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Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift has certainly never been accused of being an impartial journalist. Quite the contrary, when compared with other antique media members, Clift has to be considered one of the most consistently biased – unashamedly and unapologetically appearing as though the ideas for her columns as well as her screechy sermonettes on “The McLaughlin Group” emanate directly from Democrat talking points in her e-mail inbox. 

This is why it must have been shocking for many readers to see the sub-headline of her most recent Newsweek piece (emphasis mine): “The Original Old-Fashioned Liberal: The descendant of Irish immigrants, Ted Kennedy badly wanted a reform bill. In the end, his own party stopped him.”

Now, before you get all excited over the possibility that Eleanor either had an epiphany or a rare moment of clarity, be advised that, in the end, she really didn’t blame the Democrats for anything.

When Sen. John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in the presidential election of 2004, the press turned its attention to 2008 and Sen. Hillary Clinton as a potential Democratic savior.

As Mrs. Clinton’s home state broadsheet, the Times has a front-row seat for the run-up to Election 2008. Yet a Times Watch study has discovered that ever since the Hillary-for-president talk heated up in earnest, the newspaper has used its seat more as a cheering section for Clinton than as a dispassionate perch for objective observation.

A reader wishing for a full, balanced picture of Sen. Hillary Clinton won’t get it from the New York Times, which has followed a pattern of mainstreaming Clinton’s liberal policies while throwing roadblocks in front of her potential Republican Senate opponents and playing down Clinton’s controversial remarks.

On this morning's Today show, NY Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman repeated his astonishing wish that the price of crude oil . . . go to $100/barrel ASAP. This is apparently a favorite Friedman mantra, as NewsBusters/MRC's Tim Graham and Brian Boyd have noted.

Friedman's theory is that extremely high oil prices are desirable because they would induce behavioral changes that would ultimately decrease demand and force oil prices way down. Here's how the exchange with host Matt Lauer unfolded:

Friedman: "I hope the Iranians get as crazy as they want. My attitude toward the president of Iran is 'you go, girl', because the faster we get to $100 a barrel, pal, the quicker we're going to get back to $20. Because when we go to $100/barrel, then you're going to see all these people change their behavior and their oil-buying habits and their car-buying habits in a fundamental way."

In Wednesday's Washington Post, media reporter Howard Kurtz profiled Fox News Channel's Brit Hume with the headline "Moving to the Right: Brit Hume's Path Took Him From Liberal Outsider to The Low-Key Voice of Conservatism on Fox News."

It's obvious from the headline. Once again, Fox is the only ideological news channel. In Kurtz's stories in the Post, the liberal media is usually treated as the objective media, never as liberal as they believe Fox is conservative. On April 4, Kurtz broke the Katie Couric story with the headline "CBS Prepares to Land a New Anchor." Liberal bias was not even mentioned in the story, as liberals worried about "residual sexism." The day before, the Keith Olbermann headline had only the right, not the left, in the headline: "A Gadfly With Buzz: MSNBC's Olbermann, Exercising the Right." On April 7, Meredith Vieira's arrival at NBC landed the bland headline "Who Wants to Be a Morning Host." (MRC did appear in that piece, in paragraph 19.) Last year, Bob Schieffer was "CBS News's Unstuffed Shirt." When the media pounded on Team Bush over Katrina, the headline rejoiced: "At Last, Reporters' Feelings Rise to the Surface." (Fox was included in the list of angry Katrina networks.)

To be sure, this year’s Pulitzer Prize announcement has generated quite an outrage. Almost universally throughout the conservative blogosphere, the revelation that three of the recipients wrote stories about top-secret military information that conceivably compromised America’s War on Terror met with shock and dismay.

No better example of such disgust was apparent Tuesday than on the radio program of Bill Bennett. As reported by Editor & Publisher: “On his national radio program today, William Bennett, the former Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration official and now a CNN commentator, said that three reporters who won Pulitzer Prizes yesterday were not ‘worthy of an award’ but rather ‘worthy of jail.’" The article continued: “He identified them as Dana Priest of The Washington Post, who wrote about the CIA's ‘secret prisons’ in Europe, and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times, who exposed the National Security Agency's domestic (a.k.a. terrorist) spy program.”

E&P continued:

On his Countdown show Tuesday, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann hyped an article posted on the Vanity Fair Web site, by Washington Post and Time magazine veteran Carl Bernstein, which called for congressional hearings into, as described by Olbermann, "the entirety of the Bush administration." Olbermann referred to the crusading journalist of Watergate fame as an "eminent voice" calling for Congress to find out if the Bush White House is "worse than Watergate." He then brought aboard Bernstein for what the Countdown host touted as an "exclusive interview," to discuss the article, during which Bernstein referred to the "distressing, terrible situation" of having a Bush administration that "has not been very truthful" when it comes to "almost everything important that we have been told by this President." Bernstein also described the controversial NSA surveillance program as a "totally illegal...usurpation of power...under the guise of national security," equating it to the  illegal wiretapping by the Nixon administration. Bernstein recalled how "there was an article of impeachment against Nixon for wiretapping." (Transcript follows)

Time magazine decided to rank "America's Ten Best Senators" for their April 24 edition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Massimo Calabresi and Perry Bacon proclaim that they consulted all sorts of pundits and academics, but they mostly picked ultraliberal Democrats and moderate Republicans. Even the Republicans with more conservative voting scores (think John McCain) are seen by the media as more centrist, willing to frustrate the Bush White House.

Over at the "Right Angle" blog at Human Events Online, Rob Bluey did the work of checking these Senators' ideological scores, their lifetime American Conservative Union ratings:

The Best Senators

Thad Cochran: 81%
Kent Conrad: 20%
Dick Durbin: 7%
Ted Kennedy: 3%
Jon Kyl: 97%
Carl Levin: 7%
Richard Lugar: 79%
John McCain: 83%
Olympia J. Snowe: 50%
Arlen Specter: 45%

Frustrated with nearly five years of declining stock values and increased executive compensation, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, one of the top institutional shareholders of the New York Times is crying foul and demanding major corporate and management changes.

"Over the past several years, the New York Times Co. has consistently underperformed its peers. Its market value has declined 52% since its peak in June 2002," the company said in a statement put out by its managing director, Hassan Elmasry. "Despite significant underperformance, management's total compensation is substantial and has increased considerably over this period."

Christian Science Monitor reveals what most economists have known for years. Free Market Project

For years, the media have been telling Americans the economy, though growing, is not producing good jobs. From Lou Dobbs’ continuous rant at CNN about “The War on the Middle Class” to the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne claiming in a February 21 op-ed that “The decline of manufacturing employment means the economy is producing fewer well-paying jobs,” the media mantra has been that wage gains during this recovery have been very disappointing.

“Now Democrats have argued, though, that under the Bush administration, Americans have seen wages remain flat, also high health care costs and high heating oil and gas prices,” CNN’s Elaine Quijano reiterated on an April 15 “CNN Live” report.

After a longtime “Chicken Little” media view of the labor markets, The Christian Science Monitor finally broke from the pack in an April 11 article by Mark Trumbull stating the “Newest job numbers show that businesses are expanding opportunities in high-wage fields.”

Just two days earlier, however, The New York Times asserted that “New technology and low-cost labor in places like China and India have put downward pressure on the wages and benefits of the average American worker.”

Who’s right? Well, the Monitor used some highly-regarded economists to support its assertions:

The April 18 Fox and Friends First provided a welcome alternative to the mainstream media’s fawning over the dissident generals attacking Donald Rumsfeld. FNC co-hosts Steve Doocy and Page Hopkins interviewed retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Maginnis about his support for Rumsfeld. Doocy teased the segment this way:

Doocy: "Lieutenant Colonel Robert Maginnis. We’re going to talk to him live from down in D.C. about Mr. Rumsfeld. There is that drumbeat, okay, would you call it a drumbeat if there are seven generals, all retired, out of 8,000 active duty and retired generals, is that really a drumbeat?"

If you want a comprehensive picture of the situation in Iraq, you probably won’t get it from traditional news anchors. In fact today, on CBS’s "The Early Show" it took a report from Dave Price, the weatherman, for viewers to get a full picture of the conditions. Price has spent the last week in Iraq touring with entertainers, such as musician Charlie Daniels, who are performing for our troops. This morning, he filed a report from Baghdad where he hinted that things in Iraq really aren’t as bad as the media are making them out to be:

"And throughout this whole journey, despite what the headlines that we read and see in the United States are, the morale of the troops may surprise you."

Do you remember Leonardo diCaprio's turn as an ABC News correspondent, interviewing President Clinton on the environment in 2000? Well, premiering Tuesday on PBS: "Journey to Planet Earth," the latest public-broadcasting environmental-disaster documentary, hosted by pretty-boy actor Matt Damon.  The show's PBS website promises:

Nearly half the world’s wildlife species may become extinct over the next fifty years. Climate change, the illegal wildlife trade, the spread of disease, and the destruction of critical habitat are pushing species to the brink. Join host Matt Damon as Journey to Planet Earth investigates what scientists call 'the sixth great extinction of the world’s animals' and what we are doing to stop it." Then scroll to the bottom of the page and see all the government agencies that have given your tax dollars to this panic-button-pusher:

Continuing his tirade again FOX News' Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC's Countdown, did a segment about the host of The O'Reilly Factor -- I know, what a surprise -- and his rating on the "100 Unsexiest Men In The World". Bill Jensen of The Boston Phoenix, the writer behind this list, made his liberal views obvious when he continually bashed O'Reilly and his looks. I wonder if this was done by a moderate, where Keith would fall.

When a show does a story like this, you have to question is this really a show that should be taken seriously and is the host a real journalist? After running this segment, Countdown and its host Keith Olbermann only beg viewers to answer no to both of those questions.

DOWNLOAD - .WMV DOWNLOAD - .MP4

  Winners of the biggest prize of all, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for excellence in journalism, were announced.

Brent Baker has already discussed some of the winners, given to journalists who undermined the anti-terror program. Romenesko has a good compilation of all of them.

Check out the winners of the 2006 Pulitzer Prizes
* Public Service: New Orleans Times-Picayune; Biloxi Sun Herald.
* Breaking News: Times-Picayune.
* Investigative Reporting: Susan Schmidt, James V. Grimaldi and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post.
* Explanatory Reporting: David Finkel of the Washington Post.
* Beat Reporting: Dana Priest of the Washington Post.
* National Reporting: James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times; staffs of the San Diego Union-Tribune and Copley News Service.

Last night, Rev. Jesse Jackson appeared on The Situation with Tucker Carlson to discuss the Duke lacrosse team rape allegations. Specifically, Jackson's RainbowPUSH Coalition has decided to offer the accuser in the case free college tuition--regardless of whether her accusations prove to be true. As usual, Jackson is shamelessly injecting himself into the "hot" race-related case of the day for sake of his own publicity. But, at this point, it hardly comes as a surprise.

Anyway, it was a great shootout and Carlson does a fine job of disputing Jackson's recycled talking points.

Video available here.

Now this is something you don’t see every day: Media outlet does an Internet poll about a movie star, and then claims that friends of the star intentionally skewed the results of the poll to make the star look good.

As amazing as it might seem, this is exactly what representatives of Parade magazine – yeah, that thing that’s stuck in your Sunday papers along with all the advertisements and coupons you typically throw in the gargage without reading – are claiming according to a New York Post piece Tuesday (hat tip to HuffnPuff). It appears Parade recently ran an online poll asking whether Cruise was to blame for his failing public image or the media, and the results displeased the media outlet doing the questioning: “A shocking 84 percent of respondents blamed the press.”

As you can imagine, Parade being a member of said press didn’t like the poll’s outcome. So, it began investigating how the answers could have been different from what they wanted…er, expected. According to a Parade spokesperson:

David Limbaugh has a good column about the liberal technique of finding former military officers to bash Rumsfeld and the war in Iraq. The reasoning is that when they find someone who is willing to speak against the war, "it's like finding a smoking gun."

These vultures have hovered over Rumsfeld's stubbornly vibrant carcass for way too long, and they just can't let him sprint out of yet another crisis: the call for his resignation by a half dozen retired generals.

Nothing inspires liberals in the press more than the opportunity to glorify liberals in uniform. Conservative military or ex-military types are just jingoistic hacks. But those critical of the military in general or of the Iraq War qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize or Time's Man of the Year.

Here's a new one. To add to the media's laundry list of supposed failures in Iraq is a unique allegation by the BBC. Apparently Saddam Hussein had a soft spot for the gay rights movement, and now that Bush has invaded, homosexuals are being persecuted.

