The Media Research Center is out with its annual “Best Notable Quotables” list of what it calls “the year’s worst reporting.” Here are just a few examples of the liberal bias and stupidity that come pouring out of the mouths and word processors of media types on a daily basis. (Visit www.mrc.org for the complete list.)
* “Good Morning America” co-host Charles Gibson, May 16: “This is interesting news that we get now, and it may put the president under a lot of heat today as the public learns that he knew, through his daily CIA intelligence briefings, that bin Laden had potential terror attack plans under way….It also calls into question what happened when Andy Card, Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, that morning went and whispered in the president’s ear, as the president was talking to a group of school students in Florida [on Sept. 11, 2001]. Was the president really surprised?”
* New York Times reporter Robert F. Worth, Feb. 24 “Week in Review” article: “As President Bush toured Asia last week, some world leaders worried publicly that the war on terrorism was starting to look suspiciously like the last great American campaign – against Communism….The McCarthy years in some ways were eerily similar to the present moment….Communists were often conceived as moral monsters whose deviousness and unwavering dedication to their faith made them capable of almost anything….The first victims of anti-Communist hysteria were immigrants, and hundreds of immigrants have been detained since Sept. 11, many with little apparent cause beyond the fact that they were Middle Eastern men.”
* AOL Time Warner Vice Chairman and CNN founder Ted Turner, during Feb. 11 remarks at Brown University: “The reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don’t have any hope for a better life….I think they [the 19 hijackers] were brave at the very least.”
* Former CBS newsreader Walter Cronkite, perhaps the most overrated man in the history of American journalism, proves that great minds think alike as he echoes Turner on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Sept. 9: “I think very definitely that foreign policy could have caused what has happened [last Sept. 11]….It certainly should be apparent now – it should be, for goodness sakes understood now, but it is not ? that the problem is this great division between the rich and the poor in the world. We represent the rich….Most of these other nations of Africa, Asia and South America and Central America are very, very, poor….This is a revolution in effect around the world. A revolution is in place today. We are suffering from a revolution of the poor and have-nots against the rich and haves, and that’s us.”
* New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield, not stopping to think that maybe there’s a direct correlation between point A and point B, Jan. 21: “Since the early 1970’s, the number of state prisoners has increased 500 percent, growing each year in the 1990’s even as crime fell.”
* Quote of the Year from Bill Moyers, the unctuous former Democratic White House aide and PBS fixture who went and had the following conniption fit on the Nov. 8 edition of his PBS show “Now,” three days after Republicans won control of Congress in the mid-term elections:
“The entire federal government – the Congress, the executive, the courts – is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate. That agenda includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to surrender control over their own lives. It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from the working people to the rich. It includes giving corporations the a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable. And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine.
“Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you like the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the white House, you will swoon over what’s coming. And if you like G-d in government, get ready for the Rapture….So it’s a heady time in Washington, a heady time for piety, profits and military power….”
Jason Maoz can be reached at [email protected]