James Taranto

New York Times reporter turned columnist Frank Bruni is on a nasty streak. He devoted his long Sunday Review column, "Rethinking His Religion," to a former classmate with a pat liberal morality lesson that seemed a lot like an invasion of patient privacy, then attacked Newt Gingrich and insulted Gingrich's wife. James Taranto at Best of the Web explained:

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has some insufferable friends. Yesterday he spent nearly 1,500 words profiling one of them, a classmate at the University of North Carolina whom he knew at the time as a conservative frat boy who "attended Catholic services every Sunday in a jacket and tie." Bruni, who is gay, "kept a certain distance from him" under the assumption that the young man, whom he does not name in the column, would be hostile to the future Timesman because of his sexual orientation.

Yesterday, Anne Gearan at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, wrote what she called a "Fact Check" piece about a political promise. Really.

Two Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, are both promising to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem if they should become the nation's next president. There's literally no way to "fact check" something that is only a promise, but Gearan wasted over 500 words pretending to do just that. She couldn't even buy a clue that her item's title ("FACT CHECK: Israel embassy promise may be empty") gives away the, uh, fact that it wasn't a "fact check" at all. Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web minced no words in critiquing AP's and Gearan's cluelessness (bolds are mine):

In Monday's edition of his “Best of the Web” column, under the subhead "Recycling Is Garbage," Opinion Journal’s James Taranto unveiled a humorous pattern of New York Times columnists recycling a satirical headline from The Onion that made an apparently profound point about the unfair burdens accompanying Barack Obama into office: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job." (Not as hard as coming up with new column ideas, apparently.)

    * "Of all the coverage of Obama's victory, the most accurate take may still be the piquant morning-after summation of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Under the headline 'Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job,' it reported that our new president will have 'to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.'"--Frank Rich, New York Times, Jan. 18, 2009

Elaine Quijano continued CBS's consistently glowing coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement on Wednesday's Early Show by spotlighting how two-thirds of Crosby, Stills, and Nash gave a concert for the protesters in New York City. Quijano played 12 clips from the concert and from the demonstrators, without once mentioning the growing examples of violence involving the left-leaning movement [audio clips available here; video below the jump].

Anchor Chris Wragge introduced the correspondent's report by noting only in passing how "anti-Wall Street protesters around the country are under growing pressure to go home...critics in several cities are saying they're just becoming a public nuisance." Co-anchor Erica Hill added that "here in New York City, demonstrators say they are in it, though, for the long haul- yes, even with winter coming. Correspondent Elaine Quijano takes a look at what the future holds for the protests."

“The Republican Party is split right down the middle between Tea Party movement supporters and those who do not support the two-and-a-half-year-old movement, according to a new national survey,” a Thursday CNN.com “Political Ticker” post asserted in recounting the findings of a CNN/ORC poll which were cited on air by both Wolf Blitzer and John King.

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal just demolished a scare piece by Newsweek reporter Eve Conant (posted on July 4) with the overwrought headline "White Supremacist Stampede: A startling number of white-power candidates are seeking public office."

If we're being warned of dangerous new wave of white racist extremists, it naturally is another product of the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center, which warns daily of a radical-racist-right takeover of America. Taranto asked: How startling is this wave of white-power candidates from sea to shining sea?

The New York Times marked Father’s Day last Sunday in its own special way -- here’s the front-page tease to a 4,000-word story by N.R. Kleinfeld: “In Brooklyn, a single mother, her son, her sperm donor and his lover are helping to redefine the concept of the American family.”

At Opinion Journal, James Taranto was bothered by the Times's blithe unconcern for the child’s privacy in its rush to celebrate an alternative family lifestyle. Under the cutting headlines “Happy Donor's Day! The New York Times celebrates fatherhood by cruelly invading a 3-year-old's privacy,” he wrote:

The next time someone in the media wants to blame budget cutters for premature deaths, remember James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal, who unveiled another story filed under “Great Moments in Socialized Medicine,” once again from jolly old England and the London Daily Mail:

Peter Thompson, 41, was left in a corridor for ten hours before someone noticed he had passed away. In a final act of indignity, hospital auxiliaries pulled his lifeless body across the floor in a manner his family described as like "dragging a dead animal."

Just when you consider cutting the Associated Press a break for doing something right, they pull this.

Most people know that in the interest of "not spiking the football," the Obama administration has decided that it will not release photos of Osama bin Laden's dead body.

Shortly after the decision was announced, AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request for said photos. According to John Hudson at the Atlantic (HT to Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web), the AP's Michael Oreskes claims that "This information is important for the historical record" and "It's our job as journalists to seek this material." So far, so good.

But you just knew they'd figure out a way to potentially ruin it. Here's Oreskes as quoted by Hudson:

James Taranto could be the best columnist around.  Every day at his Best of the Web at the Wall Street Journal online, Taranto turns out an original, often unconventional, conservative take on the news, regularly managing to leaven the message with humor.

Rush today rightly extolled Taranto's column of yesterday, in which he made the point that there is a vast, inherent difference between private and public sector unions.  In the former case, unions are negotiating against corporate interests. In the latter, unions are, by definition, organizing against the interests of the public itself.

Surely even Cenk Uygur understands this.  So when Cenk suggests, as he did on his MSNBC show this evening, that without unions public employees would be "at the mercy" of "corporate executives," it seems fair to accuse him of . . . fraud.

James Taranto, who writes the “Best of the Web” column for the Wall Street Journal online, continues to be on fire on the subject of New York Times hypocrisy over “violent” political rhetoric. His Monday column opened with another moral excoriation of the Times, based on its Saturday editorial endorsing the latest cause from Common Cause, a left-wing advocacy group. An excerpt:

The New York Times editorial page, a division of the New York Times Co., on Saturday endorsed Common Cause's personal attack on Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. As we explained Friday, Common Cause, a Washington-based corporation, is complaining about Scalia and Thomas's having joined Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, the 2010 decision that overturned a law criminalizing certain political speech by corporations.

After arguing that “Common Cause's complaint is not only meritless but frivolous,” Taranto quoted a damning excerpt from the Times editorial.

Justice Scalia, who is sometimes called "the Justice from the Tea Party," met behind closed doors on Capitol Hill to talk about the Constitution with a group of representatives led by Representative Michele Bachmann of the House Tea Party Caucus.

Then he really got tough on the Times.

Two of the conservative opinion world’s heavyweights, humorist P.J. O’Rourke and Wall Street Journal writer James Taranto, both have responded in passionate, even moral fashion to the New York Times’s often disgraceful coverage of the Tucson shootings, in which six people were killed and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured.

In their view, the Times used the tragedy to play political blame games against conservative politicians and talk show hosts. O'Rourke condemned the Times for "shameful," "ugly and offensive" reporting, while Taranto accused the Times of "reckless disregard for the truth."

First, some highlights from P.J. O’Rourke’s scathing take on the Times’ decline in the January 24 edition of The Weekly Standard, “The Times Loses It.”

The Washington Post had better refrain from telling other media outlets to tone down their rhetoric, for on Sunday, one of the paper's longest running columnists asked on national television, "How much time do we have left to talk about how stupid Sarah Palin is?"

Such was said by Richard Cohen, a man that has been with the Post since 1968, towards the end of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In light of President Barack Obama's recent attack on the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto wonders: "why is the Ground Zero mosque the only case in which Obama has ever defended anyone's First Amendment rights without qualification?"

There are a number of possible answers, and at least some of them are reasonable and worthy of media attention. And indeed, a few journalists have noticed and raised objection to the White House's selective contempt for opinion media - Fox is "destructive," but MSNBC libtalkers Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann "provide an invaluable service."

But there is a deeper First Amendment double standard at work here, as Taranto notes:

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal pointed out in his "Best of the Web Today" review on Thursday how Mark Halperin of Time seems to disagree so vehemently with himself about how the Obama presidency was supposed to unfold this year. Why would Obama delay business-tax-cut talk until the fall, for example:

It is fair to ask (and many Democrats have) why the President is only now proposing such critical measures, rather than offering them up earlier in his term, before election-season politics brought governing to a standstill.

It's fair to answer, too. While Americans were anxious about the economy, Obama was obsessed with wrecking our health care. He was urged on by cheerleaders in the media like the one who wrote an article on March 22, the day after the House passed ObamaCare, which began as follows:

A recurring rubric at James Taranto's Best of the Web Today column at the Wall Street Journal online is "We Blame George W. Bush," for tongue-in-cheek blaming of the former prez for things palpably beyond his purview. Let's add another item to the list.  Dem senator Russ Feingold has blamed his tough re-election race on, yes, W.

Let's think about that. If Bush were such a bad president.  If his policies were so disastrous for the country. Wouldn't that boost the chances of an incumbent Dem senator who, like Feingold, had voted against Bush policies every step of the way?

Hey, I don't try to understand Dem reasoning: I just report it.  Feingold made his logic-defying allegation on this evening's Ed Show.

The mainstream media is of course replete with liberal opinionistas who criticize Republicans far more harshly than Democrats. That is nothing new. It is truly shocking, however, when supposedly "objective" news outlets employ even more egregious double standards than the openly-biased commentators.

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto caught the Associated Press employing one such double standard over the weekend. The AP's Ben Feller penned quite a sob story about the president's response to the Gulf spill, saying that Obama is "having to work through unforeseen problems" and made sure to note that his "ability to calmly handle many competing issues simultaneously is viewed as one of his strengths."

A contrast with the AP's rheotroic on the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina reveals quite a discrepany in the organization's views on the executive's accountability for natural disasters. That New York Times columnist Frank Rich and uber-liberal mudslinger Bill Maher have both had harsher words for the current president and his response to the Gulf spill speaks volumes.

A number of media outlets continue to hold water for the weekend's pro-illegal immigration protesters, as NewsBusters has reported, painting violence at many rallies as somehow unexpected or not representative of the larger movement.

While that characterization may be fair, the benefit of the doubt afforded to immigration protesters by some of the nation's leading media outlets stands in stark contrast to the coverage of Tea Party protests by those same outlets. Tea Parties rallies are guilty until proven innocent in the eyes of the mainstream media.

"[W]hat started as a peaceful immigrants' rights march in downtown Santa Cruz turned violent, requiring police to call other agencies for help, authorities said," read the lede of an Associated Press report. Since no Tea Party rally has turned violent, we can't make a direct comparison. But it is safe to assume that a Tea Party protest looking like the one at top right -- and involving numerous incidents of vandalism and other crimes -- would be characterized simply as "violent" or some other ugly adjective.

Bill O'Reilly wants to make sure Wall Street Journal's James Taranto isn't making a baseless charge that Democrats use race for political advantage...

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Andrew Breitbart, founder of such center-right online powerhouses as Big Government and Big Hollywood, blasted what he dubs the "Democrat-media complex." He spoke of his most recent exposes on the administration's political malfeasance and the mainstream media's refusal to cover those scandals.

Breitbart rocketed into the national spotlight with his work with James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, the young conservatives responsible for the ground-breaking ACORN sting operations that led to congressional votes to de-fund the community organizing group.

"I had a 20-year-old and a 25-year-old and my integrity on the line if we were going to launch this," Mr. Breitbart says. "It was so obvious that the mainstream media, given this information, would not cover it and would, in effect, attempt to cover it up." So he devised an intricate strategy of rolling out the videos one at a time, anticipating Acorn's defenses and rebutting each in turn with the next video...

NewsBusters under-covers media bias in the Butte, Montana media market, so when Best of the Web's James Taranto caught some in the Montana Standard, I decided to jump on it. On Tuesday, the newspaper, part of the Lee chain, announced it would carry Byron York's column each Tuesday and introduced York by explaining how he isn't the typical conservative ogre:

York, a staunch conservative, presents his arguments in a thoughtful, measured fashion, rather than resorting to cheap personal attacks on President Obama and others in the Democratic Party that seem to be the hallmark of the GOP these days, said Standard Editor Gerry O'Brien.

Taranto observed in his September 16 compilation: “We know and like Byron York and applaud the choice. O'Brien's editorializing, however, is odd for two reasons. First, does it not occur to him that he is doing exactly what he faults Republicans for, namely engaging in gratuitous insults? Second, isn't he worried about losing readers, some of whom likely are among the group he is insulting?”

In a report this morning  on the situation off the coast on Somalia, Associated Press reporters Elizabeth A. Kennedy and Paul Jelinek seemed oddly sympathetic to the cause of the terrorists in training the world insists on calling "pirates," almost to the point of grudging admiration.

Check out some of the words the AP pair used in their 9:15 a.m. dispatch (saved at host for fair use and discussion purposes, and for future reference if or when the text changes) following the "breaking news alert" at the link:

Undeterred Somali pirates hijack 4 more ships

Undeterred by U.S. and French hostage rescues that killed five bandits, Somali pirates brazenly hijacked three more ships in the Gulf of Aden, the waterway at the center of the world's fight against piracy.

..... The latest trophy for the pirates was the M.V. Irene E.M., a Greek-managed bulk carrier sailing from the Middle East to South Asia, said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur.

The Irene was attacked and seized in the middle of the night Tuesday - a rare tactic for the pirates.

Pointing out how a Reuters photo caption described those burning an effigy of President George W. Bush as merely “demonstrators,” while in a caption a few days later those burning posters of President-elect Barack Obama were characterized as “hardline demonstrators,” OpinionJournal's James Taranto on Tuesday observed: “Reuters' pro-Obama bias seems to be tempering its usual anti-American bias.” Taranto wondered in his “Best of the Web Today” compilation for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page site: “It will be interesting to see whether this continues to be the case after Obama becomes President next week.”

The two Reuters photo captions on anti-Israel demonstrations, as posted by Yahoo News. From Friday, January 9:

Demonstrators burn an effigy of U.S. President George W. Bush during a demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, in protest of Israeli aggression against Palestinians January 9, 2009. About 2,000 Muslim protesters gathered outside the U.S. embassy in the Malaysian capital on Friday holding placards and banners, and shouting anti-Israel slogans.