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It might seem like another day in Tea Party Land when a conservative columnist accuses the Obama White House “airbrushing history” like the “Stalin era” Soviet Union. But the columnist isn’t a conservative. It’s Dana Milbank of the liberal Washington Post, complaining about what’s happened to White House news photographers.
He’s not alone. A New York Times photographer has publicly compared Team Obama to the Soviets’ Tass news agency. What is going on?
As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, President Obama has chosen to sit down with one of his biggest fans in the news media Thursday.
At the beginning of Tuesday’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews promoted the event hysterically saying, “We're going to be hitting my biggest questions with the President” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
The Marxist German playwright Bertolt Brecht, apropos of a 1953 situation in which the East German people allegedly had "forfeited the confidence of the government," wondered if it wouldn't be easier "in that case for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?"
Daily Kos featured writer Hunter isn't that extreme. He doesn't think America needs a whole new group of people -- just a "new conservative movement."
On Monday's PoliticsNation on MSNBC, host Al Sharpton and the Washington Post's Dana Milbank mocked the Republican National Committee for the wording of a tweet that the group sent out marking the anniversary of Civil Rights Movement icon Rosa Parks defying racist Jim Crow laws: "Today we remember Rosa Parks' bold stand and her role in ending racism."
Sharpton picked up on liberal entities interpreting the tweet to be suggesting that racism has already ended, and, without even noting that the RNC sent out a second tweet a few hours later to placate critics by changing the wording, Sharpton pounced as he teased the segment:
As my colleague Jeff Meyer noted earlier this afternoon, msnbc.com has been busy today boosting HealthCare.gov, insisting that the "bug" which made the website nearly inoperable in October and November was now fixed and everything was working just fine.
Well now the landing page for the Lean Forward network is hailing HealthCare.gov as the "website [which] might just save your life." The teaser headline links to msnbc.com staffer Aliyah Frumin's gauzy treatment of President Obama's latest speech plugging his troubled health care overhaul (emphasis mine; see screen capture below page break):
Anyone doubting Roger Ailes' eye for talent needs to go somewhere else besides his shuffling of Fox News's weekday evening lineup, especially but not exclusively his decision to move Megyn Kelly into the 9 p.m. time slot.
Variety's Brian Steinberg reports that Kelly has put even more distance between Fox and its so-called competitors at CNN, MSNBC, and HLN, while Greta Van Susteren and Sean Hannity have both grown their respective time slots (HT Johnny Dollar's Place; bolds are mine):
Talk about burying the lede. Deep within a 5,000-word story published today in the New York Times about the Obamacare website launch is the very damaging disclosure that the much-vaunted “tech surge” promised by the president in late October was mostly just a publicity stunt. In truth, the number of people brought in to work on the project was no more than “about a half-dozen.”
Not only that, despite the Obama Administration’s claims that it met its November 30 deadline to have things fully operational, it turns out that much of the software code that operates away from website users and passes their information along to insurance companies has not even been written.
Monday's CBS Evening News and Tuesday's CBS This Morning both underlined the continuing problems with HealthCare.gov, even after the Obama administration claimed "it met its deadline to make HealthCare.gov work smoothly for the vast majority of shoppers". Meanwhile, the network's competitors at NBC hyped the supposed positive news about the ObamaCare website.
Wyatt Andrews noted how the White House "says that 375,000 people tried to shop on HealthCare.gov," but soon touted how "that high a number created some problems". The following morning, Major Garrett reported that "the challenges are not over" for the online health insurance clearinghouse [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
MSNBC weekend anchor Alex Witt once again showed that she is a big fan of ObamaCare on Sunday’s edition of her eponymous program. Witt’s guest, Dafna Linzer of msnbc.com, had just criticized one of Rep. Mike Rogers’ (R-Mich.) comments on that morning’s Meet the Press, in which Rogers was critical of ObamaCare.
Witt recalled another problem with the rollout that Rogers talked about in that interview:
The folks at MSNBC are doing whatever they can to promote ObamaCare.
On Tuesday’s Martin Bashir show, MSNBC contributor and Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson actually said, “There will be millions of men who will rise to the occasion” and be grateful when they can now get Viagra (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Obama sycophant and Hardball host Chris Matthews just landed what MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell called a “big get” interview this Thursday with the president. So naturally he took to the air on Tuesday's Andrea Mitchell Reports to gush about the chief executive who's been known to send tingles up his leg.
Matthews compared President Obama to a “brilliant writer…with a great theme” who “turns in a paper with a lot of misspellings or bad handwriting.” [One wonders if this is in anyway autobiographical, with Matthews thinking of his misadventures in book writing.] [See video after jump. MP3 audio here.]
Leading off a report on Monday's NBC Today, White House correspondent Peter Alexander skeptically observed: "The Obama administration says it met it's own goal of significantly improving the HealthCare.gov website, but that's the easy part. That's like kind of giving yourself a passing grade." At the end of segment, he noted insurance companies warning of the "logistical nightmare" caused by inaccurate information being entered into the ObamaCare database. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Despite such critical analysis of the health care law in the nearly 2-minute report, by Nightly News that evening, anchor Brian Williams reduced the news to a mere 28 seconds, emphasizing only the positive: "We have an update now on the HealthCare.gov website. It is now working better and faster, as the White House promised it would by now. But they say they know it is still far from perfect. By 5:30 this evening Eastern Time, the website had logged 750,000 visitors so far today. That's getting closer to that 800,000 daily user goal the rebooted site is supposed to be able to handle."
The folks at MSNBC.com seem to be dutifully following their on-air counterparts in providing cover for the failed rollout of the HealthCare.gov website, even as sister network CNBC is reporting ongoing problems with the site.
In a December 2 online piece, Sarah Muller, Senior Digital Producer for The Last Word w/ Lawrence O’Donnell, wrote a gushing pro-ObamaCare piece exulting that “Major Obamacare website bug [was] killed.”
MSNBC has announced that Chris Matthews, Barack Obama's most excitable fan, will be interviewing the President on Thursday's Hardball. Fawning over the liberal politician is incredibly common among journalists, but Matthews has taken it to a whole new level. According to the network host, Obama is a "perfect," "cool," brilliant figure who is comparable to Jesus, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
The verbose Matthews has no filter when it comes to the Democrat, even once bizarrely blurting out that an Obama speech made him "forget" that the commander in chief "was black." To prepare you for the likely love-fest MSNBC viewers will see on Thursday, here are the top ten most servile, sycophantic quotes from Matthews:
AP knows how to change the subject from the Obamacare fiasco. AP reporter Darlene Superville has decided now is the ideal time to focus on “5 New Things About President Obama.” They’re five personal stories about his activities.
Superville began: “The man who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is more than just another celebrity, or the famous face behind the government's troubled health care website. Here are five new things about President Barack Obama:”