Eight years ago when incoming President George W. Bush named Senator John Ashcroft as his choice for Attorney General, the broadcast network evening newscasts applied ideological labels and highlighted opposition to him from liberals, but Tuesday night with President-elect Barack Obama's pick of Eric Holder for the same position, the anchors avoided any ideological tags or controversies and hailed him as an “historic” pick which fulfills Obama's promise of “diversity.”

ABC's Charles Gibson noted Obama's promise of “diversity of political party, of gender, of geography and of race” and reported “Eric Holder would be the first African-American” Attorney General. In December of 2000, the late Peter Jennings stressed how Ashcroft is “from the conservative wing of the Republican Party. And some of the positions he's taken as a politician have galvanized liberal opposition to his nomination today.”

Katie Couric, on CBS, trumpeted Holder as “another historic choice,” but eight years ago Dan Rather decided “anti-abortion groups and the self-described Religious Right could not be happier” with Ashcroft who is “known for his tough anti-abortion stand. Planned Parenthood immediately urged Congress not to confirm him.”

On NBC, Brian Williams simply summarized Holder's resume as “a veteran lawyer, former U.S. Attorney, number two person at the Justice Department during the Clinton administration. If confirmed, Eric Holder would be the first African-American to become the nation's top law enforcement officer.” Filling in for Tom Brokaw in 2000, Williams referred to Ashcroft as a “conservative Missouri Republican Senator” and asserted the selection “calms the far right politically.”

Mary Mapes is in gloat over-drive.  Dan Rather's erstwhile producer, the woman behind Memogate, is beside herself with joy at what she sees as the impending death of the conservative blogosphere.  

It's her expectation that Barack Obama will win the presidency that has Mapes so hopeful.  Annotated excerpts from her HuffPo column, The Monster is Dying [emphasis added]:

Spreading the Word

As we reported earlier, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather noted on today's Morning Joe on MSNBC that the traditional media is largely ignoring Democratic Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden's alarming comment on Sunday:  "... (M)ark my words, within the next, first six months of this administration if we win, you're gonna face a major international challenge, because they are going to want to test him...." 

Rather pointed out "... (C)ertainly if Sarah Palin had said this it would be above the fold in most newspapers today... (I)f Sarah Palin had said this, the newspapers would have jumped all over it and so would have the major television outlets."

Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski agreed with Rather's assessment, saying "I'm seeing spotty media coverage."

Spotty is an understatement.

Guess who said the following this morning about Joe Biden's latest gaffe—his statement that America would be faced with a major international crisis within the first six months of an Obama administration as foreign forces seek to test the young new president: "certainly if Sarah Palin had said this, it would be above the fold in most newspapers today."

1. Brent Bozell
2. Rush Limbaugh
3. McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer
4. Dan Rather

If you guessed 1, 2 or 3, you'd be a rational NewsBusters reader . . . but wrong.  Yes, the answer is 4, Dan Rather.  In true man-bites-MSM mode, Rather made the remark on today's Morning Joe.

View video here.

Writing at JustFacts.com, James Agresti has a fascinating article documenting how the media spin the economy during Democratic and Republican administrations and during election years. “With another presidential election upon us and a Republican in the White House, negatively skewed economic reporting is climaxing,” Agresti writes.

After detailing how the media castigated George W. Bush for allegedly “talking down the economy” after his election in 2000, Agresti points out how the press is drenching Americans with a steady deluge of bad economic news: “This is not to deny the nation is in troubled economic times, but given what the press and politicians affirmed about ‘talking down the economy’ less than eight years ago, there can be little doubt that they have played and are playing a major role in damaging it now.”

Among the exhibits Agresti provides is a screen capture of the New York Times web site on August 28 of this year. The main headline: “Obama Speech to Cite Failures of Bush on the Economy.” Far down the page, in much smaller type, this headline: “Economic Growth Revised Higher.”

It was eight years ago this week that France 2 TV introduced the world to Mohammed al-Dura, the Palestinian boy who was allegedly shot and killed during a gunfight between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen, in a video whose authenticity has increasingly been called into question years after it inspired anti-Semitic violence around the world. The American news media not only highlighted the story -- as the ABC, CBS and NBC evening and morning newscasts collectively aired the video at least 28 times between September 30, 2000, and June 30, 2003 -- but the networks also showed other clips depicting Palestinians involved in fighting, supposedly with Israelis, that have been challenged by some media analysts, calling into question how many of the scenes shown by American media during times of Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be faked video that were passed off to international media as genuine. ABC's Good Morning American notably seems to have ignored the al-Dura story.

Boston University Professor Richard Landes has been a leader in delving into the practice by some Palestinian cameramen of staging scenes of violence to be used as propaganda against Israel. Landes notably took on CBS’s 60 Minutes in the film Pallywood, the first in a series of short documentaries produced by the Boston University professor. On his Web site, theaugeanstables.com, Landes recounts his unsuccessful attempts to convince the American news media to help expose the Pallywood hoax video phenomenon. While he recounts that American journalists he spoke with did generally agree with him that the deceptive practice likely exists, they were reluctant to be perceived as breaking neutrality by siding with Israel over the Palestinians, as he encountered a  view that it would not be “even-handed” to relay such unflattering activities by one side without finding similar examples from the other side. Professor Landes also cited an unnamed journalist at ABC as contending that there would be little “appetite” for the subject at his network. On his Web site, theaugeanstables.com, Landes recalls these conversations:

It seems that media and Obama surrogates' (but I repeat myself) trash-talking and demonizing have lowered expectations of Sarah Palin's speech tonight to the "Can she get out a complete sentence?" level.

My sense is that this will work to her advantage, bigtime.

One person who can't exactly be accused of having a conservative bias had this to say about Palin's Friday performance in Dayton:

That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.

That person would be well-known and usually popular liberal gadfly Camille Paglia in the UK Times Online.

Of course, you can't find Paglia's quote in any major media outlet, even with a search engine:

The Denver Post's attempts to dish on celebrities at the Democratic convention included this typical slice of Dan Rather, critic of spineless media:

Dan Rather got a standing ovation in the Big Tent's DIGG stage on Tuesday after castigating the current structure of the media and the resulting weak news coverage.

"Much of the press is rolling over and playing dead," the former CBS newsman said. "The American media is in need of a spine transplant." As he often did on the air at CBS, Rather welled with tears when speaking of American casualties in the war in Iraq.

They also found Ted Koppel, and compared his hair to dessert:

The experts — Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, Rice University history professor and talking head Douglas Brinkley and others — sat around the table on the top floor of the downtown Denver library talking about Hurricane Katrina. Ted Koppel, his hair in full meringue, led the back-and-forth. Ethel Kennedy and Kerry Kennedy occupied chairs against a wall, listening closely, nodding.

This is the first convention in many, many years without a prominent television platform for Dan Rather. You know it has to be just killing him. Wouldn’t he want to be the one at the top of the powder-puff pyramid, offering all the softball questions to Barack Obama in Denver? Actually, Rather did acquire an interview with Obama for his tiny corner of the TV audience on HDNet back in April before the Pennsylvania primary, and it sounded a lot like the traditional Rather interview with a Democratic contender, tackling such tough issues as "do you pray?," whether he reads "mostly fiction or non-fiction," and "More than any other thing, what rubs you in terms of the lie told about you or a misstatement about something you've done?"

HDNet's video and transcripts for Dan Rather Reports are here. The Obama episode is dated April 15.

The book discussion came as Rather asked about staying outside the bubble:

RATHER: How do you stay outside the bubble, how do you get outside the bubble, not stay outside, how do you get outside, or do you?

With this year's vice presidential picks expected any day now, time to go into the MRC archive for a look back to 2000 when Dan Rather's left-wing tilt still got air time on a major network.

When George W. Bush named Dick Cheney, Rather introduced the Tuesday, July 25, 2000 CBS Evening News story by relaying the derisive and negative Democratic spin against the GOP ticket:

In the presidential campaign, the official announcement and first photo-op today of Republican George Bush and his running mate Richard Cheney. Democrats were quick to portray the ticket as quote 'two Texas oilmen' because Cheney was chief of a big Dallas-based oil supply conglomerate. They also blast Cheney's voting record in Congress as again quote, 'outside the American mainstream' because of Cheney's votes against the Equal Rights for Women Amendment, against a woman's right to choose abortion -- against abortion as Cheney prefers to put it -- and Cheney's votes against gun control. Republicans see it all differently, most of them hailing Bush's choice and Cheney's experience.

