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2. VP Debate Moderator Ifill Writes Book About 'Age of Obama'
3. 'Brilliant' Ifill Cousin Scours Palin: 'Offensive to Black Women'
4. Jon Stewart's Plan to Mock Barack: He's Too Hopeful
On September 24, former Democratic aide-turned journalist George Stephanopoulos touted the larger lead and asserted, "...You have to go back to 1948 for the last time when a candidate having this kind of a lead, in late September, lost." He mentioned that on the issue of the economy, the Illinois Senator is "blowing away John McCain." An onscreen graphic proclaimed: "Obama Surges Ahead." But, just a week later, GMA not only ignored findings suggesting a closer national race, the morning show highlighted a rival poll's state numbers. (The Washington Post also reflected the skew. Last Wednesday, the top of the front page headline screamed: "Economic Fears Give Obama Clear Lead Over McCain in Poll." But this Wednesday, while still on the front page, the poll article did not hint at the nine-point gap closing to four, "Most Voters Worry About Economy: Majority Consider Situation a Crisis.") [This item, by the MRC's Scott Whitlock, was posted Wednesday on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org [1] ] In the 8am hour on Wednesday, news anchor Chris Cuomo explained, "Barack Obama is actually widening his lead now in the key battleground states. A new Quinnipiac poll shows Obama leading John McCain by eight points in Florida and leading by eight points in Ohio, as well." Less than an hour earlier, at 7:11am, co-host Robin Roberts played up the state numbers: "A new poll out this morning has Barack Obama leading John McCain by eight points in Florida, eight in Ohio, and 15 points in Pennsylvania."
A transcript of the September 24 segment, which aired at 7:02am and featured the larger poll lead:
7am tease
7:01am
7:02am
In addition to her portrait of Obama, Ifill will also investigate Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a close friend of Obama's; Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who Ifill describes as "very charismatic" in the video; and Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama. "They all chose to get into politics for the most upstanding of reasons, and they all have achieved much more than their parents could have hoped." It doesn't hurt that it's made Obama a mega-best-selling multi-millionaire author. [This item, by the MRC's Tim Graham, was posted Wednesday on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org [4] ] Ifill presents Obama and the others as the idealistic successors of Martin Luther King: "This book is about a generation of people who took seriously the achievements that their parents fought for. They knew that Martin Luther King did what he did so they can do what they're doing, and they decided to follow through." The obvious question in all this is whether Ifill is not merely writing about a "breakthrough" for Obama and the new generation of black Democrats, but rooting and wishing and hoping for it. The less obvious question that her liberal friends might ask: why no profiles of black female politicians in your book? Our 2004 Media Reality Check on Gwen's Greatest Hits is here: www.mrc.org [5] In an interview with her former Washington Post colleague Howard Kurtz earlier this month, Ifill suggested people like Obama (with their "immense accomplishments") are somehow left out of the "lazy" racial dialogue, and expanded on the need for what supporters call affirmative action: "We're very lazy when we think about race in this country," Ifill says. "We try to put it in a box. It's Jesse versus Al, or Jesse and Al versus everyone else," she says, referring to Jackson and Sharpton. "We love simplistic conflict. There's a whole group of people who have Ivy League degrees and immense accomplishments who actually benefited from the things their parents were fighting for." So why aren't there more of them in the media ranks at the Republican convention? "You have to look hard," Ifill says. "That's a failure of news organizations, mostly newspapers, to support and promote people of color." Kurtz's September 4 article: www.washingtonpost.com [6] Again, we need to ask: does Ifill want the elites to "support and promote people of color" from Ivy League colleges just in the media....or all the way to the White House?
Here are more signs Sarah Palin could face an uphill battle with PBS host Gwen Ifill. Professor Sherrilyn Ifill of the University of Maryland Law School, whom Gwen Ifill has lauded as "my brilliant baby cousin," has written that black women are not buying Sarah Palin's "false claims to feminism" and is portrayed as too perfect: "when women who are privileged present as though they have it all together, it's offensive to black women." The Community Times, a suburban Maryland newspaper, found Professor Ifill was ardently opposed to the Alaska Governor when they did an e-mail interview: "From the first day, Palin presented herself as shooting a bear in the morning, field dressing it, cooking up the breakfast, diapering the babies, passing legislation in the afternoon, cleaning the house, satisfying her husband, etc., etc., etc. And it's just not true," she wrote in an e-mail interview. "It's hard to be an average working mom, really hard. And when women who are privileged present as though they have it all together, it's offensive to black women." She said, "black women are not easily confused by false claims to feminism. When women like Palin lay claims to '€˜representing' average women, I think that black women have a visceral reaction to it." Ifill added that Palin "missed her opportunity when she announced Bristol's pregnancy to explicitly talk about how painful it was to her as a mother -- instead of making it as though this too was also part of her perfect life. "Hillary has the sympathy of women because of what she went through with Bill in front of the whole country. Michelle [Obama] takes pains to be self-deprecating and to talk about her concerns and fear about her girls. She insists that she couldn't do what she does without the help of her mother. Most importantly, both champion issues that affect the lives of real, average women - universal health care, equal pay, choice, etc. To do so is a recognition that real working women (not political wives or politicians) need policies that will help them maintain their families. What's the point of Palin's brand of feminism if it doesn't translate into real returns for average women?"
