Media Scandals

What should be front page news informing and warning Americans is going entirely unnoticed by the MSM. It couldn’t be any more obvious the media are in the tank for Obama. Stanley Kurtz asks, “where's the press”?

In “Something New Here,” I laid out Barack Obama’s ties to the far-left New Party. Blogger Trevor Loudon, of New Zeal, did the pioneering work on this issue. Today, Loudon has posted good quality scans of New Party documents and pictures confirming Obama’s membership. We’ve seen most of this information before (although only recently), but never so clearly.

"Meet the Press" interim moderator Tom Brokaw sits on the board of a liberal foundation that has given radical left-wing group ACORN $821,000 and that in turn is funded by liberal uber-donor George Soros, research reveals.

Conservatives have long considered Brokaw's political views to be somewhere on the left, but these revelations raise new questions about the former NBC News anchor's objectivity.

Here are the facts.

Brokaw sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that, according to its website, targets poverty in New York City by applying "sound investment principles to philanthropy." The foundation awarded ACORN a $456,000 grant in 2003 and a $365,000 grant in 2004. Brokaw does not appear to have played a role in the grants because he didn't become a member of the board until 2005 according to the guidestar.org database, but these are nevertheless the left-wing circles in which he travels.

Perhaps it's a bit much too expect from a blog that once dismissively her as a "Crazed, Christ-Loving Re-Virgin," but Gawker sure did take long enough to correct its reporting that attributed fake SAT scores in an anti-Sarah Palin photoshop to be those of blogger and Catholic author Dawn Eden. Last Friday the electronic gossip rag posted the photoshop and asked readers to judge for themselves if it was a fake or not.

[See Warner Todd Huston's related blog post on that here.]

In an early morning October 14 post at her Dawn Patrol blog, Eden noted that while Gawker corrected the record in the body of its October 13 blog, a misleading headline remained that insisted that "Sarah Palin's SAT Scores Actually Belong to Born-Again Virgin Dawn Eden." In truth, Eden's scores had been altered (view her actual SAT scores, available online here).

Writing at 12:30 a.m. today, Eden noted that the Gawker contributors that had the authority to change the headline had not yet done so:

Remember how the media had to play catch-up with the National Enquirer and blogs after rumors that begged for investigation were ignored?  Many enjoyed that.  Will the media repeat the same mistake again now that strong rumors are surfacing of an Obama affair?

The rumors are swirling, but I never heard them. The first I heard of them was in this preemptive defense calling them smears. Larry Johnson is talking this up, but he isn’t the most reliable source…however when Jammie Wearing Fool has info and predicts this will be a scoop I listen.

From Sharon Churcher’s preemptive defense piece:

Reprinted with full permission from Wake Up America:

The media has been busy reporting the “anger” of the conservatives at the McCain/Palin rallies, how supporters want McCain to get tougher on Obama and force Obama’s terrorist associations into the eyes of the public and how McCain has been forced to “defend” poor little Barack Obama…..but where are the media reports about Obama supporters wearing t-shirts calling Sarah Palin a c*nt?

Have you seen this reported anywhere at all?

Please let me know where and I will add the link as an update.

This picture came to me via email, the email text is below:

Obama’s unbreakable friendship with the unrepentant, America hating terrorist William Ayers of the Weather Underground is probably one of the most important things America needs to know about Barack before voting day. The media have done well in pretending this is not an issue, and acting as if this does not bring serious questions about Obama’s judgement. The media want this controversial relationship to be swept under the rug.

Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, finally played the Ayers card. CNN were quick to the defense in what they had the gall to call a “fact check”.

Verdict: False. There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now “palling around,” or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are.

The Judicial Confirmation Network Council are not the only ones that are reminding us of Barack Obama's poor judgement of associates with their new ad...Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is reminding everyone too.

Republican vice presidential
candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists” because of an old association with a
former ’60s radical, stepping up an effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American voters. [...]
Palin’s reference was to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the group the Weather Underground. Its members took credit for bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, during the Vietnam War era. Obama, who was a child when the group was active, served on a charity board with Ayers several years ago and has denounced his radical views and activities.
[...]
The Republican campaign, falling behind Obama in polls, plans to make attacks on Obama’s character a centerpiece of candidate John McCain’s message in the final weeks of the presidential race.

