All Three Journalists on ABC's This Week Denounce Tax Cut --5/19/2003-- Media Research Center

1. All Three Journalists on ABC's This Week Denounce Tax Cut A perfect model of liberal media bias was displayed by Sunday's This Week with all three journalists in the mainstream media denouncing a tax cut and the one radio talk show host defending a tax cut. George Stephanopoulos marveled at how Bush won a tax cut vote in the Senate given it's “weighted to the rich” and the public would “prefer” the money go to health care. Talk show host Laura Ingraham suggested that “class warfare” is a losing argument for Democrats, which prompted Nightline reporter Michel Martin to fire back: “It's not about class warfare, it's about values.” Soon, Joe Klein of Time complained that “we have 50 states...and many cities that are in real trouble and the federal government could help them out by funding, you know, public works projects.”

2. NPR's Nina Totenberg Lambastes Tax Cut as “Really Stupid” NPR's Nina Totenberg denigrated the tax cut which passed the Senate as “really stupid,” not because the size was half of what President Bush advocated, but because it's still too big.

3. Texas Dems Who Fled Earn CNN's “Political Play of the Week” Democrats in Texas used extra-legal means to shut down the legislature and prevent the vote on a redistricting plan, but the networks are still more interested in demonizing conservatives in Washington and treating the Democrats as heroes. ABC's Terry Moran lectured Ari Fleischer about how “members of his own political party, at a time of war” had “the gall to use federal resources designed to protect the country against terrorists in order to pursue partisan political objectives.” NBC's Tom Brokaw focused on the same supposed misuse of the Department of Homeland Security. And CNN's Bill Schneider awarded the Texas Democrats the “Political Play of the Week,” as he marveled at how the “renegade representatives ended up looking like heroes."

4. FNC Expert Faults Military-Belittling Stories About Lynch Rescue
Retired Army special operations Colonel David Hunt, Friday morning on FNC, denounced the Toronto Star and BBC stories, which ABC picked up, that the U.S. military concocted a fairy tale about the dangers in rescuing of POW Jessica Lynch when, in fact all the armed men had left the hospital before they arrived so they faced no danger or hostility. “This is just poor reporting,” Hunt maintained on the May 16 Fox & Friends, “there’s nobody, no military former or current that they bothered to talk to.” Hunt asserted that “there were 25 to 30 guys, armed, both fedayeen and army, Iraqi military outside and inside the hospital.”

5. Lange Lets Loose Against Bush Again in Commencement Address
Actress Jessica Lange used her commencement address at Marlboro College in Vermont on Sunday to denounce the Bush administration. The Rutland Herald reported that “she likened the war in Iraq to Richard Nixon’s 'ruthless' bombing of Vietnam. She said executive orders and judicial appointments were eroding women’s rights.” The Brattleboro Reformer relayed how she charged: "'Once again, the poorest and most disadvantage are the ones being left behind,' she said, a play on the title of the Bush administration's education law, No Child Left Behind.”

6. FNC's Newswatch Discusses Two Topics in CyberAlert Last Week You read it here first. FNC's Fox Newswatch did segments on Saturday about two topics first raised in CyberAlerts last week: Diane Sawyer claiming the Jayson Blair scandal could not occur in television news and Michael Moore contending to Bob Costas that the Bush administration knows to whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

7. SNL Mocks NY Times Ad: “I Like the Fabricated Interviews...” Saturday Night Live mocked a New York Times ad: “Hi, I'd like to start getting home delivery of the Sunday New York Times. I like the fabricated interviews, he goes straight for the plagiarized articles.”

8. Letterman's “Top Ten Surprises in the New Hitler Movie” Letterman's “Top Ten Surprises in the New Hitler Movie.”

All Three Journalists on ABC's This Week
Denounce Tax Cut

A perfect model of liberal media bias was displayed by Sunday's This Week with all three journalists in the mainstream media denouncing a tax cut and the one radio talk show host, the only one who does not report news stories for a mainstream outlet, defending a tax cut from the hostile onslaught.

During the roundtable segment on the May 18 ABC show, host George Stephanopoulos marveled at how Bush won a tax cut vote in the Senate given the size of the deficit, how it's “weighted to the rich” and the public would “prefer” the money go to health care. Westwood One Radio talk show host Laura Ingraham countered each point and suggested that “class warfare” is a losing argument for Democrats, which prompted Nightline correspondent Michel Martin to fire back: “It's not about class warfare, it's about values.” Soon, Joe Klein of Time, fresh from writing a cover story on how Democrats can win, complained that “we have 50 states...and many cities that are in real trouble and the federal government could help them out by funding, you know, public works projects.”

(As cited in the May 14 CyberAlert, over a photo of FDR, Time’s cover story mourned: "Why They Don’t Make Democrats Like They Used To (And How to Fix It)." Time’s assigned adviser to Democrats, Joe Klein, declared inside: "Ever since the George McGovern disaster of 1972, the party has routinely chosen technocratic moderates for standard-bearers." Mondale and Dukakis were “moderates”? Klein also considered Bob Graham to be more conservative than President Bush and preposterously tagged Howard Dean as a “fiscal conservative.” For details: www.mediaresearch.org )

Stephanopoulos set up the May 18 discussion about how the Senate passed the “third largest” ever tax cut: “He did this in the face of three big arguments against the tax cut: That it's going to increase the deficit, that it's weighted to the rich and that the American people would prefer, you know, to spend the money on health care, education, other priorities. How does he do it?”

Ingraham suggested polls show most support the tax cut, that tax cut supporters should concede it probably will increase the deficit, but that doesn't matter economically, and that class warfare is not working since every parent will get $400 immediately, and the rich will get a bigger cut because the wealthy pay more taxes.

     To that, Martin retorted: “It's not about class warfare, it's about values. What's the appropriate use of this very rich country's resources? And I think the argument comes down to tax cuts for a segment of the population versus other services-”
     Ingraham: “But everyone's going to get a tax cut, everyone's going to get a tax cut.
     Klein insisted: “It's not only about values, it's about how serious you're going to be governance. I mean, this is the budgetary equivalent of a photo-op. We have absolutely no idea what's going to be in this tax bill when it comes out the other end of the sausage-making machinery. I wonder whether the Bush administration has thought through the consequences of each and every one of these taxes? I mean, you could have a tax package that might stimulate the economy. The one that came out of the Senate will not.”
     Ingraham: “How do you know that?”
     Klein: “Because it's targeted to a very few people.”
     Ingraham: “Everyone gets a tax cut under this proposal, everyone, everyone.”
     Martin: “Let me pull out my weekly scripture passage, which is 'where your treasure is so will your heart be also.' The argument is-”
     Ingraham: “Oh, spend our way out of our economic problems. It's not going to work.”
     Martin: “No, the argument is how do you best ensure national security, quality of life-”
     Ingraham: “Grow the economy.”
     Martin: “-quality of living. That's why it's an argument of values as the appropriate use of that, if indeed it will grow the economy, or do you spend it on something that will provide security across the board, which is something health care would provide.”
     Ingraham: “If this doesn't work after two years, in 2004 this election is going, if this isn't working George Bush is going to feel the pain, big time. If it's working, what are the Democrats going to say then?”
     Klein: “The last one didn't work. People got a $600 rebate.”
     Ingraham: “Hasn't even kicked in yet, two-thirds of it hasn't even kicked in yet, Joe.”
     Klein: “Laura, most economists believe that people save that money rather than spend it. If you want to juice the economy, there are ways you can do it. And government spending is an old Democratic
way-”
     Ingraham: “Oh, we're spending.”
     Klein: “-but at this point, but we're not spending on an awful lot of things and you have 50 states and cities, and many cities that are in real trouble and the federal government could help them out by funding, you know, public works projects.”

Public works projects -- just like those enacted by the last President Time magazine considered worth emulating.

NPR's Nina Totenberg Lambastes Tax Cut
as “Really Stupid”

NPR's Nina Totenberg denigrated the tax cut which passed the Senate as “really stupid,” not because the size was half of what President Bush advocated, but because it's still too big.

On Inside Washington over the weekend, Totenberg whined: “It's only on paper half of what he asked for because it assumes that they'll phase out the tax cuts in three years on dividends and that's not going to happen. So he's going to get most of what he wants in this tax bill. That's number one. And number two, the amount in this tax bill is about what the deficit is. I speak as the frugal one in my family and I think this is a really stupid way to run a budget.”