The September 17-posted article with the e-mail: www.communitytimes.com [7] Pittsburgh, Pa.: Is Professor Sherrilyn Ifill at the University of Maryland Law School, who's spoken out so eloquently and thoughtfully on symbols of racial hatred lately, any relation to you? Gwen Ifill: She is indeed my brilliant baby cousin, and the author of an excellent book "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 20th Century." See: www.washingtonpost.com [8] Cousin Gwen supported that book at an event at the liberal D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose. As The Politico reported in February of 2007: Ifill's reading illustrates how decisions are made. She had everything you need: a name to draw a crowd (her cousin, moderator of PBS's "Washington Week," introduced her); a friendship with Jim Lehrer of "The News Hour," also on PBS; and a book with a liberal, social-justice bent, about lynchings that took place outside the Deep South. "Jim Lehrer's a great friend of the store," Meade said, adding that the store probably would have held the reading anyway, given the content of Ifill's book. "If it's something that involves civil rights, civil liberties, we're pretty interested in it usually." The idea that Politics and Prose has a liberal bias has caused the store some consternation, but it's rooted in reality. The bookstore draws a graying, turtleneck crowd in a neighborhood known for its liberal politics in a city that gave George W. Bush fewer than 22,000 votes in 2004. Would you expect the shelves to be buckling under the weight of Sean Hannity and Co.'s latest books? The bookstore's most well-known snub went to Matt Drudge, a conservative and the creator of The Drudge Report. Cohen reportedly called him "a rumormonger and a troublemaker" in 2000 when the store rejected his request for a reading. Politico story: www.politico.com [9]
Not backing down, Colbert's Comedy Central colleague Jon Stewart made clear that this "attack" on the Democratic nominee would be different then that of the harsh jibes at Republicans: "Even if you're satirizing how wonderful they are, that hyperbole is setting them up for an expectation to fail, especially within the American political system now, where authenticity -- and apparently mediocrity -- are the manna that the populace feeds upon." Earlier in the piece, Stewart derided: "You 'good values people' have had the country for eight years, and done an unbelievably s---ty job. Let's find some bad values people and give them a shot, maybe they'll have a better take on it." Asked whether things will change if the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House, Stewart railed against the party for past examples of not being liberal enough: "And then they [Democrats] got in and were like, 'Really, you want to eavesdrop? Okay, we'll let this one go. But this is the last blank check! Unless you want another.'" [This item, by the MRC's Scott Whitlock, was posted Wednesday on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org [10] ] For the interview, Colbert dropped the faux conservative act that he perfects for The Colbert Report and railed against the Bush administration. On the subject of change, he complained: "Any change is as good as a vacation at this point...I don't know if you've paid much attention to the past eight years, but it has been a s---burger supreme. If somebody gives me an empty burger, it's better than eating s---." In a previous example of the difference between the satire Stewart directs at conservatives versus liberals, Stewart famously referred to columnist Bob Novak as a heartless "vampire demon" on September 18, 2006. See the September 20, 2006 CyberAlert: www.mrc.org [11] The entire EW interview can be read here: www.ew.com [12] -- Brent Baker
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Good Morning America on Wednesday reported on a new Quinnipiac poll that highlighted leads for Barack Obama in Florida and Ohio, but completely skipped the network's own national poll that found a tight race. A September 30 ABC News/Washington Post survey concluded that Obama leads Senator McCain by four points -- 50 to 46 percent. In contrast, GMA last week trumpeted an ABC News/Washington Post poll that showed Obama with a nine point lead. 
The MRC's Rich Noyes reported in a September 29 CyberAlert posting that the earlier ABC poll had come under fire for an oddly weighted sample. Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 16 points in the survey, a larger than usual amount. See: 
There's one good reason Gwen Ifill, the host of the PBS show Washington Week, is moderating the vice presidential debate: she has a forthcoming book about Barack Obama (and other black Democrats) called The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Ifill talks about the book project on YouTube: 
In an interview in the October 3, 2008 issue of Entertainment Weekly, liberal comedian Stephen Colbert explained what an emerging critique of Barack Obama might be: "He's a hope-ronaut. He's in a rarefied level of hope where the rest of us have to take tanks up with us." Interviewer Josh Wolk skeptically replied, "Is that really a comedic take? Seems more like a compliment."