NPR Anchor Can't Say the Words 'Selling Fetal Tissue'

The Planned Parenthood scandal surprisingly came up in the Friday “Week in Politics” segment on NPR’s All Things Considered. (We can't say the same for the PBS NewsHour.) Both the liberal and the pseudo-conservative spoke up a bit for the humanity of the unborn. But anchor Audie Cornish developed a bad case of the euphemisms.

 “I want to turn to another issue that's been very much in the news the last few weeks,” she began. “That's Planned Parenthood. The group is in crisis mode after a video sting operation by a group opposed to abortion has put Planned Parenthood in the spotlight for the practice of fetal tissue in medical research.” What does that mean, “the practice of fetal tissue”? Shouldn’t it have been “the practice of selling fetal tissue for medical research”?  NPR was never this nervous when it described Abu Ghraib photos or the American treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo. But with abortion clinic practices, it speaks in tortured phrasing. It has a bad case of "Planned Parenthood patriotism." 

She added “Now, elsewhere in the program, we're going to hear more details about the fetal tissue research industry.” But that one-sided Jennifer Ludden story underlined the claims that no one anywhere is making a profit, and no pro-lifers were interviewed to say “So why were they joking about Lamborghinis?” - 

Here’s how liberal columnist E.J. Dionne and pseudo-conservative columnist David Brooks at least expressed some horror at the videos:

DIONNE: Well, the response that that they haven't broken laws is very important. But the fact is, if you look at that video, I think whether you are for or against abortion, it was deeply disturbing to have what looks like a casual discussion of fetal parts over lunch is just going to bother a lot of people, and understandably so.

The irony is that if Planned Parenthood were put out of business -- and a pro-life congressman made this point some years back [?] -- you might well have more abortions because Planned Parenthood dedicates a lot of its work, much more of its work to contraceptive and to preventing unintended pregnancies. So this is -- I wish we could come to a time where we had a less inflamed and more sober discussion of abortion because it's an issue, I think, at least, where it shouldn't be hard to understand why there's such passion on both sides.

CORNISH: E.J., David, I want to give you a chance to answer this. I don't know if you've seen the videos, but what does this moment say to you about this discussion?

BROOKS: Oh, I've seen the videos, and I guess, to me, they are a sign of a sort of a gradual moral degradation that occurred. Whether you're pro-life or pro-choice, to talk in this way, suggests to me just a hardening of the heart that happens when you, I guess, deal with this on a daily basis and are not - don't remain morally sensitive to the issues involved. One of the oddities now is we may have a government shutdown over this as Republicans seek to defund federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and Democrats fight to preserve it. This unexpected showdown may actually lead to a real budget crisis because of these videos.

Via: Newsbusters

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NPR Reporter: 'Pugilistic, Mean-Spirited' Fox News May Be Watered Down by Murdoch Sons

When it came to assessing Rupert Murdoch’s decision to cede more control of his empire to his sons James and Lachlan, PBS and NPR turned to David Folkenflik, who as NPR’s media reporter is a Murdoch obsessive and author of the book Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires.

On Thursday’s PBS NewsHour, Folkenflik surely pleased liberals by floating the idea that eventually Fox News would move to the center and be “a little more measured” in its point of view once Rupert and Roger Ailes fade from the scene. 

James Murdoch was said to be significantly involved in the decision by 21st Century Fox to invest a decent chunk of change in VICE, the multi-platform, multi-outlet entity that it’s own kind of pirate, renegade media outfit run by Shane Smith in Brooklyn here in New York. [Renegade? Or Obama-Kool-aid?] And that’s not something you would have thought of Fox News as investing in kind of outfit.

There has been a significant distrust and ill will between the Murdoch sons and Roger Ailes, of course, the chairman and CEO and guiding creative spirit at Fox News. I don’t think you are going to see Ailes sidelined immediately. But he is in his mid-70s. He’s not in particularly good health. And the actuarial tables favors the boys.

The question is, how can they shift it to be a little bit more measured, a little bit more like Sky News in the U.K., Australia, and elsewhere that is lively, peppy, sometimes strong voices on the air, but not itself taking a strong point of view, in the way that Fox seems to by its selection of stories and guests. So, those are some real significant indications of where things could go.

When PBS anchor Judy Woodruff asked for the legacy of Rupert, Folkenflik suggested he was creative – but he was also “destructive,” with his media properties projecting a “pugilistic, often mean-spirited character.” 

