There's little pretense of media fairness as the 2010 elections approach. Last Thursday, ABC's World News ran as "news" a video produced by the Obama White House [1]. Diane Sawyer excitedly touted how "we got to listen in on a phone call today," as viewers saw a brief clip of President Obama talking to a cancer patient who thanked him for the government takeover of health care.
Then on Monday, NBC Universal donated a 30-minute commercial-free interview to Obama [2] , shown not just on NBC's Today, but on the corporation's other networks (including USA, SyFy and Bravo). Matt Lauer informed the President how other Democrats (including Bill Clinton) don't think he's been "rigorous enough in pushing back against some of the Republican attacks." Lauer implored: "Do you intend to change your tone or your emotion in terms of your pushing back?"
Over on ABC, This Week host Christiane Amanpour took a brief respite from slamming America's Islamophobia to commiserate with White House advisor David Axelrod about how "people don't appreciate some of the amazing legislative agenda that he's accomplished." Turning to Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, Amanpour slashed [3] the "bizarre statements" of the GOP's Tea Party candidates, suggesting "their sort of fringe quality might actually turn people off."
Amanpour was echoing MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who failed to get a "thrill" from House Republicans' Pledge to America. On Hardball, Matthews railed [4] that the document "could be the biggest cover-up since Watergate" because it failed to expose the "radical ideas" and "wild stuff" from "the fringe on the right."
Newsweek's Lisa Miller appeared on CNN's American Morning on Monday to promote her magazine's nasty cover story attacking Sarah Palin's "Mama Grizzlies." Miller suggested genuinely good mothers would favor ObamaCare [5] and other big federal health bureaucracies: "It seems like a funny way to say that you're for kids, and be against all of these programs."
Yet the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found a majority (54%) want ObamaCare repealed, and by a 42% to 18% margin see the Tea Party as "a good thing." Amazingly, 59% of those polled say they get most of their news from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN or MSNBC [6] .
It seems viewers aren't buying what the old MSM is selling this year.