Journalistic Issues

Imagine if an employee at a college or university was suspended from her duties for signing a ballot petition that is for same sex marriage, the media outrage would be predictable and the person would become a household name. And the media would have good reason for doing so: no one should suffer employment consequences for their political convictions. But you probably haven't heard of Dr. Angela McCaskill, because she's on the 'wrong' side of the same-sex marriage debate.

In an incomprehensible move that is being criticized by even advocates for same-sex marriage, Gallaudet University put their Chief Diversity Officer on administrative leave until further notice. Why, you ask? Because McCaskill had the audacity to sign a petition at her church that supported a reversal of Maryland's relatively new same-sex marriage law.

In her analysis of the vice presidential debate on the October 12 edition of Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski showed disdain for Paul Ryan and utter adulation for Joe Biden's performance. She was alone in her wildly pro-Joe assessment.

As far as she was concerned, Biden utterly thrashed Ryan, and the liberal MSNBC co-host loved every minute of it: [ video below, MP3 audio available here ]

With the Vice Presidential debate hours away, new developments concerning its moderator, Martha Raddatz have been disturbing. As Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart reported today, during the 1990 Massachusetts gubernatorial race, Raddatz, who was then known as Martha Bradlee (she was married to Ben Bradlee Jr.), moderated the debate where, like a good race-baiting liberal, she asked Democratic candidate John Silber “why he had not campaigned more frequently in poor minority communities, prompting him to respond: "There is no point in my making a speech on crime control to a group of drug addicts." 

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform convened for a hearing on Wednesday at 12 p.m. EDT to delve into the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Detailed accounts were heard, revelatory statements were made, but MSNBC's noon time program Now with Alex Wagner was too busy criticizing everything Mitt Romney has said over the last few years to even acknowledge what was transpiring, much less dip in to cover the hearing itself.

With a House Oversight committee slated to hold a hearing on the deadly Benghazi consulate terrorist attack at noon today, there was really no excuse for CNN's Starting Point to not cover the story. But alas, anchor Soledad O'Brien checked her journalistic credibility at the dressing room door, going on air with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) sounding more like an Obama apologist than a hard-nosed reporter.

Every election cycle, the American people are inundated with polls.  Polls with blacks, white, Hispanics, women, Jews, Catholics, young people, and the Asians are disseminated ad nauseam ­– despite most of them being flawed or so skewed concerning the sample spread that it’s not worth commenting on in any analysis.  When Romney hit a slump towards the end of September, which led to his dip in the polls, the left thought it was over.  No one was more convinced of this than Pew Research president Andrew Kohut, a public-broadcasting regular, who had to change his tune on the October 8 broadcast of the PBS Newshour.

Howard Fineman, the former Newsweek reporter turned editorial director for The Huffington Post, is excited for the upcoming Vice Presidential debate this Thursday.  You could tell from his column published today, which glorifies Joe as the archetypal debater. It's titled "Obama Needs the Merciless Joe." 

To start things off, Fineman threw in a thinly veiled racial remark concerning Biden’s thirst for a political fight saying  “what Biden lacks in academic chops he more than makes up for in street smarts; genetic political talent (his Secret Service code name is "Celtic," enough said); an eye for and an ability to earn the loyalty of brilliant, dedicated staffers; an instinct for the jugular; and a thirst for political combat.” 

MSNBC contributor Howard Fineman lamented how the president was on the defensive in his first bout with Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Jim Lehrer, who moderated the October 3 debate, has a history of bias that is usually cloaked with his soporific disposition. However, Fineman seemed agitated to the point of calling Lehrer “useless” and equated his moderating of the debate to “criminal negligence.” Fineman’s ire seems to be indicative of liberals’ reaction towards Obama’s poor debate performance.

On Wednesday’s Jansing & Co., MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing tried to establish that there is one question “we can all anticipate and not be surprised by,” and that is a question to Mitt Romney about the 47 percent comments, because it had a “very negative effect” on voters. Jim Lehrer must repeat Obama's TV ads in a question?

But what about the “other race speech” video of Obama from 2007? In perfect formation with the DNC line, Jansing asked disgraced CBS anchor Dan Rather if that smacked of Republican desperation: [ video below the break, audio here ]

In the October 1 broadcast of NewsNation with Tamron Hall, a segment featuring former State Department Middle East officer Joel Rubin focused on how the Romney campaign was “trying to put all of these things in a big pot hoping that something picks up steam” concerning President Obama’s foreign policy. Yep, it’s still the same game with some in the media – which is to trivialize what can hurt the president to prevent it from becoming news.

As shown on Times Watch this morning, New York Times media reporter David Carr may pooh-pooh the idea of liberal bias. But he's a stronger supporter of the First Amendment than some of his Times colleagues, like movie critic A.O. Scott, who ludicrously defended a left-wing journalist's vandalism of the subway poster as "free expression" and even "democracy."

In "The Sweet Spot," a weekly videocast featuring Carr and movie critic A.O. Scott discussed controversial advertisements put up in the New York City subway system by anti-Islamist activist Pamela Geller that read: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."

MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal on Saturday morning to discuss the letter  MRC president Brent Bozell and more than 20 other conservative leaders and media personalities wrote to executives of ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News.

"I would simply say we have a news media that doesn't hold the Obama Administration accountable. It's trying to destroy the Mitt Romney presidential campaign," Graham said. "That is not what ‘objective’ news media does." (See video and transcript below, MP3 audio available here).

The ridiculous media narrative continues, in spite of the mounting evidence that has proven otherwise. A movie clip posted on YouTube months ago is still being blamed for the unspeakable acts of violence that occurred over two weeks ago. The media has effectively demonized an amateur filmmaker for allegedly inciting more rage and violence in the Middle East. It's almost as if they are equating hate speech with murder, and absolving the angry mobs for what they did. They just couldn't help themselves.

One of the actresses from The Innocence of Muslims was invited on The View on Wednesday morning to share her side of the story. What ensued was a peculiar interview that dragged on for over 7 minutes. While the rest of the cast was said to be in hiding, Cindy Lee Garcia 'bravely' made an appearance on national television to set the record straight. (see video below, MP3 audio available here)

During the September 25 broadcast of the PBS Newshour, anchor Gwen Ifill invited Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass and former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns to discuss President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and his recent address to the UN. Reporter Judy Woodruff also had a segment on the president speech. Yet none of the segments dealing with the address mentioned the fact that the Obama administration has expressed support for anti-blasphemy measures that are completely incongruous with the freedom of speech as protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Despite having failed to stop let alone reverse the rising of the seas, Barack Obama has made Newsweek’s newest ten best presidents list, which gives readers a top ten of the chief executives since 1900. Newsweek, whose list unsurprisingly is dominated by liberal Democrats, gave this justification for selecting Obama in a caption in a photo slide:

Picking a sitting president in a tally of the best is tricky – history hasn’t had time to put things in a more sober context.  But the historic election of America’s first black president cannot be ignored.  That a man whose ancestors included a slave could become the leader of a nation founded to some extent in slavery is as much an achievement for the country as it is a marker for Obama himself.  Whether Obama stays or goes, his standing, as a fundamentally groundbreaking president will remain.

The Jurassic Press have long had a field day puffing up bailed out General Motors (GM) and their electric automotive windmill - the Chevrolet Volt.

When it came to August Volt sales numbers, the Media were Justin Bieber-excited.

In the wake of Romney’s “47 percent” comments and less than positive polling from key swing states, every squishy Republican in the liberal media's stable of acceptable Republicans went into full panic mode.  But just yesterday, President Obama made a huge admission when he admitted that his biggest miscalculation was that he thought he could change Washington from the inside.

Republican strategist Alice Stewart raised that point during a chat with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts this morning, blasting Obama for it and saying that he had two years in his term in which his party ran both houses of Congress. That's an indisputable fact, but Roberts insisted that Stewart was wrong on the length of time that Democrats in Obama's term controlled both the House and Senate:   [See video below break.  MP3 audio here.]

With Occupy Unmasked being released today in select theaters, this morning’s edition of CNN’s Early Start with Zoraida Sambolin invited David Bossie, producer of the film and President of Citizens United to discuss the film.  However, things got hazy towards the end of the interview where Sombolin shamelessly tried to convey the narrative that Occupy is a “peaceful” movement.

It doesn't seem to matter what the president or vice president say on their re-election campaign trail. Even their most outrageous statements like Biden's "put y'all back in chains" remark are given the benefit of the doubt by the supposedly non-partisan media. More often than not, we're told by liberal media "fact checkers" that Republicans end up using them out of proper "context."

Take for example, the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler who furiously spun in Obama's favor in a  fact-check column on Thursday that dealt with a comment from 1998 by then-State Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.). Eager to slam Romney even though his campaign has not made an ad on the matter -- nor did Kessler quote anything Romney or a Romney surrogate said about it per se -- Kessler gave the Romney campaign a failing grade of four Pinocchios for using it as evidence against the incumbent. Claiming to be fair and balanced in the past, the Post staffer went on the defensive for what seems to be his preferred presidential candidate.

Jim Avila may not be a household name, but he has become one of the most prominent news correspondents on television – averaging 130 reports a year since 1997. But he’s done much more than just report the news, Avila has become an activist.

He made that name for himself and sullied the term “lean beef” early in 2012 with a series of stories repeatedly calling the beef “pink slime.” On Sept. 13, Beef Products Inc. filed a 1.2 billion lawsuit against ABC for the coverage of “pink slime.” Avila is specifically named in this lawsuit for his part in the anti-meat attacks. “Avila knowingly or recklessly made multiple false and disparaging statements regarding BPI and LFTB during ABC broadcasts, in ABC online reports and social media postings,” read the lawsuit. That was just one of four separate anti-meat topics Avila has pursued in 2012 alone.

The Washington Post doesn’t always report on voter fraud, but when it does, it buries the story in the Metro section.

At the bottom of page B4 in the September 11 issue, the Post noted a Democratic congressional candidate in Maryland who dropped out of the race yesterday after instances of her voter fraud were brought to light.

During early Thursday morning's coverage of the Democratic National Convention, CNN’s Piers Morgan interviewed Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), liberal activist Sandra Fluke, and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.  It turned out to be a massive pandering to Fluke and nice vehicle for Rep. Israel, Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), to disseminate falsehoods that Morgan allowed to skirt by.  

During MSNBC's August 29 GOP Convention coverage, Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton made patently false remarks during their post-speech commentary of Rep. Paul Ryan. Congressman Ryan was slammed concerning statements he made about the closure of the Janesville General Motors plant.  Rep. Ryan reiterated that President Barack Obama promised to keep the plant open, but then shut it down.  The left-wingers went rabid and supported  the false narrative that the plant was closed by George W. Bush.  

Sharpton said if you want "an eloquent person [Ryan] that does not tell the truth, this was a great performance."

Last night, Yahoo! News Washington Bureau Chief, David Chalian, slandered Romney by saying that the Republican nominee and his wife, Ann, were "happy to have a party with black people drowning."  These remarks were made during ABCNews.com's webcast of their coverage of the RNC convention.  As a result, Mr. Chalian has been fired by Yahoo!, but some liberal journalists aren't happy about it.

Gwen Ifill of the taxpayer-subsidized Public Broadcasting System (PBS) tweeted this today.

Liberal Daily Beast writer Michael Tomaksy has already labeled this year's Republican National Convention as "reprehensible."  In his insufferable knowingness, Tomasky claimed that the next few days will be a "toxic waste dump of hate and lies and race-baiting."  In other words, it will be the most racist gathering of party delegates in the history of the republic.  Why? Because The New York Times said so, of course:

Tom Edsall said it without quite saying it this morning in the Times, that this Romney-Ryan campaign is becoming among the most racist we've ever seen. The two key lies so far are totally about race--that Obama is soft on welfare recipients, and that he's "robbing" $716 billion from Medicare (77 percent of recipients are white) to "pay for Obamacare" (that is, to extend health care to black and brown people who don't deserve it, havent earned it, etc.). 

The Jurassic Press is in full-on Defend President Barack Obama mode.  But since President Obama’s record is indefensible, that means the Press is also in Eviscerate Mitt Romney mode.

The ideological godfather of the Press is, of course, the New York Times.  Where they lead, the rest of the Jurassic Press follows. 

The Washington Post really knows how to bury the lede. In a Tuesday story on how suspended CNN-Time journalist Fareed Zakaria is now under fire for stealing quotes without attribution in his book The Post-American World, media reporter Paul Farhi waited until the 13th and final paragraph to acknowledge that that the Post has joined CNN and Time in punishing Zakaria for his plagiarism.

“Zakaria also writes a separate column for The Washington Post. The newspaper said on Monday that his column will not appear this month,” he concluded. Zakaria lamented: "People are piling on with every grudge or vendetta" now that NewsBusters exposed him.

Ginni Thomas of The Daily Caller sat down last week with L. Brent Bozell, Founder and President of the Media Research Center, to discuss a wide variety of issues ranging from media bias to the future of the conservative movement. Bozell asserted that the most under-reported story this year will be the degree in which the media will not report news.

He explained, "There is a narrative that is evolving out there which is if the story helps Barack Obama re-election, it's news. If it doesn't, it's not news, you've seen story after story after story that has been completely spiked, on purpose, by the media."
Bozell added: