ABC, CBS and NBC combined devoted nearly 11 minutes of air time during their evening and morning news shows to the May 26 California Supreme Court ruling that upheld Proposition 8, the 2008 state constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage. The networks gave gay rights activists more than seven minutes of air time, through interviews and footage of their protests, while they gave Prop 8 supporters less than one minute to talk about their victory.(The rest of it)
Each of the networks provided the requisite shots of gay and lesbian couples marrying. ABC’s May 26 report on “World News with Charles Gibson” featured a protestor who said the ruling was “dehumanizing.” NBC’s “Nightly News” story included an unidentified protester asking, “This is America. What’s going on here?” CBS “The Early Show,” however, takes the award for the most biased segment on the California ruling. “The Early Show’s” more than 4-minute report on the ruling included a nearly three minute interview with Dustin Lance Black about what this means for the fight for same-sex marriage. Black won an Academy Award for his screenplay “Milk,” a bio-pic on the life of the late gay politician Harvey Milk. During his response to host Julie Chen’s question of why he thought “Prop 8 passed in the first place,” Black implied the gay community would use voter intimidation to force Californians to accept same-sex marriage:
Fair and balanced, the Big Media isn't, with regards to this issue. Just like they're not fair and balanced with respect to the Obama issue, the abortion issue, and with their appallingly, shockingly, shamefully, mean-spiritedly, Christianophobically bigoted attitude towards Sarah Palin.
Why have so many Americans turned against Palin, who made such a strong impression on the public when John McCain introduced her as his running mate at the Republican convention in September? Most likely, it’s because the few good reports they’ve heard about the Alaska governor have been overwhelmed by a blizzard of bad reports. ABC, NBC and CBS news shows are covering Palin intensively, and they are running 18 negative stories for every positive one.
Network coverage of Palin has moved beyond criticism to outright ridicule. Strikingly, all three networks have repeatedly aired clips of Palin being parodied by a comedy show, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, leading to concerns that many Americans are confusing the real Palin with SNL’s figure of fun. When have comic impressions of a political figure ever qualified as hard news?
In the warped, delusional "minds" of the Big Media, an SNL comedy skit is "news" and needs to be repeatedly broadcast and alluded to. So much for "reporting facts". No wonder the Big Media is collapsing and drowning in a sea of red ink! They're little more than a propaganda tool for the Hard Left and the Obama-Democrat Regime.
CMI reviewed network news coverage of Palin for the two weeks beginning September 29 and ending October 12, the period before and after the October 2 vice-presidential debate. We found that ABC, NBC and CBS have been stridently critical of Palin. Before the debate, the networks characterized her as a dunce whose shortcomings were dividing the GOP. After Palin laid to rest concerns about her competence by performing well in the debate, the network narrative changed: Palin became a demon, victimizing Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama with unfair criticism.
(The full story, details)
And the Left astonishingly, inexplicably still thinks they need to rein in conservative talking heads to achieve "balance and fairness"??? Well, I'd say the balance is already tipped massively in the Hard Left's favor, as the Hard Left very obviously, totally undeniably has a powerful, totalitarian-like hold on the Big Media and brazenly, openly uses it as a propaganda tool for ideological and social-reengineering purposes as well as a tool to get Hard-Left-Wing Extremists like Barack Hussein Obama elected while defamatorily demonizing his opponents. In terms of "fairness", well, clearly the Left isn't all that big on fairness.
The Right needs to have its own media and commentors and broadcast as it sees fit so as to inject at least some balance and fairness into the mix. The Left doesn't want this, so its leadership seeks to censor, to ignore the First Amendment, to rein in the Right's media via resurrecting the long-ago-scrapped-as-oppressive-unconstitutional-and-uncalled-for "Fairness Doctrine" and by using the Big Media and the White House Bully Pulpit as a propaganda tool against folks like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, FOX News, etc... in fact, everyone who's not a Leftist!
The Left and the Obama Regime are paranoid and intolerant of dissent, criticism and opposition. They believe they're entitled to rule unopposed, much like Saddam Hussein did, like Fidel Castro, like Kim Jung Il, like Vladimir Putin, like the Chinese Communist Party, like Stalin, like Hitler, like Pol Pot...
Is there any doubt about this, in the minds of folks who make the time and expend the effort and energy to pay attention and analyze their findings in their brains so as to see the patterns and to understand what's going on?
Interestingly, the White House is nervous about a fellow writing a book on Obama, a Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame.
In early May, White House Counsel Greg Craig circulated a memo inside the West Wing. Part of a series of memos on protocol, it explained how to deal with writers researching books and articles on the White House. (Craig's unsurprising instructions: Clear interview requests with the press office.) While the memo didn't mention any journalists by name--and while there are currently no fewer than half a dozen major reporters under contract to write books about the nascent Obama presidency and the 2008 campaign, any of whom could conceivably end up embarrassing the administration--there is one person in particular the White House is undoubtedly nervous about: Bob Woodward.
Officially, the White House says it is not adopting a press strategy to respond to Woodward. Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman, wrote in an e-mail that the Craig memo "was not issued in relation to any inquiry related to a specific reporter or author." Still, there is reason to think that Woodward might make the administration particularly anxious. "Every White House is wary of Woodward, " says New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker, who worked alongside him at the Post. What's more, Obama's White House is known to hate process stories, exactly the sort of exhaustive, in-the-room descriptions of high-level debates at which Woodward excels. And, even worse, Woodward has some extra motivation to fill his next book with big scoops. His fourth and final Bush book, The War Within, sold just 159,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, far below his third Bush installment, State of Denial, which sold more than half a million. "The last time I talked to him about books, earlier this year, he had been lamenting the fact his last Bush book didn't sell as well," one of Woodward's friends told me.
(...)
One possibility, and a potentially worrisome one for this administration, is that Woodward will choose to focus on national security--the area where Obama has always seemed hypersensitive about being portrayed as weak and directionless. If he does, a likely source could be Obama's national security adviser, Jim Jones. A couple of years ago, Jones was a guest of Woodward at his wife Elsa Walsh's fiftieth birthday party held at Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee's house. "He and Elsa were glued to Jones at the cocktail party before the dinner started," one attendee told me. Another source could be David Petraeus. A favorite Washington parlor game consists of trying to figure out whether various officials talk to Woodward based on how generously he depicts them. If that method is accurate, then it suggests that Petraeus, who was portrayed glowingly in The War Within, was a Woodward source--and perhaps will be again.
Of course, Woodward is not the only well-known author the White House has to worry about. Journalists writing books on Obama's presidency include Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, New Yorker Washington correspondent (and former TNR staffer) Ryan Lizza, and TNR's Noam Scheiber; two campaign books--one by Haynes Johnson and Washington Post reporter Dan Balz, the other by New York magazine's John Heilemann and Time's Mark Halperin--are also in the works.Such paranoia. Such obsession with spewing propaganda, with silencing dissent and demonizing those who criticize and offer alternatives. That's the Left. That's the Obama-Democratic Regime.
What with all the Small-Media headaches the Obama Regime has to suffer and deal with, and now with running the newly-acquired bankrupt Government Motors more slowly into the ground (at taxpayer expense!), and with all the late-night partying at the White House, I'm afraid that there's not much time and energy left over at the end of the day for the Regime to actually focus on its real job- running the country and protecting her from real threats (as opposed to the Regime protecting itself!).
This Obama-Democrat Regime will not succeed. Simply, it cannot. It's its own undoing. Self-destruct mode has been set and counting down from the very beginning, by design. It's too paranoid, unfocussed, distracted and self-destructive to be able to succeed in doing anything but screw up. After all, it's Left-Wing Extremist, and we know full well that Leftism is a self-destructive, dogmatic ideology.
It's a given that the distractingly, cripplingly paranoid Obama-Democratic Regime will destroy itself from the inside far more than any outside forces ever could.
And the Left will suffer a massively punishing, long-lasting setback because of the failure of the most powerful, most dictatorial Left-Wing Extremist regime ever to rule America. Karma has plenty in store for the Left!
