While this week’s coverage of the Obama administration’s exchange of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five senior Taliban officials has been generally critical, the broadcast networks have helped Team Obama out on another front — since Monday, coverage of the Veterans Affairs waiting list scandal has been virtually nonexistent.
Despite the continuously unfolding developments on the scandal, the major news networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted barely two minutes this week to the story. Altogether, the morning and evening shows had a combined 46 hours of air time from Monday through Friday morning, yet offered up a mere 2 minutes and 16 seconds of coverage. Not a single VA story this week amounted to more than 30 seconds in length [MP3 audio here; video below].
Once again, an MSNBC host is playing up the idea that “there must be something larger” to justify what, on its face, seems to be a disastrous prisoner swap in the Bowe Bergdahl-Taliban exchange.
On the June 4 edition of her Now program, host Alex Wagner, ever the apologist for the president, hoped that the trade for POW Bowe Bergdahl would open up broader war-ending negotiations with the Taliban [MP3 audio here; video below]:
Dan Rather loves telling people about the time he tried heroin...for journalism. Now liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in a Tuesday column about traveling to Colorado to experience the progressive new world of legalized pot. Suffice it to say, her experience was, well, quite the adventure.
Dowd detailed how she inhaled a pot-filled candy bar, and the resulting psychological effects. Let’s just say her encounter with marijuana was something less than a stoner’s fantasy. She describes, that, after about an hour, she “felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I curled up and lay in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours.”
Responding to the evolving Taliban prisoner-swap story, Politico’s Roger Simon suggested on MSNBC’s NewsNation program that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers had faulty memories on the details of Bergdahl’s disappearance and that we should not “take as absolute legal fact five-year old memories from people who served with Bergdahl under circumstances of great stress.”
In further defending President Obama’s five-for-one prisoner swap, the liberal columnist insisted there would be “little public appetite” for the wheels of military justice to grind through an investigation and possible court martial for Bergdahl. Fortunately for viewers, host Tamron Hall also had NBC military analyst Barry McCaffrey on at the same time to offer his rebuttal. The former Clinton administration drug czar strongly beat back the notion that this had anything to do with the memories of his comrades [MP3 audio here; video below]:
Addressing the critics of the Obama administration’s prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky posited that this controversy represents the Right’s new Benghazi, by which he means a new scandal obsession which will prove fruitless.
The absurdity in the piece is unrelenting; Tomasky claims that “Bergdahl may well end up being the flimsy excuse for the impeachment hearings they’ve been dreaming of.”
Ever a good soldier for President Obama, MSNBC political analyst Jonathan Alter defended the president’s actions in securing the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl by exchanging him for five high-level detainees at Guantanamo.
Appearing on the June 2 edition of Jansing and Co., Alter said the move was rather, well, routine because, “at the end of the war, prisoner exchanges are common.” Directing harsh criticism towards skeptics of this exchange, Alter intimated that the administration’s policy was a success because there were essentially only two legitimate options open for the Obama administration: either make an exchange for Bergdahl now, or leave him to die [MP3 audio here; video below the jump]:
When you’ve lost Chris Matthews, have you lost liberal America? The Hardball host stopped by for a visit on the May 30 edition of MSNBC’s NewsNation for an analysis of the resignation of VA Secretary Shinseki and the VA scandal overall.
The former Tip O’Neill staffer didn’t hold back, repeatedly hitting Obama and Shinseki for a lack of alertness regarding the scandal. Matthews was aghast at the utter lack of awareness the president has shown–not just on the VA –but on his signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare. He even insinuated that a lack of cognizance was a part of the president’s habitual behavior, proclaiming [audio here; video below]:
In a sick way, you have to hand it to the Left. They seem to be infinitely creative in the ways they charge conservatives with racism.
Both Amanda Marcotte of Slate and Randall Balmer, writing for Politico, recently took to smearing social conservatives by highlighting a small kernel of truth in an idea that is largely inaccurate.
On the May 29 edition of CNBC’s Squawk Box, Richard Engel, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, conceded that he could not name a single nation where relations have improved with the United States since President Obama took office six years ago. Engel generally stays above the political fray, so this admission about the president’s foreign policy is revealing.
Responding to further questioning by Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, Engel asserted that the reason why relations with foreign nations haven’t improved is due to the fact that “our allies have become confused.” [See video below. MP3 audio here.]
An ABC “news” program dedicated to exposing bigotry once again sought to prove how awful the American people are. And once again, it was a huge failure.
The May 23 edition of What Would You Do? featured not one but two segments that could potentially highlight the bigotry that supposedly exists in America. Host John Quinones and crew developed a scenario for the idea of shopping while black. An actor, playing the salesman for the show, directed some rather inflammatory questions and accusations at another actor, the black shopper. Predictably, the unknowing customers were appalled at the salesman’s behavior (MP3 audio here; video below).
While the NRA and other gun-rights groups have kept silent in the past few days out of respect for victims of Elliot Rodger’s senseless killing spree in Santa Barbara, California, on Friday evening, the Washington Post saw fit to run a front-pager today devoted to the anti-gun crusade of Richard Martinez, the father of one of Rodger’s victims.
While Mr. Martinez is understandably distraught about the loss of his son, it is unfortunate that the paper would play off Martinez’s raw emotion and deliver readers an unbalanced story skewed heavily in favor of stronger gun restrictions. Post staffer Kimberly Kindy noted, deep in her article, that the NRA did not reply to requests for comment, but she failed to seek out other pro-gun rights voices who might like to give her readers the other side of the story.
The Daily Beast has not failed to let a crisis go to waste. The news website gave prime placement today to a fierce anti-gun rights activist, Cliff Schecter, who was aggressive in mocking supporters of the Second Amendment in response to the fatal shooting spree outside UC Santa Barbara by Elliot Rodger. Schecter, from the National Gun Victims Action Council, scolded gun-rights advocates for their opposition to further gun control measures in a piece that was dripping with condescension.
The article mocked conservatives for endorsing the idea that people–not guns–kill people. Schecter argued that liberal gun laws are ineffective because surrounding states have comparatively weaker laws. Nevermind that Rodger legally obtained his guns from licensed gun dealers within the state of California, a relatively restrictive state when it comes to gun rights.
The liberal media continue to go to great lengths to suggest that conservatives want to turn back the clock to segregation. In an article for the National Journal, Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute absurdly claimed that today’s conservative justices would uphold ‘separate but equal’ if they were transported back to 1954 to make the Brown ruling.
Ornstein argued that the great number of 5-4 rulings in the current Supreme Court show an inability to reach consensus. Of course, he places virtually all the blame for this division on conservatives for their move “sharply to the right.” On the Brown ruling, Ornstein explained:
As difficult as it may be to believe, Craig Melvin of MSNBC found a way to attack the Democrats’ political position on Benghazi from the left.
The substitute anchor for Friday’s edition of NewsNation brought on Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) to discuss new developments surrounding the newly-formed select committee. Melvin challenged Sanchez to answer why the Democrats would join the select committee if they could not even answer what the mission was. Insinuating that the conservative position on Benghazi is nothing more than a joke, Melvin asked [MP3 audio here; video below]:
Commenting on a recent women’s health measure passed by the Louisiana state house, Joy-Ann Reid and MSNBC.com’s Irin Carmon portrayed the bill as an aggressive attack on women’s rights. The law includes such innocuous provisions as a 24-hour waiting period for abortions and a requirement that doctors must have admitting privileges within 30 miles of the clinic where the procedure is performed. This didn’t stop Reid and Carmon from waxing apocalyptic about the bill.
The Reid Report host opined that “people are actually going back to what we had before Roe v. Wade which is trying to find some other way to end a pregnancy which isn’t safe.” Irin Carmon later hyperbolically claimed (MP3 audio here; video below):
Call it partisan hypocrisy in progress. Last night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow furiously spun the VA hospital waiting-list scandal as merely a “problem in progress.”
That was radically different from her reaction to the 2007 Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal, which involved shoddy, run-down accommodations for injured servicemen (MP3 audio here; video below).
The ObamaCare boosters in the mainstream liberal media are once again avoiding negative news on the health care law’s unintended consequences. According to a study released Wednesday by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), emergency room visits are on the rise, in spite of promises to the contrary by supporters of ObamaCare.
Not a single second was devoted to this news by either the Wednesday evening newscasts or morning news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC. Stephanie Armour and Louise Radnofsky of the Wall Street Journal broke the story in the Wednesday edition of the paper, having gotten a sneak peek at the study.
In a controversy pitting a fabulously wealthy, nanny-stater, anti-gun rights liberal versus conservative middle- and working-class gun-owning Americans, you can bet on Jon Stewart siding with the former over the latter.
Reacting to the news that Chipotle is requesting – at the urging of Mike Bloomberg – that their patrons not carry weapons in their stores, Stewart devoted a segment of his May 20 Daily Show to lambasting everyday Americans who own guns and who might have heretofore legally taken their guns into a local Chipotle. Naturally Stewart crudely caricatured the viewpoint of such Americans, perhaps thinking none of them watch his show anyway (MP3 audio here; video below):
Ed Schultz is at it again, accusing conservatives of waging jihad on public education.
Responding to a tweet from Reince Preibus wherein the Republican National Committee chairman insisted that “education is the civil rights issue of our time,” Schultz went unhinged, bellowing [click here for the MP3 audio; video below]:
Emily Bazelon apparently has found the opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in lower Manhattan as a perfect excuse to suggest that conservatives are particularly prone – compared to other Americans – to buy into the absurd conspiracy theories of the so-called 9/11 Truther movement. But the most prominent of 9/11 Truthers in the national spotlight are celebrities and media personalities whose politics are left of center, including a co-host of CNN’s Crossfire.
The Slate senior editor made the pronouncement on the May 19 edition of The Lead with Jake Tapper, after Tapper asked her if there was a great deal of scapegoating involved with the Truther conspiracy [Click here for MP3 audio; Video below]: