Media Matters for America

UPDATED: O'Reilly: Media Matters, Daily Kos, MoveOn "lead intimidators" of Democratic presidential candidates

During the July 30 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly criticized the decision by several Democratic presidential candidates to attend the YearlyKos convention, calling the decision "beyond shameful" and claiming that "a group of far-left bloggers has succeeded in frightening most of the Democratic presidential candidates and moving the party significantly to the left."

He continued: "The lead intimidators are MoveOn[.org], Media Matters and the vicious Daily Kos. These people savagely attack those with whom they disagree, and the politicians don't want to become smear targets." O'Reilly later asked: "[W]hen you get these presidential candidates who are afraid of a website, my God, how are they going to deal with Al
Qaeda?" Read more

CBS Evening News falsely described proponent of Iraq "surge" as former opponent of it

On the July 30 edition of the CBS Evening News, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin falsely described Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael O'Hanlon as "a critic" of the Iraq war "who used to think the surge was too little too late, [but] now believes it should be continued." In fact, while O'Hanlon has been critical of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war, he supported the invasion and argued in a January 2007 column that President Bush's troop increase was "the right thing to try." Read more

Reporting on conflict in Bush-Brown terrorism remarks, media did not note that U.S. intel expert supports Brown

In reporting on President Bush and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's July 30 press availability, several media outlets reported Brown's statement that "Afghanistan is the front line against terrorism," and noted that Brown's comments seemed to conflict with Bush's repeated assertions that Iraq is the "central front" in "the war on terror."

But none reported that the congressional testimony by the chief U.S. intelligence analyst for international terrorism backs up Brown's assertion, describing Al Qaeda's growing presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a greater threat than "Al Qaeda in Iraq." Read more

Savage: "You're telling me there's no possibility of a conspiracy by the Democrats" to cause Roberts' seizure?

On the July 30 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage reacted to news that Chief Justice John Roberts had suffered a seizure that day by raising the possibility that "his health was in some way tampered with by the Democrats." Savage said, "Something's wrong with this picture," after noting that Roberts' seizure occurred just three days after Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said he would seek in general to reject any future Supreme Court nomination made by President Bush.

Schumer told the American Constitution Society (ACS) in a July 27 speech: "I will recommend to my colleagues that we should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court except in extraordinary circumstances." Schumer said that, since the confirmation of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, the court had come to represent "what a diminishing clique of conservative ideologues wish for." Read more