Feminism

Julie Rovner, NPR's on-staff shill for ObamaCare, filed an unashamedly one-sided report on Friday's Morning Edition about the controversial Obama administration mandate that forces religious institutions to include coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and birth control.

Rovner turned to only two individuals for her pro-mandate report: Peggy Mastroianni, general counsel at the federal government's own EEOC, an organization which recently got slapped down in a unanimous Supreme Court decision concerning the rights of houses of worship in hiring and personnel matters; and Sarah Lipton-Lubet, a lawyer for the notoriously far-left American Civil Liberties Union, who until May 2011, worked for the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights.

The Brian Williams MSNBC debate in Florida was not only dreadfully boring – I never thought I could ever long for commercials – it was pathetic. Freed of the fear of triggering an avalanche of applause against loaded questions, Williams and his co-moderators couldn’t bring themselves to utter one single question asking the Republican candidates to respond to Obama mistakes. For almost two hours, not one Obama failure was cited. Apparently, his record is spotless.

Instead, the candidates (especially Rick Santorum) were thrown four questions surrounding the 2005 legal battle in Florida over pulling the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo, which pushed all the liberal media hot buttons about “far right” religious conservatives throwing their religion around where it didn’t belong. This isn’t breaking news. But like the ABC debate fixated on contraception, it’s evidence that liberal networks are focused on their agenda, not on the voters’ concerns.

One way the left-leaning media like to downplay the annual March for Life is to play up how both sides of the abortion debate showed up in Washington, DC to mark the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, when the reality of the matter is that hundreds of thousands of pro-lifers outnumber their opponents by a very large margin every year.

On Monday, CBS's local site for the DC area took that form of bias to another level. Their photo essay, titled "Activists Hold Annual March For Life On Roe v. Wade Anniversary," completely left out the March for Life participants. Instead, the outlet put up seven photos of the handful of "pro-choice" demonstrators that showed up in front of the Supreme Court.

Conservatives' calls for taking away taxpayer funding for abortion provider Planned Parenthood and ensuring that religious organizations are not forced to pay for abortions and birth control through their health insurance plans proves we are not a "sane society," complains Jezebel founding editor and Washington Post columnist Anna Holmes in a Style section column today, blandly titled "The politics of birth control."*

The feminist writer opened her column by grousing that "almost 39 years to the day that the right to abortion was decided" by the Supreme Court, "we're still having a conversation about the access to and legality of female reproductive health services." In other words, "dammit, pro-lifers, you just won't quit!"

A pathetic, obsequious act  on the part of an establishment press member was exposed as utterly foolish mere days after its appearance.

On Wednesday (for Thursday's print edition), New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote glowingly of "Joining a Dinner in a Muslim Brotherhood Home." He swallowed a lot more than food while he was there, as the following excerpts indicate (bolds are mine throughout this post):

The Washington Post headline on a Friday story on over-the-counter abortifacients ("morning after" pills)  for middle-schoolers was "Administration's Plan B move draws strong and mixed reaction." That's a terrible headline, because reporters Anne Kornblut and N.B. Aizenman only sought out liberal reaction, and then provided a Team Obama defense. Conservative reaction was omitted. (Why would conservatives read The Washington Post? Certainly not to read about themselves.) Worse yet, the Post routinely labeled feminist defenders of "morning after" pills for sexually active sixth graders as "women's rights advocates" -- when they're fighting for the sexual opportunities of sixth-graders.

There was real comedy in the story, from ultraliberal Senator Patty Murray, suddenly in the tank for Big Pharmaceuticals: "Pharmaceutical companies here in this country make some very expensive decisions, and they need to know the FDA is going to make a decision based on science."

CBS's Barry Petersen lined up three radicals who back feminist and other left-leaning ideologies inside the Catholic Church on the December 4 edition of the Sunday Morning program, letting only one bishop speak in support of the Church's teachings on abortion and the role of women. The correspondent omitted the dissenting beliefs of his guests, labeling one as merely an "outspoken critic of the Church."

Petersen led his report with the case of Sister Mary McBride, who incurred automatic excommunication in 2009 after she sanctioned the abortion of a eleven-week-old unborn child, as a member of the ethics committee of St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. After turning to St. Joseph's chief medical officer, who spoke in favor of the "respected nun," as the correspondent labeled Sister McBride, he played a clip from Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmstead, who argued that the excommunicated woman didn't show "an equal concern for the mother and for the child."

On Monday's The Situation Room, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked a female guest if she had a "problem" with Herman Cain's comment about a "manly" man not eating pizza loaded with vegetables.   

Cain made the remark in an interview with GQ magazine -- a men's magazine -- where he was asked specifically "What can you tell about a man by the type of pizza that he likes?" Cain then answered what pizza he thought a "manly man" would like – not what a woman should or shouldn't like. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

In a softball interview with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on Monday's Today, co-host Ann Curry praised the New York Democrat for "galvanizing women to become economially empowered" and "trying to inspire a lot of people."

In a segment free from any challenging questions, Curry helped promote a women's economic summit that Gillibrand organized in New York City: "Why do you believe that women have the power to be a catalyst for our nation's economic recovery?...And in what way specifically can women today step up?...So how much power do women really have right now to be the juice in the recovery for this country's economy?"

One day after NBC's ''Today'' celebrated the ''end of traditional marriage,'' CBS's ''Early Show'' went even further, entertaining the view that marriage is an ''unnatural'' institution and a ''morality cage.''

CBS anchor Erica Hill teased a segment on Oct. 12: ''You know, as much as we all may love a good wedding, more and more women are saying, 'I don't need one!' They're either getting married later in life, or deciding 'I'm not getting married at all.' In fact, according to one poll, nearly half of Americans under the age of 40 think marriage is becoming obsolete.''

The mainstream media's campaign against traditional marriage sunk to new depths on NBC's October 11 "Today." Anchor Ann Curry teased a nearly seven-minute piece on the rapid increase of single women in society by touting "a new spin on romance, dating, and what some are calling the end of traditional marriage."

And that was just the opening.

At the top of Friday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer wondered if a joke by Republican Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown in response to a jab by Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren was a "comeback or insult" and noted that "women's groups are giving him a big dressing down today."

In a later tease of the story, fellow co-host Ann Curry proclaimed: "A senate race in Massachusetts has turned ugly and personal." Lauer summed up the situation this way: "...during a debate, a potential Democratic challenger took a shot at Republican Senator Scott Brown for saying that he had to pose nude in Cosmopolitan magazine way back in 1982 to pay for school. Brown's response is now what's drawing a lot of heat."

Daily Beast/Newsweek editor-in-chief Tina Brown today announced the launch of the new Women in the World Foundation, which holds itself out as "a powerful, new initiative dedicated to highlighting and driving solutions for advancing women and girls" that "will serve as a resource to all who seek to learn about and engage on the issues facing women and girls."

Sounds like a worthwhile venture until you remember that Tina Brown has a very narrow vision of what it means to be an empowered woman, one that discounts political conservatives like Michele Bachmann.

When reporting stories concerning the Catholic Church, the New York Times' Laurie Goodstein has had a very troublesome track record with the facts. (For starters: 1, 2.)

Unfortunately, Goodstein's record only gets worse after another faulty and misleading front-page article (Sat., 7/23/11).

In attempting to trumpet the case for "female priests" in the Catholic Church, Goodstein and the Times profile a small number of dissident and ignorant Catholics who seek "change" in the 2,000-year-old institution. And in doing so, Goodstein misleads her readers in a number of ways:

The fact that the American left is deathly afraid of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann can be interpreted in several different ways.

First of all, if both ladies are as big of fools and bumblers as they claim, why are they wasting so much time and energy trying to destroy them? If they were the idiots the self-proclaimed elitists in the mainstream media would have us believe, they'd simply fall under their own weight without any help from the insulated dodos at the New York Times.

“Daily Show” co-creator Lizz Winsted is going on tour to fund Planned Parenthood, and Lucas Kavner of the Huffington Post insisted that this is somehow not leftist:

While her comedy has always been inherently political – and she's not backing down from her own personal affiliations – this tour is not aimed at those on the right or left. It's merely to raise awareness and support for an organization that has been an essential part of her life.

