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Listen to President Obama and Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, and you could be forgiven for briefly thinking only one gender is allowed to vote. Both candidates regularly tailor their message to female voters: You can see it in the president's attacks on Romney's desire to cut Planned Parenthood funding and potentially appoint judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, and in Romney's claim that "this president has failed America's women" due to an uptick in female poverty. There's a reason for this: Women are widely perceived as more likely than men to be swing voters. In the battleground state...

Politics is a dirty business, but do the major media outlets need to be part of that 'dirty business', and do the major media outlets need to be more honest in their own selective editing? The admission of mistakes and just plain lies which President Obama made to 60 Minutes interviewer Steve Kroft somehow wound up on the cutting room floor during editing. That seems to indicate a functional bias of omission by CBS, as in the ongoing discussion at this DJ blog posted by sumdume. The 'sin' of omission in editing is seemingly the most difficult to deduce is...

re hours after Politico reported on Republican Congressman Eric Yoder's admitted skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee in Israel, CBS highlighted the story on its Monday morning newscast. By contrast, the network was slow to report on former Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner's lewd photo scandal in 2011. On June 1 of that year, ABC and NBC's morning shows reported on the "underwear uproar," while CBS's Early Show punted on the story. The following day, CBS played up conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart's early role in spreading word of the New York liberal's indecent Twitter pic: "Supporters of Weiner note that it...

During an interview of Obama senior campaign adviser David Axelrod on Wednesday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose and Erica Hill bewailed the negative tone of the presidential campaign, hinting that it might turn off voters. However, the anchors let Axelrod rip Mitt Romney's recent foreign policy speech to the VFW without challenge, and failed to ask the adviser about the President's own speech to the organization. Rose set up Axelrod's tirade against Romney with a beyond softball question - on the GOP candidate's slam of Obama: "'Contemptible conduct'; 'a betrayal' -- where are we?" The veteran journalist hinted at his...

Charlie Rose omitted mentioning the continuing high unemployment rate as he interviewed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on Tuesday's CBS This Morning. Rose also forwarded a criticism Geithner from the left, that the Cabinet official was "too friendly to the banks, because he knew them from his years at the New York Fed." The anchor also didn't challenge the Obama administration official's assertion that keeping all of the current tax rates would be a "deeply irresponsible thing to do fiscally and economically now. If you do it, it costs a trillion dollars over ten years - a trillion dollars over ten...

Back in 2007 and 2008, it was remarkable watching Barack Obama treated to one puffball interview after another, courtesy of Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes." Kroft compared him to Abe Lincoln and oozed about his "political poetry." But it's simply irresponsible, after three and a half years of President Obama wrecking the economy, that CBS -- now with anchor Charlie Rose -- is still in puffery mode. There's a certain level of contempt on the part of CBS. It could and should focus its attention on the plight of every family struggling with unemployment or a house that's underwater financially...

“‘Bullet Button’ Used To Get Around California Gun Laws,” CBS 5 San Francisco reported Tuesday. “CBS 5 went undercover to a recent gun show at the Cow Palace in Daly City and found ‘California legal’ assault rifles throughout,” they claim. It’s a non-story, really, as their undercover team found nothing illegal—they weren’t even looking for that—or that couldn’t have been obtained openly. The entire purpose of the “investigation” appears to be to gin up public frenzy about a legal device that allows for changing magazines on semi-automatic firearms that comply with California’s specific model and cosmetic features bans. “I've emailed...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Scott Pelley at this debate Saturday night was amazing to watch. This is the anchor of the CBS Evening News, and he thought he had Newt Gingrich twisted in circles over foreign policy. At one point, Pelley got this contorted, smug, all full-of-himself smile on his face while he could not have been more wrong about something. Newt slapped him down and put him in his place, but Pelley to this moment doesn't know that that's what happened! Newt put this guy in his place. Pelley still thinks that he won that little tete-a-tete. I'm convinced he...

Taking a page from Ronald Reagan, Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Saturday sought to use humor to rebound from his much-noted debate flub earlier in the week. That flub, a 53-second brain freeze that was replayed endlessly on news shows, had him forgetting the name of the Department of Energy, the third federal agency he pledges to eliminate. So Perry was quick to cut off CBS’ Scott Pelley, one of the debate moderators in South Carolina, when he began a question, saying, “Governor Perry, you advocate the elimination of the Department of Energy. If you eliminate the Department of Energy...”...

Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s campaign is expressing outrage over an internal CBS memo that they said is proof the network mistreated the Minnesota congresswoman during Saturday night’s CBS News/National Journal Debate. The email was accidentally sent to the Bachmann campaign by CBS News. The campaign decided to release the email to show what they believe was a planned effort to limit questions to Bachmann. Bachmann’s campaign manager blasted CBS for what he called “concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows.” “The liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message and limiting...

Following Saturday’s GOP CBS/National Journal debate, the Michele Bachmann campaign accused CBS News of organizing a biased event by purposefully keeping her questions to a minimum. After accidently receiving an internal email from John Dickerson – the newly appointed political director for CBS News – her campaign released a screenshot of the correspondence to reporters. Via The Hill:  Dickerson was responding to an email sent to CBS News staffers discussing the possibility of booking Bachmann for a webcast interview. The initial email notes that Alice Stewart, Bachmann's spokeswoman, was included in the email chain, but Dickerson appeared not to have...

The first broadcast network presidential debate this year, which ended its national telecast and switched to a choppy livestream feed two-thirds of the way through the event, produced a storm of complaints from viewers across the country and two of the candidates on the no-frills debate stage in Spartanburg, S.C. CBS’s foreign policy debate, co-sponsored by National Journal, offered unusually detailed discussion of policy and a format that was free of many of the literal bells and whistles of more slickly-produced face-offs. But the confusing format — the televised portion for most of the nation ended after an hour and...

f there was a loser on the debate stage tonight, it was CBS. First, they scheduled their debate on a Saturday night between two major football games. Then they decide to only broadcast the first hour of their 90-minute debate. Then their Internet feed failed for the final 30 minutes. This was CBS’s first and only debate — and it showed. Scott Pelley was a terrible moderator. He treated the men who might be the next commander in chief like schoolchildren, cutting them off in mid-sentence, lecturing them to answer his questions. He even lectured Newt Gingrich on policy, telling...

On Wednesday's Early Show, CBS's Betty Nguyen incorrectly reported that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain had been accused of "sexual assault" by two women. Nguyen later accurately reported that the women actually leveled sexual harassment allegations against Cain. The fill-in news anchor used the erroneous term during a 14-second news brief 37 minutes into the 7 am Eastern hour: "One of two women who accuse Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain of sexual assault wants to speak out. The woman's lawyer say she wants to be released from a confidentiality agreement, so that she can publically respond to Cain's recent claims...

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley spoke with chief Washington correspondent and "Face the Nation" anchor Bob Schieffer, about the Herman Cain phenomenon. A transcript follows. Pelley: Bob, I wonder how seriously should we take the Cain campaign? Schieffer: I think it has to be taken very seriously at this point, Scott, and here's why. Think about this: Mitt Romney has been plodding along at about 25 percent in the polls and it's like he's been running most of his life. Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, gets into the race, zooms immediately to the top in the polls, has...

Adios commie.

September 17, 2011 House GOP Rejects Obama Jobs Proposals (CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama's jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job. In a memo to GOP lawmakers that was also issued publicly and reprinted in The New York Times, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and other Republican leaders also objected to the president's proposal for a temporary reduction in payroll taxes, in order to boost consumer spending and increase demand. The GOP leaders say such a...

For Katie Couric, the offer in 2006 to become the anchor of “CBS Evening News” came with another incentive, one she prized almost as highly, according to two of her friends: the chance to report for “60 Minutes,” the newsmagazine that for Ms. Couric stood for the kind of serious journalism she had always aspired to. Regular appearances on “60 Minutes” were written into her $15 million-a-year contract with CBS, but once she arrived at the network, she found a chilly reception from some of the staff members at the venerable program. Some of Ms. Couric’s associates said that the...

Following his three-day bus tour to promote his economic agenda -- and not to mention the debt limit rancor in Washington before that -- President Obama is finally getting some rest and relaxation. On Thursday, he and his family are heading off to Martha's Vineyard, the island off of Massachusetts. They'll be staying at a 28-acre retreat called Blue Heron Farm for about 10 days. There has been criticism of the president's vacation at this time. But how does the number of vacation days the president has spent compare to his predecessors? CBS Radio's Mark Knoller has kept track of...