Yesterday, NPR reported an unclear snippet of audio as former Senator Rick Santorum having said the word “black” when discussing individuals becoming dependent on government’s redistribution of wealth, as opposed to being able to go out and earn their money themselves.

As per Tommy Christopher at Mediaite, a new, cleaner version of the clip does not support that conclusion.

NPR’s Ted Robbins noted: “Santorum did not elaborate on why he singled out blacks who rely on federal assistance. The voters here didn’t seem to care.”

CBS doubled down on the error, offering a brief transcript with the clip:

While campaigning in Sioux City, Iowa Sunday, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said if elected he plans to cut regulations and entitlements and he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

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From Newsbusters:

George Washington was the father of our country.

Eh! No big deal. Barack Obama is better…at least in his own mind. Such was the laughably absurd claim of President Obama on 60 Minutes last Sunday. What? You didn’t see it? That was because 60 Minutes conveniently left it out of its broadcast. If you want to see Obama engage in this latest bit of over the top braggadocio you can only see it at the online 60 Minutes Overtime which has a video of the entire interview. You can catch Obama’s excessive praise of himself at the tail end of the interview starting with Steve Kroft’s question just before the 55 minute mark:

KROFT: Tell me, what do you consider your major accomplishments? If this is your last speech. What have you accomplished?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, we’re not done yet. I’ve got five more years of stuff to do. But not only saving this country from a great depression. Not only saving the auto industry. But putting in place a system in which we’re gonna start lowering health care costs and you’re never gonna go bankrupt because you get sick or somebody in your family gets sick. Making sure that we have reformed the financial system, so we never again have taxpayer-funded bailouts, and the system is more stable and secure. Making sure that we’ve got millions of kids out here who are able to go to college because we’ve expanded student loans and made college more affordable. Ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Decimating al Qaeda, including Bin Laden being taken off the field. Restoring America’s respect around the world.

The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.

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Is it a coincidence that four days after Nancy Pelosi sat and gave an exclusive pep talk/schmooze session with AOL’s Arianna Huffington and an all-female editorial meeting in the offices of AOL/HuffPo, Arianna’s Washington Bureau Chief phoned-in a “nothing-to-see-here” apologia for the former-Speaker’s congressional insider trading scandal?

Huffington Post's wishful thinking headline a few hours after a "60 Minutes" report on congressional insider trading.

As liberal news outlets like CBS News, Daily Beast/Newsweek and even MSNBC saw fit to report the fact that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in a sweetheart IPO for VISA, while at the same time ensuring that tough regulations that would have stifled VISA’s profits stayed bottled up in the Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives, AOL/HuffPo opted to re-print Pelosi’s talking points and obfuscations in lieu of doing actual reporting.

With the awkward and ham-handed headline “Hit Job Falls Flat,” you can almost see Arianna herself hammering out bullet points on her blackberry, firing them off to reporter Ryan Grim in an effort to put her elegant fingers in the metaphorical dyke to stop the gushing in the most serious corruption story to hit Pelosi’s long career.  The banner headline, full of wishful thinking, ran just hours after the “60 Minutes” story.  First thing on a Monday morning at the beginning of a news cycle is a curious time to declare that a story “fell flat.”

In fact, the story was talked about on cable news and in the halls of congress all day.  It inspired new legislation to finally make the corrupt practice of congressional insider trading illegal.  Presidential candidate Rick Perry produced a 30-second ad featuring the story and calling for jail-time for any politician who profited from insider information.  If this is “falling flat” I would like to see AOL/HuffPo’s idea of a successful investigative report.

Seriously, I’d really like to see one.  Do they even do anything like that, or do they just sit back and let the rest of us do all of the real reporting?

