Did Shieffer zing Candy Crowley last night?

I think Bob Schieffer’s opening comments that he had not discussed his topics with either the candidates or their staffs was wholly appropriate after Candy Crowley’s obvious support for Obama in the previous debate. 

There has been suspicion in past debates of favored treatment and even coordination on the part of liberal moderators.  Crowley’s interjection of “You are right Mr. President” has no place coming from an unbiased moderator.  And it was especially inappropriate after being challenged by Obama to check the transcript, and she had that particular transcript.

It was important that Schieffer clear the cloud of coordination and bias from the debates and he did it well. 

Clark Hoyt, NY Times Public Editor plays toady again … Times just “slow off the mark”

Clark Hoyt, the NY Times Public Editor, covers its lack of reporting of the O’Keefe/Giles Acorn exposé and blames it on being “slow off the mark.” Hoyt was kept on for a year after his two year term expired earlier this year, no doubt by endearing himself to editorial management with soft criticism. He didn't fail them today.

I wrote about Hoyt last year and called him a joke. In the column I pointed out the new bias of the Times is that of burying stories that don’t support the Democrat’s game plan. Read it, it covers some points others haven’t covered. I am sure Hoyt will have a very full inbox tomorrow, especially after saying part of the blame was “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.”

But still I sent him a short e-mail. Here it is:

Not convincing.

You failed to mention your paper being "slow off the mark" on the NEA/Sargent story. That's three in this month alone. Well that's not totally true, that broke in early August, but you didn't cover it until mid September. According to Andrew Breitbart, there will be more stories to be "slow off the mark" on. More apologies for you to make. Does the Times still consider itself the Newspaper of Record?

Sad!

Crosby Boyd

With the Times using the phrase “slow off the mark,” the Washington Post (Howard Kurtz) used “lamentably late” to describe the media’s response. Makes you wonder if both papers compared notes before writing their stories.

A damaging poll confirms the obvious … 8 out of 10 don’t want taxpayers bailing out newspapers

Editor and Publisher reported on a study conducted by Sacred Heart University that came to that conclusion.

Nearly 8 out of 10 Americans would oppose any plan to spend tax dollars to aid failing newspapers, according to a poll on news media trustworthiness released Wednesday. That reluctance might have something to do with the fact that 38.1% of respondents to the poll by Sacred Heart University said they are reading newspapers less often than five years ago. Or the fact that nearly half, 45%, said they think the Internet is "adequately covering for failing newspapers." Just 35.6% disagreed with that statement.

It continues:

[T]he poll found Americans do not believe they are getting "good journalism." Just under 68% of respondents agreement with this statement: "Old-style, traditionally objective and fair journalism is dead." Just 26.5% disagreed, while 5.6% were unsure. Much of Sacred Heart poll concerns mainstream television news, which respondents clearly view with jaundiced eyes. Fully 83.6% said national news media organizations were very or somewhat biased while just 14.1% viewed them as somewhat unbiased or not at all biased.

President Obama in a recent statement said he might support efforts to help bailout newspapers. While the comment to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette may be more about relaxing anti-trust enforcement of newspapers in their attempts to come up with a common policy to charge for internet access, it raises the specter of direct government support for failing newspapers. A new buzz word is developing in Washington and it is “Public Media.”

It is being promoted by the liberal Free Press organization and mentioned also by Michael Copps, a long term Democrat FCC Commissioner. The thought of the NY Times converting itself into a non-profit National Public Newspaper, living off the public dole with Pinch Sulzberger in control, is enough to send chills down my spine.

Addendum: The Sacred Heart poll story was one of three featured stories on E&P’s home page as I began writing this post. Normally as new stories replace the old ones on the E&P site, the linked headline drops into box entitled “More Headlines.”

All references to this story have now been scrubbed from the homepage. If you read the entire story you will see why. It is extremely damaging. The story is still available through a search of E&P’s site, but in case it is scrubbed or altered, I have saved a copy.

Some thoughts on James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles

To me there have been three defining moments in the fight against the incredible leftist bias of the old media. They are the Tailwind (Vietnam War, nerve gas) story by Peter Arnett, Rathergate, and the recent ACORN exposé. Looking at the past twenty years, media bias has revealed itself as blatantly one sided coverage and often, outright false stories. It has now morphed into the blackout of stories that challenge their leftist ideals and idols.

It is inconceivable that the ACORN sting could have been totally ignored by the old media without some sort of coordination. It was too hot a story. Likewise it is inconceivable that the Van Jones story could have gone unreported for the same reasons. The old media has egg on its face, but instead of conducting introspection, they minimize the stories and call them smear jobs.

The first defining moment in exposong media corruption was the Tailwind scandal (June 1998) that was perpetrated by CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, a hard anti-war leftist, who gained his reputation in the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. His contention was, during an operation into Laos in 1970, sarin nerve gas was used to kill a group of US defectors. The story ran on CNN and in Time magazine and was strongly challenged by the Pentagon which determined the nerve gas claims were false.

CNN conducted its own after the fact investigation and found the story flawed. They publicly retracted it less than a month after it ran. Two producers were fired, one resigned and Peter Arnett stayed on until his contract expired a year and a half later, but never appeared on the air for CNN after the investigation.

Much of the internal pressure for a review came from the Time folks who had felt pressured into carrying the CNN produced story. It was a victory for openness and the few journalists at Time Warner with integrity.

Significance: Tailwind was the first major left wing agenda story that was publicly debunked and had consequences for the participants. Most of the prior journalism scandals were by writers falsifying stories to enhance their own reputations such as Janet Cooke - Washington Post, Stephen Glass - New Republic and Mike Barnicle - Boston Globe.

The second defining moment was Rathergate. Most are familiar with Rathergate, a story designed to damage George W. Bush during his 2004 reelection campaign. It ended as a victory for citizen journalists, an outcome totally unexpected by the media establishment. The old media gave the controversy scant attention. The NY Times covered this, the greatest American media scandal, as if New York based CBS News was in another country. They used primarily wire service copy and an occasional story by art critic Frank Rich.

The Washington Post used media critic Howard Kurtz and of all the networks, only ABC gave reasonable coverage. The rest ignored it. For over two weeks Dan Rather stood by his story, including the demonstrably false claim of an unbroken chain of custody of the Killian documents.

Finally CBS set up an independent review panel which declared the story shouldn’t have run. Dan Rather was pulled out of his anchor chair precisely 26 weeks after his phony report and then put out to pasture as a 60 Minutes correspondent for the remaining year on his contract. His contract wasn’t renewed.

Significance: Rathergate was the first time bloggers, exhibiting far more expertise than the network’s “fact checkers,” were able document the falsehoods of a major story and see the perpetrators suffer the consequences. They did it by giving the story legs in the established media and engendered a need by Viacom/CBS to clear its reputation.

Now come James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, “twentysomething” college students whose conservative principles led them to conduct an audacious sting operation against ACORN. This organization has avoided scrutiny for years despite voter fraud allegations, intimidation of financial institutions and participating in race hustling. They are protected by a willing media and the Democrat establishment who want to see no evil.

Last year, during the Presidential campaign, the NY Times dragged its feet when they were handed incriminating evidence of the Obama campaign working with ACORN on a money laundering scheme to funnel contributions of maxed out Democrats back to the campaign. THey never ran the story. That’s how well protected the Democrats' surrogates are.

The result of O'Keefe's and Giles' efforts: 5 video tapes showing ACORN employees aiding and abetting underage prostitution, tax cheating, and attempting to aid in illegal immigration of underage prostitutes. The story burned up the internet, but for a week there was nothing from the old media. Charles Gibson of ABC News claimed to know nothing of the story and the vaunted Times had printed nothing by the time the Census Department severed its ties with ACORN and the Senate had voted to defund them. In 7 days of new media reporting (Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government blog and Fox/Glenn Beck), the world knew more about the corruption of ACORN than from years of old media reporting.

The significance of O’Keefe and Giles was their story and its influence reached the highest levels of government without any old media support. These amateur videographers did what no others had done, expose the corruption of ACORN through investigative journalism. And they revealed the utter corruption of the old media in their attempt to hide the story.

Congratulations James and Hannah.

Fox News stomps its liberal competitors.

