Tag Archives: Media Bias

20 questions you won’t hear at Obama’s press conference tonight

From Keith Hennessey. He groups the questions into 4 categories, so I’ll excerpt one from each category below. The press conference is scheduled for Wednesday at 8 PM Eastern time.

Economy:

You proposed spending money from the TARP to prevent foreclosures, help small businesses, and to buy toxic assets from banks.  In June CBO said they had found no evidence that any money has been spent for any of these programs.  How many foreclosures have been prevented, how many small businesses have received loans from, and how many toxic assets have been purchased?

Health care:

Your Administration has said that health care reform is the key to addressing our long-term budget problem.  Yet you have adopted a lower standard, that health care reform legislation simply does not make our deficit problems worse.  If health care reform leaves the unsustainable budget situation unchanged, and since CBO says your budget would result in nine trillion dollars of new debt over the next decade, then how else do you propose to deal with the projected explosion of government debt over the long run?

Global Warming:

Does it make sense for the U.S. to impose higher energy costs on American workers and manufacturers if the two largest developing economies [India and China] are unwilling to slow their emissions growth?  Won’t that just disadvantage American workers with little reduction in future global temperatures?

Trade:

The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Finance Committee have called for you to submit to Congress for their approval the signed Free Trade Agreements with U.S. allies Colombia, Panama and South Korea.  Why have you not submitted them to Congress?  When will you do so?

These questions really expose how things have gone awry with the Obama presidency.

Gay Duke University health expert charged with selling adopted 5-year old for sex

WARNING: Mature subject matter.

Here’s the full story from Newsbusters.

Frank Lombard is an associate director at Duke University’s Global Health Institute and a homosexual who was charged last week with the molestation of his adopted 5-year-old black son and actively trying to sell him for sex on the internet.

The 40 words above are 40 more than the Main Stream Media has said on this horrible story.

In nearly a week since Lombard was arrested, not one national broadcast or cable television news show has picked up the story. Compare this to the weeks on end of sensational coverage of the white male lacrosse players of the same university charged with rape several years ago.

At the time of this post not one television show has reported the story and only 17 newspapers in the United States featured it – a majority of which are only small local newspapers.

And most of these articles cited the American Press’ report on the events, which was as follows:

AP) WASHINGTON – A Duke University official has been arrested and charged with offering his adopted 5-year-old son for sex.

Frank Lombard, the school’s associate director of the Center for Health Policy, was arrested after an Internet sting, according to the FBI’s Washington field office and the city’s police department.

According to an affidavit by District of Columbia Police Det. Timothy Palchak, an unnamed informant facing charges in his own child sex case led authorities to Lombard.

Authorities said that Lombard tried to persuade a person -who he did not know was a police officer -to travel to North Carolina to have sex with Lombard’s child.

The detective’s affidavit charges Lombard identified himself online as “perv dad for fun,” and says that in an online chat with the detective, Lombard said he had sexually molested his son, whom he adopted as an infant.

The court papers say Lombard also invited the undercover detective to North Carolina to have sex with the young boy, and even suggested which hotel he should use.”

In response to the AP report, which most of the newspapers used almost verbatim, Mike Adams of Townhall made the observation that “The Associate Press (AP) did not mention the fact that the five-year old offered up for molestation was black. Bringing that fact to light might be damaging to the political coalition that exists between blacks and gays. Nor did the AP mention that the adopted child is being raised by a homosexual couple. Bringing that fact to light might harm the gay adoption movement.”

With this shocking lack of coverage of an even more shocking story, many are asking why this did not make the front pages and top headlines like the Duke lacrosse team scandal did. Thomas Lifson of American Thinker posited that “identity politics … apparently trumps all sense of outrage.”

Thanks to ECM to alerting me to this story. Notice how this story is not covered as well as the Matthew Sheppard story or the George Tiller story was. I wonder why. I guess some victims of violence are more equal than others.

What can the political contributions of journalists tell us about media bias?

Commenter ECM sent me this link from Ace of Spades.

The story is from Riehl Worldview.

Excerpt:

In the face of ABC’s pending Obamanation on health care reform, that’s especially troubling given the tremendous imbalance in ABC’s record of recent political contributions.

None of the four McCain contributors, which includes Elizabeth Hasselbeck, are from journalists at ABC. Meanwhile, approximately 130 ABC employees gave money to Obama. That’s close to a 33 – 1 ratio. Yet, ABC officially announced that they and they alone would manage what questions were asked of Obama about his program, including from the audience.

It strikes me as simply unwise to entrust such a significant portion of the debate around a policy that will impact American lives, potentially forever, to just one organization with such an imbalance in their political views.

An analysis of contributions to the Obama and McCain campaign shows that ABC employees contributed more than $160,000 to the Obama campaign versus less than $5,000 to the McCain campaign.

And ECM also sent me this link on Ace of Spades.

Apparently, the left-wing New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are re-writing headlines to make Obama look better, despite polls showing that the public is growing increasingly disenchanted with his amateurish bumbling.

Ace writes:

The NYT poll I hadn’t heard of, so I clicked on it. The headline…
Obama Poll Sees Doubt on Budget and Health Care

…But the article originally ran with a more interesting headline, as the Rhetorican notes.
In Poll, Obama Is Seen as Ineffective on the Economy

…Similarly, the WSJ article on their own poll went from…
Rising Doubts Threaten to Overshadow Obama’s Agenda

to…
Public Wary of Deficit, Economic Intervention

Here are my previous posts on media bias at the left-wing ABCNews and the left-wing MSNBC.