Bias by Omission

So says MacsMind (via Flopping Aces via Minority Report via Jeff Emanuel at RedState).

MacsMind's post is in response to an all-too-predictable gusher delivered by Democratic operative disguised as Associated Press reporter Jennifer Loven on April 7 (bold is mine):

Cheered wildly by U.S. troops, President Barack Obama flew unannounced into Iraq on Tuesday and promptly declared it was time for Iraqis to "take responsibility for their country" after America's commitment of six years and thousands of lives.

"You have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country," the president said as he made a brief inspection of a war he opposed as candidate and now vows to end as commander in chief. "That is an extraordinary achievement."

MacsMind contends that the troop contingent was contrived, based on an e-mail he says he received "from a sergeant that was there." The corresponding sergeant also dropped a telltale clue (in bold):

Here's a Tea Party Wednesday engine-starter, so to speak.

This past week, while much the world focused on the terrorists in training euphemistically known as "pirates," and the more religious among us attended Holy Week services and celebrated the Resurrection, bean counters and government bureaucrats were trying to figure out just how much a bankruptcy at General Motors could cost the treasury .... Oh, I forgot, the treasury is empty. I should have said "how much future generations will pay for General Motors' current bankruptcy."

In a Sunday night/Monday morning story that 'skillfully' buried the lede, the New York Times's Micheline Maynard and Michael J. de la Merced misdirected readers with talk of a "surgical" bankruptcy, while saving for later paragraphs evidence they have indicating that, if it occurs, it won't be a bankruptcy as you or I understand it. Properly stated, it should be renamed "Operation Make UAW Members Nearly Whole at Taxpayers' Expense."

Meanwhile, the Detroit Free Press appears to be almost unique in reporting that, hard as it is to believe (kidding, of course), GM might not actually repay all of the monies "lent" by Uncle Sam.

But back at the Times, though they waited until Paragraph 10 to drop the big number on us, Maynard and de la Merced eventually made it clear that taking a bit of a principal hit on the government's loans might be the least of taxpayers' problems, given the skulduggery (and that is the right word) Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim "Tax Cheat" Geithner have embarked upon:

For the first year ever, the annual White House Easter Egg Roll tickets were dispersed via the Internet, as opposed to an in-person, first-come, first-served basis that the White House has used for years for the general public. This year the Obama White House tried out another first: setting aside a few tickets for same-sex marriage activists.

Washington Times correspondent Christina Bellantoni reported the story last Wednesday:

President Obama's White House saved Easter Egg Roll tickets for gay and lesbian parents, reaching out to groups that felt ostracized by previous administrations.

The White House would not say how many tickets were set aside for the group for Monday's annual celebration, only noting that it was far fewer than the large block set aside for military families and the 2,000 saved for D.C. public schools. There also is a batch for administration employees and their children.

The White House Office of Public Liaison coordinated with several groups representing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues and saved a group of tickets for those families.

Last Friday, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer expressed her shock and disbelief that Arizona State University would not award President Barack Obama an honorary degree since he was their commencement speaker.

However, over the weekend, the University announced it would instead name "their most important scholarship" after Obama - instead of awarding the president an honorary degree.

"Here's the statement from ASU President Michael Crow: ‘We never felt an honorary degree was the only or event the best means of honoring his tremendous service to our country,'" Brewer said. "‘Naming the scholarship program after President Obama that will affect the lives of thousands of students is an honor befitting, not only the president's exceptional achievements, but also his value as an individual.'"

That didn't impress Brewer, responding on MSNBC in a segment on April 13. "Whoop-dee-do! That's my reaction," Brewer said

With the Tax Day tea party rallies just three days away, outside of the Fox News Channel, the coverage has been lacking. And, it was something that even Washington Post media columnist and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources" Howard Kurtz acknowledged on his April 12 program.

"The folks at Fox News have found something to be for in this age of Obama," Kurtz said. "They are firmly in favor of tea parties. On Wednesday, that would be April 15th - there will be tax protests around the country on the theme of the original Boston Tea Party. TaxDayTeaParty.com says it was inspired by that rant against President Obama's mortgage aid plan by CNBC's Rick Santelli."

However, Kurtz didn't condemn his network and other networks for lack of coverage - but instead explored the notion that Fox News was giving it too much coverage.

I got this e-mail yesterday from CNN shortly after Uncle Sam's Monthly Treasury Statement for March was released:

That was indeed a serious piece of news. Only halfway through the year, the federal government's deficit for fiscal 2009 is already larger by far than any previous year's deficit.

So I was curious to see how the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger might work this story to minimize the damage to Dear Leader, President 'Prompter himself, Barack Obama.

That Crutsinger and AP intended to go above and beyond the call of duty was obvious in the headline. Wait for it:

As was usually the case during Bill Clinton's presidency, the ascendancy of Dear Leader Barack Obama means that we will often have to consult the output of center-right commentators, and of course the Media Research Center and its affiliates, to cut through the establishment media's puffery to pick up even the most basic pieces of news.

Charles Krauthammer's column today in the Washington Post on the results of Obama's just-completed European Adventure is one such raw news source.

I have bolded items in the excerpt below that represent news that was either not reported or vastly under-reported by what's left of the establishement media (there are even more examples at Krauthammer's full column):

That Joe Biden and the truth have been distant acquaintances from time to time was recently seen in March (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) when the Vice President claimed that Louisiana was losing 400 jobs a day. Louisiana at the time was actually gaining jobs.

The math-challenged Biden, who infamously said during the presidential campaign that the word “jobs” has three letters, is now making claims that he had face-to-face meetings with President Bush which aides and others don't recall or have a record of. Not surprisingly, Biden's narrative concerning these alleged meetings is meant to demonstrate what an influential truth-to-power guy he is.

Gag me.

Bill Sammon of Fox News has the story, which is a virtual lock not to make it into the established alphabet TV networks or into what's left of the establishment's newspapers:

Wednesday’s Early Show picked up where The Tyra Banks Show left off in interviewing Levi Johnston, the ex-fiancé of Bristol Palin, as well as his sister and mother, and continued the media’s coverage of the “family feud” between the Palins and the Johnstons. Anchor Maggie Rodriguez asked Levi’s sister Mercede if the Palin family was “snobby.” She also asked the young man if the Palin family was “lying” about the circumstances of his relationship with Bristol and the subsequent breakup.

Rodriguez asked Levi Johnston some obligatory sappy questions, such as what his son Tripp meant to him, and if his “heart was broken” over the way things turned out. She devoted nearly the entire interview to trying to get the Johnstons’ side of the story, and only brought up the Palin family’s side in one question to Levi: “Sarah Palin, through a spokesperson, has denied a lot of the things that you’re saying. So either you’re lying or Sarah Palin is lying. Which is it?” After trying to get the young father to be more specific in his less than direct answer to the question, the anchor asked again, “So they’re lying?” He answered, “Yeah.”

This is just the sort of bias against Sarah Palin and her family that is de rigeur in the Old Media. CBS seemed taken aback in an April 6 report that Governor Sarah Palin could possibly still be relatively popular "despite the negative news" that she has been confronted with of late. But all the "negative news" that CBS is so sure should torpedo Palin is little else but the soap opera of family struggles, none of it is based on any substantive issue that is a result of her actual efforts in office. It appears as if CBS wants to see Palin destroyed because some of her extended family have seen troubled times of late and not on the actual work she's done as governor.

Is CBS really that empty of substance that they'd ignore the real and important issues of Palin's governing and focus only on Bristol boyfriend Levi's snotty appearance on some meaningless TV gossip show as a way to rate the governor's work as chief executive of the state of Alaska? Can they not separate the actual work of a governor from the side-show of her family?

Or more to the point, would they rather not so separate the family from the job?

At an April 4 news conference in Strasbourg, France (White House transcript here), President Obama referred to a language that doesn't exist (bold is mine; HT to DrewM at Ace of Spades):

It was also interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate. There's a lot of -- I don't know what the term is in Austrian -- wheeling and dealing -- and, you know, people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics.

Apparently none of Obama's 12 teleprompters (their existence was cited a week ago at the UK's Evening Standard, and noted yesterday at NewsBusters and BizzyBlog) were able to guide Obama's dialect-challenged utterance in time.

Amazingly, Tom Raum of the Associated Press in effect made the same mistake (HT to an e-mailer) when he cited the above Obama quote and failed to note that there isn't an Austrian language. Raum and who knows how many editors surely had several hours to get it right, and didn't.

All parties, no matter how rip-roaringly fun, must eventually come to an end. Hardly any of them get a newspaper obituary. But Washington Post's Monica Hesse was on hand to offer a parting toast to the "Guerrilla Queer Bar", wherein gay and lesbian revelers would "invade" a "straight bar" to dance and drink the night away, all in the name of promoting "tolerance" of alternative lifestyles.

Alas, lamented Hesse in her April 6 story, "[a]fter five years, 43 bars, 48 events, and at least one instance of a guy whipping his shirt off and gyrating to Madonna in front of confused Georgetown University parents, it was time for a beloved gay and lesbian institution to end."

What Hesse failed to mention anywhere in her 23-paragraph article is her previous attendance at said "guerrilla" events, conducted in a non-journalistic capacity. Hesse is second-from-left in the picture above, taken at one such bar outing from 2004, and included in a Post story by Fritz Hahn.

Video Below Fold

It is always interesting to see the Democratic pot calling the Republican kettle black and here we have only the latest example of that with Obama's top advisor attacking former Vice President Dick Cheney for his outspoken position on the failures of the Obama administration's early efforts in office. But, as advisor David Axelrod was attacking Cheney, there doesn't seem to be any memory on the part of CNN or Axelrod of the wild-eyed, fire-breathing attacks made by former Vice President Al Gore on President George W. Bush in the years after the 2000 election.

On CNN's State of the Union with host John King, David Axelrod scolded Dick Cheney for not behaving like a "statesman" over the former vp's statements that the country is becoming less safe because of Obama's policies.

Everywhere it's been tried - liberal, or progressive as it's sometimes described as, talk radio hasn't taken off with the success conservative talk radio has.

Case and point - the top six of March 2009 Talkers magazine "Heavy Hundred" talk show hosts are conservative.  The top liberal host, Thom Hartmann, come in at number 10. However, liberal talk show host Stephanie Miller appeared on CNN's April 5 "Reliable Sources" and insisted there is more at play than just pure market forces holding the liberal format back.

"Well, you know - I just did a panel on the Fairness Doctrine," Miller said. "I have to tell you, I brought ratings information. And people like me and Ed Schultz are consistently beating conservative shows in many, many markets. And yet - there is 10 percent liberal radio in this country. Ninety percent of the stations are conservative. You just cannot argue anymore it's because liberal radio can't compete."

On Monday, the UK's Evening Standard, at its "This Is London" site, matter-of-factly noted the following in the final sentence of its report about President Obama's upcoming European trip (bold is mine):

Accompanying the party will be a total of 500 officials including kitchen staff, 35 vehicles in all, four speech writers and 12 teleprompters.

This more than vindicates yours truly's "President 'Prompter" appellation.

It is beyond me how comedians can still claim, as many apparently did after the election, that they have little raw material to work with for poking fun at this guy.

They could even tell good jokes and break news at the same time. As has so often been the case with Obama's gaffes and myriad foibles, the US media establishment has been nearly unanimous in ignoring the Standard's teleprompter tidbit.

Sometimes you just have to laugh at the Pauline Kael-like left. It seems that leftists in America are either mentally stunted or living in such an enclosed, bubble-world that they cannot discern reality from their own fantasy. Such is the case with the faux shock expressed by one Chuck Blow from The New York Times whose April 3 article is filled with the horror that some on the American right might not wish much success for a president of the United States. One must laugh at this man's alarm and wonder if he missed the last eight years where Bush, Cheney -- and at the end, even today, Palin -- were hung in effigy, where the past president was wished a long and torturous death, and where the left wanted untold horrors visited upon them and all Americans that support Republicans?

Charles' sudden awakening to the passion that politics brings is amusing if only to the extent that it is so empty of any introspection. It is hilarious that Chuck only just now had his eyes opened to enflamed political rhetoric and talk of the grave concerns for this country by many millions of his fellow Americans. Sad, in the end, that this guy thinks such vitriol has only just now come from the American right as if born fully grown and never-before-seen.

Chuck must surely have been in a coma since the year 1999.

Don't you love it when the Old Media dredges up some partisan hack Democrat supporter and presents them as an "expect" that is never identified as a partisan political hack? Well, you may not love it, but it sure seems to happen an awful lot. And here we see another example of that lame bias by our old friend Anne Sutton, an AP writer that is renown for her hit pieces on Governor Palin and her family.

This AP piece is supposedly describing "Sarah Palin's Bad Week," in which mountains are made of molehills over and over again. Little of this "report" is of note but one thing does stand out. That would be the quoting by writer Sutton of Ross Baker. Baker is described as a "political science professor " from Rutgers University (New Jersey) and is featured saying how bad things are for Palin these days.

Ever notice the media love to report stories about people fighting the power, unless, of course, the power happens to be something the media favor?

A March 31 New York Times article about Cuba's Havana Biennial art festival highlighted several artists whose political statements were in line with the anti-American, communist outlook of the island's regime, while ignoring prominent Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, who risked her freedom to protest government oppression.

During an open mic session at the festival, the award-winning Generacion Y blogger criticized Cuban policy and the lack of free expression. However, the Times did not mention her pro-free speech performance art or even cover it in a separate piece. Instead, most of the artists the paper described railed against the usual evils, such as capitalism, America and the bourgeoisie.

