Double Standards

The Boston Herald has reported that Mayor Tom Menino is threatening to make obtaining the necessary licenses for a family business to operate "very difficult" -- not because the business's products are controversial or hazardous, but because the privately-held company believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

The middle three paragraphs of an unbylined Associated Press report predictably watered down Menino's threatening posture against the Chick-fil-A fast-food chain to an issue of "discrimination" and made it appear as if there is some kind of rift between the president and the company (bolds are mine throughout this post):

On July 13, President Barack Obama told a campaign audience in Roanoke that "If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen." As Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters pointed out on Wednesday, it wasn't until July 17 that any of the Big Three broadcast TV news networks recognized the existence of the remark -- and two of them failed to run the actual quote.

Part of the reason for the avoidance is that the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, which seems to be serving as the establishment press's signal caller and official Obama administration water carrier, has given the remark little heed -- so little that, as is so often the case with controversial remarks made by leftists or Democrats, Obama opponent Mitt Romney had to force it into the news by incorporating it into his stump speech. At that point, as seen in Steve Peoples' Tuesday writeup carried at AZcentral.com (HT to an NB tipster; the story is already gone at the AP's national site), the wire service went into "mean Republicans attack" and "what he really meant" modes (bolds are mine):

When the head of a major fast food chain underscores his support for traditional marriage, lefty heads explode. Dan Cathy, son of Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett, told the Baptist Press on July 16 that his father's restaurant chain is, in fact, still conservative.

In response to a question pertaining to the franchise’s support of the traditional family, Cathy replied “guilty as charged.” The president and chief operating officer continued, “We are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that... we know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles."

Donnie Box, a steelworker in Missouri who lost his job and is the focus of an anti-Mitt Romney advertisement being run by a Super PAC that supports President Barack Obama, now says he will not vote to re-elect the president in November.

"I could really care less about Obama," the lifelong Democrat says in an article written by Mike Elk on the In These Times website before criticizing the president as "a jerk, a pantywaist, a lightweight, a blowhard. He hasn’t done a goddamn thing that he said he would do," he complained, adding:

Does MSNBC hype the bogeyman of racist "voter suppression" in a cynical ploy to alarm its liberal voter base? Only on days that end in "y."

Once again, network anchor Andrea Mitchell discarded any pretense of journalistic objective and played a game of softball with a liberal activist today, helping the Urban League's Marc Morial to denounce "voter suppression" laws -- that is voter ID laws -- that have passed in numerous states in recent years.

The Jurassic Press is missing much in their reporting on the $50 billion bailout of General Motors (GM).  The Press is open channeling for President Barack Obama - allowing him to frame the bailout exactly as he wishes in the 2012 Presidential election. 

The President is running in large part on the bailout’s $30+ billion loss, uber-failed “success.”  And the Press is acting as his stenographers.  An epitome of this bailout nightmare mess is the electric absurdity that is the Chevrolet Volt.  The Press is at every turn covering up - rather than covering - the serial failures of President Obama’s signature vehicle.

Back in May, a handful of Senate Democrats attempting to open a new offensive front against Republicans in the "War on Women" introduced The Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA). "Democrats cited statistics showing that women today are still paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, or $10,784 less a year on average. That’s the equivalent of 183 tanks of gas or 92 bags of groceries," Politico's  Matt Wong helpfully noted in a May 23 story.

One day later, the conservative-leaning Washington Free Beacon, published an article which exposed how the very same Senate Democrats out in front on the PFA were egregious violators when it came to a pay gap among members of their own congressional staffs. Reported Andrew Stiles:

Here's how a "Business Highlights" item at the Associated Press summarized the situation between Timothy Geithner and London banks whose officials had admitted to rigging the London Interbank Offered Rate ("Libor") on Friday evening: "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released documents Friday that show it learned five years ago of big banks understating their borrowing costs to manipulate a key interest rate. The documents also show Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was then president of the New York Fed, urged the Bank of England to make the rate-setting process more transparent."

