MRC/NB News

Managing Editor's Note: The following was originally published today at the Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" page. Mr. Bozell was asked to contribute this "Guest Voice" column to explain his complaints about Comedy Central's planned "JC" cartoon.

Comedians often pride themselves on being irreverent, and in today's popular culture a favorite thing to ridicule is religion. The network Comedy Central has made laughing at religion its bread and butter. Their irreverence has limits, however, and it has nothing to do with taste. When radical Muslims wrote ominously online that the creators of "South Park" could end up like Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh - shot eight times on the street - mockery of Muhammed was formally and publicly censored.

Within weeks of that very public retreat, Comedy Central announced plans to work up a series laughing at Jesus Christ called "JC," a half-hour animated show about Jesus trying to live a normal life in New York City to escape the "enormous shadow" of his "powerful but apathetic father." God the Father is preoccupied with playing video games while Christ is the "ultimate fish out of water."

Beyond the glaring double standard there is this question: Where is the market demand for an entire television series dedicated to attacks on Jesus Christ? What did Jesus Christ do to Comedy Central that they must relentlessly mock Him by portraying him defecating and talking about his "yummy, yummy crap" on "South Park" and roast him on specials titled "Merry F--ing Christmas"? Why the visuals of Jesus Christ being stabbed to death? Of the Blessed Virgin Mary menstruating? To call these attacks "juvenile" is an insult to juveniles.

NewsBusters Publisher and Media Research Center President Brent Bozell and five other members of the Citizens Against Religious Bigotry (CARB) coalition will hold a tele-news conference tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. EDT to ask advertisers on Viacom's Comedy Central to publicly pledge to not support/underwrite a show currently in pre-production.  The show is entitled "JC" - as in Jesus Christ. 

[More information on how to join the call-in appears below the page break]

Joining Bozell on the call will be Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, syndicated radio host Michael Medved, Catholic League president Bill Donohue, Parents Television Council president Tim Winter, and Rabbi Daniel Lapin of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians. 

For the conference call, Bozell will unveil an exclusive, four-minute video mash-up of some of the network's many offensive clips referencing Jesus Christ and God, as evidence of what we can most likely expect from "JC."

The CARB leaders will reconvene for another tele-press conference call on June 17th, to announce the names of the companies that have publicly pledged to not sponsor religious bigotry.  And to discuss further action for those who fail to do so.

Mr. Bozell:

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell will be Lou Dobbs's guest at about 4:20 p.m. EDT.

The topic: The media's coverage of Obama. Are the mainstream media finally starting to criticize him and his administration for their response to the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill?

You can listen live by clicking here, or to listen the old-fashioned way, click here for your local radio listings.

NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the May 25 "Fox & Friends" to discuss the media's double standard when it comes to politicians lying about their military records.

The Media Research Center president noted the most apt parallel to Richard Blumenthal was Bruce Caputo, a Republican who ran for U.S. Senate in the 1980s, only to drop out after Tim Russert -- then a staffer for Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- found that Caputo had falsely claimed to have been drafted during the Vietnam War.

At that time, "the media were relentless" against Caputo after the revelation and "it was the end of his career," Bozell noted, contrasting that with last week's Blumenthal story which to the mainstream media came and went as a "one-night story."

For the full interview, click play on the embed above at right.

On this weekend's Fox News Watch, panelist Jim Pinkerton cited this NewsBusters item in which Joe Scarborough passed along the comment from an unnamed conservative insider questioning "what the hell was [Rand Paul] doing on MSNBC?", a reference to Paul's appearance on the Rachel Maddow show in which he made comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act that have caused controversy.  The irony of course is that Scarborough is himself an MSNBC host. H/t NB reader Gat New York.

Pinkerton and his fellow News Watch panelists got a chuckle out of this NewsBuster's fond wish which concluded the item: "Oh to be an olive when Joe and Rachel sip martinis together at the MSNBC TGIF."

There's a new speech sheriff in the town of Fresno, California, and they want to silence conservative talk radio.  And they'll say or do whatever it takes to get it done.

New "community group" Citizens for Civility & Accountability in Media (CCAM) is super-peeved at Fresno, California radio station KMJ for having the temerity to broadcast (on their two stations) conservative talk radio hosts to whom people want to listen.

Because, you see, it's "hate speech" - according to CCAM.  And therefore, KMJ should "alter their programming" (read: change their content by silencing conservatives) "in order to curtail practices that we believe to be damaging to our social fabric and to civility in public discourse."

It would seem the residents of Fresno do not believe that Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and others on KMJ are "damaging to our social fabric and to civility in public discourse."  But that could not matter less to CCAM.

This local "community group" has organized a press conference for today at 11AM PT to publicly call on KMJ to dump these conservative hosts, who according to them:

Mark Levin promoted NewsBusters and its parent organization, the Media Research Center, on his radio show today. "Everyone knows the media have a very strong left-wing bias," Levin noted, "and that's largely due to 23 years of Brent Bozell's hard work at the Media Research Center, which has proven it." NewsBusters, Levin added, "is the place for up to the minute analysis on media bias and other hot stories."

(If embedded audio player does not appear, click here to listen to the ad.)

Levin lauded NB sister site, and MRC's reporting arm, CNS News, as the place to go for "the stories the libs don't want you to know about." He also encouraged his listeners to pick up one of the free "I don't believe the liberal media" bumper stickers.

Many thanks to Mark and his staff. Keep up the great work!

Editor's Note: Video and audio available below the fold.

Los Locos Yet another liberal bemoans the unbridled free speech that resulted from President Ronald Reagan's 1987 call to no longer enforce the so-called "Fairness" Doctrine.

This time it's Phoenix, Arizona Democratic Mayor Phil Gordon.  (He is not the Phil Gordon who plays poker.  The latter seeks to relieve you only of your money, not of your First Amendment rights.)

Mayor Censor participated in a May 14 panel discussion put together by the George Soros-funded, John Podesta-run, Marxist Van Jones permanent job place-holding Center for American Progress entitled "When Federal Government Failure Leads to Local Upheaval-Arizona and Beyond." 

At which Mayor Censor designated the absence of the mis-named "Fairness" Doctrine and the free market radio choices made by the American people that resulted as in part contributing to the passage of Arizona law 1070, which calls on state law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws.

Says Mayor Censor:

In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama cast doubt on President Bush's pick of Harriet Miers in part because "her [legal] experience does not include serving as a judge" and as such "we have yet to know her views on many of the critical constitutional issues facing our country today."

Yet five years later, after President Obama named his solicitor general -- who has also never served as a judge -- to the Supreme Court, the media are not picking up on the parallels between the Miers pick and Obama's choice of Elena Kagan.

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell discussed this on today's "Fox & Friends" program in an interview via satellite shortly before 8:30 a.m. EDT [MP3 audio available here].:

As a Sunday afternoon treat, here’s a sneak peek at the May 17 edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter, our bi-weekly compilation of the latest outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media. The entire edition will be posted, with five video clips, at www.MRC.org on Monday morning.

Shortsighted Voters Fail to Grasp Obama’s Historic Greatness

“Big problems. Big achievements. Big costs. Historians say President Obama’s legislative record during a crisis-ridden presidency already puts him in a league with such consequential presidents as Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt. But polls show voters aren’t totally on board with his achievements, at least not yet, and the White House acknowledges that his victories have carried huge financial and political costs. ‘There are always costs in doing big things,’ Obama told USA Today.”
— Opening of May 12 USA Today cover story by Susan Page and Mimi Hall, “Will doing ‘big things’ wind up costing Obama?” The accompanying picture showed a portrait of Abraham Lincoln peering down at President Obama.

Appearing on the May 13 "Hannity" program for a "Media Mash" segment,  NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell tackled the media coverage of the Elena Kagan nomination. After the Fox News host played some clips of network anchors focusing on how the Obama Court nominee loves opera, softball, and poker, Bozell noted it was par for the course.

While "from the moment he was nominated, [Clarence Thomas] was savaged," whenever a liberal is nominated by a Democratic president, the media label him or her a moderate and focus on humanizing them, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell noted.

[MP3 audio available here]

Also of note, Bozell argued, was how the media have been largely quiet about a promotional video the White House produced to gin up positive PR for Kagan:

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan wrote in a 1996 article entitled "Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine" that "redistribution of speech" is not "itself an illegitimate end" for government. 

As first reported by Matt Cover at the Media Research Center's news wing CNSNews.com, Kagan offers up this gem:

"If there is an ‘overabundance' of an idea in the absence of direct governmental action -- which there well might be when compared with some ideal state of public debate -- then action disfavoring that idea might ‘un-skew,' rather than skew, public discourse."

So if talk radio suffers from an "overabundance" of conservative voices, government action to "un-skew" this particular public discourse is just fine by her. 

Hello so-called "Fairness" Doctrine.  Not to mention Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd's liberally "skewed" interpretations of FCC "media diversity" and "localism" rules.

Last night on his program, Bill O'Reilly talked with Fox News contributor and friend of the Media Research Center Bernard Goldberg about the findings of an MRC study on the media's coverage of the new Arizona anti-illegal immigration law.

[MP3 audio available for download here; for WMV video click here]

Goldberg noted that he had a minor quibble with our study, arguing that stories focused on rallies against the law were bound to be skewed in their soundbites against the law, by virtue of the crowd at the venue being overwhelmingly opposed. Of course, Goldberg conceded, it should be incumbent on the media to balance coverage of those rallies with interviews with people who support the law.

For the record, our MRC Reality Check study noted about that soundbite count that it:

On the May 8 "Fox News Watch", panelist Jim Pinkerton referred to Tim Graham's May 6 Media Reality Check study entitled "Elitest Networks Pile On Against Arizona Immigration Law."

[MP3 audio available here; WMV video available for download here]

"As the MRC calculated, the coverage was 12-to-1 against the Arizona law," Pinkerton noted as he asked liberal contributor Ellis Henican if that disparity in the media's coverage of the issue bothered him.

When Henican brushed off the MRC study, Pinkerton also brought up how MSNBCer Tamron Hall posited that an Arizona sheriff's deputy may have "staged" a shooting to gain political support for the new Arizona law.

Dan Gainor, Vice-President of Business and Culture at the MRC, appeared on the May 7 broadcast of Fox News's "America Live" to discuss the double standard at Comedy Central when it comes to mocking religious figures.

Two weeks ago, Comedy Central banned "South Park" creators from mocking the prophet Mohammed because network executives didn't want to offend Muslim followers. This week, the network announced a new show, "JC," which according to the Hollywood Reporter, features Jesus Christ as a son "wanting to escape the shadow of his ‘powerful but apathetic father' and live a regular life in New York City."

Gainor told host Megyn Kelly that this newest program shows "how out of touch Comedy Central and Hollywood are" and that "Hollywood is running scared of radical Islam."

Media Research Center President and Brent Bozell appeared on last night's "Hannity" for a new recurring segment entitled "Media Mash," where the NewsBusters publisher and the Fox News host go over some of the latest instances of the liberal media's bias.

Last night's topics included media coverage of Florida Senate candidate Charlie Crist's jumping ship from the GOP to run as an independent and the new Arizona anti-immigration law, and Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber suspect. 

You can watch the full segment by clicking the play button on the video embed at right. Click here for MP3 audio.

After showing viewers of the May 7 "Fox & Friends"  a montage of network news coverage portraying Times Square bombing suspect as a down-on-his-luck family man, Fox News anchor Steve Doocy interviewed Media Research Center President Brent Bozell for his reaction about the media's portrayal of Faisal Shahzad (MP3 audio available here; click play in embed at right for video):

 

STEVE DOOCY, Fox News anchor: Brent, when we put those little clips together, it sure makes it sound like they're trying to find, you know, rationalize why that guy did it, and obviously, it's because he lost his house, and he was down on his luck, they say.

BRENT BOZELL: It can't be terrorism, and it's not just television. Here's an AP story: "Faisal had a pretty enviable life. He earned an MBA, he had a well-educated wife, he had two kids and owned a house in a middle-class suburb of Connecticut. In the past couple of years, though, his life seemed to unravel."

