Two ABC News stars have proven, once again, the media’s obsession with raising taxes over any effort to cut a cent of spending. Two days after the election, anchor Diane Sawyer repeatedly pushed House Speaker John Boehner to move away from a conservative position and agree to President Obama’s wish to hike income tax rates, but on Sunday’s This Week, Martha Raddatz refused to press House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about getting Democrats to shift from their position and accede to any reduced spending.
Instead, she quizzed Pelosi about getting Republicans to accept a tax hike and how to get around such intransigence: “Have you seen any indication that the Republicans are open to raising rates?”
Martha Raddatz
By Brent Baker | November 18, 2012 | 7:20 PM EST
Will Schools Brazile on Mandates: Almost Every House Republican Won By Much Bigger Margin Than Obama
By Noel Sheppard | November 18, 2012 | 12:55 PM EST For approaching two weeks, liberal media members have been contorting themselves to make the case the President's victory on Election Day represented a mandate for his agenda.
When CNN contributor Donna Brazile tried this on ABC's This Week Sunday, George Will marvelously responded, "Almost every member of John Boehner's caucus won his or her seat by a much bigger margin than Mr. Obama won his renewed term" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
By Scott Whitlock | November 7, 2012 | 3:51 PM EST
Now that the 2012 presidential election is over and Barack Obama has been safely reelected, the journalists at ABC's Good Morning America woke up to the fact that the President has "refused" to provide details the terrorist attack in Libya and that the administration "didn't want to talk about it." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]
Fill-in host Elizabeth Vargas blithely announced, "In the meantime, the Libya issue has been overhanging this election. Allegations of a, quote, massive cover-up, by Senator John McCain about this administration's, really, refusal to really put to rest this issue before voting day." Martha Raddatz, who moderated the vice presidential debate, agreed, saying, "They didn't want to talk about it. Everybody tried to pin them down on that. They did not want to talk about it." "Everybody" tried to pin them down on Libya?
ABC's Post-Debate Liberal Slant: Raddatz Hypes How Obama 'Humanized' Issues; Weir Complains About Climate Change
By Matthew Balan | October 23, 2012 | 1:19 AM EDT
Martha Raddatz boosted President Obama on ABC after the final presidential debate on Monday evening, just as she did during the earlier vice presidential debate that she moderated. Raddatz asserted that Obama "humanized what he was talking about. He talked a lot about the troops; he talked about the survivors from 9/11; he talked about the people in Israel. So if, in fact, he was going towards the female vote, he probably got their attention with that sort of approach." [audio available here; video below the jump]
ABC's post-debate coverage also spotlighted a Tweet from Nightline's Bill Weir, who channeled something that Al Gore had whined about just minutes earlier on Twitter: "Four #debates come and go without a single question on climate change."
By Jack Coleman | October 15, 2012 | 8:11 PM EDT
Smoking-gun evidence that ABC's Martha Raddatz was a biased moderator in the vice presidential debate -- Rachel Maddow is gushing about her.
On her MSNBC show Friday night, Maddow went so far as to suggest that Raddatz was worthy of the presidency (video after page break) --
By Noel Sheppard | October 14, 2012 | 11:27 AM EDT
NBC’s Saturday Night Live began its program last night with a vulgarity that although bleeped was as obvious as the nose on Jimmy Durante’s face.
In the opening segment spoofing Thursday’s vice presidential debate, Kate McKinnon playing ABC’s Martha Raddatz channeled Samuel L. Jackson in the movie "Pulp Fiction" telling the contestants, “Don’t try to f—k me like I’m Jim Lehrer” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
By Noel Sheppard | October 13, 2012 | 3:03 PM EDT
Jay Leno spent nearly three minutes of his opening monologue Friday trashing Vice President Joe Biden for his performance during Thursday's debate.
Although the Tonight Show host did poke some fun at Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin, the bulk of his jokes targeted Biden including him saying it was "really smart" of moderator Martha Raddatz "to cut Joe off after that third scotch and soda" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
By Tim Graham | October 13, 2012 | 2:07 PM EDT
No one was more over the top in praising ABC's Martha Raddatz as debate moderator than her colleagues at ABC. Former ABC News president David Westin -- the man so deeply biased to the left that he declared a journalist can't judge if the Pentagon is a legitimate target for a terrorist attack -- honored Raddatz on The Huffington Post with an article titled "Why and How Martha Won the Debate -- Over Media Bias."
He said the public reaction was "overwhelmingly favorable," and then guess who he quoted? "I vote for Martha Raddatz to moderate all the debates," from Roger Ebert. "Everyone seems to agree that @martharaddatz is the star of this debate," from Charlie Rose. Liberal opinion equals public opinion?
By Tim Graham | October 12, 2012 | 1:49 PM EDT
Daniel Halper of The Weekly Standard reported that White House records show ABC’s Martha Raddatz “visited the VPR (or, the vice president's residence) for a "Women's History Month Reception." That record was released on June 29, 2012.
The White House Blog relayed that “The Bidens hosted their first Women’s History Month reception to celebrate the history, accomplishments, and contributions of women across the spectrum of American life, including academia and science, business and labor, philanthropy and advocacy, athletics and the arts, as well as the military and government. So Raddatz was honored?" A press release from the University of Delaware reports other TV-news women attended, too:
By Brent Bozell | October 12, 2012 | 12:04 PM EDT
Martha Raddatz’s friends in the media are swooning over her performance in last night’s Vice Presidential debate. And certainly she deserves a good deal of credit for taking Joe Biden to task for the Obama administration’s failures in Benghazi. She asked the hard, pointed questions that the administration has managed to dodge for weeks. Her conduct during the opening segment was refreshing and professional.
But over the course of the 90-minute debate the wheels came off, especially when she shifted to domestic economic policy. Any moderator whose weighted questions favor liberals over conservatives by a 19-12 margin is biased.
By Rich Noyes | October 12, 2012 | 11:21 AM EDT
Reviewing the questions posed at Thursday night's vice presidential debate, ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz clearly favored Team Obama. Out of 48 discrete questions and follow-ups, a plurality (19, or 40%) incorporated a pro-Obama/Biden or anti-Romney/Ryan agenda, vs. 25% (12 questions) that skewed in the other direction and 35% (17 questions) that were neutral or purely information-seeking.
Raddatz showed almost no bias in her foreign policy questions, which split down the middle: eight pro-Romney vs. seven pro-Obama (not counting the neutrals). But on domestic issues, especially on the budget and taxes, she practically joined Joe Biden in pounding on Paul Ryan, with a dozen questions that incorporated liberal campaign themes, compared to just four based on a conservative premises, a stark three-to-one liberal tilt.
Stephanopoulos Initially Hedges on Biden-Ryan Clash, But Later Claims Biden 'Stops Erosion Among Democrats'
By Matthew Balan | October 12, 2012 | 2:27 AM EDT
Former Clinton administration flack and current ABC personality George Stephanopoulos slanted towards Joe Biden after Thursday night's vice presidential debate between the incumbent and challenger Paul Ryan. However, unlike his definitive pro-Democratic track record with debates, he initially wouldn't give a clear answer as to who won the match-up.
Stephanopoulos trumpeted how "Joe Biden came in and gave the game that a lot of Democrats wanted from Barack Obama last week, but did not get", and later claimed, "over the course of the debate, more of issues fell in Biden's corner. He was able to take control of more of the debate." When Diane Sawyer asked whether there was a "clear winner", he replied, "I'm saying exactly what I said, Diane," and acknowledged that "Ryan held his own – did not make any big mistakes; humanized himself, when he had to humanize himself."