Via: Newsbusters

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[VIDEO] NPR Host Offends Bernie Sanders with Accusation He Has Dual U.S.-Israeli Citizenship

Apparently this was not the first time Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been confronted with rumors that he holds dual citizenship in the United States and Israel. During an interview on NPR Wednesday, host Diane Rehm told the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, “You have dual citizenship with Israel,” to which he quickly replied, “No I do not have dual citizenship with Israel. I’m an American.”

“I don’t know where that question came from,” Sanders continued. “I am an American citizen, and I have visited Israel on a couple of occasions. No, I’m an American citizen, period.”

When Rehm said his named appeared on some sort of list she received, Sanders replied, “That’s some of the nonsense that goes on in the internet. But that is absolutely not true.” Later, he added, “I get offended a little bit by that comment, and I know it’s been on the internet. I am obviously an American citizen and I do not have any dual citizenship.”

As the Jewish Journal reported, Sanders’ name does appear on various online lists of U.S. members of Congress with dual Israeli citizenship, but the sources are non-existent and appear to have originated from “anti-Semite and anti-Zionist” activists.

Sanders is Jewish and reportedly spent several months living and working on a kibbutz there after he graduated from college. Last summer, the senator faced off with constituents at a Vermont town hall who objected to his defense of Israel’s aggressive attacks on Hamas in Gaza.

UPDATE- 4:40 pm EST: Rehm sent a follow-up statement to Talking Points Memo about her error:

On today’s show I made a mistake. Rather than asking Senator and Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders whether he had dual U.S./Israeli citizenship, as I had read in a comment on Facebook, I stated it as fact.

He corrected me, saying he did not know where the question came from. I apologized immediately.

I want to apologize as well to all our listeners for having made an erroneous statement. I am sorry for the mistake. However, I am glad to play a role in putting this rumor to rest.

Via: Mediaite

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How The New Deal Created The Ghetto

A recurring theme on this blog has been that big government creates problems that often necessitate even bigger government to solve.

(A quick example: Wage and price controls — coupled with favorable tax treatment for businesses to provide health insurance — linked health care with employment, a distortion that resulted in the skyrocketing the cost of health care. Eventually, this government-created problem had to be fixed, by — you guessed it! — more government.)

In the wake of the Baltimore riots, it is appropriate to consider government’s role in creating a tinderbox that perpetuates poverty and a cycle of abuse. Not only was Jim Crow state-sponsored segregation, but — 50 years after the repeal of those horrific laws — ghettos that were specifically and intentionally created by government are still trapping Americans and destroying lives.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how “progressive reformers” were to blame for Baltimore. And, more recently, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, was on NPR’s Fresh Air to further explain how “explicit, racially purposeful” policies contributed.

Via: Daily Caller

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Denial On NPR: Journos Say Obamacare's Not a Scandal, and Obama's 'Relatively Scandal-free'

In a sign of liberal panic, NPR's Diane Rehm Show spent its first hour Monday questioning President Obama's management style. As their website elaborated on the Healthcare.gov fiasco and the NSA spying on world leaders, "the latest embarrassments have even some of the president’s supporters questioning his management style."

To insure that their comments weren't too upsetting to Obama-loving NPR listeners, several journalists -- Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and David Gergen of CNN -- insisted the Obama administration has been "relatively scandal-free" in its operations:

MARCUS: This is not a scandal in the traditional sense of scandal. And this is not -- but scandals and problems are a fairly common hallmark of second term presidencies. There's a lot of reasons for that. The president may be feeling very emboldened and verging on cocky/arrogant. The staff -- many of the best staff may have left, or they're exhausted. You've gotten opposition that's just so furious that they haven't won the White House for a second time that they're going to make your life even more miserable.

This has been really -- and I know people are going to call about Benghazi and other things, but this has been really a very -- and the IRS -- this has been a really relatively scandal-free administration, first term and second term.

Gergen agreed strongly:

GERGEN:  I particularly agree that -- with Ruth that this has been a scandal-free administration by and large, and we should appreciate that. I also agree with Donna that it's laughable that President Obama is a bystander. I don't think that's truth. He's being very deeply involved in a lot of these programs.

What I do think is there is an insularity problem and that is that the president, as all presidents have done, brought in some terrific people with him from Chicago. He brought the people he trusted, have been with him two campaigns, naturally enough. But what good president have done -- most effective presidents have done have then supplemented those -- that inner circle with heavyweights whom they can look to.

That's pretty shameless. Gergen's hinting that, for example, Clinton went outside his Little Rock inner circle to tap heavyweights like.... David Gergen. Is this guy sending his resume to Obama again? At least Marcus is admitting that Obama himself was lacking in the executive heavyweight department:

MARCUS: But he did come into office with very little management, no executive branch, executive office experience like former governors, very little time in public federal office. And I think that we may be seeing the consequences of that, and particularly in health care, where you know you've got this enormous complicated program that would be a challenge for the most experienced manager. To not have brought in the ultimate czar [for the Obamacare launch] is obviously a huge mistake in retrospect.

Via: Newsbusters

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On NPR Station, Dan Savage Whacks Mormons, Catholics for Belief That Sex Is Only for Making 'Zombie-eyed Followers for Jesus'

NPR has been a breeze beneath the wings of snarky gay advice columnist/MTV host Dan Savage on his book tour for “American Savage.” NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro hosted a book event in his hometown of Seattle. Now, Savage is denouncing traditional Mormons and Catholics on the NPR station KCPW in Salt Lake City.

The local NPR drone Ryan Cunningham wished him a happy birthday, and led him through a softball interview. Savage (inaccurately) trashed both Mormons and Catholics on this so-called network of civility for believing that sex is only for providing more “zombie-eyed followers for Jesus”:

NPR could say it was only one media outlet spreading the Gospel of Savage. The Salt Lake Tribune also published that scripted attack without any apparent attempt at fairness or balance:

"We’ve seen the Mormon church call off its dogs in marriage equality," he said in an interview before his speech. But he didn’t exempt the Salt Lake City-based LDS Church from his take on religion and sexuality, noting that sex has been around a lot longer than the Mormon church.

"Sex is for pleasure," he said, "and the Mormon church has always taken the position that sex is for creating more worshipful, zombie-eyed followers for Jesus."

Savage expressed hope to KCPW that “Increasingly, people are not willing to sacrifice their children on the altar of this dated dogma and this hateful ideology...It would be nice for the leader of the Mormon Church, as the leader of the Catholic Church seems to be doing, to draw a distinction between Mormon doctrine and civil law, religious law and civil law.”

Via: Newsbusters

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Privatize the National Park Service

No more Obama shutdowns ever again.

The behavior of the National Park Service during President Obama’s shutdown campaign has been shocking. As has been widely reported, Park Service employees have been told to make life as uncomfortable as possible for people, and have flourished in that endeavor. They have acted crudely and unprofessionally as a partisan and ideological arm of the White House and its propaganda campaign.

If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about (that would exclude American Spectator readers), then you listen only to NPR, watch only MSNBC, and read only the New York Times. Just click Google and start searching. There are frightening first-person accounts everywhere. Among the worst examples was a case innocently covered by a small Massachusetts newspaper that reported on a group of tourists traveling to Yellowstone National Park. The tourists, by no means a bunch of Tea Partiers, described the Park Service as “Gestapo”-like in its tactics.

That, of course, is an exaggeration. But the mere fact that a group of apolitical citizens would invoke such hyperbole to describe how they were treated really says something.

The Weekly Standard, a conservative source not given to hyperbole,argues in an editorial that the Park Service’s conduct “might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration.” That’s no small claim for an administration plagued by scandals ranging from Benghazi to the eye-opening overreach of the IRS, the NSA, and (among others) the HHS mandate. The Standard rattled off examples of abuses during the shutdown, highlighting the most egregious of them all, the shameless scene at the World War II Memorial:

People first noticed what the NPS was up to when the World War II Memorial on the National Mall was “closed.” Just to be clear, the memorial is an open plaza. There is nothing to operate. Sometimes there might be a ranger standing around. But he’s not collecting tickets or opening gates. Putting up barricades and posting guards to “close” the World War II Memorial takes more resources and manpower than “keeping it open.”

Via: American Spectator

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NPR to Reporters: Stop Using the Term ‘Obamacare’ So Much

Is it “Obamacare” or the “Affordable Care Act”? The terms have become increasingly interchangeable since it was first signed into law in 2010. But as we learned from Jimmy Kimmel last week, Americans don’t necessarily realize they’re the same thing. Now, one major news organization is taking steps towards a clarification on when to use each term in its reporting.

NPR’s standards editor Stuart Seidel has sent a memo to editors and reporters asking them to “avoid overusing ‘Obamacare’” and make sure that the first reference to the law in all pieces is the “Affordable Care Act.” The memo came in response to a letter from the Maynard Institute’s Richard Prince who said “the term can no longer be defended as neutral.”

Seidel wrote to NPR staff:

“‘Obamacare’ seems to be straddling somewhere between being a politically-charged term and an accepted part of the vernacular. And it seems to be on our air and in our copy a great deal. (I haven’t counted, and I’m not going to count: numbers don’t add up to good journalism.) But word choices do leave an impression. Please avoid overusing ‘Obamacare.’ On first reference, it’s best to refer to the ‘Affordable Care Act’ or ‘the health care law.’ On later references, feel free to use ‘Obamacare’ but mix it up with other ways to refer to the law.”

President Obama himself famously embraced the term “Obamacare” in the run-up to the 2012 election. “I have no problem with folks saying ‘Obamacares,’” the president said at a town hall event in 2011. “I do care.” But some pundits, including NBC News’ Chuck Todd, believe Obama made a “complete mistake” in embracing “Obamacare” because it inevitably “politicizes” the issue.

That observation is borne out by a recent CNBC poll, which shows that the word “Obamacare” elicits both more positive and more negative reactions than the more neutral-sounding “Affordable Care Act.” The poll found that 29% of Americans supports Obamacare compared with 22% who support the Affordable Care Act. 46% oppose Obamacare while only 37% oppose the Affordable Care Act.

Despite these facts, most news organizations continue to use the two terms interchangeably without recognition of the differing connotations they elicit. As the government shutdown, which brought into being by the fight over “Obamacare,” continues into its second week, NPR is attempting to address the issue.

Via: Mediaite.com

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[VIDEO] Cokie Roberts: ObamaCare Would Have Been Defunded If Obama Lost Syria Vote

Liberal media members are clearly overjoyed that there’s – at least for the time being – not going to be a vote in Congress concerning a military strike on Syria.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday, NPR’s Cokie Roberts outlined the left's doomsday scenario saying, “If he had lost this vote, which he was clearly about to do, it would have been everything: immigration would have been down the tubes, you know, ObamaCare defunded, debt ceiling a mess, all of it” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

JOE SCARBOROUGH, HOST: Cokie Roberts, yesterday, let's talk domestic politics. Yesterday, Peter Baker of the New York Times talking about how the President - and it wasn't an overstatement - talking about how the President’s credibility was on the line like no president since Wilson was rejected in 1917. That, you know, he failed on guns, he’s failed on immigration, he's failed on so many things this year that the President's men and women were going to Capitol Hill talking to Democratic lawmakers saying, in effect, “His presidency is on the line, we need your support,” and they ignored that.

COKIE ROBERTS, NPR: That's right.

SCARBOROUGH: This is a big reset not just internationally. It's a big reset domestically for this President.

ROBERTS: If he had lost this vote, which he was clearly about to do, it would have been everything: immigration would have been down the tubes, you know, ObamaCare defunded, debt ceiling a mess...

MIKA BRZEZINSKI, HOST: Oh my Lord!

ROBERTS: ...all of it.

Via: Newsbusters

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High NPR Star Salaries Curb the Appeal of Small-Dollar Donations

The next time a public-radio station goes into pledge-drive mode and begs listeners to chip in $100 for those snazzy premiums like the Nina Totin'-Bag, it would be wonderful if, in the spirit of balance and fairness, they would read off some salary numbers for NPR stars. Do people on modest incomes really want to chip in $25 to make sure an anchor can take home $375,000?

Instead, pledge-drive announcers often plead that stations need donations to pay for program fees, not anchor salaries. Blogger and news-app developer Andy Boyle pored over a few IRS 990 forms and revealed some of the highest-paid public radio poobahs:

– Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition.” 2009-2010: $361, 093, base salary of $319,370. 2010-2011: $373,097, base salary of $334,560.

– Renee Montagne, co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition.” 2009-2010: $357,037, base salary of $328,117. 2010-2011: $369,552, base salary of  $321,919.

– Michele Norris, former co-host of “All Things Considered.” 2009-2010: $298,360, base salary of $264,9009. No 2010-2011 numbers listed.

–  Robert Siegel, cohost of “All Things Considered.” 2009-2010: $362,687, with a base salary of $309,479. 2010-2011: $375,652, with a base salary of $321,860.

– Terry Gross, host of WHYY’s “Fresh Air,” broadcast on hundreds of NPR affiliates. 2009-2010: $254,933, base salary of $233,483. 2010-2011: $256,611, base salary of $233,483.

He also had numbers for the popular public-radio show "This American Life," heard on many NPR stations:

-- Ira Glass, host and producer of “This American Life.” 2009-2010: $171,224, base salary of $127,871. 2010-2011: $170,190, base salary of $148,782.

– Alex Blumberg, producer of “This American Life,” cohost of the Planet Money podcast. 2009-2010: $154,801, base salary of $123,220. 2010-2011: $201,734, base salary of $134,400.

– Julie Snyder, senior producer of “This American Life.” 2009-2010: Not listed. 2010-2011: $156,153, base salary of $146,175.

Boyle added this point on the anchor of the public-radio show Marketplace: "Couldn’t find Kai Ryssdal’s salary in updated 990s for American Public Media."

Via: Newsbusters

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