It’s hard for the Activist Old Media to out-do itself with their leftist bias, but the Romney tax returns have them freaked out.

This fits right in their wheelhouse of deception and class envy.

The latest is an ABC story with this headline. “Romney Failed to Disclose Swiss Bank Account Income.”

Sounds serious there. Sounds like they finally busted Mitt and they are preparing the graphics and music for the hour-long prime time special showing him doing the IRS perp walk.

Five paragraphs into the story you find out the amount is $1,700 dollars. Now, $1,700 is more than most recent Democrats candidates for president donate to charity in a year, but on Romney’s tax returns to find a missing $1,700 dollars is like finding a penny in the cushions that you forgot to report. I guess the dollar amount is not important (unless its somebody making too much money,) it’s the headline they were after here.

Better get top terrorist reporter Brian Ross out of the Caribbean and off to Switzerland to uncover this latest Romney plot.

NBC’s Brian Williams called Romney’s wealth “unimaginable.” Unimaginable? How you doing Brian in your luxury Manhattan apartment? Ask your neighbor Beyonce if you can borrow some sugar.

Better send that crew back to Mexico to see how the branch of the Romney family is doing down there and demand they tell you how much money they make off their citrus farms. You left that out of the last story you did on them.

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Let’s back up a little bit before we get to the list…

A few weeks ago in Denver I had the opportunity for some up close and personal time with the Occupy movement, and what I saw was about what you would expect. These are marginal and marginally intelligent people who have grown up conditioned by public educators and the welfare state to believe that they’re something special and entitled to the good life just because they’re special and entitled to the good life. And they’ve also been brainwashed to believe that if America doesn’t acknowledge their specialness and if, indeed, they’re not enjoying the good life, the problem must be a corrupt America.

Occupy is all about greed, self-actualization, and narcissism. The fastest and easiest way to feel superior is to assume the role of a victim … because a victim is always superior to his or her oppressors.

Occupy is also an army the left and Alinksy-style community organizers like Barack Obama have been breeding for decades. The formula is simple: feed enough self-esteem to those who don’t deserve it and you create an entire generation of entitled crybabies desperate to direct the frustration of their unfulfilled lives at whomever.

The left thought they had found the right moment to launch their Army of the Frustrated. With Obama’s poll numbers in the tank and the crippled economy unable to leap on a white stallion to save him, the idea was to launch Occupy in the hopes it would change the 2012 election conversation and media narrative from Obama’s failed record to ground upon which he might be able to win reelection: income inequality and those evil one-percenters on Wall Street who destroyed the economy.

And so the filthy, frustrated, and brain-fried, under the direction of their Adbuster Masters (more about this below), took to the streets, and for a few weeks the plan went perfectly. High-profile Democrats, including President Obama, endorsed and encouraged them, while the corrupt MSM worked overtime to cover up the movement’s hundreds of subhuman misdeeds (literally) and held it up as an example of all that is pure and righteous in America.

But then something happened the left and their media allies didn’t expect. They had woefully underestimated the power of New Media to expose the truth, and expose the truth we did, until the Occupy dream all came crashing down in an overwhelming narrative (overwhelming because it was true) involving Occupy’s frightening tolerance for rape, violence, vandalism, and public masturbation and defecation.

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It’s Thursday. You know what that means don’t you? Another university “study” that proves that viewers of Fox News are uninformed boobs. This time it’s out of Farleigh-Dickinson University in New Jersey. Their shocking claim is “watching Fox News makes you less informed than watching nothing at all.”

Their telephone poll of 612 New Jersey adults purportedly shows that the Fox News watching people don’t know the right answer to a few questions the pollsters asked. That is to say, the right answers according to the pollsters.

The first question is about Egypt and whether or not the protests have been successful in bringing down the regime there. The expected answer is, of course, yes. Only 49% of FNC watchers responded “correctly” while 68% of NPR listeners did.

So, did the protesters in Tahrir Square bring down the regime? I guess that depends on how you define “the regime.” Following three weeks of protests, President Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down and his National Democratic Party (NDP) was dissolved. It was at this point that the Armed Forces of Egypt officially took control. So, why is this ambiguous in any way? Well, Mubarak and the entire upper echelon of the NDP were military. As a matter of fact, the Egyptian military have been the de facto rulers of Egypt since the military coup of 1952 that ousted King Farouk and ushered in the Nassar regime. So, the only real change in Egypt was cosmetic.

In addition, it wouldn’t be too far off to say that, of all the coverage of the “Arab Spring,” one of the few news outlets that was not reflexively cheerleading it was Fox News. Outside of the first few days of heady enthusiasm, where it all appeared to be a spontaneous push for freedom and democracy, it has become clear that many of the Arab nations that have removed their previous autocratic leaders have not been moving in a positive direction. There is a troubling move from Communist/Socialist autocrats towards Islamist autocrats. Needless to say, there has been no real change in the leadership of Egypt with the exception of getting rid of Hosni Mubarak.

The second question was whether or not the opposition in Syria has been able to bring down the regime there.  Amongst those giving the wrong answer, there was no statistical difference. All people answering, grouped by primary news source, came within 4% of each other. When the reported margin of error is 3.5%, you have no real grounds making claims that one group is getting it wrong. That is, unless you’re now looking not at who answered incorrectly, but at who answered that he didn’t know. The coverage of what has been going on in Syria has been spotty at best. For someone to answer that they don’t know is not an incorrect answer, it just means that they admit to not being having an informed opinion.

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- Joe McGinniss terrified “too busy” to pimp his book on Fox.

A Fox spokesperson said, “We’ve reached out to Random House to book Joe and was told by them that ‘he’s too busy to go on Fox News.’”

- Esquire on Jon Stewart:

He’s not so funny anymore, and it’s not only because he’s come to take himself seriously. It’s because in the Obama era, we’re starting to see the price of refusing to stand for anything.

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Jon Stewart recently claimed on Fox News that the media was not partisan, just lazy. I thought I’d offer him an example to the contrary. This could be a continuing series, but I’ll start with one glaring example. Pay attention, Jon, this is for your own good.

On Monday, Michele Bachmann officially announced her candidacy for President. After the announcement she gave an interview to Fox in which she claimed that John Wayne was from Waterloo, IA. You’ve heard this story, right?  Turns out The Duke’s parents had met in Waterloo but he grew up a few towns over in Winterset. Okay, it’s a minor mistake, fair enough.

Only some wag noticed that John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer, had spent a few years in Waterloo. He didn’t grow up there or commit his infamous murder spree there, but he was there for a couple years. A narrative quickly emerged, based on nothing except the fact that it was amusing, that Michele Bachmann had confused one John Wayne for the other. The media immediately began reporting this invented story as a fact:

Do they really believe that Michele Bachmann was talking about Gacy? Did she quickly scan Google and get confused as this video clip claims or is that an invented detail to support the invented story? Well, Bachmann denied that she was speaking about Gacy and Gacy wasn’t born or raised in Iowa. He grew up in Chicago. Plus he’s not exactly a role model. Bachmann was clearly talking about The Duke not the mass murderer.

But the joke/story that she had confused the two John Wayne’s was repeated in nearly 800 “news” articles. That doesn’t include the thousands of blogs that wrote about it. Was it true? Probably not, but it got saturation coverage on the day of her announcement. Liberals were obviously enjoying themselves at her expense.

Now compare the treatment of Bachmann to the press’ handling of another gaffe just a few days earlier.

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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…)

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?

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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.

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So in case you haven’t heard, Jon Stewart was on “Fox News Sunday” this weekend and he spent a lot of time asserting to Chris Wallace that his Comedy Central program, “The Daily Show” doesn’t have a political agenda.  He claimed that he has no desire to be a player in politics and that his show isn’t political commentary … it’s just comedy “informed by an ideological background.”

While walking that fine line, Stewart also insisted that the MSM isn’t politically biased,  they just trend toward “sensationalism and laziness.”  Inherent in that statement is the belief that one couldn’t be sensationalistic, lazy, and biased.  Thing is, bullies often are lazy, sensationalistic, and biased … it’s the nature of the beast.  But I digress.

As Stewart attempted to explain how the MSM isn’t politically biased in the face of examples from Wallace, he became visibly frustrated and spat out, “In the polls, who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox. Fox viewers! Consistently!”

Hmmmm.  After the death of Walter Cronkite, a Time poll showed that Stewart was to inherit Cronkite’s coveted title of “America’s Most Trusted Newscaster.”  For the record, 44% of respondents named Stewart, 29% Brian Williams, 19% Charlie Gibson, and Katie Couric raked in 7% large.

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Steven Crowder shares the fall-out of calling out the bias in “The Daily Show,” which prides itself on “moderation” and pretending to lampoon both sides.

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In what could qualify as the biggest non-story of the year, the mainstream media has been reporting on the utterly normal behavior of a sitting governor using a helicopter to save time:

Blunt-talking New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has made ethics and government reform a centerpiece of his Administration, raised some eyebrows yesterday with his decision to take a state helicopter to his son’s baseball game yesterday afternoon.  Moreover, he left the game in the fifth inning, presumably to make it back to Princeton for his meeting with a group of Iowa activists who had flown to New Jersey to try to convince the governor to run for president.

Governor Christie scandalously decided that his time constraints may require him to skip New Jersey traffic from time to time by using the very transportation afforded to him as governor.

One can be assured that the investigative journalists at ABC were not quite as quick to point out that Christie’s predecessor, Jon Corzine, spent a fair bit more of the tax payers dollars and not for something as admirable as making his son’s baseball game (via Cubachi):

Corzine wire transferred hundreds of millions of dollars, “Jersey style” to democrat friends across the state, and how 65% of the money NJ had for this fiscal year, was already spent.  And now he found out two days after his inauguration that the $500 million surplus he was told by Corzine that NJ had in it’s bank, was actually a $2.2 billion deficit.

For comparison, the Governor’s helicopter was $12.5 million and will be used primarily for official functions not only by Christie, but by his successors as well. (more…)

Jon Stewart got away with a lot of ridiculous arguments on The Factor the other night.  Stewart’s argument that Common wasn’t actually supporting cop killing because he somehow believes that both Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal are actually innocent of the crime – and therefore should be excused – is both irrelevant and ludicrous.  O’Reilly didn’t completely let him get away with it, but he went easy on Stewart.  Does Stewart think Rashard Mendenhall should be off the hook because he *technically* doesn’t support or sympathize with terrorism if he actually thinks Bin Laden’s hijacked airplanes might not have been the cause of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing?  Attempting to rewrite the history of clearly and unforgivably evil people is decidedly rejected by good and decent people.  Stewart can shove that argument.

Mendenhall recently lost his endorsement from Champion Sports over a few infamous, perhaps impulsive tweets.  Common wrote a damn love song about convicted cop-killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, went to visit her in Cuba, and named his daughter after her.  I have attached that song at the end of this post, because I want everyone to see exactly what we’re talking about here.  If you name your daughter after a convicted cop-killer, domestic terrorist and violent, militant Black Nationalist, then the song you wrote worshipping said cop-killer was not simply adopting an artistic voice, another defense Stewart attempted.  If your defense is going to be that you believe she’s really completely innocent, you better have some damn good reasons for believing so if you expect anyone to let it slide.

Common’s taking sides with Assata Shakur doesn’t have anything to do with his expert legal opinion.  He’s taking sides with Assata Shakur because he worships everything for which she stood – Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army (BLA), ethnic sectarianism, and the great socialist revolution.  He didn’t write a song arguing that even though Assata Shakur joined a reprehensible, racist and violent terrorist organization like the BLA and did a number of awful things with them, in this particular incident there were anomalies in the application of due process.  He wrote a song worshiping her values and her life’s mission.

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I’m going to make some points about the lesser controversies (namely the lyrics issue) surrounding the invitation of rapper/poet “Common” to the Whitehouse, because John Nolte has the larger controversies that were completely ignored by Jon Stewart pretty well covered.

One thing that stuck out to me in Stewart’s attempted takedown of Fox News (or “epic takedown” if you’re a Mediaite straight news guy: notice how the first linked article is entirely opinionated but not distinguished as such as Mediaite claims to do, and the second glosses over convicted cop-killer and FBI-classified domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, aka Joanne Chesimar — also a hero to Common as an “alleged” cop killer). It was the equivalence Stewart attempted to draw between Johnny Cash and Common.  Stewart showed George Bush presenting the National Medal of Arts to Johnny Cash (who had written some rough lyrics in his day as well) and then asked emphatically, “What’s the difference?! What’s the difference?!”  The answer Stewart was getting at was as subtle as the CB4 rap he played the next day (yeah, this actually exists.  I couldn’t stop singing it either):

Stewart is unsurprisingly asserting that anyone who objects to Common’s Whitehouse invite is either racist or trying to influence people who are, and are holding different standards to Bush’s and Obama’s choice of honorees.  But Stewart’s first deception is that while the National Medal of Arts is presented by the President, honorees are selected by the National Endowment for the Arts, not the Whitehouse, so it was not Bush’s decision at all.

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Oh what fun it is to watch the journ-o-lism at work. The White House invites a guest openly opposed to interracial relationships and our satirists and MSM ignores it … incredibly, that’s not something written two hundred years ago.

Jon Stewart does what he’s trained to do here and that’s further the media’s dishonest narratives. Here he joins the MSM in the willful ignoring of Common’s opposition — not in a rap, not in a poem, not in a song — to interracial relationships – unless of course, he’s just using women of certain races as objects of his own sexual gratification.

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What are we, in round 9 now? Can we go fifteen?

In the video above, Jon Stewart does a good job catching the story up to speed, so rather than me recap, go ahead and press play. What you’re going to see is Stewart doing a lot of hair-splitting and then insist the argument remain narrowly confined to his terms. But the crux of his argument goes something like this: Megyn Kelly says you guys never speed and I caught you speeding. Period. End of argument. Context doesn’t matter. Why you were speeding doesn’t matter. Well, how far is Stewart willing to take that argument? Since someone calling for the death of an elderly woman based on her politics doesn’t qualify as a justifiable reason to, uhm, speed, what does? What if we find out the HuffPo commenter sports a little Charlie Chaplin mustache? Or what if he’s 95 years-old and made his way to America through South America somewhere around, say, 1949?

But, as always, Stewart is only Captain Literal when it suits him. On goes the clown nose and he then goes on to make it sound as though FNC uses Nazi references as frequently as a teenager uses the word “like.” But then he has to go back years to nail O’Reilly — which brings this argument full circle to where it all started… (more…)

Yesterday, in this piece about Stephen Colbert,I mentioned Jon Stewart’s attack on Fox News but couched it with as much skepticism as possible because, frankly, it didn’t pass the smell test, especially in the area of context. To have those suspicions confirmed last night by Bill O’Reilly came as no surprise (see the video below). Furthermore, I respectfully disagree with O’Reilly that Stewart should be held to a lower factual standard because he’s a “satirist.” Stewart isn’t a satirist, he’s a political partisan disguised as a satirist, a man as determined to defeat the right as Nancy Pelosi and Bill Maher. The difference between Pelosi and Maher, though, is that they step into the arena of political battle and fly their flag. At the very least you can respect them for that. They come to wage open war whereas Stewart and Colbert come to throw rocks while wearing the protective shield of a clown nose.

I love our side and there’s really no lower form of life than someone on our side who undermines their own, so I say this to be constructive, not destructive. There are a lot of people on the Right who love Jon Stewart, people I respect, some of whom I know and like. And I agree that Stewart’s very good at what he does (which is why I take him seriously). But a conservative admiring the brilliance of Jon Stewart’s talent is like a boxer admiring the power of Mike Tyson’s punch as he’s beating you senseless. You have to fight back and in that respect, last night O’Reilly did an excellent job of threading a very difficult needle. Stewart is not easy to lay a glove on, but this was a clean hit. (You’ll be glad to know that I am now out of boxing metaphors).

Another point O’Reilly made that should be highlighted, is how the so-called “objective” or “legitimate” media too often takes what Stewart and Colbert do as some kind of gospel. Because Stewart is a “comedian,” the liberal media uses that as an excuse to blow up what he does on their air or online without bothering to fact-check, even when the stakes involve reputations. We’ve seen this before. Nobody watches “Saturday Night Live” but everyone saw Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression. With a smirk, and as though it didn’t matter, the left-wing media let Tina Fey do their dirty work on Palin with the endless looping of those SNL clips all in the name of “fun.” Well, it’s not fun, it’s an attempt to dehumanize someone into a national punchline and the media knew it. (more…)

Andrew Potter at Mediaite took a serious swipe at Jon Stewart this week, dragging “The Daily Show” host over the proverbial coals for not doing his job in the wake of the Tucson massacre:

[Stewart] …instead of taking sides, placing blame, and ultimately doing the satirist’s crucial job of holding a mirror up to power, … took the safest route imaginable and blamed the media…

To quote Stewart: “Really? Really?”

Stewart did place the blame — on the deranged shooter himself, exactly where it should be. Unless he’s got some evidence to the contrary, Potter should come to the same reasonable conclusion. But it looks like he has other sampler platter items to fry, all while trying to shield what is perhaps the most pervasive entity in American culture–the media–from social criticism. Absurd.

The media represents significant power in this country and it is the last thing that should be exempt from scrutiny. In a classic conundrum, to fight power you must amass power. The media has been a powerful influence for a long time; it is not some romantic “truth to power” enterprise. Much of the media has descended into partisan cliques whose legitimacy erodes more each day. Has the media forgotten that with power comes responsibility, not an exemption from criticism? Do J-Schools teach this, or only as it relates to left wing agendas? Stewart did the safe thing … Really? I disagree; chugging the commentariat Kool-Aid is the safe thing, not going against it. Railing against the right, conservatives, Sarah Palin, guns… that’s the easy thing to do … telling your own that they are acting like buffoons takes much more conviction and a much larger pouch.

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