Special Report

Reacting to Mitt Romney’s discomfort toward proposed independent expenditure ads reminding Americans of President Obama’s connections to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, on FNC Thursday night Charles Krauthammer delivered a rebuke to the media’s presumption raising Wright would be illegitimate. Krauthammer sure didn’t hold back:

I think there is an appalling double standard here. It’s okay for the Washington Post to run a five thousand word front page story on a prank that Romney, at the age of 15, committed. And yet it’s somehow illegitimate, the low road or whatever, for people to bring up the fact that the adult Obama had a 20-year relationship with a racist anti-American preacher whom he considered, spoke about, wrote about as his mentor and spiritual advisor.

For over a year, the Left and their media minions have dishonestly claimed Congressman Paul Ryan's (R-Wisc.) proposed budgets would "end Medicare as we know it."

At the end of a discussion about Monday's report from the Medicare trustees predicting the program goes bankrupt in 2024, Special Report host Bret Baier got NPR's Mara Liasson to admit Medicare will end as we know it even if Congress doesn't pass the Ryan plan (video follows with transcript and commentary):

“It’ll probably work politically,” The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes observed of President Obama’s “fairness”-based “Buffett Rule” tax hike quest, “but don’t reporters have a job to do here?” On FNC’s Special Report on Tuesday night he noted the 30 percent income tax rate on capital gains “would raise less than six percent of the total cost of the stimulus” and “would raise roughly the same amount in one year” as “the U.S. government accumulates in debt in a single day.”

Declaring it “totally meaningless,” Hayes asserted “there’s nothing serious about” Obama’s economic plan and so, he suggested in an idea with little chance of occurring, “reporters should do their job and put this in perspective.”

Politico reported Monday that a new book by Mother Jones's David Corn claims President Obama blamed his 2010 midterm elections defeat on Fox News constantly calling him a Muslim.

Fox News's Bret Baier struck back on Monday's Special Report saying, "For the record, we found no examples of a host saying President Obama is a Muslim" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On the "Grapevine" section of Friday night's Special Report, Fox News anchor Bret Baier reported the MRC's findings on how the networks covered this year's "March for Life" -- or, to be more precise,  how they skipped it. Once again, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nothing on the thousands and thousands of pro-life protesters marching to the Supreme Court on the 39th anniversary of the high court legalizing abortion.

"If you were listening to the Big Three broadcast networks, you wouldn’t have heard a peep about the event," said Baier. "You would have been in the dark, too, if you were reading the print version of The New York Times. Not one word." Fox asked me for a quote which then appeared on screen: (Video below)

During the "Grapevine" segment on Tuesday's Special Report on Fox News, anchor Bret Baier played a clip of a UNICEF ad depicting Santa Claus as an uncaring Scrooge and quoted an item from NewsBusters' senior editor Tim Graham: "Conservative site NewsBusters asked quote: 'Why on Earth would jolly old Saint Nicholas resent aid for the poor? Is this just another way the UN bureaucracy asserts its own moral superiority?'" [View video after the jump / audio available here]
 

Depending on which news outlet you rely on for current events, you may not have heard that convicted Chicago real estate developer Tony Rezko was sentenced to 10½ years in prison Tuesday.

On top of this, unless you read the following report from Reuters, you mightn't have known just how connected he was to a junior senator from Illinois who just so happens to be the President of the United States:

As NewsBusters previously reported, 60 Minutes on Sunday cherry picked Peter Schweizer's book "Throw Them All Out" to give the appearance that Congressional insider trading was mainly a Republican problem.

On Fox News's Special Report Monday, host Bret Baier cited our article on this subject (video follows with transcript and commentary):

National Review's Jonah Goldberg on Tuesday, appearing on Fox News's "Special Report," put James Hoffa's Labor Day attack on the Tea Party in proper perspective.

"We would not be in this mess, we would not have this controversy, if we did not have this bonfire of asininity that came out of the Tucson shootings where all of a sudden Sarah Palin’s Facebook Congressional map was somehow to blame for not only this madman but for all of the violence overtaking America" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Charles Krauthammer on Fox News's "Special Report" Friday offered Republicans a 2012 campaign slogan to defeat Barack Obama.

"President Zero: zero economic expansion, zero jobs, zero ideas on how to cure the economy" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Another entry in my semi-regular series of Saturday night humor postings for NewsBusters drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he and his staff usually select from video montages picked up off the late night comedy shows.

Tonight, a fresh one from Friday night’s program which comes from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central in which Stephen Colbert contrasted Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s safari adventures with what excited Barack Obama during a stop at a store during his bus trip.

Another entry in my semi-regular series of Saturday night humor postings for NewsBusters drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he and his staff usually select from video montages picked up off the late night comedy shows.

With few to draw on from the past week since Iowa coverage meant Baier only ran a humor clip on a couple of nights, for this one a jump back to mid-July for a clip which got a lot of Web play at the time, but if you didn’t see it then here’s your chance to watch a TV anchor dealing with putting the wrong guest on air.

Back in late June I introduced a new series of Saturday night humor postings for NewsBusters drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he selects from video montages picked up from the late night comedy shows. Well, vacations and busy news weekends sidetracked me, but here’s a fresh one, my first in about a month.

From Baier’s Wednesday night (August 3) program, a clip from Comedy Central’s Colbert Report making fun of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for musing about missing the pomegranate and fig trees at his home in Nevada.

Last Saturday night I introduced my new Saturday night humor posting drawn from the clips Bret Baier runs at the end of FNC’s Special Report which he selects from video montages picked up from the late night comedy shows.

Tonight, the second edition, taken from NBC’s Tonight Show, of some pretty funny confusion on a British newscast which played the wrong soundbites at the wrong time -- turning an unidentified blonde woman, and the network’s own weather woman, into the Nazi leader Rudolph Hess. Watch below the jump for what Baier played on his Monday, June 27 program.

At the MRC’s “DisHonors Awards” last month I got a pretty good reaction to a compilation of those humorous clips Bret Baier plays at the end of his FNC show, usually drawn from funny takes and edited news video produced by the late night comedy shows. (For that “funny clips” compilation, scroll down on this page.)

So, I thought I’d bring the concept to NewsBusters with occasional weekend postings of the “best” of Baier’s choices. For this inaugural edition, I went back to Baier’s June 15 program for Jimmy Kimmel’s mash-up of a certain term used over and over during CNN’s June 13 Republican presidential debate, a mash-up which ends with a different phrase from Herman Cain. Watch below the jump. It’s short and funny.

In Tuesday night’s “Grapevine” segment, the Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier picked up on an observation about the NBC Nightly News detailed in a Tuesday morning NewsBusters post: “NBC News Twists Its Network’s Pledge Censorship Into Slam at Rick Perry’s Intolerance.”

Baier informed viewers of how, in NBC’s look at the reaction to the NBC Sports “omission of ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance during the U.S. Open golf coverage,” reporter Mike Taibbi “went on to reference the Obama impersonator who was pulled off stage early” during a GOP event “and Jon Stewart’s appearance on Fox News Sunday.” With the quoted words on screen credited to NewsBusters, Baier noted:

One conservative media watchdog said NBC was, quote: “Trying to submerge its own network’s ‘under God’ censorship into a greater narrative.”

Normally the announcement that a government official is leaving a post to join a company they had oversight of would invoke cries of crony capitalism from the likes of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, but when that person is joining your company it makes for quite the awkward news brief. Williams, to date, has expressed no outrage at the fact that FCC commissioner Meredith Baker is leaving that job for a gig as senior vice president of governmental affairs at Comcast/NBC Universal, even though just four short months ago she voted to approve the merger of those two companies.

This bit of conflict of interest news was not lost on Fox News' Bret Baier, who reported the story on the May 12 edition of Special Report and Jon Stewart who joked about it on Monday's Daily Show. Since Brian Williams is a self-proclaimed fan of Stewart, going as far to praise him as "indispensable," it has to be asked if he felt a tinge of angst when watching his comedic hero on Monday night.

(video and transcript after the jump)

After his performance on Sunday's "Meet the Press," Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is taking hits from media members on both sides of the aisle.

A few minutes after conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer declared the former House Speaker's campaign "over," one of the Washington Post's editorial writers told "Special Report's" Bret Baier, "I think Newt established a great future for himself perhaps as a Democratic candidate" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had a tough day on "Meet the Press" Sunday.

So troubling was his performance that syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer told "Special Report's" Bret Baier Monday, "He’s done...This is a capital offense...It's over" (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

The New York Times was very excited about President Obama's deficit reduction speech.

The Gray Lady's editorial Thursday began, "The man America elected president has re-emerged":