Baltimore Sun

The media piled on when President Bush used his veto pen on this children's health insurance bill. They tried to drop the absolute moral authority bomb on it big time and paint him as not caring about children. Now it looks like a little backfire is on the horizon.

On September 29th, 12 year old Graeme Frost of Maryland got to do the Democrats’ radio address, in which he told his story of how he and his sister were seriously injured in a car accident, and if it hadn’t been for SCHIP, they wouldn’t be here today. The Baltimore Sun did a story on the family, in which it stated the family couldn’t get health insurance through their work.

"Bonnie Frost works for a medical publishing firm; her husband, Halsey, is a woodworker. They are raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. Neither gets health insurance through work."

Own a big house? Well, watch out because Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) wants to bankrupt you.

According to the August 24 Baltimore Sun, Dingell plans to propose a "cutoff of mortgage-interest tax deductions for all houses with more than 3,000 square feet."

The culprit is, of course, global warming.  Dingell heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee and has been looking for ways to appease the Gore wing of the party without hurting the auto manufacturers Dingell represents. "In order to address the issue of climate change, we must address the issue of consumption," he said in the article.

The Baltimore Sun is hardly a right-wing rag, in fact its editorials and its overall news judgment, as many a Marylander registered on this site can tell you, is rabidly left-wing. But even the Sun, reporting on yesterday's heinous, grisly discovery of four murdered stillborn infants in Ocean City, Md., used the term "baby" to describe the victims. The Associated Press also used the term "baby" to describe the pre-born or stillborn victims.

So what's holding Andrea Stone of USA Today back? The word "baby" appeared twice in her July 31 story, but only in quotes, from a police spokesman and the Worcester County State's Attorney. Likewise the term "infant" was only used once in Stone's story, again within quotes from a police report.

Also to the Sun's credit--although really it should be standard practice when the MSM report on abortion matters-- Sun reporter Lynn Anderson avoided the left-wing euphemism "woman's right to choose" in favor of a grammatically correct phrase that includes the word "abortion." In this excerpt, Anderson is describing the law under which suspect Christy Freeman may be prosecuted:

Brent Bozell's culture column this week begins with how the disgusting dog-fighting allegations surrounding football star Michael Vick have united everyone -- conservatives and liberals, theists and atheists, meat-eaters and vegetarians, you name it -- against Vick and his vile animal-killing buddies, if half of that federal indictment is true. They found 17 dog carcasses on his property near Williamsburg, Virginia. Like many, Brent believes new NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will keep Vick off the field this season until he can attempt to clear his name at trial. But, sadly that isn't the only scandalous news out of the sports world:  

OVERVIEW: I believe that the sale of The Tribune Company last week to investor Sam Zell is an unrecognized low-water mark in the newspaper publishing business. In fact, after subtracting the value of the Tribune's non-newspaper properties from the deal, what little value remains indicates that the value of having access to a newspaper's readers is a mind-boggling 70% less than it was a mere seven years ago.

Is it possible that Tribune Company investors are paying the price of many years of relentless misreporting and biased reporting at its newspapers, especially those it acquired when it bought Times Mirror in 2000? While the numbers presented here of necessity involve a fair amount of approximation, it's hard to avoid concluding that the answer is "yes."

A chart of The Tribune Company's stock performance during the past eight years shows that it has clearly been an underperformer:

Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly finally provided some perspective on the U.S. attorney firing story with some information the mainstream media will not report. On the March 22 edition of "The O’Reilly Factor," O’Reilly exposed much of the media spin on the situation from members of the White House press corps to several print media outlets. He then explained plausible reasons why three of the eight U.S. attorneys were fired.

The mainstream media hinted that the administration fired San Diego attorney Carol Lam for prosecuting former Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. What they failed to report is that Ms. Lam did not aggressively prosecute illegal alien criminals. Her lax approach concerned even Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein. Paul Charlton was not aggressive in pursuing marijuana cases, and even the liberal "Los Angeles Times" editorialized against fired attorney Kevin Ryan.

"Ugh, now the Democrats like tax cuts too!"

That's essentially the tone of a March 5 Los Angeles Times article* that took Democrats to task for their plans for what President Clinton was fond of calling "targeted tax cuts." Apparently they just "cost" the government too much of our money:

WASHINGTON // After years of claiming that Republicans were cluttering the tax code with provisions that enriched the wealthy, leading Democrats in Congress want to add more tax credits and deductions to benefit narrow groups of largely middle-class constituents.

Among potential beneficiaries: people with elderly parents in nursing homes, new parents, college students, volunteer firefighters and organ donors.

But all these goodies are raising questions about how the Democrats can give away tax revenues while keeping their pledge not to deepen the government's deficit.

But wait, there's more...

It's a good thing I wasn't sipping my coffee when I saw this on the front page of the Baltimore Sun in Starbucks this afternoon.

"Checks, balances rule Md. capital: Democratic leaders split on key issues, how to raise money."

Reporter Andrew Green began his March 5 article by conceding that "in ways large and small, Annapolis is showing signs of a leftward tilt" ever since Gov. Martin O'Malley took the helm on the second floor of the State House. But relax, Green continued, competing egos in the state government ensure that the legislative track isn't laden with runaway trains.

Maybe so, but all the freight the Maryland General Assembly is steaming into the station is filled with liberal goodies:

Obama's white ancestors owned slaves. So says the research of William Addams Reitwiesner, "who works at the Library of Congress and practices genealogy in his spare time", and who is featured in this morning's edition of the Baltimore Sun.

Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas.

But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now: it appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and Census records.

While reading this, my very first thought had me wondering how well this will sit with the Obama-isn't-black-enough contingent?

It didn't take long in the story to get the issue addressed.

Nigerian terrorists got free ink in the Baltimore Sun while the company that employs their victims, Shell Oil, got nothing, not even an acknowledgement from the Sun's reporter that the group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).

That's the gist of my latest story at the MRC's BusinessandMedia.org.

Here's a taste:

One country’s terrorist menace is one Baltimore Sun reporter’s insurgency.

In his December 18 article, “Paying the price for resistance,” Sun foreign reporter Scott Calvert gave readers a snapshot of a “violent insurgency that has forced a 20 percent to 25 percent cut” in Nigerian oil exports.