Bias by Omission

A single report by KFYI radio of Phoenix, Arizona highlights a shocking claim made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD says that five million illegal aliens hold illegal mortgages. This is just one more example of the lax lending laws put into place by Democrats like Barney Frank that have contributed to this economic crisis. One would think this would be big news. But, so far we have only this one report to cover it.

There have been earlier stories of home flipping schemes that made liberal use of illegal aliens as straw buyers and the FBI has followed numerous cases to prosecution and conviction. But the Old Media have not done much with this story.

First we see their selective editing of quotes from last night's debate. Regarding John McCain's plan for the economic crisis, they "quote" McCain as saying, "It's my proposal. It's not Sen. Obama's proposal." The AP goes on to note

Obama charged that the current crisis was the "final verdict on the failed economic policies of the last eight years" that President Bush pursued and were "supported by Sen. McCain." He contended that Bush, McCain and others had favored deregulation of the financial industry, predicting that would "let markets run wild and prosperity would rain down on all of us. It didn't happen."

But McCain's full quote -- which the AP edits above -- reads as follows: "It's my proposal. It's not Sen. Obama's proposal, it's not President Bush's proposal." Why would the AP leave this quite important nugget out of McCain's full quote?

Taking liberal media audacity to higher levels, John Heilemann would have you believe that the loss of support from liberal journalists is itself evidence the wheels are falling off the McCain campaign.  Heilemann recently wrote about a "shift" in the attitudes and opininos of the media away from John McCain and towards Barack Obama. His examples are, well, typical.

Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.

By a show of hands, how many of you knew these guys were, as Heilemann reports, "former McCain admirers?"

Did you happen to catch the candidate who handled her heckler with grace, poise, and dignity? It’s created quite a buzz in the media… The Boston Globe spoke of her ‘snappy comeback.’ The Consortium for Independent Journalism reveled in ‘her deft reaction.’ MSNBC reported from the scene that there was ‘roaring cheers and applause from the stunned crowd.’ USA Today remarked about her ‘deadpanning.’ The New York Times noted that ‘Her words were drowned out by a cheering, now-standing crowd.’ Yes, the media was all sorts of in love with the quick retort to a crazed heckler. But, if you thought that was in response to Sarah Palin’s excellent handling of an anti-war heckler, you’d be sadly, mistaken. Rather, those were all quotes in response to Hillary’s handling of the ‘Iron My Shirt!’ incident, nearly a year ago. It was all the MSM rage once upon a time.

With Virginia as a battleground state in the 2008 election and given Democrat Barack Obama's damaging gaffe earlier this year about rural voters clinging "to guns or religion", a new gaffe by another Democrat should be worthy of media attention. It remains to be seen if the mainstream media will even notice. (h/t Reformed Chicks Blabbing)

Running to fill the seat being vacated by retiring Republican John Warner, former Gov. Mark Warner (no relation) has a healthy lead in recent polls and the admiration of a pliant media. Yet an audio recording of Warner at a Democratic Party gathering caught the candidate disparaging gun owners, home schoolers, and religious conservatives as "threatening to what it means to be an American."

Republican opponent and former Gov. Jim Gilmore has a campaign ad (embedded below the fold) that features the audio:

CNN’s so-called Truth Squad, in two reports on Sunday and Monday by two different correspondents, labeled Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin "false" for stating that Barack Obama "sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country." The Squad, in their "fact-checking" of the Alaska governor, who was making a reference to left-wing terrorist William Ayers, obfuscated Obama’s past connections to the former leader of the Weather Underground. The Squad’s reports, which aired on CNN’s Sunday Morning program and on Monday’s American Morning, also left out key details about the Democratic presidential candidate’s past with Ayers.

The network first made an attempt at "fact-checking" Palin’s statement, which she made at a campaign rally in Carson, California, near the beginning of the 7 am hour of their Sunday Morning program. Anchor T.J. Holmes, after a report by Don Lemon on the Alaska governor’s claim, gave a brief look at the Obama/Ayers connection. "Well, nobody's exactly sure how well Bill Ayers and Barack Obama know each other. The New York Times, CNN, other news organizations have looked into this, found that they apparently did not have a very close relationship, it appears." Well, that’s about as clear as Mississippi River mud, and one might guess that Holmes was asking his audience to take the word of two liberal media outlets.

Updated below. Last Monday as the U.S. House of Representatives voted down the initial bailout package, both Fox News and CNN sent e-mail alert subscribers numerous alerts about the Dow's dive. The market recovered some the following day, a development that CNN neglected to mention in the same e-mail alerts.

