MAY 21, 2015, 5:56 PM LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2015, 7:23 PM
BY MELISSA HAYES
STATE HOUSE BUREAU |
THE RECORD
Governor Christie said media bias contributed to heavier coverage of the George Washington Bridge lane closures than of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email as secretary of state, as he called for an apology Thursday.
Christie, appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box, said he was branded as “guilty” by media outlets, but an internal investigation he commissioned, a legislative inquiry led by Democrats and a federal investigation have all cleared him of an involvement in the incident.
“I was guilty, guilty. I had done it,” he said. “Now we’re 15 months later, where are the apologies pouring in? Not one thing I said on the day after the bridge situation has been proven to be wrong.”
“No matter what. Stephanopoulos is not a journalist. You’re talking about the media as though they’re still media, and they’re not. The reason you’re not… You can march on the media and the networks all you want. You may as well go to the DNC and march because that’s who they are. They are the Democrat National Committee. Every damned one of them. Every editor, every executive, every producer, every writer, every reporter, every anchor, is the Democrat National Committee.” Rush Limbaugh
Main Stream Media Credibility Crisis
Clinton Foundation donors include dozens of media organizations, individuals
By JOSH GERSTEIN, TARINI PARTI, HADAS GOLD and DYLAN BYERS |
5/15/15 5:44 PM EDT
NBC Universal, News Corporation, Turner Broadcasting and Thomson Reuters are among more than a dozen media organizations that have made charitable contributions to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, the foundation’s records show.
The donations, which range from the low-thousands to the millions, provide a picture of the media industry’s ties to the Clinton Foundation at a time when one of its most notable personalities, George Stephanopoulos, is under scrutiny for his previously undisclosed $75,000 contribution.
Meanwhile they take the “what Difference Does it Make” approach to truly troubling stories… like presidential abuse of power in the Menendez and Tea Party cases or the Hillary Email-gate and FoundationFunding-gate national security issues.
That paper is not even fit for bird cages…
It is remarkable just how the media basically destroyed Christie with this relentless story, despite there being no evidence that Christie had any involvement in it. On the other hand, we have the leading contender to become the next President, and a far stronger set of circumstances that possibly involve all kinds of conflicts of interest and huge money, and the mainstream media are nowhere to be seen.
Our mainstream media is beyond corrupt.
That’s easy to explain. They would do it because they thought it would be what Christie wanted. They did it because it was punishment to “the other side”. Political campaign people get a little drunk on power and this is what appears to have happened. It’s no mystery when you want to come up with motives.
A new poll from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics has some alarming findings about the trustworthiness of the American media. Among adults aged 18-29, the poll found that just 12 percent believe the media “do the right thing.”
An even more startling 88 percent said they “sometimes” or “never” trust the media and just 2 percent of 18-29 year olds said they trust the media to do the right thing “all of the time.” 39 percent said the media “never” do the right thing.
The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard called this poll “the latest nail in the media’s coffin, a downward spiral that has resulted in fewer younger Americans reading traditional media and especially traditional platforms such as newspapers and magazines.”
The poll also found that the public’s view of the media’s ability to “do the right thing” ranked the lowest when compared to other organizations. Media ranked 12th with scientists coming in as number 1 followed by the United States military, local police, the Supreme Court, the United Nations, President Obama, local government, state government, federal government, Congress, and Wall Street.
Not only is the media consistently ranked as untrustworthy by the American public, a recent Quinnipiac poll found that among the different media outlets, MSNBC is the least trusted source of news in the United States, while Fox News was the most trusted.
According the poll, just 7 percent of Americans trust MSNBC, with NBC News and CBS news each considered trustworthy by 10 percent. ABC News garnering just 8 percent of the American public’s trust. Fox News ranked first, earning the trust of 29% of Americans.
New Hampshire man who confronted Chris Christie on ‘Bridgegate’ changes story
A New Hampshire man who confronted Chris Christie about his role in the Bridgegate traffic scandal on Wednesday was mistaken about being stuck in the paralyzing September 2013 traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he told POLITICO.
At a restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire, where Christie was greeting potential voters on his tour of the Granite State, Richard Moquin claimed to have sat in the infamous traffic jam with his wife as they traveled to Manhattan to celebrate their wedding anniversary.
by Chris Thompson Published Apr. 10, 2015 4:40 pm Updated Apr. 10, 2015 5:05 pm
New Jersey governor Chris Christie has failed to hold an open-ended press conference since November 12, mostly restricting his public presence to town hall meetings and prepackaged videos sent out by his media relations team, The Associated Press writer Jill Colvin reports.
“The access has just been minimal at best,” New Jersey Press Association executive director George White told The Associated Press.
