Barack Obama

It seems a metaphysical certitude the big takeaway for the Obama-loving media from Saturday's announcement by Mitt Romney concerning his running mate is that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee introduced Paul Ryan as "the next President of the United States."

As they bash Romney for this error, will they mention candidate Obama did the same thing when he introduced Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008? (Videos follow with transcribed highlights and commentary.)

UPDATE: The AP has corrected its story. The related NewsBusters post is here.

In his coverage of the latest Monthly Treasury Statement showing July and year-to-date federal budget deficits of $69.6 billion and $974 billion, respectively, Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, cut President Obama a significant break when he wrote that "GOP candidate Mitt Romney has criticized Obama for failing to cut the deficit in half, as he pledged to do during his 2008 campaign."

The problem is that Obama's "pledge" wasn't a campaign promise at all. It was a promise made on February 23, 2009, over 3-1/2 months after he won the presidential election and more than a month after his inauguration. The, uh, Associated Press had the scoop that he would make this promise two days earlier:

Friday afternoon, the Associated Press's Jonathan Fahey couldn't get four paragraphs into his report on higher gas prices nationwide without starting to fret about their impact on President Obama's re-election effort.

He also wanted readers to understand without any doubt that President Obama and the by inference his government bear absolutely no responsibility for the recent run-up to a national average of $3.67 a gallon nationwide with statewide averages in California and Illinois topping $4, and conveniently used one interviewed driver as a prop to begin making his quite transparent political point. Later in the report, he inadvertently cited a reason why the government is contributing to higher prices at the pump. I'll cite yet another among many additional government-induced factors later in the post.

Appearing as a panel member on Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, Politico's Roger Simon claimed to see racism in a campaign ad against President Obama which criticizes the President for granting waivers to some states to loosen work requirements for welfare recipients.

After host Gordon Peterson recalled that fellow panel member Charles Krauthammer had called the ad "accurate," Simon launched into race-baiting:

Former ABC News reporter Carole Simpson --who in 2008 insisted Hillary Clinton was the best candidate for president because of her gender -- is hoping that the women of America will rise up and demand that the presidential debate commission make a female journalist the moderator of at least one of the forthcoming presidential debates.

In a telephone interview with Politico, Simpson made perfectly clear her reasons, all but saying that the media-imagined "war on women" has something to do with it, making claims about Romney's positions on the issues that are woefully inaccurate:

For more than a decade, liberals have insisted on the presumption of innocence for all manner of poor, misunderstood jihadists intent on slaughtering as many infidels as possible.

But when it comes to alleged racism from conservatives, the burden of proof quickly turns lenient. All it takes is a left winger claiming it so, a perverse dynamic long predating the war on terror. (video after page break)

Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters might as well be located in a sewer. The content of the Priorities USA Obama Super PAC ad blaming a woman's death from cancer on Mitt Romney is almost impossible to believe. The only thing more impossible to believe is that the so-called “news” networks can go two full days pretending that it doesn’t exist.

And even then, only ABC has mentioned it during their evening news broadcast. There’s still nothing from NBC Nightly News or CBS Evening News on this. The networks shouldn’t have to be dragged kicking and screaming into reporting the news.

On Thursday, several media reports used Obama campaign talking points to downplay a new Romney campaign ad that accused the President of a "war on religion" following the ObamaCare contraception mandate that would force religious institutions to cover birth control in employee health insurance plans.

Articles for The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal all touted the Obama White House reaching a supposed "compromise" with religious groups on the issue. The Post's Rachel Weiner explained: "In a compromise designed to quell criticism, church-affiliated employers (such as universities) do not have to directly provide contraception coverage....But that compromise did not satisfy Catholic critics."

It's laughable when CNN's Erin Burnett claims to police "sandbox" politics when she covers for Obama like she did Thursday. Like her colleague Brooke Baldwin did earlier, she stood by the Obama spin that he "compromised" with Catholics on the birth control mandate and attacked a Mitt Romney ad accusing him of waging "war on religion."

"[T]o say this President is waging a war on religion, I mean, the man goes to church. That's ridiculous," Burnett complained. "That ad does not add up," she stated, adding it "seems to be at best simplistic and at worst just wrong." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Three days after CNN slammed the dishonest ad from the pro-Obama Priorities USA super PAC that blames Mitt Romney for a woman's cancer death, Friday's CBS This Morning finally got around to covering it. But correspondent Nancy Cordes downplayed the liberal group's spot by also targeting a Romney ad that was "panned" by unnamed fact checkers, and claimed that "other Romney ads have taken Mr. Obama's words out of context."

