Gwen Ifill

With the monumental collapse of the president’s anti-gun agenda, many are wondering if both sides will “go back into their corners” on gun control.  Every single measure in this new bill failed, which elicited the wrath of the president yesterday in the Rose Garden.  During the April 17 broadcast of the PBS NewsHour, Gwen Ifill asked why these measures failed to pass, mentioned the popularity of background checks, and failed to press Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on past statements about how this bill really wouldn’t have prevented Sandy Hook ergo more mass shootings.

In fairness, Ifill also had Lawrence Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat from Conneticut, on the program to discuss the failed bill.  While he said his organization supported some of the amendments in the bill, they couldn’t back it due to the background check provision, noting it would have harmed gun sellers who rely heavily on weekend sales, when most customers come to their stores [emphasis mine]:

Support for same-sex marriage is on the rise in America, and PBS couldn’t be happier about it. On Tuesday’s NewsHour, the taxpayer-subsidized network ran a story that betrayed more than a hint of elation at the growing acceptance of gay marriage among both politicians and the public. Leading the cheers was co-anchor Gwen Ifill, who narrated the story and moderated the discussion that followed.

At the top of the segment, Ifill promised her viewers that there “ appears to be an evolving sea change on attitudes toward gay marriage.” She then began her package by insisting that, “Steadily and remarkably, public and political support for same-sex marriage is on the rise.”

In the wake of the leaked Department of Justice memo detailing the legality of targeted killings by drones on American citizens, the PBS NewsHour found it fitting to have the ACLU defend its position in why these strikes are troubling, and why American-born al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki should’ve been kept alive to plan acts of terror against the United States.

Of course, this is maddening to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  Liberal publications, like The Nation, detail the dark future of drone warfare, and some anti-drone journalists, like Conor Fierdorsdorff of The Atlantic, have compared Obama to Bush.  However, even with the media either criticizing, or ignoring, this development, last night’s broadcast of the PBS NewsHour didn’t take into account the hypocrisy of liberals who were on the warpath a few years prior after release of Bush memos related to enhanced interrogation techniques.

During PBS’ coverage of the 2013 Inauguration, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Gwen Ifill, and Yale University’s Beverly Gage seemed to have forgotten what the definition of liberal is within the context of Obama’s second inaugural address.  In fact, Gage said that this wasn’t an “endorsement of collective liberalism,” and Shields called it more “humanitarian.” 

The non-taxpayer subsidized liberal media has been more honest. Today’s New York Times said Obama offered a “liberal vision.”  Slate’s John Dickerson, who infamously called for Obama to destroy the GOP, called the 44th president’s address “a liberal love letter.”  ABC finally figured out that Obama is a progressive liberal.

Liberals politicians and journalists are on a full-blown assault on the Second Amendment ever since Friday's horrific shooting in Newtown, Conn. Gun ban-pushers like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) are making the rounds in the media, including taxpayer-funded PBS. On December 17, NewsHour anchor Gwen Ifill gave Feinstein the floor to push her agenda. Naturally, Ifill failed to bring on an opposing point of view nor did she ask Feinstein tough questions.

During the December 4 edition of the PBS NewsHour, anchor Gwen Ifill decided to give a lofty eight minute and forty second interview to Obama cheerleader and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman so he can try to convince us that the fiscal cliff isn’t that big of a deal.  Of course, in his estimation, Democratic proposals for higher taxes and higher spending were serious, while Republican alternatives to tackle the deficit were trivial.  In fact, according to Krugman, “Obama is actually very serious in the real sense. It's just the notion he hasn't done anything on entitlement reform is totally unfair. He's done more than anyone has ever done before.” 

And that’s why he needs $1.6 trillion dollars in tax hikes and $50 billion in additional stimulus spending to be "serious" about reining in deficit spending?!

Andrew Sullivan made a fool of himself on ABC's This Week Sunday.

For the entertainment pleasure of viewers, George Will and PBS's Gwen Ifill assisted the Obama-loving Daily Beast columnist (video follows with transcript and commentary):

During the October 24 broadcast of the PBS Newshour, Gwen Ifill explored the state of current U.S. Senate races with Rothenberg Political Report’s Nathan Gonzales and Roll Call’s Shira Toeplitz.

The first on the list was Indiana race between Richard Mourdock and Rep. Joe Donnelly.  Here, liberal media creep leeched into Toeplitz’s analysis as she found Mourdock’s comments about life and conception frivolously similar to what she called Todd Akin's “horrific gaffe” on the matter several weeks ago.

During the September 25 broadcast of the PBS Newshour, anchor Gwen Ifill invited Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass and former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns to discuss President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and his recent address to the UN. Reporter Judy Woodruff also had a segment on the president speech. Yet none of the segments dealing with the address mentioned the fact that the Obama administration has expressed support for anti-blasphemy measures that are completely incongruous with the freedom of speech as protected by the U.S. Constitution.

On last night’s broadcast of the PBS Newshour, anchor Gwen Ifill discussed the latest polls with Pew’s Andrew Kohut and Mark Blumenthal, "senior polling analyst" of The Huffington Post.  Her talk about voter engagement and enthusiasm got a little hazy – if not completely insensitive – when she referred to last week’s embassy attacks as a “dust up.” 

Perhaps "dust up" in her mind only refers to the liberal media's insular discussions about foreign-policy developments, but could she sound more cavalier about the deaths of Americans in Libya? 

Last night, Yahoo! News Washington Bureau Chief, David Chalian, slandered Romney by saying that the Republican nominee and his wife, Ann, were "happy to have a party with black people drowning."  These remarks were made during ABCNews.com's webcast of their coverage of the RNC convention.  As a result, Mr. Chalian has been fired by Yahoo!, but some liberal journalists aren't happy about it.

Gwen Ifill of the taxpayer-subsidized Public Broadcasting System (PBS) tweeted this today.

Notorious PBS liberal Gwen Ifill took to Twitter to defend David Chalian, the former Yahoo Washington bureau chief who was fired for claiming that Mitt and Ann Romney are "happy to have a party with black people drowning," claiming that he was unjustly fired. Her defense was markedly over-the-top:

"One mistake does not change this. @DavidChalian is God's gift to political journalism. #IStandwithDavid"

Gwen Ifill of the PBS Newshour hosted Jonathan Martin of Politico and Molly Ball of The Atlantic magazine in a left wing cuddlefest that bashed Romney over Bain, his taxes, and Solyndra on July 16.  Ms. Ifill was not the least concerned that this story is mere fodder for the Obama campaign to pivot away from its abysmal economic record, but nevertheless, started off the shooting gallery by asking Jonathan Martin to "help us explain this Bain back-and-forth."

"At the end of this weekend, was there any more clarity about when he left and if he left Bain?" Ifill asked:

My Wednesday blog on PBS anchor Gwen Ifill emceeing a gay group's fundraiser that honored HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for implementing ObamaCare drew some attention across the web, including The Washington Post and The Huffington Post. WashPost media blogger Erik Wemple looked askance at the PBS star's appearance of a conflict of interest. But the strongest response came from PBS ombudsman Michael Getler: he declared Ifill should have skipped the event.

Ifill responded to Wemple's questions by claiming she isn't being paid, she wasn't going to honor Sebelius, and she accepted without knowing of the honor. She was just going to say "welcome," announce some anodyne agenda items, and "announce dessert." The Whitman-Walker Clinic is "just using me as a draw." That's still using her name (and PBS cachet) to raise money for gay-left lobbying, legal services, and health services. Wemple wrote:

In 2008, it was questionable that PBS NewsHour and Washington Week anchor Gwen Ifill could moderate the vice-presidential debate as she was writing a book called “The Breakthrough” about the rise of Barack Obama and other black liberal politicians. On Thursday night, Ifill will cross another Obama line by acting as emcee for a fundraiser for the LGBT health and advocacy group the Whitman-Walker Clinic that will honor Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services for her work in implementing ObamaCare.

The invitation says “Please join Gwen Ifill, managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent for the PBS News Hour, and the Whitman-Walker family as we honor United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius for advancements in health care.” To be an "event host" and be listed on the program requires a $1,000 donation. Individual tickets are $150.

President Obama's vacation in Martha's Vineyard also became an occasion for a panel of liberal journalists, politicians, and academics to mourn his alleged mistreatment in the media at a race-and-the-media panel discussion organized by Harvard professor Charles Ogletree. PBS Washington Week anchor Gwen Ifill  lamented the overwhelming media bias against Obama in the Henry Louis Gates controversy, when Obama said he didn't have all the facts, but the local police "acted stupidly" for their actions in arresting Gates on his own porch.

