June 3, 2011 by Michael Eden
A couple of links scream about the rabid left wing media bias. The first:
Diane Sawyer Steals Hannity, Fox Credit on WrightThe second:
By Jeffrey Lord on 6.2.11 @ 8:59AM
It was so brazen it was amazing.
ABC Anchor Diane Sawyer sits across from Bill O’Reilly last night and casually says that ABC broke the story about the tapes featuring the sermons of now radioactive and decidedly ex-Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright.
“You’re talking to the network…Obama White House remembers this… that broke the Jeremiah Wright tapes.”
The implication?
ABC News was Johnny-on-the-spot on the story of then-Senator Obama’s now infamous — and ex — pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In March of 2008.
Remember that date. March — 2008. Here’s the link to the story, filed on March 13 by ABC’s Brian Ross
This remark came about in the course of a conversation with O’Reilly in which Sawyer, discussing the role of ABC News in the last presidential campaign, insisted that her network was not populated by liberals who tilted the news leftward. O’Reilly had cited a study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs on the network news coverage of the Obama-McCain campaign that showed the tilt in favorable coverage for Obama over McCain as follows:
Obama McCain
CBS 73% 31%
NBC 56% 16%
ABC 57% 42%
ABC had fared best of the three broadcast networks, but the point of liberal media bias — the kind of reporting that dates as far back as the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign — stood. So O’Reilly persisted.
And out popped the above statement on Jeremiah Wright.
Let’s be clear here. Sawyer used the word “tapes” — and strictly speaking she is correct.
The problem comes with the context — in which she is clearly trying to imply that ABC was the proverbial dog with a bone in uncovering the relationship of Wright to his famous congregant, and what the implications might be for the country if a man who sat in Wright’s pews for 20 years listening to Wright’s leftist political rants were elected president.
Bluntly put — this is poppycock.
The man — and the network — that did the background research on this was, yes indeed, Sean Hannity and Fox News.
On February 28, 2007 — over a full year before ABC first aired its Wright story — Hannity had located columnist Erik Rush, who had written an article on Senator Obama and his church. He put Rush on the air that night.
The very next night, Hannity had managed to corral Wright himself on his Fox show with liberal Alan Colmes. Here’s the clip.
Out poured the tale of Wright’s devotion to Black Liberation Theology and the radical writings of James Cone and Dwight Hopkins. From this initial work the connections of Wright to Louis Farrakhan and Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi were uncovered and more.
And on it went.
The role of ABC News here?
Zip, nada, zero.
And yet plain as can be, there sits Diane Sawyer, the anchor of ABC News, on the set of Fox’s O’Reilly Factortrying to pretend ABC was a prime mover in Hannity’s story — a Fox story that surely would never have seen the light of day anywhere had it not been for Hannity’s tenacity in digging it out and putting it on TV. And, as regular viewers will recall, being snickered at while doing it — snickering that stopped when Obama finally felt so much pressure on Wright he stopped going to the church and felt the need to publicly rebuke the man he had once said was like an “uncle” to him.
Ms. Sawyer insisted her network would be providing “fantastic coverage” of the 2012 race, citing the liberal ex-Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos as a key member of her team.
If this is an example of the work to come from ABC News on the 2012 presidential campaign… well, we report, you decide.
BILL O’REILLY, HOST: In the “Back of the Book” segment tonight: As we reported last night, elements of the national liberal media have begun their campaign to re-elect President Obama. The attacks on Fox News are being stepped up, and we used an example of NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell deriding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for criticizing Mr. Obama.And as bad as it appears to be with the tilt in favorable coverage for liberal Barack Obama for, well, somewhat less liberal John McCain – (and here is the result of the study again):
Here now to talk about the Obama advantage in the media, Fox News political analyst Charles Krauthammer, who is in Washington this evening. So how much of an advantage? Because in my lifetime covering politics, 35 years now, I’ve never seen a media as rabidly invested in a president as the liberal national media is in Mr. Obama. Have you?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well, I think that is true, and you can see it in a Pew study, Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism that they did in 2008 election. They found that of the three cable networks, Fox played it absolutely right down the middle, the same amount of favorability to McCain as to Obama. CNN three times as favorable to Obama as to McCain; MSNBC 5 to 1. So, I mean, and that was four years ago. Interesting, to give you an idea of how biased the media is, when it issued a press release on that study, Bill, it played it as CNN was the cable norm, with MSNBC on one side and Fox on the other deviating from the norm. The norm being the pro-Obama bias of CNN, rather than the norm that any objective American would say, which is what Fox has done, which was to play it right down the middle.
O’REILLY: Sure. Now, there was another study done by the Center for Media and Public Affairs that showed the network broadcasts — CBS, ABC and NBC — were 68 percent positive for Obama, Senator Obama, then-Senator Obama, 32 percent negative. For John McCain, it was the reverse: 36 positive, 64 negative. So, my contention is that nothing is going to change this time around. That the national TV media and the big urban newspapers, like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, will all be trying to get President Obama re-elected. So the question then becomes: How much of an advantage is it for the president?
KRAUTHAMMER: Well, it’s a major advantage, but you’ve got to remember this. The left, the Democrats always have the press on their side. They’ve had it for 40 years. Nonetheless, the Republicans have won the presidency seven out of the last 11 elections, and that’s because what Republicans have, what conservatives have is the country, which is a center-right country, has remained so almost unchangingly for four decades. So what the media bias does is it slightly — it gives an advantage. It’s a major advantage, but it’s undoing the deficit that Democrats and liberals already have because it’s a country that is not essentially conducive to a liberal message.
Obama McCain- I believe it is actually FAR worse than that.
CBS 73% 31%
NBC 56% 16%
ABC 57% 42%
The reason I say that is there’s an implicit assumption that isn’t true; namely, that both John McCain and Barack Obama had exactly the same negative baggage or positive qualities. As an example, if Tom and Dick had pretty much the exact same record, and the press covered Dick more favorably than Tom, you’d certainly be able to show bias.
But what if Dick had a long history of radical associations, beginning with communist Frank Marshall Davis, and including racist un-American bigots such as Jeremiah Wright and terrorists such as William Ayers? What if Dick had all the political baggage of a Chicago thug, including dirty deals with criminal scumbags such as Tony Rezko? What if Dick’s wife had all KINDS of dirty baggage? What if Dick could be documented to have a radical history of being a communist? Just as a couple of examples? Would it be fair or legitimate to expect the coverage to be evenly “favorable” versus “unfavorable,” or would FAIR and OBJECTIVE coverage have skewed dramatically against Dick???
In the case of Barack Obama, the guy who deserved virtually ALL the negative coverage got virtually NONE. Versus war hero John McCain who should have received very little unfavorable coverage and got virutally nothing BUT???
And that same overwhelming media bias that got Obama an undeserved victory and the presidency in 2008 is just as biased today in defending the failure’s record.
