National Debt

The media’s unwillingness to release all the facts concerning the debt ceiling debate is nothing short of censorship. In their enthusiasm as cheerleaders for this President, the media are deliberately hiding and distorting the truth to further their own ideologically driven, leftist agenda.

These so-called 'news' outlets are ignoring the voice of the American people.

It is a tragedy that we even have to demand this: Tell the truth, the whole truth. Report the news.

Editor's Note: For the full press release, click here. Click here for the MRCAction.org petition to stand up to the media's distortion of the national debt issue.

MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski asked the co-host of "Morning Joe" Monday if Republicans holding the line on the debt ceiling are "so stuck to their little contract and the Tea Party that they cannot even think outside the box for the good of the country."

Somewhat less surprising, Joe Scarborough gave a pretty good answer (video follows with transcript and commentary):

This week’s Notable Quotables, MRC’s bi-weekly newsletter documenting the most outrageous quotes in the liberal media, showcases the media’s slanted coverage of the debt ceiling debate. Over the past two weeks, network reporters touted Barack Obama as “the debt slayer,” impugned the “cut, cap and balance” option as “just wasting time,” smeared Republicans as “hostage-takers” and said they were guilty of “terrorism,” and insisted that “meaningful reform” was impossible without hiking taxes.

At one point, the tax debate lurched to outright Marxism, with one “news” anchor wondering: “Why do you think the top 2 percent of America has a chokehold on the other 98 percent?”

Here are highlights from this week’s edition; full text and several videos are posted at www.MRC.org:

 On Friday’s Last Word on MSNBC, as host Lawrence O’Donnell brought up his belief - explored more thoroughly earlier in the show - that President Obama had succeeded in a strategy to appear to be the "reasonable man willing to make compromises" without actually having to make those concessions, MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolffe at first seemed to buy into O’Donnell’s "cynical" theory of Obama’s true intentions, but the MSNBC analyst also suggested that Obama was indeed being "reasonable" and "the grownup in the room." He went on to suggest that Republicans were not being "responisible’ or a "serious party about deficits," and that they were behaving as "irresponsible children."

 On Friday’s Last Word, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell advanced his belief that President Obama never had any desire for Republicans to accept the plan that he himself proposed because his strategy was to "manipulate" the process and appear willing to compromise, while at the same time insisting on tax increases to ensure that Republicans would never agree to his offer. O’Donnell further theorized that, because Republicans were about to agree to a tax increase similar to Obama’s proposal, the President changed his demands to deliberately derail negotiations.

During a segment with NBC correspondent Kristen Welker, O’Donnell observed:

Adopting the spin of President Barack Obama -- who on Friday insisted “one of the questions that the Republican Party is going to have to ask itself is: Can they say yes to anything?” – on Sunday’s Face the Nation CBS’s Bob Schieffer demanded of Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl: “Is there a problem for Republicans that might emerge as just the party of no? The party that can't say yes to anything?”

One more data point demonstrating the leftward tilt of the purportedly non-partisan Politico:

In his Playbook of today, Politico's chief White House correspondent Mike Allen depicts a "grand bargain" on the credit ceiling, which inevitably would include huge tax increases, as an "historic achievement" for which President Obama and House speaker John Boehner would "rightly get credit."

In contrast, Allen suggests that Republican leaders Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy are refusing a grand bargain out of petty political ambition.

Read more after the jump.

Reason TV's Nick Gillespie was threatened on HBO's "Real Time" by Mayor John Fetterman (D-Braddock, Pa.).

After Gillespie made a joke about Fetterman being mayor of the poorest town in Pennsylvania, the Mayor responded, "You want to take it outside?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

NBC and CBS polls released earlier this week determined that a significant portion of the American public remain opposed to any increase in the nation’s debt limit, but neither network has included that fact in their on-air reporting. And a poll released by ABC on Tuesday didn’t even bother to ask for public opinion on whether the raising the debt ceiling was a good idea or not.

The networks’ selective coverage of their own polls corresponds with CNN on-air hosts scandalously ignoring the fact that their polling found 66% of Americans supported the House GOP's 'Cut, Cap and Balance' plan and that 74% would support a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

"Inside Washington" host Gordon Peterson on Friday accused Tea Party members of being out of touch with reality due to their support for the Republican "Cut, Cap, and Balance" bill as well as a balanced budget amendment.

This lead Charles Krauthammer to respond, "I like the way you pose an objective question implying the insanity of a Republican proposal which passed the House...You manage to introduce a hell of a lot of bias" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored the existence of the Cut, Cap and Balance (CCB) bill until last week, a Nexis search revealed, despite multiple polls demonstrating overwhelming public support.

In addition to the blackout, none of the broadcast networks ever mentioned the positive polls in their coverage of the bill, even though 65 percent of the public backed a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget in a Mason-Dixon poll from May and 72 percent approved of such a measure in a Fox News poll from June.

For the second day in a row, CNN is doing its level best to avoid noting some interesting data from its latest poll that shows some 66 percent of voters favor the Republican-sponsored "Cut, Cap and Balance" plan.

The only mention of that fact on air is when guests bring it up and today the CNN.com website is casting the poll's results as evidence that while Obama is losing enthusiasm among liberal voters, that the public at large is skeptical of congressional Republicans.

From a story filed at 1:01 p.m. Eastern by CNN's political unit:

As soon as the Senate rejected the "Cut, Cap and Balance" plan, CNN.com shot out a biased Breaking News alert to e-mail subscribers that labeled the measure as one "favored by hard-line conservative [sic]" (screen capture attached below page break):

CNN's Fareed Zakaria Thursday called the debt ceiling battle a "sideshow" caused by the Tea Party.

Appearing on "In the Arena" as a supposed "astute observer of the economy," Zakaria proceeded to bungle economic and historic facts like a high school dropout (video follows with transcript and commentary):

While the media have been busy persistently denouncing the Cut, Cap and Balance plan as Republicans "wasting time" with a "show" plan that has "no chance of passage," the public aren't accepting the media spin.

A CNN poll shows nearly 2/3rds of Americans favor that approach to tackling the national debt and balancing the budget, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted on the July 21 "Hannity" program (video follows page break):

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin was at his worst Wednesday morning in a press conference.

Sure, there was the usual immature Democratic Party name-calling -- calling Republicans "dead-beat debtors" and characterizing Republicans who oppose raising the debt ceiling as a "cult fringe," even though polls seem to be showing that 60% of Americans are in that "fringe." But beyond that, Harkin uttered a demonstrably untrue statement, something so obviously untrue that if a Republican or conservative had said something similar against Democrats, the establishment press would have dwelt on it for days.

In apportioning responsibilities for annual federal budget deficits and the staggering increases in the national debt, Harkin made the following claim:

In the past week, you couldn't swing a debt cat without hitting a press report about how irresponsible the "Cut, Cap and Balance" bill passed by House Republicans is.

A new CNN/ORC poll released a few hours ago finds the media very much on the wrong side of public opinion concerning this issue:

Halfway through the July 21 edition of "NewsNation," MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall brought on Time magazine assistant managing editor Rana Foroohar to diss a Boy Scout cited by John Thune (R-S.D.) on the Senate floor.

After Hall aired a clip of Thune reading the Boy Scout's letter admonishing senators to spend only what the government can afford, she and Foroohar set about to dismiss his concern as quaint but ill-informed:

Appearing on Thursday's NBC Today, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd lamented no deal being reached on the debt ceiling and solely blamed House Republicans: "Nobody has a plan that can get through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives....that's the issue. House Republicans don't like any of these ideas that are coming out of the Senate."

Co-host Matt Lauer wondered if a plan being worked out between Senators Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid was "now dead" because of House GOP opposition. Todd floated a theory on how conservative members of Congress might fall in line: "...some sort of TARP-like moment...where the House voted down the big bailout of the banks, the markets reacted and then Congress voted again....that might be the only way something gets through the House....it actually probably would lead to the bigger deal after the near catastrophic financial reaction."

MSNBC once again repeated the liberal line that returning to the higher pre-Bush tax rates is somehow not raising taxes. "If you just go back to normal tax standards, it's not a break of the [no tax hike] pledge that many of them signed" said Mika Brzezinski on Thursday's Morning Joe.

