MRC/NB News

"Think of a caged rat, a cornered rat. What does a cornered rat do? It instinctively goes for the jugular. That's where the media are going right now," following the November 2 elections, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Ernest Istook in a radio interview.

The  Media Research Center founder appeared by telephone on the November 11 edition of Bill Bennett's Morning in America, where Istook was substitute hosting.

[Link to audio below page break]

Editor's Note: MRC President Brent Bozell issued the following statement in reaction to news that MSNBC had suspended Countdown host Keith Olbermann "indefinitely" for donating to three Democratic candidates in violation of NBC's policy. In October, Olbermann had blasted political donations from Fox News owner News Corp, slamming Fox as "a media outlet that has now put its money where everybody has known its mouth has always been."

Keith Olbermann is officially the Worst Hypocrite in the World. He rails about a ‘national cable news outlet’ that ‘starts to donate to partisan groups of one party,’ then does exactly that.

But it begs a bigger questions: why did it take NBC so long? This man has been using his perch as a newsman at MSNBC to promote a radical left-wing and hate-filled agenda for years. And they fire him over three contributions? NBC needs to review its own policies.”

(Video below page break)

The historic "shellacking" that Democrats suffered on Tuesday night brought out the worst in Obama's acolytes in the mainstream media, giving NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell plenty to talk about on Sean Hannity's eponymous November 4 program.

Appearing via satellite for the popular recurring "Media Mash" segment, Bozell and Hannity first tackled who else but Chris Matthews. Clearly frustrated with the 2010 midterms and anticipating the 2012 presidential race, Matthews all but called former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) an illiterate.

"Would she look like an imbecile" on "Jeopardy!", Matthews asked Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) Tuesday night during live election coverage on MSNBC. 

[Video after page break]

NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center president Brent Bozell appeared on last night's special Sunday edition of "Hannity" to address what's easily become the liberal media's closing campaign tactic for liberal Democrats: attempting to discredit the Tea Party movement and its candidates.

For example, in an October 26 interview with former president Jimmy Carter, Chris Matthews suggested Tea Partiers are simply the mindless dupes of corporate interests.

"Remember the 'poor, uneducated and easy to command types?'" Bozell asked Hannity. To the liberal media, "[t]hat was the religious right 20 years ago. Now it's the Tea Party," Bozell noted on the October 31 "Media Mash" segment:

The National Public Radio (NPR) executive who fired Juan Williams is behind an effort lobbying for a new tax to be levied on private media outlets in order to finance a BBC-style state media, NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center Brent Bozell told viewers of Fox Business Network's "Varney & Company" at 10:45 a.m. today.

NPR president Vivian Schiller is "part of a group which wants to essentially tax existing media companies... and use that tax money to create a national network of public broadcasting companies to put out a news broadcast on a national basis, like an American BBC," Varney noted.

"Let's put it another way, the attack on Juan Williams... wasn't really an attack on Juan Williams," Bozell replied.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews and CBS's Lesley Stahl were two of the targets in the latest "Media Mash" segment on Fox News Channel's "Hannity" program.

NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the October 22 edition of the program  to look at how the media have been denigrating the Tea Party movement.

[Video of the segment available after the page break]

Managing Editor's note: National Public Radio (NPR) has fired longtime analyst Juan Williams for admitting he gets nervous on a plane when he sees a person dressed in Muslim garb. What follows is a statement from NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center President Brent Bozell.

Juan Williams has done nothing wrong. What he said echoes what the vast majority of Americans believe. It’s their tax dollars that fund NPR. But NPR is ignoring them. Instead, they are kowtowing to the agenda of radical anti-Americans like CAIR, and doing the bidding of George Soros, who hates Fox News with a passion.

And since when did NPR have standards? Here are just three examples of left-wing statements 100 times more outrageous than what Juan Williams said, with no reaction from NPR:

Go to www.TellTheTruth2010.org to learn more about the Media Research Center's Tell the Truth! campaign (video after page break):

 

When mainstream media folks like Harry Smith dismiss the Tea Party movement as merely voters venting their anger, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell is reminded of the dismissive reaction of journalists back when Republicans won control of Congress 16 years ago.

Here's what he told viewers of the October 15 "Fox & Friends":

"I've been looking for years to find a man like him.... I've combed the whole goddam country. There are lots of good journalists around, but they're all cockeyed left-wingers."

That's how  publisher Eugene C. Pulliam  praised M. Stanton Evans in 1960, when he tapped the 26-year-old conservative Yale graduate and close friend of National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. to edit the Indianapolis News.

