Major Newspapers

I find that the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza usually plays things pretty much down the middle, and subscribe to his Fix email blast.

So it came as an unpleasant surprise to find in my inbox a little while ago a Cillizza email, linking to his current Fix column, tthat referred to Mark Sanford as "the turd in the political punch bowl."  Cillizza repeated the line in the column itself. View the screengrab after the jump.

The Los Angeles Times is up for sale, and there are super-wealthy conservative bidders. Get out the popcorn and watch the liberals squeal. The hilarious kickoff came when two leftist collectives – the Daily Kos website and the California-based Courage Campaign Institute – set out to buy an ad in the the L.A. Times to protest the Koch brothers pondering a bid.

I kid you not, the ad began: “WE NEED NEWS, NOT MORE SPIN.” This would assume that today’s Los Angeles Times  – which just endorsed Obama’s re-election –  is an oasis of objectivity in a desert of media bias. They expressed outrage when the Times wouldn't publish the ad -- but then they did.

Here's a case of "name one party and not the other."

Though there is no question that arrests made this morning in connection with an alleged plot to rig the 2013 New York City mayor's include Republicans, and that they of course should be identified as such, there is also no question that the very first person named in the breaking Associated Press story which follows the jump is a Democrat, and should have been tagged as one:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan is mighty proud of himself this week. Today, he wrote that the negative response to a column he wrote on Wednesday ("One last call to service – end military funeral honors") is "pig heaven for an attention-craving columnist." The porcine parallel McClellan made seems more than appropriate in the circumstances.

You see, Budget-cutter Bill is either too dense to realize or doesn't care that his cost-cutting suggestion to end all military funeral honors except for "men and women killed in combat" would disqualify someone he specifically cited as a hero who was not killed in combat as deserving of such treatment. But first, some lowlights from McClellan's original column (HT The Blaze; bolds are mine throughout this post):

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is at it again, telling us peons that we're not deserving of our full measure of yet another freedom, this time to express ourselves.

As reported by Dana Rubenstein at CapitalNewYork.com (HT The Blaze), "As it turns out, Bloomberg, the highest-profile cheerleader for New York City's burgeoning tech scene, doesn't really like the social media revolution upon which much of it is premised." Excerpts after the jump reveal that Bloomberg wants tech, but only on his terms:

Apparently the journalistic disease known as obsessive-compulsive interactive map publishing is spreading.

Late last year, Gannett's Journal News in White Plains, New York created a firestorm when it published an interactive map of gun permit holders in two counties north of New York City, obviously giving criminals, depending on how they target victims, the identity of places to rob to get guns or, by inference, people they could be comfortable wouldn't be carrying concealed weapons. On Wednesday evening, the Des Moines Register published an item still present on its site discussing the general degree of presence or absence of resource officers at Iowa schools. It also published a "handy" interactive map, since taken down, of which schools have resource officers, which ones don't, and which ones didn't respond to a survey on the topic. Excerpts from the report follow the jump (HT Newsmax via The Blaze):

One of the more interesting things regarding the coverage of the Supreme Court hearing two cases regarding gay marriage has been the lack of reporting on the thousands of individuals who marched on Tuesday in support of traditional marriage.

If you only got your news from the Washington Post, you'd have no clue that the march happened at all, as in two separate pieces both authors ignore the significance of the march, which attracted thousands of traditional marriage supporters.

On February 28, though he hedged a bit, Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, wrote the following about prospects for economic growth: "The only impediment may be the across-the-board government spending cuts that kick in Friday — especially if those cuts remain in place for months."

Having established the template, the self-described Essential Global News Network has apparently decided that they need to do all they can to promote it. After today's sharp decline in consumer confidence as reported by the Conference Board, AP reporter Marcy Gordon's related dispatch opened with a whine about "massive government spending cuts," tried to reinforce her claim in a later paragraph, and saved contradictory information for an even later one (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Letting down her guard on the Lean Forward network, Politico's Lois Romano, ostensibly an objective journalist, descended into biased -- and racially conscious -- commentary.  Appearing on MSNBC’s NewsNation on March 25, Romano made disparaging comments of the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.

Speaking with host Tamron Hall -- who happens to be African-American -- Romano suggested that Wayne LaPierre is, “looking like a tired old white guy that is clinging on to something of the past.”  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.] 

Searches at the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times done at 9:30 p.m. on "Obama Arafat" (not in quotes) returned nothing relevant to the matter I am about to note. A Google News search on the same term (sorted by date) returns only about a half-dozen relevant items (another very recent one is missing, and I'll get that one in a later post this evening).

On Thursday in Ramallah, as Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard blog noted, U.S. President Barack Obama "addressed the assembled journalists while standing under a Yasser Arafat banner." Arafat is rightly considered the “father of modern terrorism.” Since U.S. establishment press coverage is non-existent, I'll take readers to an outraged Nile Gardiner at the UK Telegraph to express how utterly offensive Obama's silently condoning Arafat's legitimacy really is:

As hard as the establishment press has worked over the years to make certain politicians appear to be somehow out of touch with the situation of average Americans, you might think that two legislative leaders complaining about cuts in their Congressional offices' allowance might be news. One whined that her aides, some of whom "earn" in excess of $100,000 per year, are being "priced out" of a good lunch on Capitol Hill.

Don't be silly. The press only cares about making Republicans and conservatives appear out of touch. The complainers in question are Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also heads the Democratic National Committee, and longtime Democratic Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia. The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard noted Schultz's and Moran's whining on Wednesday:

Today, on the third anniversary of the enactment of state-managed healthcare, aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka ObamaCare, it's worth noting a precursor of what we can expect from the establishment press as the law's implementation presses on. It can be summed up in eight words: "Hype the alleged good. Ignore the obviously bad." Distilled in four words: "Toe the administration line."

Two examples of how the press is ignoring the obviously bad came from the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, in its March 6 caoverage of the contents of the Federal Reserve's "beige book" released that day. The Fed's report contained five specific comments, four of them negative and one neutral, about the current and imminent impact of ObamaCare. None made it into either AP report. Many other outlets also ignored or minimized those comments.

Much of the press is describing the EU's demand that Cyprus seize a portion of bank account holders' deposits, a demand rejected yesterday by the island nation's legislature, as a "tax."

I think it's reasonable to suggest that this characterization is designed to minimize the frightening authoritarianism the EU has just attempted. In a bit of a pleasant surprise, one organization openly calling the move an attempt at "seizure" is the Associated Press.

At the Washington Post's Post Politics blog on Monday, Juliet Eilperin revealed that the White House has notified participants invited to the April 1 Easter Egg Roll that the event "is subject to cancellation due to funding uncertainty surrounding the Executive Office of the President and other federal agencies."

Eilperin only considered the White House's latest obvious example of "no petty and partisan gesture left behind" a partisan matter when a Republican who hasn't held political office for 15 years objected (bolds are mine):

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its 2013 pity party -- er, annual report -- on the State of the News Media (home page; full overview).

Two things struck me in my initial scan-through: First, the whining about newsroom cutbacks, which are largely related to pervasive bias and misplaced priorities; second, the characterization of newsmakers' improved ability to take their cases directly to the public "without any filter by the traditional media" as some kind of automatically negative trend.

In Monday's New York Times, in a report which appeared online late Sunday, reporters Richard W. Stevenson and John Harwood devoted considerable space to the idea that President Obama's latest "outreach" effort is primarily an attempt to "salvage a big deficit-reduction deal," and not a political ploy to show voters in the 2014 congressional elections that he's really interested in achieving a compromise when no genuine desire exists.

Steven Hayes at the Weekly Standard believes it's the latter ("For Obama, It's All About 2014"), as should anyone, probably including the reporters just cited, who is on the mailing list of Obama's permanent campaign known as Organizing For Action. On Thursday, three days before the Times reporters tried to convince America that Obama is in deal-making mode, OFA, which self-evidently tailors its message to the White House's true desire went into over-the-top scaremongering mode in an email from proven prevaricator Stephanie Cutter (bolds are mine):

President Obama's sequester-related press briefing on March 1 contained the usual fibs. Examples include but are certainly not limited to the following: "We've already cut $2.5 trillion in our deficit," when the entire amount involved is something which might happen in the future; his claim that his State of the Union laundry list "is the agenda that the American people voted for," when many of the items involved were never mentioned during the 2012 campaign; and that the sequester is "happening because of a choice that Republicans in Congress have made," despite the fact that his advisers with his personal approval originated the idea in 2011 and the reality that he was under no compulsion when he signed the bill setting it in place last week.

Since then, while the establishment press has largely ignored it, the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler has twice honed in on a relatively small but clearly refutable statement Obama uttered that day: "Starting tomorrow, everybody here, all the folks who are cleaning the floors at the Capitol ... they're going to have less pay. The janitors, the security guards, they just got a pay cut, and they've got to figure out how to manage that. That’s real." No it's not.

I assume no one expected that Bob Woodward would be found to be the first and only ordinarily Democrat-friendly recipient of threats from White House officials over what he has written and said.

Another such person has come forward in the name of Lanny Davis, who among other things was a completely insufferable defender of the indefensible during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky-impeachment saga in 1998 and 1999. The morning, on Washington radio station WMAL (audio is at the link), Davis said that his editor at the Washington Times received a threat as a result of what Davis was writing there:

On Saturday, Washington Post reporters Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane fretted, with the help of several leftists they quoted, that sequestration might not cause enough pain. Given that the so-called "cuts" under discussion are really "reductions in projected spending growth," that is a legitimate fear if your perspective is that government shouldn't ever shrink under any circumstances.

Rush Limbaugh was correct on Tuesday when he noted that the Post let the "sky is falling" mask slip in it report. Several paragraphs, followed by a bit of Rush's reaction, follow the jump.

The rogue collection of bureaucrats known as the Environmental Protection Agency continues its lawless ways. The establishment press continues to serve as enablers.

In January, a federal court vacated the EPA's regulations mandating the use of cellulosic biofuels which weren't produced at all until last year, and barely exist now. In response, the agency, directly defying the court, increased the production requirement of these fuels for 2013. In covering the story, as I noted at NewsBusters on January 31, the Associated Press's Matt Daly only wrote that "An oil industry representative said the Obama administration was thumbing its nose at a ruling last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia" -- as if the agency's action was only a matter of some eeeevil oil guy's opinion.

It's hard to imagine that Nicholas Confessore and his editors at the overwhelmingly Obama-friendly New York Times were just making things up when he reported over the weekend in a Page A1 story that the Obama campaign's Organizing For America operation, now "rebooted" as the supposedly independent Organizing For Action, "will rely heavily on a small number of deep-pocketed donors ... whose influence on political campaigns Mr. Obama once deplored," granting them quarterly access to the Obama if they raise $500,000 or more.

According to Charlie Spiering at the Washington Examiner, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, when asked about the story, in Spiering's words, "asserted that OFA was an 'independent organization' that just happened to support the president’s policy agenda," "refused to address the New York Times reporting," and "ended the press briefing as reporters were still asking questions and fled the podium." If the late Tony Snow had done this while serving as press secretary under George W. Bush, we'd be seeing a continuous loop of the walkout on network TV all day long. The key paragraphs from the Times story, the reaction of MSNBC's Chuck Todd follow the jump, and the Associated Press's non-denial denial firewall follow the jump.

An Investor's Business Daily editorial on Friday confirmed a couple of items which seemed intuitively obvious but which I didn't prove on Thursday in my post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) about the Department of Labor's outrageous decision to grant unionized workers at now-liquidating Hostess Bakeries "Trade Adjustment Assistance" (TAA).

The first is that it will cost a lot of money, totaling an amount which appears to have a chance to come within striking distance of about half of the annual profits in the entire commercial baking industry. The second is that there is little if any evidence supporting DOL's finding that imports have seriously harmed the industry. Excerpts from that editorial (do read the whole blood-boiling thing), followed by a bit of analysis by yours truly, follow the jump.

In yesterday's Washington Post, Bob Woodward repeated what the essence of what he wrote about sequestration in his book, “The Price of Politics.”

Why? Because leftist media stooges like MSNBC's Chuck Todd, who is upset that conservatives and Republicans are "begging the media to say it's Obama that started the sequester, not them" (well, in general, Chuck, we'd like to see you tell the truth, but we've long since given up expecting it, let alone begging for it) insist on claiming that it was a Republican idea. It wasn't. Woodward re-elaborates (internal links are in original; bolds are mine):

On Friday February 22, the Washington Post took a double-barreled approach to pushing more gun control In a 52-paragraph front-page story, staff writer Stephanie McCrummen highlighted the efforts of anti-gun activist Susan Beehler, a North Dakota woman “going against the gun culture” in the Roughrider State. Elsewhere in the A-section, staffer Philip Rucker devoted 23 paragraphs to boosting Vice President Biden's push for gun control.

McCrummen's article began by promoting Beehler as, “one activist challenging the status quo.”  Beehler, who herself admits she does not own a gun, started the North Dakota chapter of the Million Moms for Gun Control group, and McCrummen went through a plethora of examples of her efforts to, “find a few other brave souls” to push for greater gun control.

The New York Times Company, owners of the Boston Globe newspaper, is once again trying to find someone to take the struggling Massachusetts newspaper off its hands.

The Times previously tried to sell the Globe in 2009 but canceled the sale process after it received concessions from is unions (love the irony there).

Yesterday, the Department of Labor announced that it had certified "more than 18,000 former Hostess workers around the country as eligible to apply for Trade Adjustment Assistance." I'll save excerpts from DOL's inane announcement for after the jump.

The story has garnered some local coverage in areas affected by Hostess plant closures late last year, including a couple of regional Associated Press stories. But the AP, based on a search on "hostess," did not have a story at its national site as of 9 a.m. today, even though former Hostess workers in 48 states are affected. Additionally, virtually every story found in a Google News search on "Hostess trade adjustment" (not in quotes) is local in nature. Could this possibly be because doling out tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to workers whose unions thought the company was bluffing when it said it would throw in the towel without acceptable labor contracts is more than a little embarrassing, especially when President Barack Obama is simultaneously claiming that the federal government will have no choice but to lay off and furlough employees if sequestration takes place?

This goes back about ten days, and I originally missed it. Fortunately, though, an Investor's Business Daily editorial got around to mentioning Rick Perry's visit to California last week in an effort to lure businesses to the more commerce-friendly environs of Texas.

Associated Press report Juliet Williams and her story's headline writer were not amused by Perry's aggressiveness. Williams seemed to be bucking to have her picture placed next to the words "petty" and "vindictive" in the dictionary. Several paragraph from her February 11 coverage of Perry's visit to the formerly Golden State follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post):

My nominee for Media Puppet of the Day (we should consider making such an award a daily or weekly event) is Kathleen Hennessey at the Los Angeles Times.

From her perch at the paper's Washington bureau, she wrote a pathetic story today about how President Obama is so much more relaxed now that he's in his second term. Among other howlers, Hennessey claims that "Obama's vacations have been rare, brief and regularly interrupted by crises at home and overseas." Key paragraphs -- as many as I think readers will be able to stand, and no more -- follow the jump (HT to NB commenter Gary Hall at another post; bolds are mine):

On Sunday, 35,000 protestors marched on the Washington Mall urging President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, giving the Washington Post’s Steven Mufson ample space to hype the march.  In the 20 paragraph expose, the Post fails to label the protestors as liberal once and does not include any quotes from supporters of the pipeline, instead choosing to hype their global warming hysteria.  

Instead, the article is peppered with liberal quotes, while criticizing President Obama from the left:

Leaders of the rally said they wanted to press Obama to follow up on the strong rhetoric in his inaugural address about the need to slow climate change.  The official posters at the rally borrowed Obama’s campaign slogan “forward.”  The read: “Mr. President, Forward-on Climate.”