Bias by Omission

Julie Rovner, NPR's on-staff shill for ObamaCare, filed an unashamedly one-sided report on Friday's Morning Edition about the controversial Obama administration mandate that forces religious institutions to include coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and birth control.

Rovner turned to only two individuals for her pro-mandate report: Peggy Mastroianni, general counsel at the federal government's own EEOC, an organization which recently got slapped down in a unanimous Supreme Court decision concerning the rights of houses of worship in hiring and personnel matters; and Sarah Lipton-Lubet, a lawyer for the notoriously far-left American Civil Liberties Union, who until May 2011, worked for the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights.

Sometimes you read the most interesting things in those supposedly boring trade publications.

One such item of interest comes from an article in Manufacturing News (HT to an emailer) written by Richard A. McCormack which is primarily about the Mainland China's designs on the worldwide auto parts industry, including the U.S. Some of the larger American unions are demanding that the administration and Congress take action on what they see as unfair trade practices. One sentence is indicative of a more pervasive problem, and it directly contradicts what the establishment press has been telling Americans for months. It's of particular concern to all Americans because the U.S. government still owns over 25% of General Motors, and reads as follows: "China has told GM that it will not be able to sell its Volt electric vehicle in China unless GM transfers technology to China and produces the vehicle there."

After almost three weeks, CBS finally brought on a member of the Catholic hierarchy on Thursday's CBS This Morning to discuss the Obama administration health care mandate that forces Catholic institutions, like hospitals and colleges, to violate their consciences and pay for abortion-inducing drugs and contraception [audio clips available here; video clips below the jump]. On Good Morning America, ABC ignored the controversy for the second straight day.

It was also the second straight day that the CBS morning newscast brought on a Catholic cleric for his take about the prominent issue. By contrast, on Tuesday, NBC 's Today turned to their in-house radical feminist, Rachel Maddow, who blasted the completely warranted opposition to the new policy as a "pretty far-right perspective" and "an extension of anti-abortion politics."

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll with a striking finding has New York Times Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal in dismay: 53 percent of self-described liberal Democrats support keeping Guantanamo Bay open. Does this mean their previous virulent opposition was not based on concern for civil liberties, but was just partisan Bush-hatred? Of course not.

Rosenthal’s Thursday morning post “Hurray for Guantanamo Bay” ignored that clear Democratic hypocrisy while making excuses for President Obama. Apparently it’s all the fault of Republicans in Congress. (Left-wing civil liberties advocate Glenn Greenwald strongly disagreed in a March 2011 op-ed for Salon.) Rosenthal wrote:

After 19 days of controversy, CBS Evening News on Tuesday finally got around to covering the growing dispute between the Obama administration, who wants to impose a mandate for sterilizations and birth control on religious institutions, and the Catholic Church and its allies, who see it as a violation of religious liberty. All of the Big Three networks' evening newscasts on Tuesday covered the issue.

On Wednesday morning, CBS This Morning was actually the only network morning show that devoted a segment to the "hot-button issue," as anchor Gayle King labeled it. NBC's Today show gave a mere news brief on the "uproar" over the new federal policy, while ABC's Good Morning America ignored it.

On the February 8 episode of MSNBCs Martin Bashir program, the host along with liberal Democrat Rep. Peter Walsh (Vt.) used the contraception mandate controversy to advocate the elusive liberal Democratic dream of a Canada-style government-run health care monopoly. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Bashir started the interview -- better described as a Democrat strategy session -- to blast Speaker John Boehner for his opposition to the Obama administration’s health care ruling.

On Tuesday, NPR somehow thought a poll commissioned by abortion behemoth Planned Parenthood on the controversy over an ObamaCare birth control mandate was newsworthy enough to play up on its website. But later in the day, on All Things Considered, a show that reaches millions in the U.S., the media outlet spotlighted how the "new polling...suggests most voters, including Catholics, support the measure."

Correspondent Scott Horsley noted the "survey released today by Public Policy Polling," but completely failed to mention Planned Parenthood's name during his report. Horsley also highlighted a disturbing strategy from the pro-mandate camp without: "Supporters of the new policy are belatedly trying to refocus attention in a more popular direction, away from religious freedom and towards women's health care."

New York Times campaign reporters Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg found no hypocrisy in President Obama’s Monday flip-flop on the evils of "Super PAC" fund-raising in Tuesday’s front-page story, “Obama Yields In Marshaling Of ‘Super PAC.’” As of yesterday, Obama is encouraging Democrats to give to the political action committee Priorities USA, which is led by two former White House aides.

After the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United such Super PACs can raise unlimited sums from corporations, unions and invididuals. The Times' passive headline puts no responsibility on Obama, portraying his change of heart as a necessary evil he has little control over.

In his pre-Super Bowl interview with Matt Lauer on Sunday, President Obama was asked the following question about Iran in light of the heightening tensions over its nuclear program and the possibility of an Israeli air strike: "(In repsonse) Do you fear that they will wage attacks within the United States on American soil?" Obama responded as follows: "We don't see any evidence that they have those intentions or capabilities right now."

Really? The President's statement directly goes against statements made recently by other government officials, up to and including Attorney General Eric Holder. Lauer, who is paid to look good while delivering the news and conducting interviews but not necessarily to deliver on substance, especially if it might disturb the American people before the Big Game, totally missed the contradiction. Fortunately, Ed Lasky at American Thinker didn't (internal links added by me):

Media critic Mollie Hemingway, a contributor to GetReligion.org, has an excellent post up today at CNN's Belief Blog about how the liberal media did a horrible job when it came to objectively reporting the implications of the recent Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood row. In fact, the media have shown themselves "effective partisans" by telling only "half the story," the half spoon-fed by socially liberal lobby groups like Planned Parenthood.

Be sure to check out the whole thing here, but below the page break I've appended some key excerpts (emphasis mine):

Is a Planned Parenthood poll really newsworthy? On Tuesday, NPR spotlighted a PPP poll commissioned by the abortion giant which found that a majority apparently supports a federal government mandate on birth control that violates the religious liberty of Catholic institutions. The network also trumpeted how "the poll...suggested that Mitt Romney...could pay a price at the polls" for opposing the mandate.

Writer Frank James began his article for NPR.org, "Poll: Majority Of Voters Support Birth-Control Mandate," by pointing out that the ObamaCare regulation was "controversial." But he didn't acknowledge that the poll was "done on behalf of Planned Parenthood" until the second paragraph, and left out any kind of ideological label for the left-wing organization.

CBS This Morning on Tuesday led its broadcast with the Obama re-election campaign's decision on Monday night to reverse its opposition to super PAC fundraising. Charlie Rose teased the report by noting how "the White House...flip-flops on controversial super PAC donations." ABC's Jake Tapper used the same term on Good Morning America. NBC's Today show completely ignored this breaking development.

During his report on the CBS morning show, correspondent Bill Plante highlighted President Obama's "denunciation of that Supreme Court decision which allowed unlimited fundraising" and played a clip from his 2010 State of the Union address where he ripped the Citizens United decision in the presence of several of the justices who handed it down [audio available here; video below the jump].

ABC, CBS, and NBC spotlighted the Komen foundation's about-face on funding Planned Parenthood on their Friday evening newscasts, and played up the apparent role of social media in getting the charity to reverse its earlier decision. On World News, ABC's Diane Sawyer trumpeted the "dramatic day for people power," while on Nightly News, NBC's Lester Holt concluded, "score one for the power of social media."

The Big Three outlets also covered the 180 by the breast cancer organization on their Saturday morning shows. Altogether, the networks added seven more reports to the 13 from the first 60 hours or so of the controversy, bringing the total to 20 since February 1, versus only three on the face-off between the Catholic Church and the Obama administration since January 20 (the MRC documented and highlighted this imbalance in a report on Friday; ABC and NBC added mentions on their Sunday morning political shows).

On Sunday, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat highlighted the blunt favoritism shown by the media toward Planned Parenthood in last week’s headline-making spat with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, the breast cancer charity, after it announced it would no longer fund the prominent abortion provider: “The Media’s Abortion Blinders.”

Douthat compared the popularity of the pro-life position among Americans with the unanimous hostility the media unleashed on Komen, and the universal respect accorded Planned Parenthood: “... on the abortion issue, the press’s prejudices are often absolute, its biases blatant and its blinders impenetrable.”

"Coming up at 11am on @msnbctv, Gingrich a Reagan republican? We'll put the question to the President's son, Ron Reagan."

That's a teaser tweet MSNBC's Thomas Roberts put out shortly before taking the air to host his 11 a.m. Eastern hour of MSNBC Live. Of course, Ron Reagan is a political liberal, unlike his brother Michael, who is conservative and has been actively campaigning for Gingrich.

When the Susan G. Komen Foundation announced on February 1 that it would no longer be donating to Planned Parenthood, the Big Three networks -- ABC, CBS, NBC -- rushed to the defense of the left-wing organization, which is the largest abortion conglomerate in the United States. Over the course of about 60 hours, ABC, CBS, and NBC emphasized the controversy with a whopping 13 morning and evening news stories. A  Media Research Center study found that the soundbite count was loaded: 76 percent of the quotes came from supporters of Planned Parenthood (35 in total). Only 11 clips or statements came from Komen representatives or new allies.

Updated at bottom of post | Virginia Republicans proposing voter ID laws in the state's General Assembly are akin to racist Jim Crow poll workers, lynch mobs, and even Josef Stalin. Those comparisons were all made in the first seven paragraphs of Laura Vozzella's February 4 Metro section front page article, "Voter ID fight heats up in Va."*

Vozzella, who previously has complained about Virginia GOP legislators' "slew of conservative bills" front-loaded her Saturday article with the overwrought rhetoric, which she, of course, failed to dismiss as overheated rhetoric:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on a trip underwritten by the U.S. State Department (aren't justices expected to keep their distances from the government to protect their perceived impartiality?), was in Egypt on Wednesday at a Cairo University law school seminar. While there, according to the Associated Press's Mark Sherman, she told students that (in Sherman's words) "she was inspired by last year's protests that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak's regime" and to speak to them (in her words) "during this exceptional transitional period to a real democratic state." The news that Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist parties now control about 75% of the seats in the country's parliament seems not to have registered with Ginsburg or Sherman -- or, for that matter, the State Department.

Sherman's AP story failed to note what Ms. Ginsburg said about the U.S. Constitution in an Egyptian TV interview, as did virtually all of the rest of the establishment press. ABC's Ariane de Vogue is currently the most notable exception, but as readers will see, she clearly buried the lede. Here are key paragraphs from her report (the related video is at Hot Air; the relevant portion begins at the 9:28 mark; bolds are mine):

It seems media outlets only care about reporting on Planned Parenthood when its funding is threatened. When that happens, the liberal press goes ballistic.

When cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure cut funding to Planned Parenthood, the abortion mill reacted swiftly, with a press release that rallied its allies in the media to create a ruckus about losing more than $600,000 in funding. The liberal media echo chamber began ringing with howls of rage that the cancer charity would dare to say no to funding the abortion giant. Strangely, the three broadcast networks seemed to have difficulty locating Komen supporters to interview.

On Tuesday, Ken Thomas of the Associated Press covered President Barack Obama's appearance at the Washington Auto Show and allowed Obama's criticism of Mitt Romney as being among those "willing to let this industry die" to stand, ignoring known history in the process.

Obama's statement marks him as a true ingrate, because for better or worse (my opinion: worse; your mileage, so to speak, may vary) Mitt Romney, after warning of the dangers of bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, shifted gears four months later and vigorously defended the President when the administration orchestrated a boardroom coup at GM which included the forced resignation of CEO Rick Wagoner. This was the point at which it became clear that Obama wanted the government to control what happened at GM until it either recovered or was forced into what most were already seeing as an inevitable bankruptcy filing. In a CNN interview the day the news broke, Romney complimented Obama for demonstrating "backbone." What follows are five paragraphs from Thomas's piece, a screen shot of the article CNN posted that day, and a transcript of the relevant portion of Romney's March 31, 2009 interview:

The Big Three networks continued their blackout on covering the controversy involving the Obama administration trying to force Catholic institutions to include coverage of abortifacients and contraception in their health plans without a co-pay. Instead, Diane Sawyer on Wednesday's ABC World News highlighted Pfizer's recall of birth control pills that could "raise the risk of accidental pregnancy."

The same evening, both CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News aired reports on Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation discontinuing its funding of abortion perpetrator Planned Parenthood, with NBC's Brian Williams hyping how "thousands of women...[may]  pay the biggest price" for the move.

MSNBC has been mocked as MS-DNC and MS-LSD by conservative critics. But given the network's constant drum-beat against the Komen Foundation for its decision to cut off grants to Planned Parenthood affiliates, it might be sensible to rename the liberal cable outlet MS-D&C, after the abortion procedure.

Throughout live coverage this morning and early afternoon, MSNBC hosts turned to pro-choice politicians and Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards to rebuke the breast cancer charity for its decision. Finally, in the 1 p.m. hour, veteran journalist and breast cancer patient Andrea Mitchell interviewed Komen's founder, Ambassador Nancy Brinker. Yet that discussion turned out to be a hardball interview that was followed immediately afterwards by a softball chat with hard-left U.S. senators Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

MSNBC's Thomas Roberts isn't even trying anymore to be an objective journalist.

Yesterday's passage of a right-to-work bill in Indiana was a measure "stripping the state of union rights," Roberts insisted during the 11 a.m. Eastern hour of MSNBC programming. "That makes Indiana not just the 23rd union-busting state, but the first new right-to-work state in ten years," the anchor noted as he introduced right-to-work opponent Indiana State Senator Vi Simpson (D).

On their Wednesday morning shows, the Big Three networks continued their trend of all but ignoring the Obama administration trying to force religious institutions to include coverage of sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraceptives in their health care policies without a co-pay. The new mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services would force Catholic hospitals and schools to decide whether to submit to the new policy or follow the Church's teachings against birth control.

Instead of covering this growing dispute between the Catholic hierarchy of the United States and the federal government, CBS This Morning brought on Rev. Edward Beck, a Catholic priest, to respond to a story that might cast the Church in a bad light with regards to how it manages the donations it receives.

The media may be busy trying to reelect Barack Obama, but it's never too early for them to start grooming the 2016 field. Look no further than the Washington Post, for example.

"O'Malley to set ambitious agenda," read the teaser headline posted this morning at the  Post's website. "Watch the Maryland governor deliver his sixth State of the State address now," read the caption beneath a photo showing Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley in front of two American flags. A few hours later, following the speech, an updated teaser headline reading "Gov. O'Malley calls for 'tough choices'" takes readers to an article about O'Malley's February 1 speech in which the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) chief "urged Maryland lawmakers to act on gay marriage, tax hikes."

Fox News's Ed Henry challenged White House Press Secretary Jay Carney during a Tuesday briefing over the growing controversy surrounding the Obama administration's move on January 20 to force most employers to cover sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraceptives in their health care policies without co-pay. This new federal mandate would force Catholic institutions, like hospitals and schools, to decide whether to obey it or follow the Church's teachings against contraception.

Anchor Megyn Kelly trumpeted that "this is turning into a big deal, and the White House... [is] saying they believe they have struck the appropriate balance...the Catholic Church...saying, how is it the appropriate balance to delay...the time at which we'd have to violate our consciences?"  [video clip below the jump] The Big Three networks, on the other hand, have all but ignored the issue during the past 11 days. Only CBS This Morning on Tuesday briefly mentioned the growing controversy.

While NBC correspondent Peter Alexander noted on Tuesday's Today how "Republicans are jumping on the president's choice of words" in telling a woman her husband's long-term unemployment was "interesting" to him, neither ABC's Good Morning America nor CBS's This Morning bothered to highlight Obama's aloof flub.

The NBC report played the sound bite of the president's remark: "It is interesting to me – and I meant what I said, if you send me your husband's resume I'd be interested in finding out exactly what's happening right there – because the word we're getting is, is that somebody in that kind of high-tech field, that kind of engineer, should be able to find something right away."

Scott Pelley simply got it wrong on Tuesday's CBS This Morning, when he claimed that the Republican presidential candidates "have finally arrived in a state that was very hard hit by the great recession and has been suffering for a very long time. The unemployment rate here is about 10%." In reality, South Carolina, the state that held the last GOP primary, has about the same unemployment rate, at 9.9% [audio available here; video below the jump].

Two weeks earlier, on the January 17 edition of his CBS Evening News program, Pelley introduced a segment with John Dickerson, who was in the Palmetto State, which referenced the national unemployment rate. But neither on-air personality mentioned the specific unemployment rate inside the state:

NBC whitewashed the anti-American activities of the violent Occupy protests in Oakland. The network dedicated only 34 seconds to covering the riot, but refused to mention the fact that Oakland protestors burned an American flag - despite the fact that both its sister networks, ABC and CBS, had done so.

On Saturday, Jan. 28, nearly 400 Occupy Oakland protesters were arrested for their actions in a violent riot. Occupiers vandalized Oakland's historic City Hall and burned an American flag (which they stole from the City Hall). They were harshly criticized by the Democratic Oakland Mayor, Jean Quan, for their destructive actions. MRC TV obtained footage of the American flag being burned by Occupiers in Oakland while the Occupier shooting the video recited a mocking, anti-Semitic version of the Pledge of Allegiance.

On Monday, Today co-host Matt Lauer pushed Mitt Romney to stop running an ad that features a clip of former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw reporting Newt Gingrich being charged with ethics violations in 1997. However, it has now been 4,742 days without an NBC story on Gingrich subsequently being cleared on those charges.

Even as Lauer grilled Romney on use of the NBC News coverage, he still failed to correct the record with the fact that in 1999 the Internal Revenue Service completely vindicated Gingrich. Instead, Lauer simply noted how upset Brokaw was: "[He] released a statement saying, quote, 'I'm extremely uncomfortable with the extended use of my personal image in this political ad. I do not want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign.'"