Media Business

Reuters reported on Saturday (hat tip to Drudge) that the controversial British film about the assassination of President Bush actually won a critics’ choice award at the Toronto Film Festival. I imagine you’re all surprised:

"Death of a President," which stirred controversy in the days ahead of the festival, took home the Fipresci prize, which is chosen by international critics. The film, a fictional documentary showing the assassination of President Bush, was noted by the jury "for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth."

See, now that’s exactly what moviegoers want these days: a film that distorts reality to reveal a larger truth. Of course, in a disturbing sort of way, that’s better than the normal media blathering which distorts reality to reveal a tapestry of lies in order to further the goals of one of the nation's major political parties. But, I digress:

To hear the establishment media tell it, the American public is unanimously against U.S. troops being in Iraq and the war against terror. We hear about every ragtag, fly-by-night anti-war group’s activities, no matter how small the turnout or ineffectual the impact.

Conversely, three Conservative activist groups unite to announce that they’ll converge on Washington, D.C., Sept. 22-23 to show their support for the war in Iraq and the soldiers fighting it, and it’s virtually impossible to find media coverage of the event.

Not exactly media bias but worth noting: Dan Rather is hard at work on producing his new HDNet show. The report comes from the same Freeper, MindBender26, who correctly announced the departure of Dan Rather from CBS.

Rather is working overtime on his new satellite-fed dinky cable show. Editors who have seen first drafts of story treatments say it is WAY over the top, sort of a "Howard Beale on LSD reading Rolling Stone straight to camera, with a Texas accent" concept.

In other media business news, Sean Hannity is apparently set to leave his perch at ABC Radio.

Rich Muslims of the world need to unite and buy up various parts of the global media in order to force them to become more friendly to Islam. That's the message coming out of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference being held in Saudi Arabia.

As you might expect, Reuters has a reporter there who couldn't help but insert an anti-Fox News remark into the story:

Muslim tycoons should buy stakes in global media outlets to help change anti-Muslim attitudes around the world, ministers from Islamic countries heard at a conference in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.

Information ministers and officials meeting under the auspices of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world's largest Islamic body, said Islam faced vilification after the September 11 attacks, when 19 Arabs killed nearly 3,000 people in U.S. cities in 2001.

It hasn't taken Katie Couric long to tailor the CBS Evening News to her liking.  The New York Observer reports the Perky One has replaced medical correspondent Elizabeth Kaledin with Dr Jonathan LaPook, Ms. Couric's gastroenterologist.

What makes that move even more interesting is that the good doctor's father-in-law is longtime liberal activist Norman Lear.  According to the Web site Newsmeat, the physician has contributed to the presidential campaigns of John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and Al Gore.

Don't be surprised if the CBS Evening News begins reporting on stories relating to matters such as the health dangers of global warming and the desirability of socialized medicine.

In the middle of all the controversy surrounding ABC’s upcoming docudrama “The Path to 9/11,” something very important has been lost: Regardless of the protestations of the left, there were indeed some missed opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden before our nation was attacked. In fact, on March 16, 2004, the NBC “Nightly News” did a report on one such chance the Clinton administration passed on.

What follows is a full transcript of this report, with emphasis given to draw attention to statements that are quite relevant to the current controversy. Those that are interested can watch the video here courtesy of GOP Video.

I guess we all should have expected that mere changes to the story weren’t going to placate Team Clinton, for another letter was sent to ABC President and CEO Robert Iger on Friday, this one asking for “The Path to 9/11” be cancelled. For those that are interested, and can tolerate yet another example of extraordinary political hypocrisy, here it is:

This sad episode in American history continues, folks. Now, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, is requesting that ABC reveal “who funded this $40 million dollar slanderous propaganda.”

Of course, he’s talking about “The Path to 9/11.” What else?

As reported by the left-wing blog Raw Story on Friday: "It's deeply disappointing that ABC would put something on the air that has been proven to have factual inaccuracies about one of the most important events in our nation's history," said Dean in the press release. "ABC should not air this distortion of history."

Why wasn’t Dean so concerned with the reporting of “factual inaccuracies about one of the most important events in our nation's history” back in 2004 when Michael Moore released “Fahrenheit 911”? Why has the Democratic Party’s seemingly universal support for that piece of propaganda as addressed here been totally forgotten by its members?

Regardless, Dean hypocritically continued:

The following is the actual text of the letter sent to Bob Iger, the President and CEO of ABC, by folks representing former president Bill Clinton et al asking for “The Path to 9/11” to be re-edited (hat tip to TPM Café):

September 1, 2006

Dear Bob,

As you know, ABC intends to air a two part miniseries, “The Path to 9/11,” which purports to document the events leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. ABC claims that the show is based on the 9/11 Commission Report and, as Steve McPherson, President of ABC Entertainment, has said: “When you take on the responsibility of telling the story behind such an important event, it is absolutely critical that you get it right.”

MRC president Brent Bozell appeared on Friday's "Fox and Friends" in the 8am hour beginning at 8am Eastern. The topic discussed was the censorship campaign mounted by Democrats against the ABC miniseries, "The Path to 9/11."

Video clip (2:28): Real (4.07 MB) or Windows Media (4.69MB), plus MP3 audio (721 KB).

Use this thread to post your comments on the show.

Undoubtedly, the anger fomenting as a result of a television docudrama about the most serious attacks on America since Pearl Harbor has to be confounding the most seasoned of cynics.

After prominent House Democrats sent a letter Wednesday to Disney President and CEO Robert Iger requesting a re-editing of “The Path to 9/11” even though they admitted that they “have not yet seen this program” (as reported by NewsBusters here), another such request came from Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin, Senator Debbie Stabenow, Senator Charles Schumer, and Senator Byron Dorgan on Thursday.

Did you hear that sound Thursday afternoon? That was the Constitution weeping as one of the nation’s major political parties trampled all over the First Amendment. Remember what that is…that right bestowed upon us by our Founding Fathers guaranteeing freedom of speech?

Well, if what was reported by NewsBusters here, and the Ostroy Report here (hat tip to Hot Air) are correct, and ABC really has caved into political pressure from Democrats – in particular, former President Clinton – to edit the miniseries “The Path to 9/11,” such rights have changed forever. At the very least, this would demonstrate that these rights – which Jefferson said were inalienable, by the way! – apply differently to Democrats and Republicans.

The liberal blogosphere is going nuts over a miniseries about to air on ABC dealing with 9/11. Why are they so angry? Well, because just as the 9/11 Commission concluded, this program entitled “The Path to 9/11,” chronicles some of the missteps by the Clinton administration that pertain to Osama bin Laden. And, to be sure, folks on the left never want any blame for anything to be given to one of their own.

From what I can uncover, the shouting began at the Democratic Underground on August 27 in a post entitled “ABC docudrama will blame Clinton and Dems for 9/11”:

I think it's safe to say that Kyra Phillips's bathroom break embarrassment was not entirely her fault. But you do have to wonder why it took so long for someone to cut off her mic. On his radio show yesterday, Rush Limbaugh wondered if perhaps the whole affair was due to someone not liking the CNN anchor:

What was the techie at the CNN control booth doing for 90 seconds? It's obvious they weren't listening to the Bush speech. It's obvious that nobody at CNN was listening to this. Somebody caught her. Oh, the anchor that was on, Daryn was on, and she finally, when this conversation finally started getting into sisters and brothers and control freaks and so forth, while Bush was speaking, "And you're listening to President Bush, who is talking from New Orleans today," and then apparently Kyra came back, she's going to take over at one o'clock, Daryn is still sitting there and she comes back and her mic is still live when she approaches the set, because she says, "Well, I'm here. I'm ready," and that went out.

It got me to thinking. Does somebody there not like Kyra Phillips? I mean how does this just happen? How in the world can audio and video go out when nobody intends for it to? But then when it does, you can imagine... I mean, look, I know broadcasting and broadcasting is me, and these accidents can happen. Somebody can bump into a switch. But for 90 seconds nobody knew it in the control booth at CNN, which means they we were the listening to what was on their own, quote, unquote, air, which was a Bush speech. I mean Kyra Phillips is innocent in this. I mean, she just had her whole personal conversation in a bathroom broadcast all over cable news yesterday afternoon for a minute and a half.

Will Thoretz is the company spokesman for VNU Media, the company that owns Editor & Publisher and employs Editor Greg Mitchell, a man that has something of a "truth problem" according to Michael Silence, and seems to be on the wrong side of an example of "journalistic malpractice" according to Stephen Spruiell.

Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall.com attempted to contact Mitchell at Editor & Publisher for comment several times yesterday, but Mitchell has thus far decline to respond. Ham also tried to contact Will Thoretz of Editor & Publisher's parent company, VNU Media, and while she was able to speak to his assistant, Thoretz has not responded to Ham to date.

Color me skeptical, but evidence indicating that one of your editors has severe ethical issues should demand an immediate response of some sort, unless, of course, the decision has been made to stonewall the story and hope it goes away.

Faking news photos isn't just for Islamic propagandists any more.

A TVNewser reader has caught CBS in the act, altering a photo to make new anchor Katie Couric's waistline appear slimmer than it really is.

Question: Is CBS doing better now that it's only faking news to make its anchor look skinny, or is it doing worse now that it's making phony pictures instead of relying on nutjobs to do it?

UPDATE 11:21. Commenter 1sttofight correctly points out that Couric's face is also slimmer. It seems her arms are, too.

UPDATE 08:30 by Mark Finkelstein: CBS has now admitted that it "retouched" Katie's photo, but claims it was done "without the knowledge of Katie Couric or CBS news management," and Couric is quoted as claiming "she prefers the original photo 'because there's more of me to love.'"

Former veep Al Gore continues to get slavishly great press (the kind a Republican could only get by switching parties à la Jim Jeffords), this time for a speech he gave in Scotland claiming that "democracy is under attack" from media consolidation. I'm doubtful that he mentioned similar dangers from ultrarich leftists like George Soros trying to buy their own governments in various countries.

The first few grafs from AP reporter Jill Lawless are relatively straightforward (minus the fact that she did not ask other media thinkers to counter Gore):

"Democracy is under attack," Gore told an audience at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. "Democracy as a system for self-governance is facing more serious challenges now than it has faced for a long time.

"Democracy is a conversation, and the most important role of the media is to facilitate that conversation of democracy. Now the conversation is more controlled, it is more centralized."

Introducing Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert at tonight's Emmy's, Conan O'Brien joked that "these two presenters have done for fake news what the FOX News channel has done for fake news."

Video available here.

I usually wouldn't make a big deal out of something like this, but today's just the wrong day for the gratuitous slam of FOX News as "fake news." You know, because two of it's journalists were just freed from the very real experience of being kidnapped while on the job and then held hostage for 13 days.

Here's a story you're not likely to see covered by today's MSM TV: the story of a Palestinian boy band who made it big...by writing up a song praising Hezollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah. (Click here for an MP3 of it.)

The song, "Hawk of Lebanon," is mostly a 10-minute repetition of the phrase "Yallah, Nasrallah" along with other delightful lyrics such as "I hope we can destroy your life and make you worry, Zionism and Zionists are the biggest poison in Arab land."

It's taken the Palestine by storm. AP reporter Sarah El Deeb has more:

They were struggling in a boy band, working the West Bank wedding circuit and dreaming of stardom.

Now the five singers who make up the Northern Band have come a little closer to their goal, with help from an unwitting ally — Hezbollah guerrilla chief Hassan Nasrallah.

At the height of the Israel-Hezbollah war, the band wrote new lyrics, in praise of Nasrallah, for an old tune. The Hawk of Lebanon song tapped into Nasrallah's huge popularity among Palestinians and became an instant hit.

The song is being played on Arab TV networks, used as a ring tone for cell phones, passed around on e-mail and distributed on pirate CDs and tapes.

Imagine Bill Clinton in the setting shown here. Would he be standing at arm's length, tentatively extending a finger? Never! He'd be right down there hugging the child, probably - for that matter - getting an arm around Mom too.

That, in a nutshell, captures the problem campaign ad makers have in softening Hillary's frosty image.

There I was on the couch this morning in full pajamahadeen mode, searching for nuggets of MSM bias with which to titillate NB readers, when for the first time a Hillary campaign ad popped up. It's standard stuff. The theme is Hillary 'Standing Up': standing up for jobs, for military bases, for health care - seems the senator never sits down!  As I type this, a freeze frame shows a nicely-coiffed Hillary in a striped pink shirt and sporting a single strand of pearls. On a desk in the background you can discern family photos: Bill, Hillary and Chelsea in one, what looks like a young Chelsea as a ballerina in another.

It is hard to overstate the importance of what Little Green Footballs' site operator Charles Johnson learned from a clearly knowledgeable person in the news business, and revealed in a post yesterday morning. Anyone who attempts to understand events in the Middle East but is unaware of what Johnson has exposed is being shortchanged, and very likely misled.

It was only a week ago that Johnson originally caught the photoshopped "Beirut Burning" picture that sparked a blogswarm of investigations into additional photo doctoring, event staging, and other photojournalistic abuses, all of which added a new word, fauxtography, to the vocabularies of those who follow the news.

Now Johnson has expanded what began as a "narrow" photojournalism controversy into an expose of how, for decades, the news we receive from the most volatile region in the world has, in exchange for what looks an awful lot like bribery, been twisted and controlled to meet a pro-Arab, pro-terorist, anti-Israel agenda.

It's not just Samuel L. Jackson. Hollywood really does love snakes on the silver screen.

The MRC's Business & Media Institute today released the second installment of our Bad Company trilogy today.

The three-part special report series examines the television entertainment, cinematic, and network news media's biases against the American businessman.

In our first study we found, among other things that boob tube businessmen "committed crimes five times more often than terrorists and four times more often than gangs."

With a bigger budget comes bigger bias. Here's what we found when we went to the movies:

Despite lots of promotion from the entertainment media, the Dixie Chicks seem to have offended their fan base too much. The lefty group has been forced to cancel shows in 14 states, replacing them with Canadian ones, the AP reports:

Several concerts on the Dixie Chicks'"Accidents & Accusations" tour have been canceled after slow ticket sales, but the group says it has replaced them with other dates.

Kansas City, Houston, St. Louis, Memphis and Knoxville are among 14 cities no longer on the original schedule released in May, according to a revised itinerary posted Thursday on the Dixie Chick's Web site.

You've all seen the TV commercial. A chubby woman has dragged a TV onto her front lawn and is watching the game with two girlfriends, when her dutiful husband comes home, schlepping grocery bags. One of the girlfriends suggests they order in pizza, but the chubby woman actually calls her husband in the house, tricking her friends into thinking she's calling a pizza place. She haughtily orders her husband to 'make it the way I like it,' and adds 'make it snappy - chop, chop!'

You've never actually seen this commercial, of course. The dictates of political correctness would never permit it. But just such an ad for DiGiorno pizza did indeed air today [during the 4 PM EDT edition of the Tucker Carlson show on MSNBC] - the difference naturally being that it was a plump idiot of a husband acting like a complete jerk toward his wife.

Assume you were in an upper-management position at one of the many liberally-biased news outlets, and you read the above headline. Would it make you question what your organization was doing wrong, what Fox News is doing right, or what is wrong with America’s television news viewers?

Regardless of the answer, Variety released July viewer totals for the cable news outlets, and, once again, Fox News is completely destroying the competition. In fact, some of the numbers are pretty laughable (ergo, put your drinking vessels away!):

Despite FNC's declines, it still beat CNN handily in primetime, averaging 1.5 million viewers to CNN's 864,000; CNN still has a long way to go before it can be considered a serious ratings challenger.

FNC won every hour of each day over CNN for the 55th straight month. It was the No. 5-rated cable network in June, behind USA, TNT, TBS and Lifetime. CNN came in 24th, MSNBC 36th.

That deserves closer examination, doesn’t it? Fox has beaten CNN every hour of every day for 55 straight months?!? Yikes. And, FNC is the fifth-ranked network on cable? Yet, the chuckles kept coming:

In light of recent revelations of possible media manipulation in Qana, Lebanon, as reported by NewsBusters Monday, a 2005 video has been circulating throughout the Internet (hat tip to Ms. Underestimated with extraordinary video link to follow). In reality, this is an almost unbelievable look at how film footage from Israel that made national news after the Second Intifada began in September 2000 (including CBS’s “60 Minutes”) appears to have been staged, choreographed, and produced rather than real events that transpired in front of video cameras. 

The film's producer, Dr. Richard Landes, teaches history at Boston University, and is the co-founder and Director of the Center for Millennial Studies. He also is the proprietor of The Second Draft, a website “devoted to exploring some of the problems and issues that plague modern journalism”:

After being plugged relentlessly by the New York Times and other "objective" media outlets, the ratings for Air America continue to drop. Brian Maloney has the details:

Like an ice cream cone left in the hot July sun, Air America Radio's ratings are melting in some key (read: liberal) regions of the country.

Based on fresh ratings data released Thursday evening, the "progressive" radio network has lost strength in three cities where it had previously found the most listener support: Portland, Seattle and Denver.

Representing the spring 2006 Arbitron reporting period, these results provide one of the two most important report cards for the entire year.

The fact that Jason Leopold doesn't have a television show is a significant reason to believe that there is some sanity within the TV news business. However, the fact that Keith Olbermann still has one after years of failure does make one wonder about the mental acuity of the folks at MSNBC.

When you think about it, aside from its host, "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" has a lot of things going for it. It's got nice graphics, some different music to it, and a snappy pace. Far left bloggers routinely urge their readers to watch. It never fails to get good press from liberal journalists whose greatest fantasy is Roger Ailes getting hit by a bus--which may explain why so many of them have been taken by a guy whose bizarre antics, strange demeanor, journalistic ineptitude, and ridiculous pomposity should have gotten him laughed out of the news business in under three months.

It's probably safe to assume that Olbermann is aware of all this. How else could one explain his latest desperate ploy for attention, donning a mask of Bill O'Reilly while doing a Nazi salute? Now, via Olbermann Watch, we learn that NBC and the "Countdown" staff planned the entire thing.

Surprised? I sure was. I mean who ever would have thought that a guy who is afraid to interview anyone to the right of Hugo Chavez for fear of getting embarrassed would ever need to plan such brilliant humor out beforehand?

Of course, Bob Cox and the other OW folks might be lying. After all, it's quite possible Olbermann came up with the joke right after a brief bathroom break with his Bill O'Reilly hand puppet.

At a press conference for TV critics, FNC and Fox affiliates chief Roger Ailes announced he will be unveiling a syndicated morning news show next January. Now Fox fans will be able to get their fix without cable:

Ailes and Fox are gearing up for a yet-to-be named morning show that will air after the local news broadcasts. Mike Jerrick and Juliet Huddy of the Fox News Channel will host the 9 a.m. offering, which will focus on light, entertaining fare when there's little hard news.

The morning show will launch in January and will go up against the final hour of a Couric-free "Today" and newly formatted "Regis and Kelly," with a little less Regis Philbin. Since September, Philbin has been doing four days a week instead of five.