Associated Press

Turkish, Pakistani and Afghan leaders sign a pact to fight terrorism

Good news is no news, at least when it comes to the war on terrorism.

On Monday evening, the State Department released its annual Country Reports on Terrorism showing a number of interesting findings, including steep declines in terrorist attacks and murders in many regions of the globe. That has not been the lede story in America's liberal media, however. Instead, they've chosen to focus their attentions on how terrorism has increased in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

That's not entirely unjustified. Both of those countries have significant amounts of American troops in them (although I doubt that the left-wing French or German press, say, is covering this any differently). What has been unacceptable, however, is the American press's complete ignoring of the rest of the State Department's numbers.

Instead of saying that terrorism has increased markedly in Iraq (the truth), the media are extrapolating beyond that to claim that, as Reuters puts it, "U.S. sees sharp rise in global terrorism deaths."

Assume for a moment that a prominent Republican’s uncle that happened to be a former state senator was convicted of accepting bribes. Do you think:

• This would have been headline/front-page news
• The family relationship would have been in the lede and/or headline
• His party affiliation would have been in the lede and/or headline?

Well, on Friday, the uncle of former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. (D), former Tennessee State Sen. John Ford (D), was convicted of accepting bribes totaling $55,000. Yet, many media outlets buried the connection to his much more popular nephew, as well as the fact that he was a Democrat.

For instance, this is how the New York Times handled the story Saturday coincidentally on page A14 (h/t NB reader Joe Easley):

In case you hadn’t heard, there was a huge protest in Turkey on Sunday as reported by the Associated Press (h/t NBer Gary Hall and LGF, emphasis added throughout):

At least 300,000 Turks waving the red national flag flooded central Istanbul on Sunday to demand the resignation of the government, saying the Islamic roots of Turkey's leaders threatened to destroy the country's modern foundations.

Given the American media’s predilection towards never wanting to write or say anything that could possibly offend Muslims, an interesting question is raised regarding how they will report this story.

Regardless of the answer, the article continued:

Earlier this week, an Investors Business Daily editorial noted the weak treatment the Social Security Trustees' Report (summary here) received from the Formerly Mainstream Media:

Journalists in Washington are supposed to be public watchdogs. But when it comes to the crisis facing Social Security, they act more like lapdogs for politicians determined to shirk their responsibility.

The Washington Post, New York Times and Associated Press all led off their stories on the latest Social Security and Medicare trustees' projections by pointing out that Social Security isn't expected to deplete its trust fund reserves until 2041. This supports the contention of Democratic politicians and the AARP that the day of reckoning is more than three decades away, so reform is not an urgent need .....

That is, of course, incorrect, as The Heritage Foundation noted (bolds are mine):

Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski got lots of attention earlier this week as he tried to show us how allegedly inadequate the Food Stamp program is (bold is mine):

Ore. gov. starts week on food stamps
By Julia Silverman, Associated Press Writer | April 25, 2007

SALEM, Ore. --If Gov. Ted Kulongoski seems a little sluggish this week, he's got an excuse: he couldn't afford coffee.

In fact, the Democratic governor couldn't afford much of anything during a trip to a Salem-area grocery store on Tuesday, where he had exactly $21 to buy a week's worth of food -- the same amount that the state's average food stamp recipient spends weekly on groceries.

Kulongoski is taking the weeklong challenge to raise awareness about the difficulty of feeding a family on a food stamp budget.

The governor put on quite a show trying to stay within that $21:

I have heard of journalists thinking they're gods of objectivity but this is a new one. Apparently, when you become an elite journalist, you also become a prophet.

AP reporter Nedra Pickler (her real name) filed a story on the recent Democratic presidential debate 45 minutes before the event had even started. Mickey Kaus reports (h/t Small Dead Animals):

Why have a debate? AP has already written its lede: It's 3:15. The big South Carolina Democratic debate starts in 45 minutes. But you don't have to actually watch it. AP's Nedra Pickler has already filed her story, in the past tense.

Democratic presidential candidates largely stood together Thursday in support of a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and then sought to separate themselves on the details in the first primary debate of the 2008 race.

Assume for a second that you were a pro-environment presidential candidate that believed in anthropogenic global warming.

Would you be trying to demonstrate that energy conservation and reducing carbon emissions were not just so many words in a stump speech, but something you truly believed in?

Would you also expect that an impartial press might be analyzing your activities to make sure they accurately reflected the green position you were preaching?

