2 February 2009 @ 8:58AM >> During the Superbowl last night, NBC News was running ads for the Today Show touting an interview with President Obama. The ads contained a revealing line saying that Obama would enjoy “home field advantage” during the interview. In other words, NBC News has finally admitting to being nothing more than Obama cheerleaders.

They are not alone.

On the night of the Inauguration, The New York Times did its part to rally the true believers by handing out buttons with its logo prominently displayed beneath the profile of the new president.

Not to be outdone, CNN is selling t-shirts with the caption, “Obama raises hand, lifts a nation.”

And the Detroit Free Press is asking you to “see Obama in yourself” and send them a picture of your face behind a half-cutout Obama mask.

Perhaps the editors of the Free Press were worried that Obama worship wasn’t quite cult-like enough.

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. As Helen Thomas—a White House reporter since the 1950s—recently said, “I’m a liberal, I was born a liberal, I’ll be one ‘til I die, what else should a reporter be when you see so much and when we have such great privilege and access to the truth?”

No surprise. Reporters are liberal, so they’ll favor a liberal president. But given the financial state of the news industry, perhaps political reporters can be laid off for the next for years, and the media can simply re-print White House press releases.

It would save a lot of money, and the resulting press coverage wouldn’t be any different.

21 May 2008 @ 8:17AM >> In a White House letter to the president of NBC News, presidential advisor Ed Gillespie has some questions for the network that I’d love to see answered:

[P]lease allow me to take this opportunity to ask if your network has reconsidered its position that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, especially in light of the fact that the unity government in Baghdad recently rooted out illegal, extremist groups in Basra and reclaimed the port there for the people of Iraq, among other significant signs of progress.

On November 27, 2006, NBC News made a decision to no longer just cover the news in Iraq, but to make an analytical and editorial judgment that Iraq was in a civil war. As you know, both the United States government and the Government of Iraq disputed your account at that time. As Matt Lauer said that morning on The Today Show: “We should mention, we didn’t just wake up on a Monday morning and say, ‘Let’s call this a civil war.’ This took careful deliberation.’”

I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a “civil war.” Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?

And if NBC News no longer believes there’s a civil war in Iraq, given all the fanfare over the network’s initial announcement, why didn’t NBC ever publicly admit to undeclaring civil war?

4 December 2006 >> A study of how the media has been distoring war reporting since the September 11th attacks:

Convincingly and without resorting to partisan politics, [study author Jim A.] Kuypers strongly illustrates in eight chapters “how the press failed America in its coverage on the War on Terror.” In each comparison, Kuypers “detected massive bias on the part of the press.” In fact, Kuypers calls the mainstream news media an “anti-democratic institution” in the conclusion.

“What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,” said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president’s themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.”

30 October 2006 >> NBC reporter Richard Engel describes himself as “basically a pacifist” in a Washington Post profile.

Engel, who is currently covering Iraq, also says, “I think war should be illegal.”

In the same profile, NBC anchor Brian Williams says that Engel “is the most agenda-less person I’ve met in our business, I think, in the past 20 years.”

If a self-proclaimed “pacifist” who thinks “war should be illegal” is what passes for “agenda-less” in the establishment media, then I can understand why reporters deny media bias so fervently. They refuse to see it even when their colleagues admit to it.

And if Engel is “the most agenda-less person” Brian Williams has met in twenty years in the business, what does that say about everyone else in the news media?

14 March 2006 @ 9:33AM >> The Washington Post profiles David Gregory, NBC’s White House correspondent:

After six years on the beat, Gregory is emerging as the Sam Donaldson of the Bush years, the outspoken, aggressive, smart-aleck correspondent serving as a symbol for conservatives who detest the press and liberals who want reporters to crusade against the White House.

It is true that Gregory has been aggressive—perhaps overly so and maybe even rude—but comparing him to Sam Donaldson? That’s just mean!

19 October 2005 @ 3:33PM >> A perfect example of how the establishment media manufactures the news:

If Michelle Kosinski’s canoe had sprung a leak on NBC’s “Today” show Friday, she didn’t have much to worry about.

In one of television’s inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera - making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep.

Sure, this might be a little amusing, but it was less so during the Hurricane Katrina hype, much of which turned out to be phony as well. Not only is it likely that some New Orleans residents failed to evacuate due to the over-hyping of previous storms—notice how every winter blizzard in the Northeast is dramatically dubbed “The Storm of the Century”?—but the false reports of mass rapes, roving armed gangs, and snipers shooting at helicopters kept frightened relief workers out of the city.

How many people died by staying in New Orleans because earlier hurricane hype led them to disregard the pre-landfall Katrina reporting? How many people died because over-the-top reporting in the days following Katrina hindered the relief effort?

The media dedicated much of its post-Katrina reporting to hand-wringing over governmental failures in the response to the crisis, but they should also look at themselves and examine how much of that crisis they caused.

17 August 2005 @ 12:37PM >> NBC morning news man Matt Lauer, on the receiving end of a soldier’s wisdom.