On Sunday's Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer asked columnist Kathleen Parker about her views on the tea party: "the rhetoric that's coming out from the right side, especially from the tea party....you think it may be dangerous." Parker replied: "this heated rhetoric and some of these words...that are pretty loaded, 'reload,' 'targeting'...there's a danger there." Parker, syndicated with the Washington Post Writers Group, claimed she was not casting negative aspersions on the whole political movement: "I'm not saying the tea party people are violent or racist or any of that....I'm not saying that the tea partiers are... continue reading
MSNBC's Donny Deutsch kicked off a week-long segment on Monday about "America the Angry" and hinted that the "rageaholics" in this country could create another Oklahoma City-style bombing. After one guest mentioned Joe Stack, the man who flew a plane into an IRS building in February, Deutsch wrongly derided, " I don't know whether he was Republican or Democrat. I'm assuming he was probably a Republican. " In fact, Stack's manifesto , found after his death, included rants against capitalism, George W. Bush and religion. These are hardly the standard comments of a Republican. At times during the interview, Deutsch,... continue reading
New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, the paper's main reporter on the Tea Party beat , dropped all pretense of fairness in her story for the front of the Sunday Week in Review, " Tea Party Supporters Doing Fine, but Angry Nonetheless ." Sometimes it reads like a parody, with references to Joe McCarthy as a conservative hero. It all starts with that chin-leading headline, rehashing the Times' favorite word to describe the Tea Party movement (hint: it's not the word "fine"). An accompanying photo showed a single "Tea Party activist" at a rally near Albany, N.Y. Where were the... continue reading
MSNBC on Monday repeatedly promoted Barack Obama as a pro-Second Amendment President and chastised gun-rights activists for "worrying" so much over this issue. News Live host Monica Novotny talked to Skip Coryell, the founder of the Second Amendment march on Washington and complained, " What are you guys worried about? She then touted, "Our political unit today was reminding us in the First Read that President Obama has expanded gun rights more than any other Democratic President when he signed legislation that, among other things, allows people to carry weapons in national parks." Host Tamron Hall repeated the talking point... continue reading
"In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed rhetoric of the '90s is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator in the blast," charged Time magazine Senior Writer Richard Lacayo in the May 8, 1995 edition of the news weekly, the first quote cited in a " Special Purveyors of Hate & Division Issue " published at the time of the MRC's Notable Quotables newsletter. We also featured this gem from Bryant Gumbel on the April 25, 1995 Today show: The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed... continue reading
Friday follies. Before the weekend ends, two quotes from journalists worth noting made on Friday night shows: ♦ On MSNBC's Hardball, NBC's Chuck Todd forwarded the notion that if Florida Governor Charlie Crist drops out of the Republican primary - where polls put him way behind conservative Marco Rubio - and wins the Senate seat as an independent, "he becomes the most powerful Senator in the United States Senate" and "he becomes, probably, the viable third party candidate in the middle in the country" for President in 2012. ♦ A few hours later on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher,... continue reading
Catching up with an HBO sports documentary which ran several times in March: ' Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals ,' painted Boston Celtics basketball star Larry Bird as the victim of a racist national milieu exacerbated by President Ronald Reagan - a formulation which relied on the expert assessment of a journalist who a few years ago contended that if only Senator Ted Kennedy hadn't killed her, he "would have brought comfort...in her old age" to Mary Jo Kopechne. Over video zooming in on Reagan at his Oval Office desk, HBO's narrator intoned: But as Magic enjoyed his... continue reading
"Watch your words," fill-in ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas scolded in teasing Friday's World News, as she trumpeted: "Former President Clinton warns harsh anti-government talk could lead to violent acts, like the Oklahoma City bombing." Introducing the subsequent story, Vargas identified talk radio and Tea Party participants as the culprits: There is a lot of attention tonight on comments made by former President Bill Clinton, who has weighed in on the angry anti-government rhetoric, ringing out from talk radio to Tea Party rallies. He warns that sometimes firing people up with caustic comments can have unintended and dire consequences. Jake Tapper,... continue reading
MSNBC's Peter Alexander on Friday eagerly agreed with a journalist who attacked Sarah Palin as "Larry the Cable Guy, minus the class and intelligence." Talking to Cathy Areu, contributing editor of the Washington Post magazine, Alexander gushed, " It's a good line ." [Audio available here .] As first reported on NewsBusters , Areu slammed the former Alaskan governor on CNN's Headline News network on Wednesday. Playing to MSNBC's left-wing audience, an onscreen graphic playfully asked, "Palin the Cable Gal?" After explaining that Bill O'Reilly asked Areu to come on his show and defend her remarks, Alexander sympathized, "Areu said... continue reading
The April 19 Newsweek cover that's shamelessly selling the "remarkable" tale of our economic recovery also promises a story on "Hate on the Right." In fact the word "HATE" takes up half a page, white letters on a black background, with the subhead "Antigovernment extremists are on the rise - and on the march." Pictures illustrating the article strangely connect Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin with 1930's socialists. The caption read: "Huey Long castigated the rich and Father Coughlin denounced Jews in the 1930s. Today, the microphones belong to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin." (Beck's previous impassioned rebuttal of the... continue reading