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If we post this story on Facebook, will the company remove it? According to a new study from the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) and the American Center for Law and Justice, there's a good chance it will.

NRB conducted a study of "the practices of Apple and its iTunes App Store, Google, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, as well as Internet service providers AT&T, Comcast and Verizon." Its conclusion: with the notable exception of Twitter, "social media websites are actively censoring Christian viewpoints.

It's no secret that the establishment press continues to serve as a virtual PR mouthpiece for Planned Parenthood. Among the canards employed in its defense is that the organization provides a wondrous array of reproductive health services. Abby Johnson, a former Texas facility director for the organization and others have shown that abortion constitutes 98% of such "services," and that taxpayer funds which aren't supposed to pay for abortions are routinely "combined into one pot, not set aside for specific services."

For several years, Life Dynamics Incorporated has documented an even more sinister aspect of Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry which its press defenders steadfastly refuse to call out, namely that it takes the lives of a disproportionate number of pre-born African-American and Hispanic babies. A new study by LDI ("Racial Targeting and Population Control") shows that this result is no accident, as, in LDI's words, "family planning" clinics "are disproportionately placed into minority neighborhoods" (full PDF report; HT Life News; bolds are mine throughout; internal link added by me):

About the only "good" thing you can say about the Associated Press's coverage of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella is that they have been consistent. That is, the wire service, led by reporter Michael Rubinkam, up to and including today, has consistently and disgracefully failed to tag the infamous "Kids for Cash" jurist and his judicial colleague in crime Michael Conahan as a Democrat.

The consistent failure is all the more unforgivable because, as shown here, one the earliest AP reports on the topic clearly stated that "Both are Democrats." Shortly thereafter, the sentence disappeared. Since then, to my knowledge (shown here and here), in the 2-1/2 years since the story first broke, no AP report on what the it has described as "one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record" has tagged either judge as a Democrat.

On August 2 on the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that the economy under George W. Bush lost eight million jobs.

PolitiFact, which occasionally seems to engage in verbal gymnastics to give Democrats and leftists the benefit of the doubt, was more than a little annoyed with Reid's claim, giving it a rating of "Pants on Fire." As will be demonstrated later, virtually no one else in the press has deemed Harry's howler newsworthy.

Here are excerpts from PolitiFact's pommeling (HT Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin's place, where the preferred evaluation is "Liar, liar, pomegranates on fire"):

You don’t have to believe in karma to find the irony in the fact that the Web giant Google is finding itself in the cross hairs of the same pressure groups that it funded back when it was pushing heavily for “network neutrality.”

The latest cause célèbre among this crowd is “search neutrality,” the idea that somehow the government needs to get into the business of Internet search engines.

In a late Monday morning report, the Associated Press's Erica Werner wondered why "the White House has yet to take any new steps on gun violence" he supposedly promised in the wake of the January shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Either Werner or the headline writers at AP are getting extraordinarily impatient, as seen in the headline which follows the jump:

Many people, including yours truly, believe that one of the primary reasons for the Politico's existence is to carry negative stories about Democrats and leftists which the rest of the establishment press then mostly chooses to ignore ("Why should we cover that? It's at the Politico already").

President Obama's more than half-empty campaign fundraising stop in Miami Monday is a case in point. As far as I can tell, only the Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown ("Empty seats: Obama fundraiser underwhelms") and Mary Bruce at ABC's Political Punch blog, whose item was also referenced at ABC's The Note, covered the politically embarrassing situation.

On Wednesday evening in Europe (12:31 p.m. Eastern Time), in what it was already describing as "the world's deadliest known outbreak of E. coli," the Associated Press reported that "No cause for the outbreak has yet been found," while farmers on the continent were petitioning the EU for hundreds of million of dollars in compensation.

By midday European time (6:27 a.m. ET) on Friday, June 10, it was known ("Sprouts are cause of E. coli outbreak") that the contaminated food had come from Germany, when investigators "linked separate clusters of patients who had fallen sick to 26 restaurants and cafeterias that had received produce from the organic farm."

It is not my intention to get involved in a debate on farming techniques. But it seems obvious that if the outbreak came from an "organic" farming enterprise, follow-up stories should continue to mention that origin. Failures to mention organic farming have occurred often enough at the AP that one begins to wonder if those omissions are deliberate -- especially when coupled with the wire service's complete lack of coverage identifying skepticism, of which there is plenty, about the safety of organic farming practices.

Last time it was your refrigerator's ice maker, and we wondered what the media would come with next. They have outdone themselves. The latest climate culprit: Internet search engines.

The Vancouver Sun calculated in an article last week that each search engine submission emits a minuscule one to 10 grams of carbon dioxide via a small amount of electricity usage. Add up the hundreds of millions of daily submissions, the Sun wrote, "and you're making a serious dent in some Greenland glaciers" (h/t Hot Air headlines).

