Media Research Center

MRC Latest Headlines

• ABC Regrets California's 'Unwillingness to Raise Taxes'
  A Tuesday story on ABC's World News, which ignored soaring state spending, reflected frustration with California voters for the anticipated rejection of ballot initiatives to raise taxes as reporter Laura Marquez blamed the Golden State's budget deficit on an "unwillingness to raise taxes" stretching all the way back to 1978's Proposition 13. In fact, though personal income tax collections "dropped 14% last year," a Tuesday Wall Street Journal article noted they "soared 70% from 2002 to 2007."
  
  
• Sanchez and Slater Agree Bush 'Presided Over a Reign of Bullies'
  CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and Dallas Morning News political writer Wayne Slater agreed on Tuesday's Newsroom program that former President George W. Bush appeared to be "controlled by a bunch of bullies," or that he was "presiding over a reign of bullies, with [Dick] Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld and Karl Rove pushing a partisan agenda." Later, as President Obama was getting ready to speak at a meeting with small business owners, Slater sought to correct the conservative critics of the administration's economic policy: "You have the right wing pounding on him day after day for the...bail-outs...a liberal, a socialist -- and yet, here you have a guy who really is tracking a fairly moderate line."
  
  
• NBC's Mitchell Touts Liberal 'Good Republican' Chris Shays on GOP
  Who did MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell feature to respond to RNC Chairman Michael Steele's Tuesday speech about the future of the Republican Party? Chris Shays, the liberal, former Republican Congressman with a lifetime American Conservative Union score of 44, appeared on Andrea Mitchell Reports to critique the chairman of the Republican National Committee. After Shays insisted that Dick Cheney shouldn't be deciding who is and isn't a solid member of the GOP, Mitchell complimented: "Chris Shays, a good Republican." Responding to the Steele speech, Mitchell pontificated, "No mention of Dick Cheney. No mention of Rush Limbaugh. Is he [Steele] trying to move the party to a broader party, one that would include you? You were the last standing moderate from the northeast."
  
  
• ABC's Diane Sawyer Pleads for European-Style Gas Tax
  Good Morning America co-host Diane Sawyer on Tuesday aggressively lobbied for the Obama administration to install a European-style gas tax on the United States. Talking to Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, about Obama's plans for increased fuel standards, she began: "Why not just go to a gas tax, for instance, which would accomplish a reduction in the use of gasoline, dependence on foreign oil right away?" Sawyer would proceed to ask variations on this question six times. Citing calls for a gas tax by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, she pressed: "If you really want to change the fuel patterns of this country, and if you want to reduce dependence on foreign oil, not by 2015 or 2016, but right now, there is one way to do it. It's the way Europe has been doing it. And that is a gasoline tax."
  
  
• PBS's Tavis Smiley in Time: 'Capitalism is Like a Child'
  Time magazine is not wild about capitalism. In a "business roundtable" on the "future of capitalism," Time assembled several liberals to decry the idea: PBS host Tavis Smiley, blog founder Arianna Huffington, and soul singer John Legend all found the need for capitalism to have a large dose of government intervention. Smiley was frankest: "I don't think that left to its own devices, capitalism moves along smoothly and everyone gets treated fairly in the process. Capitalism is like a child: if you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody's got to look over the shoulder of that child."
  
  
• Today Show Crew 'Dazzled' by Michelle Obama's Night Out at the Met
  NBC's Matt Lauer and Al Roker, on Tuesday's Today show, revealed they enjoyed a "nice" evening at the theater the night before, in the presence of Michelle Obama, as she "dazzled New York City for a second time," when she visited the Metropolitan Opera House. After an Amy Robach piece that celebrated Mrs. Obama's return to the Big Apple, Roker and Lauer bragged that they too were in attendance at the American Ballet Theater Spring Gala, along with the First Lady, as Roker gushed: "It was fantastic!"
  
  
• Dire Couric Cites Great Depression, Kids Will Be 'Lost Generation'
  Katie Couric sees America through a very dark prism. On Monday, she launched a new "Children of the Recession" series, in collaboration with USA Today, with an op-ed in "the nation's newspaper" in which she speculated today's kids may become the "Recession Generation" since "in some ways, I think they already are," or the "innocent victims could become the Lost Generation." Then, on Monday's CBS Evening News, she portrayed America as in such a bad way that it reminded her of the Great Depression, asserting the impact of the recession "may be" to children "what the depression was to an earlier generation." In a story on the "Safe Families for Children" program that helps overwhelmed families hand their kids temporarily to other families, Couric raised the most ominous comparison: "Volunteer families stepping in during tough times is reminiscent of the Great Depression when parents in dire straits sent their children to live with relatives or other people in the community." In the USA today op-ed Couric denigrated the kind of news she's presented as dealing with "things and places that are cold, vague, incomprehensible" (quite an endorsement for her newscast!), before pivoting to how the real news is an anecdote-based recounting of the plight of a few kids.
  
  
• Matthews Likens Cheney to Stalker Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction
  Chris Matthews, on the syndicated The Chris Matthews Show over the weekend, likened Dick Cheney's recent media appearances, to defend the Bush administration and to criticize Obama on national security policy, to Glenn Close's stalker character from the 1987 film Fatal Attraction. Before playing a clip of the movie Matthews made the cinematic comparison: "Well some say Cheney's refusal to move on reminds them of Groundhog Day but you could also say it's like that more frighteningly relentless Glenn Close in 'Fatal Attraction.' Like Cheney she was not gonna be ignored." After playing the clip in which the Close character utters the famous quote, "I'm not be ignored, Dan."
  
  
• CNN's Whitfield: Have Catholics 'Evolved' on the Moral Issues?
  Minutes after she praised President Obama on Sunday for his "courageous" decision to accept the invitation to speak at Notre Dame, CNN anchor Fredricka Whitfield played the role of liberal advocate for the President's commencement address, grilling one Catholic guest who questioned the university's decision, while going easy on her other guest who was happy to see Obama speak there. Just as MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell had done on May 14, Whitfield equivocated between the issues of abortion and the death penalty, along with war, in her question to Raymond Arroyo of the Catholic television network EWTN: "So does the death penalty fall into that and also wars...does that fall into that as well?" Later, when Arroyo brought up how the Catholic teaching on abortion wouldn't change, even if most of the Notre Dame graduates agreed with the decision to bring the President to campus, the CNN anchor replied: "Well, might it suggest something else, that perhaps the Catholic majority has evolved in its opinion of certain things....Perhaps, it means that there's a greater understanding in some of the areas that you say...once upon a time there wasn't."
  
  
• Cuomo Debates Priest Over 'Angels And Demons' -- But Only Online
  After promoting the controversial, religion-baiting film Angels and Demons for a combined 19 minutes last week on Good Morning America, ABC finally featured a Catholic priest to object to the movie. Unfortunately, the interview was relegated only to the network's Web site, not the ABC morning show. (Considering the four days of fawning coverage to the film's stars last week, this hardly seems fair.) Father Edward Beck appeared on the Internet-based "Focus on Faith" to talk to Chris Cuomo and point out the inaccuracies. Beck critiqued the filmmakers behind Angels and Demons, which falsely features the Catholic Church participating in a brutal massacre of a secret society, asserting that they should be more responsible for "doing their homework, even with a work of fiction." Cuomo bizarrely responded by claiming Beck needed to consider "the atheistic [position], which is, 'It's all fiction.' So, the church doesn't have any right to hold its own truth when it is a fiction in and of itself." He reiterated the disbelievers take, stating, "Anything you say you believe in is based on a fiction, because God is a fiction. So, what's wrong with having a fiction about fiction?"
  
  

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