From the Associated Press:

The federal government hired a New Orleans man for $18,000 to appraise whether news stories about its actions in the Gulf oil spill were positive or negative for the Obama administration, which was keenly sensitive to comparisons between its response and former President George W. Bush’s much-maligned reaction to Hurricane Katrina.

The government also spent $10,000 for just over three minutes of video showing a routine offshore rig inspection for news organizations but couldn’t say whether any ran the footage. And it awarded a $216,625 no-bid contract for a survey of seabirds to an environmental group that has criticized what it calls the “extreme anti-conservation record” of Sarah Palin, a possible 2012 rival to President Barack Obama.

The contracts were among hundreds reviewed by The Associated Press as the government begins to provide an early glimpse at federal spending since the Gulf disaster in April. While most of the contracts don’t raise alarms, some could provide ammunition for critics of government waste. (more…)

All week we’ve been exploring America’s ten most left-biased working journalists and now we come to spot number four on the list. And so, for his close attention to pushing the spin and as one of the most active members of the Old Media’s Obama Butt Covering squad, we are pleased to award the number four spot to NBC Political Director Chuck Todd.

Todd is one of those journos that came from Democrat political circles — having worked for Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential run — and then crossed over into the world of “journalism.” With that you just know that he can be as unbiased as the best of them in his reporting. Well, if he can we’ll never know it because so far he has not been. Just the opposite, really.

Todd has done a bang-up job for the left in his journalism career. Likely Todd’s loyalty to the Democrat Party is probably why he felt the need to slam Senator Joe Lieberman last year, for instance. Proving his blindness to real political analysis, Todd claimed that Joe Lieberman was the “polar opposite” of the Senate’s lone socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (officially an “independent”).

In a discussion on the Today Show about the then yet to pass Obamacare bill, Todd said of Lieberman and Sanders, “Meanwhile, the Senate’s two Democratic independents, polar opposites ideologically, are split over the bill’s government-run public option and both are threatening to scuttle the process if they don’t get their way.” (more…)

As we continue our Summer series of the most left-biased journalists working in the Old Media today, it’s time for number seven on the list. We’ve done Cable TV, we’ve done a wire service, and we’ve done a newspaper, so now it’s time to turn our attention to the wonderful world of magazines where we find a worthy candidate in Howard Fineman of Newsweek.

The venerable magazine has been around since 1933, but a bit of its long-time luster has faded of late. Not long ago the news mag tried a revamping under the guiding hand of wunderkind Editor Jon Meacham, but the new take didn’t… take, I mean. For some time Newsweek has been steadily losing readers and money (it lost about $29 million in 2009 alone). Perhaps it is because some of its writers are so hopelessly biased?

Enter Howard Fineman.

One of the first strikes against Fineman is that he’s a constant presence on the most left-wing entertainment/news cable networks in America. A day hardly passes when Fineman isn’t seen on MSNBC and that right there bodes ill for his status as a non-partisan journo.

But even if it were possible to maintain a good, unbiased status while still making the cut to appear on MSNBC–a dubious proposition in itself–Fineman isn’t able to toe that line. (more…)

As we continue our list of the top ten most left-biased journalists working in America today (see part one here), we have to nominate Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press for spot number nine on the countdown.

The Associated Press has been increasingly disappointing at least since Ron Fournier, one of its former bureau chiefs, decided in 2008 to change the APs editorial policy and allow more emotive language and opinion to become an official part of its newswire copy. Not every AP reporter has taken Fournier’s challenge, but boy has Liz Sidoti claimed that policy as her own.

Liz isn’t the only AP reporter to indulge her inner Olbermann, of course, as there are many AP writers that have been caught using emotive wording, hyperbole, and straight out opinion to damn conservatives and Republicans. But Liz is particularly good at the off-handed sleight and the surreptitious slam.

Let’s take Sidoti’s explosive fawning over The One after his first four months in office as an example of her wonderfully understated style of “reporting,” shall we? Liz was so overawed by her Obamamessiah’s ascension to godhood that she couldn’t help herself from gushing like a schoolgirl. The following are some of the notable quotes from her April 26, 2009 piece. (more…)

How can President Obama know when the thrill is gone? When the kindest of responses from his fiercest apologists, the mainstream media, was a long, collective, disappointed sigh to his speech concerning the BP oil spill. CNN has a rather harsh montage of “pundit response” from the speech on their website.

Joan Walsh called the speech “Just Words” saying that Obama was not “playing to win” politically. Rachel Maddow physically dropped her head in disappointment when asked by Keith Olbermann for her reaction to the speech. She then added that America wanted a little more “adult talk from the President on this.”

Maddow continued to call the speech a “sobering spectacle”, hardly a rave review. Ezra Klein, when asked by Rachel Maddow if the president made the “best possible case for energy reform” (which is what Klein earlier that day said that Obama had to do in his speech), Klein responded with “No, I don’t.” He then went on to clarify today that the speech wasn’t “that bad of a speech. It was more of a bad situation.”
(more…)