Obama Watch

"We got about 10 minutes on the three evening newscasts" last night about "how Romney must have made a mistake" with his statement on the deadly Benghazi consulate attack instead of devoting any significant attention to the question of "What is wrong with the state of our security at our embassies in the Middle East?" NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham complained to Fox News Channel's Neil Cavuto on his September 13 Your World program.

The liberal media are a "pathetic pack of politicizers" who have "done nothing" but "politicize this issue," Graham added. Indeed, when President Obama was interviewed by 60 Minutes, "he gets asked, 'did Romney screw this up?'" the Media Research Center director of media analysis noted. The president probably gets "tougher questions from his daughters at the supper table than he's getting from Steve Kroft at CBS," Graham quipped. [MP3 audio here; video follows page break]

Barack Obama has morphed into Jimmy Carter before our eyes, but the liberal media have refused to report on the Obama Administration’s failed foreign policy of apologies and appeasement. Terrified to hurt Obama’s chances of re-election, they are shamelessly seizing on this horrific attack on Americans abroad to push their go-to narrative that Mitt Romney is tone deaf.

Romney rightly criticized the Obama Administration for its spineless apology to thugs whose idea of ‘diplomacy’ is intimidation, violence and murder. As the façade of the ‘Arab Spring’ continues to fracture and crumble away, the media have shifted to a strategy of distraction and omission.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel informed President Obama yesterday that it found his controversial Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius violated the federal Hatch Act back in February. ABC News's Jake Tapper noted the finding in a September 12 Political Punch blog post at ABCNews.com, but World News editors apparently thought the matter unworthy of coverage last night. The story was also unreported on NBC's Nightly News and CBS's Evening News.

The Hatch Act forbids federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity and Sebelius did just that in off-the-cuff remarks as the keynote speaker at a February 25 gala for the Human Rights Campaign, Tapper noted (emphasis mine):

On Sunday's CNN Reliable Sources, host Howard Kurtz spoke of President Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention:

Bob Cusack, Obama gave a pretty good speech overall. The media acted like it was terrible. And it seems to me that perhaps we have set a standard for him that (if) he doesn't he doesn't hit the stratosphere, he has somehow failed.

The media acted like it was terrible?  Kurtz must not have been watching CNN immediately after Obama's speech.  Observed CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer: "Anderson, he clearly still has that oratorical skill that he's always had over these many years." CNN chief national correspondent John King opined: "I think a very smart, well-crafted speech, both strategically and tactically."  CNN senior political analyst David Gergen said, ". . .I thought it was a very strong speech."

In their pre-game analysis before President Obama's nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, ABC News painted the costly cancelation -- "a hefty six figures" in fruitless set-up costs for broadcast equipment for the networks, reported Dylan Byers of Politico -- of tonight's planned Bank of America Stadium venue as a "lucky break."

"Absolutely a lucky break," political contributor Matthew Dowd told anchor George Stephanopoulos, insisting that while the Obama campaign "could have filled the stadium... there is no way they could have repeated the energy in this crowd." But meanwhile over on CBS, anchor Scott Pelley showed viewers at home the scene at Bank of America stadium, where "it is dark and there is not a drop of rain falling in the vicinity here in Charlotte. [video follows page break]

On Thursday's Diane Rehm show on NPR stations, NPR political director Ron Elving was truly beside himself in praising the Bill Clinton speech on Wednesday night,  going so far that he presumed Democrats said to themselves at every pause for the next gem of wisdom, "What'll that be, Daddy?"

Elving began by oozing "That was about as full-throated, robust and effective, to use your word, a defense of President Obama as I can imagine. I don't know very many people who were seeing it as inadequate last night... frankly, there are things Barack Obama can do as a speaker. We all know that. But he has not been particularly good at his own defense. This was hiring the right attorney at the right time in the right courtroom."

