The News Without The Left’s Bias
31
Mar
On Wednesday’s American Morning, CNN’s Ed Lavandera focused on the "overwhelmingly white" turnout at the rallies sponsored by the Tea Party Express organization and played up the criticisms that there is an "anti-minority undertone" at the demonstrations.
Lavandera, who is covering the Tea Party Express’ cross-country tour, highlighted the race issue from the beginning of his report, which first aired 13 minutes into the 8 am Eastern hour: "The crowds turning out for the Tea Party Express rallies are overwhelmingly white. Is this lack of diversity a problem for the Tea Party movement? We’re taking a closer look."
The correspondent noted some of the apparently "subtle efforts to make the tea party appear diverse," such as a hip hop performance and speeches by black tea party activist Lloyd Marcus. Marcus stated that "there’s not a lot of black folks here, basically, because they haven’t seen the light yet. They are still hypnotized by the first black or African-American president. But they haven’t really looked at the man and what he’s doing." This assertion is supported by a Gallup poll from earlier in March that found that President Obama’s approval rating among blacks is at 89%, down slightly from 96% in August 2009.
But instead of focusing on this statistic as a possible cause for the lack of minority turnout at tea parties, Lavandera hinted that racism was actually to blame for this phenomenon:
LAVANDERA (voice-over): Critics argue there’s an anti-minority undertone to these rallies. One anti-tea party protester lashed out at a campaigning candidate about the issue.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 1: Other than the people that are covering the story here, the only people I see are retired white people.
LAVANDERA: At the Tea Party Express kickoff rally, one woman carried a sign with a stuffed monkey that read, ‘Send Obama back to Kenya.’ Tea party activists signs also rail against immigration reform with a tone that could offend Latinos. Tea party activists, though, say attempts to portray the group as racist or not open to welcoming minorities is a biased, unfair attack.
MARK WILLIAMS, TEA PARTY EXPRESS: Don’t believe the crock you’re reading in some media about racism. I don’t see the lack of diversity at all.
LAVANDERA: Tea party chairman Mark Williams argues the movement is incredibly diverse, and says there are no specific efforts to reach out to minorities.
LAVANDERA (on-camera): So there’s no sense that you, maybe, need to go out and target black people, Hispanic people, to bring them into the fold.
WILLIAMS: All they need to do is read the Constitution and they’ll come find us.
When the CNN replayed the correspondent’s report during the 3 pm Eastern hour of their Rick’s List program, an on-screen graphic bluntly stated, "’Not A Lot of Black Folks Here:’ Tea Party Express crowds show little diversity."
This liberal slant against the tea parties isn’t surprising at CNN. Almost a year ago, former correspondent Susan Roesgen slammed the movement as "anti-government…anti-CNN…and not really family viewing." Later that year, CNN journalist Jim Spellman tried to portray the participants at the Tea Party Express’s cross-country bus tour last summer as a bunch of extremists.
31
Mar
Near the end of Wednesday’s Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC, host Dylan Ratigan led his ‘Busted’ segment by claiming that The Drudge Report did "not let facts get in the way of a good headline" on Tuesday, by featuring one which read: "CIA: Iran Moving Closer to Nuclear Weapon." Ratigan remarked: "That’ll get the ratings up."
Despite the fact that most of the world has long operated under the assumption that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, including the Obama administration, Ratigan singled out Matt Drudge’s website for scorn, arguing: "Sounds pretty scary, right? Until you find out what the CIA report actually said. The agency’s intelligence actually shows that Iran is quote, ‘keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons,’ but that they quote ‘do not know’ whether Tehran will ultimately head down that road." The headline on screen read: "Misinformed; Wordplay On Iran’s Nuke Plans."
Ratigan eventually revealed where he received his liberal taking points: "the truth, why would you let that get in the way of ratings? As our friend Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com points out on his blog, false reporting on Iran could be ultimately be far more dangerous than the perceived threat itself. Let’s try to stick to the facts."
Actually, Ratigan sanitized the last line of Greenwald’s blog, which proclaims: "As the invasion of Iraq demonstrated, the kind of fear-mongering, reckless, and outright false ‘reporting’ we’re seeing already – and have been seeing for awhile – over Iran’s nuclear program poses a far greater danger to the U.S. than anything Iran could do."
Here is a full transcript of Ratigan’s rant:
4:50PM
DYLAN RATIGAN: A little ‘Busted’ for you. Up first, do not let facts get in the way of a good headline. It’s better for the ratings, as we discussed with both Lynn Sweet and Chrystia Freeland. Yesterday, the Drudge Report happy to oblige, among other news outlets, claiming that a CIA report insists that Iran, and I will quote, ‘is moving closer to a nuclear weapon.’ That’ll get the ratings up. Sounds pretty scary, right? Until you find out what the CIA report actually said. The agency’s intelligence actually shows that Iran is quote, ‘keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons,’ but that they quote ‘do not know’ whether Tehran will ultimately head down that road. Is it me or is that different? Maybe not as good for ratings. And the truth, why would you let that get in the way of ratings? As our friend Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com points out on his blog, false reporting on Iran could be ultimately be far more dangerous than the perceived threat itself. Let’s try to stick to the facts.
31
Mar
I must have missed the groundswell of support and the public clamor for the return of Rosie O’Donnell to the daytime airwaves. It seemed that her time in the cultural spotlight had passed following her notorious 2008 variety show failure (It was hailed by one merciful critic as "dead on arrival") and her exile to a daily Sirius XM radio show that caters to creepy shut-ins and those unlucky listeners who can’t figure out how to tune-in to Howard Stern. But like some sort of loudmouthed, frumpy, left-wing vampire who just won’t stay in the ground, she is threatening to rise again with a terrifying plan to replace Oprah once the Queen of Daytime TV retires in 2011. Someone in Hollywood, please - break out the garlic.
Of course, I’m hardly Rosie’s daily television show target demographic. I work for a living instead of sitting at home staring slack-jawed at the succession of Sham-Wow commercials and ads for shyster lawyers promising big payouts for the imaginary injuries of their deadbeat clients that fill the time between inane segments of mindless yak. And while the social parasite demographic seems to grow larger after every freebie, hand-out and pay-off the Administration and its Congressional flunkies issue in favor of their employment-averse constituents, Rosie O’Donnell still seems like a bad economic bet.
This is no longer the same country as it was back in 1999 when Rosie was honchoing her first daytime gabfest and hassling Tom Selleck over his support for the Second Amendment of the Constitution. It’s not even the same country as it was in May 2007, when the former "Queen of Nice’s" anti-conservative bile culminated in her slandering American fighting men and women as terrorists on The View:
ROSIE O‘DONNELL, HOST, "THE VIEW": 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?
ELISABETH HASSELBECK, "VIEW" CO-HOST: Who are the terrorists?
O‘DONNELL: 655 Iraqis-I‘m saying you have to look-we invaded…
HASSELBECK: Wait, who are you calling terrorists?
O‘DONNELL: I‘m saying that, if you were in Iraq, and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?
She also takes particular pleasure in attacking the Catholic Church and seems to consider anyone not buying wholesale into her radical agenda against traditional marriage and adoption as a contemptible bigot. And let’s not forget her equally insightful foray into that moronic twilight zone known as 9/11 trutherism; it completes her personal trifecta of idiocy.
Rosie’s backers for the new show seem excited at the chance to pick up Oprah’s viewers, whose departure will apparently leave them without a reason to live. "Those 4, 5, 6 ratings points have to go somewhere," one told Variety. "Something’s going to come in and fill that vacuum."
But with the President’s approval ratings in freefall, and with Congress envying the polling numbers achieved by such public favorites as Kim Jong-Il, Vanilla Ice and syphilis, it is a new world. Rosie’s kind of aggressive, grating, in-your-face liberal stupidity may well serve to alienate a substantial part of today’s potential audience. Her partners seem to know it too, assuring Variety that:
"If Rosie wanted to just have a platform for her causes, she would go get a show on cable news . . . . She’s a comedian, not a political pundit."
Except no one is laughing - her Rosie Live! variety show was cancelled the first night after scoring an anemic 5.25 million viewers, though the presence of such hip, relevant and cutting edge guest artists as Alanis Morrissette and someone/something called "Ne-Yo" probably didn’t help.
The fact is that Rosie O’Donnell is an unpleasant, smug and actively dumb woman who is unlikely to garner anything like the following she once had before embracing her personal jihad against the most deeply held and sincere beliefs of a significant majority of the country. The stay at-home mommies I know are too busy to sit and watch television without a very good reason, and being bitched at by a sanctimonious harpy isn’t one of them. Oprah likes Barack Obama, but (I assume) she doesn’t spend an hour a day telling her audience that they are the scum of the Earth for not agreeing with her. Rosie probably couldn’t resist - and watching her show would probably make the Bataan Death March look like a week at Club Med.
So, there are two possible reasons behind the resurrection of Rosie as a daytime talk show hostess. The first is that the producers think they can make some money by harnessing what they believe to be her undeniable audience appeal. Perhaps that’s true, but that seems like a triumph of hope over recent experience considering the unbroken track record of audience alienation and failure that has haunted her since she left her original talk show back in 2002 as well as the increasing polarization of the American public into liberal and conservative camps. Does it seem smart to invest in a show that at the threshold flips the bird to at least 50% of the people who might be enticed to watch it?
The other possibility is that Rosie’s aggressive lefty political stance is a net positive for her backers, and that they believe she would provide a valuable, if only intermittently coherent, liberal voice in the vast wasteland that is daytime television. And they may be willing to suck up the potential losses in order to let that obnoxious voice be heard.
The truth is probably somewhere in between. It’s not unknown for Hollywood to try to mix business with leftism (*cough* The Green Zone *cough*). Of course, that doesn’t always work real well. (*cough* The Green Zone *cough*).
Will Rosie O’Donnell succeed with her career resurrection? No one can know for sure, but just in case, I’m keeping a crucifix and some garlic handy.
Originally published at Big Hollywood on March 31, 2010.