Tag Archives: Newsweek

Commentary

Which cable news network has the worst media bias?

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Why I think that MSNBC is the most biased channel

Listen to Ed Schulz, who works for MSNBC, as he takes a call from a mildly critical caller to his radio show. (H/T NewsBusters)

See, an outburst like this is why I am not at all convinced that left-wingers would protect the rights to free speech of those who disagree with them. It seems to me that there is some fundamental disrespect for the human rights of others that is grounded by the secular-left’s worldview.

Here’s another left-winger, Tamarin Hall, from MSNBC. (H/T Hot Air)

Here’s another MSNBC left-winger, Rachel Maddow. (H/T American Power Blog via Blazing Cat Fur)

News Busters has more detail on Maddow’s reaction to Obama’s Cairo speech here.

The best one of all is here at Hot Air, in which Newsweek’s Evan Thomas is interviewed by Chris Matthews on MSNBC! Thomas says, “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”.

Check out this interview by Keith Olbermann, also of MSNBC, with Steven Crowder.

Well, it’s not really Keith. So this video is fake, but accurate.

Contrast MSNBC with FoxNews

Contrast the fawning over Obama you see on MSNBC, with Charles Krauthammer on Fox News. (H/T Hot Air)

Krauthammer is too moderate for me, but at least he’s a journalist, not a sycophant.

The Western Experience

Here is a more even-handed reaction to Obama’s Cairo speech from Jason at the Western Extern Experience. He has a round-up of stories from Lebanon, Palestine and Iran that shows what is really at stake.

Here are a few of the more disturbing headlines:

This is what Obama should have talked about, but didn’t. Appeasement didn’t work for Chamberlain or Carter, and it won’t work for Obama.

What’s at stake?

The Washington Post reports that drug cartels use submarines to move massive amounts of drugs into the United States. The write that “U.S. officials fear that the rogue vessels could be used by terrorists intent on reaching the United States with deadly cargos”. Maybe Obama should be focused on defending the United States instead of apologizing on our behalf in order to send tingles up the legs of MSNBC talking heads.

Will Obama’s speeches deter aggression of this sort? Or will they be viewed as evidence that no reprisals would follow such an attack?

UPDATE: Muddling Toward Maturity links to a substantive refutation of Obama’s Cairo speech by Caroline Glick writing in the Jerusalem Post.

Commentary

At last some honesty on global warming alarmism

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You may have read something about the NYT article a while back that discussed the brilliant scientist Freeman Dyson and his opposition to global warming.

Excerpt from the NYT article:

Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus.

…IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism.

Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

Well, the NYT got a fascinating letter to the editor in response to their profile of Dyson. The letter came from a graduate student at Harvard named Monika Kopacz.

The letter is excerpted in First Things (H/T The Weekly Standard):

It is no secret that a lot of climate-change research is subject to opinion, that climate models sometimes disagree even on the signs of the future changes (e.g. drier vs. wetter future climate). The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’ — and readers’ — attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty.

Remember, in 1975, the leftist magazine Newsweek propped up the global cooling as the crisis-du-jour.

Excerpt from an article from the Business and Media Institute:

It took 31 years, but Newsweek magazine admitted it was incorrect about climate change. In a nearly 1,000-word correction, Senior Editor Jerry Adler finally agreed that a 1975 piece on global cooling “was so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future.”

Even then, Adler wasn’t quite willing to blame Newsweek for the incredible failure. “In fact, the story wasn’t ‘wrong’ in the journalistic sense of ‘inaccurate,’” he claimed. “Some scientists indeed thought the Earth might be cooling in the 1970s, and some laymen – even one as sophisticated and well-educated as Isaac Asimov – saw potentially dire implications for climate and food production,” Adler added.

Journalists, lacking marketable skills, support socialism. They believe that their word-smithing skills are more worthy than the practical skills of engineers and entrepreneurs. Socialism is their way of regaining the accolades they lost once they left the safe confines of the public school classroom.

Any myth that will allow the government to seize control of the free-market must be supported, regardless of the evidence. And the same thing applies to Darwinism. Only in this case, the target is not the free market, but the church. And the goal is not redistribution of wealth, but autonomy from moral judgments and moral constraints.

For more on scientific opposition politics masquerading as science, see here.