A 7,000-word New York Times Magazine cover story by Eliza Griswold, "The Shadow of Death," is an all-too-rare look from a major media outlet at the decimation of Christianity in the place of its birth, the Middle East, at the hands of radical Islamist groups like ISIS. From the cover text: "Christians in the Middle East are being forced out of their homes, enslaved and killed. Why is no one coming to their aid?"
Israel/Palestine
By Tom Blumer | July 22, 2015 | 11:18 PM EDT
Earlier today, Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three morning network news shows on NBC, ABC, and CBS failed to cover President Barack Obama's denial that the Internal Revenue Service ever went after Tea Party and other conservative groups in his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Specifically Obama said that "it turned out no ... the truth of the matter is there was not some big conspiracy there ... the real scandal around the I.R.S. right now is that it has been so poorly funded."
Following the lead of the Associated Press, whose Josh Lederman completely ignored Obama load of IRS-related horse manure, the same crowd which spent years screaming about how "Bush Lied" about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — he didn't lie, period; even the left has to agree, thanks to the New York Times, that it's no longer arguable — has remained notoriously silent about Obama's claim.
By Curtis Houck | July 16, 2015 | 12:39 AM EDT
The major broadcast networks continued their defense on Wednesday night of the Iranian nuclear arms agreement and specifically President Obama’s press conference from hours before, ruling that the President was “on offense” in providing “a spirited defense” of the “history-making deal.” While all three network anchors interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it was CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley who hounded Netanyahu on the deal and encouraged him "to talk things over" with Iranian President Rouhani in Tel Aviv.
By Tom Blumer | July 15, 2015 | 1:20 PM EDT
In an extraordinarily and inappropriately indulgent interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif yesterday, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell rolled her eyes as she mentioned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's position that the "deal" between Iran and an alliance led by the U.S. is a "mistake of historic proportions."
Immediately after doing so, she refocused her attention on Zarif, smiled and batted her eyelashes as she finished her question. The video which immediately follows the jump was posted at Digitas Daily (HT PJ Tatler via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit):
By Mark Finkelstein | July 15, 2015 | 9:16 AM EDT
Zbigniew Brzezinki is the man who infamously advised President Obama to shoot down Israeli warplanes should they attempt to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. So when David Ignatius asked him on today's Morning Joe what he thought of Bibi Netanyahu's condemnation of the Iran deal, Zbigniew knew he was being teed up to unload on the Israeli PM.
By Zbigniew's vituperative standards, his response was in fact relatively measured. Still, the utter disdain with which he regards Netanyahu was evident, calling him "not a very serious person" who can entertain Congress but is not good for Israel.
By Tom Blumer | June 28, 2015 | 11:43 PM EDT
It would be nice if the establishment press, including the folks at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, had spent a bit less time this past week preparing for and celebrating the Supreme Court's sadly as-expected Obamacare and same-sex "marriage" rulings, and a bit more on giving readers, listeners and viewers genuine updates on the horrid state of U.S. "negotiations" with Iran.
The only open question is no longer how quickly the pace of the sellout by Secretary of State John Kerry and his team to everything the Iranians want will be. It's far worse than that. Now, thanks to a chilling writeup authored by the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, we have to ask why Barack Obama, Kerry and the rest of the "six powers" involved in the "negotiations" are so eager to help Iran build nuclear weapons.
By Spencer Raley | June 16, 2015 | 4:38 PM EDT
It’s well known that the mainstream media loves to vilify the State of Israel for their ongoing defensive struggle against terrorist groups residing in Gaza and the West Bank. This weekend they sunk to a new low when Yahoo! News ran a report from the Agence France-Presse with the headline “Israel army kills West Bank Palestinian.” The article then began with “Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian man Sunday by hitting him with their jeep.” Accompanying the report on this supposed atrocity was a picture of a young protester with a toy slingshot.
By Tom Blumer | June 10, 2015 | 10:58 PM EDT
Among the many tired, bogus complaints heard from the establishment press is the one about how careful they are compared to the reckless knaves in the blogosphere and New Media. You see, they only use reliable sources, while bloggers will believe anything anyone writes or posts on the Internet.
Well, I suspect there are very few people in the blogosphere dumb enough to rely on a Facebook comment and then, without any further research, treating it as established fact in a discussion with a sitting United States Senator and 2016 presidential candidate. But that's what WAMU's Diane Rehm did on Tuesday in her syndicated NPR broadcast (HT Washington Free Beacon via Hot Air):
By Tom Blumer | June 4, 2015 | 12:26 AM EDT
Foreign Affairs is "a multiplatform media organization with a print magazine, a website, a mobile site, various apps and social media feeds, an event business, and more." It is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an influential organization which has caught flak for decades, predominantly from the right, for undermining and misrepresenting U.S. interests.
One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize that CFR has significant influence on Washington politicians and the press. Thus, it's fair to say that contentions in a column in its flagship magazine by Bridget Moreng and Nathaniel Barr that recognizing the ISIS victory at Ramadi last month as significant is "dangerous," and that any kind of statement indicating that ISIS is on the rise feeds "directly into the group's narrative," are very disturbing (HT Patrick Poole at PJ Media):
By Kristine Marsh | May 28, 2015 | 8:55 AM EDT
Last night, the evening news found time to talk about an airliner ordering pizza for passengers during a flight delay, but spoke not a word on a new report by Amnesty International detailing war crimes by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. The damning report released early May 27 detailed Hamas’ use of torture, kidnapping and murder on ordinary civilians during last summer’s Gaza conflict with Israel.
The Washington Post and BBC News reported on it but not ABC, CBS, or NBC. But it’s not that surprising since the networks join the majority of the lefty media in taking issue with calling Hamas “terrorists.” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour even audaciously called Hamas, “activists.”
By Tom Blumer | May 18, 2015 | 10:49 AM EDT
The competition is fierce, but perhaps the most consistent area of outright and arguably deliberate U.S. and worldwide press distortion is found in their coverage of the Catholic Church and its pontiff.
Last week, the major international wires and several U.S. outlets once again demonstrated that readers, listeners and viewers can never trust that they will get an accurate story relating to these matters without also consulting other publications and online outlets. Numerous stories claimed that Pope Francis called Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) an "angel of peace." As Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media and Ellen Carmichael at National Review have noted, he did no such thing.
By Tom Johnson | May 13, 2015 | 10:38 AM EDT
A new Pew Research study found that between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of Americans self-identifying as Christian fell from 78.4 to 70.6. In a Tuesday post, Martin Longman speculated about causes for the dropoff, commenting that “the Republican Party’s embrace of a very conservative interpretation of Christianity” may be “undermining people’s faith.”
Longman added that it’s not solely the fault of the domestic religious right: “Islamic radicals…committing unspeakable atrocities in Allah’s name” and “Jewish radicals…standing in the way of [Israeli-Palestinian] peace negotiations” share the blame. “Most of the war and killing that is going on in the world today is generated by disputes between or within a small handful of very well-established traditional religions,” he remarked. “If the whole world woke up tomorrow with no memory of the New Testament, the Torah, or the Koran, it’s quite possible that peace would break out in ways that seem unthinkable today.”