David Frum on CNN’s Reliable Sources: “People Who Watch A Lot Of Fox Come Away Knowing A Lot Less”

Media Matters touts the sensational headline above without a video link, embed, or download of the source material in any way. Not only is the quote inaccurate because it’s incomplete, but it likely stems from a weak survey first pushed by MMfA. They also neglect to inform their readers that Howard Kurtz called out Frum for his reckless statement in this very segment of “Reliable Sources.” This is how propaganda is made, thus making MMfA gulity of the very charge it dishonestly levels at Fox News.

NewsBusters has the complete video with a transcript. It’s also worth a closer look, as the “world events” could easily involve Egypt and Syria because of a previous survey also pushed by MMfA. In essence, Frum may have regurgitated some earlier MMfA propaganda, which they then recycled yet one more time, creating a disingenuous feedback loop purely to bash Fox News. More importantly, Frum was being just as critical of liberal outlets such as MMfA, and Kurtz admits that media outlets are, indeed, biased toward the left. Media Matters simply omitted that, as it isn’t what they wanted their readers to know. (more…)

Now that we’re learning something about Cain’s accusers and how the National Restaurant Association settlements agreements were handled, Politico’s unwillingness to give us specific details in that mega-story of theirs is starting to make some sense, at least to me.

What we’re now discovering is that the facts are much less troubling than what was ginned up in our collective imaginations that were fueled only by Politico’s maddeningly vague allegations and innuendo. So now you have to wonder if the 144 story (and counting) feeding frenzy Politico ’s journOlisted up over the last ten days wasn’t all smoke and mirrors designed to cover up the fact that their original story was nowhere near worthy of the Normandy-like roll out they organized and commanded.

The there just isn’t there.

Jonathan — He Who Targets Private Citizens For His Precious One – Martin and Herman Cain

Do I personally believe Politico intentionally held back certain facts that would’ve subdued the sensationalism their vague innuendo created?

What is it our esteemed journalist class likes to say? I’m just raising questions.

Politico’s playing for keeps in 2012 and the willingness of left-of-center media watchdogs like ProPublica, Howard Kurtz, and now the “Columbia Journalism Review” to question its story and suggest it ease up on the feeding frenzy proves it.

Moreover, I’m looking at the polls for the lay of the land, and at least for right now, it’s looking like Politico did more damage to itself than they did to Herman Cain.

CJR:

Yet, while the allegations against Cain are significant, it is irresponsible the extent to which some segments of the political press has allowed them to dominate the political news cycle these past nine days.

Much coverage has had a sort of frenzied, single-minded focus that has come at the cost of coverage of just about everything and everyone else.

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(Note: RealClearPolitics has since updated the post in question.)

In defending the media against conservative charges of bias in the Herman Cain scandal, Carl Cannon, Washington editor of RealClearPolitics, claims today that Andrew Breitbart did the same thing to Anthony Weiner that Jonathan Martin of Politico did to Cain–make a broad, salacious claim based on one piece of evidence, and wait for the truth to emerge.

Cannon writes:

I don’t remember conservative commentators agonizing over the journalistic ethics practiced by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart in the Weiner “sexting” case. Acting on a hunch, Breitbart threw a salacious picture on his site, asserted he had evidence that it was Weiner, and let the blogosphere do the rest. And when it was clear that Weiner was misbehaving, and lying about it, the mainstream media basically hectored this guy into telling the truth, which he ultimately did — at the cost of his career in Congress.

That is, emphatically, not what happened in Weinergate. It is a gross distortion–an inversion, even–of what happened. In fact, Andrew and the entire team at Big Government and Big Journalism were meticulously careful in Weinergate, because we knew that as conservatives, we would be held to a different and higher standard than the mainstream media.

It is worth pointing out that Anthony Weiner outed himself, publicly tweeting the infamous “grey underwear” picture to a woman in the Seattle area. Big Journalism’s first story on Weinergate reported that fact, and noted that Weiner had claimed his Facebook account had been “hacked.” Weiner’s “hacking” claim, in itself, made the story newsworthy. Neither Andrew nor anyone else at the Bigs, at that point, claimed to have definitive proof that the person in the photograph was Weiner himself.

Other evidence, publicly available through Weiner’s Twitter profile and Facebook account, suggested the congressman had been communicating with other young women. When Andrew made that allegation on CNN, making clear the source and basis for his claim, the network attacked his credibility and brought analyst Jeffrey Toobin on air to declare Andrew’s story “outrageous.”

What Andrew did not reveal was that at the time of Weiner’s errant tweet, we already had evidence that Weiner had been involved in an online relationship with a woman in Texas, who claimed to have even more pictures of Weiner. As Andrew details in a forthcoming new chapter of his book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World, to be released in the book’s paperback edition, we spent several days researching that story before releasing it.

We could have done what Martin and Politico did–and which Cannon wrongly accuses us of doing: report that we knew of an inappropriate relationship, and allow the media to ask Weiner the tough questions. Except that we knew they wouldn’t, because Weiner is a Democrat, and we are a conservative news source. We had also been reluctant to pursue a story that seemed, until Weiner’s “hacking” allegation, to be solely about Weiner’s personal life.

Politico had no such scruples.

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Howard Kurtz to Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

You had to make a go or no-go decision. I think that at a lot of news organizations an editor would’ve said, ‘You have done some terrific reporting here, you’ve got some great leads here, but you don’t have it’.

Well, no kidding they “don’t have it.” All they do have is a 90-plus story feeding frenzy (as of Friday) based on two settled sexual harassment complaints from over a decade ago.

These are also two complaints that seem to be settled for next to nothing when you consider we’re talking about an organization as large as the National Restaurant Association and a high-profile target (even during the nineties) like Herman Cain. Furthermore, these disputed events occurred during the nineties at the height of the post-Anita Hill sexual harassment jamboree when any of us who were in the business world at the time remembers the litigious atmosphere (more on this below).

But the key word here is “disputed,” isn’t it? After all, although Cain and his campaign weren’t very sophisticated in how they handled the story last week, one area in which there has been nothing but consistency is the candidate’s firm denial that he never sexually harassed anyone, ever.

And yet,  if you listen to Jonathan Martin, these charges against Cain are neither alleged or disputed — they are FACT:

Martin: “Well, we had the fact that one of these women was brought upon by Cain in a hotel room and was made to feel very uncomfortable. We reported later this week more upon what actually happened with that episode, Howie. She was upset by that, that hours later she confronted a member of the board to complain about Cain’s treatment of her, an explicit sexual overture in a hotel room.”

I’ve seen serial killers, rapists, and child molesters given the benefit of the doubt with the word “alleged,” but black conservatives apparently don’t qualify for those kinds of niceties.

Over the weekend I was told something by an old friend–and since it took place in my small town, I had remembered the incident, but this was the first time I had been made aware of the details. I’m changing a few things around for obvious reasons, but the moral of the story remains the same…

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From Breitbart.tv:

For the record, Mr. Schultz stated that he regretted the error of including a deceptively edited video clip of Gov. Perry. He never apologized for the racist implication he made with the severely edited clip. A media watchdog journalist like Howard Kurtz should know these facts before misinforming his audience.

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On yesterday morning’s “Reliable Sources” with Howard Kurtz on CNN, media critic Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times spoke out about the grave reservations expressed after the imminent hiring of activist and failed presidential candidate Al Sharpton as a prime time news anchor for NBC News’ cable station MSNBC.

Big Journalism began beating the drum over NBC News’ latest “brand downgrade” last week when we showed our readers the insidious relationship between MSNBC’s parent company, Comcast and Al Sharpton’s political action group National Action Network.  The incestuous relationship between Comcast’s $190,000 “donations” to Sharpton’s community agitator organization and Sharpton’s subsequent endorsement of the “diversity goals” of the new Comcast/NBC entity don’t pass the smell test.  Especially when you consider that Sharpton’s diversity endorsement proved critical to the FCC approval of the merger. It seems too convenient that he would now be rewarded with a prime time hosting gig on NBC’s cable news outlet.

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Jorge Ramos is the most famous and respected Spanish-Language television journalist.  He is often invited to participate in the political roundtable on ABC’s “This Week” program and last election cycle he was given the honor of moderating debates between the Presidential field.  When candidates Obama and McCain made their last appeals for the Latino vote, it was Jorge Ramos who had the honor of interviewing them on Univision.

There is no denying that Mr. Ramos is the most influential television journalist in the Latino-American community and this Sunday he interviewed Andrew Breitbart for Univision’s version of “Meet the Press”, “Al Punto”.  The following exchange was not only an example of typical “gotcha” journalism but unfortunately for Mr. Ramos, it also shows that he or his staff might be getting their talking points from the sad clowns at Media Matters for America.

RAMOS: In one of your websites, in “Big Peace,” there was an article written by Jason Bradley titled “Terror Babies: A Growing National Security Threat.” Do you share Mr. Bradley’s point of view?

BREITBART: I didn’t even read that article but I can tell you this, I created the Huffington Post in the United States of America which is a left of center blog. I created my blogs which are mostly right of center and I believe in open debate in our society. That’s why I believe so strongly in the first amendment, so I don’t know the specifics of that article, had I known going into this interview, I would’ve read it and we could have talked about the specifics.

RAMOS: Well the specifics is that Mr. Bradley’s view is that children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants are terror babies.

BREITBART: I’ve never read that, I’ve never heard that and I’d have to see the context of that to give you an opinion. I would never call people that are born in this country who are from Mexico terror babies.

There have been 3,607 posts at Big Peace,  3,659 posts at Big Journalism, 8,039 posts at Big Hollywood, 7,329 posts at Big Government and 35,422 posts at Breitbart.tv.  For Ramos to ask Breitbart about one post from March of this year, that didn’t exactly make headlines from coast-to-coast is unfair on its face.  But then for Ramos to characterize the post as saying “children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants are terror babies” is the kind of mis-representation that could only have been made if his staff only read the Media Matters lies about the post instead of the post itself.  Ramos not only slandered the post and its author with that statement, he also misinformed his audience about an article that most of them probably did not read.

Breitbart’s answer to Ramos’ fabricated mis-characterization of the post was “I would never call people that are born in this country who are from Mexico terror babies” and of course, neither did Mr. Bradley or anybody else in the Big Peace post in question.

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Now that Congressman Anthony Weiner has admitted to sending out the infamous tweet, it is time to demand explanations from members of the “mainstream press” who, inexplicably, failed to ask the simplest of questions during “WeinerGate.” It took Weiner calling a CNN producer a “jackass” for the rest of the media to finally take notice. Even then they weren’t prepared to challenge the Congressman’s answers and let glaring inconsistencies go. There are plenty of media figures who too quickly jumped to Weiner’s defense and started pointing fingers at people like Andrew Breitbart. I’m sure many articles and blog posts will be written about them in due time. Right now, I’d like to focus on one person.

Howard Kurtz is a well-known media analyst. He has made criticizing the media his career and is presumably an objective critic of the press. He hosts a show on CNN called “Reliable Sources” where he takes on the role of a “journalism cop” policing the media and pointing out what they’re doing wrong and what they get right. He also writes a column at The Daily Beast where he does the same thing. The point here is that he’s supposed to be the guy (or one of them) who steps back and analyzes the news coverage. He’s the one many people turn to when they want to find out how the media becomes part of the story rather than just reports on it. With that in mind, Kurtz has a little explaining to do.

Back on May 30th, two days after “the tweet”, Kurtz took to Twitter to address the people who had been asking him about the story. Here’s how he responded:

(He immediately corrected the use of “twerps”, by the way. He meant to say “tweeps.”)

When I first saw this tweet I was puzzled.

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I have always wondered who made Howard Kurtz the arbiter of Reliable Sources, but in Weinergate, we are reminded that Kurtz’s ability to discern them is very much in question.  For that matter, so is CNN’s.  It has never been a secret that the supposedly even-handed journalism maven is in reality almost too liberal to function, but if he can’t get his head screwed on straight, he might have to fork over the name of his show to someone else altogether.  Hopefully Kurtz will have the decency to straighten out some of his Weinergate missteps soon and reconsider who really are “reliable sources.”

Kurtz’s history of judging Reliable Sources is staggeringly one sided and ideological.  For one thing, I have frequently seen him go out of his way to profess his respect for the reliability of Keith Olbermann, of all people, not to mention the rest of the guttersnipes at MSNBC:

Now, I don’t put Keith Olbermann in the same category as Beck at all. His MSNBC show, agree with it, disagree with it, was a very well-researched program.

Sure it was, Howard.  Also have a look at how incensed he got when Hugh Hewitt insulted Olbermann on Reliable Sources.  Kurtz and his publication The Daily Beast also seem to regard the Daily Kos, where Olbermann once blogged, as a very legitimate publication.  The most recent example comes during Weinergate.  The Daily Beast didn’t respond when I inquired who writes the captions for their “Cheat Sheet,” but have a look at this caption.  This is The Daily Beast’s own writing, not a quote from the linked story:

Not even a hint of suspicion about the reliability of the post by an anonymous blogger “stef” at a radically partisan website with absolutely no editorial oversight.  The Daily Beast simply reported it as fact. Not long after this story was posted, Kurtz gave it his blessing on twitter, boasting how his “wait[ing] for the facts” had just been validated:

The bottom line is that Kurtz actually believes “the facts” come from anonymous, unaccountable bloggers at one of the murkiest breeding grounds for partisan trolls there is.  Once “stef” weighed in, Kurtz could finally comment on Weinergate without even bothering to check.  “The facts” had arrived. (more…)

As the Weinergate story leaves behind many unanswered questions, the Twitterverse is not likely to get many truthful answers – not as long as Joan Walsh has anything to do about it.  The Salon.com editor had some harsh words for reporters who tried to cover the story from an angle that didn’t suit her own anti-Breitbart bias.

Over Memorial Day weekend, the Weinergate story developed in the wee hours of the night on Friday evening and early Saturday morning, when a lewd photo purported to be from Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account surfaced on Twitter.  Given that the story was literally unfolding on Twitter, where thousands of other users were witnessing the now infamous tweet in real time, it wasn’t exactly a “sit and wait” situation.  In the age of social media, stories make themselves – good or bad, one tweet can erupt into a firestorm in the blink of instant.  This presents both a challenge and an opportunity.  On one hand, media can wait and verify every fact, but at Twitter speed, the story will move far more quickly than standard fact finding and requests for comments can possibly occur.  On the other hand, new media journalism can fill that void and get ahead of such a story before the firestorm gets out of hand.

And this is exactly what the Big sites did when Weinergate erupted.  BigGovernment.com ran with a post just before 12:30am on Saturday, headlined “Weinergate: Congressman Claims ‘Facebook Hacked’ as Lewd Photo Hits Twitter.”  Given that the story was in its infancy but was moving so quickly online, editors merely presented the facts as they were known at the time, indicating that it was a developing story.  They also decided to publish the tweet and photo, but took caution by redacting all of the personal information of the young woman for whom the tweet was supposedly intended. (more…)

**UPDATE: I missed this earlier, but in another tweet, Kurtz offered the Clinton sex scandal–the one Kurtz’s Newsweek attempted to kill–as an example of unbiased media coverage of a Democrat sex scandal!  The hubris is breathtaking.  Kurtz also suggests that the old media handled the Spitzer and Edwards scandals admirably.  More here.

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From the NewsBeast/CNN news guy:

According to another tweet, he meant tweeps, not twerps.

A quick response to the guy who defended the HuffPo Breitbart front-page ban and got the Sherrod story wrong:  Even if the infamous Weinergate image was “faked,” that means someone hacked into a sitting congressman’s verified twitter account and posted porn. THAT’S STILL NEWS!  Why not report it as a developing story, just like we have here at the Bigs? If Kurtz truly believes Rep. Weiner is the victim of a hack-attack, why wouldn’t he cover the story for that reason?

Kurtz later walked back this statement by tweeting, “of course reporters should have looked into Weiner hacking controversy.”  To paraphrase Kurtz, sometimes it pays to think a second time.

I know Tina Brown took over Newsweek last year, but if this is the way their top-tier journalists are treating potential Democrat sex scandals (real or “faked”), this invites the question: has anything really changed?  You may recall it was Newsweek which killed Michael Isikoff’s Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair scoop over a decade ago.  The Drudge Report picked it up, and conservative new media was born.  So, we who make our livings in the new media all owe a debt of gratitude to Newsweek employees and their rich history of protecting Democrats, but America deserves better.

Evidently, the newspeak definition of ‘misinformation’ is actually ‘opinions with which I don’t agree’. According to Media Matters for America that is, as The Right Sphere points out. They use an example given in Howard Kurtz’s article “Partisan Organizations Use Sound Bite Warfare” wherein Kurtz describes the “bat signal” given out by MMFA. This coordinated attack sprung from Governor Mike Huckabee making a remark on a radio show about Natalie Portman’s pregnancy and how he thought she was “boasting” about unwed motherhood:

Media Matters mission, and what presumably allows them the tax exempt 501(c)(3) status, is as follows:

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

Do you see the problem yet? No? They’re allowed tax exempt status because they claim to be an educational organization dedicated to correcting conservative misinformation. Now go back and read what Huckabee said. Where’s the misinformation? Since when is a person’s personal opinion “misinformation”? Huckabee didn’t make any declaration of fact. He wasn’t promoting a falsehood. He was simply expressing his opinion on Natalie Portman’s pregnancy. You can disagree or agree with Huckabee, but he wasn’t lying about anything. It was just a controversial statement which, as Kurtz pointed out, no one noticed for three days.

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Howard Kurtz, the longtime WaPo staffer who jumped ship for the Daily Beast (and a cool $600k/year), hosts a show on CNN called Reliable Sources, which airs Sundays.  Reliable Sources, according to CNN, “is one of television’s only regular programs to examine how journalists do their jobs and how the media affect the stories they cover.”  This is, without a doubt, a great idea for a show.  Only there’s one major problem: Kurtz.

You see, there’s nothing on CNN’s show page for Reliable Sources that explains that Kurtz comes from a left-of-center point of view and is more than willing to suspend basic journalistic principles to win a victory for his side.  The question I’ve posed CNN in the past is, who watches their watchdog?  After viewing this must-watch segment, you’ll wonder the same thing:

The Reliable Sources host gets his hypocrisy on in this segment, pure and simple.  Kurtz, who has previously criticized Breitbart for not providing full context in his multimedia presentation on the NAACP that led to last year’s Shirley Sherrod kerfuffle (i.e the redemptive moment, which Breitbart did), left out major details of today’s report on the Huffington Post’s front page Breitbart ban. The self-appointed constable of context selectively edited the details of this story to do the bidding of far-left Color of Change and Van Jones by omitting the facts that HuffPosters are among the Internet’s most predictable flamethrowers and that Breitbart’s statement was perfectly defensible.

Kurtz, who is also the Daily Beast Washington bureau chief, laughably mocks Breitbart by saying, “I’m all for people speaking their mind, but if you want to hang out in nicer neighborhoods, you can’t shout quite as loud.”  First off, Breitbart happens to be the city planner for that “nicer” neighborhood, and that neighborhood happens to be frat row.  Huffington Post is a unique space online where public figures like Aaron Sorkin can call other public figures like Sarah Palin (and other hunters) “faux-macho shitheads” with impunity, and people like Van Jones, who has called Republicans “assholes,” and Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a “twat,” are front page regulars.

And let’s not forget when HuffPoster Sorkin called Sarah Palin an “idiot” on Kurtz’s very own CNN. (more…)

Debra Saunders: An island of sanity and resilience in San Francisco and in the media.

Cooler heads. And honesty.

Let’s be honest: Journalists often use military terminology in describing campaigns. We talk about the air war, the bombshells, targeting politicians, knocking them off, candidates returning fire or being out of ammunition. So we shouldn’t act shocked when politicians do the same thing. Obviously, Palin should have used dots or asterisks on her map. But does anyone seriously believe she was trying to incite violence?

[...]

And here we go again in Arizona, as people with political agendas unleash their attacks even before the victims of this senseless shooting have been buried. I find it depressing beyond belief.

This isn’t about a nearly year-old Sarah Palin map; it’s about a lone nutjob who doesn’t value human life. It would be nice if we briefly put aside partisan differences and came together with sympathy and support for Gabby Giffords and the other victims, rather than opening rhetorical fire ourselves.

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“Is Drudge America’s assignment editor?”

Howard Kurtz recently interviewed former President Jimmy Carter on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Unless there is some significant portion of the interviewing missing from the video, it has to do down as one of the most glaring oversights in the history of media navel gazing, or perhaps it was an intended slap at ABC.

“I came in at a time when the press was in the post-Watergate period, and when two reporters in ‘The Washington Post’ had become famous because they had revealed some secrets that had brought down the Nixon administration. And when I got there, shortly thereafter, I think a lot of the reporters were looking for something within my administration that might be scandalous or put them in the headlines as very notable investigative reporters.”

It’s incomprehensible to me that a serious media analyst could re-visit the Carter years media-wise and never once mention the man and network that launched a show that went on to span three decades after bringing down the Carter administration almost single-handedly.

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It’s amazing to me that liberals can’t assume responsibility without pointing at Fox as though Fox has anything to do with Olbermann’s insubordination. Howard Kurtz this weekend:

“Well if you look at Fox News you have some of the most prominent contributors on that network, Karl Rove raised almost 40 – 5o million dollars for an independent group that aided Republicans in this 2010 midterm cycle, dick morris raised money spoke on behalf of Republicans, and even Sean Hannity who is a host obviously of a nighttime show on Fox he has spoken at Republican fundraisers. All those infractions in my view … are worse than what Olbermann did … if you’re going to criticize that sort of thing … you can’t run around and do that same thing yourself.”

And if they had been at MSNBC they would have been violating policy, the policy which dictates that you can be as slanted to the left as you want in your broadcasted content and pretend that it’s objective – and you can pretend impartiality because there exists a policy that prevents identification of such by prohibiting campaign contributions.

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