Itz News to Me

Gleen Greenwald has a post up about how the corporate chiefs got together to put an end to the on-air O’Reilly-Olbermann feud.

Naturally this has him up in arms about corporate censorship of the news. But Greenwald intentionally avoids the huge elephant in the room: GE’s use of its media networks to push its corporate interests. If I asked you to name the cable network best known for its sycophantic coverage of the Obama administration, which one would you choose? MSNBC, of course. And which network recently hosted an entire day of basically sitting on Obama’s lap and asking him to tell them a story? NBC.

Who owns both of these networks? GE.

So it’s pretty safe to say that GE is uniquely pro-Obama. But why? Obama’s anti-business policies and regularly scheduled class warfare against CEOs wasn’t exactly a closely-held secret to anyone who actually did their pre-election homework, and there’s no way GE didn’t do its homework before going all in for Obama. So then what could explain the obvious bias?

How about GE’s wind turbines powering Obama’s energy plan?
How about GE’s healthymagination being the backbone of ObamaCare?
How about the bailout of GE’s finance arm?
How about Obama killing a proposed competitor to its Joint Strike Fighter engine?

How many other ways is GE in bed with the Obama administration? I found these in about 10 minutes of Googling. How much could an actual news organization with dedicated reporters actually dedicated to finding out the truth uncover?

Their TV audience is dwindling quickly on both networks, and GE knows it. Why not go out with a bang and use their control of those networks to promote its other lines of business? And if that means getting in bed with the Obama administration in order to corruptly obtain highly lucrative government contracts, why not?

Especially when pundits like Gleen Greenwald are so eager to look the other way so long as GE keeps pimping for Barack Obama…

Popularity: 22%

A Minneapolis man was boarded up inside his house by the folks at Fannie Mae. They thought the house had been vacated after it had been foreclosed upon, but no one bothered to actually check. If this had happened under the Bush administration is there really any doubt that this would have been proof positive that the Bush administration hated poor people?

Popularity: 9%

Obama’s most important constituency, the media, are showing signs of restlessness with his brazen lying about the effects of his “stimulus.”

Could it be that The Annointed One has finally gone too far? With all these people out of work, there’s only so much lying that the media can cover. The latest reports show that the true unemployment rate is 16.4%, and Obama’s not giving the media a sufficiently plausible explanation to give their readers/viewers as to why it keeps getting worse instead of better.

If Obama loses the media, his presidency is effectively over.

Popularity: 8%

It turns out that the high-paying, super-important job that Barack Obama gave up in order to pursue a short stint as a “community organizer” was far less than he made it out to be. In fact, it was so much less than he made it out to be that it was: nothing at all like what he described whatsoever.

He was a low-level flunky at a research sweat-shop - nowhere near the mover and shaker he made himself out to be in order to show what a swell guy he was to give it all up in pursuit of his ultra-altruistic goal of organizing communities.

 So now that this vital and revealing part of his biography is revealed to be a complete fabrication, we’re going to see the media get right on investigating how much of the rest of that biography is a work of fiction too, right?

Popularity: 20%

I know it’s thin gruel, but I can’t help but speculate if Andrew Sullivan’s bosses at The Atlantic have suggested that he take a few days off - whether he likes it or not…

After a week of breathlessly “reporting” every kind of speculative slur against Sarah Palin at the behest of David Axelrod and the Obama campaign - each and every one of which was subsequently debunked with some actual fact-checking, his blog has gone uncharacteristically silent for over 24 hours now. His last post was a view from a window with the simple title “The View From Your Window” - reminiscent of the kind of pouting a child does when his mother grounds him and sends him to his room.

The Atlantic has been taking some well-deserved abuse from bloggers for continuing to write paychecks for a guy whose writing tends to remind one of a gossipy teenage girl engaged in a verbal slapfight with her rival over the star quarterback (that is when he’s not indulging himself in outright anti-Semitism or narcissistic back-patting). The only thing which separates him from those anonymous Kos diarists whose work is periodically disappeared down the memory hole after it becomes an embarrassment even to them is The Atlantic masthead.

It would show the first moment of good judgment from The Atlantic’s management since the Palin onslaught began if this is indeed the case, but only time will tell if this is anything more than rank speculation on my part…

Popularity: 22%

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 71% believe that reporters try to help their favorite candidates with favorable coverage….

Fewer than 1 in 6 believe that reporters are even trying to be unbiased. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of people willing to buy what they’re selling…

Three guesses as to which candidate they believe is being shown the most favoritism…

Popularity: 9%

Obama cited his great-uncle’s part in the liberation of Auschwitz (now corrected to Buchenwald after getting busted for stretching the truth yet again), in his Memorial Day remarks….The question that the media needs to ask, but won’t of course: was your great-uncle a “typical white person” like your grandmother?

Popularity: 10%

More and more stories like this are surfacing, and men are starting to take notice…and righteous offense.

There’s a big thick line between women achieving equality of the sexes and adopting an unsubtle outright anti-male attitude. That line was crossed some time ago, and I’m pretty sure that the feminists who thought/think it’s funny aren’t going to like it when the men inevitably begin to seriously push back against the anti-male bias prevalent today.

Advertisers and the mainstream media will soon enough find out that women aren’t the only ones with their hands on the household wallets. When enough of them start to feel the pinch, maybe they’ll rethink their attitudes. I’m not holding my breath though…

Popularity: 19%

…so says David Lightman of McClatchy Newspapers….

Never mind that Obama is a neo-Marxist…

Never mind that Obama thinks that I’m a bitter, gun-loving, Jesus-nut too stupid to figure out things for myself…

Never mind that Obama wouldn’t even be a U.S. senator were it not for the fact that he was the last man standing after scandal eliminated a rival that would have easily dusted him in an actual election…

Never mind that he doesn’t have a single legislative accomplishment to show for his time in the U.S. Senate….

Never mind that he can’t bring himself to actually denounce the idea that the U.S. brought 9/11 on itself or that the government created AIDS to kill colored people…(He only denounced what he called “controversial statements.” He never specified which statements. His lawerly parsing wasn’t an accident.)

Never mind that he thinks I am gullible enough to believe he belonged to a church for twenty years and had no idea what they stood for…

Never mind that he thinks it’s OK to hold fundraisers at the home of an admitted domestic terrorist…

Never mind that he’s involved in corrupt land deals with enemy agents and political fixers….

Never mind that he thinks people who wear flag pins are false patriots…

Never mind that his wife is a bigot of the first order…

Never mind that his first instinct, when he got in political trouble, was to throw the grandmother who loved and raised him under the bus…

Never mind that he is unable to make the distinction between having a difference of opinion and planting a bomb…

Never mind that he is the favorite candidate of Hamas and the Iranian regime…

I haven’t even gotten to the color of his skin because I could care less. Unlike Obama and Lightman, I judge people on the content of their character. I have seen Obama’s character and found it sadly lacking.

I could go on for pages, but why should I? After all, according to both Obama and David Lightman, the only reason I wouldn’t vote for him is because I’m clinging to my fear and dislike for “people who don’t look like me.”

Too bad neither of them would ever have the courage to say it to my face.

Popularity: 16%

For all the current talk about problems within Republican ranks, the truth is that when it comes to outright fraud and corruption, nobody does it like Democrats. From mafia-controlled unions to backroom politics, the biggest local “machines” such as the infamous Tammany Hall which controlled New York politics have always been Democratic. But that was the past you say. Lots of people and organizations have unsavory pasts that they’ve moved beyond. True. It’s just the Democrats aren’t one of them.

Witness New Jersey. In what at first blush seems just another local politician gone bad story, the money quote is literally the last sentence in the article:

More than 100 public officials in the state have been convicted on federal corruption charges in the last five years.

How many? More than 100. Convicted. Not charged, convicted.

If there had been more than 100 Republicans convicted across the country in the last five years, the media would be pounding on them day and night. But there hasn’t been a peep about New Jersey. Why? Because they’re Democrats. And the silence is deafening. Where are 60 Minutes, Dateline NBC, 20/20, the New York Times, or the Washington Post on this story? An entire state subverted by corrupt party politics at every level right down to the school boards, and no one thinks that’s national news?

Media defenders always conveniently ignore how many stories don’t get run because of media bias. There’s no bias? Really. Then defend this….

Popularity: 19%