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

MSNBC's Carlson pushed false contrast between Clinton and Giuliani on desire to "reduce the number of abortions"
While discussing 2008 presidential candidates with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins on the June 12 edition of MSNBC's Tucker, host Tucker Carlson asked: If the nominees are Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), "who takes a lot of money from the abortion lobby, from people who actually commit abortion, and [former New York City Mayor] Rudy Giuliani [R], who is pro-choice but says he wants to reduce the number of abortions, that's not a clear choice?" Carlson reiterated his question later, asking: "If you're morally opposed to abortion, you've never supported a pro-choice candidate, but it is a choice between a pro-choice candidate, Giuliani, who says he will work to reduce abortions, and Hillary Clinton, who takes money from people who commit them, what do you do?" Contrary to Carlson's suggestion, Clinton has stressed on numerous occasions the need to reduce abortions, having advocated making abortion "safe, legal, and rare" for years, as Media Matters for America has noted. Read more

Matthews compared Sen. Clinton's futures trading to Rep. Jefferson's indictment
On the June 11 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews -- in yet another segment dedicated largely to the presidential prospects of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) -- compared Clinton's profitable commodities investments in the late 1970s to the allegations against Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), who was indicted June 4 on charges of accepting bribes, racketeering, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Referring to what he described as "the $100,000 she made in cattle futures," Matthews asserted, "I'm still mystified how you can pick up 100K in a field you know nothing about," before adding, "Bill Jefferson is probably going to federal prison for $100,000." National Journal's Linda Douglass responded that the charge that Clinton's commodities trading was unlawful was "something that was debunked during [Bill Clinton's] presidency" and that it "was never proved to be a crime or not a crime." Matthews said, "Well, it is found money. Let's put it that way, found money." In fact, even former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth, who first reported in 1994 on Clinton's commodities earnings, and co-author Don Van Natta Jr., acknowledge in Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown & Co., June 2007), that "there was never any official finding that Hillary had done anything wrong" in the commodities trading deal. Read more

Months after "Last word," Insight offered another bogus, contradictory defense of Obama-madrassa story
In a June 7 post, the editors of InsightMag.com defended their widely debunked January 17 article, which reported that "researchers connected to" Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) had claimed that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) "spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia." InsightMag.com now falsely claims that "[t]he Los Angeles Times and The New York Sun did a follow-up piece that largely substantiates much of our original article's claims about Obama's Muslim background -- namely, that he had one." Read more

AP uncritically repeated Thompson campaign talking point: "If he runs, it will be as a Washington outsider"
In a June 13 article on former Sen. Fred Thompson's (R-TN) appearance on NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the Associated Press asserted that "[i]f he runs, it will be as a Washington outsider" and uncritically quoted the following remark from Thompson: "I often say after eight years in Washington, I longed for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." But, contrary to Thompson's portrayal of himself as an outsider, he had worked as a Washington lobbyist for 18 years prior to taking office in 1994, a fact nowhere to be found in the AP story. Moreover, as Media Matters for America noted, Thompson resumed his lobbying work after he left the Senate in 2002. Read more

Gender Discrimination/Equality

Despite own complaints about "chickification of the news," Limbaugh criticized Rather's "pure sexism" toward Couric
On the June 12 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh criticized as "pure sexism" recent statements by Dan Rather regarding the CBS Evening News, in which Rather said that CBS was "try[ing] to bring the Today show ethos to the Evening News and to dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience." After airing this portion of Rather's response, Limbaugh said, "Now, when I saw this last night -- I was talking about this -- I said this is -- that's sexism. Dan Blather [sic], this is pure sexism -- dumb it down and tart it up." However, in the past, Limbaugh himself has complained about the number of women working in journalism and their adverse effect on the news media. Read more

War in Iraq

O'Reilly: CNN, MSNBC "delight in showing Iraqi violence" and "are actually helping the terrorists"
During the "Talking Points Memo" segment on the June 12 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly responded to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found that Fox News spent less time covering the Iraq war than CNN and MSNBC in the first three months of 2007. O'Reilly asserted: "In my opinion, CNN and especially MSNBC delight in showing Iraqi violence because they want Americans to think badly of President Bush. And that strategy has succeeded." O'Reilly also stated that he "can't speak for Fox News" but that his program does not "highlight every terrorist attack because we learn nothing from that. And that's exactly what the terrorists want us to do. I mean, come on, does another bombing in Tikrit mean anything other than 'War is hell'? No, it does not." Read more

Propaganda/Noise Machine

Wash. Times mischaracterized OSC's report on Doan
A June 13 Washington Times article by Jerry Seper previewing testimony by General Services Administration (GSA) administrator Lurita Doan before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform mischaracterized the findings of a May 18 report by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC). The Times article claimed that special counsel Scott J. Bloch's report "said Mrs. Doan violated the Hatch Act when at the conclusion of a [January 26] meeting" with deputy White House political director Scott Jennings and more than 30 of the GSA's political appointees, Doan asked "whether GSA could help Republican candidates." In fact, Bloch did not report that Doan had asked "whether" the agency could help -- a construction that suggests she was asking whether it was permissible for the agency to "help Republican candidates." Rather, Bloch alleged that, according to sworn testimony by "numerous" GSA employees present at the meeting, she actually asked, "How can we help our candidates?" Read more

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