It was a tale of two media biases:  One make-believe scandal pursued vigorously by the media. One authentic scandal vigorously dismissed by the media.

Earlier this month, the mainstream media released 24,000 pages of former Gov. Sarah Palin’s emails in pursuit of a scandal that did not exist. The Washington Post even asked its readers to sift through the emails themselves and “annotate the documents displayed on the Post website.”

The strategy backfired. Palin’s emails revealed nothing embarrassing or incriminating. No crime. No underwear shots. No yfrog photos in the Alaska gym.

Nothing.

Instead, left-leaning media outlets had to content themselves with fluff stories analyzing Palin’s “level of intellect” based on the unremarkable email cache. For instance, the Huffington Post reported that, “Palin’s emails were written at 8th grade level, an excellent score for a chief executive.” But – wait for it – Post reporters are still investigating a suspicious gap in Palin’s emails. Clearly, for the mainstream media, this was not the best of times.

On Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Jon Stewart dismissed the idea that the Palin email story was rooted in media bias. “If your contention is that they [the media] are relentlessly partisan, then why haven’t they backed away from Weiner?” asked Stewart, who maintains that Fox News is the only biased media outlet. In his own words, he has characterized Fox as “a relentless agenda-driven, 24-hour news opinion propaganda delivery system.”

But when asked by Wallace whether other media outlets pushed an agenda, Stewart’s own bias became apparent. “Would you say the same thing about them [ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post] that they are — in your words — a propaganda delivery system relentlessly pushing a liberal agenda?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” said Stewart.

Apparently, when it comes to media bias, Stewart has a faulty memory. The mainsteam media initially dismissed the Weiner story. Some media bought his “hacker” storyline. Early on, some – forgive the pun – poked fun at his underwear photo and dismissed it as harmless.  Others sympathized with Weiner’s dilemma, blaming it on the advent of the new media.

In the end, it was not ABC, NBC, or the Washington Post that broke the Weiner sexting scandal story. That distinction belongs to (now vindicated) conservative blogger and author Andrew Breitbart, who, along with Big Journalism Editor Dana Loesch, had been accused of hacking Weiner’s Twitter and yfrog accounts. However, once Weiner’s pictures hit the Internet, even the unwilling media were forced to cover the story, leading to the embattled congressman’s resignation on Friday.

So much for Stewart’s flimsy claim of mainstream media objectivity, eh?

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Via Newsbusters:

Thank you, Mr. President. Osama bin Laden is finally gone. Dead. With a bullet in his head. A fitting end to the evil mastermind behind 9/11 – the worst terrorist attack on our own soil in our country’s history.

Last week, after experiencing your lowest approval ratings ever, you finally received a big bump in the polls and praise from all corners – among them your fellow Democrats and even conservative Republicans on FOX. That is not hard to understand. They want to be on the opposite side of anything starting with ‘Osama’ and ends with ‘Bin Laden.’ In this case, that would be you, Mr. President. And, of course, there are your friends in the biased mainstream media.

Apparently, the media believe that you did more than telling your military advisers, “OK, yeah, just go ahead.” Much more.

They way the media portrays it – it was your overarching philosophy in the War on Terror, your courage since 9/11, and your experience in military tactical strategy that saved the day. After all, former President George Bush and the post 9/11 intelligence infrastructure he created were so yesterday. And, really, who cares that the waterboarding stuff you have been condemning as torture actually worked?

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” … to blame Sarah Palin I think it’s very unfair to her.”

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What Exactly Are the Qualifications for Being President? This story on the Huffington Post caught my attention this recently: Barbara Walters asks Oprah if Sarah Palin is qualified to be president and Oprah declines to answer.

Walters takes this as a “no” from Oprah.  The Oprah has spoken.

I’m not exactly sure that Oprah is the person to ask regarding anyone’s qualifications to be president. She broke out of her apolitical shell to endorse Barack Obama, a man with very few qualifications. The one thing he is supposed to be is something really special … “the One” as Oprah called him. That may or may not be true, but does being “special” qualify one to be president?

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The ladies of “The View” discussed National Opt Out Day, which took place on November 24th, wherein passengers boycotted the – as O’Reilly once called them – “super naked scanners” to send a message about respecting our civil liberties to the bureaucrats running TSA.

I found Whoopi Goldberg’s remarks to be typical but was shocked that conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck is willing to give up some liberty for safety.

“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

- Benjamin Franklin

Because our airline bureaucracy is either too lazy or lacks the creativity to pursue the Israelification of airports (where multiple layers of security profile passengers’ behavior and where Israel airlines have an excellent safety record as a result (despite being surrounded by enemies) we’re instead subjected to dehumanizing, random, robotic checks. Instead of looking for behavior, for people, we’re looking for things.

This is the result:

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH… LITTLE BOY STRIP SEARCHED By TSA (Video)

TSA Pat-Down Leaves Traveller Covered in Urine

Breast Cancer Survivor Harassed by TSA

TSA Agent Arrested at LAX

TSA Agent Accused of Raping 14 Year-Old Girl

‘Humiliated’: Female passenger subjected to patdown ‘because her sanitary towel showed up on scanner’

One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans

I don’t believe that all TSA agents are unfit for the job; I think there exist solid folks out there who simply want to do their jobs and keep America safe but they’re prevented from being anything but reactionary due to enhanced and embarrassingly ridiculous security protocols which would have done nothing to prevent past terror attacks and attempts.

The body scanners would not have prevented the Panty Bomber (as he boarded overseas and was allowed in the country due to lack of enforcement of the watch list and the State Department’s inability to process the tip that the bomber’s father gave them weeks prior). I wonder if President Obama discussed that with the nudie scanner CEO when they recently travelled together.

The terrorist attacks which heightened our airline security did not begin as terrorist problems. They began as immigration problems. They began because a host of people were in this country illegally, not tracked; Mohammed Atta was even pulled over for a traffic violation prior to 9/11 and released.

Because our government cannot, or will not, match the effectiveness of Israel airports in terms of keeping Americans safe, our dignity and civil liberties must be infringed upon to shore up their inability to do their jobs? The strategy to protecting Americans is to subject them to increasingly intimate and degrading searches?

There is no freedom in peaceful slavery.

How far will it go? Napolitano remarked that mass transit is next:

The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary.

“[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,” Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on “Charlie Rose.”

“I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?”

So why are Americans who protest the increased infringement on their civil liberties in the name of inefficient and ineffective security offensively called “terrorists?” People who may create a longer line at the airport due to legal protest are like the murderers who slaughtered over 2,000 people on 9/11?

Barbara Walters sarcastically remarked that it was the “great American spirit” at work. Even though she didn’t intend it, she’s absolutely right. The resolute will to question authority when it deserves to be questioned due to a lack of respect for the citizenry from where it derives power is the spirit that built America and made it the most powerful nation on earth.

The spirit to question boundaries is the very spirit that led the way to stopping genocide in the 30s and 40s. It is the very spirit that united in the wake of 9/11 to band together and fight guerilla bullying, a.k.a. terrorism. Fear not the citizenry who questions, but fear the citizenry that blindly cedes power and sense to bureaucrats, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness.

*UPDATE: Reader Diddian corrects the satirical Daily Squib link. Noted, thanks!

Also: I noticed that the libs who took issue with the same link were silent on all the others which most certainly aren’t satirical – and while these same brand of folks were loudly against President Bush’s Patriot Act they were silently approving when President Obama expanded the Patriot Act’s scope and length. It would be easier for folks to understand their criticism if we knew to which of their double standards they were referring.

UPDATE: Feeling the heat, Behar backtracks, takes “bitch” back. In other news, Behar helps power Angle’s fundraising efforts to unseat Reid.

How will television’s living symbol of ex-wifery respond to Oprah Winfrey’s rebuke? Joyless Behar can’t fire back, by her own twisted worldview that would be racist.

Hollywood Reporter:

Don’t expect Oprah to go down market on her network OWN, launching in January.

In a speech at Maria Shriver’s Women’s Conference, she said her cable net will be “fun and entertaining without tearing people down and calling them bitches. Imagine that. Imagine.”

Over to you, Barbara Walters…

Class versus crass. Good humor versus the inability to feel your own first name. Well-crafted gamesmanship versus white hot hate.

Bravo, Ms. Angle — you have the makings of a stateswoman, compared to Joyless Behar who has the makings of every man’s ex-wife.

Via NRO, here’s what Joyless received from the Angle campaign today — a thank you note and flowers:

“Joy, Raised $150,000 online yesterday. Thanks for your help. Sincerely, Sharron Angle”

If Barbara Walters had a lick of sense (or class), she’d boot the hate-filled, foul-mouthed Behar and use Angle’s example when looking for a replacement. Feisty, smart, independent, and conservative. But Babs has a left-wing agenda to push, knows her ideas are losers, and fully understands from her years on broadcast television that outnumbering conservatives four-to-one is her only hope. (more…)

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Picture of elitists in action… Remember, only the hens of The View have the sober, thoughtful, “That Bitch Is Going to Hell,” ability to think through their vote in a serious and well reasoned manner. The rest of us, however, must be controlled because once our knees enjoy a jerk we vote only with wild, reckless emotional abandon, especially after counting the number of Caucasian kids in a campaign commercial.

And what about the hen-house effect? How much CO2 poisoned the atmosphere after this particular fingernails-on-a-chalkboard exchange? (more…)

To paraphrase Bill O’Reilly, “When they start calling you names, you know you’ve won.” To take it a step further, when they leave the conversation in the middle of an interview in disgust, you know who are the real professionals and who aren’t. In any other profession, if you leave your job during the time of executing its functions because you can’t emotionally handle the stress, you are fired or reassigned. But if you’re on The View and interviewing a Fox News commentator, the audience cheers for your emotional incompetence.

WATCH VIDEO HERE.

Bill O’Reilly was making the case about why the Ground Zero Mosque has such a large opposition against it. In the midst of all the woman trying to strangle him with their words he declares, “Muslims killed us on 9/11.” His comments were met with yelling and cussing from Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg. O’Reilly, unfazed by their antics, pressed them, “Are you saying Muslims didn’t kill us on 9/11?” That comment was met with Behar raising herself off the couch with faux righteous indignation saying, “I don’t want to sit here next to you.” Goldberg followed suit and the two marched backstage. (more…)

With David Westin having suddenly bailed on ABC News, the Daily Beast has raised the formidable challenges facing whoever becomes his successor:

In his 13 years at the network, Westin, a lawyer, has fought against the inextricable decline of the broadcast television news business. When he took over for the legendary Roone Arledge in 1997, he inherited an organization filled with stars—Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Charles Gibson—and lucrative, top-rated news broadcasts, including World News Tonight and Nightline.

Now, on the eve of his departure, ABC News is a very different place. The ratings are mostly down, the stars are mostly gone, the foreign bureaus are mostly closed, and the advertising dollars that once poured in have slowed to a geriatric limp. Since Disney isn’t exactly running a charity, something finally had to go, and this February, it did: Westin announced ABC News would cut 25 percent of its work force, or roughly 400 jobs.

But if the news division is ever going to turn out healthy profits again, it will need a lot of work. Whoever takes over for Westin must have news judgment, business sense, and also a certain je ne sais quoi—literally, since no one seems to have any clue how to rescue the foundering broadcast TV news business. There are, of course, all the usual suspects: internal candidates who’ve worked their way up through the ranks; rising stars at other networks. But given the obstacles the next president of ABC News must face, the usual suspects may not be good enough.

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From a speech by Jimmy Carter at the University of Havana on May 14, 2002 which was broadcast throughout Castro’s islandwide fiefdom and trumpeted worldwide by all “news” agencies with Havana bureaus:

My nation is hardly perfect in human rights. A very large number of our citizens are incarcerated in prison, and there is little doubt that the death penalty is imposed most harshly on those who are poor, black, or mentally ill. For more than a quarter century, we have struggled unsuccessfully to guarantee the basic right of universal health care for our people. …but Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education.

Thus did a former President of the United States prostrate himself before a regime that jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and murdered (in absolute numbers) more political prisoners in its first three years in power (out of a population of 6.4 million) than Hitler’s murdered in its first six years (out of a population of 70 million.) Not to mention that Pres. Carter’s host insulted his nation as “a vulture preying on humanity!” and came within a hair of nuking it.

There’s more: (more…)

In case you missed this cheer moment Sunday on ABC’s This Week, guest-hosted by Barbara Walters, here’s Fox News’s Roger Ailes swatting aside a pesky Arianna Huffington the way President Obama might dispatch a fly:

Naturally, the frothing Left had a fit:

… bringing in Paul Krugman, Arianna Huffington, and George Will to discuss the news with Barbara Walters on ABC’s This Week made sense, but Roger Ailes, president and CEO of FOX News, made an appearance as well and did exactly what one would expect from a FOX representative — evade the facts and rely on ratings as validation.

Using the ten-point-must system, how did you score the fight?  Let’s have your overnight thoughts.