ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel took time out of his opening monologue on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live to grumble over the news that Pope Francis secretly met with Kentucky clerk Kim Davis last week during his visit to the U.S. and quip that it would have been better if he met with Kim Kardashian or murderous North Korea dictator Kim Jong-un instead.
On the Friday morning network newscasts, CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today showed no interest in picking up on an ABC News report that former President Bill Clinton sought approval from his wife’s State Department for speeches that involved African dictators and North Korea with the speaking fee for the former engagement worth $650,000.
The “Big Three” (ABC, CBS, and NBC) networks have hailed the “historic” deal with Iran which was a described as a “major victory” for President Obama. The media, however, have a poor record when it comes to U.S. negotiations with rogue nations seeking nuclear weapons. In 1994, President Bill Clinton agreed to a deal with North Korea, an agreement which the networks at the time hailed as a sign that “the Cold War is really over.”
At the top of Tuesday’s Kelly File on the Fox News Channel, host Megyn Kelly tore into President Obama and his remarks at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day where “America's commander in chief celebrate[d] the absence of a major war, while his own top security advisers warn the American people directly that the danger right now is greater than at any time in a half century.”
New York Times veteran foreign reporter John Burns has retired after 40 years with the paper, closing a career of covering hotspots like Afghanistan, China, and Iraq, where Saddam Hussein threatened his life for his brave reporting from Baghdad for the Times and CBS News. A friend gave him the title to this essay of recollections of some of the worst places on Earth: "It's not how far you’ve traveled, it’s what you’ve brought back." What Burns brought back "was an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises," from the Communist dictatorships of China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, a revulsion some of his fellow reporters have never learned.
Things got chippy on Morning Joe today after Amy Holmes of The Blaze pointed out that President Obama has personalized and publicized his conflict with Benjamin Netanyahu in a way he hasn't done even with despots like Kim Jong Un or the Castro brothers.
When Holmes added that "only Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be the focal point of this president's ire," former Obama spokesman Gibbs called Holmes' statement "the silliest thing I've probably heard in a long time."
Conservative columnist George Will appeared on Fox News Sunday to discuss the Sony hacking scandal and the fate of liberalism in America. Speaking during a panel discussion, Will argued that Sony’s decision to pull the Interview was “self-censorship” and “there are two great citadels of American liberalism unchallenged in America, Hollywood and college campuses.”
William Boot at The Daily Beast reported that before all the hacking and bomb threats, Sony CEO Michael Leynton showed a rough cut of their movie “The Interview” to U.S. officials before completing it. The State Department apparently agreed that the movie could help put an end to Kim Jong Un's reign over North Korea.
Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations: Alex Wagner has made the case that Barack Obama is no kind of emperor or dictator . . . compared to Kim Jong Un, the brutal ruler of perhaps the world's worst regime, North Korea.
Wagner was riffing off the news that Kim has banned North Korean parents from naming their children Jong Un and ordered those already bearing the name to change it. After describing other elements of Kim's cult of personality, Wagner concluded: "to all the detractors who compare our American president to an emperor and a dictator, this is what a dictatorship actually looks like. And to the 169 babies born between 2007 and 2011 named Barack: you can keep your name."
On Tuesday, all three broadcast network evening newscasts devoted full reports to President Obama honoring 24 members of the military – only three still living – with the Medal of Honor. CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley trumpeted how the President "righted a historic wrong. He presented the nation's highest military award to 24 Americans, after a review determined that they had been passed over because they were Hispanic or African-American or Jewish." [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
However, during the fifth year of former President George W. Bush's presidency, the Big Three channels furiously covered the allegations against several U.S. Marines, who were accused of killing civilians in Iraq in November 2005. Between May 17 and June 7, 2006 – a three week period – ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted three and a half hours of air time to the accusations of misconduct. These same networks aired only 52 minutes of reporting on 20 military heroes from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq during a five-year period between September 2001 and June 2006.
As of Monday evening, ABC, CBS, and NBC's morning and evening newscasts have yet to cover North Korea's firing of 25 short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan on Sunday. NBCNews.com did post an unsigned article from Reuters on Sunday about how the "missiles flew for 45 miles before splashing into the sea," and ABC News' website went with AP's write-up on the development, but neither outlet devoted any air time to the story.
By contrast, CNN's New Day on Monday devoted a 20-second news brief to the Obama administration's reaction to this latest instance of North Korean sabre-rattling: [video below the jump]
Is there anything MSNBC hosts won't compare conservatives to?
Consider Chris Matthews who began Friday's Hardball likening conservatives such as Glenn Beck, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Mark Levin, and Rand Paul - who have the nerve to oppose the budget compromise just passed in the House - to North Korean despot Kim Jong Un killing his uncle (video follows with transcript and commentary):