NPR

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.

Once again, those class-warring liberals are organizing a luxury cruise. This time, it's National Public Radio talk show host Diane Rehm, who's syndicated in more than 80 markets through D.C. affiliate WAMU at American University:

This intimate travel experience with Diane Rehm gives you the opportunity to meet the people and experience the culture that most tourists miss. Even better, you'll do it all in the best way possible--on a luxurious river cruise ship. Unpack just once and settle into your outside cabin.

For 14 nights, you'll cruise through the very heart of Europe on this incredible voyage between Budapest and Amsterdam.

One of the benefits of the Danube River trip is three two-hour chats with Diane Rehm. She has an online letter of invitation to potential WAMU donors:

The Laura Ingraham radio show began Wednesday morning with a red-hot burst of outrage at yesterday's National Public Radio debate with the Democratic presidential candidates. She called it "an underreported treasure trove of idiocy" and said the broadcast completely lived up the boutique-liberal NPR stereotype -- which is why it was underreported by the rest of the media.

The show began with an NPR question on why America is so hated in the Muslim world, which couldn't be a bigger softball to Joe Biden, and the rest of the candidates, who quickly blamed the Bush administration for the unsettled Muslim world. 

The lead-in to NPR's evening newscast All Things Considered last night was all ‘crazy neocon’ Iran quotes last night from the candidates. (They play the theme song, and then you get that featured soundbite or set of soundbites). Sadly, that’s not on the NPR website, but the two-hour debate is here.

When business goes green, interest groups get mean.

National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" gave a report November 30 on misleading "green" products, charging companies with "The Six Sins of Greenwashing."

"You may have thought they were environmentally friendly just because the product says so, but some environmentalists think you're being ‘greenwashed,'" said host Steve Inskeep. "Is one of the sins just lying, then, basically?"

Scot Case of the environmental marketing firm TerraChoice conveyed that "the biggest sin [they] found ... was called ‘The Sin of the Hidden Tradeoff' for products that promote a single issue ... but there are a wide variety of environmental considerations."

TerraChoice evaluated 1,018 retail products for their environmental claims and only one was found to be without sin, while the rest were guilty of offenses like "The Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils," "The Sin of Fibbing" and "The Sin of No Proof."

So, what's TerraChoice's solution?

National Public Radio's arts-and-culture show "Fresh Air" recently displayed how its leftist ideology trumps artistic judgment, especially when it comes to movies designed to get America out of Iraq before our crazed soldiers senselessly kill more civilians. Film critic David Edelstein lauded Brian De Palma's new movie "Redacted" as a "laudable artistic response to an unpopular war," even as he conceded the movie is terrible as a work of art.

Edelstein knew some people hated the exploitative display of Iraqi corpses at the film's end, noting that De Palma thinks rubbing Americans' faces with the collateral damage will get us out of Iraq: "I think most Americans are immune to those techniques, but I respect his impulse. 'Redacted' is a crude piece of work but it's the kind of outright agitprop that rarely makes it to the big screen."

Edelstein also claims the movie centered around savage rape and murder by American troops isn't anti-troops: "But it's an act of sympathy to suggest that soldiers on their third tours of duty in a place where they have no knowledge of the culture, where they can't tell who's on their side and who wants to blow them up, stand a good chance of losing both their moral compass and their minds." Here's the transcript from the November 16 review:

The casual assumption that state-funded broadcasting in America would be devoted to adoration of the head of state would be exactly wrong, at least during Republican presidencies. Instead, on Monday, National Public Radio’s program Day to Day (co-produced with the liberal website Slate) awarded five minutes to leftist author Naomi Wolf and her thesis that the Bush administration is orchestrating "the end of America," and President Bush is comparable to Adolf Hitler. The headline was very frank on the NPR web site: "Naomi Wolf Likens Bush to Hitler."

If a conservative compared President Clinton to a communist dictator, there is no chance that NPR would devote a serious five-minute interview to his "Clinton hater" thesis – and they should not. But NPR tilts so far to the left that extreme cartooning of the Bush presidency, comparing it to mass-murdering dictatorships, is presented as a harsh, but respectable subject of debate. A few minutes into the unspooling of this crackpot thesis, anchor Alex Cohen (a female) made an attempt to challenge Wolf that maybe she was overstating things a bit:

Here's something you don't see every day: a well-known liberal journalist slamming the owner of Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas.

Yet, that's what happened on Wednesday's "Hannity & Colmes" when NPR's Juan Williams was invited on to discuss the recent hiring of Moulitsas by Newsweek.

