The View co-host Joy Behar offered her political expertise to explain the conservative opposition to John McCain: Conservatives support “torture” and are upset by McCain’s opposition to it. On Monday’s show Behar quoted how Ann Coulter “picked a predictably offensive reason to oppose McCain. Quote, from Ann, ‘he has led the fight against torture at Guantanamo.’

President Bush’s fiscal 2009 budget proposal calls for a 7.5 percent hike in Defense spending and a 5 percent jump in spending for Medicare and Medicaid, but while CBS anchor Katie Couric on Monday night correctly stated that Pentagon spending would “rise” in the Bush plan, she erroneously asserted “spending on Medicare and Medicaid would go down.” Similarly, while ABC’s Martha Raddatz cited the call for an “increase” in DOD’s budget, she falsely reported: “Medicare and Medicaid would be cut by almost $200 billion.”

Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent and Tel Aviv Bureau Chief, has been known to hail Palestinians as “victims” before. He has also been known often to blame Israel for all the ills suffered by Palestinians, so Fletcher is an expert at assigning blame while excusing the behavior of Palestinians. Here is a story that fits in perfectly with Fletcher’s penchant for blaming everyone but the guilty party along with extolling the supposed victimhood of the Palestinians. 

These are some rather eye-opening facts: Since the start of the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sacrifice has been enormous. In the time period from the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 through now, we have lost over 3000 military personnel to enemy action and accidents.

The recent decision by Fox News Network to not allow Rep. Ron Paul to participate in their New Hampshire debate Sunday night is nothing short of censorship and media bias. We have all come to expect this type of behavior from the three major networks and most newspapers. However, Fox News has billed itself as being “fair and balanced” and uses the slogan “We report...you decide”. Unfortunately, when it comes to truly conservative candidate Ron Paul, Fox News does not want to report his views nor do they want us to decide.

Fox News has long been considered a beacon to those that distrust televised liberal media, meaning every channel other than Fox. One of the indicators of the station’s right-leaning bent is that it has, for the most part, gotten the ‘War on Terrorism’ correct. However, with the undue influence of a Saudi Prince related to militant causes and with this month’s acquisition of Beliefnet, a religious resource website that proudly promotes radical Islam, signs show that the war coverage may soon be taking a turn for the worse.

Our seventh annual recognition of the most skewed and biased coverage of the Mideast conflict.

Long-time gossip columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, Michael Sneed, was one of the first to announce that the son of Chicago’s Mayor Daley volunteered as a private in the U.S. Army in 2004 after successfully attaining his MBA from the University of Chicago. That was interesting reporting, that such a big city mayor’s son would join the Army like a regular guy, of course, but has Sneed now taken her “exclusives” a step too far? On Dec. 11th, Sneed reported(1) that Patrick Daley is being deployed overseas. Has this somewhat specific news endangered his life and/or that of his fellow soldiers now that the enemy has been told that the son of a famous politician is on his way to a specific theater of action as well as being told a targeted window of departure?

In another arrogant piece from a “professional” journalist claiming that Internet journalism is “dangerous,” one where the writer imagines that he is somehow the personification of truth in “reporting,” we get yet another screed on the theme that ‘they’ are the only ones that should be allowed to be called “journalists.” And this one is a hoot, too. In an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, former journo and current professor David Hazinski seems to imagine that it’s the job of the “news industry” to “monitor and regulate” the content of blogs and Internet journalism. No, I’m serious, he really said that! This self aggrandizing piece is so filled with blind assumptions and presumptuous pap that it quite literally boggles the mind.

Every year my family eagerly awaits the annual broadcast of the classic 1965 Peanuts special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” This timeless masterpiece by Charles Schulz remains so popular that the networks salivate over the rights to it, despite the strong, explicitly Christian statement made in the end by Linus, which surely exasperates the secular crusaders who control TV content from New York.

The “paper of record” once again makes like a broken record with another prosaic call to take away guns from the average American.  The New York Times again displays its complete disregard of the Constitution in an editorial titled, “The Court and the Second Amendment"(1), claiming our founding law is out of date and doesn’t “confront modern-day reality.” In another editorial filled with extreme language, untrue definitions and arrogance, and cementing its reputation against self-defense and American principles, the Times addressed the recent decision by the Supreme Court to soon take on the DC Gun banning reversal case. Hitting all its best low notes and filled with propaganda laced verbiage, the Times again made the case that you, Mr. and Mrs. America, are too stupid and filled with bloodlust to be trusted with a firearm… quite despite that musty, stupid old, out of date Constitution thingie. 

What is it with the MSM and their fetish with worrying so much about everyone but Americans? For the L.A.Times, for instance, even the weakness of our dollar is cause for worrying over how bad it is for… wait for it… foreign companies. While our dollar weakens and could perhaps bring us major economic trouble, the L.A.Times shows serious concern(1) and laments that the soft currency crisis is hurting European companies who are finding ‘their’ prices rising because of our falling dollar. The Times is all upset that foreigners are losing profits, but there isn’t a word in its story about what it might do to Americans, befitting its general disinterest in America and perfectly reflecting its heightened concern for foreigners. Worse, the tone of this article serves only to make America look like the bad guy once again, like it’s our fault that the falling dollar is hurting those poor, innocent Europeans.

THE NEWS from Iraq has been so encouraging in recent months that last week even the mainstream media finally sat up and took notice. Can the Democratic Party be far behind?

There’s an old expression about war: “Victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan.” But in the case of Iraq, it seems the other way around. We’ve blamed many for the ordeal of the last four years, but it is the American victory in Anbar Province that now seems without parents.

Racism is alive and well in America. But mostly from major help from the mainstream media. But much media condemnation seems to come from “driving while black”. It is the claim that police are inherently racist, who assume that any driver that is black is likely involved with something untoward or illegal.