Special Report

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):

National Review's Jonah Goldberg on Tuesday, appearing on Fox News's "Special Report," put James Hoffa's Labor Day attack on the Tea Party in proper perspective.

"We would not be in this mess, we would not have this controversy, if we did not have this bonfire of asininity that came out of the Tucson shootings where all of a sudden Sarah Palin’s Facebook Congressional map was somehow to blame for not only this madman but for all of the violence overtaking America" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Charles Krauthammer on Fox News's "Special Report" Friday offered Republicans a 2012 campaign slogan to defeat Barack Obama.

"President Zero: zero economic expansion, zero jobs, zero ideas on how to cure the economy" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Another entry in my semi-regular series of Saturday night humor postings for NewsBusters drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he and his staff usually select from video montages picked up off the late night comedy shows.

Tonight, a fresh one from Friday night’s program which comes from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central in which Stephen Colbert contrasted Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s safari adventures with what excited Barack Obama during a stop at a store during his bus trip.

Another entry in my semi-regular series of Saturday night humor postings for NewsBusters drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he and his staff usually select from video montages picked up off the late night comedy shows.

With few to draw on from the past week since Iowa coverage meant Baier only ran a humor clip on a couple of nights, for this one a jump back to mid-July for a clip which got a lot of Web play at the time, but if you didn’t see it then here’s your chance to watch a TV anchor dealing with putting the wrong guest on air.

Back in late June I introduced a new series of Saturday night humor postings for NewsBusters drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he selects from video montages picked up from the late night comedy shows. Well, vacations and busy news weekends sidetracked me, but here’s a fresh one, my first in about a month.

From Baier’s Wednesday night (August 3) program, a clip from Comedy Central’s Colbert Report making fun of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for musing about missing the pomegranate and fig trees at his home in Nevada.

Last Saturday night I introduced my new Saturday night humor posting drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he selects from video montages picked up from the late night comedy shows.

Tonight, the second edition, taken from NBC’s Tonight Show, of some pretty funny confusion on a British newscast which played the wrong soundbites at the wrong time -- turning an unidentified blonde woman, and the network’s own weather woman, into the Nazi leader Rudolph Hess. Watch below the jump for what Baier played on his Monday, June 27 program.

At the MRC’s “DisHonors Awards” last month I got a pretty good reaction to a compilation of those humorous clips Bret Baier plays at the end of his FNC show, usually drawn from funny takes and edited news video produced by the late night comedy shows. (For that “funny clips” compilation, scroll down on this page.)

So, I thought I’d bring the concept to NewsBusters with occasional weekend postings of the “best” of Baier’s choices. For this inaugural edition, I went back to Baier’s June 15 program for Jimmy Kimmel’s mash-up of a certain term used over and over during CNN’s June 13 Republican presidential debate, a mash-up which ends with a different phrase from Herman Cain. Watch below the jump. It’s short and funny.

In Tuesday night’s “Grapevine” segment, the Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier picked up on an observation about the NBC Nightly News detailed in a Tuesday morning NewsBusters post: “NBC News Twists Its Network’s Pledge Censorship Into Slam at Rick Perry’s Intolerance.”

Baier informed viewers of how, in NBC’s look at the reaction to the NBC Sports “omission of ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance during the U.S. Open golf coverage,” reporter Mike Taibbi “went on to reference the Obama impersonator who was pulled off stage early” during a GOP event “and Jon Stewart’s appearance on Fox News Sunday.” With the quoted words on screen credited to NewsBusters, Baier noted:

One conservative media watchdog said NBC was, quote: “Trying to submerge its own network’s ‘under God’ censorship into a greater narrative.”

Normally the announcement that a government official is leaving a post to join a company they had oversight of would invoke cries of crony capitalism from the likes of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, but when that person is joining your company it makes for quite the awkward news brief. Williams, to date, has expressed no outrage at the fact that FCC commissioner Meredith Baker is leaving that job for a gig as senior vice president of governmental affairs at Comcast/NBC Universal, even though just four short months ago she voted to approve the merger of those two companies.

This bit of conflict of interest news was not lost on Fox News' Bret Baier, who reported the story on the May 12 edition of Special Report and Jon Stewart who joked about it on Monday's Daily Show. Since Brian Williams is a self-proclaimed fan of Stewart, going as far to praise him as "indispensable," it has to be asked if he felt a tinge of angst when watching his comedic hero on Monday night.

(video and transcript after the jump)

After his performance on Sunday's "Meet the Press," Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is taking hits from media members on both sides of the aisle.

A few minutes after conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer declared the former House Speaker's campaign "over," one of the Washington Post's editorial writers told "Special Report's" Bret Baier, "I think Newt established a great future for himself perhaps as a Democratic candidate" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had a tough day on "Meet the Press" Sunday.

So troubling was his performance that syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer told "Special Report's" Bret Baier Monday, "He’s done...This is a capital offense...It's over" (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

The New York Times was very excited about President Obama's deficit reduction speech.

The Gray Lady's editorial Thursday began, "The man America elected president has re-emerged":

You would think after the Juan Williams debacle, NPR would keep away from bashing Fox News again. But even as NPR's liberal bias remains controversial in Congress, NPR is still waging war on Fox. It's apparently the only national news outlet worth questioning. On Thursday night's All Things Considered, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik profiled Bret Baier, but delighted liberals by announcing that he had studied six months of guest lists for Special Report with Bret Baier, and he insisted liberals were underrepresented: 

FOLKENFLIK: I reviewed six months' worth of Baier's panels, and the same mix typically prevailed: two clear-cut conservatives and one other analyst, sometimes a Democrat or liberal but usually a journalist from a non-ideological news outlet. As I told Baier, that would seem to under-represent the left and also to cast reporters as though they're surrogate liberals.

On Wednesday, Barack Obama will appear on ESPN to announce his picks for the 2011 NCAA tournament. This past Saturday, as the disaster in Japan unfolded, the President found time to, again, play golf. On Tuesday's Special Report, Fox News host Bret Baier highlighted the difference between Obama's treatment and that of President Bush.

Baier quoted from Media Research President Brent Bozell: "If George Bush reacted this way during an international catastrophe -- wholly irrelevant radio addresses, golf outing for the 61st time, the left-wing media would require medically induced sedation to keep them in check."

[Video below. MP3 audio here.]

It's certainly not surprising that the New York Times would publish a hit piece on Glenn Beck, but coming hours after CNN's Howard Kurtz spent almost ten minutes bashing the Fox News commentator makes me smell a rat.

Add to this the increased pressure Beck has come up against from MSNBC personalities since Keith Olbermann surprisingly left America's most liberal television news network in January, and one has to wonder what Times author David Carr had in mind with his Monday piece "The Fading Power of Beck’s Alarms":

CBS on Monday night tried to corroborate the case for the position on protesting Wisconsin state union workers, claiming without citing any source that they earn less than comparable private sector works, while FNC put the union workers in a less oppressed light, showing how “apparent doctors” were “handing out doctor’s notes for sick days. Our undercover producer got a medical excuse, no illness necessary.”

CBS’s Cynthia Bowers touted “high school history teacher Amanda Bazan, of Deerfield Wisconsin,” who “took a personal day to get her students to the protests.” Bazan insisted: “They were learning about democracy firsthand.” Bowers relayed how “the single mom has been teaching 13 years and earns $41,000,” and while “public sector workers in Wisconsin do make slightly more in salary and benefits than the average private sector worker,” that's “because nearly twice as many of them have college degrees necessary for high-skilled jobs.” Without any citation from her or on screen, Bowers maintained:

When education and other factors are considered, two recent studies found public sector employees end up earning less than their counterparts in the private sector. In Wisconsin, nearly five percent less. Nationally seven percent less.

Charles Krauthammer on Thursday attacked the media's recent bogus call for civility in politics.

"The worst in uncivil discourse that we have had in the last decade occurred in the Bush years when the President was vilified, attacked, he was demonized, compared to Nazis," he told Chris Wallace on Fox News's "Special Report." "I do not remember the Times or the mainstream media all of a sudden wagging a finger and pulling a chin about the rise of uncivil discourse at the time" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It's Christmas Eve, so let's treat ourselves to something conservative political junkies enjoy: handicapping the 2012 Republican field.  

On the Fox News Special Report this evening, panelists Stephen Hayes and Charles Krauthammer both singled out Mitch Daniels as a man to watch.  Hayes identifed  the Indiana gov as perhaps the true Tea Party candidate—someone willing to speak the hard truths about the need for entitlement reform.  Krauthammer counter-intuitively found Daniels' lack of charisma appealing—as an antidote to our overdose of hope-and-change.

View video after the jump.

Al Sharpton on Monday said that he's going to be meeting with representatives of the FCC next week about revoking conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh's license.

On a special 9PM edition of the "Ed Show," the Reverend didn't mince words (video follows with transcript and commentary):