Apparently, if you were Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, or Joe Biden, this would not be much of a concern. As reported by the Associated Press (emphasis added):

A troubled newspaper industry is beset with a raging journalistic debate around using the Internet to bolster the bottom line for the nation's broadsheets.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Faced with declining circulation, many U.S. newspapers are trying to engage readers by allowing them to respond to news stories online. But the anonymity of the Internet lets readers post obscenities and racist hate speech that would never be allowed in the printed paper.

LaShawn Barber lays out her thoughts in an April 26 post to her eponymous blog, suggesting that newspapers are misguided to attempt to co-opt the blog format. Rather than allowing anonymous comments that can encourage trolls that cheapen honest debate and discussion, Barber suggests another strength of the blogosphere that is easily adaptable to newspapers' online versions.:

This is really hysterical: a group of scientists has sent a letter to the producer of the British documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” (video available here) demanding that changes be made to the film before the DVD version is released.

Yet, despite the egregious errors and factual misstatements made by soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore in his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” no such call occurred when it was released on DVD.

Why the double standard?

Regardless of the obvious hypocrisy, the Associated Press reported (h/t NB member Sick-n-Tired, emphasis added throughout):

To show the feeding frenzy that is the MSM -- as well as the constant inaccuracy -- reports abounded yesterday with rebukes to Rudy Giuliani from Democratic candidates for the 2008 Presidential election over something they all merely assumed he said at a campaign appearance.

Every single paper out there quoted the stern rebukes of each of the front running Dem. candidates and nearly every source of MSM news, from TV to the internet, repeated what it was that Rudy "said" to force the rebukes.

Unfortunately for all concerned, it appears that Rudy never said the phrase attributed to him.

Yet, not a soul in the MSM (except Fox's Brit Hume) took the time to do the research necessary to fact check and assure the story was correct.

In his report last Thursday (HT Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em) on Congress's passage of a bill that would grant congressional representation for the District of Columbia, Associated Press writer Jim Abrams opened with nearly celebratory language. He also noted the existence of a constitutional objection to the law but failed to explain how ironclad that objection most likely is:

The people of the District of Columbia moved a step closer Thursday to gaining voting rights denied to them for more than 200 years.

But the legislation passed by the House on a 241-177 vote faced a veto threat from the White House, which said the bill was unconstitutional.

In recounting a previous such effort and its results at the end of his report, Abrams missed an easy opportunity to explain why what the House did should be irrelevant:

Here's several items of interest from the Monday edition of the Washington Examiner. First, in the gossip column "Yeas & Nays," news from the big White House correspondents dinner that American Idol teen-pleaser Sanjaya Malakar is a big fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Junior:

Everyone was itching to see American Idol “star” Sanjaya Malakar (who didn’t get their picture taken with him?), but which celebrity was Sanjaya most excited to see? “Robert Kennedy,” Malakar told Yeas & Nays, adding that he’s a big fan of Kennedy’s anti-global warming efforts (Larry David, Sheryl Crow, sign him up!). But don’t expect Sanjaya to jump into politics anytime soon: When asked who he’s pulling for in the 2008 presidential race, Sanjaya declined to give a name, saying, “I’m too much inside the bubble.” (Like his singing, we’re totally confused by what he meant by that.)

Update with MSNBC video at bottom of post

You can’t make this stuff up, folks!

As most NewsBusters readers are aware, the media have been foaming at the mouth this week for Congress to advance stronger gun control laws in the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

As a result, this absolutely delightful feel-good story about an 82-year-old former Miss America that defended her farm in Kentucky with a lil ol’ .38 caliber handgun is sure to be ignored by a media more interested in advancing an agenda than doing their job as disseminators of information.

WRAL-TV in Raleigh, NC, was one of hundreds of news outlets to publish an AP story on 21 April, entitled "Mass Shootings More Common Since 1960s." The pathetic aspect of this story is that the reporter found and included the truth of the matter in paragraphs nine and ten, but otherwise acted as if he had never seen it.

Both the title and the lede warn of burgeoning mass murder in the US. The lede says that, "Mass public shootings have become such a part of American life in recent decades that the most dramatic of them can be evoked from the nation's collective memory in a word or two: Luby's. Jonesboro. Columbine."

Buried late in this article that is filled with assorted speculations about the causes of this tide of mass murder, is this finding from Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections:

Of course there were many other newsmaking events this week, but the relatively silent treatment this story received from Old Media is still not a surprise (the link is to a story at a trade publication's web site; very few papers had a related story written by the Associated Press):

Maryland Abandons ‘Fair Share’ Health Care Fight

For the last few weeks I have been watching two stories that, were they about Conservatives or Republicans, would have been scandals that would have shaken the rafters of the MSM. But, since these stories are about two favored Liberals, one old and one newly minted, we have seen no faux outrage, no shocked commentary, no calls for heads on pikes to be posted at the entrance to Congress, and no calls for resignations. Oh, the stories were reported all right, but all sensationalism was eschewed with the usual extrapolation to the level of a “culture of corruption” cast aside for a straight, newsy style atypical to their normal means against Republicans.