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From Tuesday’s Laura Ingraham Show:

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No matter how you slice it, Operation Fast and Furious is a serious problem for the Obama administration. It’s beyond question that the ATF oversaw the sale of approximately 2,500 weapons to straw purchasers whom they knew were going to pass the guns go criminals. And it’s also beyond question that some of those weapons were used to kill U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on December 14, 2010. (And it’s also beyond question that Attorney General Eric Holder knew about this mess sooner than he admitted to Congressman Darrell Issa [R-CA] on May 3rd of this year.)

These are big stories. Stories that demand attention, and which could be very damning to the steadily declining Obama administration. Nevertheless, for the most part the mainstream media has stayed far away from Fast and Furious.

But there is one exception, and that is CBS News.

That’s right: While NBC, ABC, and others have looked the other way, CBS News has spent the past few weeks doggedly reporting cover-ups tied to Fast and Furious. They’ve also been asking how far up the chain of command Fast and Furious goes? (In other words – who authorized this mess to begin with?)

For example, on September 1, it was CBS News that broke the story about how the U.S. Attorney’s office in Arizona had tried to conceal the fact that Brian Terry was killed with Fast and Furious weapons. According to CBS News, internal ATF emails showed that former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke asked investigators not to report the link between the murder and Fast and Furious weapons in order to keep from revealing Fast and Furious to the public.

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ABC’s Christiane Amanpour practically begs Mitch McConnell to raise taxes:

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NY Times Columnist Carr says Kansas, Missouri “middle places,” land of “low sloping foreheads”:

“If it’s Kansas, Missouri, no big deal. You know, that’s the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right? …Did I just say that aloud?” – David Carr, NY Times

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Scott Pelley will take over the “CBS Evening News” anchor chair from Katie Couric, effective June 6, according to a story published on the network’s web site, but that’s no cause for excitement.

Contrary to glowing comments made about the veteran reporter by CBS executives, the truth about Pelley’s biased reporting is quite disturbing. One stark example of his bias aired two years ago this week in the form of the “60 Minutes” segment, “Amazon Crude,” (below) which painted Chevron Corporation in a particularly bad light for alleged wrongdoing in Ecuador.

Even before it aired, there was plenty of evidence to refute claims Pelley let stand as facts in his piece. After that report aired, a virtual laundry list of new and irrefutable facts surfaced to change the complexion of this case. Still, neither Pelley, “60 Minutes” or CBS News has seen fit to set the record straight. Thankfully, someone else has.

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We have an update on the story of CBS’s refusal to release the full recording of His Presidency Barack Obama calling American workers “Slugs.”
Blogger John Romano of Yes But However has been doing the work of a real reporter, holding CBS to account for their decision to withhold this very newsworthy audio:

Is CBS protecting the President in some way? Did the White House bring pressure to bear on CBS over the tape? Is this all much ado about nothing? CBS News’ “decline to comment” doesn’t help matters much.

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We have an update on the story of CBS’s refusal to release the full recording of His Presidency Barack Obama calling American workers “Slugs.”

Blogger John Romano of Yes But However has been doing the work of a real reporter, holding CBS to account for their decision to withhold this very newsworthy audio:

Is CBS protecting the President in some way? Did the White House bring pressure to bear on CBS over the tape? Is this all much ado about nothing? CBS News’ “decline to comment” doesn’t help matters much.

Boy, you have to love it when a “news” organization, a company in the business of seeking comment from the subjects of their stories, refuses to comment on one of their own stories.

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The horrific disaster in Japan is no excuse for horrible reporting.

In fact, we need accurate reporting now more than ever to tell us exactly what is going on in the wake of this awful disaster.

There seems to be more mis-reporting, than actual reporting about what is going on with the nuclear power plants. In particular, we have this nugget from CBS Sunday Morning by Lucy Craft in Tokyo:

“Those who managed to survive the mega quake, the monster tsunami waves, and landslides, are now terrified by the prospect of a Three Mile Island-like radiation disaster of nuclear power plants in the state of Fukushima.”

The people of Japan should hope that this ends up like Three Mile Island.

Of course, perception is much different than reality, and the activist old media seems to hope that the perception that they gave us after the worst nuclear disaster in America history (that killed no one) can be resurrected.  They want to bring back The China Syndrome and hope that all we will remember is Jane Fonda scaring the hell out of us. Maybe the media now actually believes the movie was real, and what happened at Three Mile Island was the fake, or, perhaps they’re just hoping the next generation doesn’t take the time to research what really happened at Three Mile Island.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

Having praised Al-Jazeera English for its coverage of the demonstrations in Egypt, some American liberals are now backpedaling. They are outraged that the channel they praised so much has covered up the sexual assault on CBS News reporter Lara Logan.

The network’s mantra is, “The heart of the story. Every Angle. Every Side.” But that’s “less believable now” because of the failure of the channel to cover the attack on Logan, says Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post, a leading liberal commentator. The silence of the network on this matter is “deafening,” he said.

American media personalities such as Sam Donaldson of ABC News and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC have praised Al-Jazeera for its coverage of the demonstrations in the Arab country. Such comments have been cited in full-page ads the channel has taken out in The New York Times and Washington Post as part of its “Demand Al-Jazeera in the USA Campaign.”

The assault on Logan occurred on February 11. “She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers,” CBS reported. “Logan left the hospital on Wed. Feb. 16, to recover in her Washington, D.C. home. She received a call from President Obama expressing his concern.”

Capehart didn’t believe Al-Jazeera’s explanation that it was simply respecting the CBS News reporter’s privacy and didn’t want the conduct of reporters covering the riots to be part of the overall story. “I’m at a loss for what would drive a news network to ignore news,” he said.

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NEW YORK (AP) – CBS News says correspondent Lara Logan is recovering in a U.S. hospital from an attack while reporting on the tumultuous events in Cairo last Friday.

Logan was in the city’s Tahrir Square after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a mob of more than 200 people, the network said in a statement on Tuesday.

Separated from her crew in the crush of the mob, she suffered what CBS called “a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating.” She was saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.

She reconnected with the CBS team and returned to the U.S. on Saturday.

Logan, CBS News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent, is one of at least 140 correspondents who have been injured or killed since Jan. 30 while covering the unrest in Egypt, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. (more…)

Imagine the following scenario taking place on the world stage:

Scene 1: Employees of one of the world’s largest oil companies are found to be in league with a right-wing film producer in an effort to produce a documentary aimed at helping the company fend off a lawsuit in a third-world country’s court that, if lost, could cost the company more than U.S. $100 million.

Scene 2: New York-based lawyers, said to be working on behalf of thousands of poor plaintiffs in their suit against the oil company, ask a U.S. federal court judge to order the right-wing film producer to provide his court with outtakes from the documentary, and the judge says, “Yes.”

Scene 3: Recognizing that the outtakes are now part of the official court record, members of the news media request copies of them. In turn, the federal judge orders that copies of the outtakes should not only be provided to members of the media requesting them but to members of the general public.

Scene 4: After obtaining the outtakes, members of the media spend countless hours airing video snippets, painting the “Big Oil” company in the worst light possible and, in so doing, aiding and abetting the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Unfortunately, a real-world scenario diametrically opposite the one described above seems to be taking place now. Below is a list of the players involved: (more…)

The City of Los Angeles is so deep in red ink, they are flagrantly violating state law in an effort to generate revenue, and have been for 12 years.

As I reported in an earlier column, officers from the Parking Violations Bureau (PVB) are still videotaping cars parked in 15-minute or loading zones around elementary schools.  This videotaping occurs during school drop-off and pick-up hours, as kids start their days to learn, or leave to be reunited with their parents – parents who will receive tickets by mail in a few days.

This is an illegal method under California law by which parking tickets may be delivered.   The 2010 California Vehicle Code, Division 17, Article 3.5, Sec. 40202(a,b,d) explicitly states that the ticket must be placed on the vehicle, and may only be delivered through the mail if the car is driven away while it is being ticketed.

The MSM is nowhere to be found regarding this issue.  Instead, citizens must rely on the superior consumer protection reporting of local news stations to fuel their outrage.  These stations, along with the LA Weekly, have taken on the City of Los Angeles where the MSM has abandoned its responsibility.

So has BigJournalism.com, and your intrepid reporter. (more…)

Distantly related to Dr. Samuel Mudd, as in “your name is –,” he is the man who should have succeeded Walter Cronkite as the most trusted man in America at CBS instead of “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” Born in 1928, Roger Mudd finished a long and distinguished career at NBC.

Not incidentally, he did the nation an immeasurable favor by torpedoing the presidential campaign of the late Ted Kennedy by asking one simple question:

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Raw footage of CBS News anchor Katie Couric recording voice-overs for news segments about Gov. Sarah Palin on the day she was named as John McCain’s running mate:

What’s newsworthy here isn’t merely that Couric mocked the GOP’s historic Vice Presidential nominee–most of us have said things we’re not proud of in private–it’s that she did so so brazenly in front of her supposedly objective news team.

Conservatives4Palin raises another good point about Couric and Co.’s efforts to marginalize the former Alaska governor from day one: “[W]hat in [Palin's] impressive biography did CBS News and Couric choose to focus on? Moose burgers and beauty pageants.”

And so began the JournoListing of Sarah Palin.  But the chickens have come home to roost and it’s Couric who, by belittling Sarah Palin, looks petty and pathetic in the end.

Highlights from the video excerpt: (more…)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had just about enough of this nonsense:

Transcript from Newsbusters:

KURTZ: Let’s start with the obvious question. Why did you not ask Eric Holder in that interview about this former Justice official’s allegation that a case against the New Black Panther Party was dropped because of racial politics?

SCHIEFFER: Well, it’s certainly a question that is a legitimate question to ask. And basically what happened was this all really became a story when the whistleblower came out and testified that he’d had to leave the Justice Department and so on. And, frankly, had I known about that, I would have asked the question.

I was on vacation that week. This happened — apparently, it got very little publicity. And, you know, I just didn’t know about it.

I mean, you know, God knows everything, but I’m not quite that good. Every once in a while, something will slip by me. And in this case, it just slipped by me. If I’d have known it, I would have asked about it.

This is, of course, Howard Kurtz interviewing Bob Scheiffer on Reliable Sources.

Bob Schieffer marginalized the DOJ/New Black Panther controversy first by not asking the Attorney General about it, and then again with his phony “it got very little publicity” line.  Of course “it got very little publicity,” Mr. Scheiffer; you’re the guy in charge of publicity!  When a mainstream media authority whines that something wasn’t covered in the MSM, it’s the definition of a circular argument.  (more…)

CNN is already under fire for giving disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer a TV show during family hour; now the network is being targeted by minority journalists for the hire. The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) has joined the protest. NABJ sent an open letter (full text below) to all the cable new networks –CNN, FOX and MSNBC- about the lack of racial diversity on their airwaves.

In the letter, the journalist organization specifically attacked CNN for replacing Campbell Brown at 8 p.m. with Eliot Spitzer.  “It just seems that cable news can never find diverse candidates who are good enough to meet their standards. We want to know your standards,” NABJ demands in the letter.

CNN President Jon Klein has been unabashed about hiring the disgraced Spitzer. In the  bizarre statement from the network, Spitzer is described as “a Democrat who resigned as governor in March 2008 after acknowledging visiting a prostitute, is a well respected political mind and a take-no-prisoners prosecutor.”

NABJ jumps on this, asking the cable network in the open letter: “Are you telling us that CNN could find no one better than an ex-politician who quit being New York governor after consorting with prostitutes to grace America’s living rooms each night?” The text of their letter: (more…)