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

Hannity got "Worst Person" "silver" for using cucumber, condom to misrepresent Obama's stance on sex ed
On the July 24 edition of MSNBC's Countdown, host Keith Olbermann named Fox News host Sean Hannity the "silver" in his nightly "Worst Person in the World" segment for previewing a discussion of July 17 comments by Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) regarding age-appropriate sex education during the July 20 edition of Hannity & Colmes by asking "[W]hat is it that Barack Obama was thinking when he said he supported sex ed for kindergartners?" while Fox News aired video of a woman applying a condom to a cucumber. As Media Matters for America documented, the Obama campaign has made clear what the candidate "was thinking": "He said we needed to teach even kindergartners what kind of touching is OK, and what kind is not." Read more

Wash. Post reprinted online user comment attacking Clinton and Obama
On July 25, The Washington Post published a user comment from its website attacking Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) following the most recent Democratic presidential debate: "Hillary is so calculating, she is almost robotic. ... And Obama?? I'm still waiting. Other than an excellent cheerleader, who is he???" The comment was written in response to a July 24 entry by staff writer Dan Balz on the Post's presidential politics blog, The Trail. The comment was then published in the July 25 edition of the Post in a new section also titled "The Trail." The section did not feature any other comments from The Trail blog, although numerous other comments to Balz's entry complimented Clinton and Obama. As Media Matters for America has documented media outlets frequently portray Clinton as "calculating" or overly ambitious, while rarely offering actual examples or support. Moreover, Media Matters has also documented media baselessly suggesting that Obama is "all style and little substance." Read more

AP reported on McCain's tax claims but not how he would pay for them
A July 24 Associated Press article by James Prichard reported that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (AZ) "originally opposed Bush's tax cuts, but he advocates extending them now because he says repealing them would amount to a tax increase." The article also reported that McCain "said Democrats who hold a narrow majority in Congress want to raise taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars by repealing President Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts." The article added that "if elected president, he [McCain] would repeal the alternative minimum tax [AMT] and keep government spending in check using vetoes and line-item-veto authority." But the article gave no indication that Prichard had asked McCain, or that McCain had spoken, about how he proposed to make up for the decrease in revenue that would result from repealing the AMT and extending the Bush tax cuts. Read more

Wash. Post gotcha on Chelsea Clinton's schooling exposes poor reporting instead
In the July 25 edition of The Washington Post, staff writer Peter Baker wrote that during the July 23 Democratic presidential debate, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) said "she sent her daughter, Chelsea, to Sidwell Friends School instead of a D.C. public school because of reporters. 'I was advised -- and it was, unfortunately, good advice -- that if she were to go to a public school, the press would never leave her alone,' she said." But, Baker added, "that's not what the Clintons said in January 1993 when they announced the decision." In fact, contrary to Baker's accusation that Clinton has fabricated a new reason for sending Chelsea to Sidwell Friends, Clinton's explanation is entirely consistent with what the Clintons said in 1993 -- which Baker could have determined with a quick Nexis search. President Bill Clinton told the Associated Press in May 1993 that Chelsea attended Sidwell Friends because she "does not like getting a lot of publicity, and frankly she has more privacy and more control over her destiny" than she would in a public school. Read more

O'Reilly asked: "[W]hat's the difference between David Duke" and Daily Kos?
On the July 24 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, during an interview with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) presidential campaign communications director Howard Wolfson, host Bill O'Reilly again compared the blog Daily Kos to white supremacist David Duke, asking: "[W]hat's the difference between David Duke and the hate stuff that he puts on his website with his bloggers and this? What is the difference?" Wolfson responded that, unlike Daily Kos, "David Duke's entire organization is rooted in hate and racism." O'Reilly then asked, "And the Daily Kos is not?" Wolfson replied: "No, it certainly is not ... It is primarily hundreds of thousands, as I said, good American citizens who are participating in our democracy." Wolfson later accused O'Reilly of "cherry-picking comments that are objectionable and attempting to smear an entire community of people. And it's wrong." Read more

War in Iraq

CNN's Blitzer failed to note Hayes' false Iraq-Al Qaeda reporting, Cheney connections
On the July 24 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer interviewed Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes about his recently released book on Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President. During the interview, Hayes claimed that Cheney and President Bush "initially ... both thought there was a possibility that Saddam Hussein had had some role in the September 11th attacks," and that "pretty much everybody thought" Iraq "had weapons of mass destruction, and these terrorist groups that were -- in some cases, had overlapping relationships with Saddam ... and his intelligence services." Blitzer offered no challenge to Hayes' Iraq/Al Qaeda statements, despite the fact that Hayes wrote several articles and a book alleging connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq that were later discredited, and that Hayes' flawed work was touted by Cheney as the "best source of information" regarding the alleged connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Indeed, at no point during the interview did Blitzer note Hayes' steadfast support of the Bush administration's national security policies. Nor did CNN identify Hayes as a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard. Read more

CNN's Todd asserted that Gravel's comment that soldiers died in vain "offends America's veterans"
On the July 24 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, while reporting on former Sen. Mike Gravel's (D-AK) assertion that "there's only one thing worse than a soldier dying in vain -- it's more soldiers dying in vain," CNN correspondent Brian Todd simply asserted that Gravel's "comment offends America's veterans." Gravel's comments came during the July 23 Democratic presidential debate. Read more

Ethics

DeLay's Politico column on "failures" of the Democratic Congress rife with falsehoods
In his July 23 Politico column, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) wrote that "the defining characteristic of the new Democrat [sic] majority in Congress has been failure." DeLay claimed that the "collapse of the immigration bill is a perfect case study in the legislative idiocy that is right now posing as leadership in the Democratic Party," adding: "The Democrats wrote the immigration bill like it was 1977, when they commanded huge majorities -- behind closed doors, details kept even from their own caucus, as if confident their ideological pals at the networks and major newspapers would keep the story from the American people." At no point, however, did DeLay acknowledge that the immigration bill was actually written by a bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic senators, as well as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. Read more

Polling

Wash. Post: Cong. "Democrats in particular" have high disapproval -- in fact, disapproval of GOP much higher
An article in the July 25 edition of The Washington Post by staff writer Peter Baker asserted that despite President Bush's low approval numbers, "the president's team takes solace from the fact that the public holds Congress in low esteem too," adding that "[m]ore than half" of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC News poll taken July 18-21 "disapproved of Congress generally, and Democrats in particular." In fact, according to the Post/ABC poll, congressional Republicans have a substantially higher disapproval rating than congressional Democrats. Read more

Government and Elections

Politico's Allen uncritically quoted McConnell claiming Democratic Congress has "not been very productive"
In his July 25 "Politico Playbook," Politico chief political correspondent Mike Allen uncritically quoted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claiming that "the first six or seven months of this Congress have basically not been very productive." According to McConnell: "We've had excessive Iraq votes, excessive investigations, and not much legislating. Managed to keep the lights on and managed to do a troop-funding bill that was important, but that's really about it for the first seven months." Allen offered no challenge to McConnell's attack on Congress' "productiv[ity]"; in fact, Republicans have repeatedly blocked legislation proposed by the Democratic majority in the Senate. As Media Matters for America noted, McClatchy Newspapers reported on July 20: "This year Senate Republicans are threatening filibusters to block more legislation than ever before." Read more

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