UPDATE: Fox News White House correspondent Major Garrett corrected the record during Studio B in the 3PM ET hour on Wednesday (see video).

At 10:15AM ET during America’s Newsroom on Fox News Channel, co-host Martha MacCallum reported that in a gaggle with reporters Wednesday morning White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs claimed that President Obama did not watch election results Tuesday night but rather watched an HBO special about his 2008 campaign.

A tipster contacted NewsBusters questioning that report and after having acquired a transcript of the press gaggle, we have confirmed that the Fox News report was incorrect and Gibbs did not make any such statement.                         

Gibbs made this statement at the beginning of the untaped discussion with White House reporters:

One thing I should contextualize – the President obviously got updates about the election last night.  He did not watch – as I told some of you – did not watch election returns.  I wouldn’t read a ton into that since he didn’t actually watch election returns when he was running.  If you did watch the movie on HBO – we called him and told him he won Iowa.  He did not watch election returns.

Clearly Gibbs was simply referencing the HBO documentary as evidence that the President does not routinely watch election returns.

UPDATE: Fox News misreported Gibbs' press gaggle comments. He did not claim President watched HBO special on election night.

During the 10AM ET hour of America’s Newsroom on Fox News Channel, fill-in co-host Martha Maccallum told viewers what President Obama watched on election night while Democrats suffered big losses in New Jersey and Virginia: “Robert Gibbs said, well, he was actually watching, you know, the HBO special about his year-long campaign and how it all went.”

On Tuesday night the White House had worked to downplay the Democratic gubernatorial defeats by claiming the President did not watch the election returns. Apparently Gibbs thought it would look better if the commander in chief was watching a self-indulgent fawning documentary about himself. Interestingly, Obama apparently previewed the HBO special a few days earlier, as Gibbs himself explained to the blog Talking Points Memo: “White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says Obama has already seen ‘By the People’...Gibbs told TPMDC Obama’s review: ‘Thumbs up!’”

On FNC, Maccallum noted: “...we know that Michelle and the girls went to the Miley Cyrus concert last night... So he’s all alone in that big house, right? Nothing to do but sit back and watch – reminisce about the long campaign and watch HBO and the special.” The HBO documentary, ‘By the People,’ debuted on Tuesday, in commemoration of the one year anniversary of Obama’s election.

BMI's Julia A. Seymour appeared on FNC's "America's News Headquarters" to discuss her latest report, "Networks Flip Flop on Jobs."

During Seymour's Oct. 4 appearance, she told host Shannon Bream some of the findings of her report.

"Let's talk about who was the president 26 years ago, Ronald Reagan. So how were his unemployment numbers, or what happened under his watch covered as compared to how we see them being covered now under President Obama?" Bream asked.

And the media, 'one of Barack Obama's major constituencies,' don't complain.

The Obama Inauguration Committee sold coverage of inaugural events, effectively limiting the number of Americans who can view them and undercutting Obama’s claims of accessibility, according to Business & Media Institute VP Dan Gainor.

“Barack Obama, in his last radio address before he becomes president says this is going to be the most accessible administration in history,” Gainor said in an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Weekend Live” on Jan. 18. “Well, they’re already proving the lie to that.”

HBO paid $5 million to broadcast Sunday’s concert from the Lincoln Memorial. That meant that only HBO subscribers and the 37 percent of cable customers that have digital cable could watch. The Inauguration committee made a similar arrangement for coverage of a children’s concert scheduled for Monday night. Even C-Span was denied access to the events.

Fox News on Wednesday continued to be one of the very few media outlets covering the fact that Barack Obama's new "global warming czar" has ties to socialist groups. While all three network morning shows ignored the story, "Fox News Live" host Megyn Kelly interviewed climate change skeptic Senator James Inhofe on the subject.

After noting that appointee Carol Browner was a member of the Socialist group Commission for a Sustainable World Society, Kelly seemed puzzled as to how such a person could be given a prominent position in the Obama administration. "And she's pretty openly committed to these socialist policies....How does that happen? Is there going to be an uproar about it," the Fox News host wondered.

Now that Eric Holder is in the process of trying to graduate from Barack Obama's vice-presidential search committee to President-elect Obama's apparent nominee for Attorney General, it's a good idea to remind people of Holder's role in the Elian Gonzalez case in 2000. This post largely reprises one I put up in June.

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In between hosannas, someone should consider Barack Obama's "Judgment to Lead" in light of his selection of Eric Holder as his nominee for Attorney General.

Besides his already-known role as former Clinton Administration Deputy Attorney General in facilitating the Clinton pardons, including that of fugitive billionaire financier Marc Rich, there's the matter of Holder's involvement in the Elian Gonzalez case in 2000.

As the April 23, 2000 edition of the Media Research Center's CyberAlert noted at the time, Andrew Napolitano of Fox News charged that the early-Saturday seizure of the then 6 year-old Gonzalez from those who were taking care of him flagrantly disobeyed a ruling of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In response to a question from Fox News anchor Jeff Asman, Napolitano said the following (bolds are mine throughout this post):

CMI Director Robert Knight appeared on Fox News Live on Friday morning to discuss the key role that character played in the presidential primary debates, a major finding from CMI's latest report, "‘Character,' the Most Important Issue in the Presidential Debate."

Knight stated:

"Character was the big factor. A third of the questions were directed at trying to find out whether the candidates had leadership, honesty, integrity, and courage qualities. We were surprised at that. We were not surprised to find that the democrats faced twice the number of softball questions as did the Republicans."

MRC Director of Communications Seton Motley appeared on Fox News Channel's "Fox News Live" this morning.

FNC's Megyn Kelly was the interlocuter.

Mr. Motley was brought on to discuss the media's negative and borderline hostile reaction to Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell's having the audacity to point out their bias over the weekend at a hallowed gathering of journalists.

He also discussed the ongoing biased (the Governor is of course correct) coverage of the Democratic Convention.

 

 

Americans would love the President Bush that Rush Limbaugh has had a chance to spend time with. That was one of Rush's concluding comments in a unique simulcast of his show that he conducted with Martha MacCallum on Fox News Channel this afternoon from 1:30-2 PM ET.

View video here.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: The president is a fine man, I like him. He's incredibly upbeat. He's so different in person than the guy you see on television.

CNN decided to not to break away from its almost non-stop coverage of the California wildfires as President Bush formally awarded a Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan the Medal of Honor, as its competitors Fox News and MSNBC aired the ceremony at the White House live.

The Medal of Honor went to Lt. Michael Murphy of Patchogue, New York, who died in the line of duty in 2005 during operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Murphy received the first Medal of Honor awarded from Operation Enduring Freedom. President Bush made the decision to give Lt. Murphy the nation’s highest military honor on October 11.

Update (Ken Shepherd | 16:18 EDT): Victory is Graham's!

Tim Graham appeared on "Live Desk w/Martha MacCallum" today to discuss what appears to be NBC paying for a post-incarceration interview with hotel heiress Paris Hilton. He joked: "It just sounds like a bad MTV reality show called Pimp My News."

Video (2:36): Real (1.90 MB) or Windows (1.60 MB), plus MP3 audio (748 kB).

For a video archive of Graham and other MRC experts, click here.

Now that times are difficult in Iraq, it’s easy for the media to claim they are simply reporting the bad news that is obvious to everyone. But how did networks such as CNN and MSNBC report more positive events? According to a new study by the MRC, overall, Fox News generated the most balanced coverage of news on the ground, while the other two cable networks consistently emphasized negative stories. FNC also displayed the highest enthusiasm on days such as June 8, when U.S. air strikes killed al-Qaeda in Iraq mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Over on MSNBC, while the anchors generally reported the event as good news, the network also chose that day to broadcast four stories on military deserters. On this seemingly happy occasion, CNN aired two reports on the already heavily hyped Haditha case.

Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Javad Zarif seemed to take the advice from Howard Dean: Whenever someone challenges you, blame the "Fox News propaganda machine." On Wednesday night, Zarif spoke at a forum at Columbia University. Several students challenged him on issues from support of Hezbollah, nuclear ambitions, suppressing dissent, and denial of the Holocaust. The frustrated Zarif retorted, "my friend don’t consume whatever is fed by Fox News." The crowd reacted with laughter and some scattered applause.

This was not the first time the Iranian government, like the Democrats, blasted Fox News. Back in March, Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA Ali Asghar Sotanieh attacked Fox News. A left wing blogger chose to side with the Ayatollahs. I thought liberals hate theocracy. I guess I was wrong. The entire transcript is below.

At the MRC's Business & Media Institute (BMI), we've tracked CNN's war on the economy. Today, Fox News's Brenda Buttner took on the media's negative slant with some cold hard facts:

“If you listen to the Democrats or listen to much of our media, our economy is in dire straights, but pay attention just to the numbers, well they tell a very different story... Number one, Americans employed, there's essentially full employment in the U.S..."

Buttner added that despite media talk of the housing slowdown, the "bottom line [is that] more and more of us today are fortunate enough to enjoy a piece of the American Dream" as 70 percent of Americans own their home.

The Boston Globe refers to Charlie Savage as a "staff writer."  But judging by the hyper-partisan comments he made on Fox News Channel this afternoon, Savage belongs over on the opinion page.

Interviewed with two other legal reporters by FNC's Martha MacCallum, Savage took these shots at President Bush and his fellow Republicans:

• President Bush is "terrorizing" Americans with the terrorism issue for political gain.
• Speaking of the current rift between the president and Sen. McCain over interrogation rules for suspected terrorists, Savage snidely observed that McCain had been a POW in Vietnam while Bush spent the war "back in Texas."
  
  
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Last week, I documented here the way CNN leaned over backwards for balance in a story. In the wake of the Seattle Jewish Center shooting, it equated the fear of Jewish-Americans of similar incidents . . . with the fear of Hezbollah supporters of being unfairly accused.

Although it wasn't nearly so egregious, Fox News Channel's Anita Vogel [seen here in a file photo] just engaged in some over-reaching herself in the name of balance. She narrated an otherwise solid segment on 'fauxtography' and other ways in which the media and Hezbollah supporters manipulate the news. The segment included an interview with star blogger Charles Johnson, founder of Little Green Footballs, who played a key role in outing the smoky Beirut-skyline bit of fauxtography.

But then, searching for balance where there really is little or none to be had, Vogel claimed that the Israeli government also manipulates the news:

"But we need to keep in mind, there are other ways foreign governments control the media. The Israeli government exercises control over the media during wartime, like prohibiting them from reporting on real-time rocket strikes and places in northern Israel where officials are visiting due to safety concerns."

Made-in-the-UK Islamic radicals are trying to murder people - and it's the UK's fault for not doing a better job integrating them into society.

That was the view expressed on Fox News this afternoon by Angela Corpe of Sky News - Fox's UK sister network. Fox's Page Hopkins asked: "Given that you had 7/7 and we in New York know what it was like after 9/11. [Is it] still very fresh in Londoners' minds that these were home-grown would-be terrorists?

Corpe: "It was a problem even before 7/7 happened last year. . . We are not facing foreign terrorists but people bred here in the UK. Something our politicians have been discussing today. Not only [must we] be more tolerant of the Muslim faith and realize these few do not speak for the Muslim faith. These people born here, brought up here, going to our schools and still feel the need to blow up planes to, to plot to explode buildings and tube stations.

Continued Corpe: "We have a real job to do here in the UK to try to reintegrate these people and find out where we are going wrong in helping these people realize that if they want to stay in this country they have to accept the freedoms we have here and respect human life in the same way we do."

With that kind of attitude, should Angela ever want to 'cross the pond' she should have no problem finding employment in our MSM.

Update: Demonstrating that the UK doesn't have a monopoly on journalists concerned not to trample Islamo-fascist sensitivities, Alison Stewart of MSNBC this afternoon referred to the 'alleged' plot to plant bombs on planes.  This is the same MSNBC that yesterday, on Tucker Carlson's show, decided to extend air time to a controlled-demolition nutjob arguing that the Bush administration was behind 9/11.

You can take the man out of CBS and NBC, but apparently you can't take the MSM out of the man.

Long-time MSMer Marvin Kalb, former moderator of Meet the Press, is now a Fox News contributor. But the specialist on foreign affairs is still offering up opinions that would put him in the mainstream back at CBS or NBC.

Interviewed by Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, Kalb offered a very grim take on the nuclear stalemate with Iran, suggesting that any diplomatic or economic sanctions aimed at the country could result in Iranian retaliation in the oil markets.

Kalb might well be right. But he took his un-rosy scenario one giant step further, flatly stating that U.S. air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are "not going to work." It wasn't clear if he meant that in military or diplomatic terms, or some combination thereof, though he did add "imagine the international uproar that would be created by the United States bombing another Muslim country."

Trying to put out the fire that Hillary's "plantation" remark started, Dem strategist and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Elaine Kamarck might unintentionally have added fuel to it in a just-completed Fox News interview with host Bob Sellers.

In fairness, Kamarck, pictured here, an advisor on the Gore 2000 campaign, did not unequivocally defend Hillary's comments, even saying that she personally would not have used the 'p' word.

But in defending the thrust of Clinton's remarks, Kamarck stuck her foot in it. She said:

"Plantations were terrible places where people were forced into doing certain jobs. But at least they were doing jobs."