Former Newark, New Jersey Mayor Sharpe James has been brought up on charges of corruption and the AP, The New York Times and several other outlets have all been reporting that jury selection for the event is underway this week. These news outlets dutifully reported the charges against James, reported his long political career, some even reported how popular he was in office. Yet, not one of them remembered to mention he was a Democrat. So, today's episode of "Democrat or Not?" leaves us right back where we usually are... with a story of corruption of a public official where his Democratic party affiliation is somehow not "relevant" to the story.

In two versions of the story the Associated press seems not to notice that Sharpe James is a Democrat (here and here).

Well, now I've seen just about everything. UPI is trying to convince us that Bush's "sour economy" is killing horses all across the nation. Bad, bad, mean ol' Bush! Why does he hate the pretty horses so? I know it's hard to believe, but UPI is seriously trying to claim that the economy is killing the noble beasts in "Horses suffer as U.S. economy sours."

ZIMMERMAN, Minn., Jan. 31 (UPI) -- The operator of a horse-rescue organization in Minnesota said the number of neglected horses needing care has gone up dramatically as the economy slows....Drew Fitzpatrick ... told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press Thursday the economic downturn has been tough on horses bought when times were good.

Yes, it's the economy, stupid.

In an article previewing the possible damage to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as a result of the Winograd Report into Israel's 34-day war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, AFP's Ron Bousso echoes a questionable claim about the 2006 Israeli War against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon:

It is expected to focus on Olmert's controversial decision to order a massive ground offensive in south Lebanon 60 hours before a UN-brokered ceasefire agreement was due to take effect on August 14.

Thirty-three Israeli soldiers were killed in the offensive launched just one hour after the final version of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 was presented to Israel.

Major Tomer Buhadana was one of those wounded during the last 48 hours of war, which in all killed 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

The Lebanese killed were "mostly civilians?"

The Daily Telegraph noted during the conflict:

The so-called "dean of the White House press corps" is at it again - not abusing her front row position at White House press briefings and criticizing the Bush administration, but this time by taking shots at the new media.

Helen Thomas, columnist for Hearst newspapers and long-time White House Press Corp member, blamed bloggers for contributing to the "deterioration" of journalism that led to the Iraq war.

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As we point out on a daily basis, the MSM is heavily left leaning and biased. But this isn't the MSM's only failing. They are also extremely lazy, leftist or not, and take little time to really think about the news nor do any research about what they are reporting. Take this UPI report for instance: "Political videos not reaching Web viewers." In this one, the UPI is claiming that political video on the web isn't "reaching Web viewers" and that it isn't the "ideal way" for candidates to reach voters, but the story itself does not satisfactorily prove such a conclusion at all. When compared to the percentage of actual voting adults, for instance, the penetration might be quite favorable toward political videos reaching those they are aimed at. So, why report it as a negative? Because they neither employed reason nor research while writing their article, that's why.

UPI claims the following:

Abracadabra seems to be the magic word - at least for one New Hampshire Democrat and United Press International (UPI).

Prosecutors in Strafford County are claiming in court papers that former congressional candidate, Gary Dodds (D-NH) staged his own car accident and faked his disappearance in 2006 in order to garner sympathy and support for his weak campaign.

In that same disappearing Dodds spirit, UPI made the vanishing politician's party affiliation disappear. Voila!

We have seen over and over again how the MSM (and the AP in particular) can't seem to force themselves to mention the party affiliation of some elected official accused and/or convicted of a crime if that official happens to be a Democrat. Now the MSM has expanded that from elected officials even to party workers. The AP reports a story on two Democrat election officials convicted of recount rigging and neglect of official duties for their actions during the 2004 elections but, for some hard to determine reason, few if any news sources are mentioning that these two are Democrats. Jacqueline Maiden and Kathleen Dreamer have pleaded guilty to the charges after an aborted conviction from last January, the original trial having been granted a retrial on grounds not connected with the pair's actions.

Today the UPI news service published a story aimed at making Hillary Clinton out to be a victim of "swift boating" and "haters" by focusing on those who are gearing up to oppose her candidacy for president on the Internet. UPI dismisses all opposition to Hillary as "old news," and "rumors," calls anti-Clinton forces "snide" and "haters," but what do they say of the target? All they say is she is "ready to fight back" as if she is a stalwart hero waiting to defend her honor. And not once does this short and rather pointless report deal with a single substantive argument against her candidacy presenting opposition as if it is just crazy extremism gone wild. In the end, this report is little else but UPI shilling for their favored candidate; Hillary Clinton.

It goes without saying that one of the defining moments in the 2006 elections was when former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida) resigned in September over electronic messages sent to male House pages.

The press firestorm was extraordinary, with all media outlets focusing huge amounts of air and print space on Foley on a daily basis as Election Day neared.

Yet, eleven months later, when it was revealed Friday afternoon that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement apparently hasn't found anything to actually charge Foley with, besides UPI and a brief mention by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, not one major press organization felt it was newsworthy.

Not one.

Florida's TCPalm reported Friday (emphasis added throughout):

Are the media intentionally downplaying or ignoring reports that indicate a growing al Qaeda involvement in Iraq?

Late Thursday evening, CNN.com reported (h/t LGF, emphasis added):

American soldiers discovered a girls school being built north of Baghdad had become an explosives-rigged "death trap," the U.S. military said Thursday.”

This was a compilation of a report that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer did earlier in the day on “The Situation Room.”

However, Stars and Stripes actually reported Tuesday that military officials shared this information on Monday (emphasis added):

It is always amazing when a "news report" is merely just a rehash of some press release, or is, at the very least, a completely one sided report.

Such is the case with a recent UPI "report", "Fight anti-Arab bigotry, Gonzalez told".

UPI is wagging its finger at U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez via a group of "Arab leaders" who are warning the government "to fight anti-Arab bigotry." The whole UPI "report" is nothing but the warnings of these so-called leaders about how filled with bigotry the USA is and how the government must fight it.

With all this hooplah, one would imagine that Arabs are being attacked, mistreated and discriminated against all across the country at an alarming rate. Arab "leader" James Zogby even makes the claim that the government must "reverse this disturbing and increasingly accepted trend of anti-Arab and Muslim bias".

In light of the big Democrat win last week, United Press International is doing its best to start the ball rolling against our security with a report from the 11th called Leahy aims at restoring habeas corpus.

In this fawning report, UPI paints Leahy as the hero on the white horse "restoring rights" to those poor enemy combatants the evil, evil Bush administration has been so mean to. UPI is overjoyed that Leahy is riding to the defense of terrorists...

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is expected to take over as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and The (Calif.) Daily Journal reports that Leahy is drafting a bill to undo portions of the new law in an effort to restore habeas corpus rights for enemy combatants.

How nice of Leahy to "restore" something they never had in the first place!

The supposed rights of habes for enemy combatants never existed and still doesn't. The only thing that the last few Supreme Court decisions addressed is if enemy combatants can APPLY for habeas protections, NOT that they should automatically have them.

The liberalism of White House eternal Helen Thomas isn't exactly a state secret, and she readily owned up to it in a sympathetic profile in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday.

The White House bureau chief for United Press International since forever (until she quit when it was acquired by the company that owns the conservative Washington Times) at 87 she's now a syndicated columnist for Hearst News Service. She tells the Inquirer:

"I'm a liberal, I was born a liberal, and I will be a liberal till the day I die. That has nothing to do with whether or not this administration is telling the truth. Nor does it have anything to do with the way I presented my stories when I was a news reporter. When I was reporting news, as a person I never bowed out of the human race -- I felt my feelings and had my opinions about things, just as anyone does -- but it never got into my copy. I was never accused of slanting my copy."

The UPI and many other news sources are headlining “Military mags to call for Rumsfeld ouster”. 

Four publications of the Military Times Media Group plan to call on U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times will issue the call in an editorial scheduled to run Monday, the newspaper said.

The Chronicle published the text of the editorial on its Web site Friday.

The editorial says the truth about the war in Iraq “been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington.” Instead, the editorial says President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld have issued “one rosy reassurance after another.”

There has been some buzz in the email this morning about a question Pam Hess of UPI asked General William Caldwell in a briefing this morning. In her question, Hess referred to those who died in the air strike that killed the most wanted man in Iraq, including Abu Musab al Zarqawi himself, as victims. Her full question was:

"General, this is Pam Hess of UPI. What's going to happen to Zarqawi's body after the autopsy? Does it get returned to Jordan to his family? And do you have anything on the identity of the others killed in the strike? And was it 6 victims including Zarqawi or was it 7?"

A legitimate question, however, her word choice is unfortunate. Let us remember the true victims are the ones who were savagely murdered by Zarqawi and his network of thugs. Zarqawi and his associates killed along with him, are not victims here, rather, they are the recipients of justice.

A journalist named Nir Rosen appeared as a guest on tonight's edition of The O'Reilly Factor (Thu. May 11, 2006). He has a new book out called In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. To write the book, Rosen "gained an impressive measure of access to both the Sunni and Shia resistance" and probably obtained "more sources in the insurgency than any other American reporter" (emphasis mine, sourced here). So O'Reilly began his interview with the obvious question:

"How did you do that? Very few people, journalists, particularly writers, have been able to get in there without getting their head cut off. How did you do it?"

Rosen responded (emphasis mine),

Former UPI White House reporter Helen Thomas gave an interview to Campus Progress, the campus project of the liberal Center for American Progress. Her theme, unsurprisingly, was that the Washington press corps is a bulk pack of weenies:

Starting after 9/11, they rolled over and played dead—they were so afraid of being called unpatriotic and un-American and they thought the American people were watching on television. They lost their guts and they did a lousy job. It was so clear, for two years, that President Bush wanted to go to war. Every day on the podium in the press room, we heard Ari Fleischer and then Scott McClellan say in one breath, “9/11—Saddam Hussein—9/11—Saddam Hussein—9/11—.” So later on when they said, no, Saddam Hussein had no links with them it was a little late in the game.

Two "breakthoughs" in stem-cell research announced at roughly the same time have, based on Google News searches, received very disparate treatment in news coverage.

Click here to view the Google News screen shot. Note: the "hours ago" indicator is only for the lead item listed. Both stories originated in news coverage in the early AM on December 13.

The first, originally covered by the Louisville Courier Journal, is about adult stem cells and how researchers are claiming that they can be made to do all the tricks that, until this "breakthrough," embryonic stem cells have been thought to be able to perform:

University of Louisville researchers have coaxed stem cells from adult mice to change into brain, nerve, heart and pancreatic cells. That could lead to treatments for human diseases and end the debate over embryonic stem cells.

"We have found a counterpart for embryonic stem cells in adult bone marrow. This could negate the ethical concerns," said Dr. Mariusz Ratajczak, leader of the research team and director of the stem-cell biology program at U of L's James Graham Brown Cancer Center.

This adult stem cell "breakthough" had only 31 "related items" in a Google News search as of about 10 AM today, with no apparent coverage by the Associated Press or the New York Times. United Press International is the only major wire service or major newspaper that has mentioned the story.

The second, primarily covered by The Washington Post's Rick Weiss ("Human Brain Cells Are Grown In Mice") appeared on Page A03 of the paper on Tuesday, December 13, and is about embryonic stem cells:

As reported yesterday by NewsBusters, a brand new ABC News/TIME poll depicted Iraqis as being very optimistic about themselves and the future of their country. The Associated Press via USA Today is sharing this information with its readers by focusing attention on the negatives first. The article, entitled “Most Iraqis Oppose U.S. Troops, Poll Says,” began:

“Most Iraqis disapprove of the presence of U.S. forces in their country, yet they are optimistic about Iraq's future and their own personal lives, according to a new poll.

“More than two-thirds of those surveyed oppose the presence of troops from the United States and its coalition partners and less than half, 44%, say their country is better off now than it was before the war, according to an ABC News poll conducted with Time magazine and other media partners.”

Then the article addressed the positives:

The Associated Press and United Press International are reporting that another Democratic hawk, Norm Dicks (D-Washington), has changed his position on the Iraq war. They are both quoting from and referencing a Seattle Times article first published about 16 hours ago entitled “Defense hawk Dicks says he now sees war as a mistake.” Yet, they are conveniently ignoring previous statements made by Dicks concerning the war that were also reported by the Seattle Times.

Today’s article stated:

James O. Clifford, Sr., a retired reporter and editor with UPI and the Associated Press, has an interesting guest column, "Cardinal Law Was Looking For Media Sin In The Wrong Places," in this month's edition of the conservative Catholic magazine, New Oxford Review. Clifford argues that while the national media have rightfully reported aggressively on systemic abuses and coverups among the Catholic hierarchy regarding priestly sexual abuse of children, the media have played down similar concerns within the teaching profession about nationwide problems with student-teacher sexual misconduct in American public schools.

The article can be found teased here, featuring the first five paragraphs. There is a $1.50 charge for reading the full article.