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The 2,414th CyberAlert. Tracking Liberal Media Bias Since 1996
7:35am EDT, Wednesday May 23, 2007 (Vol. Twelve; No. 87)
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2. Couric Highlights Pro-Terrorist Views of Young Muslim-Americans
3. AP Impugns Military Vets as More Likely to Commit Sex Crimes
4. ABC's GMA Devotes Two Mornings to Promoting Gore and His New Book
5. Letterman's 'Top Ten Surprises in Al Gore's New Book'
Olbermann boasted of how "I happen to know he said all this because today I was actually listening to him while he was on the air." But far from contradicting Limbaugh's point about how members of the "drive-by media" don't listen to him, Olbermann confirmed it as he explained that he only heard Limbaugh's comments because he "was at ABC Radio in New York where I do the Dan Patrick Show from" and "listening from the perfect venue where they pipe in comedian's show and you can't turn it off -- the toilet!" Nonetheless, Olbermann named "comedian Rush Limbaugh" as "today's Worst Person in the World!" [This item was posted, with video, Tuesday night on the MRC's blog. The video and audio clip will be added to the posted version of this CyberAlert. But in the meantime, to watch the Real or Windows Media clip or to listen to the MP3 audio, go to: newsbusters.org ] WABC radio in New York City carries Limbaugh live from 12-3pm EDT. ABC-owned ESPN Radio distributes the Dan Patrick Show from 1-4pm EDT and Olbermann co-hosts a portion of it.
Olbermann's May 22 Countdown item in full: Olbermann was apparently referring to these comments by Limbaugh on his May 22 show in reaction to a caller who raised a Scarborough Country segment which re-played a slanted Today show hit piece on Limbaugh about Limbaugh's two-month old "Barack the Magic Negro" parody song. Dan Abrams hosted Monday's Scarborough Country and John Fund was one of two guests after the taped piece aired: Look, let me explain it. I didn't see it last night. I had enough people tell me about it that I went and got a transcript of it, and I appreciate your getting upset about this. Here's what is amazing to me about this. This is the thing to learn. Their report last night was actually a thing that was spawned by a Today Show report that aired yesterday, and the Today show report and what happened last night exposes the total dishonesty and lack of professionalism that is creeping into NBC News. When the Today show called us Friday afternoon and said they wanted to do this, we sent them reams, we gave them a special website link that they could go educate themselves on everything about this from beginning to end. We gave them the sound bites of Al Sharpton saying no big deal, Barack Obama saying it was dumb, we gave the original column from the Los Angeles Times where the term "magic negro" was thrown into the public domain. They ignored it all. They even went out, they talked to Michael Medved in Seattle to get one voice opposing their take on it, and they didn't use any of the interview that they conducted with him. Now, here's what gets me about this. This whole thing came from this website called Media Matters for America. The Drive-By Media, NBC, Dan Abrams, the Today show people, everybody, CNN, they rely on this religiously to "find out" what happens on this program. They don't listen to this program. Dan Abrams didn't listen to this program. He doesn't know what happened here. His source is Media Matters for America and maybe a couple newspaper columns. Dan Abrams knows, and so does everybody else at NBC and CNN, that Media Matters is a Hillary, George Soros, DNC front group. They know it has no intellectual integrity. They know that it exists to smear people who question the Democrats, and yet they bring on one of its hacks to talk about a conservative with little or no exposition about the hack. The hack is presented as an expert. The Media Matters guy is an all-knowing expert. Nobody's ever heard of him. He's never accomplished anything. He's just a hack working for a front group for the Democrat Party and they know this, and yet they continue to do this. It underscores completely their dishonesty. They were not interested in our take on this. And our take is the take! I mean, we are the record on this. I am the record on the whole "Barack, the 'Magic Negro'" parody and why and how it came about. That's ignored. I am the record. They try to rewrite the record and make the record what Media Matters says, and they know that this has happened, and yet they do it. It underscores how completely in the back pocket of the Democrat Party that Dan Abrams and MSNBC, anybody who works there or at CNN is. They are totally in the back pocket of the Democrat Party. There was nothing professional about this thing. It was kind of funny as I'm reading the transcript, John Fund was on there, and Dan Abrams said, "Why is Limbaugh getting away with this? Is he too big to bring down on something like this?" And Fund kept saying, "Well, where is the outrage? There's no story." This is two and a half months old. What's your peg? There's no story. There's no outrage.... END of Excerpt
For that page in full: www.rushlimbaugh.com Limbaugh's Web site has collated everything he's said about the "Barack the Magic Negro" song parody and its origins. Limbaugh's humorous intro: All you Drive-By journalists -- every one of you out there that thinks you have something here on "Barack the 'Magic Negro'" -- I'm going to try to help you and save you. You are going to be profoundly embarrassed if you keep going on this tune and going down this path with thinking there's something here that isn't. All you gotta do is visit www.RushLimbaugh.com. It's on the Internet. You just type that in, hit the ENTER key, and bam! My website comes up, and you can find my remarks the text of the speech or anything you want about this song, what I've said, and you would be fully informed before you start making idiots of yourselves on television.
For the list of links: www.rushlimbaugh.com 
The AP story on Yahoo: news.yahoo.com
Muslims in America, however, are no more radical than Democrats in general, a majority of whom, a recent poll skipped by CBS and the other networks found, believe President Bush knew in advance of the 9/11 attacks or are not sure if he did. A May 4 Rasmussen Reports survey of 800 likely voters exposed how "Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure." For the May 4 Rasmussen Report: www.rasmussenreports.com Another finding of concern in the Pew survey: 47 percent of Muslims in America think of themselves as "Muslims first" over being an American. Also noteworthy (see page 41 of the PDF): Muslims identify as Democrats over Republican by a whopping 63 to 11 percent and they voted for Kerry over Bush in 2004 by an overwhelming 71 to 14 percent. The 100-page plus PDF of the full report on the poll of 1,050 Muslims in the United States: pewresearch.org Check page 54 for the support for suicide bombings amongst those aged 18-29.
Couric's short item, on the May 22 CBS Evening News that she anchored from Philadelphia, in which she segued from news about al Qaeda using Iraq:
"Last year John Kerry badmouthed Americans who serve in the military as uneducated failures. Now the Associated Press is badmouthing them as perverts," James Taranto relayed in his Tuesday "Best of the Web Today" compilation for OpinionJournal.com. Indeed, AP Washington reporter Matt Apuzzo led a Sunday night dispatch: "Military veterans in prison are more than twice as likely to have been convicted for sex offenses as non-veteran inmates, federal researchers say." Taranto, however, undermined the premise: "The sex-crime incarceration rate for veterans is 23% of 630 per 100,000, or 145 per 100,000. The sex-crime incarceration rate for non-veterans is 9% of 1,390 per 100,000, or 125 per 100,000. The veteran rate is only 16% higher than the non-veteran rate. The AP notes that the overwhelming majority of veterans are male, but it does not note that men commit the overwhelming majority of crimes. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 11.3% of all men will be in prison at some time in their lives, vs. just 1.8% of women. Veterans, then, are far more law-abiding, both in terms of sex crimes and non-sex crimes, than non-veterans, once we adjust for the sex ratio." Taranto's May 22 item: Last year John Kerry badmouthed Americans who serve in the military as uneducated failures. Now the Associated Press is badmouthing them as perverts: "Military veterans in prison are more than twice as likely to have been convicted for sex offenses as non-veteran inmates, federal researchers say. They cannot say why.... "Veterans are half as likely to be incarcerated as those without service experience in the first place, researchers found, but 23 percent of the veterans in prison were sex offenders, compared with 9 percent of nonveteran inmates.... "The incarceration rate for veterans is 630 per 100,000, compared to 1,390 per 100,000 for non-veterans. More than 90 percent of U.S. veterans are male and 99 percent of the veterans in prison are male." The headline reads "Study: Imprisoned Military Vets More Likely to Have Sex Crime Convictions Than Others." It could just as easily read, "Study: Military Vets Far Less Likely to Be Imprisoned Than Others." What's more, it's very easy to make the sex-crime disparity vanish. The sex-crime incarceration rate for veterans is 23% of 630 per 100,000, or 145 per 100,000. The sex-crime incarceration rate for non-veterans is 9% of 1,390 per 100,000, or 125 per 100,000. The veteran rate is only 16% higher than the non-veteran rate. The AP notes that the overwhelming majority of veterans are male, but it does not note that men commit the overwhelming majority of crimes. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 11.3% of all men will be in prison at some time in their lives, vs. just 1.8% of women. Veterans, then, are far more law-abiding, both in terms of sex crimes and non-sex crimes, than non-veterans, once we adjust for the sex ratio. Probably the AP was just being sloppy, but the result was to smear Americans who have served their country in uniform. END of Excerpt Taranto's Tuesday rundown: www.opinionjournal.com The FoxNews.com posting of the AP story was headlined, "Study: Imprisoned Military Vets More Likely to Have Sex Crime Convictions Than Others." See: www.foxnews.com
But to be fair to the AP, while that headline matched the lead sentence, it may not have been their wording. Yahoo posted the same article under the more benign "Study finds trend among imprisoned vets." See: news.yahoo.com
[This item is based on two NewsBusters blog postings by Scott Whitlock: newsbusters.org This is the same program that, in March, featured 30 minutes of softball questions with Senator Hillary Clinton in a "town hall" style meeting, a campaign gift that the network has yet to offer to a Republican presidential candidate. See: www.mrc.org The May 21 segment contained an odd disconnect as Gore proceeded to accuse the media of focusing on unserious, silly subjects and Diane Sawyer mostly accepted, or did not disagree with criticism of the medium. The ABC host prefaced a question about the former Vice President losing weight by saying, "But to dig not-very deep, once again, at my peril here-" Gore proceeded to interrupt and hector Sawyer over wondering about such things. "Well, listen to you. Listen to you," Gore began.
Diane Sawyer: "I just want to say one more time, Donna Brazile, your former campaign manager, has said if he drops 25 to 30 more pounds he's running. Lost any weight?" Would Diane Sawyer pleasantly submit to such correction from a conservative who believed the media to be biased? (And Gore may complain about cosmetic issues, but it was just last year that GMA, in another interview, touted his "passion." See: www.mrc.org In a third piece, reporter Claire Shipman hailed him as "the comeback kid." See: www.mrc.org During the interview, Gore discussed President Bush and Sawyer pressed him about running for the White House in 2008. However, the veteran politician spent much of the segment repeatedly critiquing the media for focusing on the frivolous and the GMA host mostly responded sheepishly, trying not to draw additional ire:
Sawyer: "Well, I want to come back to that thesis because part of it involves our jobs in television news. And I want to deal with that. But nonetheless, Mr. Vice President, it is going to be very hard for people to read this book and say this is not a political because this is a book that really does go to the current administration. My question-"
After pressing Gore briefly on Iraq, Sawyer returned to politics and attempted to placate the ex-Vice President on his thesis that the media only focuses on the frivolous and political horse races: "Not to come back to this and fall into your thesis that the press only wants the horse race of the political campaign-"
In the aforementioned weight question, Sawyer came back to the topic one last time by admitting that the question was at her "peril": "But to dig not very deep, once again, at my peril here."
Sawyer: "You even talk about chickens when, when you were young and on the farm, that you could hypnotize chickens this way."
The ABC graphic set the tone for the masochistic way that GMA accepted the former Vice President's criticism. It read, "Is the news media hypnotizing you?" Sawyer introduced the segment, which aired at 7:41am on May 22, by dutifully repeating the complaints Gore makes in his new book, The Assault on Reason: First off, if Gore thinks that television anchors are hypnotizing Americans, they are doing it in a way that should please the global warming activist. As an April 2007 MRC study discovered, 97 percent of all climate change stories aired on the network morning shows, in the first four-and-a-half months of the year, featured the alarmist position expressed by Gore: www.mrc.org Sawyer then allowed Gore to expand on his "Americans-as-farm-animals" theme. GMA helped punctuate his point by providing a clip from a 1950s instructional video:
Sawyer: "He even evoking how chickens are paralyzed by repetitive motion and says TV makes us passive." Finally, the ABC news anchor permitted Gore to play media analyst and interrogate her in a manner that likely would not be afforded to a conservative critic:
Gore: "What's the difference between news and entertainment in your view?" No one would seriously argue that journalists don't sensationalize issues. But Al Gore has written a book that indicted television for trivializing politicians and reducing them to soundbites. To repeat, GMA's response to that criticism is give the former Vice President over 15 minutes to complain. What Gore really wants could be summed up in his concluding statement on GMA. Because television hasn't been doing its job, the result has been Iraq and "this climate crisis that is so threatening to, to the future of the civilization." In other words, TV news works best when it touts liberal causes in totality. And if promoting issues such as global warming 97 percent of the time isn't enough, well, the media can always strive to do better.
From the May 22 Late Show with David Letterman, as read aloud on the show by former NBA star Charles Barkley, the "Top Ten Surprises in Al Gore's New Book." Late Show home page: www.cbs.com 10. Dedicated to his "soulmate" Lindsay Lohan 9. 52 chapters...to match his waist size 8. Chastises Bill Clinton for not sharing the hot intern action 7. After the 2000 election, shaved his head and checked into rehab 6. All proceeds go to Paris Hilton's legal defense fund 5. The threat that keeps him up at night? A massive Fritos shortage 4. In his opinion there's no species more endangered than the Yankees pitching staff 3. Besides the Internet, also claims to have invented Keno 2. If Blake loses "American Idol," plans to appeal to the Supreme Court 1. Brags that he has now written more books than President Bush has read
-- Brent Baker
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"Our winner: Comedian Rush Limbaugh complaining today that the liberal media, particularly MSNBC, never actually listens to him while he's on the air and thus gets things like his racist Al Sharpton/Barack Obama song second-hand and out of context. Of course, he admitted he didn't see any of the criticism on MSNBC, he just read the transcript. I happen to know he said all this because today I was actually listening to him while he was on the air. While I was at ABC Radio in New York where I do the Dan Patrick Show from. Listening from the perfect venue where they pipe in comedian's show and you can't turn it off -- the toilet. Comedian Rush Limbaugh, today's Worst Person in the World!" 
On Tuesday's CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric allocated a few seconds to alerting viewers to how a new poll discovered that a significant minority of Muslims in America hold "disturbing" views on the acceptability of suicide bombings and who carried out the 9/11 attacks. Neither the ABC or NBC evening newscasts mentioned the new non-network poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: 
"And late word tonight, the White House has declassified some intelligence about a newly revealed terror plot against the United States allegedly ordered up by Osama bin Laden. According to the intelligence, bin Laden ordered a top lieutenant in 2005 to form a terror cell that would use Iraq as a staging ground to launch attacks around the world with the United States the top target. 
On Tuesday, for the second day in a row, ABC's Good Morning America co-anchor Diane Sawyer interviewed Al Gore about his thesis that the media are obsessed with celebrity, while "politicians are heard in soundbites." That point may be undercut by the fact that, by Tuesday, the ex-Vice President had received 15 and a half minutes of ABC airtime to complain as Sawyer mostly accepted, or did not disagree with criticism of the medium. On Monday, the ABC program extended its habit of offering copious amounts of time to Democratic political contenders as GMA devoted 10 and a half minutes of coverage to promote the former Vice President his new book, The Assault on Reason. 
In the May 22 segment on Tuesday morning, after prompting Gore to compare Americans to chickens on a farm, the co-host allowed herself to be interrogated and challenged over how the media operates. But first, Sawyer and GMA helped Gore along with his analogy that Americans are like frightened chickens in the way they allow themselves to be manipulated: 