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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (60802)	7/10/2007 12:57:17 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Reversal of 'Eavesdropping' Ruling Ignored After Bush Loss Touted Media Research Center Last August, when one federal judge ruled unconstitutional the monitoring of overseas phone calls with suspected terrorists, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts all highlighted the defeat for the Bush administration. But on Friday, after an appeals court overturned the earlier decision, ABC and CBS were silent while NBC again distorted the policy as "domestic spying." Last August 17, ABC's World News anchor Charles Gibson teased: "A federal judge tells the Bush administration one of its main terror-fighting tools violates the Constitution." Gibson introduced the story of the "major legal defeat" for the Bush administration and correspondent Martha Raddatz filed a full report in which she described the ruling as a "significant blow" to the administration. While the words "Domestic Surveillance" were displayed on screen, NBC anchor Campbell Brown relayed that the judge "harshly condemned" the program. Yet, eleven months later, though Gibson anchored Friday night during the holiday week, ABC's World News skipped the reversal from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals as ABC led with the problem of people defrauding the government of Hurricane Katrina relief money. Neither ABC or CBS caught up on Saturday night. With "Domestic Spying" on screen, fill-in anchor Lester Holt read this short item on the July 6 NBC Nightly News: <<< "A victory for the Bush administration today in the ongoing dispute over its warrantless wiretapping program. A federal appeals court dismissed a lawsuit challenging the program, saying the plaintiffs, which included the American Civil Liberties Union, had no standing to sue. The decision overturned a lower court ruling that the program violated privacy and free speech rights. The appeals court ruled 2 to 1 that the plaintiffs couldn't prove they were spied upon." >>> MSNBC's Keith Olbermann also ignored Friday's ruling on his Countdown show, while last August he had trumpeted that day's anti-Bush court decision by interviewing liberal law professor Jonathan Turley, who maintained that Bush "could well have committed a federal crime not once, but 30 times." Olbermann had hailed the August ruling as a "judicial smackdown" and a "stunning ruling" against the program, and had repeatedly referred to the NSA program as monitoring "our" phone calls or "our" e-mails. But the Countdown host did introduce Friday's show by trumpeting comments by former Reagan administration NSA director William Odom about the possibility of impeaching President Bush: "The top National Security officer from the Reagan administration insisting that the only way to protect the troops in Iraq is to get the Bush administration to bring them home, and the only way to do that may be to threaten the President directly with impeachment." (Transcript at end of this article) [This item is based on a Saturday posting, by Brad Wilmouth, on the MRC's NewsBusters blog: newsbusters.org ] While a Carter-nominated judge issued the 2006 ruling, the two judges in the majority on Friday were named by Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. July 7 Boston Globe story, "Court gives Bush win on surveillance," online at: www.boston.com ..... mrc.org