Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

Every week seems to find the mainstream media pumping another stream of distorted and disingenuous news stories into the minds of the American people.

Thanks to the excellent work of Newsbusters (NB), a division of Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, the following are some of the latest bloopers.

Nuns on the Bus vs. Fortnight for Freedom

Anyone wondering what happened to all the coverage of the Fortnight for Freedom campaign, it was buried under the media’s obsession with the dissent-filled “Nuns on the bus” tour which was staged by liberal nuns who are opposed to cuts in federal programs for the poor.

As Catholic League President Bill Donohue reports for NB, even though a total of 141 dioceses involving tens of thousands of Catholics participated in the USCCB events, it was barely a blip on the news radar. Instead, the media was busy chasing the nuns’ bus, which contained only two nuns and never more than six at any given time.  

“No matter, CNN did eight stories on the nuns, and none on the bishops; MSNBC did six on the nuns, and one on the bishops; and CBS News did two on the nuns and none on the bishops,” Donohue reports.

Maybe the reason why our Church seems to be falling apart is because only the dissenters make the news while the faithful get barely a mention. 

Politically Correct Video-Pulling at YouTube

You may have heard that YouTube pulled an ad from the Romney campaign because it features President Barack Obama singing Al Green’s  song, Let’s Stay Together, supposedly for copyright reasons.

As NB’s Noel Sheppard points out, other videos of the President singing the same song are all over YouTube. “In fact, there’s practically a deluge of “Obama sings Al Green” videos functioning just fine at YouTube,” Sheppard writes.

So why was the one used by the Romney campaign singled out for copyright reasons?

Three guesses. 

 

How to Make a Bad Bailout Look Good

Then there’s the big story about how great the new Chevy Volt is selling like hotcakes – a wildly hyped story being reported with the hope of making the $50 billion bailout of General Motors and the President’s favorite car look like success stories when they aren’t even close.

For instance, June was supposedly the “second-best sales month” for the Volt – which sold a whopping 1760 vehicles.

“Wow.  Huge number,” comments NB’s Seton Motley. “The Press also fails to put this pathetic tally in perspective. The Chevy Cruze is basically a Volt without the dead-weight, flammable 400-lb. electric battery. Which makes it $17,000, rather than the Volt’s $41,000.

“Chevy in June sold 18,983 Cruzes – more than ten times the number of Volts.  And that’s down 1/3 from last June’s 24,648.”

In addition to hyping these paltry numbers, the press is also neglecting to inform the public that there have been at least five Volt fires, the cause of which remains unsolved. No one knows if it’s the battery, the charging station, the charging cable, or all of the above.

“GM and the Administration don’t know,” Sheppard writes. “And the Press ain’t breaking their necks trying to find out.”

Hypocrisy on Steroids

One of the best revelations of the week came from a report by NB’s Ken Shepherd that reveals just how disingenuous both lawmakers and the press can be in their efforts to promote the so-called “war on women.” 

For instance, remember back in May when a group of female Senators were hawking the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA)? It was a bill aimed at correcting the problem of women who are still being paid on average about 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. What you weren’t told if you were listening to the mainstream media is that three of the loudest voices accusing Republicans of waging a “war on women” – Patty Murray (D-WA), Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) all pay their female staff members significantly less than male staffers.

Thanks to the fine reporting of the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative-leaning media outlet, women on Sen. Murray’s staff made about $21,000 less per year than male staffers in 2011, which amounts to a difference of 33.8 percent.

The strident pro-abortion Sen. Barbara Boxer is also guilty of waging a war on women’s paychecks by paying her female staffers about $5,000 less than male staffers – a difference of 7.3 percent.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein also allows a “gender gap” to exist in her office by paying her female staffers about $21,000 less than men in 2011.

All of the figures cited by the Beacon came from publicly available salary data from the transparency website Legistorm and took into account only full time staff members who were employed for the entire year of 2011.

While covering countless news conferences featuring these liberal women who were up on their high horses about the “war on women” not a single outlet bothered to print what the Beacon had discovered.

So why would the press deliberately hide, misrepresent and/or distort the facts in order to present only what they want us to know?

We’ll let you connect the dots on that one.

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