Journalistic Issues

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:

ABC News is having a banner week. First it was forced to acknowledge that reporter Brian Ross had smeared an innocent member of the Colorado Tea Party (and Tea Partiers more broadly) by speculating on-air that Aurora killer James Holmes might be a Tea Party member of the same name. 

Now, because it’s hysterical reporting harmed an industry and cost hundreds of jobs, an Iowa radio station has dropped ABC.

When the head of a major fast food chain underscores his support for traditional marriage, lefty heads explode. Dan Cathy, son of Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett, told the Baptist Press on July 16 that his father's restaurant chain is, in fact, still conservative.

In response to a question pertaining to the franchise’s support of the traditional family, Cathy replied “guilty as charged.” The president and chief operating officer continued, “We are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that... we know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles."

The Jurassic Press is missing much in their reporting on the $50 billion bailout of General Motors (GM).  The Press is open channeling for President Barack Obama - allowing him to frame the bailout exactly as he wishes in the 2012 Presidential election. 

The President is running in large part on the bailout’s $30+ billion loss, uber-failed “success.”  And the Press is acting as his stenographers.  An epitome of this bailout nightmare mess is the electric absurdity that is the Chevrolet Volt.  The Press is at every turn covering up - rather than covering - the serial failures of President Obama’s signature vehicle.

The Jurassic Press was in full-throated ObamaChorus mode in reporting on General Motors (GM)’s allegedly strong June sales.

Very few failed to receive the sheet music.

It's almost July and the president hasn't yet announced his family's vacation plans yet. So of course Washington Post columnist Al Kamen felt obliged to direct his readers to kindly offer suggestions for vacation spots for the laid-back commander-in-chief.

“[I]t’s time to do your civic duty by suggesting where the first family should vacation this year. Deadline for submissions is Friday, June 29," Kamen told his "In the Loop" readers in today's paper. "Our five favorite entries will win coveted Loop T-shirts -- perfect for wearing on your own summer vacation." Or for the 8.2 percent who are without work, on the unemployment line.

CNNMoney mustn’t pay very well, because writer Steve Hargreaves is moonlighting as a PR flack for the International Energy Agency. At least, that’s the impression given by his June 12 article on the IEA’s 700-page "sharply-worded" report that called for an additional $36 trillion of clean energy investment by 2050. 

According to Hargreaves, IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven doesn’t think governments are doing enough to keep global warming in check. “Our ongoing failure to realize the full potential of clean energy technology is alarming,” she said. “Under current policies, both energy demand and emissions are likely to double by 2050.”  

The $82 billion auto bailout has been a Crony Socialist nightmare mess. We’re going to lose at least $30 billion on the deal.  And that’s only if the Barack Obama Administration’s math can be trusted - a dicey proposition at best.

The Administration eviscerated two hundred-plus years of bankruptcy law, throwing bond holders over the side to over-reward their United Auto Workers shock force buddies.

General Motors (GM) is cutting undisclosed deals with executives’ wives businesses.And on, and on, and on....Haven’t heard most or all of this?  Not surprising - the Jurassic Press ain’t reporting it.

David Carr of The New York Times wrote an unintentional laugh line for Monday's paper: "There is a growing worry that the falling value and failing business models of many American newspapers could lead to a situation where moneyed interests buy papers and use them to prosecute a political and commercial agenda."

No! Could you believe a newspaper would follow a political agenda based on what its owner wanted to do? Where have we ever heard of that before, say, with an owner who told Daddy he thought the Americans should be shot in Vietnam? But wait: in San Diego, it's that other, somehow less professional bias: Union-Tribune owner Douglas Manchester is "anti-big government, anti-tax and anti-gay marriage. And he’s in favor of a remade San Diego centered around a new downtown waterfront stadium and arena."

The nomination is several weeks away, but the party has its “inevitable” candidate. With hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, opponents raise concerns about whether that vast wealth had completely disconnected him from the reality that most Americans face every day.

The year was 2004 and the candidate Sen. John Kerry. But the major networks gave Kerry’s great wealth nowhere near the attention that they have given to Gov. Mitt Romney’s millions in 2012.

As an ever-shrinking number of newspaper readers can attest, most major U.S. papers skew liberal. But its not every day the head of a union representing journalists lays out a list of goals that might have been written by MoveOn.org, and displays a contempt for democracy more at home on the editorial pages of state-run organs in third-world dictatorships.

But there was Larry Cohen, AFL-CIO Organizing Committee chair and President of Communication Workers of America (CWA), of which the Newspaper Guild is part, calling on progressives to “unite in a years-long campaign to restore and reclaim both workers rights and U.S. democracy.” According to report on the Guild’s website, Cohen was addressing the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C., when he declared that reclaiming democracy would mean overcoming, well, democracy. “The limits of democracy alone have blocked us,” Cohen said.

It's been several weeks since NBC disgraced itself by repeatedly airing doctored audio of George Zimmerman talking to a 9-1-1 dispatcher but the network has yet to apologize on the air, hoping instead that its paltry efforts of firing a lone producer and conducting an investigation into the matter but not releasing a report to the public would be sufficient.

Incredibly, it was a New York Times columnist, David Carr, who decided to confront the network on how that just isn't enough. NBC News president Steve Capus admitted his efforts have been insufficient but tried to spin away why his network hasn't bothered to tell viewers about its propagation of fraudulent journalism.

The Washington Post's treatment of two different cases of journalistic malpractice make clear how the paper's editors view slandering Republicans. It's not a fireable offense. But plagiarism is.

Here are the basics: Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Flock wrote a web post last year falsely accusing Mitt Romney of using a Ku Klux Klan slogan in his campaign speech. This was not a case of a mistake -- it was clear from the get-go that Romney did not use the KKK slogan, as the video of the speech incontrovertibly showed -- but Flock wrote a web article saying he did. It was a lie, intended to paint Romney as a racist. In doing so, she violated about half a dozen of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics.

After years of denying he was trying to pursue a hard-left audience, MSNBC president Phil Griffin is now shamelessly trying to justify his actions in continuing to employ infamous race-baiter and tax cheat Al Sharpton, host of the cable network's Politics Daily program. The latest controversy for Sharpton involves his dual involvement in covering the case of slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin on television while at the same time, away from the anchor desk, acting as a belligerent advocate of arresting Martin's killer, George Zimmerman.

Sharpton's conflict of interest, which he barely bothers to disclose to viewers, doesn't bother Griffin; he proudly told AP television reporter David Bauder that he "didn't hire Al to become a neutered kind of news presenter."