In some areas of the country, Planned Parenthood has gone on the offensive against local and regional news outlets in an attempt to minimize the exposure of damning undercover videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress. They are telling these outlets that the videos "should not be aired."
This is an attempt at corporate censorship which the establishment press would treat as important news if almost any other business — for-profit or not-for-profit — made such an attempt.
In a speech at a Republican Lincoln Day dinner in West Virginia earlier this week, Murray Energy Corp. founder and CEO Robert Murray decried the Obama administration's determination to, as described at the financial news site SNL.com (to be clear, no relation to Saturday Night Live), "bypass the states and their utility commissions, the U.S. Congress and the Constitution in favor of putting the U.S. EPA in charge of the nation's electric grid."
In the establishment press, Murray's speech was only covered in a single snarky paragraph by Darren Goode at the Politico titled "Don't Hold Back Now" — obviously attempting to paint Murray as unreasonable and extreme — and a writeup at the Wheeling (WV) Intelligencer. After all, what does Murray know? He's only the head of the largest company in an industry which is still responsible for fueling 39 percent of America's electrical grid, and the majority of it in many states. Who would want to give him any visibility, as if he has anything valuable to say? Well, I do.
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):
Yeah, yeah. This post is about Hillary Clinton. The left and the press (but I repeat myself) insist that nobody cares about her scandalous behavior, or her evasiveness, or her demonstrated serial dishonesty. And even though a large and growing percentage of Americans don't trust her, that doesn't matter either, because she'll still get most of their votes. That's because no one wants to ever-ever-ever-ever see a non-Democrat take the White House again. So yeah, I know, we should just shut up already.
Well, if you're on the left and reading this, do us a favor and spare us any condescension you might include in the comments. People who remain in touch with reality will recognize that what follows is pretty darned important. Perhaps by some miracle someone in the establishment press with a conscience will too.
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.
On Friday, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters reported that "the Harrisburg, PA newspaper The Patriot News announced that both they and their online site PennLive.com 'will very strictly limit op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage.'"
As of three years ago, the newspaper claimed weekly circulation of 476,000. Its current hype to advertisers boasts of "500,000 unique visitors and 22 million page views each month." Faced with what quickly and obviously became a move with the potential to cause significant losses in readership, the paper abruptly reversed course Saturday morning.
In light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to make gay marriage legal nationwide, the Harrisburg, PA newspaper The Patriot News announced that both they and their online site PennLive.com “will very strictly limit op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage.”
A terse, five-paragraph June 14 Associated Press report on the results of San Antonio's mayoral election the previous day gave no indication of the party affiliation or political outlook of the winner or loser.
Readers could only determine that the winner, Ivy Taylor, became "the first African-American elected to the post," which of course had to mean that the handpicked candidate to succeed Julian Castro, who left to the post to become President Obama's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, had triumphed. But it didn't. The AP report gave no indication that the Democrats' handpicked Hispanic candidate had lost a race they thought they were on track to win six weeks earlier.
On Friday, the Washington Post's Jeff Guo hyped a study published in the American Journal of Public Health by four people with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study contends that "Connecticut’s handgun permit-to-purchase law (passed in 1994) was associated with a subsequent reduction in homicide rates" involving firearms.
Readers wondering if there is a connection to that Bloomberg, i.e., Michael, and his fierce anti-Second Amendment agenda need not wonder. There is. Two of the four authors are with the school's Center for Gun Policy and Research — very weak research which left the Post's Guo incomprehensively claiming that the state's "permit to purchase" law regulating private firearms transactions seems to have saved "a lot" of lives.
The results of a search on the name of former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick at the Associated Press's main national site are revealing — both for what is there and what isn't. It's an understatment to say that the wire service's priorities are warped.
What isn't there is any news about the results of a Boston Herald investigation which found that "Patrick’s administration secretly diverted nearly $27 million in public money to off-budget accounts that paid for a $1.35 million trade junket tab, bloated advertising contracts, and a deal with a federally subsidized tourism venture backed by U.S. Sen. Harry Reid." The AP determined that this news only deserved a brief and woefully inadequate local story.
Ruby Cramer, "a political reporter for BuzzFeed News ... based in New York," was on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton a couple of weeks ago in Hampton, New Hampshire.
Ms. Cramer was outraged at how "two actual everyday Americans" were "crushed" by the horde of reporters who attempted to ask Mrs. Clinton real questions. What Cramer reported the couple said during the course of the "press scrum" was more than a little suspicious. Gary and Lenore Patton may be very nice people, but the idea that they are "everyday Americans" trying to keep up with politics seemed absurd. They fooled Cramer, who in turn fooled longtime Clinton apparatchik Lanny Davis, who moaned about the press's "frenzy" in an awful column at the Hill I will address on Sunday.
This has to be the month's top entry in the "Just when you think you've seen it all" category — and it will be more than a little interesting to see how the nation's press handles it.
As the Associated Press reported a week ago, the City Council in Los Angeles, by a vote of 14-1, ordered the drafting of a law mandating a citywide minimum wage of $15 per hour by 2020, noting that "the support of Mayor Eric Garcetti virtually guarantee its eventual adoption." Now that it's almost a done deal, labor unions whose members earn less want to be exempt from the law. Seriously. And it's not that the unions were caught off guard, because the person who is most visibly arguing for the exemption "helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition"! Apparently caught completely flat-footed, three Los Angeles Times reporters, in a rare break from the paper's non-stop leftist bias, filed a fair and balanced report on the truly offensive situation.