To many Hollywood left types, this must truly be the reason we shouldn't of entered Iraq.

"I don't want to be gay anymore. When I go out to buy bread, I'm afraid. When the doorbell rings, I think that they have come for me."

That is the fear that haunts Hussein, and other gay men in Iraq.

They say that since the US-led invasion, gays are being killed because of their sexual orientation.

At The Corner on National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg passed along this precious nugget from Brit Hume's "Grapevine" on Fox News Channel:

Former Clinton CENTCOM commander, Anthony Zinni — the most prominent of the retired generals attacking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — now says that, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, "What bothered me ... [was that] I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn't fit what I knew. There was no solid proof, that I ever saw, that Saddam had WMD."

But in early 2000, Zinni told Congress "Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Arabian Gulf region," adding, "Iraq probably is continuing clandestine nuclear research, [and] retains stocks of chemical and biological munitions ... Even if Baghdad reversed its course and surrendered all WMD capabilities, it retains scientific, technical, and industrial infrastructure to replace agents and munitions within weeks or months."

Hope springs eternal, and thus it was with some optimism that I read the opening lines of this morning's Boston Globe editorial, The Tel Aviv Atrocity, regarding the latest barbarism in which "an Israeli woman was torn apart in sight of her two young daughters and her husband." Was the Globe really about to unequivocally call for those who target civilians to be brought to full justice?

No, the Globe wasn't, and call me naive for even thinking they might. To the contrary, it was more of the same moral relativism and outright falsehood we have come to expect from the MSM and in this specific case, the Globe, otherwise known as the Boston farm team of the NY Times.

On Monday, for the second straight weekday, Access Hollywood's New York correspondent, Tim Vincent, a veteran of the BBC, sported a hammer and sickle T-shirt as he introduced a story. Just as on Friday's show, as documented in an April 15 NewsBusters item, though he wore a jacket over the red shirt with the symbol of the regime which murdered tens of millions and oppressed hundreds of millions more for decades, a gold hammer and sickle was clearly visible inside a gold-outlined red star which, sans the hammer and sickle, would match the Soviet's Red Army emblem. On Friday's edition of the half-hour entertainment news program produced by NBC and aired on all NBC-owned stations (as well as other stations across the country), viewers saw Vincent in the shirt as he led into a preview of the American Dreamz movie. On Monday, viewers couldn't avoid him in the shirt as co-host Nancy O'Dell set him up and he introduced a piece on his role as an extra in an upcoming Nicole Kidman film.

Given Vincent's identical attire and the same background of Rockefeller Plaza, NBC's headquarters, I'd presume both segments were taped at the same time last week.

Video clip from April 17 (23 seconds): Real (760 KB) or Windows Media (880 KB)
Video clip from April 14 (20 seconds): Real (660 KB) or Windows Media (750 KB)

The annual Pulitzer Prize awards announced Monday night, by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, rewarded Washington Post and New York Times reporters who exposed -- and thus undermined -- secret anti-terrorism efforts, as well as a Washington Post critic who mocked Vice President Cheney's outdoor apparel and ridiculed the supposed 1950s-era clothing worn by then-Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' kids. The Pulitzer board gave the “Beat Reporting” award to Dana Priest of the Washington Post “for her persistent, painstaking reports on secret 'black site' prisons and other controversial features of the government’s counterterrorism campaign.” The “National Reporting” award was won by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times “for their carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.” The duo infamously penned the damaging December 16 article, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”

Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan grabbed the “Criticism” award “for her witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism.” In a January 2005 piece featured by the Post in a new page created to showcase her Pulitzer-winning work, Givhan complained that at a gathering of world leaders to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Dick Cheney “was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.”

On Monday’s “Countdown,” host Keith Olbermann demonstrated, as he regularly does, why he should have stuck to being a sportscaster on ESPN (hat tip to Michelle Malkin with video link to follow). In his “Worst Person in the World” segment, Olbermann chose Michelle Malkin for posting the names and phone numbers of UC Santa Cruz students that recently forced military recruiters off the campus. In Olbermann’s words, the students, “as a result, have been inundated with death threats.”

What Keith conveniently failed to inform his viewers was that these phone numbers were actually part of a press release by the organization responsible for the protest, Students Against War. In addition, these names and phone numbers are still available at a number of left-wing websites including this one. I guess Olbermann didn’t think it was important to inform his viewers of this.

As of this moment all we know for sure is that a state grand jury has issued sealed indictments against two Duke University lacrosse players in a case of ALLEGED rape. Are these two really guilty? That remains to be seen. But Jesse Jackson, appearing with Paula Zahn on CNN, has already set the racial fires burning with hot-button talk of “plantation” and “slavery” and “fantasies” of white men having their way with black women.

Jesse obviously waits by the phone for the next CAUSE to divide America. This time, the call came from Duke University and here he is, front page again.

It’s too bad that Paula failed to remind Jesse that “fantasies” work both ways. Plenty of prime time African American athletes somehow walk off with the sharpest blonde on campus. Is that a problem? No, as long as we remember that we’re all in this together and that race is a problem only when we (or some people) make it a problem.

Columnist Robert Novak suggested in his weekend potpourri that Hillary Clinton is surprising supporters with some wild allegations. Have you heard anyone else in the national media on this outburst?

Clinton was off message in a Bloomberg News interview last week when she suggested "this administration has been very willing to talk about using nuclear weapons [against Iran] in a way we haven't seen since the dawn of a nuclear age." There have been no such statements by President Bush or his aides.

Hillary's Bloomberg interview was conducted by Al Hunt,  the longtime Wall Street Journal D.C. editor and a longtime partner of Novak's on CNN's "The Capital Gang." Her remarks are more comical when you notice she asserts that Republicans are ruining Washington by refusing to hammer out an immigration bill: "This is another example of the denial that I see afflicting Washington right now. It's part of what I call turning Washington into an evidence-free zone." But her Bush-nuke remarks have already landed in that spot.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been under attack lately from those in the press, and with Congress out of session, and not much happening in the world of politics over the Easter weekend, the attacks continued this morning on CBS’s "The Early Show." And, once again, Harry Smith got confused by the facts (remember this and this).

Smith interviewed Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor of "Newsweek" magazine regarding an article that appeared in today’s edition of the publication, particularly the portions of the article that dealt with a chat Thomas had with former Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki. Smith’s first question contained erroneous information:

  This time it's official. The commentary Bob Schieffer will offer the "CBS Evening News" will not be sprinkled into various news stories. Instead, it will be a dedicated segment at the end of the show.

When Katie Couric takes over as anchor, CBS wants Schieffer to take on the new role.

Gail Shister in the Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

For the first time in 20 years, since Bill Moyers left the set, CBS wants commentary on the Evening News - and it wants Bob Schieffer to do it. Twice a week, beginning with Katie Couric's debut in September.

"My answer is, 'I don't know,' " says Schieffer, who does a weekly commentary in the closing minutes of Face the Nation. "I don't know if I have three [commentaries] a week in me. I'll decide over the summer."

Sunday's off-lead story is by Japanese-based reporter Norimitsu Onishi ("Revival in Japan Brings Widening Of Economic Gap -- Reckoning for Premier -- Egalitarianism Is at Stake as Rich-Poor Division Threatens Mobility").

Of course, Japan's striated class system and government-controlled economy was for decades the main threat to mobility. But Onishi has another culprit in mind: Reaganism.

"Japan's economy, after more than a decade of fitful starts, is once again growing smartly. Instead of rejoicing, however, Japan is engaged in a nationwide bout of hand-wringing over increasing signs that the new economy is destroying one of the nation's most cherished accomplishments: egalitarianism."

Good Morning America will use even the smallest excuse to give Jane Fonda a microphone. This morning Fonda was invited on the program to talk about the newly released paperback version of her autobiography, "My Life So Far". The only change to this edition is a new preface and a DVD.

Last year when the hardcover edition of "My Life so Far" was released, Good Morning America invited Fonda on for an interview aired in two parts: April 5 and April 6, 2005. Below are transcriptions of the Vietnam War segments of the interviews from today and April 6, 2005.

April 17, 2006:

Charlie Gibson: "You have written, also extensively in the book, about Vietnam and that era. And you have called it, that picture on the anti-aircraft battery, you've called it an horrific lapse of judgment. You've said you'll go to your grave regretting it.