Afterwards, the government issued a condemnation that singled out Sanchez for “staging a provocation against the Cuban Revolution.” Fortunately, on Wednesday, Reuters reported the controversy:

Barack Obama has done something no other president has done in the five months after his election.

He and his pals Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid laid the groundwork for this achievement back in June when they created what I have since last July been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy, so it is fair to say that Obama's accomplishment, spanning November 2008 through March 2009, belongs to him, with a heavy assist from his fellow party members.

It took a lot of hard work, perseverance, and persistence, but he and they have done it. That crowning achievement follows the jump.

Apparently, America’s love of firearms has not rubbed off on our Mexican neighbors quite as much as the mainstream media led us to believe.

It has been widely reported that 90 percent of the weapons used in the Mexican drug cartel wars come from America. As it turns out, that statistic is simply incorrect. According to the figures obtained from ICE and ATF officials by Fox News, only about 17 percent of the weapons recovered from cartel-related crime scenes in Mexico actually originate in the United States.

With the G20 meeting in London, there have been raucous protests - clashes with police in riot gear, destruction of property at nearby banks and even the death of one man from a heart attack. And the media have gone out of their way to cover every sordid detail.

To former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the media's flag-to-flag coverage of the G20 protests are a glaring contrast to the recent "tea party" protests - which have had more attendees and have been peaceful.

"Look, I got a note from a friend of mine in Orlando who pointed out there were more people at a taxpayer tea party in Orlando a week ago than there are in London," Gingrich said on Fox News Channel's April 1 "On the Record with Greta van Sustren." "They just didn't get any coverage out of the media. There were more people recently in Cincinnati at a taxpayer tea party than there have been demonstrating in London. But the London demonstrators are breaking windows, they're being violent, and you know, the media is always happy to cover the anarchic and violent left."

On Tuesday, both USA Today and the Associated Press highlighted guarded optimism that seemed a bit beyond the justifiable after the release of March's sales results for the auto industry.

Though there is perhaps some cause for hope, both reports made more out of the industry's roughly 25% sales pickup from February to March (compared to a typical 20% in previous years) than was justified. More importantly, both reports failed to specifically cite:

• Continued market-share losses at bailed-out General Motors and Chrysler.
• Ford's disproportionate share of that decent but not exceptional industrywide February to March pickup (seen in a chart after the jump).

Both AP and USAT particularly emphasized that February to March improvement. USA Today's James R. Healey and Chris Woodyard brought it up almost immediately:

New York Times political personality reporter Mark Leibovich, whose mission is delivering profiles with attitude, mostly laid off the jabs in his Sunday front-page profile of what would seem to be an easy target -- the garrulous, gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden -- in "Speaking Freely, Sometimes, Biden Finds Influential Role."

Biden's history of colorful statements should have made him a prime target for a Leibovich fillet. But Leibovich has a habit of only bringing out his carving knife against conservative Republicans, while flattering Democrats. He didn't call Biden "a bit of a screwball," as he did conservative Kentucky Republican Sen. Jim Bunning.

To the contrary, Leibovich buttered up Biden, trying to convince readers that, appearances aside, Biden really is an active player in the Obama administration. The front-page photo caption read: "The influence Vice President Biden wielded in the debate on Afghan war policy is a signal of his stature in the administration."

There is plenty of evidence that many environmental activists are, at bottom, dangerous extremists who have deluded themselves into believing that the earth's population must be radically reduced if humanity is to survive. There is also growing evidence that this far-out viewpoint is more widely accepted among so-called mainstream environmentalists than the establishment media would have us believe.

Occasionally, these views surface. Ted Turner, father of five, infamously asserted the need to reduce the earth's population to 2 billion about a decade ago. He also expressed a stronger personal preference: "Personally, I think the population should be closer to when we had indigenous populations, back before the advent of farming. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was somewhere between 40 and 100 million people." In the early 1990s, the late Jacques Cousteau suggested that "World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day." More recently, though less famously, at a Psychology Today blog, writer Stephen Kotter asserted "we need to lose 4.4 billion people and we need to lose them fast."

But I don't recall seeing an adviser to a government as prominent as the UK's Jonathon Porritt publicly utter such sentiments. But utter them he has. The UK Times Online took note on March 22:

There's a clear difference between how conservative news hosts and left-wingers are greeted by the New York Times. Check out Monday's front-page profile of radio host turned FOX News Channel phenom Glenn Beck by media reporters Brian Stelter and Bill Carter, "He's Mad, Apocalyptic, Tearful, And a Rising Star on Fox News."

The Beck profile read nothing like the warm greetings extended in the Times to MSNBC's latest leftist star, former Air America host Rachel Maddow, or even the rabidly anti-Republican conspiracy-monger Keith Olbermann.

"You are not alone," Glenn Beck likes to say. For the disaffected and aggrieved Americans of the Obama era, he could not have picked a better rallying cry.

Mr. Beck, an early-evening host on the Fox News Channel, is suddenly one of the most powerful media voices for the nation's conservative populist anger. Barely two months into his job at Fox, his program is a phenomenon: it typically draws about 2.3 million viewers, more than any other cable news host except Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity, despite being on at 5 p.m., a slow shift for cable news.

With a mix of moral lessons, outrage and an apocalyptic view of the future, Mr. Beck, a longtime radio host who jumped to Fox from CNN's Headline News channel this year, is capturing the feelings of an alienated class of Americans.

According to election fraud lawyer Heather Heidelbaugh, The New York Times decided suddenly to drop all efforts last October to publish stories about the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) because it came to light that ACORN was a big donor to then presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign. The Times is said to have told ACORN insider Anita Moncrief that they were dropping the story because it was a "game changer" for the election and might hurt Obama's campaign.

Heidelbaugh, who worked for the Penn. Republican State Committee in a vote fraud lawsuit against ACORN, told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 that she had found a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign through the inside information from former ACORN worker Anita Moncrief.

Yesterday, in the process of passing on news that bloggers such as Ed Morrissey at Hot Air and outfits like the Heritage Foundation were onto earlier, Bloomberg's Kevin Hassett delivered a stinging indictment of the establishment media for being asleep at the switch (the sole exception appears to be a video report at PBS). But while he does a good job identifying the problem and indicting journalists for ignoring the news, his prescription for a solution is badly wanting.

The news? The days of Social Security surpluses are over, six to possibly eight years earlier than was thought to be the case just a year ago.

Here are excerpts from Hassett's commentary ("Recession Bites Into Social Security’s Surplus"). His first word reveals what he thinks of the nation's political elites, and of the media that are supposed to be watching them:

NBC climastrologer and all-around nice guy George Lewis said on Sunday's "Today" show that global warming is at least partly the fault of mankind. More disturbing, however, is the fact that exactly zero consideration was given to actual scientific criticism of such a viewpoint.

CARTER ROBERTS, World Wildlife Fund: We're definitely asking people to do a couple things. To turn off the lights, but also to cast a light on one of the greatest problems in the 21st century.

GEORGE LEWIS, NBC News correspondent: That problem, global climate change and the role that humans play in it. [Picture of industrial site, complete with smokestacks]

During the 10am hour of "MSNBC News Live" on Monday, host Tamron Hall completely skipped the ideology of a left-wing documentarian as she talked with him about his new movie "Rethink Afghanistan," which claims that "troops are not the answer" in that country. Hall never identified Director Robert Greenwald, who has made documentaries such as "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," and "WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price," as a liberal. Instead, she simply described him as a "documentary filmmaker."

Additionally, Hall offered almost no tough questions, instead tossing softballs such as "What is your observation, having been [to Afghanistan] recently, regarding the Obama administration's plans?" Uninterrupted, Greenwald was allowed to later assert, "Well, again, remember that many people there believe that troops are not the answer. Troops contribute to the problem." He also instructed that the U.S. should send 17,000 teachers instead of soldiers. At the close of the interview, he complained, "But, I think we all get trapped in, as one of my friends in Afghanistan said, 'Shoot first. Think later.'"

In contrast, on January 9, when MSNBC host David Shuster interviewed John Ziegler about his movie on the media's treatment of Sarah Palin, the anchor got into a heated argument with the filmmaker, repeatedly challenging the "conservative documentary's" thesis and deriding, "John, you and Sarah Palin can't take any responsibility for the fact that she wasn't prepared to run for vice president."

Here is something that you NewsBusters fans can help me with because I am having difficulty deciding what is going on with this one. We have a shooting incident in Minnesota perpetrated by three Muslim Somali immigrants but for some reason almost every single media report about the incident omits the names of the shooters, names of obvious North African or ethnic origin. So, the question is, did the Old Media in Minnesota purposefully leave the names unreported so that they could cover up the fact that the criminals were Somali immigrants? And, if so, why would they do this?

We start with the Minneapolis Star Tribune that reports that "three suspects were in jail Sunday following a shooting in Lakeville that injured four other people." Apparently one of those arrested took umbrage at being told to leave a party and began shooting up the place as he and his friends left. But, all we get from the StarTrib is "three suspects." No names or descriptions.