Barack Obama

Thursday's CBS This Morning rushed to President Obama's defense over the spat between the Democrat and opponent Mitt Romney over a statement issued by the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Egypt condemning an obscure Internet video about Muhammad. Minutes after Steve Kroft tossed softballs at the President and let him speak uninterrupted for two and half minutes, the show confronted Republican Senator Rob Portman for defending Romney's attack.

Anchor Norah O'Donnell hounded Portman, interjecting five confrontational questions in just over two and half minutes, about the same amount of time that Obama spoke without any disruption. O'Donnell cried, "You're mistaken, Senator," and read statements from Peggy Noonan, Nick Burns, and Mike Rogers to emphasize that "Republicans...are saying that Governor Romney stepped in it." [audio available here; video below the jump]

Barack Obama has morphed into Jimmy Carter before our eyes, but the liberal media have refused to report on the Obama Administration’s failed foreign policy of apologies and appeasement. Terrified to hurt Obama’s chances of re-election, they are shamelessly seizing on this horrific attack on Americans abroad to push their go-to narrative that Mitt Romney is tone deaf.

Romney rightly criticized the Obama Administration for its spineless apology to thugs whose idea of ‘diplomacy’ is intimidation, violence and murder. As the façade of the ‘Arab Spring’ continues to fracture and crumble away, the media have shifted to a strategy of distraction and omission.

While virtually everyone in the so-called mainstream press is hammering GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan regarding what he calls an “honest mistake” about his time while running in a marathon 22 years ago, only one major network has reported an embarrassing flub President Obama made over the weekend -- twice.

If you want to learn any aspect of the controversy involving the Wisconsin Republican, you don't have to look far. From Ryan's original claim that he finished a four-hour marathon in less than three hours to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's accusation that the Republican used “fictitious math” in the matter, you can find it in virtually every news organization across the country.

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.]

Whoever wrote the Associated Press's brief dispatch yesterday on the results of the government's auction of 10-year Treasury notes seemed to be stunned and on the defensive about its result.

The item, entitled "Weak Demand at Auction of 10-Year U.S. Treasury Debt," began as follows: "U.S. Treasury prices dived Wednesday after an auction of 10-year notes drew very weak demand, signaling a lack of appetite for ultra-safe investments." Gee, I wonder why there's a "lack of appetite"?

Remember the uproar from the mainstream media when presidential candidate Barack Obama used the U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan to attack President George W. Bush and John McCain? Oh, you don't remember? Perhaps that is because, unlike the MSM throwing a conniption fit over Mitt Romney criticizing an apologetic statement from the U.S. embassy in Cairo which Obama himself later disavowed, the press was absolutely silent in its reactions to Obama's 2008 criticism. John Kaczynski of BuzzFeed found this video of candidate Obama and made this observation:

The Obama campaign hit Mitt Romney for using the “tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya” to “launch a political attack.” On a July 2008 appearance on CNN, then-Senator used the death of U.S. troops in Afghanistan as talking point to ding John McCain and President Bush for their support of the Iraq War.

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, CBS and NPR reporters were caught on a hot mic plotting to ensure Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would be asked if he regrets scolding Barack Obama for his response to the recent anti-American hostilities in Egypt and Libya.

On Thursday's Fox & Friends, conservative author Michelle Malkin said the people involved were Obama's "tools' and "stenographers," and that this represented "an underline and exclamation point on the obituary of main stream objective news" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Meet the Press host David Gregory said Wednesday, "A lot of corporate America is waiting for Romney to get elected rather than another term of Obama."

Speaking with Jimmy Fallon on NBC's Late Night, Gregory added, "That may unleash a little bit more progress" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Conservative author Ann Coulter on Wednesday called the media out for its attacks on Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's criticism of Barack Obama's response to Tuesday's anti-American hostilities in Egypt and Libya.

Appearing on Fox News's Hannity, Coulter said, "You know that Romney’s statement was devastating to President Obama because the media is screaming bloody murder" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In her writeup covering the Census Bureau's latest release of income and poverty data, Hope Yen at the Associated Press quoted University of Michigan economist Sheldon Danziger, who specializes in "Applied Policy, Labor Markets, Poverty and Social Welfare," describing the news that the official poverty rate was statistically unchanged, moving from 15.1% of all Americans to 15.0%, as "good news and surprising."

