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CNN's upcoming miniseries "God's Warriors," hosted by left-wing bias exemplar Christiane Amanpour, looks like it will play the old liberal game of moral equivalence. Amanpour reportedly compares Christian chastity advocates to the Taliban in the miniseries. Even the promos for the miniseries which have been running on CNN for the past few weeks demonstrate the probable "game plan" that Amanpour and CNN have in mind, grouping together pro-life Christian college students protesting in front of the Supreme Court, Jewish settlers on the West Bank, and Islamic radicals. To paraphrase an old children's jingle, "two of these things are not like the other."

An "unprecedented six-hour television event," the miniseries will examine "God's Jewish Warriors" on Tuesday night, "God's Muslim Warriors" on Wednesday night, and "God's Christian Warriors" on Thursday night. A preview of "God's Christian Warriors," which ran on Friday's "The Situation Room," featured an interview of Jerry Falwell, which was conducted a week before the evangelical pastor's death. As one might expect, Amanpour asked Falwell about his much-publicized connection of the 9/11 attacks with secularism in America, in particular, the legalization of abortion.

A new study published in the journal Science last Friday concluded that the continued burning of oil-related energy products combined with the planting of additional forests is better for the environment than the manufacture and use of biofuels such as ethanol.

In fact, the authors suggested that governments across the globe move away from biofuels as a global warming solution completely, and instead focus moneys and energies on reforestation and increasing the efficiencies involved with the burning of fossil fuels.

Of course you didn't hear about this because no major American press outlet thought it was newsworthy despite media's fascination with anthropogenic global warming.

Fortunately, several British outlets covered this interesting study, including the Guardian (emphasis added):

In an August 19 post at PajamasMedia, journalist and bestselling author Richard Miniter delved into the question of "How the New Republic Got Suckered" in the case of the fabricated stories of military blogger Scott Thomas Beauchamp. Among the questions Miniter raised was if TNR's fact-checking operation is "structurally flawed":

Let’s go into the fact-checking department. Elspeth Reeve was one of three fact-checkers at the magazine.

Did she fact-check her husband’s articles? While it is hard to believe that an established magazine would make such an elementary error, so far no one at the magazine has bothered to address the question. That’s an interesting omission.

On Monday, "Good Morning America" reporter John Berman ignored any role that journalists might have in the developing scandal of anonymous individuals altering Wikipedia entries. On the ABC program, Berman alerted viewers to the fact that companies such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks have changed sections in their Wikipedia bios. However, he skipped the recent revelation that both the BBC and New York Times have been linked to derogatory, childish alterations in President Bush’s entry. (CNN covered the story on August 16.)

Berman began the segment by asking viewers how they would feel if they knew "the entry on Wal-Mart was edited by someone inside Wal-Mart? The Starbucks entry? By someone inside Starbucks." He also noted that the CIA has changed its section. However, the ABC reporter failed to explain that a new computer program, which can determine who alters Wikipedia information, traced the culprit behind the addition of the words "jerk, jerk, jerk" to President Bush’s Wikipedia profile. The source? A New York Times computer. There was also no discussion of a similar incident involving the insertion of the word "wanker" to Bush’s entry from a BBC computer.

Even as one of them heatedly denies that she advocates "socialized medicine," it is a fact that each major US presidential candidate on the Democratic side favors some form of nationalized health care. Additionally, while governor of Massachusetts, Republican candidate Mitt Romney was firmly behind health-care legislation that, as commentator John Stossel noted back in May, the Wall Street Journal described as "a death warrant for small business in the Bay State."

Given its potential as a top-tier 2008 presidential campaign issue, you would think that there would be Old Media interest in how nationalized health care is working out in other countries.

But if there was, you would have surely heard about this news a week ago without having to go to British newspapers to learn of it:

Drug companies and campaigners yesterday lost a high court appeal for people in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's to be prescribed on the NHS a £2.50-a-day drug (about $5/day in $US -- Ed.) which is said to provide relief from the symptoms and respite for families.

Over the weekend, Michael Deaver, the PR strategist and campaign manager known best for his work for Ronald Reagan passed away. John Fund has a nice tribute in today's OpinionJournal that focuses on Deaver's innovative work, beginning during the time Reagan was governor of California.

When Reagan became president, Deaver continued to innovate, arranging such cinematic settings as the famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" moment and finding out ways to get around the endemic liberal bias inherent in most of the elite press corps.

Where is that innovative spirit today within the conservative movement?

Ron Brownstein is a liberal. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

On Sunday, the national affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a liberal notwithstanding, went on NBC's "Meet the Press" to discuss the just-announced imminent departure of Karl Rove from the White House.

Like many of the really disingenuous liberal shills in the media, Brownstein chose to ignore extremely pertinent facts as he disparaged the soon-to-be-former Administration member:

"Activist arrested in L.A.: Deported to Tijuana, pastor says."

That's the headline for an August 20 Chicago Tribune story on convicted Social Security fraudster and serial border-jumper Elvira Arellano. Reporter Antonio Olivo mentioned the conviction, but deep in the article in the 14th paragraph:

Much of the anger from across the political spectrum surrounding illegal immigration has been crystallized by Arellano's story. After entering the country illegally twice, she became an activist shortly after she was arrested in 2002 during a federal sweep at O'Hare International Airport, where Arellano cleaned airplanes. She was later convicted of using a fake Social Security card.

Tell me why I don't like Mondays...

The San Francisco Chronicle joins the bandwagon of liberal newspapers that have addressed the "achievement gap" -- the difference between majority [white] student academic achievement and that of minority [black/Latino] pupils. Right from the headline of "Children of Color Being Left Behind," readers are clearly left with the impression that there has been some purposeful scheme to "shortchange" minority students.

Michael A. Fletcher of the Washington Post has a little snippet of a story so full of hyperbole about how wonderful and "crystallizing" so-called "Peace Mom" Cindy Sheehan has been for the country that unintentional comedy is the result -- that or it raises a collective groan for its slobbering sycophancy. He so outlandishly exaggerates the impact of the "antiwar hero" and her protégé in "Camp Casey" that it just boggles the mind. Seems like Fletcher is far from a disinterested "journalist" but has succumbed to outright hero worship here.

I say "little snippet" of a story because it is one of those entries containing several short snippets of political news, the Sheehan story being one of them. But, befitting Fletcher's obviously smitten condition with "grieving mother" Sheehan, it is the largest entry in the article.

PBS is scheduled to broadcast nationally Tuesday night a biased documentary about a gold-mining project in Romania. The segment of the PBS series Wide Angle, titled "Gold Futures," looks at the ongoing controversy over a proposed gold mine in the village of Rosia Montana and all indications are that it will follow the anti-mine perspective promoted by a variety of European environmentalists who don't live in the village, an effort now backed by leftwing American financier George Soros, whose Soros Foundation-Romania recently opened an office in Rosia to fight the mining project.

(Soros' history of investment in gold-mining companies raises questions about why he has chosen to oppose the Rosia mining project, but that's a subject for another post some day.)

CBS's Bob Schieffer, on Sunday's Face the Nation, resurrected the media canard that John McCain's support of the Iraq war is what cost him the frontrunner status in the Republican presidential contest. Unlike Schieffer and other members of the press corps, McCain himself recognized that it was his lax stand on what to do about illegal immigration which plummeted him amongst GOP primary voters, a position where he is well to the left of the rest of the Republican field that, just like McCain, has backed the decision to go into Iraq and opposes withdrawal plans pushed by Democrats.

After pointing out to McCain how “you started out this campaign season basically as the front-runner,” but “you are no longer the front-runner, by a long stretch. You're running fourth in some polls,” Schieffer proposed: “Do you think the fact that you have been so steadfast in support of this war is what has cost you in those polls?” McCain realized: “I think, frankly, the immigration issue has caused me some difficulties with our base, because I think we still, we've failed to convince the American people that we're serious about securing our borders.”

Was ABC's George Stephanopoulos [file photo] moderating a presidential debate in Iowa today [transcript here], or running an internal Dem strategy session over how to most propitiously handle U.S. surrender in Iraq?

Imagine that instead of being a former Clinton operative, you're a bona fide journalist dedicated to challenging candidates about their assumptions. When talk turned to Iraq, wouldn't the first questions out of your mouth have been along these lines?:

• Some of your Democratic colleagues, members of the House and Senate, who recently visited Iraq, have acknowledged that the surge is working. Rep. Brian Baird of Washington, a previously anti-war Democrat, said just Friday that "we're making real progress. I think the consequences of pulling back precipitously would be potentially catastrophic for the Iraqi people themselves, to whom we have a tremendous responsibility … and in the long run chaotic for the region as a whole and for our own security." Doesn't this give you pause about your unconditional plans to withdraw?

There was a lot of competition in the category of Rove Derangement Syndrome last week inspired by the resignation of Karl Rove from the White House. Many of the entrants in the RDS contest were chronicled by NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard last Tuesday. He declared the winner in the highly competitive RDS contest to be Joe Garofoli, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. However, I respectfully beg to disagree.

Well, it only took a week for NASA's James Hansen to formally address the changes made to the United States historical climate record by the agency he oversees.

When he finally got around to it, Hansen actually quoted from a letter Thomas Jefferson sent to James Madison in 1789 to suggest that the Founding Father would have been a global warming alarmist, while castigating today's skeptics as court jesters employed by oil companies.

Oddly, Hansen's statement didn't appear at the Goddard Instititute For Space Studies website, but instead cropped up unceremoniously at Slashdot Friday morning (h/t Glenn Reynolds).

Regardless of the delay, Hansen's piece entitled "The Real Deal: Usufruct & the Gorilla," represents a marvelous example of how unscientific the alarmists are in their approach to this issue, and how even the head of a major NASA division feels the need to insult and attack those who disagree with him and pay his salary through their tax dollars (emphasis added throughout):

As usual, Mark Steyn's Sunday column in the Orange County Register is a read-the-whole-thinger.

Steyn takes on the lunacy of sanctuary cities, media-report tiptoeing, and the apparently hopelessly-in-denial political elites:

..... there's been a succession of prominent stories with one common feature that the very same pundits, politicians and lobby groups have a curious reluctance to go anywhere near. In a New York Times report headlined "Sorrow And Anger As Newark Buries Slain Youth," the limpidly tasteful Times prose prioritized "sorrow" over "anger," and offered only the following reference to the perpetrators: "The authorities have said robbery appeared to be the motive. Three suspects – two 15-year-olds and a 28-year-old construction worker from Peru – have been arrested."

All of the attention in the media in recent days over reports of cheers in the Seattle Times newsroom over Karl Rove leaving the White House, and boos in the MSNBC newsroom during a George W. Bush State of the Union speech, don't surprise me. I've seen this kind of naked and unprofessional expression of political bias against Republicans in a newsroom before.

My first job in a newspaper newsroom was in Abilene, Texas. I could not have told you what any one of my co-workers there thought about politics. Ditto for my second daily newspaper job, at the newspaper in Lubbock, Texas, and my third, at the newspaper in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Political bias was a little more on display at my fourth job, at a business weekly in Nashville, but nothing like what happened at the Tennessean on election night in 1994.

It's Sunday. Doesn't that mean tomorrow's Monday again?

Is PBS still making money off a discredited documentary that they know is filled with untruths, misquotes, and lies? It would seem so.

In 2003 PBS aired a show titled "Einstein's Wife" that attempted to prove that Albert Einstein's world changing theories of physics were a result of a hidden collaboration with his first wife, Mileva Maric. This documentary claimed that Maric’s work on the theory of relativity was lied about and hidden away all these years by Einstein, his biographies and history. Imagine the implications if the work of what must be the smartest woman on earth was hidden by those evil, greedy men who don't want to share credit with a woman. It's a feminist's dream story promulgated by PBS.

Unfortunately it isn't true. Not only is it not true, but also so many historians have since complained to PBS that they surely know the real truth by now, even if their original airing was a result of their honestly just not knowing the truth then. Yet, this faux documentary still has a PBS sponsored webpage and was recently aired by Australian broadcasters. PBS is also still selling DVDs and attempting to make money off a film hat has been discredited by dozens of historians and even attacked by the scientists in the film who were misquoted and misrepresented by the film's producers.

Here's a headline you'd never expect to see:

Global Warming Watchdog Invests in Oil, Coal, Utilities

Think I'm kidding? Well, check the link.

Making the issue that much more delicious, it was the leading front-page story in Saturday's San Francisco Chronicle (emphasis added throughout):

Original caption:

Rutgers University students watch Kia Vaughn of the Rutgers University women's basketball team as she appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Vaughn sued Don Imus and CBS on Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2007, claiming the radio personality's sexist and racist comments about the team on April 4, 2007 damaged her reputation.

See incredible Roberts double-standard Update at foot.

Michael Vick, victim. That's how Selena Roberts's article in today's New York Times largely portrays the NFL QB accused of involvement with dogfighting. The article's headline sets the tone: Vick Is Trapped in His Circle of Friends.

Excerpts:

• The crooked circle Michael Vick drew around himself has tripped and squeezed him.
• The first to fail Vick was Davon Boddie, a cousin and personal chef. His marijuana possession charge in April led police to a white house with black buildings behind it on Moonlight Road in Surry County, Va. [Darn that Davon. If only he hadn't been busted on the pot charge, Vick might have been able to continue -- allegedly -- killing dogs that didn't make the grade.]

Take a look here for another example of the media's Fred Thompson-is-lazy meme. Without much else to criticize about him, many are taking his slow approach to announce and anything else they can to label him as lazy, such as using a golf cart instead of walking at the fair. Notice how it is pointed out that he is the "only presidential candidate" to do this. Do these petty things really matter?

I think going after the designer shoes was a definite cheap shot. You tell me, do the shoes make the man? Is this Fox News Channel's idea of "fair and balanced?"

There are times when I hate being a media analyst, for I am often forced to view and review television reports and newspaper articles that literally make me nauseated while undermining my faith in journalists as a whole as well as my fellow citizens.

The following video is a perfect example, a virtual piece of detritus that unfortunately is likely to offend so many viewers on so many levels that it's almost unimaginable a highly-regarded American journalist was responsible for its content.

Alas, Bill Moyers was at it again Friday evening closing out his Bill Moyers Journal program on PBS with a monologue about President George W. Bush and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove that is guaranteed to sicken you as much as it did me.

In fact, my disgust over this abomination is so great that I care not to excerpt or highlight any of its contents in fear of ruining my weekend. As such, what follows is a partial transcript of this disgraceful refuse for your reading displeasure (video available here, h/t NBer mattm):

Over at the Counterterrorism Blog, Steve Emerson has a great post detailing the New York Times's latest attempt to burnish the image of the pseudo-moderate Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR):

In what has become practically a routine, whenever bad publicity for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) surfaces, in an almost Pavlovian response, the New York Times leaps to its defense.

As I wrote about last March in The New Republic, when CAIR had befallen several embarrassing public setbacks, including the rescinding of an award from Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office and public opposition on Capitol Hill for the use of a room to host a CAIR event, the Times dispatched its reporter, Neil MacFarquhar, to resuscitate CAIR’s image.

Some extraordinary statements concerning global warming have been made in the past couple of days by a key member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum that could signal the end of the Kyoto Protocol as we know it.

Of course, you likely didn't hear about this, for even though America is part of APEC, our media seemed thoroughly disinterested.

However, as this is indeed quite important news for folks on both sides of the anthropogenic global warming debate, the following was reported by the Associated Press via the International Herald Tribune Friday (emphasis added throughout, h/t Benny Peiser):

The powerful "manufacturing is in decline" meme won't go away soon, but it should.

It apparently isn't enough that the Institute for Supply Management's Manufacturing Index has read "expansion" in 48 of the past 50 months. It has become an article of faith among reporters and opportunistic politicians that American manufacturing has been, and continues to be, in a long-term decline.

The fact is that government reports also show the exact opposite. Why apparently no one, including the sector's supporters, has done, or at least published, the simple math involved to debunk the myth of "deindustrialization" is indeed a mystery.

There has been support by anecdote. For example, on August 6, Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal ("The Myth of Deindustrialization"; link requires subscription). His column led as follows:

Chris, How Do You Really Feel?

Cable host Chris Matthews reacted to the resignation of top Bush aide Karl Rove by calling the political operative a "bum" and speculating as to whether he would tell all in an autobiography. Matthews sneeringly wondered if "you have to pay to get the truth from Karl Rove." In general, he contributed to the media frothing by hungering for the scalp of the Bush aide.

MSNBC: Liberal and Unbalanced

Dan Abrams, MSNBC host and general manager of that cable network, continued the political savaging by labeling Rove the "Constitutional Crippler." Abrams went on to slam Rove for "hypocrisy. He also asserted that he wouldn’t "shed a tear at his farewell bash." (I wouldn’t expect an invitation.) The Rove rage wasn’t limited to MSNBC, however. ABC managed to inaccurately blame the Bush operative for the 2004 Swift Boat ads.