Texas Dems Who Fled Earn CNN's “Political
Play of the Week”

Democrats in Texas used extra-legal means to shut down the legislature and prevent the vote on a redistricting plan -- fleeing Austin to Oklahoma so they could avoid capture by Texas Rangers -- but the networks are still more interested in demonizing conservatives in Washington and treating the Democrats as heroes.

ABC News reporter Terry Moran lectured Press Secretary Ari Fleischer at Friday's White House briefing: “Is the President troubled at all that members of his own political party, at a time of war, days after Americans were killed in a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, would have the gall to use federal resources designed to protect the country against terrorists in order to pursue partisan political objectives?”

Catching up to Dan Rather from the night before, on Friday night, without having ever explained how current gerrymandering has resulted in a situation which Democrats control a majority of Texas U.S. House seats though Republicans candidates earn the most votes, NBC's Tom Brokaw focused on the supposed misuse of the Department of Homeland Security to track down the miscreant Democrats.

And CNN's Bill Schneider awarded the Texas Democrats the “Political Play of the Week,” as he marveled at how the “renegade representatives ended up looking like heroes."

Friday's CyberAlert explained: Democrats in Texas employed extra-legal means to thwart the will of the majority by leaving the state in order to prevent a quorum, but on Thursday night, CBS portrayed U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as the ogre by focusing on his supposed misuse of federal resources to track down the fleeing Democrats. Earlier, Bob McNamara made DeLay the heavy as he falsely referred to how “DeLay's redistricting Texas power play is designed to add as many as seven more GOP seats to a state congressional delegation Republicans already control.” CBS ignored how, as Fred Barnes explained on FNC, previous Democratic gerrymandering means that though the GOP captures the most House votes in Texas it has a minority of seats. CNN's Bruce Morton relayed how a left-wing columnist, unlabeled, charged: “These are Shiite Republicans.” For more: www.mediaresearch.org

ABC's Moran went into a tear about the subject at Friday's White House press briefing, MRC analyst Ken Shepherd noticed:

     Moran: “We went over this a little bit yesterday with Scott, but I wanted to ask you about it, as well. The use -- or abuse, I suppose -- of the Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center, now under the Department of Homeland Security, for partisan political purposes -- does the President support an investigation as to how, at a time of war, the Department of Homeland Security's resources could be abused like this by Republicans in Texas?”
     Fleischer: “Without accepting the premise on which you laid this out -- because I think the facts and the circumstances are all what need to be looked into -- I think you will find that the Department of Homeland Security does intend to look into the facts and circumstances of the request that they received.”
     Moran: “Is the President troubled at all that members of his own political party, at a time of war, days after Americans were killed in a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, would have the gall to use federal resources designed to protect the country against terrorists in order to pursue partisan political objectives?”
     Fleischer: “Well, again, I think that the facts and the circumstances involving any contacts that took place will be explored by the appropriate agency, in which this case is the Department of Homeland Security. They are doing that.”

Moran wasn't even able to convince Peter Jennings of the newsworthiness of his whining, since World News Tonight did nothing on it on Friday night, but on the May 16 NBC Nightly News, Tom Brokaw intoned:
“Now the latest on those Texas Democratic legislators who left the state rather than let a congressional redistricting plan they thought was unfair pass the state legislature. It turns out, the Texas Department of Public Safety tried to use the federal office of Homeland Security to find the Democrats. Texas officials placed an urgent call for assistance to Homeland Security officials saying a plane, being used by the Democrats, was lost or had crashed. Homeland official made phone calls searching for the plane, then referred the matter to the FAA. Homeland Security officials in Washington said the Inspector General will now investigate all of this.”

Earlier, on CNN's Inside Politics, MRC analyst Ken Shepherd noticed, Bill Schneider awarded the “Political Play of the Week” to the Texas Democrats.

