Magazines

Via TV Newser, we learn that MSNBC has "suspended indefinitely" its senior political analyst Mark Halperin for stating on Morning Joe that President Obama was "kind of a [male appendage]." This is not exactly what the "No Labels" crowd at Morning Joe were expecting. The official MSNBC statement:

Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air.  Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role as an analyst.

Last week my colleague Eric Ames addressed the bias and some misstatements of fact in Richard Stengel's recent attack on the Constitution/defense of ObamaCare here.

Today, Aaron Worthing over at Patterico's Pontification's ticked off 13 factual errors in the Time magazine editor's piece and systematically addressed each one.

It's an excellent piece. Here's an excerpt that I think addresses some of Stengel's biggest errors:

Brent Bozell reminded readers of his column that the networks piled on 152 stories about Rep. Mark Foley in the story's first 12 days in the fall of 2006, but they weren’t the only ones with a vast left-wing disparity. Time and Newsweek each devoted cover stories and multiple pages to the Foley scandal. Time put an elephant’s rear end on the cover with the words “What a Mess...Why a tawdry Washington sex scandal may spell the end of the Republican revolution”. Newsweek had a huge picture of Foley (with a small President Bush in front of his face) with the huge headline “Off Message” and the subhead “Foley’s Secret Life: How a Predator’s E-mail Sex Scandal Could Cost Bush Congress.”

Dennis Cauchon at USA Today has been one of a very few establishment press reporters willing to expose federal workers' disproportionate pay and benefits (previous examples here and here) as well as Uncle Sam's precariously dangerous financial situation.

Cauchon has two USAT items today on the latter topic (HT to NB commenter Gary Hall): "U.S. funding for future promises lags by trillions," which reports that federal obligations totaled $61.6 trillion as of September 2010, a $5.3 trillion increase from a year earlier, and "Government's Mountain of Debt," which itemizes those obligations by major source.

Unsurprisingly, 75% of federal obligations, or a combined $46.2 trillion (actually more, which will be seen at the end of this post), relate to Social Security and Medicare, which no one but a few deluded leftists believe (or pretend to believe) are sustainable in their current form. Unfortunately, at the end of his first story, Cauchon quoted one of them, Michael Lind, whom the USAT reporter described as "policy director at the liberal New America Foundation's economic growth program," who said the following:

Congrats to NB's Tim Graham for writing up a post ("Are Time and Mark Halperin Racist? Herman Cain Omitted Twice in GOP Oddsmaking") linked by Matt Drudge (headlined "Time Magazine Ignores Black Candidate in Race") pointing to an egregious and arguably deliberate omission of Herman Cain's name in Mark Halperin's coverage of the race for the GOP presidential nomination at Time Magazine. Tim noted that Halperin has handicapped the race twice (May 23 and June 6), but has left Cain out each time.

Tim pointed out that Cain's omission is hard to forgive, given that Cain, whose background includes extensive business turnaround experience, a stint as Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve in Kansas City, and a number of years as President of the National Restaurant Association, as well as more current involvements with talk radio and Tea Party activism, "participated in the first presidential debate on May 5 to high praise and formally announced on May 21."

There are two additional items which especially make Halperin's second exclusion of Cain appear virtually smoking-gun deliberate:

In lockstep with Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who scolded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "please don't speak to my president that way," MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell cautioned of the "political pitfalls" for Republican presidential candidates who dared to challenge Barack Obama's speech on the Middle East.

On the May 20 edition of "Andrea Mitchell Reports," NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent warned against criticizing the Democratic commander-in-chief and bewailed the "angry reception" he's received over his desire to see Israel surrender territory it acquired in the six-day Middle East war of 1967.

Time magazine’s not being shy about who they like in 2012 GOP presidential field. A big spread in the May 23 edition is headlined "The Cool Kid: Jon Huntsman is a pro-civil union Mormon who spent nearly two years working for Obama." The main emphasis followed: 

He is, after all, a pro-civil-union Mormon who has just finished nearly two years of service for Obama in the land many Americans consider the new evil empire. He is pro-environment — a little too green for many in his party — and hardly anyone knows who he is. Though Huntsman's path to the nomination is a certified long shot, you have to wonder why so many on both the right and left seem to be freaking out at the prospect of his jumping into the race.

The President’s secret meetings with Fareed Zakaria – the same reporter who openly used a CNN network broadcast to promote Obama in 2008 – show a clear and disturbing double standard at CNN.

For decades, the liberal media have repeatedly condemned conservatives in the media who communicated privately with Republican presidents. They furiously attacked George Will in 1980 when he advised candidate Ronald Reagan, and trounced on Roger Ailes when he sent President Bush a note about the new war on terror in the wake of September 11th.  Neither of them was a reporter.

Just when you consider cutting the Associated Press a break for doing something right, they pull this.

Most people know that in the interest of "not spiking the football," the Obama administration has decided that it will not release photos of Osama bin Laden's dead body.

Shortly after the decision was announced, AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request for said photos. According to John Hudson at the Atlantic (HT to Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web), the AP's Michael Oreskes claims that "This information is important for the historical record" and "It's our job as journalists to seek this material." So far, so good.

But you just knew they'd figure out a way to potentially ruin it. Here's Oreskes as quoted by Hudson:

How convenient. Via Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry's Audit Bureau of Circulations, in issuing its March 31, 2011 circulation figures, tells us we shouldn't try to compare this year's numbers to last year's:

Because of the new and redefined categories of circulation on this FAS-FAX report, ABC recommends not making any direct comparisons of March 2011 data to prior audit periods.

As readers will see, if the ABC was really interested in enabling us to make apples-to-apples comparisons, it could have done so with appropriate definitional caveats. But it didn't; instead, it revised its definition of "total circulation" this year without disclosing the impact of the switch.

I've made the comparisons where possible for daily editions anyway, and they follow after the jump (original info links: March 31, 2011; March 31, 2010; Boston Globe data obtained here):

In 1966, Time magazine's April 8 cover story famously asked "Is God Dead?"

Forty-five years later the magazine is still hard at work attempting to discredit traditional Christian faith, with former Newsweek writer Jon Meacham exploring the question  "Is Hell Dead?"

Meacham doesn't answer the question definitively but used the raging controversy over Michigan pastor Rob Bell's new book "Love Wins" to argue that evangelical Christianity may be moving away from its tradition teachings on eternal conscious torment of the wicked in Hell towards a universalist view of salvation:

In this week's issue, Time magazine followed Newsweek in honoring gay sex columnist Dan Savage and offering him space to trash conservatives. The liberal media sets Savage up as an anti-bullying activist, then lets him push conservative faces in the dirt. In December Newsweek printed him saying "F--- John McCain" and asserting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was clearly a "c---sucker."  In their Ten Questions feature honoring his "It Gets Better" videos affirming homosexual children, Time asked him "Who hasn't made a video yet who you hope will?" This allowed Savage to insist conservatives don't care if homosexual children (or children who think they might be) commit suicide:

Rick Santorum. Tim Pawlenty. Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck. The Prime Minister of Britain, who leads the Conservative Party there, made a video, and we haven't seen one from anyone on the right in the U.S. to even say, You're 14 and gay. Don't kill yourself.

What Savage really wants is what David Cameron of Britain provided: a "Conservative" who's 100 percent in agreement with government celebrating homosexuality. Cameron says in his video:

All you need to know about why people on the right were dissatisfied with Kathleen Parker as the supposedly conservative counterweight to Eliot Spitzer on the pair's recently-canned CNN show was crystallized on Morning Joe today.  The panel unleashed an absolute gush-a-thon over Parker, Mika Brzezinski declaring her "one of my favorite people" and Willie Geist describing her as "a great writer."

For good measure, the MSNBC folks delighted in dumping on rival CNN.  Mike Barnicle took top trash-talking honors, claiming Parker had been "brutalized" at the network.

View video after the jump.

"It's one thing to look a gift horse in the mouth. It's quite another thing to slaughter a gift horse and send its disemboweled corpse back to Washington."

That's how Time magazine senior correspondent Michael Grunwald characterized Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott's decision to spurn a federal Department of Transportation high-speed rail grant for the Sunshine State.

"This was the nation's most shovel-ready high-speed project, and the state wasn't required to spend a dime to build it," Grunwald noted in his February 16 Swampland blog post.

On Thursday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted that Us Weekly's web site briefly posted a satirical item as legitimate news.

The satire item was about Sarah Palin criticizing Christine Aguilera's infamous National Anthem botch at last week's Super Bowl on Sean Hannity's Monday radio show. Palin didn't even appear on Hannity's show on Monday. Once caught by gossipcop.com, Us Weekly pulled the item.

The same cannot be said of Time.com. Time was also apparently fooled, but seems to be pretending that it knew the item was satire all along. Readers can judge for themselves from the graphics which follow.

Leave it to the religion writer who sees the Jesus of the Bible as "typically cranky" to give credence to "scholars" who argue the Bible considers gay and/or premarital sex perfectly kosher.

In her February 6 post, "What the Bible Really Says About Sex," Miller noted that "[t]wo new books written by university scholars for a popular audience try to answer this question.":

"If the majority [of the U.S. Supreme Court] agrees with [Judge Roger] Vinson, President Obama would find not only his health care bill undone, but also face the most significant scaling back of the government's power to use legislation to solve its problems in decades," Time's Michael Lindenberger warned in a February 2 post at the magazine's website.

To reach such a conclusion, however, Lindenberger must have misunderstood Vinson's ruling on Monday in State of Florida v. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, which sought not to "turn back the clock" on commerce clause interpretation but merely prevent its overextension into an unprecedented and dangerous arena: forcing Americans to buy private health insurance under the flimsy illogic that such economic inactivity actually amounts to commercial activity.

"I am required to interpret this law as the Supreme Court presently defines it. Only the Supreme Court can redefine or expand it further," Vinson noted on page 43 of his 78 page opinion. The Reagan appointee noted that no less legislative authorities than the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office have found Congress requiring Americans to purchase private health insurance under penalty of law to be "novel" and "unprecedented"

Noel Sheppard posted the news about J. Eric Fuller's arrest at NewsBusters earlier this evening:

According to the website of ABC-TV affiliate KGUN, J. Eric Fuller was arrested and charged with threats, intimidation, and disorderly conduct.

Demonstrating impressive prescience, John Hayward at Human Events predicted on Friday that Fuller would attempt to capitalize on his being among the injured in last Saturday's Tucson murders. After the jump, you'll get a sampling of Fuller's full feelings from Hayward:

In his January 4 article, "Why Journalists Aren't Standing Up for WikiLeaks," Newsweek's Ben Adler offers three reasons, the first of which is quite risible given the media's persistent advocacy for ObamaCare in the year past:

So why are American journalists hesitant to speak up for Assange? There are essentially three reasons.

 

1. Refusal to engage in advocacy: American journalists, unlike many of their foreign counterparts, have a strong commitment to objectivity and nonpartisanship...

Tuesday's Washington Post print edition ran a front-page obituary for Richard Holbrooke which closed by noting that the veteran diplomat told his surgeon "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

Of course numerous news outlets latched onto that quote. Leftist magazine Mother Jones even made the line their quote of the day late Monday evening as blogger Kevin Drum approvingly added in a December 13 post, "That would be a fitting memorial."

[See screen capture after page break]

But politicizing a dying man's last words has its risks. It turns out Holbrooke's exchange with his doctors taken out of context:

From Time magazine's Michael Crowley:

All you need to know about the MSM: two of its stalwarts don't think Barack Obama is a real liberal . . .

Time editor Mark Halperin, and Jon Meacham (until recently head Newsweek honcho) expressed--to the astonishment of Joe Scarborough--their fact-defying views on today's Morning Joe.

View video after the jump.

A few weeks ago, just before GM's initial public offering went to the market (at the Washington Examiner; at BizzyBlog), I noted that Multi-Government/General Motors had spent the past several months shipping more cars than its dealers were selling, to the point where dealer stocks represented an unusually high number of days of dealers' sales.

GM's December 1 press release made that trend even more obvious, as month-end dealer inventory rose to 536,000 units, about 30% higher than May's level.

As seen below, the trend was already pretty obvious in October, and a vigilant press should have been alert enough to notice it and attempt to gauge its financial impact:

Here's something about which the environmentalists and car czars planted inside the Obama administration can't be pleased: as a percentage of their U.S. sales, Multi-Government/General Motors and Chrysler are selling more "light trucks," consisting of pickups, SUVS, and "crossover" vehicles than any other major manufacturer. Further, the companies are clearly emphasizing light trucks at the expense of their car models.

I wonder how a government promise to accomplish this would have been received by the fossil-fuels-are-awful media at bankruptcy crunch time last year?

You can pretty much count on this inconvenient product mix not getting a great deal of establishment press attention while it drools over the underpowered, heavily subsidized electric lemon known as the Chevy Volt and whatever toy disguised as a useful vehicle Chrysler/Fiat plans on foisting onto the market.

The detail is at the Wall Street Journal's monthly report on vehicle sales (link will change in one month). Key items include these:

In an interview with Gov. Rick Perry published today, Newsweek's Andrew Romano falsely claimed that "Many Tea Partiers want to repeal the 14th Amendment, which provides for birthright citizenship." Romano then asked the recently-reelected Texas Republican, "Do you agree with them?"

Perry answered that while he believed a constitutional prohibition on birthright citizenship was "probably not" needed, he didn't address the fundamental error in Romano's premise.

While there have been suggestions by some conservatives at looking at amending the Fourteenth Amendment to ensure that children of illegal immigrants do not automatically gain American citizenship, the notion that Tea Party activists favor a full repeal of the post-Civil War amendment is a faulty liberal media meme.

We won't try to weave too much political-cultural significance into the spat that erupted on Morning Joe today.  Just sit back and enjoy the spectacle as Joe Scarborough struggled to get in a word edgewise with Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation.

Scarborough was seeking to cite statistics showing that by a ratio of about 40:20, more Americans identify as conservatives than as liberals.  That, he argued, makes it hard for Dems like Obama to govern from the left, and suggests that lefties like vanden Heuvel should cut the prez some slack.

Somehow, a certain Frank Sinatra song comes to mind.  Or not.  View video here.