Blogs

Update: Links to other blogger reactions at bottom of post.

Bernard Shaw, the former CNN reporter and Washington, D.C. anchor, told WTTW Channel 11 in Chicago that he's "very, very disappointed with the way news management" at CNN "has gone," reports TVSpy.com. He further complained that Fox News Channel is "the ratings leader ... and what Fox puts on the air is not news." Fox, in Shaw's view, is "commentary, personal analysis."

"I don't want to hear an anchor's personal opinion about anything. Just report the news," said Shaw. "But CNN continues to ape many of the on-air mannerisms of the Fox News Network, and I don't like that." This doesn't match his record. More on that in a moment.

Ford's protracted sales slump continued in May, while every other major automaker showed gains:

DETROIT — Toyota Motor Corp.'s U.S. vehicle sales jumped 14.1 percent in May to its best monthly level ever and General Motors Corp.'s sales rose 9.7 percent, helping boost industry sales 5 percent, as both automakers credited in part the appeal of their more fuel-efficient offerings amid high gas prices.

For the second month this year, Toyota outsold Ford Motor Co., which saw sales fall 6.9 percent as it continued to cut low-profit sales to rental companies. Nissan Motor Co.'s sales gained 7.4 percent, DaimlerChrysler AG's sales rose 3.9 percent and American Honda Motor Co. rose 2.5 percent.

Even factoring in the change in sales to rental companies, the article goes on to say that Ford's retail sales were still down 3%.

As he did last month, George Pipas of Ford tried an advance PR stunt that fizzled, but left less-than-close observers thinking that the company might be doing better than it really is:

What's the matter with Cuba? Why is its economy a disaster, its people mired in poverty? Could it be . . . communism? Of course not. Cuba's dire straits are the fault of that hegemonistic entity just to the north of the Florida Straits. Oh, and Cuban youth could care less about being enslaved. Don't believe it? Ask Andrea Mitchell.

The NBC correspondent appeared this morning at 7:10 am EDT on a special live-from-Havana edition of "Today," anchored by Matt Lauer.

NBC CORRESPONDENT ANDREA MITCHELL: The island's infrastructure is crumbling, crippled by a U.S. trade embargo that has lasted nearly half a century.

That was the sum total of Mitchell's explanation of Cuba's economic woes. Although Cuba is free to trade with all the 180-or-so other countries in the world, she offered not a word suggesting the brutal communist dictatorship could be to blame for what Matt Lauer had earlier acknowledged is the 50-cents per day average wage. True, Mitchell was seen boldly inveighing for change to a government official . A U.S. official, that is. Interviewing Cuban-born U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Mitchell made her case for lifting the embargo.

Update I & II at bottom:

In this June 4 article, the AP worked hard to leave out something very important but very basic in an article about Democratic US Representative William Jefferson’s 16-count bribery indictment. What the AP left out was any identification of Jefferson’s party affiliation. In almost 30 paragraphs, no where is there any hint of what party Jefferson belongs to, not even a “(D-LA).”

When a politician is in trouble and the party is not identified, it a safe bet to assume that the missing letter is a Big “D,” as in this AP piece.

How were other politicians identified? Nancy Pelosi is identified as “Pelosi, D-Calif.” John Boehner is identified as “House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio.” But Jefferson is not a Democrat, just “Louisiana congressman William Jefferson.” Strange how that works, huh?

Since party is usually identified in the first paragraphs, the AP had many opportunities to note that Jefferson is a Democrat and simply did not (emphasis mine):

On NPR’s new talk show "Tell Me More," Michel Martin brought her sympathies to the cause of Cindy Sheehan and her "devastating conclusion" to withdraw from the public arena (Martin made no mention on the air of her disgust with the Democratic Party). She interviewed three other "anti-war" mothers of soldiers who died in Iraq, and asked if they were disappointed by Sheehan’s decision and how conservatives have made their lives difficult: "Cindy Sheehan reports that she's paid a very high price for her activism. She said her life has been threatened. She's been called, you know, many, many derogatory names, you know, some of which I can't really repeat here. I'd like to know have you felt that you've paid a price for your activism?" Martin made no mention of the many derogatory names Sheehan used for President Bush (an "evil maniac," the "biggest terrorist") or his cause ("the cancer of Pax Americana.") 

The conversation even turned to American racism, with Martin asserting "we know that minorities are disproportionately represented in the military, particularly in the Army. And yet, many of the people we've seen be most publicly active in opposing the war have not generally included minorities, and you are among the few." Mother Elaine Johnson complained that the media might be racist for focusing on Sheehan and not on her.

On Monday's Countdown show, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pushed the theory that the recent announcement of a terror plot involving JFK Airport was politically timed to benefit the Bush administration, as the Countdown host revisited and added to a recurring segment titled "The Nexus of Politics and Terror." Olbermann also suggested a connection to Fox News via the participation in a news conference of NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the father of FNC correspondent Greg Kelly, and further theorized that President Bush was trying to provoke a "new Cold War" with Russia to distract attention from the current war in Iraq.

Olbermann teased the show by mocking a soundbite of U.S. attorney Roslynn Mauskopf, who referred to the danger of "unthinkable devastation" at JFK Airport if the plot were successful. The Countdown host quipped: "Yeah, well, so would me blowing up the moon with Mentos and a liter of Coca Cola." As he opened the show, Olbermann suggested that Bush was pushing missile defense to provoke "a new Cold War" with Russia. Olbermann: "Mr. Bush, meanwhile, arriving in Europe tonight for this weekend's G-8 Summit, and possibly fomenting yet another war in the process, a new Cold War with Russia, possibly to obscure the unending nightmare in Iraq, where, if the present rate continues, 140 American service personnel will have died by the first of July." (Transcript follows)

Surely you've heard the phrase "out of left field" when something is part of a discussion yet it makes no sense to be included? In this case, I have an example of leftist sentiment slamming Richard Nixon at the end of a story that has nothing to do with modern political "sides." It strikes one as quite odd to be where it is. When you see it, you'll cock your head and say, "What the heck is THAT all about"?

You know what I mean, I am sure. It's jarring when someone in the media is talking sports and then suddenly takes a jab at Bush, or when they're talking about fashion and they abruptly throw in a crack at those "evil conservatives", always when it is quite off topic. It makes you go "huh?" It makes you wonder if their hatred of the right is so ginned up in their tiny little minds that they cannot even talk about movies and sports without taking shots their political enemies -- and those enemies are us, folks.

This particular head spinning "Huh?" is in a story in the UK's Telegraph titled, "One filing cabinet held 500 years of history." This is a story that has nothing to do with politics per se, yet this UK paper can't resist a shot at an American Republican. The slam is completely gratuitous and makes no sense in context to the story.

An update to my earlier post that I figured would do just as well as a fresh item.

USA Today's "On Politics" blog, "TV Newser," and The New Republic's "The Plank" contain explanations from Joe Scarborough's people of how they believe the Friday "Morning Joe" banter between the MSNBC host and guest Craig Crawford about potential GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson's wife was taken out of context.

Noted USA Today's Mark Memmott:

A spokesman for the news network said this afternoon, though, that the comment has been taken out of context and that it is "irresponsible" to suggest Scarborough was employing sexual innuendo. "Works the pole" could have been a reference to poles that some strippers use in their acts. MSNBC says it was a reference to an exercise routine that a growing number of women are performing.

It's been eight weeks since Time magazine redesigned itself, and part of that refurbishment is handing over the "Ten Questions" interview inquiries to the readers instead of Time's reporters. In the June 11 edition, Time's interviewee was Rep. Tom Tancredo, a presidential contender and one of the nation's leading opponents of illegal immigration. Among the questions Time selected for Tancredo was a whopper from Ubaldo Padilla of Oroville, California: "Why do you hate Mexicans?" It wasn't the only snotty question Time picked. There was also James Smith of Phoenix, who asked: "I recently found out my family came from Holland without permission in the 1600s. Should we be sent back?"

Since Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel introduced the new format in the March 26 edition, there haven't been any Democrats interviewed. But in the March 12 edition, Time's Massimo Calabresi had ten (mostly softball) questions for Ted Kennedy, one of the nation's leading advocates of an amnesty for illegal immigrants. No one at Time asked him about immigration and why he supposedly hated Americans. Instead, Calabresi's list of questions included these soft touches:

Someone at the AP must really like Stephen Colbert. A bait-and-switch June 3 article was supposedly about a new book by Afghanistan-born author Khaled Hosseini, but gave readers stealth fanboy journalism that wrote a play by play of Colbert’s shtick without discussing the book. From the reporting, the BookExpo America breakfast was more like a segment of the “Colbert Report” than a national book fair discussion. Instead of any information about the book, it was line after line of Colbert coverage, "That Stephen Colbert sure is funny, and he sure has some funny ideas about books. Just ask "The Kite Runner" author Khaled Hosseini."

Barbara Miner of the Milwaukee Journal, Sentinel has written one of the funniest anti-gun screeds I've seen in a long, long time. Oh, she didn't MEAN to be funny, of course. But, her article gave the effect of seeing a 40-year-old white guy trying to chant the lyrics to a popular rap music tune to look cool to his eye rolling kids. Her rambling little column was so filled with unintentionally funny moments, was so clueless in its lack of introspection and so completely absurd that one would have thought the link at the Milwaukee Journal, Sentinel website had accidentally taken you to the satirical website, "The Onion".

Now, I have always been somewhat confused when leftists are being unintentionally funny. Do we laugh and be mean at their utter cluelessness, or do we feel sorrow and pity instead of mirth? How should we feel, for instance, when Keith Olbermann pretends that he is giving pertinent commentary, or when Babs Streisand acts as if she is to be taken seriously... or anytime we even see Cindy Sheehan doing, well, anything. So, when I read this anti-gun piece so chock full of absurdity, I was torn as to how to feel about it.

Ah, who am I kidding? I laughed like a hyena at how foolish this liberal chick is. I mean, what planet is this woman from?

George Stephanopoulos, who has co-hosted Good Morning America on several occasions over the years, on Monday night served as anchor of ABC's World News with Charles Gibson. From what I can recall, this is the first time the long-time adviser and strategist for Bill Clinton, and Dick Gephardt before that, has anchored World News -- or World News Tonight as it was previously named.

The screen shot to the right is from the top of tonight's (June 4) newscast.

UPDATE. Video of opening of the newscast with the announcer declaring: “From ABC News headquarters, this is World News with Charles Gibson. Reporting tonight: George Stephanopoulos.” (42 secs): Real (1.3 MB) or Windows Media (1.5 MB), plus MP3 audio (250 KB)

Just before the Democratic debate, ABC "World News Sunday" provided their health care talking points for them in the June 3 broadcast.

Reporter Dan Harris presented the viewpoint that American taxpayers have a moral obligation to make sure all children have insurance, citing two left-wing Clinton supporters and several tragic stories.

“If you judged a country by how it treats its most vulnerable people, we're certainly failing when we leave 9 million children behind,” said Ron Pollack of the liberal Families USA.

Harris neglected to inform viewers of Families USA’s liberal agenda. Pollack and his organization have consistently promoted more government involvement and control of health care. In 1994, Pollack supported the Clinton administration’s plan for a federal takeover of health care.

Conservative blogs are abuzz with a controversial remark MSNBC's Joe Scarborough made on his Friday "Morning Joe" program about Jeri Thompson, the wife of former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who is mulling over a White House bid.

[More Scarborough coverage linked below the fold]

Hot Air has the video.

Here's the relevant transcript:

Sen. Barack Obama's new Web site geared to his presidential bid, faith.barackobama.com, includes official endorsements from notorious clergymen known for making fantastic, racially inflammatory claims---yet the liberal media aren't saying much about these endorsements or the controversial clergymen who Sen. Obama has officially embraced. It is doubtful the liberal media would be as silent if such people were publicly endorsing a Republican or conservative political candidate.

Rev. Jeremiah A Wright Jr. is Sen. Obama's pastor. Concerning 9/11, Rev. Wright, says, "White America got their wake-up call after 9-11. White America and the Western world came to realize people of color had not gone away, faded in the woodwork, or just disappeared as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.” Wright also calls America "this racist United States of America." Another Obama-endorser is Rev. J. Alfred Smith Sr., who was honored by the violent Black Panther Party and given a community award by the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam (hat-tip to Catholic League). The liberal media's near-silence about all this actually says a lot about their political agenda.

Bizarrely enough, the terror plot in New York City to blow up airport terminals and fuel lines at Kennedy International Airport didn't make the front page -- or even the national news section -- of Sunday's New York Times. Instead, it received a front-page "tease" and topped the Times' Metro section of regional news. By contrast, the Washington Post put the story on the front page, and the Los Angeles Times made it Sunday's lead item.

The story by Cara Buckley and William Rashbaum went to some length to downplay the seriousness of the threat:

"Mark J. Mershon, the assistant director in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in New York, said all four men had 'fundamentalist Islamic beliefs of a violent nature,' although they appeared to be acting on their own and had no known connection to Al Qaeda.

