No MSM bias to see here... move along..

[AMDScooter]

Comon "fairness" doctrine....


Americans See Liberal Media Bias on TV News

By a 39% to 20% margin, American adults believe that the three major broadcast networks deliver news with a bias in favor of liberals. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 25% believe that ABC, CBS, and NBC deliver the news without any bias.

Similar results are found for CNN and National Public Radio (NPR). By a margin of 33% to 16%, Americans say that CNN has a liberal bias. The nation’s adults say the same about NPR by a 27% to 14% margin.

There is one major exception to the belief that media outlets have a liberal bias—Fox News. Thirty-one percent (31%) of Americans say it has a bias that favors conservatives while 15% say it has a liberal bias.

[AMDScooter]

Hold onto your lunch.... put any liquids down...

Good Grief. Time Magazine Calls Democrats 'The New Moral Majority'

Time magazine has a lengthy piece on Democrats and religion called, "How the Democrats Got Religion." (HT: Drudge) (Btw, the original title on the web yesterday was "Leveling the Praying Field.") It focuses on efforts by Democrats (most notably, Sens. Obama, Clinton, and Edwards) to attract voters who are religious. There is certainly an attempt at balance in the article, but the folks at the DNC must be pretty happy. The article, penned by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, claims, "The Democrats are so fired up, you could call them the new Moral Majority."

[AMDScooter]

'Sun-Times': Cancel That Left Turn

"We're not going to start being a Democratic paper or a liberal paper or a conservative paper or an ideological paper -- we're an independent paper," he said. "We're not going to be a small L liberal paper. We're not going to bind ourselves to a party or ideology in anything."

And then..

"We are returning to our liberal, working-class roots, a position that pits us squarely opposite the Chicago Tribune -- that Republican, George Bush-touting paper over on moneyed Michigan Avenue. We're rethinking our stance on several issues, including the most pressing issue facing Americans today: Bush's war in Iraq."

[AMDScooter]

Media Bias: Confessions of an Ex-BBC Agent [Dan Collins]

Media Bias: Confessions of an Ex-BBC Agent [Dan Collins]

Several times a year, I come across an article that I feel absolutely compelled to recommend. Some months ago I stumbled upon Iron Shrink’s piece on the methodology of the “study” demonstrating that conservatives suffer from arrested psychic development that leads them to desire the strong-handed guidance of patriarchal authority figures. You’ve seen how this smug-inducing meme has circulated around the nets in various strains, up to and including the idea that all conservatives are closeted gays.

Today, The Telegraph posted a confessional piece by an ex-BBC employee, who, one might imagine, has gained a certain wisdom and insight from his own experience and self-reflection, but who will be denounced to much screeching as being a “sell-out” instead. He is Antony Jay, and the article is entitled, “Here is the news (as we want to report it).” The immediate occasion for the article is the revelation regarding the BBC’s deliberate snipping of footage to create the impression that Her Majesty stormed out of a photo shoot:

This week the BBC was forced to apologise to the Queen for falsely claiming that she stormed out of a photo shoot. We shouldn’t be surprised, says former producer Antony Jay. In this exclusive extract from a brilliant new CPS pamphlet, he argues that the anti-establishment views at the heart of the corporation have always dictated its mind set

A few highlights:

We belonged instead to a dispersed ”metropolitan-media-arts-graduate” tribe. We met over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner to reinforce our views on the evils of apartheid, nuclear deterrence, capital punishment, the British Empire, big business, advertising, public relations, the Royal Family, the defence budget… it’s a wonder we ever got home. We so rarely encountered any coherent opposing arguments that we took our group-think as the views of all right-thinking people.

The second factor which shaped our media liberal attitudes was a sense of exclusion. We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual élite, full of ideas about how the country should be run, and yet with no involvement in the process or power to do anything about it. Being naïve in the way institutions actually work, yet having good arts degrees from reputable universities, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge. We ignored the tedious practicalities of getting institutions to adopt and implement ideas.

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world. We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. Some people called us arrogant; looking back, I am afraid I cannot dispute the epithet.

We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there. Say ”Tesco” to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says, “Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers”. The achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract millions of shoppers every day does not show up on the media liberal radar.

The third factor arises from the nature of mass media. The Tonight programme had a nightly audience of about eight million. It was much easier to keep their attention by telling them they were being deceived or exploited by big institutions than by saying what a good job the government and the banks and the oil companies were doing.

