American Morning

I wonder how the media will pretend this is bad news? The latest employment numbers are in and not only are they solid, but last month wasn't the catastrophe first reported.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced 110,000 jobs were created in September and 89,000 were created in August. The August number replaces the 4,000 jobs lost that were first reported. If you flash back to last month, you'll remember how much the media screamed about this. ABC was declaring the August numbers a sign of "new fears this morning about the state of our economy," said Bill Weir on September 8. That's how he lead off a downbeat "Good Morning America" story entitled "Road to Recession? Bleak Signals from Job Report."

It only got worse. "And now many are asking whether the disappointing employment figures, coupled with the housing crisis, may head us, have us headed for a serious economic downturn or even recession," worried Weir.

How dare CNN Meteorologist Rob Marciano say Al Gore was wrong in his movie "An Inconvenient Truth?" Apparently, his comments from yesterday that "There are definitely some inaccuracies" in the film generated a lot of controversy and e-mails for the network.

Today was Round Two. And Marciano excelled by showing both sides of a debate Gore says doesn't exist and by pointing out even more of what Gore got wrong. First the wrong: "He does talk about tornados, implying that there's an increase in tornados from global warming, that's not necessarily true," said Marciano.

Then Marciano interviewed two climate experts from opposite sides of the battle, including "science and operations officer of the National Hurricane Center, a big time researcher named Chris Landsea." Landsea explained the limits of the Gorean hype machine. Read on for details and full transcript.

Bill Bennett corrected CNN's Wolf Blitzer's presumption on Monday that Rush Limbaugh's “phony soldiers” comment was directed at soldiers who served in Iraq and now oppose the war, but in setting up the “Strategy Session” segment on Tuesday's The Situation Room, Blitzer again adopted as fact the spin of the far-left group pushing the attack on Limbaugh. With the text on screen, Blitzer highlighted how “Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania...says: 'Someone should tell chicken hawk Rush Limbaugh that the only phonies are those who choose not to serve and then criticize those who do.'” To Bennett and Donna Brazile, Blitzer wondered: “What do you make of this strategy that Harry Reid...and others are saying now that Rush Limbaugh was inappropriately offensive to veterans?” Bennett retorted with “not much” and observed: “When you shoot at a king, and he's the king of talk radio, you better get him. They didn't get him here.”

On Monday night, Blitzer had dismissed Limbaugh's explanation, that he was referring to anyone who claims to have served in Iraq but has not, and introduced a story on “Limbaugh's charge that some veterans who are criticizing the war are, in his words, quote, 'phony soldiers.'" Meanwhile, on Tuesday's American Morning, CNN anchor Kiran Chetry proposed: “Two weeks after Republicans went after MoveOn.org's 'General Betray Us' ad, the Democrats are turning the tables on Rush Limbaugh. They say that he made hateful and unpatriotic remarks about U.S. troops on his radio show.” Not until the end of the story, after relaying Senator Tom Harkin's insult that “maybe he was just high on his drugs,” did Chetry provide Limbaugh's take.

Ted Turner made a rare appearance on CNN on Wednesday’s "American Morning," and made an odd statement about what his priority was in global affairs. "Well, the two things that I'm most concerned about are the nuclear arsenals and the fact that they are still on hair-trigger alert, the Russian and American arsenals, and if something were to go wrong, or a mistake, and they get accidentally launched, it's the end of the world in an afternoon. I think that's probably the greatest danger that we face. And the second one is probably global warming."

Turner also made a thinly-veiled attack on the Bush Administration while making a prediction about the future of the world. "We're in a dangerous spot, but we can pull it out if we really work together and go to work on it, and do the smart things and stop doing the dumb things, like bombing Third World countries."

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CNN co-host Kiran Chetry and CNN contributor Roland Martin, in a segment on Tuesday’s "American Morning," discussed comments on race Fox News host Bill O’Reilly had recently made on his radio show, and the question you might expect came up: "Is this going to be one of those Don Imus moments?"

Chetry asked this question to Martin due to some blogs "buzzing" over O’Reilly’s comments about a visit he made to a "soul food" restaurant in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City with Al Sharpton. Martin denied that this was going to be O’Reilly’s "Imus moment."

O’Reilly, in a conversation with NPR host and Fox contributor Juan Williams, had said of his visit to Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem, "I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’ They were ordering and having fun, and it wasn't any kind of craziness at all."

While ABC’s Chris Cuomo played softball with Columbia University president Lee Bollinger on the upcoming speech of Iranian president Ahmadinejad, CNN’s John Roberts directed tough questions to John Coatsworth, dean for Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Roberts opened the interview with a question which summarized Ahmadinejad’s record. "Here's a leader who's advocated the destruction of Israel, denied the Holocaust, and is accused by our government, the United States government, of supplying both fighters and equipment to insurgents in Iraq, to kill U.S. troops. Why would you ever want him on your campus?"

As if she were president already, Hillary Clinton went on CNN’s "American Morning" as well as the morning shows of the "Big Three" networks on Tuesday to sell her new health care proposals, a day after their unveiling. At the close of the "American Morning" interview, co-host John Roberts brought up the controversial "Betray Us" ad by MoveOn.org. He twice asked the junior senator from New York if she wanted to distance herself from the ad. Both times, she skirted the question by talking about General Petraeus and his record of service, instead of the ad itself.

Besides Roberts, Harry Smith of CBS News, ABC’s Diane Sawyer, and NBC’s Matt Lauer interviewed Clinton on Tuesday morning. Out of the four, Roberts was the only one who brought up the issue of the ad.

A transcript of the exchange between Roberts and Senator Clinton, which took place near the bottom of the 7 am Eastern hour of Tuesday’s "American Morning."

CNN, in their day-long reporting on Tuesday about the opening day for a controversial publicly-funded Arabic-language school in New York City, sympathized with the school and its supporters, and helped denigrate its opponents. On "American Morning" and throughout the day on Tuesday on their "Newsroom" program, CNN aired a report from correspondent Richard Roth on the Khalil Gibran International Academy, whose curriculum will focus on teaching "Arabic language and culture" (as detailed in a CNSNews.com report last week). The report focused on Carmen Colon, a mother and "community activist" in Brooklyn (a detail not mentioned in Roth’s report) who pulled her son from the school before its opening. The report closed with a clip from Colon, who said, "The people who are so against this school who, for me, seem more like the terrorists by terrorizing the community and making us feel that it's unsafe for our children to be there. They're the ones who are terrorizing us, not the school, not the principal, and not the administration."

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Jeff Toobin, CNN’s senior legal analyst, made two statements on the resignation of attorney general Alberto Gonzales on Monday’s "American Morning" that point to his own political leanings. Co-host John Roberts, following-up on Toobin’s remark that he found himself "surprised" by this announcement, asked "Really? But surprised, but are you shocked? Toobin’s answer: "Well, not shocked. I mean, you know, this was a really preposterous attorney generalship at this point." Toobin also invoked the memory of John Mitchell, the attorney general under Nixon who was jailed due to Watergate, in his answer.

Later, when Roberts asked about the possibility of Michael Chertoff replacing Gonzales, Toobin mentioned some of Chertoff’s qualifications, including how he was law clerk to former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, "the biggest liberal, probably, in the history in the court." Immediately after mentioning this detail, Toobin added, "So, he certainly has the resume you'd want." Toobin also offered some "balance" to this by mentioning that Chertoff was the Homeland Security Secretary during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

For a change, the media gave the government a hard time about air travel, instead of bashing the airlines. The media reported on new Federal Aviation Administration guidelines for better runway safety and on ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson" and CNN's "American Morning."

Lisa Stark said, "The FAA commission admits that runway collisions are an increasing threat," and cautioned that new rules could "lead to some more delays," but the report did not indicate that the airlines were a part of the problem.

This is in contrast to CBS's Randall Pinkston, who said August 12 that it would cost airlines more money to provide more services to passengers but charged: "airline analysts say [the airlines] can afford it," pointing to Northwest Airlines' $2 billion profit and neglecting to point out their bankruptcy status only a few months prior.

"American Morning" co-host Kiran Chetry, an alumna of Fox News Channel’s "Fox & Friends Weekend," gave her former colleagues at Fox a run for the money in highlighting a case of media bias. While "Fox & Friends" on Thursday morning was covering the earthquake in Peru, and featured several segments on the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis, Chetry interviewed "Wired" magazine senior editor Nick Thompson towards the end of the 7 am EDT hour on a new website that traces who is editing different entries on Wikipedia. Chetry brought up an instance in December 2005 where the words "jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk" appeared on President Bush’s Wikipedia entry, and the new website traced the entry to the IP address of a computer at the New York Times.

