Other FNC

Former American Ambassador to the UN John Bolton took MSNBC's Keith Olbermann to task last week for accusing US intelligence agencies of deliberately ignoring red flags that led to the failed Christmas day bombing plot (h/t Johnny Dollar).

Olbermann suggested that the CIA and other agencies might have been engaged in some sort of turf war, and allowed the plot to move forward. He insinuated that there was "at least a possibility somebody understood how serious this could be and yet withheld information to make some other part of the counterterrorism system look bad".

Bolton, speaking on the late night Fox News show Red Eye, said Olbermann was making accusations of attempted murder against American intelligence officials. He noted that Olbermann carefully crafted his accusations to avoid legal complications, but that the libtalker's point was quite clear.

Perhaps there is something obstructing the view overlooking Rockefeller Plaza, where MSNBC broadcasts "Countdown" nightly because the show's host, Keith Olbermann fails to see the existence of a news media with a liberal bias.

On MSNBC's Dec. 14 broadcast of "Countdown," Olbermann came to the defense of NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" executive producer and noted left-winger Dick Wolf. The Dec. 9 episode of Wolf's program featured a killer who targeted the children of illegal immigrants and in that episode, one of the characters, played by John Larroquette, blamed conservatives "like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck" for inciting violence against immigrants. That prompted O'Reilly on Dec. 10, the next broadcast of the Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," to fire back at Wolf.

And that led Olbermann to respond to O'Reilly, five days later, which deteriorated into Olbermann making the seemingly laughable assertion there is no such thing as the liberal media. Olbermann began his tirade by attacking Andrew Breitbart, who is launching a Web site called "Big Journalism," which will take on "the Democratic-media complex."

One of the favorite talking points that often comes from Fox News detractors is the claim that the News Corp (NASDAQ:NWSA) cable news is somehow an organ of the Republican Party. It's a claim that former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn made, along with countless other accusations from prominent Democrats.

However, these Democrats would be doing themselves and their audiences a favor to take notice of two Fox News anchors, "Your World" host Neil Cavuto and the weekend edition of "America's News HQ" co-host, Gregg Jarrett. The two recently challenged two Republican members of Congress, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill.

On the Dec. 12 broadcast of Fox News Channel's "America's News HQ," host Gregg Jarrett took on Grassley, who made an appearance to rail against federal spending, but all the while having so-called "pork project" money earmarked for his home state (emphasis added).

On Saturday's Huckabee show on FNC, host Mike Huckabee interviewed gameshow host Chuck Woolery, who admitted to being conservative and voiced support for term limits, the Constitution, and tea party protesters. As the segment started, Woolery -- who famously hosted the shows Love Connection, Scrabble, and even the first several years of Wheel of Fortune -- joked: "I'm now sacrificing my career coming out as a conservative. So I'll never be hired in Hollywood again once they find out I'm doing it on your show."

When Huckabee brought up the tea party protests, Woolery spoke approvingly: "It's a grassroots movement, and I think it has legs. I can only pray as a citizen myself that this gains momentum, and people really start to turn on their government."

I can actually remember that Rush Limbaugh's television show in the 1990s once played a clip from Scrabble in which host Woolery admitted to liking Limbaugh after the word "Limbaugh" was revealed as the answer to a word puzzle in which the clue was: "He's been blamed for a lot of bad rush (Rush) hours." Woolery joked that the puzzle was made up by a "pinko commie," and declared, "I like Rush Limbaugh."

Below is a transcript of portions of the interview from the Saturday, November 28, Huckabee show on FNC:

Joe the Plumber was certainly on to something when he got then-candidate Barack Obama to admit he wanted to redistribute the wealth, according to former Republican presidential candidate and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. 

Huckabee, who now hosts a show aired on the weekends on the Fox News Channel, told "On The Record" host Greta Van Sustren on Nov. 16 that Obama's policies go beyond just the redistribution of wealth, especially on health care. He likened a provision in the House health care bill that would require people to have some sort of health care coverage to a "poll tax."

"[W]hile we really wish [the president's priorities] were recovery, getting jobs back - that's the number one thing we ought to be focused on - but it appears to be redistribution," Huckabee said. "That's what's going on in the health care world, where we're trying to make sure that we've redistributed health care, taking it from people who have it, taking from them, giving it to people who may not even desire to have it, and forcing people into an unconstitutional system where they're going to have to virtually pay into a private marketplace in order to get full rights of citizenship. It's the equivalent of a poll tax."

On Saturday’s Huckabee show on FNC, host Mike Huckabee interviewed the former executive director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan Texas, Abby Johnson, who became a pro-life activist after witnessing an ultrasound of an abortion while she assisted in a procedure. She charged that the abortion provider tries to "increase the number of abortions they do" for the purpose of making money, and described the emotional experience of watching an unborn baby at 13 weeks pregnancy "trying to get away" as its life was being ended. Video of the interview can be found here.

Johnson: "I saw the probe going into the woman's uterus. And at that moment, I saw the baby moving and trying to get away from the probe. ... And I thought, 'It's fighting for its life.' And I thought, 'It's life, I mean, it's alive.'"

She soon continued:

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez again attacked Fox News on Monday’s Newsroom, implying the channel wasn’t a “real news organization,” and bizarrely labeled Glenn Beck “pudgy-faced.” Unsurprisingly, Sanchez continued his silence concerning his own network’s left-wing bias [audio clips from the segment are available here].

The anchor began the segment by summarizing his attack on the Fox News Channel from the September 18 edition of Newsroom, and then dropped his hint that his competitor was not a genuine news outlet: “Real news organizations- real news organizations- are not supposed to stage events, nor should they promote news events, nor should they hype news events. Otherwise, they lose their ability to be impartial. They’re no longer even remotely objective if they do that, nor are they being ‘fair and balanced.’”

Seton Motley, the Media Research Center's Director of Communications, was on the Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck to discuss the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s new "Chief Diversity Officer," Mark Lloyd.

Chief Diversity Officer Lloyd is virulently anti-capitalist, almost myopically racially fixated and exuberantly pro-regulation.  He is a frightening guy to have having any power at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  And yet that is exactly where he currently stands, astride the private radio industry he loathes like a Socialist Colossus.

It does not bode well for free speech on the radio airwaves, but as Seton says to Glenn during this appearance, "That's irrelevent to these people."

Noted free-speech champion Keith Olbermann has declared that we have to "legally stop" Glenn Beck. The Fox News host's crime? Not reacting strongly enough for Olbermann's taste when a guest made an over-the-top remark.  [H/t reader JKF.]

On the June 30 editon of Beck's show, former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer said: "the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to detonate a major weapon in the United States." Apparently Scheuer thinks that's what it would take to shock the country and its leaders back to their senses. Olbermann was infuriated that Beck didn't "scream at him" or otherwise jump down Scheuer's throat, choosing instead to nod gravely while suggesting that would be the last thing OBL would do.

View video here if player not visible.

In Olbermann's eyes, nodding in the third degree is a crime warranting legal action to "stop" Beck.

The swine flu story has captured the news cycle for three days and counting now and that's perpetuating the hysteria, according to Fox News Channel's Brit Hume. 

Hume appeared on the FNC's "The Live Desk with Trace Gallagher" April 27 and blasted the media in general for hyping the swine flu story 24/7.

"I realize it's been a slow weekend in terms of news," Hume said. "The president went out and played golf on Sunday. The White House reporters don't have much to work with today, so they're trying to get a piece of this swine flu story, which you know, all the cable news channels are agog about, bug-eyed about. But so far, it doesn't amount to much in the United States of America."

In the wake of the tax day tea parties, the Business & Media Institute's Dan Gainor appeared on Fox Business Channel's "Cavuto" on April 16 to discuss the protests.

Host Neil Cavuto compared the tea parties to the successful 1978 California tax revolt led by Howard Jarvis, noting that the media failed to take notice of the movement in that case as well, until they had to report the surprise passage of Proposition 13.

"Well of course it's relatable," Gainor said of the comparison. "What we're dealing with now are the same problems. Taxes and government growth are out of control and the politicians are out of touch -- and frankly most of the media are out of touch."

As part of a continuation of his "COMЯADE UPDATE" segment he started near the beginning of his show, which became a YouTube sensation, Fox News host Glenn Beck is picking up right where he left off.

Beck, on his March 4 program took on a couple new targets, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and union labor.

"Comrades! Comrades, there is good news from the Western front," Beck said. "Our glorious revolution is starting to take hold on a global scale. Just listen as Comrade Brown pounded our propaganda into the minds of the clueless capitalist pigs today. Listen up."

Beck played a clip from Brown's address of a joint session of Congress, where the prime minister lobbied for the "world" to work together.

Well-known atheist Michael Newdow is old news. Few mainstream media outlets are covering the suit he filed  Dec. 30 in U.S. District Court to strip prayer and any mention of God from the inaugural ceremony of President-elect Barack Obama. Of those that are reporting on the suit, however, the Washington Post and MSNBC gave Newdow and his fellow litigants a largely unchallenged platform to argue their case.

Newdow has long fought to impose a tyranny of the minority, failing in attempts to remove God from inaugural ceremonies in 2001 and 2005, and losing a U.S. Supreme Court battle in 2004 to remove the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. He was joined in the current suit by the American Humanist Association (AHA), the Freedom From Religion Foundation and others. The suit names U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Rev. Rick Warren, liberal California senator Dianne Feinstein and several other individuals associated with the inaugural events as defendants in their case.

In her Dec. 31 article, Post reporter Nikita Stewart cited a portion of the lawsuit that labeled the prayers "completely exclusionary, showing absolute disrespect to Plaintiffs and others of similar religious views, who explicitly reject the purely religious claims that will be endorsed, i.e., (a) there exists a God, and (b) the United States government should pay homage to that God." 

Stewart also quoted Bob Ritter, staff attorney for the AHA, saying, "the group could win ‘as long as the judges uphold the Constitution.'"

Brent Bozell, president of the Conservative Victory Committee, as well the publisher of NewsBusters and MRC president, appeared on Friday's America's Newsroom program on Friday and discussed a recent meeting he hosted with the leaders of other conservative organization: "The purpose was to look at the election results and take stock of where we are and where we're going" [audio available here].

As he pointed out in his Fox & Friends segment earlier in the morning, he stated how voters thought Barack Obama was the fiscal conservative in the presidential race. He also emphasized how "conservatives didn't play a role in this campaign."

One would assume that the Old Media would have a phalanx of intrepid mushing, journos swarming about Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin's hometown. One would think that every single person that lives within 100 miles of Wasilla would have been contacted by at least one journalist by now. That the media's due diligence would have been dilagenced to death at this point. I mean, it's been two weeks! Well, according to Greta Van Susteren, the media is curiously absent in Wasilla.

Greta posted a quickie blog entry on September 12 wondering where the heck everyone was?

Appearing on Wednesday’s America’s Election HQ on FNC, the senior editor of US Weekly, Bradley Jacobs, defended the magazines recent cover, which showed a picture of Sarah Palin and the headline ‘Babies, Lies and Scandal,’ by explaining that: "Actually, the lies that we point out are some of the liberal bloggers who were speculating that the daughter was actually -- had given birth, that there was a coverup there. We're one of the few magazines that actually did call to task those liberal bloggers for the news stories over the weekend."

A skeptical Megyn Kelly responded to that claim by asking: "Bradley, do you think the cover in any way suggests to the viewer who's looking at your magazine while standing there in the grocery store that the lies are lies about Sarah Palin, by her attackers?" Jacobs replied: "I don't think we can talk about all that here. It is -- we've gotten a lot of press today, but a lot of people haven't read this story. You may disagree but it is a fairly...It's a very balanced story. We interview strategists on both sides."

ST. PAUL, Minn.-- Defending his colleagues in the media with their "hard vet" of Gov. Sarah Palin, Fox News Channel's Mort Kondracke told NewsBusters that Republicans should have expected the intense media scrutiny of Palin, a selection he said was "Dan Quayle all over again."

NEWSBUSTERS: Do you feel that the media are vetting Sarah Palin to an extent that they didn't vet Obama in his 19 months of running for office?

MRC Director of Research and NewsBusters Senior Editor Rich Noyes appeared on the July 17 "Election HQ" program on Fox News Channel. Noyes appeared opposite liberal columnist Ellis Henican to discuss whether there was a double standard by the media in covering Sens. McCain and Obama and their foreign trips. [Audio available here.]

The Big Three network news anchors are planning on traveling to Iraq with Sen. Obama, whereas McCain's Iraq trip in March was all but ignored. For example, Noyes noted, Katie Couric gave John McCain's Iraq trip a grand total of 10 seconds of coverage on the "Evening News," and yet she and her competitors are all hopping the press plane for Obama's visit as though they were groupies following a rock star.

For background, read Kyle Drennen's July 17 blog post here. An excerpt of that blog follows:

While Thursday's New York Times reported that the anchors from all three network newscasts will be joining Barack Obama on his trip to Iraq, they showed no such interest in following John McCain during his visit to Iraq in March. During the week of March 16, McCain's trip received only four full-length stories during the combined ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news program coverage. Three of those stories were on NBC's "Nightly News," one of which focused on McCain's mistaken comment about Iran funding Al Qaeda in Iraq. ABC's "World News" did only one full-length story on McCain's Iraq trip, which mentioned the gaffe. The CBS "Evening News" was by far the worst, devoting only 31 words, a grand total of 10 seconds, to the Republican nominee's Iraq visit during the entire week of evening news coverage. Read Media Research Center press release here.

MRC's Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham appeared on the July 1 edition of Fox News Channel's "Just In" to discuss a Chicago Tribune article entitled "Coded Prejudice Is Cloaked Dagger," marking the second media appearance in two days dealing with Chicago Tribune nonsense.

Graham appeared opposite Paul Porter of IndustryEars.com, who alleged the media have an anti-Obama bias.

"The question isn't whether he's getting a fair shake, the question is, 'Is the hug too tight?'" quipped Graham about the media's pro-Obama bias. [audio available here]

The dog ate my transcript.  

That's roughly what Susan Rice's response to a pointed question from Laura Ingraham amounted to. Give credit to Rice, Obama senior foreign policy advisor, for appearing on Ingraham's "Just In" FNC show today and taking on the host in a freewheeling conversation.   But she and her candidate are really going to have to learn to do better than the feeble dodge she offered.

The subject was the recent phone conversation between Obama and Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari.  ABC's Jake Tapper reports that after the call, Obama claimed that Zebari "did not express" any concern about the Dem candidate's plan to withdraw U.S. troops.  But Zebari told the Washington Post "that he had some frank talk for the candidate: 'The foreign minister said ‘my message’ to Mr. Obama ‘was very clear...Really, we are making progress. I hope any actions you will take will not endanger this progress.’"

That led to this exchange between Ingraham and Rice.

View video here.

Now that Jim Johnson has quit Barack Obama's vice-presidential candidate selection team, maybe somebody, anybody, in the media, instead of making "He's havng a bad day" excuses, might focus on the questionable judgment of Barack Obama in having Eric Holder serve on that team.

Besides his already-known role in facilitating the Clinton pardons, including that of fugitive billionaire financier March Rich, there's the matter of former Clinton Administration Deputy Attorney General 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 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):

In an e-mail conversation today with Greg Gutfeld, the Fox News Channel "Red Eye" host pointed out to me that he joked about cannibalism as a solution to environmental woes, and this, mind you, months before Ted Turner came out clucking about how global warming will make us all cannibals.

Some might say Gut is a voice crying in the late night wilderness, but maybe he actually is a prophet. From his July 20, 2007 item at HuffPo (emphasis mine):

Many of our most thoughtful environmentalists are telling us that our planet is facing an unfathomable calamity. The combination of unbridled overpopulation and increasing greenhouses gases puts us on a path to destroy Mother Earth...unless we do something now. [...]

I have examined this problem closely and realize there is a simple answer to this dilemma. If overpopulation and consumption of animals cause major harm to our planet, then we can simply eradicate both threats through cannibalism.

Let's eat each other.

[...]

Gutfeld has a wicked sense of humor, so I snipped a little excerpt below. You can catch "Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld" at 2:00 a.m. EDT on the Fox News Channel:

Folks, I just spent three hours surfing the net and did I learn a lot! Did you know that most of the news we get is controlled by the Bu$hies? Let me enlighten you about today's so-called terrorist bombing attempt in London:

On Sunday night’s “1/2 Hour News Hour,” comedian Dennis Miller gave Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) the on-air tongue-lashing that every conservative in America has longed for since Reid replaced Tom Daschle as the Democrats’ top guy in that chamber of Congress.

In a two and a half-minute evisceration, Miller referred to Reid as a “dim bulb” stating that he’s had it with the Senator’s “projectile naysaying” while deliciously presenting his views “with no due respect.”

For your entertainment pleasure, here are some of the highlights (video available here, h/t Hot Air):

Update (April 13 | 10:46 EDT): The April 13 edition of Fox News Channel's "Red Eye" briefly addressed Moran's blog entry. I've added a screen capture from the program.

Leave it to a liberal journalist to bring racial tension and class warfare into a story about three men exonerated of rape allegations after a year of prosecutorial misconduct.

ABC's Terry Moran found the outpouring of sympathy for the exonerated Duke lacrosse players is a bit much because, in a nutshell, they're white guys from wealthy families who attended a private university. In fact, in an April 12 "Pushback" blog post at ABCNews.com, he suggested that in a way, they were victimized less than the Rutgers women's basketball team by Imus. Portions in bold are my emphasis. Video Clip: Real (2.7 MB) or Windows (3 MB), Plus MP3 (477 KB)

Washington Post arts reporter Jacqueline Trescott reports on the front page of the Style section today that the Smithsonian Institution (with its fresh new contract with the Showtime cable network) is shutting Oliver North's Fox News Channel cameras out:

The Smithsonian Institution rejected a request from Oliver North to film a stand-up in front of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. This is the latest flap in the Smithsonian's development of programming for a cable television network.

North, who hosts a Fox News Channel series called "War Stories," returned fire, condemning the Smithsonian's decision. He said in an opinion column that the museum's action raises questions about the propriety of the contract between Showtime Networks and the Smithsonian, which limits access of film crews.

Trescott's story is a reasonable recounting of the battle -- first revealed in North's column in Sunday's Washington Times. (Be sure that the Post hates following in the wake of the conservative Times.) But she omits a crucial fact: the Smithsonian institution is private, but receives most of its funding from the federal government.

It's not just Chris Matthews who sees racial bogeymen behind the RNC's now-famous ad [view here] with a Playboy bunny inviting Harold Ford, Jr. to "call me."

On last evening's "Beltway Boys," normally-kindly moderate Mort Kondracke claimed the Republicans designed the ad to "stir up rednecks."

Mort's fellow "Boy," Fred Barnes, was having none of it:

"You have to be living in the 50's or 60's to think it is racist. . . There is absolutely nothing wrong. It amounts to the way Democrats play the race card and you fall for it."

Keith Olbermann, who did the Nazi salute with an O'Reilly mask covering his face, has responded to FOX News' Roger Ailes remark that the MSNBC host's action was over the line.

Unsurprisingly, Olbermann's response was made available to TVNewser:

"'Over the line?' Where was Roger when O'Reilly defended the Nazi SS stormtroopers from Malmedy in World War II? The SS shot 84 American POW's there in 1944, and three different times in the last year, Bill called has called those dead Americans war criminals.

That didn't take long! Just yesterday I suggested readers keep in mind the MSM's bashing of Pres. Bush on his birthday the next time a liberal accused conservatives of being 'mean-spirited.'  Groucho fans will know what I mean when I say: bring down the duck! On last evening's Journal Editorial Report , liberal newsie Marvin Kalb said the magic 'm-s' word in condemning the Wall Street Journal for its criticism of the New York Times.

The Journal had run an editorial, Fit and Unfit to Print  [subscription required] that both explained why it had run a story on the anti-terror financial tracking program, and criticized the New York Times for doing so.  For the record, the editorial explained that in contrast with the Times article, the Journal only published declassified information that had been provided them by the Treasury Department.