Christie’s office responded that his numerous town hall meetings with constituents, as well as his monthly hour-long radio appearance on NJ 101.5 and interviews with individual reporters, prove that the governor is still accessible and answerable to the public. “The governor believes it’s just as important, if not more important, to communicate directly with his constituents as it is to communicate with the media,” Christie spokesperson Kevin Roberts told the AP.
Reporters in the national press are all in bed with their powerful government sources, and that is proven each year during White House Correspondents’ Dinner week. That’s the conclusion of a new documentary directed by a former reporter at one of Washington, D.C.’s biggest news publications.
Patrick Gavin, who most recently worked as a journalist for Politico until leaving in 2014, chronicles in his film the evolution of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner from a small annual gathering of journalists and West Wing officials in the 1920s to the multimillion dollar week-long power-jockeying event it has become today.
“Nerd Prom: Inside Washington’s Wildest Week” is an indictment of the incestuous culture fostered by the Capitol’s elite journalists and the government officials they’re supposed to be holding accountable. In Gavin’s view, this connection is encapsulated by the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Gavin says in the movie that he created it to find out what the annual event is truly about. By the end, he’s bemoaning the loss of the dinner’s meaning, which is produced by the White House Correspondents’ Association and was originally intended to celebrate press freedom, as well as serve as a scholarship award ceremony for aspiring journalists.
Reader says perhaps Starbucks is succeeded with initiating productive dialogue by the people rather than the media
Here’s some fuel for the fire. Does anyone else notice that there is rarely any media coverage about discrimination of any other group that even comes close to the hype provided for the race-baiters that soak up the camera and $$$ today? Pick any “oppressed” group. I’m no historian, but did any of these groups destroy, on a continuous basis, their own communities with riots, fire and other illegal activities? And at the same time have their own media darlings who benefitted as a result. It appears that the groups who experienced such a plight improved themselves and their peers, or are in the process of this. There are already laws on the books. At what point is society no longer to blame and personal responsibility becomes necessary?? This is a genuine question, so looking forward to informative responses rather than personal attacks. I don’t like Starbucks coffee either, but perhaps it succeeded with initiating productive dialogue by the people rather than the media.
Corzine Huckster Bradley Campbell Leads Charge Against ExxonMobil Deal
“The” Bradley Campbell who as NJDEP commish issued a no-further-action letter on DOW Chemicals Superfund site in Paulsboro for Sweeney and Burzichelli’s crony Pork Paulsboro, where Campbell has a sweetheart consultant job, along with Kolluri, former NJDOT commish??? Pork Paulsboro – No oversight no money for cleanup thanks to Campbell. Perhaps he’s posturing for a position on DumpSweeney’s cabinet with this NY Times article? That Brad Campbell??
NYT ExxonMobil coverage “irresponsible, disingenuous, and baldly political”
Posted by Matt Rooney On March 05, 2015
By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
Chris Christie told last week’s CPAC gathering that he planned to give up The New York Times for Lent.
I suspect he’s still abstaining after today’s coverage of the ExxonMobil settlement, Save Jerseyans, including a guest op-ed from the former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Bradley Campbell. Alleging that the Governor’s chief counsel, Christopher Porrino, drove the settlement negotiations rather than the Attorney General’s office, Campbell directly accused Porrino of having “inserted himself into the case, elbowed aside the attorney general and career employees who had developed and prosecuted the litigation, and cut the deal favorable to Exxon.”
Press Secretary Kevin Roberts struck back. Hard.
“Baseless allegations concerning the State’s proposed settlement with ExxonMobil were published today in the New York Times based on comments from a known partisan, Bradley Campbell (a many-time Democratic appointee who worked for the Clinton Administration and McGreevey Administration),” Roberts noted in a statement.
Roberts (center) with Governor Christie at Bordentown Regional High School in March 2012. (Governor’s Office/Tim Larsen)
“The notion that this settlement represents something less than what is fair for New Jerseyans is absurd and baseless when you consider the facts of the settlement and Campbell’s prior comments on this case,” he added, pointing out that today’s announced $225 million damages settlement (not pre-announcement, baseless partisan-motivated speculation, a point I made yesterday on WNYC radio) is hardly unreasonably small.
Want proof? Here you go:
In May 2006, after a state judge ruled in New Jersey’s favor against ExxonMobil (remember: this expensive litigation is many, many years old), Bradley Campbell reportedly told the Star Ledger that damages “could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Why does Mr. Campbell think the price tag of the settlement stinks today?
When a 9-figure settlement was perfectly acceptable in 2006?
Reader says the Mayor does indeed go out of his way to slant the news.
Do you all recall when our Mayor squelched a negative letter-to-the-editor that Mrs. Linda MacNamara had sent to the Ridgewood News? In the interest of TRANSPARENCY, she gave a copy to the Council in advance of the publication, even though it had already been accepted by the RWD News. The Mayor then told the Editor not to print it (Mr. Ed Virgin was out of town, but his next-in-command took the order from Mayor Aronsohn and obeyed it). Yes, this is true. The Mayor does indeed go out of his way to slant the news. Mind you, this was a letter to the editor, not a news story, so the writer’s opinion should have gone through to printing. It was a horrible, blatant act on the part of Mr. Aronsohn.
I’m not sure which is more absurd, for the media to be up in arms about former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s statement that he doesn’t believe that President Obama loves America or for them to mug Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for declining to weigh in on the subject.
Many of us have been speculating for years about Obama’s affinity for this country as founded. He promised to fundamentally transform this nation — something he wouldn’t have done if he embraced the American idea.
There is so much evidence that Obama has a different feeling about America than all of our past presidents that it borders on disingenuous to pretend otherwise. What other president has ever denigrated the Founding Fathers as “men of property and wealth”? What POTUS has repeatedly apologized for the United States and its record? Obama has done so, often on foreign soil, complaining to Europe about America’s arrogance, admitting to the Americas that we have sometimes dictated our terms, telling the Turkish Parliament that we have “our own darker periods in our history,” sending a letter to the Afghan president apologizing for coalition forces inadvertently burning copies of the Quran but failing to object to the killing of U.S. troops in return, apologizing to Japan for our nuclear bombing of its cities, criticizing Americans for distrusting Islam, and even going so far as to blame America for the rampant gun violence in Mexico. What other president has belonged to a church whose pastor was openly racist and anti-American? What other president has scoffed at the idea of American exceptionalism?
What other president has bad-mouthed his own country’s record on civil rights to the United Nations Human Rights Council and submitted U.S. laws and policies to that council for review? Has another POTUS married someone who admitted to never being proud of America in her adult life before her husband was elected president?
Even venerated conservative commentator Thomas Sowell has said, “I think this is a man who has enormous resentments toward this country, especially towards those people who have flourished and prospered here.” Giuliani’s statement was neither outrageous nor unique. Some of the rest of us have been talking and writing about it for years now.
What about the media’s hysteria over Walker’s refusal to contradict Giuliani, saying that Giuliani was free to speak for himself and that he was not going to comment on whether Obama loves America.
What is wrong with that answer? Why should the media ask Walker about it? He didn’t make the statement. The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank skewered Walker for “avoiding anything that might resemble leadership,” because Walker wouldn’t condemn Giuliani and because he hadn’t fallen for the media’s loaded question on whether he believes in evolution.
How This Left-Wing Activist Manipulates the Media to Spread His Message
‘Jetsetting terrorist’ Peter Young tells us how he gets malleable bloggers and lazy journalists to generate outrage and attention for him
By Ryan Holiday | 02/11/15 10:16am
I first heard of Peter Young when a reporter at the Daily Dot asked me if I was somehow involved in 2013’s “Ex-Vegans” stunt in which dozens of former vegans were exposed for having eaten meat. After dominating the media cycle for several days, the surprise left hook of the campaign landed: All the traffic and inbound links were redirected to footage of appalling slaughterhouse conditions. Hundreds of thousands of people were unwittingly exposed to the very unpleasantness that media attempts to shield from them.
I’m not a vegan, and I had nothing to do with the campaign—but I do have a lot of respect for its brilliance and execution and for the fact that it reveals a salient fact about our times. Today’s media system is a bit like an emperor with no clothes. Peter Young resembles nothing so much as Mathew Carpenter, the man who recently turned a stunt about shipping glitter to your enemies into $100,000. They both understand intuitively how the media works and have used it repeatedly to advance their interests. While they did what they did for very different reasons, I learned that they’d both read my book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, and it had influenced their actions.
200,000 March for Life – Networks Give Them 15 Seconds
By Katie Yoder | January 23, 2015 | 11:37 AM EST
On Jan 22, 200,000 people descended on Washington, D.C. for the annual March for Life, commemorating the 57 million babies destroyed since 1973’s Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.
Of the three broadcast networks, only CBS mentioned the 2015 March for Life, allotting it just 15 seconds. That’s one second for every 13,000 people who put work and school aside and traveled from as far away as the West Coast. It’s one second for every 3.8 million babies aborted in the last 42 years.
What’s more, CBS’s coverage was part of a 2-minute, 11-second report on “moderate” GOP opposition to the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
“Evening News” host Scott Pelley noted “[t]he 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade which gave women the right to have an abortion.” But he then bridged into the bill banning abortions after 20 weeks.
While Nancy Cordes, CBS News’ congressional correspondent, interviewed one of the marchers, she asked about the bill, not the march.
Instead, CBS found other stories more important – spending 21 seconds on a prehistoric shark, 2 minutes, 49 seconds on the New England Patriots allegedly cheating their way to the Super Bowl, and 3 minutes and 2 seconds on a measles outbreak.
ABC and NBC said nothing on the 200,000 marching for the 57 million babies lost to abortion. Even the eight arrests of “abortion on demand” protesters in front of the Supreme Court weren’t worth their time.
Like CBS, ABC and NBC focused on other stories. ABC’s World News dedicated 1 minute, 41 seconds to Prince Andrew’s “sex scandal” while NBC’s “Nightly News” spent 2 minutes, 16 seconds on a documentary about “side car dogs in America.”
Spanish-speaking TV news viewers weren’t any better informed about the March. Neither Univision nor Telemundo covered the March for Life or congressional action on anti-abortion legislation.
But Univision and Telemundo dedicated 2:36 and 2:32 segments, respectively, to Deflategate developments. Telemundo included a 3:07 feature story on this weekend’s Miss Universe contest.
For last year’s march, the networks devoted 46 seconds to the hundreds of thousands marching in Washington, D.C. (that’s six times less than they spent on the National Zoo’s baby panda cub and four-and-a-half times less than the Climate March).
In 2013, the networks spent a total of 17 seconds on the March for Life (in comparison, they spent 521 times more on the Manti Te’o football scandal).
As with this year, when the nets do cover the march, they refuse to use the word “life.” Instead, CBS’ Cordes used terms like “anti-abortion demonstrators” to describe the marchers.
Steve Adubato , Robert Menendez and Cory Booker Interview a gold-plated love-in
What a gold-plated love-in. The statement made by Senator Menendez was in response to a direct question by Newark’s own, Steve Adubato, worded in exactly the same way as Menendez’s answer is reported as being. Menendez could simply have said “yes” and received the same reaction.
My reaction to this syrupy vignette is that Steve Adubato has to be the most frozen-in-time, fact-resistant, paleo-liberal, pitiable case of a journalist living and working in the Metro NY region who is actually still a well-meaning, non-scheming, and good-hearted person. With the way Adubato framed and worded the question, he teed the issue up for Menendez no less favorably than you might expect him to do if he were the Senator’s own chief of staff! Watch the video at the 25:00 mark and you’ll see Menendez’s eyes go wide at the prospect of hitting Adubato’s question into the next area code.
Oh, Steve, Steve, Steve…what are we to do with you? Where did we go wrong? How could you be so ideologically shackled as to fail to finally realize what is happening all around you? You are a man of full age, yet you have utterly failed to sharpen your approach. One cannot groove a fastball with the likes of Menendez like you just did and even hope to retain, much less burnish one’s professional reputation!
Come over to the dark side, Steve!!! You will learn that we are actually not the heart of darkness, but true children of the light. We struggle with our frailties, as all in the human condition must do. But we are clear in our sight, and in our thinking. If we are guilty of anything, it is merely trying to collectively blow out, one by one, the limitless supply of matches this arson of a so-called-president (and increasingly, the GOP-e) seems to have on hand. It can get tiring, and certainly seems and feels repetitive, but someone must do it if we are to come out the other end of this house of horrors in one piece.
Politically and intellectually speaking, the past seven years or so have been a hand-to-mouth existence for true constitutional conservatives who prize the civil society and traditional morality, as well as the federal and republican model of democratic government extended continent-wide, as conceived by the frail but brilliant James Madison in the face of so many historical examples of failed democracies over the millennia. We are now so regularly the object of abject, thought-free obloqy that it almost has no ill effect on us. The notion that we can live rent-free in the minds of an Obama, a Menendez ….an Aronsohn….keeps us moving forward.
Steve, you can do this. Do the deed. Make the switch. Make that light bulb to shine like the Sun. Peel yourself away from these charletans and breathe the clean air for once in your young life!!
Reporters say White House sometimes demands changes to press-pool reports
By Paul Farhi September 23 at 7:06 PM
White House press-pool reports are supposed to be the news media’s eyes and ears on the president, an independent chronicle of his public activities. They are written by reporters for other reporters, who incorporate them into news articles about President Obama almost every day.
Sometimes, however, the White House plays an unseen role in shaping the story.
Journalists who cover the White House say Obama’s press aides have demanded — and received — changes in press-pool reports before the reports have been disseminated to other journalists. They say the White House has used its unusual role as the distributor of the reports as leverage to steer coverage in a more favorable direction.
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