Los Angeles Times

Updated with link below fold.

Yesterday's testimony by a disaffected former Bush official gave the mainstream media the opportunity to resurrect a favored meme: President Bush hates science.

Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona yesterday testified before a House committee on White House meddling in Carmona's speeches. Of course, Drs. C. Everett Koop and David Satcher also complained of political meddling from the Reagan and Clinton administrations respectively, but this fact was buried deep in the print accounts I've read.

But rather than exploring the complaints of political interference as a "systemic problem"-- Carmona's words -- that transcend party line and administration, news coverage in the mainstream media has sought to single out the Bush administration as anti-science.

This one is a hoot. The L.A.Times has posted a piece in their politics section about the supposed revelations of Drew Westen, a psychologist who is advising Democrats that they are too logical and rely on "facts" too much in their campaigns. Westen is warning Democrats that they need to be more "emotional" in their appeals to the voters because, according to his "research", Democrat and independent voters are just too darn stupid to understand logic and facts. And Westen makes this claim as if Democrats don't already campaign almost strictly on pure emotion with little appeal to intellect now!

WASHINGTON — Drew Westen, a genial 48-year-old psychologist and brain researcher, was talking to a rapt liberal audience about the role of emotion in politics, how to talk back aggressively to Republicans, and why going negative is not to be feared.

One wonders when, exactly, Democrats didn't follow this path toward using overly emotional campaign methods? Have we so soon forgotten the James Byrd ad where then Governor Bush was accused of agreeing with the racist dragging death of a black Texas man? How about LBJ's famous Daisy ad where Democrats accused Barry Goldwater of wanting to start a nuclear war? How about today where John Edwards is campaigning on "two America's" or his 2004 claims that Democrats would make sure the crippled could walk if America elected he and John Kerry to office? And how often are Republicans cast by Democrats as those evil people who want to poison the water, keep blacks from voting, take away women's rights, and starve the children?

...only EVERY election!

With Update...

Jim Geraghty over at National Review Online is reporting on an interesting thing concerning this story that the L.A.Times printed last weekend claiming that some abortion advocates hired Fred Thompson to lobby the White House for them over a pro-abortion issue in 1991 (NewsBusters story here). It seems that the story as originally posted on the LAT website has been altered with no notice of the change, nor an explanation of why it was changed. Once the removed sentence is looked into, though, it becomes clear that it was removed in an attempt to clean up the story to remove items problematic to the veracity of the thing!

The AP, taking their cue from the new because-she-said-so story offered by the L.A.Times, has run with a short clip on a story that claims Fred Thompson was working as a lobbyist for an abortion agency in 1991, giving the hearsay evidence against him but not offering the meat of his against the claim. The result is that the AP offers more "evidence" against Thompson than it does for him making it too easy to conclude he is "guilty" of the charge of lobbying for an abortion advocacy organization.

The AP did a wonderful job making this story seem more cut and dried than it really is, of course, but the fact is, this claim of Thompson's supposed lobbying for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association is nothing but an unproven (and maybe unprovable) claim against Thompson made by people who are well-known, far left activists and heavy contributors to the Hillary Clinton for President campaign. Naturally, neither the AP nor the L.A.Times wastes any time to detail the history of those making these claims against Thompson, leaving their relevant backgrounds completely out of the story.

Gee... why do you think they'd forget to let readers know that this story is based solely of the good word of Hillary supporters?

In a landmark 5-4 case today, the U.S. Supreme Court found that two school systems had improperly used race as a consideration in managing the public school districts. Web sites for many newspapers have carried Associated Press coverage of the ruling, and the later the revision of the AP report, the more information tends to be packed in them.

As of 1:15 a.m. Eastern when I started this post*, the Los Angeles Times front page linked to an AP story published just before 11 a.m. Eastern. But in that version of the AP story, Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, is not quoted at all. Yet a similar AP story (perhaps the same story but with fewer paragraphs edited out) was published just minutes later in the Washington Examiner.

Depending on which newspaper you read Tuesday morning, the wildfires in the Lake Tahoe region of California and Nevada were either caused by global warming or environmentalists.

I kid you not.

In Northern California, just a few hours from the devastation, the number one paper in the region, the San Francisco Chronicle, chose to blame the fires on overdevelopment in Tahoe, and, of course, global warming (emphasis added):

What do you call a guy who leaves the priesthood, rejects fundamental doctrine of the Catholic Church, and propagates egregious falsehoods about Catholics? If you're the Los Angeles Times, you call him a "Devout Catholic" - in your headline. Un·be·liev·a·ble.

The subject in a fawning article in the Times is James Carroll. A new documentary film is based on his 2001 book, Constantine's Sword, an awful work that advances the premise that anti-Semitism is central to Catholicism and Christianity.

When it was announced Tuesday that China surpassed the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide, NewsBusters asked, “Will Media Notice?”

In reality, the answer is a mixed windbag, with most press outlets totally ignoring the revelation, and a few actually blaming the problem on – wait for it! – the United States. I kid you not.

However, before we address that stupidity, it first must be relayed that not one of the television news outlets bothered reporting the Chinese CO2 data at all. It appears that television news divisions only feel CO2 is a problem if it’s emitted by American corporations or citizens.

As for the print media, the few that did cover this story either gave it very little attention, or made some fairly predictable excuses for why it’s okay as the planet nears its seemingly inevitable doom at the hands of greenhouse gases for China to be the leading “polluter.”

For instance, the New York Times devoted a total of 83 words to this story in its “World Briefing Asia” section Thursday on page A12 (no link available):

The Los Angeles Times is on the case of mean government bureaucrats who are making poor, innocent kids cry in their lunch milk.

CHULA VISTA, CALIF. — When too many parents fell behind on paying for school lunches, the Chula Vista Elementary School District decided to get tough — on the children.

They told students with deadbeat parents that they had only one lunch choice: a cheese sandwich.

The sandwich, served on whole wheat bread, came with a clear message: Tell your parents to pay up — or no more pizza and burgers for you.

Cheese sandwiches and other "alternate meals" have been added to menus in school districts across the country as they try to take a bite out ofparents' lunch debts.

The strategy worked in Chula Vista: Lunch debts in the district fell from about $300,000 in 2004 to $67,000 in 2006. Some angry parents say success came at too high a cost, however.

On Saturday, NewsBusters asked two important questions: “Will Media Report Palestinians Fleeing Gaza For Israel,” and will they address the theft of Yasser Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize by Hamas looters?

At this point, the answer to the latter is a resounding “No.” The answer to the former is “Not much.”

To be more specific, extensive searches of Google News and LexisNexis have identified that no major American media outlet with the exception of the New York Daily News bothered to report the theft of Yasser Arafat’s Noble Peace Prize:

Check out the very first line from this June 7, 2007, article in the Los Angeles Times (emphasis mine):

A judge Wednesday ordered Cardinal Roger M. Mahony to testify in a lawsuit alleging that he failed to protect parishioners from a pedophile teacher, but then granted the Los Angeles cleric's request for a trial delay.

Now check out this whopper of a correction from the Times on June 13, 2007 (emphasis mine again):

For the Record
Clergy abuse: An article in Thursday's California section about Cardinal Roger M. Mahony being ordered to testify in a lawsuit said the suit alleged that he failed to protect parishioners from Paul Kreutzer, a pedophile teacher. In fact, the suit accuses the Archdiocese of Los Angeles of failing to protect parishioners from abuse by Kreutzer between 1974 and 1976. Mahony did not become archbishop until September 1985 and is not named in the suit.

This one is really stretching the limits of any legitimate blame being leveled at Fred Thompson, but the L.A.Times has published a story linking Thompson to businessman with a shady past over a radio advertisement that the Senator narrates for that businessman's company. But, as we find out, Thompson's ABC Radio contract requires that he and other ABC Radio personalities act as narrator for the radio spot, so it isn't like Fred has gone out of his way to endorse this shady businessman's product. Naturally, the L.A. Times has to title the piece "An Awkward Ad By Fred Thompson", even as the Senator barely has a walk on part in the article. Most of the article ends up being about the company that the ad was recorded for and not Thompson. So, the light is shined on Thompson even as the story is not really about him much at all.

Color me pleasantly surprised, given the media's past treatment of the issue. The June 7 Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today all gave prominent play to news of a stem cell breakthrough that may make moot the embryonic stem cell ethical dilemma.

I don't have a hard copy of the LA Times, but I know the other papers featured the story on their front pages.

Of course, it appears that the New York Times couldn't let the good news go without a separate Debbie Downer article as counterbalance. Here's an excerpt, portion in bold is my emphasis:

Story after story about Rupert Murdoch’s purchase offer for Dow Jones & Company, which owns The Wall Street Journal, has criticized the prospect as a threat to journalism, questioned the media mogul’s “editorial integrity” and attacked his character.

Journalists, media critics and the union representing the Journal were up in arms.

“[P]robably not quite as frightening as the day we learned Kim Jong Il has the bomb, but close … very close. It could be worse. We might have discovered, for example, that Saddam Hussein had stashed all those missing weapons of mass destruction in a Pasadena storage locker rented to Osama bin Laden,” said a Los Angeles Times column.

As people who are following the G-8 summit in Germany are well aware, it is highly doubtful that any meaningful accord will be reached at this meeting concerning CO2 emissions. In fact, reports out of Europe and Asia for many weeks leading up to this event have made this eventuality quite clear.

Yet, this didn’t prevent the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein for blaming the lack of such an agreement on President George W. Bush.

In an op-ed published Wednesday entitled “Don't Sugarcoat Climate Change; Calling out Bush's intransigence on emissions caps may be the best way for other G-8 countries to get the U.S. to budge on global warming,” Brownstein chose to ignore all of the facts surrounding this issue, and instead pointed an accusatory finger at the media’s favorite target (emphasis added throughout):

On Tuesday (5/29/07), we published this post. We wrote how a recent book review in the Los Angeles Times didn't bother to disclose that the author of the reviewed book, Gustavo Arellano, happens to be a contributing editor to the Times.

This morning I opened the Times to find this on page A2:

For the Record
May 31, 2007

Mexican book: A review in Friday's Calendar section of Gustavo Arellano's book "¡Ask a Mexican!," a compilation of his columns by the same name for OC Weekly, should have added that Arellano is also a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times' Opinion page.

Well! I guess the Times's "Readers' Representative" received my e-mail and read our article!

Kudos to the Times for acknowledging their lack of proper disclosure.

Although most media coverage of the closure of RCTV by the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela has been somewhat bland, we now have an example of a journalist who actually supports the takeover of that long established television station. It is the former Associated Press reporter in Venezuela, Bart Jones, who wrote an approving article in today's Los Angeles Times, Hugo Chavez versus RCTV. Jones justifies the closing of that station by the Chavistas by claiming that it supported the 2002 coup against Chavez:

RCTV's most infamous effort to topple Chavez came during the April 11, 2002, coup attempt against him. For two days before the putsch, RCTV preempted regular programming and ran wall-to-wall coverage of a general strike aimed at ousting Chavez. A stream of commentators spewed nonstop vitriolic attacks against him — while permitting no response from the government.

Gustavo Arellano got a book review in the Los Angeles Times that every writer dreams of. With glowing prose they dubbed his book ¡Ask a Mexican! as "hilarious and testy," "insightful," and "witty and fearless." "Arellano ... offer[s] much-needed common sense," added the Times. A nice color photo of Arellano accompanies the review. (See an image of the article here.) Sounds great, doesn't it?

So ... What's the problem? Nowhere in the review does the paper bother to disclose that Arellano is a contributing editor to the Times. For the paper he has penned no less than ten columns in the last 11 months, including a book review that was published only a couple of weeks ago.

In other words, Arellano had about as much chance of receiving a negative review as it snowing in Santa Monica this week.

It’s been a full 48 hours since antiwar icon Cindy Sheehan publicly announced that she was leaving the Democrat Party due to Thursday’s bipartisan agreement on an Iraq war funding bill.

Yet, Google News and LexisNexis searches have identified that not one major media outlet has covered her announcement.

Not one.

Given the media’s fascination with this woman since she traveled to Crawford, Texas, in August 2005 to picket near President Bush’s ranch, one must wonder why they have abandoned her now?

Does this suggest that the media’s antiwar proclivities are only important when they shed a negative light on the Administration and Republicans, but not when events such as this speak poorly about Democrats?

Before you answer, consider the following data. Since August 1, 2005:

During Monica Goodling's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee testimony Dem congressman Steven Cohen of Tennessee quizzed the former Justice Department official regarding her Christian faith and the law school at Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson, that she attended.

An internet search reveals brief references to the interrogation in articles by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post and Maura Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. But I saw no coverage of the grilling on any of the morning news shows, nor have CNN or MSNBC picked it up as far as I have noticed.

I'm setting forth the actual transcript below, taken from this article, with the following changes. In place of "Regent" university, I'm substituting the name of an apocryphal Islamic university, which I'm calling "Prophet." In place of Christian or Christianity, I'm substituting Muslim. And in place of God, Allah.

Now imagine what kind of MSM uproar there would have been if a Republican congressman had posed these questions to a person of Muslim faith.

Congressman: And it says you went -- chose Muslim universities in part because they -- value they placed on service. What was the other [reason] that you chose Muslim universities?

Imagine for a moment that a high-ranking Republican was accused by a Democrat of violating House rules in order to get a $23 million earmark approved for his district.

Would the media report it?

Probably on front-pages all across the country, and on morning and evening network newscasts for days, right?

Well, last Thursday evening, Politico reported (emphasis added throughout):

Sometimes you read something by a member of the MSM that is just so elitist, someone whose arrogance is so amazing, that it is hard to believe it was written by a member of a democratic society.

We MSM watchdogs love to poke our fingers in the eyes of the homogeneously leftist elitists in the media establishment assailing them for their pervasive assumptions of their own superiority. We don’t often, however, get to see them come right out and say that they truly do think they are better and smarter then the rest of us mere commoners. Usually they are sly enough not to show their arrogance so obviously, leaving it unsaid but broadly hinted at. But, once in a while their egos get the better of them and they let that upturned nose snort just enough at the rest of us to let us know where our “place” in life is.

This is one of those times.

Does L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks think 9-11 was "fictional and entirely implausible"? I ask, because in The GOP's Torture Enthusiasts today, that's how she describes a similar scenario that Brit Hume sketched during this past Tuesday's GOP presidential debate.

In inviting the candidates to discuss their views on interrogation during this past Tuesday's get together, debate moderator and Fox News DC Bureau managing editor Brit Hume said the following:

The questions in this round will be premised on a fictional, but we think plausible scenario involving terrorism and the response to it. Here is the premise: Three shopping centers near major U.S. cities have been hit by suicide bombers. Hundreds are dead, thousands injured. A fourth attack has been averted when the attackers were captured off the Florida coast and taken to Guantanamo Bay, where they are being questioned. U.S. intelligence believes that another larger attack is planned and could come at any time.

Brooks sniffed at the scenario, calling it "the kind that most intelligence experts consider fictional and entirely implausible."

The TV industry is a fickle business, just ask any veteran of the small screen. While most actors in Hollywood would probably tell you that they're at the mercy of you the viewing audience, blogger LaShawn Barber noticed that comedian George Lopez whipped out the race card to complain about his five-season-long show being canned by the alphabet network.

"TV just became really, really white again," complained Lopez, who was reacting to the premise of "Cavemen," the sitcom that will replace his show. "Cavemen" will basically transform the Geico commercial cavemen premise into a half-hour laugh riot (you can tell I suspect it will be even less funny than Lopez's show).