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", flashing a Newsweek cover of the candidate and uttering superlatives. Not one substantive policy question was asked during the interview. 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 and tort reform, (which most Dems opposed, and also neglected to mention that Obama's top funders since 2006 were Wall Street investment banks. At the same time, Williams and his crew at NBC ran almost daily attacks against Clinton and later on Gov. Palin and her husband Todd. Shameless stuff...
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 before Super Tuesday, claiming 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.
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. Of course, this is how the C.I.A. engineers elections in other countries. Why not do the same here?
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 she 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 Clinton, highlighted by a series of pejorative rants he called "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. Does the tactic sound familiar? (Substitute the word communist for racist.)
Chris Matthews
Matthews described 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 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 Steve Kroft's rock-star segment on Obama (see below).
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. Funny how Kroft forgot to mention Rezko/ Obama associate Aiham Alsammarae, the minister of electricity, in his segment. 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 ten years from now.
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 as the so-called civil rights attorney. No mention of the tainted campaign cash in his 2004 senate bid 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 left no scandal or unsubstantiated rumor unmentioned.
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 put 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 asbizarre, creepy goblins that Americans should never invite into their homes. Of course, now that the Clintons support Obama,
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 Hillary and Bill Clinton. Originally, she was fair, but all that changed when CNN took her off assignment from Clinton and ordered her to promote Obama instead.
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 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, 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 Sen. 57-states 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 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, 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 extra taxes out of their windfall profits... Naturally, Obama opposed the tax. He also supported the Cheney energy bill in 2005, the bank bailouts and warrantless surveillance/telecon immunity in 2008
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 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 until the next show, after they had 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. Billed as "panel discussions", they were little more than Obama rallies. In October, Ifill was chosen to moderate the vice-presidential debate, despite the fact that her glowing book about Barack Obama was due out two months later.
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 30-year record of public 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) later 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 had 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.
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 the 2008 election, 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 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
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 $600 million in campaign contributions came from those three sources.
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 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. Kort did run two articles by Donna Brazile, the influential Democratic Party operative who 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, but Sen. Obama's shady, well-documented, ten-year sellout of the African-American community in Chicago didn't rate a mention. The progressive vote helped tip the election to Obama, the candidate of the neocons. 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 2008-2009 TheCityEdition.com
