Roger Aronoff

Chris Matthews: Gaffe Machine

One should always be careful, when criticizing and making fun of others, to not be guilty of the same offense. We try to be very careful, with a name like Accuracy in Media. It can come back to bite you. That is unless you’re some hotshot left-wing “news” person on MSNBC. Then it doesn’t matter. But let’s pretend it does.

Measuring Liberal Bias—By Numbers and By Examples

Liberal media bias is a subject we at Accuracy in Media confront on a daily basis. We identify examples, explain the significance, and present facts, figures and informed opinions that the media usually choose to ignore.

Media Coverage of China is Overlooking Significant Stories

China has been increasing its influence and presence in recent months, though it’s not getting a lot of attention in our media. One topic that was covered extensively was the issue of Congress attempting to pass a law to combat China’s currency regulation. It has passed in the Senate, and is being held up in the House. There is concern that the bill could start a trade war, and antagonize the Chinese, costing American jobs.

Olbermann and Letterman: Men of the People

Two extremely wealthy white American comedians, both who “earn” in excess of $10 million a year, gaggled last night CBS's The Late Show with David Letterman about the “two or three percent of the people [who] have all the money” in this country, while expressing their solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.

MSNBC Promotes New Bush Bashing Book

Paul Pillar is the author of a new book on 9/11 and the Iraq War entitled, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform. In an appearance on Monday on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, Pillar said that the “the most important point to make is, that war decision was not driven by intelligence…if you look at what intelligence was saying to the Bush administration, they were not talking up Iraq as a threat before the decision was made. The infamous intelligence estimate about Weapons of Mass Destruction didn’t even exist when the President had made his decision and the selling of that decision to the American public by late summer 2002 moved into high gear, the President didn’t even read the estimate.”

Operation Fast and Furious: The Scandal that Can No Longer be Denied

The usual truism is that many politicians make the mistake of not coming completely clean when allegations of wrongdoing surface. The cover-up, it is said, is often worse than the underlying crime or ethical violation. This has often been cited as the mistake made by people including Richard Nixon (Watergate break-in), Bill Clinton (Lewinsky, not to mention Filegate and Travelgate), and John Edwards (love child and cheating on his cancer-stricken wife). More recently, Anthony Weiner. There is a long list.

Obama’s Charade Exposed

There was a very revealing segment on The Chris Matthews Show on Sunday. The discussion was about President Obama’s recent focus on jobs, jobs, jobs. Obama gave his much ballyhooed speech in Congress, right after everyone returned from their August recess. You will recall that Obama first tried to schedule it up against a long-planned Republican presidential debate, the first day Congress was back, but that was rejected in what was treated by the media as a show of disrespect. The President agreed to speak the next night, and had to carefully schedule it so as not to conflict with the opening game of the National Football League season.

The Deal is Done—Assessing Winners and Losers

The voting is in from the House and Senate, but opinions are sharply divided among both conservatives and liberals as to whether or not the debt ceiling deal was a good one for either party or country. Wall Street’s first response was quite negative, with the Dow down 265 points on the day the Senate sent the bill to the White House.

Media’s Disgraceful Coverage of Debt-Ceiling Debate

Events are moving fast toward the artificial deadline of August 2nd. President Obama has apparently given up on getting a tax hike, and thus balance, as he has called it. In his Friday morning (July 29th) announcement, he urged folks to keep the pressure on with phone calls and tweets. Speaker of the House John Boehner has revised his plan that failed to garner enough votes on Thursday night to include once again a balanced budget amendment. And Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid is reportedly planning to finally introduce Democrat-backed legislation sometime soon.

America’s Hidden Epidemic—An Interview with Arnold Mann

America is in the midst of a public health crisis that has received very little attention from the press or the medical community, yet it affects literally millions of Americans. In his new book, They’re Poisoning Us: From the Gulf War to the Gulf of Mexico, Arnold Mann, a prominent medical and environmental journalist, has documented and exposed this silent epidemic, with potentially enormous ramifications.

Obama, Osama and a Love Struck Media

The great achievement of the Barack Obama presidency occurred on May 1st, 2011, when a team of Navy SEALs took out the most wanted man in America, Osama bin Laden. It happened on Obama’s watch, and the mission succeeded, but how it was handled, and mishandled, by Obama and his team in the aftermath raises many disturbing questions. There is no question that America’s elite military forces performed brilliantly in pulling off this mission, and we salute them. Count me among those who are glad that he was killed, and not captured for trial and detention.

Obama Energy Policies Running Out of Gas

One of the more important issues raised during the budget battle that nearly shut down the Federal government in April was over power given to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by President Barack Obama to regulate greenhouse gases that they claim can contribute to global warming. This has led to renewed discussion on the validity of concerns about global warming, and the related issue of America’s future energy sources.

Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation: Exclusive Interview

Andrew Breitbart is a modern day media mogul. He has created a series of websites that draw hundreds of thousands of people a day, sometimes millions a day, to see what he’s up to now. And he makes no bones about his politics and the journey from being a “default cultural liberal” who grew up in Southern California, to his current status as a “conservative culture warrior.” He is also a blogger and very much a provocative force in modern journalism who considers himself to be a combatant in a battle of ideas and values against what he calls the Democrat Media Complex.

Democrats Counting on Media in Fiscal Showdown

As a deadline approaches that could mean shutting down the non-essential operations of the federal government, both sides are weighing the potential impact on their political fortunes. The Republicans are squabbling among themselves over how much to cut from the remainder of the 2011 Budget, the Democrats have crafted a policy of offering minimal savings, as well as a campaign to label the Republicans as Tea Party extremists.

Obama Deconstructed: An Interview with Jack Cashill

Donald Trump’s recent comments calling for President Obama to show his birth certificate have brought added pressure on him to do so, because it seems to have been the impetus for at least some discussion of it in the mainstream media. But in reality, the unwillingness of Obama to release his original, long-form birth certificate is just one piece of a much larger narrative that brings into question much of Obama’s past.

Interview with Dr. Robert Goldberg on the Dangers of “Tabloid Medicine”

Dr. Robert Goldberg is warning people in his new book that the Internet has become the repository for a dangerous mix of tabloid journalism and vital medical information, often badly misrepresented. Goldberg told Accuracy in Media in an exclusive interview that “not only do we have interest groups and trial attorneys trying to use the Internet to shape people’s perceptions of medicine, but under ObamaCare the government is launching an unprecedented effort to crowd out other voices, other forms of information so that doctors and patients sort of fall into step with the quality guidelines under ObamaCare.”

Media Playing Crucial Role in Middle East Uprisings

[Editor's Note: This is the March-A AIM Report, but due to the timeliness of the subject matter, we are posting it now] The events unfolding in Egypt that began on January 25 were indeed historic, but they may well be obscuring a much bigger story going on in the region, that the media are generally ignoring. The crowds that assembled in Egypt were large indeed, but not unprecedented, as was widely reported. While many in the media stated that the recent uprising in Tunisia, resulting in the removal of a dictator, was what sparked a democratic revolution in the heart of Egypt, the story of revolutions and attempts to democratize began much earlier. Perhaps the spark may have been with the start of the war in Iraq, in March of 2003. Or maybe with the first free elections in Iraq, with the purple ink-stained fingers, in March of 2005.

Foul Play or “Fair Game?”

By now the movie version of the Valerie Plame book, Fair Game, has been so thoroughly debunked, as has the version of history that it purports to tell, that it hardly seems necessary to go back down this path again. But unfortunately it is. Because although the movie bombed at the box office, grossing less than $10 million in the U.S. since its release in November, its assault on the truth will continue as a DVD release, video-on-demand, premium cable and on network TV.

Interview with Melanie Phillips on “World Turned Upside Down”

Has Western civilization now reached a point where it has stopped trying to survive? That is one of many questions raised by British journalist and author Melanie Phillips in her recent book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power. In an exclusive interview with Accuracy in Media, she was very critical of the role the media have played in creating this upside down world, as she sees it. She said that “The British media are worse than your American media. At least in America you have Fox News, you have talk radio, which can challenge the otherwise unchallenged worldview of the Left represented in organizations like CNN, ABC, and so on—and our BBC. But the fact is, most journalists are on the Left, and most journalists, I think, are acting as fifth columnists in the war against the West, a war waged both from within and from without.”

Media Embrace Economic Hypocrisy

As the debate over taxes has heated up during the lame duck session of Congress, the media invariably have failed to ask the tough questions of the Democrats, and are regularly mischaracterizing the positions of the Republicans and trying to keep them on the defensive.