NBC
Brian Williams
On the night before the New Hampshire primary, Williams scrapped his anchor job and shot an infomercial for Sen. Obama. Acting as someone undergoing a spiritual epiphany, Williams said the Obama campaign was a "movement", uttering superlatives and flashing a glowing Newsweek cover of the candidate. Not one serious foreign policy question was asked of the candidate. It was a clever way of creating a bandwagon effect and branding the candidate as an anti-establishment figure. The segment ignored the fact that top Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs have largely underwritten Obama's campaign since 2006. During general election season, Williams has continued to exalt Obama and run almost daily attacks on Gov. Palin and her husband Todd, not only misrepresenting the facts, but failing to interview the Palins or their representatives for their side of the story.
Andrea Mitchell
On the night before the New Hampshire primary, Mitchell (who is the wife of Alan Greenspan) tried to convince viewers that 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 on the eve of several more primaries, and before Super Tuesday, claimed Democratic Party leaders were all switching to Obama because of the Clintons' supposedly racist remarks about him. The reporter nevere bothered to identify sources for her bombshell revelations. Like the rest of the NBC team, Mitchell has attacked Gov. Palin without any pretense of objectivity.
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 Florida and Michigan were resolved and several other states had voted. Of course, this is how the C.I.A. engineers elections in other countries. Russert probably knew all about the covert operation that was underway here.
Matt Lauer
It was Clinton herelf, and not the press, who first brought up Obama's longtime fundraiser, 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 she wasn't telling the truth. NBC eventually became expert at transfering Obama's crimes onto Clinton.
MSNBC
Keith Olbermann
Like his two co-horts below, Olbermann executed a non-stop pile-on against Clinton, highlighted by a series of pejorative rants he calls "special comments". The jist of these monologues is that Clinton is a racist Republican in disguise who wants Obama assassinated. Geraldine Ferraro is also a racist. In fact, anyone who criticizes Barack Obama is a racist. And how convenient is that?
Chris Matthews
Matthews described Clinton as a "she-devil" during the primaries, and said Obama gives him a thrill in his leg. Is this NBC's idea of political commentary suitable for cable? Tom Brokaw has quipped that Matthews is beset with Turrets Syndrome. 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 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. (The New York senator was ahead in delegates at the time.) Couric also asked Clinton if it was true that her high school classmates called her Miss Frigidaire. This smear piece aired right after Kroft's rock-star segment on Obama (see below). In her interview of Palin, she cynically fired one gotcha question after another until a handful of unflattering soundbites were amassed for later use.
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 who stole nearly $2 billion in reconstructions funds. Funny how one of one of those thieves, Obama associate Aiham Alsammarae, didn't come up in Kroft's election piece. In 2006, Blackwater broke Alsammarae out of jail Al Capon-style after his kids contacted Obama's office. The fugitive was grateful, donating to the senator's campaign in January, February and March. Maybe Sixty Minutes will tell us all about it one day.
CNN
Anderson Cooper
This puppy was already in the doghouse before the election. In one of CNN's "Keeping 'em Honest" reports, Cooper championed the efforts of an ambitious Louisiana D.A. to destroy the reputation of woman doctor and two nurses who stayed on the job through the Katrina nightmare and were later accused of mercy killings. Well, keeping Mr. Cooper honest, his often-aired biography piece on Obama neglected to mention longtime benefactor Tony Rezko (who was about to go on trial) and the several other slumlords Obama spent a decade representing in Chicago. No mention of the tainted campaign cash in his 2004 senate race or the collusion of the G.O.P. in forcing his challenger to drop out of the race. By contrast, Cooper's bio pieces on the Clintons and McCains crammed every scandal and unsubstantiated rumor into the narrative that CNN could fit.
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 and McCains. Like Matthews at MSNBC, Cafferty's unrestrained venom puts the neocon ideologues at Fox News to shame.
John King
Night after night during the primaries, King mislead viewers by mixing superdelegate endorsements into the pledge 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 until the convention. In the general election, King is reprising the performance, using persistently unreliable polling data to prove Obama has over 300 electoral votes in his column.
Jessica Yellin
Principle job assignment in the primaries: Play gotcha with former President Bill Clinton. Through Yellin's journalistic lens, the Clintons were portrayed bizarre, creepy goblins that Americans should never invite into their homes. Of course, now that the Clintons support Obama, Yellin doesn't have any problems with them to report in her daily Obama booster speech.
Candy Crowley
The only thing worse than professional liars posing as journalists on television is professional journalists morphing into liars. Over time, Crowley amped up her negative tone when speaking of either Clinton, eventually reaching the macabre plateau of Jessica Yellin (see above). Now covering Obama, Crowley describes him in terms of the scrappy "community organizer" that deserves a pat on the back and the U.S. Presidency.
Jeffrey Toobin
Toobin spent the primary cycle obsessing about what he called "the math". Never mind that those 800 superdelegates who weren't supposed to vote until convention, Toobin claimed Clinton could never catch up with Obama in delegates - period. (Karl Rove first started propagating this math fiction in March.) When Clinton refused to concede the race on June 3rd - only 138 pledged delegates behind - 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 until the convention.
FOX
Bill O'Reilly
O'Reilly claims to be "watching out" for his viewers, who he says enter a "no-spin zone" when they watch his show. But day in and day out he dishes out the Rove propaganda that "Obama is a smart guy" and deserves the benefit of the doubt regarding all the unsavory characters he associates with. Either Bill is retarded or he's helping Rove prop up Sen. 57-states Obama so he can get elected. It's certainly not very patriotic to omit reporting on the Iraqi felon Auchi and the fugitive Alsammarae, two men with financial ties to Obama. (See Steve Kroft/CBS.) While Bill's interview with Clinton was the most informative of the election season, in general the show is 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, not a sitting U.S. senator. One day, in a rare glimpse of his last job as an aluminum siding salesman, he tossed a copy of Clinton's gas tax legislation to the floor and said this epitomized how little the experts on Capitol Hill regarded it. Boy, what a ludicrous idea to make oil companies pay the tax out of their windfall profits. Funny, that's exactly what Gov. Palin did in Alaska, but nobody in the so-called liberal media wants to talk about that.
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 her competition 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. More recently, 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 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. 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 are tasked with selling Barack Obama's out-of-nowhere candidacy to the female-over-forty demographic. Behar delivers the daily talking points, sometimes verbatum, all the while pretending she came up with the material herself. In April, when Clinton called on the oil companies to pay the gas tax, Behar said she and McCain were "pandering" and didn't have the power to accomplish this. Clinton's bill in the senate was never mentioned.
Shepherd readily admits she's voting for Obama because he's African American, but Whoopi initially feigned support for McCain. 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, she announced she'd decided to vote for Obama because he was the first candidate to oppose tax breaks to companies that outsourced jobs abroad. (Of course, Clinton was first to propose the corporate crackdown, but voters wouldn't find that out after they voted.) Goldberg later confessed 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 the pile-on process that eventually ended her candidacy.
PBS NEWSHOUR
Gwen Ifill
This close friend of Condie Rice anchors the roundtable talk show Washington Week. It's funded by the mining industry and brings together Obama press secretaries from NBC, the New York Times, the L.A. Times and Time magazine. Ifill took this circus on the road during primary season to appear before live audiences. The Obama rallies were billed as "panel discussions". She later moderated the vice-presidential debate, despite the fact that her book about Barack Obama is due out next January, on the day he's likely to be inaugurated, thanks to folks like Ifill.
Judy Woodruff
In an interview with Clinton, Woodruff kept badgering her until the candidate agreed that Obama was the greatest development in human history since the moon landing. Clinton barely got a word in edgewise about her own background and record service.
David Brooks
Mark Shields
Newspaper reporters and columnists, Brooks and Shields are ostensibly charged with point/counterpoint commentary on the election. One is conservative, the other progressive, but by some coincidence both despised Clinton and wanted her out of the race A.S.A.P. Brooks (the converative) has described Gov. Palin as "poison" for the the Republican Party.
NEWSWEEK
Eleanor Clift
With a classic Stepford wife mentality, Clift denigrated Clinton in every mouthful that passed from her lips. If Clinton found the solution to global warming, Clift would have dismissed it as a calculating power grab.
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". It was but one of many death wishes uttered by the so-called election analysts about Clinton. Klein seems to be doubling as Obama's press secretary in the lead up to Nov. 4th.
TIME
Mark Halperin
Like Newsweek, Time ran more than a half a dozen rock star covers of Obama in less than a year's time, compared to one or two for Clinton. 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 had a long, prestigious history until a few months ago, when it started throwing tantrums about how unfair it was for Obama's rivals to actually criticize him. The staff filtered out negative or pro-Clinton comments from its election blog, and ran several editorials crucifying her for a handful of cheesy campaign ads. One gets the impression lately that a bunch of Ritalin-pumped interns have locked the adults in the basement there at the Times and are now putting out a comic strip.
Maureen Dowd
Who'd have expected that the beacon for misogynist hate speech in America would take the form of a female New York Times columnist? Dowd spent the primary season propagating the conservative line that Clinton's political credentials can be traced to public sympathy following the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Like everyone else in the Rogues Gallery, Dowd failed to acknowledge the candidate's three-decades-long resume in the public sector. Instead, Dowd gave us the comprehensive election analysis entitled "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 what this one has been smoking.
Frank Rich
The Times Op-Ed columnist characterized Clinton's candidacy as "a pox tantamount to avian flu".
NPR
Michele Norris
Accused Clinton in an interview of trying to "win ugly". (Here's the audio.)
THE NATION
Katrina van den Heuvel, editor
Van den Heuvel appeared regularly on CNN during the primaries to dismiss Clinton as a right-wing politician and pretend Obama possessed vast foreign policy credentials. She also touted her candidate's pervasive lie about not taking money from oil companies, lobbyists or PACs. Of course, the vast majority of his money comes from these three categories and van den Heuvel knows it.
HUFFINGTON POST
Arianna Huffington
If fascists in the 1930s could have had a website, they would have modeled it after Huffington Post. Its blogs abound with so many hateful comments about Hillary Clinton, one observer said it reminded him of gnats on flypaper. Arianna is the ex-wife of oil millionaire Michael Huffington, a family friend of the Bush's 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 she 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 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. Even so, Kort did run two articles by Donna Brazile, the influential Democratic Party operative who manipulated the primary calendar and led the charge to strip Florida/Michigan delegates, 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 must be 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 Obama's candidacy. Nary a word about the homophobia, his embrace of mysognist rappers, his slumming with Chicago slumlords, the episode of busting an Iraqi war profiteer out of jail using Blackwater guards, or the Wall Street banks and oil companies financing his election bid from the outset. Amy Goodman's Democracy Now has been all over the Todd Palin/Alaska Secessionist Movement angle. Sen. Obama's shady, well-documented, ten-year sellout of the African-American community in Chicago didn't rate the same level of diligent reporting. The progressive vote helped tip the primary to Obama, the candidate of the neocons. It will likely make him President, thanks to the numskulls at Pacifica. 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:
Bush's Third TermCopyright 2008 TheCityEdition.com
