"When 99 percent of women used birth control in their lifetime and 60 percent use it for something other than family planning, it's outrageous and I think the Supreme Court will suggest that their case is ridiculous." - Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on MSNBC's The Ed Show, March 25
Debbie Wasserman Schultz may have gotten two Pinocchios from Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler Monday for that statement above, but she got off easy.
With the help of research materials from Newsbusters and the Media Research Center, the National Center for Public Policy Research (disclosure: my employer) today challenged Disney chief Robert Iger over media bias at ABC News at Disney's annual shareholder meeting.
National Center Free Enterprise Project Director Justin Danhof asked Iger why, as revealed by the MRC, ABC News devoted only 128 seconds to coverage of the IRS scandal from July 2013-January 2014, even though 53 percent of Americans believe the IRS broke the law and even Democrats, by a 2-1 margin, believe a special prosecutor should be appointed.
(audio after break)
It is a sign of the unseriousness of the mainstream media that the NBC program "Meet the Press" will be hosting a climate debate Sunday featuring a person who plays a scientist on TV.
Yes, tomorrow it is "Bill Nye the Science Guy" versus Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The indefatigable David Rose of Britain's Daily Mail, working with British climate blogger Tony Newberry, has today exposed bias in news reporting of climate change of a scale heretofore unknown, even for that never-accurately-covered subject.
He reveals that, in a move orchestrated by the BBC itself and a left-wing lobby group, the British government under the Labor Party paid for BBC personnel to be taught the left-wing, pro-alarmist spin on climate issues for the specific purpose of using the "news" as propaganda.
MSNBC's Chris Hayes is not happy that skeptics of the catastrophic anthroprogenic global warming (CAGW) theory, in particular, Matt Drudge, have been pointing out that in this age of global warming, it often seems very cold.
As the Washington Examiner's Charlie Spiering explained today (link includes video of Hayes):
Earlier this month I teased Slate for trying to spin the government's partial shutdown so hard it lurched into satire – trying to start a pity party because some college women who are getting free money from the taxpayers might get their money late which might cause them to have trouble paying for their birth control.
Today I'm teasing Slate again over another bit of wild spin.
Sometimes the left approaches satire in its ongoing propaganda campaign to make the partial government shutdown seem worse than it is.
Take Amanda Marcotte's October 1 Slate article "Government shutdown: From WIC to the panda cam, seven ways the shutdown will hit women hardest," no doubt a continuation of the whiny "war on women" meme only idiots fall for. My favorite paragraph in Slate's list of how the "shutdown" is going to hurt women "particularly hard":
If you listen to the left, you're probably hearing about food stamp "cuts."
What you're probably not hearing is, as Ira Stoll reported in the New York Sun, that the Democrats wanted to increase food stamp spending by 65% over the next ten years but Republicans passed a bill to raise it by only 57%, so partisan spinners and liberals in the media are calling what the GOP passed "a cut."
How frightened is the Washington Post of being accused of racism? Apparently, very.
As the Washington Navy Yard shootings story was still breaking mid-day Monday, the Post hastened to assure its readers that a witness who identified a shooter as a black man is black himself: "He was a tall black guy," said her co-worker, Todd Brundage, who is black. "He didn't say a word." The Post is basically saying it's okay to say it, you see, because they found a black man to say the word.
I don't watch Rachel Maddow much, but when I do, I am always amazed at how few minutes it takes before I hear her make a baldfaced lie.
Today I heard her say this on her August 16, 2013 broadcast (text from MSNBC transcript, with spelling corrected):
Salon magazine this afternoon is asking the silly question, Why can Limbaugh speak, but not Costas?
It is Rush Limbaugh who is banned from speaking, not Bob Costas.Salon’s David Sirota has a long introduction to his argument (which you can read here) that boils down to this:
Media reporting of Voter ID fails to meet basic standards of objectivity and integrity, says a new report released today, "Media Shows Pervasive Bias When Covering Voter ID" by Justin Danhof.
In fact, Danhof says, the media in many cases is openly hostile to Voter ID, using three primary tactics to attack it: rhetoric, flawed data and selective coverage.
Ever creative in finding things for which to blame the "right wing," Salon magazine is criticizing conservatives in a headline ("Planned Parenthood Firebombed, Right Wing Silent") about an apparent incident in McKinney, Texas last Tuesday in which an unknown person allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at a Planned Parenthood establishment.
No one with even superficial understanding of conservatives and a sound mind could conclude the conservative movement supports throwing Molotov cocktails at business establishments, even left-wing ones. That we did not comment on an incident that received almost no press attention and at which no one was injured is more logically attributed to the fact that we, like almost everyone else on the planet, had no idea it took place.
Can you spot the bias? From the New York Times, a March 8 report by John M. Broder, "At House E.P.A. Hearing, Both Sides Claim Science":
In yet another example of the news media being selective about which party labels it chooses to share, a recent CNN online story about Shirley Sherrod mentioning three Democrat politicians included the "D" when the politicians where doing something the story applauded, and left it off when the Democrat was a bad guy.In "Sherrod's steadfast motto: 'Let's work together'" by Jim Kavanagh, the party identification of segregationist Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, a Democrat, is omitted:
A senior official of the NAACP appears to have further undermined the credibility of his organization when, in a Fox News debate with Project 21's Deneen Borelli Friday, he directly contradicted something he said on Fox News Tuesday.The Media Research Center created a short video comparing the two clips that is available here
The top three things the editors of TIME magazine should have caught, but didn't, in the February 22 edition: 3) From "Colin Firth" by Richard Corliss and Mary Pols:
As Noel Sheppard reported last night on Newsbusters, CBS's Sharyl Attkisson revealed Monday (see Noel's post for video) that "101 Congress-related" people flew to the Copenhagen climate summit last month, at tremendous cost to taxpayers.
Former Solictor General Ted Olson's Newsweek essay, "A Conservative Case for Gay Marriage," is embarrassing for conservatives -- that is, embarrassing that we had a Solicitor General so willing to publicly use straw-man arguments.
Of course, as it has ever been, when an individual conservative of moderate fame wants some nice press in the mainstream media, he offers up a 'man bites dog' story, to wit, "Neanderthal Conservative Sees the Light [Insert Topic Here]."
Which is not to say a desire for fame is Olson's motivation, particularly; his essay is ardent enough to signal his logic has been overwhelmed and thus it is likely he is sincere, but how many of us, pushed out on a limb of illogic after letting our emotions rule, are rewarded with an essay in Newsweek?
(I daresay even a fashionable liberal, penning "A Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage," couldn't get one.)
Olson lists the "reasons I have heard" against legalizing gay marriage.
He's not a listener.
Last June, as Newsbusters readers will remember, ABC allowed President Obama to pitch his health care proposal in a special edition of ABC's Primetime hosted by retiring World News anchor Charlie Gibson and (now incoming anchor) Diane Sawyer. Obama was given additional airtime to pitch his health care agenda that evening on Nightline. Conservatives didn't get equal time. Worse, ABC News even refused to allow the conservative group Conservatives for Patients Rights to purchase paid advertising to put out an alternative perspective.
