Major Newspapers

"Barack Obama, have mercy on us!" cried the lepers of the newspaper media unto the president-elect. And lo, he spake unto them, saying, "Go, and print some more."

Noticing heavy demand for post-Election Day editions of major daily newspapers, Newsweek wondered of President-elect Obama, "Can He Save the Media?"

The subheader to Newsweek's front page tease promised a look at "[h]ow Obama has reinvigorated newsstand sales."

Yeah, and the Chicago Cubs "seem" not to have won a World Series for 100 years.

A Thursday afternoon Chicago Tribune story (HTs to Ace and Say Anything) by Rex W. Huppke covers the appearance of a new afterword in a book by former Weather Underground leader William Ayers.

Let's just roll the excerpt:

In a new afterword to his memoir, 1960s radical William Ayers describes himself as a "family friend" of President-elect Barack Obama and writes that the campaign controversy over their relationship was an effort by Obama's political enemies to "deepen a dishonest narrative" about the candidate.

Wednesday evening's dour Associated Press report by Tom Krisher and Ken Thomas on the proposed bailouts of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler acted as if their fates will determine the viability of the entire US auto industry, and waited until the 15th paragraph to name the primary reason why the companies are where they are financially. Beyond that, the AP report did not mention that United Auto Workers has flatly ruled out union contract concessions.

Here is how the AP's report began, followed by selected other paragraphs, including the one (of over 30) that mentioned labor costs (bolds after headline are mine):

The litmus test results are in: If you're against the legalization of same-sex marriage and are discovered, you can't be involved in the performing arts in California, even though the majority of potential patrons in your state agree with you.

Under the pressure of a threatened boycott, the artistic director of a Sacramento theater has stepped down after it was learned that he contributed to Yes side ("yes, same-sex marriage should be prohibited") of the supposedly Golden State's Proposition 8 campaign.

Here's the opening of the Sacramento Business Journal's story (links were in original):

Scott Eckern, artistic director of the California Musical Theatre, is resigning his post and leaving the organization.

A boycott of the theater was called Tuesday by some in the national arts community when news broke that Eckern contributed $1,000 to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign, which supported the ban on gay marriage.

Matthew Vadum (Right) Speaking Truth to Flower PowerAs Bill Cosby said via Fat Albert and the Gang, it's like school on Saturday: No class.

NewsBusters.org Contributor, the estimable Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center, made an October 30th appearance on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, during which he discussed the many illegal activities of the community organizing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and their long relationship with the media's all-time favorite candidate: Illinois Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama.  Soon thereafter, Mr. Vadum changed his Facebook Profile photograph to one of him hamming it up with his Daily Show interlocutor John Oliver. 

This was all too much for New York Times reporter Dan Mitchell.  Mitchell sent Mr. Vadum a poison Halloween Facebook email, which is hostile from start to finish and in which he calls Mr. Vadum the aforementioned body part.

The Mitchell email in its entirety, with the one word redacted so as to maintain our G-rating:

Give them credit for noticing. Pass out demerits for incompleteness.

Friday's USA Today carried a slightly inaccurate Page 1A tease ("Iraq is safer for US troops; October is on track to tie July for the month with fewest combat deaths"). It went to a top of Page 7A story ("US Deaths in Iraq on track for record low") that noticed how relatively well the month of October has gone for our troops in Iraq. That still is the case, with hours to go in the calendar month in Iraq. Reporter Charles Levinson even noticed that there have been no hostile US troop deaths in Baghdad during the entire month.

But Levinson missed the opportunity to notice even better longer-term results in Iraq. He also failed to notice that coalition troop deaths in Afghanistan, again with hours to go until the end of the month, are less than half of that seen in previous months. Finally, he didn't catch this remarakable fact, given the gloom that seems to abound over the supposedly intractable situation in Afghanistan -- Combined theater troop deaths in October have been the lowest in over four years. (Straight zeroes everywhere would, of course, be ideal.)

Here are the key paragraphs from Levinson's report:

Al Neuharth's Friday mini-column in USA Today should have been in a section the paper doesn't have: the comics.

Neuharth claimed that today's newspapers play the news straight, while in the "olden days" they didn't.

Put down all drinks before reading (bolds are mine):

Fewer newspapers try to dictate votes
Plain Talk by Al Neuharth

More newspaper bosses across the USA have wised up to the fact that you readers are smart enough to decide who to vote for in Tuesday's election. Newspapers making presidential editorial endorsements this year likely will be the lowest percentage ever. Editor & Publisher, the trade journal, compiles the numbers.

On Tuesday, Editor & Publisher released daily and Sunday newspaper circulation figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations as of September 30, along with percentage changes from the preceding year. Showing that the press can't even report accurately about itself E&P's accompanying commentary vastly understated the situation:

Most Major Papers Continue Circ Decline

According to ABC for the 507 newspapers reporting in this period, daily circulation slipped 4.6% to 38,165,848 copies. For the 571 papers, Sunday dropped 4.8% to 43,631,646 copies.

For comparison purposes, in September 2007 reporting period, daily circ fell 2.6% and Sunday was down 4.6%.

"Most"? Try "Virtually All." The daily figures show that all but two of the top 25 papers lost circulation during the previous 12 months (USA today and he Wall Street Journal both gained a "whopping" 0.01%). Only the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, at +0.80%, gained on Sundays. E&P's commentary cited precious few tiny increases at non-Top 25 papers.

If you think the one-year news is bad, check out what has happened during the past five:

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported today that former Republican Governor Arne Carlson (Minn.) has endorsed Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's presidential bid. Carlson heralded himself as a "Republican maverick" and hailed Obama as a potentially "truly great president." Tribune staffer Mike Kaszuba failed to label Carlson's ideology, but suggested in the second paragraph of his October 23 article that Carlson saw himself in the lineage of "the moderate philosophies of past Republican leaders such as Ohio Sen. Robert Taft and President Dwight Eisenhower."

Left unmentioned by the Tribune's Mike Kaszuba was that Carlson -- who was governor from 1991 to 1999 -- had a left-of-center record, particularly early in his tenure when he hiked taxes and pushed government-run health care.

From the libertarian Cato Institute's January 1994 Fiscal Policy Report Card, wherein Carlson was given a failing grade of "D" (emphasis mine):

The Media Research Center's Director of Communications and NewsBusters.org Contributing Editor Seton Motley appeared on the Fox News Channel's Fox News Live yesterday to discuss another New York Times hit job on the McCains, this one on wife Cindy.

Included in the Times outrages was co-author Jodi Kantor contacting friends of the McCains's youngest daughter Bridgette via Facebook email "trying to get a sense of what she is like as a mother."

Motley decries the Times sleazy, sub-tabloid tactics, points out their total fealty to Michelle Obama in a June profile and delineates the proper bounds to be observed in what is and is not fair game for the media regarding the spouses and families of candidates.

Story after story on the full-year results for the federal budget refers to the size of the full-year deficit for the fiscal year that just ended on September 30 ($455 billion), and how it compares to last year's deficit ($162 billion).

Almost none of them talk about why the deficit ballooned.

I wonder why?

Could it be because the Democrat-controlled Congress of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid allowed spending to spiral out of control?

Yes it could:

The son of an 8-term Democratic congressman from Illinois has pleaded guilty to having sex with jail inmates under his charge, the Chicago Sun-Times News Group reported today. Yet the congressman's Democratic Party affiliation was left out of the story altogether:

The son of U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush will spend six months in jail after pleading guilty to having sexual encounters with two female inmates and arranging encounters with another while serving as a state prison official.

Jeffrey M. Rush, 42, of the 700 block of Brookfield Court in Lake Zurich, pleaded guilty Wednesday to three counts of official misconduct and agreed to a sentence of 180 days in the Kane County Jail and three years probation, according to a release from the Kane County State’s Attorney’s office.

Two of the charges stem from sexual relationships Rush had with two female prison inmates between Feb. 1 and June 18, 2007, while he was serving as head of security at the Fox Valley Adult Transition Center at 1329 Lake St. in Aurora, the release said.

Rep. Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther, was first elected to the House in 1992.

Poor Karl Ritter and Matt Moore of the Associated Press must have a lot of time to kill, a dearth of ideas, and a studied disinterest in accuracy as they await the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics in Stockholm, Sweden on Monday. A list of past winners is here. 

Besides lamenting that no woman has ever won the Economics Prize (so?), the AP pair felt the need to relate the financial bailout passed by Congress and signed by the President a week ago, and the current steep stock market decline that followed it (or, as yours truly and Investors Business Daily would argue, occurred because of it), to who might win the award.

Along the way, they, as AP reporters are wont to do, erred, and quite seriously.

Here's how their report, weirdly entitled "Amid the meltdown, economics Nobel no easy pick," began (bold is mine):

On August 27, 1996, in the midst of that year's Democratic National Convention in the Windy City, the Chicago Tribune had interesting news (posted in full at my web host for fair use and discussion purposes) about what was then a new Internet initiative.

That Tribune story serves to confirm why the distancing from and supposed ignorance of the past activities of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn by presidential candidate Barack Obama and other members of the Democratic Party ring very hollow.

James Coates's Tribune piece begins with an all-too-typical whitewash of the pair's violent past. But what's revealing is what Ayers and Dohrn were involved with, and who else was involved with them (bolds are mine):

Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers took to the streets 28 years ago to protest what they considered the injustices in the world, especially the war in Vietnam.

The former leaders of the Weather Underground still are fighting injustice, but--adapting to the changing landscape of American politics--their current arena is the World Wide Web.

There has been an unreality in the reports on the falling stock markets for at least the past 10 days. Each day's plunge seems to have been exclusively due to the "global economic crisis" and/or the supposed "freeze on credit."

Oddly enough, the admittedly small bank where I have my business accounts is having absolutely no problem funding mortgage, home-equity, and other loan applications from qualified borrowers -- a fact I confirmed just before posting this entry. With all due respect to the global business press, if there's truly a "freeze," how can that be?

I've put forth an alternative explanation to the media meme a couple of times this week myself, but an editorial at IBDeditorials.com yesterday brought out a major element of what I have been saying much more forcefully and articulately. Remarkably, though the possibility seems pretty obvious to me, and I suspect many others, I have seen no one in the business press covering daily market events even mention the obvious and quite likely alternative that follows.

The editorial, "Investors' Real Fear: A Socialist Tsunami," teases with the plaintive question, "What is it about the specter of our first socialist president and the end of capitalism as we know it that they don't understand?"

The editorial's body begins thusly:

A former San Francisco Supervisor pleaded guilty Friday to three felonies Friday that go to the fundamental integrity of city operations.

Both the Associated Press's Paul Elias and the San Francisco Chronicle's Wyatt Buchanan did not see fit to name the party of Ed Jew, who is, naturally, a Democrat.

Interesting, Jew attributes his downfall to the examples of others, and, according to Buchanan, "is prepared to name others who he says have engaged in similar actions." Though there's clearly an element of personal responsibility avoidance at play here, it's nonetheless worth noting that AP and Buchanan still had no interest in learning where Jew picked up what Elias described as "lessons taught by other politicians."

Here are the first five paragraphs of the AP story:

Old Media's coverage of the recently-lifted executive and congressional bans on offshore exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas largely overlooked an important element that should have been very relevant to the discussion.

Supporters of lifting the bans surely share much of the blame for only rarely citing it. Though they have frequently noted the hundreds of billions of dollars a years annually sent overseas to pay for oil that could have been extracted here, they have mostly missed a golden opportunity to tell the American people what over a quarter-century of drilling bans has cost the government and taxpayers. They also generally failed to tell us about the windfall that awaits if the end of the offshore and other bans finally leads to appropriately aggressive use of this country's God-given resources.

But if we had inquisitive financial reporters in the business press who were interested in information relevant to the "Drill Baby Drill" debate instead of merely repackaging the press releases they received from those on both sides (the sole exception I found was this Wall Street Journal editorial), many more Americans would have long ago learned about what follows.

Congressman John Peterson (R-PA) has assembled information about this. The numbers are stunning.

If Old Media can cook their numbers to make their favored candidate look good, they will.

Earlier today, I covered two cooked AP-GfK polls (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog). The pollster dramatically changed the party-ID makeup of the second poll to include a much higher percentage of Democrats, and watered down the strong-GOP component of the Republicans sampled. As a result, the two poll results, taken together, fabricated an illusion of Barack Obama momentum, and John McCain decline. The results couldn't be more bogus; holding the mix constant from one poll to the next would have caused John McCain's lead from three weeks ago to shrink by about 1%.

Its also seems that if Old Media can't use a poll to fabricate its way to the result it wants, it simply ignores it. Two examples from the same poll will demonstrate this.

On Wednesday, NewsBusters' Scott Whitlock noted that ABC ignored its own national poll conducted with the Washington Post that showed a 4% national edge for Barack Obama -- down from 9% the previous week.

Yesterday, the Washington Post's Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta didn't totally ignore the poll (full results are here). Like ABC, they ignored the topside result just mentioned, which is pictured below:

As I write this on Monday afternoon, the People's House has rejected "the $700 billion bailout."

You won't believe, unless you're a very experienced cynic, where that $700 billion figure came from.

The answer appears to be "out of nowhere."

With no basis.

I'm not kidding.

Here's the evidence, carried six whole days ago at Forbes (HT LAT's Top of the Ticket Blog via BizzyBlog commenter Dan Scott):

What if I told you that sheriffs and prosecutors in, say, Indiana, had formed "truth squads" and "subtly" threatened prosecutions of critics of John McCain?

Does anyone think that the New York Times, Washington Post and Old Media in general wouldn't be putting the news on the front page, even with the bailout-apalooza going on in Washington?

Well, there is a "truth squad." It's in Missouri. It includes prosecutors and sheriffs. Oh, and they have formed their truth squad to threaten and intimidate the critics of ..... Barack Obama.

Here is a transcript of a report from station KMOW in St. Louis (first 1:45 of vid; HT Gateway Pundit) that may leave you wondering whatever happened to the country we once knew:

The Associated Press apparently isn't satisfied going after Sarah Palin full throttle.

The GOP Vice-Presidential nominee's visit to New York City apparently went so well that an ABC pictorial series is called "Sarah Palin Takes News York" -- though the last slide takes a shot at the McCain campaign for setting boundaries on access to Palin during her meetings with foreign leaders. ABC claims that the media threatened to boycott covering her (yeah, right).

Both the New York Times and the AP chose to address Palin's observation that her parents had involvement in the recovery effort in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. In a surprisingly pleasant development, the Times's story covered that angle reasonably well. But the AP's story (as carried at the Times web site), was incomplete, nasty ("rat-killers"), and condescending.

Here's how the Times's coverage started:

This post updates primary work done by the Chicago Sun-Times in July (accompanying video is here), this September 7 post at NewsBusters, and two related posts (here and here) at BizzyBlog. Graphics are mostly courtesy of NewsBusters commenter "tnculp." Hat tips go to all who tipped me to the news.

In a Thursday story by Chris Fusco and Dave McKinney that has been linked by Drudge, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on the latest developments relating to what was supposed to be a Barack Obama-sponsored $1.1 million botanical garden in an economically blighted area on the South Side of Chicago -- complete with "a gazebo, a parrot sanctuary, and a walk of fame."

While an Illinois state senator in 2001, Obama, as the Sun-Times reported in July, "gave $100,000 in state money to a campaign volunteer who failed to deliver" on the initial phase of the work or to garner additional community funds, leaving "what was supposed to be a six-block stretch of trees and paths ..... a field of unfulfilled dreams, strewn with weeds, garbage and broken pavement."

Now Illinois' Attorney General is investigating, and has determined where much of the money went -- sort of (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air noted a revision to an existing Associated Press report carried in the Miami Herald yesterday. It concerned Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius's accusations that Republicans are engaging in racial "code word" campaigning.

The original version that Morrissey cached is here; the revision is here (for now; backup is at my web host here if it changes).

Among other adds, changes, and deletes, the revision deleted a racial reference in the original headline. It also removed a direct quote from Sebelius that "(Republicans) are not going to go lightly into the darkness."

Morrissey wasn't sure at the time he noted the revision whether the Herald or AP and writer Nigel Duara (with editorial help?) instigated the changes.

I can tell you that, as expected, it was AP, as the two Google News search pics taken during the noon hour Eastern Time show:

It has already been established (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) that the Obama campaign's ad ridiculing John McCain's computer skills, including the claim that McCain "can't e-mail," has several reality-based problems:

• McCain has been an e-mail devotee since 2000, if not earlier, receiving help from a loving spouse to respond to messages, and was described by Forbes Magazine that year as "the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist."
• The reason McCain gets help with e-mail is that his severe war injuries prevent him from doing many things many of us take for granted, including typing on a keyboard.
• Further, the current and previous Oval Office occupants have rarely used e-mail -- the former because he never learned how while in office, the latter because of legal considerations. Future occupants will likely be, and probably should be, similarly constrained.

So it's as clear as can be that Obama's ad is wrong and, intentionally or not, very mean to a man whose physical challenges are a result of beyond-the-call service to our country.

Beyond all that, Kevin Aylward at Wizbang has noted that McCain's 2000 presidential run was effusively praised as a groundbreaking high-tech campaign by a Democratic Internet pioneer in a 2005 book.

John Stephenson at NewsBusters early this morning asked, “Will (the) Media Report Obama’s Mocking of McCain’s Disability?”

The answer is "I doubt it," at least beyond their blogs. Print edition or televised examples will be rare to non-existent.

Two other pertinent items will also probably be ignored:

• Bill Clinton's acknowledged lack of tech skills and virtual non-use of e-mail.
• More important, the high likelihood that the next President of the United States, like his two predecessors, will rarely, if ever, use e-mail.

NB commenter "mikej" at Stephenson's post did some web searching a falsely giddy Team Obama apparently didn't have the time for (or do they not know how?). "mikej" found the following January 28, 2004 CNN Reuters item carried at CNN.com about Bill Clinton's nearly non-existent e-mailing during his presidency (bolds after title are mine):

I guess if the press can't find anything substantive to throw up against Sarah Palin, making stuff up will have to do.

A front-page article by the Washington Post's Anne Kornblut crows over what the reporter claims is a gaffe by GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin:

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 -- Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The idea that Iraq shared responsibility with al-Qaeda for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself.

"Good Morning America" on Monday featured liberal New York Times columnist Tom Friedman as an energy expert to "fact check" John McCain's policies on the subject and advocate for higher taxes. GMA co-host Diane Sawyer never referred to Friedman's economic policies as liberal, despite the fact that he repeatedly made assertions such as this: "But, you know, there's really no effective plan to make us energy independent without what I call a price signal, without either a carbon tax or a gasoline tax that's really going to shape the market in a different way."

Sawyer began the segment by noting both candidates have plans for energy independence. She then asked, "Are they going to achieve it? Do they mean it?" However, the ABC host didn't ask Friedman to "fact check" Obama's plan. Instead she simply recited the Democrat's plans for eliminating Mid East Oil. And while Friedman freely attacked McCain's policies, he responded to a clip of Obama talking about investing more money into alternative energy by, again, complaining about a lack of gasoline tax: "Unless we have a floor onto the price of gasoline that really keeps that behavior going, you can't throw enough money at this problem."

The media and the Obama campaign (but I repeat myself) are comparing the "experience" of'the Democrats' presidential nominee to that of the GOP's vice-presidential pick -- meaning, one must assume, that the debate over his experience vs. John McCain's is over, in McCain's resounding favor.

Let's look back a couple of months at a post I put up on July 14 (with minor revisions) that gives a, uh, concrete example of one of Barack Obama's management "experiences" -- one that the national media has (of course) totally ignored.

______________________________________________________

Barack Obama's $100,000 Gazebo

Here's an interesting story I found in the Chicago Tribune archives (obtained from ProQuest library database; for fair use and discussion purposes):

First, Bill Whittle at National Review Online.

That will be followed by observations of commenter "Tom W" (not yours truly) at Pajamas Media.

If they indeed reflect what is happening on the ground, you won't hear about it from the Associated Press, or read it in the New York Times, or see it on the Big Three Networks news or cable shows -- which is why it's so necessary to post items like this here. In fact, it's fair to say that if you were going to see commentary and commenting such as that which follows, it would have occurred already.

Here's just a taste (HT NixGuy) of what Whittle, whose columns are always read-the-whole thingers, had to say:

What do you do if you're the New York Times and you're faced with having to report on an incident-free soccer match in Iraq that had 40,000 in attendance?

Why, you bury it in a totally unrelated story about a bombing, omit any mention of it in the headline, and hope against hope that only a few readers bother to reach the seventh paragraph.

Here's how the report by Erica Goode and Stephen Farrell began: