When Lyndon Johnson lost CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite during the Vietnam War, or so the legend goes, he knew his days in the White House were numbered.
If President Obama hears what previously stalwart liberal ally Ed Schultz said on his radio show yesterday, he may feel a similar chill down his spine. (Audio after page break)
Liberals endlessly harp on what they perceive as conservatives' greed. What really sticks in their craw is conservatives' generosity.
An example of this occurred on Ed Schultz's radio show Monday with guest Robert Greenwald, a filmmaker specializing in left-wing agitprop at an outfit he modestly calls Brave New Films.
Greenwald was describing a website he recently created, Koch Brothers Exposed, about energy magnates David and Charles Koch. The site includes a video of protesters outside a Lincoln Center theater named after David Koch when he pledged $100 million for badly-needed renovations three years ago. The demonstrators staged a "renaming ceremony" demanding the theater shed Koch from its name.
<p><a href="http://www.mrc.org/splash/TellTheTruth.htm" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.mrc.org/splash/images/TellTheTruthHeader.jpg" width="632" align="top" height="79" /></a></p><p>What do leftist documentary maker Robert Greenwald, Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson, and Daily Beast contributor Max Blumenthal have in common? </p><p>They all peddled malicious, false quotes attributed to Rush Limbaugh and are unrepentant about furthering false information regarding the talk show host.</p><p>NewsBusters parent company the Media Research Center has <a href="http://www.mrc.org/splash/TellTheTruth.htm" target="_blank">a new Web site complete</a> with video and/or screenshots of these and others in the media furthering the phony quotes.</p>
During the 10am hour of "MSNBC News Live" on Monday, host Tamron Hall completely skipped the ideology of a left-wing documentarian as she talked with him about his new movie "Rethink Afghanistan," which claims that "troops are not the answer" in that country. Hall never identified Director Robert Greenwald, who has made documentaries such as "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," and "WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price," as a liberal. Instead, she simply described him as a "documentary filmmaker."
Additionally, Hall offered almost no tough questions, instead tossing softballs such as "What is your observation, having been [to Afghanistan] recently, regarding the Obama administration's plans?" Uninterrupted, Greenwald was allowed to later assert, "Well, again, remember that many people there believe that troops are not the answer. Troops contribute to the problem." He also instructed that the U.S. should send 17,000 teachers instead of soldiers. At the close of the interview, he complained, "But, I think we all get trapped in, as one of my friends in Afghanistan said, 'Shoot first. Think later.'"
In contrast, on January 9, when MSNBC host David Shuster interviewed John Ziegler about his movie on the media's treatment of Sarah Palin, the anchor got into a heated argument with the filmmaker, repeatedly challenging the "conservative documentary's" thesis and deriding, "John, you and Sarah Palin can't take any responsibility for the fact that she wasn't prepared to run for vice president."
The front page of Sunday's New York Times featured the paper's latest defense of Barack Obama against alleged Internet smears -- reporter Jim Rutenberg's "Political Freelancers Use Web to Join the Attack."Rutenberg went to Culver City, Calif. to profile leftist filmmaker Robert Greenwald and his cottage industry of anti-McCain films. While Rutenberg chided two conservative filmmakers for making dubious claims in their anti-Obama videos, Rutenberg found nothing misleading or objectionable in Greenwald's films, or anywhere else on the left end of the Internet.Check this contrast:
The change has added to the frenetic pace of the campaign this year. "It's politics at the speed of Internet," said Dan Carol, a strategist for Mr. Obama who was one of the young bulls on Bill Clinton's vaunted rapid response team in 1992. "There's just a lot of people who at a very low cost can do this stuff and don't need a memo from HQ."
That would seem to apply to people like Robert Anderson, a professor at Elon University in North Carolina whose modest YouTube site that features videos flattering to Mr. Obama and unflattering to Mr. McCain, or Paul Villarreal, who from his apartment in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, has produced a harsh series of spots that attack Mr. Obama and make some claims that have been widely debunked.
Fox News is using its mighty power to bully the mainstream media into promoting yet another war, left-wing activist/filmmaker Robert Greenwald and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are warning. Claiming that "Fox wants war with Iran," Greenwald is urging other news networks -- ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN -- "not to follow Fox down the road to war again."
Again?
Greenwald and Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.) are touting a new viral ad campaign for the filmmaker's anti-Fox video "exposing" what Fox News supposedly is doing. According to Greenwald, Fox News engaged in "daily fear-mongering" in the days leading up to the war with Iraq, serving as a media cheerleader for the U.S.-led war.
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