CNN did a poll on the Iran deal from September 4 to 8. On Sunday morning, CNN pollster Jennifer Agiesta (formerly of The Washington Post) reported the results – another poll showing deep skepticism about Iran, and the prospect that Iran will cheat on any nuclear deal. Obama has a bad disapproval rating on Iran.
Will any of this come up from the CNN moderators in Wednesday night’s debate? Or will they ignore it?
The Hill newspaper relayed that London-born actress Emily Blunt says she had second thoughts about becoming an American citizen last month after watching the first Republican presidential debate.
“I became an American citizen recently, and that night, we watched the debate and I thought, ‘this was a terrible mistake. What have I done?' ” Blunt quipped in a video made by The Hollywood Reporter.
On Friday's edition of Washington Week on PBS, Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus expressed dismay that Hillary Clinton was having ongoing political problems over the e-mail scandal. How could this political tumble happen, given that she "is an accomplished politician” and “has the smartest campaign staff in America” and “one of the smartest pollsters in America"?
Check the video for sincerity. It seems like McManus is dead-serious and puzzled here, not attempting to mock Team Clinton’s stonewalling and lying, even after PBS host Gwen Ifill played a set of clips illustrating Hillary’s changing spins on the scandal:
In the run-up to the papal visit to America, The Washington Post keeps pushing stories against allegedly heartless Catholic positions on the life issues. On Monday’s front page, they promoted this story: “A Catholic hospital in Michigan cited religious reasons for refusing to perform a tubal ligation requested by a woman with a brain tumor.” (Emphasis theirs.)
The headline on page A-3 was “Mich. hospital faces ACLU suit: Pregnant woman with brain tumor was denied sterilization surgery.” Post “social change” reporter Sandhya Somashekhar promoted the ACLU’s staunch opposition to Catholic hospitals having anti-feminist hangups about abortion and sterilization.
Gay activists can be a bit petty when someone doesn't completely endorse their agenda -- especially within the LGBT lobby. Take Bruce "Caitlyn" Jenner, whose slowness to endorse gay marriage annoyed Ellen "I Have No Agenda" DeGeneres on her show. On The Meredith Vieira Show on Wednesday, former N'Sync singer and gay activist Lance Bass mocked the transgender reality-TV star for trying to say he was a "traditionalist" as he sat in full makeup and a blouse and a skirt.
The Washington Post loves pushing those stuffy conservative church folk around in the Sunday paper. The entire top half of the Sunday Outlook section carried a condom package with wings and the headline “Why the church needs condoms: A more honest position on contraception would help reestablish the Vatican’s moral authority.”
That’s according to former New York Times religion reporter (and liberal Catholic writer) Peter Steinfels. Like every secular liberal, Steinfels thinks the contraception ban is not only “dishonest,” but even “offensive,” starting with Obamacare.
The Washington Post published a special section on the NFL, complete with the usual predictions of how the teams would finish in the standings. They even polished it up by illustrating the teams with comic-book-style art.
But the Post is so averse to offending the most sensitive Indian activist that it refused to illustrate not only the Washington Redskins, but the Kansas City Chiefs with an Indian image.
Liberal journalists and pundits were losing control over the Murdoch family buying another prestigious media property, this time the National Geographic brand. "A climate change denier with now even more power and influence over science grants in the United States." Murdoch says he's a skeptic, not a "denier."
Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple and his website handlers tried this clickbait headline on Friday: “We nominate Rachel Maddow for CEO, Republican presidential debates.”
Why? Wemple is impressed that Maddow is now trashing CNN like she trashed Fox for how they selected the tiers of Republican debaters, specifically CNN now adding in Carly Fiorina (and Chris Christie) for an eleven-candidate debate. The feminist doesn’t like the woman added?
MSNBC passionately kept pushing the line on Thursday that moving to defund Planned Parenthood would be a debacle for Republicans On Andrea Mitchell Live, Mitchell toed that line not once, but twice. Krystal Ball touched that line on Live with Thomas Roberts, and then Rachel Maddow brought the same argument into prime time.
Roger Cohen is a columnist for the international edition of The New York Times, and he wrote an eye-opening column for Friday headlined “Obama’s Syrian Nightmare.” American readers can find it online, but will its harsh verdict on Obama’s Syria policy make an impact on the overall media tendency to paint Obama’s legacy in happy rainbow colors?
“Syria will be the biggest blot on the Obama presidency, a debacle of staggering proportions,” Cohen began.
On Wednesday night’s All In, MSNBC host Chris Hayes attacked the House hearing into Planned Parenthood with the strangest attack you can imagine from the Lean Forward Network: Hayes complained it wasn’t fair and balanced. As if MSNBC is fair and balanced?
He cited an article by ex-Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff at Vox that Planned Parenthood wasn’t given the “opportunity” to speak. Does anyone believe the Democrats wouldn’t invite the abortion giant if they wanted to testify?
Actress Meryl Streep whined at the Telluride (Colorado) Film Festival that almost no one in Congress replied to her urging that they revisit passing the “Equal Rights Amendment,” that old feminist proposal from the 1970s.
"I sent them each a book called Equal Means Equal by Jessica Neuwirth. It's about the revival of the attempt to get an ERA that would codify in law that you can't discriminate against women," she said. "I got five answers."
Illegal aliens coming into America are almost always treated as sympathetic hard workers longing to “come out of the shadows.” There is no cynicism about their arrival.
But on September 4, AP reporter Kirsten Gieshaber reported from Berlin that Middle Eastern refugees arriving in Germany might be cynically faking conversion from Islam to Christianity to plead for asylum now that they’re likely to persecuted back in their home countries.
“There will be new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious,” New York Times Hillary-beat veteran Amy Chozick reports. James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal quipped: “So Mrs. Clinton’s team is embarking on a campaign of effortful spontaneity and carefully choreographed unscriptedness.”
The press-release headline was "Hillary Clinton to Show More Humor and Heart, Aides Say." Taranto noticed the Times keeps repeating itself. Mrs. Clinton “desperately wants to present an everywoman’s approachability,” Chozick wrote back in April.
The double standard our media impose on child sexual abuse is garishly obvious. On August 14, The Washington Post set the stage for the coming American visit of Pope Francis with another splashy front-page story on a man still berating the Catholic Church after being abused by a priest from 1969 to 1976.
But on August 21, after a court sentenced former Baltimore Ravens cheerleader Molly Shattuck, 48, for sexually abusing a 15-year old boy merely a year ago, the Post ignored it completely. Apparently there was no room. That boy’s family had no media advocate there.
In the Los Angeles Times, Dexter Thomas warmly recalled hip-hop artist Kanye West dropping a rhetorical bomb on President George W. Bush ten years ago in a supposedly unifying fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina victims on NBC. It was headlined “When Kanye West told George Bush that Black Lives Matter.”
"I hate the way they portray us in the media,” West said, quavering. “If you see a black family, it says they’re looting. If you see a white family, it says they’re searching for food.” The paranoia grew. He declared “Those are my people down there … they’ve given [the military] permission to go down and shoot us.” Then he said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
The Washington Post is celebrating the gender-blurring agenda again. Friday’s positive transgender freakout came on the front of the Style section, simply titled “BARF BABES.” Music writer Chris Richards profiled Barf Troop, an “outsider ‘gender-fluid’ hop-hop group that formed on Tumblr” and its leader, “Babeo Baggins.”
Richards oozed that their music can be "exponentially affirming" when people like it.
Emily Smith of the New York Post’s Page Six reports that MSNBC scaled back its coverage of the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina because Brian Williams “misremembered” that he saw a dead body float past his hotel while he was there.
Since MSNBC ended up with Williams as a breaking news anchor with no assigned program as a fall-back after his wild exaggerations cost him his Nightly News anchor job, decided not to send any key anchors to New Orleans, enabling them to avoid awkward references to the Williams scandal
After eight videos exposing Planned Parenthood from the pro-lifers at the Center for Medical Progress, NPR’s Diane Rehm Show devoted an hour Thursday morning to.....”New Tactics In the Anti-Abortion Movement.” Not the tactics of Planned Parenthood, those aren’t going to be the subject.
The guest panel was stacked with two “objective” journalists both questioning these tactics, along with Terry O’Neill of NOW and Carol Tobias of the National Right to Life Committee. Then the show is further tilted by....the callers. Diane Rehm’s producers couldn’t find one pro-life caller in the entire hour.
