Media Business

Appearing in studio on the November 20 edition of "Fox & Friends Saturday," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted the one year anniversary of the ClimateGate scandal.

During one year of coverage, the three broadcast networks aired just 12 stories, an average of one per month, Bozell noted. What's more, the Media Research Center founder added, "when they do cover [ClimateGate], they dismiss" the gravity of the scandal or "use it as a way to buck up their original argument" about global warming.

For the full interview, check out the embedded video below the page break.

Katie Couric's boosterism of "moderate Republican" Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and NPR's cheap shot at former President George W. Bush's recovery from alcoholism were just two of the "Media Mash" topics NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell and Fox News host Sean Hannity addressed on the November 20 edition of "Hannity."

"When will you ever hear the word 'liberal' attached to a Republican?" Bozell asked, noting that Murkowski is in fact a liberal Republican.

"In eight years, she was on [CBS] one time. In the last week, she's been on there twice," the Media Research Center president noted after viewing a clip of CBS "Evening News" Katie Couric's November 15 interview with the Alaska senator.

[Video of the full "Media Mash" segment is available after the page break]

Upon receiving the Kennedy Center's Mark Train Prize for American Humor on November 9, comedian Tina Fey trashed Sarah Palin in her acceptance speech.

By the time PBS broadcast the taped ceremony, the taxpayer-subsidized network had edited out some of Fey's harsher jokes that maligned the former Alaska governor.

NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell appeared in studio on today's "Fox & Friends" to address the controversy, lauding PBS for doing the right thing by making those edits.

[Video follows after page break]

MSNBC's Chris Matthews is a devout liberal, including on contentious social issues like abortion and homosexuality. But on the front page of Tuesday's Washington Post, religion reporter Michelle Boorstein began a story on Archbishop Donald Wuerl's elevation to Cardinal at the Vatican like this:

The archbishop's two brothers will be there. So will a rabbi he knows from Pittsburgh, the D.C. barber who cuts his hair and the fast-talking (and devoutly Catholic) television commentator Chris Matthews.

Do "devout" Catholics lecture their bishops that they should get their churchy noses out of our legislating? Boorstein apparently missed Matthews lecturing the Bishop of Providence, Thomas Tobin, in defense of Rep. Patrick Kennedy's pro-abortion politics on "Hardball" last November.

An Oxford University think tank is taking the media to task for not doing more to whip up a frenzy about global warming.

Apparently the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism crunched the numbers and found that "[l]ess than 10 percent of the news articles written about last year's climate summit in Copenhagen dealt primarily with the science of climate change."

The study lamented the attention that was given to the ClimateGate scandal.

On her website, The Daily Beast, on Thursday, editor-in-chief Tina Brown joyously announced the "wedding" of the left-leaning blog with the equally liberal Newsweek magazine: "Some weddings take longer to plan than others. The union of The Daily Beast and Newsweek magazine finally took place with a coffee-mug toast between all parties."

Brown touted how she would now serve as editor-in-chief for both publications. She expressed her desire to oversee the "great magazine's revival" and praised it for being "lively" and "well-informed." Brown should fit in well as head of the liberal magazine given her own history of left-wing advocacy.

"Think of a caged rat, a cornered rat. What does a cornered rat do? It instinctively goes for the jugular. That's where the media are going right now," following the November 2 elections, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Ernest Istook in a radio interview.

The  Media Research Center founder appeared by telephone on the November 11 edition of Bill Bennett's Morning in America, where Istook was substitute hosting.

[Link to audio below page break]

According to Newsweek's Allison Samuels, American TV audiences are not "ready for 'super-negros' on the small screen."

Samuels made her complaint in light of NBC's cancellation of it's ratings-plagued spy series, "Undercovers," which featured a black actor and actress in the lead roles as glamorous and deadly CIA agents:

Editor's Note: MRC President Brent Bozell issued the following statement in reaction to news that MSNBC had suspended Countdown host Keith Olbermann "indefinitely" for donating to three Democratic candidates in violation of NBC's policy. In October, Olbermann had blasted political donations from Fox News owner News Corp, slamming Fox as "a media outlet that has now put its money where everybody has known its mouth has always been."

Keith Olbermann is officially the Worst Hypocrite in the World. He rails about a ‘national cable news outlet’ that ‘starts to donate to partisan groups of one party,’ then does exactly that.

But it begs a bigger questions: why did it take NBC so long? This man has been using his perch as a newsman at MSNBC to promote a radical left-wing and hate-filled agenda for years. And they fire him over three contributions? NBC needs to review its own policies.”

(Video below page break)

The National Public Radio (NPR) executive who fired Juan Williams is behind an effort lobbying for a new tax to be levied on private media outlets in order to finance a BBC-style state media, NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center Brent Bozell told viewers of Fox Business Network's "Varney & Company" at 10:45 a.m. today.

NPR president Vivian Schiller is "part of a group which wants to essentially tax existing media companies... and use that tax money to create a national network of public broadcasting companies to put out a news broadcast on a national basis, like an American BBC," Varney noted.

"Let's put it another way, the attack on Juan Williams... wasn't really an attack on Juan Williams," Bozell replied.

As I noted yesterday in my NB Extra piece, in an October 26 editorial listing endorsements for the Montgomery County [Md.] Council, the Washington Post erroneously stated that the incumbent County Executive Isiah "Ike" Leggett (D) was unopposed in his reelection bid.

That simply is not true, and the Post today issued a correction noting that Leggett does indeed face a challenge, from Republican Doug Rosenfeld.

Yet in today's correction notice, the Post noted that it will print an "editorial on that contest... in the coming days."

The Post most certainly has a right to make such an endorsement, but considering its gross negligence in the first place, should the paper opt simply to refuse to make an endorsement?

A search of the Nexis database from September 15 (the day after the primary election) through October 27 found just two mentions of Rosenfeld. The second was today's correction notice and the first was the very last paragraph of Metro section reporter Michael Laris's September 15 roundup of local primary election results:

Last night Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly aired an ambush interview that "O'Reilly Factor" producer Jesse Watters sprung on Vivian Schiller, National Public Radio's president.

Last week, Schiller fired Williams over the phone in reaction to a comment the Fox News contributor made on the October 18 edition of O'Reilly's eponymous program.

Schiller, no stranger to cable news -- she used to head up CNN's documentary division --  also put her foot in her mouth last week by flippantly dismissing Williams's comments on the "Factor" as something he should have kept between himself and his psychiatrist.

[Video follows the page break]

MSNBC's Chris Matthews and CBS's Lesley Stahl were two of the targets in the latest "Media Mash" segment on Fox News Channel's "Hannity" program.

NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the October 22 edition of the program  to look at how the media have been denigrating the Tea Party movement.

[Video of the segment available after the page break]

Juan Williams's firing from National Public Radio (NPR) earlier this week was not only animated in part by the liberal George Soros-backed radio network's disdain of Fox News, it also reeks of a double standard, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told viewers of Friday's "Fox & Friends" program.

"If [Juan Williams] had said those words on the Charlie Rose show, it would have been seen as provocative or thoughtful.... This is the same network that featured Nina Totenberg hoping that Senator Jesse Helms would die or one of his grandchildren would die of AIDS because of his position on gay rights and nothing ever happened to her."

[Video after page break; MP3 audio version available here]

Managing Editor's note: National Public Radio (NPR) has fired longtime analyst Juan Williams for admitting he gets nervous on a plane when he sees a person dressed in Muslim garb. What follows is a statement from NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center President Brent Bozell.

Juan Williams has done nothing wrong. What he said echoes what the vast majority of Americans believe. It’s their tax dollars that fund NPR. But NPR is ignoring them. Instead, they are kowtowing to the agenda of radical anti-Americans like CAIR, and doing the bidding of George Soros, who hates Fox News with a passion.

And since when did NPR have standards? Here are just three examples of left-wing statements 100 times more outrageous than what Juan Williams said, with no reaction from NPR:

Although experts from plenty of liberal-leaning news agencies agree that the Obama administration's complaint about the Chamber of Commerce allegedly spending foreign money on campaign issue ads is overblown, Time's Joe Klein is dead set on griping about the non-scandal.

From his Swampland blog post yesterday:

Karl Rove is a great American patriot, a genius, a statesman, even. And now he has proven his phenomenal, overflowing patriotism by setting up a secretive finance group, in conjunction with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--that's right, our very own, United States Chamber of Commerce--to run sleazy political ads, funded by foreign investors. I can't imagine why all these foreign companies are just itching to hook up with Rove and influence American politics...can you?

I'm sure Klein's die-hard groupies found that wickedly witty. But even writers further to the left of Klein and the center-left mainstream media, like the folks at Mother Jones magazine, think the complaint is just plain lame.

"I've been looking for years to find a man like him.... I've combed the whole goddam country. There are lots of good journalists around, but they're all cockeyed left-wingers."

That's how  publisher Eugene C. Pulliam  praised M. Stanton Evans in 1960, when he tapped the 26-year-old conservative Yale graduate and close friend of National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. to edit the Indianapolis News.

Why are Americans not being bombarded with sermons on the irresponsibility of blogs and new media generally? After all, the White House's attacks on the Chamber of Commerce originated with a salacious, factually-erroneous report on a highly partisan left-wing blog. Shouldn't we be hearing about the dangers of relying on new media for political news?

We were inundated with such talk after the video that led to the Department of Agriculture's fired of Shirley Sherrod turned out to have misrepresented her words. The story - that Sherrod made race-based decisions in her capacity as an Ag Department employee - was based on faulty evidence. It would never have made it into the mainstream were it not for the lax journalistic standards of digital reporters - in this case, Andrew Breitbart.

Ten years after the USS Cole bombing, the alleged mastermind of the attacks hasn't been tried in a military commission, angering survivors and families of the dead.

Yet for its coverage of the 10 year anniversary memorial service in today's paper, the Washington Post elected to go with an 11-paragraph article by Newport News [Va.] Daily Press's Hugh Lessig rather than assign a Post staffer to the story.

Here's how Lessig opened his story:

Howard Kurtz quoted MSNBC president Phil Griffin in two stories in Monday's Washington Post, and both quotes seriously strained credulity. In a front-page story on how politicians campaign on cable news, Griffin tried to argue that they're not simply a Democrat talking-points factory and promoter of Democrat candidates. Oh no, claimed Griffin, just because Republicans choose to decline their invitations doesn't mean they're in the tank for the DNC:

The reality, said MSNBC President Phil Griffin, is that "politicians want to hit their base." But "we're different than Fox," he added. "We ask for people to come on from both parties all the time. We can't control who comes on. A lot of people choose not to, and they choose to go to Fox....We have so many different voices. We're not trying to push Democratic talking points, as some people accuse us of."  

Kurtz didn't mention that Keith Olbermann never has Republicans on his show, or note how a host like Ed Schultz can have a leftist candidate like Bill Halter on repeatedly, and plug his web site. Then there was a mention of MSNBC's lame "Lean Forward" motto in Kurtz's Media Notes column:

Fired CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was granted an online Q&A Monday on The Washington Post website. Sanchez still finds it unfair that he would be knocked for noting knowing how many feet are in a meter. Hasn't someone pulled him aside and told him that audiences expect an anchor to at least fake that they've taken the time to figure out feet to meters? When he was asked about why Jon Stewart mocked him so often, Sanchez replied:

I have taken to heart some of Jon Stewart's criticisms and I asked Jon about that last week. He said, "Rick, I'm a comedian and the only reason I focused on you was because I like you."

Maybe I just never saw it that way. Maybe I was too thin-skinned. I blamed it on Jon's prejudice and that was wrong. But here is my point: Oftentimes the ridiculing was simply baseless. I was ridiculed for not knowing how many inches or feet in ten meters. I didn't think that was fair, because it happened during a breaking news story and frankly I'm not good with the metric system.

On Tuesday, Fox Chicago News anchor Bob Sirott suggested that Rick Sanchez might land at the Fox News Channel. In his "One More Thing" commentary, Sirott pointed out that most people had never heard of Sanchez until CNN fired him last week.  Still, Sanchez could bounce back:

Some believe Rick Sanchez's career is is over, but others think it's just beginning, and now that he's a nationally known hot button subject a network that likes controversial personalities will hire him. Can you say FOX News Channel?

Calling the liberal mainstream media the "'shock troops' of the Obama administration," NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center president Brent Bozell has “declared war on the liberal media” with a new $2.1 million campaign to demand they stop lying and “Tell The Truth!” about Obama, the damage his radical policies have caused, and to cease immediately the character assassinations launched against the Tea Parties.

MRC President Brent Bozell provided these remarks in the live webcast launch of the campaign:

What would have been the reaction of the American people if on Election Day 2008, they had gone to the polls knowing that in electing Barack Obama, they were electing the single most radical socialist in the history of this country? I submit to you he never would have been elected. That's the power of the left-wing media ... I call the news media the ‘shock troops' of the Obama administration because they're the ones doing all the dirty work - for him - so that he doesn't have to do it.

The national campaign -- accessible online at www.TellTheTruth2010.org -- will reach millions of people each week through end of 2010 and includes:

Edward R. Murrow Award-winning radio journalist Howard Arenstein was arrested Friday by the Metropolitan Police Department for growing marijuana plants in his Georgetown backyard. 

Arenstein is the manager for the Washington, D.C. bureau of CBS Radio.

CBS network officials have declined to comment, but feel free to leave yours below.

When news broke in August that News Corporation, the media conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch, had donated a million dollars to the Republican Governors Association, liberals howled that Murdoch's personal political views - reflected in that donation - compromised the neutrality of News Corp's subsidiaries. The same arguments are being offered today, as news emerges that Murdoch's company gave another million to the Chamber of Commerce.

But Murdoch testified before a congressional subcommittee on Thursday in support of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Almost immediately, the left began asking why Murdoch had not incorporated his own views on the issue into Fox News's programming.

So now that liberals may have some common ground with Murdoch on the immigration issue, they are pleading for him to do exactly what they criticized when it benefitted Republicans: inject his own personal political views into reporting by News Corp. outlets.