This Week

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Sunday once again perfectly illustrated the intolerance of America's liberal media.

Appearing on ABC's This Week, he said the National Rifle Association is - and I quote! - "an insane organization" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Isn't it fascinating how in this supposedly "post-racial society," media members feel comfortable bashing white people at the drop of a hat?

Take New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who on ABC's This Week Sunday, in the middle of a discussion about immigration, felt it was necessary to talk about how Republicans are "doomed if they are only the party of old white people" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Friday it was revealed that the FBI is investigating Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) for allegedly sleeping with underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic.

Despite this, when Menendez was given a six-minute interview with Martha Raddatz on ABC's This Week Sunday, he was not asked one question about the investigation or the allegations (commentary follows with full transcript at end of post):

ABC and CNN contributor Donna Brazile - posing as one of Barack Obama's trusted defenders in the media like she always does! - got a much-needed education Sunday about the President's profligate spending.

Countering Brazile's propaganda on ABC's This Week, George Will said, "A dollar spent on A cannot be spent on B...This is our future. We're going to be an assisted living home with an Army. That's going to be the American government" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

George Will had an interesting take on the fiscal cliff agreement reached by Congress and the White House last week.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Will said, “I think people will look back on this deal as where liberalism passed an apogee and went into decline” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

George Will spoke an inconvenient truth about the media Sunday that should have everyone of its members sitting up and taking notice.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Will said, “The journalistic narrative about Washington today is 180 degrees wrong” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took a lot of heat from conservatives on ABC's This Week Sunday.

Shortly after Republican strategist Mary Matalin derogatorily asked him if he was an economist or a polemicist, George Will said, "I have yet to encounter someone who disagrees with you who you don't think is a knave or corrupt or a corrupt knave" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

George Will made a comment on ABC's This Week Sunday that is guaranteed to anger conservatives while delighting liberals in and out of the media across the fruited plan.

"Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying. It's old people" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Republican strategist Mary Matalin on Sunday asked New York Times columnist Paul Krugman an absolutely marvelous question.

As Krugman spewed typical Democrat talking points about the fiscal cliff negotiations on ABC's This Week, Matalin interjected, "Are you an economist or a polemicist? Just make up your mind" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In a colorful demonstration of the Washington press corps’ disdain for Grover Norquist and his anti-tax pledge, on Sunday’s This Week, a flustered ABC News/NPR veteran Cokie Roberts blurted out: “It’s...politically smart to cut the knees out from under Grover Norquist. I mean this guy is, you know, who is he? He’s an unelected lobbyist.”

She soon urged that “a certain amount of saying ‘the emperor has no clothes’” about Norquist is helpful. “To say that, I think is very useful.”

On the November 25 broadcast of ABC's This Week, former Bush advisor Matthew Dowd continued his shift away from the Republican Party by bashing conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, saying he’s a impediment to good government. For good measure he childishly drew the connection to the name of a Muppet character on Sesame Street.

"Grover Norquist is an impediment to good governing…and the only good thing about Grover Norquist is he’s named after a character from Sesame Street…and that’s the last I hope we hear of him,” according to Dowd.  It’s sad that some on the Right feel that fighting for the American taxpayer is “an impediment to good governing.”

America has created almost six trillion dollars in new debt in the past four years and Time magazine's Joe Klein wants to "bring back earmarks."

On ABC's This Week Sunday, Klein also said, "I think John McCain did a tremendous disservice to this country by making such a huge campaign about earmarks" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Two ABC News stars have proven, once again, the media’s obsession with raising taxes over any effort to cut a cent of spending. Two days after the election, anchor Diane Sawyer repeatedly pushed House Speaker John Boehner to move away from a conservative position and agree to President Obama’s wish to hike income tax rates, but on Sunday’s This Week, Martha Raddatz refused to press House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about getting Democrats to shift from their position and accede to any reduced spending.
 
Instead, she quizzed Pelosi about getting Republicans to accept a tax hike and how to get around such intransigence: “Have you seen any indication that the Republicans are open to raising rates?”

For approaching two weeks, liberal media members have been contorting themselves to make the case the President's victory on Election Day represented a mandate for his agenda.

When CNN contributor Donna Brazile tried this on ABC's This Week Sunday, George Will marvelously responded, "Almost every member of John Boehner's caucus won his or her seat by a much bigger margin than Mr. Obama won his renewed term" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Greta Van Susteren on ABC's This Week Sunday took exception with a cheap shot at Fox News from Nation magazine's Katrina vanden Heuvel.

This came after vanden Heuvel said of former CIA director David Petraeus, "Don't forget that over at your network at Fox, he was your candidate for a while" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

NBC’s David Gregory isn’t always a news reporter. As we're seeing with increasing frequency on that network, he's squashing stories. Call him an unreporter. On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” he showed the extent to which he'll vaporize any suggestion that Team Obama failed to offer adequate protection from terrorists at our consulate in Benghazi.

Businesswoman Carly Fiorina slammed Obama’s Libya response: “That attack went on for seven hours…[with the] Secretary of Defense saying he denied requests for help over that seven hours.” Gregory cut her off: “We’ll get to Libya a little bit later.” Surprise: It never came up again.

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume upbraided the press for its lack of interest in pursuing the Obama administration’s misstatements and dissembling on what they knew before and after the Benghazi terrorist attacks, lamenting on Fox News Sunday that “one of the problems we’re having here is, that it has fallen to this news organization, Fox News and a couple others, to do all the heavy lifting on this story.”

A “couple of others” may be generous. CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson is about the only other major news outlet journalist showing any interest. “The mainstream organs of the media that would be after this like a pack of hounds, if this were a Republican President,” Hume observed, “have been remarkably reticent.”

Andrew Sullivan made a fool of himself on ABC's This Week Sunday.

For the entertainment pleasure of viewers, George Will and PBS's Gwen Ifill assisted the Obama-loving Daily Beast columnist (video follows with transcript and commentary):

ABC analyst Matthew Dowd on Sunday cheered the "laudable" Candy Crowley for propping up Barack Obama with wrong information about Libya during last week's debate. Referring to a contentious exchange between the President and Mitt Romney over when the White House called the attack a terrorist indicent, Dowd enthused, "...What Candy Crowley did, I actually thought, was laudable, because what happens in this whole thing is the truth becomes a casualty." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Dowd, appearing on This Week,  lamented a media culture where "we're just supposed to make accusations back and forth to each other and nobody's supposed to correct and say, 'by the way, that's not true.'" Of course, Obama did not initially call the violence in Benghazi a terrorist attack." As the Washington Times explained, he "used the word 'terror' exactly once, late in his [September 12th Rose Garden] address."

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman, who three weeks ago derided Mitt Romney for how he “acts...as if he learned his foreign policy at the International House of Pancakes,” on Sunday’s Meet the Press dismissed concerns over how the Obama administration handled Benghazi before and after the attacks. “To me,” he declared, “this is an utterly contrived story in the sense that ‘this is the end of,’ you know, ‘Obama’s foreign policy.’”

Over on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos ludicrously argued: “Hasn’t the White House been relatively transparent?”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman made a fool of himself on ABC's This Week Sunday.

Seconds after claiming "The press just doesn't know how to handle flat out untruths," Krugman called factual misstatements by President Obama during Wednesday's debate "minor fudges" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

There were serious fireworks on the set of ABC's This Week Sunday.

Mostly at odds were George W. Bush aide Mary Matalin and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman with the former eventually telling the latter, "You're hardly credible on calling somebody else a liar" (video follow with transcript and commentary):

Leading into tomorrow’s presidential debate, journalists are busy setting expectations for the candidates. On Sunday’s Good Morning America, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos argued that Mitt Romney is under “huge, huge” pressure: “He is behind right now. He is behind nationally, he’s behind in all of the battleground states. This is the last big audience that Mitt Romney is going to have with about four and a half weeks left to go.”

But more undecided voters will be swayed by the media’s post-debate spin about who won and who lost than by any pre-debate expectations. Reviewing the last several campaigns, MRC analysts have found a clear trend of network reporters fawning over the performance of liberal candidates, while harping on any perceived weaknesses or gaffes from conservatives.

One of the most reliable pro-Democratic pundits is none other than George Stephanpoulos — not especially surprising, given his track record as a loyal operative for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, but hardly the objective, unbiased voice touted by ABC News. MRC has documented how, in eight out of the last nine general election presidential debates (every one since he joined ABC News in 1997), Stephanopoulos has gone on his network’s airwaves to claim victory for the Democratic candidate, all in the guise of offering impartial analysis. [Video review below the jump.]

ABC's Good Morning America hasn't once reported on U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's claim on the September 16, 2012 edition of This Week that the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya was "a spontaneous - not a pre-meditated - response to what had transpired in Cairo." Even worse, the morning show hasn't reported on the subsequent developments on the consulate attack over the past 12 days that cast doubt on Ambassador Rice's statement.

NBC's Today show also hasn't covered Rice's talking points on the attack, after she appeared on Meet the Press on the same day as her This Week appearance. News reader Natalie Morales merely reported on September 19 that "the White House says there is currently no evidence that last week's deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was planned and pre-meditated. Officials say it appears that the violence was sparked by that anti-Islam film made in the U.S." Two days later, Morales gave an update on how "the White House is now classifying the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya as a terrorist attack....But intelligence officials now believe it was a planned attack in the guise of a protest."

Both of those programs provided voluminous coverage of Romney's "47%" tape, but have no time to scrutinize the Obama administration's public statements about an incident that claimed the life of an American ambassador?

There is clearly no embarrassment threshold at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press.

In a dispatch today, an unbylined AP report headlined "Romney: Benghazi a 'Terrorist Attack'" seems to act as if this is some kind of revelation to the GOP nominee even though everyone except Obama administration insiders desperately trying to bring life to the corpse formerly known as the Arab Spring have been saying that for well over a week. It gets much worse than that in the report's third paragraph:

Each morning, NewsBusters has been showcasing the most egregious bias the Media Research Center has uncovered over the years — four quotes for each of the 25 years of the MRC, 100 quotes total — all leading up to our big 25th Anniversary Gala September 27. (Click here for details and ticket information.)

If you’ve missed a previous blog, recounting the worst of 1988 through 1996, you can find them here. Today, the worst bias of 1997: Fawning over Bill Clinton as a candidate for Mt. Rushmore; impugning conservative Senator Jesse Helms as a “terrorist;” and a classic New York Times headline: “Crime Keeps On Falling; but Prisons Keep On Filling.” [Quotes and video below the jump.]

"I think this Democratic Convention was really over the top in terms of abortion. Every single speaker talked about abortion. And you know at some point you start to alienate people."

So astonishingly said ABC's Cokie Roberts on Sunday's This Week (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"The Romney campaign slogan should be the title of Paul Krugman’s book which is 'End This Depression Now' because these are depression level [employment] numbers. And, if the Republican Party cannot win in this environment, it has to get out of politics and find another business."

So said George Will on ABC's This Week Sunday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

When the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks preview Vice President Joe Biden’s 2012 Democratic National Convention speech, will they fill their programs with a montage of the mental mistakes that have plagued him over the years? If recent coverage is any indication, they will choose to bypass Biden’s bumbling.

While the Big Three networks were quick to make fun of GOP vice presidential selections in the past from Dan Quayle to Sarah Palin for their campaign trail stumbles, they’ve either downplayed or completely ignored Biden’s most embarrassing and offensive moments. From insensitively telling a wheelchair-bound state senator to “Stand up!” to not recognizing how many letters there are in the word “jobs,” the media have let Biden get away with gaffes that would have gotten GOP VP picks pilloried. (Video compilation after the jump)