Ifill somehow ignored that the Obama-supporting news networks pouted over how this comment was a "distraction" from passing ObamaCare, and overpublicized the "beer summit" Obama held at the White House with Gates and his arresting police officer to fix any public-relations damage he might have incurred. (She even ignored the newscast she sometimes anchors, the PBS NewsHour.) On August 18, the Vineyard Gazette reported Ifill complained:

After Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's win in Saturday's Iowa Straw Poll, the Obama-loving media have been working overtime to make darned certain the public doesn't think this has any significance.

Doing her part was PBS's Gwen Ifill who said on Sunday's "Face the Nation," "The last person to actually get elected president to win a Straw Poll was George W. Bush" - as if that was soooo long ago (video follows with transcript and commentary):

PBS fans love how the show Washington Week is such a peaceful regurgitation of the conventional liberal media wisdom. But there are times in the calm that you wonder what world these liberals are living in. For example, the show's host, Gwen Ifill, seems to think it's plausible that President Obama -- the man who's made trillion-dollar-plus deficits a routine -- could take the "deficit slasher" label away from a conservative. New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny suggested that seniors might be willing to consider seriously Medicare reforms if they'll help lower the debt.

Ifill replied: "Is that why when we see the president come out this week and make speeches like this, it seems like he was snatching the mantle of deficit slasher from Paul Ryan's hands and saying 'No, no, no -- me'?"

Few people really pine for the opportunity to read an 815-page memoir of a former Secretary of Defense. But in Tuesday's Washington Post, the front of the Style section matches a book review of Donald Rumsfeld's new memoir Known and Unknown as equal with...a 110-page Rumsfeld torture fantasy concocted for the small magazine company McSweeney's. The title over both was "Two Shots of Rummy." In his review, novelist and former reporter Dan Fesperman suggested that the leftist "literary guerrilla action" is more authentic about Rumsfeld:

It is tempting at first to dismiss "Donald" as a mere literary guerrilla action, a publication-day ambush by two clever writers whose narrative voice, to their credit, may sound more authentically like Donald Rumsfeld than the former defense secretary's memoir.

If you were to cast this stunt as a war movie, co-authors Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott would be the wily tricksters who don fake uniforms to slip behind enemy lines, speaking the language like natives and clearing all checkpoints until they vanquish the opposing general with his own diabolical weaponry.

The December 31 edition of PBS's Washington Week tried to spin the year 2010 in the most favorable way for Obama. First, Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty tried to suggest the massive Democratic losses in the House were somehow pretty conventional, yawn:

Well, I think it shook out as a pretty conventional midterm election. All year long, right up until Election Day, the Democrats kept telling us elections are really choices between two candidates and the Republicans kept saying no, this is going to be a referendum on the president. And that’s what midterms are for after presidential elections.They are often the American public kind of putting its foot on the brake just a bit.

A 63-seat loss for the Democrats? That's not so high a tidal wave. Then host Gwen Ifill suggested the electorate missed something. It was a better year for America and Obama than the voters thought:

Sarah Palin at Monday's Tea Party rally in Reno, Nevada, told attendees, "Don't be thinking that we've got victory for America in the bag yet...We can't party like it's 1773."

Clearly not understanding that was the year of the famed Boston Tea Party, history challenged media members, including PBS's Gwen Ifill and Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas, mocked Palin via their twitter accounts (screencaps follow with video of Palin's remarks courtesy Right Scoop, h/t Perfunction):

How phony is Barack Obama? PBS Washington Week host Gwen Ifill reviewed New Yorker editor David Remnick's new Obama book The Bridge in the Washington Post Outlook section Sunday, and she kept finding Obama is a Slick Barry, a "shape shifter." Obama even admitted to rhetoric what should be obvious -- how he changes "dialects" depending on the audience he's talking to:   

Obama cops to this. "The fact that I conjugate my verbs and speak in a typical Midwestern newscaster's voice -- there's no doubt that this helps ease communication between myself and white audiences," he tells Remnick.

"And there's no doubt that when I'm with a black audience I slip into a slightly different dialect. But the point is, I don't feel the need to speak a certain way in front of a black audience. There's a level of self-consciousness about these issues the previous generation had to negotiate that I don't feel I have to."

PBS Washington Week host Gwen Ifill was featured Friday on the Romenesko media-news site for her "Gwen’s Take" blog post dismissing the Eric Massa groping scandal as a silly distraction (echoing  Rachel Maddow, and Nancy Pelosi). She compared Washington to Dug the talking dog in the cartoon movie "Up" chasing a squirrel.

But in 2006, Ifill’s show almost screamed with hype that the Mark Foley internet-message scandal was "a Watergate-kind of meltdown" for Republicans, as Ifill asked "Why didn’t [Speaker] Dennis Hastert resign?"

Ifill wrote that she loves the movie "Up," and finds the talking dog a scream:

NBC's Today show, on Monday morning, invited on former Democratic liberal Congressman Harold Ford Jr. and PBS' liberal Washington Week moderator Gwen Ifill to discuss whether Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should step down for his "Negro dialect" comments about Barack Obama and not surprisingly neither guest suggested Reid should go.

Both Ford and Ifill dismissed any comparison to when Trent Lott was forced to resign for racially insensitive comments as Ford claimed "I don't believe in any way that Harry Reid had any animus, racial animus," and with Lott there were "other allegations and even proof of racial comments that he had made before." For her part Ifill claimed the two cases were "apples and oranges," as seen in the following exchange with Today co-host Matt Lauer:

The roundtable members on Sunday's This Week derided or dismissed Sarah Palin, with David Brooks, the putative conservative columnist for the New York Times, declaring “she's a joke” and insisting “Republican primary voters just are not going to elect a talk show host” -- leaving it to PBS's Gwen Ifill, of all people, to come to her defense as a fellow woman.[MP3 audio available here]

Left-winger David Corn yearned for how she will damage Republicans while the Washington Post's Bob Woodward agreed with Brooks and George Will wondered: “Some conservatives think they have found in Sarah Palin a Republican William Jennings. Why they would want somebody who lost the presidency three times I do not know.”

The derogatory take from David Books on the November 15 This Week with George Stephanopoulos on ABC:

Yeah, she's a joke. I mean, I just can't take her seriously. We've got serious problems in the country. Barack Obama's trying to handle war. We just had a guy elected Virginia Governor who's probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell. Pretty serious guy, pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters just are not going to elect a talk show host.

The White House has berated Fox News for days now for purportedly pushing an agenda and calling it news. So Americans may have been surprised when, as reported by Noel Sheppard, Obama invited two of MSNBC's most divisive liberal pundits--Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow--to the White House for an off-the-record briefing.

As it turns out, Maddow and Olbermann were only two of the left's heavyweights at the briefing. Yesterday, TVNewser received from the White House a complete list of names. Virtually all of them have their histories of shilling for the administration or Democrats generally, and of bashing conservatives.

Let us review the colorful histories of these pundits, and the reader can decide whether they "have a perspective," in the words of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (in the context of a Fox News attack).

PBS's Gwen Ifill has apologized for using the sexually-charged derogatory term "Tea Baggers" during last Wednesday's broadcast of "The NewsHour."

According to the PBS ombudsman, responding to an e-mail message from a NewsBusters reader, Ifill didn't know what it meant.

Apparently, she's just as clueless about current events as ABC's Charlie Gibson.

Before we get there, here's what Ifill said last week on a television station funded with your tax dollars:

On Tuesday night, PBS’s NewsHour discussed the Sotomayor nomination with a panel including Jenny Rivera, a former Sotomayor clerk and head of the Center on Latino and Latina Equal Rights. You could hear the latest buzz words on diversity being used. The addition of Latina diversity brings a certain "integrity" to the Supreme Court, which suffers from an "insularity," from being encased in a bubble:

GWEN IFILL, anchor: Jenny Rivera, how much is there -- is there a just concern about identity politics beginning to define the day for picks like this? Here we have another first.

RIVERA: Well, I think the president didn't make a choice based on identity politics. He made the choice based on the merits of her intellectual capabilities, on the experience that she brought to the court.

And you heard David Axelrod say, you know, the fact that she happens to also be Latina and be a woman, it's wonderful that we can bring that to the court. But this was a choice based on the strength of her background, her experience, and her intellect. And, certainly, that's important.