Apparently, YouTube doesn't think that a conservative journalist has anything to say to help all you budding citizen journalists out there. A glance at the denizens of the Old Media offered up as journalism experts on the Internet video giant will show a long list of well known lefties with not a single center or center right professional in the mix.

On April 30, YouTube set up a channel dedicated to a sort of how-to instruction manual or an online media 101 class that folks interested in becoming citizen journalists can watch to help them learn some of the tricks of the Media trade. Ostensibly, this will help the average, every day blogger present his work in a more professional way. This is a great idea, by the way. Many blogs could use some tips on better writing and presentation, interview skills, and video presentation if not an occasional editor -- and I should know on that last one!

Clearly, the most important takeaway from ABC's low-rated White House forum on health care was President Barack Obama's admission that he would go outside the constraints of a nationalized system to get the "very best care" if necessary for his own family.

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey noted that Obama's response should properly be seen as "a Michael Dukakis moment that exposed him as a hypocrite."

A video of the exchange is at YouTube. To the extent possible, see if you think Diane Sawyer, standing next to the inquiring doctor, looks a bit peeved as the nature of his question becomes clear.

ABC's Jake Tapper and Karen Travers understood the newsworthiness of what Obama said, and led with it in their post-forum coverage:

Pornography is no longer a poison creeping into the crevices of our popular culture. It is part of the very fabric. One sensation at a recent Apple conference for new and developing applications in San Francisco was the "i-Porn bikini girls" advertising free X-rated films for your i-Phone. It sounds like a whole new reason to fear people using their mobile phone while they drive.

Free porn sites are all over the Internet now, with zero restrictions or minimal electronic barriers against curious children who might be in for a very crude shock within seconds, just with the still photos on the home page. Even the most mainstream of video sites are inundated with pornography and its promoters. YouTube touts itself as the world’s most popular portal for Internet videos. It has become so big it’s even promoting a new technology called YouTube XL to put its videos directly on your big-screen TV.

A new study by Matthew Philbin and Dan Gainor of the Culture and Media Institute (CMI) found that YouTube is stuffed with porn videos.

On June 6, 1944, the crucial Normandy Landings that formed the spearhead of the Allied invasion of Nazi held Europe occurred. D-Day ultimately led to the victory of the Allies over the despotic Nazi regime. Now here we are on June 6, 2009 and, in its inimitable way, Google has decided to memorialize the important occasion by adding an image on its homepage depicting... the computer game Tetris.

Yes, it's far more important to Google to celebrate the anniversary of the invention of the video game Tetris than to memorialize D-Day. It just warms the heart, doesn't it?

As NewsBusters has regularly reported, internet behemoth Google, despite recognizing such important American events as Giovanni Schiaparelli and Charles Darwin's birthdays with special logos, has never done anything to commemorate Memorial Day.

Well, whether they succumbed to the pressure, or are feeling more patriotic with Barack Obama in the White House, Google has finally done something to recognize America's fallen soldiers along with the rest of the country.

Yet, unlike the elaborate logos for other events deemed important, Google on Monday displayed a little yellow ribbon under the search field (actual size right, h/t NBer R D Helm). 

Yep -- that tiny ribbon.

Compare that to the fuss they made over Dr. Seuss's birthday in March:

Reuters is only the latest wire service to go way over the top in taking pity on President Obama for having to deal with nasty things that intervene to disturb Dear Leader's apparent solitude.

At the same time, Reuters seems to be characterizing the situations in Iran and North Korea as "distractions" that are equivalent to that being posed by the Somali pirates.

I don't know how else you can interpret the way this Reuters article by Steve Holland currently appears:

There is plenty of evidence that many environmental activists are, at bottom, dangerous extremists who have deluded themselves into believing that the earth's population must be radically reduced if humanity is to survive. There is also growing evidence that this far-out viewpoint is more widely accepted among so-called mainstream environmentalists than the establishment media would have us believe.

Occasionally, these views surface. Ted Turner, father of five, infamously asserted the need to reduce the earth's population to 2 billion about a decade ago. He also expressed a stronger personal preference: "Personally, I think the population should be closer to when we had indigenous populations, back before the advent of farming. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was somewhere between 40 and 100 million people." In the early 1990s, the late Jacques Cousteau suggested that "World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day." More recently, though less famously, at a Psychology Today blog, writer Stephen Kotter asserted "we need to lose 4.4 billion people and we need to lose them fast."

But I don't recall seeing an adviser to a government as prominent as the UK's Jonathon Porritt publicly utter such sentiments. But utter them he has. The UK Times Online took note on March 22:

Gallup has issued two polls in the past couple of weeks showing that the reality is breaking through the non-stop, years-long propaganda blitz known properly known as the Great Global Warming Hoax (characterized by me since January 2007 as globaloney):

• On March 11, the pollster told us that "Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated." That's up from 30% three years ago.
• On March 19, we were informed that "For the first time in Gallup's 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent." And it's a 51-42 rout, a 27-point swing from 55-37 the other way just two years ago. Since globaloney is the main environmental justification for slowing (really stopping) economy growth, this result is a good proxy for increased rejection of the enviro kool-aid.

