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POPSBBC's First Warped Headline Before It Gets Changed Our Special One Year Analysis of the BBC demonstrated how its headline selection for stories focused on combat and terrorist attacks was inconsistent and favored the Palestinian side. Stories about Palestinian attacks never directly named the aggressors, headlines such as "Rocket injures dozens in Israel" were used. Indeed, even the latest BBC headline "Bulldozer rampage hits Jerusalem", is also fundamentally flawed, failing to attribute the attack to the Palestinian individual who carried it out. It was not the city of Jerusalem, the subject of the headline, that was murdered, but at least three innocent Israelis. For accurate coverage and the latest developments from Jerusalem on this breaking story, see English-language Israeli sources such as The Jerusalem Post, Ha'aretz and YNet News. You can also read the thoughts of HonestReporting's Backspin blog editor who happened to be in downtown Jerusalem at the time of the terror atttack.
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POPSMcFlip-Flop Why does the mainstream corporate media give McCain a free ride with regard to his changing his position on just about everything, as long as it suits him?
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POPSThe "Dark Genius" of Fox News "To me, that's the smoking gun if you're looking for evidence that Fox News is as much a partisan political machine as a news organization. I think TVN is a great piece of evidence in that whole puzzle. And Joe Coors played the role of Rupert Murdoch in that. Basically, Ailes learned how to run a national news service. He learned how to get stories to deadline, he learned how journalists work the news, but most importantly, he learned from Coors and his associates, people like Jack Wilson, how to try and manipulate the news product. Because the Coors people, they wanted a conservative news service, they were frustrated they couldn't get that because it turned out the reporters they hired were too professional."
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POPSChris Matthews' Russert Eulogy: Like a Belch in Church In an uncharacteristic moment of staggering truth, Mr. Olbermann then paraphrased news doyen Barbara Walters in noting, "This is a loss for the country. This is a loss in terms of the ability to get information from an honest broker -- someone who managed a neutrality that the rest of us dream of, perhaps. How big is that gap that we have now seen opened today...How big is the loss, and how on earth is the American public going to fill it in terms of getting the information it needs for the vital choices ahead?" Mr. Matthews wisely dodged the query, perhaps because the answer is painfully obvious. Having the Olbermann-Matthews dynamic duo discuss this valid question would qualify as satire of the highest order.
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POPSFOX forced to apologise for THIRD TIME in TWO Weeks The apology comes just over a week after one of Fox's anchormen expressed regret for a comment on the night that Obama won the Democratic nomination. Obama, in a show of affection, lightly touched his fist against Michelle's and the anchorwoman referred to it as a "terrorist fist jab". Previously, a Fox contributor Liz Trotta had to apologise after making a joke about Obama being assassinated. The trio of apologies is embarrassing for Fox. Murdoch last month praised Obama but stopped short of endorsing him, though his New York Post came out for Obama in January.
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POPSDepends on the meaning of "all" For Kurtz and the rest of the MSM, then, the concept of “tell-all” has little to do with the amount of actual information revealed, or its quality. The key, instead, is the amount of vitriol directed at (in this case) a president the MSM dislikes.
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POPSBiased coverage? No way!?!? Every election is rife with biased coverage by the main media news outlets; it's just that party heads deny it until it works against them. Whether you believe in the “vast right wing conspiracy” or the “left wing media” scourge, it seems that bias in the machine has indeed played a large role in defeating Hillary.
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POPSObama's distractions So, what is Obama's stance on distractions? Seems to be that they are only distractions when used against him.
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POPSThe Obama double standard Do you think that if those moderating a debate asked the GOP candidate about these relationships for the first time, after 22 previous debates had been held, that other journalists would become apoplectic at the moderators for merely asking about the relationships? Not only would there be a near-universal consensus that those questions should be asked; there would be a moral urgency in pressing for answers. We would, I predict, be seeing an unprecedented media “feeding frenzy.” The truth is that a close relationship with a white supremacist pastor and a friendly relationship with an abortion clinic bomber would, by themselves, torpedo a conservative candidate running for president. There is an enormous double standard at play here, one rooted in the fawning regard many journalists have for Barack Obama....The reaction to Stephanopoulos and Gibson is a revealing and depressing glimpse into the state of modern journalism.
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POPSOldest Iraq Casualty: Americas SHAME After years of being away from hosting that daily, national discussion, Donahue returned to TV in 2002 as the host of a nightly debate-style program on MSNBC. For many people, the show was a much-needed breath of fresh air on the cable networks, increasingly dominated by right-wing pundits and media personalities. Antiwar voices long kept off these cable news channels were suddenly given a seat in the forbidden studios to take part in a national debate about the so-called war on terror. Donahue was on in the same time slot as Fox’s Bill O"Reilly. But the show didn’t last long. In fact, it didn’t even last a year, even though it was MSNBC"s top-rated program. When Donahue was fired, the network moved to hire a string of right-wing hosts. ...DN! I loved him. Replaced by... crap. How? Who owns the media in America?
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POPSEconomy Freezes Amid A Media Meltdown Every broadcast, it seems, warned about something involving the economy — jobs, growth, housing, outsourcing, retail sales. You name it, the media covered it. And their reporting was often wrong. Take gas prices, a topic near and dear to our wallets these days. This spring, that gasoline could get close to $4. But for years the networks have warned that gas prices would go that high and more. At least 20 times from 2005 to 2007, the networks cautioned about prices hitting $5, and another six times for $6 or higher. Sometimes journalists gave up promoting cataclysm and decided to cheerlead for it. In a Feb. 20, 2008, column, the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein attacked Wall Street, saying "the best thing that could happen to our economy is for a dozen high-profile hedge funds to collapse; for investment banking to enter a long, deep freeze; for a major bank to fail."