NPR

What a "coincidence!"

While the Senate Democrats are currently engaged in a Global Warming (now conveniently called "Climate Change") all nighter publicity stunt whose real purpose even  a Washinton Post reporter claimed was to raise desperately needed campaign cash, the usual suspects in the media are suddenly reporting about this mostly forgotten topic. Among these media outlets, perhaps the most comedically entertaining report came from National Public Radio station WBUR in Boston which conducted a bizarre survey of computerized voice shoutouts to somehow determine how much the sea level has risen in South Florida. The transcript is below the jump but you must listen to the computer voice survey to fully savor the hilariously surreal nature of this report.

Leftists and libertarians who join them in their “national security state” rhetoric love Edward Snowden for leaking thousands of classified documents to leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald and to The Washington Post, exposing and compromising U.S. surveillance programs. 

On Monday night, the public radio show “The World” – distributed to NPR stations across America by Minneapolis-based Public Radio International – oozed online that Snowden was “bigger than a rock star” in his appearance at an ACLU event at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. That same line was announced by anchorman Marco Werman:

NPR's Lauren Frayer repeatedly emphasized the conservative ideology of the ruling party of Spain on Thursday's Morning Edition, as she reported on proposed legislation there that would be, in her words, "one of the toughest abortion laws in Europe – a near-total ban, except in cases of rape or threats to the mother's health." However, she didn't point out the left-of-center political affiliation of opponents of the proposal.

Frayer noted how "topless women" shouted "abortion is sacred...surrounding a Catholic cardinal on his way into church a couple weeks ago," but failed identify that these protesters were from Femen, the radical feminist group that got its start in Ukraine by cutting down a memorial cross to victims of Soviet communism. The correspondent also played up how the party that proposed the pro-life law is "moving to the right – trying to keep members from defecting to a new far-right political party, similar to the Tea Party in the U.S."

In December, NPR, the New York Times, National Journal, and other establishment press platforms gave the Republican National Committee grief over the following tweet: "Today we remember Rosa Parks' bold stand and her role in ending racism." The tweet erronseously shortened the following sentence from a longer GOP statement: "“We remember and honor Rosa Parks today for the role she played in fighting racism and ending segregation." Juliet Lapidos at the Times noted that the tweet was corrected in 3-1/2 hours, and seemed to lament that it took so long.

On Friday, "the official Twitter account of the Democratic Party" tweeted the following in support of increasing the federally mandated minimum wage (HT Patterico):

NPR celebrates political anniversaries – when it likes them. They celebrated the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, when when it had already faded away. This week, NPR aired five stories discussing the fourth anniversary of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative to get kids to eat better and exercise.

But there was no story on the fifth anniversary of the Tea Party. The closest thing was a Mara Liasson analysis on Thursday of how the Senate races look tough for Democrats this fall – if the Republicans can keep the Tea Party extremists at bay:

There are few things that might please liberal journalists more than finding that elusive voter that proves a dearly held theory: anti-Obama voters really hate black people. It’s all about his race, not his policies.

NPR hit that jackpot on Tuesday’s Morning Edition in a seven-minute story on Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) seeking re-election in Louisiana. In seven minutes, NPR’s Ailsa Chang never even whispered the name of Landrieu’s expected Republican opponent, Rep. Bill Cassidy (or his challenger, state Sen. Paul Hollis). The latest poll found Cassidy in the lead. But Chang found a racist sitting under an oak tree in Galliano, Louisiana, in Cajun territory:

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik was given the chance to promote his book “Murdoch’s World” in an interview for the latest edition of The Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists. He tried the usual line that Rupert Murdoch deserved a whole book on his scandals because he’s so “unique.” (Read: somewhat conservative tycoon in a liberal media.)

Folkenflik said he was on a Fox News “blacklist,” and not for the first time. Then he made sure he said he had “a lot of respect” for the Wall Street Journal, unlike Fox:

NPR's Richard Knox played up a Pennsylvania judge's dismissal of a homicide case involving admitted euthanasia as "a sign that attitudes about end-of-life decisions are changing, whatever most statutes say," in a Wednesday item for the public radio network's health news blog. Knox euphemistically described the contoversial practice, as he asserted that "the [judge's] decision is the latest in a series of recent developments signaling a reluctance of courts and state legislatures to criminalize medical care that may hasten death."

The correspondent also slanted towards pro-euthanasia groups by including two quotes from a representative of an "advocacy group," while providing none from pro-life opponents.

NPR’s afternoon talk show “Tell Me More” spent 17 minutes on Thursday on a cover story in The Nation entitled “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars” by Michelle Goldberg, a contributor to The Daily Beast. They called it "Mean Girls Online."

Host Michel Martin interviewed four feminist radicals about nasty online fighting along racial lines, and even "transphobic " lines. The uber-feminist actress Martha Plimpton (a star on Fox's sitcom "Raising Hope") hilariously came under attack because promoting a pro-abortion event called "A Night of a Thousand Vaginas" was cruel to "trans men" who don't have vaginas:

NPR's resident ObamaCare booster, Julie Rovner, lionized outgoing liberal Congressman Henry Waxman on Friday's Morning Edition. Rovner trumpeted how "during his 40 years in the House, he focused on passing legislation – lots of legislation – the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Orphan Drug Act, nutrition labels, food safety, and the Affordable Care Act. Waxman played a major role in all of them."

The correspondent left out any conservative/Republican criticism of the California representative, and let a fellow Democratic member of Congress and two liberal talking heads laud the retiring politician, with one heralding him as the Ted Kennedy of the House. She did include two clips from Orrin Hatch, but the Utah Republican senator heaped praise on Rep. Waxman. Rovner also gave the congressman a chance to take a parting shot at the Tea Party-friendly caucus in Congress:

Sen. Rand Paul sat down with NPR anchor Audie Cornish on the January 29th All Things Considered, and from the moment the interview began, NPR’s listeners knew the likely outcome: a one-sided attack job.

Anchor Robert Siegel explained that while Cathy McMorris Rodgers gave the official GOP response, Sen. Mike Lee had a Tea Party response, and Paul had an online video response. Cornish began the interview by asking, “How do you convince the independent voter out there who sees this kind of mishmash of responses from various Republicans and no definitive agenda?”

Wade Goodwyn, who hyped Wendy Davis's pro-abortion filibuster as a "ray of light" for Texas Democrats, slanted toward the left in a Tuesday item on NPR.org about the controversy surrounding Marlise Munoz and her unborn baby. Goodwyn asserted that the hospital, which sought to keep Munoz on life support until the baby could be born, was in the wrong: "The hospital's defense of its conduct was a tortured interpretation of the Texas Advance Directives Act."

The journalist, who once worked as a left-wing community organizer, also likened the baby, who was injured when Munoz suffered her life-ending malady, to a mere body part:

On Friday, as I noted on Saturday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told public radio's Susan Arbetter that "extreme conservatives" – that is, people who are pro-life, understand the clear meaning of the Second Amendment, or wish to keep marriage as it has traditionally been defined – "have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are." Note well that Cuomo's remarks are still not news at the Associated Press's national site.

On Sunday, Cuomo's people sent and released an "open letter" containing a very inaccurate transcription of the original interview accusing the New York Post's Aaron Short of being "entirely reckless with facts and the truth" in his report ("Gov. Cuomo to conservatives: Leave NY!"). As I demonstrated on Monday, the only reasonable interpretation of what Cuomo said is that Republican Party members who hold any one of the three positions noted in the previous paragraph "have no place in the state of New York." In the past several days, the matter has escalated. The Post has continued to cover the story – that's what newspapers are supposed to do – while, in an extraordinary move, the Counsel to the Governor has entered the fray with what can only be interpreted as threatening language.

Rachel Martin, anchor of NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” rocked her Sunday morning six weeks ago by hailing the religion-bashing punks of Bad Religion deconstructing religious Christmas carols like a "Monty Python skit."  On this Sunday, Martin hailed “Laura Jane Grace, transgendered punk,” the lead singer of the band Against Me!

NPR wasn’t really as “progressive” as they could have been on this story, since their in-house transcript calls half the lyrics they played as “(unintelligible)” and then cut out the God part of the song “True Trans Soul Rebel,” and did not mention the song’s title. They also neglected to discuss the new album tracks "F--kmylife666" and "Osama Bin Laden As The Crucified Christ." (Congratulations, taxpayers.) This was the "Trans Soul Rebel" presentation: 

Imagine if Texas Senator Ted Cruz or Lone Star State Governor Rick Perry told a public radio show's host that "people who support abortion, gun control, and same-sex marriage have no place in Texas." There would be breaking news alerts on every cable news station. It would be a press obsession for weeks. More immediately, there would be intense pushback from the show's host.

On the public radio show "Capitol Pressroom" with Susan Arbetter on Friday morning, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is surely assessing the 2016 presidential landscape, asserted that "extreme conservatives" – that is, people who are pro-life, understand the clear meaning of the Second Amendment, or wish to keep marriage as it has traditionally been defined – "have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are." Arbetter just let Cuomo's remarks slide on by without meaningful follow-up, and arguably appeared to agree with their thrust. Audio and relevant portions of the transcript follow the jump.

On Monday’s All Things Considered, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik drew this unintentionally hilarious sentence out of NBC executive Alexandra Wallace: “Our job is to report on what's going on in the world. We're not activists. We're observers and analysts.”

Folkenflik’s story pressed on NBC News from the left, that they must campaign against Russian repression before, during, and after the Olympics. NBC protested they'd been interviewing gay athletes like Billie Jean King and Brian Boitano and letting them express their joy at being picked by Obama to represent the U.S. delegation. Russian gay lobbyist Konstantin Yablotskiy represented the Russian leftists:

Benghazi could have been prevented. Those were the findings in a newly released bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that blamed the State Department for failing to protect the U.S. consulate in eastern Libya.

During its nightly All Things Considered program on Wednesday, NPR anchor Audie Cornish and reporter Tom Gjelten spent nearly four minutes discussing the report without uttering the names Obama and Clinton once. Gjelten even made a bit of a gaffe about the Democrats. On Thursday, NPR’s Morning Edition didn’t bother to cover Benghazi, but instead found time to discuss whether or not Florida would decide that medical marijuana should be given to children with seizures.

Milestones in one's life should serve as an impetus for a person to reflect on the past and on the future. Totenberg turned 70 yesterday. Another such milestone occurred at the end of 2013 in the life of NPR's high-profile Legal Affairs/Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg. Totenberg concluded her 19-year run as a weekly no-holds-barred pundit, pontificating on about every topic under the sun -- not just on her journalistic beat.

Most notoriously, she said in 1995 that a fitting punishment for a quite controversial remark by Republican US Senator Jesse Helms made about AIDS funding would be that he or his grandchildren contract AIDS: "I think he ought to be worried about the -- about what's going on in the good Lord's mind because if there's retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion or one of his grandchildren will get it."

Billionaires who back conservative Republicans are trashed on NPR when they die as “scathing TV ad” backers. But what about a black radical who wrote a poem blaming 9-11 on Israel and implying America was evil and terrorist? On Thursday night's "All Things Considered," NPR began by calling him “one of America's most important — and controversial — literary figures,” under the headline “Amiri Baraka's Legacy Both Controversial And Achingly Beautiful.”

The man’s invented Muslim name was Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones). He was the poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002, but they abolished that honorary office after his poem. NPR cultural correspondent Neda Ulaby found his most controversial work wasn’t too negative, it was “complicated.”

On DC's NPR affiliate WAMU on Wednesday, New York Times environmental blogger Andrew Revkin complained about those conservative "confusers" taking joy in the stranded Antarctic ice ship full of hyperbolic global-warming activists. Washington Post senior editor Marc Fisher was guest-hosting on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, and he asked him to explain how "this incident somehow has energized the climate change contrarians."

"So anyway, you get a ship trapped in growing sea ice, a ship full of climate scientists who have been blogging about the importance of global warming, getting caught in sea ice, it's like raw meat for those who want to confuse the public, or who just, again, as that listener and Matt have said, who already holds an ideological position that's firm, it just sort of reinforces that position, and on we go into the future."

On the day after Christmas, NPR’s All Things Considered offered a little gift to openly gay reporter Ari Shapiro: seven minutes of air time for a story with the online title “How 2013 Became The ‘Gayest Year Ever’.”

As anchor Robert Siegel said NPR was looking at the “winners and losers of 2013...for gay rights groups, the last 12 months saw a huge string of victories, from state legislatures to Congress to the Supreme Court. The surprise ruling in Utah legalizing same-sex marriage is just the latest win. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports on why some LGBT advocates are calling 2013 the gayest year ever.”

NPR sports-and-culture correspondent Mike Pesca appeared on MSNBC's "Up With Steve Kornacki" on Sunday to discuss the Winter Olympics in Russia and how Obama is sending gay Olympians and gay tennis legend Billie Jean King instead of going himself. Kornacki asked Pesca "What is your sense of what the atmosphere is going to be like for gay athletes? And just in general, the atmosphere is going to be like at these games?"

Pesca began by mocking America: "Yeah, well, they`re going to have protest zones which seems un-American -- except, you know, America has used them for political conventions and stuff." Then he turned to quoting how Obama's decision is a "brilliant snub" of "soft power" that leaves Vladimir Putin sputtering at Obama's cleverness.

Today’s installment of the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2013,” as selected by our 42 expert judges: The “Damn Those Conservatives Award,” recounting journalists’ nastiest attacks on conservatives.

Past winners of this venerable award include: Nina Totenberg in 1991, for verbally accosting then-Senator Alan Simpson after a Nightline appearance on October 9 of that year: “You big [expletive]....You are so full of [expletive]. You are an evil man....You’re a bitter and evil man and all your colleagues hate you.”

In 2005, Helen Thomas took top honors for a quote she gave The Hill newspaper: “The day I say Dick Cheney is going to run for President, I’ll kill myself. All we need is one more liar.” Luckily for Helen, Mr. Cheney did not choose to run in 2008. (This year’s winners and videos after the jump.)

What’s been called the “war on Christmas” is often a case of secular liberals wanting to engage in Christmas denial. In the name of not wanting to offend people of minority faiths (or no faith), they remove the C-word from department-store catalogs and remove Christmas songs from public-school concerts, leaving us with lame messages about snow.

But there’s another kind of Christmas denial: the kind that simply stomps on Christianity as ridiculous and kicks over the nativity set. Take the atheist punk band Bad Religion and their new record of Christmas songs they found “hilarious” to record.

On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid showed up for a phone interview on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR to discuss shredding the filibuster for presidential appointees. A very polite Rehm asked if this might make partisanship worse.

“I'm sorry to smile, as you can't see on radio, but more dysfunction? I mean, gee whiz,” Reid replied. But underneath the Nevada-nice routine came an attack out of nowhere on black libertarian judge Janice Rogers Brown as one of the “extreme right wing people” the Senate confirmed in the Bush years.

In the midst of taxpayer-subsidized NPR's week of John F. Kennedy / utopian Democratic president idolatry (four full hours plus 22 stories--plus others that discussed him), NPR's Dallas reporter and anti-conservative sermonizer Wade Goodwyn slandered the right and the GOP by shifting blame for President Kennedy's assassination. In his "reporting," the far-left Alinskyite community organizer turned NPR reporter played fast and loose with the facts, selectively quoted left-leaning writers, and provided his own subjective interpretation of history to lay the blame for Kennedy's death on Goodwyn's political opponents.

In his November 21 All Things Considered rant, Goodwyn presented a left-wing funhouse-of-mirrors version of 1963 Dallas. He falsely claimed that the Dallas Morning News chose to border its front page in black on the day of Kennedy's Dallas visit. The truth is that the black bordering was on a paid advertisement--on Page 14. Goodwyn went on and on about the hateful right-wing leaders in Dallas and how they were responsible for Kennedy's assassination. Despite his piece being drenched in politics, Goodwyn never bothered to mention that the lone killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a far-left communist who just seven months earlier attempted to assassinate another prominent anti-communist in Dallas.