Tag: liberal

From the reaction of many on the liberal/left to the controversy over CUNY's granting an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner, one sees yet again just how unremarkable and acceptible the most virulent views of Israel have become, even - perhaps especially - among Jews.

It's inevitable that the joy and national unity over the killing of that monster bin Laden would cool. Already we're debating the journalistic and political ramifications. President Obama told CBS he wouldn't "spike the football" by releasing photos proving Osama is dead.

Last week's column, on the declining popularity of several of talk radio's most prominent conservative hosts, seems to have ruffled more than few feathers. Even some readers who in the past have agreed with the Monitor virtually down the line took issue this time - but, interestingly enough, not on the subject of talk radio hosts.

The interview with John Batchelor on the front page of this week's Jewish Press should clarify, for anyone who still doesn't get it, why Batchelor's show is thriving while many of talk radio's erstwhile Big Names suffer declining ratings.

Our column week before last, "No Hate Like Liberal Hate," drew a number of interesting responses from readers, many of whom submitted their own favorite morsels of liberal hate speech. A few noted that for many years Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby devoted a column every December to the year's most egregious examples of liberal hate.

Need further proof of how hopelessly liberal the mainstream media really are? Just consider the coverage of the accusations of incivility and incitement hurled at Republicans and conservatives by Democrats and liberals in the aftermath of the December shootings in Tucson.

WASHINGTON - The post-shooting debate over political civility is cooling down, but passions are still raging over Sarah Palin's claim that critics were guilty of perpetuating a "blood libel" against her.

Arizona Shooter Tied To Larger Radical Nexus     Jared Lee Loughner, the suspected gunman in Saturday's Arizona fatal shooting that left six dead and...

The Media Research Center is out with its annual compilation of the year's Best Notable Quotables (December 2009 through November 2010) - a collection of dozens of examples of media liberal bias and idiocy that is as dispiriting as it is (unintentionally) humorous.

The common wisdom is that CNN's Rick Sanchez was fired because he made anti-Semitic remarks. That's an understandable assumption, but it's also untrue. Sanchez was fired because he attacked a celebrity more liberal and more popular than he is. That he did it with racial overtones made it easy for CNN to pull the plug on him. But his real crime was that he had become an embarrassment, from a liberal perspective, and that's the only perspective in the media that counts.

The passing last month of veteran journalist Daniel Schorr brought forth all the expected media testimonials, but to the Monitor Schorr essentially was a liberal pamphleteer who attempted to hide his biases under an unconvincing fa?ade of "objective journalist."

I've been reading Newsweek since 1975, when, as a yeshiva student in Israel, I subscribed in order to keep abreast of world events when otherwise not ensconced in the study of Torah. It's been three and a half decades, and my subscription, which lapses next month, will not be renewed. The reasons are reflective of the current state of American culture and mainstream journalism.

A number of years ago this column mentioned someone named Glenn Rosenthal, a self-described liberal Reform Jew who had been communicating with the Monitor for some time (and continued to do so until early 2009).

Helen Thomas's boundless disdain for Israel, so apparent to anyone who heard or read her leading questions and hostile asides at countless presidential press conferences over the years, finally did her in this week.

A new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, a new book and a new documentary (which aired in New York on May 6) comprise a joint project with the apparent aim of refurbishing the tarnished reputation of John Vliet Lindsay, who presided over the rapid (and at the time seemingly irreparable) decline of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There is a widespread impression that prior to June 1967 Israel was beloved by American liberals, who turned lukewarm only when the Jewish state lost its underdog status. While most mainstream liberal politicians at the time were indeed pro-Israel, the same cannot be said for liberals in academia and in an often overlooked but influential source of elite opinion – the major Protestant denominations, which by the mid-1960's were almost uniformly leftist in their political orientation.

The recent release of yet another batch of Nixon tapes and transcripts inspired a new round of fulminations by Nixon-haters, most of whom are tellingly silent or remarkably forgiving when the misdeeds and indiscretions of other former presidents are revealed.

Apparently it was not enough that many of America’s best-known journalists disgraced themselves and their profession by portraying Barack Obama during last year’s presidential campaign as a savior-like figure come to redeem a sin-sick America. Now that the Anointed One is in a position to exercise his wise and benevolent rule from Pennsylvania Avenue, it will no longer do to cast him as a mere mortal.

As Israeli officials continue to warn of the unacceptability of a nuclear-armed Iran, the 28th anniversary of Israel’s June 7, 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor approaches. The world of course was outraged at Israel’s effrontery, with the usual suspects – European leaders and the liberal media – leading the way.

The cause that for two years now has been closest to the liberal heart – the election and glorification of Barack Obama – has, of course, benefited immeasurably from the virtually uncritical coverage accorded it by the mainstream media. The weeks since Obama’s election have been a period of celebration and self-satisfaction for liberal journalists who barely even attempt to conceal their bias anymore.

No doubt there were some well-meaning consumers of news who labored under the naïve illusion that the mainstream media would become just a wee bit more objective in its coverage of Barack Obama once their anointed one won the White House.

Perhaps sensing that the liberal media’s attack template of Sarah Palin as lightweight rube had not made a discernible difference in the campaign polling numbers – and may in fact have driven swing voters to the McCain-Palin ticket – The New York Times appeared to be trying a different tack last weekend.

The brouhaha over the July 21 New Yorker cover illustration of the Obamas as the epitome of terrorist chic extended well beyond the abbreviated news cycle to which we’ve become accustomed.

There is one question readers have asked the Monitor with far greater frequency than any other. It’s a simple one, and it goes basically like this: What is the most important thing you can say about the media after doing a column like this for ten years?

Reminders of the mainstream media’s egregious political double standard vis-à-vis liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, come on an almost daily basis – the latest being last week’s New York magazine, the cover of which features a head shot of John McCain smack in the middle of a concentric-ringed bulls-eye board accompanied by this charming teaser copy: “Target: Bush-Backing, Surge-Loving, Economically Clueless Geezer.”

Was there ever any doubt that liberal journalists and media outlets would swoon over whatever Barack Obama would say in response to the controversy concerning his relationship with his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Liberals just have too much invested in the storyline of a post-racial, biracial healer whose mission it is to set our house in order after the unspeakable depredations of the George W. Bush years.

With its Oct. 5 front-page story on Rudy Giuliani’s experience hosting an often boisterous weekly call-in show on WABC radio for the better part of his mayoralty, The New York Times found yet one more way to portray the Republican presidential frontrunner as a reckless hothead, reflexively rude and not at all willing to suffer fools (or even just annoying callers) gladly.

Could there be such a thing as Women's Art? From my liberal modernist perspective such a notion is foreign, threatening and, indeed, heretical.

Last week the Monitor considered the matter of radio host Don Imus’s firing and the hypocrisy that infused the affair throughout its eight-day life. Ironically, Bernard Goldberg – the veteran television newsman who with his 2001 surprise bestseller Bias blew the whistle on how liberal journalists routinely slant their reportage – has a new book out, Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right, that includes an amusing, counterintuitive, anecdote about Imus.

For obvious reasons, the disproportionate number of Jews who were either members of the old American Communist Party or otherwise active in left-wing politics during the Cold War has always been a sensitive issue for the Jewish community.