Brutally Honest

MSNBC: The network that will do anything to maintain the Republicans are racists meme

Or more accurately, will do nothing:

One of the left’s favorite attacks on the Republican Party is that it is the party of old white people, devoid of diversity and probably racist.

If you were watching MSNBC’s coverage of the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Tuesday night, you might believe those assertions, since missing from the coverage was nearly every ethnic minority that spoke during Tuesday’s festivities.

In lieu of airing speeches from former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, a black American; Mia Love, a black candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Utah; and Texas senatorial hopeful Ted Cruz, a Latino American, MSNBC opted to show commentary anchored by Rachel Maddow from Rev. Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes and Steve Schmidt.

Shameless.

Just shameless.

Chris Matthews removes all doubt

The man is a caricature, he's a joke, he's one of the biggest journalistic buffoons in the history of journalism.

I think at this point we can all say confidently that no one will ever unseat him.

I honestly don't believe that you can sink any lower than the depths the man has plumbed.

Are you ready to experience the worst of all asshattery?  Experience this:

60 Minutes edits out Ryan's admission that his mother is "a Medicare senior in Florida"

Hmm... now why would they do that?

BOB SCHIEFFER: You're going to have to see-- you're going to have to do a little selling.

PAUL RYAN:  My mom is a Medicare senior in Florida. Our point is we need to preserve their benefits, because government made promises to them that they've organized their retirements around. In order to make sure we can do that, you must reform it for those of us who are younger. And we think these reforms are good reforms, that have bipartisan origins. They started from the Clinton commission in the late '90s.

That, from the 60 Minutes transcript, didn't get aired.  Didn't fit the meme.

You know the meme right?

Paul Ryan tosses Grandmas from cliffs.

Fake polls and the fakers who breathlessly report them

Like the fakers at Politico who run with the following headline:

Pew: Obama has big lead; Romney favorability drops 

Only to post an update a short time later when readers call them on their fakery:

We've been getting emails from readers pointing out that the sample of the poll is skewed toward Democrats. This is a fair point: the poll does sample significantly more Democrats than Republicans. As I noted above, these results are different than the mostly static numbers we've seen so far -- the sampling numbers explain why.

You can't help but wonder how many times the fakers in the media have been faking news in the past but weren't caught in their fakery.

How anybody can trust them now is simply beyond me.

[Image source]

"The media-formerly-known-as-mainstream are still lying in wait, and will pounce on any opportunity to give the Obama campaign a boost"

The bias is blatant now and in your face:

It started in England, where Romney’s observation that certain logistical issues relating to the Olympic Games were “disconcerting”–a judgment that has since proved resoundingly correct–was treated as a major diplomatic faux pas. Already forgotten, apparently, is the press’s attempt to make something sinister out of a Romney aide’s reference to America’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage” and its “shared history” with Great Britain. Of such thin gruel do liberal reporters and editors try to generate controversy.

Then it was on to Israel, where Romney’s visit can fairly be characterized as triumphant. Without criticizing President Obama, he made it clear, in a ringing speech in Jerusalem, that his administration would be far friendlier to Israel than Obama’s. Romney’s speech was widely hailed in Israel as well as in the U.S., and probably enhanced his standing with many American Jews. Not to mention the fact that he raised $1 million from contributors with whom he met the next day.

And yet press coverage has focused mainly on the Palestinian reaction to Romney’s pointing out that Israel’s “culture” has much to do with its prosperity relative to its neighbors, much as America’s culture explains its economic advantages over Mexico. The Palestinian objection was silly, and here is a news flash for American media: Romney isn’t angling for the Palestinian-American vote.

...

None of this will have any effect on the election, except insofar as Romney benefits with pro-Israel voters and with Polish-American and Catholic voters. But it is a useful reminder that the media-formerly-known-as-mainstream are still lying in wait, and will pounce on any opportunity to give the Obama campaign a boost.

I know not how anyone can attempt to say with integrity that the media aren't in the tank for Obama.

They are no longer a free press, they are bought and paid for.

I don't think an apology is enough

Shouldn't heads roll for this sort of recklessness?

ABC News and Brian Ross are apologizing for an "incorrect" report that James Holmes, the suspect in the Colorado theater shooting, may have had connections to the Tea Party.

"An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect," ABC News said in a statement. "ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted."

In a similar statement released minutes earlier, ABC News said the report was "incorrect" but did not include the apology. "Several other local residents with similar names were also contacted via social media by members of the public who mistook them for the suspect," the initial statement read.

ABC's apology comes after Ross reported this morning that there is "a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site... talking about him joining the Tea Party last year."

Ross has a history of this sort of idiocy:

There was the time he falsely connected the 2001 anthrax attacks to Iraq; the time he described the Ft. Hood shooter's emails to Anwar al Awlaki—which the FBI knew about and regarded as related to his medical research—as attempts to "reach out" to "people associated with Al Qaeda"; and the time he falsely reported that one of the planners of the Christmas underwear bombing was a former Guantanamo detainee (the guy happened to be in Saudi custody at the time). And then, of course, there was the time he hyped the Toyota Death Machine story by passing off staged footage of a parked Toyota revving its engines as a runaway automobile.

Point being: Never, ever listen to anything Ross reports unless and until it has been confirmed by another, better, reporter.

Ross should be fired.

Don't hold your breath.

Newly released documents show Zimmerman passed lie detector test, Reuters ignores

The media lynching of George Zimmerman continues.

Yesterday, a slew of documents were released by the prosecution, including details of a voice stress analysis test  I alluded to back in early April. Those details, reported by The Smoking Gun, follow:

A day after killing Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman passed a police lie detector test when asked if he confronted the teenager and whether he feared for his life “when you shot

the guy,” according to documents released today by Florida prosecutors.

According to a “confidential report” prepared by the Sanford Police Department, Zimmerman, 28, willingly submitted to a computer voice stress analyzer (CVSA) “truth verification” on February 27.  Investigators concluded that he “has told substantially the complete truth in regards to this examination.”

Zimmerman, the report noted, “was classified as No Deception Indicated (NDI).”

Along with questions about whether his first name was George and if it was Monday, Zimmerman was asked, “Did you confront the guy you shot?’ He answered, “No.” He was also asked, “Were you in fear for your life, when you shot the guy.” Zimmerman replied, “Yes.”

Before the CVSA test, Zimmerman--who was apparently not accompanied by legal counsel--signed a Sanford Police Department release stating that he was undergoing the examination “voluntarily, without duress, coercion, threat or promise.”

Reuters made the editorial choice to ignore those findings, instead focusing on how Zimmerman failed to defuse the situation by properly identifying himself:

George Zimmerman, the man charged in the killing of Trayvon Martin, failed on at least two opportunities to identify himself as a neighborhood watch volunteer before he shot the unarmed teenager, a police investigator wrote in a report made public on Tuesday.

...

In a report detailing the police investigation into the shooting, Sanford Police Detective Christopher Serino wrote that Zimmerman "had at least two opportunities to speak with Trayvon Benjamin Martin in order to defuse the circumstances surrounding their encounter."

...

According to Zimmerman's statements about the incident, he followed Martin but then lost track of him and eventually got out his car, only to have the teenager reappear suddenly and punch him to the ground.

"While Zimmerman was returning to his vehicle, he states he was attacked by Martin," the report said. "But only after Martin inquires to Zimmerman 'What's your problem?' Zimmerman, instead of attempting to inform Martin of the reason he was following him, stated to Martin 'I don't have a problem.'"

"ULTIMATELY AVOIDABLE"

The report said Zimmerman had another opportunity to identify himself.

"As Zimmerman responds to Martin, by his own admission, Zimmerman reaches into his pocket attempting to locate his cell phone," it said. "As Zimmerman reaches for his cell phone, he stated Martin replies 'You have one now,' and Martin punches Zimmerman in the face, knocking him to the ground."

The report said the sequence of events was based on Zimmerman's account and could not be corroborated or refuted by independent witnesses.

But Zimmerman did pass a lie detector test and you'd think at this point in the story, that might've been relevant.  Reuters decided it was not.

What is most interesting here is that it was Reuters, in the piece I excerpted back in April, that reported Zimmerman passing the voice stress analysis test.  That link, interestingly enough, is now broken.

Convenient.

Oh how NBC reaches in their quest to support Obama

Catch this headline over at NBCPolitics:

Is Romney too focused on the economy?

And the story that follows:

Is it possible that Mitt Romney, in his campaign for the presidency, has been too focused on the economy?

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee has focused intently on turning the election into a referendum on President Barack Obama, rarely veering from making the case that the Democratic incumbent has failed to manage the economy.

Most every issue but the economy is viewed as a distraction by Romney’s high-command in Boston; it dismisses hand-wringing over issues like Donald Trump, Democrats’ claims of a “war on women,” or the president’s recent order on young illegal immigrants as a distraction. When Romney reacts to those topics, he quickly works to reframe them in terms of jobs and the economy.

But the “economy-colored” prism through which every issue is refocused by the Romney campaign could risk votes at the margins of some key constituencies. Moreover, by leaving questions about his approach to other issues unanswered, Romney gives Democrats an opening to fill the void in describing his alternatives.

What a stretch.  What a load of crap.  What an obvious attempt to take Romney off message.

NBC is officially now the one true comedy channel.

"You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession"

It's quite normal and routine to read about media bias on these pages.

It's quite another to read about it from an insider, from an acclaimed news guy who spent decades in the biz, from someone who has historically poo poo-ed the notion that your regular news outlets are completely in the tank for leftist thought, memes and ideologies, from someone who is usually most calm, most mild, most unruffled and most unlikely to be anything but.

Deacon Greg however has had enough and is uncharacteristically ranting about it in what I'm calling a most righteous diatribe:

First, there was the Trayvon Martin boondoggle a few months ago.

Then yesterday, evidence of some creative editing regarding Mitt Romney’s visit to a WaWa in Pennsylvania.

Today, we have Andrea Mitchell’s spectacularly lame followup to “criticism of the Romney clip edit” — which amounted to Ms. Mitchell saying, with a sigh and a frown, “Oh, bother.  Fine.  Here’s what we left out.”   She failed to acknowledge what the “criticism” entailed; she neglected to point out how the editing misrepresented the event being covered; and she offered nothing resembling an apology or an admission of responsibility for something that was, as a matter of fact, irresponsible.

I’m tired.  Truly.  I’ve grown weary of trying to defend the indefensible and explain the inexplicable.  For years, people have stomped their feet and pounded their fists and snorted “Liberal media bias!” and I’ve always tut-tutted and shooshed them and said, “No, no.  Calm down.  They meant well.  It was just a misunderstanding.  A mistake.  These things happen.”  I spent over 25 years working in the oft-reviled Mainstream Media and I saw up close and personal how the sausage was made.   I knew the people who wielded the knives and wore the aprons, and could vouch (most of the time, anyway) for their good intentions.

But now?

Forget it. I’m done.  You deserve what they’re saying about you.  It’s earned.  You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you.   You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more.  You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.

Head over there if only to read the title of his post... and understand this comes from someone who would normally make Clark Kent look like an agitator.

With props to The Anchoress who writes:

You know Deacon Greg, right? Affable fellow, likes to write homilies and participate in Adoration? Doesn’t like yelling or gratuitous snark? Formerly an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning writer for CBS News? For almost 30 years? Blogs like a news miner, offering up choice nuggets without comment?

During the course of our long friendship he has been the guy psssting to me, “don’t you think you’re being too hard on the press? Must you piss on the press all the time? They don’t mean anything malicious. The newsroom is just a busy place; balls get dropped….yadda yadda…well, okay, you can sneer at that one…”

Well, today, this gentle soul’s last nerve got fried, and it was Andrea Mitchell and NBC News that flipped the switch.

She's got more and yep, it's worthy.

The media's stranglehold on agenda setting is over and NBC is helping speed that slippage along.

Good.

I pray Obama's re-election chances are caught up in the backlash.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

"This is a nothingburger of a story"

Elizabeth Scalia takes on media hypocrisy:

It is, of course, the usual mainstream media free-assist that should probably be considered a kind of campaign contribution: the LA Times, read by Hollywood folk who air-condition their garages while telling the little people to make sure they hang their laundry out to dry, today tries to help the Obama campaign’s class warfare efforts by talking about Ann Romney’s equestrian hobby, which both the headline and the very first paragraph of the Times’ story points out, is “pricey.”

This is an article, I am sure, that will be of interest to Bruce Spiingsteen, whose daughter demonstrates her own equestrian skills every summer in the Hamptons.

We still do not know much about Barack Obama’s past, or his wife’s — we know only what they want us to, and the incurious media remains…incurious — but we know about Mitt Romney’s misguided hijinks from 50 years ago, his church’s misbegotten “militia” from 150 years ago, and now Ann Romney — who by the way has “never worked a day in her life” — gets an examination of past litigation (from which she was eventually dropped) examined, with a lengthy look at her love of equestrian dressage.

Really, this is a nothingburger of a story, but the examination of past litigation was really just an excuse for the paper to deliver a subliminal message: Oooooo…this wealthy person has a “pricey” hobby, while you’re eating a bologna sandwich and realizing you can’t even afford a “staycation.”

You know what else is a really “pricey” hobby?

She answers that question more than adequately.