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.

Propaganda/Noise Machine

AP ran false headline on story reporting baseless GOP allegations against Pelosi
An Associated Press article bore the headline "GOP says water bill benefits Pelosi's husband's property," but the article itself reported that "Republicans are accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of including a provision in a water redevelopment bill that could benefit property her husband owns in San Francisco" -- not alleging that it does benefit her husband's property. The article also noted that Republicans "offered no evidence of benefit to Paul Pelosi's real estate holdings" -- raising the question of why AP thought it merited publishing at all. Read more

Olbermann named O'Reilly "Worst Person" for suggesting Soros funded IU study
On the May 7 edition of MSNBC's Countdown, host Keith Olbermann named Fox News' Bill O'Reilly the winner of his nightly "Worst Person in the World" segment for, as Media Matters for America documented, suggesting that a recent Indiana University study -- which found that "O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the ['Talking Points Memo'] editorials that open his program each night" -- was funded by philanthropist George Soros. Read more

O'Reilly fabricated new sinister links between Media Matters and other progressives
On Fox News, Bill O'Reilly alleged a sinister link between Media Matters for America and Sen. Ted Kennedy. Discussing an email he said he received from Kennedy's office, O'Reilly said: "So, obviously, Kennedy sent that thing to us and shot it over to Media Matters." In fact, Media Matters cites materials from a variety of places as relevant, though in this case, it did not "duplicate" an email from Kennedy's office, but rather debunked an assertion O'Reilly made by providing transcript and video from a 2006 edition of The O'Reilly Factor and pointing to a 2006 fact sheet from Kennedy's office regarding immigration. Read more

2008 Elections

Fineman, Matthews mind meld: cite Dem satisfaction with candidates as harbinger of future Dem dissatisfaction
On Hardball, Newsweek's Howard Fineman suggested that a recent poll finding that 77 percent of Democrats and "Democrat Leaners" are satisfied with their party's choice of presidential nominees, while 52 percent of Republicans and "Republican Leaners" said the same, meant that "both parties are going to nominate somebody that they're sort of not wildly enthusiastic about, and then there is going to be seven months ... for everybody to have buyer's remorse big time." Chris Matthews asserted that the supposed dissatisfaction could lead to a "third party" bid. Read more

Ethics

CQ uncritically quoted Republican aide's false assertion about location of Pelosi property
In a May 7 article on Republican complaints that earmark disclosure rules allowed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to "certify that she had no financial interest in an earmark for repairing a pier even though her husband owns properties nearby," Congressional Quarterly Today quoted without challenge an anonymous "senior Republican aide" who made a claim about the distance between the pier and the Pelosi properties that was significantly less than the distance asserted by the Republican Study Committee (RSC). In the article, staff writers Jonathan Allen and Kathleen Hunter quoted the senior Republican aide saying, "If Tiger Woods teed a ball up at Pelosi's million-dollar rental property, he could easily hit the earmark in two strokes, with a slight draw to avoid the water." Unless Woods can drive a ball more than a half-mile, the anonymous aide's claim conflicts with the assertion on the RSC's blog that the Pelosi properties are "within 5,400 feet and 9,000 feet" of the waterfront improvement project. Read more

Global Warming

Exposed: Glenn Beck's Climate of Distortion
On the May 2 edition of his CNN Headline News show, Glenn Beck aired an hour-long "special report" titled "Exposed: The Climate of Fear," which he promised would present the "other side of the climate debate that you don't hear anywhere." During the show, Beck and those he featured rehashed several falsehoods and misleading talking points in an attempt to discredit the scientific consensus on global warming and to claim that former Vice President Al Gore "exaggerate[d]" and misrepresented climate science in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Classics, 2006). Read more

War in Iraq

Wash. Post, NY Times, AP reported Boehner's new timeline for Iraq progress without noting his previous one
In their May 8 reports on the Iraq war funding debate, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and The New York Times all cited House Minority Leader John Boehner's (R-OH) May 6 statement that members of Congress will want to see results from President Bush's troop increase by September or October, without noting that, in January, Boehner set a similar timeline regarding the war's progress -- for a period of time that has already passed. On the January 23 edition of CNN Newsroom, Boehner said of Bush's troop escalation plan: "I think it will be rather clear in the next 60 to 90 days as to whether this plan is going to work," adding that "we need to have close oversight, so that we just don't look up 60 or 90 days from now and realize that this plan is not working." Read more

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