Media Scandals

From TVNewser:

Breaking: The New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division has thrown out Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit against his former employer, CBS Corp. "We find the complaint must be dismissed in its entirety," reads the decision. The Appellate court found that the motion court "erred in denying the defendants' motion to dismiss the claims for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty."

Of course, unfazed, Rather (file image at right above) has vowed to appeal (h/t Hot Air):

"How do you say 'FAIL' in Polish," Michelle Malkin quipped in a blog post this morning dealing with Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, who in a September 27 blog post decried the arrest of Roman Polanski in Zurich the day before.

Applebaum, you may recall, failed to note in that blog post that her husband, Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, is pleading for Polanski's release. Well, Malkin noted today that Applebaum is defending her lack of full disclosure, despite having been called out on the blogosphere for the glaring omission:

"ACORN appears to be a corrupt organization that aids and abets criminals and gets millions of dollars in taxpayer money."

Such was reported Tuesday evening, but not by one of the mainstream television news outlets.

That was Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," who in a fabulous six-minute segment not only covered the story of ACORN representatives giving business advice to folks trying to set up a child-prostitution ring, but also lambasted the media for getting scooped so embarrassingly by "two kids from the cast of ‘High School Musical III.'"

After walking through some of the videos captured at numerous ACORN offices by James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, Stewart said (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

Bruce Springsteen once wrote: “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come).” I doubt he expected that story of love gone wrong would become ideal political commentary for the group known as ACORN.

The small scandal showing an embarrassing video of Baltimore ACORN staffers giving tax advice on how to set up a brothel for underage girls is now national news. This story has everything you could ever want – corruption, sleazy actions at tax-funded organizations, firings, government ties, sex, hookers. It is a network news director’s dream. Imagine the ratings!

Only almost no one has been covering it. CBS and NBC just joined the party -- days late.

This is the news media in the era of Van Jones and President Obama. The major outlets cover what they want and create the themes they want. When they find something inconvenient, they let it pass. They didn’t like the Van Jones story because he was a community organizer and environmentalist, so they ignored it. The network news media liked the financial entity known as Fannie Mae, so they ignored that scandal-plagued organization for years. ACORN is getting the same treatment.

When Glenn Beck reports that a top-level White House advisor has endorsed communism, accused 'white polluters' of poisoning minority communities, called his political opponents a**holes, and believes an American president was complicit in the slaughter of innocent civilians, Beck must have a hidden agenda. When the mainstream media fails to report these facts, it's all an honest mistake.

Or so one might gather from listening to CNN contributor and Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz. Kurtz continues to waffle between a cynical take on Glenn Beck's outing of Van Jones as a truther conspiracy theorist, and an apologetic approach to the mainstream media's virtual silence on the story until after Jones's resignation.

The Times's Managing Editor Jill Abramson offered a number of excuses for the lack of Van Jones coverage last weekend, chiefly that the paper's Washington Bureau was short-staffed. This did not stop the Times from sending two reporters to Boston for the weekend to cover the non-story of Joseph Kennedy II's Senate run (which he later said would not happen).

Topside Update, 2:15 p.m.: Imagine that -- Roxana Mayer was also an Organizing For America "host" during the Texas primary last year.

Anyone visiting here even semi-regularly knows that the establishment media consistently fails to determine the legitimacy of people who "say the right things." Further, when someone else, often a blogger, digs and finds the truth, the reporters and publications involved may sometimes grudgingly acknowledge it, but even then usually incompletely; and more often than not, they won't give credit where due.

This all-too-typical scenario has played out in the past two days in the case of a certain Roxana Mayer. In two posts (here and here), LA-area blogger Patterico, best known for his relentless skewering of the target-rich environment known as the Los Angeles Times, exposed Ms. Mayer, who claimed to be a doctor when she spoke at a town hall meeting held by Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (and who later hugged her, as seen at the top right), as a leftist fraud.

As Patterico noted in the title of his second post, Mayer's mantra ought to be "I’m Not a Doctor But I Play One at Town Hall Meetings." Patterico also showed that Mayer was also a Texas Obama delegate at last year's Democratic Convention.

At first, the Houston Chronicle took Mayer's word that she is a doctor, failed to investigate her bona fides, and reported the following:

This morning, some 30 people were arrested in New Jersey, the fruit of a two-year federal investigation into a international money laundering scandal. Among those arrested were Democratic Mayors Peter Cammarano III (Hoboken) and Dennis Elwell (Secaucus), as well as Democratic deputy mayor of Jersey City Leona Beldini and Republican state Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt.

But if you only got your news of this mass arrest from the Associated Press, you would not learn the party affiliation of these politicians. To their credit, other news outlets readily accessible to New Jerseyans such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal noted the party affiliations of these allegedly crooked pols.

Here we go again. 

During his opening monologue on ‘Real Time’ Friday night, Bill Maher, couldn’t resist piling on to the David Letterman controversy and the sex jokes made by him earlier in the week regarding Sarah Palin’s daughter.

In defending his friend, Maher thought Republicans had over reacted and this was just a case of ‘fake’ outrage. Much ado about nothing. He then went on talking about how Letterman had invited Sarah Palin and her young daughter, Willow, to appear as guests on his show but the Governor declined because she thought it would be wise to keep her daughter away from him. Said Maher, “…that’s right, he’s 62 years old, he’s gonna f*** her right there on stage…it would be very wise to keep her, very wise, yes. You know, I’d worry a little more about the 18-year old hockey players who knock up your daughters.” To which his audience of trained seals laughed and clapped and had a good old time. 

I sat there stunned. Much like his pal Letterman, as far as I was concerned, Maher had crossed the line. Big Time. What is it with these guys? 

Media Research Center Director of Communications Seton Motley appeared Sunday morning on Fox News Channel's "America's News Headquarters" to discuss comedian David Letterman's inappropriate joke about Gov. Sarah Palin's 14-year-old daughter Willow.

Motley noted a marked difference with the now infamous Don Imus joke about the Rutgers women's basketball team.

While both Letterman and Imus made crude and inappropriate jokes, conservatives like Gov. Palin do not have the benefit of the mainstream media's outrage as did the Rutgers basketball players [audio available here, see embedded video at right]:

Sometimes the numbers in a wire service report are so ridiculous, you just know that they're bogus.

On Wednesday, June 11, a duo of Associated Press reporters, Chris Kahn and Sandy Shore, with an assist from Tali Arbel, reported on a study "green jobs" study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts. In "The Clean Energy Economy: Repowering Jobs, Businesses, and Investments Across America," Pew made the growth in "clean energy" appear more impressive than it is by vastly understating job growth in the rest of the economy during the past decade -- by a factor of three.

None of the three AP "journalists" involved, and none of the alleged layers of fact-checkers and editors at the wire service, had the intuitive sense to detect an error by Pew so pathetically obvious that anyone following the economy at all -- and that includes the folks at Pew -- should have known the figure involved was false.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the AP story (bold is mine):

While the liberal Democratic mayor of Los Angeles has a thing for news babes, it seems his hometown paper has a penchant for leaving out the mayor's party affiliation from reporting on his liaisons.

"A Los Angeles television reporter is dating Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, about two years after his extramarital affair with another local newscaster led to the breakup of his 20-year marriage," Phil Willon of the Los Angeles Times informed readers in a June 2 article devoid of the mayor's Democratic party affiliation:

KTLA-TV Channel 5 reporter Lu Parker, a former Miss U.S.A., has been dating Villaraigosa since March, station officials confirmed Monday. On Sunday, while working as a weekend anchor, Parker announced a story about the likelihood of Villaraigosa running for governor in 2010.

