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Trumpeting the “major endorsement” from John Edwards for Barack Obama, the day after Obama was trounced by 40 points in West Virginia all three broadcast network evening newscasts led Wednesday night with the “dramatic” announcement of the “political prize” that gives Obama a “major boost.” Katie Couric returned at the end of the 6:30 PM EST CBS Evening News feed to reiterate “our top story tonight” as she effused over live video of Edwards speaking at the rally: “John Edwards endorses Barack Obama, saying he's one man who knows in his heart that it's time to create one America, not...

HonestReporting exposes anti-Israel activists manipulating the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit, may strive for pure democracy, but that doesn't mean it's always fair. Our colleagues at CAMERA learned this the hard way last month when their effort to fight anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia ended in several members being banned from the site and bad press for the organization. CAMERA's campaign involved recruiting volunteers and instructing them in the basics of Wikipedia participation. The Palestinian advocacy group, Electronic Intifada (EI), however, branded the effort "a plan to rewrite history" and filed a bitter complaint with Wikipedia administrators,...

Today, the Washington Post editorial board urged Cindy McCain to release her tax returns, repeating a call made four years earlier to Teresa Heinz Kerry. But the timing seemed coincidental, given that Media Matters just wrote a letter to Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt last Friday. In that letter, the organization brought up the Heinz Kerry editorial from 2004, and asked why a similar request was not made to McCain. Hiatt tells Politico that the letter wasn't the reason for publishing Wednesday's editorial. "The editorial actually had been drafted before the [group's effort] began, or at least before I...

(IsraelNN.com) Anti-Defamation League (ADL) director Abe Foxman said Tuesday afternoon that mainstream media are turning against Israel. One of the guests at the three-day Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, he told Voice of Israel government radio, "Painting Israel as the cause of the nakba [catastrophe] has taken root in the mainstream." Foxman pointed out that both The New York Times and the Washington Post published front-page articles on Israel's Independence Day that focused on Arab suffering as well as Jewish celebrations instead of describing the miracle of the re-establishment of the Jewish state. He added that American Secretary of State Condoleezza...

Unfriendly Fire From Left by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 13, 2008 In World War II and even into the Cold War, academics, journalists and politicians tempered their criticism of American foreign policy with a concern for U. S. troops serving in harms way. Sixty years later, men and women in U. S. military combat fatigues can count on no such sympathy from American elites. This treatment is on vivid display in the new book Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9-11 by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson. Perhaps not too surprisingly,...

I want . . Freedom of the press to be the right not to be lied to. You are confused. So very seriously confused about the First Amendment, that you are not thinking any more clearly about it than I was before the mid-1990s, when I began to see through the system by which the "journalistic objectivity" con is perpetrated. And since I was already in my fifties by then, I have every reason to understand how you might see things the way you do. Freedom of the press is much more like "the right to lie to you"...

Two frightening killers were on the loose, and the Sacramento Bee’s readers wanted to protect themselves. They wanted more than descriptions of the attackers’ clothing at the time of the murders. They wanted to know the criminals’ race. The Bee, they accused editors, had allowed outdated policies to endanger public safety. Challenged by readers and by bloggers who don’t adhere to journalistic conventions, many editors have been thinking about loosening their rules for identifying race in crime stories. In general, news outlets have avoided racial and ethnic identifiers unless they were important to the case, or, perhaps, if victims’ descriptions...

After exhaustive meetings between the Republicans and Democrats, the debate schedule for the upcoming general election between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama has been set. "In determining these debates, we had to take into account the schedules of each candidate and their positions on several important domestic and international issues. Regrettably, we weren’t able to schedule both candidates on any one given night, so each debate will have the candidate questioned separately, on different nights, in front of a live studio audience comprised purely of randomly selected independent voters. For John McCain, who will be interviewed behind a...

Michelle Obama has spoken frequently on the campaign trail about the amount of student loans she and Barack had to take out to get through Harvard and Princeton. Worse yet, she had to pay them back! As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your...

Kevin Roberts told his parents he was joining the Army two months after 9/11. Soon he was wearing the "Screaming Eagle" patch of the 101st Airborne Division— the same unit his father had served with four decades earlier. On Wednesday, the 25-year-old staff sergeant was killed in eastern Afghanistan when his vehicle was blown up by a makeshift bomb, according to the Department of Defense. A fellow soldier, Spc. Jeremy R. Gullett, 22, of Greenup, Ky., was also killed in the same explosion. "He came home one day and he said, 'I'm going into the service. It's what I want...

In its subtly mind-manipulating photographs conveying an alienated, leftist view of America, the New York Times is tops in the field, and its photo of the triumphant Barack Obama greeting people at the U.S. Capitol yesterday, by Doug Mills, is one of the Times' best. Note the artificially dim light, like one of those prime time TV dramas where all the scenes, including in courtrooms, hospitals, and the Oval Office, are in half darkness. Notice how virtually every person in the photo looks nonwhite. Notice how the photo centers on Obama, with all heads turned in unison toward him, giving...

When Maine officials tried to warn residents of the dangers of this winter's near-record snowpack, Big Media slanted the story, hampering efforts to warn folks of the danger....The result? "There are people who are losing their property, their homes and their livelihoods," Maine Governor John Baldacci said after the flooding that officials had tried to warn the public about did occur last week.

How could job loss for 80 small-town residents be a "great story?"

Last week, the government released two important figures: GDP growth (or lack thereof) for the first quarter of this year, and the number of jobs created (or lack thereof) for the month of April. The day before the released GDP report, a headline in USA Today read, "USA TODAY survey: We're in a recession, economists say." The first two sentences read as follows: "The U.S. economy is in recession, or soon to be in one. … the economists said the U.S. economy is in recession." the 52 economists' predictions. They predicted 0.1 percent economic growth for the first quarter, 0.5...

Dan Rather fired another round against his former network Tuesday, charging in an amended lawsuit that CBS News labeled the anchor "too hot to handle" and prevented him from being hired by other networks following his acrimonious departure. Rather was rebuffed in an earlier attempt when many of his claims were knocked down by a New York state judge. But the judge also allowed Rather to resubmit his claims. In the latest filing, Rather claimed that CNN, ABC, NBC and other networks met to talk about possible employment but that all eventually declined for reasons that included, in the lawsuit's...

What kind of night is one on which Hillary Clinton, in the eyes of many, lost her shot at the nomination? "A great night"—according to Diane Sawyer. Sawyer made her remark at the opening of today's GMA. She started with some shtick with co-anchor Robin Roberts, displaying a series of cards explaining she was losing her voice, then managed to get out these words: DIANE SAWYER: It was a great night last night. What a night, huh? Any ambiguity as to what made last night "great" was resolved when the duo immediately moved to a discussion of last night's primary...

If Barack is out of touch with America, then the media must be too. People with the slightest interest in politics, especially journalists, spent 2006 and 2007 smacking their lips and rubbing their hands in anticipation of 2008, relishing the prospect of gorging on the story of a lifetime: no incumbents running, a free-for-all of mad-interesting candidates, world-historical issues at stake. Mmmm! Be careful what you wish for. This election cycle now reminds me of the one Looney Tune that terrified me as a child, where a selfish and gluttonous Porky Pig is subjected by a mad scientist to a...

THE REAL NEWS of April played second fiddle to the presidential campaign, the pope's visit to America, and the Texas polygamy case. more stories like thisThe death toll for the US military in Iraq hit 49 in April, making it the deadliest month since September, according to the Associated Press. Around Iraq, at least 1,080 Iraqi civilians and security personnel were killed last month, an average of 36 a day, according to the AP tally. While that's down from March's total of 1,269, or an average of 41 per day, those casualties certainly don't add up to a stable Iraq....

The mainstream media need to get their heads out of their backsides. Seriously. If the national media is supposed to be liberal, it’s sure not doing much for liberal causes. At least that’s the opinion of this registered Democrat. Most Americans, the average kind who work long hours trying to feed their families, pay their mortgages and fuel their vehicles, don’t have the time to surf the Internet ad nauseam in pursuit of information about the candidates for president. Instead, they rely on the ABCs, CNNs and assorted major wire services to do that job for them. Unfortunately, the major...

The American economy lost 20,000 jobs in April, the fourth consecutive month of decline, in what many economists took as powerful evidence that the United States is almost certainly now ensnared in a recession. But the number of jobs reported lost by the Labor Department on Friday was significantly smaller than most analysts had predicted, and the unemployment rate nudged down to 5 percent, raising hopes that the economy may not suffer as severely as once feared. “It strongly argues that this downturn will be mild and short- lived,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “As long as...

As if Katie Couric didn't already have enough problems. Weighed down by record-low ratings at the anchor desk of "CBS Evening News," and by reports suggesting she will leave that post two years before her multimillion-dollar contract expires, Couric now has civil rights groups — mostly Hispanic — on her back. And for good reason.

Standard & Poor's on Tuesday cut its long-term ratings on New York Times Co. to one level above junk because of declining newspaper ad revenue. S&P lowered its corporate credit rating and senior unsecured debt rating for the newspaper publisher to BBB- from BBB.

It’s wasn’t the first Time and it won’t be the last Time. Showing an utter disregard for ethical journalism, the editors at Time twisted American patriotism into an ad for the green movement to promote “winning the war on global warming.” Green is the new red, white and blue we are told by editors who never liked the old red, white and blue. The magazine used the historic Iwo Jima flag raising photo as a global warming marketing gimmick for its April 28 issue. The flag the Marines were raising was replaced with a tree to equate the evils our...

The Denver Post has managed the amazing feat of criticizing Rush Limbaugh for supposedly calling for riots at this summer's Democrat convention in Denver while completely downplaying the role of the very organization calling for recreating 68 and all the problems of Chicago '68 that implies in their article provocatively titled Limbaugh dreams of DNC riot: Rush Limbaugh says he is not calling for a riot in Denver during the Democratic National Convention — he only "dreams" of it, to the tune of "White Christmas." The conservative talker discussed the possibility of Mile High unrest in August on his national...

THE New York Times' news room is bracing for a bloodbath in the next 10 days. The word from inside is that approximately 50 unionized journalists have accepted the buyout proposal, and only another 20 non-union editorial employees have gotten on board. That means the ax could fall on as many as 30 editorial people in the company's first-ever mass firing of journalists in its 156-year history.

April 25, 2008 -- THE New York Times' news room is bracing for a bloodbath in the next 10 days. The word from inside is that approximately 50 unionized journalists have accepted the buyout proposal, and only another 20 non-union editorial employees have gotten on board. That means the ax could fall on as many as 30 editorial people in the company's first-ever mass firing of journalists in its 156-year history.

On Election Night 1990, after the news broke that Sen. Jesse Helms had beaten black Democrat Harvey Gantt, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell mourned "This has really been a heart-breaking race," and compared Helms to racist David Duke. On Thursday, Mitchell was seeing old Helms commercials as she denounced the North Carolina Republican Party ads featuring Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s "God damn America" comments. "This has such deep roots in the North Carolina Republican Party, the Jesse Helms Republican Party," she complained on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. During her 1 pm newscast on Wednesday, Mitchell interviewed McCain adviser Jack Kemp, and asked him what...

Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee has another case of agenda-driven media coverage. This time, it's ABC's Brian Ross and a story they did about Mexican drug gangs getting a hold of American firearms at gun shows and other venues that are perfectly legal but that Ross and ABC see fit to "prove" what a bad thing the Second Amendment is: U.S. gun stores and gun shows are the source of more than 90 percent of the weapons being used by Mexico's ruthless drug cartels, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials. "It's a war going on in Mexico, and...

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it. Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election. If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get...

The Washington Post on Sunday was only the latest of major media outlets to examine the issue of... Sen. John McCain's temper, which emerges in the national news every time he does. The legitimate issue, of course, is, would his judgment as commander in chief be clouded by fury at a key time?... One of the major sources for Leahy's story was Mark Salter, a key McCain strategist and co-author with him of five books. To say he disagreed with much of Leahy's account puts it mildly. When he saw Ponnuru's post Sunday afternoon, Salter fired off a long, detailed...

George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson of ABC News weren't just criticized for their tough questioning of Barack Obama during last week's Democratic debate. They were flayed. Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker called their approach "something akin to a federal crime." Tom Shales, the Washington Post's TV critic, said the ABC duo turned in "shoddy and despicable performances." Walter Shapiro of Salon magazine said the debate had "all the substance of a Beavis and Butt-head marathon." Most of the media mauling consisted of anger that the ABC moderators brought up a series of issues that had surrounded Mr. Obama since...

Powerline’s John Hinderaker remarks on the ferocity that journalists re supporting Obama and attacking ABC’s Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos for asking Obama about his relations to radical terrorists like William Ayers and to Jeremiah Wright, as well as his remarks about small town people in Pennsylvania. Reporters don’t like it when you pick on their anointed candidate. Joe Klein sums up in the Washington Post. Instead, we are supposed to be terribly interested in the 22nd iteration of their stands on global warming (against), Iraq (against), government controlled healthcare (for), taxes (higher) and other issues that are part of...

Back in November 2005, the mainstream media and much of the Democratic Congress, spurred on by the anti-war, military-bashing, hate-America crowd, went into hysterics over the so-called "Haditha massacre." The claim, made by Iraqi witnesses, was that a squad of Marines in the village of Haditha -- angry after comrade-in-arms Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas was ripped in half by a roadside bomb -- retaliated by wantonly slaughtering unarmed women and children. Big-city newspapers, network and cable TV ran with the firestorm for days. Time and Newsweek had cover stories on it. Congressional members denounced Marines' so-called brutality, highlighted by U.S....

BET Founder: 'Liberal Media' Want Obama to Win Photo of Matthew Sheffield. By Matthew Sheffield | April 18, 2008 - 11:47 ET Bob Johnson, founder of BETThe continuing left-wing furor over George Stephanopoulos's perfectly valid question about Barack Obama's associations with a known terrorist reminded me of something I wanted to blog earlier in the week before it erupted: an admission of a leftward bias on the part of the media from BET founder Bob Johnson. Interviewed by the Charlotte Observer Tuesday, Johnson said that the "liberal media" want Obama to win, partly out of racial pandering but also because...

Eight out of 10 people in the Arab world have a negative view of the US, according to a new poll. By extension, governments supported by the US are unpopular, found the survey, which was released in Washington. A recent BBC World Service survey found views of the US had started to improve by 4% globally, although they remained negative in the Arab world. Only 6% of Arabs believe the US troop surge in Iraq has worked, according to the latest poll. It was carried out by the University of Maryland and Zogby International. A majority of Arabs believe that...

Have you ever wondered why Elvis pulled out a gun in his Las Vegas hotel suite and shot his TV screen? Well, if Elvis had been watching a TV show just a tenth as annoying as MTV's "The Paper" you could easily understand why he did it. Normally, I don't watch ANY MTV "Reality" shows which are all completely unreal. I watched just one of them years ago and found the spoiled kids on the show so completely obnoxious that I have avoided all such MTV shows like the plague. So why am I now watching "The Paper?" Mainly...

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said that media in the U.S. have abandoned any pretense of neutrality in the Democratic presidential race and are heavily biased toward Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. In an interview with Britain’s Financial Times, Rendell — who has endorsed Clinton in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary — said the bias against the former first lady is the worst instance of favoritism “I have seen in my 31 years in politics.” He added: “The media has drunk the Kool-Aid with Obama … They have fallen in love with the message and the messenger… “They don’t even pretend to...

The party girl image was nowhere to be seen when Jenna Bush gave the keynote address at the annual banquet held by Wisconsin Women in Government. The 25-year-old daughter of President George W. Bush, who was cited twice for underage drinking during her college days, has undergone a public relations metamorphosis since the publication last year of her bestselling book, "Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope," which is about a single mother living with HIV. On Thursday night at the Monona Terrace Convention Center, Bush, who is expected to wed fiance Henry Hager this May, was gracious and humble in...

It's not widely recognized that the Wall Street Journal is a left-wing rag, a propaganda organ for the Democrat Party no less than the New York Times. That's because people compare the editorials, not the news coverage. The WSJ is a schizophrenic, split-personality paper with a pro-America editorial page (yes, except for their open-borders nonsense), while that of the NYT's is so anti-American it is often outright treasonous. But if you focus on the front section news coverage, you'll see little difference between the two. A perfect example is this "news" story of April 7 in the WSJ:Democrats' Hopes for...

Suppose one of the networks decided to host a presidential debate to which they’d invited only the Democratic nominee. To be “fair,” after playing up all the talking points of his own party, the nominee would make sure to articulate what he thought the Republican position might be, would proceed to rebut them and then go home after having presented “both sides.” If you believe this scenario to be absurd, how is it different from the daily routine of networks getting all political news from Democratic National Committee talking points? To be sure, on occasion, they will give token mention...

The Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese and the Illinois-shaped corn flake appear to have new competition for webbies' fascination: Dick Cheney's mysterious sunglasses. An undated photo of the vice president on the White House Web site has caused a stir on the Internet, causing some people to wonder if he's in eyeshot of an unclad female. The White House says it's just someone holding an innocuous fishing rod (the veep -- allegedly -- is fly fishing in Idaho).

Katie Couric and CBS News are talking for the first time about her giving up the anchor chair after the November election if her ratings don't improve, a course that could result in her leaving the network, sources familiar with the situation say. These sources say the network's top executives believe Couric is doing an excellent job on the "CBS Evening News," but that both sides have grown frustrated with a situation in which she seems mired in third place and unable to use the range of talents that made her a superstar in morning television. They stress that a...

It’s nothing new that the American news media, complete with starry-eyed ideologues, want to be a part of the possible history a Barack Obama presidency would be. They see it as a national historical vindication, an erasure of racism past, and it would be a damn good story. Thus, the media has been correctly accused of being in the tank for the Obama campaign, lobbing him softball questions, and overlooking questionable comments made by the candidate, his wife, his acquaintances, and his staff. However, the latest tactic implemented by ABC News is nothing less than shameless, and this with an...

So, do you want to see a most egregious example of equating apples to oranges? Well, even that old saw is too mild a metaphor to describe the disgusting example of Christiane Amanpour's latest foray into moral relativism. In her CNN piece titled, "Survivor recalls horrors of Cambodia genocide," Amanpour assumes that American "waterboarding" today is exactly the same thing as the genocide of millions as perpetrated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Amanpour seems to think that waterboarding is the same thing as what Pol Pot did with prisoners that were "whipped raw, their fingernails...

Members of the military are prohibited from engaging in political activity, but ABC News convinced a few soldiers in Iraq to go before the cameras to discuss their choices for president. It is well known that the troops generally support Republicans because of their pro-military credentials, which is the reason Al Gore tried to have ballots from overseas military bases disqualified during the 2000 recount. However, Martha Raddatz could not find a single soldier who supported Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran for Commander in Chief. Most of those Raddatz interviewed backed Sen. Barack Obama with one favoring Sen....

ABC's Martha Raddatz asked American soldiers in Iraq what issues are most important to them when looking at the presidential candidates. Though the military is not supposed to engage in partisan political activity, these soldiers spoke out about their personal endorsements, and their opinions are likely to matter. In 2004, 73 percent of the U.S. military voted for a presidential candidate, and officials believe it may be even higher this time around. PFC Jeremy Slate said he supported Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., because of his stated intention to pull out of Iraq right away. "That would be nice," Slate said,...

WASHINGTON - Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has stopped telling a story of a pregnant woman's medical tragedy after an Ohio hospital challenged its accuracy last weekend. But recent accounts of the episode have omitted key details that suggest there was more truth in the essence of Clinton's tale than her critics, and even her presidential campaign, have acknowledged. Since early March, the New York senator has often told campaign audiences a heartbreaking story of a young Ohio woman who began having problems with her pregnancy. She said the woman was twice turned away by a local hospital because she...

We wrote here about left-wing radio host Ed Schultz, who denounced John McCain as "a warmonger" in the course of introducing Barack Obama at North Dakota's State Democratic Convention Friday evening. Now, CNN has compounded the offense by inviting Schultz on the air to explain why he thinks McCain is a "warmonger." The network gave Schultz more than four minutes on-air to amplify his smear, without inviting anyone from McCain's camp to participate or respond. Unbelievable. You can watch it here.

He's only the Governor of Pennsylvania and former head of the Democratic National Committee, and he has Olbermann's number...

BEND, Oregon, April 4, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The mainstream media pushed the story of Thomas Beatie this past week, billing the story as the 'miraculous' male pregnancy. The startling news headline took the media by storm on April 1 (was this date a coincidence?), following Beatie's appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show and an interview in People magazine.If this story really were an instance of an unexplained pregnancy in a male, it might really be newsworthy. But it is actually a total non-story about a woman becoming pregnant. And yet, it has been turned into a giant media deception to...