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How is it that in this time of historic change and euphoria, the media can remain so pessimistic?

The messiah has been elected, ACORN and Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie are stealing an election in Minnesota, conservatives are going to be silenced via the Fair-Less Doctrine, and gay marriage activists are assaulting the elderly. It is a time of hope and optimism in this, our liberal country.

So, why so negative?

The answer of course is, certain news might be perceived as a positive point in the waning days of the Bush Administration.

The bias, after the break…

Carl Cameron of FOX News reporting for the "O'Reilly Factor" took the low road yesterday in repeating rumors and gossip from unnamed staffers in the McCain camp about Sarah Palin: her knowledge, temperament, being a shopoholic, etc.

In failing to mention the names of the accusers, or input from staffers who disagree with the rumors, Cameron failed the 'fair and balanced' creed of FOX News. Plus Cameron's somewhat fevered manner in repeating the rumors, was not only surprising, but showed his lack of objectivity.

If I could be candid for a moment: Inside fighting is all to common in campaigns, I know. When my husband, Duane, ran for U.S. Congress and lost the last time we experienced the same thing from one person on his staff who, instead of pulling 100% with the candidate, turned and created dissent in the camp. The things said were untrue, and were the fruit of those who couldn't handle losing well. How do we know that this is not what is happening with these few (how many are they? we don't know, could be one instigator) McCain staffers?

Before the New York Times published Saturday's 2500-word, front-page hit piece about Cindy McCain, an attorney representing the wife of the Arizona senator sent a letter to executive editor Bill Keller appealing to his "sense of fairness, balance and decency" to not run "another story about her."

In the correspondence, which has been posted in full by Time magazine's Mark Halperin (h/t NBer Bob Mc), attorney John Dowd chastised Keller for: not employing his "investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama;" not trying to "find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father," and; not interviewing Obama's "poor relatives in Kenya and determin[ing] why Barack Obama has not rescued them. Thus, there is a terrific lack of balance here."

FoxNews.com is reporting further anger over this Times article being expressed by the McCain campaign (emphasis added, picture courtesy AP):

Updated below. Last Monday as the U.S. House of Representatives voted down the initial bailout package, both Fox News and CNN sent e-mail alert subscribers numerous alerts about the Dow's dive. The market recovered some the following day, a development that CNN neglected to mention in the same e-mail alerts.

Yet today, with the bailout package having been passed and signed into law by the president just three days earlier, the market cratered yet again, diving well below 10,000 before finally closing down just a bit shy of 370 points to close down at 9,955.5, the first time the Dow has closed under 10,000 since October 26, 2004.

This time CNN.com didn't care to notice. By way of contrast, here's how Fox News and ABCNews alerted e-mail subscribers today:

While both CNN.com and FoxNews.com sent e-mail alert subscribers "breaking news" alerts on the Dow's steep slide yesterday in reaction to failure of the bailout package in the House of Representatives, CNN didn't think it worthy of a breaking news text to note the gains made today in the market.

Here are the Fox News text messages sent on September 30 regarding the Dow Jones:

• DOW REGAINS NEARLY 500 POINTS ONE DAY AFTER RECORD LOSS (received 4:08 p.m. EDT)
• DOW REBOUNDING, UP MORE THAN 300 POINTS A DAY AFTER 778-POINT FREEFALL (received 1:27 p.m. EDT)

Below, in reverse chronological order are the text message alerts I received from Fox News and CNN.com yesterday tracking the Dow's drop.:

On PBS's Web site today, ombudsman Michael Getler writes of complaints over an incident during last Sunday's pledge drive.  He describes the cheap shot taken by actor Mike Farrell against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

According to Joseph Campbell, vice president of fundraising programs, here's what happened:

 On CNN's American Morning today, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on Barack Obama's campaigning in Virginia.  Afterwards, anchor Kiran Chetry had a question:

CHETRY: All right. And Suzanne, what's on tap for the campaign today? And please tell me it's not lipstick again.

MALVEAUX: Let's hope not. He's going to be in Norfolk, Virginia. That is in southeast Virginia, and it's home to the world's largest Naval base. It's one of the most competitive areas that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. It's a critical piece of property, piece of land there with folks in Virginia, and they want those voters.

Barack Obama's running mate could use a bit of remedial education on both biology and Catholic teaching. Biden joins House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in being publicly corrected by Catholic clergy for misrepresenting the teachings of the Catholic Church on human life before the media.

The Associated Press has the story (excerpted below via FoxNews.com). The AP also covered the Pelosi row as well as Fox News, the Washington Post, and Reuters. Some outlets, such as CNN, presented a virtual blackout on the Pelosi story, as my colleague Matthew Balan noted on August 27.

In its September 10 story, the AP news wire noted that Cardinal Justin Rigali and Bishop William Lori corrected Biden's September 7 statement on "Meet the Press" that he could not impose his personal conviction that life begins at conception upon others via his role as a legislator (emphasis mine):

Asked on the program about when life begins, Biden said: "Look, I know when it begins for me. It's a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I am prepared to accept the teachings in my church."

The fallout that began a week ago after the publication of the Associated Press's Tony Snow obituary continues.

Fox News's Bill O'Reilly took his concerns about it to the top of AP, and didn't like the response he received. He shouldn't.

In his column this morning at Townhall.com, he also reaches a conclusion about the self-described "Essential Global News Network" that is becoming increasingly difficult to deny.

Today on Neil Cavuto, Monica Showalter of Investor's Business Daily was on, speaking about their editorial on Nanny Pelosi called "Feckless to Reckless." It's about Nancy Pelosi's recent reckless call to drain the strategic oil reserves in an attempt to answer our problems and pains at the gas pumps, short term. Needless to say, IBD was not impressed; in fact, the article calls for her resignation. You can read about it and watch the video interview at MsUnderestimated's site here.

We’ve lost another giant today. I was prepared to go straight to bed after having stayed up all night watching movies, but as I tuned to the TV, I saw that one of my favorite people, Tony Snow, had passed. I could not be sadder. He was only 53 years old, and colon cancer took his life. The world is missing a great friend today. Godspeed, Tony.

Matea Gold's Los Angeles Times story today lets readers know what a close call it was that Jesse Jackson's off-color comments made it on the air yesterday.

But for an alert overnight transcriber, Jackson's comments, meant to be private, almost stayed that way. What a loss to the public interest that would have been. Not.

I suggest that the public benefited very little from knowing Jackson's personal feelings on this matter, and that Fox was doing little more than spreading gossip.

Revealing all isn't always useful. Take the rush to report then-President Reagan's remark, meant as a joke, that the bombing of the Soviet Union "begins in five minutes"? Like Jackson's comment, it was said into a live mic, but it wasn't meant to be public.

What if the Soviets had believed Reagan meant it? The satisfaction a few reporters received by covering something the President didn't intend to be public would have been faint consolation had nuclear warheads rained down on our heads.

Sure, Reagan shouldn't have said it, but was it any wiser to report it?

You have to wonder sometimes what the headline writers at the news network Web sites are thinking.

Take in this gem from FoxNews.com today:

Um, yeah, the "notion of [a] suffering" Messiah comes from Hebrew prophecy itself (see Isaiah 53), according to historic Christian teaching, which holds that Jesus Christ fulfilled the numerous prophecies about the Messiah from the Old Testament, starting from Genesis 3:15 (the protoevangelion) and extending all the way through the books of "the Law and the Prophets" (Acts 28:23).

It's hardly an earth-shattering notion that Jesus Christ was prophesied in the Old Testament, and even journalists who don't believe in Jesus as Messiah should surely have a functional knowledge of this basic, nay central, claim of orthodox Christianity.

If an elected official in the United States, at any level, promises to "rip apart" six year old rape victims, then describe in vivid detail how their lives would be ruined, one would assume such a statement would lead the news. But it did not.

Following up on D.S. Hubes post on the local media coverage, Massachusetts State Representative James Fagan (D) voiced his opposition to Jessica’s law requiring stiff mandatory sentences to child rapists. As a defense attorney, Fagan promised if such a law were in place and victims assume the stand "I’m gonna rip them apart." Fagan continued "I’m going to make sure that the rest of their life is ruined, that when they’re 8 years old, they throw up; when they’re 12 years old, they won’t sleep; when they’re 19 years old, they’ll have nightmares and they’ll never have a relationship with anybody."

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani is the latest Marine to turn out not to be a "cold-blooded killer" that the media and Democratic politicians painted Marines charged with the Haditha "massacre" to be. This two weeks after another Marine was acquitted in a Haditha court martial.

FoxNews.com has the AP story about the dismissal of charges against him here.:

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. - A military judge dismissed charges Tuesday against a Marine officer accused of failing to investigate the killings of 24 Iraqis.

Col. Steven Folsom dismissed charges against Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani after finding that a four-star general overseeing the case was improperly influenced by an investigator probing the November 2005 shootings by a Marine squad in Haditha.

As you might have guessed, this story is not exactly commanding the airwaves of the cable news networks this afternoon, although the media obsessed about the "massacre" in 2005.

From my colleague Scott Whitlock's June 5 post about the media's similar lack of interest in the acquittal of Marine Lt. Andrew Grayson:

The line of the day comes from NRO’s Media Blog, where Greg Pollowitz passed along the Fox News report that Bill Clinton is livid at a new, negative, anonymous-quote-filled profile in the trendy liberal mag Vanity Fair, written by Todd Purdum, the husband of former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers. The office of President Clinton responded fiercely: 

Most revealing is one simple fact: President Clinton has helped save the lives of 1,300,000 people in his post-presidency, and Vanity Fair couldn’t find time to talk to even one of them for comment," the statement continues, along with several pages of argument refuting the article’s main points.

Greg quipped: "The Vanity Fair piece accused Clinton of ‘cavernous narcissism,’ which his office confirms with the ridiculous claim that he saved more than one million people."

How perfect.  The director of some of Hollywood's most revoltingly violent, sexually explicit, culturally corrosive movies has an even more destructive hobby on the side: iconoclasm. 

Paul Verhoeven, director of "Basic Instinct," "Robocop" and "Showgirls," turns out to be a member of the academically suspect Jesus Seminar, and in September he will publish a book attacking the foundational Christian doctrine that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

For the past twenty years, the Dutch filmmaker has reportedly been attending meetings of the Jesus Seminar and researching his biography, "Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait."  Fox News quotes a spokesman for Amsterdam publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff saying Verhoeven "hopes it will be a springboard" for making a movie about Jesus' life.

Wall Street saw a 391-point rally on the Dow today, the first day of the second quarter. ABCNews.com saw the development worthy of a "Breaking News" tag towards the top of its Web page and put the story in the top headlines rotation.

But it appears that ABCNews.com was alone among its competitors in trumpeting the news. I checked numerous Web sites shortly after 5:30 and found ABC's to be the only one to give the rally top billing. [see the screencaps below the page break]

Al Gore has made a lot of money and publicity with his crusade against global warming. I have written in the past how this whole crusade seems to be based on a Big Lie, and its real purpose appears more intended to get global government so the rest of the world (ie. the United Nations) can gain control over the United States' many assets without having to go through the awkward exercise of actually getting a their authority recognized by the US Congress.

However, there has been a backlash against the Gore Warming crusade (fueled partly by Gore's own hypocrisy in using large motorcades, private jets and his lavish lifestyle- none of which are designed to show others that he is serious about the entire issue. Not that the press has bothered to do any real reporting- they have fallen in line with Gore's crusade lock, stock and barrel- refusing to report on critics and making statements equating said critics with Nazis and other undesirables. However, the evidence is mounting that Gore and his global warming friends are no more accurate in their claims than Newsweek was in its new ice age campaign in the 1970s.

About a week ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested in a UK Telegraph column that allowing hospitals to harvest organs from dead patients without their prior consent or their families' post-mortem consent might be a good idea.

Mr. Brown's occasion for bringing up the topic was telling, and perhaps explains why Brown's proposal got very little coverage in the US:

This year will be the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service: a year to celebrate and thank all the staff who run our hospitals, clinics and GP practices; but also a year in which to renew the NHS for the 21st century, because I believe that only by renewal can we make the NHS even more relevant for future decades than it has been in the past.

..... we may need to do more to encourage more of us to donate (organs. In Britain we have 14.9 million people on the organ donor register - which is around 24 per cent of the population. In terms of actual donors (not just people willing to give, but those whose organs are actually used) we have a rate of about 13 donors per million in our population. This compares with about 22 per million in France, 25 per million in America and around 35 per million in Spain - the best in the world.

That is why I want to start a debate in this country about whether we should take steps to move towards a new system designed to enable far more of us to benefit from transplant surgery - one that better reflects survey findings that around 90 per cent of us are in favour of organ donation.

Chris Wallace and Mike Huckabee campaign chairman Ed Rollins got into it a bit during an interview on Fox News after the announcement that Huckabee took Iowa. During the exchange Wallace had asked Rollins about a blog article that appeared on Townhall.com where Rollins was allegedly overheard bad mouthing Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani.

The blog article must have hit a sore spot as Rollins became defensive in explaining his comments that appeared in the blog entry while confirming that he did indeed say some of the things that were attributed to him. (video at Webloggin)

Wallace took the opportunity to follow up on that answer in an exchange where Rollins became agitated, calling Wallace and the rest of the Washington press corps "wise men", with a final swipe that "all the wisdom doesn't live in the press corps."

Hillary Clinton fundraiser Norman Hsu was indicted earlier today in a $20 million Ponzi scheme. I received a text message e-mail alert to this effect shortly after 1:30 p.m. Eastern. Given the heated lead-up to Iowa and New Hampshire, it's major news. In a 24/7 media cycle, it's inconceivable that it major news organization Web sites could not or would not give it top billing shortly after the news broke.

Yet at 3 p.m. today, a review of some major media Web sites showed no prominence given to the story. MSNBC.com didn't have a teaser headline for it until its "local news" box for WNBC, the NBC network's East Coast flagship in New York City:

Fox News, by contrast, had this tease prominently displayed on it's front page:

A major political figure calls for the torture and execution of homosexuals and the mainstream media ignores it. Why? Could it be because the individual is a high level Iranian official? The story "Gays Deserve Torture, Death Penalty, Iranian Minister Says" appeared on the front page of FoxNews.com, yet it was nowhere to be found on CNN’s, MSNBC’s, ABC News’, or CBS News’ websites.

The Fox News story, lifted from The Times of London, reports that in a "peace conference" with British MP’s in May, the leader of the Iranian delegation, Mohsen Yahyavi, stated according to the article that "homosexuals deserve to be executed, or tortured, and possibly both."

"The Times" story, appearing on the Fox News website, reports on the meeting as follows:

On the May 19th edition of Fox News Channel's Geraldo at Large, host Geraldo Rivera went on another pro-illegal immigrant rant. Commenting on the debate over the new immigration bill Rivera declared: "The deal beefs up border security, at the same time it allows millions here, illegally, to emerge from the shadows." Rivera then went on to spotlight the story of one illegal that was stuck in the "shadows."

The following is the full segment as reported by Geraldo and his brother and fellow Fox News reporter, Craig Rivera:

Geraldo Rivera: "So now up-front tonight the President praised senators of both parties for crafting a potential fix for the nation's broken immigration policies. The deal beefs up border security, at the same time it allows millions here, illegally, to emerge from the shadows. But whether Congress will pass the controversial bill into law is far from certain. Here's the President from his Texas ranch where he and the First Lady are spending the weekend."

FoxNews.com is following up on the Fort Dix terror plot by probing how the three illegal immigrant suspects got into the country in the first place.

Below the jump I've posted a creencap taken shortly after 2 p.m. EDT from the Fox News front page.

Fox News correspondent Catherine Herridge contributed to the story, entitled, "Sources: Brothers Charged in Alleged Fort Dix Terror Plot May Have Been Smuggled Into U.S.":

FORT DIX, N.J. — The three brothers being charged as part of the alleged Fort Dix terror plot may have been smuggled across the border, FOX News has learned.

[...]

Four of the arrested men were born in the former Yugoslavia, one was born in Jordan and one came from Turkey, authorities said. Three were in the United States illegally; two had green cards allowing them to stay in this country permanently; and the sixth is a U.S. citizen.

Federal investigators are now checking whether the latter three lied on their immigration paperwork to remain in the United States.