MSNBC Recants Hoaxster's Boast

NEW YORK – MSNBC was the victim of a hoax when it reported that an adviser to John McCain had identified himself as the source of an embarrassing story about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the network said Wednesday.

David Shuster, an anchor for the cable news network, said on air Monday that Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, had come forth and identified himself as the source of a Fox News Channel story saying Palin had mistakenly believed Africa was a country instead of a continent.

Eisenstadt identifies himself on a blog as a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. Yet neither he nor the institute exist; each is part of a hoax dreamed up by a filmmaker named Eitan Gorlin and his partner, Dan Mirvish, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

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Dem Governor: Obama Coverage 'Embarrassing'

From Politico ~ Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was supposed to give “closing remarks” during this afternoon’s Shorenstein Center-sponsored panel discussion with all three Sunday show moderators — NBC’s Tom Brokaw, ABC’s George Stephanopoulous and CBS’s Bob Schieffer — but instead, he opened up a can of worms about bias in 2008 election coverage

"Ladies and gentleman, the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing," said Rendell, in the ballroom at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. "It was embarrassing."

Rendell, an ardent Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter during the primaries, now backs Obama in the general election.

Brokaw and Rendell began debating campaign coverage, including the on-air comments by Lee Cowan, and when MSNBC came up, Rendell went after the cable network.

“MSNBC was the official network of the Obama campaign," Rendell said, who called their coverage "absolutely embarrassing."

Chris Matthews, Rendell said, "loses his impartiality when he talks about the Clintons.”

At that point, PBS's Judy Woodruff, who was moderating the moderators event, said: "Why don’t we let Governor Rendell sit down."

That was met with applause from the crowd of big-time media figures, which included Arianna Huffington, Gwen Ifill, Al Hunt, and Chuck Todd.

Woodruff allowed Brokaw to respond, and in defending the network, he said that Matthews and Keith Olbermann are "not the only voices" on MSNBC.

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Mainstream Media's Selective Reporting Noted

Fox News Opinion ~ The mainstream media likes to brag about bringing us all the news that’s fit to print. Remember these recent stories?

~ Public schools in California next year will be required to teach 5-year-olds that homosexuality is normal and healthy — and that kids pick their "gender."

~ Television meteorologist John Coleman, who founded the Weather Channel, published a scathing article dismissing global warming as "the greatest scam in history."

~ Rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq fell in October to the lowest level in 21 months, after peaking in June before the "surge" in forces got under way.

Draw a blank? It could be because the mainstream media mostly ignored these stories, or briefed them on page A13. To hear about them, you likely had to rely on talk radio.

Buried speech isn’t free.

Read this entire oped piece at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312489,00.html.

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Groups Find Media Political Coverage Lacking

The Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy have once again looked at the media's coverage of politics and found much they don't like. "The game of politics -- rather than the ideas or even the background of the personalities -- has dominated how the press has presented the race for president" so far, the projects' researchers write in a report released today.

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MSM Slow To Recognize Power Of Blogosphere

Blogger Ocean Guy in Florida writes for many when he posts: "Those of us who blog and pay attention to blogs have long recognized that the traditional media…The Mainstream Media…is no longer the gatekeeper of the news the way they once were. The New York Times and CBS have been slow in recognizing that fact."

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