     Schneider began: "Well, since when do you get the [political] play of the week for walking off the job? Since Texas Democrats did just that this week. Walking off the job can get you called some rude names in Texas."
     Sue Weddington, Texas GOP Chairman: "The majority of Texans see 'em as cowards."
     Schneider: "But somehow the renegade representatives ended up looking like heroes."
     Jim Dunnam, Chairman of the Texas House Democratic Caucus: "We weathered some troopers and we weathered some tornadoes, and we weathered Denny's."
     Schneider: "How did they make the walkout work? By choosing a terrific target."
     Dunnam: "We have a message for Tom DeLay: Don't mess with Texas."
     Schneider: "The walkout demonstrated what looked like a power play by Tom DeLay, trying to ram a bill through the Texas legislature that would redraw district lines to give Republicans at least four more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and not coincidentally, help DeLay keep his job as majority leader."
     Pete Gallego, Chairman of the Texas Hispanic Democratic Caucus: "Let me point out that last week, Congressman DeLay wasn't in Washington, attending to his duties as a national leader. He spent several days in Austin, and he missed at least 15 roll call votes as he took those days off to work on this redistricting effort."
     Schneider: "How's that for walking off the job? When the news got out that Texas authorities had followed up on DeLay's suggestion and asked the feds to help round up lawmakers on the lam, Democrats had a field day."
     Rep. Martin Frost (D-TX): "Tom Nixon DeLay. Not since Watergate, 30 years ago, has anyone tried to invoke federal law enforcement officials to resolve a political partisan dispute."
     Schneider: "On Friday, the Texas Democrats returned in triumph."
     Unnamed Democratic legislator during return celebration: "Oklahoma is okay, but we're glad we're back in Texas!"
     Schneider: "To claim the political play of the week. Texas Republicans accused the Democrats of abandoning the tradition of the Alamo, a serious charge in Texas. Texans are supposed to stay and fight. But you know, the defenders of the Alamo lost. The Democrats won.”

Thanks, in part, to media reinforcements.

FNC Expert Faults Military-Belittling
Stories About Lynch Rescue

Retired Army special operations Colonel David Hunt, Friday morning on FNC, denounced the Toronto Star and BBC stories that the U.S. military concocted a fairy tale about the dangers in rescuing of POW Jessica Lynch when, in fact all the armed men had left the hospital before they arrived as so they faced no danger or hostility.

“This is just poor reporting,” Hunt maintained on the May 16 Fox & Friends, “there’s nobody, no military former or current that they bothered to talk to.” Hunt asserted that “there were 25 to 30 guys, armed, both fedayeen and army, Iraqi military outside and inside the hospital.”

As highlighted in the May 8 CyberAlert, ABC and Peter Jennings picked up on the claims to illustrate more military incompetence: Unnecessarily breaking doorknobs. Recalling the rescue of POW Jessica Lynch, Jennings asserted: “Now we hear that it may have been less dangerous and maybe even less challenging than Central Command first told us.” David Wright noted that the U.S. “soldiers broke down doors in the intensive care unit,” but, he insisted, “they could have just asked where she was” since, people at the hospital told him, there were no Iraqi soldiers in the building. Over video of punched out doorknobs, Wright complained that “the hospital still bears the scars of that midnight raid. The administrators had to sell precious drugs to pay for the damage.” For more: www.mediaresearch.org

The next day's CyberAlert pinpointed a Toronto Star story as what spurred ABC: MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Thursday night inadvertently outed ABC's Peter Jennings as to how a piece on Wednesday's World News Tonight belittling the U.S. commando rescue of POW Jessica Lynch, because of how no Iraqi military were in the hospital, aired two days after a story with that theme ran in Jennings' hometown newspaper, the Toronto Star. But that Star story was not obsessed, as was ABC, with how commandos unnecessarily broke doors. Toronto Star reporter Mitch Potter mentioned broken doors just once in his article and that did not occur until the 20th paragraph. For more, and an except from, and a link to, the Toronto Star story: www.mediaresearch.org

Fast forward to Friday morning, May 16, and the MRC's Rich Noyes noticed that, prompted by a fresh BBC story tied to a then-upcoming weekend program on the subject, FNC brought aboard Hunt via phone from Maine.