While folks at MSNBC are calling Republican vice presidential nominee a "compulsive liar" for, among other things, his factually accurate statement about then-Sen. Obama's February 13, 2008 visit to a now-shuttered Janesville, Wis., General Motors plant, it's worth noting that, well, the video doesn't lie.

Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com has Obama's pledge on video here [You can also watch the video below the page break.] What's more, a search of the Nexis database reveals that David Wright of ABC News showed Obama's pledge in a story on the February 13, 2008 World News (emphasis mine):

For decades the liberal media have enjoyed poking fun at conservative politicians for their public gaffes, real or imagined. Dan Quayle, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin -- these are just a few of the many conservatives parodied by the press. Vice-President Joe Biden is set to address the Democratic National Convention Wednesday evening. There will be many interviews conducted with him during this time. So in the interest of fair play -- the news media are fair, aren't they? -- NewsBusters's parent organization the Media Research Center (MRC) -- has compiled a list of ten questions the media should pose to Joe Biden.

Questions we wish the liberal media would ask Biden:

Christian eschatology sees Jesus Christ as the central, salvific figure of all of human history. So it's perhaps blasphemously fitting that MSNBC's Chris Matthews sees his messiah as the object of all of American history.

"President Obama is the product of our turbulent history, all that came before led to him," Matthews insisted in the closing portion of his "Barack Obama: Making History" documentary that aired at 10 p.m. Eastern on Monday. As such, Obama "needs to continue making history," for "the moment he becomes just another incumbent president, bogged down in the status quo, he will lose something vital since we first met him: his historic self."

If you restrict the supply of something, the price will go up.  It’s one of the laws of supply and demand.  Thus, cap-and-trade energy rationing schemes drive the price of energy up, by capping the supply.  President Obama has conceded that in his unguarded moments.  In a January 17, 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Obama said that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his cap-and-trade plan to fight global warming.  He also said that under his plan, “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

But journalists are not economists, and often have difficulty understanding the most basic principles of economics.  (Some cannot even do basic math).  What is clear to any economist or any college graduate who has taken Econ 101 seems disputed or unclear to many journalists, who are more familiar with trendy fads in college English Departments, and left-wing critical race theory, than they are with basic economic truths.

Most Americans don't watch the coverage of party nominating conventions, and everyone in the media knows it. So as a public service,  "NBC Politics team has curated some of the notable speeches from the first night of the Republican National Convention in Tampa," according to a late night August 28 post on NBCNews.com website.

While NBC has the resources to embed videos of EVERY speech from last night, it decided to judge which ones were "notable." Wouldn't you know it, the speech of Artur Davis -- the former Democratic congressman from Alabama who seconded Barack Obama's nomination for the presidency at the Democratic convention in 2008 -- was not included in the list.

On Thursday, Sentier Research released a study showing that household income has actually declined at a worse rate in the sluggish economic recovery than it did during the December 2007-June 2009 recession. "From June 2009 to June 2012, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 4.8 percent, to $50,964," Washington Post's Michael Fletcher noted in Friday's paper, although his article was buried by editors on page A10. The New York Times ran a story on the report on Friday on page B1 entitled "Big Income Losses Hit Those Near Retirement."

This should of course be troubling news for any incumbent president, but since that happens to a be liberal Democrat, the media are not making much of it. Indeed, the broadcast networks have completely ignored the story, as a search of our DVR recordings and of the Nexis database confirm.

Yesterday a "report by Sentier Research, a firm headed by two former Census Bureau officials," found that "[f]rom June 2009 to June 2012, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 4.8 percent," Michael A. Fletcher of the Washington Post reported today. What's more, the fall in median household income was much worse for blacks, "a staggering 11.1 percent drop." June 2009, you may recall, marks the end of the recession that began in December 2007.

Yet such news was shoved down to page A10 by Post editors, rather than placed on the paper's August 23 front page, which included, among other things, a large photo of a woman working on a large sand sculpture at a resort in Florida, a story about Mitt Romney's campaign 'Mad Men,' and a story about how Lance Armstrong "won't fight doping charges" anymore.

A new poll by Rasmussen shows that 51 percent of voters think the media will, for the most part, attempt to help reelect President Obama rather than work to accurately and fairly report on the campaign. Only 9 percent of respondents believe the media are in the tank for Romney. That same poll found 59 percent of likely voters "believe Obama has received the best treatment from the media so far."

Filling in for Bill O'Reilly last night, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham discussed this poll and other evidence that the American public are wary of the media's liberal bias with NewsBusters senior editor/Media Research Center research director Rich Noyes. You can watch the full segment below the page break.

There’s no denying that what Rep. Todd Akin said was completely inappropriate, but for it to receive four times more coverage than the Vice President of the United States’ indefensibly racist gaffe is unconscionable. Todd Akin is a congressman. Joe Biden is one heartbeat from being the leader of the Free World. Once again, the media’s double standard is exposed for all to see.

If Ronald Reagan was the "Teflon President," then Joe Biden is the "Teflon Blowhard." He’s spent his entire career with his foot firmly lodged in his mouth, uttering an endless stream of impossibly stupid, vulgar, and insensitive things. And yet the media fall all over themselves to make excuses for blustery "Old Uncle Joe."

Although the Obama/Biden campaign has plenty of gaffes and erroneous statements to answer for from the past five-and-a-half months -- the last presidential press conference was March 6 -- Associated Press White House correspondent Jeff Kuhnhenn opted to toss a softball to President Obama today as he was selected by the president to ask the first question at the chief executive's impromptu session with reporters in the White House press briefing room.

"You are no doubt aware of the comments that Missouri Senate candidate, Republican Todd Akin made on rape and abortion. I wondered if you think those views represent the views of the Republican party in general. They have been denounced by your own rival and other Republicans. Are they an outlier or representative?" Kuhnhenn asked, having obviously answered his own question. [MP3 audio here; video follows page break]

On Saturday's World News, ABC correspondent Jake Tapper explained President Barack Obama's deceptive strategy of trying to get voters to believe that Mitt Romney supports lowering his own tax rate to less than one percent by attacking a tax plan which his running rate, Paul Ryan, once proposed in Congress which is not part of Romney's own plan.

As he introduced a deceptive soundbite from President Obama, host David Muir raised the issue:

Paul Ryan is radically anti-woman, anti-senior citizen, and if he and Mitt Romney are elected and ObamaCare is repealed, people will die! That, in a nutshell, is the liberal media's spin about Gov. Romney's pick of the Wisconsin Republican as his running mate, with the latter claim being made recently by MSNBC political analyst Jonathan Alter, formerly of Newsweek.

"That sleazeball did exactly accuse Romney of murder!" NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell exclaimed on the August 16 Hannity program, adding that by Alter's logic, it would be the majority of Americans who voted for Romney's presidency who would be complicit in "murder." "Where is that talk... where is the discussion of civility? Where are those high-minded people talking about civility now?" the Media Research Center founder asked. [watch the full "Media Mash" segment in the video embedded below]

ABC News's Jake Tapper noticed an interesting trend with President Obama.  He hasn't been around to take any questions from the press lately.  In fact, he has evaded the national press corps  for more than two months.  However, as Tapper noted on his blog today, Obama did have time to talk to "reporters from People Magazine and Entertainment Tonight."  In addition, "during his three-day Iowa bus tour this week, for example, he conducted three interviews with local radio stations, including a sports talk radio show, and a roundtable discussion with columnists from three Iowa papers, in addition to sitting down with People and Entertainment Tonight. On July 12, he did an interview with Charlie Rose for CBS This Morning."

Obama's "last news conference was at the G20 in June, when he answered six questions from three reporters on the European debt crisis, the conflict in Syria, and the notion of politics stopping at the water’s edge. The White House press corps has not formally been given the opportunity to ask questions of the president on U.S. soil since his appearance in the Briefing Room on June 8 (when he said “the private sector is doing fine.)"