Culture/Society

The PBS NewsHour has yet to invite a strong conservative on the program to talk about the fiscal cliff.  Tuesday night they had New York Times columnist, left-wing economist, and Obama cheerleader Paul Krugman to detail his view.  Wednesday night they had moderately-conservative Sen. Bob Corker ( R-Tenn), but last night was the most interesting. PBS invited the Norquist of the left, Max Richtman, of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, who insisted we shouldn’t be in a rush to reform our entitlement spending. 

After all, when the unfunded liability of both programs is around $100 trillion dollars, what’s the big hurry? Where’s the fire? Suffice it to say, none of Richtman's claims were met with skepticism by anchor Judy Woodruff.  She continued with her interview, as if what Richtman said was fact.

In what appears to be the latest homage to the moribund if not completely defunct Occupy movement, Los Angeles Times writer Frank Shyong chronicled the lasting impact of the movement in a December 7 article, gushing that in its heyday it had “enjoyed widespread popularity, and politicians responded with resolutions of support.” 

Shyong lamented, however, that “as demonstrations wore on and public sentiment shifted, cities got tougher with protesters.” Oddly enough, Shyong failed to note a huge factor in the shifting public sentiment: Occupy camps were plagued with violent crimes, including rape. What's more, on at least one occasion, a child was left abandoned in one of the squalid squatters' camps.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. The extremely liberal MSNBC host was recognized in the spoken-word category for the audiobook version of her New York Times bestseller.

Maddow's nomination is an apt opportunity to remind our readers that an assortment of reviewers have critically panned the progressive commentator's polemic about the military-industrial complex for its blatant misrepresentation of history and glaring omissions.

Founded by Roy Beck in 1998, Numbers USA is a grassroots organization and an influential lobbyist group that concerns itself with immigration reform and the threat of mass amnesty. As the unemployment rate among the citizenry continues to grow, over one million permanent work authorizations are handed out each year to immigrants -- further saturating an already stagnant labor market.

Beck sat down for an interview with MSNBC.com's Jane C. Timm recently, only to find himself labeled as the "Grover Norquist of the immigration debate." With no intention of portraying him in a positive light, Timm argued that the 1.3 million grassroots members of Numbers USA will not allow Republican congressmen to moderate their stance on immigration reform.  And rather than consider it an anti-amnesty organization, in predictable fashion she presented the group as "racist" in motivation.

In a video posted at the Daily Caller by Jeff Poor (HT Hot Air), Fox News's Greg Gutfeld went after Bob Costas's opportunism and hypocrisy on gun rights in the wake of the Jovan Belcher tragedy. He also took on Jason Whitlock's inexcusable characterization of those who believe that the Constitution's Second Amendment means what it says and insist that our government to continue to act as if it does as racists.

The video and a transcript follow the jump (internal links added by me; bolds are mine):

Football Hall of Famer Joe Namath called out NBC's Bob Costas on Monday's Piers Morgan Tonight for gratuitously inserting his pro-gun control views into a NFL telecast: "As a football fan, I'm not up to that kind of a halftime take. There is a time and a place for it, and I wasn't pleased about that."

Namath also hinted that gun control efforts were ultimately futile because of humanity's unpredictable nature: "I think there's always going to be a problem dealing with firearms, with knives. It's the animal we are that cause the problems." [audio available here; video below the jump]

Jim Axelrod filed a completely one-sided report on Tuesday's CBS This Morning linking the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide to a lack of gun control inside the NFL  – and in the country in general. Axelrod turned to only pro-gun control advocates as talking heads – Brady Center flack Marcellus Wiley, NBC's Bob Costas, and New York Times sportswriter William Rhoden.

Rhoden blamed the widespread availability of guns in the U.S. for sportsmen getting involved in violent incidents: "Why do athletes love guns? Well, the reality is that this is a gun culture. Lots of people - and lots of people with money - own guns." The correspondent also outlined that liberal newspaper journalist "says the issue of guns and athletes is about youth, money, and perceived power." [audio clips available here; video below the jump]

When your network milked the "war on women" for all its worth, it's a little much to condescend to a conservative woman in a segment dealing with gun control and domestic violence, but Steve Kornacki turned up the volume on his boiler plate anti-gun talking points in a segment on the Dec. 3 edition of MSNBC's The Cycle that discussed Jovan Belcher's murder-suicide and the resulting exploitation by sports journalists like Jason Whitlock and Bob Costas.

The panel's lone conservative, columnist S.E. Cupp reasoned that blaming an inanimate object for violence is a dangerous and misguided assumption, but co-host and Salon contributor Steve Kornacki could not have disagreed more. [ video & transcript below ]

In an appearance on Monday's America's Newsroom program on Fox News, veteran sportscaster Jim Gray at first expressed what seemed like absolute agreement with NBC's Bob Costas regarding the need for more gun control in light of the horrific Jovan Belcher murder-suicide on Saturday.

In what turned into a sanctimonious lecture during halftime programming on Sunday Night Football, NBC's Costas endorsed an anti-gun screed by Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock. Asked for his thoughts by Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, Gray wholeheartedly agreed with Costas and Whitlock, but then oddly backtracked just as the interview was concluding [ video (via MRCTV's Ian Hanchett) and transcript below ]

On Monday's CBS This Morning, Cheesecake Factory CEO David Overton spotlighted the looming economic impact of Obamacare's implementation, especially on small enterprises: "For those businesses that don't cover their employees, they'll be in for a very expensive situation." Overton also warned that the cost of the law would be passed on to customers.

Anchor Norah O'Donnell raised the issue of the still-controversial health care law: "One of the things that's going to change, of course, in the new year is ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act. How do you implement that at Cheesecake Factory, and how will you pay for health care for all of your employees?" [audio clips available here; video below the jump]

One was a self-educated rail-splitter and circuit lawyer in humble frontier towns. The other is an Ivy League-educated radical who only ventured out from his comfortable Hyde Park digs for some day work stirring up trouble as a “community organizer.” But to watch MSNBC is to learn that Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama have so much in common.

In the run-up to Obama’s re-election and in the weeks since, as the movie “Lincoln,” opened, the media have hyped similarities between the two presidents. It’s helpful to them that the film is a product of high-profile liberal Steven Spielberg and associated with Participant Media, the same lefty company that produced Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Angus T. Jones told the truth. In a religious video posted on YouTube, the former child actor who’s the “half” man of the CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men” shocked the celebrity press by saying “I don’t want to be on it. Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth.”

Calling this show “filth” is like calling your Christmas tree an evergreen. Yet about 14 million Americans still love filling their head with this filthy show, and they don’t want to be told what they’re doing.

Stephen Colbert channeled the mother and teacher from the classic "A Christmas Story" on Thursday's Colbert Report, as he made fun of a proposed dormitory for undergraduates with gun permits at the University of Colorado. The only thing missing from his left-wing stereotypes of gun owners as trigger-happy yahoos was the famous "you'll shoot your eye out" line.

Colbert cracked that the move from the mountain state school would "forever ensur[e] that no one will think of it as a safety school." After pointing out that not one student had signed up for the dorm, he snarked, "Come on! This is college! It's time to get crazy - do shots, take shots, get shot....live a little - if not very long." As you might expect, CBS This Morning spotlighted the Colbert sketch on Friday. [audio available here; video below the jump]

How can someone who garnered nearly 60 million votes in a recent presidential election not be considered the least bit influential? As inexplicable as it sounds, that's what GQ Magazine declared when it selected Mitt Romney to headline its annual list of the 25 most uninspiring and insignificant people of the year. According to the author however, they were ranked in no particular order, "because all zeros are created equal."

Seeing a perfect opportunity to have a little fun at the expense of others, the hosts of MSNBC's The Cycle compiled their own list on Thursday. Token conservative S.E. Cupp appeared to have taken the assignment literally with a clip that introduced the world to a mild-mannered man from Indiana. Krystal Ball and Touré Neblett followed, and having some inkling of where their heads were at -- Cupp pleaded with them not to pick her. Instead they chose Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh respectively, gloating about how wrong they both were about Romney's legitimate chance to emerge victorious. [video below the page break]

CBS's morning and evening newscasts conspicuously glossed over reporting on actor Angus T. Jones calling his own show, Two and Half Men - which airs on the network - "filth." By contrast, ABC's Good Morning America covered the remark on Tuesday, and NBC's Today show aired a news brief on the story on Wednesday.

Correspondent Teresa Garcia did file a report on the controversy on Wednesday, but only after Jones issued an apology to his employers and coworkers. Garcia's segment was also banished to CBSNews.com.

You may recall when CBS fired Charlie Sheen early last year from the popular Two and a Half Men series for a string of "felony offenses involving moral turpitude." In the weeks and months that preceded this decision, an increasingly erratic Sheen received an inordinate amount of media attention for his drug-induced rants. To this day however, Sheen's bad boy persona is received warmly by the media, and he's been rewarded for it with ad spots for Fiat and DirecTV and even another show on the FX network that jokingly plays off his history of reckless hedonism.

By contrast, Sheen's former co-star, Angus T. Jones, the titular "half man" on the sitcom, has been castigated by the media for his recent religious conversion and subsequent YouTube testimonial in which he urged folks to avoid his popular TV series. Perhaps pressured by producers, Jones has since apologized for coming across as indifferent and unappreciative for the lucrative opportunity, but that hasn't stopped the media for characterizing Jones's video as another celebrity meltdown. [ video below the page break ]

In a story the New York Times appears not to have touched, Hunter Walker at Observer.com's Politicker ("about" page is here) reported on Tuesday that Thomas Lopez-Pierre, a black Harlem activist, "circulated an email" Monday night "in an attempt to plan a 'private meeting' to 'discuss the potential damage to the political empowerment of the Black and Hispanic community if Mark Levine, a White/Jewish candidate was elected to the 7th Council District in 2013.'" So we see that black Chicagoland establishment officials trying to ensure that the successor to the recently resigned Jesse Jackson Jr.  in Illinois' 2nd Congressional District are not alone in seeing a political office as somehow "belonging" to them.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required) has also picked up the story ("Race, Religion Used as Basis For an Attack"). Verbiage from the Politicker report, along with separate comments from James Taranto at the WSJ's Best of the Web, follow the jump (internal links are in originals; bolds are mine throughout this post):

Fox News Channel's Greta Van Susteren has reached her boiling point after seeing yet another person at MSNBC hurl a gratuitous, objectively false charge of "racism" at Arizona Senator John McCain for having the gall to believe that Susan Rice would not be a good choice to be the next Secretary of State.

She let it rip in a blog post Monday afternoon:

On Tuesday's CBS This Morning, Norah O'Donnell hounded popular Christian pastor Rick Warren over his support of defining marriage as being between one man and one woman. O'Donnell quoted the second greatest commandment of Christianity - "love thy neighbor as thyself" - to Warren as she asked, "Why do you oppose same-sex marriage?"

When the Saddleback Church senior pastor affirmed that he was "in favor of not redefining marriage," the anchor used the current trend in polls towards approval of such unions to lobby her guest to change his views:

MRC president Brent Bozell ripped The New York Times and the Washington Post in his November 17 column for their positive reviews of Colm Toibin's short novel "The Testament of Mary," which distorts the biblical Virgin Mary into an angry woman bitter at her son Jesus' crucifixion and filled with contempt for His followers. But these left-leaning rags weren't the only media outlets boosting Toibin's iconoclastic re-purposing of the Mother of God.

NPR boosted the Irish writer in an interview on the November 13 episode of Morning Edition. Correspondent Lynn Neary could have been mistaken for a publicist for Toibin as she unquestioningly forwarded his talking points on the book. Neary acknowledged that Toibin's warped version of Mary is a "controversial figure," but barely touched on how Christians - especially Catholics and Orthodox Christians - might be offended by his novel.

Filling in for Alex Wagner on Monday afternoon, Ari Melber of the left-wing Nation magazine did some thing on MSNBC's Now that Wagner and many of their colleagues have been reluctant to do themselves -- expose the deception and dishonesty of Obama on the subject of drone attacks. While there was a brief mention or two in the weeks and months that preceded the election, the coverage was never sufficient -- considering the circumstances.

It's a telling sign however, that such a report would air three weeks after the incumbent's decisive re-election victory, by a guest host at that. Armed with indisputable video evidence, Melber noted the disparity between the candidate and the president [video below the page break]:

Armed with so-called 'facts' disguised as the same liberal talking points we're all too familiar with, MSNBC's staff of bloggers published an article yesterday that detailed the top 10 comebacks that are guaranteed to confound and demoralize any Republican relative who dares to speak ill of Obama at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

The "Lean Forward" network won't let their bias take a rest even for the holidays, nevermind that politics is hardly polite conversation for the dinner table on any given holiday, let alone Thanksgiving. But family harmony is a small price to pay for dutifully defending President Obama to your relatives who aren't buying into the hope-and-change mantra.

This Thanksgiving, a record high of 42.2 million Americans will use food stamps to curtail the cost of a big meal. At a whopping expense of $72 billion to the taxpayer per year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has grown by 70 percent since 2007, an increase of over 15 million more people.

Despite acknowledging all of this, Elizabeth Flock of US News & World Report declared "More Americans will use food stamps to buy their Thanksgiving dinner this year than ever before," and implied these government handouts aren't as sufficient as they could be.

This is the eighth year I have looked into how the media treats these two topics: The use of "Christmas shopping season" vs. "holiday shopping season," and the frequency of Christmas and holiday layoff references.  

I have done three sets of simple Google News searches each year -- the first in late November, followed by identical searches roughly two and four weeks later. I will wait until just after Christmas to relay the full results, but feel compelled to note the following relating to today's "shopping season" searches, namely that the proportion containing "Christmas" came in at the lowest I've ever seen.

On Monday's CBS This Morning, Norah O'Donnell helped British author Frances Osborne advance discriminatory policy prescriptions from the left to get more women in high positions of political and economic power. Osborne stated that so-called "positive discrimination" is "necessary...to equal out the opportunity" for women. O'Donnell also reacted enthusiastically to a draft E.U. quota that would require businesses to set aside 40 percent of their boards for women.

The best-selling writer also hyped the continuing political fight over federal funding for abortion giant Planned Parenthood as "women...beginning to lose their rights." [audio clips available here; video below the jump]