Magazines

In the annals of fawning coverage of scandal-plagued Democrats, Michael Biesecker's Saturday morning report on John Edwards's illness and its effect on his upcoming trail on campaign finance violations surely must be among the worst.

Biesecker missed at least a half-dozen natural opportunities to tag Edwards as a Democrat, finally doing so in cryptic fashion in his 15th of 17 paragraphs. He didn't identify Edwards as the 2004 vice-presidential candidate until that same paragraph, and in doing so named who was at the top of the GOP ticket (George W. Bush) without naming who was at the top of the Dems' (John Kerry). The AP reporter threw obsequious virtual kisses at a man who betrayed his terminally ill wife while omitting two clearly relevant recent reports, one from an outlet which has scooped the look-the-other-way establishment press time after time in this sad, four-year saga. Here are several paragraphs from Biescecker's blather (some of the many clear opportunities to tag Edwards as a Dem and examples of over-the-top fawning are bolded):

On Friday, two Deputy Secretaries, one at the Department of Transportation and the other at Defense, in their capacities as co-chairs of the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Executive Committee, released a one page letter concluding that the modified broadband deployment plan of LightSquared could not coexist with current GPS devices and their spectrum. That's because: a) LightSquared's deployment "would cause harmful interference to many GPS receivers"; b) It would not be "compatible with several GPS-dependent aircraft safety-of-flight systems," and c) "there appear to be no practical solutions" to the problems.

Stories about the release, to the extent they exist, are largely avoiding the mention of "Falcone" (that's hedge fund operator and heavy Obama campaign contributor Philip Falcone, "SEC" (which is investigating Falcone and his hedge fund, and "Obama" (as in President Barack Obama, the beneficiary along with the "Democratic Party" -- another unmentioned term in any variation -- of said contributions). Coverage by Daniel Fisher at Forbes at least brings up Falcone, the SEC, and the Obama administration:

We can forgive Pittsburgh Steelers for avoiding the mention of the name of a certain quarterback who plays for the Denver Broncos in the coming days.

Related forgiveness does not extend to Jesse J. Holland at the Associated Press concerning his coverage of the Supreme Court's u-u-u-unanimous ruling today that religious workers cannot sue for job discrimination. As seen here at a Weekly Standard excerpt, the unanimity of the ruling was in the first sentence of the wire service's initial report. Now look how deep it's buried in the 4:10 p.m. version of Holland's report, and how the AP writer attempted to water down the ruling's significance in the interim (bolds are mine):

A month ago, Aya Batrawy at the Associated Press's Egyptian bureau described those who ransacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo as "protesters," and absurdly asserted in the face of contrary evidence I was able to find in about five minutes that "the historic 1979 peace treaty with Israel ... has never had the support of ordinary Egyptians."

Last week, in the wake of the burning -- more like the gutting -- of the Institut d’Egypte in Cairo and the destruction of and serious damage to thousands of priceless books, manuscripts, documents, and artifacts, Batrawy attempted to deflect blame to the military (which did have a role, as will be seen later) for not sufficiently protecting the building instead of placing it on the arsonists who did the damage. And of course, you'll search in vain for any references to the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi radicals, or Islam. I guess Batraway didn't want anyone to get any kind of crazy idea that this "Arab Spring" enterprise which Western news outlets so gullibly embraced earlier this year isn't exactly working out. Here are several paragraphs from the AP repoter's dispatch (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Anyone who made the easy prediction that the Associated Press would fail to bring up Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac in its fawning tribute to Barney Frank after his retirement announcement yesterday was correct. Anyone making the easy prediction that the AP would lionize him as a "gay pioneer" was also spot-on.

Also predictably, the wire service's Bob Salsberg and David Espo failed to mention that Frank advocated abolishing Fan and Fred as a dishonest survival tactic during his final reelection campaign in 2010, and of course did nothing visible to make that happen this year. What's really odious in this regard is that the AP pair gave him credit (pun intended) for how he "worked to expand affordable housing," when the Community Reinvestment Act-driven subprime crisis Fan and Fred engendered has sent the housing market levels not seen since World War II. What follows are excerpts from the AP. After that I have a few contrary and clear-headed paragraphs from an Investor's Business Daily editorial, and a little reminder of a 1999 "Present" vote which should have generated controversy, but didn't:

On November 15 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I compared how two of the leading wire services, Reuters and the Associated Press, covered the announcement by Geron Corp. of its decision to halt the first government-approved clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells. Reuters fairly noted that "teams working with adult stem cells -- a less ambitious area -- are making good progress." While one could quarrel with the characterization of adult stem cell research as "less ambitious" (unless you throw in cloning, which is what sometimes seems to be embryonic researchers' primary area of intrigue), its "good progress" descriptor was fair. Meanwhile, the Associated Press's coverage of the same story failed to even recognize the existence of adult stem cell research.

Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism and an influential prolife author, has observed that the establishment press has largely come down where AP did. A Friday Catholic News Agency item elaborates (bolds are mine):

On Monday, Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters noted how former New York Times op-ed writer (and before that, theater critic) Frank Rich, who now plies whatever his trade is at New York Magazine, criticized MSNBC's Chris Matthews for writing a "man-crush of a biography" about John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated 48 years ago today.

Monday evening, Allahpundit at Hot Air identified a particularly egregious contention in that same very poor Rich piece, namely that "the hate that ended his (JFK's) presidency" which inspired avowed communist and Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to commit his heinous crimes (Oswald also shot Texas Governor John Connally in JFK's motorcade and killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit later that day) came from the right. Really. What follows are selections from Rich's risible self-righteousness:

For those who don't know, ProPublica (bold is mine) "is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with 'moral force.' We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them." It has received predominant funding from the Sandler Foundation (yeah, those Sandlers; Herbert Sandler is Chairman). Other contributors include George Soros's Open Society Foundations. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (yeah, him) is also on ProPublica's board.

Translation: They lean left. Nevertheless, the organization's Stephen Engelberg (HT Instapundit) questions whether the Politico had enough information on sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain to publish a story (bolds are mine):

Time magazine’s Ishaan Tharoor and Nate Rawlings romanticized the Occupy Wall Street crowd in an October 14 news story wrought with melodrama about the left-wing crowd’s tensions with New York City police.

Tharoor and Rawlings opened their article by painting the OWS folks as anxious and the NYPD as practically itching for a confrontation. The trespassing squatters in the privately-owned park were painted as conscientious “activists” and “protesters” whose efforts at cleaning the park were unappreciated by corporate goons who were attempting an "eviction" (emphasis mine):

In a report filed at the Los Angeles Times's Politics Now blog earlier today, Washington Bureau reporter James Oliphant relayed a number of whoppers delivered by Vice President Joe Biden without anything resembling a challenge.

Breaking Biden's bilge into three sections, they involve his claim about the historical origins of the Tea Party, which Biden characterized as a collection of "barbarians" only a month ago (and as "terrorists" two month ago); his hit at Bank of America and its $5 monthly fee for debit-card use; and the nature of the "bailouts" which followed the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in the fall of 2008. In this first part, I will go after what Biden said about the Tea Party. An excerpt from Oliphant's writeup follows the jump (bolds are mine throughout):

A month before the 9/11 attacks, American missionaries Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry were captured and imprisoned by the Taliban.

Their detention and subsequent rescue by American troops in November 2001 received extensive media coverage at the time, including criticism by "Dateline" correspondent John Larson about their proselytizing in a Muslim country.

So far, however, it seems no mainstream media outlet has caught up with Mercer or Curry for a ten-year anniversary retrospective.

Yesterday, at organized labor's traditional Labor Day picnic at Cincinnati's Coney Island amusement park, Vice President Joe Biden gave the keynote address. His key lines, as reported by Carl Weiser at the Cincinnati Enquirer's Politics Extra blog (video is here at MRC-TV): "... this is a different kind of fight. This is a fight for the heart and soul of the labor movement. This is a fight for the existence of organized labor. You are the only ones who can stop the barbarians at the gate! That’s why they want you so bad.”

Biden's statement is in an important aspect more problematic than the more widely (but not sufficiently widely) noted "son of a b*tches" comment made by Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. in Detroit yesterday at a Labor Day event President Obama keynoted. While Hoffa was threatening and hateful, he was at least in theory speaking only for Big Labor (though Obama has essentially adopted it by not condemning it). In Cincinnati, Biden, who was elected to serve all citizens of the country, personally characterized a large plurality of those he is supposed to be serving with a word which means "savage, primitive, uncivilized persons." Biden's "barbarians"comment has received very light establishment press coverage, as did what appears to have been a singularly unimpressive number of people who actually heard his speech:

To Time magazine, apparently, it's "weird science" to believe that abstinence is a sure-fire way to avoid pregnancy.

Writing about "Gov. Rick Perry's Weird Science," reporter Meredith Melnick promised readers a look at the Texas governor's penchant for "weird science" including his enthusiasm for experimental adult stem cell treatments -- never mind the mainstream media have for about a decade hyped the similarly uncertain promise of embryonic stem cell therapies.

Under the heading, "Teen Pregnancy Aside, 'Abstinence Works,'" Melnick groused how "Texas has the highest teen birth rate and the fourth highest teen pregnancy rate in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute," going on to note that:

Jay Carney, meet Jay Carney.

In 2001, the then-Time magazine reporter wrote a snarky piece criticizing President George W. Bush's month-long vacation that was billed as a "Home to the Heartland" tour. But almost exactly 10 years later Carney, now the Obama White House's press secretary, is defending President Barack Obama's Midwest job-creation tour and vacation at Martha's Vineyard.

"I don't think Americans out there would begrudge that notion that the President would spend some time with his family," claimed Carney at a recent press briefing.

"I don't know what's worse," Tina Brown's selection of the wild-eyed Michele Bachmann cover photo for Newsweek or her "bold-faced lie" defending the choice, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Fox News's Sean Hannity on his program last night.

"There's not a person in the face of this Earth that looks at that picture and says, 'she looks more presidential,' which is what Tina Brown" insisted on the August 10 edition of MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

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Probably in response to a firestorm of criticism over their cover photo of Rep. Michele Bachmann, Newsweek today released a slideshow of "outtakes" that they say show that, in essence, the Minnesota Republican is unphotogenic and didn't give them much to work with in terms of a flattering photo.

For his part, left-leaning Mediaite.com reporter Tommy Christopher isn't buying it, calling "bulls**t" on the Tina Brown-edited publication (emphasis mine):

To Michael Tomasky, Barack Obama's problem is not lack of leadership or a rigid fixation to liberal ideology.

No, it's just that the president is too darn decent a guy, a veritable Mr. Smith who's gone to Washington, but perhaps in this case without the Capraesque happy ending:

In an otherwise typically dismal column about President Barack Obama which is one part pity party and another part an attempt at building him a he-man reputation (not kidding), New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd describes an upcoming movie featuring the exploits of Navy SEAL Team 6 in the operation which killed Osama Bin Laden on May 1.

Dowd celebrates the fact that the movie's currently anticipated opening is October 12, 2012, describing it as "perfectly timed" and "just as Obamaland was hoping." She expects that it will "give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher," and "counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual."

Here are the relevant paragraphs from Dowd's column, including reference to a New Yorker column about the operation which has become the subject of considerable controversy (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

While the liberal media scoffed at George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" in 1999 and 2000 as gimmicky and insufficient compared to traditional big government social welfare spending binges, they're starting to miss it now.

Just ask Time's Amy Sullivan:

This afternoon's report at Time.com's misnamed Curious Capitalist blog by Roya Wolverson ("GDP Report: What It Tells Us About the Debt") is an embarrassing hash of omissions, errors, and gratuitous political points.

Ms. Wolverson's most obvious omission is her failure to mention the government's breathtaking downward revision to first quarter gross domestic product growth from the annualized 1.9% announced in late June to today's revised 0.4%. That's a nearly 80% hit compared to where we thought we were just a month ago, indicating how anemic the so-called recovery has been. It also gives one reason to doubt that today's 1.3% figure for the second quarter will hold up in subsequent revisions.

What follows are excerpted paragraphs containing just some of Ms. Wolverson's errors and political postures:

Halfway through the July 21 edition of "NewsNation," MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall brought on Time magazine assistant managing editor Rana Foroohar to diss a Boy Scout cited by John Thune (R-S.D.) on the Senate floor.

After Hall aired a clip of Thune reading the Boy Scout's letter admonishing senators to spend only what the government can afford, she and Foroohar set about to dismiss his concern as quaint but ill-informed:

After Entertainment Weekly graciously gave grades of B+ to Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and A- to former Vice President Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth,' EW's John Young has bestowed a much different treatment on his review of the new Sarah Palin political documentary, 'The Undefeated.'

The conservative documentary, which successfully opened last weekend in limited release, was given a snarky review under the headline "Sarah Palin's 'The Undefeated': We saw it so you don't have to!".

Conservative Republicans are divorced from reality while Democrats are governed by the facts.

That's the take Time's Alex Altman has on how the two congressional parties are addressing the looming debt ceiling deadline in his July 19 Swampland blog post, "The Fact Gap: Can Republicans Overcome Their Alternate Reality to Strike A Debt Deal?":

Barf. “We sometimes forget just how in the tank much of the press is for Obama,” the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto observed last week in catching an effusive, to put it mildly, love letter to Barack Obama published in the August edition of Hearst’s Esquire magazine.

“2011 is the summer of Obama,” gushed Stephen Marche, genuflecting “‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy.” More sophistry: “Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.”

MSNBC "NewsNation" anchor and Texas native Tamron Hall was delighted to find that four Lone Star cities made it to Forbes.com's list of "The Next Big Boom Towns in the U.S."

"Forbes [magazine] says many of the cities on the list have some of the best job creation records in the nation," Hall noted as she introduced contributor Joel Kotkin, who authored the July 6 piece.

Kotkin identified the nation's new 10 boom towns, five of which are in states without a personal income tax (Florida and Texas) and one, Nashville, Tenn., where the state levies person taxes only on dividend and interest, but not salary or wage, income.

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He said it, he meant it, and there's no denying it.

On Monday, in a statement carried at the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the New York Times (Page A8 of Tuesday's print edition), and elsewhere, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told U.S. troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad: "The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked. And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that."

That sound you hear is a Democratic Party meme shattering into teeny tiny pieces. The attempts to put Humpty Dumpty together again, both by Panetta himself and the establishment press contingent following him, have been pathetic and ineffectual, which is what happens when one is up against succinctly stated truths.