Biased Mainstream Media Yet Again Proven To Be In The Tank For Obama, Democrats

A couple of links scream about the rabid left wing media bias.  The first:

Diane Sawyer Steals Hannity, Fox Credit on Wright
By Jeffrey Lord on 6.2.11 @ 8:59AM

It was so brazen it was amazing.

ABC Anchor Diane Sawyer sits across from Bill O’Reilly last night and casually says that ABC broke the story about the tapes featuring the sermons of now radioactive and decidedly ex-Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright.

“You’re talking to the network…Obama White House remembers this… that broke the Jeremiah Wright tapes.”

The implication?

ABC News was Johnny-on-the-spot on the story of then-Senator Obama’s now infamous — and ex — pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In March of 2008.

Remember that date. March — 2008. Here’s the link to the story, filed on March 13 by ABC’s Brian Ross

This remark came about in the course of a conversation with O’Reilly in which Sawyer, discussing the role of ABC News in the last presidential campaign, insisted that her network was not populated by liberals who tilted the news leftward. O’Reilly had cited a study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs on the network news coverage of the Obama-McCain campaign that showed the tilt in favorable coverage for Obama over McCain as follows:

Obama   McCain

CBS 73% 31%
NBC 56%   16%
ABC 57%   42%

ABC had fared best of the three broadcast networks, but the point of liberal media bias — the kind of reporting that dates as far back as the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign — stood. So O’Reilly persisted.

And out popped the above statement on Jeremiah Wright.

Let’s be clear here. Sawyer used the word “tapes” — and strictly speaking she is correct.

The problem comes with the context — in which she is clearly trying to imply that ABC was the proverbial dog with a bone in uncovering the relationship of Wright to his famous congregant, and what the implications might be for the country if a man who sat in Wright’s pews for 20 years listening to Wright’s leftist political rants were elected president.

Bluntly put — this is poppycock.

The man — and the network — that did the background research on this was, yes indeed, Sean Hannity and Fox News.

On February 28, 2007 — over a full year before ABC first aired its Wright story — Hannity had located columnist Erik Rush, who had written an article on Senator Obama and his church. He put Rush on the air that night.

The very next night, Hannity had managed to corral Wright himself on his Fox show with liberal Alan Colmes. Here’s the clip.

Out poured the tale of Wright’s devotion to Black Liberation Theology and the radical writings of James Cone and Dwight Hopkins. From this initial work the connections of Wright to Louis Farrakhan and Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi were uncovered and more.

And on it went.

The role of ABC News here?

Zip, nada, zero.

And yet plain as can be, there sits Diane Sawyer, the anchor of ABC News, on the set of Fox’s O’Reilly Factortrying to pretend ABC was a prime mover in Hannity’s story — a Fox story that surely would never have seen the light of day anywhere had it not been for Hannity’s tenacity in digging it out and putting it on TV. And, as regular viewers will recall, being snickered at while doing it — snickering that stopped when Obama finally felt so much pressure on Wright he stopped going to the church and felt the need to publicly rebuke the man he had once said was like an “uncle” to him.

Ms. Sawyer insisted her network would be providing “fantastic coverage” of the 2012 race, citing the liberal ex-Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos as a key member of her team.

If this is an example of the work to come from ABC News on the 2012 presidential campaign… well, we report, you decide.

The second:

BILL O’REILLY, HOST: In the “Back of the Book” segment  tonight: As we reported last night, elements of the national liberal media have  begun their campaign to re-elect President Obama. The attacks on Fox News are  being stepped up, and we used an example of NBC News correspondent Andrea  Mitchell deriding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for criticizing Mr.  Obama.

Here now to talk about the Obama advantage in the media, Fox News political  analyst Charles Krauthammer, who is in Washington this evening. So how much of  an advantage? Because in my lifetime covering politics, 35 years now, I’ve never  seen a media as rabidly invested in a president as the liberal national media is  in Mr. Obama. Have you?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well, I  think that is true, and you can see it in a Pew study, Pew Center for Excellence  in Journalism that they did in 2008 election. They found that of the three cable  networks, Fox played it absolutely right down the middle, the same amount of  favorability to McCain as to Obama. CNN three times as favorable to Obama as to  McCain; MSNBC 5 to 1. So, I mean, and that was four years ago. Interesting, to  give you an idea of how biased the media is, when it issued a press release on  that study, Bill, it played it as CNN was the cable norm, with MSNBC on one side  and Fox on the other deviating from the norm. The norm being the pro-Obama bias  of CNN, rather than the norm that any objective American would say, which is  what Fox has done, which was to play it right down the middle.

O’REILLY: Sure. Now, there was another study done by the  Center for Media and Public Affairs that showed the network broadcasts — CBS,  ABC and NBC — were 68 percent positive for Obama, Senator Obama, then-Senator  Obama, 32 percent negative. For John McCain, it was the reverse: 36 positive, 64  negative. So, my contention is that nothing is going to change this time around.  That the national TV media and the big urban newspapers, like The New York  Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, will all be trying to get  President Obama re-elected. So the question then becomes: How much of an  advantage is it for the president?

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, it’s a major advantage, but you’ve got to  remember this. The left, the Democrats always have the press on their side.  They’ve had it for 40 years. Nonetheless, the Republicans have won the  presidency seven out of the last 11 elections, and that’s because what  Republicans have, what conservatives have is the country, which is a  center-right country, has remained so almost unchangingly for four decades. So  what the media bias does is it slightly — it gives an advantage. It’s a major  advantage, but it’s undoing the deficit that Democrats and liberals already have  because it’s a country that is not essentially conducive to a liberal  message.

And as bad as it appears to be with the tilt in favorable coverage for liberal Barack Obama for, well, somewhat less liberal John McCain – (and here is the result of the study again):

Obama   McCain

CBS 73% 31%
NBC 56%   16%
ABC 57%   42%

– I believe it is actually FAR worse than that.

The reason I say that is there’s an implicit assumption that isn’t true; namely, that both John McCain and Barack Obama had exactly the same negative baggage or positive qualities.  As an example, if Tom and Dick had pretty much the exact same record, and the press covered Dick more favorably than Tom, you’d certainly be able to show bias.

But what if Dick had a long history of radical associations, beginning with communist Frank Marshall Davis, and including racist un-American bigots such as Jeremiah Wright and terrorists such as William Ayers?  What if Dick had all the political baggage of a Chicago thug, including dirty deals with criminal scumbags such as Tony Rezko?  What if Dick’s wife had all KINDS of dirty baggage?  What if Dick could be documented to have a radical history of being a communist?  Just as a couple of examples?  Would it be fair or legitimate to expect the coverage to be evenly “favorable” versus “unfavorable,” or would FAIR and OBJECTIVE coverage have skewed dramatically against Dick???

In the case of Barack Obama, the guy who deserved virtually ALL the negative coverage got virtually NONE.  Versus war hero John McCain who should have received very little unfavorable coverage and got virutally nothing BUT???

And that same overwhelming media bias that got Obama an undeserved victory and the presidency in 2008 is just as biased today in defending the failure’s record.

White House Ignores War In Afghanistan To Pursue New War On Fox News

Up until the exaltation of The One – may socialist Scandinavians place golden medallions around his neck forever – the Democrats’ spiel on Afghanistan was that it was the right war, the top priority war, the just war, the necessary war, but that the devil Bush ignored Afghanistan while he focused on Iraq.

Iraq, of course, was the unwinnable war (even after Bush won it), and the surge strategy was bound to be a costly failure (even after it worked).

Well, now that Obama – in the words of a leftist “journalist” – “stands above the country” and “above the world” as “sort of God,” well, the “change” the left kept blathering about resulted in a change of focus:

Afghanistan is no longer the “war of necessity,” or the “top priority,” or the “cause that could not be more just.”  Nope.  That war morphed into the war that the White House has declared on Fox News.

White House communications director, Anita Dunn:

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director.

And:

“The reality of it is that Fox often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

And:

“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Mind you, every major totalitarian dictator in the world is more “legitimate” than Fox News, as far as the White House is concerned:

White House communications director Anita Dunn also said this:

“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Yes, that’s right.  Dunn is referring to CNN — the same CNN that demonstrated that it is so completely in the tank for the Obama agenda that it actually “FACT-CHECKED” a Saturday Night Live skit.

That’s the criteria for “a news network”: complete ideological loyalty.

Obama pretty much pointed that out himself when he addressed White House correspondents:

“Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me.  Apologies to the Fox table.”

Unlike all the other media, Fox correspondents didn’t vote for Obama.  And that’s enough to declare war.  For all must love The One.  No dissension can be tolerated.

Mind you, while the White House asserts that Fox News is evil because it – alone by itself – is not in the tank with Obama, it’s interesting to see that Obama himself is in the tank for SEIU and the hard-core union agenda as he vows to “paint the nation purple.”

We’ve seen this reaction to media criticism by a president before – from the darkest and most evil days of Richard Nixon.  It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t end well.

Is Fox the media arm of the Republican Party?  Viewers who are flocking to Fox News in droves don’t seem to think so:

Fox News Channel was the 2nd highest rated cable channel on all of television during the first quarter of 2009 in prime time Total Viewers. CNN was 17th and MSNBC 24th for the first three months of the year. FNC beat CNN and MSNBC combined and gained the most compared to the first quarter of 2008, up 24%. 2009’s first quarter was FNC’s 3rd highest rated quarter in prime time in the network’s history — just behind Q4 ’08 and Q3 ’05. In prime time, ages 25-54 demo, and in total day in both categories, FNC grew more year-to-year than CNN and MSNBC combined. FNC had nine of the top 10 programs on cable news in Total Viewers.

The hardly right-wing UCLA seems to find plenty of bias from all of those journalists that Obama boasted voted for him, rather than Fox:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

To the extent that Fox News is biased to the right, every single other news outlet is biased toward the left.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs’ study concluded that Fox News was in fact the most fair and balanced network, concluding:

Fox News Channel’s coverage was more balanced toward both parties than the broadcast networks were. On FOX, evaluations of all Democratic candidates combined were split almost evenly — 51% positive vs. 49% negative, as were all evaluations of GOP candidates — 49% positive vs. 51% negative, producing a perfectly balanced 50-50 split for all candidates of both parties.

Sacred Heart University’s media study discovered that Fox News was the most trusted in the nation:

Researchers were asked which national television news organization they trusted most for accurate reporting. Fox News was named by 30.0% of all respondents – up from 19.5% in 2003 and 27.0% in 2007.

Those named most frequently as the television news organization most trusted for accurate reporting in 2009 included: Fox News (30.0%), CNN (19.5%), NBC News (7.5%) and ABC News (7.5%). Fox News was also the television news organization trusted least. Just over one-quarter, 26.2%, named Fox News, followed by NBC News (9.9%), MSNBC (9.4%), CNN (8.5%), CBS News (5.3%) and ABC News (3.7%).

In fact, it didn’t come all that far from being TWICE as trusted as the runner-up, CNN (the network that fact-checks SNL sketches that are negative to Obama).

So this war – that again seems to be replacing the “just war of necessity” that Afghanistan was SUPPOSED to be is just ridiculous.

It merely shows just how dramatically ideological this administration truly is.

It also explains why former longtime ABC correspondent Chris Wallace said of the Obama administration:

“They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

Let’s just take a second to consider what Obama seems to think about the media, as evidenced by his selection of Mark Lloyd to be his FCC Diversity Czar.  Remember that cartoon of dictators that Obama has met with?  Obama’s FCC Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd admiringly said this of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez:

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution.  To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela….The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”

Just as Obama is now taking Fox News seriously in this country.

But how did Hugo Chavez “take very seriously the media”?

Newsbusters answers that by simply pointing to the facts in Venezuela:

NGOs Warn of Restrictions in Pending Venezuela Law

Associated Press – May 7, 2009

Prominent Venezuelan nongovernmental organizations warned Thursday that a bill being drafted by lawmakers loyal to President Hugo Chavez could be used to financially strangle groups that criticize the government.

Chavez clamps down on broadcast media

Irish Examiner – Friday, July 10, 2009

President Hugo Chavez’s government is imposing tough new regulations on Venezuela’s cable television while revoking the licenses of more than 200 radio stations.

Report: Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez aggressively seizing control of media

Miami Herald – August 14, 2009

An unclassified report lists examples of Venezuelan government efforts to crack down on or seize control of media outlets to stifle criticism.

How’s that for a chronology of authoritarian censorship?

And Obama’s choice for FCC Diversity Czar also had this to say:

[From a 2005 Conference on Media Reform: Racial Justice]: “Because we have really, truly good white people in important positions. And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions.  And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem.

We’re in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.”

It’s nice of Mark Lloyd to acknowledge that there are “good white people” around – just before he announces the need to have a purge of white people from the media.  But Mark Lloyd is a racist who has also said:

“There are few things I think more frightening in the American mind than dark skinned black men. Here I am.”

And Barack Obama also showed what he thought about free speech rights when his selection for FCC Diversity Czar said:

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

“[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.”

So we pretty much know where the Obama White House is coming from: the media should be the exclusive tool of leftist propaganda to advance the Obama agenda.  Only Obama voters need apply to be considered as “journalists.”  Free speech is a terribly overrated thing, which needs to be “reinterpreted” to exclude ANYONE who has ANYTHING but a far-leftist revolutionary agenda.  And Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has provided the American left with the model as to how to proceed in that direction.

Obama is dithering around in Afghanistan while our soldiers languish and die for lack of support.  But he seems all to willing to pursue his war on Fox News with a gusto.

In both the war in Afghanistan and the war on Fox News, the threat is to freedom itself.