Time to Crush the Myth about Gender Pay Inequality

The other day as part of a “Professionals” panel on NBC’s Today show, the program’s chief medical editor Nancy Snyderdman said, “We [women] still make 77 cents to the dollar [compared to] men. It’s ridiculous.” It sure is ridiculous, mainly because it’s not true.

Another panelist, attorney Star Jones said, “My bread does not cost 30 cents less than a man’s bread when he goes into the grocery store. Equal pay for equal work.”

I don’t know about you but I’m getting tired of pundits and activists – almost always on the left — who don’t know what they’re talking about, spouting off in the media about how women don’t make as much as men for doing the same work.

The reason men, on average, earn more than women is because men, in many cases, dodifferent kinds of work than women. More men work in dangerous jobs that pay higher wages – like jobs in coalmines and on oilrigs. They’re also more likely than women to work the overnight shift, and that also pays more. Women also take more time off to take care of their children, which over time means less pay.

It doesn’t take a scholar to figure that out. It’s obvious. Nonetheless, a scholar – James Sherk at the Heritage Foundation — did figure it out and earlier this month he issued a report that said: “This gender gap is not the result of rampant discrimination. Rather, it exists because men and women often work in different jobs, work different hours, and have different qualifications. When work experience, education, occupation, and hours of work are taken into account, the average woman makes 98 cents for every dollar earned by a man.” Anti-business liberals are always telling us that cold- hearted, money-hungry corporate types care only about the bottom line. So then why — if it’s true that women are getting paid 77 cents for every dollar a man makes; if women are not getting equal pay for doing the same job — why would any company hire any man at all?

Why wouldn’t companies only hire women to do all the work and save 23 percent on their labor costs? This is not a rhetorical question. If greedy businessmen are fixated on “maximizing profits” how do we account for so many “overpaid” men in the workforce?

I expect very little from what passes for the mainstream media. And they rarely disappoint. But it would be nice if the next time the Today show, or any other news program, put someone on the air who carelessly threw out misleading statistics about supposed pay inequality, a real journalist would step in to set the record straight.

I know … hoping for something like that is what’s really “ridiculous.”

The Identity Crisis of a Liberal Thinker In promoting his latest book, “The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas”, writer Jonah Goldberg has been making a solid, distinguishing point about how conservatives and liberals view themselves.

As Goldberg told CNN’s Piers Morgan a few weeks ago, we conservatives are largely aware that we are… well, conservative. There’s an inherent cognizance that allows us to self-identify as such.

Conservatives understand that small government, personal responsibility, the right to bear arms, and a pro-life stance are ‘conservative’ issues.

When conservatives watch Sean Hannity on television or listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, we recognize that we’re hearing a conservative viewpoint – not a mainstream consensus. When we turn on FOX News, we’re aware of a right-leaning tilt in much of their analysis.

Conservatives understand that when our candidates lose an election, it’s due to either unpopular policies, a failure to persuade voters toward a vision, or qualification concerns.

Because of this self-awareness, conservatives have traditionally been shy about expressing their political views. That’s changed a little bit over the past couple of years, but for the most part, we naturally presume that the people around us are not conservative, so we choose not to burden them with our grandiosity. Liberals are often a different story.

They typically view themselves as the mainstream of America. They openly speak their mind in the realm of politics because they assume everyone around them pretty much feels the same way as they do.

Liberals watch the national network news and they can’t seem to find any ideological bias in its presentation. They buy into subtly (and not so subtly) placed commentary as conventional wisdom.

Liberals have a hard time understanding criticism of President Obama. To them, he’s dignified and largely infallible so they reject the notion that reasonable people could possibly be unhappy with the job he’s done. Thus, they conclude that racism must be a factor in those people’s grievances and that FOX News and conservative radio are somehow brainwashing the electorate away from reason and common sense.

A prime of example of this identity crisis was put on display last week when Regis Philbin interviewed David Letterman on CNN. Letterman, whose bitter, left-wing rants and lopsided castigation of prominent Republicans have become trademarks of his program in recent years, made it a point to declare that he was a registered ‘Independent’. He presented this information in order to dismiss the accusation that partisanship plays a role in who he targets for ridicule on his late night show.

The defense was laughable, and Letterman wasn’t even trying to make a joke. The vast majority of hyper-partisan, left-wing nut-jobs at MSNBC are most likely also registered as Independents. Does that mean they’re moderate or fair-minded? Of course not. Merely checking ‘Independent’ on a voter registration form doesn’t exonerate someone from being an ideologue. To insist otherwise would be pure buffoonery. All it means is that you’ll probably receive less political junk- mail and fewer campaign calls in the Fall.

Yet, Letterman probably does fancy himself as some nondiscriminatory, middle-of-the-road guy who’s just saying what he thinks everyone else is thinking. He suffers from a liberal identity crisis.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is suffering from the same ailment. Despite providing the country with countless hours of embarrassing fawning over President Obama, and making it his life-mission to excoriateeverything conservative, he routinely insists that he’s a centrist, not a liberal.

Chris Matthews would probably have a defender in Dan Rather, who told Jon Stewart earlier this week that, contrary to popular belief, most journalists are not liberal. Rather took it a step further, going as far as to call the notion of liberal prevalence in the mainstream media “a sham.”

Rather’s assertion is a tough one to defend, considering that study after study has drawn the exact opposite conclusion, including one reported in 2010 by the Washington Examiner. The study revealed that President Obama and the Democratic party received 88 percent of the 2008 campaign contributions given by network news executives, on-air talents, producers, and reporters at ABC, CBS, and NBC. And my guess is that most of those contributors wouldn’t consider themselves to be “liberal” either.

Speaking of Jon Stewart, at least he admits that he’s a liberal. As Newsbusters recently unearthed, he even told Larry King back in 2000 that he’s more of a “socialist” than a Democrat. And no, he wasn’t joking. Yet, even in Stewart’s case, he seems to have fooled himself into believing that the left-leaning political tilt that exudes every night from his show on Comedy Central is representative of prevailing wisdom in our country. After all, he and Stephen Colbert organized their “Million Moderate March” in Washington DC less than two years ago as a way to denounce the ideological divide in our country.

Yes, Stewart and Colbert actually presented themselves as moderates.

Now, I’m the first person to admit that Jon Stewart is a comedic genius. I was a fan of his long before he was a household name. But he’s anything but a genius when it comes to how inclusive he believes his views to be. Let’s recap the timeline: In 2000, he was to the left of the Democratic party by his own admission. During the Bush era, he’d clearly swung even further left. Suddenly, in 2010, he was the embodiment of the American moderate?

And let’s look at Stewart’s views on the media. He believes that FOX News is bias. As a conservative, I understand why he says that. I would challenge him on some of the specific allegations he’s made over the years, but the reality is that FOX News leans right in its presentation. It does. I think most conservatives would concur.

What completely substantiates my point about the identity crisis of liberals, however, is that Stewart does NOT see liberal bias in the rest of the news media. Last year on FOX News Sunday, he told Chris Wallace that there is NOT political bias coming from the likes of ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. The most he ceded to Wallace was that he thought MSNBC was just now “attempting” to go in the same direction that he believes FOX News has gone in.

MSNBC is just attempting to show a political slant?

Keep in mind that Stewart made this observation less than a year ago. He wasn’t speaking of the MSNBC from ten years ago. He was speaking of today’s MSNBC who long let Keith Olbermann spew left-wing, dishonest diatribes on a nightly basis. This is the MSNBC that featured the thrill up Chris Matthews’ leg, in his adoration for President Obama. This is the MSNBC that has given Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Al Sharpton, and Martin Bashir all hosting positions on their own shows. This is the MSNBC who reported on “white people” who were “showing up with guns” at a Tea Party rally in 2009, when in reality the only guy who brought a gun was an African American – a fact the network purposely edited out of the accompanying video.

Yet, Stewart wasn’t quite prepared to accuse MSNBC (or any of the mainstream media outlets, for that matter) of putting forth an ideological slant. To him, they’re more or less down the middle.

It’s all very sad, isn’t it?

People like Letterman, Matthews, Rather, and Stewart are certainly representative of something, but it’s not the American moderate. They’re representative of the left’s inability to recognize who they, themselves, are. And when so many people refuse to self-examine their shared ideological beliefs, it’s tough to make the case that their ideology has any merit at all.

What Obama’s Literary Bio Says About the Media Imagine if from 1991 to 2007 (sixteen years), Sarah Palin’s own agent repeatedly published a biography for her that stated her origin of birth as being Canada.

When she joined the Republican presidential ticket in 2008, does anyone honestly believe that the media wouldn’t have discovered this information and wondered what the heck was going on? As everyone knows, only individuals born in the United States can hold the office of the president.

Thus, one would assume that during the vetting process for the highest leadership position in our country, the media would have certainly identified this discrepancy, questioned it, and investigated it. After all, the army of reporters sent by media outlets to Wasilla, Alaska in 2008 to research Palin divulged and scrutinized just about every imaginable, personal tidbit they could find about her.

The media told us all about the allegations that Palin had dismissed a public official for personal reasons related to her sister. They presented the incident as a major controversy, even coining it with the name, Troopergate. They fixated on her daughter’s pregnancy, after first questioning whether or not Sarah was even the biological mother of her own infant son. They investigated whether or not Palin billed tax- payers for a tanning bed in the governor’s office. They told us all about the visiting pastor from Kenya who once spoke at Palin’s church, and how he was an admitted “witch hunter”. They ran video over and over of that pastor anointing Palin during the service. They discovered that Palin’s husband was once a member of a group that promoted the secession of Alaska from the United States, and they questioned if the governor herself felt the same way. They obsessed over Palin’s hacked emails and demanded to know if she ever used her private account for public business.

Regardless if the media was being fair or not, it’s safe to say that they thoroughly vetted Sarah Palin.

Now, let’s talk about presidential candidate, Barack Obama from 2008.

We know all about the media’s laziness and neglect when it came to their investigating of the person Obama described as his “mentor” and “spiritual leader”, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright’s numerous racist and anti-American rants during his sermons were completely ignored by news outlets until his church started selling a DVD compilation of them in their lobby. Only then, when it was clear the videos would inevitably go public, did the media bother to report on Wright.

As the good folks at Breitbart.com reported on Thursday, the media’s disinterest in vetting candidate Obama was even worse than we thought.

From 1991 to 2007, Acton & Dystel who was Barack Obama’s literary agency during that time, published a brief biography on the future president, stating in the very first sentence that he was born in Kenya, and was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.

Now, I understand that misprints often happen in publishing, but misprints are also corrected when information is re- published. Acton & Dystel re-published the Obama biography time after time over several years with that detail remaining unchanged. How does that happen?

If I had an agent who was misrepresenting my origin of birth, I’d sure as heck let him know about it and make sure the information was corrected. Barack Obama didn’t, and it’s a no- brainer that the question of ‘why not?’ should have been posed to him by the media. Yet, it wasn’t.

It’s not that the media was completely oblivious to the inference that Obama had been born in Kenya. In 2004, an Associated Press reporter printed this information inan article: “Kenyan-born US Senate hopeful, Barack Obama, appeared set to take over the Illinois Senate seat after his main rival, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race on Friday night amid a furor over lurid sex club allegations.”

When candidate Obama was running for the presidency, did anyone in the national news media ask this Associated Press reporter why he believed Obama was born in Kenya? Did they ask him if he was told this by Barack Obama himself, or maybe by someone who was part of Obama’s senate campaign? It sure doesn’t appear so.

Let me make something very clear: I’ve never bought into the Birther notion that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. I still don’t. I believe he was born in Hawaii, and there’s ample evidence (including the birth certificate the administration released last year) that shows that. The new findings, by no means, debunk that conclusion.

There are some pretty striking questions, however, than can be drawn from this freshly uncovered information. First of all, why didn’t the media find and question this discrepancy during the 2008 presidential campaign? To me, it appears that Barack Obama was at best complacent with being publicized as having been born in Kenya. At worst, there’s enough evidence to at least consider that Barack Obama may have actually been promoting himself, at some point, as having been born in Kenya.

Why would he do such a thing?

Well, over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a story unfold in Massachusetts where U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has been exposed for misrepresenting herself as having a significant Native American heritage. She admittedly did so for personal gain, and is suspected to have done so for professional gain in order to lend ethnically diverse bragging rights to the universities she’s served as a faculty member of.

It’s legitimate to at least ponder the notion that a young academic, and aspiring author might have concluded that publishers would take more notice of him if his background was more exotic and interesting than it actually was. In other words, a form of resume padding. I’m not drawing that conclusion by any means, but it’s a plausible theory and the evidence certainly warrants the question.

And if that theory were researched and determined to be true, one has to wonder what that would say about our president and his administration who mocked and ridiculed theBirther movement on numerous occasions (which I admit I’ve done in past writings myself). After all, how fair would it be for a man to condemn believers in a theory that he, himself, was the originator of?

In the end, it all comes back to media bias in the form of willful negligence. The question of why his publicist promoted incorrect information, and why Barack Obama was apparently fine with it, should have been asked by the media four years ago. It wasn’t, and I believe the most likely reason is that the media viewed Barack Obama as their dream car. They fawned over how great he looked and sounded, and they were swept away into the daydream of cruising down the road with him in the sunshine and light breeze. He was so perfect that they refused to take him out for a test-drive, fearing that he had significant mechanical problems that would force them to wake up from their fantasy.

It’s too little too late, but the media still has a responsibility to independently investigate this discrepancy, because the implications go directly to the character of our president. Maybe they’ll find that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation that makes sense of everything, but it would be scandalous for them not to even bother.

If they need some motivation, they could always pretend they’re investigating Sarah Palin.

Answering David Letterman’s Question: What ‘More’ We Want From Obama

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to beg our parents to let us stay up on weeknights to catch the first twenty minutes or so of David Letterman’s show on NBC. It aired pretty late in the evening, so if we got to see the opening monologue and whatever humorous bit preceded the guests, we were happy.

Back then, Letterman was the king of innovative and original comedy. His show was different than others in that it presented a style of lowbrow humor that appealed to our inner adolescence. The viewing masses tuned into watch watermelons dropped from the tops of buildings, loud and obscure displays of talent, and a host dedicated to entertaining his audience while refusing to take himself seriously.

People felt comfortable watching Letterman’s presentation because they viewed him as one of them. He didn’t come across as an elitist celebrity, but rather a common man who checked his ego at the door and only wanted to make us laugh.

My how times have changed.

These days, if you flip on Letterman’s show for a laugh or two before you go to bed, there’s a decent chance you’ll find yourself witnessing an angry tirade overflowing with shallow and tired, left-wing propaganda rhetoric. Some nights, the rancor is so bitter and uncomfortable that you have to wonder if the MSNBC hosts watching from home are even wincing and squirming in their seats.

Such a moment took place on Tuesday’s show when NBC News anchor, Brian Williams, was Letterman’s guest. The two were discussing the Obama re-election campaign’s recent use of last year’s successful Osama Bin Laden raid as an argument for why the president deserves a second-term. Letterman was clearly frustrated over the criticism the president has received for invoking the operation into a political argument. He vented that frustration by launching into the kind of cursory, fuming outburst you would expect to find at a rabid anti-war rally along the campus of Berkley.

Not surprisingly, Letterman once again trotted out the typical trite lines about President Bush “not caring” about capturing Bin Laden, and the Iraq war being waged to increase Dick Cheney’s stock portfolio while we “grabbed up all the oil.” He also treated us to his new, nonscensical theory that the Bush administration actually didn’t even want to capture Bin Laden because they were worried about upsetting their “Saudi Arabian royalty buddies.” How terribly creative.

Williams, of course, offered only a half-hearted attempt to dismantle the nonsense.

Letterman then predictably sung the praises of President Obama’s unmatched courage and intelligence and hailed him as the greatest gift to our country since The Statue of Liberty. Now, I get it. Letterman is a true liberal ideologue and a fierce partisan. He has a very tall soapbox at his immediate disposal five nights a week, so he feels compelled to use it to try and sway his viewers into seeing the world the way he does. That’s certainly his prerogative. It’s just a sad reality that the days of David Letterman as a comedic genius who just wanted to entertain us are long gone.

There was one legitimately interesting moment in the interview, however. It was the last sentence that Letterman spoke in the segment. He threw out this question to Americans, regarding President Obama: “What more do we want this man to do for us?”

It’s the kind of question that could only be asked with a straight face when coming from a disconnected, far-left elitist who clearly has no clue as to the challenges and concerns of the common American, nearly four years into the Obama administration.

Only someone like Letterman could see a chronically high unemployment rate, a crippling and ever-increasing national debt that we’re burdening our children with, anemic U.S. economic growth, a workforce participation rate at historic lows, record-breaking gas prices, and failing social safety nets… and ask what more we could possibly expect from the leader of our country.

Only someone like Letterman could listen to the administration’s every-day stoking of class envy and the promotion of nonsensical tax increases, and wonder how we could possibly be unhappy with the president.

Only someone like Letterman could watch his political party divide us into demographics over fake disputes, and label their opposition as racists, and wonder why we aren’t happy with our president.

Only someone like Letterman could witness the economies of European nations crumble and their citizens riot in the streets, and wonder why Americans aren’t eager to follow our president’s push for the same types of policies that led to those environments.

Only someone like Letterman could expect us to be content with a president who refuses to put forth serious national budgets, and demagogues the reforming of our entitlement programs that are quickly becoming insolvent.

Only someone like Letterman could wonder why we’re not applauding the president for routinely distracting us from our nation’s problems, rather than actually fixing those problems.

