Frank Rich

Liberal journalists Frank Rich and Piers Morgan have teamed up to bash conservatives before, and they raised new fears on Thursday that conservative "rich white men" could buy the election through super PACs. Rich admitted on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight he was "seriously worried Mitt Romney could buy this election," even though to date President Obama has raised more campaign money than Romney.

However, the media also have extraordinary power to influence this election on a daily basis. Liberal media bias may be a non-issue for liberals like Rich and Morgan, but the daily slant on campaign coverage from the three major networks and cable news could have a big hand in tipping the balance toward the Democrats this fall. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Sunday must have been reverse racism day for past and current New York Times employees.

After David Brooks and Helene Cooper expressed concern about there possibly being two "white guys" on the Republican presidential ticket, former Times columnist turned New York magazine flame thrower Frank Rick wrote "Sugar Daddies: The Old, White, Rich Men Who Are Buying This Election":

New York magazine's Frank Rich on Monday stereotyped folks who back ballet as defacto supporters of gay rights.

This came during a lengthy segment on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show wherein the host absurdly told viewers that it's wrong for wealthy people who appear to be socially liberal to fund conservative candidates that don't completely support same sex marriage (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Liberals hate it when conservative politicians talk about their religion. Except when they don't. They hate that too.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't. (video after page break)

On the Monday, January 9, Imus in the Morning, as he was interviewed by phone, New York magazine's Frank Rich - formerly of the New York Times - argued that he believes President Obama should be reelected, and seemed befuddled when host Don Imus, who plans to vote for Mitt Romney, asserted that Obama's foreign policy has been "disastrous." The liberal columnist then tried to give President Obama credit for the death of Osama bin Laden.

After Imus asked, "So you like President Obama, don't you? I mean, you'll vote-"

Rich responded: (Video below)

Liberal columnist Frank Rich claimed on Monday's Piers Morgan Tonight that the "radical right" which began during the Kennedy administration is now the base of the Republican Party. Both he and CNN's Piers Morgan also drew parallels between the environment which led to Kennedy's assassination and the politically-charged atmosphere now.

Rich's most recent column – which NewsBusters has dissected – asserts that the same "hate" which fueled the assassination of President Kennedy is now alive and well in the Obama era. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

Nearly a half century after John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, many liberals now grudgingly accept that it was a left winger who killed him. But it was the harsh right-wing rhetoric of early '60s Texas that compelled the assassin to pull the trigger,  liberals also insist.

The latest iteration of this transparent exercise in ideological face-saving comes from Frank Rich in a New York magazine piece dishonestly titled, "What Killed JFK -- The Hate That Ended His Presidency is Eerily Familiar."

On Monday, Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters noted how former New York Times op-ed writer (and before that, theater critic) Frank Rich, who now plies whatever his trade is at New York Magazine, criticized MSNBC's Chris Matthews for writing a "man-crush of a biography" about John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated 48 years ago today.

Monday evening, Allahpundit at Hot Air identified a particularly egregious contention in that same very poor Rich piece, namely that "the hate that ended his (JFK's) presidency" which inspired avowed communist and Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to commit his heinous crimes (Oswald also shot Texas Governor John Connally in JFK's motorcade and killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit later that day) came from the right. Really. What follows are selections from Rich's risible self-righteousness:

The day after MSNBC's Chris Matthews tore into Barack Obama for having "the worst kind of a notion of the presidency," New York magazine's Frank Rich blasted the Hardball host for publishing a "man-crush of a biography" about the late John F. Kennedy (emphasis added):

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, New York Times reporters overcame enormous danger and duress to perform often-heroic feats of journalism, as proven by the Pulitzer Prize winning “Portraits of Grief” series, which commemorated the lives of every single victim of the terrorist attacks. But in the months and years that followed the paper reverted to partisan and liberal ways, even when the subject was the deadly attack on their hometown.

On Sunday the Times will print a special section marking the 10th anniversary of 9-11 (you can read it online now). In anticipation of the paper's commemoration, here’s a sampling of the paper’s years of slanted coverage related to the attacks.

CNN's Piers Morgan hosted New York Magazine columnist Frank Rich for a conservative-bashing session on Thursday. Morgan took the opportunity to ask his liberal guest if the Tea Party can even govern.

"But can they actually govern? Or does the rather intransigent streak that they bring to all that policy-making, is that always going to be the problem?" Morgan asked. Rich responded that the Tea Party's refusal to compromise on the debt ceiling was "temper tantrum-throwing and pure, you know, far right ideology."

[Video below the break.]

Frank Rich, the New York Times’s puzzlingly influential former op-ed columnist and over-dramatic hater of the Bush administration and the Tea Party, has landed with a splash at New York Magazine,penning the magazine’s new cover story, “Obama’s Original Sin,” going after the president's timidity from the left in a way he never managed at the Times.

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers.

Radical Chic: Times Relaunches Mag With Hagiography of Terrorist Helper

“Such an outpouring of rage at a 40-year-old woman, mother to a toddler, who was convicted in her mid-20s of abetting a terrorist plot that never took place, is a measure of the degree to which Peruvians are still traumatized by the violence that convulsed their country during the years when the Shining Path warred with the military and nearly 70,000 Peruvians were killed....The M.R.T.A. was a much smaller insurgent group than the dominant Shining Path, and historically less violent....” – From novelist Jennifer Egan’s sympathetic March 6 Sunday magazine cover profile of Lori Berenson, middle-class Manhattanite turned terror collaborator, paroled after being sentenced to life in prison in Peru in 1996 for housing Marxist terrorists of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (M.R.T.A.).

“The New York Times Magazine is based on long-form narrative journalism, and this week’s cover article, by Jennifer Egan, is a prime example. It is about Lori Berenson, a New Yorker who moved to Latin America as a young adult, got mixed up in revolutionary politics in Peru and was promptly thrown in prison, where she spent the next 15 years before being paroled last year. Egan traveled to Lima, where Berenson must remain until 2015, and tells the story of a wounded but resilient woman struggling to sort out a place for herself in the world. It is in every way a classic Times Magazine story.” – From New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Hugo Lindgren “Editor’s Letter” in the March 6 edition.

Last Sunday, Frank Rich filed his last column for the Week in Review, “Confessions of a Recovering Op-Ed Columnist.” Rich is joining his friend and former Times Magazine editor Adam Ross at New York magazine.

Rich’s farewell is typically self-indulgent:

"My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage. I do have strong political views, but opinions are cheap. Anyone could be a critic of the Bush administration. The challenge as a writer was to try to figure out why it governed the way it did -- and how it got away with it for so long -- and, dare I say it, to have fun chronicling each new outrage."

He did admit the column-writing routine “can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambiguous conclusion. Believe it or not, an opinion writer can sometimes get sick of his own voice.”

I must have missed the nuanced period of Rich’s column writing. Here’s just a smattering of Rich’s lowlights, both nonsensical and nasty, since the Times Watch project was launched in early 2003:

Like Rahm Emanuel, who wouldn't waste a crisis, Frank Rich doesn't want to let a murderous rampage pass without trying to wring political advantage.  By now, even most ardent liberals have had to admit that there was no nexus between conservatives and the manifestly psychotic AZ shooter.  But there was Rich, in his New York Times column of this morning, still bitterly clinging to the accusation.

To be sure, Rich recited some disclaimers that by now have become standard.  But by unlucky paragraph 13, Rich could restrain himself no more.  Fulminated Frank: "Much of last week’s televised bloviation was dishonest, dedicated to the pious, feel-good sentiment that both sides are equally culpable for the rage of the past two years." That is a "false equivalency," he sputtered.

Two paras later, out popped what amounted to a flat-out accusation.  After claiming there exists "antigovernment radicalism as rabid on the right now as it was on the left in the late 1960s," Rich argued:

"That Loughner was likely insane, with no coherent ideological agenda, does not mean that a climate of antigovernment hysteria has no effect on him or other crazed loners out there."

Translation: yeah, Loughner was crazy, but conservatives are still to blame.

 

The liberal press likes to scold what it sees as lapses in civil rhetoric, usually from conservatives who fail to properly respect the icons of the Left. But as documented by the MRC's Best Notable Quotables of 2010, the media elite itself lurched into some pretty uncivil rhetoric this year — especially when the targets were Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party and other conservatives.

PBS's Tavis Smiley won MRC's "Poison Tea Pot Award for Smearing the Anti-Obama Rabble" (and was runner-up for "Quote of the Year") for arguing with author Ayaan Hirsi Ali that everyday Christians and the Tea Party were just as dangerous as radical Muslims.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich has said some astonishingly stupid things throughout his career, but a comment in Sunday's "The Bipartisanship Racket" might get on his top ten list.

In the eyes of this liberal writer working for the most powerful liberal newspaper in the country, the Left in this nation doesn't have as strong a media megaphone as the Right:

Frank Rich’s Sunday column for the New York Times, “Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian,” on the removal of a video from the “Hide/Seek” show of gay artists sponsored by the federally funded museum, was even more melodramatically offended (and offensive to Christian conservatives) than Arts critic Holland Cotter’s Saturday anguish.

After a video that included an 11-second clip of ants crawling over a crucifix  was removed from the show for being offensive to Christians, it was inevitable that Rich, an enthusiastic defender of gay art (the artist who made the video, David Wojnarowicz, died of AIDS in 1992), would offer a fulminating defense.

By Rich's own description, the "Hide/Seek" clip showed a crucifix “besieged by ants that evoke frantic souls scurrying in panic as a seemingly impassive God looked on."

“Fire in My Belly” was removed from the exhibit by the National Portrait Gallery some 10 days ago with the full approval, if not instigation, of its parent institution, the Smithsonian. (The censored version of “Hide/Seek” is still scheduled to run through Feb. 13.) The incident is chilling because it suggests that even in a time of huge progress in gay civil rights, homophobia remains among the last permissible bigotries in America. “Think anti-gay bullying is just for kids? Ask the Smithsonian,” wrote The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, Christopher Knight, last week. One might add: Think anti-gay bullying is just for small-town America? Look at the nation’s capital.

It appears that President Obama is about to approve the extension of the Bush tax cuts and this has sent liberals into a frenzy. How to explain it? Well, Frank Rich of the New York Times has a very creative explanation: a weak Barack Obama has been spiritually kidnapped by Republicans and is now suffering from Stockholm Syndrome which allows him to sympathize with his captors. Here is Rich explaining it in "All the President's Captors" at his entertaining best:

National Public Radio is right to defend itself against charges of Nazism leveled at the radio station by Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who has since apologized for the remark. But NPR decided to make the leap from defending the station to attacking Fox News as uniquely disposed to Nazi comparisons, an absurd claim on its face.

There are commentators on both sides of the political spectrum who routinely prove Godwin right. But being the predictably-liberal news outlet that it is, NPR invoked vague claims by far-left Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (neither his ideological leanings nor the multitude of his most recent baseless Fox accusations are mentioned) to paint FNC as unique in its invocation of Nazism.

The Republicans scored an historic victory on November 2, but New York Times columnist Frank Rich thinks former Alaska governor Sarah Palin had a dreadful election night.

Such was written in Rich's most-recent hit piece published Sunday:

Never mind the personal feelings of people, which they're entitled to have, over the notion of a mosque being built in close proximity to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Those sensitivities have nothing to do with what's really going on. It's really all about President Barack Obama and his political opponents according to New York Times columnist Frank Rich. 

On MSNBC's Aug. 26 broadcast of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow admitted she was befuddle that anti-Islam sentiment has seemingly peaked in the past few weeks and wondered why it has suddenly been brought to boil, with the mosque in question at the forefront.

"For all the bad decisions made post-9/11, we really didn't see a national, like, open partisan two-minutes hate toward Muslims the way we are seeing now about this mosque debate," Maddow said. "Why is it happening now?"

New York Times columnist Frank Rich on Sunday blamed America's opinion of the Ground Zero mosque on the "Islamophobia command center" of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

As readers are likely aware, its properties include Fox News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal, all witting accomplices to a devious plot to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment according to Rich.

Never mind that public opinion polls around the country and in New York state show vast majorities in opposition to the building of this Islamic center at the site of the 9/11 attacks.

In Rich's paranoid view, it's all Murdoch's fault:

Leave That Sort of Thing to Us

"But it is an open question whether conservative media outlets risk damage to their credibility when obscure or misleading stories are blown out of proportion and when what amounts to political opposition research is presented as news." -- Media reporter Brian Stelter on the Andrew Breitbart-Shirley Sherrod tape controversy, July 26.




Leave That Sort of Thing to Us, Part II

"But what is emerging is more of a permanent crusade, where information is not only power, but a means to a specific end. As content providers increasingly hack their own route to an audience, it's becoming clear that many are less interested in covering the game than tilting the field." -- Media columnist David Carr on the Andrew Breitbart-Shirley Sherrod tape controversy, July 26.




Conservative Sen. James Inhofe, "Laughable Fool"

"Senator Inhofe should be a harmless diversion, the kind of laughable fool that any state can kick back to the capital, where hard-earned ignorance is supported by a well-paid staff." -- From former reporter Timothy Egan's July 21 post at nytimes.com.

The New York Times went to town on Andrew Breitbart and Fox News on Sunday and Monday, rehashing the racial controversy over the Shirley Sherrod tape and suggesting conservative media outlets were guilty of "tilting the field," blowing "obscure or misleading stories...out of proportion" and presenting "political opposition research" as news. Hmm. Isn't that what the New York Times has been doing to conservatives for years?

Media reporter Brian Stelter made the front of Monday's Business page with his Fox News-bashing take on the controversy, "When Race is the Issue, Misleading Coverage Sets Off an Uproar."

In the last couple of days, Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Web site operator, has been called a liar, a provocateur, a propagandist -- and even a race-baiter. But he says he knows who the true race-baiters are: some Democratic activists.

Andrew Breitbart highlighted the edited video clip of Shirley Sherrod on one of his Web sites. "It's warfare out there," he says.

It was one of Mr. Breitbart's Web sites, BigGovernment, that highlighted the heavily edited video clip of Shirley Sherrod, a black official at the Department of Agriculture, apparently saying that she had been biased against a white farmer she was supposed to help. Ms. Sherrod's full speech actually demonstrated the opposite, but do not expect Mr. Breitbart to be embarrassed.

Stelter later evinced a convenient concern for journalist credibility for "when obscure or misleading stories are blown out of proportion and when what amounts to political opposition research is presented as news." Stelter must have missed the Times's hit pieces on John McCain alleging an affair and suggesting his birthplace made him unqualified to serve as president, or the paper's sabotage of two successful Bush-era terror-fighting programs it disapproved of.

"Has the mainstream media -- which turns left -- have they abandoned the president on his economic policies?" Stuart Varney asked NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell in a brief interview held shortly after 10 a.m. today.

The Media Research Center founder answered in the affirmative, noting that staunch liberals in the mainstream media think Obama is too conservative on his spending plans:

BRENT BOZELL: It's the columnists, particularly for the New York Times. It's the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the Times. It's Paul Krugman, it's Frank Rich, it's Maureen Dowd, it's that crowd, they are out to get Obama now. Not from the right, from the left.

STUART VARNEY: Yeah. I mean Bob Herbert, I think it was just yesterday, talking about the failure of the president's policy. Missed opportunity. He wants another trillion dollar stimulus program. So does Paul Krugman.

To watch the full interview, click the play button on the embedded video above at right.

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.

With the Gulf Coast oil spill appearing to spin out of control, the Obama-loving media are now working overtime to shelter the President from any possible blame.

Exhibit A: New York Times columnist Frank Rich's pathetic piece published Sunday.

Almost incomprehensibly, "Obama's Katrina? Maybe Worse" is more of hit piece on the Bush administration than a serious analysis of the failings of the current White House to do anything to prevent the environmental disaster slamming the Gulf Coast after that oil well exploded almost six weeks ago.

But that's just the beginning, for Rich actually ends up pointing fingers at Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and Rand Paul:

While many on the right expressed concern for the media's sympathetic treatment of Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad, New York Times columnist Frank Rich is far more worried about how MSNBC couldn't take its cameras off the White House Correspondents' Dinner to even mention what was happening in the Big Apple.

According to Rich, as he was watching the festivities on that gross caricature of a news outlet, the attempted bombing "didn’t even merit a mention on a crawl."

"MSNBC was instead busy covering the correspondents dinner itself, so we could feast on journalists schmoozing with mostly B-list show business folk — and sometimes C-list, as in Kim Kardashian," he wrote Sunday. 

And that was just the beginning of his criticism:

One clue that health care is not being well received among the public: Liberal media members, instead of celebrating the wonderful era of health-care access to come, can't stop obsessing over unsubstantiated allegations of racism among Tea Party activists, as if trying to change the subject.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich's super-sized entry on Sunday, “Welcome to Confederate History Month,” is the latest in the string. The text box is loaded with sarcasm: “The Civil War, like the war against Obama, wasn't about race.”


It's an unusually dumb entry for Rich, but typical in content -- beginning with an utterly irrelevant pop culture reference that's neither fitting nor clever, followed by 1,400 words all but accusing Republicans of racism (Rich prefers odious comparisons to direct accusations he'd have to back up).

At least he seems to be reading his criticism, and reacting hotly. Rich is evidently discussing this column by David Paul Kuhn of Real Clear Politics, which directly refuted Rich's previous column on this same tired subject, in which Kuhn lambasted Rich: “All he has are anecdotes of angry white activists. So he stereotypes. It's like a white person who watches a black criminal on the local news and draws racist generalizations.”