Here is how the AP describes the video below: “Mobs set two churches on fire in western Cairo on Sunday as clashes broke out between Muslims and Christians, killing up to 12 people and injuring more than 200.”

“Clashes between Muslims and Christians” makes it sound like a scene from “West Side Story” with two sides causing equal amounts of trouble. But there were no Mosques burned in the clashes, only Christian Churches. (more…)

Why am I not surprised.  Once again the Main Stream Media (MSM) exposes its lack of journalistic integrity in ignoring news that doesn’t fit its liberal narrative, when all but one of Chicago’s MSM snubbed a well publicized press conference with over 40 African-American religious and political leaders who gathered “… to decry the misrepresentation of King’s legacy and the noble civil rights cause” as being equivalent to the efforts by the Left and homosexual activists to legalize same-sex marriage.

The impetus for the gathering was the recent passage by the Illinois General Assembly in a veto session—the equivalent of a lame-duck—of the “Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act.”

Illinois Family Institute publicized the press conference to Chicago’s major media outlets NBC, ABC, Fox Chicago, WGN, Univision, WBBM, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Herald, and the Southtown Star.  David E. Smith, IFI Executive Director, stated, “Sadly, the only major secular news outlet in Chicago that covered this important event was WBBM radio and television (CBS). While Univision and WGN News attended the press conference, apparently the producers decided it didn’t fit their messaging on the issue of so-called ‘gay rights.’”  To their credit IFI had their own camera rolling during the event, a portion of which you can view here:

Just think how widespread the coverage would have been had these African-Americans gathered to show their support for the bill.  I dare say it would have been wall to wall.

Try to count the instances of “speaking truth to power” by our stalwart White House press corps:

President Obama and Rep. Butterfield at the signing of Pigford II.

From the Huffington Post:

I’m writing this a little before sunrise at a hotel room in Jackson, Mississippi. I’m traveling with my family — my wife, three of our kids and two cats — and gathering facts and conducting interviews about the Pigford vs. Glickman settlement that was designed to remedy the decades of discrimination that black farmers in this country faced from their own government, specifically the USDA. The Pigford tale is one that the mainstream press has barely covered, so I’ve had no problem finding people close to the story who want to tell the world their side of it. My family has driven through four different states in the past 10 days, and I’ve videotaped more than five and a half fours of interviews, in addition to spending countless hours on the phone in both on and off the record conversations.

One thing that’s emerged from every conversation I’ve had is that America’s black farmers are this country’s unsung heroes. Farming is hard enough work on its own, but when you add the additional weight of fighting the government’s “good old boy” network that existed in many places, the resilience of the black farmers is amazing.

The dignity of the black farmers makes the mainstream media’s blanket of silence about Pigford especially offensive. A black reporter I spoke with attributed some of that to the subtle systemic racism that exists in the mainstream media, with a bias towards covering stories that affect or are about white folks. Too often, the press is able to pat itself on the back by dealing with stories about race in a surface way. They pretend that by calling the Tea Party or a Republican politician a racist, they’ve done their job and scored a victory for minorities. In fact, though, all those reports end up doing is casting heat but not light. They stir up racial tensions and let the press give themselves a pass for not actually digging into a story like Pigford.

Another thing that everyone seems to agree on about Pigford is that it’s a very complex story. It’s not something that can be explained easily between two commercial breaks or in a couple of soundbites. That being said, it’s fascinating — a long, winding trail of outright corruption and wholesale fraud weaving itself between complicated, passionate people on all sides who have struggled to do the right thing to remedy the plight of black farmers.

(more…)

Gallup puts out the statistics that affirm the the outrage we share with you on a daily basis:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.

The 43% of Americans who, in Gallup’s annual Governance poll, conducted Sept. 13-16, 2010, express a great deal or fair amount of trust ties the record low, and is far worse than three prior Gallup readings on this measure from the 1970s.

Trust in the media is now slightly higher than the record-low trust in the legislative branch but lower than trust in the executive and judicial branches of government, even though trust in all three branches is down sharply this year. These findings also further confirm a separate Gallup poll that found little confidence in newspapers and television specifically.

Nearly half of Americans (48%) say the media are too liberal, tying the high end of the narrow 44% to 48% range recorded over the past decade. One-third say the media are just about right while 15% say they are too conservative. Overall, perceptions of bias have remained quite steady over this tumultuous period of change for the media, marked by the growth of cable and Internet news sources. Americans’ views now are in fact identical to those in 2004, despite the many changes in the industry since then. (more…)

The elephant in the room should be anchoring the evening news.

Seriously. I never cease to be amazed how those who say they are there to protect us are totally unable to see what is killing them.  Oh, viewers will be told to watch out for mad cow disease and deadly tennis rackets (you’ve seen the promos), while those same “experts” are incapable of self reflection. Right now, the media needs the paddles but they refuse to call the EMT.

One of two things is happening here; a) The leftist activist old media is on a mission to push their agenda and nothing else matters, or b) they really don’t know what they’re doing and the stories just take on a life of their own and like NASCAR , they just happen to take left turns nearly all the time. (more…)

The mainstream media’s headlong and heady descent into denigrating George W. Bush over the last decade signaled a dark moment in media history that has surely damaged American consciousness. Caught up in “Bush-bashing,” the MSM reached a critical turning point, and likely one of no return.

At times consciously and even triumphally, the media increasingly abused the traditional journalistic standards of independence and neutrality in favor of functioning as a virtual arm of the liberal Democratic Party. They took on, in effect, a new and disturbing identity.

So consumed by politics, power and status did the MSM become during this period that bashing the former president became standard media fare. This death by a thousand cuts proceeded unabashedly, unabatedly, and largely without challenge by Bush and his staff during his presidencies.

Jim A. Kuypers concluded as much in his study, Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age, in which he meticulously documents how the agenda-driven and “anti-democratic” media not long after the 9/11 terror attacks began pervasively distorting the former president’s statements, failing to report critical parts of his speeches, and even “framing” (manipulating stories) to portray the president as an enemy.

Among countless examples: (more…)