Newspaper, Magazine, Wire

Media bias doesn't operate by outright lies (usually). Instead it operates by settling on and relentlessly repeating an overly-simple and therefore deceptive narrative. The Washington Post's article yesterday morning about how meaningful climate change legislation is being stifled (but only on this side of the Atlantic) by economic concerns in Climate Change Debate Hinges on Economics. There are those of us who are grateful for such concerns, but the Post seems disturbed by them. Naturally, the issue is cast as a morality play, with the selfless Europeans facing off against the narrow-minded Americans. The truth is, naturally, a little more, ah, nuanced.

The potential economic impact of meaningful climate legislation -- enough to reduce U.S. emissions by at least 60 percent -- is vast. Automobiles would have to get double their current miles to the gallon. Building codes would have to be tougher, requiring use of more energy-efficient materials. To stimulate and pay for new technologies, U.S. electricity bills could rise by 25 to 33 percent, some experts estimate; others say the increase could be greater.

Someone at the AP must really like Stephen Colbert. A bait-and-switch June 3 article was supposedly about a new book by Afghanistan-born author Khaled Hosseini, but gave readers stealth fanboy journalism that wrote a play by play of Colbert’s shtick without discussing the book. From the reporting, the BookExpo America breakfast was more like a segment of the “Colbert Report” than a national book fair discussion. Instead of any information about the book, it was line after line of Colbert coverage, "That Stephen Colbert sure is funny, and he sure has some funny ideas about books. Just ask "The Kite Runner" author Khaled Hosseini."

Video update below- 11:52 EST:

 “Entertainment Weekly's” online site, EW.com, is usually politics-free, but not this week. Who would have thought that EW's “Lost” blogger could inject a little Bush Derangement Syndrome into a review of the show's May 23 season finale? Somehow, writer Jeff Jensen managed to find a way (spoilers ahead).  

In case you aren’t a “Lost” viewer, here’s what you need to know to help explain this article about the show's season closer entitled “Through The Looking Glass.” Ben, the leader of the Others, intercepted the retreating Losties to negotiate with their leader Jack. Three Losties stayed behind to attack the Others’ but were taken hostage in the process. Ben threatened to have them killed by their captors if Jack didn’t follow his demands. So, now that the scene is set up, here is the BDS in full glory (emphasis mine):

Did you know that the Palestinian Authority believes Al Qaeda-linked groups are trying to assassinate Palestinian political leaders and are responsible for Sunday's deadly attack on a co-ed children's festival at a UN-run elementary school in Gaza? What about the attackers using sharia law as the reason? No? Well, if you weren't reading a handful of the foreign press, you wouldn't know. What little US reporting there was, as is often the case,  was based on the AP. Unfortunately, the AP omitted any Al Qaeda references, the rise of Salafism [which the article explained is a branch of Islam that is often referred to as Wahhabism—"a derogatory term...” to many adherents] as well as the “other al-Qaida-linked groups” terrorizing Gaza and the resulting violent enforcement of sharia:

The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh led with what should be the most important parts of this story, especially to US readers (emphasis mine throughout):

Palestinian Authority security officials accused supporters of al-Qaida in the Gaza Strip of carrying out Sunday's attack on a UNRWA-run school [U.N. Relief and Works Agency] in Rafah in which one person was killed and six others were wounded.

"There is no doubt that al-Qaida is operating in the Gaza Strip," a senior PA security official said. "Today's attack carries the fingerprints of al-Qaida." (...)

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Real Earnings News Release yesterday:

Average weekly earnings rose by 4.4 percent, seasonally adjusted, from March 2006 to March 2007. After deflation by the CPI-W, average weekly earnings increased by 1.6 percent.

And here's one for Paul "the rich are getting it all" Krugman of the New York Times -- Note who is being surveyed when these numbers are determined:

Earnings series from the monthly establishment series are estimated arithmetic averages (means) of the hourly and weekly earnings of all production or nonsupervisory jobs in the private nonfarm sector of the economy.

It's Joe and Josephine Sixpack whose earnings have "really" increased in the past year.

Even more confirmation came from BLS today:

Lordy, Lordy (HT Instapundit), the economic "surprises" don't stop. The report is from AFP:

Economists are hastily upgrading their forecasts for the US economy after a series of surprisingly strong reports suggesting the so-called "soft landing" may be over and growth is accelerating.

Over the past week, surprises have come in stronger-than-expected reports on US job creation, the trade balance and retail sales -- all key contributors to economic activity.

Lehman Brothers chief US economist Ethan Harris on Friday boosted his forecast for fourth quarter 2006 growth to an annualized rate of 3.3 percent, a leap from the firm's prior call for just 2.0 percent growth.

"After slowing in November, the economy seems to have regained its stride," Harris said.

..... The latest data defy predictions that the slump in real estate would filter into other areas of the economy, notably consumer spending.

