The indictment case against Republican Governor Rick Perry, that even liberals have described as “weak,” is just the latest GOP controversy that the networks have jumped on to taint Republicans in this midterm election year. In the 2014 campaign season, the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks have filled their programs with one GOP scandal after another. Congressman Trey Radel’s drug possession, the “kissing congressman” Vance McAllister’s affair, Oregon GOP Senate candidate Monica Wehby’s alleged stalking of an ex-boyfriend and of course Governor Chris Christie’s Bridgegate were all controversies these networks made sure their viewers heard about.
But curiously, there have been other political scandals the networks have chosen to either bury or outright ignore. It just so happens the politicians in trouble, in those cases, are Democrats.
On Thursday, NBC News sources confirmed that Chuck Todd will bump David Gregory from the Meet the Press host chair. And while Todd isn’t as liberal as his predecessor, he has played defense for the Barack Obama administration on a number of fronts.
Most recently he dismissed the IRS-Tea Party scandal by asking “are there any actual real victims?” and diminished Benghazi hearings as “partisan.” The NBC News chief White House correspondent also claimed Benghazi figure Susan Rice was simply a “victim” of conservative media but in the past compared Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin to a “car-wreck.” (videos after the jump)
Russell Brand’s hatred for Fox News is so intense he couldn’t get through his eulogy of Robin Williams without taking a shot at the network’s “angry” viewers.
In Tuesday’s online edition of The Guardian, Brand tried to find deeper meaning in the death of Williams as he pondered how “we live in a world that has become so negligent of human values that our brightest lights are extinguishing themselves?” Brand added “all around us people are suffering behind masks less interesting than the one Robin Williams wore?” and then warned “Do you have time to tune in to Fox News, to cement your angry views to calcify the certain misery?”
On August 6, Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies charged that while the media have filled their stories on the current conflict in Gaza with “pictures of neighborhoods reduced to rubble, with Palestinian men, women and children in desperate circumstances,” they have been negligent in telling their audiences that Hamas has been “deploying civilians as human shields, storing missiles in mosques and UN schools, setting up command posts in hospitals, using ambulances to ferry terrorists to battle, and children to dig tunnels.”
One reason for this bias, according to May, is Hamas’ intimidation of journalists. May relayed that when one Spanish journalist was asked why TV viewers weren’t seeing more footage of Hamas fighters the reporter responded: “It’s very simple, we did see Hamas people there launching rockets, they were close to our hotel, but if ever we dared pointing our camera on them they would simply shoot at us and kill us.”
Gene Simmons is tired of watching the world walk all over the President. On Thursday’s edition of FNC’s Outnumbered the frontman for the rock band Kiss railed against Barack Obama: “I think that our president is not being a leader. He is not stepping up and drawing the line in the sand and sticking to it.”
During a discussion about Vladimir Putin defying the United States on a number of fronts Simmons told the panelists he’s seen this story before with Obama: (video after the jump)
Could the liberal-leaning ladies of The View be pushed even further left? It could happen as MSNBC’s vice president of prime-time programming and producer of The Rachel Maddow Show has been picked to be the new showrunner.
On Thursday, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that Bill Wolff will replace longtime producer Bill Geddie. The producer-switch comes on the heels of the announcement that the ultra-liberal Rosie O’Donnell will be returning to the set of ABC'sThe View.
On Wednesday, actor Rob Lowe took to Twitter to criticize Barack Obama’s failed foreign policies.
Waiting for the President to deliver a speech at the U.S. Africa Leaders Summit, the irritated star of NBC’s Parks and Recreation demanded the President explain how the world literally fell apart on his watch:
David Remnick, on Tuesday’s Charlie Rose show, actually compared state-controlled Russian TV anchors to Glenn Beck. The editor of the New Yorker magazine told the PBS host that Vladimir Putin benefits from “a media that’s completely in the hands of the state” and then went on to liken pro-Putin anchors to the former conservative Fox News host and current CEO of The Blaze.
Remnick: “Imagine that Glenn Beck were in every anchor chair but he was appointed by the President of the United States. It’s, it’s that perverse. The sense of ‘they are out to get us’ is profound. And people who used to be on the margins, people who used to be on the kind of nutty margins of the discussion, have now been empowered to be on television, and are very forceful voices.” (video after the jump)
What will it take for the networks to start covering the IRS scandal again? How about the central figure emonstrating her personal bias against conservatives? On Wednesday CNSNews.com reported the following bombshell: “A newly discovered email exchange from Lois Lerner’s official IRS email account ‘directly demonstrates Ms. Lerner’s deep animus towards conservatives, which she refers to as ‘---holes,’ House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday.”
Will the venomous language Lerner used be enough to get the networks to notice the IRS targeting scandal again? If recent history is any guide, probably not.
On Monday, Geraldo Rivera barked at his fellow FNC hosts for using the term “illegals” around him. On Wednesday, he amped up his attacks on conservatives when, on his WABC radio show, he accused Matt Drudge of “doing his best to stir up a civil war” because he was posting so many border crisis stories.
Rivera also attacked him on Twitter: “Shame on Drudge. His authoritative website has gone hysterical on issue of immigrant children. 14 stories like ‘Could Ebola sneak across?’”
Something really remarkable happened on Tuesday’s edition of The View. Three out of the four panelists actually came out strongly in favor of a woman’s right to protect herself and her children with a gun! The one panelist who didn’t want a gun in the house? ABC Good Morning America co-host Lara Spencer. The three who favored firearm ownership (Sherri Shepherd, Jenny McCarthy and FNC’s Juliet Huddy) all shared the real world threats that prompted them to go get a gun.
