AIM's Aronoff Misleads on CMPA Topic: Accuracy in Media
In a Nov. 3 Accuracy in Media column touting the "evidence of bias in favor of Barack Obama," Roger Aronoff describes the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which produced a study supporting Aronoff's contention, as a group that is not "considered in any way to have conservative leanings." In fact, as we've detailed, the CMPA is a conservative-leaning group.
Curiously, Aronoff doesn't cite the one thing that might have supported his contention about the CMPA: its study from July finding that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks fo the general election campaign. But then, that would have undercut the premise of his column (not to mention the entire raison d'etre of AIM).
Media Matters catches the MRC's Brent Bozell, claiming that Barack Obama "ran as a Reaganite" and "won over ... the public as a fiscal conservative" -- even though less than two weeks earlier, Bozell accused Obama of espousing "socialism" throughout the "entirety of the campaign." In that appearance, on the Nov. 7 edition of Fox News' "America's Newsroom," host Bill Hemmer partially followed the template by allowing him to appear solo, but surprisingly identified Bozell as president of the Conservataive Victory Committee -- perhaps because he was appearing in that role.
A separate Nov. 7 Bozell appearance on "Fox & Friends" followed the template completely -- Bozell appeared solo and was not identified as a conservative.
UPDATE: NewsBusters' post on Bozell's "America's Newsroom" segment is silent on Bozell's flip-flop.
Newsmax Promo Falsely Blames Obama for Market Drop Topic: Newsmax
A front-page Newsmax promo for a Nov. 6 Associated Press article reads:
Markets Tumble Again With Obama Blues
Uncertain over the direction of a liberal president-elect and reeling from job losses and poor outlooks from leading companies, the market has plunged over the last two days. On Friday, automakers are expected to announce huge losses and more job cuts that will only make the challenge greater for Barack Obama.
Wall Street plunged for a second day, triggered by computer gear maker Cisco Systems warning of slumping demand and retailers reporting weak sales for October. Concerns about widespread economic weakness sent the major stock indexes down more than 4 percent Thursday, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which tumbled more than 440 points.
Nowhere does the article blame the market plunge on the "liberal president-elect"; in fact, Obama is not even mentioned until the 28th paragraph.
Tapscott: Whites Voted for Obama to Prove They Aren't Racist Topic: Washington Examiner
A Nov. 6 Washington Examiner column by Mark Tapscott makes this claim:
First, Millions of white Baby Boomers saw in Barack Obama an opportunity to prove once and for all that they were not racists. Most Americans long ago tired of incessantly hearing that they are bigots, so voting for Obama was an historic opportunity to put an end once and for all to the Left's favorite stereotype of American society.
Is Tapscott really saying that the only reason white people voted for Obama was to prove they weren't racist? It appears so.
Lesson for the Republicans – Palin connects with real people as one of them because she is. She has that rare gift of speaking with candor and grace in the common manner. People who confuse Palin's appeal and virtues for a lack of experience or intelligence have no business running a political party that presumes to some day regain the trust and active support of its rank and file.
New Article -- Out There, Exhibit 48: The Heathers at NewsBusters Topic: NewsBusters
The political angst of Tim Graham and crew is awfully close to having a body count: They're kicking conservatives out of the club for being insufficiently loyal to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Read more >>
ConWeb Dumps McCain, Rushes to Palin's Defense Topic: The ConWeb
Having seen its side lose the election, the ConWeb is now engaging in little cleansing ritual: throwing John McCain under the bus and defending Sarah Palin from criticism.
Newsmax has been the leader so far. A Nov. 5 article by Dave Eberhart blamed McCain's loss on "the woeful campaign they said John McCain had run and how blatantly biased the media has been." After noting revelations that Palin's "infamous shopping expeditions for her entire family were even more outrageous than previously reported," Eberhart spun it as best he could: "But the McCain campaign failed to turn the clothes issue into positive spin: Palin was an "average Jane" who wasn't a millionaire like the Obamas." He continued:
Criticism of her deflected the real missteps McCain was making, including his spasmodic response to the financial crisis that gripped the nation. McCain, a self-proclaimed maverick, quickly embraced Washington's bailout of Wall Street.
Despite the multiple fumbles, McCain aides remain fixated on Palin's wardrobe.
Eberhart concluded: "Sarah Palin demonstrated real charisma and will remain a force in the GOP for years to come."
A Nov. 6 article by Jim Meyers was even harsher on McCain and more defensive of Palin:
McCain campaign aides have launched a full-scale smear attack on Sarah Palin to blunt criticisms that they bungled a winnable election.
[...]
But the Times even had to acknowledge the real reason for the post-election sniping.
“But beyond those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008,” Elisabeth Bumiller disclosed in The Times.
A Nov. 6 article by Rick Pedraza featured right-wing radio host Michael Reagan asserting that "Palin is not the reason McCain lost the presidential election to Barack Obama." That blame, he said, goes to "George Bush and his lack of leadership in Washington, D.C. with his own party."
At CNSNews.com, a Nov. 6 article by Susan Jones headlined "The Post-Election Sliming of Sarah Palin" lamented that "Disgruntled McCain staffers apparently are behind media reports critical of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin":
Newsweek magazine, in an article called “Secrets of the 2008 Campaign,” says Palin spent extravagantly on new clothes. One angry aide characterized her shopping spree as, "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast." That anonymous aide said the truth will come out when the Republican Party audits its books.
Fox News reports that anonymous McCain aides are complaining about Palin's grasp of basic civics and geography.
And The New York Times also reports on “internal battles” that divided the McCain and Palin camps.
That's the entire article; Jones doesn't offer detail on any of the claims.
Even normally friendly Fox News reporters weren't immune to scrutiny for telling the truth about Palin. A Nov. 6 NewsBusters post by Sharon Hughes complained that "Carl Cameron of FOX News reporting for the "O'Reilly Factor" took the low road yesterday in repeating rumors and gossip from unnamed staffers in the McCain camp about Sarah Palin: her knowledge, temperament, being a shopoholic, etc." Hughes continued:
In failing to mention the names of the accusers, or input from staffers who disagree with the rumors, Cameron failed the 'fair and balanced' creed of FOX News. Plus Cameron's somewhat fevered manner in repeating the rumors, was not only surprising, but showed his lack of objectivity.
[...]
The most popular Governor in the United States with an 80% approval rating in her own state of Alaska, continues to be portrayed negatively by the media. Perhaps it will be found that one of more of these nameless cowards in the McCain camp were plants, or idealogues who took the job but ended up sabotoging the effort, ie the handling of Palin with the press. Time will tell if 'fair and balanced' reporters will investigate.
Hughes makes no effort to disprove the claims, nor does she provide a video of Cameron making the claims so that her readers can judge for themselves (that would be here). She also fails to explain that having "an 80% approval rating in her own state of Alaska" (in fact, it's currently 65 percent) has nothing whatsoever to do with the accusations made by those unnamed McCain staffers.
WorldNetDaily arguably declared war on women with its disturbing obsession with female teachers accused of having sexual relations with students.
Now comes a Nov. 5 WND article citing polling results stating that unmarried women supported Barack Obama "by a stunning 70 to 29 percent margin" -- or, actually, the WND poll of the day asking readers their opinion on this development. The four top results as of this writing:
Women are naturally more emotional than men, and Obama's appeal was entirely emotional: 19%
With Obama to pay the mortgage and the gas bill, why would a woman need a husband?: 14%
It's ironic because liberal government policies are what have broken up so many families and left women and their children without support: 14%
These women see Obama as their government-protector husband: 12%
Do WND and its readers have some issues they need to work out with a licensed therapist? It appears so.
NewsBusters Flip-Flops on Tough Questions Topic: NewsBusters
It was just a week or so ago that NewsBusters was ridiculing Democrats for going into "full panic mode" over a "grilling" of Joe Biden by an Orlando anchorwoman.
Apparently, it doesn't work the other way. From a Nov. 5 NewsBusters post by P.J. Gladnick:
Sheesh! Talking about rolling around in the dirt! CNN's Rick Sanchez was arguing taxes with Joe the Plumber (Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher) yesterday and somehow couldn't figure out the concept of "principles." Ironically, Sanchez then showed just how unprincipled he is by rolling around in the mud and digging up recycled "dirt" on Joe. Here is the transcript of the video so you can see for yourself just how low Sanchez went in an attempt to smear Joe the Plumber.
Gladnick later adds: "WARNING! WARNING! Stand by for a sleaze attack by Rick Sanchez." That "sleaze attack": noting that Wurzelbacher owes back taxes.
Funny, we thought NewsBusters liked it when anchors asked tough questions of political figures. Guess not; Gladnick concludes: "It looks like Rick Sanchez will air your dirty laundry if he finds he is losing an argument."
P.S. The headline on Gladnick's item is "Rick Sanchez Gets Dirty With Joe the Plumber." Does Gladnick know what he/she is implying by putting "dirty" and "Sanchez" in close proximity in the headline?
Raezler Still Complaining That Media Told Truth About Palin Topic: NewsBusters
Before the election, as we noted, the MRC's Culture & Media Institute released a report complaining about news coverage of Sarah Palin focused too much on the (very much true) facts that Palin didn't display a whole heck of a lot of knowledge during interviews, that some conservatives declined to support her, and that she served as the McCain campaign's attack dog.
Report co-author Colleen Raezler is still pushing her faulty meme in a Nov. 5 NewsBusters post, complaining that an NBC report "virtually recapitulated CMI's study in a single news segment." Raezler again lamented that Palin is being portrayed as "unqualified and unintelligent" even as evidence piles up to support the claim.
Any chance Raezler will ever concede that the things she's complaining about are basically true and that what she's really complaining about is that the media didn't slavishly repeat McCain campaign spin? Somehow we doubt it.
UPDATE: A Nov. 6 post by Matthew Sheffield is quite happy to report that Palin "seems to have gone out of her way to attack the press," uncritically repeating her lament that there's a lack of "fairness and objectivity in the reporting."
Brennan Falsely Claims Earth Is Cooling Topic: Newsmax
In his Nov. 5 Newsmax column, Phil Brennan asserts: "The Earth is not warming. The 28-year period of warming between 1970 and 1998 stopped dead in its tracks, and the climate has been cooling ever since. That's a fact, but the global warmiacs ignore facts because they sometimes tend to be inconvenient."
Actually, Brennan's the person ignoring the facts. As we've previously detailed, researchers have found that the Earth, in fact, got warmer over the past decade, not cooler.
NewsBusters is joining Newsmax in downplaying the idea of Barack Obama having a mandate to do anything.
A Nov. 4 post by Jeff Poor repeats CNBC's Larry Kudlow's warning that "Obama shouldn't misinterpret the election results to unleash an attack on vital parts of the economy," adding, "Kudlow explained to viewers that some of Obama's strength on Election Day came in traditionally red states by very close margins - meaning Obama voters wanted change, but not radical liberal policies."
And a Nov. 4 post by Matthew Sheffield tout how, on CNN, "Bill Bennett was the lone voice trying to say that an Obama presidency is not a mandate for radical liberalism," going on to complain how after recent presidential election victories by George W. Bush, "one of the most common liberal media refrains was how Republicans shouldn't read too much into their victories."
But as we detailed in 2004, the ConWeb insisted Bush had a solid mandate, even though he defeated John Kerry by only half the margin that Obama defeated John McCain. By that measure, Obama has much more of a mandate than Bush did.
The sense of betrayal I feel at this time from my fellow citizens is beyond comprehension, let alone description. I had assumed not more than 35 percent of our fellow citizens would vote for an eloquent socialist gasbag with an empty resume, a carefully sanitized past and a massive wealth redistribution plan.
[...]
"Equally important was 'Gleichschaltung' from below: militant behavior on the part of the National Socialist Student League, which organized early and soon came to dominate or replace traditional student groups and formed an arrogant subculture with intense camaraderie and more than a tinge of violence. Its members broke up lectures that displeased them, and understood their task as opposing all teaching that was not rooted in National Socialist doctrine. When the Education Ministry found it necessary to tone down the students, it passed the mantle of Gleichschaltung from below to the Nazi League of University Instructors, whose leader understood his organization to be 'the appointed trustee of the National Socialist Party at the universities to see that universities and scholarship are not only painted brown (the Nazi color) but really made over to fit the pattern of National Socialism.'"
– "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide," by Robert Jay Lifton, Basic Books, p38, 1986.
Let there be no doubt where the road we have embarked upon finally ends.
Altogether, this means we are fooling ourselves if we think the United States is still a Christian nation. Its people just elected a barbarian as president[.]
President-elect Obama has already proven himself to be one of the greatest purveyors of male bovine fecal matter in human history, and a greater liar than George W. Bush was ever painted. The blame for future failures will be passed along to previous administrations. This will be reinforced by media propaganda and mutely consumed by the shambling masses to be regurgitated at appropriate times.
If we're lucky, the zeitgeist remains such that Obama will not be able to act as the Marxist he is while serving as president.
Newsmax Downplays Obama, Dem Mandate Topic: Newsmax
When President Bush won re-election in 2004 with a bare majority of 51 percent of the vote, the ConWeb did its best to portray it as a mandate. The leader was Newsmax, which stated: "The major media are very angry George Bush won the presidency by a significant margin. America is not divided. The race was not even close. The verdict of the people is clear: Americans today support President Bush and the values he stands for." Newsmax's Christopher Ruddy followed up by asserting that "the American people voted decisively to re-elect President Bush."
But with Barack Obama's victory margin over John McCain being twice as large as Bush's over John Kerry in 2004, what is Newsmax doing? Playing down the idea he has any sort of mandate.
Lowell Ponte tried some pre-emptive mandate-squashing in a Nov. 3 Newsmax article:
Because voting is not compulsory, approximately one-third of eligible voters — who meet the age, citizenship, and other legal requirements — never even register.
Of the remaining two-thirds, on a typical national Election Day only half of us — perhaps a bit more this year — who have registered bother to vote.
And of this one-third of eligible voters casting ballots, only about half will vote for the winner.
This means that the winner will win only about one-sixth of the potential ballots of eligible voters, and no matter how you slice this, it is hard for the winner to call his less-than-17 percent of eligible votes a mandate.
But in Barack Obama's case, his victory will carry even less of a mandate than this.
How so? Ponte cited a 2004 statement by Newsweek's Evan Thomas that media bias is "worth maybe 15 points" to the Democrats, which "could give Mr. Obama 15 more points on election day that he would never have won had the media been fair." Ponte continued:
Over the years ACORN and its front groups claim to have added 4 million people to the voter rolls in America. When Virginia authorities investigated a random sample of ACORN registrations, they found that 83 percent of them were fraudulent or otherwise had potentially disqualifying problems.
Multiply the 4 million names ACORN registered by 83 percent — and, voila, we get approximately 3.3 million potentially fraudulent votes that might be cast for Barack Obama.
That claim comes from an similar one Ponte made in an Oct. 6 Newsmax article: "In 2005, Virginia authorities sampled Project Vote registrations and rejected 83 percent of them for containing false or questionable information." Ponte offers no evidence to back up this claim or the source from where he plucked it. A quick Google search uncovered no independent source making the same claim.
Nevertheless, Ponte deducted 3.3 million votes, or 2.75 percent, from Obama's vote total and concluded:
Barack Obama, in other words, if this were an honest election, would win approximately 1 out of every 9 eligible voters.
Yes, the media will call it a mandate. Their ethical dishonesty is electing Mr. Obama.
And Ponte's ethical dishonesty is offering statistics that can't be verified, as well as general Democrat Derangement Syndrome.
Aaron Klein Just Can't Quit Ahmed Yousef Topic: WorldNetDaily
Despite the failure of his previousattempts to smear Barack Obama by promoting apparent endorsements of Obama (and Joe Biden) by a Hamas official, Aaron Klein goes back to the Ahmed Yousef well one more time, using a Nov. 5 WorldNetDaily article to quote Yousef, "Hamas' chief political adviser in the Gaza Strip," as saying that Hamas "is drafting a letter of congratulation to be sent tomorrow directly to Obama."
As before, Klein buries the fact that Obama has condemned Hamas as a terrorist group far down in the article.
It appears that Klein is using Yousef like an automaton, playing that particular key on his mighty Wurlitzer whenever he feels the need to link Obama to terrorism. Is Yousef aware he's being cynically used by Klein?
And thus, Klein's hatred of Obama will continue to burn brightly for the next four to eight years, even though his (and WND's) brand of fact-free smears masquerading as "reporting" has been repudiated by Obama's win.
Along with Tim Graham, P.J. Gladnick has a key component of NewsBusters' Heatherscrew, ostracizing anyone not sufficiently, slavishly dedicated to the right-wing agenda. The latest victim is Philadelphia radio host Michael Smerconish.
In a Nov. 4 post, Gladnick gets all snippy about "conservative" (the scare quotes are Gladnick's) Smerconish's endorsement of Barack Obama, channeling right-wing blogger Brian Maloney's baseless assertion that Smerconish did so only to please his corporate bosses and to gain greater exposure in the form of his show expanding to Washington, D.C.
Gladnick called Smerconish's endorsement "self-serving" and "career-enhancing," adding ominously, "It's all part of the Faustian bargain. Selling your soul comes with a huge price tag as Smerconish will find out."
And Smerconish won't get to hang out at the mall with Gladnick anymore, either.
