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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NPR’s Nina Totenberg joins the ranks of feminists who are prostituting themselves – excuse me, sex worker-ing themselves – for Weiner. On Friday’s Inside Washington, Totenberg had the utter gall to spew the following drivel:

NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: I finally felt sorry for Anthony Weiner at that press conference with people heckling him, making him a further spectacle. I mean the guy was finally resigning. You should be able to resign in public with a little, without, and control it a little bit without having people treat it as a spectacle. He’s gone, and it just seemed incredibly mean.

First, forgive me if I don’t take etiquette lectures from someone who wishes AIDS on people and their progeny. Totenberg finds it perfectly acceptable to  wish AIDS on someone, and their grandchildren, because she thought his politics icky. But heckle a sexual predator who, in order to try to cover his own depraved arse, also lied and demonized innocent people for merely reporting on his reprehensible behavior? How gauche. And super mean! This isn’t actually surprising, coming from the same oh-so-unbiased ‘journalist’ who claimed that Michelle Obama gives out ‘warm and fuzzy’ feelings and asserted that another serial sexual harasser, Bill Clinton, is ‘the most gifted politician she’s ever seen‘.

Since I’m not a liberal feminist willing to sell myself and all other women out for an agenda – an agenda that is itself anti-woman – maybe I can explain a little something to Totenberg. Representative Weiner used and abused his power to harass women online to the point where he sent naked crotch shots to women, unsolicited.  He further had no way of knowing the ages of the women to whom he sent these photos, which he referred to as ‘jokes’. From his demeanor and his own words at his first press conference, he did not even seem to care, either. He referred to his phone sex, which by all accounts was done from a congressional office phone on our dime, as ‘fun and frivolous.’ He referred to his sexting in the same way. Perhaps Ms. Totenberg should take a gander at his ‘fun and frivolous’ sexting chats, wherein he exhibited not only predatory behavior, but misogynistic and abusive behavior as well.

When caught, he preyed on the women further by first refusing to tell the truth, invading their privacy even more. Then again by trying to lure them into lying for him, a man in power. He made the trifecta of reprehensible by then also adding shameless and vile demagoguing of Andrew Breitbart and his team of writers for doing their jobs and reporting the truth about the atrocious behavior and actions of an employee of we, the people. Heckling was the very least that he deserved.

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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.

The MRC found in part: (more…)

Creative editing of direct quotations often lands journalists in trouble – for good reason.

The ellipsis, usually shown in print as a series of three dots ( … ) between words, is an important tool for the journalist. It signifies that words have been omitted. Without ellipses, extended quotations would drag on, weighted down with information irrelevant to the story at hand. The ellipsis allows the writer to leave in the important words and banish the unimportant ones.

Failing to use an ellipsis when it is called for is misleading at best and dishonest at worst, but that’s exactly what National Public Radio did in a report that makes a conservative legal commentator look bad.

Curt Levey, executive director of the right-leaning Committee for Justice, discussed the nomination of Goodwin Liu, a radical Berkeley law professor with some very unusual ideas about the law.

In case you haven’t been following it, President Obama has nominated Liu to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The reason pundits the nation over are paying close attention to the nomination is because they believe President Obama is grooming Liu as a future Supreme Court nominee.

If hostility to the Constitution were a prerequisite for the federal bench, the radical leftist Liu would be a shoo-in. Liu has said with a straight face that “free enterprise,” “private ownership of property,” and “limited government” are “code words for an ideological agenda hostile to environmental, workplace, and consumer protections.” Liu’s sentiments are reminiscent of deposed Ways and Means Committee chairman Charlie Rangel’s (D-N.Y.) infamous rant that tax-cutting is Republican code for racism. (more…)