A plot to blow up a major airport and with it a huge fuel pipeline running under densely-populated residential neighborhoods is, safe to say, an objectively devastating and horrific prospect were it executed to fruition. So why the editorial version of air quotes in this June 2 AP story (h/t DailyGut.com) for the word "chilling"?:

NEW YORK - Federal authorities announced Saturday they had broken up a suspected Muslim terrorist cell planning a "chilling" attack to destroy John F. Kennedy International Airport, kill thousands of people and trigger an economic catastrophe by blowing up a jet fuel artery that runs through populous residential neighborhoods.

Three men, one of them a former member of Guyana's parliament, were arrested and one was being sought in Trinidad as part of a plot that authorities said they had been tracked for more than a year and was foiled in the planning stages.

Think global warming is a bad thing?

Well, not according to Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press.

In an article published Saturday entitled “Blame Coal: Texas Leads Carbon Emissions” (h/t NBer dscott), the AP writer, whilst trying to point fingers at certain states for being bigger polluters than others, accidentally suggested that global warming might actually be a good thing.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at paragraph eight (emphasis added):

If this morning's Today show segment on Cuba is any indication expect Matt Lauer's visit to the communist country tomorrow to gloss over much of Fidel Castro's brutal regime. Previewing the Today show anchor's trip, NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell reported on Castro's health and actually highlighted an unidentified Cuban citizen wishing Castro well as he exclaimed: "I care about him. I love him!"

Judging from Mitchell's report 'Today' viewers may also get more than their fair share of Cuban mouthpiece Ricardo Alarcon tomorrow, as the Cuban National Assembly president was featured as the go-to-guy for the latest on Castro's health. While Mitchell did air one soundbite from Condoleezza Rice criticizing the regime, she then went on to depict Cuban opinion on Castro as merely "divided." Neither Mitchell nor Lauer bothered to mention critics of Castro often end up being imprisoned or worse.

Update (15:40 EDT): Ana Marie Cox helpfully corrects/excuses Klein's error re: Kucinich.

Well, that didn't take long. Just a few hours after former Rep. Dick Armey's (R-Tex.) first guest blog post to Time's "Swampland," liberal journalist and author Joe Klein slammed Armey for "red-baiting" the audience on the Democrats' stances on issues like health care.

Socialized medicine is a right-wing scare trope. None of the Democrats is proposing that. None of them is even proposing a "single-payer" plan, like Canada, where the government collects the premiums and people get to choose private providers. And now that we're at a point where much of corporate America is hoping for some relief from the burden of providing health insurance, ain't this kind of red-baiting getting a little old?

But Klein is dead wrong. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is precisely pushing a single-payer universal coverage plan that the liberal Center for American Progress labels as "Medicare for All."

From Kucinich.us, the Ohio Democrat's campaign Web site (PDF file):

On Monday’s "Good Morning America," ABC co-anchor Chris Cuomo acted as lawyer for the defense when he interviewed the co-authors of a new book that contains critical revelations about 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Cuomo grilled Don Van Natta and Jeff Gerth, the New York Times investigative journalists behind "Her Way," asking if their book was a "sleeper" and an "Ambien substitute."  

The ABC host, who didn’t appear comfortable even discussing a book critical of Senator Clinton, began the interview by derisively wondering, "...Do you think you have the silver bullet in this book? Is this is this the book that derails the campaign?" Then, Cuomo, the son of a Democratic governor and the brother of New York’s Democratic Attorney General, questioned the standards of the two authors with this loaded query:

Chris Cuomo: "The [Clinton] campaign said it is an Ambien substitute. They say the book is just a rehash. How do you respond to that, that your book is a sleeper? It’s all been done before. You only needed a library card to report this out. Your response?"

Jeff Gerth: "Well, The New York Times chose to put 8,000 words of our book on the cover of the Sunday magazine and we feel that their news judgement is better than that of Senator Clinton’s."

In April, NewsBusters contributor Dan Gainor criticized how the Washington Post puffed up a liberal secessionist movement in the state of Vermont. You know, the state that now has two very liberal independent senators, socialist professor Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy (D), and previously gave the nation RINO-turned-independent Jim Jeffords. [UPDATE: See "Little Green Footballs" for more on just how liberal the secessionist movement's leaders are]

Well, now the Associated Press is running with the story, and outlets like CBSNews.com are peddling the piece to readers. In CBS's case this morning, on the Web site's front page (see screencap at right).

Nowhere in the story does the AP describe the key players behind the secession movement as liberal or even as "progressive," (not to mention conspiracy nutjobs-- see bottom of post) nor is any pundit brought in to chalk up their rumblings about secession as hysteria driven by Bush Derangement Syndrome.

What's more, the AP doesn't address the unconstitutionality of secession until late in the article and even then in a misleading fashion:

CRITICAL UPDATE: At end of post, Rush responds to NBers' concerns regarding his appearance with two women in bikinis.  

                                                     

For those that missed Sunday's "1/2 Hour News Hour" on Fox News, as he promised a few weeks ago, President Limbaugh is on vacation (video available here courtesy of El Rushbo himself).

Addressing the nation from the Southwestern White House, President Limbaugh informed us that:

I’m sure I’m speaking for millions of anthropogenic global warming skeptics when I say that virtually nothing brightens my day more than an article written by a climate expert exposing the Global Warmingist-in-Chief, soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore, as nothing more than a snake oil selling charlatan.

All those who agree say "Aye."

With that in mind, the sun came out brightly this morning when I received the following article in my inbox.

As published at the Muskogee Phoenix Sunday evening, a former military meteorologist named Paul Becker wrote a marvelous letter to the editor (emphasis added throughout):

I've documented on NewsBusters numerous occasions where Time magazine's political news-oriented "Swampland" blog has skewed to the left, including when the blog allowed veteran liberal columnist/pundit Michael Kinsley to guest blog at the site in March.

But this week, readers should have a real treat with the pro-free market, conservative insights of former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.).

In his first post, Armey tells readers that his primary concern is battling the growth of government under the watch of both Democrats and Republicans:

For those who read this column, you probably most know me as a an architect of the Contract with America, House Majority Leader from 1994-2003, and more recently as Chairman grassroots powerhouse FreedomWorks.

In all of these endeavors I have been guided by my highest political value: freedom. This is a good place for me to start. While tyrannies work only for those at the top, the American tradition demonstrates that all people are better off when their political and economic freedoms are protected. Government can only expand its scope of power and authority at the expense of the citizen. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan knew this.

[...]

Most climate change watchers are aware that leaders from the eight most developed nations will be meeting in Germany this week to discuss, among other things, issues related to global warming.

With a delicious sense of irony, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt put his two cents into this debate with comments that will surely not be reported by America’s alarmist media even though he was somewhat speaking to them.

As reported by Deutsche Welle (emphasis added, h/t Benny Peiser):

For general comment and discussion...

While the relatively narrow Dow Jones Industrial Average has been achieving alltime highs for a couple of months, it took until last week for the broader S&P 500 index to beat its previous record of 1527. The index closed at 1536.24 last week.

Instead of writing up the big winners in the 77% of companies that have brought the index back from its 2000 low, USA Today writer Matt Krantz looked for dark clouds in on otherwise blue sky, taking an opportunity to focus on the index's losers who kept the index's recovery of value from happening sooner:

S&P's run leaves Wal-Mart, other big caps behind

For a quarter of the stock market, the celebration about the Standard & Poor's 500's charge back to record levels for the first time in more than seven years is an example of history being written by the victors.

Even though the benchmark S&P index last week finally took out its old high from March 2000, investors who own 23% of its stocks have completely missed out. A total of 115 stocks in the S&P 500-stock index are still below where they were in March 2000, according to data from Bridge Information and S&P. They aren't down just a little, either, but off 45% on average.

"At any given time, you're going to have companies that have one-off issues," says James Paulsen of Wells Capital Management.

Yeah guys, and that's why investing in a broad-based index of stocks in an index mutual fund is often a good idea for investors who don't have the time to evaluate and keep up with either individual stocks or actively-managed mutual funds. Zheesh.

As the "mainstream media" books on Hillary emerge, the media itself often echoes the Clinton spin line -- yawn, no news here. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch joked this week: "Newsbreak: Her marriage has been troubled! Some good details, but we've heard it all before." Carl Bernstein's book was excerpted on page 3 of the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section -- not even the front page of an inside section? -- and you can watch Bernstein attempt the usual ridiculous loving-marriage-full-of-womanizing spin:

She carefully positioned herself during those years to have a fallback plan in case their marriage or political journey ran aground. She knew that Bill's history of compulsive infidelity during their courtship meant the chances for a stable marriage, especially a marriage without adultery, were at best a crapshoot.