NBC
Brian Williams
On the night before the New Hampshire primary, Williams scrapped his anchor job and shot an infomercial for then Sen. Obama. Acting as someone undergoing a spiritual epiphany, Williams said the Obama campaign was a "movement", then flashed a Newsweek cover photo of the candidate and gushed with joy. It was a clever way of creating a bandwagon effect and at the same time branding the candidate as an anti-establishment figure. The segment ignored Obama's votes for the Cheney Energy bill of 2005 and tort reform, (which most Dems opposed), and also neglected to mention that Obama's top funders since 2006 have been Wall Street investment banks. Instead, Williams and his crew at NBC ran almost daily attacks gainst Hillary Clinton and later on Governor Sarah Palin and her husband Todd. Most of those charges, of course, proved to be baseless.
Andrea Mitchell
On the night before the New Hampshire primary, Mitchell (who is the wife of Alan Greenspan) tried to convince NBC viewers that Hillary Clinton's campaign was about to collapse. Even when the candidate was ahead by 3 points on election night, Mitchell insisted it was all over for Clinton. She continued to eulogize her before Super Tuesday, claiming Democratic Party leaders were all switching to Obama because of the Clintons' supposedly racist remarks about him. The reporter never bothered to identify any sources for her bombshell revelations.
Tim Russert (deceased)
When the Bush Administration was pushing the Iraq War in 2002, it received a warm reception at Meet the Press, whose longtime moderator was close friends with many of the crooks and liars behind that deception. So it wasn't surprising that Russert hammered on Clinton through the primaries. He falsely claimed Ted Kennedy's endorsement would give Obama the Latino vote. He also declared Obama the nominee long before Donna Brazille's Florida and Michigan voter dienfranchise schemes were resolved. This is how the C.I.A. engineers elections in other countries, so it probably came as no surprise to Russert that it was happening here at home.
Matt Lauer
It was Clinton herelf, and not the press, who first brought up Obama's longtime mentor, slumlord Tony Rezko, during primary season. In a Today Show interview shortly afterward, Lauer confronted her with a photo taken in the 1990s of both Clintons posing with Rezko at a White House social event. There wasn't any evidence of a relationship, but his terse, accusatory tone never let up, as if suggesting to viewers that Sen. Clinton wasn't telling the truth. NBC used the device of transfering Obama's crimes onto Clinton repeatedly throughout the election.
MSNBC
Keith Olbermann
Like his two co-horts featured below, Olbermann executed a non-stop pile-on against the Clinton candidacy, highlighted by a series of pejorative rants he called "special comments". The jist of these monologues held that Clinton was a racist Republican in disguise who wanted Obama assassinated. Geraldine Ferraro was also a racist, according to Olbermann. In fact, anyone who criticized Barack Obama was a racist. If the tactic sounds familiar, think McCarthy Era.
Chris Matthews
Matthews described Hillary Clinton as a "she-devil" during the primaries without consequence, and said Obama gave him a thrill in his leg. Is this NBC's idea of political commentary? That a broadcast corporation provides a forum for such individuals says a lot about the state of journalism.
David Shuster
Small-potatoes Shuster is distinguished as being the only male newscaster to incur punishment for making sexist remarks against Sen. Clinton. He was suspended for two weeks after accusing the senator of "pimping out" her daughter in order to advance the campaign.
CBS
Katie Couric
In a contentious and hostile interview shot before a series of early February primaries, Couric harassed Clinton about how she would handle losing the election. (Clinton led the race in the delegate count at the time.) Couric also asked her if it was true that her high school classmates called her "Miss Frigidaire". This smear piece aired right after Steve Kroft's rock-star segment on Obama (see below). Couric later went on to receive one of journalism's most prestigious awards for her handling of Sarah Palin. In that interview, she prodded the Alaskan governor to name the periodicals she read.
Steve Kroft
In conjunction with Couric (above), Kroft replicated the Brian Williams/Andrea Mitchell love-one/hate-the- other routine on Sixty Minutes before the Virginia/ Maryland /Wash D.C. primaries. It worked better this time, as Obama won all three contests. Kroft, you may recall, did the "Mother of all Heists" report a year earlier about Iraqi exiles hired to key posts in Iraq by the Bush Admin., only to steal nearly $2 billion in reconstructions funds. Yet he somehow forgot to include Rezko/ Obama associate Aiham Alsammarae in the rundown. Selected by Pres. Bush to become Iraq's minister of electricity, Alsammarae was subsequently arrested in Bahgdad after allegedly embezzling about $600 million. In 2006, the security firm Blackwater broke Rezko's friend out of jail in the Green Zone after his kids contacted Obama's office for help. The fugitive was grateful, donating to Obama's campaign in January, February and March of 2008. (He bailed Rezko out of jail in April.)
CNN
Anderson Cooper
This puppy was already in the doghouse before the election, championing the efforts of a Louisiana D.A. out to destroy the reputation of woman doctor and two nurses who stayed on the job through the Katrina nightmare. The women were charged with mercy killings, while the male doctor who abandoned his post before the hurricane was never even named. Well, keeping Mr. Cooper honest, his often-aired biography piece on Obama neglected to mention Tony Rezko (who was about to go on trial) and the several other slumlords Obama spent a decade representing in Chicago (while working at the so-called civil rights firm). Neither was there any mention of the tainted campaign cash in Obama's 2004 senate bid or the collusion of the G.O.P. in forcing his challenger, Jack Ryan, to drop out of the race. By contrast, Cooper's bio pieces on the Clintons and McCains presented a long laundry list of unsubstantiated rumors.
Jack Cafferty
A Yellowstone geyser of hate speech, Cafferty has already been condemned by many in the Asian community for his racist remarks about China. His Cafferty File, which poses questions for viewers to answer by email, is really just a vehicle for his rants against the Clintons, Palins, McCains and other decent Americans he doesn't like. Like Matthews at MSNBC, Cafferty's unrestrained venom puts even the neocon ideologues at Fox News to shame.
John King
Night after night during the Democratic primaries, King mislead viewers by mixing superdelegate endorsements into the pledged delegate counts. Despite being corrected in emails submitted by viewers, he kept up this charade (like the DNC and the rest of the media) until Clinton conceded the nomination. In fact, superdelegates were not supposed to vote at all until the convention. So much for accuracy in the media.
Jessica Yellin
Principle job assignment in the primaries: Play gotcha with former President Bill Clinton. Through Yellin's journalistic lens, the Clintons were portrayed as bizarre, creepy goblins that Americans should never invite into their homes. Of course, now that the Clintons support Obama, she's lightened up a little about the former president and current senator.
Candy Crowley
The only thing worse than professional liars posing as journalists is professional journalists morphing into liars. Veteran correspondent Crowley amped up her negative tone toward Hillary and Bill Clinton as the New York senator won more and more primaries. Ater Ohio, CNN took Crowley off assignment from Clinton and ordered her to cover (i.e. promote) Obama instead. She did her job well, and like King, eventually got her own show on CNN.
Jeffrey Toobin
Toobin spent the primary cycle obsessing about what he called "the math". Never mind that those 800 superdelegates weren't supposed to vote until the convention, Toobin claimed Clinton could never catch up with Obama in delegates - period. (Karl Rove, incidentally, was first to start propagating the math fiction in March.) When Clinton refused to concede the race on June 3rd, Toobin accused her of "deranged narcissism". He wouldn't have dared said that about Ronald Reagan, Teddy Kennedy and other candidates who found themselves even farther behind in previous elections, yet pressed on till all the votes were counted at the convention.
FOX
Bill O'Reilly
O'Reilly claims to be "watching out" for his viewers, and says they enter a "no-spin zone" when they watch his show. But day in and day out he dished out the Rove propaganda that "Obama is a smart guy" and deserves the benefit of the doubt regarding all the unsavory characters he associated with. Either Bill is retarded or he was helping Rove prop up Obama so he could get elected. Many Bush campaign operatives were by then working on the campaign, and the brother of Fox's VP of News was writing the candidate's speeches. While Bill's interview with Clinton was clearly the most informative of the election season, in general the show was about as much a no-spin zone as Kansas in the springtime.
Major Garrett
While covering Clinton, Garrett's dismissive tone gave the impression that he was talking about a convenience store robber and prostitute, not a sitting U.S. senator. One day, in a rare glimpse of his last job as an aluminum siding salesman, Garrett tossed a copy of Clinton's gas tax legislation to the floor and said this epitomized how little congressional leaders on Capitol Hill regarded it. Boy, what a ludicrous idea to make oil companies pay extra taxes out of their windfall profits... Naturally, Obama, who voted for the Cheney energy bill in 2005, opposed the corporate gas tax.
Copyright 2008-2009 TheCityEdition.com
ABC
Jake Tapper
In the primaries, Tapper repeatedly characterized Clinton as an unscrupulously ambitious woman who would say or do anything to win - exactly what what the Obama talking points instructed him to say. In Tapper lingo, Obama "fights back", Clinton "goes nuclear". One of his web posts bore the title "Deconstructing Hillary". He even compared the New York senator to Tanya Harding, the ice skater who attacked Nancy Kerrigan with a pipe swing to the ankle. Of course, the Harding comment also originated with the Obama campaign, which makes you wonder who's cutting Tapper's paycheck, ABC or David Axelrod. Later, Tapper described Gov. Palin's so-called Trooper gate as an incident in which Palin fired her public safety commissioner over a dispute about her brother-in-law, who himself was involved in a "messy divorce" with her sister. In fact, the trooper had been caught driving his patrol car twice while intoxicated, tasered Palin's nephew, and threatened to kill her father. For all that, trooper Wooten returned to work after a five-day suspension.
Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Sherri Shepherd, Barbara Walters (The View co-costs)
While only Walters is a journalist, these women were tasked with selling Barack Obama's out-of-nowhere candidacy to the female-over-forty demographic. Behar delivered the Obama campaign's daily talking points, sometimes verbatum. In April, when Clinton called on the oil companies to pay a gas tax, Behar accused her of "pandering". That Clinton had submitted a bill to achieve the objective was never mentioned. Perhaps not surprising, Behar got her own show on CNN's sister channel.
Shepherd, meanwhile, admitted from the getgo she was voting for Obama because he's African American. Goldberg took another tack, feigning support for McCain in the beginning. That allowed her to rip the National Organization for Women's New York state chapter when they criticized Ted Kennedy for not endorsing Clinton. Then, on the morning of Super Tuesday, Goldberg announced she'd decided to vote for Obama because he was the first candidate to oppose tax breaksfor companies that outsourced jobs abroad. This was false information, corrected the day after the election. (It was Clinton who proposed the corporate crackdown,) Goldberg later confessed that she shared Shepherd's glee at the prospect of "a brother" occupying "the Caucasian House". On June 4th, she mocked Clinton's refusal to concede the nomination - part of a successful pile-on that destroyed Clinton's candidacy.
PBS NEWSHOUR
Gwen Ifill
This close personal friend of Condie Rice anchors the roundtable talk show Washington Week. It's funded by the mining industry and brings together Obama press secretaries posing as reporters from NBC, the New York Times, the L.A. Times and Time magazine. Ifill took this circus show on the road during primary season to appear before live audiences. Billed as "panel discussions", the events were little more than Obama rallies airing on a TV network financed in part by American taxpayers. In October, Ifill was chosen to moderate the vice-presidential debate, despite the fact that her glowing book about Barack Obama was due out in just two months. Talk about a stacked deck...
Judy Woodruff
More PBS hypocricy... In an interview with Clinton, Woodruff kept badgering her until she agreed that Obama was the greatest development in human history since the moon landing. Clinton barely got a word in edgewise about her own 30-year record of public service.
David Brooks
Mark Shields
Still more PBS meddling in the election... Newspaper reporters and columnists, Brooks and Shields are ostensibly supposed to present point/counterpoint commentary on the election. One man is conservative, the other progressive. Yet by some coincidence both despised Clinton and wanted her out of the race pronto. Brooks (the converative) went on to describe Gov. Palin as "poison" for the Republican Party.
NEWSWEEK
Eleanor Clift
With her classic Stepford wife mentality, Clift denigrated Clinton in every mouthful that passed from her lips during numerous appearances as a CNN and PBS election analyst. If Clinton had proposed a viable solution to global warming, Clift would undoubtedly have dismissed it as a calculating power grab by the wicked witch of the west.
Joe Klein
On a segment with CNN's Campbell Brown, Klein said he thought the only way Clinton would get out of the race would be if someone "exploded an IED under her car". This was but one of many death wishes uttered about Clinton without any disciplinary consequence.
TIME
Mark Halperin
Like Newsweek, Time ran more than a half dozen rock star covers of Obama in less than a year's time. What other candidate in history has received so much free publicity at the grocery stand? Like his counterparts at Time partner company CNN, Halperin kept up the steady drum beat of disparaging commentary about Clinton's candidacy until she left the race.
NEW YORK TIMES
Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor
David Shipley, Op-Ed page editor
The New York Times has a long, prestigious history. That is, until the 2008 election, when it started throwing tantrums about how unfair it was for Obama's rivals to criticize his inexperience and questionable proximity group. The staff methodically deleted negative Obama and pro-Clinton comments from its election blogs. One gets the impression that the newspaper's Ritalin-pumped interns have locked all the adults in the basement.
Maureen Dowd
New York Times columnist Dowd spent the primary season propagating the conservative line that Clinton's widespread popularity was entirely the product of public sumpathy following the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Her published diddies include the thoughtfully titled "Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?" Women journalists may have come a long way, baby, but it would be nice to know exactly what this one has been smoking.
Frank Rich
Another NYT columnist, this one characterized Clinton's candidacy as "a pox tantamount to avian flu".
NPR
Michele Norris
The NPR news reporter accused Clinton in an interview of trying to "win ugly". (Here's the audio.)
THE NATION
Katrina van den Heuvel, editor
Daughter of a well-known Beltway politico, and current editor of The Nation, Van den Heuvel appeared regularly on CNN during the primaries to dismiss Clinton as a right-wing politician. She also touted Obama's pervasive lie about not taking money from oil companies, lobbyists or PACs. In fact, the vast bulk of his unprecedented $600 million in campaign contributions was generated by investment banks (Goldman Sachs was #1), corporate lawyers, the nuclear firm Exelon, and yes, oil company executives, some of whom served as his top bundlers.
HUFFINGTON POST
Arianna Huffington
If fascists in the 1930s could have had a website, they would have modeled it after Huffington Post. Its blogs abounded in 2008 with so many pages crammed with hateful remarks about Hillary Clinton, one observer said that scrolling through them reminded him of gnats on flypaper. Arianna is the ex-wife of oil millionaire Michael Huffington, a Bush family friend she met at a party thrown by the Gettys. Like George Soros, she claims to have switched her allegiance from those aristocratic snobs to the progressive MoveOn.org crowd. Sure thing... In the 1990s Arianna ran a website calling for the resignation of President Bill Clinton. The conservatives loved her then, still love her now.
MS. MAGAZINE
Michele Kort, editor
The premier periodical of American feminism didn't publish a single story about Clinton during the primaries. Did they forget that she was the first viable female presidential candidate in U.S. history? When asked, Kort said doing so might threaten the tax status of Ms.'s parent company, the Feminist Majority Foundation. It seems somebody needs a lesson in basic tax law here. Kort did run two articles by Donna Brazile, the influential Democratic Party operative who led the charge to strip Florida/Michigan delegates from Hillary Clinton, insuring Obama's higher delegate count. Brazile also used her paid analyst position at CNN to smear Clinton as a racist and a party establishment snob trying to "steal" the election from Obama. And this is who Ms. featured in its election coverage? Bella Abzug is rolling over in her grave...
PACIFICA RADIO
Larrry Bensky
Laura Flandersky, anchor
Bensky, Flanders and the rest of the self-righteous gang at KPFA and its sister stations have a bad case of glaucoma - at least, when it comes to Barak Obama. Nary a word about his homophobia, his embrace of mysognist rappers, his slumming with Chicago slumlords, his connections to Iraqi war profiteers, or the Wall Street banks and oil companies financing his election bid.
Amy Goodman's Democracy Now was all over the Todd Palin/Alaska Secessionist Movement angle, but Sen. Obama's ten-year sellout of the African-American community in Chicago didn't even rate a mention in 2008. Apparently, for progressives hating women takes precedence over human rights causes. Both their silence and their votes helped tip the election to Obama, the candidate of the neocons. Thanks a lot guys... Read the commentrary in the Third Estate Sunday Review.
Articles on the media bias and sexism:
Marie Cocco's May 15th column in the Washington PostArticles on the election:
The Donna Brazille - Karl Rove Connection
Bush's Third Term
