Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Media Matters for America February 27, 2007

"Democratic pollster" Caddell: If Obama or Richardson sought votes based on their race/ethnicity, "people would hang them high"
On the February 23 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Fox News contributor Pat Caddell asserted that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) presidential campaign is "saying, 'Vote for me because I'm a woman' " and declared, "If [Sen.] Barack Obama [D-IL] was out there saying, 'Vote for me because I'm black,' or ... [Gov.] Bill Richardson [D-NM] said, 'Vote for me because I'm a Hispanic,' people would hang them high." Co-host Sean Hannity introduced Caddell as a "former Democratic pollster." Read more

Fox News' Cameron assigned racially charged comments to "Clinton campaign"
While discussing state Sen. Robert Ford's racially charged comments about why he is supporting Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination over Sen. Barack Obama, Fox News' Carl Cameron attributed Ford's comments to the "Clinton campaign." But Cameron did not present, nor could Media Matters for America find, any evidence showing that Ford is either a paid consultant or a staff member of Clinton's presidential campaign, and Clinton's campaign has disavowed Ford's comments. Read more

On Chris Matthews Show, Cramer called Edwards "the equivalent on Wall Street of -- he's Trotsky"
On the February 25 edition of the NBC-syndicated Chris Matthews Show, during a discussion of presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), host Chris Matthews said to roundtable guest Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's Mad Money, "You don't like [Edwards] because he's against free trade," to which Cramer replied, "He's a tort lawyer for heaven's sake. He's a -- that's the equivalent on Wall Street of -- he's [Russian communist leader Leon] Trotsky." Read more


CNN's Collins: "He was once the biggest loser; today just call Al Gore an Oscar winner"
On the February 26 edition of CNN Newsroom, while playing a clip of Davis Guggenheim, director of the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, and former Vice President Al Gore, the film's narrator, accepting the award for Best Documentary Feature during the Academy Awards, host Heidi Collins said, "He was once the biggest loser; today just call Al Gore an Oscar winner." Read more

Interviewing Energy secretary, Blitzer failed to explain that Bush policy could allow emissions increase
On the February 22 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer allowed Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to tout President Bush's environmental record by stating that "this president has put us on a path of reducing the greenhouse gas intensity of our economy by 18 percent" without explaining that reducing "greenhouse gas intensity" is not the same as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and that a reduction in intensity could occur even as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Read more

John Stossel: Global warming "may be a good thing"
On the February 23 broadcast of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program, John Stossel claimed that "you can't deny that the globe has warmed" but added that global warming "may be a good thing." Stossel, who is co-anchor of ABC's 20/20, then asked: "And is it a catastrophe, where we have to wreck the lives of poor people and turn our freedom over to [former Vice President] Al Gore and he'll tell us what we can drive and whether we can air-condition our house? And even if he does that, it's not going to make any difference." Read more


Wash. Post baselessly linked Abramoff to Democratic fundraisers
A front-page, February 24 Washington Post article by staff writers Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and John Solomon baselessly linked current Democratic fundraising efforts to the scandal surrounding former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The article, which reported that "congressional Democrats have enlisted their committee chairmen in an early blitz to bring millions of dollars into the party's coffers," reported that "[c]ritics deride the aggressive fundraising push as the kind of business as usual that voters rejected at the ballot box last November." The article twice suggested that Democrats' fundraising from former Abramoff clients was inconsistent with their 2006 campaign pledge to end the Washington "culture of corruption." Read more


Jack Kelly column repeats "slow bleed" rhetoric, results of dismissed poll
In a February 25 column, Toledo Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette national security writer Jack Kelly repeatedly suggested that Rep. John P. Murtha (D-PA) had "outlined" a "slow bleed" strategy for dealing with the administration on Iraq without noting that the term "slow bleed" was invented by the media, has been promoted by the Republican Party, and is not used by Democrats, as Media Matters for America has noted (here, here, here, and here). In the column, which bore the sub-headline, "A 'slow bleed' strategy to stop the surge probably would backfire on the Democrats," Kelly wrote: Read more


Wash. Post parroted White House claim that Iraq war was authorized by U.N. Security Council
Disregarding its own reporting, The Washington Post uncritically reported the White House's claim that "the United States went [into Iraq in March 2003] as a multinational force under United Nations authorization to take military action against Iraq." In fact, days before the invasion, the Bush administration failed to obtain the votes necessary from the U.N. Security Council clearly authorizing new military action against Iraq. Read more


On Fox, Pinkerton claimed Wash. Post Walter Reed story was "going after the administration from the right"
During the February 24 edition of Fox News Watch, Newsday columnist James P. Pinkerton claimed that the reason it took the media so long to report on deteriorating conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was because "the media typically come at the Bush administration from the left" by criticizing the Iraq war. "The idea of going after the administration from the right as it were," Pinkerton continued, "that we're not supporting the troops enough, not [providing] body armor enough, not [protecting] Humvees enough, not helping at Walter Reed enough -- that is an angle that most reporters don't naturally think of when they're waking up" because "they come from a different ideological perspective." Read more

No comments:

Post a Comment