On Sunday's 60 Minutes on CBS, correspondent Bob Simon noted the eighth anniversary of the war in Iraq by describing how "questions still remain as to why the United States launched the war in the first place. The Bush administration said it was because of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. But there were no such weapons." In the segment that followed, Simon interviewed Rafid Alwan - also know by his code-name 'Curve Ball' - a former Iraqi chemical engineer who claimed the Hussein regime was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Before the interview Simon implored viewers to "ponder how... continue reading
Good Morning America on Monday featured two liberal experts to explain the escalating crisis in Japan, but didn't identify the leftist background of either. Co-host George Stephanopoulos identified Joe Cirincione as someone "who has also spent many years inside the U.S. government dealing with nuclear issues." The ABC anchor failed to mention that Cirincione previously worked for the liberal Center for American Progress and was the director of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. (Stephanopoulos only explained Cirincione's current job, President of the Ploughshares Fund, a group dedicated to achieving a "achieve a safe, secure, nuclear weapon-free world.") At one point,... continue reading
ABC's Bill Weir inaccurately lectured Friday night: "Consider Japan's state of the art undersea sensors and tsunami gates, protecting key ports, while just last month, our House of Representatives voted to slash funding for the Hawaiian tsunami warning center that issued last night's alarm." Then on Saturday's World News , reporter Clayton Sandell found it newsworthy to highlight how "Democrats accuse Republicans of being irresponsible for proposing budget cuts to NOAA, the federal agency that provides forecasts and early warnings of natural disasters." Sandell cued up a California Democrat with a loaded question: "NOAA's budget gets cut, are people's lives... continue reading
On Thursday's Newsroom, CNN's Ali Velshi claimed that Rep. Peter King has a " seemingly strange obsession with Islam and Islamists, or whatever you want to call it ," given the lead up and the first day of hearings looking into the radicalization of American Muslims. Velshi also bizarrely stated that " I don't quite understand how when you put an -ist at the end of it [Islamism], it changes the subject ." The anchor discussed the hearings with former FBI agent Foria Younis, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, and former Catholic turned Episcopal priest Rev. Alberto Cutie during... continue reading
Actor Alan Cumming ( IMDb page ), who was born in Britain and plays the scheming campaign manager " Eli Gold" on CBS's The Good Wife , told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week: "I wanted to become a U.S. citizen so that I could vote for [Barack] Obama." Cumming also has a voice role in the upcoming The Smurfs movie. The Post-Gazette 's Patricia Sheridan explained in the interview published March 7 : "Cumming, 46, is a citizen of both Great Britain and the U.S. Once married to a woman - he's now with a man - Mr. Cumming has... continue reading
Hundreds if not thousands of people are dead due to a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. But at least it gave Barack Obama an avenue to remind everyone he was born in Hawaii. That's the silver lining for MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "Was this sort of a good opportunity for the president to remind everybody that he grew up in the United States and Hawaii?" That's a question that Chris Matthews posed to MSNBC host and White House corresondent Chuck Todd about President Obama taking a question from a Japanese reporter during a news conference earlier today at the White... continue reading
On Thursday's CBS Evening News, following a report that portrayed congressional hearings on radical Islam as bigoted political theater, correspondent Seth Doane profiled a Muslim family in Tennessee and suggested they were indirect victims of the testimony on Capitol Hill: "The Sbenaty family is getting tired of defending their religion." Anchor Katie Couric introduced Doane's report this way: "...most of the more than two and a half million Muslims living in this country want it known they are patriotic Americans." As if the hearings somehow accused all American Muslims of being unpatriotic. Doane began by proclaiming: "Every morning at his... continue reading
On Thursday's CBS Evening News, congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes implied that the House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims was simply a political show put on by committee chairman Peter King: "Ignoring calls from Democrats to cancel his hearing...King embarked on the inquiry in a room newly decorated with fiery images from 9/11." Cordes later declared that "King's own past assertion that most U.S. mosques are run by radicals" resulted in "poisoning the atmosphere" of the hearing. She remarked on how King's "relations with Muslim leaders there [in his Long Island, NY district] deteriorated after 9/11."... continue reading
CNN's Deborah Feyerick performed a cut-and-paste job on Thursday's Newsroom by partially re-running a biased report from September 2010 on the apparent rise of "Islamophobia" in the United States. Just as before, all but one of Feyerick's sound bites during her report came from those who were worried about the supposed " intensifying hostility and rise in hate speech " against Muslims. Anchor Suzanne Malveaux introduced the correspondent's report, which ran 40 minutes into the 12 pm Eastern hour, by putting it in the context of Rep. Peter King's hearings into the radicalization of American Muslims: "King says his radicalization... continue reading
An NPR correspondent recently went incognito for a sting operation aimed at exposing U.S. border agents who target Muslims for "interrogation" at the Canadian border. Employing the same tactics used by James O'Keefe to bring down top NPR executives, counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston draped herself in a headscarf, drove to the northern border, and recorded her encounter with a U.S. border agent. [Click here for audio.] "An agent from Customs and Border Protection was sitting in what looked like a little toll booth," recalled Temple-Raston on the March 10 Morning Edition, who gave the agent no indication that he was... continue reading