Mr. Danziger should consider moonlighting as a stand-up comedian. With laugh lines like that and another one which will be seen in the excerpt after the jump, he's a can't-miss prospect, even if his delivery is as deadpan as Steven Wright's. But, as will also be seen shortly, he has stiff competition from White House bloggers. In both cases, audiences will be laughing at them, not with them (bolds are mine):

Has an empty chair been getting 56.2 percent of the president's intelligence briefings?

In light of the news that fatal attacks on U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, may well have been pre-planned by al Qaeda operatives, it would behoove the media to scrutinize just how infrequently President Obama sits in on his daily intelligence briefings. As Marc Thiessen noted in an op-ed in Sunday, September 10 edition of the Washington Post, President Obama sat in on his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) a mere 536 times out of his first 1,225 days in office. That's a mere 43.8 percent of the time. "By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting," the American Enterprise Institute fellow noted.

Bob Woodward singled out congressional Republicans as the main party to blame for the 2011 debt ceiling showdown during an interview on Wednesday's CBS This Morning and minimized President Obama and Senate Democrats's responsibility regarding the looming fiscal cliff: "The Republicans are like a brick wall, and it's very difficult to deal with them."

Woodward also bemoaned that the press apparently wasn't doing enough to press the budget issue with Obama and Romney: "What's astonishing to me, is it clearly is the key domestic issue. We have a presidential campaign going on....and no one is pressing the candidates – if we had the candidates here, we would say, what is your plan? What are you going to do? This is not something to do by the seat of your pants....we need to have answers."

The media's full-throttle attack on Mitt Romney's condemnation of Barack Obama's weak handling of the Libyan crisis isn't surprising given they invested so much time praising the President's Libyan policy in 2011. During the Arab Spring of 2011, Time's Mark Halperin called the administration’s policy toward Libya "deft" and CBS’s Norah O'Donnell declared Obama's "victories" in the Middle East would "burnish his credentials as a world leader." NBC's David Gregory hailed that since Obama "has been tested" in the foreign policy "arena" he would use the experience as "a club against Republicans."

The following quotes are the worst examples of journalists' adulation of Obama's Libyan policy back in 2011:

Both President Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney spoke earlier today about the horrendous murders yesterday of U.S. foreign service officials in Benghazi, Libya. Of the two, only Romney took questions from the media. Yet rather than scrutinize the president's failure to be open to inquiry from members of the press, MSBNC's Thomas Roberts and NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd devoted the top segment of the 11 a.m. MSNBC Live program to focusing on Romney "doubling down" in today's press conference of his criticism of the Obama administration.

For his part, Roberts suggested Romney's press conference today was in response to President Obama's post-convention bounce in the polls:

After reading Ben White's "Morning Money" report at the Politico this morning, I went back to Real Clear Politics to make sure that I was up to date on the current polling. Currently, RCP has Barack Obama up by 3.2 points over Mitt Romney in an average of the five most recent polls -- and at least two of those polls are cooked.

But if we're to believe White, "bankers and their lobbyists" are already talking "about what went wrong with the Romney campaign, as if there is no chance the GOP nominee will turn it around and eke out a close win over President Obama."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came down strong on the Obama adminstration Tuesday for its failure to implement a foreign policy that would prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe Wednesday, Time magazine's Joe Klein called Netanyahu's actions "absolutely outrageous and disgusting" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania turned MSNBC contributor Ed Rendell said something on Tuesday's Hardball that is going to make a lot of jaws drop.

"Even people who lost their jobs are better off" under Obama (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Taking into account how the majority of Hollywood supports the Democratic Party no matter what, it should come as no surprise that Entertainment Tonight continues to produce segments of political fluff in an election year.

The president himself showed up for a softball interview with his wife on Aug. 15, where he insisted that his re-election campaign hasn’t “tried to divide the country.” While avoiding  questions from the White House press corps earlier this summer, the president did find the time to sit down with People Magazine, a couple newspapers in Iowa, and called in to a few radio stations however (including a sports talk show).

But far from being excoriated for his obvious pandering scheme, the lapdog media seemed to love it, seeing it as a pitch for the youth vote. Senior Newsweek Editor Tony Dokoupil recently said on Entertainment Tonight that, "young voters want to feel like they're behind the hip party. That's what matters most."

If journalists were interested in fairness, there's nothing more basic than giving a similar amount of airtime to each major party convention. An MRC analysis finds that's exactly what CBS and ABC did, giving virtually identical airtime to the Republican and Democratic conventions on their morning and evening news shows.

But NBC skewed in favor of the Democrats, donating 25 percent more coverage to the Democratic National Convention (121 minutes) than they did the previous week's Republican convention (97 minutes). Most of the disparity is accounted for by the Today show, which gave 30 percent more coverage to the Democrats (87 minutes vs. 67 minutes), although the NBC Nightly News also favored the Democrats, albeit by a slighter margin (34 to 30 minutes).

New York Times White House reporter Jackie Calmes filed from Charlotte on Saturday after the Democratic National Convention had passed, "Democrats Face a Juggling Act Over Jobs."

Surprisingly, Obama loyalist Calmes discerned political problems in the president's anti-business rhetoric. More predictably, she defended Obama's anti-entrepreneurship remark "you didn't build that," accusing the GOP of taking it out of context, even though the context does not save Obama from the charge of showing hostility to enterprise and individual initiative.

The title of John Cassidy's column in the New Yorker is "Rational Irrationality" but after reading the reason he gives for Barack Obama ditching his outdoor stadium speech at the Democrat convention in Charlotte, NC, I think it would be safe to ditch the "Rational" part of the column title.

One of the big reasons why Cassidy pretty much comes off as completely irrational was his explanation as to why Team Obama really moved the convention speech from the 75,000 seat outdoor stadium to the much smaller indoor venue. At first Cassity does seem a bit rational in his Six Unanswered Questions From Charlotte, which is also notable for his complete lack of curiousity about the "two-thirds" platform voice vote, since he admits what most of us already knew---that the excuse of poor weather was bogus. However, he provides an "answer" so off the wall as to be a real howler:

Poll cooking season is officially in full swing. The headline today at the Washington Post reads: "Among likely voters, Obama-Romney close." Dan Balz and Jon Cohen report that in a September 7-9 poll, "the (presidential) race remains close among likely voters, with Obama at 49 percent and Romney at 48 percent, virtually unchanged from a poll taken just before the conventions." Ah, but Obama supposedly has a six-point lead among registered voters.

Based on pair's report, the easy choices on how to interpret the results are these: Either President Obama really didn't come out of the Democratic Convention with a polling bounce, or, if he did have a bounce, it disappeared after last Friday's dreadful employment news. There's a third and far more likely choice, which only becomes apparent once one sees the mix of respondents in the poll's final listed question.

Promoting his fawning profile of President Obama for the October issue of Vanity Fair on Tuesday's NBC Today, contributing editor Michael Lewis described a game of basketball he played with the commander in chief: "...it was actually very revealing...he doesn't let anybody treat him like the president. If you're watching the game, you'd have no idea who – which one is the president...he likes a really challenging environment...it's a relationship among equals." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

The gushing from Lewis was prompted by co-host Matt Lauer wondering: "What did you see about the way he [Obama] handles himself on the court that sheds some light on his personality and how he might handle himself in the job?" Lewis observed: "...he's effective on the court, he's a good basketball player – but he plays a game that seems very risk averse....But then all of a sudden, when there's a risk to take, it's boom. He's got the personality of a sniper."

ABC's Diane Sawyer, in a Nightline interview with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward Monday, aggressively defended President Obama from any blame for last summer's debt ceiling crisis.

"Barack Obama was hostage to events outside his control" due to a "Republican Congress newly dominated by the Tea Party" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Conservative talk radio host Steve Malzberg and NewsBusters' associate editor Noel Sheppard had a lengthy Spreecast conversation Monday about the media's support of pedophilia, its love affair with Bill Clinton, and its hatred of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney (video follows with highlights and commentary).

CNN deemed it newsworthy enough to interview an Obama-supporting restaurant owner who gave the President a bear hug on the campaign trail. The Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer tossed softballs to guest Scott Van Duzer, a registered Republican, on Monday afternoon.

"It's the campaign stop everyone's talking about. The President of the United States got a lift, literally, from a super-enthusiastic supporter," Blitzer introduced the segment. "Congratulations. I love the bear hug," he told Van Duzer. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

The media have "nostalgia" for Bill Clinton and a "tedious marriage" with President Obama, according to panel members on Sunday's Reliable Sources. Is media bias any more evident when reporters admit the media had a past love affair with the current Democratic president and pine for the days of his Democratic forerunner?

CNN's Howard Kurtz mused that "the extraordinary media reaction to Bill Clinton's speech" from the past week's DNC "says to me journalists missed the guy." The Hill's managing editor Bob Cusack admitted "I think there was definitely some nostalgia here," and added "the media reaction was a little bit much, because he [Clinton] did meander." [Video below the break. Audio here.]