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Remember how many of the Democrat presidential candidates, led by John Edwards, announced that they would refuse to participate in any debate sponsored by Fox News because they complained about the so-called unfairness of that network? It turns out that Dennis Kucinich is upset about the coverage he is receiving from a major news network and it isn't Fox News. Kucinich is angered over what he perceives to be an attempt by ABC News to minimize him. Here is the Kucinich list of complaints about ABC News from his  campaign website:

The broadcast network evening news shows on Wednesday night pounced on President Bush's reminder that the U.S. pullout from Vietnam led to millions being killed, as all three shows featured historians to discredit Bush's parallel to what may happen if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, and NBC portrayed Bush as hypocritical for raising Vietnam after earlier rejecting comparisons to Iraq as a Vietnam-like quagmire. Only ABC, leading into Bush recalling “killing fields,” showed a picture of stacks of skulls and ABC also uniquely featured two Vietnam vets who backed Bush's case.

NBC anchor Brian Williams asserted that “after years of rejecting any comparisons to Vietnam, today President Bush invoked the Vietnam War as a way of saying the U.S. must stay the course and not pull out.” Reporter Kelly O'Donnell noted that “after years of pushback rejecting the Vietnam-Iraq comparison, today in Kansas City, before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the President made a turn and embraced his own Vietnam analogy.” O'Donnell insisted: “Mr. Bush's comments to the VFW today contrast with what he said last year when asked if he saw an Iraq-Vietnam connection.” Viewers then got just this very short soundbite from Bush at a June 14, 2006 press conference: “I don't see the parallels.” Contrary to NBC's implication, there is no conflict between scorning of a liberal comparison of Iraq to a Vietnam-like quagmire and suggesting other lesson about Vietnam.

Does liberal New York Times columnist Selena Roberts have a double standard for white/blacks accused of crimes? A review of her recent work makes that conclusion hard to escape.

Earlier this year, Roberts wrote passionately (if incorrectly) regarding the three falsely accused Duke lacrosse players in the Times's once-august pages. One of her main themes was that the lacrosse players were engaging in a wall of silence designed to protect the guilty. She condemned this behavior in very strong terms, even using the illustration of a gang member wearing a "Stop Snitching" T-shirt on her first article, published on March 31, 2006. In this she portrayed them as equally despicable and in fact equivalent to those gang members who discourage snitching to the authorities with threats of physical violence.

CNN used an old tactic in the mainstream media’s play book - a person overcome by emotion - to drive home the point they wanted to make - that the only state that hasn’t been visited by President Bush is Vermont. In a segment during the 4 pm hour of "The Situation Room" detailing this apparent "snub," CNN chief national correspondent John King played a clip from an interview of Regina Gilbert, the mother of Kyle Gilbert, who was killed serving in Iraq four years ago. Gilbert fought back tears as she made her plea for a visit from the President.

Video (1:46): Real (1.54 MB) or Windows (1.74 MB), plus MP3 audio (309 kB).

On Wednesday night's "Hardball" both substitute host Mike Barnicle and MSNBC's David Shuster took pot shots at the President over his stated concern about Iraq becoming a Cambodian-like massacre if the U.S. leaves too early. Substitute hosting for Chris Matthews, Barnicle blurted: "Do you think the President has ever read a book about Vietnam?" while Shuster sneered: "The mere mention of Vietnam and arguing for more sacrifice in Iraq is fraught with potential political peril. After all, President Bush didn't serve in Vietnam and Vice President Cheney received multiple deferments, telling reporters, a few years ago, that in the 1960s he had other priorities than military service.

They may not be YouTube-friendly, but the Chicago Sun-Times has on staff at least two Obama Girls cranking out their undiluted admiration for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Columnist Lynn Sweet, the newspaper's Washington Bureau Chief, has expressed her displeasure with not being able to follow him into the East Bank Club's locker room. When Obama announced his candidacy, Ms. Sweet deemed his speech "soaring" and "inspirational," an evaluation not shared by everyone seeing it.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is apologizing for its decision to run a haiku contest about its decision to not run the photos of two men sought by the FBI for questioning related to possibly terrorist-related activities involving the Seattle-area ferry system

The paper's "online reporter" Monica Guzman writes on the paper's "Big Blog":

The paper's decision not to run photos of the two Seattle ferry passengers sought by the FBI didn't take long yesterday to become part of a widespread debate that provoked readers around the country.

Tuesday August 21, Glenn Beck interviewed Ben Wallace (CNN transcript), who profiled Beck in a September GQ article that asked if Beck is “The Most Annoying Man On TV?” After Wallace told Beck that he thinks the talk show host's annoyance factor ranks up there with Michael Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, Alberto Gonzales and Criss Angel, the only magician to top David Blaine's creepy-factor, the writer really whipped out his liberal media bona fides by claiming that “there aren't that many on the [left] side of the aisle who have talk shows” (emphasis mine):

CNN’s Jack Cafferty, who recently thinly-disguised his support for the impeachment of President Bush, couldn’t resist talking about the recent AP/Ipsos poll that claimed that liberals read more than conservatives. (See Matthew Sheffield's post debunking the poll.) His question during his "Cafferty File" segment during the 4 pm EDT hour of Wednesday’s "The Situation Room" took this apparent "fact" for granted. "Liberals read more books than conservatives. Why?"

The full transcript of Jack Cafferty’s segment:

On Wednesday’s "Good Morning America," anchor Chris Cuomo completely glossed over the health care implications of a Canadian mother giving birth to quadruplets in America and not her home country. According to Cuomo, Karen Jepp and her husband, the new parents of identical quadruplets, had to be flown 300 miles from Calgary to Montana on August 16, because "every neo-natal unit in their country was too crowded to handle four preemie births."

Apparently, it didn’t occur to Mr. Cuomo to wonder why all the hospitals in Canada, a nation with universal health care, were full. During a subsequent interview with Jepp and her husband J.P., the co-host continued with this unquestioning explanation. He elaborated, "...Towards the very end, it gets even more complicated....You know, they're not ready for them at the hospital. Your doctors have to make calls. You have to fly 300 miles to have [the children]." Considering that back in June, "Good Morning America" co-anchor Diane Sawyer announced "a commitment to take a hard look at the health insurance industry," it seems odd that unusual circumstances, which forced a very pregnant mother to fly to another country and give birth, would be of such little interest to Mr. Cuomo.

If George W. Bush's approval rating hit a low point for any president in 33 years, do you think the network evening news programs would have reported it?

Maybe as the lead story, right?

Well, a new Gallup poll was released on Tuesday stating that the approval rating for Congress tied the lowest point since Gallup began tracking such a thing, and none of the broadcasts networks thought it was newsworthy last night.

The likely reason for the boycott, beyond the obvious fact that the Democrats are now in control, is that much of the recent decline in this favorability has come from Democrats and Independents (emphasis added):

Sometimes I wonder if, when she left "The View," Rosie O'Donnell ever looked in the mirror and borrowed from the 37th President of the United States. "You won't have Rosie to kick around anymore!" Of Course, Richard Nixon never had a blog, Rosie does, and when she's not showing videos of her kids or writing stream-of-consciousness poetry, she's sharing her favorite 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Joy of joys.

Here's the latest:

It seems that the U.S. media has decided to take a pass on revelations that the Glasgow Airport Bomber Kafeel Ahmed left an e-mail claiming that he wanted to "die for Allah". In fact the New York Times avoided this fact altogether by using the word 'God' instead when referring to a Guardian UK article with the headline, Airport bomber's email to relative said he wanted to die for Allah.

The person close to the investigation said that Mr. Ahmed had sent an e-mail to his brother two hours before crashing the Jeep, but it was not opened until 90 minutes after the attack. On Monday, The Guardian newspaper reported Kafeel Ahmed had sent a text message to “a relative” with link to an e-mail and a password to access it, saying he was acting according to God’s will.

Bob Filner, the San Diego representative who got into an altercation with an airport security official really must have a great press staff. At least he'd have to if he were a Republican since almost no GOPer could ever get CNN to omit his party affiliation from a news report.

Turns out, though, this isn't the first time that Filner has been getting pushy with security staff. That's not exactly a surprise. What is a surprise, and disgrace for that matter, is that the last time Filner had such an altercation, he did so in the presence of two reporters who declined to report on the event:

Rep. Bob Filner's alleged altercation with an airline employee in Virginia on Sunday, which led to an assault-and-battery charge against the San Diego Democrat, wasn't his first such run-in, according to a 2003 Justice Department incident report.

Fox News is using its mighty power to bully the mainstream media into promoting yet another war, left-wing activist/filmmaker Robert Greenwald and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are warning. Claiming that "Fox wants war with Iran," Greenwald is urging other news networks -- ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN -- "not to follow Fox down the road to war again."

Again?

Greenwald and Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.) are touting a new viral ad campaign for the filmmaker's anti-Fox video "exposing" what Fox News supposedly is doing. According to Greenwald, Fox News engaged in "daily fear-mongering" in the days leading up to the war with Iraq, serving as a media cheerleader for the U.S.-led war.

The New York Times front-page "News Analysis" by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jim Rutenberg delved into President Bush's dissatisfaction with Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his failure to bring Sunnis and Shiites together politically -- and strangely finds Bush "already facing skepticism" about the troop surge in Iraq (um, didn't that surge start some months ago?)

"It was not quite the vote of no confidence delivered by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who on Monday said Mr. Maliki should quit. But it was a striking attempt by the White House to distance itself from the Maliki government before September, when the president’s troop buildup faces an intense review on Capitol Hill.

Kiss federally subsidized collegiate promiscuity goodbye.

Prices for birth control are going to increase a lot for college students. That has CNN deeply concerned. Higher prices for birth control? Oh, the humanity.

That’s because deficit reduction legislation has changed how much the federal government pays to underwrite contraceptives. Costs for the pill and patch have gone up enough, apparently, for college students to consider anything except abstinence.

Video (27): Real (759KB) or Windows (895KB) or MP3 (209KB)

"How in the world could anyone write a lengthy article about the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), without mentioning once that the group has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in the nation’s largest terrorism trial?"

That's what Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs is wondering about USA Today's gauzy August 21 profile of Islamic convert and ISNA president Ingrid Mattson.

In June, Johnson picked up on ISNA's brush with federal prosecutors in a blog post entitled "A Really Bad CAIR Day." You can also read more reporting on the matter in Josh Gerstein's June 4 New York Sun article, "Islamic Groups Named in Hamas Funding Case."

Indeed, while reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman failed to mention ISNA's ties to Hamas, the USA Today writer focused on how sick and tired Mattson is of persistently denouncing radical Islam:

An amazing thing happened in the Georgia Legislature Tuesday that national media seem guaranteed to ignore: House members dismissed claims that man is responsible for warming the planet.

As reported Wednesday by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution (emphasis added throughout):

And now for a message on global warming from your Georgia Legislature: Don't sweat it.

Climate scientists and environmental activists like former Vice President Al Gore are alarmists. They use flawed statistical models to predict a catastrophic future of thawed glaciers, super-charged hurricanes, swamped coastlines and scorched crops.

That's some way to start an article, don't you agree? But there was more:

The Seattle Post Intelligencer is carrying an AP report of a suspicious package found on ferry, but still hasn't published the photos of two men the FBI is seeking in order to question them about their suspicious surveillance-type activity aboard several Seattle-area ferries in recent weeks. The AP report in the P-I says the details of the contents of the suspicious package "were not immediately available, but the Seattle Times' report, by a Seattle Times staffer, says Trooper Cliff Pratt of the Washington State Patrol's bomb squad, described the package, found rolled in carpet in a ferry bathroom earlier Wednesday morning, as possible remnants of a bomb that had not functioned correctly.

If you've been wondering lately why liberal defeatist media outlets like the New York Times have suddenly been bullish on Iraq, here's the payoff: Democrats have begun to shift their political strategy in light of the success of the surge. While I have to give the Washington Post credit for reporting on the Democrats' failure to spin reality into defeat, I have to note that the following article came on page A4 of today's edition:

Democratic leaders in Congress had planned to use August recess to raise the heat on Republicans to break with President Bush on the Iraq war. Instead, Democrats have been forced to recalibrate their own message in the face of recent positive signs on the security front, increasingly focusing their criticisms on what those military gains have not achieved: reconciliation among Iraq's diverse political factions.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell scolded Matt Drudge and other "Internet writers" for making much ado about nothing over Michelle Obama's "If you can't run your own house, you certainly can't run the White House," slam of Hillary Clinton. On the Wednesday "Today" show, Mitchell ran the aforementioned quote from Sen. Barack Obama's wife and then proceeded to wag her finger at Drudge and other "Internet writers" everywhere:

On the heels of last night's PBS broadcast of the biased "documentary" titled "Gold Futures," which portrays the Romanian village of Rosia Montana as a pristine rural village threatened by a behemoth gold mine, village resident and blogger Gheorge Lucian is preparing to send PBS a message in a bottle - literally.

Lucian, as seen on this YouTube video, has collected samples of the highly polluted river water that flows through Rosia Montana from the now-closed former communisty-run state-owned gold mine, an environmental disaster zone that would be cleaned as part of the development of a new, modern, state-of-the-art gold mine in Rosia Montana.

He intends to send a bottle of the water - it's orange - to PBS.

Whether an accident or intentional, the placing of a picture of President George W. Bush laughing next to the headline "Children May Lose On Insurance" is rather deplorable, especially since the picture was not from the article in question.

However, that's what occurred at Google News' Health section Wednesday morning when the featured article was the Boston Globe's piece by Alice Dembner discussing how "[t]housands of Massachusetts children from low-income families could be denied health insurance under new rules imposed by the Bush administration late last week."

Yet, for some reason, the picture above right, from an article published Tuesday at the website OverTheLimit, was placed next to the Globe's headline, and was actually about a story in the New York Times Monday (emphasis added, h/t reader Lloyd Hohn):

Possible discussion point: "Two-thirds of US adults admit to being in the dark about political issues outside the United States, and only a third are well-versed in US politics, the results of a poll published Tuesday showed."

The Seattle Times today has published the photos of two men the FBI wants to locate and talk to in regards to their suspicious behavior aboard several Puget Sound ferries in recent weeks, while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer continues to refuse to do so - even though the photos have now been widely published in the Seattle area and nationally via other media outlets and the blogosphere. As we discussed yesterday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer offered a haiku contest related to the case, but refused to help the FBI locate the men by publishing their photos.

Sometimes watching the MSM grapple with the challenges of web journalism can produce some quite funny results. Such was the case with the editor, Earl Maucker, of my hometown newspaper, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, as he attempted to explain how his newspaper was dealing with that newfangled thing called the Internet. In his reponse to the question on how the Internet has affected the newspaper business, Maucker provides a pollyannaish response with Web offers new visual dimension:

Last night, it occurred to me, as I was preparing an e-mail to notify New York Times business columnist David Cay Johnston about updates to yesterday's original posts (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog) about his "smaller average incomes" report and a new source data update post, that I should bring a festering Times-related business reporting matter to his attention.

So I did (links to previous NewsBusters, BizzyBlog and other posts not in the e-mail have been added by me; Mr. Johnston was advised that this portion of the e-mail would be posted):

David,

..... Until earlier this year, I really didn't have too adverse of an opinion on the hard business reporting at the Times (outside of Paul Krugman, but he's a commentator). I've usually seen AP as consistently worse on hard biz-econ news.

Then, in February, Times reporter David Leonhardt told readers that manufacturing was in a recession. Not heading towards one. Not on the verge of one. Nope -- IN one.

Mika Brzezinski might be taking a break from "Morning Joe," but the MSNBC show hasn't missed a liberal beat with her replacement. Tamron Hall today seemed to suggest that Christians and Jews could be next to emulate Muslim terror tactics.

At 6:35 A.M. EDT today, talk turned to the CNN series "God's Warriors," a classic exercise in moral equivalence. Hosted by Christiane Amanpour, the series focuses on extremists in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Earlier today, Hall had watched the segment on Jewish extremists. Scarborough called CNN on its moral relativism.

JOE SCARBOROUGH [Note: speaking very much tongue-in-cheek]: I'm sure we're going to find that there are Jewish and Christian organizations, international terror networks, that are set on the destruction of entire civilizations as we find in the Muslim world.

That's when Hall began to rise to CNN's defense.

View video here

Update with video posted below fold.

File this one under the rubric "Unintentionally Revealing Moments of MSM Bias." ABC publishes an article about media watchdog groups and singles out two for mention: NewsBusters and Media Matters. But the article goes on to cite the work of and publish comments by a representative of only one of those groups. Which one do you think it was?

Yesterday, ABC posted an article by its Samantha Wenders entitled The Camera Is Always Watching: The Internet Has Helped Citizens Play 'Gotcha' With the Press; Is That a Good Thing?"

Wrote Wenders: "Media watchdog groups like the conservative Newsbusters and the liberal Media Matters regularly post examples of what they see as bias in the media."