CHRIS WALLACE: Jon Stewart, thanks for appearing again on Fox News Sunday.

JON STEWART:  Wasn’t my idea, Chris.  Last time, I looked like Kwai Chang Caine being schooled by Master Po.  My ratings actually fell off the next week.  So the suits at Comedy Central Central told me to take another shot at you.

WALLACE:  So, you got your marching orders . . . to do what?

STEWART:  Leave you whimpering like Jim Cramer, my friend, make you look like a boob.  [from jacket pocket pulls out small beaker, removes cover, tosses contents into Wallace’s face]

WALLACE:  [reeling] Whoa, what the hell!

STEWART:  Who’s the joke on now, Chris?

WALLACE:  [wiping face] Are you crazy?

STEWART:  Lighten up, Chris.  You need a sense of humor if you want to be taken seriously.  Hey, it’s only water, man.  [pointing to label on beaker] See, water–  H2O.  Says here right on the . . . [reads]  “HCl—hydrochloric acid.”  Oops. Mislabeled.  My bad.  Note to self: use cream pie or glitter next time.

WALLACE:  But why?

STEWART:  [reasonably] Try to understand my position, Chris. A sizable chunk of The Daily Show’s core audience hates your guts; they were PO’d when I showed respect and treated you like an equal.  That’s not who I am.  I humiliate right-wingers in a non-partisan way.  I had to return to redeem myself.

WALLACE: Your core audience?

STEWART:  Yeah.  Fox has the Birchers, the neo facists, LaRouchers, and unborn rights freaks.  My core’s a mishmash of animal liberationists, anarchists, human extinctionists, Palinphobes, water cooler thirtysomethings, and fever swampers from The Daily Kos and Democratic Underground.

WALLACE:  I reject your . . . . (more…)

Every person who speaks eventually makes stupid comments – that’s a given, especially for individuals on the public stage and more specifically politicians who are required to have their facts straight all the time. Yet, there seems to be a disparity between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to so-called unbiased journalists putting the spotlight on gaffes. Moreover, the chasm gets wider if an opportunity arises to repeat misstatements made by Republican women.

The liberal media conveys a tacit attitude that those on the right are intellectually challenged. The unspoken question: Other than being a victim of a comprehension deficit, what other reason could there possibly be for a person to choose to be a conservative?

For years, the public has been subjected to the media bestowing accolades upon liberal women for superior intellect ranging from Hillary Clinton, who successfully dodged sniper fire in Bosnia, to Nancy Pelosi, who cited “500 million Americans” who lost jobs monthly prior to the stimulus.

Not every woman can be as astute and articulate as pseudo-intellectual leftist mouthpiece Janeane Garofalo. So, when a Republican woman misstates a fact, gets confused, or is quoted out of context, as a public service the media pounces on every word in an effort to reconfirm the fact that conservative females, as a whole, are an intellectually-challenged group.

Ever since accomplished lawyer, businesswoman, Minnesota Congresswoman and presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann joined the Republican field, attention has somewhat shifted from spending inordinate amounts of time convincing Americans that Sarah Palin is an idiot. The newest pastime is scoffing at Michele Bachmann’s foster parenting claim and her perceived inability to look directly into a television camera.

Much to the delight of the left, a mother lode of fodder has also been gleaned from Michele’s faith-based and social issue statements having to do with homosexuality, intelligent design, abortion rights, and her desire to return to the nation’s founding principles.

While smarmy sarcasm demeaning conservative women is expected from the media, what was not expected was Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asking Michele Bachmann if she’s a “flake.”

(more…)

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?

(more…)

In the past I’ve made my distaste for MSM fact-checkers pretty clear. No one owns the truth, no one has the right to declare what is and isn’t true. Certainly, some things are objectively true, but too often these self-appointed MSM fact-checkers are used by others in the mainstream media as cover to pretend they’re objective as they intentionally and dishonestly taint our side as liars. See: panels, death. As Mickey Kaus writes, Politifact “has no place in an open, honest democratic debate.” I couldn’t agree more. Furthermore, the more our side can work neutralize them prior to 2012, the safer our democracy will be. What sites like these can be useful for, however, is a place for research and analysis that allows you to come to your own conclusion.

And so in the case of Jon Stewart’s repeated claims on last week’s Fox News Sunday that “every poll” proves that Fox News viewers are the “most consistently misinformed,” the Daily Show host was either misinformed himself or just making something up to save his uncharacteristically defensive ass from a near-trainwreck of an interview that likely did his brand little good:

On the June 19, 2011, edition of Fox News Sunday, comedian Jon Stewart — host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central — sat down for an interview with Chris Wallace. Many readers asked us to review one of his claims. …

So we have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets — such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks — often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows — such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show — actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.

(more…)

Like most conservatives I am of course thrilled to see my political nemesis Keith Olbermann gone from his perch at MSNBC. His Angry Ted Baxter routine in which he hurled insults and dishonesty like a monkey hurls his own poop, was never a pretty sight. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t at least somewhat respect Olbermann for flying his partisan flag. With Olbermann gone, the news media is somehow even more dishonest today than it was yesterday.

Olbermann stridently declared, “I’m coming to get you Righties,” and then hurled away. Fair enough. Politicio, Mediaite, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, the rest of the broadcast networks, the New York Times, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum — they all do the same in the department of poop hurling, but without hoisting their partisan flag. And that is all the difference in the world.

And so, if for no other reason, I do credit Olbermann for not attempting to hide his agenda behind some sanctimonious veil of objectivity. The others, however, the so-called “objective” outlets are contemptible spies, out of uniform, and deserving of nothing more than our own brand of contempt. The whole idea of objective journalism is a lie, a conceit, a ploy for Leftists to declare what truth is and float above the debate. Any day of the week, I will take a thousand Keith Olbermanns over a single Christiane Amanpour –I will embrace Olbermann’s Tokyo Rose over this endless parade of Walter Durantys.

Yes, there are exceptions, we are fortunate enough to benefit from a few truly objective journalists, chief among them Brett Baier, Jake Tapper, and Chris Wallace. But so few exceptions in a media ocean of willful dishonesty, only serves to prove the rule. (more…)

One of the hacks and non-entities from Media Matters gets his mug on national television, if you call Chris Matthews’s basement-rated show, Hardball, national television:

Forget that Beck made his “racist” remark on Fox & Friends in the early morning, not on his own show.  Forget the fact that he’s since apologized for it.  This is a classic Media Matters smear, with a kernel of truth buried in a large steaming pile of leftist claptrap that would be heartbreakingly juvenile were it not so nakedly malevolent.

By the way, don’t you love the way Matthews mangles what sounds like Ari Rabin-Havt’s name, as if he’d never heard of the MMFA “vice president of research and communications”? (more…)

Modern American leftism is, at heart, a culture of thugs and bullies who simply assert what they wish to be true and never let facts get in the way whatever ridiculous argument they are trying to make. Which is why it’s such a pleasure to see an honest newsman like Chris Wallace stand up to them:

More please.

In his June 8, 2010, 7,000-plus word Rolling Stone article entitled “The Spill, The Scandal, and the President,” Tim Dickinson fixed blame for the oil leak in the Gulf, but ignored how the effort to fix the mess it’s causing has been badly mismanaged. In that sense, he hit his intended targets, but missed the mark.

The subtitle of the piece identifies his targets.

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder.

The storyline is simple. A notoriously negligent oil company, British Petroleum (BP), plus a corrupt Minerals Management Services (MMS) inherited from Bush, equals The Spill. It’s a variation on the “It’s Bush’s Fault” motif.

Even a Republican Congressman piled on:

It’s tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office. But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill. “Bush owns eight years of the mess,” says Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. “But after more than a year on the job, Salazar owns it too.”

(more…)