The key excerpt from Chetry’s interview of Thompson:

As the stock market went up and down over the past few weeks, media coverage also bounced from end-of-the-world rhetoric to rational analysis.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer went on an impassioned rant August 6 calling for the Fed to reduce interest rates.

“Bernanke needs to open the discount window. That is how bad things are out there … in the fixed income markets we have Armageddon,” said Cramer on “Stop Trading!” Following Cramers’ rant, NBC brought him on “Today” to analyze the economy August 10.

NBC’s Meredith Vieira asked “Are the markets about to crash?” on the August 10 “Today” show.

Contrast that with CNN's Ali Velshi on August 13:

The tide may be turning now with glimmers of good news emerging out of Iraq. On Thursday’s Today, Matt Lauer’s questions to John McCain signaled that success in Iraq won’t be an impediment to Democrats sticking with the doom line and demanding rapid "redeployment." Suddenly, the once-crucial Petraeus report in September is now developing into a so-what moment:

LAUER: "You, you've been in Congress a long time, in the Senate for an awfully long time. You now which way the wind is blowing. There are some people who say, Senator, that the momentum, right now, in Congress is so strong to pull the troops out of Iraq that it doesn't matter what's in that report, in the middle of September from General Petraeus, or even in reports that follow that. Even if we start to change momentum in Iraq and start to see more success, the momentum in Congress is already so strong that it's unstoppable. How do you feel about that?"

In the recent past, CNN, to its credit, has highlighted the Democrat-controlled Congress’s reluctance to reform the congressional earmark process. Co-host John Roberts on Tuesday’s "American Morning" brought up the issue of earmarks again during a sympathetic interview to Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense. But instead of bringing up the Democrat’s continuing lack of leadership on the issue, the segment instead began with a discussion on the pork-barrel spending project of the former Republican chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has received plenty of flak from both the Left and the Right for various reasons, but CNN's "American Morning" on Wednesday spent more than six minutes discussing an article critical of Giuliani's wife in the latest issue of the left-wing glossy magazine "Vanity Fair." Co-host John Roberts interviewed the author of the article, Judy Bachrach, as well as got a response from Giuliani friend and campaign aide Randy Mastro. In addition to this, "American Morning" ran a segment from "Anderson Cooper 360" political reporter Tom Foreman on Giuliani's criticism of the universal health care proposals of several Democrat presidential candidates. Foreman, using an overexcited tone in his voice, compared Giuliani to Tony Soprano, and portrayed Giuliani in a pretty unflattering light. (see more including transcript after the jump)

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Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon's surprising op-ed in the New York Times on improvements in Iraq may have been ignored by NBC Nightly News on Monday , but CNN's John Roberts thought it was worthy enough to mention the article in an interview of Representative John Murtha on Tuesday morning. Murtha, a frequent guest on CNN when the subject of discussion is the Iraq war, dismissed the Pollack/O'Hanlon assessment. "I dismiss it at as rhetoric. I dismiss it as -- you know, in my estimation, the things that I measure are not -- oil production, electricity production, water. Only two hours of electricity. I don't know where they were staying. I don't know what they saw. But I know this, that it's not getting better. It's rhetorical is what is getting better. It's over-optimist. It's an illusion."

CNN's John Roberts, co-host of "American Morning," gave nothing but softball questions to New York senator Chuck Schumer on Thursday morning. Prefacing his interview with sound bites from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where attorney general Alberto Gonzales was testifying on the controversial Terror Surveillance program, Roberts got right to the point that Schumer wanted to get out in the press. "So, did Gonzales lie to you?" Roberts was even brazen about his aid to Schumer with this interview at the close of the segment. "Well, there's your newsy sound bite this morning. Senator Schumer, thanks very much. Good to see you."

CNN "American Morning" co-hosts Kiran Chetry and John Roberts, in a discussion on Tuesday morning on the Democrat presidential candidates' performance CNN/YouTube.com debate, could only offer constructive criticism to one of the candidates, and nothing but praise for most of the others. Roberts gushed, "You know, I think that Hillary Clinton did really, really well last night. I thought John Edwards did well.... Barack Obama, I thought was very good as well. I was a little disappointed in Mike Gravel."

Chetry responded: "You know, and Joe Biden got off a couple of one-liners. Dennis Kucinich also did really do what he is best at doing, which is showing how different he is from some of the other candidates." Neither said anything about Chris Dodd or Bill Richardson, but given they offered praise for all of the others but Gravel, odds are they would have said something positive about them if they were given an opportunity.

White House homeland security advisor Fran Townsend made the rounds of the TV morning shows on Wednesday – except for NBC, which was too busy chronicling the Senate Democrat stunt on Iraq. ABC’s Diane Sawyer pounded Townsend with criticism from former Clinton adviser Dick Clarke and a quip from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that Bush created a "spa" for Osama bin Laden. CNN’s Kiran Chetry homed in on how critics say Iraq was a diversion from the war on al-Qaeda. On the Early Show on CBS, co-host Hannah Storm pulled a Dan Rather – as in the man who liked to use the words "the group calling itself the Christian Coalition" – and referred to the "so-called War on Terror."

Storm's first question was this: "So we're almost six years after 9/11. Billions of dollars spent on the so-called War on Terror. Thousands of Americans lives lost. And yet we hear this report that we're no safer now than we were then. Why not?"

CNN contributor Roland Martin took aim at Republicans on Friday's "American Morning, since Congressman Tom Tancredo was the only GOP presidential candidate to appear at a recent NAACP forum. Co-host John Roberts asked Martin, "what do you make of this idea that nine of the 10 Republican candidates took a pass on this convention?" Martin's response was blunt: "Of course, conservatives won't like this, but the bottom line is, the GOP, they're scared of black folks. I mean, it's as if they can't even talk to them."

Martin, a regular contributor on CNN's "American Morning," and a liberal talk show host based out of Chicago, has been given regular opportunities on the morning show to give left-wing lines about various issues without a counter-balance from a conservative. He continued his offensive by citing President Bush's single appearance before the NAACP in his several years as president, and Rudy Giuliani's "terrible history with black folks in New York" as the reason there was "no doubt he [Giuliani] was going to ignore the NAACP."

Here's another sign that Al Gore's Live Earth was probably a bust. CNN entertainment correspondent Lola Ogunnaike (pictured at right) gave a great one-liner with regards to the celebrity component of Live Earth: "Frankly, I don't want to hear about environmental causes from the Pussycat Dolls."

Co-host John Roberts and Ogunnaike discussed the concert's lackluster ratings in the first hour of Monday's "American Morning." Ogunnaike blamed the ratings situation on "benefit fatigue" and people actually wanting to be out in the environment instead of sitting at home watching celebrities rant about saving it.

CNN contributor Roland Martin jumped on the Elizabeth Edwards bandwagon during an appearance on Thursday's "American Morning," and launched two fronts of attack on Coulter for her recent comments about John Edwards. First, in reply to co-host Kiran Chetry's question on whether Elizabeth Edwards should have even dignified Ann Coulter with a phone call, Martin invoked the schoolyard. "I think she should have, because at some point, you have to punch the bully in the mouth."

Roland Martin, a columnist and talk radio host, makes frequent appearances on "American Morning," which are also broadcast on his Chicago-based radio show. After Martin discussed Coulter's "track record" of "outlandish comments," as he put it, Chetry posed the question that brought out his schoolyard comparison.

Just over 12 hours after Monday's NBC Nightly News reported that 50 out of 141 high school seniors visiting the White House presented President Bush with a handwritten letter asking him to "stop the violations of the human rights of... all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants," CNN's "American Morning" had 3 of the 50 students on for an interview. Co-host John Roberts asked the students to recount their experiences writing the letter, obtaining signatures, and handing it to the president, and asked one student, "[I]n response, the president said, ‘we respect human rights,' do you buy that?"

The three students who were interviewed - Mari Oye, Leah Anthony Libresco, and Colin McSwiggen, all recently-graduated high school students, were among the one-third of the Presidential Scholars who signed a letter asking President Bush, among other things, "to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants." Roberts emphasized the apparent intelligence of the three. "And you want to talk about brain power, the collective group that you're seeing there. Mari and Leah going to Yale next year, Colin accepted to MIT." None from the remaining two-thirds who didn't sign the letter made an appearance on "American Morning."

“American Morning” provided another forecast of mostly cloudy skies for the housing market on June 26.

“I got to tell you John [Roberts, “American Morning” co-host], this is not good news for people who are out there trying to sell their house and this of course is supposed to be the biggest time of year for sales,” said Gerri Willis to begin her report.

Willis, the personal finance correspondent for CNN and host of “Open House” was reporting new data from the National Association of Realtors that showed lower median home prices and slipping sales.

While the NAR data was downbeat, Willis called it too “upbeat” and “optimistic.” She then labeled a doomsayer with a more negative prediction “respected."

Make a crazy eco-rule that affects thousands and the mainstream media finds critics – who said it doesn’t go far enough.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome banned city departments from purchasing bottled water, even for water coolers. But that wasn’t good enough for Greenpeace Energy Policy analyst Samantha Rogers.

Rogers told CNN’s “American Morning” fill-in host Rob Marciano she wanted to see the mayor do more than just ban plastic bottles, but to sign a plan championed by global warming doomsayers that would force the city to have more than 50 percent of its energy come from renewable resources by the year 2017.

The energy debate on the Hill could help determine policy and prices for decades. Just don’t expect CNN to report it in a fair way.

Instead, you get Ali Velshi, the ‘American Morning’ business reporter, taking swipes at energy companies and the Republican Party. While the GOP stopped plans for a new tax to pay for more Democratic goodies, Velshi said the Republican wasn’t “particularly sound.”

That’s OK, he also complained that the oil companies are “getting off free.” Apparently, Velshi, not always known for math accuracy, needs a tune-up when it comes to taxes. Oil companies paid an estimated $48.36 billion in income taxes in 2004. They also collect a similar number in excise taxes for Uncle Sugar.

CNN contributor Roland S. Martin advised Democrats to emulate two of their past presidential candidates - Jesse Jackson Sr. and Bobby Kennedy - and play up the issue of poverty, which is a place that he thinks "where candidates can make some kind of headway in trying to appeal to voters beyond the middle class or the upper income voters."

Martin makes regular appearances on CNN’s "American Morning," and besides being a CNN contributor, he is a syndicated columnist and talk radio host. Co-host Kiran Chetry on Thursday’s "American Morning" asked to comment on a recent column in which he advised the Democrats to reach out to poor whites, and to focus their attention on the issue of poverty, particlarly in rural areas. As he did in his column, he gave the examples of Jesse Jackson Sr.’s campaigns in 1984 and 88, as well as Bobby Kennedy’s trip down to the Mississippi Delta region in order to reach out to poor people.

Have we entered the Twilight Zone? A mainstream media outlet is going after Congress, particularly a Democrat Congress, for not living up to one of their promises?

CNN correspondent Drew Griffin and a team of two staffers and six interns all 435 members of the House of Representatives a simple question - if they get obtain a copy of each representative's earmark request. Even with the Democrats' campaign promise before the last election that they wanted a more "open" government, 330 members of the House never responded to the simple request. Another 67 refused the interns' request. Ultimately, they were only able to obtain the earmark requests from the offices of 31 representatives. Out of the 31, seven said they had no earmark requests in the fiscal year 2008 budget.

CNN aired two different reports about this, one on "Anderson Cooper 360" on June 18, and the other on the June 19 "American Morning." The report on "Anderson Cooper 360" aired the following excerpt from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

DREW GRIFFIN: ...Last week Speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed a new open earmark process saying finally the American people will know where their money is going, and then she said this.

REP. NANCY PELOSI, (D) HOUSE SPEAKER: If I just might direct the record to another place, why don't we just leave this room today forgetting the word earmark? This is legislatively directed spending as opposed to executive spending.

GRIFFIN: And Ms. Pelosi, for the record, a member of your staff told us you would not reveal your "legislatively directed spending requests."

Christiane Amanpour is a leading example of biased mainstream media journalism, particularly with regard to the Iraq war. She appeared on Monday's "American Morning" program on CNN with co-host John Roberts, and repeated the platitude that mainstream media reports "without fear nor favor... giving voice to those who don't have a voice, and just simply trying to tell the truth..." As she continued, she revealed her own bias. "...[W]e must always remember that our job is not to be part of the propaganda campaign, but to report without fear nor favor, because if we don't, we can get really into a big disaster. And I, as you know, feel strongly that that's what happened in the lead-up to the Iraq war."

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When two mainstream media outlets like CNN and the New York Times converge as they did on Thursday's "American Morning" and discuss Hillary Clinton, you might expect sugar-coated discussion of the leading Democrat presidential contender. But that wasn't the case when "American Morning" co-host Kiran Chetry interviewed New York Times correspondent Don Van Natta Jr., who is the co-author of a new book on Hillary Clinton entitled "Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton."