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

CNN reporters falsely suggested Democrats are only now talking about religious beliefs and values
On June 4 and 5, several CNN correspondents suggested that, until recently, Democrats have largely been silent on their religious beliefs and "values," ignoring the fact that presidential candidates, including John Edwards, and Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, among other Democrats, have talked about their religious faith and values for years. Several of the Democratic candidates referred explicitly to "values" or "morals" during the June 3 presidential debate, which aired on CNN.
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Wash. Times falsely suggested Obama equated "evil" of 9-11 with Gitmo, Abu Ghraib
A June 5 Washington Times article about the June 4 Presidential Forum on Faith, Values, and Poverty reported that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) said "there is evil in the world -- as seen in the September 11 terrorist attacks -- and said he sees it in the detention camp in Guantanamo and in the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq." Obama, however, did not use the word "evil" in reference to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal or to the Bush administration's "decision to detain people without charges" at the Pentagon's detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Rather, he cited them as examples of how the United States has "act[ed] unjustly." Read more

Media ignore facts undermining "Reaganesque" Fred Thompson's image as anti-Washington populist
On the June 3 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, Fortune magazine Washington bureau chief Nina Easton said of former Sen. Fred Thompson's (R-TN) possible 2008 presidential bid: "He's going to be posing himself very much as an anti-Washington populist, very much like when he drove his red pickup around the state in 1994 in his Senate race. He's good at that sensibility. There's going to be a lot of talk about his Reaganesque appeal." Easton's suggestion that Thompson will display an "anti-Washington" sensibility and "Reaganesque appeal" echoes characterizations of him advanced by Republicans and conservatives and adopted by several other news outlets and media figures. But contrary to those who portray Thompson as an outsider, he spent 18 years as a lobbyist, and reports indicate that he was not above partisan politics during his eight years as a U.S. senator. Moreover, several observers characterized Thompson's first speech in the run-up to an expected presidential bid as disappointing. Read more

Ethics

UPDATED: The Hill called Jefferson "first lawmaker to be indicted since 2001" -- but DeLay was indicted in 2005
A June 5 article in The Hill falsely reported that when Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) was indicted on June 4, he became "the first lawmaker to be indicted since 2001, when the Justice Department indicted then-Rep. James Traficant (D-Ohio), who is still serving a prison term." In fact, as The Hill itself reported on September 29, 2005, in an article headlined, "DeLay indicted, steps down: Rep. Blunt takes over temporarily as majority leader," then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) "temporarily resigned his leadership position ... after an indictment by a Texas grand jury over his connection to a political action committee in that state." Read more

Fox News downplays Scooter Libby's sentencing
News organizations began to scramble just before noon on June 5, when news broke that federal judge Reggie Walton had sentenced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to 30 months in prison and a $250,000 fine on charges of lying during the CIA leak investigation. Libby was found guilty in March of obstructing justice and lying to FBI agents in connection to the Valerie Plame case. With the sentencing, Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, became the highest-ranking White House official to face a jail sentence since the Iran-Contra affair nearly two decades ago. Read more

ABC's Tapper left out Pelosi's actions in 2006 stripping Jefferson of committee post
On the June 4 edition of ABC's World News with Charles Gibson, ABC News chief political correspondent Jake Tapper reported that, following the June 4 federal corruption indictment of Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), "Republicans ... pushed to have Jefferson expelled from Congress." Tapper added that "Democrats said the matter would be referred to the ethics committee," suggesting that this referral was the only action the Democratic House leadership has taken with Jefferson. In fact, after the federal investigation into Jefferson's alleged corruption revealed in 2006 that Jefferson had allegedly stashed $90,000 in his home, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) stripped him of his Ways and Means committee assignment. Read more

Gender Discrimination/Equality

KSFO's Rodgers: Sec. Rice's "spike-heeled boots" make her look "like the hostess at an S&M parlor"
On the June 5 broadcast of San Francisco radio station KSFO's The Lee Rodgers & Melanie Morgan Program, co-host Lee Rodgers said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "spike-heeled boots" make her look "like the hostess at an S&M parlor." The remark came during a conversation with conservative commentator and former H.W. Bush official Jed Babbin, who screamed on air when Rodgers mentioned a rumor that possible Republican presidential candidate and former Sen. Fred Thompson (TN) is considering Rice as a running mate. Read more

Global Warming

Fred Barnes still mired in sea level misinformation
On the June 1 edition of Fox News' Special Report, Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes falsely claimed that there is a "difference between [former Vice President] Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] of the United Nations" because "Al Gore says that over the next century sea level rises 20 feet" but the IPCC "says, 'Well, maybe 17 to 23 inches.' " In fact, Gore never said in either the film or book version of An Inconvenient Truth that the potential 20-foot rise in sea levels would happen "over the next century," as Barnes claimed. Indeed, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, the supposed "difference" between Gore and the IPCC on the issue of sea levels relies on a false comparison. While the February 2007 IPCC report projected a maximum 23-inch sea-level rise before 2100 as a result of rising temperatures, Gore's statement predicted a 20-foot rise in sea levels if the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets were to melt completely or collapse at an indefinite point in the future. Read more

War in Iraq

ABC's World News only network news broadcast not to report shortfall of Iraq "surge"
Of the three network news broadcasts on June 4, only ABC's World News did not report that President Bush's Baghdad security plan involving an increase of U.S. troops has thus far only been able to control one-third of the city, according to an internal military assessment first revealed in a June 4 New York Times article. "When planners devised the Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July," the Times noted. By contrast, NBC News chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski gave a full report on the assessment during NBC's Nightly News, and on the CBS Evening News, reporting on two missing U.S. soldiers captured last month near Baghdad, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan also noted that U.S. and Iraqi troops "only control about a third of the capital." Read more

Propaganda/Noise Machine

O'Reilly named Olbermann's "Worst Person" for attacks on man with TB
On the June 4 edition of MSNBC's Countdown, host Keith Olbermann named Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly the winner of his nightly "Worst Person in the World" segment for, as Media Matters for America documented, that Andrew Speaker acted on "secular progressive" values when he traveled by airline despite his tuberculosis and adding, "Traditional-values people put others on a par with themselves. That's a Judeo-Christian tenet. Love your neighbor as yourself. Secular progressives put themselves above all others. That philosophy says, 'Me first, then I'll worry about you.' " Read more

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