Journalistic Issues

Ping-pong diplomacy worked with China, so why not b-ball diplomacy with North Korea? Mika Brzezinski is clearly not buying that line of logic. On today's Morning Joe, Brzezinski confessed to being "angry" with George Stephanopoulos for having the extraterrestrial otherwise known as Dennis Rodman on This Week to discuss his recent trip to North Korea, which included meeting with its new leader, Kim Jong Un.

Mika didn't spare her fellow MJ panelists, calling them "idiots" when they persisted in discussing Rodman's trip and TW appearance.  View the video after the jump.

Bob Woodward is a legend in modern journalism, especially for fellow liberal reporters. But that all is for naught now that Woodward has committed the cardinal sin of criticizing the White House for an operative's use of what apparently is a fairly common tactic: a harsh bullying of the press in order to demand even more favorable coverage than the Obama-friendly press already lavishes on Team Obama.  It centers on Woodward reporting that sequestration was the White House's idea.  This morning Matt Lauer, on the Today Show, questioned Woodward's judgement, saying "I'm a little surprised you've gone public with this."  Even, the New York Times offered no refuge for Woodward.

He isn’t the only one.  Clinton operative and op-ed columnist Lanny Davis has received similar treatment, and veteran White House reporter Ron Fournier at National Journal also reported threatening emails and calls. But in today’s broadcast of Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski decided to give deference to Obama acolyte David Axelrod’s days as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune in order to portray Woodward as going over the line in his reporting on Gene Sperling's harassment:

Hold the presses! The far-left blog Daily Kos is insisting that liberal reporter Bob Woodard, in doing his job as a journalist, has gone “full Breitbart” with his coverage of sequestration. Just a few short years ago, the Kossacks loved when reporters "spoke truth to power" in confronting Republicans in the White House. But now that Woodward has gone on record saying that he received threatening emails from senior Obama administration officials, well, that's a far different story.

On the February 27 broadcast of The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Woodward said:

Remember when Washington Post In The Loop columnist Al Kamen launched another frivolous, liberal pandering contest for participants to name Hillary Clinton’s memoir to make things “a little easier” for her?  Kamen is known for his inside the Beltway commentary on politics within Washington, which probably explains why bureaucrats love him. Well, after a strenuous vetting process, the winners are in, and it’s full of liberal boot-lickers, pro-Obama journalists, and former staffers of Joe Biden.

The top three that were the most interesting were from Alfred Friendly, Jr., a former reporter for Newsweek and the New York Times, who suggested Hard Times, Soft Power as his title for Hillary’s memoir.  Does anyone else feel that the name sounds like a title suitable for the Adults Only section of the Clinton Presidential Library bookstore?

The Washington Post has been around for more than 150 years and is the largest newspaper in the nation's capital. So there's absolutely no excuse why the paper recently commissioned and published a poll related to the looming sequester which failed to account for the Democrats controlling the upper chamber, even though Republicans were noted as controlling the House.

 As Ed Morrissey at Hot Air noticed today:

As press secretary to President Obama, Robert Gibbs was often in the obfuscation business.  Now that he's been freed from that role and become a news analyst—albeit at MSNBC—Gibbs has become considerably more candid. Readers will recall, for example, that he described Chuck Hagel as "unimpressive and unprepared" at his Senate confirmation hearing.

Today, Gibbs took that frankness a significant step further.  On Up With Chris Hayes, Gibbs stated that as press secretary, he had been ordered not to acknowledge the existence of the drone program. View the video after the jump.

When a news story is too newsworthy to ignore but too embarrassing to the Obama administration to highlight, what's a liberal newspaper editor to do? Why, bury it, of course. That's what Washington Post editors did to Steven Mufson's February 14 story on an inspector general's report finding, surprise, surprise, that taxpayer monies on another Obama-hyped green energy project have gone to waste.

What's more, the Post's editor's assigned the item a boring headline, "Report: Grant to battery company was mismanaged."

The liberal hosts on MSNBC  just couldn't get enough of watching U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio reach for a glass of water and take a sip during his rebuttal of President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, airing the snippet a staggering 155 times during the Wednesday broadcast schedule, according to a tally by the Daily Caller.

Other cable news networks showed the footage far less often. CNN aired it 34 times, and Fox News Channel played it just 12 times -- all of which took place on “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Hannity” while the hosts discussed the media's obsession with the Florida Republican's “watergate” incident.

Today, our friends at Twitchy reported that Lee Judge, a left-wing political cartoonist, illustrated a depraved caricature depicting the grave of ex-sniper, and Navy SEAL, Chris Kyle – with the caption “if only there had been a good guy around.”  This is wholly insensitive, and a craven attempt to smear an American hero who was tragically slain by a fellow veteran whom he was helping cope with PTSD. 