Today, Charles Gasparino at the New York Post called total BS such pathetic media spin (bolds are mine):

Microsoft’s ill-advised marriage of convenience to NBC News has finally landed in divorce court, and it couldn’t have happened soon enough. Like any marriage built on a lie – in this case that MSNBC would be a legitimate news organization – it was doomed to fail.

The MSNBC brand is a tumor, corrupting everything it touches, and it’s good to see that Microsoft is finally cutting it off. Even though Microsoft untethered itself from MSNBC TV in 2005, MSNBC.com was still a stain on one of the most valuable, respected corporations in American history.

Democrats are at it again, claiming that Republicans, particularly House Republicans, are sabotaging the economy, while ignoring the quite effective job President Barack Obama has done to ruin the economy both on his own (regulatory and anti-fossil fuel hostility, wasteful green "investments," etc.) and with the help of Congressional Democrats when they controlled both Houses of Congress (stimulus, ObamaCare, trillion-dollar deficits, etc.).

The best argument against this nonsense is that if Republicans were really interested in hurting the economy, GOP governors wouldn't be doing good to even great jobs with their own states' economies. At the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Josh Lederman, reporting from the National Governors Association meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, attempted to frame a response to GOP governors' contentions (in bold after the jump) which qualifies as the howler of the day:

Media critic Howard Kurtz warned CNN on Friday that "to many people" it looks like the media has a massive double standard in its campaign coverage of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

"[W]hen you combine all the stories, all the airtime, all the column inches, it looks to many people, I'll just say this bluntly, like the press is giving much more aggressive scrutiny to Romney and his background than it ever gave to Barack Obama," Kurtz told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.  [Video below the break. Audio here.]

The national liberal media’s bias has eroded the public’s confidence in the news they get.  Americans’ distrust of the national media will continue to grow until the national media provides the public with objective news reports. Recent bias displayed by the national media has caused one of its long-time defenders to grow “weary of trying to defend the indefensible.” 

These recent remarks by former CBS producer Greg Kandra highlight the continued existence of the national media’s liberal bias.  As a result of the national media’s use of selectively edited clips to push its liberal agenda, Kandra stated that he cannot and will not defend his former colleagues against claims of liberal bias.

During Tuesday night's edition of CNN's Outfront, substitute host Tom Foreman departed from the network's usual liberal spin to accuse President Obama of failing to keep his promise of presiding over the most transparent presidential administration ever.

After running a clip of the president stating that “We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest transparency rules of any administration in history.” Foreman asked if Obama's claims “add up” regarding the “transparency tornado.”

Not only is the Associated Press aptly currently described as the Administration's Press -- as least as long as the White House's current occupant remains there -- it also seems to be serving as the Administration's Protection.

In a story about the "Lie-bor" scandal, wherein British banks have admitted to colluding to set the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) -- arguably the world’s most important benchmark for interest rates -- artificially low, AP reporter Martin Crutsinger "somehow" forgot that current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was President of the New York Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank during much of the time period in which Congressional investigators are interested. Clearly, they want to know what Geithner knew, and when he knew it. The first three paragraphs of Crutsinger's writeup, followed by his sole context-free mention of Geithner, follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Anticipating “a real defeat for Obama and the end of health-care coverage for many,” The New Yorker had several covers ready to go if ObamaCare was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, including one which depicted Chief Justice John Roberts poised to push an elderly woman in a wheelchair down the Court's stairs.

Francoise Mouly was so sure that ObamaCare would be struck down that she instructed her artists to come up with possible sketches for the magazine cover before the ruling. Yesterday, Mouly decided to publish an article showing readers several of the possible covers that the artists came up with but never used.

Sunday's front-page "political memo" from New York Times reporter Richard Stevenson played into the Obama campaign's hands by obsessing over Romney's supposedly ostentatious displays of wealth, in contrast to Barack Obama's down-home populism: "On Tricky Terrain of Class, Contrasting Paths."

The print edition featured large dueling photos contrasting a down-home President Obama at the Kozy Corners restaurant in Ohio, with Romney and family on a boat at his New Hampshire estate. The online headline was blunter: "Obama and Romney Gamble on Wealth Divide."

On Monday, New York Times reporters Michael Barbaro and Sarah Wheaton made much of a left-wing protest of Mitt Romney fundraising in the well-heeled Hamptons, "Romney Mines the Hamptons for Campaign Cash." The text box: "Protesters gather outside events in sprawling homes."

President Obama hauled in $15 million in Hollywood at a fundraiser on George Clooney's Hollywood estate on May10. Yet searches of Nexis and nytimes.com indicate the Times didn't even cover the fundraiser in its print edition, limiting event coverage to a noncritical blog post.

Certain events in the 2012 campaign make you ask how would the media respond if a particular story was about Mitt Romney rather than President Obama.  Take this past Friday, when President Obama was introduced at an Ohio rally by a man accused to stealing trade secrets from his former employer.

 According to a local CBS affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio, Daniel Potkanowicz has been ordered to pay $500,000 to his former employer after a judge ruled that Potkanowicz had stolen trade secrets.

The Huffington Post decries attacks on women – at least, those it agrees with. But the outlet has no problem with sexually sliming conservative women.  

The Huffington Post created a video mixing scenes of Republican congresswoman Jean Schmidt celebrating initial, inaccurate reports that Supreme Court struck down the individual mandate with the iconic orgasm scene from the movie “When Harry Met Sally.”

July 1 is traditionally the day when many new state laws take effect, and every year on or about that date, the Washington Post makes sure to inform its readers of some new laws hitting the books in Maryland and Virginia. This year, Marylanders are seeing tax increases, with residents of Montgomery County -- a significant portion of the Post's subscriber base -- disproportionately affected.

Yet in reporting on "A slew of new laws for Md., Va.," Post staffers Laura Vozzella and John Wagner buried infomation about the Old Line State's tax hikes. The first mention came in paragraph 4 out of the article's 34 paragraphs. What's more, Vozzella and Wagner dealt with Virginia's new laws first, meaning that more in-depth explanation of Maryland's tax increases only came 24 paragraphs into the article.

In a report currently time-stamped early Saturday morning, Emily Wilkins at the Columbus Dispatch claimed in her opening sentence covering Ohio's second We The People Convention in Columbus ("Fears fuel kinship at tea party convention") that "Tea party members are alone and scared — and to them, that’s a good thing."

Well, I was there this weekend in Columbus. I didn't see "alone" or "scared," or hear anyone say that such a combination of emotions would be "a good thing. Neither did the rest of Wilkins' report, some of which follows the jump:

Meet the Press host David Gregory displayed a stunning double standard throughout NBC's Thursday morning coverage of the Supreme Court ruling on ObamaCare. Prior to the decision, he warned of a "nightmare scenario" if the law was struck down. Hours later, following the Court upholding the law, Gregory cheered Chief Justice John Roberts for taking "a big step here" to keep the Court from being "too polarized." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Early the 7 a.m. et hour of Today, Gregory melodramatically fretted over the possibility of  ObamaCare being ruled unconstitutional: "What happens if it is struck down in part or in whole by a 5 to 4 decision? Would that not underscore how dysfunctional our government is, the major institutions of our government are? That is a real nightmare scenario, I think, for the political class in this country."

It seems that there will be little reason for the Obama campaign to bother issuing press releases as long as Julie Pace of the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, is around to breathlessly relay the information for them as some kind of exclusive, insider report.