Earlier today, NB's Tim Graham noted that the establishment press has given the silent treatment to a study by Timothy Conley of the University of Western Ontario and Bill Dupor of Ohio State University showing that the stimulus plan passed in February 2009 was a major net economic loser. In the first paragraph of the study, the authors revealed their core estimate that  the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act "created/saved 450 thousand government-sector jobs and destroyed/forestalled one million private sector jobs." That's a net loss of 550,000 jobs "destroyed/forestalled."

To test Tim's contention that "Our media only cites studies which estimate the number of jobs Team Obama 'saved or created,'" I did searches on Dupor's last name at the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and got back the following results:

Yesterday evening (late afternoon West Coast time), Phil Bronstein at the San Francisco Chronicle informed his readers that one of its reporters had been banned by the Obama administration:

The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.

 

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.

University of Virginia media professor Siva Vaidhyanathan on Sunday said the Huffington Post is a bigger threat to journalism than Google.

Such occurred during a discussion about the internet behemoth on CNN's "Reliable Sources" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The fate of former Luzerne County, Pennsylvania Judge Mark Ciavarella is in the hands of a jury tonight.

After an initial media slip-up that occurred and was quickly "corrected" when he and a fellow judge were indicted two years ago ("Un-Name That Party" proof here), Ciavarella's party affiliation (Democrat, natch) has gone virtually unmentioned.

One such non-party-identifying example (overall details to follow) this evening comes from the Associated Press's Michael Rubinkam. Those who are unaware of the outrages allegedly perpetrated by the these judges need to brace themselves:

When the legislators and good-government people who drafted the law requiring the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to audit and render an opinion on the financial statements of the federal government as a whole and the major departments within it, they must have known that early-year results would not be very pleasant. But I also suspect that they thought the shame of being exposed as having unauditable records would be lead to constructive action and improvement.

Maybe on the margins, but not on the whole, as this GAO press release addressing its report on Uncle Sam's financial statements last week tells us:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) cannot render an opinion on the 2010 consolidated financial statements of the federal government, because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.

A funny thing happened on the way to finding yet another year of media emphasis on the use of "holiday" vs. "Christmas" in describing the shopping season.

Google News searches conducted this morning at about 7:30 ET on "Christmas shopping season" and "holiday shopping season" came back with the highest percentage of "Christmas" results I've seen in the six years I've been doing these searches. Not that the result is yet impressive, but at least it's an improvement:

• "holiday shopping season" (in quotes) -- 4,040 (79.1%)
• "Christmas shopping season" (in quotes) -- 1,070 (20.9%)

Compared to previous late-December results ("holiday" v. "Christmas"), that result is indeed a noticeable uptick:

There are many areas where the establishment press's terminology preferences are significantly out of sync with everyday usage by the general public. To name just two examples, the ever so PC press routinely replaces publicly favored and more informative terms such as "illegal immigrants" and "Muslim terrorists" with "undocumented workers" and "militants." And of course, we can't forget the press's affection for "a certain late-term pregnancy-ending procedure," when it's really "partial-birth abortion."

Though the disconnect I'm about to describe isn't as serious as the ones just noted, there is another area where press terminology is at wide variance with the public's preferences. That would be in how to describe the shopping season that occurs from Thanksgiving until the end of the year.

For a while, the press's terminology choices seemed to be winning over retailers. But at least this year, that isn't so, as noted in an item at Advertising Age (HT to Tim Graham at NewsBusters, who tweeted on this about 10 days ago):

Shortly after the Labor Department announced a very disappointing jump in the unemployment rate to 9.8 percent, Google News featured as its top story an Associated Press article published Thursday predicting "the tight job market may be easing at last."

Here's a screen cap of Google News from about an hour ago:

This is the sixth 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.

A graphic containing key results from the past five years is here.

The results of this year's first set of searches, done at roughly 3:00 p.m. this afternoon, largely reinforce the trends noted last year:

Hours after Bloomberg News revealed Google's billion dollar scheme to avoid corporate taxes, President Obama spoke at a Democrat fundraiser held at the home of one of the Internet giant's executives.

From what I can tell, only the Washington Examiner's Byron York thought the timing of this event was at all odd (h/t Seton Motley):

Here's a delightful little story from the Sept./Oct. issue of Mother Jones, the far-left political magazine. It's called "Rick Santorum's Anal Sex Problem," and, with its helpful creative artwork, it's not something you want to read over lunch.

Thanks to the efforts of a vindictive liberal writer, anyone Googling conservative former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is fairly likely to get an unpleasant surprise. Among the top three results will probably be a nauseatingly offensive website based on making "Santorum" a "sexual neologism," according to Mother Jones' Stephanie Mencimer.

Back in 2003, Santorum expressed a traditional Catholic view on the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Then talking in general about "orientations" always excluded from understandings of marriage, he included pedophilia and bestiality along with homosexuality.

