Good article on the liberal leanings of NBC

The War Inside NBC

by Jed Babbin

Posted 06/30/2008 ET

The guest list for the funeral mass for “Meet the Press” anchor Tim Russert was an “A list” of politicians and media mentionables. Real reporters mixed with the television personalities and the network executives who control their lives. It was a black day for journalism in NBC: Russert’s death released one of the last brakes slowing NBC’s descent into political activism and journalistic irrelevance.

NBC was once the proud home of real journalists. People such as Chet Huntley and David Brinkley brought its standards to — and above — the level prevalent in most news organizations. But now, it’s an asylum for people such as Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann.

Matthews has made himself a caricature of the liberal news anchor. In one memorable moment of the primary season he said he felt, “…this thrill going up my leg…” while listening to an Obama speech.

Were that not bad enough, NBC’s leadership — NBC-Universal CEO Jeffrey Zucker and NBC News President Steve Capus — are pushing the network off into liberal la-la land. Russert, who tried hard to be fair to liberals and conservatives alike, was in a shrinking minority. Except for Russert, the moderates have been marginalized in favor of hyperventilating liberals such as MSNBC dolt-laureate Keith Olbermann.

The war within NBC is between the network suits and the real journalists who remain. They see what’s happening: the suits are using NBC to make MSNBC credible and to get their political jollies.

NBC’s news reporting has long been riddled with liberal bias. But over the past two years it’s divorced itself from the news business and gone into political activism. Its programming is so biased it could be confused with a broadcast arm of the New York Times.

Exhibit A is the May 19 letter written by Presidential Counselor Ed Gillespie to NBC News president Steve Capus. The letter was precipitated by the previous night’s Nightly News broadcast of an interview with President Bush. The interview was a setup, and the tape edited deceptively to make the President’s answers to questions from reporter Richard Engel appear to be something the clearly weren’t.

A perfect sin in journalism, the editing made it appear that the President accepted Engel’s premise that Bush’s
speech to the Israeli Knesset equated negotiations with Iran to appeasement and was a calculated political attack on Barack Obama. In print journalism, this wouldn’t have made it past a rookie city desk editor. On NBC, it made the prime-time broadcast.

Gillespie’s letter went on to document a series of anti-war, anti-Bush positions NBC had taken in its reporting. What he didn’t document was the hyperbole MSNBC’s hosts engage in regularly.

Exhibit B is Olbermann’s relationship with the NBC’s leadership. Buoyed by some of the highest ratings among MSNBC’s shows, Olbermann regularly delivers himself of near-profane rants. In one last May, he advised the President to “shut the hell up.” Two years ago, he denounced then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a “quack” pushing “fascism.” In a June 23 article in the New Yorker, Peter Boyer reports that the Rumsfeld rant earned Olbermann an attaboy from Capus.

Boyer wrote that Capus told him, “I think we’re onto something. That’s what we keep hearing from the audience, more and more, is that they appreciate that we have people who are actually speaking truth to power, or being transparent in their own personal viewpoints.”

Transparency in their personal liberal viewpoints, that is. That attitude — and its leakage into NBC’s primary network news operation — is the cause of the conflict within the network.

NBC’s corporate parent — General Electric — is feeling the heat generated by the Olbermann rants. Capus’ favorite screecher created a feud with Fox and its most
popular host, Bill O’Reilly. Olbermann had falsely accused Fox Chairman Roger Ailes of providing campaign advice to Rudy Giuliani, and was regularly attacking O’Reilly in very personal terms.

As Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz reported on May 19, the feud triggered high-level conversations between Ailes and Zucker as well as between News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch and Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of GE. The latter were apparently about O’Reilly’s criticism of GE for trading with Iran.

O’Reilly’s high-temperature criticism of GE and Immelt — calling him a “despicable human being” responsible for the deaths of American troops in Iraq — may even have contributed to GE’s stock slide. From a high of $42.15 on October 2, 2007, GE’s shares have lost 36% of shareholder value, closing last Friday at $26.83.

That fall is comparable to the New York Times’ loss in shareholder value under Pinch Sulzberger. Liberal bias and media political activism don’t benefit shareholders.

Russert’s death left NBC’s best news show without a host in the critical time of the presidential race. Zucker and Capus have brought back liberal elder statesman Tom Brokaw to host the show until the election.

Zuker reportedly believes the future of NBC is not the broadcast news of old, but MSNBC and its online presence. According to a report published in “Broadcasting and Cable” in February, Zucker told a Harvard Business
School conference, “The definition of NBC News is really changing, and it’s becoming more MSNBC and MSNBC.com.” Zucker added, “I think [MSNBC has] found its identity. Politics is their calling card.”

As Boyer reports, politics — going far beyond liberal bias and into political activism — is behind the turmoil in the network. He wrote that Brokaw is uneasy about the conflict within the network: “Listen,it’s a strain,” says Tom Brokaw, the longtime anchor of ‘Nightly News,’who remains an active and revered figure at NBC. ‘And it’s under constant examination. There’s dialogue going on behind the scenes all the time. It’s not perfectly sorted out.’”

Nor will it be before November. The professional journalists in NBC are more frustrated by it every day. They know they’re losing the battle. With Russert gone, there’s no one left to stand up for them in the fight against the suits.

NBC has chosen sides, and its reporting will continue to boost Obama, attack the President and paint Sen. John McCain’s candidacy as the promise of another Bush term. Republicans — especially senate candidates — will be targeted as often as McCain.

When the New York Times published its thinly-sourced smear of McCain in February, implying a non-platonic relationship with an attractive lady lobbyist, McCain’s
top advisor Charlie Black told the Politico, “We’re going to war with them now.” So far, that war is entirely one-sided.

Sen. McCain needs to respond reflexively. If his campaign is to survive the media assault it will have to have its own truth squad, prepared to issue statements and make campaign commercials much faster than usual to go after the activist media.

It takes CBS, NBC or ABC –
and, of course, MSNBC — only hours to prepare an attack ad to be passed off as news that night. If McCain’s crew cannot respond just as quickly, the war Charlie Black declared will be lost, and millions of votes with it.

Republican candidates need to do the same. There will be many close Senate races this year, and few Republicans will follow the model of John Thune’s campaign, taking on a big newspaper that was allied with his opponents. Americans know the media is riddled with bias, and they don’t respect candidates who don’t fight back.

And there’s one way for the journalists who remain at NBC: get yourselves together. Form a small committee and demand a meeting with Immelt. Make him listen and promise to restore NBC’s journalistic standards to what they should be. If he refuses, start circulating your resumes. There will be no future for you with the Olbermann Network.

The Terminator and the Oil Crisis

Arnold has spoken:

“Anyone who tells you that this will bring down our gas prices immediately or any time soon is blowing smoke,” he said. “America is so addicted to oil it will take us years to wean ourselves from it and to look for new ways to feed our addiction is not the answer.”

Schwarzenegger says feeding oil addiction no answer

I’m sure that Arnold means well… in a California kind of way but I would pose a couple of questions to all these folks so ready to give up on oil. When will the scientists come up with the means for us to get along without it? When will we be driving electric cars? How long before ethanol actually becomes an alternative fuel source? And who will be able to afford it?

It will be a long long time Arnold. I guarantee you that we will be pumping lots of crude from our own resources decades before there will be any viable alternative sources of energy. There is a lot of talk. People have all kinds of theories about what we can do. But we are a long way from getting away from our oil addiction.

We need oil! We need to keep it flowing. We need to be able to afford it. No doubt we will not be able to depend on the Middle Eastern variety. That could get real tricky in days to come. So why can’t we do as so many other countries do? Why don’t we drill our own? At least as much as we can. I don’t get it.

I’m just sayin’

Jesse

Come Out From Among Them…

Are the Anglicans About to Split? – TIME

“We have arrived at a crossroads; it is, for us, the moment of truth.” This will be interesting. Stay tuned.

Plain Truth About Sodomy

From Chuck Missler (Koinonia House):

SAME-SEX ATTRACTION, CAUSES AND CURES

Dozens of gay and lesbian couples were married in California Monday evening, starting at 5:01pm when same-sex marriages officially became legal in the state. Some of those who rushed to sign up for marriage licenses were from out-of-state; unlike Massachusetts, California has no law requiring residency to obtain a marriage license. All of the new unions may yet be nullified, though. California voters can go to the polls in November to overturn the state Supreme Court’s ruling, and reinstate the state ban on same-sex marriages.

The promotion of gay marriage pulls from two basic assumptions, that:
1) homosexual attraction is inborn and genetic;
2) homosexual attraction, though found in a relatively small portion of the population, is still normal and harmless.

If people believe that homosexuals are normal and are truly “born that way”, then it is easy to argue that gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to marry just as other minorities are allowed to marry. These consider discrimination against same-sex couples as a cruel denial of basic human rights.

The gay and lesbian political machine has been working hard for decades to promote those two assumptions. Neither, however, is close to having been proven. While a significant number of gays and lesbians truly feel that they were “different” from birth, there is little to prove that same-sex attraction is purely genetic. Homosexuality flies in the face of basic laws of procreation, and cannot therefore be considered “normal”, and there is plenty of evidence that the lifestyles of gay men tend to be anything other than harmless.

In July, 1993, the magazine Science announced the existence of the “gay gene.” Of course, what the research actually determined was more like, “There could possibly be maybe a chance that this particular gene could conceivably have an influence on being gay. Sort of.” Unfortunately, many people in the public assumed an actual gay gene had been found, and the idea that people are “born gay” took off.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the list of psychiatric illnesses. According to a survey reported in the journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality in 1977, though, 69 percent of psychiatrists still considered homosexuality a disorder.

The fact is that the “experts” don’t know exactly what causes homosexual attraction. The APA does see it as a combination of nature and nurture. Certain trends pop up, though. Sensitive personalities, poor relationships with fathers, forceful mothers, trauma in childhood, early sexual activity and/or molestation, early rejection by peers – things that leave small children longing for love or acceptance, or that create an extreme sense of inadequacy – are the sorts of things in the backgrounds of many unwilling homosexuals. Then there is the spiritual aspect, which is even harder to nail down in politically correct America.

Ex-Gays

Perhaps the biggest arguments against the “born that way” mantra are the many men and women who have changed. The process is often difficult and takes a long time and careful, loving therapy. When the foundational causes of the same-sex attraction are addressed and dealt with, however, significant numbers of once-homosexuals have become heterosexual. They have been freed from something that was a chain around their necks and hearts, and have rejoiced in becoming whole.

Former lesbian Debbie Thurman says, “I can count myself among the growing numbers of men and women who have overcome a significant struggle with same-sex attraction. While our stories and the degree to which we have found wholeness may be different, the central themes are often similar. Frequently, you will find we came from broken homes, were alienated from one or both parents, were sexually abused as children, are sensitive by temperament, and suffered from depression.

“…Sticky problems arise when a number of those who have ‘always felt’ homosexual begin moving along the continuum of feeling less so, and at the same time, actually begin feeling better about themselves. How dare we forsake the gay cause célebrè? Like crabs trying to escape from a bucket, gay activists begin dragging us down.

“Detractors insist that measurable results must be quick, and that change ‘isn’t change’ if it requires a long process. These same people generally see life as a continual ‘journey’ in all other respects. But if someone gives up during the long process, that is somehow ‘proof’ that change is a sham. Never mind that overeaters, alcoholics or drug addicts fall off the wagon every day. The standard for sexual identity change remains ‘all or nothing’!

“So where are the mental health professionals who will stand up and challenge these untruths? Why do they allow the APA to hijack the truth?”

Regardless of what the politically-charged APA accepts, the Bible consistently condemns same-sex sexual intercourse as wrong. At the same time, Jesus Christ specifically came to save those who were lost. That’s all of us. He loves us. He died for our sins, and through the power of the Holy Spirit working in our lives, we can all be freed from the various chains that hang around our necks. According to Paul in Romans 1:18-32, homosexuality has a root cause in a culture’s turning away from God the Creator. It’s easy to attack people lost in same-sex attraction, but we are all responsible as a culture to truly put Christ first in our lives, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. If we do that, maybe we will have fewer young people falling prey to the lie of homosexuality.

“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites,nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.” – 1 Cor 6:9-11 (NKJV)

Bush To Urge Congress To Allow Offshore Drilling

How Conservative Is McCain?

Check this out from Richard Viguerie:Richard Viguerie’s Conservative HQ | Here’s the Beef:Conservatives’ Problems With John McCain

Why is it that conservatives have such a hard time lining up behind John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president? Is it, as some liberals suggest, just “pique” — that we didn’t get our way, and now we’re throwing a tantrum? Or are the differences between McCain and conservatives very real, very serious matters that go to the heart of the principles of conservatism?

More Jeremiah Wright Stuff

Obamacide – Obama’s Church Reprinted Hamas Manifesto « Creeping Sharia
I know that he has “left” Trinity United CoC but here is yet more incriminating evidence that this church has never been anything but extremist and radical. Here we see more of the antisemitism and terrorist love that characterized this “ministry.”

I’m just sayin’

Jesse

What Is Conservatism?

True Conservatism | Christianpost.com

It would seem that the conservative movement is now in a state of flux. We have Goldwater conservatives, neo-conservatives, libertarian conservatives and paleo-conservatives. Before the Bush disaster there were just conservatives. Now we who are conservatives have to identify ourselves with a certain camp so as to distance ourselves from those who are like the ilk that drug us down with Bush.

The above link is to an interesting article by Chuck Colson on what is true conservatism. If I am not mistaken, Russell Kirk identified six principles of conservatism and Colson deals with the first. This first principle is that there exists an enduring moral order. With that said I cannot imagine a Christian who would not consider himself a conservative. And I can also see that there may be differing kinds. What do you think? What are some non-negotiable principles of conservatism?

What say ye?

Jesse