editorial:

Some would have been offended by Field's choice of words. Some would have been offended by her political sentiment. But everyone ought to feel a chill over the fact that they didn't get to hear the end of her sentence at all.

So, OK, the Chicago Tribune opposes that chilling effect. Hurrah.

The Trib's outrage might be more persuasive if it didn't selectively edit a story in the same day's paper.

On Tuesday’s "Good Morning America," Diane Sawyer interviewed Hillary Clinton about health care and recycled campaign talking points that her fellow 2008 Democrat, John Edwards, has been peddling. According to Sawyer, upon his election, Edwards will "cut off health care for Congress so that they don't have health care while the rest of America doesn’t." The ABC anchor earnestly followed up by wondering, "Would you do that or is that a gimmick?" Clinton responded by observing the implausibility of the concept. She patiently explained to Sawyer that Edwards would "have to get Congress to vote for that, of course."

The Sawyer interview did contain some surprises, however. The GMA host featured two clips from the 2008 Republican hopefuls challenging Mrs. Clinton. But the eight minute and 19 second segment also continued GMA’s habit of offering generous amounts of time to the New York senator. In March, the ABC program featured Hillary for over 30 minutes during a town hall style infomercial. During Sawyer’s interview on Tuesday, she also asked Clinton emotional, softball queries. Over video of Clinton at a ‘93 health care event, the morning show host wondered, "What do you wish this woman we're looking at now on the screen had known then that you now know, since it went down in flames?"

As if she were president already, Hillary Clinton went on CNN’s "American Morning" as well as the morning shows of the "Big Three" networks on Tuesday to sell her new health care proposals, a day after their unveiling. At the close of the "American Morning" interview, co-host John Roberts brought up the controversial "Betray Us" ad by MoveOn.org. He twice asked the junior senator from New York if she wanted to distance herself from the ad. Both times, she skirted the question by talking about General Petraeus and his record of service, instead of the ad itself.

Besides Roberts, Harry Smith of CBS News, ABC’s Diane Sawyer, and NBC’s Matt Lauer interviewed Clinton on Tuesday morning. Out of the four, Roberts was the only one who brought up the issue of the ad.

A transcript of the exchange between Roberts and Senator Clinton, which took place near the bottom of the 7 am Eastern hour of Tuesday’s "American Morning."

Delivering his best Michael Moore in "Sicko," impersonation NBC's Matt Lauer hit Hillary Clinton from the left on health care reform on Tuesday's "Today" show. Appearing in the first-half hour of "Today, Clinton was tagged repeatedly by Lauer as he worried that Hillary "watered down" her new health-care reform plan and feared Hillary had sold out to the insurance industry as he wondered: "Are you losing some leverage in asking these insurance companies to get on board and make tough choices?"

The following are all of Lauer's questions, on health care, to the Senator from New York and her responses as they occurred on the September 18 "Today" show:

Matt Lauer: "Senator Hillary Clinton is in Washington this morning. Senator, good morning to you."

Hiding behind a fake company name, Planned Parenthood came into Aurora, Illinois, a suburban Chicago neighborhood, and built an abortion clinic without telling the city of Aurora that it was to be an abortion clinic. Yet, all the news about this story is centering on the pro-abortion/pro-life debate instead of Planned Parenthood's lies. This story has been going on for a few days in Aurora, Illinois. It seems Planned Parenthood told a teeny, tiny white lie to the City Planning Board of Aurora about what use a new building they were constructing near a residential neighborhood would be put to. In fact, they even misled city officials as to who they even were, and those officials are none too happy about it.

The city granted a building permit to a company called Gemini Office Development LLC to build what was being called a “medical office building.” It turns out, however, that Gemini Office Development LLC is actually a shell company for Planned Parenthood and this new building was not going to be just a regular, non-descript “medical office building” but a Planned Parenthood abortion mill, instead. Curiously, Planned Parenthood neglected to tell the city of its plans until the building was complete and they were ready to open for business.

If you were a former president of the United States of America, would you be doing an interview on a liberal, independent news program that airs on, amongst other things, public access and college radio stations?

Should be able to get a better gig having once occupied the White House, dontcha think?

Well, if your name is Jimmy Carter, and you had already sold your soul by giving an interview to the terrorist television network Al-Jazeera back in January, how much lower could you go? (Update: Please see Charles Johnson's answer!)

Such must have been the presidential thinking on September 10th when Carter sat down with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman to continue his anti-Israel rants unfettered by an impartial journalist who might challenge his disgraceful views. Here are some of the lowlights (h/t Tim Graham):

Talk amongst yourselves...

I found little coincidence in the fact that yesterday's New York Times Learning Network word of the day was "belie". Especially considering that this weeks lesson plan for teachers (grades 3-12) is a romantic walk down the path of the "pre-Reagan (and pre-Giuliani)" days of drugs, sex and parental permissiveness.

The lesson plan is a discussion of author Chris Sorrentino's yearning for the return to parenting as it was when he was 17. An era where the rules were different but lamentably better in his eyes. The message however is not being sent to parents, it is being peddled like a drug to kids in high schools across the nation.

Another episode of "NewsBusted" has arrived! Topics in this episode include Nancy Pelosi, Osama, Larry Craig, South Carolina prostitutes, MTV and more.

Note: You can subscribe to “NewsBusted” if you click the little takeboard icon. That way, you'll be automatically notified via email any time we post new shows. Click here for the show archive.

Even as the words were leaving his mouth, Joe Scarborough acknowledged that he was going to get "killed by conservative bloggers." And being the obliging sorts we are here at NewsBusters . . .

Interviewing Hillary Clinton on today's "Morning Joe," Scarborough's performance was one long paean to her perfection, coupled with a mea culpa for the wrongs that he and other Republicans visited on the Clintons during the '90s.

View video here.

Excerpts: