TVSquad

Imagine if one of the leading Republican candidates for president in 2008 like John McCain or Rudy Giuliani had a civil lawsuit for campaign finance fraud pending against him. Do you think that the media would be following this action with every legal brief filed, and every breath uttered by anyone involved?

Well, there is a huge campaign finance fraud case pending against Hillary Clinton that was enacted by the largest contributor to the junior senator’s 2000 campaign almost three years ago, and the media couldn’t care less. Those looking for some background regarding this issue should read a comprehensive analysis of the subject published by the New Media Journal last March.

Get real .... it goes both ways...

Reply

(yawn) If the Bush Administration were against it, then the MSM would have aired it.

Snoogins

Reply

If Hannity wasn't a Republican, would you even be complaining, Keith? Somehow I doubt it. Get down off your high horse and stand on the ground with the rest of us.

Reply

Uhm, the only ones defending Hannity and the like are far from, "down here with the rest of us". They are wallowing in the filth of the basest instincts of humanity. I hope you like it down there, but I like it up here just fine.

Reply

Of course Hannity wouldn't have aired it. There'd be no need since it would've been aired repeatedly by the likes of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN....

Reply

Exactly, free press usually means the bias/opinion goes both ways.

Reply

Hannity is a well known Repub, who is obviously only interested in airing "selected clips" from the movie because Hillary Clinton is running for President, in an attempt to damage her credibility.

Reply

Even diehard republicans MUST cringe on the bully tactics Hannity exacts on any of his guests that do not agree with him (on his radio show). Oh wait....we don't know if his guests agree with him or not because he usually hangs up on them after a lengthy barrage of personal insults that directs his audience away from any good point his guest may have. Hannity is not a good debater of issues. He is a bully that is in control of the mic. IMO Hannity is a not a diplomat for problem solving but a dangerous man that can sway the uniformed.

Reply

The Fax Lies Channel!

There was a reason why it wasn't shown. If Fox wasn't full of shit they wouldn't be airing it.

Reply

There's a very important issue that is related to this: Disney/ABC is suing a blogger who used some recordings of an ABC-owned talk show to back up his claims that the talk show host was saying some pretty inflammatory and hateful things on the air. He was well within his fair use rights, but Disney/ABC came down on this guy with both feet, and it has raised a very serious first amendment issue.

Contrast that with this story: the clip (which was so outrageous and entirely fabricated that ABC/Disney had to cut it from their movie) was screened by the director to a private audience, and Hannity is running footage from that event.

Why is Disney allowing Hannity to use that material but won't allow a critic to use a similar recording in a similar manner?

The double standard makes it seem like ABC/Disney really has an agenda to push.

Reply

Waaaaah! Fox is biased! WAAAAAHHH! Hannity is a Republican! Meanwhile Matthews and Olbermann exist, are equally as abhorrent on the opposite side of the political aisle, and nary a peep from the peanut gallery who pretend to care about what is right or fair.

Call me when you aren't being hypocrites.

Reply

"If it were the other way around and the Bush administration had pressured ABC to change its script, do you think Hannity would still air it?"

Most definitely not since Hannity is a conservative talk show host.

In the same light, if it were the other way around as you say, I most definitely think someone like Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews would air it because they are liberal talk show hosts.

Reply

"If it were the other way around and the Bush administration had pressured ABC to change its script, do you think Hannity would still air it?"

The inverse of your statement is that none of the liberal friendly media has aired it.

Got to be fair with your political grandstanding there Keith. And TV Squad in general.

Reply

News flash to the dupes of Faux News: Your gullibility has led us into a war on false premises. Hannity, O'Reilly and all the other liars at the Republican Party's Ministry of Propaganda have blood on their hands. And to complain about some campaign finance issue against Hillary Clinton, when the sitting president lied in the State of the Union speech (remember 'Uranium from Africa') reveals the shallowness of right wing values. Bill lied and no one died. Bill lied and no one died. Bill lied and no one died.

Reply

"If it were the other way around and the Bush administration had pressured ABC to change its script"

The New Your Times and Dan Rather came to mind as I read that line...

Reply

Of course Hannity wouldn't have aired it; Keith Olbermann would have. People often confuse Hannity, Olbermann, and similar to being "Journalists" when they are in fact "Analysts". There is nothing wrong with an analyst having a bias as long as he is upfront about it. Neither of these two try to pass off their analysis as journalism.

The problem with bias is in reporting. Too often in the newspaper and the network news work completely appropriate to the opinion pages is passed off as journalism. This is the reason many one the right complain about the liberal media, while they embrace O'Reilly and Hannity. It isn't that they despise bias in political discussions (they love talk radio, don't they), rather, they are disgusted with Journalists crossing the line into analysis.

Oh, and to add fuel to the fire about a double standard with Disney, Mr. Hannity works for WABC radio in New York, owned, as you can imagine, by ABC and by extension, Disney.

Reply

Bill lied and no one died. Bill lied and no one died. Bill lied and no one died.

Except all those people in various African and Slovakian nations. And those in the terrorist attacks by al Queda that he ignored. And the WTC/Pentagon attack in 2001, which was conceived of and planned while Clinton was "not killing anyone."

The list goes on and on. Clinton's hands are plenty bloody and anyone who doesn't admit that is simply lying, both to the world and to themselves.

Reply

Right wing logic isn't like normal logic. In normal logic, the phrase "Bill lied and no one died" clearly implies that no one died as a result of his lie about having sex with Monica Lewinsky. It does not mean that no one died while Bill Clinton was president, or that all of his policies were correct and successful. In contrast, Bush and his fellow deceivers lied about Iraq buying uranium from Africa. This was part of their lie about Iraq having an active nuclear program, just one of the lies they used to get the nation to launch a war with Iraq, while letting Bin Laden and company escape from Tora Bora. No amount of right wing propaganda can hide these facts. And let's not forget that Bush read the memo "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the United States," and promptly went to his ranch in Texas to clear brush. No emergency meetings. No action of any sort. That's the way he is, as we saw with Katrina. So yes, Bill lied and no one died. Bill lied and no one died. Bill lied and no one died.

Reply

Dan you can certainly have your own opinions, but you cannot have your own facts. Please prove that Bush lied. Perhaps you should scan over the Iraq pre war intelligence report and you will see that the blame laid firmly on various intelligence agencies. The vote to authorize war powers also happened well before the Iraq/Africa uranium connection and was voted on based on Iraqs compliance with U.N. inspections with a deadline of March 17th 2004.

Now in hindsight, the information was wrong. Please feel free to open up a dictionary to see the difference between lying and being wrong.

Also, since you seem to hold Clinton to such a high standard, I will direct you to an article about a speech he made during a bombing campaign against Iraq in late 1998.

http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/

"Saddam (Hussein) must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons,"


"Clinton also stated that, while other countries also had weapons of mass destruction, Hussein is in a different category because he has used such weapons against his own people and against his neighbors."

"The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government -- a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people," Clinton said."

Now of course it can be debated on whether or not the situation in Iraq would improve if a different approach was used in maintaining security after Saddam was removed, but you are only deluding yourself in thinking that when it comes to Iraq that Clinton and Bush were any different, but then again I assume you didn't think Bill was "lying" when he said that Saddam was building nukes.

Reply

LC your quotation of Clinton clearly states "Saddam (Hussein) must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons." No where does Clinton say Sadaam was building nuclear weapons, as you falsely claim. This is typical of Republican spin-- use just enough of the truth to make it sound plausible and hope that people aren't paying close attention. Clinton never called for a WAR against Iraq. His policy was to maintain the sanctions, provide a safe haven for the Kurds, and wait. Inspections after the war revealed that this policy was remarkably successful in preventing Sadaam from getting WMD.
You also say "Please prove that Bush lied. Perhaps you should scan over the Iraq pre war intelligence report and you will see that the blame laid firmly on various intelligence agencies." Again this is Bush administration spin--faithfully parrotted by the likes of Bill O'Reilly. Somehow the responsibility president always seeks to shift the blame to others, in this case, the intelligence agencies. Never mind that Cheney and his men cherry picked the most incriminating intelligence, including the stories told by the alcoholic Iraqi defector labeled "Curveball" by the CIA because of his unreliability. He was the source of the fable about mobile biological vans. Remember that? There is also the case of the aluminum tubes. Bush's own experts at the Department of Energy told him that they were the wrong size to be used in uranium enrichment. Instead they were components of rocket launchers. This proved to be the case. But In writing up the intelligence assessments presented to Congress, the Bush administration relegated all such doubts and counter-arguments about Iraq's WMDs to the footnotes. That is called cooking the intelligence. The most grievous instance of this involves the yellow cake uranium that Sadaam was supposedly buying from Africa. This was based on a set of forged documents. How do we know they were forged? Because they refer to a man who was no longer Niger's energy minister at the time. A crude error easily picked up by CIA analysts. That is why the CIA insisted that a reference to yellowcake be removed from a presidential speech in October 2002. The White House complied. But then, mysteriously, the claim reappeared in the State of the Union Bush delivered January 28, 2003. At that time, Bush was pulling out all the stops to justify calling back the inspectors from Iraq so he could launch the war. So even though the authorization to use the threat of force was in October 2002 (timed to precede the elections, of course) Bush still had to get the country's assent to actually start the war. (To show you what a liar he is, he later claimed (7/14/2003) that Sadaam wouldn't allow inspectors into Iraq! I guess it's hard for him to keep track of his lies.) No amount of parsing of Bush's language can cover up the fact that he deceived the American people, in much the same way Clinton tried to use language to deceive the American people in the Lewinsky affair. But that was about a blow job, and this is about WAR. Once again proving the maxim "Bill lied and no one died."

Reply