On Thursday, NPR's Linton Weeks spotlighted several extreme proponents of eliminating gender differences and hinted at support for such an endeavor: "In a country with the ideal of treating everyone fairly and equitably, do we really need to know if someone is a boy or a girl?" Weeks portrayed the cause as just part of the normal progression of society: "As history shows, one enterprise in which Americans excel is the breaking down of divisions."

The correspondent began his article for NPR.com, "The End of Gender?" (which was the most viewed article on the website on Thursday), with three "signposts" which supposedly pointed at an end of the concept of gender:

These are tough times to be an American dad, and indeed, an American man. The recession, or "mancession," as it's been called, hit men harder than women; male unemployment was 8.9 percent compared to 8 percent for women in May. Adding insult to injury, leftwing journalists have sniggered about the plight of the "beached white male." In 2010, women became the majority in the work force for the first time in history. More women receive college degrees than men do.

Culturally, in article after magazine article, on TV and in films, fathers and men in general are portrayed as hapless bumblers at best, abusive deadbeats at worst.

ABC's "This Week" actually used the occasion of Congressman Anthony Weiner's (D-N.Y.) sex scandal to discuss whether this was "a good moment for women."

During a lengthy segment, host Christiane Amanpour along with her exclusively white female guests proceeded to bash members of the opposite sex with ABC's Claire Shipman actually saying, "A group of all white men are not going to reach the best decisions" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Attempting to offer a defense of Ed Schultz, CNN's Randi Kaye told guest Howard Kurtz Thursday that "there are mixed interpretations" of the term "slut," which Schultz called conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham Thursday. Kaye also referred to Laura Ingraham's response to Schultz as "biting," proving that she possibly was harder on Ingraham than on tyrant Sadaam Hussein back in 2006.

"Yeah, but you know when you hear the word 'slut' – I mean I hate to even say it on our air, to be honest with you – but there are mixed interpretations about the word," Kaye told Kurtz. The media critic didn't buy it for a second.

[Click here for audio. Video below the break.]

As first picked up by NewsBusters from Brian Maloney's Radio Equalizer blog, MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz on Tuesday demeaned conservative radio host Laura Ingraham as a "right-wing slut," prompting his indefinite suspension on Wednesday.

But on "Morning Joe" today, the panelists demonstrated their devotion to equal treatment of women in the workplace with a special, "Knowing Your Worth," which Ingraham's staff noted completely ignored Schultz's crass insults.

Call him a NOW-hawk . . .

Of all the reasons to send our people to fight and die in Afghanistan, spending $2 billion per week in the process, Howard Dean has managed to come up with perhaps the worst: feminism.

On today's Morning Joe, Dean explained that "the whole reason" he used to support President Obama's waging of the Afghanistan war was that leaving the country would plunge its women back into "the Stone Age."  But now that Afghan President Karzai has showed insufficient support for women's right in Dean's eyes, it's time to get out.

View video after the jump.

In the Sunday New York Times obituary for liberal Democrat 1984 vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, Douglas Martin presented her as "hounded" by sexist anti-abortion conservatives who would metaphorically persecute her to death:

The abortion issue, magnified because she was Roman Catholic and a woman, plagued her campaign. Though she opposed the procedure personally, she said, others had the right to choose for themselves. Abortion opponents hounded her at almost every stop with an intensity seldom experienced by male politicians.

Writing in The Washington Post in September 1984, the columnist Mary McGrory quoted an unnamed Roman Catholic priest as saying, “When the nuns in the fifth grade told Geraldine she would have to die for her faith, she didn’t know it would be this way.”

All you need to know about why people on the right were dissatisfied with Kathleen Parker as the supposedly conservative counterweight to Eliot Spitzer on the pair's recently-canned CNN show was crystallized on Morning Joe today.  The panel unleashed an absolute gush-a-thon over Parker, Mika Brzezinski declaring her "one of my favorite people" and Willie Geist describing her as "a great writer."

For good measure, the MSNBC folks delighted in dumping on rival CNN.  Mike Barnicle took top trash-talking honors, claiming Parker had been "brutalized" at the network.

View video after the jump.