Anderson Cooper

According to CNN, Mitt Romney "doubled down" on a "false claim" on Tuesday, but it was CNN that doubled down on its own faulty fact-check of the Obama administration and welfare reform.

"We begin tonight 'Keeping Them Honest' on a campaign distortion that will not seem to die. The false claim that President Obama is trying to take the work requirement out of welfare," began Anderson Cooper on his Tuesday show. As NewsBusters reported, CNN canned the Romney claim back in August despite conservative experts arguing that Obama indeed gutted the work requirements at the heart of welfare reform.

Who knew that "a source familiar with Ambassador Steven's thinking" may have been Ambassador Stevens himself?

Citing an unnamed but mysteriously close source on Wednesday, CNN's Anderson Cooper reported that Christopher Stevens was concerned about security threats, Islamic extremism, and an al-Qaeda hit list in the months leading up to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

Two days later, Cooper admitted that some of the information from that report secretly came from Stevens own handwriting, in a seven-page personal journal that the network had found at the scene of the attack.

In Cooper's own words:

Just how bad is the media's track record this election season? On Monday, CNN's Anderson Cooper led his show with a manufactured Mitt Romney controversy instead of news that the U.S. may have had advance warning on deadly terrorist attacks.

Here's how Cooper started his show: "On Libya, late word on what American diplomats may have been told about the threat from Muslim extremists, terrorists, just three days before the attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi. We're going to have that, but first, what could be a campaign blockbuster, what Mitt Romney said to big money donors about President Obama voters when he didn't think cameras were rolling." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

GOP strategist Ari Fleischer set the record straight about the media infatuation with Mitt Romney's statements on the embassy attacks. On Wednesday's Anderson Cooper 360, he called out the media's "double standard" and defended Romney's criticism of the Obama administration.

"Debates about foreign policy are an absolute vital part of our democracy and I don't know why the media is rushing to criticize Mitt Romney for criticizing a foreign policy when they did not do that to Barack Obama or John Kerry when they exercised their right to criticize Republican foreign policy," stated Fleischer. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

CNN's Anderson Cooper smacked the Romney campaign Monday night for alleged dishonesty. He claimed they were talking too much about social issues while saying the economy is their real focus.

"The question tonight, and not just from the opposition, have the Romney forces been moving away from dollars and cents and jobs, and shifting toward more red meat, hot-button culture war mode?" Cooper asked. "I mean what's up with the culture stuff suddenly?" he posed later. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Earlier today I wrote about how Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was caught lying about a reporter misquoting her. That reporter, Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner, did, in fact accurately quote her and produced the audio of Wasserman Schultz to prove it.

Fast forward to this evening, as Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reports that Wasserman Schultz refuses to apologize to Klein, despite having been caught in a falsehood:

A major controversy erupted on the floor of the Democratic National Convention Wednesday surrounding God and Jerusalem inside the Party's platform.

Hours later, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz gave CNN an absolutely ridiculous explanation for what transpired resulting in her being mocked for her "alternate reality" by numerous commentators including Anderson Cooper and John King (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

CNN fawned over Michelle Obama's DNC speech on Tuesday, lauding it as "not hitting a home run but probably a grand slam," as Wolf Blitzer first put it.

"She did an amazing job for this President of the United States," gushed Blitzer. Anderson Cooper tweeted that "I've never heard such a well delivered speech by a First Lady ever." Piers Morgan argued that "Michelle Obama, I thought, knocked it out of the park as you Americans would say." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

There are some lies told by the DNC that even CNN can’t let slide.  Such is the case with a recent DNC fundraising email written by Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz which misquotes the L.A. Times in order to attack Mitt Romney.

The email at question centers around the RNC platform on abortion which has remained the same for the past twelve years in its steadfast support for the protection life.  [See video below.  MP3 audio here.]

For the second straight day, CNN blew the whistle on a nasty and misleading Obama super PAC ad that ABC, CBS, and NBC entirely ignored as of Wednesday night. CNN hammered the ad, which links Mitt Romney to a woman's death from cancer, each hour from 6 p.m. through 10 p.m. and twice grilled the man responsible for the ad, Bill Burton of Priorities USA.

"I think it is deliberately mendacious," stated CNN's Piers Morgan on Wednesday. "It is a deliberate attempt to lie and smear about Mitt Romney. And I find it contemptible. I mean I'm really appalled." The three networks showed no such disdain for the ad which will air in battleground states, because they failed to even mention it on Tuesday and Wednesday. [Video coming soon.]

The Big Three networks largely yawned at Majority Leader Harry Reid's wild charge on the Senate floor on Thursday that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney hasn't paid taxes in 10 years. ABC, CBS, and NBC failed to mention it on the evening newscasts on Thursday. On Friday morning, CBS This Morning was the lone broadcast morning show to report on Reid's "explosive accusation," as correspondent Nancy Cordes put it.

By contrast, all three networks covered Rep. Joe Wilson's 2009 "you lie" shout at President Obama at the State of the Union within 24 hours and were unanimously scandalized at the "stunning moment" in the House chamber, as then-anchor Charles Gibson labeled it on ABC's World News. Both ABC and CBS trumpeted Wilson's outburst as the "shout heard 'round the world."

A rather shocking thing happened on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Thursday.

Not only did the host and his guests David Gergen and John King claim presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mittt Romney is right that he left Bain Capital prior to any companies it held outsourcing employees, Gergen accused President Obama of "playing a very rough form of politics" counter to what he promised when he ran in 2008 (video follows with transcript and commentary):

David Letterman said Monday that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is promising conservatives that if he's elected, "he will put Anderson Cooper back in the closet."

Such was said during the obligatory Romney-bashing portion of Letterman's Late Show monologue on CBS (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary, file photo):

CNN is anything but the Centrist News Network on gay issues, and that’s certainly going to be true now that its twice-in-prime-time star Anderson Cooper is out of the closet. CNN’s Reliable Sources reviewed this issue on Sunday with three guests: two delighted gay journalists and TV critic Eric Deggans, who wrote on The Huffington Post that conservatives should be banned:  “When does a news organization exclude the haters?”

Viewers were told Cooper came out because he was afraid to be on “the wrong side of history” when he would look “completely out of the mainstream.” So who would care whether Cooper can be seen as fair to two sides. “What two sides?” seems to be the company line:

NBC's coming out party for Anderson Cooper featured soundbites from gay journalists, his being hailed as a "powerful voice" and an "advocate" for the gay and lesbian community, and panel members approving of his admitting to being gay, all on Tuesday's Today show.

"[H]e will have a powerful voice being an advocate for the gay and lesbian community," offered Natalie Morales. Ironically, her "Today's Professionals" panel then brushed off sentiment that Cooper's "coming out" would hurt his career or his journalistic integrity.

Longtime CNN anchor Anderson Cooper has finally said it: “Fact is, I’m gay.” In an e-mail to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast/Newsweek, Cooper declared, “I've always believed that who a reporter votes for, what religion they are, who they love, should not be something they have to discuss publicly. As long as a journalist shows fairness and honesty in his or her work, their private life shouldn't matter.”

Well, in that case, Cooper fails, despite his claim “I’m not an activist.” His work on gay issues hasn’t had fairness -- matching an aggressive pro-homosexual bias at CNN – perhaps in part to keep angry gay activists at bay.

The media crusade to redefine marriage has taken a radical turn. Media outlets have put a spotlight on the narcissistic practice of “self-marriage,” in which a person marries himself or herself in a formal ceremony.

CNN’s sister network HLN provocatively titled a June 1 piece “Is self-marriage for you?” The HLN piece cited several examples of people who have “taken vows of self-marriage as a way of contractually binding themselves to matrimonial values,” quoting psychologist Brian Powell: “It doesn’t surprise me that people who live alone want some type of acknowledgment from others that this is a reasonable choice.”