These two stories and the lack of passionate coverage of them by the MSM shows that the MSM employs as much liberal bias in what they chose not to cover as they do in what they chose to go ahead and focus upon.

Are those combustibles, potables, and sharp objects still in a safe place? Good, because the Silly Saturday Snowstorm Stories continue.

As reported Saturday morning by the Associated Press (emphasis added):

WILMINGTON, N.Y. -- Skiers unfurled a protest banner in April snow on Whiteface Mountain on Saturday to kick off a nationwide day of demonstrations aimed at drawing attention to global warming.

The skiers fear long-term temperature increases promise trouble for native plants, wildlife and people in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York state.

Why is this funny? Well, because a massive snowstorm is heading directly to this area threatening to drop more of the white stuff ever seen in this part of the country in April. (Update: Winter storm warning issued for Wilmington, NY.) As reported by AccuWeather (emphasis added):

The AP is still spinning the anti-Imus wheel with spinoff articles. AP's Sean O'Driscoll wrote a scolding article (this could be old, but this one was posted Tuesday) that whites like Karl Rove should not attempt to rap, as he did at the Radio & TV correspondents dinner, concluding with Jimmy Kimmel saying it is "never, ever funny." Then there's this one from Deepti Hajela: "'Nappy' Has Long, Hurtful History." We are told that whites should never attempt the loaded "in-group" terms:

"When Imus says 'these nappy-headed hos,' his first flaw is he's using an in-group term that's loaded," said Lanita Jacobs-Huey, associate professor of anthropology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California."When I hear it from someone who doesn't understand the depth of pain, they just don't have the right to say it," Jacobs-Huey said.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, has not let her tragic news get in the way of a little partisan fearmongering and classist snobbery. In a USA Today article, the AP reports that, even though she’s never met him, John Edwards’ wife said she is scared of the gun-carrying “rabid, rabid Republican” who lives on what Elizabeth Edwards called a “slummy” property, which is across the street from candidate’s luxury compound in a woodsy part of Orange County, NC (video here):

Elizabeth Edwards says she is scared of the "rabid, rabid Republican" who owns property across the street from her Orange County home — and she doesn't want her kids going near the gun-toting neighbor.

The Associated Press reported rallies celebrating the fourth anniversary of the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein -- without ever mentioning Saddam Hussein. Lauren Frayer's article makes it sound like the American forces deposed a city, not a dictator: "Tens of thousands marched through the streets of two Shiite holy cities Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of Baghdad's fall." Nowhere in the article is Saddam even mentioned. The headline was also "Rally marks anniversary of Baghdad's fall."

The reader quickly learns the rallies were organized by Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army as an anti-American event, which would explain why it broke through the media's resistance to hopeful-sounding news:

Not surprisingly, Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards has dropped out of another debate sponsored by the Fox News Channel. As reported by the Associated Press (emphasis added throughout):

The Edwards campaign said it will not attend the September 23 debate in Detroit hosted by Fox News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, but officials added that Edwards is "looking forward" to a different debate hosted by the institute and CNN in South Carolina in January 2008.

Hmmm. Canceling FNC to appear on CNN, John? Why might that be (wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more):

Language does matter when it comes to using terms. Take the word "gay" versus the word "homosexual". Not too long ago no one had an issue with referring to a homosexual person as a "homosexual". The reason why is because the term homosexual means someone who is attracted to another of the same gender sexually.

Well, now the politically correct word police are saying that we should not use the word "homosexual' because it connotates negative images of homosexuals.

First, let's look at one online dictionary says about the term:

adjective - homosexual 1. sexually attracted to members of your own sex [ant: bisexual, heterosexual] noun 1. someone who practices homosexuality; having a sexual attraction to persons of the same sex

Yes, a clear and concise definition of the word homosexual that accurately defines people who are homosexuals.

Reporting a crime story from Colville, Wash., the Associated Press refused to use the term "unborn baby" to describe the intended victim of a crime that landed an 18-year-old man in prison for over six years:

(AP) An 18-year-old pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hit man to kill his ex-girlfriend's nearly full-term fetus and was sentenced to more than six years in prison.

Charles D. Young received 76½ months in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to first-degree solicitation to commit manslaughter. State law allows for such a count when a viable fetus is the intended target.

Prosecutors allege Young, then 17, offered an undercover officer posing as a hit man $3,250 last October to injure his estranged 17-year-old girlfriend so badly that her fetus would die.

One sign that a news outlet is liberal is how they can find nothing controversial in peace protests by long-time avant-garde hippies like Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon. The Washington Post greeted her latest publicity stunt in DC with an honorific article on the front page of the Style section headlined "Yoko Ono's Peaceful Message Takes Root." Jessica Dawson didn't mention how this alleged peacemaker caused the War Among the Beatles that broke up the band. Dawson could only produce awe for her celebrity and for her care for all humanity: "Yes, that was Yoko Ono whispering into the bark of a cherry tree at the Tidal Basin yesterday morning. The artist, performer and widow of John Lennon visited Washington on Sunday and Monday to bring her 'Imagine Peace' project to the city."

Ono encouraged public participation in art by having people write their wishes on a piece of paper and tie it to one of her peace trees. How scribbling a wish on paper is "art" is anyone's guess. Is it art if you bring your calligraphy pen? The Post account continued this press release for peace:

For those skeptical about man’s role in climate change who haven’t grown concerned about the media’s fascination with this issue, and the propaganda being spread by soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” this report by the Associated Press Saturday should open your eyes (emphasis added throughout):

Citing Al Gore's movie on global warming, a federal judge has advanced a lawsuit against the government for its financing of overseas projects that may contribute to climate change.

Shocked? You should be, because the alarmism running through society concerning this issue, and being flamed by Gore and his sycophant cadre in the media and Hollywood, clearly carries risks that an obedient and complicit press ignore:

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) began its spring season of announcing its annual GLAAD Media Awards for pro-gay journalism last week at the Marriott Marquis in New York (thanks in part to 100 donors, including "Platinum Underwriter" Time Warner). Other ceremonies will follow in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami, but the bulk of their awards were celebrated in New York. Among the big winners: Rosie O'Donnell for her "All Aboard!" HBO documentary touting her gay and lesbian family cruise. She was there to accept the award with filmmaker Shari Cookson, and gave a nod to tennis legend Billie Jean King, subject of another nominated documentary, saying "if it hadn't been for Billie Jean King, there wouldn't have been a gay movement."

Also honored in the awards, offered to journalists and entertainers GLAAD thought were "fair, accurate, inclusive, and impossibly glam," were the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, ABC's "Nightline," and especially The New York Times, which won three.

That was the headline on the AP story, claiming that Sydney went “black.” The much-ballyhooed event actually fizzled and the same story said “that the city’s patchwork of millions of tiny lights had thinned, not disappeared.”

Still the eco-elite couldn’t grasp that the lights did not go out on Sydney. Sure, the city government turned out some of the lights and so did some restaurants, but the city stayed amazingly bright – unlike the clueless lefties who claimed otherwise.

Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett was there to watch and claimed “It’s an hour of active, thoughtful darkness, a celebration of our awakening to climate-change action.”

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is in for a world of hurt from his former constituents should he center his 2008 campaign on his handling of 9/11 and its aftermath, the Associated Press is reporting. But in his March 30 article, reporter Larry McShane left out some crucial facts about two people he cited in his story to bolster that point: Sally Regenhard and Hank Sheinkopf.

Let's begin with Regenhard. She's portrayed merely as the angry, distraught mother of a NYC firefighter who perished on 9/11.:

"If Rudolph Giuliani was running on anything but 9/11, I would not speak out," said Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son was among the 343 FDNY members killed in the terrorist attack. "If he ran on cleaning up Times Square, getting rid of squeegee men, lowering crime _ that's indisputable.

"But when he runs on 9/11, I want the American people to know he was part of the problem."

A rather small section, one small paragraph, in a pretty straight forward story reveals the sheer absurdity and incomprehension that prevails in the Media today and serves to show the emptiness of what passes for thinking and logic about American history in what some feel are our cultural elites. It also shows the bias against things Southern in certain circles these days.

The story, "Confederate General's Painting Sold", is mostly a simple retelling of the facts around the $400,000 acquisition by Colonial Williamsburg of a painting painted by Robert E. Lee's wife to be in the 1830s.

Monika Scislowska of the Associated Press reported on Warsaw rallies in support of a complete ban on abortion in Poland. It's restricted now to the first 12 weeks and only in the cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother. But look at the labeling contrast AP employed, the usual stereotype of the epic political battle between the ultraconservatives and the nonpartisans:

The two marches were organized by an ultraconservative Roman Catholic radio station and a right-wing political party. Mostly elderly demonstrators attended a Mass and marched through central Warsaw carrying Polish and Vatican flags. One banner had an image of a baby and the words, "Can you really kill me?"

Elsewhere in the capital, about 700 mostly young people held a rally with music and balloons in support of abortion rights.