NPR

That “Made in America” sticker is looking more attractive.

Second-quarter (2Q) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was revised up from 1.9 percent growth to a higher than anticipated 3.3 percent, according to reports on August 28.

Rising exports played a significant role in the expansion. According to the Commerce Department, real exports increased 13.2 percent in the 2Q of 2008, compared with an increase of 5.1 percent in the first. Real imports of goods and services decreased 0.8 percent in the first quarter and 7.6 percent in the second.

The good news on exports has been falling by the wayside in the media. The Business & Media Institute's video blog, The Biz Flog, pointed out the positive news about exports back on August 6.

Thanks to a weak dollar, it is now cheaper to export goods from the U.S. to other countries. But the story hasn't caught on in the mainstream media just yet.

Estranged family members come out of the strangest places when the lottery is won or someone has presidential aspirations. These quiet individuals find a sense of power never felt before in their lives when a blood relative hits it big or is about to hit it bigger.

In Barack Obama’s case, Vanity Fair reported on a half-brother who was recently discovered living in a small shack in Kenya. Obama’s relative lives on less than $1 a month.

Forget the basics of supply and demand, just find someone to blame.

As Congress takes new aim at speculators for the high price of gasoline, some media reports seem to be following suit. But as The Biz Flog explains this week, there is considerable debate over whether speculators should be blamed for the high cost of oil.

June 23, the same day Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee condemned oil speculators, the "CBS Evening News" and ABC's "World News" blamed oil speculation for a large chunk of the spike in prices.

"There's no doubt speculation plays a role in the skyrocketing price, but how much?" ABC correspondent Ryan Owens said June 23. "Experts say if it were just simple supply and demand a barrel would cost $75. Today it closed north of $135."

Scott Horsley explained oil speculation on June 29 for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," where he pointed out that there have always been financial players in the oil market and there is still a debate over what influence they really have.

Mass murder in real concentration camps in the Soviet Union are ancient history to National Public Radio, but the cause of poor, blacklisted communists in Hollywood charging America was a concentration camp is still a fresh and poignant soundbite. On the June 17 edition of All Things Considered, anchor Melissa Block championed a forthcoming new documentary about communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, made by Peter Askin and Trumbo’s son Christopher and featuring big celebrities like Michael Douglas. Block made no mention of Trumbo’s actual Communist Party membership in the age of Stalin, and nowhere in the interview was there even a whisper of an alternative historical point of view, from Ronald Radosh to Kenneth Billingsley.

Block could only lament once again this alleged persecution of communists, once again utterly free of the irony that communists specialized in persecution everywhere they came to power:

NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast an interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, lamenting her from the left. Co-host Steve Inskeep reported that a new vote on war funding "means Democrats get a reminder of something they have not accomplished. For a year and a half now they've tried and failed to end the war." Would that really be an "accomplishment"?

While the story aired current and dated declarations from Pelosi that Bush has his "head in the sand" to conditions in Iraq, NPR’s interviewer, KQED/San Francisco correspondent Scott Shafer, never asked if improvement in Iraq might have changed just which politicians look like they have a "head in the sand" to current conditions. But then, Shafer has a partisan background: he worked as a press secretary to San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos and as chief of staff to Gray Davis when he was the state of California’s comptroller.

Shafer made no acknowledgment anything has changed since 2006, that the surge happened and violence is way down, but only that the death toll surpassed 4,000:

Now that the general election is apparently on, National Public Radio staffers and listeners are already bracing for the "rancor" that John McCain and the Republicans are going to unleash. On Wednesday’s nationally distributed Diane Rehm show, Rehm asked bluntly: "What kinds of comments, what kinds of rancor are we likely to see coming from John McCain as he goes up against Barack Obama?" Rancor is apparently a Republican product, and something that will never be emitted by the Obama campaign.

Several Obama supporters worried to Rehm that the American voters are dumb enough to be talked out of voting for Obama by right-wing rumor-mongering about Obama’s religion. One caller complained about how voters listen to "silly rumors on the talk shows, they don’t bother to ascertain facts." After another caller told a story of a houseguest who thought Obama was a secret Muslim, NPR political director Ron Elving said the American people are intelligent, but often uninformed. Former Time reporter John Dickerson, now with the liberal Slate website, added that Obama will have to deal with voters who are "willfully stupid" about his life history.

