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.

Dishonest Propagandist Government Network NPR Fires Juan Williams For Muslim Remark

Mainstream media outlets an d the apparatchiks who staff them reach low after low; and then keep right on digging.

Monday night Juan Williams appeared on Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly Program and said:

Well, actually, I hate to say this to you because I don’t want to get your ego going.  But I think you’re right.  I think, look, political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality.

I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot.  You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country.  But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

Now, I remember also when the Times Square bomber was at court — this was just last week — he said: “the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood.” I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts.

NPR is basically firing Juan Williams the day after getting $1.8 million from far-leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations to buy at least 100 “journalists” at NPR.

If that isn’t blatant enough, the same day far leftist radical George Soros gave that $1.8 million to NPR, he similarly gave another million dollars to the profoundly leftwing Media Matters, with the express purpose of attacking Fox News.  From Newsmax:

Billionaire currency titan George Soros, long a patron of liberal political causes in the United States, is giving $1 million to Media Matters in what he says is an attempt to stop the growing popularity of Fox News.

And, just to complete the picture, Media Matters proceeds to tell us the real sin of Juan Williams – appearing on Fox News – as it turns its demonization campaign to Mara Liasson.  From millionaire Media Matters:

News that Juan Williams’ contract with NPR was terminated over comments he made about Muslims while appearing on Fox News shines a spotlight on the radio network’s evergreen controversy: Its continued affiliation with Fox News. Specifically, NPR’s Mara Liasson and her long-running association with Fox News has often raised questions.  This might be the proper time for NPR to finally address that thorny issue.

So liberals, being the dishonest lying slime that they are, can’t just say, “We’re firing Juan Williams because he’s appearing on the most trusted name in news, which and we just can’t have that.”

A study last year by George Mason University stated, “Our results show a very significant liberal bias.”  And identified Fox News as the most balanced.  NPR wants bias, and they most certainly don’t want balance.

They don’t have the decency to say that former Nazi collaborator George Soros bought them 100 paid-in-fill propagandists, and probably instructed NPR to clean house of anyone who won’t properly march to his goose-step.

Instead NPR relied upon the favorite tactic of the left – the politics of personal destruction – in order to try to personally destroy Juan Williams’ character and integrity.

That’s just the kind of slimy reptiles these people are.

And to add “slimy” to “reptilian,” the NPR CEO issued a comment that implied that Juan Williams needed to see a psychiatrist.  Which is to say that that this woman – who just fired the only black journalist on her entire network – should fire herself for bigotry.

A few things come to mind as I think about the craven excuse NPR used to get rid of Juan Williams:

1) Juan Williams was fired for telling the truth, of all things.  You just can’t have truth in liberal “journalism.”  Because truth is an embarrassment to the left.

A Pew survey documented that journalists describe themselves as being even MORE LIBERAL than they were in the past.  Which is frankly amazing, given how liberal journalists were in the past.

NPR’s own ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, has acknowledged that NPR held a bias.

So NPR fired Juan Williams under the guise that Williams took a “personal public positions on [a] controversial issue.” But that wasn’t why he was fired, or else NPR journalist Nina Totenberg would have been fired for wishing that Republican Jessie Helms or his grandchildren would get AIDS.  That wasn’t why he was fired, or NPR journalist Andrei Codrescu who called the Christian doctrine of the Rapture “crap” wouldn’t still be part of the NPR team.  That wasn’t why he was fired, or else Cokie Roberts would have been fired for saying that “Actually, Beck is worse than a clown. He’s more like a terrorist who believes he has discovered the One True Faith, and condemns everyone else as a heretic. And that makes him something else as well — a traitor to the American values he professes so loudly to defend.” It very clearly and obviously wasn’t that Juan Williams expressed a “public position on a controversial issue” that got him fired; it was that he expressed such a position that did not conform to doctrinaire liberal political correctness.  And in particular, it was that he appeared on Fox News, a network that has the audacity to actually allow conservatives to offer (along with many liberals) their point of view.

Further, “government-funded” and “journalism” go together like ketchup and milkshakes.  NPR and PBS stand as embodiments of disgrace to journalism.  And when you add “George Soros” to “government funded,” you get something that is quintessentially dangerous to both journalism and democracy itself.

2) Every mainstream media outlet is fundamentally hypocritical as well as dishonest regarding Islam as the “religion of peace.”

On the one hand, we are constantly told that Islam is peaceful.  And that anyone who fears Islam is some kind of a bigot.

And yet, on the other hand, the same “journalists” and news outlets that say this to us are themselves so piss-in-their-pants afraid of this peaceful religion becoming über-violent at the drop of a hat that they constantly censor themselves lest they end up as terrorist murder victims.

Case in point: the Washington Post, the Denver Post, and many other mainstream media papers, refused to allow the following Non Sequitur cartoon:

“Piss Christ” – an image of Jesus Christ on a cross in a jar of urine – okay.  A cartoon that doesn’t even show Muhammad?  Not okay.

Why?  Because the people the leftist journalists so dramatically insist are “peaceful” will launch a murderous jihad if they feel insulted or offended in any way, shape, or form.

If NPR, the New York Times, the “ladies” of The View, or anyone else, wants to tell me that Muslims are peaceful, or that Islam is the religion of peace, let them publish pictures of an image of The Prophet immersed in a jar of urine.  So we can see Islamic “tolerance” in action.

And don’t let them hide and change their identities like cartoonist/journalist Molly Norris recently did, because THEY HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR FROM THESE PEACE-LOVING MUSLIMS, DO THEY???

The fact of the matter is that the very mainstream media news outlets that are the most vocal in telling us that fear of Islam equals bigotry are in point of fact the most terrified of Islam.  And journalists have literally bowed down to the point of becoming the most pathetic form of useful idiots out of fear of the thing they constantly tell the American people they must not be afraid of.

3) NPR, in firing Juan Williams, committed a terrorist act itself.  With this firing as their “jihadist propaganda bomb.”

I think that’s what Rush Limbaugh was getting at when he started referring to Muslims today as “Middle Eastern liberals.”

Let’s face it.  This wasn’t just about Juan Williams.  This was about any journalist who dares to cross the line from propaganda to truth.  If you tell the truth – especially on the most trusted network in news – they will bury you.

The idea was to strike terror in any journalist who would say, “I’m going to be objective for once in my life.”

I always got the sense that Juan Williams was both a personally gracious man and a straight shooter who called it as he saw it.

Now, having said all of that, I found most of Juan Williams’ offerings to be frankly idiotic.  And if the man was to be fired by anyone, it should have been by Fox News for offering mostly stupid, doctrinaire liberal crap.

Instead, he was fired by the left for telling the truth, and for appearing on a network these First Amendment-despising, “Fairness Doctrine” propagandists despise.

Hey, Obama: Here’s Why “Talking” To Evil Tyrants Won’t Work

I hope our nation’s leaders read about Tojo and learn from him.

Diary shows Japan’s wartime leader Hideki Tojo resisted surrender till end

August 12, 2008 By: Mari Yamaguchi, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TOKYO – Japanese Second World War leader Hideki Tojo wanted to keep fighting even after U.S. atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, accusing surrender proponents of being “frightened,” a newly released diary reveals.Excerpts from the approximately 20 pages written by Tojo in the final days of the war and held by the National Archives of Japan were published for the first time in several newspapers Tuesday.

“The notes show Tojo kept his died-in-the-wool militarist mentality until the very end,” said Kazufumi Takayama, the archives curator, who confirmed the accuracy of the published excerpts. “They are extremely valuable.”

Tojo, executed in 1948 after being convicted of war crimes by the Allies, was prime minister during much of the war. The notes buttress other evidence that Tojo was fiercely opposed to surrender despite the hopelessness of Japan’s war effort.

Can you imagine Barack Obama flying to Imperial Japan to “dialog” with Prime Minister Hideki Tojo? Can you imagine Obama convincing Tojo to get in line with American policy when a pair of nuclear bombs couldn’t?

I mean, understand something. This Barack Obama who says that as President he would talk with rogue leaders such as Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejab “without preconditions,” yet is somehow so afraid to talk with any conservative hosts (such as Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity) – or any real conservative media at all – that you’ve got to wonder how effective even Obama thinks he’d be.

But all that aside, why on earth would anybody but a genuine fool think that a leader like a Saddam Hussein, a Kim Jung Il, a Mahmoud Ahmadinejab, a Osama bin Laden, a Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, etc. etc. – who would let millions of their people starve, who would send out thousands of suicide bombers to murder women and children, who would inflict hell on earth if given half a chance – would turn from their evil ways if only Barack Obama talked with them? And if he really has the kind of persuasive powers he thinks he does, then why doesn’t he go on Hannity’s America and turn Sean into an abortion-loving liberal to prove it to the rest of us?

And yet this utterly stupid idea of “Barack Obama will talk to our enemies!” somehow holds sway over so many liberals.

You could paint string yellow and sell it to these people as gold.

Many tyrants respect only power, and fear only leaders who are willing to use it. But increasingly, there are more and more leaders arising in the world today who – like Tojo – won’t even restrain their evil in the face of catastrophic death and defeat. The only option, save bearing your throat to their knives, is to kill such people before they do more far more damage.

Had British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain recognized that Adolf Hitler was such a man, rather than trying to “talk” with him, millions who died would likely have been saved.

The reason Chamberlain (who was actually ruthless in domestic politics) is considered one of the greatest weaklings and appeasers in history is because he continued to try talking when he should have been fighting.

It was with that thought in mind that Robert Heinlein wrote:

“Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that violence never solves anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler would referee. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor; and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.”

Furthermore, there is a strange ignorance among liberals regarding the fact that the United States government under President Bush, like every President before him, is in constant communication with both friends and enemies alike. President Bush doesn’t personally give Mahmoud Whatanutjob the time of day, but the State Department, the CIA, and the U.S. military are in contact with intermediaries who are in contact with Iran. The same is true with every other rogue regime.

Another thing to consider is the size, power, wealth, and influence of the United States relative to other countries. In terms of size, if you overlay the United States over Europe, the U.S. literally either covers or overlaps Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Herze-govina, Serbia and Montenegro, Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Turkey, Russia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sweden, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Syria. To say that we should allow France or Germany to tell us what we should do in a given crisis is akin to letting Oklahoma run our nation’s affairs.

And given Obama’s documented penchant for arrogance as a mere presidential nominee, it’s frankly very hard to imagine that he would be any better or more humble of a listener than George Bush would he to win the office of President and become the leader of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth.

If that isn’t enough, then let me say one last thing: Obama really isn’t all that good of a talker. If he isn’t reading it off a teleprompter, chances are he isn’t making much sense:

I mean, yeah, maybe Ahmadinejab would say, “All right! Enough! Whatever you want! We’ll give up our nuclear weapons program! Anything! Just get this clown away from me before I lose my mind!” But you have to figure Ahmadinejab is tougher than that, and Obama’s ramblings would barely faze him.

However you want to slice it, the thinking that Barack Obama is somehow going to solve all the world’s problems by talking to the rogue leaders of the world is beyond irrational.