Clayton Morris

Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin said Friday that there is a deep-seated anti-Catholic bigotry at the New York Times.

Speaking with Clayton Morris on "Fox & Friends," the former George H.W. Bush administration official also called the Gray Lady "a hub of liberal thinking" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

What the media like about President Obama's budget proposal over Rep. Paul Ryan's are the former's insistence on tax hikes, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told the audience of Friday's "Fox & Friends."

"That's the part of deficit reduction they like" but "anytime anybody proposes any cut of any wasteful spending, the media are the first ones there to talk about the sky falling and everyone about to die," the Media Research Center founder added.

What's more, despite Barack Obama dangerously running up the U.S. national debt in two years more than every president from Washington to Reagan combined, the media have been portraying the president as a serious fiscal hawk.

For the full segment, watch the embedded video below the page break:

   On Saturday morning, FNC’s Fox and Friends Saturday and ABC’s Good Morning America highlighted Democratic Senator Bob Menendez’s assertion that negotiating with Republicans taxes is like negotiating with terrorists. NBC’s Today show included a brief mention, but CBS’s The Early Show and CNN Saturday Morning ignored the New Jersey Democrat’s over-the-top rhetoric.

FNC included a soundbite of Menendez in the opening teaser, as co-host Alisyn Camerota asked if the "hostile words" of Democrats would "hurt negotiations." On ABC, correspondent David Kerley included a clip of the "tough language," and co-host Bianna Golodryga gave Republican Senator Orrin Hatch a chance to respond as the Utah Senator appeared as a guest. Golodryga: " I want to begin by asking your response to that dramatic language we heard from your Democratic counterpart, Senator Menendez, basically calling Republicans terrorists with regards to the process of tax cuts."

FNC began its show:

ALISYN CAMEROTA: Good morning, everyone. It's Saturday, December 4. Two major tax votes happening today in the Senate, but are the Democrats' hostile words hurting negotiations?

SENATOR BOB MENENDEZ (D-NJ): It's almost like the question of: Do you negotiate with terrorists?

"It took about three days" after Katrina's landfall in New Orleans for the media to attack the Bush administration for acting "too little, too late," but after April's oil spill it took "about four weeks before you heard any criticism of any substance on the networks," Media Research Center's Rich Noyes told Fox's Clayton Morris on the Saturday, May 29 "Fox & Friends." Noyes and MRC analyst Kyle Drennen wrote about that double standard three days earlier on NewsBusters.

Playing devil's advocate, Morris noted that in the initial aftermath the damage of the BP oil well blowout was grossly underestimated, perhaps accounting for the lack of critical response by the media.

Noyes granted that point, but argued that only explains about "the first week or so" of the media's silence. In fact, it took normally partisan Democrats like James Carville coming out to complain about the Obama administration's reaction before the media took up the torch on the issue, when "it should be the other way around," the MRC Director of Research argued.

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

Near the end of the Saturday edition of Fox & Friends on Fox News, co-host Clayton Morris introduced a segment on the media's double standard when it comes to covering the tea party movement versus left-wing protestors: "Mainstream media casting tea party protesters as violent and racist, the same media that characterized leftist protests against President Bush as patriotic."

Morris brought on a tea party activist to discuss the topic: "Well, our next guest is someone who's not afraid to stand up to biased coverage. Check out this heated exchange with a CNN reporter at a tea party rally last year." A clip was played of tea partier Kathy Barkulis berating former CNN reporter Susan Roesgen: "You are not talking to regular, mainstream people. You picked people to talk to." Roesgen was later fired from CNN in July of 2009, in the wake of her slanted reporting on the tea party.

After the clip, Morris asked Barkulis: "So what do you say here? That the mainstream media's casting tea party protests as violent, dangerous, extremist? Is there a double standard, as you see it?" Barkulis replied: "Oh, of course there is, there's always been a double standard and it's just getting worse.... they're misrepresenting us and I really don't even think they've ever been to a tea party rally and they don't really know what we're all about. They're just repeating what other left-wing sources have told them."

Next week, the Media Research Center will be releasing a special report documenting media coverage of the tea party movement over the past year.

Wednesday’s Fox and Friends on FNC passed on a piece of information not likely to receive much attention from the mainstream media – that Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue is so far outpacing Hillary Clinton’s Living History in sales. Co-anchor Alisyn Camerota relayed that "now there's a comparison between how Sarah Palin's book has done in the first week and how Hillary Clinton's memoir did the first week, and the winner is: Sarah Palin."

Co-anchor Clayton Morris, noting that Clinton had received a larger advance than Palin, elaborated on the number of first-week sales: "A lot of the number of sales, so far here, the numbers, Sarah Palin 700,000 for Going Rogue. Hillary Clinton's Living History got 600,000. But maybe Hillary's Clinton's sort of laughing all the way to the bank because she made – look at that number there – for her advance from the book, from the publisher, $8 million. Sarah Palin got $5 million."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Wednesday, November 25, Fox and Friends on FNC:

In light of recent reports that Vice President Cheney had ordered the CIA to withhold information about a counterrorism program that was being planned during the Bush administration, on Sunday ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on both Good Morning America and on This Week suggested that the revelations may be "vindication" for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or that they at least "bolster" her claims about the CIA lying to her. Stephanopoulos even seemed to be pushing Pelosi to claim "vindication" even while the Speaker’s office was reluctant to do so. Stephanopoulos, from Good Morning America: "I spoke with Speaker Pelosi's office about that, and they don't want to use the word "vindication," but, clearly, it does bolster their case that on several occasions, they were either misled or not given relevant information that the Congress was supposed to have."

During the roundtable discussion on This Week, after conservative columnist George Will brought up the danger of leaks by members of Congress, since congressional members leaked the current story, Stephanopoulos again suggested the story helps Pelosi: "And part of the reason they wrote those letters was in defense of the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi ... they said that they had been misled, and, of course, the Speaker had said the CIA has lied to us on many occasions. I think she said they lie all the time. So this is a measure of vindication, I suppose, for the Speaker, even though she doesn't want to claim it."

During the roundtable discussion, it was left to Will to point out not only that the program "remained in the planning stages," but that the law Democrats are alleging may have been broken has a loophole, suggesting that withholding information on the program may have been legal. Will: