Tim Graham
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National Review editor Rich Lowry has been granted space for a column in the liberal Politico newspaper/website, and he's not mincing words. On Wednesday, his headline was "The media's terrible trip."
"During his overseas trip, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, traveled to some of our closest allies accompanied by some of his most merciless enemies — the media. If you don’t know that Romney’s foreign jaunt was the worst diplomatic fiasco since the Zimmermann telegram or the XYZ Affair, you haven’t been reading his press clips," he wrote. Politico reminded readers that was its spin by advertising within Lowry's piece: "Also on POLITICO: Mitt needs veep to replace flop."
Yesterday’s “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” was huge across the country. MRCTV’s Dan Joseph and crew traveled to several Chick-fil-A locations around the DC area to interview some of the many Americans who came to support traditional marriage and freedom of speech.
“It’s a shame we can’t say what we think these days,” protested one woman. Another added, “We’re protesting, you know, the media and everybody trying to say it’s hate. I don’t hate anybody.” Joseph even found a huge line in Springfield, Virginia at 2 pm – hardly the lunch rush:
The media-news site JimRomenesko.com reports on Facebook comments by Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press reporter Mark Krzos, who summed up his disgust as he covered Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day: "Such a brave stand ... eating a g-ddamn sandwich." [UPDATE: Krzos has taken his Facebook page down.]
"I have never felt so alien in my own country as I did today while covering the restaurant’s supporters. The level of hatred, unfounded fear and misinformed people was astoundingly sad. I can’t even print some of the things people said," he claimed. Then he bashed talk radio:
For some reason, NBC anchor Brian Williams decided it was national news on Tuesday night that Rep. Steve LaTourette would retire, one of "the last GOP moderates remaining in Congress...he lamented the fact that compromise has now become a dirty word."
LaTourette, elected in the 1994 wave election, has a lifetime ACU score of 68, but in recent years, his "moderation" could also defined as an enthusasm for more taxes, especially for his cherished transportation projects. Not only did LaTourette attack the Tea Party freshmen as anti-tax-hike "knuckledraggers," he even attacked Obama Transporation Secretary Ray LaHood for failing to propose a gas-tax hike (which would violate Obama's campaign promise not to raise middle-class taxes).
On Monday morning, CNN interviewed 10-year-old Kameron Slade, who's the toast of New York liberals and The New York Times (pardon the redundancy) for wanting to give a speech in his class in favor of "marriage equality." School officials said the subject was inappropriate for ten-year-olds, but Slade's speech was videotaped and then went viral through...the liberal-Democrat blog Think Progress, which is becoming a regular source of "news" for CNN.
Christian students have been forbidden in some public schools to offer projects that profess Christianity or Christian themes, but that's not as attractive a controversy to CNN. Slade was invited to speak before the New York City Council, and The New York Times devoted a whole story to this activist PR event with no troublesome dissent whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, CNN anchor Carol Costello didn't offer a skeptical or discouraging word:
When NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross conducted an "I feel your pain" interview with radical-feminist Sister Pat Farrell on July 17, she promised a rebuttal from Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo. But Gross was much tougher in that interview on July 25. She laughably said "I don't mean to speak on their behalf here," but that's exactly what she did throughout the interview.
Gross said her "ultimate question" was why wouldn't the Catholic Church bend to changing times and liberalize on female priests, contraception, and homosexuality? "Churches change," so why won't the Catholics? Bishop Blair very calmly educated Gross that churches that have tried to obey Gross's dogmatism and follow "the spirit of the times" like the Episcopalians are having trouble retaining members:
The Bill Press radio show returned to mocking Ann Romney and her dressage horse on Friday. Dave Zirin, a sports writer for The Nation began with "Dressage, a word so many of us didn't even know before a few months ago." Bill Press replied, "And Thursday here poor Ann Romney is there with Rafalca...Doesn't get to dance until Thursday and Mitt Romney is not even going to be there."
Then came a rude joke about putting the horse on the roof of an airplane:
The website Ancestry.com is trying to build an appealing Obama tale...and promote business to its website, and The Washington Post and other pro-Obama media are biting like hungry fish. Washington Post reporter Krissah Thompson was thrilled: "President Obama’s extraordinary family story gained a new layer this week as a team of genealogists found evidence that he is most likely a descendant of one of the first documented African slaves in this country."
Underline "most likely." They didn't find actual proof. "The company says it can't establish a definitive link because of gaps in family history....The Ancestry.com findings make for a tantalizing tale that wasn't uncommon in early colonial Virginia, and the team probably got it right, [Elizabeth Shown] Mills said. 'They did the best job possible,' said Mills, who reviewed the findings at Ancestry.com's request." But tantalized pro-Obama media often skipped over the "didn't prove it" part:
Daniel Halper of The Weekly Standard reports that ABC campaign reporter Matthew Jaffe married Obama campaign deputy press secretary Katie Hogan in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin on Saturday. This would be the second ABC-Obama union, after OMB director Peter Orszag and ABC correspondent Bianna Golodgryga. These camps are very cozy.
ABC touts Jaffe has “traveled around the country covering the Republican primary, from the Iowa Straw Poll to the various debates to this year's primaries and caucuses” with an emphasis on the Latino vote, since he also reports for the Spanish-language channel Univision. The news from the wedding first broke in Politico:
On Monday morning, Washington Post gossips Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger hailed Michelle Obama the fashion plate with the headline "Fit For a Queen (Truly)." For a reception at Buckingham Palace for heads of state, Mrs. Obama wore a "very fancy" jacket priced at a "princely $6,800." Readers could exhale, the American now fits in.
The very same Washington Post greeted the GOP nominee's wife with a much different spin online, despite a lower price tag. The headline was “Ann Romney's $990 T-shirt is indicative of a tone-deaf campaign” and Suzi Parker began by asking “Does Ann Romney wear her $990 designer shirt while driving one of her two Cadillacs?” At least the Post alerted Washingtonians someone had critized Mrs. Obama for "not dressing up enough" in London:
"Someone should have told Mitt Romney that they still speak English in England," snarked Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza as he awarded Romney the "Worst Week In Washington" on Sunday for calmly laying out security concerns to NBC before the London Olympics -- concerns the networks themselves reported beforehand.
That matches the attitude that political reporter Philip Rucker brought to his Romney story's lede on Saturday: "Mitt Romney’s Friday was better than his Thursday. He did very little." Cillizza said Romney "seemed to be talking in a foreign language, politically speaking," and once again, the Post cited the "Mitt the Twit" headline:
MSNBC is your network for badly fractured Bible analogies. Jeff Poor of the Daily Caller revealed that on Friday morning, Roberts cracked up MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry by telling anyone for "marriage equality" who eats at Chick-fil-A on August 1 -- when the conservatives turn out in support -- is a "chicken-eating Judas."
So in the Roberts analogy, Jesus is Barney Frank, and the critics of homosexuality are the ones who hand him over to be crucified? Roberts slammed former Gov. Mike Huckabee for backing the chicken chain:
When CBS This Morning co-host interviewed the Obamas earlier this month, Matthew Balan revealed it was mostly personal goo and political softballs. So it was more than a bit shocking on Friday morning when Rose interviewed House majority leader Eric Cantor and whacked him with four questions hammering him about the "intolerance" of the Republican Party -- like the networks do every four years around the conventions.
Rose was playing off an interview Cantor gave to the website BuzzFeed in which he said "absolutely" the Republicans should do more to accept Republicans who differ from party orthodoxy. That could make conservatives queasy, but the media bias point is this: When are Democrats ever asked about their tolerance of Democrats who support traditional marriage, gun rights, or the pro-life cause? Here were the attack questions:
Jonah Goldberg has written a column advocating a swift execution for Aurora theatre killer James Holmes, which outraged “Tytalus” at the Daily Kos. His article is titled “Doughy Pantload vents his violent impulses.”
In classic Kosmonaut fashion, the advocacy of killing the mass murderer somehow morally merges Holmes and Goldberg into identical warts on society’s gluteus maximus:
South Carolina’s largest newspaper has a new anti-Republican scoop: “Gov. Nikki Haley’s 14-year-old daughter is working in the State House gift shop, raising questions about nepotism that the governor’s office declines to answer.” The daughter, Rena Haley, is working about 20 hours a week at $8 an hour.
The newspaper called The State (based in Columbia, the state capital) is holding an online poll asking "Is it proper or improper for a governor's child to have a state job?" Three-fourths of respondents said "improper." The paper marched over to the Democrats so they could denounce Haley’s lack of ethics:
CNN Worldwide president Jim Walton announced Friday he would be leaving at the end of the year, which came as no surprise since CNN's ratings fell 35 percent in the second quarter. What's surprising is that media reporters would pretend CNN can be "branded" as non-ideological, that it doesn't have that liberal-establishment media bias like ABC, CBS, and NBC.
NPR's David Folkenflik asserted in a brief report: "The cable landscape is dominated by opinion shows, but CNN's brand is based on the idea of news unadulterated by ideology at a time when viewers are rewarding the conservative-leaning shows on Fox News and the liberal tilting programs on MSNBC." AP's David Bauder let the CNN folks employ that spin:
Just like the networks, The Washington Post aggressively presented Mitt Romney's Olympics remarks as an embarrassment that ruined the "easy day" of his foreign trip.
Reporter Philip Rucker raised the bar high, suggesting Romney was no match for Candidate Obama: "For any candidate on a foreign trip, the margin for error is small, with every misstep magnified, fairly or not — especially so for Romney, whose visit is drawing inevitable comparisons to Barack Obama’s largely successful foreign tour as a candidate in 2008." Rucker also underlined hostile British media coverage:
James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal smells elitism in a blog post by John Cassidy at The New Yorker titled "Is America Crazy? Ten Reasons It Might Be." Cassidy thinks our gun-rights arguments carry an "inner madness."
But check out his cast of experts: "When Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Mayor Bloomberg, and Rupert Murdoch are all in favor of something -- in this case, tougher gun laws -- and there's still no chance of it being enacted, you can rest assured that forces other than reason and partisan politics are involved." What?
Disgraced ex-CBS News anchor Dan Rather may have applied a flamethrower to his own reputation with the fake-documents smear of George W. Bush in 2004, but he's still a Famous Person (or Infamous Person if you care about Bush or careful journalism).
NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates offered a puffy profile of Bravo executive and talk-show host Andy Cohen, who's plugging a book, on Thursday's Morning Edition. The former CBS This Morning producer was thrilled that he landed Rather as a guest on his Watch What Happens Live late-night talk show. Well, he worked for Rather at 48 Hours, so maybe he's just throwing an old boss a bone:
Actor Chad Everett, best known for his role as Dr. Joe Gannon on the CBS drama Medical Center in the 1970s, died of lung cancer at age 75. Oddly, obituary writers in both the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post dragged out an old incident from 1972, when Everett -- identified in both newspaper articles as a "conservative Republican" -- upset feminist Lily Tomlin on the Dick Cavett Show as he mocked his wife, the actress Shelby Grant.
Everett and Grant married in 1966 and stayed married until she died last year. This is how Matt Schudel revisited it in the Post: