Long, long ago, the Associated Press simply decided to stop being objective. Other than the final act of officially declaring their left-wing bias, the AP has done just about everything else required to announce that they are on a crusade, among other things, to ensure Barack Obama’s reelection. But even then, you would think credibility would mean something to the AP. Biased or not, no one wants to come off as a hack, but hacky the AP is, especially with respect to today’s story about President Obama’s fourth-quarter fundraising for his reelection campaign.

When you read the AP’s reporting, it’s obvious what the AP is up to. The goal is to create the impression that Obama and the DNC represent an unstoppable political juggernaut, that they are unstoppable cash machines firing on all 12 cylinders of competency and popularity:

U.S. President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, together with the Democratic National Committee, raised more than $68 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina said on Thursday. 

Messina told supporters in a video message that 98 percent of the donations were made up of $250 or less, illustrating growing grassroots support for Obama, a Democrat, as he works to hold on to the White House in November’s election. …

The campaign beat its goal of raising $60 million in the final three months of 2011. 

Obama’s fundraising totals dwarf those of Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, whose campaign said on Wednesday it had raised $24 million in the fourth quarter.

By hiding the context in this report, the AP intentionally lies through omission to put some wins in Obama’s sagging sails.

Here’s what the AP chose not to report:

(more…)

Second place looms large and it is quite an honorable — or maybe onerous — award on our top ten most left-biased working American journalists list. Amusingly our number two guy even graduated from a school that foretold his future work. From the bowels of New York’s exclusive Hackley School comes our number two most left-biased journo, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein.

Klein is another one of those far left writers that imagines himself to be unconventional in his politics when the truth is he is a left-winger all the way down the line without a scoshe of non-conventional thinking.

For instance, in his book, The Natural, of his politics Klein wrote, “… the conventions of journalism prevent me from fitting too neatly into one political niche (although as a columnist for the New Yorker and Newsweek my predilections are obvious).” Far from not “fitting too neatly” into the left’s “niche,” that niche fits him like a glove. For the better part of thirty years, Klein has been revealing his ill-fitting niche to the reading public and we couldn’t be more grateful for his niche-like, nichieness.

So let’s start by finding an example of Klein supposedly being nicheless, shall we? How about in 2007 when Klein attacked the left-wing blogosphere as being too vitriolic. Did that piece show that he was able to criticize his own? Did it show he isn’t just a knee-jerk leftist? (more…)

More than a week since a New York Times story on the Obama-approved program to assassinate U.S. citizens named as terrorists, Keith Olbermann still has not condemned that program. One reader correctly observed that Olbermann reported on the story in early April but, inexplicably, without commentary or expressing an opinion and, instead, he gave a commendably fair and balanced presentation almost worthy of broadcast on Fox News. As Glenn Greenwald noted at Salon:

What’s most striking to me about all of this is that — as I noted yesterday (and as Olbermann stressed) — George Bush’s decision merely to eavesdrop on American citizens without oversight, or to detain without due process Americans such as Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, provoked years of vehement, vocal and intense complaints from Democrats and progressives. All of that was disparaged as Bush claiming the powers of a King, a vicious attack on the Constitution, a violation of Our Values, the trampling on the Rule of Law. Yet here you have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping on or detaining Americans without oversight, but ordering them killed with no oversight and no due process of any kind. And the reaction among leading Democrats and progressives is largely non-existent, which is why Olbermann’s extensive coverage of it is important. Just imagine what the reaction would have been among progressive editorial pages, liberal opinion-makers and Democratic politicians if this story had been about George Bush and Dick Cheney targeting American citizens for due-process-free and oversight-less CIA assassinations.

And back then, as he did with Bush, Olbermann castigated Obama as a fascist; a criminal committing impeachable offenses.  Oh, wait.  I’m sorry.  No, he didn’t. (more…)

Media Matters (for America, they claim) has officially become a parody unto itself.  What started as a wonderful (if not Orwellian) dream of a non-profit entity living off of the ample teat of George Soros busily crafting “rapid response” items in opposition to the small yet enormously effective voices from the right in journalism, has now turned into what appears to be a bunch of guys monitoring radio, TV and the internet with the hopes of finding the slightest divergence from left wing orthodoxy as dictated by their founder, spaceship enthusiast John Podesta.

John Podesta

It isn’t enough that they label as “homophobic” any questions about Safe School Czar Kevin Jenning’s objectively questionable judgment with regard to the teaching materials associated with his organization GLSEN.  And it isn’t enough that they dismiss any video report exposing left-wing sacred cows such as ACORN and Planned Parenthood as “heavily edited” as if editing automatically renders a report untruthful (even though the entire, unedited transcripts and audio for the ACORN stories have been available at Big Government).  No, those ridiculously laughable positions that fly in the face of common sense are not enough to keep the team at MM(FA) feeling smugly supercilious and self-important… now they go on the attack if a journalist dares to refer to Guantanamo prisoners as “terrorists,”   No, this is not a parody. (more…)

Hope springs eternal for the future of the journalism whenever I eat at Tomboy’s Burgers. It’s not only the gloriously greasy burgers and hearty, artery-clogging breakfasts that draw me to Manhattan Beach a couple of weekends a month.  It’s the Los Angeles Times and the off chance that those who produce it will wake up and give what should be a great paper new life.

Only a matter of time now

I only read the Times at Tomboy’s, and I can only do so because there is usually a forlorn copy of it lying between the hot sauce and utensils.  My subscription lapsed years ago–I’m a casualty of the Times’s limp writing and consistent lefty spin–but something inside me still hopes to one day open up that paper and once again find something worth reading.  That did not happen on New Year’s Day.  Not by a longshot.

On New Year’s Day, the Times’s lead editorial was its annual 40 or so “Wishes for the New Year.” It was truly thought provoking, except the thought that was provoked was, “who the hell writes this stuff?” (more…)