MSNBC is looking more and more like Pinocchio every day; its nose grows longer with every lie and the DNC obviously is pulling its strings. Ronald Reagan has absolutely nothing in common with Obama, especially not on taxes and the debt ceiling. It’s outrageous for this disgraced network to exploit the late President’s good name and his conservative economic brilliance.

MSNBC is nothing more than DNC-TV. But are we really surprised? This is the same network whose dozens of viewers will soon start to salivate over the loony liberal Rev. Al Sharpton in the anchor chair.

Editor's Note: For the full Bozell press release, click here.

On Thursday's NBC Today, congressional correspondent Kelly O'Donnell reported on a war of words between Republican Congressman Allen West and Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz: "...West, a freshman Republican who hit 'send' on a nasty e-mail to Wasserman-Schultz....Democratic congresswomen accuse West of sexual harassment."

While O'Donnell quoted from West's email – in which he referred to Wasserman-Schultz as "vile, unprofessional, and despicable" and "not a lady" – O'Donnell failed to bring up past offensive comments Wasserman-Shultz directed toward West. In the fall of 2010, Wasserman-Schultz personally led a protest outside West's campaign office, calling him an "extremist" who "wears his extreme disrespect as a badge of honor" and "thinks it's okay to objectify and denigrate women."

House Republicans have a budget-cutting proposal that stands no chance of getting by President Obama while some Senators have a big tax-hiking plan which stands no chance of passage in the House, but CBS, in illustrating the larger media take, framed the conservative plan as a distracting waste of time while cheerleading the Senate’s “Gang of 33” plan in the name of “bi-partisanship.”

Chief New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt celebrated the return of Obama the “fiscal conservative” in his Wednesday column, “Negotiating Election Headwinds.”

Maybe it’s not the economy, stupid.

White House officials have begun to entertain the idea that they can run for re-election without being able to point to a strengthening economy. For one thing, they may not have a choice. For another, they believe that recent Republican budget proposals have given President Obama an opportunity to draw contrasts in which he is more in line with most voters.

As NewsBusters previously reported, Chris Matthews on Wednesday lied about Ronald Reagan's position on taxes in a "Hardball" segment insinuating the late President would oppose the current Republican stance on the debt ceiling.

When Salon editor Joan Walsh said Obama "is actually the Reagan figure here," former RNC chairman Michael Steele bust out laughing (video follows with transcript and commentary):

At least five MSNBC anchors since Tuesday have promoted a cherry-picked House Democratic Caucus video that distorts President Ronald Reagan's position on the debt ceiling, inaccurately asserting that President Barack Obama is more in line with Reagan than the Republicans.

If any of the anchors had played the entirety of Reagan's 1987 radio address, instead of giving free air time to the Democratic Party's deceptively edited spot, they would have heard Reagan articulate a position on the debt ceiling almost identical to House Republicans' and nearly opposite Obama's: "You don't need more taxes to balance the budget. Congress needs the discipline to stop spending more, and that can be done with the passage of a constitutional amendment to balance the budget." Lo and behold, the House passed a plan last night, "cut, cap, and balance," that contained both spending cuts and a balanced budget amendment.

A compilation video of MSNBC anchors misrepresenting Reagan is below the page break:

On Wednesday's NBC Today, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd promoted the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, declaring that when it came to raising the nation's debt ceiling, "...it was a landslide as far as what the public preferred. 58% preferring the President's vision on that front versus 36% [for the Republican proposal]."

Todd went on to conclude that "most of this poll shows that the middle of the country and a majority of Americans basically don't like the Republican position on this debt plan." He blamed conservatives for GOP stubbornness: "But who does like the Republican position right now on all of these fronts and, you know, sticking to their guns on taxes? Tea Party supporters. And that is why you're seeing Republicans, they're caught between their Tea Party supporters who want them to do one thing and frankly independents who want them to do another."

"Your World w/ Cavuto" guest host Stuart Varney interviewed NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham today about the media bias against the conservative Cut, Cap and Balance plan and how the media have boosted the “Gang of Six” plan instead.

Guest host Stuart Varney of Fox Business Network will conduct the interview.

Video of the nearly 3-minute-long interview follows the page break: