In the annual competition between leftist media outlets for the screwiest (or most Scrooge-like) criticism of Christmas traditions, a Huffingon Post item published Thursday morning by Michael McLaughlin (HT Breitbart) was a formidable entry.
After the HuffPo reporter's headline noted that "U.S. Christmas Lights Burn More Energy Than Some Nations In A Year," he suggested that "maybe we should unplug our decorations."
Amidst their ongoing coverage Wednesday night of the terror attacks in Paris, the major broadcast networks failed to report on news that five Syrians had been arrested in the Central American country of Honduras with stolen Greek passports and intended to travel to the U.S.
Japan, once a feared world economic powerhouse already at "two decades of little or no real economic growth," just reported that its economy contracted during the second quarter at an annual rate of 1.6 percent.
The common thread throughout the two-decade slump has been the alleged need for ever-increasing levels of Keynesian "stimulus." Apparently refusing to believe there are any other viable alternatives to what hasn't worked for 20 years, the world's press is expecting — and creating pressure for — even more "stimulus."
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.
During a pair of interviews with people from Vox.com -- which is described as a "general interest news site for the 21st Century" -- president Barack Obama on Monday described the roles of news sources in a variety of unflattering ways.
In the first discussion, editor-in-chief Ezra Klein asked Obama to respond to the fact that “you are the most polarizing president really since we began polling.”
At roughly 8 a.m. Eastern Time Tuesday morning, the wire service AFP (Agence France-Presse) had a story entitled "Fighting nears Baghdad as UN warns crisis 'life-threatening.'" AFP reported that "Militants pushed a weeklong offensive that has overrun swathes of Iraq to within 60 kilometres (37 miles) of Baghdad Tuesday." A Skynet video found at Gateway Pundit tells us that "ISIS Terrorists Surround Baghdad From Three Sides."
Meanwhile, as of 12:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday only one of the three Iraq-related stores (here, here and here) at the Associated Press refers — and even then only in a very late paragraph — to how ISIS (or ISIL, using AP's preferred acronym) "overran Mosul then stormed toward Baghdad."
Did you ever notice how the liberal media can obsess for days over a Koran-burning stunt, but ignore feminist groups that have a serious hatred problem with the Catholic Church? Via Chicks on the Right, we learned that the bratty anti-Catholic leftists of FEMEN have pulled their latest stunt. A woman with the message “I AM GOD” painted on her body jumped up on the altar and screamed in the middle of a Mass on Christmas at Cologne Cathedral, the home of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cologne and one of the tallest cathedrals in the world.
In their own statement, FEMEN boasted “Josephine foiled Christmas mass in the main cathedral.” As if a woman throwing a momentary screaming fit and getting dragged out somehow expels Christmas from a church. (Video below)
On October 3, the National Retail Federation projected that "sales in the months of November and December" will "marginally increase 3.9 percent to $602.1 billion, over 2012’s actual 3.5 percent holiday season sales growth." But on October 16, it warned that "the average holiday shopper will spend $737.95 on gifts, décor, greeting cards and more, two percent less than the $752.24 they actually spent last year."
Anne D'Innocenzio at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, in a report on the upcoming Christmas shopping season, chose to report the NRF's overall November-December increase, and ignored the obviously more relevant and more recent individual spending expectations. She also held off mentioning the elephant in the room — sharply reduced spending by Obamacare "sticker shock" victims and those who anticipate more of the same during 2014 — until the 19th of her 21 paragraphs (bolds are mine):
It must be nice to be a political leader preferred by news agencies because you can count on them to pull unflattering photos. Such was the case with both Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Reuters when they pulled a bizarre photo of French President Francois Hollade in which he appears to have a clueless smiling clown expression on his face. The UK Guardian describes the controversy:
Two international news agencies are at the centre of a row over self-censorship after withdrawing an unflattering photograph of the French president, François Hollande. Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Reuters were subjected to criticism and widespread ridicule on the internet and social media sites after deciding to pull the picture.
Today, as the wire service AFP reported in a story carried at Yahoo.com, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in the question and answer exchange after his prepared testimony, told the House Financial Services Committee that "If we were to tighten (monetary) policy, the economy would tank."
That assessment of the economy's fragility qualifies as news, especially given the Obama administration's continued claim that the economy is "continuing to recover at a promising rate." Outlets besides AFP virtually ignored Bernanke's soundbite, which should be considered scary to anyone who realizes that Big Ben can't go on "stimulating" at his current rate forever.
An unbylined Agence France-Presse report Wednesday opens by telling readers that Japanese researchers "have succeeded in growing human kidney tissue from stem cells for the first time, in a potential first step towards helping millions who depend on dialysis." Another version of the report at another website identifies the reporter as Harumi Ozawa; an accompanying picture caption describes the achievement as a "potential breakthrough."
I perused Ozawa's dispatch to see what kind of stem cells were involved, and in the process came across a confirmation of what those of us who have been following these matters for several years have suspected for some time, namely that the supposed scientific justification for harvesting stem cells from human embryos -- supposedly because there is no other path towards combating many diseases and maladies -- no longer exists. The paragraph containing that confirmation, as well as an odd and likely nonscientific term Ozawa used in the previous paragraph, are in bold in the excerpt following the jump:
It's hard to find a benchmark against which to compare remarks delivered by Vice President Joe Biden, but here's one from a past administration. In June 2004, Bush 43 Vice President Dick Cheney was greeted on the Senate Floor at the annual Senate photo op by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. Leahy had previously been flogging the left's phantasm over alleged "profiteering" by Halliburton, the company at which Cheney had served as Chairman and CEO from 1995-2000. At the end of a testy exchange, Cheney either said "(F-word) you" or "(F-word) yourself."
The Washington Post (go to the third of 22 pages at the link), the New York Times, and the Associated Press covered the story. A Taipei Times dispatch claiming to a blend of Times and AFP reporting actually contains the F-word. A Google News Archive search surfaces at least a dozen establishment press stories and commentaries which are still out there. However, I found almost no mainstream press stories covering what the father of slain Benghazi-defending hero Tyrone Woods claims that Biden said to him when the casket containing his son's remains returned to America (bold was in original):