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I thought I would be in a better mood in 2010. I mean, you can't do much worse than 2009. But after only 24 days, I'm deeply cranky about several things on the food radar. Watercress-gate: Earlier this month, Food Network aired an episode of "Iron Chef America" starring White House chef Cristeta Comerford competing with Bobby Flay against Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse. The hook: The chefs were to use vegetables harvested from the White House kitchen garden started by Michelle Obama. Only they didn't. Sure, they showed the four chefs tromping through the garden picking and snipping and...

In January 2009 we brought a six-camera crew to Washington to create a documentary on the subject of the annual March for Life called Thine Eyes. What motivated Steve Sanborn, the organizer of the project and a March veteran, was the media's historic failure to capture the numbers, the demographics or the spirit of the marchers. With the advantage of rooftop cameras, we estimated there were about 350,000 participants, about 75 percent of whom were under 25, with more females than males among the young people. I also assigned our six cameramen to find as many pro-abortion protestors as they...

Amid the rash of appeals for Haiti donations has come a call from one of the most prominent voices on the American right for people to hang on to their cash because Barack Obama might steal it. Rush Limbaugh, the most popular radio talkshow host, who is sometimes described as the real leader of the Republican party, says Americans should not give a penny to a population struggling for survival after the earthquake. Limbaugh agreed with a caller suspicious that the White House website was being used to direct funds to the American Red Cross. "Would you trust the money's...

Give Greg Sargent credit over at the Plum Line blog for a good catch here.  Read the following exchange, for which Sargent will have audio shortly, and see what it means to you: QUESTION: “Scott, what do you think about the Tea Party movement and what they are trying to do?”SCOTT BROWN: “I am not quite sure what you are talking about, what are they trying to do?”QUESTION: “The anti-smaller government, sort of anti-establishment organization that is trying to take over the country.”SCOTT BROWN: “Taking over the country. I think that is a little bit of an exaggeration.”QUESTION: “Well, they...

Yeah, I know, nothing new for Tingles. But Brooks is taking a beating in the other tea-party thread so I thought I’d give him a break by reminding you that accusing tea partiers of having issues with the “educated class” is actually pretty mild compared to the usual insinuations. Also, in fairness, employees of MSNBC are probably contractually obligated to call them “teabaggers.” I’m giving you two clips, actually. The second is short, but an essential — and timely — gloss on the first. Update: Remember, MSNBC’s been known to edit video in order to obscure unhelpful facts that contradict...

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow launched an error-riddled attack against the John Birch Society in her December 18 show, nominally because the John Birch Society has become a sponsor of the upcoming February 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

CNN: Sarah Palin's 'Death Panel' Comment Wins 'Lie of the Year' By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-12-20 18:44 If President Obama or any Democrat had actually won the dubious honor of committing PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year," do you think CNN would have reported it? Fat chance, right? Before you answer, consider the glee exhibited by CNN's Josh Levs Sunday when he announced Sarah Palin had "won" for her Facebook comment concerning a "death panel" in healthcare reform legislation (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Story Balloon [1]): BETTY NGUYEN, CO-ANCHOR: Well, let's talk about politics, shall we? Something...

And of course, stories that Joe Klein makes up get recycled in Palestinian propaganda. Ben Smith reports: U.S. and Israeli officials are dismissing an eyebrow-raising claim from a prominent Palestinian activist and official, Mustafa Barghouti, in today's International Herald Tribune. "The Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, stands up and walks out on the U.S. envoy, George Mitchell, every time the American envoy mentions East Jerusalem," Barghouti wrote in an op-ed deploring "U.S. and European inaction" in the face of Israeli intransigence. Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, through a spokesman, dismissed the claim as "nonsense." "I have never heard such a thing,"...

The Media's Top 10 Worst Economic Myths of 2009 From jobs 'saved or created,' to stimulus saving the economy, to 'deficit neutral' health care reform; here are ten biggest stories the media got wrong this year. By Julia A. Seymour Business & Media Institute 12/9/2009 12:18:20 PM Each year the Business & Media Institute looks back on the year's news and selects the top 10 worst economic myths. Here is our 2009 list: 10. CBS, NY Times Support Ecuadorian Shakedown of U.S. oil company 9. Media Fail to Scrutinize Obama’s Job Claims 8. Government Stimulus is the Answer to Our...

While CBS and NBC ignored yesterday’s expansion of the federal definition of hate crimes to include sexual orientation, ABC’s Charlie Gibson reported it, explaining that the amendment was “named for Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming college student killed 11 years ago because he was gay.” It’s true that the amendment, attached to a defense spending bill, was named for Shepard but Gibson ignored his own network’s investigation of the Shepard case that revealed sexual orientation was not the sole motive behind his murder. ABC’s “20/20” investigation in 2004 found that drugs fueled Shepard’s brutal murder, not homophobia, as is widely believed....

The NYT is calling Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of the Washington Post, a liar. The NYT has reported this morning -- in a brief, buried "postscript" in the corrections column -- that it now has evidence that Brauchli lied last July when he told the NYT that he didn't know the paper's controversial corporate-sponsored dinner parties would be off-the-record. The NYT doesn't state flatly that Brauchli lied. But the juxtaposition of the two Brauchli statements in the postscript make clear the NYT's position that he misrepresented the truth in interviews with the NYT. [UPDATE: In an email to The...

In the wake of the news that radio host Rush Limbaugh was hoping to buy a chunk of the St. Louis Rams, Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote a column containing the now-infamous quote, supposedly from Limbaugh, regarding the notion that slavery "had its merits." We first became aware of the quote not from perusing the copy of the Post-Dispatch that arrives in our mailbox every morning in West Virginia, but because Limbaugh mentioned the issue during the Monday broadcast of his radio show. (Indeed, if Limbaugh had never talked about the quotes on his radio show, we...

Now that they played their part in smearing Rush Limbaugh and creating a firestorm that resulted in Limbaugh being criticized by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and eventually being dropped from the group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams, some in the media are admitting they used alleged "quotes" that they cannot confirm. First, here is Rick Sanchez at CNN apologizing for using quotes against Limbaugh that he now admits he cannot independently confirm . . . MSNBC's David Shuster admitted on air today that they cannot verify the quotes they used either, be he did not apologize . ....

Rick Sanchez: i've know rush. in person,i like him. his rhetoric,however is inexcusably divisive. he's right tho. we didn't confirm quote. our bad.

"We want to be fair to Rush" - no, you don't.

Veteran Washington Post reporter Daryl Fears, part of a two-person writer team, unmistakably wrote that filmmaker John O'Keefe had “said” he “targeted” ACORN, the advocacy group, for his candid-camera expose, because it registered voters to defeat Republicans. O'Keefe said no such thing. It was a non-quote made out of whole cloth by reporter Fears, and published as fact on Sept. 17. Making the falsehood exponentially worse, the Post story then was retailed worldwide by the Associated Press.

The whispers among some of his allies: that those who loathe Obama are driven in part by racism. Demonstrators are shown during a rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington on Saturday. Photo: AP AUSTIN – Eight months into Barack Obama’s presidency, as criticism of his administration seems to reach new levels of volume and intensity each week, the whispers among some of his allies are growing louder: That those who loathe the nation’s first African–American president, and especially those who would deny his citizenship, are driven at least in part by racism. It’s a feeling that’s acutely felt among...

TELL THE TRUTH TELL THE TRUTH TELL THE TRUTH NO MORE LIES NO MORE LIES GO HOME CNN

Supporters of the President have been bragging all day about the CNN poll which claimed that among people who watch the Health Care speech there was a 14-point gain in support for the plan read the report below.. pay extra special attention to the final paragraph:

I have not found one person in the major media-and that includes on the "conservative" Fox News Channel-who has dared to tell the ugly truth about Walter Cronkite's disastrous record in favor of defeat in Vietnam, unilateral disarmament in the face of the Soviet threat, and one-world government. His press has been as good as that of Barack Obama. However, many people are aware of Cronkite's real record, primarily because of the work of AIM founder and long-time AIM Report editor Reed Irvine. Here are just a few of the messages I received in response to my column, "The Terrible...