Rehm read a letter from Scott in Dallas, Texas:

On Sunday, I mentioned that the Saturday night version of NPR’s All Things Considered was a pacifist’s dream. It was also a Bush-basher’s delight. Leftist actor John Cusack explained his new anti-war comedy (read: the next box office flop) this way: "The ideology behind this war is so radical and it's so destroying the country that I think a somber serious take on it would just add to the sense of depression and inevitable doom that this administration has unleashed on the country."

Cusack added War Inc. was Bush-inspired: "And the argument of the Bush administration is that there's nothing, no function of state, there's no national interest that is not a corporate interest. Everything is to be privatized, everything is to be -- the core function of government is to create the optimal conditions for a feeding frenzy."

It’s probably a good thing Cusack didn’t try to argue the Bush administration lied its way into war, since Cusack charmed and tickled his NPR interviewer by explaining how they basically lied to major companies seeking to use their corporate logos for mockery by filing innocuous requests, not telling the Financial Times, for example, that their logo was going to be put on the side of a tank for laughs.

Saturday night’s All Things Considered on National Public Radio came to an overtly pacifist conclusion. Substitute host Guy Raz (an NPR Defense Department correspondent) conducted a seven-minute interview with John Cusack on his satirical anti-war, anti-Bush film "War Inc.", and Cusack predictably denounced the war and Bush as absurd. Then came a six-minute interview with a smitten John Lennon fan who’s hoping to make a half-million dollars auctioning the original hand-written lyrics to "Give Peace a Chance," since she was there in Montreal for the original "bed-in" protest that produced the anthem. Then, as the music continued, Raz unloaded a little editorial.

Raz decided to read from Dwight Eisenhower, a "man who knew war better than most," on the need for peace: "I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it."

As part of their post-mortem for the zombified Hillary Clinton campaign, National Public Radio is blaming the media (including talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and Fox's Neil Cavuto and Bill Kristol) for demeaning Hillary Clinton "pioneering candidacy" with sexist coverage during her race for the White House. On Wednesday’s Morning Edition, media reporter David Folkenflik interviewed male political reporters (Richard Stevenson of the New York Times and Chuck Todd of NBC) and liberal feminists (Dee Dee Myers and Susan Estrich) to recount Hillary’s burdensome struggles with cackle coverage:

FOLKENFLIK: But journalists and pundits do constantly describe Clinton in different terms than they would her male rivals. In the following clip, Fox News pollster Frank Luntz was asking voters what kind of campaign they wanted Obama and Clinton to wage.

FRANK LUNTZ (Pollster, Fox News): How many of you want them to really argue? Raise your hands. And how many of you want them to make love to each other?

FOLKENFLIK: Just try imagining John McCain and Mike Huckabee in that scenario, or Joe Biden and these remarks by conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

NPR war correspondent Anne Garrels spoke to students at Northwestern University recently and acknowledged the widely held belief that NPR's on the liberal end of the media spectrum that holds Fox News Channel in contempt. But in Baghdad, the two media outlets formed what Garrels called the "most unlikely of partnerships." Reported the Daily Northwestern:   

Garrels, who spoke as part of the Crain Lecture Series, said NPR had been struggling with power; they received electricity from Baghdad's grid for only two hours a day.

Someone from Fox News offered to share the station's generator with NPR, which Garrels said it initially rejected.

"My boss said, 'Not on your Nelly,' " Garrels said. "But no Fox, no power and eventually saner minds prevailed. People do help each other out in Baghdad a lot."

Not on your Nelly? This would lead one to suspect the NPR boss is not an American, or perhaps spent a lot of time in London. It's described as "Cockney rhyming slang for not on your life."

Guess Which Party, and What Label?

Here are Old Media excerpts relating to recent presidential contenders you might find interesting.

First, here's the Associated Press from May 15 (fourth short item at link):

The United Steelworkers union endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president Thursday, giving the Illinois senator a powerful advocate in attracting blue-collar voters.

The endorsement comes one day after former presidential candidate and Steelworker ally John Edwards endorsed Obama, a key component in the union's decision to go with the Democratic front-runner.

Edwards won only one primary, his home state of South Carolina, in two presidential runs.

Here's ABC's "Political Radar Blog" on that same day:

Talk about finding every reason to push the war on climate change. National Public Radio President Kevin Klose found a way to get at the sensibilities of southern California commuters - by telling them global warming will make driving even worse.

Klose was a panelist at the forum "Covering a Changing Climate: The Media Challenge" held at Harvard University in Boston, Mass., on April 30. He said the effects of climate change will include migration from the south and cause a U.S. population boom of 100 million people. Klose told the audience this would be the subject of a series on NPR.

"We're going to do a unique one-week series called ‘The Next Hundred Million,' because in the next 30 years, absent of anything else, there will be another hundred million people living inside the United States of America," Klose said.

For a moment, let's step away from the commentary, per se, and focus on the commentators. Liberals love to chide Fox News for its alleged conservative bias. So why don't we see, when it comes to being fair and balanced, how this morning's Fox News Sunday panel stacked up against that of its main competitor, Meet the Press?

Here are the line-ups—you be the judge.

MEET THE PRESS

Host–Tim Russert

Panel

• David Broder–Washington Post columnist
• John Dickerson–Slate
• Gwen Ifill–PBS
• Andrea Mitchell–NBC
• Richard Wolffe–Newsweek

Republicans are welcome on National Public Radio – especially if they’re former Republicans who think the Bush-Cheney administration is a reckless disaster. On April 17, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross interviewed former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who’s now left the GOP and gone independent. He has a new book titled "Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President." Chafee wasn’t kidding: he told Gross the Democratic opposition was too weak, and regretted not contesting President Bush’s election in 2000, as the Congressional Black Caucus requested. NPR’s Fresh Air site also reprinted an excerpt from Chafee’s book, as he described his horror at a meeting with Dick Cheney pressing his "clashist" agenda.

But Chafee’s GOP primary opponent in 2006, Cranston mayor Steve Laffey, also wrote a book (published last September) called Primary Mistake, complaining that the national GOP favored the hopelessly liberal Chafee. NPR and Fresh Air didn’t grant him a book interview. The ideology didn’t match as neatly as NPR’s and Chafee’s did. Here’s a part of the interview where Chafee underlines how nobody in Washington stands up to the Bush-Cheney machine:

Almost a year ago, NewsBusters introduced readers to Kristen Byrnes, a 15-year-old Portland, Maine, student that marvelously took on the so-called global warming consensus, as well as some of its strongest proponents such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and NASA's James Hansen.

At the time, Kristen was being invited by all kinds of media outlets -- including Fox News -- to discuss her research either on television or radio. All such requests were turned down, as Kristen wasn't ready for the camera or the microphone.

Well, it appears that turning sixteen has been a good thing for Kristen's confidence, for on Tuesday, she was interviewed by NPR, and she did a fabulous job.

As such, with great pride, I recommend you sit back, and listen to America's future, which, with folks like Kristen waiting in the wings, is far better than the left and their media minions want you to believe (audio available here).

National Public Radio knows how to identify itself as the secular liberal media. On Good Friday, the show Fresh Air with Terry Gross recycled a 2004 interview with retired academic John Dominic Crossan, a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, a man who believes the Gospels are largely mythology, someone's ahistorical hopes, and that the resurrection of Jesus never occurred, and that perhaps the body of Jesus was consumed by wild dogs. In this interview, Gross also asked him to comment on (disparage) the movie The Passion of the Christ, which he eagerly did. He suggested too much focus on the passion of Christ is "dangerously close to pathological." (Photo from NPR.org)

Just two weeks ago, we noted Fresh Air gave unbelievers about three times more air time than believers. Here's a sample of the Crossan interview:

GROSS: When you, as someone who studies the historical Jesus, think about the resurrection, do you think about it as metaphor or as actuality?

In all the brouhaha last week over the incendiary comments made by Barack Obama's pastor the media seemed to forget to partake in their traditional Holy Week Christian-bashing excercise.  There were a few entries in the "Easter Hit Parade," like the Comedy Central show "Root of All Evil" which my boss, Brent Bozell, wrote about in a column recently, and an episode of "Law and Order" which featured another Christian-stones-someone storyline.

I suppose it's good news that there was less faith flagellation courtesy of the liberal media, and yet at the same time it's sad that I was expecting to find it at Easter time.  But the fact remains that Christmas and Easter are generally times when the media attacks on Christians are more pronounced.

For atheists it's a different story.

On Friday, the NPR chat show Fresh Air with Terry Gross (aired on over 400 stations from WHYY in Philadelphia) carried two interviews on science and religion. They might claim the discussion was balanced, but not when you consider the time allotted, as listed on the NPR web page:

Richard Dawkins: An Argument for Atheism (27 min 41 sec)

Francis Collins: A Scientist's Case for God (10 min 50 sec)

Apparently, an almost three-to-one time difference is a fair fight on NPR.

In case that's not imbalanced enough, the Dawkins page also helpfully links to another 30-minute NPR interview with Dawkins about his book The God Delusion on the show Talk of the Nation. The interviews are repeats from last year, but NPR doesn't generally tell listeners about that when the show airs.

Jennifer Harper, Washington Times reporter and friend of Newsbusters, gives us a revealing look at how far left our taxpayer funded National Public Radio network has gotten itself these days. Even when they try to go a little toward the conservative side of the debate, they get lambasted by their audience, angered that they had the temerity to air conservative views. Of course, the only reason they would get such a rude reception from their own audience is because they have garnered only a far left listenership as a result of their far left programming. After all, if they had a balanced listenership they wouldn't get deluged by angry emails when they aired conservative content.

Apparently, at the end of February, the NPR program "Morning Edition" took the unusual move of airing four consecutive days of interviews with conservative thinkers in a segment they dubbed "Conversations with Conservatives."

The Washington Post reported Thursday that National Public Radio, long a taxpayer-subsidized sandbox for Sixties-retread liberalism, has decided to keep its headquarters in the District of Columbia -- thanks to a huge 20-year property tax holiday. "Neil O. Albert, deputy mayor for planning and economic development, said that NPR will not pay property taxes on the building for 20 years, saving $40 million. The city has agreed not to raise property taxes by more than 3 percent on the station's Massachusetts Avenue building for two decades, or until NPR sells it."

Reporters Yolanda Woodlee and Miranda Spivack also reported other local property owners were incensed at the special dealing as their taxes multiply:

Nicholas Deoudes, who owns three buildings less than a mile from the future NPR location, said that his property taxes increased last year from $13,614 to $36,151. Deoudes, who has owned the buildings for 29 years, said the city needs to help longtime business owners who stayed when the area was a "ghost town."

Over last weekend, the NPR show On The Media devoted a segment to co-host Bob Garfield remembering the legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. Garfield quoted George Will on the massive effect Buckley had on the history of conservatism and even ending the Cold War, but he turned it around to how conservatism is badly represented today by the Limbaughs and Coulters. 

"It’s an unfortunate bit of media irony, then, that the most famous moment in his courtly, witty, supremely civilized pundit’s career would be his televised confrontation in 1968 with author and rival Gore Vidal," as Garfield recalled Vidal calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" and Buckley pledging to sock him in his "queer" face. Would the liberal media remember liberal eminences by their biggest TV fight? Garfield concluded:

New NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard took up a flurry of complaints when veteran news anchor Jean Cochran told listeners President Bush was traveling to Africa, the "dark continent." They insisted NPR was sounding racist:

"I thought that we had wrested that comment along with 'colored' and other euphemisms for Africans or Afro-Americans," wrote one listener, summing up how others felt. "Could you please report my comments to NPR management? I almost drove off the side of the road to start a protest!!!"

"This is simply an outdated reference as well as being outrageously offensive," wrote another listener, Karrye Y. Braxton.

The copy, which had been approved by an editor, was pulled and Cochran agreed to never use the expression again.

"The New York Times is not a supermarket tabloid," boasted their Washington Bureau Chief R.W. Apple when Gennifer Flowers first declared in 1992 that she and Gov. Bill Clinton had an affair. Even then, the line sounded laughable.

One year before, then-Times reporter Maureen Dowd penned a 2400-word front-page stink bomb passing along discredited gossip author Kitty Kelley’s unproven charges of something apparently too glorious to fact-check: an alleged long-time affair between Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra, including private "luncheons" that went on all afternoon at the White House.

During the four weeks preceding February 20, New York Times Company stock had been staging a nice comeback.

Lord only knows that the company's long-suffering shareholders, who before then had seen the share price drop more than 70% since June 2002, a point in time that roughly coincides with the onset of the Old Gray Lady's seemingly intractable case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, welcomed any kind of reversal of fortune.

For a while, they had it. From a intra-day low of $14.01 on January 23, the stock rose over 50%, closing at $21.07 last Wednesday.

But on Thursday and Friday, that climb was halted abruptly, and partially reversed. While the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.4% in those two days, and the S&P 500 dipped 0.5%, NYT stock dove almost 9.7%, closing Friday at $19.03.

NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr has a new book out, a package of his radio commentaries. In a nod to where the NPR brand appeals most, Schorr will be selling his book at a members-only meeting of the Woman’s National Democratic Club next week, as Fishbowl DC passes along:

"Legendary broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr will speak about and sign his book, Come to Think of It at a luncheon program co-sponsored by the English-Speaking Union on Tuesday, February 19 at the Woman's National Democratic Club. ... The cost of the program is $30. For tickets, contact the English-Speaking Union at esuwdc.net/(202) 234-4602, or the Woman's National Democratic Club at (202) 232-7363."

Here's a belated item for your media-bias talking points: after rummaging through the media coverage of the typically large March for Life on Tuesday, January 22, I have the following scorecard:

-- ABC, CBS, and NBC had absolutely nothing on the March, and absolutely nothing on the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. Put the word "abortion" into Nexis and you get a black hole for that day, and the next day.

-- By contrast, Fox News Channel at least had a fair-and-balanced report on the March (complete with abortion advocates like Vicki Saporta of the National Abortion Federation) on Tuesday night's Special Report with Brit Hume.  

-- National Public Radio offered several segments on the Roe anniversary, but no mention of the March for Life  (with the asterisk that news breaks on the hour are not loaded into Nexis.)

NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr is torn over the two Democratic front runners Sens. Clinton and Obama. This according to a weekly newsletter from Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, D.C.

As taken from the January 30 e-mail newsletter (emphasis mine; h/t Carter Wood):

One last State of the Union note. I found this introduction to an NPR interview with a Clinton speechwriter and a Reagan speechwriter on Monday's Morning Edition on a two-term president's last SOTU a little odd:

STEVE INSKEEP, anchor: It's a moment for any president to reflect on his accomplishments, as President Clinton did in his last State of the Union in 2000.

CLINTON: Never before has our nation enjoyed at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats.

How is it that NPR plays that clip thinking that it represents Clinton's accomplishments, instead of his utter cluelessness in retrospect about the gathering storm of 9/11?

Did Hillary’s misty talk of how much she loved America and wanted to reverse the Bush administration help her win in New Hampshire? NPR’s All Things Considered on Wednesday night went looking for women voters who were moved. Co-anchor Melissa Block interviewed three Hillary voters in Manchester: "Do you think that the polls underestimated women here?" One said: "I think they really, really did.

On NPR’s evening newscast All Things Considered on Tuesday night, anchor Melissa Block talked to primary voters in Milford, New Hampshire, and the liberal ones were very expressive. One touted Hillary as "Mother Earth...a mother to take care of the country," and another broke down into tears at the similarities in the hopes inspired by Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy. She began with Steven Shaheen, making no effort to confirm or deny whether he was related to former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen:

STEVEN SHAHEEN: I just feel the country needs a woman to run this country. I think it needs like a Mother Earth. It needs a mother to take care of the country.

BLOCK, struck by the analogy: Mother Earth.

SHAHEEN: That’s how I feel, I mean, personally. She struck me as the person with more experience, she seems, you know, with a lot of intelligence, a lot of education, and it's a gut feeling inside — can't really put words to that.