If there's any difference between campaign hype and what Pace wrote in a theoretically objective news piece, it must be really subtle, because I didn't see it. Here goes (fawning and/or obsequious word choices are in bold):

In a particularly petty attempt to pump up President Obama and denigrate Mitt Romney, Tuesday's NBC Today brought on left-wing MSNBC host Alex Wagner for a supposed pop culture segment that devolved into Democratic campaign talking points. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Co-host Natalie Morales touted a new viral video that "reveals details about President Obama and Mrs. Obama's first date." Wagner gushed: "They always sort of had a high bar, as far as their husband and wife interactions.....The First Lady and the President first went and had lunch at the Art Institute of Chicago, then they took a walk down Michigan Avenue, and then they ended the date with a screening of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. The First Lady said it showed that he was hip, he was culturally sensitive. We know that it all ended in marital bliss."

Despite several updates to the story first reported by Bloomberg last night that the Democratic National Convention's "move" of its "celebration" originally scheduled to take place at Charlotte Motor Speedway is really a cancellation likely driven by money problems, the Associated Press has not updated its virtual relay of the DNC's related press release published late last night.

Additionally, in its brief story on Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill's decision not to attending the convention, the AP made no reference to the nine other prominent Democratic Party politicians who have decided they'd be better off not being seen in the same convention venue with their party's incumbent presidential candidate.

This one of the most obvious "if the shoe were on the other foot" items I've seen in some time.

If a Republican or conservative presidential candidate's campaign ever dared to suggest that supporters register their wedding, graduation, or other event so they could then ask friends and family to make donations to the candidate's election efforts in lieu of a gift, the ridicule wouldn't stop for the next year -- and, I should add, deservedly so. But the Obama Event Registry (Obama-Biden blog post here; HT Weasel Zippers), which has been out there for about 48 hours, has barely made an establishment press ripple. What follows is a graphic from the blog post, followed by its first four outraged comments, showing that the idea is not getting a warm, uh, reception.

On Thursday, at the Washington Examiner, Byron York concentrated on Obama's clear antipathy towards business as described in David Maraniss's recent book about President Obama (Barack Obama: The Story) relating to Dear Leader's brief stint at a company called Business International.

Though that's obviously a critical point to make during the 2012 campaign, a more foundational one is that this mindset, as well as most of Obama's stream of "embellishments" (most people would call them "lies") about his time at BI, were known or knowable well before the Illinois senator decided to run for president in early 2007 -- even the one that has the folks at Michelle Malkin's Twitchy.com all atwitter, namely that Obama didn't, as he claimed, have a secretary.

The count of prominent Democratic Party politicians who have decided not to attend the Democratic Party's convention in Charlotte, thereby attempting to avoid direct association with the formal renomination of incumbent President Barack Obama, is up to seven. Press coverage has been sparse. One can only imagine how much media end-zone dancing there would have been in 2004 had one governor, one senator and five congresspersons chosen not to attend the Republican National Convention to renominate George W. Bush.

On Thursday, the Hill had the story about the latest declared non-attendee, who admittedly is the least surprising addition to list (internal links are in original):

Here’s more proof that the media cynically use the environment as a hammer to whack Republicans: the non-existent response of ABC and muted comment by The New York Times about Obama’s refusal to attend a major environmental conference, contrasted with their fury 10 years earlier over a similar decision by President George W. Bush.

President Obama is not attending the United Nations Environmental Conference on Sustainable Development, informally known as Rio+20, scheduled from June 20 to June 22. Rio+20 seeks “to secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development, assess the progress to date and the remaining gaps in the implementation of the outcomes of the major summits on sustainable development, and address new and emerging challenges.”

CBS This Morning on Friday spun Mitt Romney's upcoming meeting in Utah with prominent Republicans and top fundraisers as a "secret summit." Just a week earlier, the morning newscast didn't even devote a full report to President Obama's fundraising jaunt to New York City, merely playing three soundbites on the Democrat's $40,000 per plate dinner at the home of liberal actress Sarah Jessica Parker.

Political director John Dickerson also bizarrely labeled the upcoming GOP event as "kind of a mix between a shareholders' meeting and a renewal of vows."