Roger Aronoff

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.

Interview with Journalist Ken Timmerman on Iran, Gitmo and Tensions in the Middle East

In light of this weekend’s latest WikiLeaks document dump of more than 250,000 State Department cables, Accuracy in Media’s exclusive interview with veteran journalist Ken Timmerman couldn’t be more timely. As of this weekend, it is clear that most of the world stands in fear of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, and for the most part desires, that actions be taken to keep the regime from gaining those weapons.

Those Pesky Lines Between News and Commentary

In a commentary in The Washington Post on November 14, Ted Koppel, the host of ABC’s Nightline for 25 years, analyzed the modern news landscape, in a piece titled “Olbermann, O’Reilly and the death of real news.” In it, he bemoaned the loss of a unified view of the news, a nightly perspective we can all agree on. Koppel made clear the world he longs for: “…we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers. We’re now a million or more clusters of consumers harvesting information from like-minded providers.”

Interview with Jed Babbin on America at War and the State of the Union

In an exclusive interview with Accuracy in Media last week on Veteran’s Day, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense and bestselling author Jed Babbin said that now that the Republicans have made big gains in Congress, they will have to deliver or else face the same fate the Democrats met earlier this month. And he is warning that the Obama administration is doing damage to the military, and may not be up to the many national security challenges that the United States currently faces.

NBC Favors Rich Over Poor

While NBC has once again put itself in the service of the Obama administration, this time on education, they are both unwittingly making the case for more choices for parents desperate to get their children out of dead-end public schools. But is there a reason other than liberal bias that explains NBC’s willingness to serve as an outlet for Obama Administration propaganda?

Interview with Former Sen. Bob Smith, Now with AIM

Bob Smith is a former two-term U.S. Senator, a Navy veteran, and now a Special Contributor to Accuracy in Media. Last week, following the elections, we discussed his fascinating career in the public arena, and his thoughts on a number of topics, including the meaning of the elections, the impact and role of the Tea Party movement, the media, and challenges and opportunities for the new Congress.

Olbermann’s Back

Keith Olbermann is back after his indefinite suspension turned out to be just two days. TVNewsers sources, which I cited last week, were mistaken at best when they quoted “insiders” as having said he “won’t be back.”

Interview with Diane Dimond on “White House Gatecrashers”

The ongoing story of the Salahis, the so-called White House gatecrashers, appears on the surface to be a tabloid story about some social-climbing status seekers who, with the help of the Bravo Network, were able to crash President Obama’s first White House state dinner last November. But as I pointed out in a special report last December, there was much more to the story. Could the Secret Service have been so incompetent or careless to allow people into such an event who were not on a list? Why was President Obama contradicting his pledge of transparency by exercising executive privilege to keep the key people in a position to know from testifying before a Congressional committee looking into the affair? And were the media once again covering for Obama by viciously going after the Salahis, who were easy targets because of their style of living large while stiffing a number of small businesses, as was well documented at the time.

Interview with Retired Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson on Obama, Clinton and National Security

In an exclusive interview with Accuracy in Media, Retired Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson says that President Obama is very “dangerous to our military, and to the national security of this nation.” He says that Obama’s refuses to “acknowledge the fact that we’re fighting a very extreme element of Islam.” And he cites the National Security Strategy Policy of the United States, which is President Obama’s national security policy, in which “he does not, one time, use the words jihad, Islam, Muslim, extremism, fundamentalism, terrorism—in fact, quite the opposite: He identifies the greatest national security threat to America being global warming.”

Obama Loses Media in Last-Ditch Smear Campaign

It is rare when The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post and The New York Times all agree on something. But President Obama’s attack on the Chamber of Commerce—for supposedly spending “foreign money” on the campaign—caused all of them to cry foul.

Interview with Rochelle Schweizer on “The Disturbing Truth About Nancy Pelosi”

With midterm elections less than three weeks away, a blockbuster new book has come out on Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which to no one’s surprise is being ignored by the mainstream media. Recent polls have shown that the nation is not too happy with Speaker Pelosi, which could lead to dramatic changes in the new Congress that will convene in January. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that Pelosi is viewed very positive or somewhat positive by only 22% of the respondents, while 50% view her negatively or very negatively.