“I am pleased that I’ll be running the election coverage on Current, following this Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary,” said Olbermann in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter on Sunday. “However, I don’t think those participating in the New Hampshire primary will share my satisfaction.”
ABC’s “This Week” is bringing back George Stephanopoulos little more than a year after Christiane Amanpour replaced him and sent him to NYC for their morning show. There were rumors of Amanpour’s departure for some time, that the shakeup came from both parties with Amanpour longing to do more field reporting as opposed to sitting behind a desk.
NEW YORK — George Stephanopoulos is returning to Sunday mornings at ABC News, replacing Christiane Amanpour as host of the political talk show “This Week.”
ABC said Tuesday that Stephanopoulos, who returns Jan. 8, will remain as host of “Good Morning America,” although likely on a four-day schedule.
Amanpour, meanwhile, enters an unusual job-sharing role where she will become ABC’s global affairs anchor, contributing to prime-time shows on world news, while also being host of a daily show on CNN International.
[...]
Critics wondered from the start whether the Iranian-born Amanpour, a veteran foreign correspondent for CNN, was a good fit for a panel show dominated by American politics. It hasn’t budged from third place behind NBC’s “Meet the Press” and a resurgent “Face the Nation” on CBS, with the ABC show down 1 percent in ratings from last year.
The media is having a field day right now questioning the late Steve Jobs and his “Reality Distortion Field.” Skipping the fact that the deceased makes for an easy target, I find it hilarious that the media is all that shocked at the concept of reality distortion.
Take this popular statement in its many variations: Occupy Wall Street is just like the tea party. Seriously? There’s Reality Distortion for ya, right there, by those in the media who have promised to tell us the truth and put it in the proper context. Have they not seen the destruction of property, public nudity, suspected sexual assaults, riots and near riots, numerous arrests for a variety of crimes? Still, they will continue to compare what they are seeing on the streets today with what we saw at tea party rallies? Reality Distortion Field.
I was watching ABC’s Good Morning America recently and George Stephanopoulos was interviewing Joe Biden. They were talking about #OWS and George was making his statement about how similar the protests were to the tea party movement, and while George was talking, the B-roll footage was showing cops arresting OWS protestors. Reality Distortion Field. Let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say he wasn’t looking at his monitor. I know how difficult that can be sometimes with a bunch of different things going on all at the same time, but still, anybody think George hasn’t seen the video of the anarchy and can’t tell the difference between OWS and the tea party?
Ex-Clintonista George Stephanopoulos did his very best to torpedo Michele Bachmann yesterday on his ‘news’ show. In the course of his extremely smarmy interview, he asked her about a quote of hers to the effect that the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery, citing that Washington and Jefferson, among others, were slave owners.
While Bachmann countered by mentioning John Quincy Adams, who was his father’s secretary, the fact is that the Founding Fathers, or at least the majority of them did indeed work tirelessly to end slavery, and while they failed in the immediate sense, they succeeded in that they laid the groundwork for slavery’s demise 70 years later.
An excellent read on the matter is a brilliant book called Miracle in Philadelphia, by Catherine Drinker Bowen, which recounts the actual history and debates around the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
Slavery was a huge issue during that convention, and many of the Founding Fathers wanted it outlawed, but ran into an impasse after many hours of debate with the southern colonies whose agricultural productivity depended on it.
The Founders who wanted to set the stage for the abolition of slavery came up with a compromise involving the issue of apportionment.
Very stark difference between Jake Tapper and George Stephanopoulos’s reporting and that of Andrea Mitchell. Stephanopoulos/Tapper reported the fallout from the videos, namely, that it has resulted in the canning of NPR’s two chieftains and more momentum behind the push to defund it. Mitchell tried to discredit the source and defend NPR’s work. One comes across as journalism, the other pure advocacy. Watch the videos and see if you can tell the difference:
“The culture war with new and old media, an undercover upstart has dealt a major blow to the establishment.”
Here at Big Journalism we’re pretty tough on the media when they behave badly, but we also try to offer kudos where they are deserved, even if that’s only with benefit of hindsight.