But two weeks later, his glowing Tuesday, August 8, 2000 set up of the Gore-Lieberman pairing forwarded the Democratic ticket’s boasts about themselves which included a sly dig at Bush-Cheney:

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore officially introduced his history-making running mate today, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. History-making because Lieberman is of Jewish heritage and faith. The two started running right away. In their first joint appearance they gave a preview of the Gore-Lieberman fight-back, come-back strategy. Their message: They represent the future, not the past, and they are the ticket of high moral standards most in tune with real mainstream America.

Audio: MP3 audio of Rather on Bush-Cheney; MP3 of Rather on Gore-Lieberman.

The tree doesn't grow far from the apple. A little under two years after Katie Couric, Dan Rather's successor as anchor of the CBS Evening News, suggested just before the 2006 election that President Bush was manipulating gas prices to benefit Republican candidates, on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show over the weekend a conspiratorial Rather predicted “the people who can affect the price of oil would prefer a Republican” presidential victory, so “watch the price of oil.” Rather didn't identify these people, but presumably he meant Big Oil executives who he thinks can raise or lower prices at their whim. In the “Tell me something I don't know” segment, Rather told Matthews:

Things to watch with the thought in mind many people vote their pocketbooks when it comes to voting for President: price of oil. The price of oil has been high. The people who can affect the price of oil would prefer a Republican presidential candidate. Watch the price of oil. If it goes down, which it may very well it could help John McCain quite a bit.

Matthews tried to clarify: “October surprise?” Rather promised “October or before” and then anticipated “you'll hear the argument, 'listen, we never were in a recession, it was a near recession but wasn't actually a recession.'” Of course, as things stand now, that would be the truth, but in Rather's eyes that apparently would reflect some kind of nefarious scheme to fool the public.

On this morning's "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, co-host Tiki Barber asked guest Dan Rather about his feelings regarding the recent Jesse Jackson imbroglio -- his "off mike" comments about Barack Obama. In the middle of praising Jackson, Rather referred to Barack Obama as "Osama bin Laden" -- and none of the four "Morning Joe" co-hosts reacted (nor did Rather).

Question: Will the media pick this up? That one of America's longest-serving network news anchors referred to one of the two presidential candidates as the world's most wanted terrorist -- and no one in the room seemed to notice?

While you ponder, here's what the former anchor of the "CBS Evening News" said (h/t to FiveThirtyEight who first noticed this blunder!):

Best-selling author Tom Wolfe made some statements about American journalism last week that would raise a lot of eyebrows in newsrooms around the country if anyone cared to notice.

For instance, he believes "newspapers are declining rapidly," that when a television news outlet does "a big story it`s always wrong," and that Dan Rather and his "60 Minutes" crew were "idiots" for airing the totally erroneous piece in August 2004 about George W. Bush and the National Guard:

They should have looked at the piece of paper. Obviously not written by a typewriter.

What follows is the relevant section of Wolfe's discussion with PBS's Charlie Rose last Wednesday (video available here, relevant section at 33:30, h/t and photo courtesy NY Post):

(Editor's note: this column was syndicated on Friday.)

It’s axiomatic that people who’ve disgraced themselves are the last to realize it, or maybe the first to pretend they don’t know. Take longtime CBS anchorman Dan Rather, who shredded his own reputation by smearing President Bush’s military service with phony documents.

He’s still at it, still in shameless self-denial, raging against the world, still pontificating about that which he has no standing to speak about: Journalism ethics. On June 7, he mounted a soapbox at a far-left event in Minneapolis called the "National Conference for Media Reform," perhaps the last and perhaps the best forum interested in his opinion.

In front of this fervent group of leftists, Rather tried to put on Superman’s cape and pledge to push back against the evil forces "that imperil journalism…and impair democracy itself." In Rather’s vision, blatantly biased reporting is not only what passes for "journalism," it is the lifeblood of democracy. Dismiss Dan Rather for a lack of professionalism, and suddenly, you’re part of the corporate media vast right-wing conspiracy against Jeffersonian ideals.

Stephen Spruiell reports on NRO's Media Blog that disgraced CBS anchor Dan Rather interviewed Scott McClellan at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Wednesday night. This is surely a last straw in Bush betrayal. For his part, Rather pressed Scottie to confirm that certain brave anchormen with a deficiency in identifying modern typefaces were done in by a vast right-wing conspiracy of bloggers and Bushies.

With echoes of Watergate, Rather smells a Gordon Liddy-style covert operation that "seeks to orchestrate, perhaps even run some of what’s on the Internet." Bloggers who favor Bush may even be "paid by the White House political operation." To Spruiell's transcript: