Liberal Bias?

The Associated Press has put 11 reporters to the job of "fact checking" Sarah Palin's new book Going Rogue: An American Life. This FoxNews story points out that the same Associated Press put no reporters to work fact checking many other political books.

The organization did not review for accuracy recent books by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, then - Sen. Joe Biden, either book by Barack Obama released before he was president or autobiographies by Bill or Hillary Clinton. The AP did more traditional news stories on those books.

The attraction to Palin doesn't appear to be partisan, since AP didn't fact-check recent political tomes by Republicans Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich.

Given the moderate political stances of Giuliani and Gingrich could it be because Palin is the only true conservative on the list? You can probably guess what my opinion is.

Recent AP Poll

As readers of this blog already know, polls can be big news on condition that they report something that props up liberalism or tears down conservatism. Look at results from a November 10 AP poll that you've probably heard nothing about.

• 38% of people think the country is heading in the right direction
• 54% approve of the President to some degree, down from 74% only 8 months ago
• 46% approve of the President's job on the economy
• 49% approve of the President's job on health care
• 39% approve of the President's job on immigration
• 7 % strongly approve of what Congress is doing

In answer to a question on what the Democrats should do about health care, only 31% said they should go ahead and pass a bill without Republicans. 61% said they should keep trying until they make a deal with Republicans.

Why do you think that you can't find a single significant issue where a majority of people believe Barack Obama is right, yet he has majority support (54% approve)? How can you approve of the man, yet disagree with his positions. Personally I have no problem with him. He has a beautiful family, regularly dates his wife, seems to lead a clean life, etc... My disagreements aren't personal.

If this poll supported the President or Congress in any way, I'm sure it would have been headlines everywhere. Since it doesn't, it gets shelved. Typical left-wing media bias at work.

Scandal in the White House?

Vice President Joe Biden is in a bit of hot water. It seems that he has used his position to enrich a friend of his, Peter W. Galbraith. Galbraith who is the son of renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars. The Washington Examiner puts it this way - "It seems that Galbraith used his political influence to get rich off Iraqi oil money."

The article then marvels at the great lengths that the New York Times goes in order to distance this from the Vice President.

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

The Times needs to read its own paper. Of course Joe Biden advocated this view. He wrote about it in this May 2006 article printed in the New York Times! Or how about this Times article written by Galbraith himself admitting that Biden advocated a plan that enriched Galbraith. The key part is this paragraph.

IN a surge of realism, the Senate has voted 75-23 to acknowledge that Iraq has broken up and cannot be put back together. The measure, co-sponsored by Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, and Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, supports a plan for Iraq to become a loose confederation of three regions — a Kurdish area in the north, a Shiite region in the south and a Sunni enclave in the center — with the national government in Baghdad having few powers other than to manage the equitable distribution of oil revenues.

Does anyone believe that if this had happened when President Bush was in office that Dick Cheney would have had the New York Times making excuses for them? Would they have accepted the word of "aides to both politicians" as the final word?

The Washington Examiner concludes its story with the following paragraph.

What happened here is clear -- Joe Biden advocated policies in Iraq that his adviser Galbraith also advocated. Galbraith profited handsomely off those policies through close ties to oil companies. Does anyone think that if this story were about an adviser to Dick Cheney profiteering as a nexus between powerful politicians and oil companies that the paper would dishonestly obscure the relationship between the two men?

Would anyone want to bet that this story never becomes a scandal, that the mainstream press virtually ignores it? The odds are in favor of this being swept under the rug. This is as blatant a display of partisan, dishonest media corruption that I have ever seen in this country.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Without Bush, media lose interest in war caskets

The hypocrisy of the left-leaning media is shown again in a wonderful article by Byron York in the Washington Examiner. He starts the article with the following:

Remember the controversy over the Pentagon policy of not allowing the press to take pictures of the flag-draped caskets of American war dead as they arrived in the United States? Critics accused President Bush of trying to hide the terrible human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He then quotes Joe Biden and explains that the Obama administration changed the policy in April of this year. The press rushed in to cover the first arrivals but quickly tired of the story.

In April of this year, the Obama administration lifted the press ban, which had been in place since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Media outlets rushed to cover the first arrival of a fallen U.S. serviceman, and many photographers came back for the second arrival, and then the third.

But after that, the impassioned advocates of showing the true human cost of war grew tired of the story. Fewer and fewer photographers showed up. "It's really fallen off," says Lt. Joe Winter, spokesman for the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where all war dead are received. "The flurry of interest has subsided."

The amount of coverage this has received in September is abysmal. No TV. Only one reporter present when allowed. York explains it this way.

On Sept. 2, when the casket bearing the body of Marine Lance Cpl. David Hall, of Elyria, Ohio, arrived at Dover, there was just one news outlet -- the Associated Press -- there to record it. The situation was pretty much the same when caskets arrived on Sept. 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 22, 23 and 26. There has been no television coverage at all in September.

Could it be that the press has lost interest since there is a Democrat in the White House and the casualties are mounting? Nah..... they are objective journalists. That couldn't possibly be the explanation.

March On Washington

On Saturday, September 12, 2009 there was a march on Washington DC in protest of the Obama administration's spending and health care plans. It is interesting to notice how different news outlets reported the number of participants in attendance.

The BBC, hardly a bastion of conservative idealism reports that "As many as one million people flooded into Washington for a massive rally organised by conservatives claiming that President Obama is driving America towards socialism."

This same event is reported by ABC as "Thousands of conservative protesters from across the country converged on the Capitol Saturday morning to demonstrate against President Obama's proposals for health care..."

What the BBC calls nearly one million people, ABC calls thousands. And that isn't the only instance. CBS labeled the event on their website as "Thousands Pack Downtown DC To Protest Spending".

Not to be outdone CNN at least referred to the group as "tens of thousands" in a blog (I couldn't find a story about it in their regular news section) but they couched it in terms of racism. "Obama doesn’t think the protests and the growing conservative movement against Obama are motivated by racism."

Is it any wonder that we have stopped trusting the traditional news sources and their liberal "agenda journalism"? What the BBC calls a million (the web page's title is labeled 'up to two million march'), American news outlets try to minimize by referring to it as thousands or tens of thousands. Does anyone remember the Million Man March? That event was covered for weeks, always citing the number of one million. Not many actually remember that the actual count was closer to 400,000 men according to the Clinton administration's National Park Service.

Why do you think the disparity in reporting exists? Can anyone say liberal media bias?

Man With a Rifle - Take 2

MSNBC's Contessa Brewer made the man carrying a gun at an event the President attended into a racial thing when she said

At a pro-healthcare reform rally... wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip.... There are questions about whether this has racial overtones. I mean here you have a man of color in the Presidency, and white peopple showing up with guns strapped to their waists or onto their legs.

What Brewer missed is the photo on the left because MSNBC had cropped it (see top of image) so that the man's race was not identifiable. And you wonder why I believe the media is biased.