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

Cameron falsely claimed Thompson is "consistently pro-life"
On the May 31 edition of Fox News' Special Report, Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron falsely asserted that former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN) "is ... consistently pro-life." In fact, on July 29, 1993, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that Thompson, then running for a Tennessee U.S. Senate seat, said during an interview that he "supports the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision that established a constitutional right to abortion." In an October 21, 1994, article, The Washington Post similarly reported that "both" Thompson and his Democratic opponent in the 1994 Senate race, then-Rep. Jim Cooper, "believe in legal abortion." Read more

Is the Clintons' purported "secret pact of ambition" a Gerth-Van Natta creation?
In an advance copy of the new book Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown & Co.) obtained by Media Matters for America, co-authors Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. claim that former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), "in the earliest days of their romance," "made a secret pact of ambition, one whose contours and importance to the two of them has remained their secret across all these years." Read more

On Today, Bernstein omitted key fact in purported disclosure of Clinton's D.C. bar exam failure: It's not news
On the June 1 edition of NBC News' Today, Carl Bernstein suggested that he, in his upcoming book A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Alfred A. Knopf), is the first to disclose that Hillary Clinton failed the D.C. bar exam in the 1970s. Co-host Matt Lauer asked whether Bernstein believed it was "love" or "strategy" that caused Clinton to "move to Arkansas with Bill." In response, Bernstein stated, "They love each other. They always have," later adding: "But at the same time, this is a person who failed her bar exam, another great secret that she kept for 30 years ... in Washington D.C., where she wanted to make a life, and her friends were flabbergasted at this." Also, during the June 1 edition of MSNBC Live, anchor Mika Brzezinski described the fact that Clinton failed her D.C. bar exam as a "new nugget" that Bernstein "revealed" in his book. But, as Media Matters for America has noted, Clinton acknowledged in her autobiography Living History (Simon & Schuster, 2003) that she failed the D.C. bar exam and suggested that this event influenced her decision to go to Arkansas. Bernstein himself cited Living History while discussing this fact in his book. Read more

Wash. Post, CNN reported on Thompson's pickup truck without noting it was a leased campaign prop
An article in the Style section of the May 31 edition of the Washington Post described possible Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson as "the pickup-driving former senator and 'Law & Order' star," referring to the long-running television series in which Thompson stars and the red pickup truck he drove during his 1994 and 1996 Senate races. On the May 30 edition of CNN's American Morning, anchor John Roberts said of Thompson, "He'll be taking his red pickup truck, which has become synonymous with Fred Thompson, around on the campaign trail." But neither the Post nor Roberts noted that the pickup truck Thompson took on the road during his Senate campaigns was a prop leased by his campaign staff for the purpose of winning over Tennessee voters and, despite subsequently buying it, Thompson told a reporter through a spokesman that he left it in his mother's driveway "looking a little forlorn," with expired Senate license plates, once the races ended. Read more

NY Times refuses to run correction for false claim in Her Way excerpt
On June 3, The New York Times Magazine will print an excerpt from Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.'s upcoming book, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown & Co.) that asserts that Sen. Clinton's (D-NY) June 21, 2006, floor statement was "the first time in her public speeches" that she offered "a new interpretation" -- or "revised account" -- of her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq. But Clinton had made the statement to which they were referring numerous times before. In the excerpt, which was posted online on May 29, Gerth and Van Natta write: "The authority Congress given [sic] the president and his administration four years earlier, Clinton explained, had been 'misused' because they acted 'without allowing the inspectors to finish the job in order to rush to war.' " In fact, as Media Matters for America documented, Clinton had been publicly claiming that President Bush misused the Authorization For Use Of Military Force Against Iraq long before June 2006. Read more

Global Warming

ABC World News reported Bush greenhouse gas reduction proposal, ignored criticism of it
On the May 31 edition of ABC's World News, host Charles Gibson reported that President Bush "call[ed] on 15 major nations to set a goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions" and that "[t]his is a major change for the White House." Gibson noted that "the Bush administration was expected to face heavy criticism [at next week's G8 summit] for not doing enough about global warming." However, he failed to mention that Bush's greenhouse gas reduction proposal does not include any specific targets to be met or penalties for failing to reduce emissions -- shortcomings highlighted by numerous lawmakers and environmentalists. By contrast, other media outlets did report on the criticism of Bush's proposal, including the May 31 editions of the CBS Evening News and NBC's Nightly News. Read more

Propaganda/Noise Machine

Dobbs responded to leprosy criticism by falsely suggesting he had admitted error
On the May 30 edition of his show, CNN's Lou Dobbs characterized an inaccurate citation in 2005 of the number of leprosy cases in the United States as "an ad-lib on the set of this broadcast uttered more than two years ago ... an unscripted ad-lib, not a report," and claimed that he "set this record straight a couple of weeks ago." But on the May 16 show to which he referred, Dobbs did not correct the inaccurate report, as Media Matters for America noted; instead, he misrepresented it without admitting error. Read more

Media

Gibson on "TB Man story": Usually it's someone "from the third world" or who contracted "ooga booga fever" in "some godforsaken hellhole"
On the May 31 edition of Fox News' The Big Story, host John Gibson said he was "mesmerized" by what he called "[t]he TB Man story" -- the recent news that American attorney Andrew Speaker traveled by airline while infected with antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. Gibson stated: "It seems every time a story pops up about somebody who has suddenly contracted some strange or incurable disease, it's somebody who is either from the third world, or was traveling through some godforsaken hellhole, and somehow managed to contract ooga booga fever." 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