The LAT is no stranger to omitting Villaraigosa's party affiliation from readers, as we at NewsBusters have noted. The omissions are all the more glaring when contrasted to the paper's treatment of scandal-plagued California Republican politicians. As I noted in NewsBusters back in October 2007:

In his Monday “Media Notes” column, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz addressed Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democrats and explored whether the media has a double standard in covering party-switchers: “little attention was devoted to this question: Was this a betrayal of the voters who elected Specter?”

Correspondent Carl Cannon, on AOL's new PoliticsDaily site, says conservatives are right in complaining that much of the media have "a double standard regarding party-switchers....When Republicans morph into Democrats, we tend to act like they finally saw the light, and quote them ad nauseam about how the Republican Party has gotten too narrow, etc., etc." But when a Democrat joins the GOP, "we concentrate on the tactical advantage to the party switcher."

Cannon recalled conservative disgust over the media celebration of departing Republican Jim Jeffords in 2001. Kurtz’s review of media coverage found a real lack of questioning Specter’s disloyalty to his party:

Fair-minded conservatives were aghast in President George W. Bush's second term when the left-wing character assassination machine went into high gear to destroy Jeff Gannon.

Gannon, also known as James Dale Guckert, asked questions that annoyed liberals because they were based on a right-wing political perspective.

Liberals were outraged. How dare the White House allow a conservative in who didn't constantly bash President Bush. The nerve!

Partisan, ideologically-driven people shouldn't be allowed into White House press briefings, they howled in unison.

Gannon had skeletons in his past, which sent the left into deepening shades of delight. Even though the left prides itself on being gay-friendly, the fact that Gannon's indiscretions were related to his homosexuality only egged on the vicious hypocrites, feeding their schadenfreude.

First came word of the daily secret planning session phone calls between Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and several highly placed Old Media types (Here and here) and now Politico has revealed the existence of a hush, hush web message board where denizens of the lefty media get together on a daily basis and plan how they will all cover the news for the great unwashed out there.

But don't worry, this "journolist" is no great cabal of underground left-wing plotters attempting to co-opt the message emanating from the bowls of the Old Media. We know this cuz they told us so!

Move along.... nothing to see here.

The above headline isn't even the half of it.

After the attacks were known to all, James Carville told assembled Washington reporters at a hotel conference room breakfast where he and Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg spoke (photo is from the May 20, 2004 Christian Science Monitor) to "Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!"

The assembled press apparently understood that as something each and every one of them should take to the grave.

Bill Sammon of Fox News has the story (HT Hot Air):

On Monday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Maggie Rodriguez spoke with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, who a year ago was named in a New York Times article implying she had an affair with then presidential candidate John McCain, an accusation Iseman flatly denied: "No, I did not. And four New York Times reporters, two editors, their entire institution, 200 people that they went out and sought to try and figure out if this was true or not, came back and said there's no there, there...They were calling friends and family and colleagues and former staffers, it was just -- people I'd hired and fired at my firm, it was nuts. It was just unbelievable...They became so invested in this that they couldn't walk away...this was just out of control, they just could not, for some reason, walk away."

While Iseman detailed how absurd the Times’ accusations were, Rodriguez still worked to give the paper the benefit of the doubt: "So everybody believed that you had an affair with him, even though the article, according to the Times, didn't mean to imply that and certainly didn't prove that, all of a sudden you were that girl?...You sued the New York Times, they printed a note to the readers that said ‘we never intended to imply she was having an affair with him.’ Where do you think they went so wrong? Because they have sources and they did try to contact you. Where do you think the New York Times failed here?

We couldn't resist posting this one for a good Friday laugh -- I think the video speaks for itself.

Found via SunSentinel.com

Following the Media Research Center's ongoing call for an explanation of George Stephanopoulos's reported strategy conference calls with Democratic operatives Paul Begala and James Carville and White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel,  the MRC has released a new Profile in Bias for the "This Week" host.

"[I]n his on-air role at ABC, Stephanopoulos has been a reliable mouthpiece for the Democratic spin of the day — using his perch as an analyst and correspondent to add an extra boost to liberals, undermine conservatives and push a liberal policy agenda," the profile notes before listing scores of examples, such this one from March 18, 2008, wherein Stephanopoulos lauded Obama for refusing to castigate his former pastor:

By refusing to renounce Reverend Wright, that was in many ways an act of honor for Senator Obama.

As we at NewsBusters have documented, ABC News executives have refused to directly confront the breach of journalistic ethics first reported in the January 27 Politico:

This post follows up on last night's NewsBusters post ("They Never Learn: CNN Withdraws Apparently Faked Video of CPR Attempt on 'Dead' Palestinian Child").

CNN has reposted a video it withdrew yesterday. That video purports to show the death and hasty burial of a cameraman's 12 year-old younger brother, one of two children allegedly killed on the roof of their home in rocket fire from an Israeli drone.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee, and several NB commenters yesterday all questioned the credibility of the video. Johnson, Owens, and Morrissey still believe it was staged.

Here are some excerpts from CNN's explanation for re-posting the video, and why it believes it to be genuine (the video itself is here):

Correction (Feb. 10, 2009): Corrected from original reporting attributing AP and Getty with the photo editing. In fact it was ABCNews.com, not AP or Getty Images that overlaid the Bush photo on the Gaza rubble photo. AP and Getty Images supplied the respective photos.  Thanks to the folks at StinkyJournalism.org for pointing out the error.

I guess, since flat-out fauxtography as practiced in 2006 in the Middle East has become so difficult, and has been shown as likely to be detected, that the press has decided to go with "creative" image placement to do the dirty work that must be done to create sympathy for Hamas and antipathy towards President Bush and the United States.

For "some reason," the editors at ABCNews.com placed President Bush's image at its bottom right. The photo compilation (shown above) accompanied a report by Miguel Marquez and Simon McGregor-Wood that appears to have also run on the network's "World News" program.

The wreckage in the photo purports to be "the destroyed house of Hamas leader of Nizar Rayan following an Israeli air strike the day before in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip" (given the state of reporting out of the region, one never knows for sure).

There is no good reason for Mr. Bush's picture to be included, since:

See Jan. 9 Follow-up -- "CNN Doubles Down: Reposts Withdrawn Video of Apparently Faked CPR Attempt on 'Dead' Palestinian Child"

Not that it ever really went away, but fake news is back in Gaza, and the worldwide media is being played.

Many readers will likely detect the fakery in the linked video pictured on the right on their own (HTs to Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs [LGF] and Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee via Instapundit).

The video purports to show the death and hasty burial of a cameraman's 12 year-old younger brother, one of two children allegedly killed on the roof of their home in rocket fire from an Israeli drone.

A seemingly pretty knowledgeable LGF commenter spotted what many inexpert readers who see the video will also catch (bolds are mine):

I’m no military expert, but I am a doctor, and this video is bullsh-t. The chest compressions that were being performed at the beginning of this video were absolutely, positively fake. The large man in the white coat was NOT performing CPR on that child. He was just sort of tapping on the child’s sternum a little bit with his fingers. You can’t make blood flow like that. Furthermore, there’s no point in doing chest compressions if you’re not also ventilating the patient somehow.

There was no Memorex around when the brontosauri were bidding bye-bye, but I think we have a pretty good idea of what they sounded like as they were going extinct.  Just listen to Brian Williams this morning.  Appearing on Morning Joe, the NBC Nightly News anchor lamented the decline of "classically-trained" journalists in favor of guys with "an opinion and a modem."  

A question from Pat Buchanan about the ebbing fortunes of the old media set Williams off on a soliloquy he assured us was not self-interested.

The humor site The Onion, the offbeat weekly The Chicago Reader, and Time Out Chicago have discovered that some of their articles have appeared in total on Arianna Huffington's mega web outlet The Huffington Post. And they are none too happy about the wholesale lifting of their material, either.

Wired.com has the full story about the Huffington Post's unwelcome lifting saying that Huffington Post is "being accused of slimy business practices by a handful of smaller publications who say the site is unfairly copying and publishing their content." And this wholesale stealing of others' work seems strange when the latest news about Huff Post is that it was graced with a $25 million capital infusion by investors. With that kind of cash flow, you'd think they could hire a few out of work MSMers and give them a job, wouldn't you?

Though members of the mainstream media seem to have noticed in recent days that the radical, thoroughly corrupt left-wing group ACORN exists, the MSM are still accepting ACORN's word that it is strictly nonpartisan.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

While the MSM continue to churn out stories about alleged "voter suppression" (yes, it exists, but it is a pretty minor thing, especially when compared to ACORN's widespread electoral fraud), ACORN's interim organizer in chief Bertha Lewis has removed any remaining doubt about which political party ACORN supports.

Lewis is featured in a video posted on YouTube by an ACORN affiliate,Working Families Party. Says Lewis:

The mainstream media is so in the tank for Barack Obama that only in the last few days has it begun to do some serious shoe-leather reporting and trace the connections between ACORN, Barack Obama, William Ayers, ACORN founder Wade Rathke and his embezzling brother Dale, the Weather Underground Organization, and the Democratic Party.

The MSM is still largely downplaying Americans' justifiable fears that ACORN is attempting to steal the election through massive voter fraud. As NewsBusters has exhaustively documented, MSM talking heads say: fears of voter fraud are overblown, ACORN is just an innocent community group, Obama never technically "worked" for ACORN because when he worked for Project Vote it was allegedly an independent organization (that's a fave of Seth Colter Walls at the Huffington Post), and so on.

Sometimes the MSM needs some help.

I wrote the paper, "ACORN: Who Funds the Weather Underground's Little Brother?" for the November issue of Capital Research Center's Foundation Watch newsletter.

Read it here or read on for a summary.

Mary Mapes is in gloat over-drive.  Dan Rather's erstwhile producer, the woman behind Memogate, is beside herself with joy at what she sees as the impending death of the conservative blogosphere.  

It's her expectation that Barack Obama will win the presidency that has Mapes so hopeful.  Annotated excerpts from her HuffPo column, The Monster is Dying [emphasis added]:

Listen to this audio from a 1995 interview where Obama says a blatant race baiting statement implying that whites don't want to pay taxes to inner city children for them to go to school.  The interview is full of defense on Obama's socialistic views on taxation, and other controversial remarks. 

It took the "new media" and blogs to dig this information up.  This would have never seen the light of day if it were left up to the mainstream media.  Now that it has been brought into the light, will the media pick up their fumbled ball and run with it?  I doubt it, but perhaps if enough blogs report on it they can be shamed into doing so.  They won't report on this unless they have to.

What should be front page news informing and warning Americans is going entirely unnoticed by the MSM. It couldn’t be any more obvious the media are in the tank for Obama. Stanley Kurtz asks, “where's the press”?

In “Something New Here,” I laid out Barack Obama’s ties to the far-left New Party. Blogger Trevor Loudon, of New Zeal, did the pioneering work on this issue. Today, Loudon has posted good quality scans of New Party documents and pictures confirming Obama’s membership. We’ve seen most of this information before (although only recently), but never so clearly.

"Meet the Press" interim moderator Tom Brokaw sits on the board of a liberal foundation that has given radical left-wing group ACORN $821,000 and that in turn is funded by liberal uber-donor George Soros, research reveals.

Conservatives have long considered Brokaw's political views to be somewhere on the left, but these revelations raise new questions about the former NBC News anchor's objectivity.

Here are the facts.

Brokaw sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that, according to its website, targets poverty in New York City by applying "sound investment principles to philanthropy." The foundation awarded ACORN a $456,000 grant in 2003 and a $365,000 grant in 2004. Brokaw does not appear to have played a role in the grants because he didn't become a member of the board until 2005 according to the guidestar.org database, but these are nevertheless the left-wing circles in which he travels.