While the "media will wade into a Tea Party event with hundreds of thousands of people looking for that one brain-dead Lyndon LaRouche follower" who says something asinine that they can plaster "all over the news," they have ignored the insane rhetoric coming from featured speakers at last Saturday's "One Nation Working Together" rally, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told viewers of the October 7 edition of "Hannity."

Appearing on last night's 9 p.m. Eastern program for the popular recurring "Media Mash" segment, the Media Research Center quoted the extreme rhetoric of musician Harry Belafonte, which was ignored by the mainstream media:

NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell sat down for a satellite interview this morning with Fox Business Network's Stuart Varney to discuss the recently-launched "Tell the Truth" campaign.

It's a very simple proposition, Stuart. I think it's time that the American people say simply to the media, tell the truth! Stop distorting stories. Stop projecting an agenda and calling it objective truth. Start reporting news. Tell the truth about what's going on in Washington. Tell the truth about the positions of these candidates. Stop playing politics with everything.... I want them to get the message loud and clear the public is sick and tired of this left-wing agenda masquerading as news.

A slightly skeptical Varney then asked the Media Research Center founder if he thinks that's always been the case:

Calling the liberal mainstream media the "'shock troops' of the Obama administration," NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center president Brent Bozell has “declared war on the liberal media” with a new $2.1 million campaign to demand they stop lying and “Tell The Truth!” about Obama, the damage his radical policies have caused, and to cease immediately the character assassinations launched against the Tea Parties.

MRC President Brent Bozell provided these remarks in the live webcast launch of the campaign:

What would have been the reaction of the American people if on Election Day 2008, they had gone to the polls knowing that in electing Barack Obama, they were electing the single most radical socialist in the history of this country? I submit to you he never would have been elected. That's the power of the left-wing media ... I call the news media the ‘shock troops' of the Obama administration because they're the ones doing all the dirty work - for him - so that he doesn't have to do it.

The national campaign -- accessible online at www.TellTheTruth2010.org -- will reach millions of people each week through end of 2010 and includes:

The following is NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center (MRC) founder Brent Bozell's new editorial posted at CNN.com in association with their upcoming documentary Right On The Edge about what they call conservative "guerrilla journalists" this weekend: 

It was the fall of 1995, and there was open warfare in Washington over the Republicans' Contract with America.

Liberals had declared that civilization as we knew it was imperiled by the evil machinations of Newt Gingrich and Co.

This is to be expected of liberals on Capitol Hill -- but those weren't the effective ones. It was their colleagues in the national so-called "objective" so-called "news" media whose "reporting" was poisoning the public discourse.

Former CBS anchor Dan Rather was a frequent target of conservatives' ire. On November 28, he was a guest of Mike Rosen, the top-rated conservative radio talk show host in Denver, Colorado. Rosen directly accused him of having a liberal bias, but Rather would have none of it.

The following is NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center (MRC) founder Brent Bozell's statement regarding news of James O’Keefe’s sting operation attempt to embarrass CNN.

The MRC unequivocally denounces James O’Keefe for his attempted assault on CNN. It isn’t just childish and immature; it’s ugly, dishonest and filthy. There is no place in the conservative movement for this type of behavior and that’s exactly what I warned about in a commentary piece I submitted to CNN.com just two days ago.

"Could the Citizen Journalist abuse the public trust?" I wrote in this piece that should run in the next few days. "Hypothetically, of course. Conservatives must all guard against this. Let there be scrutiny, by all means." And I repeat: there must be scrutiny.

Bottom line: We want nothing to do with O’Keefe or his dirty antics.

On Sunday, the season premiere of 60 Minutes will include an anticipated Scott Pelley report on the Ground Zero mosque. Will the story be pro-mosque, just like President Obama? The first clips displayed softballs of sympathy, that it should be seen as "a hub of culture, a hub of coexistence, a hub of bringing people together." To underline the overwhelming sympathetic tilt of this program in the Obama era -- especially all the Steve Kroft hope-and-change goo before the 2008 election -- the MRC has a new special report called "Syrupy Minutes." Here's my executive summary: 

In the last five years, CBS’s 60 Minutes has become infamous for letting its left-wing ardor get way ahead of its journalistic mission. Dan Rather destroyed his own reputation in 2004 with a 60 Minutes II “expose” of President Bush’s incomplete Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard which relied on falsified documents. A CBS-appointed panel found “myopic zeal” in Rather’s professional demise, but no one would admit a political bias.

For more than 40 years, CBS has boasted of 60 Minutes as a hard-hitting news show, a weekly story of investigative gumshoes digging up dirt and accusing major business and government leaders of committing dastardly deeds against the public interest. But the history of 60 Minutes isn’t filled to the brim with brutal investigations. It has a much softer, syrupy side, and it isn’t just reserved for movie stars or rock musicians. When it comes to champions of liberalism and even the radical left, the CBS News program has rolled out a red carpet, asking softball questions and lionizing their policy stands and programs – whether they were actually “achievements” or disasters.

Closing out the "Media Mash" segment on the September 16 edition of his eponymous "Hannity" program, the Fox News host asked for NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell's reaction to NBC's Meredith Vieira telling House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) that the Bush tax cuts "didn't succeed" and asking him "what's so good about them?":

Memo to Meredith [Vieira]: You can have a debate about what future tax cuts might or might not result in but a record is a record. Under George Bush, 8 million jobs were created with his tax cuts. With Ronald Reagan's tax cuts there were 20 million jobs created. We've done nothing but lose jobs with Barack Obama with the stimulus package. Truth is truth, facts are facts. Don't go on television saying it didn't work. It did work!

The economy-boosting, jobs-creating benefits of across-the-board tax cuts are not all the media are not telling the truth about. The Media Research Center founder and president also addressed how the media, particularly ABC's Christiane Amanpour are smearing everyday Americans as "Islamophobic" [Listen to MP3 audio here or download WMV video here]:

"This is what we are to expect, and it's going to get worse between now and November."

That's how NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center President Brent Bozell reacted this morning on Fox Business Network's "Varney & Company" to the media's drumbeat of criticism regarding Tea Party-backed Republican nominees for office this November.

Bozell agreed with host Stuart Varney that the media are incessantly bashing Tea Party favorites like Delaware's Christine O'Donnell because they have to change the subject from the demonstrable failures of Obamanomics [MP3 audio available here; WMV video for download here]:

Brent Bozell, the founder and president of the Media Research Center, and publisher of NewsBusters, will be making an important announcement at 7 p.m. (Eastern Time) on Wednesday, September 15.  This announcement will be made via live web broadcast and you won’t want to miss it! The liberal media are in panic mode. The Obama experiment in socialism is failing. Americans are waking up and rising up for freedom and limited government. America is truly at a crossroads of history. The next few months may very well determine whether socialism or freedom will be the dominant force in American government for decades to come. The Media Research Center will not watch this struggle unfold from the sidelines and we know that you don’t plan to either.  So be sure to view the webcast here or by watching the video chat embed below the page break.

Thousands of protesters descended on Washington, Sunday, for the 9/12 rally and many rallied with MRC signs proclaiming, "Don't believe the liberal media!"

The message could be seen in the background of cable coverage, including a live report from CNN. (See picture at right.)

To see conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart and others sporting the MRC's signs, see a selection of pictures below the jump.

The gay left hates debate – especially the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. They're furious that CNN Headline News offered balance and came to the Media Research Center's Culture and Media Institute for a negative opinion on homosexuality. That's apparently beyond the pale.

Mediaite reported that GLAAD succeeded in pressuring CNN into spiking an online poll that asked the question “Is the surge in gay TV characters 'bad for society'?” On the GLAAD blog, Aaron McQuade found it was "troubling" for CNN to allow dissent:

The report then goes on to give a troubling amount of airtime to anti-gay activist Dan Gainor from the Culture and Media Institute, who does believe that it’s “bad for society” to offer authentic depictions of the lives of LGBT people. He remarked that, “Hollywood has done a great deal of work causing acceptance in American culture for homosexuality.”

The ABC, CBS and NBC evening new shows have yet to notice Fidel Castro's astonishing admission that Cuban Communism does not work. But non-journalist Jay Leno brought the news to his Tonight Show audience on Thursday, joshing:  "Most Cubans heard this announcement on a 1954 RCA Deluxe console TV -- beautiful black-and-white, all mahogany...." (Video at right)

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg recounted Castro's confession in a September 8 post:

During the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.

"The more Ronald Reagan was attacked like this, the stronger he got," Media Research Center (MRC) founder and NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell explained on the September 10 Fox & Friends. “The more conservatives are being attacked this way, the stronger we're getting."

Referring to insults directed at Americans who oppose the construction of a mosque close to Ground Zero, Bozell excoriated the liberal media for dismissing conservatives as bigots: "There are a lot of serious debates you can have, but to do this name calling...this is all the Left has left."

For the full segment's MP3 audio, click here. To watch the segment, click here to download the WMV video file or click the play button in the embed above.

Congratulations, ABC News! You are now free from the 14-year reign of the news president that helped drive your ratings into the ground.

Under his leadership, Westin continually promoted some of the most liberally biased reporters in news, including George Stephanopoulos, Diane Sawyer, Christine Amanpour and Bill Weir.  He hired an Obama donor as ABC’s new Senior Medical Editor in the midst of the healthcare debate and ignored the 83,000 Americans who petitioned him to ensure that ABC reported the truth about Obama’s government takeover of healthcare. Westin neglected to address the obvious conflict of interest in George Stephanopoulos’ daily strategy phone call with Rahm Emanuel, and failed to keep his promise that ABC News would offer ‘objective’ reporting on the War on Terror in 2003. He even had the gall to suggest that the Pentagon was a legitimate terrorism target in the wake of September 11th. Two years later, he banned any ABC News personnel from wearing a patriotic flag lapel pin.

ABC should seize the opportunity to replace Westin with a president who will deliver what the American people want and deserve – real journalism. It’s ABC’s only glimmer of hope for surviving in the news industry.

Tuesday marks the four-year anniversary of Katie Couric's assumption of the anchor chair for the CBS Evening News on Tuesday, September 5, 2006. To commemorate the occasion, the Media Research Center has assembled Perking Up for Liberal Spin, a profile in bias of Couric's top forty biased quotes from her four years at CBS.     

Marking her one-year anniversary, a September 2007 MRC Media Reality Check, New Network, Same Old Biased Katie, noted: "In her first year at the helm of the CBS Evening News, Katie Couric has perpetuated the bias problem that eroded CBS's credibility under Dan Rather." The three years that followed were no exception, as Couric actively promoted liberal figures and causes, while disparaging conservatives. From cheering on Barack Obama's campaign and presidential agenda to smearing Arizona's immigration law or opposition to the Ground Zero mosque, she has maintained her long journalistic record of liberal slant.

Couric's biased reporting has not been a hit with the broadcast's shrinking audience, during the week of August 16, 2010, the network news program tied it's all-time ratings low, slipping below five million viewers.

Here are some bias highlights of Couric behind the anchor desk:

"This is one of those ever more obnoxious teaching moments that we're getting from the left-wing press," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell complained on last night's "Hannity" after watching a clip of MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell lament that Americans need to be more sensitive to minorities, not for the "burden" to be on Imam Feisal Rauf to assauge concerns about the planned Ground Zero mosque.

Noting that polls show 70 percent of the American people oppose the Park 51 project planned just two blocks from Ground Zero, Bozell argued Mitchell's complaint is just more evidence of the liberal media's "worldview that is completely contrary" and out-of-touch with the American public.

Besides Ground Zero mosque bias, The Media Research Center founder also reacted to NBC's Chuck Todd passing along an unnamed "observer" who told him the 2010 midterms would be the "fear" election in contrast to the 2008 "hope" election:

Editor's Note: For the list of NewsBusters T-shirt contest winners, skip to the end of this post. 

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with Five for Five.

In our final installment, we look at the Top Five Outrageous Outbursts by liberal media journalists and/or celebrities over the past five years. We start with an honorable mention we just couldn't let pass without notice: Ted Turner from April 2008 predicting that global warming would lead to mass cannibalism.

You can view that video below the page break.

Numerous conservative radio talk show hosts across the fruited plain are dedicated fans of NewsBusters and mention our site or otherwise direct their listeners to our content day after day.

Some of them have told us that our site is invaluable to their show prep, which is quite the honor for us as the blogosphere and talk radio are the primary media outlets conservatives have to challenge the liberal bias of the mainstream media.

So today we thought we'd share the kind words and warm wishes of three local conservative radio hosts: Fred Grandy and Chris Plante of Washington, D.C.'s WMAL, 630-AM and Rob Port, a blogger from North Dakota who hosts the early morning show on Fargo's WZFG 1100-AM.

You can listen to the testimonials by clicking on the logos for the respective stations.

As part of the 5th anniversary celebration of NewsBusters we have started a weekly Five for Five feature to list the blog's top twenty five posts. Last week, we looked at the top five posts that broke news. Today we continue with the top five posts on journalistic Obamagasms.

We have picked out a couple posts from each of the five categories and asked the authors to reflect back on writing them up. In this series of short videos, they share their thoughts on how they caught the particular media moment and describe the impact their post had.

We continue our video look back by reflecting on two of top posts on journalistic Obamagasms: "Matthews: Obama Speech Caused 'Thrill Going Up My Leg'" by Brad Wilmouth (reflection by Tim Graham) and "Newsweek's Evan Thomas: Obama Is 'Sort of God'" by Kyle Drennen.

Check out last week's video of NewsBusters' Rich Noyes and Kyle Drennen remembering some of the top posts that broke news.

Editor's Note: For the list of NewsBusters T-shirt contest winners, skip to the end of this post. Click here to enter the contest.

It's time once again for "Five for Five," this time around we unveil the top five Journalistic Obamagasms Exposed by NewsBusters.

We know what you're thinking: "Only five?!"

Since they're all so equally good, or bad, as the case may be, I'll leave it to you folks to rank them in the comments section.

They are: