Reuters

The Washington Post today reported how the White House expects the federal budget deficit to shrink, but placed it in a five-paragraph story below the fold on page A6. Yet a Reuters story on the same development noted something that the Washington Post's Lori Montgomery left out of her story. The new White House figure of $205 billion "is still higher than many private forecasts, which have pegged the deficit at around $150 billion."

What's more, Post reporter Montgomery included a reference to President Bush crediting his tax cuts with the revenue surge, but added "that has been challenged by many economists." Montgomery failed to name any such economist, much less his/her rationale. After all, if tax revenue is growing at unexpected rates following tax cuts, are there many economists who actually expect tax revenues to roll in at a faster pace when levied at their pre-Bush tax cut levels?

Of late, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been arguing that the mainstream media persistently exercise the "management" of the news. That is to say, aside from slanted and biased reporting on the news of the day, they frame news developments in a way that manage events to fit a preconceived meme or storyline.

The media's coverage of Army recruiting numbers is no exception.

Bear in mind these facts included in some of the stories I cite below but usually well after the lede:

• The Army is nonetheless ahead of its year-to-date recruiting goal
• July, August, and September are traditionally the best months for recruiting
• Many potential enlistees are turned away from being overweight or lacking a high school diploma
• Some experts, such as former Defense undersecretary Edwin Dorn, marvel that "the big surprise is that Army recruiting has remained as healthy as it has been" given the Iraq war's falling support in the polls.

Nope, instead the lede is two straight months of numbers that aren't up to par and immediately Iraq is blamed.

Voila! A "trend" story waiting to happen for a media bent on managing the news.

Let's take a look at some major news outlets.

The reviews are in for Saturday’s international effort to save the planet from global warming, and the news isn’t good for folks like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his band of not so merry sycophants.

From boring acts, to poor attendance, and folks actually leaving early out of sheer frustration, the concerts appear to have failed miserably.

Is this a sign that Al Gore is as poor an event planner as he is a presidential campaigner? Or, is the public’s interest in this issue dropping faster than temperatures in the southern hemisphere?

Before we get there, it is clear that folks in America and Great Britain were less than thrilled with this event as reported by Reuters Sunday (emphasis added throughout):

What's in a name? If your name is Al Gore, it means that a majority of respondents to a worldwide poll believe you have the power to battle the evil known as global warming:

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and ex-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan are best suited to champion work to fight climate change, a 47-nation opinion poll said on Monday.

The three were most picked by more than 26,000 Internet users from a list of more than 20 politicians, actors, singers and soccer players to highlight links between celebrities and the environment before Live Earth pop concerts on Saturday.

[...]

Gore was chosen by 18 percent of people when asked to pick up to three people from the list as the most influential to "champion efforts to combat global warming".

The storyline. That's the thing. Feed the storyline.

The media has been just enthralled with the idea that the removal of political appointees, and their replacement with other political appointees, somehow constitutes a grand scandal, since it's a Republican adminstration that did it. The storyline was promoted again in a Reuters piece on Friday.

An assistant attorney general at the Justice Department announced her resignation on Friday, becoming the seventh official to quit the department since the Democratic-led Congress launched an investigation in March into the firing of nine federal prosecutors. Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general for legal policy, said she would step down on July 9. No reason was given.

Sounds pretty suspicious, doesn't it? Pretty sinister? Just more fuel on the fire that is the scandal of the President exercising his power to appoint and remove federal prosecutors.

But maybe, if they'd actual done some investigation and research, they could have reported it differently. At NationalReview.com, Ed Whelan has some relevant information:

Remember when you were a kid and got caught telling a lie, but your excuse was that a pal "made you do it" and it was so hard to tell the truth anyway because of this reason or that? It didn't matter to your parents then, did it? Well, here we have Reuters revealing that they fell for a false story about 20 beheaded Iraqis that was planted by insurgents, but do they just admit it and take responsibility? No, they whine that it is "very hard" to get stories in Iraq because it is so dangerous for journalists there.

I can tell we are all rolling our eyes, aren't we?

On the 28th Reuters and the AP along with most major news sources recklessly reported that 20 beheaded bodies were found by "Iraqi Policemen" on the banks of the Tigris River near Salman Pak, 19 miles south of Baghdad.

I say recklessly because not one of these supposed professional news sources substantiated the story but merely accepted the "news" as fact with no corroboration. This is something we have seen dozens of times since we entered Iraq with these news services explaining away this breach of professional standards by saying that it is just too dangerous for journalists to be in those areas to do the leg work to make sure their stories are true before they publish them.

Right on cue, as the illegal immigrant amnesty bill failed to get the required support for passage in the Senate, the MSM is here to tell us mean spirited LEGAL Americans how "hard" it is on all those poor, innocent ILLEGAL migrants who break the law to come here by the millions. Yes, folks, women and children hardest hit, as the old saw goes. Of course, it is nearly ignored by the MSM that these people are not just "innocents" but are here knowingly breaking our laws and then blaming us when they find life a bit uncomfortable -- and a bit uncomfortable is all they are facing it should be remembered.

Three quick reports are indicative of how the MSM is making the average, legal American out to be an evil, racist, selfish creep by urging their elected officials to think of their own constituents before they think of undeserving foreign invaders.

The feelings of illegal aliens who were disheartened by yesterday's failed cloture vote on the "comprehensive immigration reform" bill in the Senate are the focus of this Reuters piece by Tim Gaynor. Get your handkerchiefs ready...the Tearjerker Express is ready to leave the station.

PHOENIX (Reuters) - For day laborers seeking work in a sun-baked parking lot on Thursday, defeat of U.S. President George W. Bush's plans for an immigration overhaul has set back their dreams of a normal life.

In a report on a recent release of decades old documents detailing CIA operations in the 1960's and 70's, Reuters seems to find it necessary to interject "criticism" of president Bush "being too secretive now" even though not one part of the story has anything to do with president Bush or any modern CIA operations. It would be like talking about the Civil War and interjecting a Bush comment, or talking of Roman times and suddenly sticking in a "US imperialism" comment into the mix where it doesn't legitimately belong.

The MSM's Bush Derangement Syndrome is so pervasive that they cannot even discuss historical information without trying to embarrass or attack this president in the midst of it all.

At issue is the CIA's recent release of decades old clandestine operations documents.

By now you should know the drill concerning potables, combustibles, and sharp objects…

American heartthrob Tom Cruise has been prevented from filming scenes to a new movie about the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler at German military sites due to the actor’s connection with Scientology.

I kid you not.

As reported by Reuters Monday (emphasis added throughout):

More headline editorializing, this time on Yahoo. A June 5 Reuters article titled, “Bush bashes Putin on democracy on eve of G8 summit” sounds like Bush attacked Russian president Vladimir Putin, but the body of the article clearly did not support that view.

The headline told a very different story than the article. Editors not reporters are generally responsible for headlines, and they can greatly influence opinions about the news. The importance of a bias-free headline is that most people don’t read every word of every article; they often just skim the headlines. That meant the people who read just the headline got a very different impression from those who read the entire article (emphasis mine throughout):

"Russia is not our enemy," Bush said after meeting Czech leaders on a visit aimed at highlighting the country's emergence from Soviet domination.

He said he would urge Putin at the summit to cooperate with the U.S. plan to deploy a radar system in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles in Poland, but later in a speech took a dig at Moscow's record on democracy.

"In Russia reforms that once promised to empower citizens have been derailed, with troubling implications for democratic development," Bush said.

As people who are following the G-8 summit in Germany are well aware, it is highly doubtful that any meaningful accord will be reached at this meeting concerning CO2 emissions. In fact, reports out of Europe and Asia for many weeks leading up to this event have made this eventuality quite clear.

Yet, this didn’t prevent the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein for blaming the lack of such an agreement on President George W. Bush.

In an op-ed published Wednesday entitled “Don't Sugarcoat Climate Change; Calling out Bush's intransigence on emissions caps may be the best way for other G-8 countries to get the U.S. to budge on global warming,” Brownstein chose to ignore all of the facts surrounding this issue, and instead pointed an accusatory finger at the media’s favorite target (emphasis added throughout):

For the second time in four days – oddly occurring coincident with a G-8 summit being held in Germany to address climate change – a major news organization has published an article extolling the benefits of global warming.

In fact, Reuters not only followed the Associated Press’ lead as reported by NewsBusters Monday, but did them one better.

In a piece entitled “Global Warming May Be Good For Greenland,” writer Wojciech Moskwa made this stunning revelation early and often (emphasis added throughout, h/t NBer Sick-n-Tired):

Readers rarely get the truth about the US economy's performance from Old Media business reporters without having to sift through a litany of "yeah, buts" and "what ifs" designed to water down anything that might make the Bush economy appear successful. But if you look hard enough, you sometimes stumble across stories in other areas that indicate how things really are.

Stories on the environment are good candidates for finding economic truth, because the writer has to establish that continued economic growth without what the writer believes are appropriate environmental constraints is a bad thing. That means that the writer has to somehow acknowledge that economic growth exists.

Such is the case in a story buried on Page A14 of Thursday's Washington Post about lower CO2 emissions in the US last year (you read that right). In it, writer Juliet Eilperin let the reality of how the economy is performing slip in (bold is mine):

U.S. Carbon Emissions Fell 1.3% in 2006

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped slightly last year even as the economy grew, according to an initial estimate released yesterday by the Energy Information Administration.

The 1.3 percent drop in CO2 emissions marks the first time that U.S. pollution linked to global warming has declined in absolute terms since 2001 and the first time it has gone down since 1990 while the economy was thriving. Carbon dioxide emissions declined in both 2001 and 1991, in large part because of economic slowdowns during those years.

Whoa. At what other time has the Post informed its readers that the economy is "thriving"?

Reuters wants us to know that Republican Senators who block honors for “environmentalist pioneers” are bad but they don’t want to just come right out and say so, of course. So, they write a story that presents the environut in question as akin to a saint and the Republican Senator as somehow “arbitrary” and mean. This particular story from Reuters is a classic example of advocacy on the sly by presenting the “wrong” side of the issue as the uninformed or mean protagonist to the innocent and well meaning good guys.

In question is an honorific for what many imagine is the Godmother of the environut movement, Rachel Carson, the woman responsible for destroying the reputation of DDT, a life-saving insecticide that once helped control a killer called malaria all over the world. A resolution to honor Carson’s 100th birthday was to be introduced by Maryland’s Democrat Senator Ben Cardin, but Cardin put the brakes on his plans when it became clear that Senator Tom Coburn (R, OK) would use Senate rules to oppose the effort.

National Review contributor John Derbyshire has been a favorite whipping boy of snarky left-wing bloggers for a while, but perhaps most noticeably after some controversial postings he made on the heels of the Virginia Tech shooting.

But now a blogger at Wonkette is portraying Derb as a crotchety bigot on the basis of a blog post whereby Derbyshire notes Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) both insists on voters judging him on the basis of his leadership and agenda, not race, but then goes back to pandering to a crowd on the merits of his Hispanic heritage:

Outraged over Big Bill’s public admission of Mexican-ness during a time when Americans are supposed to be united against the Mexican Menace, Derbyshire bravely decides to use that very Mexican-ness against Richardson:

"Gay bishop snubbed by Anglican conference" reads the headline for the May 22 Reuters article by Luke Baker. But take a look at the lede and second graf and you'll see there are two bishops to be excluded from the gathering of Anglican prelates:

LONDON (Reuters) - The Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual head of 77 million Anglicans worldwide, has not invited two wayward bishops to a major conference next year, a move likely to stir controversy in the deeply divided communion.

Archbishop Rowan Williams has sent invitations to more than 800 Anglican bishops asking them to attend the Lambeth Conference in July and August 2008, but has not invited two American bishops, Gene Robinson and Martyn Minns.

By now you’ve probably heard about former President Jimmy Carter’s absurd comments to the BBC regarding President George W. Bush’s foreign policy being the worst in American history.

You may even have seen Carter on the “Today” show Monday morning saying that his statements were “maybe careless or misinterpreted” (video available here).

However, did you read the following absurd double standard crafted by Reuters about the White House’s response (emphasis added):

As gas prices hit all-time highs – not adjusted for inflation, of course – it appears that the media are missing a fabulous opportunity to rightly or wrongly blame the problem on President Bush.

Since press representatives rarely pass up such a chance, one has to wonder what’s causing this peculiar oversight.

An article published Monday by Reuters might give us a clue.

Astonishingly, though it didn’t go far enough to identify the real culprit for the recent price rise, Reuters did indeed point a finger at an extraordinarily unlikely target (emphasis added):

"Women voters shun Segolene Royal" reads one Reuters headline. Writes reporter Kerstin Gehmlich:

The weak female support is a bitter personal blow for Royal, who had played up her feminist credentials throughout the campaign, frequently defending policies she would want "as a mother" and accusing critics of male chauvinism.

Yet Gehmlich noted that the Sarkozy-Royal split among women voters in general was 52-48, according to an Ipsos exit poll. That closely tracks the 53-47 split among voters generally and is not far afield from 54 percent of men who voted for Sarkozy.

Indeed, younger female voters were about evenly split while elderly female voters broke heavily against the Socialist Royal, suggesting that generation, not gender, may have been a stronger determinant in the election outcome.

Royal's support among older voters was particularly poor, with 64 percent of women above the age of 60 supporting Sarkozy, and only 36 percent voting for Royal, according to the Ipsos survey. Women under 35 were split between her and Sarkozy.

Those numbers come from an Ipsos exit poll. Meg Bortin of the New York Times gave more data in her May 7 article that points to age differences in voting for the candidates. (Emphasis mine):

If a high-ranking member of the Taliban told Al-Jazeera that the recent attempted assassination of Vice President Dick Cheney was devised by Osama bin Laden, would you expect the media to report it?

In reality, after this interview, the claim was largely discredited. However, one has to wonder why Mullah Dadullah’s (the believed leader of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan) statement made last Wednesday went largely ignored.

Was this an attempt by a media seemingly always interested in downplaying the war on terror to keep the public from even considering that bin Laden could have been involved?

Regardless of the answer, Dadullah’s words certainly seemed newsworthy (video available here courtesy Memri TV):

For several years as oil and gas prices have exploded, a frequent media commentary has been to blame the problem on President Bush.

Either he didn’t do enough to stop a hurricane from hitting New Orleans, or it’s due to the war in Iraq, or he should talk to Iran, or it’s due to Cheney’s having run Halliburton – whatever the specious connection, the White House has been routinely at fault.

Yet, along comes Reuters on Wednesday cautioning drivers about upcoming record-high gas prices with a cause that, mysteriously and quite remarkably, had nothing to do with President Bush.

Better brace yourself (emphasis added throughout):

A truly extraordinary media event occurred Wednesday.

One news outlet reported: “Developing nations that are fast industrializing, such as China and India, have braked their rising greenhouse gas emissions by more than the total cuts demanded of rich nations by the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol.”

Practically at the same time, another reported: “Yet [China’s] coal habit means it will soon overtake the United States as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, some say as early as this year.”   

Can’t be, right? Well, the first report by Reuters (h/t NB member dscott) dealt with a draft about to be released by the United Nations concerning CO2 emissions (emphasis added throughout):

Turkish, Pakistani and Afghan leaders sign a pact to fight terrorismGood news is no news, at least when it comes to the war on terrorism.

On Monday evening, the State Department released its annual Country Reports on Terrorism showing a number of interesting findings, including steep declines in terrorist attacks and murders in many regions of the globe. That has not been the lede story in America's liberal media, however. Instead, they've chosen to focus their attentions on how terrorism has increased in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

That's not entirely unjustified. Both of those countries have significant amounts of American troops in them (although I doubt that the left-wing French or German press, say, is covering this any differently). What has been unacceptable, however, is the American press's complete ignoring of the rest of the State Department's numbers.

Instead of saying that terrorism has increased markedly in Iraq (the truth), the media are extrapolating beyond that to claim that, as Reuters puts it, "U.S. sees sharp rise in global terrorism deaths."

To show the feeding frenzy that is the MSM -- as well as the constant inaccuracy -- reports abounded yesterday with rebukes to Rudy Giuliani from Democratic candidates for the 2008 Presidential election over something they all merely assumed he said at a campaign appearance.

Every single paper out there quoted the stern rebukes of each of the front running Dem. candidates and nearly every source of MSM news, from TV to the internet, repeated what it was that Rudy "said" to force the rebukes.

Unfortunately for all concerned, it appears that Rudy never said the phrase attributed to him.

Yet, not a soul in the MSM (except Fox's Brit Hume) took the time to do the research necessary to fact check and assure the story was correct.

In addition to asking ABC's chief climate alarmist Sam Champion about the snow-laden wind farm he surveyed today and what it says about "global warming," NewsBusters would love to hear the "Good Morning America" personality chalk 100 trapped sealing boats in Canada up to Americans who use too much fossil fuel and thereby warm the planet.

Here's just a few news sources covering the story:

Canadian seal hunters trapped by ice (BusinessWeek, April 19)

Talk about your really inconvenient truths, a new study to be released on Wednesday refutes one of the major cataclysmic claims of soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his band of not so merry global warming alarmists.

For those that have forgotten – or just intentionally blocked it out -- in the schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore contended that global warming was responsible for increased hurricane activity with ominous portent for the future of such storms. In fact, this was a common media meme in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Yet, according to an article by Reuters Tuesday, not only does this appear not to be the case, but global warming actual reduces tropical cyclone frequency and intensity (emphasis added throughout):

For the last few weeks I have been watching two stories that, were they about Conservatives or Republicans, would have been scandals that would have shaken the rafters of the MSM. But, since these stories are about two favored Liberals, one old and one newly minted, we have seen no faux outrage, no shocked commentary, no calls for heads on pikes to be posted at the entrance to Congress, and no calls for resignations. Oh, the stories were reported all right, but all sensationalism was eschewed with the usual extrapolation to the level of a “culture of corruption” cast aside for a straight, newsy style atypical to their normal means against Republicans.

These two stories and the lack of passionate coverage of them by the MSM shows that the MSM employs as much liberal bias in what they chose not to cover as they do in what they chose to go ahead and focus upon.