Media Business

It's been breaking news all over MSNBC, liberal blogs, newspapers and even The Wall Street Journal: "Federal spending under Obama at historic lows ... It's clear that Obama has been the most fiscally moderate president we've had in 60 years." There's even a chart!

I'll pause here to give you a moment to mop up the coffee on your keyboard. Good? OK, moving on.

"You know what, you've been a great journalist for 44 years," The View host Barbara Walters gushed to Dan Rather at the close of a softball interview on May 23 about his new memoir, "Rather Outspoken."

"No matter what CBS says!" an excited co-host Joy Behar interjected. Yes, "no matter what CBS says," Walters agreed of the former anchor/managing editor of the CBS Evening News, who was fired from the Tiffany network for running stories on a discredited phony memo that alleged President George W. Bush was often AWOL when he should have showed up for training exercises when serving in the Air National Guard.

"In 2008, in the primaries, there were 1,365 stories on Barack Obama" and of those, "not one single story" was devoted to President Barack Obama's admitted youthful use of illicit drugs. By contrast, President Bush's refusal to admit either way on youthful drug use in the 2000 campaign was met with non-stop media scrutiny, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted on Friday's edition of Hannity on the Fox News Channel.

What's more, when Hillary Clinton's campaign raised the subject of Obama's drug use in the 2008 campaign, it was denounced by the media as descending "into the gutter," the Media Research Center founder noted on the May 18 edition of Sean Hannity's primetime program. To watch the full "Media Mash" segment, click the play button on the video embed that follows the page break.

Politico media reporter Dylan Byers is impatient with the media: “When will we talk about Mormonism?”

He means the negative stuff: “I’m talking about a national conversation about the Mormon faith, including its past practice of polygamy (which was renounced by the church in the 19th century) and its exclusion of African Americans from the priesthood (until 1978). That sort of thing.” Does he watch anything?

On Tuesday, May 16, CNN did something that hadn't happened to the network since 1997: The 9 p.m. edition of Piers Morgan Tonight drew an audience of only 39,000 viewers in the important 25-54 age demographic.

These numbers come as a huge blow to the host, liberal, former tabloid editor Piers Morgan.

As an ever-shrinking number of newspaper readers can attest, most major U.S. papers skew liberal. But its not every day the head of a union representing journalists lays out a list of goals that might have been written by MoveOn.org, and displays a contempt for democracy more at home on the editorial pages of state-run organs in third-world dictatorships.

But there was Larry Cohen, AFL-CIO Organizing Committee chair and President of Communication Workers of America (CWA), of which the Newspaper Guild is part, calling on progressives to “unite in a years-long campaign to restore and reclaim both workers rights and U.S. democracy.” According to report on the Guild’s website, Cohen was addressing the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C., when he declared that reclaiming democracy would mean overcoming, well, democracy. “The limits of democracy alone have blocked us,” Cohen said.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews is featured in a new "Lean Forward" promo spot [embedded below page break; MP3 audio here] quoting his "hero" Winston Churchill as having asked "Then what are we fighting for?" when his finance minister suggested that the government's budget for the arts would have to cut to aid Britain's war effort.  Matthews used that story as a warning to conservatives that the nation's dire financial straits are no excuse for cutting federal spending on the arts.

But alas, it seems the story is poppycock, as Churchill historian Richard Langworth noted in a March 2009 blog post.

On MSNBC's Ed Show on Monday night, Ed Schultz attacked Mitt Romney for failing to disagree emphatically with a voter who said Obama should be tried for treason. "For all his faults, at least John McCain [in 2008] had the guts to talk down the crazy. Four years later, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party doesn't have the character or leadership skills to correct conspiracy theories on the road at an event? Romney didn't address the treason accusation at an event until a reporter grilled him about it."

Guess who didn't have the "character or leadership skills" to correct his supporters when they made crazy talk about "treason" in the last presidential election? That would be Barack Obama. Which supporters? You can start with...Keith Olbermann, occupying Ed Schultz's current spot on MSNBC. Check out Olbermann on April 25, 2008, for example, when the treason came from Team Clinton, which was supposedly going to undermine Obama in the fall:

The news Monday of a thwarted al-Qaeda plot to place another explosive device modeled on the "underwear bomb" that failed on Christmas Day 2009 might make a news consumer wonder: What ever happened to that terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab? On February 16, he was sentenced to life in prison for his attempt at mass murder. Did you miss it? The networks weren't very interested. Only ABC's World News filed a full evening-news report by legal reporter Pierre Thomas, but even that left out Team Obama -- especially Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano claiming "the system worked" when it obviously didn't. Citizens foiled the attack over Detroit, not the government.

NBC never covered the life sentence in the evening. One 67-word brief by Amy Robach on "Today" was all they did. CBS Evening News mentioned it briefly, but here's one full Obama report they did instead, correspondent Norah O'Donnell explaining how White House tourists were "overcome with emotion" when Michelle Obama made a surprise appearance:

One day after the lavish White House Correspondents' Dinner was held in Washington, D.C., former "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw stated that the annual event is diminishing the reputation of the journalists who attend it.

The longtime newsman made the remark to host David Gregory while appearing as a guest on "Meet the Press" the following morning, according to a column written by David Eldridge at the Washington Times on Sunday.

Apple -- the world's most valuable business and an engine of economic growth and personal freedom across the United States and around the world -- is coming under fire because it had the nerve to structure its global business in such a way that saves the company on taxes.

