2008 Presidential

The New York Times’s outgoing Executive Editor Bill Keller received some pushback on his recently posted column that demanded, in rather insulting fashion, that the media more aggressively question the religious views of the G.O.P. candidates.

Times Watch and others noted that his paper was hardly a model of journalistic assertiveness during the spring of 2008, when Barack Obama endured political controversy over the racially inflammatory and conspiracy-minded Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's minister at Trinity United Church of Christ. Keller responded via Twitter on Friday morning:

Yes, Dems should be asked about their faith (and influences) too. We were late to Rev. Wright in '08, but we got there, and did it well.

As NewsBusters has been reporting, the Obama-loving media have largely been gushing and fawning over the current White House resident taking a vacation on Martha's Vineyard as the economy appears to be heading into a double-dip recession.

Giving an interesting insight into the President's decision to not call Congress back from its summer break to tackle the problems facing the nation was New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd who wrote Sunday:

Sometimes I wonder how liberal media members could possibly live in the same country as I do and hold such startlingly absurd ideas about it.

Take for example Fareed Zakaria who on the CNN program bearing his name this Sunday is going to tell viewers that America would likely still have a AAA credit rating if we had a parliamentary system of government with a prime minister rather than a president (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On the August 19 "Fox & Friends" panel segment, co-host Gretchen Carlson highlighted the Media Research Center's (MRC) "revealing" labeling study comparing broadcast network coverage of the 2007 Democratic primary to the 2011 Republican primary.

Published by MRC Research Director Rich Noyes on Tuesday, the study reviewed the ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening news programs from January 1 through July 31, 2011 and found 62 "conservative" tags for Republican candidates, compared to only three "liberal" labels for Democratic candidates running during the same time period in 2007.

"That's a 20-to-1 margin, if you're doing the math with us this morning," remarked Carlson.

[Video follows page break]

As NewsBusters has been reporting, the Obama-loving media are working overtime examining the records of every GOP candidate for president.

"The bright side though is," conservative author Ann Coulter told Fox News's Sean Hannity Wednesday, "we don't end up with a Republican president who is suddenly having an affair with an intern, or a Republican president who votes present for his entire term as the economy falls into the toilet" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

With each passing day it is becoming clearer and clearer the brainiacs at MSNBC replaced one blithering idiot in their 6PM time slot with another blithering idiot.

On Wednesday's "Morning Joe," Al Sharpton actually accused well-known isolationist Pat Buchanan of having supported the Iraq war (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Charles Krauthammer on Friday evening exposed a classic liberal media hypocrisy concerning the differing bar used to determine truthfulness in politicians depending on their political leaning.

When "Inside Washington" panelist Nina Totenberg (NPR) asked if Republican presidential candidates might not have been totally honest Thursday evening when they all said they wouldn't accept a budget that incorporated ten dollars worth of spending cuts for every dollar raised in taxes, Krauthammer smartly responded, "Obama in the end said he wouldn’t sign a bill that didn’t increase taxes. In the end, he did. Was he lying?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Wednesday took some poorly-researched cheap shots at conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh responded Thursday explaining that this is borne of frustration over the failure of Barack Obama noting, "The Chris Matthewses and the media are very close to the rioters in London in terms of anger, disappointment" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

For some reason, in the middle of a lengthy "Morning Joe" segment dealing with President Obama's obvious failures as a leader, host Joe Scarborough on Thursday felt the need to bring up conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Liberal bias is rampant among the media, but there is no more tangible example of it than in how the media treat Conservative women. The most recent cover of Newsweek features a very wide-eyed Michele Bachmann, looking surprised and unattractive. Perhaps more disturbing is the caption Newsweek placed below the presidential candidate's photo: "Queen of Rage."

Bachmann, an attractive 55 year-old mother of five, is a three term member of the House of Representatives, constitutional conservative and prominent voice of the Tea Party movement. But if you get your information from liberals or the mainstream media, you might know her as 'crazy,' a "zombie" a"phony-ass broad" and a "skank."

The primary argument conservatives made against presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 was that he lacked the proper experience and qualifications for the most important job on the planet.

On Tuesday, Huffington Post's Howard Fineman, one of the many liberal media members that helped get the woefully lacking junior senator from Illinois into the White House, said on MSNBC's "Hardball," Obama "should have spent more time on the Chicago Board of Aldermen than at the University of Chicago" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Joe Scarborough on Tuesday told his "Morning Joe" co-host an inconvenient truth that she and most of her colleagues in the media just can't handle.

"A president that cannot control 45 backbenchers in the opposing Party in the House of Representatives is too weak to be President of the United States. It is that simple" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

ABC's Cokie Roberts said something on national television Sunday that made her colleague George Will shake his head on camera.

During a "This Week" discussion about the recent credit rating downgrade by Standard and Poor's Roberts said, 'The problem that we have here is the Constitution of the United States of America which actually does require people to come together from different perspectives" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The predictable MSM reaction to Standard & Poor's downgrading of the US government's credit rating? Kill the messenger, of course.  Yesterday, we noted how Jeff Glor at CBS' Early Show parroted the Obama line about the downgrade being "political."

Today it was ABC's turn.  Good Morning America had on Mellody Hobson, a regular ABC "financial contributor" and former host of her own ABC financial-advice show. Hobson hit S&P hard, expressing the view that "everything that they do is suspect."

There's just one little factoid ABC didn't share with viewers. While presented as a presumably objective financial expert, Chicagoan Hobson in fact is an Obama partisan.  Hobson served as a big-time fundraiser during Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and is involved with his 2012 campaign.

View video after the jump.

If Barack Obama has lost Andrea Mitchell, has he lost the MSM?

Surveying the economy on her MSNBC show his afternoon, Mitchell gloomily observed: "it just seems as though everyone is feeling a lack of hope."

The White House needn't fear too much.  Mitchell might have wandered somewhat off script. But Andrea has surely not abandoned the ranks of the Obama-loving media.  She fretted that because of Washington gridlock, the super committee might--horrors!--wind up cutting spending.

View video after the jump.

Good Morning America's Jon Karl on Thursday placed the blame for a partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration on House Republicans, ignoring the role Senate Democrats have played.

4000 thousand FAA workers have been furloughed, construction projects have been stopped, but Karl complained, "What's the hold up? Republicans are insisting on cuts to a program that subsidizes flights to small rural airports."

MSNBC's Chris Matthews took his hateful attacks on conservatives to a new level, Wednesday, smearing the Tea Party as "southern" "secessionists" who want to "kill" Obama. The Hardball host quickly amended, "politically." 

After guest Howard Fineman suggested Republicans have opposed the President from the start, the Hardball anchor retorted, "What? 'We hate you, want to kill you–'  politically." 

[See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Speaking on the floor of the Senate Saturday, Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) said, "If we had a billion dollars for every time I heard the words 'Tea Party extremist,' we could solve this debt problem."

Proving his point about the vitriolic name-calling of conservatives so prevalent now, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman began his most recent piece, "Watching today's Republicans being led around by an extremist Tea Party":

Forget about 2008's "Hope and Change" mantra.

New York magazine's John Heilemann said on this weekend's "Chris Matthews Show" Barack Obama's message in 2012 will all be about "fear" of the Republican candidate, and the President will spend $500 million on negative attack ads against his opponent to instill it (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters previously reported, Chris Matthews on Wednesday lied about Ronald Reagan's position on taxes in a "Hardball" segment insinuating the late President would oppose the current Republican stance on the debt ceiling.

When Salon editor Joan Walsh said Obama "is actually the Reagan figure here," former RNC chairman Michael Steele bust out laughing (video follows with transcript and commentary):

For having made a shocking revelation that deeply undermined one the most repeated stories of Obama's 2008 campaign and 2009 health care debate, Janny Scott is staying extremely quiet. Scott's new book, 'A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother,' proved false Obama's claim that his mother was fighting with insurance companies from her death bed, one of Obama's favorite lines to use when campaigning and appealing for the passage of Obamacare.

Yesterday, the Washington Examiner's Byron York wrote of being turned down twice after trying to reach Scott for an interview, even though the New York Times landed an interview with her in between York's two requests. It seems likely that Scott, whose liberal bias has been exposed here at NewsBusters and at our sister site TimesWatch, is not thrilled that conservatives have used her book as a way of exposing the liberal president.

As Clay Waters at the Media Research Center's Times Watch reported earlier today ("One of Obama's Emotional Arguments for Obama-Care Proven Wrong in NYT Staffer's New Book"), the New York Times's Kevin Sack ran a story yesterday which "reflects badly on Barack Obama and how he misled people in his campaign for Obama-care."

I'll say. As reported by Sack (bolds are mine throughout this post):

It's no secret that most campaigns are heavily funded by big checks from lobbyists, PACs, and rich donors, but President Obama's campaign team is turning away from that assertion, instead showcasing the claim that it is 98-percent-funded by grassroots support. Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager, said "we did this from the bottom up," pushing the idea that the $86 million fundraising figure released on Wednesday was fueled almost entirely by grassroots organizers.

While 98 percent of the checks may have come from grassroots donors, it doesn't mean that 98 percent of the money did. Many media outlets are taking the bait and are ignoring the two percent of donors whose contributions may turn out to be a far greater portion of Obama's campaign funds than Messina is making them out to be.

For comparison, eight years ago when then-President George W. Bush was ramping up for his re-election campaign, the media magnified a small fraction of extremely wealthy donors to be the image of his campaign.

John Lennon in the '70s sang about instant karma getting you.

On Wednesday's "Hardball," two weeks after mocking Texas governor Rick Perry for calling Twitter "Tweeter," the pathetically pompous Chris Matthews made the same mistake not once, but twice (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Good Morning America's John Berman on Tuesday offered a condescending, dismissive take on how the money "obsessed" presidential candidates spent their Fourth of July. Yet, four years ago, the same program offered a fawning look at what Barack Obama did on Independence Day.

After mentioning Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, Berman suggested that the Fourth of July could be "a chance to take a break from their recent big obsession, cash."

The journalist quickly followed this up by noting that the President has raised $60 million. Berman pointedly explained, "...Though he spent the day with men and women whose value is beyond priceless." (This was a reference to Obama's speech to U.S. troops at a barbeque.)

Conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart was on Saturday's "Fox & Friends" to discuss the double standard concerning how President Obama's gaffes are reported compared to the miscues of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.

In Breitbart's view, "Life for [Palin and Bachmann] is a permanent game of Jeopardy where the George Stephanopouloses of the world, he of the Clinton war room, are there to try to make them look stupid on YouTube" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Thursday's CBS Evening News and Friday's Early Show, CBS glossed over President Obama's aim to break a campaign promise with a proposal to raise taxes on people who make less than $250,000 a year. Both Chip Reid and Bill Plante noted that "the White House is also insisting on...a limit on deductions for people...making more than $200,000 a year," but didn't reference the Democrat's 2008 tax pledge.

Near the end of his report, which aired 44 minutes into the 6 pm Eastern hour, Reid highlighted the Obama administration's push for tax hikes: