CBS online

The CBS News website Friday not only published a video of a tree carved into the shape of a penis, but someone deemed it important enough to put it at the site's recommended videos list.

The story was originally broadcast by Phoenix, Arizona, ABC affiliate KNXV, and was about a man in Tempe whose friends played a joke on him.

Days later, CBS's Phoenix affiliate KPHO apparently aired an edited version of the segment now available at CBSNews.com.

According to the blurb at YouTube, "[Adam Starr] says he asked some friends to help him out, but a mix of alcohol and chainsaws created what some consider an explicit carving" (video embedded below the fold with commentary, h/t Story Balloon):

The popular chain coffee shop, Starbucks, is known for a lot of things, but up until recently guns were not one of them. Some patrons of the Seattle-based coffee shop have recently started exercising their rights to carrying guns while they enjoy a cup of coffee. While the Starbucks customers have been expressing their right to bear arms, as allowed by the Second Amendment, there has been some resistant to Starbucks.

Liliana Segura, of AlterNet, painted a bleak picture and wrote, “So you're at your neighborhood Starbucks, maybe with your kids, and you notice a man sitting at the next table with a revolver strapped to his waist. The man next to him has a pistol. In fact, you realize as you look around, there's a table full of gun-toting customers just a few feet away, sipping coffee and doing nothing to conceal their deadly weapons. Aside from steering clear -- or else getting the hell out of there – what can an unarmed citizen do?”

Well, not much. (Except maybe relax and consider that the establishment you’re in is at the moment quite safe from armed robbery and other violent crime. Go ahead, buy Junior another triple mocha latte.) Thing is, Starbucks does “not have a corporate policy regarding customers and weapons,” according to a spokesman. Segura explained that some states, such as California, have an “open gun” policy and many people in California are gathering at Starbucks to openly exercise their rights.

On Tuesday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric and White House reporter Chip Reid cast President Obama’s push for “bipartisanship” in a favorable light, with Obama “working hard,” “following through on a promise” and “open to ideas from Republicans.” But in an item posted on CBSNews.com, Reid’s fellow CBS White House correspondent, Mark Knoller – who has covered every President since Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s – was far more skeptical: “When a sitting President calls for bipartisanship by the opposition – he really means surrender.”

Knoller’s blog, with the jaundiced headline: “Obama Says Bipartisanshp, But What He Wants Is GOP Surrender,” was posted at roughly the same time the CBS Evening News was airing on the East Coast. [Here in Washington, D.C., the CBS affiliate WUSA-TV pre-empted the Evening News in favor of local weather coverage, but I was able to view the entire February 9 broadcast at CBSNews.com.]

Knoller painted the President as motivated by frustration: “His top legislative priorities are going nowhere and he’s searching for a way to get them out of lockup.” After recounting past Presidents’ tactical demands for bipartisanship, Knoller outlined the political motive:

During a web-only interview with CBS's Katie Couric to promote her new role on "American Idol," comedienne Ellen DeGeneres went on a rant about our sexist culture that demands women look more attractive than men.

There's just one problem: DeGeneres is the face of Proctor and Gamble's famous makeup line CoverGirl. In fact, she even appeared in a well known commercial saying, "Inner beauty is important -- but not nearly as important as outer beauty."

Too bad a serious journalist like Couric didn't think to ask if DeGeneres's fans might get confused. Then again, The Perky One would have had to confront her own complicity in flouting short skirts on network news programs and giving condescending interviews to women like Sarah Palin.

Without regard to the obvious hypocrisy, Couric teed up the subject by asking if DeGeneres was concerned for women who "are so obsessed and worried and spend so much time thinking about their bodies." DeGeneres used the question to accuse American culture of a sexist double standard (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

Some in the liberal media continue to insist that James O'Keefe and his three cohorts were trying to "bug" or "tap" Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone lines when law enforcement officials have clearly said that they were not. Since the left doesn't like O'Keefe, the liberal media seems to think standard practices of journalistic integrity don't apply here.

According to MSNBC, one law enforcement official, who was not named, said "the four men arrested for attempting to tamper with the phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) were not trying to intercept or wiretap the calls." This statement comports with the affidavit filed in court after O'Keefe and company were arrested, which did not mention wiretapping or bugging, and only referred to the "tampering" of phone lines (h/t Patterico).

But the Boston Globe parroted this false accusation this morning in a gossip blog post about one of the alleged perpetrators, Joe Basel. The Globe--the same Globe that complained about ACORN's "trial-by-video"--called him a "political dirty trickster who was busted in a Watergate-style bugging operation earlier this week," and said again a couple paragraphs later that Basel was "bagged by the feds allegedly trying to bug the phones" in Landrieu's office. At least the Globe writers said "allegedly" the second time.

Today, Roger Alford and Bruce Schreiner of the Associated Press, reporting from Frankfort, KY, are giving leftist bloggers, columnists, journalists who assumed or gave the impression of assuming that the death of Census worker Bill Sparkman was some kind of right-wing hit job another chance to come clean with an unconditional "I was wrong, I amy sorry." The list of those needing to post corrections and apologies includes the Associated Press itself.

You see, not only is it crystal clear that Sparkman (may he rest in peace) indeed killed himself, Alford and Schreiner tell us that he told a friend of his plans:

Jan 15, 6:09 PM EST

Police: Ky. census worker had told of suicide plan

An eastern Kentucky census worker found naked, bound and hanging from a tree had told a friend he intended to kill himself and that he had chosen the time, place and method to do it, police records show.

Americans love to talk sports. Polite Americans don't talk religion. So when those two things meet, the news media has no idea what to make of it.

Unfortunately for journalists, sports and religion - Christianity in particular - seem to be publicly mingling more often these days. Some star athletes are more outspoken in their faith, while many others regularly find themselves in need of spiritual, if not legal, redemption.

Liberals in the media don't understand religion and religious people, so when they surface on the playing field, the resulting coverage veers wildly from awkwardly respectful to clueless to downright contemptuous.

Fox's Brit Hume caused a firestorm by suggesting on air that Tiger Woods could find "forgiveness and redemption" in Christianity, rather than the casual Buddhism the golfer has said he practices. Woods, whose marriage and career are in melt-down because of his serial infidelities, should "turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world," Hume said. And in doing so, the former anchorman committed several mortal sins in modern secular America.

Angry, frustrated, troubled, disappointed, disgust, disrespect - words not normally associated with holiday season. However, they were words Katie Couric used to describe where she sees the mood of country right now.

Couric, the anchor of the "CBS Evening News," in a live Facebook video chat on Dec. 22, took on illustrating her view of the populace - a not very sunny picture (emphasis added).

"I think more distant - I hate to say that, but I think, I think the economic situation in this country, I think, when people are struggling, that sometimes they need a place to vent their rage and to channel their rage and I think, I feel like right now in many ways, we're a very angry nation," Couric said. "Very frustrated, troubled and disappointed in many ways in terms of people feeling that the American dream just isn't within their reach. I mean I still think it's a place of incredible opportunity and entrepreneurship. But I just think that, I don't know - maybe it's because what I do for a living, I feel that the country is pretty polarized right now."

Got an idealized notion of Christmas? A cherished memory, or a favorite carol or story? The simple smell of pine needles in your living room? Do you insist on celebrating the birth of the savior?

If so, you’re at war, like it or not.

The main war on Christmas – we’ll call it the conventional war – has been well-documented, and it goes on, with victories and defeats for both sides. In Loudoun County, Va. on Dec. 1, the Board of Supervisors reversed a ban on religious holiday displays on the courthouse lawn. (The one supervisor who voted “no” said, “I am concerned that this motion would turn the courthouse grounds into a public circus.”) Meanwhile, in Arizona, public school children remain unable to use Christmas themes when decorating ornaments for the Capitol Christmas tree.

There is plenty to report from the conventional front. But there are other fronts. There is the sexualization of the holiday, either in service to commercialism or out of the lefty arts community’s desire to be “transgressive” (read, vile and offensive). And there are the attempts squash the mysteries and magic that accompany even a traditional secular Christmas.

So from “living” lingerie mannequins to Frosty’s “porn collection,” and from the lies you tell about Santa to our president’s “non-religious” observance, here are some dispatches from the war on Christmas, 2009.

If you go to Google today and search on the phrase "warmest decade" you will get a result set with thousands of breathless articles claiming that 2000 to 2009 is the warmest decade on record. This is on the cusp of an announcement from the UN climate talks in Copenhagen where world leaders are desperate to speed past Climategate and refocus the world's attention on their apocalyptic global warming agenda.

The media that couldn't bring themselves to report on the growing scandal surrounding falsified data is all on board with reporting this latest news. Yet it is clear that the Huffington Post, CBS News, the New York Times and others didn't even bother to check the data that was released from the the UK MET (UK Government Department of Climate and Weather Change). If they had they would have immediately discovered what I found, that the US csv (comma delimited) data dump from 1851 to 2009 is erroneous in its compilation. The January column for each year shows period information instead of temperature records and the latitude appears transposed as well. It appears that they incorrectly shifted the column headers when compling the dump. (Load the raw file into Excel and compare it with the UK csv data to see the erroneous data columns side by side. Data provided by the Guardian UK.) 

CBS on Saturday finally covered the growing ClimateGate scandal, but did so when its "Evening News" program was going to be preempted by college football in most of the country.

With the SEC Championship game between the universities of Florida and Alabama starting at 4PM EST, few would see CBS's report on this controversy unless they read an article at the network's website.

There, the video of the segment was available with the surprising caption "Climate Change a Hoax?"

According to LexisNexis, anchor Jeff Glor teased the story before a commercial break, "Just ahead on tonight`s CBS EVENING NEWS -- did some scientists fudge the numbers to make climate change look worse than it is."

After the break, Glor introduced correspondent Kimberly Dozier who offered a surprisingly detailed report on the scandal (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

The same CBS legal analyst who...:

• wrote that former Vice President Cheney "is just a dick"
• labeled Chief Justice John Roberts "silly and condescending" and Justice Alito a "rigid starboard-facing ideologue"
• and blamed Karl Rove for the Valerie Plame leak despite the fact that Richard Armitage admitted that he was the inadvertent leaker of that information

...is now ending his CourtWatch blog, all the while insisting that his writings over the years were mostly dry legalese and that those which were not, well, that's the fault of the people he was writing about, namely, the Bush adminstration.

CBS's Andrew Cohen in his Nov. 30 "Banging the Final Gavel" retrospective:

The day before Thanksgiving brought encouraging news on unemployment.  CBS News.com reported "New Jobless Claims Plunge to 466K."  Investors.com headlined "Jobless Claims Dive To 466,000."  CNN Money.com issued a special report titled "Jobless claims plummet to 14-month low."  And the Financial Times included a link to the Calculated Risk blog article "Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims Decline Sharply."  

Such good news, reported widely throughout the media, doubtless gave hope to many Americans.  If some of them wished to attribute this dramatic turnaround to Barack Obama's stimulus program, so much the better.  The truth, however, is that improvement in the number of jobless claims was less than electrifying.  The numbers touted in the media are, according to the Department of Labor, "seasonally adjusted" with a statistical technique designed to accommodate fluctuations in the job market.  Set that aside, and the numbers are not nearly as rosy.  As DOL's Employment and Training Administration reported:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 543,926 in the week ending Nov. 21, an increase of 68,080 from the previous week.

Yesterday, CBS News.com's Political Hotsheet blog reported on "Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln and the Politics of the Health Care Vote."  It notes:

The focus is also on some Democrats with doubts, notably Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and Nebraska's Ben Nelson, who aren't up but do represent very red states, and Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln, who is, and could face a tough test in 2010.

The piece later states that Nelson:

has cast many a conservative vote in representing a state that, while historically willing to send Democrats to the Senate, is nonetheless firmly Republican overall.

Many a conservative vote?  According to interest group ratings compiled by Project Vote Smart, for 2008 the American Conservative Union assigned Nelson a rating of 16.  The National Taxpayers Union gave him a rating of F. Nelson received a 100 from the liberal AFL-CIO for 2008 and an A for 2007-2008 from the liberal National Education Association.  For 2007, Nelson racked up a 5 with Americans for Tax Reform.

Take a look at some extra video footage from the latest episode of NewsBusters’ Notable Quotables comedy show.

CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric interviewing former Vice President Al Gore provided us with so much joke material we couldn’t fit it all in.

To see current and past episodes of the show check out the NQ Show channel on the Media Research Center’s video sharing website, Eyeblast.tv. There you can also view the show in full screen format.

CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen is a long-time critic of the Bush administration, enhanced interrogation techniques, military tribunals, Gitmo, and many aspects of the government's prosecution of the war on terror. For general background, see Cohen's CBS News blog "Court Watch." It is, therefore, no surprise at all to see Cohen defending the propriety of the upcoming New York City terror trials. 

Is it newsworthy when an animal urinates on a member of the press?

The good folks at CBS News must think so.

On Thursday, CBSNews.com not only created a video clip of Debbye Turner Bell getting splashed in the eye by a beaver on that morning's "Early Show," but someone actually posted it at the website's "Recommended" videos section (embedded below the fold):

A rather stunning Gallup poll was released Wednesday showing Republicans moving ahead of Democrats in which Party registered voters support in next year's Congressional elections.

As Gallup reported in its summary, this is a rare occurrence in the almost sixty years since the polling organization has been tracking generic voter preferences for the House of Representatives.

Given media's downplaying of the significance of last week's election results, it's going to be fascinating to watch how they spin these numbers (h/t Byron York):

You thought your car was bad for the planet?

Heck with that! Your dog is WORSE!

MUCH worse!

So claimed CBSNews.com Monday in a piece hysterically titled, "Just Blame the Dog for Environment's Ills":

"Should Anti-Gay Rights Petition Signers Be Exposed?" asked a teaser headline [screencap shown at right] on CBSNews.com's front page.

"Hot Topic: Battle Rages in Washington State over Privacy of Petition Signers" the subheader read. 

While the November 3 article itself by staffer Brian Montopoli was balanced -- giving room for a social conservative activist to defend keeping the names and addresses of signatories of the Referendum 71 petition from being made public -- the headline sets the tone for readers to see pro-traditional marriage backers in Washington State as folks motivated to deprive fellow citizens of their "rights."

So what does Referendum 71 actually do? According to Montopoli:

Earning a chuckle even from Al Gore himself for the over the top glorification, CBS's Katie Couric opened her “@katiecouric” CBSNews.com Web show interview with Al Gore by extolling: “I'm honored to be joined today by the Godfather of Green, the King of Conservation: Former Vice President Al Gore.” The very friendly 30-minute Monday interview was prompted by the release of Gore new book, 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.'

Monday's CBS Evening News carried a brief excerpt, sans the excessively laudatory introduction: “Today I spoke with someone who knows a bit about Washington politics and the environment, former Vice President Al Gore. He's out with a new book and is on the cover of this week's edition of Newsweek.”

Audio: MP3 clip which matches the video.

Three weeks after their gushing praise of President Obama's meeting with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the media have taken a cue from the lack of action that followed.

It was a good run while it lasted.

Word from the conflict became more dire almost by the day as Obama's cabinet squabbled. The American media, having sensed Afghanistan could be lost without action, chose to cover for their favorite president and begin the process of mentally preparing the public for defeat.

The Washington Post published a perfect example of the new meme in Howard Kurtz's column on October 23. Kurtz attacked Republicans as "armchair quarterbacks" for their criticism of Obama's stalling and said it was "rich" of Dick Cheney to demand a new plan. As for what that plan might be, Kurtz's Vietnam defeat song sounded all too familiar:

Monday’s CBS Early Show touted a new 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll about American cultural attitudes, with CBSNews.com’s Cali Carlin asking co-host Maggie Rodriguez one of the survey questions: "Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie or Beyonce...Who would you want to swap lives with for a week?" Rodriguez immediately responded: "Hands down, Michelle Obama."

Carlin happily declared that Rodriguez, who had not yet seen the poll results, was "in step with mainstream America." Carlin further explained: "26% of women we surveyed said they’d want to switch with Michelle Obama. In fact overall, Washington beat out Hollywood, surprisingly. So both Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton beat out Angelina Jolie and Beyonce."

The poll had a similar question for men, as Vanity Fair online editor Michael Hogan asked co-host Harry Smith: "Okay, so the choices are George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen, Barack Obama, or Tom Brady. So what do you think?" Smith went the Hollywood route: "George Clooney... I mean that’s who I would switch places with. I mean, I know he wants to switch places with me, obviously." Rodriguez joked: "We could arrange that."

No one can accuse "CBS Evening News" anchor Katie Couric of being totally in the tank for President Barack Obama - at least when it comes to the issue of health care. 

Couric appeared in a Facebook exclusive video chat on Sept. 24 and suggested the president could do a better job selling his health care plan, but instead is being very vague.

"I think that the President could have done a better job of really outlining the issues and what's involved in health care reform. I think it's mind-numbingly dull and complicated and a lot of people don't truly understand a) why the system is broken, if it is in fact broken and the proposals - and how these proposals will actually improve the quality of care."

"It's the most explosive moment for the soda industry since the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment," CBS's Katie Couric quipped of a proposed federal soda tax in her September 18 Notebook video on CBSNews.com (embedded at right).

While careful not to explicitly endorse a proposed one-cent-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks, Couric hinted that taxing sodas could help curb obesity, because, after all, "some lawmakers say taxes on cigarettes have reduced smoking and raised revenues."

Pledging to help soda-drinking Americans lose weight while simultaneously thinning their wallets -- and fattening Uncle Sam's coffers -- certainly appeals to the self-appointed food police and tax-hiking liberals, but it's likely to cause average Americans to gripe about having to pay taxes for the harmless guilty pleasure of cracking open an ice-cold soda pop.

Yet Couric sees only a downside to that dastardly profitable soft drink industry, not average Americans tired of government intrusion into their personal choices:

"U.K. Docs Worry Patients Dying Prematurely," reads a headline featured this afternoon in CBSNews.com's Top News menu. The link brings readers to a CBS/AP story with the same headline.

But when one reads through the article, it becomes clear the matter at hand may have some bearing over a controversial issue in America's current health care reform debate (emphasis mine):

A group of British doctors who treat the terminally ill said they were worried that some are dying prematurely because of guidelines on dealing with patients in their final hours.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph newspaper Thursday, six palliative care specialists said the "tick-box approach to the management of death" could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On a Sunday evening in August four summers ago the NBC Nightly News devoted its “In Depth” segment to how Cindy Sheehan was “single-handedly bringing the Iraq debate to Mr. Bush’s doorstep” with her protest in Crawford, Texas. But Sunday night this year, after Sheehan departed Martha's Vineyard without earning any network media coverage as President Barack Obama's wrapped up his vacation there, NBC's Ron Allen began a story: “Hours before President Obama's vacation ended, he treated his girls to ice cream and candy -- the kind of family time the President said he had in mind for the week on Martha's Vineyard. A chance, friends say, to renew himself.”
    
A week ago, a MRC Media Reality Check asked: “Will Nets Note Sheehan's Anti-Obama Protest? Media Embraced Cindy Sheehan's Anti-Bush Push in 2005; ABC Anchor Now Says: 'Enough Already.'” (NB posting) The answer: No. Though she spent four days on the island and held an event on Thursday right next to the media set up in the Oak Bluffs School, her anti-Obama efforts were ignored by all the networks (cable too) as well as major newspapers.

"As Castro Turns 83, Cuba Caught Between Past, Future," announces an August 13 headline for the CBSNews.com World Watch blog.

The 10-paragraph entry by Havana-based news producer Portia Siegelbaum amounted to an electronic birthday card for the Communist dictator.

No Castro critics, domestic or foreign, were cited in the story, although Siegelbaum made sure to note how a "U.S.-based religious group, Pastors for Peace" got to hang out on Wednesday with the aging despot.

Yet Siegelbaum failed to note the leftist political bent of Pastors for Peace, describing it merely as "an anti-embargo organization." The Web site for Pastors for Peace, a project of the Interreligious Foundation for -- wait for it -- Community Organization (IFCO), insists that its purpose is:

What follows is not meant in any way to make light of a literally life-and-death issue. It is instead meant to perhaps (we can always hope) drill a little truth into the thick heads of the establishment media's alleged "journalists" who continue to refuse to see what's right in front of them in ObamaCare (or in many cases to even read the legislation in the first place).

You see, abortion coverage in ObamaCare is analogous to the pasta afficionado's expected set of ingredients in Prego Spaghetti Sauce, as presented in this popular 1984 commercial -- that is, "It's in there."

On Sunday, in an alleged "Fact Check" piece on ObamaCare, the Associated Press tried to pretend abortion coverage isn't in there. Two days later, prodded by Steven Ertelt at LifeNews.com and others in the pro-life community, the wire service specifically backtracked and admitted that yes, it's in there ("Gov't insurance would allow coverage for abortion").

Now it's Stephanie Condon of CBS who is pretending that abortion coverage is not in there in ObamaCare. LifeNews.com and pro-lifers are once again out there pushing back, while deliciously reminding the network of a 2004 story that wasn't all there -- or was only there in the vivid, anchor-ending imagination of Dan Rather (link to CBS story within excerpt added by me; bold is mine):

Why does CBS employ as one of its online editors a blogger who refers to town hall meeting protesters as "teabaggers?"

For those that have chosen to block it out, teabagging is a sexual reference unsuitable for further explanation here.

Yet, Charles Cooper, an editor for CBSNews.com, wrote the following headline at his Coop's Corner blog Thursday (h/t and image courtesy Doug Ross):