From Accuracy in Media’s Lynn Woolley and Cliff Kincaid:

When the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure made a decision to sever its ties with America’s number one seller of abortions, Planned Parenthood, the media went to war. The media coverage was slanted in such a way that “mainstream” reporters like Andrea Mitchell and Lisa Myers of NBC News were openly advocating for a point of view—pressuring Komen to reverse course and give in to Planned Parenthood.

Why would the media go to war over something as seemingly insignificant as a policy change regarding funding at Komen, a private cancer charity? Part of the answer lies in the fact that, for the media, “women’s rights” take precedence over all other rights, including the rights of children. This is what “feminism” has become and this is what the Komen controversy was supposed to be about. In reality, it had nothing to do with breast cancer because the fact is that most Planned Parenthood affiliates don’t even provide mammograms. That money from Komen was used to refer women at risk of contracting the disease somewhere else.

So the issue was something else as well. While there were references to Planned Parenthood being an “abortion provider,” there was no explanation of what this “service” actually “provides”—a procedure that destroys a human life. This is why the annual March for Life against abortion is mostly ignored by the major media. It is a sad fact that even some conservative women still think that Planned Parenthood is simply an organization that provides information about voluntary family planning.

You saw very little in the mainstream media from pro-life people who supported Komen’s initial decision. The bias is so pronounced that the media long ago adopted the language of the Left. The term “pro-life” is never used. But “pro-choice” is. Newspapers use the term “abortion rights” to describe the political process of terminating the lives of the unborn, but use “anti-abortion” when referring to those of us who value human life. We are “against.” They are for “rights.”

So we made it a point to tune into the Big Three network newscasts on Friday night—hours after Nancy Brinker of Komen had caved. We wanted to see if this story would be treated in a neutral manner, or if the stories would be written from the standpoint that Brinker did the right thing—and, why did it take her so long? We did receive a shock, though it was a mild one. One of the three networks actually did a fairly nice job.

(more…)

You would think that a media “analyst,” like Politico’s Dylan Byers, would be one of America’s primary defenders of free speech, especially political speech. But rather than defend political speech and satire, Byers is nothing more than a left-wing book burner, a politically correct speech-enforcer who wants certain speech chilled and specific individuals silenced. His blacklisting attempts might be disguised as passive-aggressive concern and requests for comment from employers, but when the outcome desired is obvious — to get people fired and/or reprimanded for something they’ve said — it’s still blacklisting.

Lately, Byers has been on a rampage to get two conservative CNN contributors in hot water, our own Dana Loesch and Red State’s Erick Ericson. Today Byers joined forces with GLAAD — an organization notorious for its bullying, speech policing, and un-American use of “re-education” camps – to target CNN’s Roland Martin:

Roland Martin has now become the third CNN political analyst to cause controversy this year.

Last month, Dana Loesch celebrated U.S. Marines who had urinated on Taliban corpses, announcing, “I’d drop trou and do it too.”

Last week, Erick Erickson celebrated the tasing of an Occupy D.C. protester, saying, “Watching a hippie protester get tased just makes my day.”

Now, the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is calling for Martin’s removal from the network for a comment he made on Twitter about H&M’s Super Bowl ad featuring a near-naked David Beckham: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”

In Dylan Byers’ world, the obvious political humor Loesch and Erickson used to make a point, and a silly joke tweeted by Martin, is a “CNN political contributor problem.”

(more…)

Right off the bat C-SPAN should have aired this hearing. There is absolutely no excuse not to air it on TV. Since I had to stream it online I kept my TV on DirecTV News Mix to keep an eye on the news. The only network that had consistent coverage of the testimony was FOX News. I’m not shocked at all. I didn’t see anything about the testimony on the other channels. Jeff Poor from The Daily Caller helped me keep an eye on MSNBC and he didn’t see anything. He said they were hung up on Donald Trump all day. I was informed by a friend on Twitter, Doug Mataconis, that the hearing was discussed on The Situation Room on CNN for about 15 minutes. “Special Report” and The FOX Report both started off with Mr. Holder’s testimony.

Before I continue I noticed some friends on Twitter growing upset that headlines were partisan. The MSM was right: This was a partisan fight and every single Democrat coddled Mr. Holder. The Republicans were the only ones to demand withheld documents and answers from Mr. Holder.

Right after the testimony ended I began searching for coverage of the hearing on Google. First stop was Associated Press. Remember: If the AP doesn’t write anything on Fast & Furious more than likely the rest of the media won’t mention it. Pete Yost did write about the testimony, but hat’s where the excitement ends. Again, he distorts information to favor Mr. Holder and the Department of Justice. Mr. Yost fails to mention the subpoena was issued October 12, 2011. That’s 4 months ago. That is plenty of time to go through the hoops to release the documents. Mr. Yost says, “Though neither side said so, negotiations are almost certain to be the next step.” If you watched the testimony do you honestly think Mr. Issa or Mr. Holder will negotiate? Didn’t think so. Mr. Issa won’t accept anything less than the documents he needs. Then Mr. Yost describes a few dialogues, but doesn’t bother to get down to nitty gritty of the testimony.

(more…)

The firestorm over Komen For The Cure’s recent announcement that they would be cutting funding to Planned Parenthood was remarkably furious, so much so that it has degenerated into an obtuse PR mess for Komen. As I noted yesterday at the end of my piece defending Komen from the bitter Leftists at NPR, the situation was looking shaky and there was concern Komen would cave to the vitriolic attack from the Left (self-described vanguards of “free choice”, ironically).

Much of the wagon-circling against Komen was fomented by the Leftist media machine and their Hollywood sycophants, and leading the charge was Andrea Mitchell of Mitchell Reports:

&widget_type_cid=svp” width=”1196″ height=”580″ frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ scrolling=”no” allowtransparency=”true”>

This is truly activist journalism at its worst. Mitchell has no intention to inform with this piece, but to advance her Leftist agenda against the Komen Foundation’s decision. She claims to be decrying the politicization of the issue, yet she aired the segment on her own show, which she herself describes as as a “political” program.

NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent  Andrea Mitchell hosts an all political hour from 1 p.m. EST to 2 p.m. EST, Monday — Friday on msnbc. The show features in-depth interviews with high-profile figures and constant news updates.

The hypocrisy by Left and their media cohort concerning this issue has been stunning. They claim to only be interested in the advancement of women’s healthcare, yet their true agenda has been exposed as a mafia-like hit job to pound Komen into submission; protecting Planned Parenthood and their sacred sacrament of abortion. It does not get any more political than that.

(more…)

Politico’s Jonathan Martin didn’t only malign residents of Florida’s Panhandle on MSNBC when he invoked the phrase “Cracker Counties” to refer to the region, he went on to equate the region with all of the Deep South, also mentioning Georgia and Alabama by name. We can also assume it would cover many of the military men and women residing in Florida’s Panhandle.

Jonathan Martin, right

Politico’s Jonathan Martin isn’t a big fan of everyday people, especially those who don’t vote for Obama. If you want to understand who this man really is, you need only click here. To protect then-candidate Barack Obama and get the heat off of him after making his infamous and revealing ”spread the wealth” comment, Martin needed to change the narrative quick, so he investigated and published dirt on a PRIVATE CITIZEN. What followed was a narrative-changing (to benefit Obama) MSM attack against a guy who was minding his own business when Obama approached him.

“Cracker” has a long pejorative history, much of it linked to slavery, as in he who “cracks” the whip, while other uses of the word always refer to the more lowly born.

Frederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from Connecticut, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and wrote that “some crackers owned a good many Negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated.”

Martin may just as well have slandered the people of the region by referring to them as “White Trash.” That is, in effect, how the word can be interpreted today. One can only imagine the outrage had a less than liberal outlet and journalist maligned an entire race or class, as Martin did. There’s also this from a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth. (more…)

***UPDATE: Some are arguing “cracker” is acceptable within the context of Florida. Newsbusters, who also caught the slur, sums it up perfectly:

Jonathan Martin is also the left-wing operative who led the campaign to bring down Herman Cain over 15 year-old allegations. This partisan campaign was so frenzied and over-the-top and outrageous that even left-wing media watchdogs said so.

And now we get another glimpse into what motivates Mr. Martin, as he launches a racial slur against Southerners on a national cable channel:

—–

Wikipedia sums it up perfectly:

Cracker, sometimes white cracker, is a pejorative term for white people.

You’ll also note that MSNBC host Chuck Todd says nothing in response to Martin’s racial slur. In fact, Todd doesn’t blink an eye.

Moreover, keep in mind that these are the same MSM leftists who have and will continue to attempt to define every effective attack against Barack Obama as “racist” or as some sort of “racial dog-whistle.” This includes FACTS, such as the record increase in the number of food stamp recipients under Obama’s failed recovery.

(more…)

Via The Huffington Post:

On Saturday Al Sharpton actually asked: “Are we dealing with someone who’s just racially insensitive or someone who’s cynical, who would use race to play and blacks as backboards to score a shot?”

Is the mainstream media trying to help Newt Gingrich win? Do they really think a fight on air between Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton would do anything but make Gingrich more powerful? Or are they that cynical that they want to drive ratings on the back of Gingrich’s surge?

But Gingrich can’t easily be tarred with the racist brush because he has a long history of supporting blacks as individuals against government largesse.

Here’s what he told ABC in 2008:

There are a lot of good cases to be made that the African- American community has been hurt more by the failures of government than any other community. Look at New Orleans, where the African- American community was devastated by the failure of the federal, state and local governments in Katrina.

Gingrich repeatedly supported outreach efforts toward blacks as Speaker of the House, especially J.C. Watts, who helped oust a younger John Boehner from a leadership position in the party. Gingrich even selected Watts to deliver the rebuttal to Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speech in 1997. Watts is now returning the favor, having endorsed Newt Gingrich in his presidential bid. (more…)

General Electric owns 49% of NBC. General Electric’s Chairman and CEO is Jeffrey Immelt.  Jeffrey Immelt is a big-time Obama supporter, and if you’ve watched any one of NBC’s three news networks (or their entertainment endeavors), you know that NBC is the biggest billionaire-led, multinational corporation-owned Super PAC ever created, and it’s all in to get Barack Obama reelected.

It is within this context that you must look at everything NBC does in order to make sense of their behavior.

What Brian Williams did last night, with his fascist demand that the debate audience shut the hell up, was to ensure nothing exciting came out of the debate and — what do you know? — nothing did. Williams is obviously aware of the fact that the more excitement and attention stirs around the GOP, the more infectious that excitement might become, and that is not good for the news media’s Precious One — who will need the MSM in prime fighting form if he’s going to win a second term and, you know, ruin America.

Newt Gingrich, like many politicians (including Obama), feeds off  his audience, and over the course of this primary it has been the roar of audience approval that has made Gingrich’s counter-attacks against Obama’s Media Palace Guards so compelling. Clips of these counter-attacks have gone viral, which means that Gingrich’s message exposing the corrupt MSM is starting to penetrate beyond the GOP faithful.

Can’t have that. And without the crowd roaring their approval, Williams knows any kind of counter-attack against him would look different, less like a winning moment and more like an argumentative one. In other words, Williams wasn’t going to allow himself to get John Kinged or allow our side to look like fighters and winners.

Brian Williams is not a dumb man. He’s a very smart and savvy political operative for the left, and he’s certainly smart enough to look for any angle that might help his side.

And that’s what last night was really about.

(more…)

Via Newsbusters, Lawrence O’Donnell decided to rewrite history on the story of progressives, Newt Gingrich, and foodstamps:

There’s a tremendous amount of cynicism in Gingrich’s use of food stamps because of what he actually know that his Republican debate audiences do not know. His Republican audiences do not know that most people on food stamps are white.

Actually, it’s been progressives that didn’t know:
(more…)

No one will aver accuse me of being a Chuck Todd fan, but let’s give the man credit where it’s due. Though he’s careful with his language, Todd not only sees through what Colbert’s doing, he’s also troubled that much of the MSM is complicit in furthering the Stewart/Colbert left-wing agenda:

—–

HuffPo:

“He is making a mockery of the system,” Todd said. “…Is it fair to the process? Yes, the process is a mess, but he’s doing it in a way that feels like he’s trying to influence it with his own agenda and that may be anti-Republican.”

He cautioned the media to be “careful” about amplifying Colbert’s message, and said it should not be treated as “shtick” or satire.

“What is his real agenda here?” he said. “Is it to educate the public about the dangers of money and politics, and what’s going on? Or is it simply to marginalize the Republican Party? I think if I were a Republican candidate I would be concerned about that.”

Todd concluded by saying that he “idolized” American politics and didn’t want to see people become more cynical about them.

Less than a few minutes ago, Colbert was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” being fawned over by Scarborough, his guests, and his audience. All rather nauseating.

I also disagree with Todd’s claim that Colbert is doing something noble in going after these Super PACs, but we’ll leave that debate for another day. (More on that here.)

(more…)

One thing I do respect about MSNBC is that unlike the rest of the mainstream media, even during the network’s so-called straight news segments, MSNBC doesn’t even try to hide its agenda. If only the equally left-wing Politico had the same integrity. For starters, it might help their traffic numbers. Both outlets are in bed together, though, but only one has come out of the closet. They still make a good tag-team for Obama. No question about it.

Below is a segment where MSNBC host Alex Wagner moderates and Politico’s Maggie Haberman participates in a mostly one-sided roundtable discussion about the “great” work Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are doing to make the case against free political speech for everyone but them. The clip is longish but illuminating in a number of ways:

—–

As I wrote in my piece last week, the reason outlets like Politico and millionaires like Stephen Colbert hate Super PACS is because they believe that only corporations like Politico and millionaires like Stephen Colbert should enjoy unlimited political speech. Once you eliminate Super PACs, then leftist outlets like Politico and leftist partisans like Colbert will enjoy a lot less competition for the all-important 2012 election narrative.

Politico and Colbert both know that the whoever owns the narrative wins the election, and they intend to win the election for Obama.

Another fascinating part of the segment is how Wagner makes no secret of the fact that Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin helped to define the Governor in Obama’s favor during the ‘08 campaign. Wagner completely misses the irony, though. To whatever degree Fey was effective, that effectiveness did not come from “Saturday Night Live,” a show that only draws somewhere around 10 million viewers.

(more…)

It’s always fun when media and their analysts tie themselves into knots when confronted with something that destroys their template.

Republican front runner Mitt Romney gives 50 or 60 bucks to one of his volunteer campaign staffers and leftists spin themselves into a self-imposed Ken Shamrock-style submission.

The fact that the volunteer was black is driving the left and their media absolutely nuts. “It galls me, I don’t even like to watch it. I felt like it plays into every sort of patronizing stereotype of what black people are.” That was the line on MSNBC over Romney paying Ruth Williams the cash.

Now, let’s get this straight, Williams felt inspired (by God, she said) to volunteer for the Romney campaign before he paid her. She earned the money. She worked for the money. She never expected it, but she was unemployed, she needed the cash and Romney gave it to her. Sounds like a fair transaction to me. Of course, the problem here is that it was done by an Evil Rich Republican who isn’t supposed to do acts of gratitude and since the recipient was a minority they are angrier than an OWS’er being told to find a job. Listen to the entire MSNBC segment and you’ll learn that it’s government’s job to take care of people like this, not churches or individuals. Seriously, these loons have snapped over this.

What they don’t care to mention is that this is nothing unusual for Romney. He sacrificed two and a half years of his life (beginning at age 19) to serve the people of France on an LDS mission. Hey, he was an unpaid community organizer before it was supposedly cool to call yourself that. You can just begin and end with that act of service, but if they cared to look at the rest of his life, they would learn more.

(more…)

If you want to see a perfect example of how the left-wing media plans to smear and destroy Mitt Romney should he win the GOP nomination, no better example can be found than the hoax over a photo that lefties every where are trying to sell as evidence of Romney’s “privileged” life. Lefties say the photo in question shows Romney “getting his shoes shined” before getting on a private jet during his campaign travel. That is not what the photo shows, of course, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good left-wing mudslinging, OK?

The meme began from a photo by Getty showing Romney sitting in a chair on the tarmac with his foot up and a red-jacketed worker attending to the candidate’s footwear. The left immediately assumed that Romney was getting his shoes shined before getting on a “corporate” jet. This story was made up out of whole cloth because in reality what the picture shows is Romney getting his shoes wanded by an explosive sniffing device wielded by a TSA agent before being allowed to board the plane.

The photo seems to have appeared early on the blog of the MSNBC smear show “The Ed Schultz Show” with the headline, “Romney Creates Another Job.” The caption set the tone for the left-wing onslaught to come saying, “Mitt Romney created another job with his presence alone… a job giving shoe shines on the tarmac in front of a corporate jet.”

From there Salon’s most virulent hater, Joan Walsh, picked up on the meme on her blog with one titled “Mr. 1 Percent is clueless about inequality,” where she used the photo as an illustration to “prove” that Romney was out of touch with the reg’lar folks.

Salon’s Steve Kornacki then went on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show and launched into his interpretation of the supposed shoe shining.

“There’s a picture that’s making the rounds today — the shoe shine on the tarmac,” Kornacki explained. “I don’t know if you saw this one. I don’t know where this came from… He’s sitting in front of an airplane. I think it might be a corporate jet, and he’s wearing a suit and he’s getting a shoe shine. He’s got a big smile on his face.”

…“He’s getting a shoe shine! We put this on Salon earlier today. I’m not sure where it originated. But it never looks good for a politician to be getting a shoe shine, you know, on a tarmac but it looks terrible when it’s Mitt Romney and this is your image and background. It looks worse when it’s the year 2012 and the economy is in such a bad place, and the Democrats are going to be going after your party for being the one that sort of favors the people who get shoe shines on tarmacs!” he added.

So, not only did Kornacki lie about the photo — he had no knowledge at all about what it really showed — but he then throw in the “I think it might be a corporate jet” on top of it — again without knowing if it really was or not — so that he could add more layers of lies to the story.

(more…)

Yesterday in New Hampshire Larry O’Connor of Breitbart.tv caught up with Lawrence O’Donnell and asked him his opinion on the Republican field. Here’s what he had to say:

Romney is the one they don’t want. They know they can beat anybody else. Romney, they think they can beat, but it’s a harder road… The problem Romney has is that he cannot energize Republicans.

Lawrence O’Donnell also sounded off on how the vice presidential picks don’t really matter and how McCain would have been marginally better off picking Tim Pawlenty and not Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Really? Could it be that Lawrence O’Donnell and his MSNBC colleagues simply have the largest opposition research file on Mitt Romney from years of following him?

O’Donnell perhaps gave us a taste of the Democratic strategy against Mitt Romney when he said the following, after repeatedly calling Romney by his first name, Willard, so as to make him look out of touch:

Mitt Romney is so rich he doesn’t have a reality show on NBC…It couldn’t be more clear that Mitt Romney knows how to kill jobs. There is absolutely no evidence that he knows anything, anything at all, about how to create jobs.

(more…)

Martin Bashir has situational concern for race. His remarks from his program the other evening:

“It also showed how political leaders could be responsible for either encouraging better race relations or making matters a whole lot worse by using cheap and nasty slurs Now listen to some of the things being said by these republican candidates.”

He mentions only Republican candidates using two instances: the deconstructed false flag of race on Gingrich’s remarks, and the CBS story of Santorum’s remark.

Where, pray tell, was Martin Bashir when Democrats said all this?

Harry Reid:

… Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he said privately.

Bill Clinton on Obama:

“A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

Joe Biden:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Or this Biden classic:

“You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

(more…)

Keith Olbermann is making waves. Again.

The former MSNBC host has pulled out the big guns, bringing in Hollywood (and gaming) superlawyer Patricia Glaser “to ‘determine his rights’ in his five-year contract,” after his public spat with Current TV bosses, a source tells The Wrap.

Meanwhile, executives at Current TV said that relations – especially those with Current CEO Joel Hyatt – were at a breaking point after deteriorating over the past several months.

“I hope Keith is part of our future, but it’s up to Keith,” an executive with Current who declined to be identified told TheWrap. “Keith set us in the right direction and we’re on that path now … and as I’ve learned over the years, everybody is replaceable.”

Olbermann was conspicuously absent from special election coverage of the Iowa Caucuses at Current TV, where the notably cantankerous host has held the title of Chief News Officer since his abrupt departure from MSNBC last summer. After his “Countdown” program, which was migrated from MSNBC to Current TV, was pre-empted Tuesday night by the GOP primary coverage, sans Olbermann, details of a breaking point began unfolding to the public.

It initially appeared that the programming change came as a surprise to Olbermann. On Tuesday, he tweeted what implied the return of Countdown following its holiday hiatus, only to later tweet a correction, directing his 360,000+ followers to defer questions to his bosses.

(more…)

When the left-wing snark site Wonkette went after Governor Sarah Palin’s youngest child Trig in the worst way you could imagine, I was pretty sure the left had finally hit bottom. How do you get any lower than the ridiculing of an innocent Down Syndrome child? Well, shame on me for underestimating the left’s capacity for depravity. First Alan Colmes did it (though he later apologized), and now NBC News contributor Eugene Robinson has done it on MSNBC:

—–

The idea behind all of this is political. The left wants to toxify GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum as crazy and obviously they’re so desperate that they’ve decided to publicly ridicule both the Senator and his wife over an unimaginable tragedy — the death of a child, their newborn son Gabriel:

First it was Alan Colmes; now it is Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who went on MSNBC to mock Rick Santorum​ for how he and his wife Karen dealt with the death of their son Gabriel. (A severe prenatal development led to his very early delivery, and Gabriel died two hours after his birth.)

“He’s not a little weird, it’s that he’s really weird,” Robinson said of Santorum. “And some of his positions he’s taken are just so weird, um, that I think that some Republicans are gonna be off-put. Um, not everybody is going to, going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the, the, the stillborn ah, ah, child, ah, um, whose body they took home to, to kind of sleep with it, introduce to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story.”

Except it’s not weird. It’s not even close to weird. In fact, medical professionals recommend doing exactly what the Santorums did:

(more…)

Earlier today, Mark Allen, who is a contributor to the New York Times and National Public Radio, compared Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum to Dan White, the man who assassinated Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s first openly gay member of the Board of Supervisors, in 1978.

Allen’s comments reflect a continued trend in Democrat-friendly media to compare Republican candidates to notorious criminals. Recently, for example, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich “looks like a car bomber.” (more…)

Tuesday wasn’t a great night for accuracy at the (openly) liberal network, as Charlie Spiering of the Washington Examiner points out: