Dayhoff Westminster Soundtrack: 20070516 CyberAlert

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

20070516 CyberAlert

CyberAlert

Media Resarch Center

The 2,411^th CyberAlert. Tracking Liberal Media Bias Since 1996

6:05am EDT, Wednesday May 16, 2007 (Vol. Twelve; No. 84)

1. Falwell Derided Over Teletubbies, CBS: He Wanted Women in Kitchen The ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts Tuesday night couldn't resist ridiculing the late Jerry Falwell for pointing out how a children's character on a PBS show appeared gay -- though gay rights advocates had earlier made the same observation -- and CBS brought aboard liberal presidential historian Douglas Brinkley who called Falwell "comedy fodder for people," found it relevant that "feminists never liked him," and dismissed him as "a backlash figure" whose "returning to family values was returning to women being in the kitchen."

2. Newsweek Diagnoses Bush Ill for His 'Pathological Certainty' Is President Bush mentally ill? Sharon Begley is a Senior Editor for science at Newsweek, which apparently entitled her to conduct a tired psychoanalysis of President Bush and his state of denial about the war in Iraq, suggested earlier in his life by his comforting his mother as his sister Robin died of leukemia at age three, and his alcohol abuse as an adult. It "could all be dismissed as psychobabble," Begley wrote in the May 21 issue, but she marshaled experts to diagnose him from afar for his "pathological certainty that things are going well."

3. ABC Panics Over 'Highest Gas Prices Ever'; Skews Oil 'Truth Test' Matching Monday's World News on ABC, Tuesday's Good Morning America forwarded the canard about the "highest gas prices ever," when, adjusted for inflation, they are lower than in 1981. GMA co-host Diane Sawyer and reporter Claire Shipman hyperbolically investigated "soaring" gas prices, and after noting that oil companies have been publically presenting their explanations, Sawyer wondered, "But are they true? We put them to the truth test." To prove the oil companies are dissembling, ABC featured a soundbite from Gulf Oil President Joe Petrowski's May 14 interview with CNN in which he, Sawyer asserted, blamed refineries. Shipman then maintained that "what you didn't hear those CEOs talk about is those refineries, and the people who own them, are reaping windfall profits right now because of the higher prices." In fact, Petrowski said exactly that in a portion of the CNN American Morning interview not played by ABC: "It is refining profits that are at absolute record levels. Normally, a refining margin to turn the crude into refined products is between 15 and 20 cents a gallon" but now "those margins are at absolute all-time record levels to a degree that's 80 cents a gallon."

4. NYT: 'Unclear What Role, If Any, Religion Played' in Ft. Dix Plot "Unclear What Role, If Any, Religion Played" in Fort Dix Six Terror Plot? In the face of clear evidence, New York Times reporter Alan Feuer claimed in a Monday story: "It is unclear what role, if any, religion played in the attack Mr. Shnewer and the five other men are charged with planning." In contrast to the Times' uninformative, politically correct take, the New York Post had a complete story with details on the suspects' radical Islamic beliefs.

5. 'Top 10 Surprises During the Queen's Visit to the White House' Letterman's "Top Ten Surprises During Queen Elizabeth the Second's Visit to the White House."