     Tri-host E.D. Hill set him up, as taken down by MRC analyst Patrick Gregory: “The BBC is reporting that according to one Iraqi doctor that they’ve named that they interviewed, that nothing like that happened -- that all of the enemy had left the hospital two days before, that the American soldiers were shooting blanks, and that Jessica had no shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound, and it was all like a Hollywood movie.”
     Steve Doocy: “Stage managed.”
     Hill: “Yeah. What do you know?”
     Colonel David Hunt, retired: “There’s two things, the Toronto Star story and then the BBC, I think they’re playing off each other. People in Baghdad sell these stories. One, there were 25 to 30 guys, armed, both fedayeen and army, Iraqi military outside and inside the hospital. Then when Marines cordoned it off, chased off [inaudible] Seals and the Rangers took the hospital. Jessica, the only time that someone drove up to a guard, that was another accusation -- apparently somebody in an ambulance drove up to the Marines and offered $10,000 for information about Jessica. We did not put people in harm’s way for nothing. The guy I’m talking to is the first guy in the door. The one thing of the story is true, they did flex-cuff all of them, everyone they came in contact with in the raid, because that’s procedure, you flex-cuff everybody until you find out if they’re friend or foe.”
     Doocy: “Well you know what Colonel, maybe this doctor who has seen what happened to Mohammed the lawyer where he’s got, he’s here in the United States and he’s probably going to wind up with a movie deal, the Lynch’s are gonna end up with movie deals; maybe he’s come up with this contrary story to cash in on the Jessica Lynch story.”
     Hunt: “I don’t mind him coming up with any story; sometimes I’d [inaudible] expect it, some of these people. But the Toronto Star and the BBC to run it without even checking -- I mean they didn’t even check any military sources, and this is, unfortunately comes out the same time that the New York Times has their yellow journalism. This is just poor reporting. There’s nobody, no military former or current that they bothered to talk to, but if they had-”
     Hill: “You’re absolutely right. I’m looking at it, there’s not one attribution to U.S.”
     Hunt: “Our guys wound up killing about ten fedayeen outside the hospital and a few inside, armed Iraqis. Jessica was terribly brutalized as we’ll all find out later, but to suggest that we just did a raid/we didn’t have to, is flat wrong and very poor journalism. It didn’t happen that way.”
     Brian Kilmeade: “Colonel there’s no way to say it -- I mean that’s really insulting especially to a military guy like yourself, to find out that people would question the courage and veracity of military people in action, all the way up to the highest levels.”
     Hunt: “You come to kind of expect it of the BBC. They don’t even show the BBC on their own ships at war anymore. They did this in Bosnia to us. If you catch us making a mistake, that’s fair. You know and we all make bad decisions. To put it out this way, as if we didn’t do the raid, we did it just for publicity, they don’t even know the difference between a television camera crew, and that was a combat camera, there was a military camera crew that we used for pictures, for our own use, for our own after action reviews, our own see how we did type of stuff. That wasn’t a Hollywood production.”
     Hill: “In theater, would U.S. military soldiers ever use blanks?”
     Hunt: “Ha! No. Excuse me, I’m going to go in at night, into the bad guy’s country, you know what I’m so good-”
     Kilmeade: “Ambush alley.”
     Hunt: “I’m going to use paint guns. I’m going to use paint guns. I’m going to use blanks. I mean come on.”
     Doocy: “Right exactly, they almost make it sound like Barney Fife from the ‘Andy Griffith Show’ where he’s got the one bullet in his shirt pocket.”
     Hunt: “Exactly.”
     Doocy: “You know, ‘If you see any bad guys, just pull that out and put it in your rifle.”
     Hunt: “These are, the guys who did this, I mean the marines cordoned it off, we have these great Rangers and SEALS do the operations, they never use blanks, even on the training ranges. I mean, in combat? That’s how ludicrous these two stories....It's almost too easy to beat them up. They absolutely never had any military sources or even bothered to check.”

For the online version of the BBC's May 15 story: news.bbc.co.uk

For FNC's bio of Hunt: www.foxnews.com

Lange Lets Loose Against Bush Again in
Commencement Address

Actress Jessica Lange used her commencement address at Marlboro College in Vermont on Sunday, from which her daughter was graduating, to denounce the Bush administration. The Rutland Herald reported that “she likened the war in Iraq to Richard Nixon’s 'ruthless' bombing of Vietnam. She said executive orders and judicial appointments were eroding women’s rights.”

The Brattleboro Reformer relayed how she charged: "'Once again, the poorest and most disadvantage are the ones being left behind,' she said, a play on the title of the Bush administration's education law, No Child Left Behind.”

At the MRC's “DisHonors Awards: Roasting the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2002,” held in March, Lange won the “I’m Not a Geopolitical Genius But I Play One on TV Award” for this outburst at a September, 2002 film festival in Spain, as captured by the syndicated TV show, Inside Edition:
“I despise him [President George W. Bush]. I despise his administration and everything they stand for....To my mind the election was stolen by George Bush and we have been suffering ever since under this man’s leadership....There has to be a movement now to really oppose what he is proposing because it’s unconstitutional, it’s immoral and basically illegal....It is an embarrassing time to be an American. It really is. It’s humiliating.”

For a rundown of the DisHonors event and RealPlayer videos of all of the award category quotes: www.mediaresearch.org

Back to the Sunday afternoon commencement in Marlboro, Vermont, an excerpt from the May 19 story by Rutland Herald Reporter Peter Crabtree:

In a speech that mixed the personal and the political, actress Jessica Lange urged the Marlboro College Class of 2003 to battle injustice while remaining alive to the moment Sunday.

A Hollywood star by way of rural Minnesota, Lange quoted another artist from that state when conferring her blessings on the 74 graduates, one of her whom was her daughter.

“I wish you all the courage to have an adventurous heart,” Lange told an overflow crowd at the Person’s Auditorium. “And as Dylan said, 'May you stay forever young.’”...

Shura Lange Baryshnikov, whose father, dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, attended the graduation ceremony, wrote about the role of women in the United States, with an emphasis on issues surrounding motherhood.

Lange cited that project when telling an anecdote about filming a movie recently in Montgomery, Ala. When returning from the set, she passed a strip mall that contained a day-care center. A sign outside the center boasted that it was open until midnight.

“It made me very sad,” Lange said.

Lange said she felt for both the children at the center and the parents forced to consign them there so they could most likely work minimum-wage jobs.

“Something’s really terribly wrong,” Lange said, noting that the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty among major nations.

Lange went on to condemn the Bush administration’s foreign and domestic policies. She likened the war in Iraq to Richard Nixon’s “ruthless” bombing of Vietnam. She said executive orders and judicial appointments were eroding women’s rights.

The public schools, meanwhile, are being forced to meet tough new standards at the same time that Washington is denying them the resources they need. As for the environment, the national forests are being logged at an alarming rate.

“The list goes on and on and on and on,” Lange said. “Now is the time to be vigilant. Now is the time to act. This is the world you are inheriting.”

While she urged the graduates to take social action, Lange also offered them some advice with a Buddhist flavor.

“Just be present,” she said. “Don’t be rigid in your expectations.”...

Sounding like Dylan again, Lange urged her audience to be “receptive to the winds of change.”

“Everything is transient. Everything is constantly changing,” Lange said. “The only thing we really have is now.”...

END of Excerpt

For the story in full: www.rutlandherald.com

An excerpt from the May 19 Brattleboro Reformer story by Daniel Barlow:

Criticism of President Bush, hope for a better future and repeated odes to the quickly changing times marked the 56th commencement ceremony at Marlboro College Sunday as the school awarded 74 degrees.

The ceremony, which featured a speech by Academy Award-winning actress Jessica Lange, was also the last for college president Paul LeBlanc, who announced last month he would step down after seven years....

The big draw of the day was Lange, whose daughter, Shura Baryshnikov graduated from the college that day with a bachelor's degree in American studies and women's studies.

Lange compared the graduating seniors of today to where she was after finishing college in 1972. Then, the Vietnam War was in its seventh year and President Nixon had authorized bombs that killed thousands of civilians all in the name of stopping the communists.

Today, she said, President Bush authorizes the dropping of bombs to kill thousands in the name of stopping Saddam Hussein.

But Iraq is not the only battlefield in the world right now, she said. Women's reproductive rights, civil liberties and the health and education of children all over the world are under attack, she said.

Lange said she recently drove past a child care center in Minnesota and saw a sign saying "Now open until midnight." She said the sight made her feel bad for the children who are raised without seeing their parents and for the parents who have to work menial jobs in order to survive.

"Once again, the poorest and most disadvantage are the ones being left behind," she said, a play on the title of the Bush administration's education law, No Child Left Behind....

END of Excerpt

For the story in its entirety: www.reformer.com

Notice any differing facts in the two news articles?

Rutland Herald: “Lange cited that project when telling an anecdote about filming a movie recently in Montgomery, Ala. When returning from the set, she passed a strip mall that contained a day-care center. A sign outside the center boasted that it was open until midnight.

     Brattleboro Reformer: “Lange said she recently drove past a child care center in Minnesota and saw a sign saying "Now open until midnight."

     Alabama or Minnesota? Their climates are so similar! Either one reporter misquoted her, or she sees a lot of day care centers that are open late.

Marlboro College's Web site, which may at some point post the text of Lange's remarks: www.marlboro.edu

FNC's Newswatch Discusses Two Topics
in CyberAlert Last Week

You read it here first. FNC's Fox Newswatch did segments on Saturday about two topics first raised in CyberAlerts last week.

-- The FNC announcer plugged an upcoming segment: “ABC's Diane Sawyer says what Jayson Blair did couldn't happen on television. Could it? Did it?”

From the May 13 CyberAlert: ABC's Diane Sawyer contended on Monday's Good Morning America that the Jason Blair/New York Times type of fabrication “is much less likely to happen” in broadcast journalism “because you've got so many people working on every story that there are more people to ask questions.” But that doesn't keep viewers from getting fabricated stories produced by groups of TV producers and reporters working in concert, such as Dateline NBC's exploding pick up trucks or the incident involving Sawyer herself, ABC producers participating in a scheme to make Food Lion look bad by working with disgruntled union workers. See: www.mediaresearch.org

-- Host Eric Burns set up a subsequent segment: “First, filmmaker Michael Moore blasted President Bush for the war in Iraq at the Academy Awards. Now he's told interviewer Bob Costas that the President knows where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but refuses to go after him because the Saudis are providing money to bin Laden and the Saudis are our allies.”

From the May 12 CyberAlert: To the astonishment of Bob Costas, Friday night on HBO, far-left crank/movie producer Michael Moore claimed that the Bush administration “absolutely” knows where Osama bin Laden is located and doesn't go after him “because he's funded by their friends in Saudi Arabia!” Moore speculated: “Do you think that Osama bin Laden planned 9-11 from a cave in Afghanistan? I can't get a cell signal from here to Queens.” See: www.mediaresearch.org

SNL Mocks NY Times Ad: “I Like the Fabricated
Interviews...”

Saturday Night Live's mock newscast, “Weekend Update,” featured a take-off on the New York Times radio and TV ads featuring a wife recounting, as she orders home delivery, which sections she and her husband enjoy on Sunday morning.

Tina Fey, held her closed hand to her ear to suggest talking on the phone and Jimmy Fallon, playing her husband, leaned into the shot. Fey then joked: “Hi, I'd like to start getting home delivery of the Sunday New York Times. I like the fabricated interviews, he goes straight for the plagiarized articles.”

Letterman's “Top Ten Surprises in the
New Hitler Movie”

From the May 16 Late Show with David Letterman, prompted by the CBS movie, Hitler: The Rise of Evil, the “Top Ten Surprises in the New Hitler Movie.” Late Show Web page: www.cbs.com

10. Small mustache result of practical joke by drunken fraternity buddies

9. Hitler is captured after being recognized from deck of "Nazi Most Wanted" playing cards

8. He trademarked the word "Hitler-riffic"

7. Hitler tries to use his newfound powers to help Morpheus destroy the Matrix

6. Evil manifests itself in young Hitler after he is voted off "German Idol"

5. Hitler replaced by guest-Fuhrers during bout with Shingles

4. Favorite food? Fish sticks

3. Hitler furiously stocking bunker with delicious chocolate Yoo-Hoo

2. Scene where CBS fires executive who decided to make a Hitler movie

1. Middle name: Dwayne

Part one of CBS's Hitler movie aired on Sunday night. Part two will air on Tuesday night.

-- Brent Baker

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