NBC's David Gregory is taking a lot of heat for asking the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald on Sunday's Meet the Press if he should be charged with a crime for aiding and abetting National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.
Greenwald and a host of folks struck back at Gregory on Twitter (video follows with transcript and commentary):
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was booed by liberal activists Saturday for defending President Obama on the NSA’s surveillance programs and saying leaker Edward Snowden broke the law.
This occurred during a Q&A session at the far-left Netroots Nation conference in San Jose.
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer and the Washington Post’s Colby King got into a heated debate on PBS’s Inside Washington Friday over who’s to blame for Iraq spinning out of control now that the United States is no longer there.
Not surprisingly, King was opposed to laying any of the blame on President Obama for failing to negotiate a troop withdrawal that left some of our forces there (video follows with transcript and commentary):
As NewsBusters reported almost ad nauseum, Anthony Bourdain on his 9PM Sunday CNN program Parts Unknown regularly uttered profanities including varieties of the S-word without being censored.
Yet on Friday’s Stroumboulopoulos which airs at 11PM, Bill Maher was censored when he said “bulls—t” (video follows with commentary):
Bill Maher may have said one of the dumbest – and therefore funniest! – things ever to come out of his mouth Friday.
Appearing on CNN’s Stroumboulopoulos, Maher said, “You have to really be smart” to get on his HBO Real Time show (video follows with transcript and commentary):
"The national news media are aiding and abetting a censorship campaign," regarding the "cascading" IRS scandal, Media Research Center founder and president Brent Bozell argued on the June 21 edition of Fox Business Network's Varney & Co.
Bozell noted, for example, that only CBS's This Morning covered the fact that IRS officials received $70 million in employee bonuses this year, despite a White House order freezing such bonuses during the sequester cutbacks. [MP3 audio here; Watch the video of the segment following the page break]
CNN's new morning show New Day hosted only one member of Congress – a Democrat – to discuss the immigration bill on Friday. Co-host Chris Cuomo interviewed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and pushed for Congress to "get this done."
Cuomo let the Senator dodge his question on border security, but pinned her down when asking why amnesty wasn't granted to even more illegal immigrants. "Why leave out a whole year's worth of people who have come into the country?" he asked the Senator.
On the June 15 Evening News, reporter Elizabeth Palmer noted that all the candidates in the Iranian presidential election had been "very conservative" and all of them met the approval of the country's Islamic theocrats. "In U.S. terms, it was as if all the candidates for the presidency came from the Tea Party," Palmer explained to viewers at home.
After watching that clip on the June 20 "Media Mash" segment of FNC's Hannity, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell lashed out at Palmer's attack on conservative Americans. Palmer, Bozell noted, was "equating the Tea Party, that at its essence believes in freedom with a movement that at its epicenter is totalitarianism." "If that isn't character assassination, I don't know what is," the Media Research Center founder concluded. [watch the full Media Mash segment below the page break; thanks to MRCTV's Bob Parks for putting the video together]
The folks at MSNBC were at it again Thursday.
In an effort to make it appear Congressman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said food stamp recipients are all rapists, pedophiles, and murderers, someone at this farce of a so-called news network decided to highly-edit and deceptively cobble together snippets of comments he made at various times on the House floor Wednesday (video follows with transcript and commentary):
According to pop culture-obsessed Chris Matthews, a good comparison to TV "icon" Tony Soprano is Bill Clinton. While discussing the untimely passing of actor James Gandolfini, the Hardball anchor insisted that if "more politicians could invoke" the personality that the fictional mobster did, "we'd have a lot more popular politicians."
Matthews gushed, "I think Clinton had a piece of this. I think we always knew Clinton's problems. He was the most transparent guy ever to be president." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] The liberal journalist proclaimed, "All his problems were human problems," just like Tony. He added, "People today really look back on [Clinton] with tremendous affection." Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton explained the popularity of the two men: "Hey, we like a little evil in people...It's one of the most attractive qualities that a person can have." Remember, Matthews and Lipton were trying to be positive.
President Obama's speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was much anticipated by the network morning shows on Wednesday. On ABC's Good Morning America, Jonathan Karl announced: "Expectations are high." On CBS This Morning, Major Garrett touted the White House hope that the address would rank among past "famous and memorable speeches." On NBC's Today, Matt Lauer reminisced over the President being "greeted like a rock star" in 2008. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
However, after Obama's lackluster performance on Wednesday, there was nothing but silence on Thursday's morning shows, not even a mention of the supposedly "historic speech" that was promised.
A sneering group of MSNBC hosts and analysts on Thursday berated Sean Hannity for his "mindless" anti-government attitude, mocking him as "pathetic." The Fox News host gave an interview to Playboy magazine in which he dismissed much of the federal government as "dysfunctional." Ex-Newsweek editor Howard Fineman, who has bragged about "steering clear of partisanship," slammed Hannity for having a "deliberate lack of self-awareness [that] is just stunning."
Speaking of the federal government, Fineman continued, "One of the reasons why the system is so dysfunctional is because of the mindlessly accusatory nature of what he...what they [conservatives] do." The journalist, who has prided himself on "keeping an even keel ideologically," accused Hannity of being "an enthusiastically, vigorous user of that style of rhetoric and politics and it's one of the main reasons why things aren't working." Fineman exhorted viewers, "Wake up! Wake up!" [MP3 audio here. See video below.]