In a rather stunning turn of events, Williams seemed absolutely disgusted by the announcement (video available here, relevant section begins at minute 3:37):

NPR personage Garrison Keillor loans his public-radio voice – hailed by liberals at Slate as "a breathy baritone that seems precision-engineered to narrate a documentary about glaciers" – to a feature called "The Writer’s Almanac," which usually features a poem and and some literary and historical notes of the day. On Thursday, Keillor recounted how Democrats once regretted demands for an early withdrawal and ended up looking like the party of surrender:

It was on this day in 1864 that Abraham Lincoln was elected to his second term as president of the United States, one of the few elections in world history to be held in the middle of a civil war. Lincoln might have tried to cancel or postpone the election until the war was over, but he said, "If the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."

National Public Radio’s "Car Talk" program is a popular weekend show, as Tom and Ray Magliozzi (or "Click and Clack") trade light banter over what can go wrong with your Chevy. But even the "Car Talk" guys are acting out as liberal activists. In a letter to the House Select Committee on Global Warming, the NPR hosts gleefully sign up as part of the "barrage of lobbying" around higher fuel-economy standards, and knock the automobile industry:

The onslaught of "we can’t…it’ll ruin us… you’re denying Americans a choice of vehicles" begins every time we the people—through our elected representatives—try to bring the auto industry, kicking and screaming into the modern era. And every time, their predictions of motorized-skateboard futures have failed to materialize. Let us repeat that, because the historical record bears it out to a tee. Every single time they’ve resisted safety, environmental, or fuel economy regulations, auto industry predictions have turned out, in retrospect, to be fear-mongering bull-feathers. Isn't it time we (you) stop falling for this 50 year-long line of baloney? [Emphasis theirs.]

According to a new study, those news organizations that hold themselves up as the most neutral and professional — big newspapers, the broadcast networks and taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio — are actually producing campaign stories that are the most tilted in favor of Democrats, while online news and talk radio have actually been the most balanced.

The study, released Monday from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, found newspapers and broadcast TV outlets devoted far more time to covering the Democratic candidates than the Republicans and that the tone of those stories was much more favorable to the Democrats, mirroring the results of a Media Research Center study released in August.

Major National Public Radio moneybags Garrison Keillor is up to his usual rhetorical tricks over at Salon, putting on the sardonic tone like a pair of his red sneakers about George Bush's waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq:  

I suppose that $8 billion is not so much considering that the war will cost $200 billion this year alone, and yet one is curious to know why the G-men can't find out where it went, at a time when the Current Occupant is so very concerned about keeping medical benefits away from undeserving children. Hundreds of millions paid to the gunslingers of Blackwater, but an American family with a seriously ill child has to tap-dance backward through a gantlet of government forms to prove they really, really, really are desperate.

As the old adage says, the little thieves get hung and the big thieves get richer and richer. When it comes to larceny, it pays to be ambitious.

For years now, Valerie Plame has been the toast of the liberal glitterati, a celebrated combat specialist against the Vast Bush Conspiracy. Every move the former CIA employee has made has oozed political and commercial calculation. She struck a book deal with Simon & Schuster worth more than $2 million. She struck a movie deal based on the book deal with Warner Brothers for millions more, so she can be played as a patriotic heroine on the silver screen by Nicole Kidman or Naomi Watts. How many millions more? Two million? Five million? Don’t wait for the media to ask. They're too busy playing her as victimized.

In the Clinton years, any opponent in a Clinton scandal was assumed to be overwhelmed with greed, desperate to get an agent and make millions with lies about the president, to sell "trash for cash." Since she's been encouraged to wage political war by Hillary Clinton, none of these assumptions have been applied to Valerie Plame, or her husband, Joe Wilson. Here’s a rundown of the Plame interviews and the number of questions about the Wilsons making millions:

To commemorate the Media Research Center’s 20th anniversary this month, we’ve just published a special expanded edition of our ‘Notable Quotables’ newsletter with more than 100 of the most outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes we’ve uncovered over the past 20 years. Earlier this week, I presented quotes showing the media’s hostility towards Ronald Reagan and other conservatives, and sycophantic coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Today’s installment: America the Awful. On Monday, I recounted how many journalists offered sympathetic coverage of totalitarian communist regimes. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, too many journalists opted to take a harsher approach with their own country. In a commencement address at the State University of New York at New Paltz back on May 21, 2006, New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., exposed his extreme left-wing agenda as he railed against everything he saw as wrong with America:

Video (0:52): Windows (1.64 MB), plus MP3 audio (261 kB).

Back in March, liberals tried to make a major controversy out of Rush Limbaugh’s parody of Al Sharpton singing "Barack the Magic Negro" (to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon") even though it borrowed the "magic negro" term from a black writer in the Los Angeles Times. Critics thought it was racist and made Sharpton sound like an idiot. One blogger called for station managers to drop Limbaugh and this "worst kind of vile, demeaning garbage." It even became a news story on NBC.

But what about when the left does a similar kind of satire against Clarence Thomas – and on National Public Radio, no less? On October 1, the first day of the Supreme Court’s new term, NPR’s All Things Considered aired a parody by Bruce Kluger and David Slavin, using ethnic and racial stereotyping for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and Thomas. Scalia is pitched as the Godfather (complete with notes from the "Godfather" soundtrack) and Thomas is mocked as Scalia’s goon, who repeats everything Scalia says and even calls him "Boss." Fake Thomas also seems well-versed in the signals of public-restroom sex. (You have to hear it to believe it. Audio here.)

Long-time NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards was dumped by NPR in 2004 after almost 25 years in the anchor chair. Later in that year, he found a new perch at XM satellite radio’s XMPR or XM Public Radio channel, where he hosts a daily hour-long show that re-airs several times. On Thursday’s show, he still sounded like a typical liberal NPR host as he interviewed ex-President Jimmy Carter, and his affection for Carter and his policies came tumbling out.

Late in the hour, the normally staid host got passionate, prodding Carter to explain how America’s global image was ruined by President Bush, and after Carter spun a long potential inauguration speech for the next president, stuffed with liberal platitudes, Edwards replied "That’s a great inauguration speech." He also complained that Carter was "hammered" for insisting on energy conservation and that Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House roof, as if to say "Those wusses are gone" and now "we’re going to drill for oil." He also snorted that leaders like Bush weren’t really leaders, because they didn’t tell the "truth" like Carter did.

On NPR's Diane Rehm show Friday, Time political reporter Karen Tumulty touted Al Gore's latest prize as part of a "remarkable story" about his "remarkable career," and how he's won just about every award you can win. Tumulty says all the "moral authority" he has gained from denouncing the Iraq war before it began could make a difference if he decided to endorse one of the Democratic presidential contenders.

It’s a quite remarkable story that you know, the Vice President after coming out of this traumatic election has built just a remarkable career for himself and really made a difference. But I’m sitting here trying to figure out what award he hasn’t won at this point. We have the Academy Award, the Emmy award, the Grammy award, the Webby award, and now this one.

After the other guests had a turn -- Jim Angle of Fox News and Paul Glastris of the liberal Washington Monthly -- Tumulty underlined Gore's new clout:

Former ABC reporter Michel Martin has a history of one-sided bashing of Clarence Thomas. In 1994, the reporter then known as Michel McQueen helmed a 60-minute special on the ABC prime-time magazine Turning Point highlighting women who charged Anita Hill was right and Clarence Thomas was wrong. Pro-Thomas colleagues at the EEOC were not interviewed.

Outraged now at the new Clarence Thomas autobiography My Grandfather’s Son, Martin used her new forum, the National Public Radio talk show Tell Me More, to interview Angela Wright, a disgruntled employee that Thomas fired, who then denigrated him on NPR as "a mean-spirited, nasty, you know, fairly unstable person" who carried around "his self-loathing and his hatred for anything black or civil rights-oriented or affirmative action." She claimed that the Democrats never wanted her to testify. But the actual record from the hearing clearly shows that Sen. Joe Biden read a letter to Wright saying he would honor her request if she wished to testify, and then attached a statement from Wright saying "From Angela Wright, 'I agree the admission of the transcript of my interview and that of Miss Jourdain's in the record without rebuttal at the hearing represents my position and is completely satisfactory to me.'"

During his Monday smackdown on the Laura Ingraham radio show, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin declined to say yes or no when Laura asked him if he had ever met or interviewed Justice Clarence Thomas before he claimed the Justice was "furious all the time." Toobin suggested Laura should ask Thomas. In a soundbite Ingraham aired at the top of the 10 am hour on Thursday, after his hour-long interview was done, Thomas confirmed that he granted no interview to Toobin. Thomas said he "would have no clue" who Toobin was if he saw him on the street.

Deep into his Monday interview on NPR’s Diane Rehm show, Toobin explained the difference between Justice Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia. Thomas was "a nut." He added at show’s end that Thomas’s legal views were "highly unusual and extreme." He also predicted that if elected president, Hillary Clinton would nominate Barack Obama to the Supreme Court, a "political masterstroke" for Hillary since Obama would be an "unassailable nominee."

Ah, those diversity-loving liberals. You know, the kind who would stifle free speech with their Orwellian "Fairness Doctrine," who threaten legal action against mom-and-pop T-shirt makers who criticize MoveOn.org. Wesley Clark would now take things one step further, whacking Rush Limbaugh off the Armed Forces Network radio airwaves.

"Today" co-anchor Meredith Vieira interviewed the retired general and former Dem presidential candidate on this morning's show.

Last Thursday, on her new show "Tell Me More," NPR talk show Michel Martin held another one of those non-debates on whether the Republican front-runners should have submitted to the debate organized by leftist PBS host Tavis Smiley. She invited both former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele and former Gingrich pollster Frank Luntz to come on and denounce the GOP no-shows for political stupidity and moral cowardice. Luntz insisted "Tavis Smiley is an incredible host, and he is completely fair." But while Martin pointed out that Smiley had prevailed on Steele to help cajole Republicans to attend for several months, she failed to tell listeners that Luntz was hired by Smiley to do polls after the PBS Democratic candidates debate in June. This is not a little-known fact. Liberal Democrat groups like Media Matters had a fit that Smiley hired a Republican pollster for a Democratic debate, and (unsuccessfully) demanded PBS fix it.

In refusing to interview anyone who felt that PBS and Tavis "George Bush is a serial killer" Smiley were offering a hostile forum for Republicans, Martin merely said the RNC failed to send a spokesman – as if there aren’t many conservatives outside the RNC building on Capitol Hill who would accept that opportunity. That's a lazy way to avoid having a contentious debate, instead of a double-beating.

National Public Radio is continuing its historical place as the scene of the original unproven allegations of Anita Hill. NPR's Nina Totenberg broke the story of Hill's unsubstantiated tales of sexual harassment back in 1991. On Monday, NPR talk show host Diane Rehm professed it was "a remarkable thing to say" that Virginia Thomas would dare ask for an apology from Hill. At NPR, they can't even imagine a possibility other than Thomas is a liar. Rehm also wondered if "this kind of fury" from Thomas has biased his court decisions against "the people he calls the liberals who were out to get him." (Audio here.)

Diane Rehm's Monday guests were CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin and  Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic. (Rehm described them as "two authorities on the Supreme Court," with no troublesome ideological label.) Toobin spurred Rehm's commentary by spinning his wild theory that Thomas was both popular at the Court and simultaneously "furious all the time," and Rehm didn't respond by asking if he'd ever met Thomas:

Does National Public Radio have a nose for news? Or a nose that's offended by the scent of President Bush? NPR news boss Ellen Weiss has snubbed an exclusive interview opportunity with President Bush. Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz reported Wednesday that the White House offered NPR’s Juan Williams an interview on race relations, but NPR didn’t want it on its airwaves. So it aired instead on the Fox News Channel.

Williams told Kurtz he was "stunned" by NPR's decision. "It makes no sense to me. President Bush has never given an interview in which he focused on race. . . . I was stunned by the decision to turn their backs on him and to turn their backs on me." Fox was even sharper. "NPR's lack of news judgment is astonishing, and their treatment of a respected journalist like Juan Williams is appalling," said Fox spokeswoman Irena Briganti.

Anybody that has logged on to the Internet in the past couple of days is well aware that the far left in our nation are doing what the far left are best at: calling people racists, and hoping folks will be fired as a result.

The latest conspiracy fabricated by the left - albeit in a long line of conspiracies - deals with comments made by Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on his radio program.

Tuesday evening, O'Reilly invited liberal NPR correspondent Juan Williams on "The Factor" - who, coincidentally, was O'Reilly's radio guest when the supposedly offensive words were uttered - for his views on the subject.

Likely much to the chagrin of liberals throughout the nation, Williams came strongly to O'Reilly's defense, and pointed an accusatory finger at those that have intentionally mischaracterized what transpired for their own benefit (video available here, h/t Johnny Dollar):

As America headed into the weekend before the sixth anniversary of the horrific September 11 terrorist attacks, the latest purported video from Osama bin Laden reminded the country that the war on terrorism is still a real and persistent battle. But some people despise the whole war-on-terror concept. They believe that commemorating 9-11 is getting tired and dated and even psychologically harmful to the country.

As hard (or as easy) as it may be to believe, The New York Times, situated just miles from Ground Zero in Manhattan, published a typically portentous Sunday article asking: "As 9/11 Draws Near, a Debate Rises: How Much Tribute Is Enough?" Times reporter N.R. Kleinfeld suggested the whole rigamarole was tedious, and perhaps distasteful: "Again there will be the public tributes, the tightly scripted memorial events, the reflex news coverage, the souvenir peddlers. Is all of it necessary, at the same decibel level -- still?" Amassing the usual anonymous mass of radicals who are allergic to expressions of national unity or love of country, Kleinfeld insisted "many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying."

"Excessive and vacant, even annoying." Come to think of it, that's a pretty good motto for the masthead of The New York Times.

The blogoshpere is full of opinions, but this one you're paying for. Your tax dollars are going to National Public Radio Blogger and Morning Edition commentator John Ridley to editorialize "I'm sorry, but chick fights are sexy" in his new blog on the NPR website called “Visible Man”, which will appear twice a week. Ridley chimes in on why he likes Elizabeth Edwards for his first post:

Ladies throwing down is just plain hot, and that's true whether they're drunk and tussling on the Vegas Strip or if they're doing some verbal mud wrestling in the media. And the woman least afraid to get her li'l dukes up, and therefore currently the sexiest in politics, is Elizabeth Edwards.

In his Monday "Media Notes" column in The Washington Post -- for some reason, the whole column was demoted to page C-7 -- Howard Kurtz reported (in his second item) that National Public Radio's FBI reporter, Dina Temple-Raston, recently did a report quoting the American Civil Liberties Union. That wouldn't be shocking, except that Temple-Raston is also co-author of a new book with the executive director of the ACLU on "the dangerous erosion of the Bill of Rights in the age of terror."

Temple-Raston claimed she's aware of the "perception issue," but will try to be "really,  really balanced." (So is NPR, which includes the data in her online bio.) This hire is a complete insult to the idea of creating an impression of a fair, nonpartisan public-radio news network. It would be bad enough if an NPR reporter gave money to the ACLU, or attended their fundraising dinners. But this reporter has written a book, cheek and jowl, with the leader of the ACLU, endorsing their leftist worldview on a blooming Bush dictatorship. How on Earth can NPR think it doesn't look transparently partisan from the first broadcast word?

In the July 14, 2007, episode of NPR's humorous quiz show, "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!," host Peter Sagal claimed, "The Bush Administration reported this week that Iraq hadn't quite met any of the 18 benchmarks set out for them" (emphasis mine).

Not quite, Peter. The newly released report (pdf file, released 7/12/07) stated that Iraq has achieved satisfactory progress for eight of the 18 benchmarks. President Bush had been required by law to "submit an initial report to Congress, not later than July 15, 2007, assessing the status of each of the specific benchmarks ... and declaring, in his judgment, whether satisfactory progress toward meeting these benchmarks is, or is not, being achieved" (emphasis mine). A second report is due from Gen. David Petraeus in September.

If you’re the kind of liberal elitist who makes untold millions as a precious literary mind on National Public Radio (complete with relentless program-related merchandising), then you are the kind of person who finds the "War on Terror" to be nothing more than the comedic Gift That Keeps on Giving. I’m talking about Garrison Keillor of "A Prairie Home Companion," who takes up space on the left-wing site Salon.com on Thursday with a "comedy" piece headlined: "His stethoscope is loaded: The war on terror must be pursued wherever it leads and right now it points toward people in green scrubs." The recent finding that some terrorist suspects are doctors will no doubt lead to dramatic and tyrannical overreaching by "Secretary Shirtsoff" and the Department of Homeland Security, Keillor suggests:

On Tuesday, National Public Radio displayed two very different takes on the current situation in Iraq from reporters for The New York Times and the Washington Post.

John Burns of The New York Times was the cautious optimist on the Tuesday edition of NPR’s Day to Day (in partnership with the liberal site Slate.com):

As for Senator Lugar's assessment that they've overestimated what they can do, I think it's a little early to say that. In the last few days I've been at several places around Baghdad where the offensives are underway. I've been out in Ramadi, where as you know, Anbar province has been the most remarkable reduction in violence. And there's no doubt that this surge is having an effect, that al-Qaida for the time being at least appears to be on the back foot. Can that be sustained? Probably too early to tell.

I've been too busy with the Hillary book to blog, but I've been really wanting to agree with Radio Equalizer and others that the Center for American Progress/Free Press talk-radio study has huge holes in it. The biggest one is excluding public radio talk shows. It’s simply inaccurate to argue there’s little or no progressive talk in major markets with NPR affiliates broadcasting the Diane Rehm show, or Fresh Air with Terry Gross, or the new Michel Martin vehicle Tell Me More, or the Tavis Smiley radio show, or the other national and local left-leaning talk programs. A right-winger could even count Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion sometimes!