Yesterday I pointed out that three high profile network newspeople–Katie Couric of CBS, George Stephanopoulos of ABC, and Charlie Rose of PBS–had attended a party at the New York home of a convicted sex offender named Jeffrey Epstein. If you’re unfamiliar with the name, suffice it to say that Epstein isn’t your average offender. He’s a billionaire money manager who was accused of paying more than 40 teenage girls for sexual favors and, as I noted in yesterday’s post, transporting at least one teenager around the world as a party favor for his adult friends. Thanks to a plea deal offered by the FBI, he spent less than 18 months in jail.
As a father of two daughters, this is the kind of thing that gets me upset. It’s even more upsetting that reporters who should know better continue to treat him like a respectable member of high society. So yesterday I sent out tweets to the three news people who attended the party, asking them if they had any comment and/or explanation for their decision to socialize with a convicted sex offender. Late yesterday afternoon I received a message from Katie Couric in response. Because her response was made via a private channel, I believe she has an expectation of privacy. However I can characterize what she said as a sincere expression of regret. I still think Couric deserves criticism for attending the party, but she also deserves credit for not ducking the issue now that she has the benefit of hindsight.
When news broke that ABC would air the first “live interview” with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld since 2006, I determined to tune in. The host was George Stephanopoulos, the setting was Good Morning America (GMA), and the topic was Rumsfeld’s recently released memoir, Known and Unknown.
On paper, everything seemed harmless: the Navy Captain and political figure who embarked on his career in public service while Dwight Eisenhower was president, became a Congressman in his own right, held the post of Secretary of Defense in both the Ford and George W. Bush administrations, and served in various capacities for Nixon and Reagan, was going to sit down and talk about what he’d experienced through decades of service to the nation he loved.
ABC News talking head Cokie Roberts was shilling for the Obama administration once again on Good Morning America during an interview with former Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos. She wasn’t just shilling for Obama but tying to mold the news and public opinion to her left-wing druthers instead of giving an honest review of today’s political climate.
Like the rest of the Old Media establishment, Roberts was filled with praise for the great success that Obama had in this lame duck Congress. “It was incredible,” she gushed.
Of course, Roberts interpreted the Lame Duck session to mean that the Republicans are the ones that came to Obama as opposed to the truth that he had to come to them for the first time in his political career. This lame duck session was the first time in Obama’s life he was forced to actually compromise with Republicans as opposed to merely giving compromise lip service but otherwise sticking to his hard-left agenda — and even at that he barely compromised at all here.
But instead of reporting the truth, Roberts spun it to make it seem as if the GOP came hat-in-hand to her powerful and righteous president. And she pronounced it good and insisted that the GOP must continue it despite gaining the upper hand in the recent midterm elections.
We have a pretty substantial file built up on liberal Mediaite blogger Tommy Christopher, who has put in a lot of hours attempting to damage the Breitbart brand. But today he writes one of the best pieces we’ve seen recapping ABC News’s attempt at credibility suicide. And when you’ve lost Tommy Christopher…:
Under pressure from groups like Media Matters and Color of Change, ABC News first scaled back, and then canceled, Andrew Breitbart’s planned participation in its Election Day coverage. Rather than admit they were responding to pressure, however, they decided to blame Breitbart, claiming that he had exaggerated his role in their coverage, essentially firing him for promoting their broadcast.
[...]
However, in his first conversation with [ABC Executive Producer Andrew Morse] Morse, Breitbart says he was calm. “Do you understand that you invited me to be a participant in this, and because of pressure from the predictable (George) Soros, Huffington, Talking Points Memo, John Podesta activist left, to shut up other voices that they disagree with, a la Juan Williams, of course you would have to react.”
“But to react by throwing your invitee under the bus, and humiliating him in the process? Do you think that that sends the right message to your audience, and to the people out there who think that I am a credible news source, that I offer a valuable opinion as the primary defender of the Tea Party movement against merciless attacks by this very same mainstream media?” (more…)
There’s been yet another troubling turn in the story of ABC News caving to left-wing Blacklisters since Andrew Breitbart published this article last night laying out the facts with respect to how the network offered him a gracious invitation to participate in tomorrow’s “online and network broadcast election night coverage” and then revoked at least part of that invitation after the left ginned up a coordinated Juan Williams-like astro-turf attack to silence him.
Via Yahoo!, this morning ABC News contradicted themselves further with this jaw-dropping accusation claiming that this is all Breitbart’s fault for exaggerating his role:
“Mr. Breitbart exaggerated the role he would play on his blog,” ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider told The Upshot on Monday. “We immediately made it clear that was never the role he was supposed to play. He had been invited to be part of our digital town hall, and that is still the role.”
Before we look at what “Mr. Breitbart” posted on “his blog,” let’s look at what ABC News told him. This is a direct quote from an an email to Breitbart from an ABC News producer…
This program will broadcast on the ABC Television Network.
And then there’s this from a statement by David Ford of ABC News…
He [Breitbart] will be one of many voices on our air[.]
How exactly does Big Journalism’s October 29th announcement qualify as an exaggeration when compared to what ABC News has said both privately via email and publicly via that statement?: (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 DailyKos 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 1st 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.
Here’s everybody’s favorite Clinton-era apparatchik/hack masquerading as a “newsman,” George Stephanopoulos, starting the Obama drumbeat early and often. Let the shilling begin!
Shame on Steffi, and worse shame on ABC for employing a political operative and trying — unsuccessfully, thankfully — to fob him off on the public as an objective journalist.
Somewhere, the ghost of Howard K. Smith is weeping. In case you’ve forgotten — or in case you never knew — here’s what a real TV newsman used to look and sound like: (more…)
There’s a lot of buzz on the Internet about what has been called the JournoList. This was a private e-mail list maintained by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein of about 400 journalists, bloggers, and academics who may have colluded in aiding the election of Mr. Obama. Mr. Breitbart is the king of the alternative media and created his “Big” sites to report what was being unreported by the mainstream media. Big Journalism and Big Government are two Breitbart sites that have uncovered scoops that took weeks for the mainstream media to report. The Acorn scandal would never have come to light without this exposure. On May 10, Brad Thor posted on Big Government the capture of Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Pakistan, yet to date we haven’t heard a ripple in the mainstream media.
Mr. Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide the complete Journolist e-mail sessions and while no one has claimed that reward yet, Tucker Carlson, the editor of the DailyCaller.com, has released copies of some of the e-mail correspondence. These have been reported on the “Big” sites and Fox News. What they reveal is very disturbing to those who still naively believe that the Fourth Estate is incorruptible. Uncovered is an egregious conspiracy to slant the news for an ideological motive rather than journalistic integrity.
The mostly white, liberal, leftist group correspondence suggested ways to cover the 2008 presidential campaign that would benefit Mr. Obama and vilify the McCain/Palin team. Of course, this media bias is not news to anyone on the right, but for the first time there is concrete proof that Mr. Obama was the choice of the mainstream media, which aided and abetted his campaign. (more…)
Seriously? Sasha and Malia doing babysitting to earn extra cash and Barack Obama says he is not that far removed from what most Americas are going through? What is this, a Saturday Night Live Skit?
Nope—a morning interview on ABC with consumer reporter Elizabeth Leamy.
During this gem of an interview we learned that Obama is teaching his daughters fiscal responsibility (insert laugh track here) by having them do babysitting jobs (now you’re rolling on the floor, right?)
I’d love to have heard whom the girls are babysitting. Perhaps George Stephanopoulos’ kids need to stop by the White House for a little while and George flips the girls a twenty for keeping an eye on them while he and the president plan their next candid interview. Maybe George Soros has great-grandkids that need tending. I’m seeing $20 million an hour for that job. Just to help the girls with their depleted college fund. Times are tough out there, you know. Just ask the president.
We have finally reached the number one, most left-biased journalist in America today on our top ten count down and our most biased journo pick probably won’t surprise any of you. Even though she just “retired” due to her outrageous bias and hatred for Israel, we just have to give the number one most biased slot to the ever-vitriolic Ms. Helen Thomas, long time employee of United Press International (UPI) and the Hearst New Service.
Thomas was an over 50-year employee of UPI but in the year 2000 she quit the wire service because it was bought by News World Communications which is affiliated with the Unification Church. She was proud of herself, though, because according to her she was “never, never accused of bias” in her reporting.
I worked for United Press International for more than fifty years, and I wrote straight copy. I was never, never accused of bias. I did not bow out of the human race. I permitted myself to care, to believe, to think. But I assure you, I assure you that it did not get in my copy.
But that isn’t what her record says. Bias was epidemic throughout. In May of 2000 the MRC went back and found at least half a dozen instances where Thomas readily revealed her bias. Instances range from Ronald Reagan’s days in office up to the year 2000 when she quit UPI.
After a heated appearance on MSNBC, Breitbart accused David Shuster of tricking him into an appearance on the show and attacked Shuster’s objectivity. On January 28, following an interview about O’Keefe’s Louisiana arrest, Breitbart assailed host David Shuster for luring him “into this story based upon the false premise of his objective neutrality.”
Breitbart’s fisking of Shuster was posted online while the two were on the air together, not afterward. Breitbart prepared the piece prior to going live with Shuster and in no way did the piece address the interview itself, just the events leading up to it.
The premise of Media Matter’s “Breitbart bites the hand that feeds him” piece is to demonstrate that Breitbart tends to report on the journalists to whom he grants interviews. And why not? We at BigJournalism are of the opinion that the media are frequently the message. But whether or not you support MMFA’s thesis that Breitbart is mereley “lashing out” after interviews, the David Shuster example they reference is an invalid piece of evidence and should be omitted from a corrected version of the article.
We kindly request Media Matters for America issue a formal correction.
George Stephanopoulos’s “interview” with James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart on this morning’s Good Morning America summed up everything that is wrong with institutional American journalism. No doubt it is even now speeding its way over to the Newseum for permanent enshrinement in the Hall of Shame.
First, the very fact that a partisan hack like Stephanopoulos is actually employed by ABC News is a disgrace in itself. In the old days of “real journalism,” PR men and political operatives found no welcome in a newsroom: they were considered far too tainted by their flackery to ever be credible as independent reporters or newsgatherers. And yet here is “Steffi,” one of the architects of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and star of The War Room, segueing smoothly from blind loyalty to his impeached boss, to the author of a more-in-“sorrow”-than-in-anger tell-all, semi-mea-culpa memoir (for which he was paid $2.75 million), All Too Human: A Political Education, to prime spots in the ABC pantheon.
Is that all it takes — a quick, highly remunerative sheep-dip memoir, accompanied by a few bogus crocodile tears — to transform an apparatchik into a newsman?
But this is our culture today: cheap second-hand celebrity, such as Stephanopoulos’s, has come to replace accomplishment, and its kissing-cousin, access, has been substituted for integrity. You just know that if ABC couldn’t get Bill Clinton then Steffi was the next best thing, the same way CNN hired James Carville and Paul Begala, although with not quite the same breathtaking audacity of dope. (more…)
Today James O’Keefe and I had the privilege to go on ABC News’ Good Morning America to launch O’Keefe’s new set of undercover videos – the Census. While most of the feedback email of the contentious segment is running negative against George Stephanopoulos for emphasizing long debunked and retracted smears and for using the word “criminal” throughout the piece, what is missing is an acknowledgment of how courageous Stephanopoulos was to put O’Keefe and me on the air in the first place.
ABC NEWS and Stephanopoulos are not immune from partisan propaganda campaigns to ignore points of view that run counter to their already center-left mainstream media line. In fact, Stephanopoulos himself was the person who delayed the mainstream media’s report on the Clinton/Lewinsky story by stopping Bill Kristol in his tracks on ABC News’ This Week in January, 1998. He was also the political operative who internally attacked ABC News brass for booking former White House FBI agent and New York Times bestseller, Gary Aldrich. Twice Stephanopoulos tried to use his political skills to kill a story.
One small detail in an AP/Washington Post article of Feb. 10 has outed ABC News: the news network withheld a crucial detail in its reporting of the Andrew Young/John Edwards sex tape story.
The crucial detail? ABC News had already seen the now-infamous Edwards-Hunter sex tape before the interview — and then acted on-camera as if it hadn’t.
That crucial detail raises questions as to why ABC News purposely mislead both its viewers and readers of its website–essentially covering up its own coverage of a cover-up. This action was repeated in recent ABC interview of Young and corresponding news reports on Rielle Hunter’s restraining order regarding the sex tape.
On February 10th the Washington Post published an AP report on the Andrew Young contempt of court hearing in North Carolina. Titled “Ex-Edwards aide faces pressure after tell-all book,” the report focused on Rielle Hunter’s attorney’s “frustration” over Young changing his story on where the tapes were located. (more…)
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
Follow Us on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS
Got a Tip?