The latest data showed US employers added a healthy 167,000 new jobs in December (196,000 with revisions to prior months -- Ed.), with unemployment holding at a low 4.5 percent. Average wages were up 4.2 percent annually.

That's what happens when economists like Ethan Harris read too much Paul Krugman and Rex Nutting, and not enough of yours truly (see cautious "3% or more" prediction about halfway through the post).

This past week saw The Washington Post ask a classically liberal question: Is America more racist or sexist?

Following the lead of this major paper, ABC’s Diane Sawyer asked the same question, adding a surreptitious angle. She wondered, "Is the nation, secretly, I guess, more racist or more sexist?"

The "Good Morning America" host wasn’t through, however. On Tuesday, she offered the query again. This time, Sawyer added a new spin, "secret genderism." The recipient of the question, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, readily agreed. America is guilty, she asserted, it just isn’t "very secret."

Speaking of The Washington Post, ever wonder how many times the paper mentioned "macaca?" According to MRC President Brent Bozell, the paper featured the phrase no less then 112 times!

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann absurdly linked domestic terrorism to "right-wing blogs."

While Olbermann slimed conservatives, CNN labeled the current low gas prices "a recovery." Why, just a few weeks ago, the falling costs represented a link between "Big Oil" and the GOP. What a difference an election makes!

First there was "Dowdification," named after the NYT columnist's deliberate truncation of a speech by President Bush to falsely imply he had said al Qaeda was "no longer a problem. Now, Patterico (aka Patrick Frey) suggests a new term, "Isikoffed" for the Newsweek reporter who similarly truncated a memo by Alberto Gonzales to make the Bush admin look like it considers all the Geneva Conventions to be "quaint" when it comes to the war on terrorism. Instead, Gonzales was making the sensible point that some of them, such as the requiring prison guards to provide inmates with scientific instruments and athletic clothes, are obsolete.

That the MSM has not sufficiently corrected the record on this point continues to be a problem since many liberals in and out of the blogosphere continue to believe this bit of misinformation.

Update 11:02. While you're over at Patterico's, be sure and read his post about how the LA Times is providing cover for a left-wing church leader who basically said voting for Republicans is a sin.

Don't let the title of the article by Washington Post staff writer Dan Balz fool you. Though the title reads: "Bush's Midterm Challenge--Rebuilding Public Support May Bolster GOP Candidates," one comes away after reading the piece thankful that the elections are not till November.

Still, one cannot help but feel anything but optimistic if one depended on such as the mainstream media for its cues.

Balz opens the piece in typical Bush-bashing fashion, a hallmark of liberal writers and observers, stating that the State of the Union Address to be given by the president on Tuesday is "eagerly anticipated by Democrats and fraught with worries for Republicans, whose hopes in November may depend in large part on how successfully Bush can turn around his troubled presidency."

     On Thursday, angry liberal readers of the Washington Post forced the ombudsmen of the paper, Deborah Howell, to shut it down.  In her Sunday column, written on 1/15, Howell wrote that Abramoff "had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties," prompting a wave of nasty reader postings on post.blog. 

     So much for our open-minded, elitist friends on the left, who are all to glad to once again enact another episode of "Do as I say, and not as I do."  This is the same bunch that screams for openness and truth in media reporting, but only IF it hurts the GOP.

In a somewhat sad but, unfortunately, true article, the UK Guardian Unlimited ran a story written by the Guardian's Jamie Wilson Titled: "Stars turn backs on America's troops in Iraq". 

Wilson goes on to directly charge that today’s Hollywood elites cite "danger" as well as an "anti-war stance" as to what keeps celebrities away. Wilson also cited, perhaps a bit too distressingly, that the "Show now depends on Christian hip-hop groups."

Almost immediately into the story titled "Mexico Retaliates for Border Wall Plan," written by Associated Press staff writer Mark Stevenson, it easy to see where the AP's sympathies lie, and that is squarely with law-breaking illegal aliens, or what the AP calls "migrants" or "migrant workers."

The piece is an out and out condemnation of the House of Representatives recent bill that passed just last week that will employ tough new immigration deterrents, among them a 700-mile security fence, and an end to the 50,000 per-year diversity visa lottery.

UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose releases results from a study that objectively quantifies media bias.

Take a wild guess how that came out.

Yes, Virginia, there is a leftist media bias. The only real surprises are that the Wall Street Journal news pages and the Drudge Report are more liberal than they get credit for.

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left. ...

In its usual over-the-top manner, the New York Times has once again treated the destruction of New Orleans due to ravages of Hurricane Katrina as a product of the Bush administration.

The Times's Sunday lead editorial, "Death of an American City," waits until two-thirds of the way down the article to place blame on something other than the federal government: the local and state government officials who run New Orleans and Louisiana. The Times neglects to mention that it is Democrats who primarily run the government in both New Orleans and the State house.

The October 28, 2005 Print Edition of Entertainment Weekly features a column entitled "Good Witch? Narnia gets a double-edged endorsement." (Pg. 16)

Writing for EW, Michelle Kung notes that a religious endorsement by James Dobson's group "Focus on the Family" can hurt the upcoming movie Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, giving the group the introduction as being a "controversial conservative group led by Dr. James Dobson that's known for a staunch anti-gay marriage platform."

Kung states: "Sure, the prospect of 2 million ticket buyers is alluring. But is the endorsement of a potentially polarizing political/religous interest group worth it?... Aggressively publicized thumbs-ups from groups like FOF could turn off secular audiences."

Shortly, the 2,000th death of an American serviceman or woman will occur in Iraq. That will generate an orgy of coverage in the American press on how “deadly” the war is. Sidebars will suggest that citizens are becoming “increasingly doubtful” about the conduct of the war. This Newsbusters article denounces that coverage as dishonest, in advance.

I wrote on 24 April, 2004, that the War on Terror is the LEAST bloody war in the history of the United States, measured by deaths per month. This is true going back to the Revolutionary War, even though the nation’s population then was only 1 percent of what it is today. (In impact on the population, every death in the Revolution was equivalent to about 100 deaths today.)

Source: http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=7041

The title is, of course, an ancient joke from the vaudeville circuit. It’s an appropriate way to praise, rather than attack, one particular article – and in the process to attack ten thousand others. Here is the lede from “Show Me the Risk!” by Deroy Murdock in NRO (National Review Online) on 19 October 2005:

“According to The Archives of Internal Medicine, pharmaceutical companies market a drug that kills some 7,000 Americans annually. These people don’t die instantly, but instead expire after slowly suffering gastrointestinal bleeding. Oddly enough, TV-news producers are ho-hum about this deadly medicine. The Food and Drug Administration has yet to prohibit it. Personal-injury attorneys aim their crosshairs elsewhere. No one seems much concerned about a lethal substance called aspirin.”

With The recent Iraq election turning out to be better than anyone had expected, the Associated Press has decided to do its best to drag everyone back down to reality. The only problem here for the AP is the reality they seek to push is their own.

One only has to go to the line under the headline of the story, "Iraq Constitution Seems Headed for Approval" to begin to see the AP's attempt to downplay any good whatsoever coming out of Iraq.

For two days, all parts of the American press have been reporting a "constitutional compromise" which has "gained the support of a main Sunni political party." With this compromise, it is expected that upwards of half the Sunnis (a 20% minority in Iraq) will support its new Constitution, and it will be ratified in the vote on Saturday.

All well and good. But hasn't anyone in the press recalled certain adventures of James Madison? (He was in all the papers.) We in the United States have been through exactly the same process. But NO ONE in the American press has, so far, remembered and mentioned that fact.

There was a bitter fight between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists in Philadelphia in 1787, whether we would have a new Constitution. And if so, what would be the powers of the new federal government. When the Constitution was submitted to Congress for its review, and afterwards to the states for their ratification, that same fight spilled out to the state capitols.

In Sunday's Washington Post, journalist Brian Faler provides what can only be described as a fawning push-piece aimed at exciting the liberal activist and elite--both state and nation-wide.

In a piece titled : "Dean Camp's Tactics Applied to Colorado," Faler contends that what Howard Dean started in his aborted presidential run in 2003/2004--namely huge Internet participation--local activist will now continue, as they start web sites to organize liberal activists.

In the article, Faler highlights a Colorado-based progressive site called ProgressNowAction.org, in which he says: "The goal is to create a go-to site for Colorado activists -- a sort of online hub for everyone from environmentalists to abortion rights advocates to those concerned about the direction of their school boards. The group hopes liberals will use the site (ProgressNowAction) to find each other, organize and meet people working on other issues. In the process, it hopes to assemble a statewide network of activists and, ultimately, give Democrats a new and easily replicated model for local political organizing."

Mark Silva, national correspondent who covers the White House for the Chicago Tribune, essentially wrote a 750-worded epithet titled "Hard Times Wear on Bush," that sounded more in sync with the giving of "last rites" than what a national news correspondent would write. 

Reporting about Bush's first formal news conference since May 31, Silva opens this way: "Stepping out from the Oval Office on an overcast morning, President Bush appeared browbeaten. He sounded wistful about his party's political fortunes and even his own."

"Browbeaten" and "wistful" being not nearly enough for Mr. Silva, he continues to pile-on with more negativity from events that have nothing to do with what the president called this formal news conference for, namely to talk about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers:

TIME's cover this week asks "Are We Making Hurricanes Worse?" Jeffrey Kluger is back with a longer version of his theory that man-made global warming is worsening hurricane season, titled "Global Warming: The Culprit?" They also take another bite out of the Mike Brown apple with a longer piece on how the Bush team has been good at placing political cronies in places with genuine power in the bureaucracy despite their unconvincing resumes.

Also in the enviro-sensitive department, a story headlined "Centipedes Deserve Your Respect."