Here are today's news items from Media Matters for America, click on the title or 'read more' to read the entirety of each story.

2008 Elections

Limbaugh "Worst Person" for claiming VA Tech shooter was a "liberal"
On the April 20 edition of MSNBC's Countdown, host Keith Olbermann named nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh the "winner" of his nightly "Worst Person in the World" segment for claiming that the perpetrator of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech was a "liberal," as Media Matters for America documented. Olbermann quoted Limbaugh saying: "This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich, and all this other -- this guy is a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act." Read more

NBC News producer uncritically gives Giuliani campaign's explanation for inconsistency on abortion
On the April 20 edition of MSNBC Live, NBC News producer Jen Yuille reported that 2008 presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's (R) "critics say" that recently released Giuliani statements on the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 "highlights his inconsistencies on both issues, because it's different from what he said in the past." Yuille then added that Giuliani's "campaign will tell you that ... he hasn't changed, but that the laws have changed, and therefore he has kind of evolved over time with them." In fact, Giuliani's reversal on the "partial-birth abortion" ban cannot be explained as the result of a "change[]" in the law as Giuliani's campaign has asserted. Read more

Limbaugh falsely accused Media Matters of not providing context for his "Obama Osama" comment
On the April 20 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, host Rush Limbaugh asserted that Media Matters for America "takes everything that we say here out of context". The example Limbaugh provided was an incident on his July 11, 2005, broadcast in which he repeatedly referred to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as "Obama Osama" and "Osama Obama." Limbaugh argued that he was just engaging in a "parody because Senator [Edward] Kennedy [D-MA] at the National Press Club was asked about Obama and said, "Well, we need to ask Osama about that." In fact, as Media Matters documented at the time, while Limbaugh mentioned Kennedy's gaffe during the broadcast, he also repeatedly referred to Obama as "Osama Obama" or "Obama Osama" in criticizing Obama and Democrats in general. Read more

Propaganda/Noise Machine

Limbaugh claimed Media Matters "fell for" his "liberal" gunman "joke" "hook, line, and sinker"
On the April 23 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, host Rush Limbaugh claimed "I was making a joke" when he said on his April 19 broadcast that Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui "had to be a liberal, " and "it's a liberal that committed this act" before adding on April 23, "I do believe that it was liberalism that got a hold of this guy and made him hate things, professors and this sort of thing." Limbaugh also lashed out at Media Matters for America, claiming that he had made the comments about Cho "as a means of illustrating on this show how the words of conservative talk show hosts are twisted and taken out of context," before adding, "And sure enough, Media Matters fell for it hook, line, and sinker. They had it up all over the place." Read more

Spinonymous: Newsweek gave anonymity to DOJ official defending Gonzales
An article in the April 30 edition of Newsweek by investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff quoted an anonymous "top Justice official" defending Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales' alleged role in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, saying: "We believe the burden is now on the Democrats to prove that something improper occurred here -- and they haven't done that." According to Newsweek, the official "asked not to be ID'd talking about nonpublic matters." The article offered no indication as to what "nonpublic matters" the anonymous official referred to, or why they would prevent this official from speaking on the record. Read more

Gender Discrimination/Equality

Smerconish: "It almost seems like" VA Tech shooter "wasn't hooking up enough"
Discussing Cho Seung-Hui -- the 23-year-old student who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech -- on the April 23 edition of Michael Smerconish's radio show, simulcast on MSNBC, Smerconish asserted, "It almost seems like, you know, this guy wasn't hooking up enough, and it allowed him to build up these frustrations that he might not otherwise have had." Read more

Taxes

Reporting bipartisan desire to fix AMT, Wash. Post left out Bush budget's reliance on it
An April 23 Washington Post article by staff writer Lori Montgomery on House Democrats' plan to shift the burden of the alternative minimum tax (AMT) onto wealthier Americans reported that Republicans "also advocate repealing or substantially rewriting the AMT." Yet the article did not mention that President Bush's Fiscal 2008 budget goal of, in Bush's words, "balanc[ing] the budget by 2012 without raising your taxes," relies on revenues raised from not adjusting the AMT after FY 2008. The White House's prediction that the budget will reach balance or surplus by 2012 rests, in part, on the assumption that Congress will stop raising the exemption level of the AMT -- although the Bush administration proposed that Congress increase of the exemption level again for FY 2008. Without a continuation of this temporary fix, the AMT would increase the income taxes of millions of middle-class Americans in the years to come, as Media Matters for America has noted. Read more

Polling

Newsweek's Meacham: "[L]ong time" since Dems have let Americans know they share their values
On the April 22 edition of NBC's Meet the Press, Newsweek managing editor Jon Meacham repeatedly suggested that Democrats are out of step with "American value[s]." Meacham claimed that Democrats "are still struggling to find out how do they signal to the broad American public that they share their values ... whether it's religion or guns or life" and that "Democrats are living in terror of ... look[ing] as though they're being unsupportive of the troops, because ... that's an American value." In fact, recent polling indicates that Americans think that Democrats are more in line with their "values" than Republicans. Read more

Ethics

Ignoring polling, Matthews claimed "[t]wo-thirds" of Americans say leave [Gonzales] alone
Discussing Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales' April 19 appearance at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys on that day's edition of MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews baselessly asserted that "[t]wo-thirds of the American people say -- I mean, they don't like it, but they don't think he's [Gonzales] telling the truth -- but they say leave him alone." In fact, several polls have indicated that a plurality of respondents believe Gonzales should resign, while other polls show the public divided on the subject. During the program, Matthews also did not challenge the false assertion by guest David Rivkin, a Justice department official under President George H.W. Bush, that senators "did not talk about specific U.S. attorneys" with Gonzales during the hearing. Read more

War in Iraq

PBS gave Perle hour to repeat debunked claims about Iraqi WMDs and links to Al Qaeda
On the PBS series America at a Crossroads, former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, in an April 17 segment titled "The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom," made a series of assertions about the Iraq war that have already been shown to be false. He claimed that "all of the intelligence available to us suggested that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction [WMD]. ... We all believed that, which is why I object to referring to some of the things that were said before the war as 'lies.' " In fact, the Bush administration made several statements about Saddam's WMD capabilities that "all of the intelligence available to us" did not support. Perle then claimed that prewar Iraq had a working relationship with Al Qaeda, a claim that has been debunked by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Finally, Perle claimed that Osama bin Laden's "network has been destroyed," even though U.S. intelligence officials' have reportedly said that bin Laden is rebuilding his network. Read more

This mail was sent by Media Matters for America to 'news@energy-net.org'. Please visit us at http://mediamatters.org

You can help support our work; become a volunteer media monitor, or donate to Media Matters for America.

To change your email subscription preferences, visit http://mediamatters.org/users/prefs.html

If you'd like to unsubscribe from all Media Matters for America emails, you can just click on http://mediamatters.org/users/unsub/_TFiSm6WIkiaci7iLu6ZtH8gu6JaPh8t_vLvpt4dfhY.

To contact us directly, reply to this mail or visit http://mediamatters.org/contact_us