You know how criminals often get caught because they can't resist bragging about their exploits? What follows may be yet another example of that phenomenon.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who spent several years covering the Iraq War, has previously been a news subject herself as a result of her extracurricular activities.

Logan had an affair with "a married federal contractor whom she met while stationed in Iraq," and became pregnant as a result. At the time of the linked Associated Press story, the father was "in the midst of a divorce from wife Kimberly, with whom he has a 3-year-old daughter." Early this year, the New York Post reported that Logan "apparently courted two beaus while she was in Baghdad, and has been labeled a homewrecker ...."

Now it appears that Ms. Logan may have left Iraq with questionable "souvenirs," according to the Post's Page Six (the Post obtained its core information from this ERSnews.com story; bold after title is mine):

It was eight years ago this week that France 2 TV introduced the world to Mohammed al-Dura, the Palestinian boy who was allegedly shot and killed during a gunfight between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen, in a video whose authenticity has increasingly been called into question years after it inspired anti-Semitic violence around the world. The American news media not only highlighted the story -- as the ABC, CBS and NBC evening and morning newscasts collectively aired the video at least 28 times between September 30, 2000, and June 30, 2003 -- but the networks also showed other clips depicting Palestinians involved in fighting, supposedly with Israelis, that have been challenged by some media analysts, calling into question how many of the scenes shown by American media during times of Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be faked video that were passed off to international media as genuine. ABC's Good Morning American notably seems to have ignored the al-Dura story.

Boston University Professor Richard Landes has been a leader in delving into the practice by some Palestinian cameramen of staging scenes of violence to be used as propaganda against Israel. Landes notably took on CBS’s 60 Minutes in the film Pallywood, the first in a series of short documentaries produced by the Boston University professor. On his Web site, theaugeanstables.com, Landes recounts his unsuccessful attempts to convince the American news media to help expose the Pallywood hoax video phenomenon. While he recounts that American journalists he spoke with did generally agree with him that the deceptive practice likely exists, they were reluctant to be perceived as breaking neutrality by siding with Israel over the Palestinians, as he encountered a  view that it would not be “even-handed” to relay such unflattering activities by one side without finding similar examples from the other side. Professor Landes also cited an unnamed journalist at ABC as contending that there would be little “appetite” for the subject at his network. On his Web site, theaugeanstables.com, Landes recalls these conversations:

Earlier today I noted how AP reporter Sara Kugler painted the McCain/Palin campaign as having "banned" print reporters from asking the Republican vice presidential candidate questions as she met with foreign leaders. This despite no concern by the AP or other print outlets back in July when Barack Obama conducted closed-door meetings with European heads of state.

Now a NewsBusters tipster has brought to my attention that Kugler shelled out a few benjamins to a liberal 527 during the 2004 campaign.

From OpenSecrets.org:

Reacting to photographs of Sen. John McCain taken by a freelance photographer for Atlantic Monthly, MRC President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell took aim at the photographer while noting the magazine has reacted appropriately by denouncing her work. [audio of segment here]

"In this case, I don't know that I blame Atlantic Monthly for this reason. [Jill Greenberg] is a rogue photographer," Bozell told Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes on their September 15 program.

Bozell added that Atlantic's editor denounced Greenberg as "appalling." "This wasn't the [fault of the] Atlantic Monthly, this was the photographer" who is among a segment of the political left that "is just out of control." That doesn't negate that fact that the media have not been biased in this election cycle, Bozell added.:

While the media use all their resources to hunt fake scandals on Sarah Palin, there are some serious developments that America needs to know about. The accusation from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry is that Barack Obama attempted to undermine troop withdrawal negotiations when he made his publicity trip to Iraq. For some reason, we have heard very little reporting on this from the media, even after Obama practically admitted to this.

In the New York Post, conservative Iranian-born columnist Amir Taheri quoted Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari as saying the Democrat made the demand when he visited Baghdad in July, while publicly demanding an early withdrawal.

“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview, according to Taheri.

In light of their reporting on the failure of investment firm Bear Stearns Companies Inc. (NYSE: BSC), it seems CNBC reporters aren't "tip-toeing around on eggshells" when reporting about problems at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (NYSE: LEH).

On CNBC's "Squawk Box," reporter Charlie Gasparino told co-host Joe Kernen, "I will say this about the Bear Stearns thing when you compare that [Lehman] with this. I think our reporting was incredibly responsible. It was so responsible ... and you know we went out of our way with Bear Stearns ... We just report on how feckless management is and I can't help that Bear Stearns was feckless. [Lehman] was feckless too and that is the scary part."

"They're going to parse every ‘is' that a journalist said," said Kernen. "We don't hammer the stock. We watch the stock get hammered and then we talk about it."

Sometimes simply adding the link to our Editors' Picks sidebar just isn't enough. First reported by Luke Ford and confirmed by ERS News, it looks like LA Observed's Kevin Roderick's didn't actually share two Pulitzer Prizes after all.

You see, there's sharing and then there's sharing. In the first sense, we all "shared" in Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor's Olympic Gold medal. In the second sense, the U.S. women's gymnastics team all shared the team's silver medal.

In 1993 and 1995, the Los Angeles Times "staff" won Pulitzers for the LA riots and the Northridge earthquake, respectively. The Pulitzer awards committee names "staff" as the recipient when contributors number more than three. With a dozen stories listed and over two dozen credited reporters and photographers, the LA Times's Pulitzers were awarded to "Staff," meaning the 25 or so credited participants. Roderick certainly "shares" the Pulitzer in the second sense, that it redounds to the good of the entire LAT, but in purely official terms--you know, the ones that make it alright to claim it on your resume--Roderick did not share the Pulitzers.

All the spin will make you dizzy. Obama digs the hole deeper. After the media ignored the Obama campaign admitting that he lied about a vote he made in 2003 in favor of infanticide, now Obama is accusing others of “attacking” him with “outrageous lies”!

“Senator Obama strongly supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose. He believes that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue, and he believes that women do not make these decisions casually, but wrestle with them in consultation with their doctors, pastors and family. Senator Obama understands that some will disagree with him and choose not to support him, and he respects those with different opinions.

Kudos to ABC News for doing an investigation no one else would:

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

Consider this an open thread about the Edwards case.

As chronicled by your humble correspondent  in his NewsBusters story yesterday, the UK Sunday Times took great delight in tweaking the American mainstream media for maintaining a hypocritical wall of silence on the alleged John Edwards love child scandal. However, dawn has broken over a new day and a few minor cracks in this MSM wall of silence has emerged in the form of opinion columns. One such crack was in today's Hartford Courant column by Kevin Rennie, a lawyer and former Republican state legislator,  speculating about Elizabeth Edwards making a dramatic speech at the Democrat convention. It didn't take long for Rennie to go from Elizabeth Edwards to John Edwards:

They make Reverend Wright and Trinity United disappear

The Media,
Lining it Up

And for their next trick, the media will stuff Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s liberalism back into his hat.

On Sunday, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman gave us a 1,152 word news-ish story entitled “Obama Addresses His Faith”, which was a glowingly open forum for Obama to deliver “a highly personal account of his spiritual journey” and in which he proffered “a promise that he will make ‘faith-based’ social service ‘a moral center of (his) administration.’”

It’s hard to read the word “faith” in the same sentence as the name “Barack Obama” without thinking of the racist, anti-American radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who for twenty years served as the Senator’s pastor, and (as Obama described him) his “spiritual advisor” and “mentor”, in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. It cannot be accidental that the Washington Post made no mention whatsoever of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United in a piece dedicated exclusively to the Senator’s religion.

Staffers for the Detroit Free Press are now in the clear when it comes to cutting campaign contributions for politicians, reports NewsGuild.org, the Web site for The Newspaper Guild, a print journalists union. (h/t Business & Media Institute's Dan Gainor; emphasis mine):

An arbitrator's decision voiding a Detroit Free Press ban on political contributions by editorial employees has implications for other publishers attempting to control what their employees can do off the job-provided those employees are protected by an appropriately worded collective bargaining agreement.

In his May 27 decision, arbitrator Paul E. Glendon ruled that the Free Press cannot ban any particular activity of its editorial employees without documenting that the activity is compromising the paper or the employees' work. Without such documentation, Glendon wrote, the company could not justify its "unilateral incursion" against contractual safeguards.

The bloodletting from Dan Rather's ongoing lawsuit at CBS continues, although this time, Rather is going after himself saying that no one wants to hire him after his forged document scandal:

Dan Rather has filed an amended lawsuit against CBS that says other TV networks refused to hire him because of the damage executives at his former company did to his reputation after a disputed 2004 report on President Bush.

Rather’s lawyer, Martin R. Gold, said new papers were filed because a judge said in April the initial lawsuit did not specify how CBS injured Rather in his occupation. The judge said the veteran newsman could submit an amended complaint. [...]

Rather says he met with CNN, ABC, and NBC in 2006 to talk about employment after his departure from CBS, but they refused to hire him because he brought “too much baggage.”

In a particularly dire analysis on Tuesday’s CBS "Early Show," co- host Harry Smith reacted to the recent media tour of Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and declared: "He's being called the 'Pastor of Disaster' for the effect he's having on Barack Obama's campaign. Why is Reverend Jeremiah Wright taking his case to the public now?"

Smith began the segment on Wright by observing that: "Well, the month of April has probably been the longest month of Senator Barack Obama's life. He started off this month by distancing himself from comments made by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Now he's doing it again."

Smith then talked to Democratic strategist, Joe Trippi, who said of Wright’s media appearances: "It's a nightmare for the Obama campaign. They can't like this at all and they've got no control." Smith went on to comment on Obama’s initial speech in Philadelphia that addressed Reverend Wright: "The speech on race that was so lauded, almost forgotten now." He followed up by asking Trippi: "...is this a campaign killer, can this be a campaign killer?"

At the end of Thursday’s CBS "Early Show" co-host Harry Smith interviewed former CBS News anchor Roger Mudd about his new memoir, "The Place to Be: Washington, CBS and The Glory Days of Television News," and teased the upcoming interview by declaring: "And we're also joined this morning by one of the great legends of CBS News, Roger Mudd, who's covered every major story in Washington for decades and worked along some of the best reporters who ever lived." One of those "best reporters," Mudd later explained, was Dan Rather: "There was a front row, Harry. And in the front row was Dan Rather, Marvin Kalb, George Herman, Dan Schorr, Roger Mudd."

Mudd went on to describe Rather and his numerous other colleagues in these terms: "No, it was a -- it was just a great conjunction of very talented, very hard working, very honest, ethical men and women, linked up to 20 years of some of the greatest and most profound stories that could have happened." Of course after Rather’s controversial National Guard story about President Bush in 2004, based on forged documents, the terms "honest" and "ethical" do not exactly come to mind.

Near the end of the segment, Smith asked about Mudd’s famous interview with then Democratic presidential candidate Ted Kennedy in 1979 in which Mudd asked Kennedy why he was running for president. Mudd recalled to Smith: "And his answer was -- it wasn't incoherent, but it wasn't really coherent either. And I think the answer is, Harry, that he really hadn't thought very seriously about why he wanted to be. And that exposed a weakness. That interview was not helpful." Smith later commented that: "Wow and it ended his candidacy." However, that interview was in November 1979, just as Kennedy announced his candidacy and he did not drop out of the race until the Democratic convention in 1980.

The Press doesn't care about these things, why should you?

This originally appeared in the April 21st edition of Human Events.

The Media's Reaction to George and CharlieCall it the Audacity of Journalism.

ABC's Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos slipped and let a bit of actual reporting seep into their Democrat Presidential debate moderation efforts on April 16. They mistakenly engaged in fifty minutes worth of pertinent inquiry, largely regarding the patriotic perspectives and numerous troubling relationships of Illinois Senator Barack Obama -- and to a lesser extent examining the fact that New York Senator Hillary Clinton has a Herculean ability to create her Living History out of whole cloth.

The response from the Left has been withering and unremitting.

Reuters highlights a great little tale filled with anti-gun bias and bad reporting, all topped with an extremely misleading photo that presents a wonderful example of biased "reporting" at its worst. The story is about a German man who was "crowded out of his home" by his gun collection but the photo is of a gun store display in America. What the two have to do with each other is anybody's guess. But then we find out the man wasn't crowded out by his gun collection after all. Just a little thought put to the Reuters tale reveals that the whole thing is bunk.

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man was such an avid collector of weapons and other paraphernalia that he ran out of space at home and had to sleep in a hotel, neighbors said following the 71-year-old's death... Executors found an arsenal of weaponry and assorted goods at the man's two-story home in the western city of Aachen...

Wow, it must have been hundreds and hundreds of guns that caused this man to flee from his two-story home to a hotel, right?

Well, not really.

The anti-American bias at Al Jazeera English became “so stereotypical, so reflexive” that former “Nightline” reporter David Marash quit his job with the Qatar-based channel, in part over that attitude. What was even more interesting was Marash's assertion that the anti-American attitude came more from the British administrators than the Arabs at AJE.

In a March 27 article, AP television writer David Bauder reported the situation that made the award-winning reporter quit (all bold mine):

Former "Nightline" reporter Dave Marash has quit Al-Jazeera English, saying Thursday his exit was due in part to an anti-American bias at a network that is little seen in this country.

Marash said he felt that attitude more from British administrators than Arabs at the Qatar-based network.

Marash was the highest-profile American TV personality hired when the English language affiliate to Al-Jazeera was started two years ago in an attempt to compete with CNN and the BBC. He said there was a "reflexive adversarial editorial stance" against Americans at Al-Jazeera English.

"Given the global feelings about the Bush administration, it's not surprising," Marash said.

But he found it "became so stereotypical, so reflexive" that he got angry.

Editor's Note: This originally appeared in Human Events today -- Monday, March 24th.

The Big Three Networks and Their Plan to Protect Obama (PPO)Why did it take until Thursday March 13, 2008, for the nation to begin to learn about Barack Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright? The man whose Trinity United Church of Christ Obama has attended and generously funded for seventeen years? Whom he had publicly and repeatedly cited as his mentor and had named as a campaign advisor? Whom he chose to perform his wedding and baptize his two daughters?

Because, until then, we were in the midst of Phase I -- preventative medicine -- of the media's version of campaign health care for the Senator's Presidential bid. Call it the Plan to Protect Obama (PPO).

The Reverend Wright story had been percolating beneath the surface for several years. It finally broke through to widespread dissemination last week. A picture is worth a thousand words -- moving pictures with audio of Wright's anti-American, paranoid rantings from the pulpit have finally inspired many more than that.

The latest comes from the AP’s whitewash where after ignoring the controversy for as long as possible, they put out a piece titled Obama Decries Racial Rhetoric. The piece then omits the pastor’s actual comments from the readers, and minimizes them as “inflammatory.”

Sen. Barack Obama on Saturday decried “the forces of division” over race that he said are intruding into the Democratic presidential nomination contest.

“We have to come together,” he told a town-hall meeting at a high school.

He cited videos of inflammatory sermons given by his pastor that are now being used as political ammunition against him — remarks that Obama has denounced.

“If all I knew were those statements I saw on television, I would be shocked,” Obama said.

Like Colored and MindedThis is past a bit ridiculous, is it not?

Agence France-Presse (AFP) yesterday disseminated to its client list a headline and photograph caption labeling sex scandalized and self-ousted New York Governor Eliot Spitzer an (R), when he is in fact a (D) -- emocrat.

They then responded -- to correspondence on the subject of their error and the error itself -- rather meekly.

AFP having only corrected their copy -- leaving myriad errors strewn throughout the print and web worlds -- left wide open the possibility that others would follow their poor suit.

And indeed someone has.

Not Minding Their Ps & QsWe on Thursday brought you the Agence France-Presse (AFP)'s ludicrous labeling of self-ousted New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as an (R). This after a week's worth of the Gong Show Media's failure or utter refusal to ascribe any Party affiliation to the man.

Well, we have heard word from the horse's ... mouth.

DScott, an intrepid NewsBusters participant, contacted AFP to point out their inanity. And in the wee small hours of Friday morning -- they wrote back.

DScott was generous enough to share it with us, and we now, in turn, share it with you: