In covering President Obama’s refusal to refer to terrorism as Islamic extremism, CBS and NBC devoted portions of their reports on Thursday night to comments Rudy Giuliani made the day before with NBC reserving a majority of their airtime to attacking the former New York City Mayor for having “set off a war of words” and taking presidential criticism “to another level.” Andrea Mitchell declared he set off “a firestorm” over telling an audience that “I do not believe that the President loves America” and suggested that Giuliani went too far.
ISIS
By Curtis Houck | February 19, 2015 | 3:30 AM EST
While his fellow network news colleagues all but ignored any criticism of President Obama’s speech on Wednesday afternoon and his avoidance of using the term Islamic extremism, NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel ripped the current U.S. strategy for defeating ISIS during NBC Nightly News. “ISIS is spreading like a virus and months of U.S.-led air strikes don't seem to be containing it,” declared Engel at the onset of his report.
By Mark Finkelstein | February 18, 2015 | 9:23 AM EST
Latest dispatch from President Obama's Department of Terrible Deeds in the Name of Christ . . . Morning Joe invited the State Department spox Marie Harf on today to give her a chance to clarify what she said to Chris Matthews about the US being unable to "kill our way" out of the ISIS problem and the need to focus on the "root causes" of terrorism.
After brushing off the suggestion by General Michael Hayden that she'd like a "mulligan" on those remarks, Harf attempted to distract from the focus on Islamic terrorism. Discussing this week's White House summit on "extremism," Harf cited the Lord's Resistance Army led by Ugandan Joseph Kony. Huffed Harf: "I don't remember people talking about that as much anymore, but that's a Christian militant group."
By Ken Shepherd | February 17, 2015 | 9:18 PM EST
Appearing on the February 17 edition of All In with Chris Hayes, liberal radio talk show host Bob Kincaid essentially argued that the CSX freight-rail company was a graver threat to Americans than ISIS. Kincaid was on the program to discuss an oil-train derailment and fire in West Virginia.
For his part, Hayes did not attempt to reel Kincaid in from such an outlandish statement.
By Ken Shepherd | February 17, 2015 | 12:32 PM EST
The president and his acolytes in the Democratic Party and the liberal media love to rehash the trite, politically correct nonsense that ISIS is fundamentally un-Islamic because its horrendous actions are beyond the pale of what the vast majority of peaceful Muslims worldwide would ever countenance. But in a piece for the March edition of The Atlantic, hardly a right-wing publication, Graeme Wood delves deeply into the theology undergirding ISIS to prove that it's a thoroughly orthodox, hyper-puritanical brand of Islam finding much in accord with the life and teachings of Muhammad.
By Mark Finkelstein | February 17, 2015 | 7:23 AM EST
Mike Barnicle: proud member of the Barack Obama "terrible deeds in the name of Christ" school of moral blindness . . .
Joe Scarborough opened today's Morning Joe with a protracted and impassioned plea for America—and in particular President Obama—to call out radical Islam by name. Mika Brzezinski was dubious, citing unspecified "difficult times" in the past when presidents used the wrong language. But taking Mika's misgivings a giant step further, Mike Barnicle flatly declared that we can't call radical Islam by name because "we're the Crusaders."
By Curtis Houck | February 16, 2015 | 10:41 PM EST
While reporting on the aftermath of the weekend terrorist attacks in Copenhagen, ABC and CBS neglected to mention in their Monday evening reports that the man believed to have carried out the attack that killed two had pledged his allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, just prior to the first attack at a free speech event. Even though ABC’s Terry Moran referred to the attack as a “terror spree” and “terror” on World News Tonight with David Muir, he failed to go any further and mention Islamic extremism or that it was an Islamic terror attack.
By Mark Finkelstein | February 16, 2015 | 9:13 PM EST
If once is an MSNBC aberration, is twice is a trend? Earlier today we reported on Ed Schultz getting surprisingly angry over the Obama administration's weakness in confronting ISIS, calling the situation a "religious war."
Just two hours later, Chris Matthews sounded a similar alarm, saying "if I were ISIS I wouldn't be afraid . . . the American people are getting humiliated . . . it sounds like we can't stop it." Have we reached a watershed moment among normally dutiful MSM supporters of President Obama?
By Matthew Balan | February 16, 2015 | 4:56 PM EST
On Friday's NBC Nightly News, Richard Engel zeroed in on an ISIS atrocity that hasn't gotten enough media attention – its sexual enslavement of women from Iraqi minority groups, especially the Yazidis. Engel interviewed two Yazidi women who escaped from their Islamist captors, and spotlighted that "ISIS is reviving the barbaric tradition of the slave trade." He later bluntly added, "There's a word we don't use a lot in the news media, but it fits here. This is evil. It was absolute evil by design."
By Mark Finkelstein | February 16, 2015 | 8:01 AM EST
Joe Scarborough says he doesn't want to be "torn to shreds online" for analogizing the threat of radical Christianity to that of radical Islam. Simple solution: stop analogizing the threat of radical Christianity to that of radical Islam.
On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough twice suggested such parallels, analogizing radical Islamists to "ultrafundamentalist Christians who believe every single word of the Bible has to be interpreted in the exact ways which could also lead to some violence." A bit later, Scarborough circled back, saying "it doesn't matter what faith you're in," that a literal reading of scripture attracts the outcasts of society, for better or "for much worse."
Vox Writer: Obama’s 'High Horse' Remark Angered Those Who ‘Cling…Desperately to Their Anti-Muslim Bigotry’
By Tom Johnson | February 10, 2015 | 11:35 AM EST Max Fisher writes that Obama’s comment was “so banal it could be an after-school special. That it has provoked national controversy goes to show that there is still a mainstream thread of thought in America that Islam is an inherently violent religion, that the world's 1.6 billion Muslims are somehow different, and that non-Muslims are superior human beings.”
Network Blackout of Obama Bashing Christianity Continued Friday; NBC Spends 20 Minutes on ‘50 Shades of Grey’
By Curtis Houck | February 6, 2015 | 4:20 PM EST Following zero coverage on Thursday evening of President Obama drawing a moral equivalency between ISIS and Christians, the networks continued their blackout into a second straight news cycle with no mention of it on any of their Friday morning newscasts. The evening broadcasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC combined to exclude any mention that the President told attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast that acts of terrorism carried out by Islamic extremists are similar to Christianity being the grounds for the Crusades, slavery, and Jim Crow.