District of Columbia

There's nothing biased here, just some industry news. Politico and Media Bistro's fishbowlDC are reporting that it looks like NBC/MSNBC will be giving up their Capitol Hill cubby hole digs and moving most if not all of their DC bureau operation out to Nebraska. Avenue that is.

For those unfamiliar with Washington, the NBC offices on Nebraska are considerably farther from Capitol Hill than the stone's throw from the Senate that NBC now enjoys.

The bottom line: this could make it harder to get congressmen and senators who need to stay close to the Hill for legislative votes to appear on camera on MSNBC.

For the past 20 years, every Memorial Day weekend,  tens of thousands of motorcyclists join together as Rolling Thunder to honor the military, particularly the dead and MIA.  The coverage is usually positive and focuses on the patriotic bikers and their interesting-looking bikes.  On May 27, ABC News went a different direction for this year’s ride. Instead of covering Rolling Thunder and their military and veteran-related issues, the way the Washington Post and the Washington Times did in their articles, ABC turned it into advocacy journalism to inform people about the importance of--wearing helmets while riding motorcycles. After four rather bland sentences about the the event, ABC slipped into lecture-mode (emphasis mine thoughout):

In today's Washington Post, staff writer Carol Leonnig heavily skewed in favor of the District of Columbia gun ban. The stringent 1976 gun law was overturned earlier this year by a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals but may be appealed to the Supreme Court. Notice the skew of the article in favor of the D.C. government's position in the first two paragraphs of "Gun Ban Ruling Puts Fenty on the Spot.":

D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty must make a risky choice about the District's gun ban: defend it before the Supreme Court or write new, looser laws governing how city residents can keep guns in their homes.

As he wades into a high-stakes debate over the Second Amendment, the new mayor of the nation's capital faces the possibility that the city could lose the case and undercut decades of hard-fought gun-control legislation across the country.

Yeah, because it's a darn shame when laws that undercut a constitutional right might, you know, be repealed by the highest Court in the land.

UPDATE (01:15 EST): Law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh addresses factual errors in reporting in the New York Times and Washington Post (h/t Instapundit).

How are your local TV news shows covering today's federal court decision overturning the D.C. handgun ban?

I live just outside Washington, D.C., and the station I most often watch for local news deployed a few typical media bias tricks: stacking the deck with sources aligned on one side (4 pro-ban, one anti-ban) and focusing on emotional aspects of a debate (highlighting emotional reactions to the court ruling rather than dealing with the legal merits).

This is going to be controversial.

In an article written earlier today by Benny Morris and published by the UK's Guardian Unlimited newspaper, famous historian and civil rights activist John Hope Franklin had this to say regarding his home:

"This country is so arrogant, so self-certain," he says, asked whether the west is now engaged with the Muslim world in a war of civilisations. "I am not sure that is what we are confronting. [But I am also] not sure we have done what we ought to have done to cultivate the rest of the world. We're so powerful and so presumptuous that it makes us unattractive, almost unbecoming. We don't treat other countries and people right. Power without grace is a curse."

Bonneville Radio announced yesterday that it will launch Washington Post Radio on three dial settings in the Washington, DC radio market (1500, 107.7, 104.3). Bonneville currently runs WTOP radio, a 24/7 newsradio station in Washington. Are we about to get the Post's liberal bias on the radio, too? Bonneville executive Joel Oxley said in today's Post story, "It's going to be NPR on caffeine. It will be non-drowsy public radio."

Bonneville will own and operate both WTOP and Washington Post Radio. Washington Post Radio's programming will include in-depth local, national and international news and commentary provided by Washington Post reporters, editors, and columnists as well as news makers and other local media personalities.

The Hill is a specialized publication, mostly for Members of Congress and those whose living depends on Congress. Still, an article in The Hill today (Wednesday) is typical of the media coverage of the Senate vote yesterday to require “reports” to Congress on the progress of the Iraq War.

The title is “Needed: An Exit Strategy from Iraq.” It is written by Rep. Jane Harman (D. Calif) and its lede includes these paragraphs.

There is now a strong bipartisan consensus that we need an exit strategy. But yet to emerge is the content of that strategy.

We have two overriding objectives in Iraq: to facilitate a viable power-sharing agreement among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and to turn over responsibility for security to the Iraqis on a steady basis.

"Hate Calls Swamp Herndon Town Hall," proclaimed the Washington Post Metro section headline above the fold in Saturday's edition, "Radio Host Had Urged Day-Labor Site Protests." Staff writer Lisa Rein penned the story on how a substitute talk show host for WMAL---a mostly conservative-programmed news-talk station which carries Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh---had succeeded in harnassing his audience's ire at a local Northern Virginia town planning to use tax money to build a jobs center for illegal aliens:

Herndon Town Hall unplugged its phone lines yesterday after listeners of a talk show on WMAL-AM flooded the switchboard with what officials said were hate calls against a proposed day-laborer site.