Yet today, with the bailout package having been passed and signed into law by the president just three days earlier, the market cratered yet again, diving well below 10,000 before finally closing down just a bit shy of 370 points to close down at 9,955.5, the first time the Dow has closed under 10,000 since October 26, 2004.

This time CNN.com didn't care to notice. By way of contrast, here's how Fox News and ABCNews alerted e-mail subscribers today:

Investigation or inoculation?

John McCain has said he'll be taking a tougher line against Barack Obama and his associates, and reporter Scott Shane's front-page piece in Saturday's New York Times on the "sporadic" ties between Obama and William Ayers, a founder of the 1960s domestic terrorist group Weather Underground, serves as a 2,100-word inoculation, a long investigative piece that does little in the way of actual investigating, providing the appearance of due diligence while exonerating Obama.

The two men knew each other years in Chicago politics, most notably when Obama served as chief executive of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school project co-founded by Ayers, while Ayers served on the board. Ayers and his wife, fellow Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a gathering for their Hyde Park neighbor Barack Obama. It was Obama's "coming-out" party for politics.

Ayers has never repented from his domestic terrorism, which included a bomb attack on the Pentagon (a Weather Underground member planted a bomb in a Pentagon restroom). In a Times profile that coincidentally appeared the morning of September 11, 2001, Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." In his memoir, "Fugitive Days," he wrote: ''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon."

"Does Palin have explaining to do," Chicago Tribune religion blogger Manya Brachear asked in her post-vice presidential debate blog post. Here's how Brachear opened her October 3 entry at her "The Seeker" blog:

Pentecostals have called on the mainstream media to stop mocking their sister Sarah Palin. But when will the Republican vice-presidential candidate answer the questions that swirl every time a new church video surfaces on YouTube? Was Thursday's prime time debate yet another missed opportunity?

By contrast, a review of Brachear's blog entries dealing with Sen. Obama's controversial former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, show Brachear did not have similar concerns with Obama's relationship with Wright. Indeed, back in June, Brachear asked, "Can a candidate worship in peace?" The Trib staffer was referring to the fact that Obama was leaving Trinity United Church of Christ, blaming media scrutiny for ruining the worship experience for himself and his fellow parishioners:

The mainstream media is going through another one of their meltdown moments as they rush to defend Barack Obama from his relationship with American terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. (plural)

John Stephenson of Newsbusters detailed CNN's supposed fact check that came in response to a speech that Sarah Palin gave. In that speech Palin did the job the mainstream media refuses to do by mentioning the words terrorists, relationships and Barack Obama in a single sentence while referring to the former Weather Underground leaders.

In rushing to Barack Obama's defense CNN slipped the following into the end of their fact check: 

The McCain campaign did not respond Saturday to a request for elaboration on Palin's use of the plural "terrorists."

Well excuse me, but why should they? If CNN doesn't know that Bernardine Dohrn was a leader of the Weather Underground while they were bombing federal buildings and police stations why should the McCain campaign give CNN the legitimacy of a real news organization by providing a response?

Old Media's coverage of the recently-lifted executive and congressional bans on offshore exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas largely overlooked an important element that should have been very relevant to the discussion.

Supporters of lifting the bans surely share much of the blame for only rarely citing it. Though they have frequently noted the hundreds of billions of dollars a years annually sent overseas to pay for oil that could have been extracted here, they have mostly missed a golden opportunity to tell the American people what over a quarter-century of drilling bans has cost the government and taxpayers. They also generally failed to tell us about the windfall that awaits if the end of the offshore and other bans finally leads to appropriately aggressive use of this country's God-given resources.

But if we had inquisitive financial reporters in the business press who were interested in information relevant to the "Drill Baby Drill" debate instead of merely repackaging the press releases they received from those on both sides (the sole exception I found was this Wall Street Journal editorial), many more Americans would have long ago learned about what follows.

Congressman John Peterson (R-PA) has assembled information about this. The numbers are stunning.

The Media Research Center's Director of Communications and NewsBusters.org Contributing Editor Seton Motley appeared this morning on the Fox News Channel's Fox & Friends to discuss the media's ongoing silence about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known by it's acronym, ACORN.

Seton asserts that the media has remained steadfastly silent about ACORN due to the group's extensive and extended connections with Sen. Obama, and have done so so as not to damage Sen. Obama's chances in this year's Presidential election.

Seton discusses how ACORN has been in the past convicted of voter registration fraud in six states and is currently under investigation for either registration fraud or misuse of funds in fourteen. He points out that they have routinely registered to vote dead and underage people, and fictitious personages with names like "Jive Turkey," "Mary Poppins" and "Dick Tracey". He mentions that in 2006 in Washington state, ACORN turned in 1,800 registrations of which six were valid.

If Old Media can cook their numbers to make their favored candidate look good, they will.

Earlier today, I covered two cooked AP-GfK polls (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog). The pollster dramatically changed the party-ID makeup of the second poll to include a much higher percentage of Democrats, and watered down the strong-GOP component of the Republicans sampled. As a result, the two poll results, taken together, fabricated an illusion of Barack Obama momentum, and John McCain decline. The results couldn't be more bogus; holding the mix constant from one poll to the next would have caused John McCain's lead from three weeks ago to shrink by about 1%.

Its also seems that if Old Media can't use a poll to fabricate its way to the result it wants, it simply ignores it. Two examples from the same poll will demonstrate this.

On Wednesday, NewsBusters' Scott Whitlock noted that ABC ignored its own national poll conducted with the Washington Post that showed a 4% national edge for Barack Obama -- down from 9% the previous week.

Yesterday, the Washington Post's Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta didn't totally ignore the poll (full results are here). Like ABC, they ignored the topside result just mentioned, which is pictured below:

Granted the focus of today's news is overwhelmingly on the bailout and the presidential race, but there is also big news on how Americans are now seeing the war effort. The pendulum has swung from despair to hopeful belief and this is important news that impinges on the elections.

Rasmussen released new data on September 30 that shows that more Americans are now viewing the war as a success and a growing number think that things will get even better in the near future. This is the highest support that Rasmussen has seen since they began to report on this issue. Curiously, news of the war has completely dropped off the radar of the Old Media.

In his look at the "McCain campaign's end-run around media," San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Joe Garofoli pitted one media insider's defense of McCain campaign strategy on the matter of Gov. Palin's press availability, and that at the end of his 20-paragraph story:

"All politicians go through a stage where they want to minimize how much they are exposed to the media," said Paul Friedman, vice president of news at CBS, the network that scored one of the three major Palin interviews. He shrugged at what could be learned in a news conference that couldn't in a one-on-one interview. "I just don't think it is that cosmic of an issue. We'll see more of the candidates soon. Just wait for the debates."

To counter Friedman, Garofoli cited female journalists and pundits who complain that Palin is being overly sheltered. Aside from PBS's Judy Woodruff and CNN's Campbell Brown, Garofoli noted the complaints of conservative Kathleen Parker, labeling the syndicated columnist, and rightfully so, by her ideological label.

But when it came to labeling a liberal critic of Palin, the chief of a liberal feminist organization was treated as a non-partisan observer, even though her organization was co-founded by Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem:

UPDATE, Oct. 1, 11:25 p.m.: The final number for deaths from hostile action came in at 8, which ties the previous lows of July 2008 and April 2003.

_________________________________________________

This item will likely not make an Old Media splash, because overall US troop deaths in Iraq in September will be higher they were in July and August. But they're probably not interested anyway.

To be sure, it would be ideal to note that no US soldiers have died.

Nonetheless, with eight hours remaining until the month ends in Iraq, in what would seem to be strong evidence that the gains from the 2007-2008 troop surge are holding, it is good to note that September US troop deaths from hostile action are at an all-time low (Source: icasualties.org; select "Hostile" in the drop-down bar to replicate):

The news comes from Media Bistro's DC Fishbowl, with a twist that the post overlooked:

On Friday's "Hardball," Chris Matthews interviewed a number of student members of the group Concerned Youth of America.

One of those students -- Caroline -- is his daughter, a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Did Matthews disclose that fact as he interviewed her?

Not so much.

One tipster tells FishbowlDC that "Matthews, at the asking of his daughter, instructed the producers not to name her."

Video is at the link.

Here is what Matthews asked his daughter, and how she answered (bolds are mine):

In a September 29 blog post aimed at "Placing Blame" for failure of the bailout package in the House of Representatives today, Time's Joe Klein began by tossing, "I don't blame John McCain for not rounding up enough Republican votes to get this bailout bill through the House of Representatives."

Klein added a few other reasons he doesn't blame the Arizona senator:

...he's never held a leadership position and therefore doesn't know how to whip votes and finally--well, uh--there is one tried and true method for getting members of Congress to vote aye and McCain opposes it: a sweetener, like say, funding for a bridge in their districts. That is one reason why we have earmarks. McCain is opposed to giving away baubles for the greater good.

Yet he left out one key fact. It was Democratic, not Republican votes that doomed the bailout agreement.

As I write this on Monday afternoon, the People's House has rejected "the $700 billion bailout."

You won't believe, unless you're a very experienced cynic, where that $700 billion figure came from.

The answer appears to be "out of nowhere."

With no basis.

I'm not kidding.

Here's the evidence, carried six whole days ago at Forbes (HT LAT's Top of the Ticket Blog via BizzyBlog commenter Dan Scott):

What if I told you that sheriffs and prosecutors in, say, Indiana, had formed "truth squads" and "subtly" threatened prosecutions of critics of John McCain?

Does anyone think that the New York Times, Washington Post and Old Media in general wouldn't be putting the news on the front page, even with the bailout-apalooza going on in Washington?

Well, there is a "truth squad." It's in Missouri. It includes prosecutors and sheriffs. Oh, and they have formed their truth squad to threaten and intimidate the critics of ..... Barack Obama.

Here is a transcript of a report from station KMOW in St. Louis (first 1:45 of vid; HT Gateway Pundit) that may leave you wondering whatever happened to the country we once knew:

The New York Times is going the way of MSNBC. I suspect they're going to find that appealing to the Angry Left is not a successful business model.

Rather than investigate the campaign donations paid out to Senators Dodd, Clinton, and specifically, Barack Obama, by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the NYT focused instead on McCain aide Rick Davis's employment by the consulting firm, Davis & Manafort.

Even the crossword puzzles in The New York Times are biased in favor of Obama and Biden finds David Levinson Wilk in Politico. Wilk did a little research to see how many times McCain has been an answer in the NYT puzzle since 2005. He came up with zero entries. When he looked for Obama he found the name "regularly appeared" in the puzzle. Does this prove that the Times is "150 percent in the tank" for Obama as McCain adviser Steve Schmidt recently claimed?

I find it a bit amazing that neither McCain's name, nor Palin's name (unless it is referring to Monty Python alum Michael) appears in the Times puzzle. But, there you have it. Wilk gives us his findings but tries to make light of the whole thing.

The two mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — seized by the government September 7 before they went completely bankrupt, at a potential cost to taxpayers of more than $25 billion — have been in obvious trouble for much of the past five years — with criminal investigations, accounting scandals, firings, resignations, huge losses and warnings from the Federal Reserve that their huge portfolio of mortgage securities posed a risk to the overall financial system.

But prior to this year, the watchdogs at ABC, CBS and NBC found time for only 10 stories on the financial health and management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A review of the three networks’ morning and evening news programs from January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2007 found nine anchor-read items or brief references to the companies troubles, plus one in-depth report by CBS’s Anthony Mason on the May 23, 2006 Evening News, after Fannie Mae was fined $400 million for accounting fraud.

Networks have given more coverage this year to the 6-year-old collapse of Enron than the role of federal government-sponsored mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the present financial crisis, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell noted in a September 25 interview with the hosts of Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends." The NewsBusters publisher argued that the media's lack of interest was due to its ideological commitment to the liberal social aims of Fannie and Freddie: extending loans to people who otherwise were priced out of owning their homes.

Bozell appeared via satellite from Nashville, Tennessee. A portion of the transcript follows [audio of segment here]:

STEVE DOOCY, co-host: Look at the coverage that the Fannie Mae catastrophe is getting as opposed to say the Enron collapse a number of years ago. Much different.

BOZELL: That's an understatement.... If you look at the height of the crisis during that time period, you know that the word Fannie Mae never appears in an ABC transcript? ABC never reported it. And ask yourself what's bigger, Enron or this? CNN, how about this, CNN gave at the height of this gave Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac three percent the coverage that they gave Enron. Get this statistic: This year, this year, there's been more coverage by the networks on Enron -- which isn't in the news -- than on both of these calamities combined.

Rocky Mountain News staffer Ed Sealover offered readers a 12-paragraph article on how Planned Parenthood is making a killing off of John McCain's choice of running mate. Too bad he downplayed that they're literal killings.

In his September 23 article, "Planned Parenthood gains from Palin e-mail campaign," Sealover noted that the "staunch abortion-rights opponent" is inspiring pro-choice women to give donations to the organization in Palin's name, meaning that John McCain's campaign headquarters will soon be "receiving tens of thousands of thank-you notes."

Sealover briefly noted that Planned Parenthood provides abortion services, although he failed to mention that, although technically a not-for-profit entity, it earns windfall profits by selling abortion services. Reported Penny Starr of CNSNews.com* earlier this year:

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz traces Barack Obama’s partnership with former domestic terrorist William Ayers when the two collaborated at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity established to help Chicago’s public schools that was commandeered by Ayers to promote his radical agenda.

The association between Obama and Ayers has received virtually no attention from the three broadcast networks, with the conspicuous exception of a primary-season debate sponsored by ABC when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers. Out of 1,365 broadcast evening news stories about Obama prior to the end of the primaries, only two mentioned Ayers — one a brief mention of the debate question on the April 17 Nightly News, and the other a World News Sunday story about McCain raising the Ayers issue on This Week.

With just 42 days left until Election Day, the broadcast networks have not presented a single in-depth report on Obama’s relationship with Ayers. But Kurtz’s review of the documents at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) shows the two “worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda,” which “flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.”

Associated Press writer Matt Volz has been a busy bee covering the Troopergate anti-scandal over the last two weeks. Not surprisingly, he continues to write story after story without citing to the obvious bias underlying the entire investigation.

I am guessing most of you know the basic facts, but here they are in a nutshell. Sarah Palin has an ex-brother-in-law named Mike Wooten. Prior to Palin becoming governor, she and her family filed a formal complaint against Wooten regarding a number of misdeeds including the tasering of a young boy, threatening to kill Palin's father-in-law, and shooting a moose (apparently a heinous crime in Alaska). After Palin became governor, she and her staff had several conversations about Wooten with Walt Monegan, the Public Safety Commissioner. Palin later had a separate dispute with Monegan and offered him a reassignment. Monegan refused - and would later claim he felt pressure to fire Wooten. Palin has repeatedly stated that Monegan was offered reassignment (i.e. fired) for independent reasons and Wooten had nothing to do with it.

From this modest difference of opinion, the Alaska legislature saw fit to order an independent investigation. Although Palin initially welcomed the investigation, once she became John McCain's running mate the probe took a decidedly partisan tone.

Washington Post staffer Christopher Twaroski's 18-pargraph September 21 story on how John McCain was "Seeking Minority Groups' Support" in Northern Virginia quickly morphed from a rehash of former Sen. George Allen's "macaca" moment to a gauzy focus on Sen. Barack Obama's campaigning efforts in the Old Dominion.

Twaroski opened his article noting that the former Republican senator from Virginia was the featured guest speaker at a Saturday GOP "ethnic unity rally" held in Alexandria, but quickly shifted focus to a disruption by two Democratic protestors:

When he first reached the podium to speak, Allen was greeted by a shrieking whistle and two women screaming: "George Allen is a racist! Shame on the Republican Party for having him speak!"

The outburst referred to remarks by Allen in his 2006 reelection campaign against James Webb, in which he used a slur to refer to one of Webb's campaign volunteers, a college student of Indian descent.

**Video Below Fold**

A 2005 Video of Fannie Mae CEO Shown Affirming his Connection to Congressional Black Caucus and Barack Obama, Where is the Media?

In a 2005 video Daniel Mudd, at the time the interim CEO of the catastrophically failed mortgage lender Fannie Mae, affirmed his fealty and that of Fannie Mae to the Congressional Black Caucus. The top three campaign donation recipients were Democrats, number two of which was Barack Obama, yet the media is laying mum on these facts. One wonders what would be going on in the media if John McCain were a top recipient of campaign donations from a market crashing, government bail-out getting organization like Fannie Mae?

The three top campaign donation recipients from Fannie Mae were all Democrats. Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) got $165,000, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) was given $126,349, and failed presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) took $111,000 from the folks at Fannie Mae. Is this information getting out there?

Along with the claim that Joe Biden had a "blue-collar" upbringing -- he had a decidedly upper class (though not "rich") childhood -- Joe Biden has for years claimed that his first wife and his daughter were killed by a "drunk driver" in 1972. However, closer examination of the records proves that the man driving the truck that slammed into the Biden family car was never charged with drunken driving. So, why has the media allowed this perception that Biden lost his wife to a drunk driver to persist?

As late as 2007 Biden said that the man who was involved in the fatal crash that killed his wife and daughter was a "guy who allegedly ... drank his lunch" before he got behind the wheel of his truck and in 2001 the TV show Inside Edition aired a tape of Biden saying the truck driver "stopped to drink instead of drive." Additionally, several media outlets have included the drunk driver claim in their bios of the Senator from Delaware.

This drunk driving accusation, though, is simply a Biden creation and every time this claim is uttered it pains the family of the poor, maligned man involved in the tragic accident with Biden's family, truck driver Curtis C. Dunn. Gannett-owned DelawareOnline reports the anguish that Biden's continued lie causes the man's family every time it is uttered.