Obama Watch

The broadcast media's blackout on news of the Catholic Church's lawsuit against the Obama administration continues apace, while the news media covers much more important events like who won American Idol.

So it's no wonder that MRCTV's Dan Joseph found only one person yesterday who knew about the lawsuit. Watch the video in the embed below the page break.

Here’s how it is for socially conservative Republican politicians.

If they broach the topic of abortion, liberals howl, “It’s the economy, stupid!” and proclaim them obsessed with divisive social issues.

Updated with new statements | Fury over the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts’ continued refusal to report the lawsuits Catholic entities have filed against the Obama administration has spread beyond the Media Research Center watchdog group and Catholic leaders to 11 additional Christian leaders equally concerned about this decision to deliberately not report national news. Below are statements released by FRC’s Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer of American Values and nine more leaders.

Once again last night, President Obama faced an embarrassing showing in Democratic Party primaries, winning only 58.3 percent of the votes of Arkansas Democrats and 57.9 percent of Kentucky ones. Once again, in covering the story, the Washington Post buried the news placing the development on page A6. The last time the president faced such an embarrassingly low showing, the Post put its coverage of federal inmate Keith Judd's stunning 40 percent showing in West Virginia's Democratic primary on page A4.

This time around, Post editors gave readers a misleading subheadline that invoked an all-too-predictable liberal bogeyman: "His struggles in Appalachia, parts of South could be attributed to racism, some say." Yet in the article itself, two Southern Democrats told the Post that while a small minority of white Democrats may be motivated by antipathy to Obama's racial heritage, the vast bulk of the anti-Obama vote is predicated on their distaste for his liberal policies.

On today's edition of The Daily Rundown, MSNBC's Chuck Todd sat down to chat with Rev. Jesse Jackson to discuss a variety of issues, from Afghanistan to whether the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is fair game for Republicans to attack President Obama. In the middle of the interview, Todd asked the former Democratic presidential candidate about the NAACP Board of Directors's "historic" decision over the weekend to give the organization's stamp of approval to same-sex marriage.

"There has been this conventional wisdom that particularly among older African-Americans that the president's position on gay marriage is going to hurt him," Todd noted, adding, "Does the NAACP sort of backing up the president on this help convince the older African-American [voters], might be a little more religious, might be struggling with this issue, to ignore that part?"

Edward Klein’s unauthorized biography of Barack Obama, "The Amateur," was released yesterday.

While I appreciate that Klein devoted a chapter of his book, albeit only three pages, to Obama’s opposition as state senator to the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act, he got it pretty much all wrong. You can read the chapter at the link above, but here is the relevant section:

Some passages in Barack Obama's commencement address Monday at Barnard College on Broadway didn't make the media quote machine -- especially the ones whacking the media, and the comparative stupidity of men. Now that's a way to build a gender gap. The "founding mothers" were smarter than the Founding Fathers, he quipped.

CNSNews.com reported the media slam -- which is an odd way to treat your most devoted supporters:

Reuters correspondent Margot Roosevelt touted over the weekend that “Weary Warriors Favor Obama.” According to the latest Reuters-Ipsos poll, “If the election were held today, Obama would win the veteran vote by as much as seven points over Romney, higher than his margin in the general population.”

Under the heading “Fading Cool Factor,” Roosevelt summarized that many veterans sound like Obama did in the last election cycle, pessimistic about the wars Bush started:

The rainbow halo over President Barack Obama's head on Newsweek's cover isn't sufficient for some in the mainstream media.  Now the meme is shifting to the inevitability of his re-election.  Or so it would seem based on CNN's Your Money today.  Anchor Ali Velshi devoted his heavy intellectual resources to the subject after discussing Mitt Romney's opposition to the auto bailout:

If you doubted where many journalists stand on gay marriage, don’t. The Newspaper Guild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), joined with other unions, such as the AFL-CIO, in expressing its support for Obama on homosexual marriage. President Larry Cohen of the CWA stated: 

 "The Communications Workers of America stands with the President and those who support equality and human rights.”

If you had any doubts that the liberal media are doing their level best this year to shield the public from embarrassing news developments pertaining to President Obama, you need look no further than the strange tale of federal prison inmate #11593-051, Keith Judd, who gave President Obama a run for his money in yesterday's West Virginia Democratic presidential primary.

The quadrennial presidential vanity candidate who is serving out a 17-year sentence for extortion garnered more than 40 percent of the state's primary votes, well above the 15 percent threshold to secure at least one delegate at the national convention in Charlotte this summer. Keep in mind that West Virginia's primary is closed, meaning this is not a matter of Republican voters casting mischief votes to embarrass the president.  So how did the broadcast network mornings shows -- NBC's Today, ABC's Good Morning America, and CBS This Morning -- deal with what at the very least is a head-turning watercooler story? They didn't. All three networks ignored the story.

Imagine President Barack Obama leaning hard into Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, pressing him to support a piece of legislation or, say, introduce a budget bill that has been MIA for the past three years. Obama is a real go getter and has been burning up the phone lines until late at night to convince legislators to support him. He even invites a number of people from Capitol Hill to join him for rounds of golf where he continues the art of persuasion.

Hard to believe that fantasy? Well, that is what the Washington Post opinion writer Richard Cohen is fervently wishing for. Cohen's magic genie wish, inspired by the newly published Robert Caro book, The Passage of Power, is that Obama will do a complete U-turn on his introverted, hands-off personality and become like Lyndon B. Johnson. Here is Cohen going into flights of fantasy on this topic in his latest column with the somewhat less than ringing endorsement title, What Obama doesn’t know about being president:

When then-President George W. Bush visited U.S. troops, saying similar things to what President Barack Obama said in his recent visit, MSNBC's Chris Matthews snarled that it was a mere "photo-op," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted last night on FNC's "Hannity."

Yet when President Obama made his surprise visit to Kabul earlier this week, Matthews ridiciculously gushed that Obama's speech was "right out of Henry the Fifth," alluding to the St. Crispin's Day "band of brothers" speech in the Shakespeare play. [Watch the full "Media Mash" segment below the page break; MP3 audio here]

While presidential siblings might normally receive soft interviews on television, President Obama's half-sister Auma had the red carpet rolled out for her on Wednesday's Piers Morgan Tonight. Morgan wasn't just cordial but was enraptured by her "wonderful" new book and her brother Barack's "amazing" story.

"You have the Obama smile. I would have recognized that a mile off," Morgan told Auma. Was he exaggerating or does he know President Obama that well? Regardless, he followed up with more flattery praising her book's "wonderful" title, Barack's "memorable" 2008 campaign speech, and his "unbelievable" singing voice. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

He's compared conservatives to radical Hindus and Islamists, called the Tea Party the "racist white bloc" of the GOP, and compared evangelicals to the Taliban, so naturally Huffington Post writer Frank Schaeffer was the perfect guest for Martin Bashir to bring on the May 2 edition of his eponymous program to discuss the importance of religious "faith as an issue" in the 2012 general election campaign.

Schaeffer toned down his rhetoric a tad bit from previous excursions on the "Lean Forward" network, but he still managed to work in grotesquely misleading and hateful slams of evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

A brief but telling episode from As The MSM Mask Slips . . .

On her MSNBC show this afternoon, chatting with chum and fellow Obama fan Tom Daschle about the anniversary of the killing of OBL, Andrea Mitchell said: "What do you think of the Republican criticism that we are politicizing it, that the White House, I should say, is politicizing it"?  View the video after the jump.

In his "The Fix" blog yesterday, Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza uncritically furthered a faulty Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) that argues that President Obama has actually received more negative news coverage this political season than the Republican presidential primary contenders. This morning, Post print edition editors excerpted Cillizza's item on page A4, the "Campaign 2012" news page.

While Cillizza noted in his blog post that there are "mitigating factors" in the survey data -- that langauge was cut from the print edition excerpt -- he confidently asserted that "for all the chatter about Obama’s preferential treatment by the media, the data tells a very different story. And the data doesn’t lie." But as my colleague Rich Noyes explained on Monday, the data examined by the study are fundamentally flawed and hence worthless to arrive at a conclusion about the media's judgments of the candidates (emphases mine):

In the 2008 campaign, "[t]he media were awestruck, embarrassingly so," over Barack Obama and failed to vet him thoroughly, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted on last night's edition of Hannity. "In the primaries in 2008, we counted 29 different times when the networks either called him a rising star, an emerging star, a rock star, or a superstar. Twenty-nine different times," but they never, of course, affixed such a label to his GOP opponent John McCain.

Shortly after that, Hannity played a montage of liberal journalists gushing over President Obama -- treating him like awestruck groupies -- since he's taken office. "This is embarrassing, this is journalism today," Bozell, the founder of the Media Research Center observed. [MP3 audio here; watch the full segment below the page break]

President Obama's ham-handed, laissez faire handling of his signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare, "cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader," argued retiring one-term Sen. James Webb (D-Va.). Webb.

"If you were going to do something of this magnitude, you have to do it with some clarity, with a clear set of objectives from the White House," reporter Karen Tumulty quoted Webb, noting he made his comments Wednesday at "a breakfast organized by Bloomberg News." Webb held out ObamaCare as a key reason why the president may ultimately be unable to keep Virginia in the Democratic win column in the 2012 presidential race. But alas, Tumulty's reporting was consigned to six paragraphs and printed on page A4 in the Election 2012 digest.

The Telegraph (UK) notes that President Obama made an "uncharacteristic" gaffe the other day by calling the Falklands Islands -- known as the Malvinas in Argentina -- the "Maldives." And it did so by pointing out ... that George W. Bush was more prone to such blunders, "Barack Obama made an uncharacteristic error, more akin to those of his predecessor George W. Bush, by referring to the Falkland Islands as the Maldives."

While President George W. Bush certainly made his fair share of gaffes, one can certainly wonder if the former chief exec was indeed more apt to make such errors, or whether it was the media -- in this case the foreign press -- that highlighted them more often than it does those of our current president.