Media Bias Debate

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is at it again, telling us peons that we're not deserving of our full measure of yet another freedom, this time to express ourselves.

As reported by Dana Rubenstein at CapitalNewYork.com (HT The Blaze), "As it turns out, Bloomberg, the highest-profile cheerleader for New York City's burgeoning tech scene, doesn't really like the social media revolution upon which much of it is premised." Excerpts after the jump reveal that Bloomberg wants tech, but only on his terms:

Apparently the journalistic disease known as obsessive-compulsive interactive map publishing is spreading.

Late last year, Gannett's Journal News in White Plains, New York created a firestorm when it published an interactive map of gun permit holders in two counties north of New York City, obviously giving criminals, depending on how they target victims, the identity of places to rob to get guns or, by inference, people they could be comfortable wouldn't be carrying concealed weapons. On Wednesday evening, the Des Moines Register published an item still present on its site discussing the general degree of presence or absence of resource officers at Iowa schools. It also published a "handy" interactive map, since taken down, of which schools have resource officers, which ones don't, and which ones didn't respond to a survey on the topic. Excerpts from the report follow the jump (HT Newsmax via The Blaze):

Note to Piers Morgan: Journalism isn't rocket science and making a few phone calls can go a long way.

Giddy about a Newtown search warrant that showed there was an NRA certificate found in the Lanza household,  Morgan tweeted giddily: 

I want to hear Wayne LaPierre explain what checks they made on Adam Lanza before sending him a @nra certificate. #Newtown

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) March 28, 2013

Yet, this is an abject lie.

So, Politico jumped the shark on gay marriage yesterday in reporting that Justice Elena Kagan that she had a ‘gotcha’ moment during yesterday’s hearings on the Defense of Marriage Act.

But a real ‘gotcha’ moment would have been if Politico did their homework and resurrected Kagan’s past comments about gay marriage from 2009, when she was awaiting confirmation to the post of solicitor general and she insisted in the answer to a questionnaire that “there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.”

In Elena Kagan's DOMA 'Gotcha' Moment, Jennifer Epstein and Josh Gerstein gushed that:

Just when you think you've heard it all, along comes Philip Kent -- chairman and chief executive officer of the Turner Broadcasting System, which owns the Cable News Network – who says that CNN “is a serious news network” that viewers would appreciate more if they would watch the channel “more critically.”

Kent made the laughable comments during an interview published in this week's edition of Broadcasting and Cable magazine, when he admitted that the “biggest misconception about CNN is that it's a liberal news network,” which “drives me crazy” because “it's not.”

Actress and Tennessee resident Ashley Judd announced today that she is not running for Senate in Kentucky.

Politico has two items on this political development. The main story by Maggie Halberman and Manu Raju defensively describes her as "an eighth-generation Kentuckian." The second is a very short post from Caitlin McDevitt linking to the longer original which merely excerpts five paragraphs from the longer item. It's at that post where a commenter made the following observation:

A search at the Associated Press's national web site tonight at 11 p.m. ET on "Gosnell" returned one result: a very early Monday morning story by the wire service's Maryclaire Dale. This would indicate that the self-described Essential Global News Network hasn't carried a subsequent national report on the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Pennsylvania and Delaware abortionist accused of eight murders, one of a patient and seven of babies allegedly born alive, even though there have now been three additional days of trial proceedings and testimony.

The later paragraphs of Ms. Dale's report includes a disturbing one describing Gosnell -- disturbing more because of what it may say about the AP reporter than Gosnell -- and two devoted to an attempted defense of the abortionist which, at least as written, constitute no defense at all (bolds are mine):

On February 28, though he hedged a bit, Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, wrote the following about prospects for economic growth: "The only impediment may be the across-the-board government spending cuts that kick in Friday — especially if those cuts remain in place for months."

Having established the template, the self-described Essential Global News Network has apparently decided that they need to do all they can to promote it. After today's sharp decline in consumer confidence as reported by the Conference Board, AP reporter Marcy Gordon's related dispatch opened with a whine about "massive government spending cuts," tried to reinforce her claim in a later paragraph, and saved contradictory information for an even later one (bolds are mine throughout this post):

In an item about how Arizona Senator John McCain is sticking to his characterization of illegal immigrants as "illegal," Kevin Cirilli at the Politico relayed without the least bit of skepticism a claim by illegal-immigrant advocates that those who enter the country illegally should only be called "illegal" if they have previously been deported, and that those who illegally overstay their visas really aren't acting illegally at all.

McCain's current position (who knows what it will be tomorrow or a week for now?), as quoted by Cirilli, is that "Someone who crosses our borders illegally is here illegally. You can call it whatever you want to, but it’s illegal. I think there’s a big difference between someone who does something that’s illegal and someone who’s undocumented. I’ll continue to call it illegal.” Illegal-immigrant advocates -- incorrectly, as will be seen -- don't see it that way (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Sometimes one learns interesting things perusing stories at tech web sites.

A report by Michelle Maisto at Eweek about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has one nugget of information which has been out there for a while, and another which I believe hasn't been and still isn't widely known about both Mayer and her former employer Google. Both items indicate to me that Mayer as a woman and the two tech companies involved are getting free passes from the press which a male CEO and non-tech would likely not receive. Excerpts follow the jump (internal link is in original; bolds are mine):

The liberal media's push for gun control has long included the tactic of attempting to shame the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other gun rights activists into silence. That tactic was once again deployed by MSNBC's Thomas Roberts this morning in his interview with liberal Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), who is calling on the nation's oldest civil rights organization to cease and desist robocalls to phone numbers in the Newtown, Connecticut, area.

At no point in the softball interview, however, was it mentioned that some Newtown parents like Mark Mattioli and Bill Stevens have testified in opposition to fresh gun control laws nor that there's been a spike in applications for gun permits in Newtown following the mass shooting, perhaps because those facts cut against the notion that the entire Newtown area is anti-NRA as a result of December's tragedy.

Don't tell us that Al Sharpton and MSNBC are hypocrites?  Noooo!!  The Reverend Al opened his show by praising President Obama's efforts to promote tougher gun control laws.  But 28 minutes into the show, a commercial appeared for, of all things  . . . Henry Repeating Rifles.  

Go to Henry Rifle's website and you'll find one rifle described as "big, brutal and beautiful" and noting that it fires ammunition "said to have killed more game, big and small, and more men, good and bad, than any other in existence."  Another model offered for sale, the AR-7, is based on a military rifle, Henry emphasizing that given its lightweight design "you can carry a large quantity of ammunition."  Oh the horror!  View the video after the jump.

While the liberal news media have been trumpeting Mayor Michael Bloomberg's new $12-million ad buy as an attempt to push federal gun control legislation, a glaring irony of one such ad is being ignored by the media: an actor in a Mayors Against Illegal Guns ad entitled "Responsible" is handling a shotgun in an irresponsible manner, violating three cardinal rules of gun safety.

Washington Times senior opinion editor and gun aficionada Emily Miller explains (emphases mine):

AP Reporter Dina Cappiello at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, has put up what I guess is supposed to be an analysis of President Obama's possible actions relating to "climate change" that is so bad that an adequate critique would require a college term paper -- at one of the few colleges left which doesn't brainwash and intimidate students into believing the alleged unassailability of contentions about man-caused "global warming."

So other than noting that Cappiello "somehow" forgot to note a Bloomberg News report about Obama's plan to "expand the scope of a Nixon-era law that was first intended to force agencies to assess the effect of projects on air, water and soil pollution" to now include "climate change" -- an action which if carried out to its full potential could stop virtually any project anywhere -- I'll just post key paragraphs and let commenters have what promises to be virtually endless fun picking Cappiello's work apart:

One is so dreadfully boring she makes watching paint dry seem fascinating. Another once got arrested for defacing a poster in a New York subway station. A third has this nasty habit of showing way too much flesh on her HBO program. So what do Chelsea Clinton, Mona Eltahawy, and Lena Dunham, respectively, have in common, besides their liberal political leanings? Well, at least as far as Time magazine is concerned, theirs are just three of "The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013."  The magazine charged its section editors with finding feeds that "stand out for their humor, knowledge and personality."