But this is hardly the first time Judge has inked a cartoon that transgresses the bounds of decency in service of a left-wing political argument. For example, when the NRA first proposed armed guards in schools back in December, Judge thought it was clever to suggest that Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook shooting, would have been the perfect candidate for such a job.  In another cartoon, the Kansas City Star cartoonist also insinuated that guns rights activists only care about their firearms, and not protecting children. 

It's always interesting when liberals disagree on something because each one believes he or she is always 100 percent correct on any issue, a stance that often leads to fiery confrontations and personal attacks.

The latest example of this concept is the angry Twitter debate between Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith and Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall over an article entitled “7 Things Democrats Would Have Freaked Out About if Bush Had Done Them.”

On Friday, February 8, Erika Bolstad of the left-wing McClatchy Newspapers wrote that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was “anti-science” for doubting manmade global climate change, an advocacy project that was made famous by ex- Vice President Al Gore, who recently sold his Current TV Network to oil producers in Qatar.  

In her piece, Bolstad wrote:

…Rubio doesn’t think much of climate change, one of the other hot political topics of the moment. That puts the 41-year-old Rubio squarely in the anti-science wing of his party and among a shrinking number of Americans with doubts about global warming.

The Florida senator this week in an interview questioned whether “man-made activity” is contributing most to global warming, and he suggested there’s reasonable debate on whether there’s “significant scientific consensus” on the human role. He also questioned whether there’s anything the government can do to make a difference.

Early this morning, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he’d abdicate the papal throne at the end of the month, which is the first time a pontiff will have stepped down in seven centuries.  Such breaking news was bound to set off rampant media speculation about next month's meeting of the College of Cardinals --which will decide Benedict's successor -- and talk in the media about the outgoing bishop of Rome's legacy.

All that is well and good, but on MSNBC, it was the perfect excuse for the liberal network to feature liberal Catholics Chris Matthews and E.J. Dionne scolding the Church as out of touch with modernity on issues of sexuality and women as priests. And that was on top of laughingly treating the election of a new pope as though it were some presidential primary where candidates work feverishly to line up enough delegates to win nomination. Read the relevant transcript below the page break:

If beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, then the host of “The Ed Show” on MSNBC is definitely wearing blinders.

During the Wednesday night edition of his program, Schultz attacked Steve Doocy of the morning “Fox and Friends” show for stating that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the subject of a new website that is “showing off this glamorous new face. Face-lift, perhaps?”

Last night, PBS NewsHour anchor Ray Suarez noted the manhunt for alleged cop killer Christopher Dorner, a former Los Angeles police officer and former naval officer who left behind a rambling manifesto in which he called for an assault weapons ban and praised liberal politicians and journalists.  Unfortunately for viewers, the taxpayer-subsidized network left out those details about the manifesto, even though the manifesto gave some pretty revealing insights into the political ideas that may have inspired Dorner to violence.

Here’s what Ray Suarez reported.

With this afternoon's Senate confirmation hearings for CIA director nominee John Brennan in view, the February 7 broadcast of Now with Alex Wagner devoted significant attention to the Obama administration's use of armed drones and the recently-leaked DOJ White Paper defending the legitimacy of drone strikes that explicitly targeted American civilians overseas. 

For her part, host Alex Wagner failed to mention Anwar al-Awlaki’s activities as a terrorist operative affiliated with al-Qaeda.  The Now host merely tagged al-Awlaki as an American-born cleric, even though he served as a talent recruiter within the organization and inspired Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan.  Al-Awlaki also had contact with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the terrorist who attempted to blow up a passenger airliner on Christmas Day of 2009.  None of that was mentioned on the show. 

For two nights in a row, NBC, ABC, and CBS have ignored a story that would damage the liberal narrative they are helping the White House to push. Two days ago, the Congressional Budget Office reported that it has revised its projections of the cost of ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies. The CBO now estimates that the subsidies, which are to be offered through exchanges beginning in 2014, will cost 29 percent more than the CBO initially projected in 2010. The projected 10-year cost has increased by $233 billion.

In addition, the report estimates that 7 million workers will lose their employer-sponsored health insurance due to ObamaCare, almost twice as many as the CBO previously estimated. Monetary penalties on those who don’t buy insurance are now expected to be $36 billion higher from 2014 to 2019 than was originally thought.

In the wake of the leaked Department of Justice memo detailing the legality of targeted killings by drones on American citizens, the PBS NewsHour found it fitting to have the ACLU defend its position in why these strikes are troubling, and why American-born al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki should’ve been kept alive to plan acts of terror against the United States.

Of course, this is maddening to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  Liberal publications, like The Nation, detail the dark future of drone warfare, and some anti-drone journalists, like Conor Fierdorsdorff of The Atlantic, have compared Obama to Bush.  However, even with the media either criticizing, or ignoring, this development, last night’s broadcast of the PBS NewsHour didn’t take into account the hypocrisy of liberals who were on the warpath a few years prior after release of Bush memos related to enhanced interrogation techniques.

In his ongoing campaign to demonize the National Rifle Association and with it defenders of 2nd Amendment rights in general, MSNBC's Martin Bashir featured left-wing Rolling Stone journalist Tim Dickinson to promote his hit piece on the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. Liberal Democratic strategist Julian Epstein, who added more reverb in the anti-gun echo chamber, joined Dickinson for the segment.

Dickinson and Epstein tag-teamed to bash the NRA. Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre was a “menace with a gun,” as he was irresponsible with one during a PR stunt featuring him at the range, Dickinson insisted, cited an unnamed source on background.  For his part, Epstein charged that the NRA accepts “blood money” from gun manufacturers in order to fund their agenda.  Yes, these are the folks Bashir insists just want to have a reasonable debate on gun control in America.

Washington Post In the Loop columnist Al Kamen has once again proven he’s one of the Obama administration’s biggest cheerleaders.  You may recall that he asked readers to choose the First Family’s vacation spot last summer, and dismissed criticism coming from liberals that Obama's second term Cabinet was getting more monochromatic and male.

Well, ol' Al has a new contest for us: picking the title of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's memoir.

The tumult at CNN that has seen several contributors leave the cable news network continued on Wednesday, when Soledad O'Brien's morning show, “Starting Point,” was canceled because her program's small audience was “too ethnic, based on the high concentration of minority viewers.”

Despite ending O'Brien's morning show, a CNN spokesman told Politico on Thursday that "Soledad is very important to the network, and we're discussing various options with her.”

Ben Cosgrove of Time magazine's sister publication Life penned a piece today concerning gun safety in the 1950s, saying it was important for historical context about the gun control debate in today's political environment. The Life editor dusted off a March 1956 Life story on an Indiana conservation officer teaching grade school children basic gun safety, using real shotguns and bolt-action rifles.

While the historical retrospective is instructive, Cosgrove's accompanying commentary was fraught with liberal swipes, and missed the mark on the Second Amendment.   What's more, Cosgrove insinuated that our gun culture is, and always has been, loaded with “insane” statistics when it comes to the harm it inflicts on society:

Hours before the Senate Judiciary Committee held Newtown-inspired gun control hearings, MSNBC's Morning Joe program brought on former Playboy chairwoman and CEO Christie Hefner to warn that warmer weather in Chicago has been a contributing factor in the number of gun deaths in the Windy City.  "[W]e are having this climate change effect that is driving" young men in Chicago to commit 500 homicides in 2012 she insisted.

For his part, quasi-conservative host Joe Scarborough made no attempt to press Hefner on this outrageous claim, although he did mildly mock it. In doing so, however, he dismissed conservative bloggers with a lame stereotype:

MSNBC and NBC News--already famous for their perpetual bashing of conservatives and Republicans--are fast acquiring another claim to fame: dishonest editing of news footage to gin up the left-wing outrage machine.

The latest edit appeared on the Monday edition of the “Martin Bashir” program where the father of one of the victims of the Newton, Conn. school shooting was shown supposedly being shouted down by gun rights supporters as he testified before a hearing about banning certain types of guns in the state. Full video below the fold.

On the January 28 edition of his afternoon MSNBC program, Martin Bashir brought on liberal Democratic strategist Julian Epstein to talk about the left-wing’s favorite topic of late gun control.  As the interview progressed, Epstein made a comparison of the firearms industry to Big Tobacco, attacking firearms manufacturers for their role in sponsoring youth sporting events and publications like Junior Shooters.

This whole narrative was spawned from a ludicrous Sunday New York Times piece that basically said instructing kids in safe gun-handling is hazardous to their health.  As my NewsBusters colleague and MRC Times Watch director Clay Waters wrote today:

Those who doubt the idea that modern liberalism is essentially about denying reality need to hear the latest laughable bit of media analysis from President Barack Obama.

According to the former junior senator from Illinois, the American media elite, the same group of people who have described themselves as "swooning" for him, is actually too nice to Republicans. This same group of people has taken the notion of "objectivity" too far, according to Obama.

On the January 25 broadcast of MSNBC’s The Cycle, 9/11 Truther and liberal commentator Touré Neblett “thank[ed] God” that abortion was there to save him from unwanted fatherhood with a girlfriend who was "just not the one."  "[I]n some ways that choice saved my life," the MSNBC host insisted in his closing commentary, seemingly remorseless for how that choice cost an innocent human being his or her life.

Noting that last Tuesday marked 40 years since the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade,  Touré argued that there’s “something undeniably misogynist about the impulse to deny a woman's dominion over her own body and limit her ability to shape her life – and impose another sense of morality on her.”  So, when did respecting and protecting innocent life become “misogynist”?