Special Report

Fox News's Bret Baier quoted NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard on Thursday's Special Report.

In a "Grapevine" segment about Newsweek's announcement that it will be printing its last magazine on December 31, Baier read from the note Newsweek publicists sent Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters from editor Tina Brown in July claiming that this wasn't going to happen (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer had some harsh words for his fellow journalists Tuesday concerning their coverage of the murders of four Americans last month at our consulate in Libya.

During a Fox News Special Report segment about this matter and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's assertion that the buck stops with her on Benghazi,  Krauthammer said, "The media had to be shamed by Fox News into looking into this in the first place" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Mitt Romney was correct in his critique of President Barack Obama’s “Arab Spring” policies but, on the timing, The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes cautioned on FNC’s Special Report, Romney should have known the media would use it against him:

You knew the media were going to obsess on this and obsess on it they did. They’re so now fascinated by this process story, using this process story to beat up Mitt Romney rather than taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture question about the policies.

“You don’t want to put delegates in a position where they’re booing God and Jerusalem, especially on videotape,” the Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes observed on FNC’s Special Report in citing a “basic rule” for conventions, calling it “a bad moment for Democrats” since “it has to be included in all the coverage of the convention.” Hayes, it turns out, was far too generous in his presumption about media professionalism – at least at ABC News.

World News on Wednesday evening devoted 12 minutes – more than half the newscast – to the Democratic conclave, yet spiked the embarrassing decision by Democrats, which drew boos from the floor (earlier NB item with video of booing), to revise their platform to add a reference to God and identify Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

“Harry Reid is disgrace. But you expect this from Harry Reid,” The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes zinged on FNC’s Special Report Friday night before turning his ire on a certain Washington, DC-based anchor for CNN for advancing Reid’s baseless allegation that Mitt Romney didn’t pay any income tax for ten years.

“The disappointing cohort in this, to me, is journalists,” Hayes contended as he recalled how “I saw another network anchor ask a Romney supporter about this accusation, saying Harry Reid is a really honorable man.”

Yesterday on Fox News's Special Report, senior national correspondent John Roberts did a segment on the controversy surrounding gay marriage.  A version of his report also appears on the Fox News Web site.  In it, Roberts interviewed a gay marriage proponent saying that young Republicans "overwhelmingly support the freedom to marry." And then:

Roberts:  It isn't just young Republicans who are changing their minds. Conservative David Blankenhorn fought fiercely for Prop 8, California's measure to ban gay marriage.  In June, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times with the headline: "How My View On Gay Marriage Changed".  Blankenhorn is now fully in favor of same-sex marriage.

Two separate Fox News anchors on Wednesday took NBC and MSNBC to task for liberal media bias and outright deception. Bill O'Reilly slammed the egregious actions of Andrea Mitchell and her selective editing of Republican Mitt Romney.

O'Reilly played MSNBC's version of Romney mentioning the fast food outlet Wawa and the one that conforms to reality. The host mocked the liberal cable outlet for "doctoring" the tape. Video of both can be found below:

Reacting to Mitt Romney’s discomfort toward proposed independent expenditure ads reminding Americans of President Obama’s connections to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, on FNC Thursday night Charles Krauthammer delivered a rebuke to the media’s presumption raising Wright would be illegitimate. Krauthammer sure didn’t hold back:

I think there is an appalling double standard here. It’s okay for the Washington Post to run a five thousand word front page story on a prank that Romney, at the age of 15, committed. And yet it’s somehow illegitimate, the low road or whatever, for people to bring up the fact that the adult Obama had a 20-year relationship with a racist anti-American preacher whom he considered, spoke about, wrote about as his mentor and spiritual advisor.

For over a year, the Left and their media minions have dishonestly claimed Congressman Paul Ryan's (R-Wisc.) proposed budgets would "end Medicare as we know it."

At the end of a discussion about Monday's report from the Medicare trustees predicting the program goes bankrupt in 2024, Special Report host Bret Baier got NPR's Mara Liasson to admit Medicare will end as we know it even if Congress doesn't pass the Ryan plan (video follows with transcript and commentary):

“It’ll probably work politically,” The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes observed of President Obama’s “fairness”-based “Buffett Rule” tax hike quest, “but don’t reporters have a job to do here?” On FNC’s Special Report on Tuesday night he noted the 30 percent income tax rate on capital gains “would raise less than six percent of the total cost of the stimulus” and “would raise roughly the same amount in one year” as “the U.S. government accumulates in debt in a single day.”

Declaring it “totally meaningless,” Hayes asserted “there’s nothing serious about” Obama’s economic plan and so, he suggested in an idea with little chance of occurring, “reporters should do their job and put this in perspective.”

Politico reported Monday that a new book by Mother Jones's David Corn claims President Obama blamed his 2010 midterm elections defeat on Fox News constantly calling him a Muslim.

Fox News's Bret Baier struck back on Monday's Special Report saying, "For the record, we found no examples of a host saying President Obama is a Muslim" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On the "Grapevine" section of Friday night's Special Report, Fox News anchor Bret Baier reported the MRC's findings on how the networks covered this year's "March for Life" -- or, to be more precise,  how they skipped it. Once again, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nothing on the thousands and thousands of pro-life protesters marching to the Supreme Court on the 39th anniversary of the high court legalizing abortion.

"If you were listening to the Big Three broadcast networks, you wouldn’t have heard a peep about the event," said Baier. "You would have been in the dark, too, if you were reading the print version of The New York Times. Not one word." Fox asked me for a quote which then appeared on screen: (Video below)

During the "Grapevine" segment on Tuesday's Special Report on Fox News, anchor Bret Baier played a clip of a UNICEF ad depicting Santa Claus as an uncaring Scrooge and quoted an item from NewsBusters' senior editor Tim Graham: "Conservative site NewsBusters asked quote: 'Why on Earth would jolly old Saint Nicholas resent aid for the poor? Is this just another way the UN bureaucracy asserts its own moral superiority?'" [View video after the jump / audio available here]
 

Depending on which news outlet you rely on for current events, you may not have heard that convicted Chicago real estate developer Tony Rezko was sentenced to 10½ years in prison Tuesday.

On top of this, unless you read the following report from Reuters, you mightn't have known just how connected he was to a junior senator from Illinois who just so happens to be the President of the United States:

As NewsBusters previously reported, 60 Minutes on Sunday cherry picked Peter Schweizer's book "Throw Them All Out" to give the appearance that Congressional insider trading was mainly a Republican problem.

On Fox News's Special Report Monday, host Bret Baier cited our article on this subject (video follows with transcript and commentary):