Now there's a third. Yesterday, Gallup told us that not only is globaloney increasing not believed and not more important than economic growth, it's the least important environmental issue we face. You have to look past its "clever" title and subhead to get to what should be the lede, but the glum news for Saturday's Earth Hour participants is there (bolds after title are mine):

This "Name That Party" situation has many of the usual elements. There are several stories about two Democratic judges involved in criminal behavior in Pennsylvania, and, with one exception, they "somehow" don't get around to identifying their party.

But this saga is different for two reasons:

• The crimes to which the judges have pleaded guilty involve "thousands" of juveniles.
• In one lonely exception, the Associated Press's coverage prominently identified the judges' party. But in what was apparently a subsequent longer revision, their party identification disappeared.

What follows is a side-by-side picture of the first four paragraphs of a February 11 AP story carried at topix.com (also saved at my host for future reference), and of the five paragraphs of the story as it now appears at MSNBC (also saved at host; red and green boxes are mine; portions of the Topix link were moved from their original locations on the page for demonstration purposes; MSNBC graphic is of the printer-friendly version):

In the past several hours, I have received multiple e-mail messages from readers claiming that internet behemoth Google, for a brief period of time Saturday morning, flagged a number of conservative websites including NewsBusters, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News as possibly harmful to computers.

UPDATE: This is NOT a problem exclusive to conservative websites. 

NewsBusters has reported such instances before when they happened to Lucianne and the American Spectator. 

NewsBusters reader James Marie e-mailed moments ago (with permission):

Internet behemoth Google on Sunday declared the conservative website Lucianne, founded by Lucianne Goldberg, harmful to computers.

Oddly, as NewsBusters reported, the same thing happened to the conservative website "American Spectator" almost exactly a year ago. 

If you do a regular Google web search of the word "Lucianne," the following is the first result:

Despite conservative grumblings of liberal bias, Internet behemoth Google has for years claimed its search engine exclusively uses algorithms to provide accurate and impartial results for those interested in finding out information concerning a particular subject.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt affirmed this contention while speaking to a group of conservative bloggers during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul this past September.

According to the British Register, such a digitally impartial procedure, assuming it indeed exists today, may at some time in the future be altered:

Those who thought that President-elect Obama's pre-Thanksgiving promise to "create or save jobs," appropriately satirized by Mark Finkelstein at NewsBusters on November 24, might have been another one of the Oh-So-(in)Articulate One's "inartful" statements should know that it has become standard fare in Obama speeches.

In related news, Uncle Sam told us Friday that over 136 million seasonally adjusted jobs were "saved"in November (go here to replicate):

Never mind the 533,000 seasonally adjusted jobs lost -- which illustrates just how risible Obama's promise shift from the presidential campaign really is. Old Media's failure to note this shift is journalistic malpractice that would never occur during a Republican presidency.

Some think that Harry Reid must live a charmed life.

After all, he asserted last year that the Iraq War "is lost." Now it looks like victory, at least to seasoned on-the-ground observers like Michael Yon.

He has fretted over how fossil fuels like coal make us sick. Never mind that life expectancy, largely, uh, fueled by industrialization and its accompanying higher living standards, continues to climb.

In each case, the consequences to Reid's political career have apparently been minimal.

Now Reid has said that visitors to the Capitol -- everyday American citizens like you and me -- stink, and that he's glad to get away from them.

Really (HT Michelle Malkin; last paragraph bolded by me; CNS News also has coverage):

This is not a promo for the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) per se, as there may be other similarly effective organizations out there to help families who homeschool their kids.

But if the following examples don't prove that homeschooled children and their parents need to have access to legal help at a moment's notice, I don't know what will. I will present blood-boiling excerpts here, but strongly advise all to read the full stories at the links.

First, the HSLDA reported the following incident at their web site on November 6 (HT One News Now):

As the Christmas shopping season went into full swing in 2005, I sensed that journalists in general have a strong preference for using the term "holiday shopping" instead of "Christmas shopping" when covering business and commerce, but that when it came to people losing their jobs, they preferred to describe layoffs as relating to "Christmas."

My instincts have been proven correct, as you can see below from the results of three different sets of Google News searches in November and December in each of the last three years (links to last year's related posts are here, here, and here; 2006's are here, here, and here; 2005's are here, here, and here):

Earlier today, Christopher Booker at the UK Telegraph noted a "surreal scientific blunder," followed by an attempted cover-up, that should cause everyone to question the source's past and future credibility.

The source of the shoddy work is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the outfit run by world champion globalarmist James Hansen. Hansen has in the past stated that "heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be 'tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.'"

What Booker reports causes one to wonder what the appropriate punishment should be for committing drop-dead obvious errors and integrity-lacking follow-up.

Part of the punishment is surely the Telegraph's delicious headline, followed by Booker's criticism (bolds are mine):

The world has never seen such freezing heat

As Americans celebrate Columbus Day, one of our nation's largest companies, Google, is commememorating the occasion by displaying a picture of the Paddington Bear at its website.

I kid you not.

I guess the good folks at Google feel the 50th anniversary of the creation of this fictional character is more important than the 516th anniversary of Columbus landing in the Americas (via Wikipedia, h/t NBer Priebles):

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:

On PBS's Web site today, ombudsman Michael Getler writes of complaints over an incident during last Sunday's pledge drive.  He describes the cheap shot taken by actor Mike Farrell against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

According to Joseph Campbell, vice president of fundraising programs, here's what happened:

 On CNN's American Morning today, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on Barack Obama's campaigning in Virginia.  Afterwards, anchor Kiran Chetry had a question:

CHETRY: All right. And Suzanne, what's on tap for the campaign today? And please tell me it's not lipstick again.

MALVEAUX: Let's hope not. He's going to be in Norfolk, Virginia. That is in southeast Virginia, and it's home to the world's largest Naval base. It's one of the most competitive areas that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. It's a critical piece of property, piece of land there with folks in Virginia, and they want those voters.

This doesn't qualify as any kind of surprise, but it should be noted nonetheless.

Thursday, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama gave a stunningly downbeat assessment of the nation's overall situation in a response to a seven year-old girl who asked him why he is running for president. Obama's media water-carriers have virtually ignored his very telling response, one that is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's gloomiest, malaise-based assessments of America during his awful presidency.

Here is a rundown of what happened from Ed Morrissey of Hot Air (direct YouTube link to relevant video is here):

Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, while waffling, has wanted to appear to many of his constituents as being opposed to free trade agreements, or at least wanting to renegotiate the terms of many of them.

On Wednesday, the Department of Commerce issued a press release, the kind of thing you would hope business journalists get in their e-mail boxes. But I found no coverage of this news in a Google News Search on [commerce "free trade'] (typed as indicated inside brackets).

Perhaps it's because the news would be inconvenient for Obama, who is in the midst of an Excellent Overseas Adventure, speaking to fawning crowds who fortunately will have no say at the ballot box in November.

Here is that news:

The good folks at Google are at it again, for if you do a web search for the conservative magazine "The American Spectator," a disclaimer says:

The American Spectator

This site may harm your computer. Features opinions, reviews, and an interactive section, as well as archives of the monthly. www.spectator.org/ - Similar pages - Note this

Click on "The American Spectator" link, and a message reads (h/t Ed Driscoll):

**UPDATE** BELOW FOLD

It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign and decided that its contribution would be to shut down any blog on the Google owned Blogspot.com blogging system that has an anti-Obama message. Yes, it sure seems that Google has begun to go through its many thousands of blogs to lock out the owners of anti-Obama blogs so that the noObama message is effectively squelched. Thus far, Google has terminated the access by blog owners to 7 such sites and the list may be growing. Boy, it must be nice for Barack Obama to have an ally powerful enough to silence his opponents like that!

It isn't just conservative sites that Google's Blogger platform is eliminating. For instance, www.comealongway.blogspot.com has been frozen and this one is a Hillary supporting site. The operator of Come a Long Way has a mirror site off the Blogspot platform and has today posted this notice:

Google News early Sunday morning, at its "Top Stories" front page, posted a suggestive Photoshopped picture of President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair next to a headline about the California Supreme Court's recent ruling on same-sex marriages.

In the picture, Bush and a shirtless Blair are cuddling underneath an American flag.

Accident? Something to do with Google's auto-generation software program?

Maybe. But consider as you examine the following screencap that the article the picture came from wasn't even one of the featured stories (link to larger more legible version here):

The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen says one of the steps to fight global warming is using images to affect people's outlook.

At the "Covering a Changing Climate: The Media Challenge" forum held at Harvard University in Boston, Mass. on April 30, Cullen suggested using Weather.com and Google Earth to add visual elements to promote the cause.

"[I] split my time between The Weather Channel and this think tank in Princeton and one of the things we've been trying to do is work with Google Earth essentially. And for me, coming from The Weather Channel, the most powerful tool that exists is Weather.com and you type in your zip code and you get a forecast out five days."

Today is Earth Day, and you don't have to look any further than the home pages of the top Internet companies to see it. Green is the politically correct color of choice for firms that want to score cheap environmental points online.

The bias is most blatant at Google and its video-sharing subsidiary, YouTube. Google's logo has gone completely green, and the television screen within YouTube's logo is a snapshot of the earth.

YouTube also has turned over the prime real estate on its home page to earth-friendly videos, with headlines like "5 Easy Ways To Save The Planet" and "Veggie Cars." Oh, and don't forget, "Paris Hilton Is Greener Than You."