- Ridiculous. The arrest of “journalists” at the Occupy movement has caused the US to drop in its ranking of press freedom.

Reporters Without Borders’ latest Press Freedom Index was released on Wednesday, and the list reflected some of the tumult that took place in the world in 2011, as well as the impact that those events had on journalists across the globe. Reporters became targets over and over again throughout the year, both in the Middle East and on the streets of New York.

I’m sure Reporters Without Borders didn’t bother delving into the habit many of these “journalists” had of blurring the lines between journalist and protester. No worries, we at Big Journalism did. When you cease acting like a professional during a protest and join in with the protesters, yes, you are subject to arrest if you break the law. Your media badge doesn’t give you special allowances under said law.

- Diane Sawyer’s reporting under fire for inaccurate remark on tornado warnings in Alabama:

After being publicly criticized yesterday for a report stating Monday’s tornadoes hit Alabama residents with “no warning,” “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer backpedaled last night, saying the death toll “could have been far worse” without the tornado warning system.

That criticism?

ABC “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer reported that Alabamians had “no warning” of the tornadoes that struck Jan. 23, but Birmingham weatherman James Spann begs to differ.

Spann hits back on his blog:

NO WARNING? Get a clue. This event was forecast days in advance, and the average lead times for the entire event were 20 to 30 minutes. That is plenty of time to get to a safe place.

We were on the air non-stop from about midnight until almost 8 a.m. It has been our policy at ABC 33/40 to provide long form, uninterrupted severe weather coverage if ANY county in our market goes under a tornado warning.

No warning?

(more…)

Echoing the spin of Red Star recipient Scot Horsley of NPR, ABC’s Diane Sawyer today celebrated Richard Cordray, President Barack Obama’s new appointee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as a “consumer champion.”

(more…)

ABC World News is no better than NBC Nightly News. Last week was the time to do it: Department of Justice dumping 1,400 pages on Congress, Sharyl Attkisson releasing information showing they wanted to use Fast and Furious to mandate new gun laws, and, of course, Eric Holder’s testimony. Then again ABC World News has never mentioned Operation Fast and Furious all year. Why start now?

The day of the document dump, Friday, December 2, ABC decided to do a segment on how the elderly are working well into their 90s and a story about a fallen soldier’s dog. But let’s just give them the benefit of the doubt and maybe they just ran out of time. They had the whole weekend to get a segment for it.

Come Monday did it appear on the show? No: Instead, Tiger Woods’s comeback is a much bigger story than the document dump from the previous Friday. Then they had to do a healthy living segment to tell us that too much sitting is bad for us. Yes didn’t you know to much sitting is bad for you? If you’re going to do a healthy living segment at least tell us something we don’t know.

Instead of talking about Mr. Holder’s testimony the next day or new documents revealing the intent to use Fast & Furious to mandate new gun laws, ABC talks about Alec Baldwin getting kicked off a plane. An entire segment was devoted to him. They actually did a study group to figure out which one was right: Baldwin or the flight attendant. They’re able to fit in a few sentences about Blago’s jail sentence too. Surprise! Another governor from my home state is going to prison! They couldn’t fit in one or two sentences about the attorney general testifying? No?

(more…)

If Katie Couric is preparing to square off against Diane Sawyer over Sawyer’s anchor spot my money is on Sawyer.

Ambitious news presenter Katie Couric is said to be eyeing up Diane Sawyer’s hot seat on ABC World News.

The 54-year-old newswoman serves as a special correspondent for the network – but according to insiders is keen to fill in for anchor Sawyer, 65, when she is away.

However, this news has apparently not gone down well with veteran Diane – who wants her rival to stay well away from her chair.

A source told the National Enquirer: ‘[Couric's] time as anchor on CBS wasn’t very successful, but she’d like to show she can still do it,’ but added Sawyer would be ‘very unhappy if they use Katie as her substitute when she’s off.’

I bet; Sawyer doesn’t strike me as a Barbie font fan.

(more…)

In her exclusive interview with Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D, AZ), ABCs Diane Sawyer began with a retrospective of the terrible crime committed against the Congresswoman by a mentally disturbed, a-political gunman. But true to her left-wing agenda, Sawyer could not resist illicitly linking tea party activists, anti-Obamacare sentiment, and even Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to what was perpetrated against Rep. Giffords on that terrible day.

Yes, even though these calumnies against conservatives and Sarah Palin have been thoroughly discredited, Sawyer links them anyway to the shocking crime that took the lives of six people, injured others, and delivered a debilitating head wound to Representative Giffords.

It was only hours after the shooting occurred on January 8, 2011, that left-wing activists, purported journalists, and Democrat operatives alike began blaming the shooting of Rep. Giffords on “Tea Party hate” and the “violent rhetoric of the right.”

The false narrative was picked up by nearly every Old Media outlet and disgorged from their talking points sheets over and over again. It was days before everyone learned that the killer, one Jared Lee Loughner, had been stalking Giffords for several years before the tea party, Obamacare or Sarah Palin became national news.

In fact, killer Loughner was not interested in politics at all. He was just a sick-minded, lunatic that had a crazy infatuation with Rep. Giffords.

The media ultimately stopped bandying about its discredited theory that the shooting was spurred by conservatives, the tea party and Gov. Palin, but no apologies were ever uttered by the spinmeisters in the press.

At least we thought that the discredited theory that the Giffords shooting was the fault of conservatives had disappeared. Now, with Sawyer’s new interview, we are once again treated to scenes of tea partiers unhappy at townhall meetings in the days before the shooting. We also get a brief scene of Gov. Palin addressing a crowd. So, once more we are visited with the lie that conservatives are at fault for Giffords shooting. Sawyer didn’t say so directly, of course. She’s too slick for that. But by showing tea partiers, conservatives, and Palin and painting them as a hostile force against Giffords, Sawyer was obviously linking them to the crime. Sawyer slyly floated irate conservatives as the reason the “atmosphere” of the days before her shooting were so filled with portent of the dangers to come.

Only it’s all a lie. The tea party, the dislike the nation has for Obamacare (which is still extant, by the way), and the political activism of Governor Sarah Palin had precisely nothing to do with Giffords’ shooting. Giffords was in Jared Lee Loughner’s gunsights regardless of the political situation in the country in the days leading up to his crime.

(more…)

The video below is pretty symbolic of what we’re seeing from the MSM as a whole, the very same MSM that reported on the absurdly peaceful tea party with seething hostility and contempt:

—–

Well, there may only be a couple hundred cities in the world, but the real pull-quote there is, “And of course they are calling for the 1% of richest Americans to find more ways to help the 99%.”

Oh, how sweet and noble and innocent they all are.

One now wonders if the same national MSM that obsessed over Tea Party signs brought in by obvious infiltrators to aid the MSM in their crusade to smear the whole movement will find this treasure-trove of frightening astro-turf newsworthy, or the violence that broke in New York City this morning AFTER Mayor Bloomberg caved about cleaning the park, or this:

(more…)

In a world with around 200 countries, we get this from the breathlessly excited ABC News anchor:

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Writing at Malkin’s spot, Doug Powers makes the excellent observation that this was likely a Freudian slip: 

ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who is ensconced in the 1% of America that the “Occupy Wall Street” occupiers are complaining about, is nevertheless fairly excited about the rapid spread of the protests. …

Sawyer seems a little too desperate to give the “movement” galactic legitimacy. Did she mean to say “a thousand cities” around the world? That still seems like a terribly high estimate[.]

(more…)

Intelligence Director James Clapper was apparently previously unaware of the London terror arrests, which, when you consider that his job is to brief the President daily on national security, is sure to inspire lots of confidence in the administration. He learned about it from Diane Sawyer in this interview, around 3:40 in:

SAWYER: “I was a little surprised you didn’t know about London, Director.”

CLAPPER: “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t.”

Clapper’s first response was to slam Sawyer, calling her question “ambiguous.”

(more…)

KATIE COURIC:  We’ve never been used this way before.  The White House called the other day and gave me a list of 2012 election night analysts acceptable to them.  I don’t like it.

BRIAN WILLIAMS:  Remember when it was collaborative?   Now, they don’t even trust us to spin anything correctly.   Zucker took away my Managing Editor title and assigned it to Chris Matthews.  And he reports to Gibbs.

DIANE SAWYER:  Wasn’t so long ago they rolled over in the morning and kissed us and said they still respected us.  Now, well.  I hate to say it, but the right is right: Obama’s an egocentric narcissist who doesn’t know he’s in over his head.

(more…)

In response to the announcement that I would provide my analysis on ABC News from Arizona on election night, like-clockwork, from the George Soros-funded Media Matters to Keith Olbermann to Huffington Post to Daily Kos to Talking Points Memo to Twitter (#boycottABCNEWS), the institutional left began on Friday to inundate ABC News with a wave of partisan objections and unfounded allegations against me.

Make no mistake: this is a calculated “astroturf“ intimidation campaign by the well-funded and frightened-for-their-political-lives institutional left to quash dissenting voices. It’s what they do.

What was ABC News’ response? Not standing up for free speech and the 1^st Amendment. Not sticking by their original invitation. Not standing up for diversity of opinion.

Instead, on Saturday, ABC News issued an official statement that was immediately heralded as a victory by the anti-free speech forces on the left:

Since conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart announced on his website that he was going to be a participant in ABC’s Town Hall meeting at Arizona State University, there has been considerable consternation and misinformation regarding my decision to ask him to participate in an election night Town Hall event for ABC News Digital. I want to explain what Mr. Breitbart’s role has always been as one of our guests at our digital town hall event:

Mr. Breitbart is not an ABC News analyst.

He is not an ABC News consultant.

He is not, in any way, affiliated with ABC News.

He is not being paid by ABC News.

He has not been asked to analyze the results of the election for ABC News.

Mr. Breitbart will not be a part of the ABC News broadcast coverage, anchored by Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. For the broadcast coverage, David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg will contribute reaction and response gathered from the students and faculty of Arizona State University at an ABC News/Facebook town hall.

He has been invited as one of several guests, from a variety of different political persuasions, to engage with a live, studio audience that will be closely following the election results and participating in an online-only discussion and debate to be moderated by David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg on ABCNews.com and Facebook. We will have other guests, as well as a live studio audience and a large audience on ABCNews.com and Facebook, who can question the guests and the audience’s opinions.

George Stephanoplous quickly tweeted, “Breitbart NOT on ABC network broadcast http://bit.ly/bgkseJ.” (more…)

Over the past couple of months, a lot of readers of my website, AtlasShrugs, have been asking me why I go on these consistently belligerent TV shows to discuss Islam, knowing that:

• It is going to be a hostile environment;
• I will be debating liars, deceivers and Islamic supremacists;
• I will be defamed, smeared and slandered;
• The playing field will be grossly unfair;
• I will be interrupted, cut off, and rebuked;
• I will be given much less time than my opponent.

I will tell you why. It is an opportunity, however compromised. Voices like mine, Robert Spencer’s, Wafa Sultan’s and Ibn Warraq’s are never heard in the mainstream media. The truth is hidden from the masses, and the media’s criminal negligence is cloaked in good intentions. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This is guerrilla warfare in the information battlespace, in the war of ideas. These media opportunities were hardly perfect, but they were something. Why make perfect the enemy of the good? They were better than the traditional blackout on our freedom- defense initiatives. It was a shot, and I was taking it and running with it, no matter how disgusting it all was.

From the media’s perspective, the Ground Zero mosque was an historical phenomenon. For the first time, a major news story became the most important national and international news story without the media. Think about that. Unlike the fringe pastor in Florida, who tweeted a Qur’an threat and the media descended like locusts to a Florida backwater to create a news story, a narrative, the Ground Zero mosque was not shaped by the media, not covered by the media — not at first anyway. (more…)

Or so says Diane Sawyer, shaking her head wearily at the sheer senselessness of it all:

Every now and then, someone seems to express the nation’s frustration with the endless wrangling and delay in Congress.

That’s Anthony Weiner, aka Mr. Huma Abedin, shouting at fellow New York representative Peter King. We especially like Ms. Sawyer’s not-at-all-biased lead in: (more…)

My name is Hippocritico and I’m here to help my friends in the mainstream media protect their journalistic legacies by making sure they don’t come off as brazen, biased, hypocrites by covering a particular story that hurts one political party and not covering a similar story that hurts a different one.

Diane Sawyer and ABC News are obviously very concerned with issues of discrimination in America. Last night all kinds of time was devoted to covering the NAACP’s condemnation of the Tea Party movement — the same NAACP that didn’t condemn the SEIU for beating Kenneth Gladney. ABC News also covered an event that’s now famous for never really happening:

Late word from Washington tonight about just how ugly the crowds gathered outside the Longworth office building have become. We learned that as Congressman Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri was leaving his office someone in the crowd spit on him. There are also reports of racial and homophobic slurs, one targeting Congressman John Lewis, the famous civil rights champion, and the other involving Congressman Barney Frank. You can listen in for yourself.

It looks like the end is near for the dinosaurs formerly known as the news divisions of the Big Three — at least two of them anyway.  Hard on the heels of layoffs at CBS came a serious ax-wielding at ABC, resulting in the staff cut by more than a quarter, the diminishment of its foreign bureaus and a number of prominent correspondents let go, including Brian Rooney.  Here’s the New York Times on their plight:

If “Good Morning America” or “World News” look any different in the coming weeks, it might be because ABC News is employing nearly 400 fewer people.

Earlier this week, ABC News, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, largely completed one of the most drastic rounds of budget cutbacks at a television news operation in decades, affecting roughly a quarter of the staff. The cutbacks promise to change ABC both on- and off-camera.

For some employees, like the longtime Los Angeles correspondent Brian Rooney, Friday was their last day. Mr. Rooney said his contract expired at “exactly the moment when they needed to shed an enormous amount from the payroll.” In an e-mail message, he compared it to “standing looking straight up when the bomb dropped.”

Yes, that’s the ticket: in the name of “lean and mean” — the same cliche we’ve been hearing in the canyons of Sixth Avenue since the Time-Warner merger back in the eighties — wreck your news operation, give the public less and hope that somehow the bottom line improves.

Ask former Time Inc. exec Jerry Levin how well that worked out.

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KATIE COURIC:  Is it even possible to report the “South Park” incident without offending Muslims?

BRIAN WILLIAMS:  Sure.  Just remain neutral.  Say, “In other news, Comedy Central censored this week’s “South Park” episode to avoid offending Muslims.  Next on our broadcast, etc.”

DIANE SAWYER:  But there’s no context.

WILLIAMS: When have we ever worried about context?  Context is Fox’s thing.

COURIC: Parker and Stone asked for trouble.  Religion’s a hot button issue; you’ve got to tread carefully.  What’s your lead tonight, Brian?

WILLIAMS:  A former priest who claims he facilitated an affair between the Pope and an American cardinal during the last papal election.  Both refused requests for interviews to present their side of the story. (more…)

Wasilla, Alaska (UIP)— Shocking news last night as former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced that she is following in the footsteps of the noble senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, and is switching parties to become a Democrat.

This news comes just five days after Palin appeared as the keynote speaker at a Tea Party rally in Searchlight, Nev., where she appeared in her former guise as an angry white female and told the crowd of at least a dozen or so people that she was tired of government intrusion into her life and that she was going to do everything she could to “send Harry Reid back to Searchlight where he would be lucky to be elected as part-time street sweeper.”

Sometime since then, Palin said, she had an epiphany and realized “the weather of Nevada must’ve unfrozen my cold, steely Alaskan heart,” and that she had awakened from her icy slumber of neocon-ism.  “What the hell was I thinking?” She also resigned as a Fox News contributor, effective immediately.

Reaction was swift from the Democrats across the nation. (more…)

Legacy journalism is seeing some hard times, as the situation at ABC illustrates: its news division has announced it is going to close all of its brick and mortar bureaus around the nation (except the one in Washington DC) and will cut half of its domestic correspondents. Those who are left will be asked to work out of the local ABC affiliates.

[ABC News President David] Westin said the network would cope with the reduced manpower on breaking news stories by hiring freelance crews and making use of its expanded team of digital journalists, staffers who would be able to handle multiple tasks. Although a majority of stories will still be covered by traditional four-person crews, Westin said he expected a “plurality” of pieces would be done by people shooting and editing their own video. The digital journalists will be stationed in two-person teams around the country.

In other words, ABC News plans to make do with less, as millions of other businesses around America are doing. In this economy, it’s becoming a sadly familiar story.

What stands out, however, is how ABC sees no problem with paying ABC World News Tonight anchor Diane Sawyer an estimated $12 to $15 million per year while laying off the little people in order to make ends meet. And she doesn’t seem to have a problem cashing those juicy paychecks. (more…)

This time last year, two proud and powerful citizens of the world stood at the pinnacle of victory.  Barack Obama was being inaugurated as President of the United States.  Both on the campaign trail and in his inaugural address, Obama proclaimed the start of his “remaking America” revolution.

George Soros had finally managed to back, promote and land a winner.  Their joint venture – Obama’s 2004 bid for the U.S. Senate —  had paid off in the ultimate jackpot:  the presidency.

Soros, the instigator and funder of various “velvet revolutions” in smaller countries, seemed convinced that all he needed to bring the U.S. into submission to a global government, stripped of her sovereignty, was a “citizen of the world” president to replace the all-American president, George W. Bush.  Soros has openly referred to the “bubble of American supremacy” and has berated our lone-superpower position as bringing much more harm than good to the “global family.”

Soros explained his early support of Obama, telling Judy Woodruff in May 2008, “…Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the world.”  When Woodruff queried Soros on whether it might be a concern that Obama lacked experience to lead in this dangerous time we live in, Soros responded, “…this emphasis on experience is way overdone…” (more…)