Our knowledge of public events and political arguments come direct from the media rather than from a face-to-face group. We still have some local, territorial group memberships, but their importance is now much diminished and their influence weakened.

These four factors have significantly accelerated, and indeed intensified, the spread of media liberalism since I ceased to be a BBC employee 40 years ago. It still champions the individual against the institution. The BBC’s 2007 impartiality report reflects widespread support for the idea that there is “some sort of BBC liberal consensus”. Its commissioning editor for documentaries, Richard Klein, has said: “By and large, people who work in the BBC think the same, and it’s not the way the audience thinks.” The former BBC political editor Andrew Marr says: “There is an innate liberal bias within the BBC”.

For a time it puzzled me that after 50 years of tumultuous change the media liberal attitudes could remain almost identical to those I shared in the 1950s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy, even less a political programme. It was an ideology based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. We were, of course, believers in democracy. The trouble was that our understanding of it was structurally simplistic and politically naïve. It did not go much further than one-adult-one-vote.

We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism - and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible.

But analysis was irrelevant to us. Ultimately, it was not a question of whether a policy worked but whether it was right or wrong when judged by our media liberal moral standards. There was no argument about whether, say, capital punishment worked. If retentionists came up with statistics showing that abolition increased the number of murders we simply rejected them.

*****

I do not think the same is true today. The four mitigating factors above have faded into insignificance, but the media liberal ideology is stronger than ever. Today, we see our old heresy becoming the new orthodoxy: media liberalism has now been adopted by the leaders of all three political parties, by the police, the courts and the Churches. It is enshrined in law - in the human rights act, in much health and safety legislation, in equal opportunities, in employment protections, in race relations and in a whole stream of edicts from Brussels.

It is not so much that their ideas and arguments are harebrained and impracticable: some of their causes are in fact admirable. The trouble - you might even say the tragedy - is that their implementation by governments eager for media approval has progressively damaged our institutions. Media liberal pressure has prompted a stream of laws, regulations and directives to champion the criminal against the police, the child against the school, the patient against the hospital, the employee against the company, the soldier against the army, the borrower against the bank, the convict against the prison - there is a new case in the papers almost every day, and each victory is a small erosion of the efficiency and effectiveness of the institution.

Commence vitriol spewing, trolls.

[falcon_view]

Scooter

If you want to make a real difference in politics this is what you have to do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/us...rssnyt&emc=rss

Those politicians are being bought. No matter what you say and do will make no difference unless you have the grease.

[AMDScooter]

Scooter

If you want to make a real difference in politics this is what you have to do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/us...rssnyt&emc=rss

Those politicians are being bought. No matter what you say and do will make no difference unless you have the grease.

While that is interesting and all.. the topic here is MSM bias.

[AMDScooter]

NY & LA Times continue to slide toward insolvency... won't be long now!! Perhaps if they did not completely alienate 50% of their potential customer base. Liberal bias is not just a bad journalistic quality... it's extremely suicidal from a business standpoint also.


Los Angeles Times' Cash Flow Slid 27% in 2nd Quarter (Update1)

Los Angeles Times' Cash Flow Slid 27% in 2nd Quarter (Update1)

By Tim Mullaney and Michael Janofsky

July 13 (Bloomberg) -- The Los Angeles Times' cash flow fell 27 percent in the second quarter as advertising continued to decline, the newspaper's publisher said in a memo to employees today.

The result was ``one of the worst quarters we have ever experienced,'' Publisher David Hiller said. Sales slid 10 percent, led by a drop in advertising pages that overwhelmed gains in Internet advertising and ad supplements, he wrote.

The Times is the largest newspaper owned by Chicago-based Tribune Co., which has agreed to be bought in an $8.2 billion leveraged buyout led by investor Sam Zell and an employee stock ownership plan. Other Tribune newspaper had similar results, Hiller wrote.

``Results were similar across Tribune, but overall Tribune was worse than the industry,'' Hiller said in the memo.

Tribune is set to report second-quarter results on July 25 before financial markets open in the U.S.

The decline will complicate efforts to complete the sale, said analyst Ed Atorino of Benchmark Co. in New York.

``It's going to cast a pall over the deal,'' Atorino said in an interview. ``The stock is going to go down.''

Hiller, in an interview, confirmed the contents of the memo. He disagreed with Atorino, saying he didn't believe the results would interrupt the sale.

