Washington Post

In the wake of the embassy attacks in Cairo and Benghazi that left four people dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, you would think the White House would be on crisis alert.  After all, when members of the American Foreign Service come under threat, with one being assassinated– it is comforting to have a commander-in-chief executing his leadership to make sure the situation is under control.  Apparently, that isn’t the case in the Obama White House and, for the most part, the national news media don't seem to mind.

Volyndra?

That might be the best description of General Motors' Chevy Volt according a scathing review of that car. And the source of the review? None other than the editorial board of the liberal Washington Post so Obama administration supporters can scarcely write off the criticisms as "right-wing propaganda." Before you even get to the text of the story you can see the WaPo editorial board slam the Volt in the title, GM’s vaunted Volt is on the road to nowhere fast:

Media reporting of Voter ID fails to meet basic standards of objectivity and integrity, says a new report released today, "Media Shows Pervasive Bias When Covering Voter ID" by Justin Danhof.

In fact, Danhof says, the media in many cases is openly hostile to Voter ID, using three primary tactics to attack it: rhetoric, flawed data and selective coverage.

The Washington Post doesn’t always report on voter fraud, but when it does, it buries the story in the Metro section.

At the bottom of page B4 in the September 11 issue, the Post noted a Democratic congressional candidate in Maryland who dropped out of the race yesterday after instances of her voter fraud were brought to light.

Poll cooking season is officially in full swing. The headline today at the Washington Post reads: "Among likely voters, Obama-Romney close." Dan Balz and Jon Cohen report that in a September 7-9 poll, "the (presidential) race remains close among likely voters, with Obama at 49 percent and Romney at 48 percent, virtually unchanged from a poll taken just before the conventions." Ah, but Obama supposedly has a six-point lead among registered voters.

Based on pair's report, the easy choices on how to interpret the results are these: Either President Obama really didn't come out of the Democratic Convention with a polling bounce, or, if he did have a bounce, it disappeared after last Friday's dreadful employment news. There's a third and far more likely choice, which only becomes apparent once one sees the mix of respondents in the poll's final listed question.

It’s become clear that media “fact checkers” have gone far beyond the facts and are often simply flagging ads for using dramatic words, like commercials often do. Writing for the Washington Post’s Fact Checker page, Josh Hicks tried to “correct” a pro-life ad:

“The antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony List released a video with testimony from failed-abortion survivor Melissa Ohden, who criticized the president’s Illinois Senate votes and said: 'I was aborted and my body discarded like I didn’t exist. But a nurse heard me crying and cared enough to save my life.'” Hicks flunked the ad because he didn’t like the word “discarded”:

Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley reviewed a new book on Sunday by historian William Chafe called Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal. The book included this bizarre concept: "in the strangest of ways, Clinton’s reckless sexual behavior actually enhanced their personal ties. It made their relationship more functional and productive."

Yardley called this "a bit of a stretch." Just a bit??

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer gave some well-deserved ribbing to the Washington Post's Colby King on PBS's Inside Washington Friday.

"You do live in a completely different world," Krauthammer told King when he disagreed with his views about the just-ended Democratic National Convention. "And you drink, what is it, the Kool-Aid? Isn’t that your favorite drink?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The fashionistas in the “objective” press displayed their favoritism by boosting Michelle Obama’s convention speech dress and quoted flagrant Michelle-boosters like Kate Betts, who insisted whatever stylishness the Republican women had they owed to the pioneering Mrs. Obama.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press posted a story headlined, “Michelle Obama gets raves for Tracy Reese dress,” and out came the bare-arms worship: 

Washington Post TV writer Lisa de Moraes made a big deal on Friday about how Bill Clinton’s extremely verbose Wednesday night convention speech (when you add up seven networks) apparently trumped the season premiere of NFL football (which aired just on NBC.)

Actually, football beat Clinton, until the Post made a special mathematical effort to include ratings estimates from Current TV and PBS (but apparently couldn’t grab the C-SPAN numbers):

Once a day for 25 days, NewsBusters is showcasing the most egregious bias the Media Research Center has uncovered over the years — four quotes for each of the 25 years of the MRC, 100 quotes total — all leading up to our big 25th Anniversary Gala on September 27. (Click here for ticket information)

So far, we’ve published the worst quotes from 1988 through 1992 (you can check those out here). Today, the worst bias of 1993, including the Washington Post smearing Christian conservatives as "poor, uneducated and easy to command," Dan Rather fawning over Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Helen Thomas disavowing any tilt, saying she does not “know what a liberal bias is.” [Quotes and video below the jump.]

As Washington Post columnist and MSNBC analyst Ezra Klein appeared during the midnight hour of Wednesday night's Democratic National Convention coverage on MSNBC, he described former President Bill Clinton as a "missile" for the Obama administration, and argued that high tax rates have not harmed the economy in the past.

But, as he pointed to periods of high growth while marginal tax rates were higher than modern times, he neglected to mention that the existence of more tax shelters often kept effective tax rates from being as high as they might have appeared, whereas many of those tax shelters were removed in the 1980s. He also did not note that the capital gains tax was cut in the mid-1990s during the Clinton presidency after Republicans took control of Congress.

Referring to Clinton's speech, Klein began:

Since Wednesday, the Obama-loving media have been working overtime trying to disprove a number of statements made by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan during their respective speeches at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

On ABC's This Week Sunday, George Will called out Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler for claiming Ryan had mislead Americans about a GM plant closing in Janesville, Wisconsin (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan is a Catholic – but not a good enough Catholic in the eyes of the media. Writers, bloggers, and talking heads have hammered Ryan for his supposed “dissent” from Catholic teaching.

Journalists have falsely claimed that the bishops “rebuked” Ryan and called his budget “un-Christian.” Writers who usually scorn the Church and its hierarchy fretted that the bishops found Ryan’s budget “uncompassionate.”

Immediately after Paul Ryan concluded his acceptance speech for the Republican Party's vice presidential nomination on Wednesday, the media sought ways to tear down the Wisconsin Congressman's indictment of the failures of the Obama administration. In particular, networks and newspapers attempted to knock down Ryan's accurate claim that President Obama promised to keep open a GM plant that closed in 2009.    

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and PolitiFact quickly labeled Ryan's criticism as "false," claiming Obama made no such promise and that the plant closed before he took office. But as The Examiner's Conn Carroll detailed on Thursday, that supposed "fact check" was false:

The liberal media can’t seem to help themselves. While counter-arguments are occasionally acknowledged, most journalists of the progressive persuasion are not interested in fair and balanced coverage of politics. Facts and figures are seemingly subjective in the whole scheme of things. Severely limited studies and polls seem to provide them with all the information they need. Oh, and almost everything is racist.

The Washington Post has been one of most reliable offenders, as far as daily publications are concerned. For example, Rosalind Helderman, Jon Cohen and Aaron Blake collaborated on a report that was published today suggesting the “Republican Party base is white, aging and dying off.” This is according to an “extensive analysis" by David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Ezra Klein, the "former" head of the Journolist news coordination conspiracy (given the evidence of coordination seen during the Republican convention, it's hard to believe it hasn't continued in some form), rolled out a graphic yesterday at the Washington Post which he touted as "the one graph you need to see before watching" the Republican convention.

To show would be to give it more attention than it deserves. Its core contention, delivered via the lefty-driven Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is that "Tax Cuts, Wars Account For Nearly Half of Public Debt by 2019." They could have changed the title to "we're going to blame Bush for eight more years." Some of Klein's clanking follows the jump; I'll deal with the "Blame Bush's tax cuts" mantra after that (the "wars" claim has been addressed several times before, and is just as dumb):

By now you've likely heard Ellen Barkin and Samuel L. Jackson's disgusting remarks about the hurricane pounding the Gulf Coast hopefully killing innocent members of the GOP.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post's Sally Quinn actually published a piece at her On Faith blog entited "Did God Plan Issac to Punish Republicans":

If you're a conservative poll watcher on Election Day, you're probably a racist! That's essentially the charge leveled in an August 25 Washington Post-published article by AJ Vicens and Natasha Kahn of the News21 Carnegie-Knight Initiative.  Entitled, "True the Vote and other poll watchers motives questioned," Kahn and Vicens opened their article by noting the paranoia of a Milwaukee voter creeped out at the fact that there were three white poll watchers at her mostly-black polling precinct on the recall election day a few months back:

 As Jamila Gatlin waited in line at a northside Milwaukee elementary school to cast her ballot June 5 in the proposed recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, she noticed three people in the back of the room. They were watching, taking notes. Officially called 'election observers,' they were white. Gatlin, and almost everyone else in line, was black. That’s pretty harassing right there, if you ask me, Gatlin said in the hall outside the gym. Why do we have to be watched while we vote?

As I suggested yesterday (hardly a prediction since it was so clearly going to happen), "2016: Obama's America" has taken in enough in estimated gross proceeds this weekend ($6.238 million from Friday through Sunday) to become the top conservative post-1982 documentary (and number six overall, behind four Michael Moore films and Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth").

Some critiques, currently compiled at the Hollywood Reporter (this post went directly to the underlying write-ups), are coming in, and let just say that there's no Michael Moore-level fawning:

The Washington Post film review of the new conservative documentary 2016 mocked the movie as a "fear-mongering" "infomercial" that is too opinionated. The same paper, however, gushed over the "emotional power" of liberal filmmaker Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, praising it as a "cultural juggernaut."

2016 reviewer Michael O'Sullivan knocked the "slick infomercial," deriding, "As these things go, the movie seems destined to irritate the president’s supporters while mobilizing his detractors, even as it is doomed to win precious few converts. It’s a textbook example of preaching to the choir." In contrast, Fahrenheit 9/11 critic Desson Thomson defended, "Documentaries aren't news articles; they're subjective points of view, which is why Moore has almost endless fun at the president's expense."

The Washington Post editorial board today set out to slam Florida's Republican governor for "threaten[ing] the integrity of elections" with his voter "purge" effort and for enforcing the state's new curtailed early-voting hours.

But in their editorial on the matter, the Post misled readers with deceptive language about how the state undertook its voter roll cleanup effort (emphasis mine):

Yesterday a "report by Sentier Research, a firm headed by two former Census Bureau officials," found that "[f]rom June 2009 to June 2012, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 4.8 percent," Michael A. Fletcher of the Washington Post reported today. What's more, the fall in median household income was much worse for blacks, "a staggering 11.1 percent drop." June 2009, you may recall, marks the end of the recession that began in December 2007.

Yet such news was shoved down to page A10 by Post editors, rather than placed on the paper's August 23 front page, which included, among other things, a large photo of a woman working on a large sand sculpture at a resort in Florida, a story about Mitt Romney's campaign 'Mad Men,' and a story about how Lance Armstrong "won't fight doping charges" anymore.

“Can’t wait for the stoning-of-adulteresses question,” Washington Post TV critic Lisa de Moraes snarked in a column back in March about The American Bible Challenge, an original game show in development for GSN (formerly the Game Show Network), to be hosted by comedian Jeff Foxworthy.

Fast forward to this morning’s Washington Post, and readers would find Hank Stuever’s scathing review on the front page of the Style section. Since GSN isn't listed in the Post’s daily TV listings grid – nor is it necessarily a highly-trafficked cable network – it seems obvious that the only reason for a review would be to malign it. And trash it he did.

"Democrats aim to be inclusive," blurts the headline in Amy Gardner's 5-paragraph item on how the Democratic convention "will feature a long list of female speakers and a slew of activities designed to make it the most inclusive convention in history, organizers announced Wednesday."

Gardner went on to note that Sandra Fluke and "women from many other walks of life" will take to the podium, such as NARAL Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan, Caroline Kennedy, and actress Eva Longoria. Gardner left out that Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood was also announced as a speaker, and that Keenan served on this year's platform drafting committee, which shot down an effort by Democrats for Life of America to add "big tent" language to the platform. Somehow a handful of pro-choice speakers addressing contraception and abortion is diversity to the Washington Post.

Imagine for a moment, if you will, Sarah Palin attending an event at Ohio State University.  She casually greets college aged supporters, and a group of excited, young students decide to spell out the word “Ohio” using the old YMCA routine.  The group is in place, arms readied, fans surrounding them armed with their cameras and cellphones.  Then this happens…

The so-called “people’s convention” is scheduled to commence on Labor Day in Charlotte, but the “most open and accessible (convention) ever” won’t be sticking to the theme of transparency after all.

Despite an earlier vow to reveal all contributors, Democratic officials are now refusing to do so until federal disclosure documents have to be filed in mid-October.

To its credit, the Washington Post recognized the humorous contradiction and a shameless  double standard by running this story in the August 22 print edition. Unfortunately, the liberal-leaning paper buried T.W. Farnum’s report on A7.

The Washington Post's "On Faith" blog network has joined the chorus of media outlets extolling the virtues of Islam. Kathleen Duff of the Religion News Service, in an August 17 post, expressed her newfound admiration for the holy book of Islam. In a glowing piece titled “What Catholics Can Learn from the Quran,” Duff wrote: “This year during Ramadan – the ninth month of the Islamic calendar when Muslims believe the Quran was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad – I was in solidarity with my Muslim sisters and brothers throughout the world by reading the Quran. But here’s the thing: I am a Roman Catholic.”

Duff waxed eloquently in her praise of the Quran, writing: “The Quran encouraged me to continuously be aware of a gracious and merciful God who cherishes humanity and cherishes all of creation. I came to believe more firmly during my humble Ramadan experience that being cherished by God is an example of divine love beyond the limitations of any one language, symbol and imagination.”