The New York Times has a very lengthy story exploring all of the ways that Apple minimizes its tax bill. The article, entitled "How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes," makes a great effort to tie Apple's strategy, which is legal, to the ongoing budget problems faced by California, where Apple has its global headquarters, and to the federal budget deficit.

In his "The Fix" blog yesterday, Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza uncritically furthered a faulty Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) that argues that President Obama has actually received more negative news coverage this political season than the Republican presidential primary contenders. This morning, Post print edition editors excerpted Cillizza's item on page A4, the "Campaign 2012" news page.

While Cillizza noted in his blog post that there are "mitigating factors" in the survey data -- that langauge was cut from the print edition excerpt -- he confidently asserted that "for all the chatter about Obama’s preferential treatment by the media, the data tells a very different story. And the data doesn’t lie." But as my colleague Rich Noyes explained on Monday, the data examined by the study are fundamentally flawed and hence worthless to arrive at a conclusion about the media's judgments of the candidates (emphases mine):

Yesterday the trustees who oversee Social Security announced that "the program's trust fund will be depleted by 2033 -- three years earlier than projected last year." "Never since the 1983 reforms have we come as close to the point of trust fund depletion as we are right now," trustee Charles Blahous said. But alas, the Washington Post shuffled that story over to page A3 rather than the front page.

So what actually made today's Post front page? Among other things, a highly parochial story about a lawsuit pitting neighbors against each other in a wealthy Northern Virginia community. "Plans for a Va. mansion modeled on Versailles irk neighbors," read the subheadline for Post staffer Justin Jouvenal's 30-paragraph story. Why on Earth is this worthy of front-page space? You have to wait until paragraph 14, when Jouvenal discloses that a former media executive is one of those filing the lawsuit against his neighbor, Young Yi:

The liberal media generally but the Associated Press in particular are acting as mere "stenographers" for Barack Obama, failing to scrutinize the president's campaign rhetoric about the economy, NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham noted on today's Your World with Neil Cavuto.

"As much as they say they hate being stenographers to power, this really is what we're seeing in this reelection year, and that is, oh, well, Obama said this today and Obama's going to do this today, and they don't seem to come up with any troublesome facts or counter-arguments," the Media Research Center director of media analysis told Stuart Varney, who was substitute-hosting the April 19 program. [MP3 audio here; watch the full segment in the video embedded below]

Earlier this week, NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell announced he was calling on Congress to investigate Comcast, the parent company of NBC, given the network's malfeasance in the Zimmerman 911 audio editing.

Comcast's "continued silence on how to prevent such malfeasance in the future constitutes a serious breach of public trust," Bozell noted in letters sent to Congress on Tuesday. As the cable giant is "in the midst of a business deal with Verizon requiring approval" by the FCC and DOJ, "the public policy issues related to the approval of this deal are so critical" as to require congressional hearings, Bozell wrote in his April 10 letter to the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights Subcommittee. A similar letter was simultaneously transmitted to the chairman and ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet. You can read those letters here and here.

While most everyone in political circles has condemned Hilary Rosen's slam of Ann Romney, rank-and-file liberals on Twitter apparently haven't read the memo.

Twitchy has an excellent post documenting all the bile, complete with requisite leftist slams of Mrs. Romney as a c*nt, b*tch, and whore. As Michelle Malkin, no stranger to left-wing hate, tweeted, "Some are baptized by fire. On Twitter, outspoken conservative women are baptized by vile."

"Gas prices are soaring again in 2012, yet the auto industry is booming, and drivers, while annoyed, are mostly taking rising fuel costs in stride. What’s changed?" Time magazine's Brad Tuttle asked in an April 10 TIME Moneyland blog post. Tuttle offered numerous explanations but failed to consider the media's coverage as one explanation for why Americans seem to not be seething angry about high gas prices.

As our colleague Julia Seymour of the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute noted earlier this month (emphasis mine):

When NBC's "Today" show played the audio of George Zimmerman's call to a Sanford, Fla., police dispatcher about Trayvon Martin, the editors made him appear to be a racist who says: "This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." What Zimmerman actually said was: "This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. It's raining, and he's just walking around, looking about." The 911 officer responded by asking, "OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?" Zimmerman replied, "He looks black." NBC says it's investigating the doctoring of the audio, but there's nothing to investigate; its objective was to inflame passions.

In his Associated Press article titled "Old photos may be deceptive in Fla. shooting case," Matt Sedensky pointed out that the photos carried by the major media were several years old and showed Zimmerman looking fat and mean and Martin looking like a sweet young kid.

NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center (MRC) founder Brent Bozell announced earlier this morning that the MRC is calling upon Congress to investigate Comcast / NBC News for the intentional editing of the George Zimmerman audio that was broadcast multiple times and subsequently flamed the fires of racial hatred and animosity

“NBC is laughing at the public. Last week we said we would have more to say if their behavior in this matter didn’t change.  Given their continued irresponsibility, today we open up a new front," Bozell noted in a press release available here.

Christians are entering the most important season on the annual calendar, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. But the national media often treat Christianity as a religion that imposes itself too aggressively on American society. To review this hostility, MRC has compiled a new Special Report titled "Secular Snobs: Documenting the National Media's Long-Standing Hostility to Religion."

Even in this campaign, reporters have sneered that conservatives like Rick Santorum are seeking a theocracy like Iran or a Christian version of Sharia law. We've gone all the way back to the MRC's founding in 1987 to remember this bias over the years.