The latest media double-standard was on display Wednesday night as ABC’s World News Tonight ran a full report dubbed “an ABC News investigation” into news that former President George W. Bush charged a speaking fee to appear before a veterans charity while having neglecting to have done a similar report digging into the millions made in speaking fees by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
George Bush
By Curtis Houck | December 8, 2014 | 11:09 PM EST
On Monday night, ABC News continued to report on the impending release of a report on the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation methods as though partisanship had no role when, in fact, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are the very reason it was compiled and will be released.
Following a morning in which ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today made no mention of the political reasoning, ABC kept the streak going on World News Tonight with David Muir with another report from ABC News chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz.
By Matt Vespa | August 7, 2013 | 1:37 PM EDT
George W. Bush should’ve waited to have a heart attack, hints Daily Beast contributor Kent Sepkowitz, in a story exploiting the 43rd president's emergency procedure yesterday to insert a stent in his coronary artery.
After a few paragraphs replete with medical jargon, Sepkowitz argued that Bush probably should’ve waited a while before having the procedure, and held out the quick treatment for the blockage as a prime example of how our health care system in America is "broken." Providing prompt preventative heart care for a 67-year-old man is evidence of a "broken" system?! Only a depraved anti-Bush liberal could use a possibly life threatening health condition as a commentary on health care politics – and sequestration, and that's precisely where Sepkowitz ran with his screed:
By Matt Vespa | January 14, 2013 | 5:04 PM EST
Leave it to a Washington Post book reviewer to find a way to blame George W. Bush for the Irish Potato Famine. Okay, Peter Behrens didn't do exactly that, but he used the occasion of reviewing two books about the mass starvation of millions of Irish in the 1840s as an opportunity to bash the Bush administration over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Oh, I almost forgot, the bogeyman of the "free market" also finds itself in Behren's sights.
In his January 13 Washington Post item, Behrens reviewed two new books on the subject, The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy and The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People, by Tim Pat Coogan and John Kelly respectively. Behrens favorably accepted Coogan's conclusion that “it was British reluctance to interfere with the supposed workings of the free-market economy that allowed famine to continue in Ireland at a time when the country was producing and exporting tons of food to England.”
By Lauren Thompson | June 14, 2012 | 11:01 AM EDT
We hardly needed more proof of the cesspool that is original programming on the pay cable networks. But just in case: “Game of Thrones” producers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have willingly admitted to using a gruesome image of former president George W. Bush’s head impaled on a stake during the HBO drama’s season one finale, “Fire and Blood.”
Bush’s decapitated likeness appeared as one in a row of traitors’ heads on spikes (implication much?) in King’s Landing. When King Joffrey forced his child bride-to-be Sansa to gaze upon her father’s bloody, severed head the camera panned out and revealed a beheaded Bush covered in dirt and draped in long, matted hair.
By Tim Graham | June 13, 2012 | 8:00 AM EDT
“Viewers of TV Land will not be able to watch insult comic Don Rickles compare President Barack Obama to a janitor at the recent American Film Institute tribute to Shirley MacLaine,” The Hollywood Reporter revealed. “I shouldn’t make fun of the blacks...President Obama is a personal friend of mine,” said Rickles. “He was over to the house yesterday, but the mop broke.”
"He is not being censored," a Rickles agent told the paper. "Before all of this started, we knew Don's spot would be cut a bit for time, as would others, including possibly Shirley herself since the show ran over and we knew it was likely that might be edited.”
By Aubrey Vaughan | July 14, 2011 | 3:53 PM EDT
It's no secret that most campaigns are heavily funded by big checks from lobbyists, PACs, and rich donors, but President Obama's campaign team is turning away from that assertion, instead showcasing the claim that it is 98-percent-funded by grassroots support. Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager, said "we did this from the bottom up," pushing the idea that the $86 million fundraising figure released on Wednesday was fueled almost entirely by grassroots organizers.
While 98 percent of the checks may have come from grassroots donors, it doesn't mean that 98 percent of the money did. Many media outlets are taking the bait and are ignoring the two percent of donors whose contributions may turn out to be a far greater portion of Obama's campaign funds than Messina is making them out to be.
For comparison, eight years ago when then-President George W. Bush was ramping up for his re-election campaign, the media magnified a small fraction of extremely wealthy donors to be the image of his campaign.
By Aubrey Vaughan | July 7, 2011 | 4:20 PM EDT
Hailed for his engagement with the online world and being cutting edge for hosting a Twitter town hall, President Barack Obama made quite the gaffe at his town hall yesterday, calling the internet, "internets," the same mistake for which former President George W. Bush was widely mocked following a 2004 presidential debate.
The flub, which Obama quickly corrected, came while he was discussing the importance of bringing the internet to classrooms, but the president has received little media flack for his slip-up.
By Aubrey Vaughan | June 29, 2011 | 6:06 PM EDT
Having friends in Washington is one of the quickest and dirtiest paths to success, but when President Barack Obama is the one helping you out by discriminately favoring your company's products over others, very few in the media seem to care.
Flashback to the early 2000s during former President George Bush's first term. The mainstream media pounced on former Vice President Dick Cheney's association with Halliburton, an oil company for which Cheney once served as CEO. The Bush administration supposedly favored Halliburton by rewarding the company with a number of multi-million dollar oil contracts in the Middle East, purportedly only using a bidding process to make the game look fairer.
Today it's a different fuel and a different president, but Obama has an almost identical story: favoring the clean-technology companies of his financial supporters through rewards of federal money. This time around, though, the media is giving his shady dealings a free pass.
By Rusty Weiss | April 5, 2011 | 12:43 AM EDT
A news article written by a reporter at AFP and reproduced at such news sites as Google, Yahoo, NPR, the Dallas Morning News, and others, might qualify as an example of what happens when one allows opinion to seep into reporting. Despite a mission statement involving claims that AFP coverage is balanced, accurate, and includes the other side of the story, this piece makes no secret of where the reporter’s bias lies.
The article features such gems as:
- A strong yet hyperbolic opening statement – “President Barack Obama, once a fresh faced prophet of hope…”
- A picture of the presidential seal with the caption ‘The presidential seal of Barack Obama’
- Comedy – “Obama will … brandish a record as a genuine reformer…”
- Labeling of the President’s opposition – “…a Republican Party dragged right of the crucial political center ground by the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement” – with no labeling of his own liberal policies or base.
Most interesting was the inclusion of this possible 2012 campaign slogan: “Though many of America's problems predated his presidency…”
Blame. Bush.
Here is a short list of American problems since Obama took office:
By Rusty Weiss | December 27, 2010 | 12:51 AM EST
A man is arrested and detained for months without any charges being brought against him. He is being held in deplorable conditions, forced to endure extreme physical and mental distress. He is exposed to the same ‘torture’ tactics that other enemies of the United States have allegedly suffered through.
So why isn’t the Commander-in-Chief taking heat for this travesty of justice?
Because this isn’t the Bush administration.
Firedoglake blogger, David House, has been detailing a recent visit with Bradley Manning, accused of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, at a military prison at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia (h/t Weasel Zippers). Of course, House bemoaned the ‘inhumane’ treatment of Manning, describing the toll that months of solitary confinement have taken on his physical and mental well-being.
AFP ran with the story and made it clear that they had no intention of offering a balanced report. In fact, viewing the headline, one would never know that the story came from an extremely liberal website, reading more as fact than a slanted accusation.
By Rusty Weiss | December 17, 2010 | 4:25 PM EST
For all of the bluster and glory, for all of the pomp and circumstance and yes, for all of the anticipated hope and the promised change, the whirlwind of hype and expectation surrounding the President a mere two years earlier has virtually dissolved, and Barack Obama has set a course that will leave his legacy as no more than a footnote in American Presidential history.