Media Business

Current TV isn’t just largely unwatched in America. Mimi Turner at The Hollywood Reporter notes its horrible ratings in the United Kingdom are causing BSkyB to drop them. “Co-founder and CEO Joel Hyatt has launched an astonishing attack on the Rupert Murdoch-backed pay TV platform, accusing it of shutting down the channel in an act politically motivated by News Corporation.” It sounded just like Al Gore when Current TV got the ax in Italy.

“Sky is shutting down an intelligent alternative to mass market programming,” said Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current Media. In Britain, the land of the liberal BBC and just recently, PBS UK? Hyatt continued his Murdoch-bashing: “By doing so, Sky is once again discriminating in favor of the networks it owns and the points of view News Corporation agrees with.”

"Using common sense," a skeptical news consumer can see right through the liberal media ripping Mitt Romney's "fire people" comment out of context, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Fox News's Neil Cavuto on the January 10 "Your World."

"What you conclude is, here we go again, what did he really say?" Bozell added, noting that Romney was talking about the need to open up "competition in the [health insurance] market." [video posted below page break; MP3 audio here]

Doubling down on its commitment to left-wing programming, MSNBC announced today that Nation magazine columnist and Tulane professor Melissa Harris-Perry will anchor a new weekend program starting on February 4.

Harris-Perry has been a frequent contributor on MSNBC's dayside programming, where she's been a reliable liberal pundit, offering up such gems as arguing that it's immoral for government to lay off bureaucrats:

As surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, it seemed inevitable that moonbat cable news personality Keith Olbermann would soon do something to sour his relationship with his current employer, obscure cable channel Current TV. After all, he still remains the same man who famously spent days in the bathroom in fits of rage rather than report for work.

We don't know what that something was, but it appears that the former ESPN-MSNBC-Fox Sports-MSNBC anchor has managed to commit it for, as noted by New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter, Olbermann does not appear to be part of the channel's lineup to cover the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary election. Instead, viewers will be treated to performances by Current's usual stable of failed politicians and MSNBC rejects:

Every year a panel of leading conservative media observers and experts picks the most-biased media quotes for the Media Research Center’s annual awards for the year’s “worst reporting.” And these judges have done so.

But earlier this week, we let our fans and all concerned about liberal media bias to also participate via a separately-compiled Web ballot. More than 3,000 MediaResearch.org and NewsBusters.org visitors took part. Now you can see which quotes were judged the “worst” of the year in this online ballot.

"You know, we have a saying in the military: You don't receive flak unless you're over the target," retired Army colonel Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) told NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell in an interview earlier this week.

"I think that too often on the Republican side of the House" that conservatives have been gun-shy about "taking the flak" from the liberal media for their conservatism. "When you start to water down your message, when you start to say I can maybe get the other side to really like me, then you get yourself in trouble" and the liberal media are "going to hate you anyway," West added. [see video of the interview embedded below the page break]

Suggest that infrequent churchgoer Barack Obama may not really be a sincere from-the-heart Christian and MSNBC's anchors will be chief among the media pack to denounce you for questioning the president's religious faith.

But when it comes to Herman Cain, MSNBC's Martin Bashir is comfortable not merely charging the presidential contender as a hypocrite but suggesting he's headed to Hell (MP3 audio here; video follows page break).

Amidst all the media coverage of Rep. Barney Frank's (Mass.) retirement from the U.S. House of Representatives, the media largely praised the retiring Democrat while overlooking the scandals of his tenure in office and his crucial support to government policies that helped fuel the housing bubble, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told viewers of the December 1 edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity.

"Why isn't anyone in the media talking about the obvious? This is a man who single-handedly presided over the collapse" of the U.S. housing industry, Bozell reminded host Sean Hannity in the popular recurring "Media Mash" segment. "Barney Frank in  2003 fought George Bush when he tried to do something about it." [video of the full segment follows page break]

"The media loves the idea of being able to push someone out of the race by saying they're dead," not because they want to show off they are political prognosticating geniuses but simply because they want to push them out of the race, NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham noted on today's Your World program on Fox News.

"I think you can really hear this with Cain" as we're now into "day three" of the media pushing Cain to drop out of the 2012 race, Graham told anchor Neil Cavuto.

With penetrating political analysis like this, no wonder Ed Schultz has been named one of the least influential people alive . . .

On his MSNBC show this evening, discussing the recall effort in Wisconsin, Schultz said that Republican Governor Scott Walker "sucks." Video after the jump.

There was little doubt when Martin Bashir started his mid-afternoon gig at MSNBC in February that he'd be another left-of-center anchor in the show's afternoon lineup, although to what extent the British-born reporter would be a fierce partisan bulldog was uncertain. The past few months, as we've noted, the former rugby player has displayed pugnacious partisanship, at one point ridiculously calling on John Boehner and Eric Cantor to resign if they refuse to give ground on raising taxes.

It's now reached the point where Bashir's mean-spirited, unbridled raw partisanship is not going unnoticed or unchallenged by his guests. Today Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus quipped that Bashir "should be writing ads for the Democratic National Committee" after the MSNBC anchor kicked off a panel discussion with her and Democratic strategist Julian Epstein thusly:

Will Herman Cain ever catch on that certain subjects -- such as the alleged sanctity of Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas -- are no joking matter? (video and audio clips after page break)

You Tube is launching a series of nearly 100 new channels. The set of new channels is laden with liberal voices and controversial material, and is practically devoid of conservative and Christian voices.

Liberal-leaning channels include offerings from sources such as Slate, The Chopra Well (with Deepak Chopra, a New Age guru and Huffington Post contributor), and Take Part TV (makers of Al Gore's 2006 global warming scare documentary ''An Inconvenient Truth'').

Those prestigious publishers at Simon & Schuster selected All Saints Day to unleash the book world's latest attempt at mocking Christianity. It’s called "The Last Testament, by God."

The author is David Javerbaum, a top writer for 11 years for "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, perhaps America's leading religion-hating TV network. Is it any surprise that the critics are loving it?

October 20 marked the second annual "Spirit Day" thrown by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Debate (GLAAD). They say the D stands for Defamation, but they've been very aggressive in pressuring media outlets to refuse to grant time to any conservative guest that dares to question the gay agenda. To celebrate "Spirit Day," GLAAD encouraged the news and entertainment media to wear purple to show their leftist support -- ostensibly for the "LGBT" youth and against bullying, and boy, did they show it.

TVNewser reports two of three evening news anchors -- NBC's Brian Williams and ABC fill-in George Stephanopoulos -- wore purple, and there was even more gay-alliance violet on the morning shows:

Incoming NPR president Gary Knell smugly dismissed NPR critics in an interview with James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times. "If you listen over a period of time you hear voices from all ends of the political spectrum on NPR," Knell argued. "I think a lot of the critics, by what they say, don't even listen to the service." (Dear Mr. Smug: read the NPR section of NewsBusters, with links to your transcripts.)

That's not the only smug echo among the NPR rookies. Another line is that conservatives (or people who agree there's a liberal tilt) aren't the "real listeners," the "core audience" of NPR -- even if they're "core" funders through taxes. That's what new NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos said in an interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation on October 11:

Update (10:00 EDT, Oct. 20): CNBC has an update/correction on the story:

<<Update: On Wednesday evening, a Department of Energy spokesman said that the press releases had been returned to their original content as a result of CNBC's inquiry about the changes.

Correction: A previous headline on this article incorrectly characterized the press releases as being related to Solyndra.>>

Is the Obama administration literally rewriting history when it comes to the Solyndra scandal Energy Department's solar energy loan programs?

"Someone affiliated with the Department of Energy has been going back to make changes to press releases posted on the Internet weeks and months ago," Eamon Javers of CNBC reported this afternoon.

Two more shoes dropped in the Solyndra scandal today, but it remains to be seen their sound will stir the sleepy liberal lapdog media.

Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison resigned last Friday, the Associated Press reported early this afternoon.

Oh, and while the media of late have cheerleading the Democratic push for a new surtax on millionaires, don't expect the news media, particularly MSNBC, to note how a key Obama donor who pushed for the Solyndra loan has been delinquent on his evaded federal taxes for years. As Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott noted this morning:

As the Occupy Everything crowd marches in dozens of cities nationwide, it’s obvious their goal is nothing less than “global revolution.” It’s the phrase that headlines the live video feed. It’s the sentiment that flows through their entire series of events – from signs to guest speakers. Egyptian speaker Mohammed Ezzeldin encouraged the crowd with comments such as “We have nothing to lose but our chains,” and “Long live revolution.” One-time comedienne Roseanne Barr simply called for bankers to be “beheaded.”

But anarchists, socialists, anti-capitalists and Hollywood idiots chanting “Vive la revolution” isn’t big news. What is news is that the news industry is behind them. This isn’t simply the case of select individuals in journalism supporting the protests. They always do. The Washington Post ran four separate pro-Occupier op-eds in the Sunday Oct. 9, paper. And that’s just on one day. CNN’s Roland Martin called the protesters “American patriots.” The big news here is that two separate news unions, including the newspaper guild, the recognized union for many print and online journalists, and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) are fully behind the radical message of Occupy Wall Street.