On Saturday's Fox News Watch, as the group discussed the media's tepid attention to Vice President Joe Biden's "chains" gaffe, panel member and left-leaning FNC analyst Kirsten Powers asserted that "There is a glaring media standard, no question about it."
After noting that there was a similar double standard in Biden and Sarah Palin's treatment during the 2008 campaign, Powers complained:
On Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, regular panel member and liberal Washington Post columnist Colby King admitted that it "bothers" him that Vice President Joe Biden felt the need to "resort to colloquialisms to talk to African-Americans," referring to the Vice President's "chains" gaffe in Danville, Virginia.
After host Gordon Peterson asked, "How did the White House handle this one?" King responded:
On Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, regular panel member Evan Thomas dismissed media claims that Mitt Romney's recent trip abroad suffered from gaffes as the Politico correspondent asserted that the GOP presidential candidate spoke the truth about the Olympics in London and the social problems of the Palestinians.
A 30-minute conference call on Tuesday featuring four small business owners was intended to be a response to President Obama's comment that "If you got a business, you didn’t build that -- somebody else made that happen."
However, the press took advantage of the situation to demand an apology from former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who said he wished the President “would learn how to be an American,” and call for more financial records from GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
On today's edition of MSNBC Live, anchor Thomas Roberts talked with Michael Barbaro of the New York Times discussing the so-called Young Guns who are on the short list to be Mitt Romney's running mate: Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), Gov. Bobby Jindal (La.), and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.).
But when the MSNBC graphics team showed photos of the Young Guns, they accidentally used a photo of Rep. Ron Paul, the septuagenarian former Republican presidential candidate with strong libertarian convictions, in lieu of Paul Ryan. See our video below:
Straining to find a way to excuse President Obama's Friday remark that "the private sector is doing fine," on Monday's NBC Today, co-host Ann Curry did her best to spin for the White House: "He is right in saying that the private sector is doing better than the public sector, is he not? And so that was his point, that this comment was taken out of context." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Curry's attempt at Obama campaign damage control was prompted by left-wing guest and MSNBC host Chris Hayes arguing: "I would also say that the point he's making specifically about the difference between where the private sector's at and where the public sector's at is a really important one. We've lost 600,000 jobs in the public sector....Those layoffs did not have to happen if we had extended revenue sharing from the federal government."
As the campaign season moves forward, the American people will see more "desperation" by the liberal media and President Obama as the case for his reelection grows harder to justify. "They're not seeing gravitas and they're not seeing presidential statesmanship," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity during last night's "Media Mash" segment.
Bozell was reacting to MSNBC's Ed Schultz, who took to his May 29 radio program The Ed Schultz Show to despondently whine that should Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) survive the union-backed recall effort and should Mitt Romney get elected, there would never be a Democratic president elected in his lifetime again. [watch video below page break]
Earlier this week saw Mediaite's Tommy Christopher hilariously see "racism" in a Romney campaign banner and witnessed Christopher referring to himself in the third person throughout an article about ... himself. But perhaps the highlight is an unintentionally guffaw-inducing line in this story. In it, Christopher makes a big deal out of past Mitt Romney gaffes where he momentarily confused "Obama" with "Osama (bin Laden)" (but in which Romney had immediately corrected himself). The problem is, in the very same column, Christopher does just this himself. To make things worse, Christopher (or his editors at Mediaite), after a few hours, edited Christopher's "Romney-like" gaffe without noting the correction. But no matter -- we have a screen capture. Here's the original paragraph as it appeared:
The Telegraph (UK) notes that President Obama made an "uncharacteristic" gaffe the other day by calling the Falklands Islands -- known as the Malvinas in Argentina -- the "Maldives." And it did so by pointing out ... that George W. Bush was more prone to such blunders, "Barack Obama made an uncharacteristic error, more akin to those of his predecessor George W. Bush, by referring to the Falkland Islands as the Maldives."
While President George W. Bush certainly made his fair share of gaffes, one can certainly wonder if the former chief exec was indeed more apt to make such errors, or whether it was the media -- in this case the foreign press -- that highlighted them more often than it does those of our current president.
Eager to seize on an unfortunate Etch-A-Sketch analogy made by a Romney campaign advisor, on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Ann Curry used all her cleverness to come up with this one-liner: "...a very mixed day for GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney. He picked up a key endorsement on Wednesday, but it's a campaign gaffe from a top aid that Romney's having a hard time shaking."
In the report that followed, correspondent Peter Alexander declared: "Mitt Romney's critics have hounded him as a flip-flopper....[He's] on the defensive once again..." Alexander also joined in the mocking: "Who knew that classic toy could cause a presidential candidate so much trouble....If only those words could magically disappear."
Closing out an interview with Sen. John Hoeven (R) of North Dakota on today's Andrea Mitchell Reports, substitute host Chris Matthews thanked the former governor and said he "loved visiting your state this summer" and that he loves Mt. Rushmore, having "sat there for two hours and just looked up at it" during his trip to South Dakota over the summer.
Hoeven corrected Matthews, saying he was from North Dakota. Matthews retorted that he "liked South Dakota better anyway."
While NBC correspondent Peter Alexander noted on Tuesday's Today how "Republicans are jumping on the president's choice of words" in telling a woman her husband's long-term unemployment was "interesting" to him, neither ABC's Good Morning America nor CBS's This Morning bothered to highlight Obama's aloof flub.
The NBC report played the sound bite of the president's remark: "It is interesting to me – and I meant what I said, if you send me your husband's resume I'd be interested in finding out exactly what's happening right there – because the word we're getting is, is that somebody in that kind of high-tech field, that kind of engineer, should be able to find something right away."