Fox News is on a tear. Its ratings have surged and its competitors have declined, not just in share, but in total numbers. When Fox News began in 1996 it was given little chance for success. But by 2001 it began surpassing CNN the only other all news cable channel at the time. The hunger for better balance, so lacking at CNN, vaulted FNC into the lead. It now has prime time demo ratings larger than its two competitors combined. From Media Life Magazine: When Barack Obama arrived at the White House six months ago, there was a lot of speculation that conservative media outlets would see ratings shoot up as unhappy Republicans turned to shows whose hosts were critical of the new administration's agenda. For the cable news networks, that appears to be the case. Fox News, the No. 1 cable news network and the most right-leaning of the bunch, is surging. At the same time, CNN is sinking, with its ratings sometimes slipping below those for liberal-leaning MSNBC. And further… For the quarter in 25-54s in primetime, Fox News was up 50 percent from the year-earlier period, to an average 518,000 viewers. MSNBC ranked No. 2 for the first time ever for a full quarter, but it was down 1 percent to 268,000 viewers. CNN’s audience plummeted 19 percent, to 240,000 viewers in the demographic.

Liberty and Tyranny number 1 at the Times … Where’s the review?

Mark R. Levin’s new book, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto hit the New York Times Best Sellers list as number 1 in non-fiction. It has not been reviewed which leads to the question of whether it will be. You may remember in 2004 John O’Neill’s Unfit for Command was on the Best Sellers list for 7 weeks, four of them in first place before they found the courage to review it. Then, of course, they dutifully panned it. In fairness Jennifer Schuessler does comment on the book in her column, Inside the List. It’s a short, rather snarky take on a very serious book. And it’s evident she hasn’t read the whole thing. Reviewing this book presents a challenge to the Times. It’s the difficulty in finding a reviewer on staff who can tolerate 8 to 12 hours of total immersion in conservative thought. Ah the pitfalls of the liberal monoculture!

The fix is in. The media’s iron wall of silence still prevails.

Four years ago when John Kerry was running for president, he got caught up in the Swift Boat controversy. He blamed his defeat on his failure to respond promptly and forcefully to the allegations. What was really at play here was he felt confident the story would be spiked by the MSM and never get legs. But that didn’t happen. Through conservative websites, Fox News and talk radio, the myth of war hero John Kerry was quickly demolished. The first to go was the Christmas in Cambodia fairy tale. Here Kerry blamed President Nixon for ordering him into Cambodia during Christmas 1968. His oft repeated story was “etched in his memory.” Only problem, Nixon wasn’t President yet and couldn’t have ordered it. The iron wall of media silence cracked and the story did get legs.

Not so in 2008. When John McCain recently accused the NY Times of being an arm of the DNC, he just scratched the surface. Hot button stories, harmful to Obama, are simply ignored all over. When KMOV TV in St. Louis picked up on the fact St. Louis law enforcement officials were forming “truth squads” to actively challenge and prosecute “lies” by Obama opponents in political ads, the story went unreported in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. When Missouri Republican Governor Blunt issued a strongly worded press release condemning the strong arm tactics, again the Post Dispatch ignored it. The most recent example is the handling of the Ayers/Obama connection. This has been a no-go area for the media up to recently. Now the NY Times has taken a new tack. It now publishes “whitewash” stories to preempt any valid criticism. Here’s an example from today’s Times.

Mr. McCain’s reference to Mr. Ayers’s desire to carry out more bombings was from an article in The New York Times, published by chance on Sept. 11, 2001, about Mr. Ayers and his memoir, “Fugitive Days.” The article opened with a quotation: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Three days later, Mr. Ayers wrote on his Web site that the meaning of his remarks had been distorted. Most of the bombings attributed to the Weathermen were meant to damage only property, but a 1970 pipe bombing in San Francisco attributed to the group killed a police officer and severely hurt another. Mr. Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and lives in Mr. Obama’s neighborhood. He was named citizen of the year in Chicago in 1997, has worked with Mr. Obama on a schools project and a charitable board, and gave a house party when Mr. Obama was running for the State Senate.

This is laughable. McCain quotes the NY Times, and the Times tries to refute its own story by saying Ayers wrote on his own website it was distorted. Wow! This is almost as bad as the Washington Post calling McCain a liar (two Pinocchios) when he quoted a Post story word for word that former and discredited Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines was giving financial advice to the Obama campaign. I guess the lesson here is that the two leading papers consider themselves unreliable. The world is coming around.

How does the MSM maintain such discipline? Part of it is the liberal monoculture at the top levels of the news gathering organizations. You simply won’t get ahead as an aspiring reporter if you stray too far from the plantation. Rush Limbaugh has another take. He see evidence of “Democrat talking points” being shared and repeated by the networks. The most dramatic evidence of this was in August 2000, when network news commentators started accusing presidential hopeful George Bush of lacking “gravitas.” For a term used infrequently, according to Lexis Nexis, it began being used on news broadcasts hundreds of times a week. Rush now plays, almost daily, a montage of liberal catch phrases, simultaneously regurgitated by the MSM. His take is this is, it can’t be sheer coincidence and must be orchestrated. The only chinks in the MSM armor are a handful of papers and Fox News.

About a year an a half ago the DNC tried to marginalize holdout Fox by urging presidential hopefuls to boycott Fox's debate, co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus. Bill Clinton’s blowup with Chris Wallace was another effort to accomplish it. Of course this failed when Hillary appeared on O’Reilly in May in an attempt to rescue her failing effort for the nomination.

How do we stop this biased coverage? There is no magic bullet. But remember the liberal media is populated with big egos. They go berserk when their integrity is challenged. So challenge their integrity. Write letters to the editor with valid points and document them. Patrick Frey at Patterico’s Pontifications has an ongoing open correspondence with the reader’s representative of the LA Times. He points out conflicts of interest by reporters, questions the airbrushing of stories, and challenges the accuracy of many. When the LA Times fails to respond, he writes about it on his blog. At the end of the year he publishes a compendium of misdeeds at the Times, which he refers to as the dog trainer. Subscribe to a conservative competitor. If you live in the Washington DC area, subscribe to the Examiner or the Washington Times.

Fox News became an instant success when CNN didn’t provide unbiased coverage and conservatives flocked to them. Don’t patronize those who provide consistently inaccurate or slanted news. Share your thoughts with others. By the end of October we will learn how much damage the newspapers have done to themselves. That’s when the Audit Bureau of Circulation releases the latest 6 month figures for newspapers. Based on the most recent reports, it’s not going to be pretty. Also by then the NY Times will have released its Q3 revenue and earnings (or lack thereof) figures.

Rathergate remembered

Four years ago today, Sept. 8 2004, Dan Rather aired his infamous and decidedly false 60 Minutes Wednesday piece on CBS. It ultimately caused his own ouster from CBS Nightly News, not the piece’s intended victim, President George W. Bush. It was a cataclysmic event, forever shattering the MSM’s sacrosanct position as the sole arbiter of news. The internet effectively challenged CBS and won. Two events involving the internet have shaken the MSM like no others. Both involve patently liberal bias. And both were victories for the internet. The first was the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton sex and perjury story. Newsweek had the story in type ready to run, and spiked at the very last moment. Two days later Drudge broke it and you know about the rest. Instantly Matt Drudge was a household name, and the Drudge Report at or near the top of the ratings. It became the go-to site for so many, including media types, for top news headlines. The second and most important was Rathergate. Within hours of airing a documentary asserting Bush had shirked his duty in the Texas Air National Guard and received preferential treatment, conservative voices challenged the documents CBS had posted on its website documenting the segment’s assertions. A lawyer from Atlanta posted on Free Republic questioning the typography in the documents, pointing out it appeared to be Times New Roman a photocomposition typeface, not in use on typewriters. He also questioned the variable spacing and superscript in the memos. Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs went one better. To him the documents looked like they had been composed on a modern day computer. So he retyped one of them in MS Word in the default settings. He then superimposed his over one of the Killian documents, and except for distortions from Xeroxing it multiple times, they were identical in typeface, spacing and line breaks. Instantly a firestorm ensued from conservative blogs. Drudge steered readers to them. Lightly read blogs such as Powerline, Captains Quarters,and Little Green Footballs became instant hits. They chimed in with their expertise overwhelming the timid coverage of the MSM. New blogs started such as Rathergate concentrating on this one issue. Of the MSM, only the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and ABC News gave it serious coverage. The New Your Times covered it with wire service reports and an occasional article by Frank Rich, their uber liberal art and TV critic. The rest is history. After 12 days (Sept. 20), CBS publicly repudiated the validity of the documents. Rather also made a public statement in part saying, “if I knew then what I know now – I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired.” Subsequently an independent panel, commissioned by CBS came to the conclusion the segment shouldn’t have aired. Precisely 26 weeks to the day after the segment ran, Rather had his last day anchor chair of CBS Nightly News.

It is my understanding Rathergate.com will be giving a day by day repeat of coverage as it happened four years ago. The media still doesn’t appreciate how badly it is perceived. Rathergate.com makes sure the reading public knows it. Follow what happened four years ago there.