Negative Trends

``The current trends across the whole industry are in the negative range,'' he added. ``We're hoping to do a variety of things to improve upon them. It remains to be seen how fast we can do it.''

The landscape for newspaper publishers has become ``extremely competitive and dramatically changed from what it had been not so long ago, with an explosion of options and choices for readers and advertisers,'' Hiller said.

In the memo, Hiller said the Los Angeles Times is considering selling ads on its front page, a move that has been made at papers including The Wall Street Journal.

``They are common at reputable papers across the U.S. and Europe,'' wrote Hiller, who said the ads would ```raise several million dollars in revenue.'' He invited employees to comment on the idea and on other planned initiatives to boost sales.

Shares of Tribune, which also owns 23 television stations and the Chicago Cubs baseball team, rose 60 cents to $30.58 at 4:31 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They are little changed this year.

Tribune agreed to the $34-a-share buyout in April after the publisher and broadcaster's largest shareholder, the Chandler family trusts, pushed for a sale. The company has scheduled an Aug. 21 shareholder vote on the plan.

Zell was named to Tribune's board in May after investing $250 million in the company, also publisher of the namesake Chicago Tribune and Newsday in New York, as part of the transaction.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tim Mullaney in New York at tmullaney1@bloomberg.net ; Michael Janofsky in Los Angeles at mjanofsky@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: July 13, 2007 20:55 EDT

[AMDScooter]

NPR.. that taxpayer funded bastion of conservative views..


A Perception Issue? Revolving Door Between the ACLU and National Public Radio

A Perception Issue? Revolving Door Between the ACLU and National Public Radio
Posted by Tim Graham on July 16, 2007 - 09:33.

In his Monday "Media Notes" column in The Washington Post -- for some reason, the whole column was demoted to page C-7 -- Howard Kurtz reported (in his second item) that National Public Radio's FBI reporter, Dina Temple-Raston, recently did a report quoting the American Civil Liberties Union. That wouldn't be shocking, except that Temple-Raston is also co-author of a new book with the executive director of the ACLU on "the dangerous erosion of the Bill of Rights in the age of terror."

Temple-Raston claimed she's aware of the "perception issue," but will try to be "really, really balanced." (So is NPR, which includes the data in her online bio.) This hire is a complete insult to the idea of creating an impression of a fair, nonpartisan public-radio news network. It would be bad enough if an NPR reporter gave money to the ACLU, or attended their fundraising dinners. But this reporter has written a book, cheek and jowl, with the leader of the ACLU, endorsing their leftist worldview on a blooming Bush dictatorship. How on Earth can NPR think it doesn't look transparently partisan from the first broadcast word?

[AMDScooter]

Still moving along I hope.. nothing to see here...

Poll: By 2-to-1, Nets Biased to Left; More Libs See NY Times as Liberal Than Conservative

As highlighted Monday night by FNC's Brit Hume, a new Rasmussen Reports poll discovered that, by about two-to-one or greater, the public recognize a liberal bias over a conservative bias on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR as well as in the New York Times and Washington Post. “By a 39 percent to 20 percent margin,” a Friday summary of their survey relayed, “American adults believe that the three major broadcast networks deliver news with a bias in favor of liberals.” The public perceive liberal bias by 33 percent to 16 percent for CNN and 27 percent to 14 percent for NPR. More believe FNC delivers the news with “neither” a bias in favor of liberals or conservatives than see ABC, CBS, CNN or NBC as unbiased: While 25 percent consider the broadcast networks to be without a slant, 32 percent think CNN is “without bias,” but even more, 36 percent, say that about the Fox News Channel.

On the newspaper side, in results released Sunday, Rasmussen learned than Americans see the Washington Post as liberal over conservative by about two-to-one (30 to 16 percent) while it's closer to four-to-one (40 to 11 percent) for the New York Times. “One of the more startling details,” Rasmussen proposed, is that while liberals see all broadcast outlets and most newspapers as having a bias in favor of conservatives, even “25 percent of liberals see a liberal bias at the New York Times while only 17 percent see a conservative bias. This makes the New York Times the only media outlet that liberals are more likely to see as having a liberal bias than a conservative bias.”

In a Saturday night NewsBusters posting you may have missed, Noel Sheppard recounted the broadcast network numbers.

Rasmussen pointed out how nearly half of liberals consider the major media outlets to be unbiased and nearly five times as many perceive a conservative over a liberal bias: “Among self-identified liberals, all of the media outlets are believed to have some net bias in favor of conservatives. However, 50% of liberals say that NPR is unbiased. Forty-three percent (43%) say the same about CNN. As for the major television networks, 49% of liberals believe they have a conservative bias. Just 10% of liberals see a liberal bias at ABC, CBS, and NBC.”

The Rasmussen rundown noted that independents see a liberal bias by two-to-one: “Those not affiliated with either major party tend to see a liberal bias everywhere except Fox. Thirty-eight percent (38%) of unaffiliateds see a liberal bias at the major television networks while only 19% see a conservative bias.”

Hume's item in the “Grapevine” segment on the July 16 Special Report with Brit Hume:

Most of the people who took part in a Rasmussen Reports poll about news coverage believe there's too much bias out there. The two organizations perceived as having the least bias are National Public Radio and Fox News: 37 percent say NPR plays it straight, 36 percent say that about Fox. CNN gets 32 as you can see, and the three major broadcast networks come in as a group at 25 percent thinking they're not biased. No news outlet was considered biased to the right by more than 31 percent. And as far as newspapers are concerned, the New York Times is perceived as liberal by the most people -- 40 percent, the Washington Post at 30 while 35 percent of the respondents felt their own local newspaper was slanted to the left as well.

he question posed by Rasmussen: “When CBS, NBC, and ABC report the news, they show a bias that favors...” with the name of the network replaced in subsequent questions and with a newspaper name in a second survey.

An excerpt from RasmussenReports.com's “Americans See Liberal Media Bias on TV News,” the July 13 rundown of the network news portion of the poll, of 1,000 adults conducted July 11-12, posted on Friday:

By a 39% to 20% margin, American adults believe that the three major broadcast networks deliver news with a bias in favor of liberals. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 25% believe that ABC, CBS, and NBC deliver the news without any bias.

Similar results are found for CNN and National Public Radio (NPR). By a margin of 33% to 16%, Americans say that CNN has a liberal bias. The nation’s adults say the same about NPR by a 27% to 14% margin.

There is one major exception to the belief that media outlets have a liberal bias -- Fox News. Thirty-one percent (31%) of Americans say it has a bias that favors conservatives while 15% say it has a liberal bias.

When it comes to delivering news without bias, 37% believe NPR accomplishes that goal. Thirty-six percent (36%) say the same for Fox and 32% believe it’s true of CNN. As noted earlier, just 25% believe the major broadcast networks deliver news in an unbiased manner....

Not surprisingly, there are huge partisan and ideological differences in the data. For example, among self-identified liberals, all of the media outlets are believed to have some net bias in favor of conservatives. However, 50% of liberals say that NPR is unbiased. Forty-three percent (43%) say the same about CNN. As for the major television networks, 49% of liberals believe they have a conservative bias. Just 10% of liberals see a liberal bias at ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Conservatives throughout the nation see things entirely differently. Sixty-two percent (62%) see a liberal bias at the major broadcast networks and 55% say the same about CNN. Forty-five percent (45%) of conservatives see Fox as unbiased and the rest are evenly divided. Eighteen percent (18%) of conservatives see Fox News as having a liberal bias while 21% say the opposite.

Younger adults are less likely than their elders to see a liberal bias across all of the media outlets.

On a partisan basis, Democrats see the major television networks and Fox as biased in favor of conservatives. Solid pluralities of Democrats believe CNN and NPR deliver news without bias. Those Democrats who see bias at CNN and NPR are fairly evenly divided, but are a bit more likely to detect conservative bias.

Republicans see a strong liberal bias on all the outlets except Fox. Forty-nine percent (49%) of the GOP faithful see Fox as fair and balanced.

Those not affiliated with either major party tend to see a liberal bias everywhere except Fox. Thirty-eight percent (38%) of unaffiliateds see a liberal bias at the major television networks while only 19% see a conservative bias....

An excerpt from “New York Times, Washington Post, and Local Newspapers Seen as Having Liberal Bias,” RasmussenReports.com's Sunday, July 15 rundown of its survey of 967 adults conducted July 13-14:

A Rasmussen Reports survey on perceptions of media bias found that Americans tend to believe that the New York Times, Washington Post, and their local newspaper all show a bias in favor of liberals. A plurality believes that the Wall Street Journal delivers the news without bias....

Among the print publications in the survey, the New York Times is perceived as being furthest to the left. Forty percent (40%) of Americans believe the Times has a bias in favor of liberals. Just 11% believe it has a conservative bias while 20% believe it reports news without bias.

Thirty-five percent (35%) of Americans see a liberal bias in their local newspaper while 21% see a conservative bias. For the Washington Post, 30% see a liberal bias and 16% see a conservative bias.

Twenty-nine percent (29%) see the Wall Street Journal as unbiased. Among those who see the Journal as biased, opinion is fairly evenly divided as to who that publication favors—22% say the Journal has a conservative bias while 18% see a liberal bias.

One of the more startling details concerns the perceptions of liberals towards the New York Times. Liberals tend to see all broadcast outlets and most print publications as having a bias in favor of conservatives. A plurality of liberals (40%) believes the Times delivers news without bias. However, 25% of liberals see a liberal bias at the New York Times while only 17% see a conservative bias. This makes the New York Times the only media outlet that liberals are more likely to see as having a liberal bias than a conservative bias....

The MRC's “Media Bias Basics” Web page (updated regularly by Rich Noyes) contains a section, “How the Public Views the Media,” with about a dozen previous surveys on how Americans see the media as liberal.

[AMDScooter]

New Poll Produces More 'Nuance' from AP Headline Writer, Reporter

The story on AP's latest poll has the following headline:

AP Poll: GOP pick is 'none of the above'

That's the headline resulting from the latest AP/Ipsos poll finding that 23% of Repubs are undecided in the 2008 GOP presidential race. The poll has Giuliani at 21%, Thompson at 19%, McCain at 15%, and Romney at 11%.

AP reporter Liz Sidoti writes in the first three paragraphs: (emphasis added)

And the leading Republican presidential candidate is ... none of the above.

The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly a quarter of Republicans are unwilling to back top-tier hopefuls Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mitt Romney, and no one candidate has emerged as the clear front-runner among Christian evangelicals. Such dissatisfaction underscores the volatility of the 2008 GOP nomination fight.

In sharp contrast, the Democratic race remains static ...

According to the report, this percentage of undecided voters is evidence that Repubs are 'dissatisfied,' but it's not until the 14th and 15th paragraphs of the story that we read this:

Andrew E. Smith, a polling expert at the University of New Hampshire, said the number of voters in flux is no surprise, given that the primaries aren't for another six months. "People really don't decide who to vote for until the last couple months or days," he said.

On the Democratic side, 13 percent declined to back a candidate, and of those who picked a candidate, some may be willing to change their minds.

It's interesting how a 10-point difference in the parties' undecided voters six months before the primaries -- 23% for Repub candidates and 13% for Dem candidates -- is reported: the undecided Repubs are "unwilling" to support a candidate, "dissatisfied" with their choices, or "apathetic" towards the field.

Meanwhile, the fact that 13% of Dem voters are undecided receives no such similar description; presumably, the Dem undecideds are just undecided.

Nuance.

Just for the sake of comparison, AP/Ipsos' last poll about 10 days before the 2006 mid-terms had the Dems winning Congress over the Repubs by a margin of 19% points in a generic poll; the Dems actually won the aggregate 2006 congressional vote by about 8% points.

Meanwhile, the Real Clear Politics average of all polls shows Rudy Giuliani with an almost seven-point lead among Repub primary voters; RCP shows Hillary Clinton with a 14-point average lead among Dem primary voters -- six months before the first primary is held.

Take from it what you will.

[AMDScooter]

As MM points out.. they were not jailed simply for protesting. They were jailed for inciting murder. Thanks for the Muslim snow-job BBC.

Jail time for UK Mohammed cartoon protestors

Six years and four years. Deportation ought to follow, but it won’t. You have to read deep into the Beeb’s account to find out that they weren’t jailed for “protesting,” but for inciting murder.

Four men have been jailed for their part in protests outside the Danish embassy in London, against cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

Mizanur Rahman, 24, Umran Javed, 27, and Abdul Muhid, 24, were each jailed for six years for soliciting to murder after telling a crowd to bomb the UK.

A fourth man, Abdul Saleem, 32, was jailed for four years for stirring up racial hatred at the protest in 2006.

The men, from London and Birmingham, were convicted at the Old Bailey.

Judge Brian Barker said their words had been designed to encourage murder and terrorism.

Their very justifiable prison time is already a cause celebre.

Outside the sentencing hearing, a group of around 40 demonstrators waved placards with slogans including “Muslims Under Siege”.

Over/under on how long it takes some group of miscreants to stage an attack on the prison to free these guys?

Just to get it into the record here, here’s what earned them prison time:

Rahman, from Palmers Green, north London, was filmed at the rally talking over a loudspeaker and calling for UK soldiers to be brought back from Iraq in body bags.

He said: “We want to see their blood running in the streets of Baghdad.

“We want to see the Mujahideen shoot down their planes the way we shoot down birds. We want to see their tanks burn in the way we burn their flags.”

Javed, from Birmingham, was filmed by police shouting: “Bomb, bomb Denmark. Bomb, bomb USA.”

Father-of-five and BT engineer Saleem was cleared of soliciting murder at his trial in February, but convicted of stirring up racial hatred.

Saleem, from Poplar, east London, chanted, “7/7 on its way” and “Europe, you will pay with your blood”.

Finally, Abdul Muhid, 24, said to be the leader of the demonstration, chanted “Bomb, bomb the UK” and waved placards with slogans such as “Annihilate those who insult Islam”.

I found this story on Jihad Watch, which notes how the Beeb treats its references to Mohammed.

[jimzinsocal]

No bias. Scroll to the business stuff from yesterday

http://images.stltoday.com/stltoday/.../frontpage.pdf


Rally Cry

[AMDScooter]

The BBC does not even pretend any more... just like NPR and PBS. I guess you can do that when joe public is forced to pay for your drivel whether they like it or not...

The BBC and the Arab League: jointly silent on Darfur

The BBC and the Arab League: jointly silent on Darfur [Tom Gross]

Updating my earlier story on how the BBC and the Arab League together cover up what is going on in Darfur, I just watched the BBC program “HardTalk” in which presenter Stephen Sackur interviews – for almost 30 minutes – Amre Moussa, Secretary General of the Arab League.

Sackur didn’t ask Moussa about Darfur once, and instead just concentrated on allowing him to bash Israel. What a surprise.

(The BBC likes its anti-Israel programs, of which there are many, and the 30-minute interview with Moussa has now been broadcast seven times in the last 24 hours.)

Meanwhile, the BBC has just apologized and ordered an internal enquiry after it was caught repeatedly lying in its entertainment programs – see here and here. But when is it going to apologize for all the lying it does in its news and current affairs programs?

[AMDScooter]

You've got to be fekkin kidding me. How could ANY supposed "interviewer" let this slide?



Rather "I'm big on personal responsibility."

Most of Dan Rather's pontifications on today's "Morning Joe" rolled off my back, as I flipped between his performance and that of Tiger Woods over the closing holes at Carnoustie.

But something made me sit up and take notice. At 8:34 A.M. EDT, Rather suddenly blurted out: "I'm big on personal responsibility." And yes, he managed to do so without laughing.

This from the man who notoriously brought us Memogate, yet who to this day has refused to squarely admit the truth: that the documents were blatant forgeries.

For documentation of Rather's dodges, weaves and rejections of personal responsibility, check out reports from MRC [NB's parent] here, here and here.

Take, for example, Rather's statement highlighted by MRC on September 16, 2004, in which Rather trumpeted how a retired, 86-year-old secretary, Marian Cox:

flew to New York this afternoon to tell us she believes the documents we obtained are not authentic. But there's yet another confusing twist to this story. She told us she believes what the documents actually say is exactly as we reported.

The "fake but accurate" defense. How's that for being big on personal responsibility?

I waited in vain for Joe to call Rather on the disconnect between his professed values and his performance in Memogate. One person not having trouble with the truth was newsreader Mika Brzezinski when she admitted on last week's show to admiring Rather very much. Check out the loving look Mika gives Dan here. She later gave Rather an Ann Curry-ish arm squeeze.

[jimzinsocal]

Another NY Times Leak - JK Rowling Rails Against Potter Review Spoiler

By Terry Trippany | July 19, 2007 - 14:01 ET The New York Times has been taking a lot of well deserved guff over the last couple of years for obtaining and publishing classified national security secrets but it had not been prepared for the latest row over its pre-publication book review of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows".
The review, that gives away a few spoilers, has been met with anger by both the book's author JK Rowling and her publishers. Rowling came out swinging after learning that both the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun had obtained pre-publication copies of the book despite a costly embargo.

"I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children," she said.

• Terry Trippany's blog |
• 30 comments |
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Barf bags available at the Hypocrisy stand on the 3rd floor of the Rolleyes News Pavillion.