Clinton and Eltahawy made the list under the "activist" category, while Dunham made the "celebrities" list. While there are plenty of relatively apolitical Tweeps in the mix, Time made sure to make Pete Souza, the president's photographer, one of the 10 honored in the arts and photography list. Below the page break you'll see the Souza tweet they chose, along with the picture of President Obama that accompanied it, as well as the magazine's state reason for why they like Souza's feed:

Almost eight years after the Supreme Court's odious Kelo v. New London ruling and eight years of press failure to report the utter lack of subsequent development in the affected area in New London, Connecticut, construction might start taking place in a couple of months -- emphasis on "may."

What's notable about how Kathleen Edgecomb at the New London Day wrote up her Sunday story is how hard she worked, as the Day has since the Court's ruling, to make sure that the term "Kelo" did not appear. That's "Kelo" as in Susette Kelo, the lead plaintiff who tried to keep her pink house where it was and save the properties of other plaintiffs from destruction as a result of eminent domain, and who was ultimately thwarted by a Supreme Court ruling which radically misinterpreted the Constitution's Fifth Amendment to to allow goverments to take properties for "public purpose" (i.e., any conceivable reason) instead of limiting such seizures to "public use" (e.g., roads, bridges, and other public works). Excerpts from her Edgecomb's report, including the relevant word-dodging, follow the jump (bolds are mine):

Al Arabiya is a Saudi-owned television news channel launched in March 2003 the channel is based in Dubai. It claims to have conducted the first media interview of Barack Obama after he became President.

As I noted earlier this evening, Obama spoke last week under a banner of Yasser Arafat, "the father of modern terrorism." That move is being seen as a gaffe by the very few, almost none of whom are in the establishment press, who have even noticed it. What if it's not a gaffe, but rather an intentional move? That may be the case if what Al Arabiya reported on Friday, seen after the jump, is indeed true (HT Examiner.com):

Searches at the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times done at 9:30 p.m. on "Obama Arafat" (not in quotes) returned nothing relevant to the matter I am about to note. A Google News search on the same term (sorted by date) returns only about a half-dozen relevant items (another very recent one is missing, and I'll get that one in a later post this evening).

On Thursday in Ramallah, as Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard blog noted, U.S. President Barack Obama "addressed the assembled journalists while standing under a Yasser Arafat banner." Arafat is rightly considered the “father of modern terrorism.” Since U.S. establishment press coverage is non-existent, I'll take readers to an outraged Nile Gardiner at the UK Telegraph to express how utterly offensive Obama's silently condoning Arafat's legitimacy really is:

The headline at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, seems to make Attorney General Eric Holder look heroic: "Holder averts furloughs of prison staffers." No, all he did was get forced into prioritizing how he should allocate resources in a department where spending grew from $26.54 billion in fiscal 2008 to $31.16 billion in fiscal 2012, a 17% increase.

The AP's Pete Yost did his part to make Holder seem heroic, and, as will be seen later, avoided mentioning one probably major motivator (bolds are mine throughout this post):

In a brief item Friday at Politico, Donovan Slack reported that President Obama has withdrawn his nomination of Caitlin Halligan for the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit.

Concerning Republican senators' opposition to her nomination, Slack said it was "because they said she had a record of advocacy and an activist view of the judiciary" without citing specifics. It's almost as if Slack knew he had to write something, but wished to keep a rare Republican success at stopping an objectionable court nominee as vague and quiet as possible. In early March, the folks at Eagle Forum compiled a useful list of how awful Halligan would have been had her appointment made it through the Senate (bolds are mine throughout this post):

As hard as the establishment press has worked over the years to make certain politicians appear to be somehow out of touch with the situation of average Americans, you might think that two legislative leaders complaining about cuts in their Congressional offices' allowance might be news. One whined that her aides, some of whom "earn" in excess of $100,000 per year, are being "priced out" of a good lunch on Capitol Hill.

Don't be silly. The press only cares about making Republicans and conservatives appear out of touch. The complainers in question are Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also heads the Democratic National Committee, and longtime Democratic Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia. The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard noted Schultz's and Moran's whining on Wednesday:

Silly me. I thought a "balanced budget" was defined as one where receipts equal outlays and there is no surplus or deficit during the period involved.

Not to David Espo, who is chief congressional correspondent at the Associated Press. In an "analysis" piece which looks more like a tool to begin reframing the language of "balance" to mean what Barack Obama and his Democratic Party really want it to mean -- namely to describe a "budget" containing deficits as far as the eye can see that has lots of tax increases and "spending cuts" which based on the historical record never materialize -- Espo showed once again why it's more than fair to call his employer and its journalists "the Administration's Press" (bolds are mine):

Today, on the third anniversary of the enactment of state-managed healthcare, aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka ObamaCare, it's worth noting a precursor of what we can expect from the establishment press as the law's implementation presses on. It can be summed up in eight words: "Hype the alleged good. Ignore the obviously bad." Distilled in four words: "Toe the administration line."

Two examples of how the press is ignoring the obviously bad came from the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, in its March 6 caoverage of the contents of the Federal Reserve's "beige book" released that day. The Fed's report contained five specific comments, four of them negative and one neutral, about the current and imminent impact of ObamaCare. None made it into either AP report. Many other outlets also ignored or minimized those comments.

I don't know whether AP Food Industry Writer Candice Choi misidentified the union responsible for the final demise of Hostess late last year deliberately or out of ignorance.

But in the final five paragraphs of her report on the company's sale of several of its best-known brands to two investment groups, Choi definitely blew it (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Are congressmen four times as important as the President? CNN spent over four times more airtime questioning claims made by Rep. Michele Bachmann against President Obama than it did on President Obama's falsehood on the sequester.

Three weeks ago, CNN reporter Dana Bash corrected President Obama's statement that Capitol Hill janitors and police would receive a pay cut because of the sequester. Her report aired four times on CNN that weekend, for a total of three minutes of coverage. In contrast, Bash's confrontation with Bachmann got over four times more coverage this week.

On Monday, President Obama tapped Thomas Perez, currently the head of the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, to take the helm at the Department of Labor, replacing outgoing Secretary Hilda Solis.  This will be the third controversial Cabinet appointment after Brennan and Hagel.  In covering the story, Peter Baker of the New York Times mentioned Republican opposition to his nomination, but failed to mention Perez’s radical past preceding his service in the Obama administration, much less his controversial actions while at Justice.

According to Investors Business Daily, Perez was involved in the following:

A Marine Corps official accuses the Senate majority leader of "pure political posturing on the backs of these dead Marines" and the networks whistle right by it. There is no question what Harry Reid is implying during his disgraceful remarks on the Senate floor. He links the sequester to the deaths of seven Marines, and ABC, CBS, and NBC censor the story by giving it ZERO seconds of coverage.

His conduct is disgusting, and so is theirs. [read more below page break]

Much of the press is describing the EU's demand that Cyprus seize a portion of bank account holders' deposits, a demand rejected yesterday by the island nation's legislature, as a "tax."

I think it's reasonable to suggest that this characterization is designed to minimize the frightening authoritarianism the EU has just attempted. In a bit of a pleasant surprise, one organization openly calling the move an attempt at "seizure" is the Associated Press.

At the Washington Post's Post Politics blog on Monday, Juliet Eilperin revealed that the White House has notified participants invited to the April 1 Easter Egg Roll that the event "is subject to cancellation due to funding uncertainty surrounding the Executive Office of the President and other federal agencies."

Eilperin only considered the White House's latest obvious example of "no petty and partisan gesture left behind" a partisan matter when a Republican who hasn't held political office for 15 years objected (bolds are mine):

A true "watchdog press would be all over" President Obama's "moving the goalposts" on the federal budget, NewsBusters senior editor Rich Noyes told Fox Business Network's Stuart Varney on Monday's Varney & Co.

Instead, the media are falling down on the job, failing to note how the president has broken promise after promise on federal spending, both from his 2008 campaign and subsequently as president: