GMA is attempting to recreate the Rebecca Black sensation (for the lack of a better word) by patterning with crimes against music, Ark Music Factory. The company seemingly produces easy-to-make videos for rich suburban tweens, the ridicule of which, not the artistic skill, makes them famous.

In a weeklong programming stunt called “One Week to Hit it Big: Pop Star,” the show will select an ordinary teenage girl, and will attempt to turn her into an overnight sensation.

Why GMA would want to do this is beyond me; it shows that they miss the point out of the gate.

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Barry is now a budget buster.

After being told by the media that President Obama is the new Ronald Reagan, we are now being told he is busting the budget.

“The President says the plan he’s sending to Congress today is gonna slash more than a trillion dollars from the deficit. We’ll tell you what those cuts will mean to you and your family.”

That was George Stephanopoulos on ABC Good Morning America. George left out the part that the President’s plan would be over a ten year period, but when you’re trying to create “Barry the Budget Buster,” you have to leave out little facts like the number of years needed to come up with that trillion dollar number. They just want to help Barry the Budget Buster perpetuate the myth that he is out to protect our dollars from those evil people in government who want to steal them from us.

The deception continued. George finally mentioned that the cuts would take a decade to be fully realized (presumably Obama would be out of the White House by then, unless he chooses to ignore the 22^nd amendment.) “OBAMA PROPOSES SEVERE CUTS’ was the graphic at the bottom of the screen. Severe cuts? Which adjective would ABC use to describe the Republicans budget cuts, if they are using “severe” to describe Obama’s, super-duper severe?

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The excitement from ABC’S Good Morning America could hardly be contained. Oh, it started out on a somber note about the price of everything going up in 2011. Populist concern showed on Robin Roberts face as she said, “The former head of Shell Oil said gas prices may hit $5.00.” She continued to say that the cost of just about everything will be going up.

Hummmm. Where have I been hearing that?

I believe Rush Limbaugh mentioned this a year or two ago. It’s been hard to watch a day of Glenn Beck without him preaching that inflation is going to smack us silly soon and we had all better be prepared. How could they have possibly been so brilliant as to know this? In fact, how could anybody not have predicted this when you look at Dear Leaders economic policies?

The big difference is, Limbaugh and Beck (and other conservatives) have told us why this is happening, ABC, and for the most part, the rest of the activist old media mention inflation without stating the cause, and in fact, in this case, they even said it was a good thing!

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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.

Today was different. (more…)

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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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…)

Why did Game Change authors, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann keep quiet on one of the 2008 campaign’s juiciest stories–only to spill the beans eighteen months later?

More importantly, why did they tell their readers about the John Edwards scandal only after it became personally profitable to do so?

Political reporters Halperin and Heilemann signed their book deal in June 2008, reportedly for a “mid- to high- six-figure sum.”co-authors of the ubiquitous political tell-all, Game Change.  Sprinkled amongst this cornucopia of unsourced gossip, rumor, whispers and innuendo are nuggets of hard news, particularly about former 2008 Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards.

Of particular interest was the following passage, from the excerpt published by Heilemann’s employer, New York :

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