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

Colbert Report ridiculed Hannity's baseless suggestion of "foul play" in Vince Foster's death
On the July 25 edition of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert mocked Fox News host Sean Hannity's July 22 report on Hannity's America -- documented by Media Matters for America -- which asserted: "[Former deputy White House counsel] Vince Foster got in his car and drove to Fort Marcy Park in Virginia. And he supposedly walked through the woods, and depending on which version of the story you believe, he took his own life. ... In the minds of some, these questions may have provided a motive for foul play." After playing a clip featuring those quotes, Colbert said: "Shocking. And if it weren't for the minds of some, like Sean Hannity, we wouldn't even have the implication that the Clintons killed one of their oldest friends." He also stated, "Sean Hannity knows there is no greater threat to America today than Bill Clinton 15 years ago." Read more

Thompson's role as Nixon mole in Watergate probe absent from Solomon's Wash. Post story
A July 26 article on potential Republican presidential candidate and former Sen. Fred Thompson (TN) in The Washington Post by reporter John Solomon asserted that Thompson "gained fame in the early 1970s as the 30-something lawyer who helped Republican Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee pursue Richard M. Nixon's misdeeds during the Watergate hearings," without noting that, as reported in a July 4 article by Michael Kranish in The Boston Globe, citing Thompson's memoir, "The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer" to warn the White House that the committee knew about the tapes. Read more

O'Reilly continued to attack Daily Kos while ignoring objectionable comments on his own site
During the July 25 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, discussing the Democratic presidential candidates' decision to attend the YearlyKos convention, host Bill O'Reilly again railed against the purportedly "objectionable" material on the Daily Kos blog, and comedian Dennis Miller agreed, saying: "There's some mean stuff on that site. ... [T]hat's a pretty fetid little orchard over there." But neither O'Reilly nor Miller discussed the content of comments on O'Reilly's own site, including one from July 13 that was flagged in a July 26 Americablog post, in which a user mused: "Maybe it's time to burn down the capitol building like Hitler did with the Reichstag building? Anyone comparing Bush to Hitler has no idea of what the real Nazis were like in the '30s. Ellison is an idiot." The poster was apparently commenting on a remark by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) comparing the Bush administration's response to the September 11 attacks with the fire at the Reichstag building orchestrated by the Nazi party. Read more

CNN's King reported social conservative support for Thompson, but not his inconsistent abortion stance
On the July 25 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, national correspondent John King reported that leaders of socially conservative advocacy groups say that they "can't be with" Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani because he "supports abortion rights" and that they "don't necessarily trust" fellow Republican candidate Mitt Romney because he "has changed his position on abortion." King then said that leaders of such groups are "gravitating toward" former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN). King suggested a contrast between Romney, who has changed his position on abortion, and Thompson, who, by implication, has not. In fact, in the early 1990s, Thompson reportedly lobbied for a group seeking to ease restrictions on abortion. In 1993, Thompson reportedly said he was in favor of Roe v. Wade, but recently said he was "always" opposed to Roe. Further, the Nashville Tennessean reported that Thompson's previous positions "could be viewed as tolerating abortion," including an answer to a Christian Coalition survey in which Thompson said he opposed "criminaliz[ing]" abortion." Read more

Race/Affirmative Action

Hannity & Colmes previewed debate by suggesting Arabic-language school would be "madrassa"
On the July 25 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, co-host Sean Hannity previewed a discussion of plans to operate an Arabic language and culture school in Brooklyn, New York, by saying that "if you live in New York City, guess what? Your tax dollars could be going to fund a madrassa," and that "the city that fell victim to the biggest terrorist attack in world history challenges the separation of church and state and using tax dollars to fund an all-Muslim school." During a later preview an on-air graphic read: "funding fatwa." In fact, the school's "advisory council" is made up of several Christian ministers, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim imams, according to a comment posted by Daniel Meeter, a member of the advisory council, on The New York Sun's website in response to an April 24 Sun article attacking the school. Co-host Alan Colmes also noted that the person after whom the school is named, author and artist Khalil Gibran, was a Maronite Christian, an eastern rite Lebanese sect in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Read more

Media Ethics

Three journalists listed as AHIP speakers, then disappear from website following Kos diary
A July 23 Daily Kos diary by "nyceve" noted that three medical correspondents -- Robert Bazell and Nancy Snyderman of NBC News and Susan Dentzer of PBS' NewsHour -- "all participate on the AHIP [America's Health Insurance Plans] Speakers Network." AHIP describes itself as "the voice of America's health insurers" and "the national association representing nearly 1,300 member companies providing health insurance coverage to more than 200 million Americans." Its board of directors consists mainly of insurance-company executives. A July 25 Roll Call article (subscription required) described AHIP as "the lobbying group for the health insurance industry." The Daily Kos diary also noted that none of the bios for the three journalists on the websites of NBC or PBS disclosed the journalists' roles with the AHIP Speakers Network. Each of the reporters was, indeed, listed on AHIP's website as part of its speakers network, but all three names have since been removed from the list. Read more

Propaganda/Noise Machine

Novak ignored potential violations of law in column about Waxman's "grand inquisition"
In his July 26 column, syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak claimed that House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) was waging "an all-out war against" President Bush because Waxman has launched investigations into the Bush administration's alleged politicization of various federal agencies. Novak -- who called the committee's investigations a "grand inquisition" -- asserted that Waxman had "planned payback through 12 years in the minority" and that the investigations were "[a]t a staff level ... simply payback time for Democrats who remember when Rep. Dan Burton [R-IN] chaired the committee that Waxman now heads and sought e-mails revealing illegal foreign political contributions." As examples of this "grand inquisition," Novak referenced the Oversight Committee's investigation into "a politicized" Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and suggested that Waxman's "claim[]" of "a 'tradition of non-partisanship' " within the ONDCP was belied by the fact that ONDCP's "first drug czar was the conservative writer and pundit William J. Bennett." In fact, a letter by Waxman to which Novak referred in his column noted that in 1994, after Bennett left his post, "Congress passed legislation to insulate the drug czar and the agency's Senate-confirmed deputies from political pressures by prohibiting them from engaging in political activities even on their own time." Read more

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