2008 Presidential

Salon editor Joan Walsh took a truly disgusting cheap shot at the late Andrew Breitbart Friday.

Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball, Walsh said, "I didn’t think it was possible to get lower than Andrew Breitbart, but his spawn have gotten lower than Andrew Breitbart" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer pleaded with former Secretary of State Colin Powell to again endorse Barack Obama for president: "...it sounds like you're on his [Obama's] team still, four years later....why hesitate at this stage of the game here? I mean, it's basically Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney. Why not just come out right now and throw your weight behind somebody?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

At the top of the show, fellow co-host Ann Curry excitedly teased the upcoming interview: "Four years ago, one of the country's most prominent Republicans threw his support behind Democrat Barack Obama. Will he endorse him again?"

Political reporter Michael Shear uses a half-baked Times "expose" to accuse the GOP of using racial attacks by bringing up the legitimate issue of the anti-white, anti-American, paranoid ravings of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for decades in Chicago, in Saturday's "Race and Religion Rear Their Heads."

Perhaps the uglier side of politics is always close to the surface.

President Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, have said for months that the 2012 election will be about the economy. But on Thursday, it became -- at least for a brief moment -- about the always touchy issues of race and religion.

If there was a contest each week for the dumbest comment made by a member of the media, this would likely be last week's prohibitive favorite.

On the syndicated Chris Matthews Show this weekend, during a discussion about Barack Obama's America-hating Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page actually said with a straight face, "Right-wing wouldn't have that story if it wasn't for the mainstream media" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Over the past few weeks, the John Edwards corruption trial has been all over the news, and for good reason: Edwards was one of the most visible and charismatic figures in the national Democratic Party for several years. The former trial attorney served as a senator from North Carolina from 1999 to 2005, and in 2004 and 2008 ran for president of the United States. In 2004, Edwards was his party's vice presidential nominee.

In the past month, the trial has brought forth sordid details of John Edwards using campaign funds to cover up an affair and provide for the love child who resulted from it. Between April 12 and May 16, ABC World News and NBC Nightly News ran a combined total of 34 stories about the John Edwards trial. Yet the CBS Evening News found time to run only one story on case during that same time period, and that on the opening day of the trial, April 22.

CBS chief White House correspondent Norah O'Donnell and Republican strategist Bay Buchanan had a bit of a tussle about women in the workplace on Sunday's Face the Nation.

When Buchanan said opportunities for women are currently unlimited, O'Donnell strongly disagreed claiming, "There is a glass ceiling in politics" which led the conservative to correctly point out this is largely due to women's personal choices rather than anything nefarious (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On MSNBC's Ed Show on Monday night, Ed Schultz attacked Mitt Romney for failing to disagree emphatically with a voter who said Obama should be tried for treason. "For all his faults, at least John McCain [in 2008] had the guts to talk down the crazy. Four years later, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party doesn't have the character or leadership skills to correct conspiracy theories on the road at an event? Romney didn't address the treason accusation at an event until a reporter grilled him about it."

Guess who didn't have the "character or leadership skills" to correct his supporters when they made crazy talk about "treason" in the last presidential election? That would be Barack Obama. Which supporters? You can start with...Keith Olbermann, occupying Ed Schultz's current spot on MSNBC. Check out Olbermann on April 25, 2008, for example, when the treason came from Team Clinton, which was supposedly going to undermine Obama in the fall:

Returning to form, the last two New York Times updates from the Greensboro, N.C. trial of two-time Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, charged with misusing campaign money to cover up an affair, contain zero mentions of Edwards's Democratic affiliation. The word doesn't even appear in either story.

On Thursday, Lizette Alvarez covered the testimony from Elizabeth Christina Reynolds, who was research director for Edwards during what the Times referred to only as his "2008 presidential campaign." As if the former Democratic senator wasn't running for president as a Democrat.

Three years ago, then-CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric fawned over Barack Obama: “You’re so confident, Mr. President, and so focused. Is your confidence ever shaken?” On ABC’s World News, Diane Sawyer often softens her interviews with the President by tossing in questions about college basketball, asking, at the start of the U.S. military operation against Libya last year, “How much do you think Kentucky will win by?”

But of the three evening news anchors, by far the most admiring of Obama is NBC’s Brian Williams who has — no big surprise — been rewarded with exclusive access to the White House Situation Room for what promises to be a prime time Obama campaign infomercial (on Wednesday’s Rock Center) on how the brave President monitored the mission as Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden’s compound and killed the terrorist mastermind exactly one year ago. (Round-up of Williams' most fawning Obama moments, with video, below the jump).

Per her bio, Gail Collins at the New York Times "joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page." So she was hanging with the Old Gray Lady in 2003.

The columnist's presence at the paper that year is quite relevant. You see, Ms. Collins has brought up the 1983 story of Seamus, the Mitt Romney family Irish setter, who the presumptive GOP presidential nominee put "into a dog carrier on the roof of his station wagon for a 12-hour trip to Ontario," on dozens of occasions in her Times column in the almost five years since the story first appeared. Yet during those five years, it seems she has never recognized (and if she has, she certainly has not been chastened by) the existence an exceptionally positive dog-related Romney story printed in her employer's own paper on July 8, 2003. It follows the jump (underlines are mine; presented in full for fair use and discussion purposes):

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor appeared on MSNBC's NOW with Alex Wagner Tuesday and claimed that the Democrats' "War on Women" campaign tactic had been validated by recent actions by GOP politicians. Under a graphic that bluntly stated as fact the liberal opinion that "War On Women Continues," Wagner and Kantor had this exchange:

The Media Research Center's Dan Gainor tipped me to a remarkable development this afternoon. Someone at the Atlantic, probably with the help of commenters there, took notice of the noise being made by Doug Ross, yours truly (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), and probably others, and took some action on a disgracefully written 1,800-word article about the upcoming trial of John Edwards by Hampton Dellinger ("Why the John Edwards Trial Is a Bigger Deal Than You Think") -- for the better.

Doug's more than valid complaint was that Dellinger never tagged the former 2008 Democratic presidential contender who was also the party's vice-presidential nominee in 2004 and (shudder) would have become Vice President if Bush v. Kerry in Ohio had gone the other way, as a Democrat. Yet Dellinger was somehow still able to mention the Republican Party or specific Republicans five times. I further noted that the author's bio was totally inadequate, as it never mentioned his unsuccessful run -- as a Democrat, of course -- for Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina in 2008. These shortcomings have been fixed, as will be shown after the jump.

Appearing on Tuesday's NBC Today, political director Chuck Todd warned Mitt Romney against picking Marco Rubio as a vice presidential running mate with a negative comparison to Sarah Palin: "The drawbacks – inexperience. Do you want to pick somebody who basically has the same amount of time in statewide office that a person who was on the ticket last time by the name of Sarah Palin had?"

Todd oddly asserted: "...he's never really been vetted. When you say vetted, his campaign for the Senate, he breezed through. He never had the rough and tumble." In what way did he "breeze through"? Rubio had a long and contentious primary battle with former Florida governor Charlie Crist, who then proceeded to run in the general election as an independent. Rubio had to defeat both Crist and the Democrat to win the seat.

On Monday's CBS This Morning, correspondent Erin Moriarty and legal analyst Jack Ford wrote off the campaign finance case against former Democratic V.P. candidate John Edwards. Moriarty and Ford agreed that "even if [Edwards is] convicted, it will be overturned on appeal; that he'll never spend a day in prison." The network did devote 12 minutes total to the upcoming Edwards trial on Sunday and Monday.

Both reports on the Sunday Morning and CBS This Morning programs played sound bites from Hampton Dellinger, but failed to mention that he ran for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in North Carolina in 2008. The Sunday report also featured Melanie Sloan, the president of the liberal-leaning organization CREW, without mentioning her past work for Democrats John Conyers, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden.

During a report for the April 18 edition of NBC's Rock Center, correspondent Ted Koppel was right at home with French socialist campaign workers: "...it is the Socialist campaign directed by these three young men, Vincent, Arthur and Guillaume, that has the distinctly American flavor." Guillaume declared: "We've been pushing this, you know, let's do what Obama did for two years."

At the same time, only seconds earlier, Koppel touted attacks against current French President Nicolas Sarkozy for being too American: "This US-style rally is one reason that President Sarkozy's rivals call him La American, 'the American.' It is not meant as a compliment."

New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane promised that the Times would take "A Hard Look at the President" during the 2012 presidential campaign cycle, while admitting that "the paper basked a bit in the warm glow of Mr. Obama’s election in 2008," in his latest column for the Sunday Review.

That admission is nice to hear, but in fact the paper not only celebrated Obama's election, it worked to put him in the White House in the first place, through biased coverage from the likes of Larry Rohter and Carl Hulse. Even other liberal journalists, like Mark Halperin of Time Magazine, saw "extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage." Times Watch found plenty of ammunition for its special campaign report, "Top 10 Lowlights of the New York Times from Campaign 2008."

The Times even raised journalistic eyebrows by throwing a painfully hip Obama-themed Inauguration party that incorporated his famous "O" logo.

The Media Research Center has just concluded an update of our “Media Bias 101” Web package, with more than 40 articles detailing scholarly research of the past 30 years showing the mostly liberal attitudes of American journalists and opinion polls showing the public’s growing recognition of the media’s liberal bias.

The package also includes dozens of quotes from reporters denying this bias, plus a few notable instances of media figures admitting their tilt.

Key stats and links to major studies after the jump

Chris Matthews asked what some might consider an astonishingly biased question this weekend.

As he teased an upcoming segment on the syndicated program bearing his name, the said of the presidential race, "This time will it be the messiah again or a mechanic – in other words, Romney?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It has become clear what the Obama campaign's strategy for trying to win states like Michigan and Ohio is and will continue to be. In three steps, it's as follows: 1) Pretend that the states' Republican governors, John Kasich in Ohio and Rick Snyder in Michigan, who both succeeded free-spending Democrats who presided over stagnant economies, have had nothing to do with their increased employment, lower unemployment rates, and improved business climates (as well as balanced budgets in fiscal 2012 involving no tax increases, though Snyder may ruin that in Michigan this year); 2) Instead give the credit for all of these favorable developments to Obama and the governments' bailouts of Chrysler and General Motors; 3) Don't say anything about how other states run by Dems, particularly Illinois, North Carolina, and Connecticut, are lagging because they have instead tried to apply Washington's tax-and-spend model to their states' fiscal situations.

Of course the AP, aka the Adminisitration's Press, is all too willing to make the administration's laughable claims appear credible. It did so in two separate items this week, one giving basic details about the job-market situations in Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina, and the other covering Obama allegedly improving chances of winning Ohio, Michigan, and a dozen other "swing" states. There was no mention of the Buckeye State's or Wolverine State's chief executives in either article.

As NewsBusters reported earlier, David Chaney, a now fired secret service agent involved in HookerGate, boasted on his Facebook page in 2008 as having ogled former Alaska governor Sarah Palin while guarding her.

On MSNBC's Martin Bashir Show Friday, the host scolded Chaney for "making Sarah Palin relevant" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In the 2008 campaign, "[t]he media were awestruck, embarrassingly so," over Barack Obama and failed to vet him thoroughly, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted on last night's edition of Hannity. "In the primaries in 2008, we counted 29 different times when the networks either called him a rising star, an emerging star, a rock star, or a superstar. Twenty-nine different times," but they never, of course, affixed such a label to his GOP opponent John McCain.

Shortly after that, Hannity played a montage of liberal journalists gushing over President Obama -- treating him like awestruck groupies -- since he's taken office. "This is embarrassing, this is journalism today," Bozell, the founder of the Media Research Center observed. [MP3 audio here; watch the full segment below the page break]

Yesterday, Time's Joe Klein may have produced the single dumbest analysis post ever. Absurd as it is, it's still important, because it probably betrays Barack Obama's election strategy, with which the press will gleefully cooperate. The strategy is: Make it about anything and everything besides what I and my administration have and haven't done, because it hasn't impressed anyone, and we know it.

Klein's entry (HT Hot Air Headlines) at Time's Swampland, which should be named Fever-Swampland, was so brain-dead that he failed to cite a single example of an incumbent facing reelection (vs. a successor seeking election for the first time) in attempting to make his case:

Adding to past reports defending disgraced former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards against charges of violating campaign finance laws, on Thursday's NBC Today, correspondent Lisa Myers proclaimed: "Now, for all the dislike of Edwards, the public does seem to have serious doubts about the merits of this case. Most surveyed say they believe this prosecution is a waste of taxpayer money."

Presumably, Myers was referring to a Public Policy Polling survey in North Carolina that she had cited earlier in the report about jury selection beginning in the trial of Edwards: "A new survey by Public Policy Polling shows most North Carolinians have an unfavorable opinion of Edwards and most already think he's guilty of the charges." Then why would they think prosecution of the case would be a "waste of taxpayer money"?

What does one need to do to be a special guest of President Obama's at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll?

Play Sarah Palin in a film using biased sources to bash the former Alaska governor, that's what.

Glittarazzi reported Monday:

While serving as guest host on Tuesday's NBC Today, Sarah Palin literally gave HBO's hit piece on her, Game Change, a thumbs down, and declared: "I didn't see the movie. And I wouldn't waste my time seeing the movie....because I don't waste my time on false narratives, on lies." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Palin made the criticism during the Today's Professionals panel segment, causing shock among the liberal pundits. Advertising executive Donny Deutsch wondered: "So you didn't like Julianne Moore?" Attorney Star Jones proclaimed how much she liked the movie and asked in disbelief: "Are you telling the truth? You didn't see it?" Co-host Matt Lauer chimed in: "You didn't see Game Change? You never saw it?"

I don't know about you, but I thought Sarah Palin did an extremely good job in her guest-host stint on NBC's Today show Tuesday.

Comedy Central's Jon Stewart predictably didn't, and began his Daily Show later that evening with a blistering attack on the former Alaska governor (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer pressed Sarah Palin on whether the Republican nominee should pick a vice presidential running mate with more experience than she had in 2008. Palin hit back: "I would say it doesn't matter if that person has national level experience or not, they're going to get clobbered by the lamestream media, who does not like the conservative message." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Lauer denigrated Palin's qualifications as he asked: "When you were plucked from obscurity in 2008 you'd been Alaska's governor about two years. You didn't have any real experience on the national stage....Do you think, if Mitt Romney's the nominee, he should choose someone with more experience on the national battlefield than you had at the time?"

NPR's Tamara Keith filed a one-sided report on Monday's Morning Edition about Mitt Romney's "apparent shift in emphasis, if not an outright reversal" on the issue of energy policy. Keith cited the "liberal news site Think Progress" as one of her main sources for her report. She also turned to a former aide to Democrats John Kerry and Deval Patrick without giving his political/ideological affiliation.

Fill-in host David Greene spotlighted in his introduction to Keith's report how "the GOP candidates have seized on price spikes as a line of attack against President Obama, largely saying the answer is more domestic oil drilling. But one of those candidates, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, used to have a position somewhat contrary to that."

On Friday's The Ed Show on MSNBC, host Ed Schultz and MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolffe - formerly of Newsweek - drew attention to a woman at a shooting range who recently encouraged Rick Santorum to "pretend it's Obama" while the GOP presidential candidate was firing at a target.

After Schultz noted that Santorum criticized the comment when it was brought to his attention, Wolffe warned viewers:

Comedian Bill Maher, host of HBO's panel show "Real Time," appeared in Thursday's New York Times, pleading for a cease-fire in the current culture wars over insensitivity: "Please Stop Apologizing."

It's quite a convenient argument for Maher, given that he's been under fire from conservatives lately for his vulgar and demeaning descriptions of Sarah Palin, delivered last year both on his HBO show and in his comedy act (and refused to apologize). Conservatives have argued there is a media double standard against conservative figures, noting that radio host Rush Limbaugh was excoriated for calling a Georgetown law student a "slut," but that Maher suffered no censure for his far more vile comments about Palin (you can read them in this Reality Check from Rich Noyes of the MRC).

What makes Maher's appearance in the Times galling is that the paper has yet to inform its own readers of Maher's previous comments, even though conservatives have spent weeks making them an issue. Not even a front-page Times story that included details of Maher's $1 million donation to a pro-Obama SuperPAC roused the Times to mentioning his attacks on Palin.