Cordes also dredged up the famous and entirely accurate anti-Michael Dukakis Willie Horton ad from 1988 as an example of negative ads being "a hallmark of presidential campaigns for decades."

ABC on Thursday night finally broke the network's silence about a dishonest Obama super PAC ad that, essentially, accuses Mitt Romney of killing a woman. On Friday, Good Morning America's hosts and reporters vaguely, but haughtily, chided "both sides" for negative ads, as if they had been covering Obama's commercial all week. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]
           
At the very end of a segment on Romney's possible VP choices, co-anchor George Stephanopoulos lectured, "It really seems to be, watching this time around, that both sides are willing to take all kinds of heat for getting accused of running misleading ads, but they're going to keep pumping them out there." What was Obama's ad? He didn't say. Karl, who on Thursday night became the first ABC reporter to note the misleading Obama spot, huffed about both campaigns: "You know, it's almost like they're not trying to be factual."

On Thursday Jackie Calmes (pictured) and Trip Gabriel, two of the New York Times's more slanted campaign reporters, teamed up to cover Obama's campaign trip to Colorado and Romney's trip to Iowa: "Obama Assails Romney on Women’s Health Care." Covering Obama in Denver, the Times credited the president's popularity among women, while the Romney coverage from Iowa emphasized a controversy in that state, underlined by an accompanying photo caption: "Mitt Romney, visiting Iowa, kept quiet about his opposition to tax credits for wind power."

Still working hard to avoid mentioning an outrageous Obama super-PAC ad that basically accused Mitt Romney of being responsible for the cancer death of a woman, Thursday's NBC Nightly News had the gall to instead promote pro-Obama fluff, as anchor Brian Williams gushed: "Knowing a hot product when he sees one, the President today visited the U.S. Olympic training facility in Colorado."

Williams made sure to inform viewers that Obama "Promptly took his shoes off, got on the mat, and said his grandmother would be proud there were no holes in his socks."

Comedian and radio talk show host Dennis Miller tore into a caller Thursday for accusing him of hating Democrats.

When Miller gave "Dave from Ohio" the chance to back away from his accusation, things got even more heated (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Appearing as a guest on Thursday's The Ed Show, MSNBC political analyst Jonathan Alter - formerly of Newsweek - advised the Obama campaign to argue that, if Mitt Romney is elected President, "a lot of people will die" when Obamacare is repealed.

On Thursday's World News, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl gave attention to  the now-infamous Obama superpac ad that blames Mitt Romney for a man's wife dying of cancer, labeling it "the single most outrageous ad of the campaign."

Karl's piece was devoted to criticizing campaign ads from both sides, and, after a clip of President obama complaining about ads from Romney's side, the ABC correspondent continued:

Fifty years from now, everyone will agree that Karl Rove committed treason by revealing the identity of CIA "spy" Valerie Plame, tea partiers shouted the N-word at a black congressman and Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper. Liberals tell whopping lies, and most conservatives can't be bothered to learn history.

In the last few days, we've heard both George Will and Charles Krauthammer, otherwise intelligent people, repeating bogus Democratic talking points about how Joe McCarthy allegedly smeared innocents with false allegations.

A small business owner in a crucial swing state has found herself losing business from loyal customers due to her ad being featured in a Mitt Romney campaign ad. It seems her customers believe she is a Romney backer, but in fact she prefers to keep politics out of her business. And so this business owner demanded that the Romney camp either pull the ad or blur her deli's name from the frames that it's in. The campaign, she says, ignored her pleas.

You didn't hear about that story? Well, you certainly would if it actually happened, but, you see, this is the case of deli owner Debra Krause-McDonnell whose complaint is with President Obama's reelection campaign, reported Jane Prendergast in today's Cincinnati Enquirer:

On Thursday morning, the Big Three continued their complete blackout on the controversy surrounding a pro-Obama super PAC's new ad that points the finger at Mitt Romney for a woman's cancer death. ABC's Good Morning America and NBC's Today minimized their political coverage. Even worse, CBS This Morning had former DNC head Ed Rendell on, but instead bringing up the hot topic, they discussed the apparently fascinating topic of federal infrastructure funding.

By contrast, liberal CNN slammed the Priorities USA ad on Tuesday and Wednesday, with The Situation Room, Erin Burnett's OutFront program, Anderson Cooper 360, and Piers Morgan Tonight all covering it. Even MSNBC's Mika Brzensnski hammered Obama operatives on Thursday's Morning Joe for playing dumb about the misleading ad: "That's just not going to pass. They're not telling the truth." (video below the jump)

The Washington Post seemed to honor Obama-commercial star Joe Soptic in the news section Thursday. Nia-Malika Henderson’s article was headlined “For anti-Romney ads, Democrats call Joe the Steelworker.” The subhead: "New spot seems to tie his wife's death to plant's closure after Bain took over." Online, the headline was "Forget Joe the Plumber -- Meet Joe the Steelworker."

The Post couldn't find space for the Soptic story on Wednesday, even though Henderson interviewed him on Tuesday. Just like with the David Plouffe-scores-100-grand story this week, the Post headlines downplayed that Henderson found more details that make the Soptic ad look even more misleading:

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.]

All three evening newscasts on Wednesday continued to ignore a super PAC ad by top Obama supporters that accuses Mitt Romney of, essentially, killing a woman. At the same time, CBS and NBC amplified the Obama administration's "war on women" talking point, playing up attacks from Sandra Fluke, who previously tangled with Rush Limbaugh over contraception. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

NBC and CBS uncritically parroted a vicious new campaign quote from the President: "They [Republicans] want to take us back to the policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century." NBC's Andrea Mitchell cheered, "Playing a starring role for the first time in the campaign, Sandra Fluke, the former law student who became a lightning rod after Rush Limbaugh denounced her for supporting contraception rights."

As NewsBusters has reported over the years, Venezuelan actress Maria Conchita Alonso is no fan of her native country's current despotic ruler Hugo Chavez.

During a Spreecast interview with Steve Malzberg Wednesday, Alonso said that if Barack Obama wins reelection in November, America would be making a step towards becoming like Chavez's Venezuela "in the near future" (video follows with transcript, relevant section at 17:40):

On Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, as correspondent Andrea Mitchell filed a report recounting that President Obama is running ahead of Mitt Romney with female voters, Mitchell referred to liberal birth control activist Sandra Fluke's political activities as a push for "contraception rights" rather than more accurately relaying her desire to force health insurance to pay for birth control pills for women as if they could not choose to purchase such products on their own.

CNN relied on liberal analysis and Democratic talking points to dismantle a new Romney campaign claim about Obama gutting welfare reform. On Wednesday morning the network twice cited PolitiFact calling Romney's new ad "Pants on Fire" and quoted former President Clinton calling it false.

As NewsBusters reported, the July HHS directive does away with work requirements for welfare recipients, which was at the heart of the 1996 welfare reform bill. The memo would allow states to creatively redefine the work requirements and replace them with excuses for "work."

Not so, says CNN, who even resorted to quoting former Democratic President Bill Clinton to back up its argument. "Even former President Bill Clinton who orchestrated this welfare-to-work program back when he was president said it's just simply not true," anchor Carol Costello said of the Romney ad.

On Wednesday's Morning Edition, NPR followed the example of its Big Three counterparts in failing to cover a new ad from a pro-Obama super PAC that points the finger at Mitt Romney for a woman's cancer death. Instead, the liberal radio network sent correspondent Ari Shapiro to "do some truth squadding" about the Romney campaign's latest ad slamming the Obama administration on welfare reform.

Shapiro slanted towards the Democratic campaign's spin of the Romney ad, and concluded that the White House's move on welfare work requirements was "poor form by the Democrats, perhaps, but not the same at gutting welfare reform."

Clay Waters at NewsBusters addressed this item earlier today, but I want to emphasize one particular quote in the related New York Times piece which also caught the (possibly gullible) attention of Chris Ariens at Media Bistro's TV Newser: "In private meetings with columnists, he has talked about the concept of 'false balance' — that reporters should not give equal weight to both sides of an argument when one side is factually incorrect. He frequently cites the coverage of health care and the stimulus package as examples, according to aides familiar with the meetings."

Wow. Where do you start? I'll cite just one example in each area Obama cited. I suspect readers will have more.