Government & Press

Nuns on the Bus tour leader Sister Simone Campbell appeared on MSNBC's The Cycle on Thursday afternoon to discuss her ministry, which predictably led to her left-wing agenda becoming the focal point of the conversation. The only host to take issue with her talking points was token conservative S.E. Cupp, who was armed with facts and figures that the good sister could not rebut except by adamantly insisting they were "really wrong." That's when it started getting a little tense. [ video below, MP3 audio here ]

Democrats picked up seven new House seats and expanded their caucus in the Senate by two seats, electing along the way the House's first Hindu member and the Senate's first Buddhist. But for liberal religion scholar Stephen Prothero, that's not good enough, because both chambers are still disproportionately too Protestant, with Republicans in particular looking too much like an "old-fashioned America" of yesteryear.

From Prothero's November 16 CNN Belief blog post (emphasis mine):

Chicago Tribune reporter Christi Parson's fawning fan girl act at Wednesday's press conference was bad enough, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Sean Hannity on the November 15 edition of Hannity, but even worse was the reaction of the rest of the press corps in the room.

"This is the blue chip ensemble of journalists in America," the Media Research Center founder noted, and yet, "no one, but nobody seemed the least bit perturbed that she and [President Obama] are playing kissy-face in a press conference. Nobody was at all surprised by that. What does that tell you about our press corps?" Bozell asked. [watch the full "Media Mash" segment below the page break]

In what was a transparent attempt to scrutinize how conservative a black actress can really be, the ladies of The View invited Stacey Dash on the program to substitute for Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Immediately following her summary of what was to come, Whoopi Goldberg inquired how Dash was doing after the vicious attacks she had endured on Twitter for simply endorsing Mitt Romney.

Without resorting to the same animosity, the liberal hostesses were seemingly just as incredulous. Why would someone like her -- a black woman who works in Hollywood -- vote for anyone but Obama? They made it their mission to find out, pushing her to explain herself. Perhaps they were too busy to read the 3-page essay that she posted online before the election. [video below, MP3 audio here]

"After months and months and months" of Barack Obama "stiff-arming the press," the president was treated softly on Wednesday's press conference, NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham told Fox Business Network's Stuart Varney on the November 15 edition of Varney & Co.

True, "we got a Benghazi question from Jon Karl of ABC, although he pitched it as 'please yell at [Sen.] McCain.' And we got a Benghazi question from Ed Henry of Fox News, which he [President Obama] stiff-armed," but other than that, the questions were soft. "This is their ferocity?!" Graham asked rhetorically. [watch the video below the page break]

Rolling with the martial theme of the current edition of Newsweek -- "The Obama Conquest Lucky General or Master of the Game" -- writer Michelle Goldberg exulted in the GOP's defeat with her story, "The War on Women Backfires." "Republicans thought they could get away with the endless attacks on the fairer sex. They couldn't have been more wrong," thundered the subheadline (emphasis Newsweek's).

Of course, as we've noted here at NewsBusters, Goldberg conducted her own war on conservative women earlier this year with an attack on the "insufferable" Ann Romney. But conservative women, apparently don't seem to matter to Goldberg, who sees as misogynistic the notion of cutting off federal taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood, which of course happens to be the nation's largest abortion provider and hence largest murderer of unborn baby girls:

Apparently the folks at Politico think the White House press corps is set to be tougher on the president at press conferences in his second term than they're actually proving to be.

As my colleague Tom Blumer noted, early this morning, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown and Josh Gerstein posited seven "hard questions" they anticipated being raised at today's presidential press conference. "[W]hen he holds his first full-scale news conference in eight months Wednesday, Obama will have to explain how he plans to re-create his national security team, what he knows about the burgeoning [Petraeus] scandal and why he didn’t get wind of it sooner, " Budoff Brown and Gerstein noted, adding, "It’ll probably leave him longing to talk more about the fiscal cliff, the less titillating storyline of the week." The Politico writers then listed seven questions that they anticipated would be asked. Some of the predicted questions ended up being asked in some form or another, but I've excerpted below the ones which didn't get pressed in any fashion at all (emphasis mine):

We hear this from the liberal media every single time the Republicans don’t win something. They have only one solution for the Republican Party: don’t be conservative. It’s never about the failures of the candidates or a poor voter turnout effort. It’s that Republicans are too conservative – a false conclusion that ignores the successful campaigns of conservatives Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

The liberal media discourage candidates from being conservative because it helps their preferred liberal candidates. Mitt Romney didn’t embrace the conservative base and he lost, just like Bob Dole and liberal media sweetheart John McCain. The liberal media’s rush to scare the GOP away from conservatism is a deliberate attempt to divide the party. They don’t want Republicans to embrace conservative principals because conservative Republicans win.

With all the gloating the liberal media has been doing since the election, one would think the margin of victory was comparable to that of Ronald Reagan's overwhelming win over Walter Mondale in 1984. From The Atlantic to Politico and various other outlets, there have been an abundance of columns published in the past week urging, as they always do after a rout at the polls, that the GOP must evolve to the left on key issues.

The underlying themes have all been indistinguishable, almost as if they are collaborating with one another. The Republican party is in trouble, and anyone who refuses to accept the reality of this is delusional, they insist. If you can't beat the Democrats at this point, join them wails the chorus of liberal writers -- or at least impose the Fairness Doctrine to get the ball rolling.

On everyone's mind this morning was the resignation of CIA Deputy Director David Petraeus on Friday. Liberal radio talk show host Bill Press did his best to catch his listeners up on the details of the scandal, but then went on a rant asking why it's even an issue.

At no point in his defense of the former Army general and CIA chief did Press bring up the impending hearing concerning Libya on Capitol Hill that Petraeus was scheduled to appear before, nor did he think an FBI investigation was necessary -- despite the confidentiality agreement Petraeus submitted to before accepting one of the highest, if not the highest-level security clearance job there is in the federal government [ video below, MP3 audio here ]:

It's hard to imagine a major newspaper according Style section coverage to a 10-part documentary that was the brainchild of a conservative filmmaker with a penchant for conspiracy theories. But a left-winger, that's a different story. The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday today gave readers of the paper a 12-paragraph puff piece about "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States" which premieres tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on Showtime and focuses considerable attention on FDR's vice president Henry Wallace, a socialist who, had he been re-nominated in 1944 instead of Harry Truman, would have succeeded to the presidency in 1945 upon Roosevelt's death.

"Untold History" is a 10-hour-long documentary grounded "in indisputable fact," Hornaday assures readers, noting that Stone's collaborator in the project is an American University professor, Peter Kuznick.

"We can all be thankful" that "after 30 years of taking Christianity hostage and claiming that the church was really the Republican Party at prayer, this election actually revealed that the church is owned by neither Democrats nor Republicans," MSNBC's Martin Bashir pontificated at the open of is "Clear the Air" commentary which closed his eponymous November 9 program. 

Fortunately for Mr. Bashir, making straw-man arguments and spouting overheated political rhetoric is not a sin. What is, however, is hypocrisy. You see, Bashir has been fond of using the Bible as a cudgel to attack conservative Republicans for having allegedly unbiblical, even anti-Christian politics. Take his hostile interview with Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) back in May, in which Bashir slandered Barton by saying he was for slashing funding to Meals on Wheels and that cutting back funding to the program was unbiblical:

As if she half-expected conformity, the Grio's managing editor Joy-Ann Reid expressed doubt on MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner that conservatives will ever be enlightened enough to move enough towards the center to win an election.

Diversifying the messengers beyond white men and women simply isn't good enough to Reid, who condescendingly described Black and Hispanic Republicans as "window dressing" and "decoration": [video below, MP3 audio here ]

In his "Winners and losers from Election 2012" feature filed at his paper's website on Wednesday afternoon, the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza concluded that foreign policy in general was a "loser" in the campaign, failing to move votes (emphasis mine), "Despite all of the media attention that Libya drew in the final month of the campaign, foreign policy was an afterthought — at best — for most voters," he noted, adding that "Just 5 percent of people in the national exit poll said foreign policy was their most important issue. Interestingly, Obama won that group by 20+ points."

But as we've noted in numerous places on this blog, the administration's ever-shifting storyline on Benghazi failed to get scrutiny in the media, and new, damning revelations were downplayed or ignored, especially as the election drew closer and closer:

With President Obama's election win, the worldwide celebrations have commenced again. NBC's Today show documented as much as they possibly could on Wednesday morning.

Reporting from London, foreign correspondent Michelle Kosinski was tasked with narrating the story of how the election has been perceived and reported overseas. Eerily similar to four long years ago, jubilant residents from other sovereign nations were shown in a high spirits after a second term was guaranteed to Obama. [ video below, MP3 audio here ]

During a November 6 chat with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell in which he handicapped the election, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) argued that Republicans had done themselves no favors by both having as many debates as they did in the primary season and turning those debates over to liberal journalists for moderating. "If you were going to have the debates, let them be sponsored by the Heritage Foundation or let them be sponsored by the Republican National Committee."

For her part, Mitchell was visibly upset by this charge and shot back that various state Republican Party organizations had co-sponsored those debates. "But they were controlled by the news media," Barbour reminded her. "But I am accepting your point," Barbour conceded, that the lengthy, debate-laden primary season hurt Romney's ability to campaign for independents' votes. [watch the video below the page break]

Whether Mitt Romney becomes the 45th president or not, Politico's Jonathan Martin insists that the Republican Party is on the verge of a looming crisis. Sticking with the same overgeneralized racist narrative, it is basically a 'fact' at this point that the GOP's conservative ideology and a lack of diversity will ultimately lead to its downfall.

Conversely, the Democratic Party is poised to dominate in future elections. Nevermind that we heard this before in 2006 and 2008, with Clinton acolyte James Carville forecasted 40 years in the wilderness for the GOP. No, Martin insists that demography is destiny, and the GOP is bound to shrivel electorally as older white conservatives die off the voting rolls:

In the quadrennially important swing state of Ohio, one of the Toledo Blade's featured front page stories on Sunday wondered if Mormonism would shape Romney's policy. Following an endorsement of Obama last week in which there was no mention of the president's beliefs, religion editor Timothy Knox Barger's penned a 2,500 word piece that resorted to scare tactics and conjecture.

Among them was a seemingly legitimate concern that Romney might try to impose a ban on certain things that he's known to abstain from himself -- like coffee for instance.