Washington Post

Appearing as a panel member this weekend on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show, Nia-Malika Henderson of the Washington Post predicted that Fox News and the "far right" may drive independents and women to vote for President Obama, as she suggested that they may "hint at" racial issues or birtherism and cause "blowback" that would benefit the President.

She also theorized that mothers may vote to re-elect Obama because they "take some pride" in having their children "growing up in this country with an African-American President."

After Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker theorized that people who are racist against the President are a group he cannot win over and are therefore irrelevant to the campaign, Henderson responded:

Exactly one month ago, the Washington Post published a 5,400 word front page hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's high school years which included a now infamous hair-cutting incident.

On Sunday, the Post devoted 5,500 words, beginning on the front page of the sports section, to an excerpt of David Maraniss's new book with the headline "President Obama’s Love for Basketball Can be Traced Back to His High School Team":

You don’t have to be Catholic to find the liberal media often sounds intentionally clueless when it writes about the Catholic Church publicly identifying for people both inside and outside the church what its teaching is.

When the church makes an announcement that perhaps someone who supports abortion, homosexuality, and masturbation isn’t really anywhere on the planet of Catholicism, liberal journalists have a fit. In Saturday’s Washington Post, (anti-)religion columnist Lisa Miller was so exercised she found someone to say the Vatican sees wayward nuns as comparable to Islamic terrorists (sort of like the Rosie O’Donnell character in An American Carol):

Sister Margaret Farley probably would have had Sally Quinn's respect when she endorsed same-sex marriage in her 2006 book Just Love, which has recently been denounced by the Vatican as unsuitable for use in Catholic theological or moral instruction due to its various departures from Church teaching.

But by golly, it's the Church's rebuke of Farley's defense of masturbation that Quinn thinks is her ticket to convincing her audience that the Church has lost its mind. From her June 7 On Faith blog post "Fifty Shades of Catholicism" (emphases mine):

The Catholic News Agency's Michelle Bauman reports that there has been a "wave" of recent defections and departures from the Democratic Party that could be as many as several hundred. The establishment press is clearly being remiss in failing to note them at all -- something which would not be occurring if it involved Republicans going to the party of the left.

The reasons for the moves primarily relate to President Obama's endorsement of same-sex "marriage" and the assault on religious freedoms inherent in his administration's requirement that employers who offer health insurance plans, in Bauman's words, "cover contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, even if doing so violates their consciences." Excerpts from her report follow the jump, including a notable quote from Artur Davis, the former four-term Democratic congressman who announced to very little press coverage in late May that if he runs again for public office, it will be as a Republican:

In today's 16-paragraph page A6 story, "Legal challenges tie up new voting restrictions,"* the Washington Post's Krissah Thompson reported that many "[s]tricter ID laws and other controversial voting restrictions" could be held up in the courts until after November election.

At no point in her story, however, did Thompson note recent polling shows 70 percent of Americans back photo ID for voting. What's more, while Thompson noted Obama/Holder Justice Department staffers are working to thwart "an effort by Florida's Republican secretary of state to remove noncitizens from voter registration lists, saying it is illegal to conduct such a purge this close to an election," she failed to note that in this instance, it may well be the Obama administration that is violating federal law by refusing to assist Florida officials.

Since his very public endorsement of same-sex marriage on May 9, President Obama has become the unabashed hero of the LGBT community – a fact the liberal media has openly cheered. On Thursday's NBC Today, White House correspondent Kristen Welker described Obama being "greeted by thundering and sustained applause" at a Hollywood fundraiser Wednesday night.

Welker proclaimed that gay community had been, "newly energized after the President's recent endorsement of same-sex marriage." On CBS's This Morning, correspondent Bill Plante highlighted President Obama's "warm welcome from campaign donors in the Los Angeles gay community" at the LGBT Leadership Council Gala.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post could barely contain its glee over the event: "...the president had to plead with the audience to sit down after a long and emotional ovation and chants of 'Four more years!' Twin screens on each side of the stage displayed huge 'Obama Pride' logos."

In the same spirit as Scott Bauer's claim for Associated Press of a "narrow 7-point gap" in the Wisconsin recall polls, so The Washington Post on Wednesday's front page classified Scott Walker's win as "Walker survives," and below that, "LONG LINES AND A CLOSE VOTE." Close?

Via my Twitter friend mattjmobile, here's a reminder of the Washington Post's front page on November 5, 2008, when Obama won by the same margin as Scott Walker: "Obama Makes History: US DECISIVELY ELECTS FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT." [See below]

The Boston Globe is reporting on a Massachusetts solar company that received state loans under Governor Romney, and is now filing for bankruptcy.  The Globe insists that this news means that Romney's attacks on the President's failed Solyndra investment have backfired, and are implying that it opens up the Republican presidential contender up to charges of hypocrisy. 

An excerpt:

Politico went to its “Arena” pages to ask the experts if its recent story on the New York Times and The Washington Post being "in the tank" for Obama was accurate or inaccurate. The expert mix was pretty balanced.

Former USA Today reporter Richard Benedetto was candid: “As a daily reader of the print edition of The Washington Post, I have the clear anecdotal impression that President Obama and wife Michelle receive better headlines, photos, story placement and more-positive story angles than Mitt Romney and his wife Ann. My thesis is that an empirical study would bear that out.” Others were deniers:

On Thursday, NB's Mark Finkelstein reported that MSNBC was airing an ad for The Ed Show and its obsession with recalling Gov. Scott Walker that said “Get Out The Vote!” Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple picked up the story and lamented that MSNBC would be so baldly partisan, except – MSNBC told him it was being scrubbed.

"No need to lecture too much here, because MSNBC told me yesterday evening that it has taken a critical look at the spot.” he reported. MSNBC spokeswoman Lauren Skowronski said “The spot is being revised. The original version is no longer airing.”        

President Obama infuriated the leaders of Poland on Tuesday while honoring Jan Karski with the Medal of Freedom. He said Karski smuggled into a “Polish death camp” to see the Holocaust. (Um, no, that’s a Nazi death camp located in Poland). Despite the international incident, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nothing on the gaffe.

But shamelessly, ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today both found “news” in the scoop-let that the Romney campaign misspelled “America” in an iPhone app. (CBS skipped both.) The gaffe also recalled the so-called “fashion faux pas” of 2005, when Vice President Cheney wore a parka to an anniversary at Auschwitz -- except the Poles weren't furious at that one.

NewsBusters reported Thursday disgraced former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather said the idea of liberal media bias "is a sham."

Hours later, Politico surprisingly took a different position saying the presence of such bias "often rings true, even to people who don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh":

You might think that the news of an African-American former Congressman switching his publicly declared party loyalty from Democrat to Republican would a national story.

Well, it isn't at the Associated Press, as a search returning no results at the wire service's national site on the full name of former Alabama Congressman Artur Davis (not in quotes) done at about 9 p.m. indicates. Additionally, the link to news about Davis's party switch is currently perched in the "Post Local" section at the Washington Post's web site. If this makes TV anywhere but Fox News, I'll be surprised, even though by any rational definition of "news," this is an objectively big deal. Davis is a former four-term Congressman, was a Barack Obama campaign co-chair in 2008, and was a former member of the Congressional Black Caucus. The last time an African-American congressman or former congressman changed his party from Democrat to Republican was ... well, maybe someone else can come up with a previous example, but I can't. Several paragraphs from the AP's "local" story in the Post follow the jump:

Michelle Obama is out with a new book about the White House vegetable garden and Krissah Thompson of the Washington Post is doing her level best playing book publicist.

"One of Michelle Obama's early worries about life in the White House had to do with a plot of land," Thompson gushed in the lead paragraph of today's page A4 story. "[T]he first lady found herself fretting over whether her much-hyped garden would grow," Thompson added, going on to quote a passage from Mrs. Obama's new book:

On Tuesday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose yet again ripped a line from a liberal print media outlet that portrayed the GOP as a radical faction. Rose quoted a front-page article about Mitt Romney from that morning's Washington Post to Republican media favorite Peggy Noonan: "The Republican Party will have selected an unlikely standard bearer for 2012...a man of moderate temperament in a party fueled by hot rhetoric...a flip-flopper in a party that demands ideological purity."

Noonan herself endorsed this left-leaning spin: "That's very well put." The columnist also denounced the "freak show atmosphere to the Republican primaries in the past six months or so." [audio available here; video below the jump]

NewsBusters reported Friday that the Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave a MarketWatch piece claiming President Obama's "spending binge never happened" three pinocchios for its utter falsehoods.

On Monday, the Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and former assistant managing editor Eugene Robinson actually misrepresented his own paper's findings to hype the thoroughly debunked MarketWatch piece and bash Mitt Romney:

Don’t look for sophistication in The Washington Post’s coverage of the Catholic lawsuits against ObamaCare. Religion columnist Lisa Miller began on Saturday: “Mommy and daddy are fighting, and the anguished children don’t know where to turn.”

“A small group of very conservative bishops has hijacked the church, or at least the public voice of the church,” Miller complained. “The bishops are playing the role of the authoritarian father. In case after case, their message to the faithful is ‘Do it because I say so.’” Mommy, naturally, is represented as the people who support Obama or favor ongoing "dialogue" with Obama:

On the front page of Saturday’s Style section, Washington Post writer Michael Cavna touted the new “relevance” of promoting homosexuality in comic books and strips now that President Obama has un-closeted his long-obvious support for gay marriage. Guess who wasn’t relevant: conservatives who thought it was a bad idea.

The headline was "Comics' gay couples land with election-year splash." Cavna began with Archie Comics executive Jon Goldwater, who was stunned when someone couldn’t believe they still made Archie Comics. So obviously, it was time to go gay: “If we didn’t change Riverdale, we would risk becoming irrelevant.”

MRC president L. Brent Bozell III had his Letter to the Editor published in Saturday's Washington Post. He objected to liberal Post columnist E.J. Dionne trying to make a mountain out of the molehill of one liberal bishop granting an interview to one liberal Catholic magazine. Dionne did not note that this same bishop, so nervous about the bishops being used by political partisans "far to the right," delighted liberals by attacking the Paul Ryan budget.

Dionne wrote the conservative bishops who are "eagerly picking fights with President Obama....have angered more progressive Catholics and led to talk among the disgruntled faithful of the need for a 'Catholic spring' to challenge the hierarchy’s shift to the right." So now the Catholic hierarchy is like Arab dictators? Brent wrote in reply:

In a May 25 front-page story headlined "Romney's outreach meets hostile reception," Washington Post staff writers Nia-Malika Henderson and Philip Rucker passed off a political activist by the name of Madaline G. Dunn as simply being a 78-year-old "protester" who has lived in West Philadelphia for 50 years and was "personally offended" by the fact that "Romney would visit her neighborhood."

"It's not appreciated here.... It's absolutely denigrating for him to come in here and speak his garbage," Henderson and Rucker quoted Dunn. Yet what the Post staff writers left out is that Dunn is no otherwise-apolitical resident who happened to be on hand to react to Romney's campaign swing. She's a seasoned political activist, having served as the legislative committee chair for the Philadelphia Congress of the National Congress of Black Women (PCNCBW).

White House spokesman Jay Carney on Wednesday lectured journalists to not believe the "BS" that Barack Obama is a reckless spender. Rather than investigate Carney's assertions, or the sketchy basis for them, reporters have either embraced the talking points or allowed them to go unchallenged.

Chris Matthews on Wednesday repeated the "fact" that federal spending "is rising at the slowest rate" in 60 years. The network evening and morning shows have failed to investigate this highly questionable assertion from MarketWatch's Rex Nutting. The Washington Post, however, gave this claim "three Pinocchios" and chided Carney, "The data in the article are flawed, and the analysis lacks context."

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, White House press secretary Jay Carney during the previous day's press gaggle cited a bogus MarketWatch report hysterically claiming "Obama Spending Binge Never Happened."

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler looked at Carney's comments as well as Rex Nutting's article Friday and gave their assertions three Pinocchios:

"A House committee chairman charged Wednesday that the CIA and Defense Department jeopardized national security by cooperating too closely with filmmakers producing a movie on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden," reported Larry Margasak of the Associated Press yesterday. "[Rep. Peter] King [R-N.Y.] referred to documents obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act request. He said the filmmakers received 'extremely close, unprecedented and potentially dangerous collaboration' from the Obama administration."

Margasak's story on Rep. Peter King's hearing investigating the matter was printed in today's Washington Post, but editors buried the item on page C4, deep in the heart of the Style section, which typically reports on fashion, music, and the entertainment industry. Noted Margasak:

In her May 22 "Singles File" -- described as "A weekly playlist for the listener with a one-track mind" -- Washington Post music critic Allison Stewart suggested readers might want to download the new single "Reagan" by rap artist Killer Mike.

"The Obama years haven't been fruitful ones for sociopolitically minded rappers, at least until now," Stewart gushed, noting that the Atlanta musician "dusts off some late '80s ghosts on this unblinking and brutal track from his newest [album] 'R.A.P. Music.'" But when you check out the lyrics of the track, and read his May 21 interview with HipHopDX.com, what really becomes clear is Killer Mike's "unblinking" apology for the late terror-sponsoring Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi.