Your World Today

On The Situation Room today, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer made a surprising admission to, of all people, real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump:

BLITZER: What do you think of his (Obama's) decision to pick Joe Biden as his running mate?

TRUMP: I really don't know Senator Biden but I know one thing. He's run a number of times for president. He's gotten less than 1 percent of the vote each time. And that's a pretty tough thing. You know, he's also been involved in pretty big controversy like plagiarism in college and various other things. That's a pretty big statement. So perhaps you change over a period of time. But when you plagiarize, that's a very bad statement. That hasn't been brought up yet, but I'm sure at some point it will. I'm sure that Sarah Palin will bring it up in a debate or somebody's going to bring it up.

BLITZER: Are you talking about plagiarism when he was running for president?

TRUMP: No, I'm talking about when he was a college student as I understand it, and this was a big issue originally but he supposedly plagiarized as a college student. That's a pretty serious charge.

BLITZER: I don't remember that. We'll check it out. But maybe you obviously have a better memory about that.

CNN International’s Hala Gorani couldn’t fathom why a Palestinian terrorist organization wasn’t invited to the upcoming Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland. Following-up to an answer made by State Department spokesman Michael Pelletier during an interview, Gorani exclaimed, "How can you have a Middle East peace summit that doesn’t include Hamas? Forget whether or not you don’t like them as a group, or call them terrorists. How can you not?"

Gorani asked the question 18 minutes into the 12 pm "Your World Today" program on Monday, which is simulcast on CNN. Gorani began the interview on a bit of a skeptical, even hostile note, and she acted as if she should be the one directing the negotiations. After her initial question and the answer from Pelletier, Gorani shot back with the following point. "You have two very weak leaders. The Palestinian isn't even representative of his entire population. Ehud Olmert is the least popular Israeli prime minister, practically, in history. George Bush won't be in office in 13 months' time. Why would anything come out of this?"

Video clip (1:24): Real (2.28 MB) and Windows (2.58 MB), plus MP3 audio (652 kB).

CNN viewers on Friday saw a relatively rare acknowledgement of those who are skeptical of Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth," including a British judge who recently ruled that there are nine inaccuracies in the movie. But CNN's Miles O'Brien dismissed the views of dissenters, and downplayed the importance of the errors cited by the judge.

As he made several appearances on various CNN shows on Friday, O'Brien tagged dissenters with such labels as "dead-enders," a "tiny fraction of a minority," and a "very small fringe," as he linked skeptics to fossil fuel companies. He also repeatedly declared that the scientific debate on global warming is over. Notably, on the July 20 "The Situation Room," O'Brien had curtly lectured former Republican Congressman J.C. Watts with similar comments on the subject. O'Brien: "You're not paying attention to the science, J.C. You're definitely not paying attention. ... The scientific debate is over, J.C., we're done." (Transcript follows)

Assume for a moment that a new study by NASA proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that manmade global warming was indeed responsible for the recent ice melts in the Arctic. Think media would have reported it?

In reality, that's a bit of a trick question, for in the past several weeks, television newscasts, papers, and magazines have been filled with hysterical assertions about decreasing Arctic ice levels destined to cause imminent flooding to coastal regions around the world.

As such, it certainly was no surprise when NASA released a report Monday claiming "the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds," virtually no media outlets shared the information with the citizenry, and those that did still blamed the melting ice on - you guessed it - global warming.

The largely boycotted announcement out of NASA stated no such thing (emphasis added):

"Recruiting the next generation of militants. A Mickey Mouse-like character reaches out to Palestinian children."

That's how CNN's Jim Clancy, co-host of "Your World Today" teased a May 9 story about the infamous rodent that hosts an Hamas-funded TV show geared towards little children. (see related NB post here)

Video (0:34): Real (960 kB) or Windows (1.06 MB), plus MP3 (492 kB).

After the theme music for "Your World Today" concluded, Clancy and co-host Rosemary Church took turns setting up the terror mouse story.:

Surely, CNN doesn’t stand for Communist News Network. But CNN’s Soledad O’Brien went looking for the "grass roots" of the pro-illegal immigration movement in Chicago during Tuesday’s Your World Today at mid-day. She interviewed a man she described as "Shaun Harkin of the March 10th Movement." She did not describe him with ideological precision: he’s a fervent Leninist.

An instant Googling of "Shaun Harkin" quickly brought up an article from Socialist Worker Online, where "SHAUN HARKIN explains why the Russian revolutionary Lenin and the theory that Lenin developed about the rise of imperialism remains so relevant today." Harkin concluded: "The dynamics of imperialism that Lenin analyzed are still present. His approach continues to offer the best framework to understand imperialism -- and is an essential tool for revolutionaries today."

Books, not bombs? Like a golden oldie from the Reagan Eighties, CNN’s Tom Foreman forwarded the classic liberal claim on Monday’s (noon Eastern) "Your World Today" show that the Iraq war is so costly that it could have been better spent on hundreds of grade schools or millions of new teachers, new cargo inspectors, and new cops -- or "every American driver could get free gasoline for a year."

Anchor Jim Clancy began by lamenting all the money "poured down the hole" on Iraq:

"Turning back to Iraq now, it is a loaded question, for sure, Hala, and it's this -- do you have any idea at all how much money in U.S. taxes have poured down the hole, so to speak, in Iraq?"

Anchor Hala Gorani: "Well, I have a general idea, but it's a safe assumption to say that few people do, at least in terms of how much each individual is paying, but some are following the spiraling costs very closely. Tom Foreman is one of them."

On the day after President Bush announced a troop surge in Iraq, CNN chose to commemorate an odd "anniversary." As of January 11, it has now been five years since the first terrorist suspects arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The cable network’s "Your World Today" program used this date to highlight the "allegations of mistreatment amounting to torture" at the facility. On Thursday, the hour-long show featured two segments and a news brief on the subject, all heavily focusing on how the camp could be shut down, not whether it should be closed. After an intro piece on the history of the camp, anchor Hala Gorani interviewed Human Rights Watch Executive Director Ken Roth and began her questioning with this loaded lead-in:

Hala Gorani: "Well, Human Rights Watch says detaining hundreds of men without charge at Guantanamo has been a legal and political debacle of historic proportions. But what can human rights groups do to shut the facility down or put pressure on governments? Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth joins us now live from Washington. That was a quote from you, ‘a legal and political debacle of historic proportions,’ Ken. Did you imagine in 2001, that in 2007 Guantanamo Bay would still be operating?"

At the conclusion of CNN’s "Your World Today," which features an international take on the news of the day, anchors Stephen Frazier and Rosemary Church read a variety of e-mails on North Korea’s testing of nuclear weapons. Only in the morally relativistic world of CNN, where all opinions are equal, could a letter like this repeated aloud:

Church: "And a completely different view. Soh, from Singapore writes: ‘The North Koreans have done the right thing. Since the end of the Korean War, they have been subjected to hostilities from the United States. and other western powers. This bomb is a source of tremendous pride for the Korean people, north and south. The world should congratulate the North Korean people for this achievement."

One can imagine a 1930s CNN reading German e-mails congratulating Hitler on his triumphant liberation of Poland.

NewsBusters contributor Jack Engelhard incorrectly thought he received an email from CNN anchor Jim Clancy. This did not occur. NewsBusters retracts this story and apologizes to CNN and to Jim Clancy for this false assertion.

As they do every weekday at noon, CNN’s American viewers were switched over to the CNN International network’s “Your World Today,” a show so far to the left that it makes the rest of CNN look like a Norman Rockwell tribute to the greatness of America. Today, during coverage of the U.S. military’s successful elimination of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the CNNI caption referred to him as a “top Iraqi insurgent.”

Al-Zarqawi, as everyone (including CNN's foreign bureaus?) surely knows by now, was not an Iraqi, but a Jordanian who spent most of the past three years instigating the deaths of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians. Was CNNI trying to falsely paint the self-appointed leader of “Al Qaeda in Iraq” as some sort of nationalist freedom fighter, or are they just sloppy with their choice of words? Either way, it seems like an insult to the people of Iraq to have their worst foreign enemy listed as one of their own.