The segment began with The View airing a new ad from the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety but instead of sparking the expected rant against guns from the usually liberal View crew, something very different happened. (video after the jump)
Geraldo Rivera hates it whenever any one around him refers to people illegally crossing the border as “illegals.” On Monday’s edition of Outnumbered he challenged FNC’s Ainsley Earhardt when she dared to use that phrase in his presence. Rivera barked: “Every time you say ‘illegals,’ it’s like fingernails on a black board!”
Well Earhardt, along with a few of her co-panelists, fought back against Rivera’s insistence that the border-crossers were “law-abiding.” (video after the jump)
The saga of Lois Lerner’s missing emails took a bunch of twists and turns this past week, but you wouldn’t know that if you only got your news from the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks. On July 21, it was reported that even more IRS officials had their hard drives crash on them, including employees who “routinely corresponded” with Lerner. What a coincidence! On that same day it was revealed that a top IRS official was uncertain if backup tapes of Lerner’s lost emails still existed. The next day the story changed again when it was reported that Lerner’s hard drive was only “scratched” and the data was recoverable.
Then on July 23 the head of the IRS testified that the back up tapes had finally been discovered but stressed he does not “how they found them” or “whether there’s anything on them or not.” So how many of these intriguing nuggets were reported on any of the network evening or morning shows last week?
The women of The View are sick and tired of people using Bill Clinton’s mistresses to get in the way of Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. At the top of Tuesday’s show Whoopi Goldberg introduced the topic: “You know, there’s a new book called The First Family Details: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of Presidents. And it claims that Bill Clinton has a mistress that visits the house so often that when Hillary is out of town, they see her and they have nicknamed her The Energizer.”
Guest host and former CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin led the charge against the rumors as she huffed: “You know I’m so tired of hearing about Bill Clinton’s sort of extracurricular activities. Because the bottom line is this is to shame Hillary. Right?” Sherri Shepherd didn’t care either: “I always see former President William F. Clinton, he always seems to be so in love with his wife.” As for Jenny McCarthy and guest host and star of American Pie Jason Biggs? Well they had more salacious takes on the whole affair: (video after the jump)
PBS’s Charlie Rose opened his 62 minute-long interview with Hillary Clinton, aired in two parts on Thursday and Friday’s Charlie Rose show, by reciting a Maya Angelou poem dedicated to the former Secretary of State. Almost an hour later Rose finally asked Clinton about the Benghazi scandal.
In the second part of the interview, aired at the end of Friday’s show, Rose waited until his last question, with just a little over 3 minutes of interview time left, to finally bring up Benghazi. Even then Rose sheepishly tip-toed up to the topic as he told Clinton that if he didn’t ask the question he was worried “a thousand people will write me.” Sadly, neither Rose or Clinton could even bring themselves to actually mention the names of the four victims (Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, Glen Doherty) killed in the September 11, 2012 attacks. (video after the jump)
Government officials restricting reporter access to illegal immigrants at detention centers. Border patrol agents being infected with diseases “not seen in decades.” The general in charge of the U.S. Southern Command warning that terrorists and gang members could be hiding among the new influx of immigrants. These are just some of the startling new border crisis stories the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) have refused to tell their viewers about.
From June 8 through July 15 the networks have run a total of 133 border crisis stories on their evening and morning shows (CBS 54, NBC 53, ABC 26), yet not one of them has mentioned any of the following explosive reports from recent weeks:
A Quinnipiac poll that listed Barack Obama as the worst president since World War II had the ladies of ABC’s The View quite upset. On Monday’s show Jenny McCarthy defended Obama’s terrible ranking by asking “isn’t the sitting president always considered the worst president?” She then griped that Obama has had to deal with the “worst Congress ever.”
Sherri Shepherd spoke up for all the “happy” people on ObamaCare and guest-host Ana Ortiz played the race card as the Devious Maids actress complained: “It’s 1400 people and 73 percent of those people were white. I have never been asked a poll question ever.” (video after the jump)
At a time when some businesses like Starbucks, Chipotle and most recently Target have discouraged responsible citizens from bringing guns into their stores FNC's The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson, on Thursday, showcased one Colorado restaurant owner who unashamedly lets her patrons exercise their Second Amendment rights.
When substitute host Shannon Bream asked Lauren Boebert if there had been any "pushback" to her restaurant's open-carry policy, the co-owner of Shooters Grill responded that they've enjoyed "broad support." Boebert then expressed gratitude to her customers, the Second Amendment, and her religion. Apparently not worried about being called a “bitter clinger” Boebert proclaimed: (video after the jump)
While all three networks played clips of Barack Obama on Monday blaming the GOP for the border crisis, they have been reluctant to cite the President’s own failure to enforce immigration laws as a cause for thousands of immigrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexican border.
From June 8 through the morning of July 1 ABC, CBS and NBC have offered a total of 45 stories on the border crisis, on their evening and morning shows, and in only 5 (11 percent) have they brought up Obama immigration policies as a possible cause for the most recent surge of illegal immigrants, including unaccompanied children, crossing the border. (Video after the jump)
On Tuesday, Univision’s Jorge Ramos did something his colleagues at the Big Three networks have been reluctant to do. He pinned the blame for the ongoing border crisis squarely on Barack Obama’s immigration policies.
Writing in the June 24 edition of Miami’s El Nuevo Herald (translation courtesy of MRC Latino’s Ken Oliver-Mendez) Ramos blasted the President: (video after the jump)