-By Warner Todd Huston
In a June 24 report for NBC’s Rock Center, video for a story was deceptively edited and misleading voice overs added to quotes from an Hasidic Rabbi that made it seem as if the Rabbi was insisting that allegations of sex abuse should only be handled internally, within the community, and should not be taken to police. But in fact Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz did not say that at all.
After a series of emails from Rabbi Berkowitz complaining of the deceptive edits the web entry of the Rock Center story has an update and the video was pulled, but even that update does not really address the extremely unfair treatment that Berkowitz received at the hands of NBC’s editors
The story was ostensibly to have been an “inside look” at the Hasidic community in New York and in a segment near the end of the report the piece turned to recent sex abuse charges leveled at Nechamya Weberman, a once respected member of the community who acted as a “therapist” for the other members of his community.
Continue reading “
NBC’s Deceptive Editing Makes Rabbi Appear to be Covering Up Sex Abuse”
Over the last several days in the last week of June the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) handed down two important decisions, one striking down part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and one striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) leading to a renewed national dialog in the issues. But for CNN the rulings were just another opportunity to analyze the decisions from a decidedly leftward point of view.
The news departments at the Big Three TV networks have done 92 new stories on the global warming debate recently, but, curiously, not one of those stories informed viewers that there has been decade-long lull in rising temperatures.
Barack Obama has been reaching out to all sorts of non-government partners in a renewed effort to push his Obamacare law. The President’s latest Obamacare-pushing partner will be the famed women’s magazine Cosmopolitan. 
Media broadcaster Al Jazeera is owned by the Nation of Qatar, a Muslim country whose legislature operates mainly upon Sharia law. Since the mid 19th century Qatar has been entirely controlled by the monarchical Al Thani family. Today, Al Jazeera’s new American cable news network will broadcast out of the “Newseum,” an organization dedicated to freedom, liberty, and the First Amendment situated only blocks from the capitol building in Washington D.C.
A recent Politico story seems to indicate that the Department of Justice is stymied on its prosecution of the political activist that recorded a private campaign meeting between Senator Mitch McConnell and his staff because the DOJ considers the activist a “journalist” and wants to tread gingerly as a result.
Greg Sargent of The Washington Post has decided that any worries over the IRS intimidation tactics that have gotten the county so riled up is nothing but “fever swamp” nonsense.
Labor unions and ACORN-styled community groups based in America’s big cities are hailing a new decision by the Federal Communications Commission to auction hundreds of low power FM radio frequencies in compliance with the federal 
Lyndon LaRouche and his followers have never been welcomed into the Tea Party movement but his followers shadow nearly every Washington-based protest that occurs, whether left, center, or right. But in its coverage of Wednesday’s D.C.-based IRS rallies, U.S. News featured a follower of LaRouche as if he were a legitimate part of the Tea Party protest.
For Politico, the news about the hundreds of Tea Party protestors in Washington DC on Wednesday, June 19, wasn’t so much about why the protesters were upset, but how it affected the “bipartisan approach” to the House IRS probe. And Politico seemed to blame Glenn Beck for the strain.
A new poll on newspapers and television news shows that Americans’ confidence in the news industry continues to erode in this era of mass communications, reaching a low not seen since 2007.
In a recent interview, CBS Evening News host Scott Pelley said that he thinks that Fox News really doesn’t have very many viewers–underestimating the network’s actual ratings by about 90 percent.
Apparently the Big Three TV networks have decided that the IRS intimidation scandal is over and it seems that reporting on the issue has disappeared from the airwaves.
If you are a Twitter user you know without question that the social media service often becomes little else but a massive fight club with lots of name calling and foul language and a survey of the Twitter accounts of some well-known journalists and media types shows that they are just as prone to the fight club mentality as everyone else.
The Washington Post recently made waves with a story on the National Security Agency’s domestic data mining project “Prism,” but interestingly one of the co-authors of the article is a radical, left-wing filmmaker who has been a loud critic of U.S. counterterrorism policies.
Liberal economist and leading modern Keynesian, Paul Krugman of The New York Times, has been one of Barack Obama’s biggest cheerleaders, but suddenly he is a bit down on the Obama administration saying that he is afraid that the country is becoming an “authoritarian surveillance state.” 
CNN is drawing criticism for a feature story on a Palestinian soccer player who is in the news for boycotting Israel. The cable network is being criticized because its glowing treatment of the Palestinian protester neglects to mention that he is a member of the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). In fact, the piece seems to reject any claim that he is a member of the group.
Noah Rothman recently did an excellent job detailing what the progressive media said about Condoleeza Rice when George W. Bush appointed her as his Secretary of State in 2005. Rothman noted how the media dismissed Condi Rice as merely a “friend” of Bush and otherwise made it seem as if her appointment was just a payoff for loyalty instead of the appointment of a qualified person. In contrast, Obama’s appointment of Susan Rice as his national security advisor is not being so quickly dismissed by that same media establishment.
On the afternoon of June 6, Breitbart correspondent Ben Shapiro 
Calls have been coming from all across the political spectrum for President Obama to fire U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. But some reports now are presuming that Obama simply won’t do it and that AG Holder will weather yet another firestorm of controversy.
Recent polling of likely voters by the Rasmussen polling firm finds that trust in government is at a low ebb with nearly half of voters feeling that the Justice Department’s seizure of reporters’ phone records and the IRS targeting of conservatives are serious scandals. Yet the media is still not widely trusted.
On June 1, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer went to 
152 new sex abuse allegations have been made against dozens of BBC employees as well as its most famous TV presenter. The new allegations have been brought in the Jimmy Savile sex scandal that erupted last year. About 40 of the accused BBC employees still work for the broadcasting giant.
Former CNN on-air anchor Soledad O’Brien was chosen by students to deliver Harvard’s 2013 Class Day speech–an address delivered to seniors the day before graduation. O’Brien had two important bits of wisdom to pass on to the graduates: “Most people are idiots” and “don’t take anyone’s advice.”
Bob Shrum, a longtime Democrat operative, has decided that President Obama’s handling of the White House during this IRS scandal is bad. Maybe not “Nixonian” bad, but is instead a sort of Carteresque incompetence because of the way the President has handled these recent crises.
Charles P. Pierce of Esquire once wrote a book titled Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, but after his latest blog post it seems clear that he first learned of those idiots in America a little closer to home: himself.
Troubles are growing for New York City’s venerable “alternative” weekly newspaper, The Village Voice. With multiple layoffs, ad revenue at an all time low, and resignations by key staffers over the paper’s management, the 58-year-old publication is coming to what one commenter is calling “the end times.”