Here are today's news items from Media Matters for America

by Biodun Iginla, Media Analyst for BBC News and the Economist, in London, UK

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.

Wash. Times debunked own claims that Obama "hijack[ed]" and "borrowed" Republican language about role of states
A Washington Times article by reporter Stephen Dinan headlined "Obama hijacks GOP language on key issues" asserted that President-elect Barack Obama was "borrowing a line from the Republican-revolution playbook" when Obama said that, in Dinan's words, states should be "laboratories for solutions to the nation's big problems." However, later in the article, Dinan rebutted his own assertion, as well as the Times' headline, in noting that Obama "trac[ed] the concept back to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who ... said states could 'serve as a laboratory.' " Read More

Wash. Times continues to publish false claim that Big Three autoworkers earn average of $70 per hour or more in wages and benefits
An editorial and a column published in The Washington Times included the false claim that U.S. autoworkers earn an average of $70 an hour or more in wages and benefits. In fact, according to General Motors, the figure is based not only on current workers' hourly wages and benefits, such as health care and retirement, but also retirement and health-care benefits that U.S. automakers are providing for current retirees.
Read More

Conservative radio hosts continue to promote discredited claim that Obama has yet to prove he was born in the U.S.
Radio hosts Brian Sussman, Mark Davis, Lars Larson, Bob Grant, Jim Quinn, and Rose Tennent repeated the discredited claim that President-elect Barack Obama has not produced a valid birth certificate and is not eligible for the presidency because he is not a natural-born citizen. In fact, the Obama campaign posted a copy of Obama's birth certificate on its Fight the Smears website and reportedly provided the original to FactCheck.org, whose staff concluded that it "meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship." A Hawaii Health Department official also reportedly confirmed that the birth certificate Obama's campaign posted is valid. Read More

Cunningham compared Cincinnati Zoo to Bull Connor for pulling out of planned partnership with Creation Museum
Radio host Bill Cunningham compared the Cincinnati Zoo to Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Birmingham Public Safety commissioner infamous for using dogs and fire hoses against civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s. Cunningham made the remark while criticizing the zoo's decision to pull out of a promotional partnership with the Creation Museum, which seeks to "affirm the truth of the biblical record of the real origin and history of the world and mankind" and reportedly contains a display featuring "a triceratops with a saddle on its back." Read More

Quinn defended suggestion that military response to India attacks is warranted regardless of whether "a lot of peaceful Muslims" are harmed or killed
Responding to a Media Matters item, radio host Jim Quinn defended his suggestion that a military response to the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, is warranted regardless of whether "a lot of peaceful Muslims" are harmed or killed. Quinn responded, in part: "[I]f I'm in a room with a thousand people, and 999 of them love me, but one has a gun and wants to kill me, how relevant are the 999? They have no relevance whatever. I'm sorry, but peaceful Muslims will only be relevant insofar as they rise up against those who are not peaceful." Read More

Conservatives cherry-pick 1930s unemployment figures in continued assault on New Deal
Columnists Mona Charen and George Will continued a trend among conservative media of responding to comparisons between the current economic situation and that of the 1930s and between Barack Obama and FDR by attacking the New Deal. In separate columns, both Charen and Will cherry-picked unemployment figures to assert that the New Deal did not reduce unemployment. But historians and progressive economists have noted that unemployment fell every year of the New Deal except during the 1937-38 recession; further, Nobel-laureate Paul Krugman has said it was a reversal of New Deal policies, not a continuance of them, that contributed to rising unemployment in 1937 and 1938. Read More

Media advance notion of disappointment on "the left" with Obama, but polling undermines their claims
Several media figures are promoting the notion of division among Obama supporters, asserting that "the left" is or should be disappointed with the president-elect's Cabinet selections. But the idea of significant disappointment with Obama runs counter to a USA Today/Gallup poll finding that 94 percent of Democrats "approve of the way Obama is handling his presidential transition." Read More

Media's glowing reports on Bush's AIDS-relief program ignore criticism by the officials responsible for implementing it
Several media outlets have praised or uncritically reported praise of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. However, none of those outlets noted criticism of PEPFAR's requirement that starting in fiscal year 2006, 33 percent of funds set aside for prevention under the act that created PEPFAR be spent on abstinence-until-marriage education. According to many of the government officials responsible for managing PEPFAR abroad, as well as the Institute of Medicine, this requirement hindered PEPFAR's effectiveness in preventing the spread of AIDS until it was removed when Congress reauthorized PEPFAR in 2008. Read More

Politico contributors, guests on CNN and MSNBC join chorus claiming Clinton will bring "drama" to sec. of state office
Since initial reporting that President-elect Barack Obama was considering naming Sen. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, many in the media have raised the specter of personal and political "drama" -- which they claim follows Hillary and Bill Clinton wherever they go -- negatively affecting the Obama administration. The Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page acknowledged that the media are hoping for "drama" resulting from a Clinton appointment; Page responded to the question of how Obama is "going to keep the drama at bay" by saying: "Well, do we want that? We're journalists." Read More

You can help support our work; become a volunteer media monitor, or donate to Media Matters for America.

This mail was sent by Media Matters for America to 'biginla@yahoo.com'.
To change your email subscription preferences, visit http://mediamatters.org/users/account_preferences