Here's the headline from Newsweek: "Did the economy make him do it?" Here's the headline from AOL: "New York bomb suspect cooperates, but motive a mystery." This is unbelievable! It's not a mystery, folks.

NewsBusters contributor Scott Whitlock's May 4 item, "MSNBC's Contessa Brewer 'Frustrated' That Times Square Bomber Is a Muslim" was noticed by Fox News Channel "Special Report" anchor Bret Baier, who included a reference to the story and the underlying controversy in his May 5 "Grapevine" segment.

[MP3 audio available here; click play on embed at right to watch video]

Brewer, a daytime live news anchor, told liberal talk show host Stephanie Miller on Tuesday regarding the Times Square bombing suspect that, "There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country."

Editor's Note: NewsBusters Publisher and Media Research Center President President Brent Bozell released the following statement today regarding the broadcast and cable news media's silence about President Barack Obama's use of a crass sexual slang term to refer to Tea Party members.

For a fuller statement, click here to access Mr. Bozell's Facebook page. For the full press release at MRC.org, click here: 

If President George W. Bush had slurred the gay-rights movement during his presidency, it would have immediately dominated the news of every single national media outlet. Reporters would have pummeled the Administration and demanded an explanation and apology for the offense, and rightly so. You don’t smear anyone – let alone fellow Americans who elected you to office – regardless of your political differences.  

Yet ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN haven’t even lifted an eyebrow since news broke that President Obama used the raunchy ‘teabagger’ slur to demean the hundreds of thousands of Americans who comprise the Tea Party movement. Reporters should be asking questions like:

Hosting a debate segment this morning between  Republican strategist Alex Conant and Democratic strategist Mo Elleithee that examined the political dimensions of the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill, MSNBC's Tamron Hall played soundbites from two politicians with rather divergent views on offshore drilling.

The first was liberal Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) opposing expanding offshore drilling to California, the second was conservative Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), who gave a rather dopey comment where he downplayed the devastation of the oil spill by comparing its appearance to "chocolate milk."

After playing those clips back-to-back, Hall asked for Conant's reaction, mistakenly referring to Taylor as a Republican.

We at NewsBusters quickly tweeted Hall about her error and she promptly issued an on-air correction, albeit mistakenly tagging Taylor as a "Michigan Democrat" [MP3 audio available here]:

Blogger Matt Lewis took Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel to task in a post at AOL's Politics Daily site today.

Lewis noted our early skepticism here at NewsBusters as well as reaction from NewsBusters contributor and Business & Media Institute Vice President Dan Gainor:

This is how the Post covers the conservative movement: Find someone who doesn't even understand the traditional values that made our nation great and then assign him to report on the right. Throw in the fact that Weigel loves to bash conservatives and he's the ideal Postie. At the same time, the paper hired a hard-core lefty in Ezra Klein to advocate for the left. It's a ridiculous double standard. The Post should be both embarrassed and ashamed.

For his part, Lewis, a conservative writer, lamented that Weigel, whom he considers generally "accurate and fair," has taken to his Twitter feed to bash average Americans as "bigots" for working to protect traditional marriage in state law:

At the White House Correspondents Association dinner Saturday night, President Barack Obama mocked CNN’s Rick Sanchez for saying Iceland is “too cold” for a volcano, a remark launched into the blogosphere by NewsBusters (April 15 NB post with video) and which prompted Sanchez, who insisted he was joking, to put NB post author Matthew Balan at the “very top” of his “List U Don't Want 2 Be On.” (April 19 NB post with video)

Obama’s joke centered on his bad opening day “first pitch” at the Washington Nationals game. He displayed how FNC described his pitch, “President Panders to Far Left of Batters Box,” and MSNBC’s on-screen graphic under Keith Olbermann: “President Pitches No-Hitter.” The President then played the real video from CNN of Sanchez, and then, generating laughter from the DC audience, quipped: “I guess that’s why they’re the most-trusted name in news.”

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell appeared on today's "Fox & Friends" to discuss how the media portray Tea Parties as hot beds of extremism and/or racism -- despite the fact Tea Parties have been peaceful affairs with no scrapes with the law -- while violence-plagued rallies held to protest the new anti-illegal immigration law in Arizona law are being defended in the media as "mostly peaceful."

About 45 minutes before that segment, the Fox News hosts mentioned a related April 26 story by NewsBusters contributor Scott Whitlock on the same topic.

The video embedded at right shows both that mention and the Bozell interview (MP3 audio available here).

On Thursday evening our good friend Mark Levin cited and read from the latest Media Research Center special report, "TV's Tea Party Travesty: How ABC, CBS and NBC Have Dismissed and Disparaged the Tea Party Movement."

You can hear that segment by clicking here for the MP3 audio file (courtesy of Levin's producer Richard Semanta).

Here's the transcript by MRC intern Alex Fitzsimmons:

Where are all the big taxers and spenders today? You heard from any of them? But the Tea Party protestors are out there and that's a good thing. All over the country-and the media hate them. And we know this is a matter of empirical fact now thanks to our friends at the Media Research Center. Hat tip to Drudge Report who links to them: MRC.org. And they've done an analysis that reviewed every mention of the Tea Party on ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening newscasts, the Sunday talk shows, ABC's "Nightline," from February 19, 2009 through March 31, 2010.

Now here among their major findings is how our "news outlets" our big news outlets, our liberal news outlets, treat the American people who attend these rallies. They write:

Media Research Center Research Director Rich Noyes will appear on Breitbart.tv's "The B-Cast" Web-cast program at 5 p.m. Eastern time today. The NewsBusters senior editor will be discussing his latest report, "TV's Tea Party Travesty: How ABC, CBS and NBC Have Dismissed and Disparaged the Tea Party Movement."

You can watch the live Web cast by clicking here or by watching the embedded video below the page break.

Editor's Note: Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell released the following statement earlier today -- available here on his official Facebook page. The NewsBusters publisher praised Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank for denouncing the "clinic" that President Obama put on "for some of the world's greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press" in his April 14 column, "Obama's disregard for media reaches new heights at nuclear summit":

It's a rare occurrence that the MRC and the typically left-leaning Dana Milbank agree, but this time he is spot on. Indeed, President Obama must have made world leaders feel as if they were transported back to a ‘Soviet-era Moscow' for the media restricted nuclear energy summit instead of arriving in the capitol of the free world."

But are we really surprised? After all, this is the same President who has won lavish praise from some of the world's most brutal dictators including Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro."

"In 2009, with all the activity that took place in 2009, guess how many network news stories were done on the TEA Party," Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell asked the hosts of WMAL radio's "Grandy & Andy Morning Show" at the open of his April 13 interview.

[click here or on image above to play MP3 audio, courtesy of WMAL producer Ann Wog]

When Bozell -- citing the result of MRC's latest study -- noted that the total number of stories through all of 2009 on the TEA Parties registered at a paltry 19, co-host Andy Parks exclaimed, "Is that all?!"

A deliberate brute force attack, a criminal act, knocked NewsBusters offline since late Friday morning. More information to come, but now we’re back and we thank you for bearing with us as our tech team worked studiously to restore the site.

While we were offline, Media Research Center staff continued to post on MRC.org and, as our bloggers catch up with postings, we’ll be adding these articles to NewsBusters. But in the meantime, below are links to those posts on the MRC site: 

> ABC's Moran Frets Obama May Not Be Able to Replace Stevens with Equally Liberal Justice

> CNN's Toobin: Obama Not A 'Liberal Firebrand;' Heller Decision 'Activist' (with video)

> NBC's Williams: 'Liberal Lion' Justice Stevens 'One of the Great Quality Minds' on Supreme Court (with video)

> MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell Plays Race Card on Gingrich, Colleagues Laugh at Her (with video)

> ABC's George Stephanopoulos Prompts Obama to Tout His Legacy

Good evening NBers. In about half an hour, NewsBusters founder and executive editor Matt Sheffield and I will be live-tweeting a speech by News Corp. founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch. A feed of our tweets can be seen below the fold.

News Corp. is the world's second largest media conglomerate, and the parent company of, among many others, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News Channel, and MySpace.

According to the National Press Club's website, Murdoch will speak about "the future of journalism and the media."