"The ensuing controversy," wrote Mencimer, "prompted syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who's gay, to start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for slang terms to "memorialize the scandal." Having selected the nastiest entry, "Savage launched a website, and a meme was born."

The theater of the Sherrods continues.

Earlier today, Shirley Sherrod, who, according to the current version of ruling class wisdom, was prematurely evacuated from the USDA by Director Tom Vilsack, decided not to accept an offer to return to the agency.

Instead, according to Politico's Matt Negrin, "she hasn’t accepted the department’s offer to work there again, but that she wants 'some type of relationship' with it later." We wouldn't closure or anything, would we?

Five weeks or so have intervened since Andrew Breitbart posted a video excerpt of Sherrod's speech at an NAACP event. (It should be noted USAactionnews.com actually posted the video earlier; though their link has been taken down, their original July 15 tweet is here.)

In that time, the establishment press has either seriously downplayed or totally ignored the several important items relating to the background and outlook of Ms. Sherrod and her husband Charles.

The Theater of the Sherrod(s) is apparently not over.

At AL.com last night, Mike Tomberlin of the Birmingham News reported the following:

Former USDA employee Shirley Sherrod says she will meet Tuesday with agriculture secretary

Shirley Sherrod, the former USDA rural development director for Georgia, said today she plans to meet Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to discuss a new job offer.

... Sherrod today spoke in the Sumter County town of Epes at an event hosted by the Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. Ben Jealous, executive director of the NAACP, shared the stage with Sherrod during a panel discussion.

Sherrod said she had no ill feelings toward the NAACP or President Barack Obama.

It the meeting does indeed occur, it will be an interesting test of establishment media credibility, given the accusations leveled at Ms. Sherrod and her husband Charles by Ron Wilkins at the leftist publication Counterpunch several weeks ago. Here are some of the specifics:

On August 3 ("U.S. To Train 3,000 Offshore IT Workers"), InformationWeek.com's Paul McDougall reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development is operating at cross purposes with the Obama administration's stated goal to keep high-tech jobs in the U.S.

USAID has since attempted to do some backing and filling about the assistance it is providing in Sri Lanka, but its arguments may ring hollow, given McDougall's report two days later that the agency is also helping to fund IT outsourcing efforts in Armenia.

Here are the first four paragraphs of McDougall's original August 3 report:

As it continues its exponential expansion to cellphones, mobile advertising, television sets and book publishing internet giant Google has been simultaneously expanding its presence in the U.S. political scene, adding lobbyists, DC-based employees, and ramping up its campaign donations.

Writing for Politico on Friday, Kim Hart provides some details on how the company is becoming much more politicized than ever before:

Google boss Eric Schmidt is one of the nation’s most politically active business leaders — a man who uses the cachet of the company he leads, as well as his own charisma, to build strategic alliances in the Obama administration and on Capitol Hill.

Schmidt, 55, grew up in Washington and returns frequently to visit his mother, who still lives in Northern Virginia. Those trips often double as chances to meet with President Barack Obama, chat with staffers at the Federal Communications Commission and meet with top lawmakers.

At the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog (HT Instapundit), Byron York documents the results of some Lexis Nexis searching:

• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the New York Times: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the Washington Post: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on NBC Nightly News: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on ABC World News: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on CBS Evening News: 0.

As a supplement, here are the results of a search on "Charles Bolden" (not entered in quotes), NASA's Director, done at 9:00 a.m. ET at the Associated Press's main site:

A new study found significantly more people trust tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft than they do traditional media.

Adding insult to injury, the relatively new social networking website Facebook is even more trusted than the media which 88 percent of respondents said they had little to no trust for. 

As reported last week, "A Zogby Interactive survey of U.S. adults found that among Apple, Microsoft and Google, 49% had trust in each of these brands. Twitter and Facebook were rated much more poorly, with trust levels of 8% and 13% respectively."

And here's the marvelous punch line (h/t NBer pvoce):

In an article published yesterday afternoon, CNBC news associate Joseph Pisani took note of something the rest of the media mostly hasn't, or at least hasn't highlighted: the terrible job market for teenagers. The headline and text indicate that this is the worst such market in 41 years. That's true, based on the stat Pisani presented. But barring a near miracle in the next three months, in terms of the stat that matters most, the unemployment rate, it's the worst ever.

Give the CNBC reporter props for doing something almost no other journalist has done, which is to use the not seasonally adjusted (NSA) employment numbers as his factual source. As I have discussed several times, including here, the reported NSA numbers represent the government's best estimate of what really happened in a given month, while the seasonally adjusted (SA) numbers published (and appropriately labeled) by the government and reported (but usually not labeled) by the press represent the result after smoothing out seasonal fluctuations.

Pisani's prose proceeds as follows: