UPDATE AT END OF POST: Headline changed to "Goofy."
The next time one of your liberal friends tells you there isn't any bias in the media, show him or her the following headline published Tuesday by CNN Money's senior writer Jeanne Sahadi.
"Wingnut Debt Ceiling Demands" was actually placed directly above a picture of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, and Florida senator Marco Rubio:
Not with a bang but with a whimper. Reporting from Juneau, Alaska, New York Times reporters Jim Rutenberg and William Yardley wrapped up Sunday the less-than-earthshaking findings from the media’s bizarre full-court press to see three-year-old emails from Sarah Palin’s time as Alaska governor -- “Palin’s E-Mails Undercut Simplistic Views of Her, Both Positive and Negative.”
In the three years since Sarah Palin stormed the national political stage, her brief tenure as governor of Alaska has often been reduced to caricature. Critics cast her as petty, preoccupied and disengaged. Supporters say she was a maverick reformer, a salt-of-the-earth true believer who bucked the establishment elite.
The Times’s own coverage of Palin certainly fits the “critics” part of the bill, and the paper's decision to "crowd-source" the Palin email dump with help from its liberal readership suggests it was eager to uncover controversy. It didn't quite turn out that way, forcing reporters to write around the absence of bombshells.
Last night was the second GOP debate, this time hosted by CNN and including candidates Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Ron Paul.
From Bachmann officially announcing her intentions to run for president, to Romney asking why Obama never called him to discuss the pitfalls of a healthcare mandate, the debate covered a broad range of issues yesterday.
Check out a video and analysis of the debate after the break, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Today's media bias question: Can you call someone "anti-war" or a "peace protester" if they're suspected of providing material support to violent groups like Hezbollah or the FARC guerrillas in Colombia? Apparently they do at The Washington Post. The top story in Tuesday's Post carries the anodyne headline "Activists cry foul over FBI probe." That should be "Radical-left activists cry foul." The subhead was "Peace protesters, labor organizers are apparent targets." The FBI's anti-terror probes (involving U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Plamegate fame) are apparently infuriating Obama labor-union agitators in the Midwest.
You have to read down to paragraph 23 in Peter Wallsten's article to get the real point:
People know that the MSM despises Sarah Palin. Still, it was shocking to hear the beans so blithely spilled . . .
Jim Vandehei of Politico, on Morning Joe today:
"If you talk to any single reporter at any media organization that we're aware of, I don't think that anyone thinks she can be president or should be president."
View video after the jump.
Previewing Tuesday’s Early Show town hall meeting with Republicans on the economy, CBS’s Bob Schieffer, who pushes his Face the Nation guests to agree taxes must be raised, hailed a Republican, Senator Tom Coburn, for expressing a willingness to include a tax increase in deficit negotiations.
After dismissing the Republicans CBS assembled -- Monday afternoon at the Newseum -- for how they “pretty much stuck to the Republican line: Low taxes and cutting the deficit will eventually lead to economic growth,” Schieffer championed: “But it was Coburn who may have won the prize for candor.” Viewers then heard Coburn declaring: “I’ll stand up as a conservative Republican, one of the biggest deficit hawks in Congress, and say ‘I'll negotiate on taxes’ -- because our country’s in trouble.”
To say that the statistics concerning new business formation during the past few years haven't been very good would be a major understatement.
USA Today's Scott Patterson deserves some credit for even looking at the topic. It is tailor-made for neglect by the rest of the establishment press. When government policies lean towards lower taxation and regulation, policies left-leaning journalists tend to oppose, net business formations generally grow, and they'd rather not report it. In the high-tax, high-regulation environments they favor, net business formation slows considerably -- and again, they'd rather not report it.
On her Friday show, liberal talk radio host and that renowned economist Randi Rhodes – okay, she had no academic credentials and never went to college – but she insists that America urgently needs a second “stimulus,” but won’t get one because the Republican 2012 plan is “to starve you!...So be it, said John Boehner.”
The problem is the American people are getting hip to this - they're starting to figure it out, economists are writing about it, Wall Street Journal's written about it - the fact that we don't have a second stimulus is so ridiculously stupid, that we don't have any investment in our people.
MSNBC's Chris Matthews took a well-deserved shot at rival network CNN Monday for actually giving former New York governor Eliot Spitzer his own program.
The "Hardball" host also took a swipe at Spitzer saying it was "ludicrous" for him to actually be talking about Congressman Anthony Weiner's (D-N.Y.) sex scandal (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Post your comments if you're watching. It's on CNN right now.
MRC Director of Media Analysis and NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham appeared on the June 10 edition of FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor to document the broadcast networks’ double-standard on congressional sleaze stories. When the story first broke, ABC, CBS and NBC refused to cover the Weiner “sexting” scandal, and their overall weekday evening news coverage had amounted to less than a dozen stories as of last Friday.
But back in 2006, Graham noted, the networks pounced right away on the similarly sleazy actions of a congressional Republican, Mark Foley, which were a focus of five times as many evening news stories (55) in the first 12 days, even though Foley had quit Congress almost immediately.
(Video and a partial transcript below the fold)
Not surprisingly, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh had some choice words Monday for the media's epic fail concerning their hunt for dirt in the recently-released email of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.
Probably the best line concerning this disgraceful episode was, "Palin did better in her public colonoscopy than Katie Couric did in hers" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
In the wake of the release of 24,000 emails from the office former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the media’s obsession with the former Vice Presidential candidate has reached such a fever pitch that even Morning Joe can no longer stand it.“Did you see the obsessive countdown to Sarah Palin's e-mails being released? Did they not make themselves look like fools and - and just prove - and again we have been harshly critical of Sarah Palin, but did the media not prove how biased , over the top biased they’ve been every step of the way on Sarah Palin?” host Joe Scarborough said this morning.
(video after the break)
When lefties Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore think the media's Palin Derangement Syndrome has gone too far, you know the press are hitting new depths of indecency.
Judging from the couple's Twitter accounts, the recent feeding frenzy over the former Alaska governor's email was all they could stand:
Imagine a Republican president giving a speech on tough economic times in which he claimed that the plight of Americans who are hurting is what is on his mind every day as he walks to the Oval Office. Imagine that same Republican president, in that same speech, bragging that he has "a better plane" and "a bigger entourage" than when he was a candidate. Now imagine the howls from the MSM about such president's vainglory and insensitivity.
President Obama gave just such a speech today. Speaking at a plant in North Carolina about the tough economic times, PBO claimed that "what drives me every day as I walk down to the Oval Office" is the need to provide jobs and economic security for Americans.
But Obama opened his speech by bragging that "I have a better plane" than when he visited the same plant three years ago as a presidential candidate. Later, in explaining that he had brought the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness with him to North Carolina, Obama boasted "I travel with a bigger entourage" than he did as a candidate.
View video after the jump.