Mr. Letterman, I’ll tell you what ‘more’ we want from this president. We want him to start showing us and our children some of the same respect that you clearly have for him.

Bill O’Reilly’s Wrong – Mocking Double-Standards Isn’t ‘Justifying Bad Behavior’

I watch The O’Reilly Factor on a pretty regular basis. Like many people, I enjoy its entertaining and often insightful presentation of news analysis. While I don’t always agree with the opinions of host, Bill O’Reilly, I think he’s honest and generally has a pretty good observational take on most news items.

That’s why I was so surprised last Friday, when I watched him swing and miss badly in his Talking Points Memo segment. His topic was, “Exaggerating and justifying bad behavior in politics”. O’Reilly confided in his audience that he becomes annoyed when political partisans defend the actions of someone in their party by diverting attention to similar offenses committed by someone from the opposition party. He considers the practice to be an example of “justifying bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior”, and likened it to the maturity level of a third-grader.

In a broad sense, I think there’s some validity to that argument. However, the examples O’Reilly provided to substantiate his point were completely off the mark.

First, he brought up the liberal media’s often-cited criticism of the Romney family’s nearly 30 year-old road-trip to Canada, in which the family dog was kept in a carrier above the roof of their car and became sick during the ride. Romney first shared the anecdote during the 2008 presidential campaign. Ever since then, it has remained fodder for critics who’ve used it to accuse the former Massachusetts governor of, you guessed it, animal abuse.

O’Reilly then criticized the retaliating, partisan pundits who have recently pointed out that President Obama stated in one of his books that he had eaten dog meat as a child when he lived in Indonesia. O’Reilly’s assertion was that the two stories had nothing to do with each other, so they shouldn’t be compared.

His second example was a recent Washington Post article that described a nearly fifty year-old incident in which Mitt Romney had physically bullied a classmate. Like with the dueling dog stories, O’Reilly dismissed thetit for tat chiding of “other politicians doing even worse stuff.” I presume he was referring to another recently unearthed passage from Barack Obama’s book that depicts an incident where a young Obama pushed a female classmate. Now, there’s no doubt that all four of these stories are petty and completely irrelevant to any sensible measure of evaluating a presidential candidate. To be honest, I feel a little silly even citing such non-issues. But, there is absolutely legitimacy in lumping together these partisan, give-and-take examples. No one is justifying bad behavior. That’s not what’s going on here. What’s being pointed out (mainly by conservatives) is the double-standard the mainstream media uses when covering a politician’s past. That double-standard links directly back to the politician’s party affiliation.

The right-leaning pundits who have recently dredged up the stories of Obama eating dog meat and pushing a childhood classmate haven’t done so because they believe those incidents constitute substantive criticisms. On the contrary… They’ve brought them up precisely because they are ridiculously meaningless.

You see, both of the Obama incidents were available to the public (via Obama’s books) before the two Romney incidents ever were. Yet, the media showed no interest in perusing them whatsoever. For that matter, they’ve shown little interest in Obama’s young-adult years at all, whether it be the grades he received in college, the radical people he surrounded himself with, or the fact that he was a self-professed, avid cocaine user.

Yet, when it comes to decades-old, personal tidbits about Mitt Romney that are trivial by any common-sense standard, the media turns them into major news stories.

The obvious conclusion, of course, is that the media has a propensity to make something out of nothing when it comes to a negative fact about a Republican. When it comes to a negative fact about Democrat, on the other hand, they tend to make nothing of it… even if it’s something. There’s an almost endless list of examples of this propensity, but let’s stick with the Mitt Romney stuff for now…

The story with Mitt Romney’s family dog has received intense media interest, with the incident being treated by the news media as having genuine relevance to the evaluation of his moral character. New York Times columnist, Gale Collins has referenced the plight of Romney’s dog in more than 50 columns since 2007. ABC News and Time Magazine have published pieces on the incident citing the president of PETA who called Romney’s actions a “lesson in cruelty” that was wrong for his children to witness. Senior political analyst, Mark Halperin claimed that the incident was a “serious issue” for “a lot of voters.” The Boston Globe’s Neil Swidey called the story a “valuable window into how Romney operates.” When Diane Sawyer brought the incident up in her interview with the Romneys last month, numerous media outlets went to the owner of a website named “Dogs Against Romney” for comment. There have even been two super PACs formed to publicize the incident which the media hasn’t been shy about referencing.

Likewise, the Washington Post felt that Mitt Romney’s youthful antics from a near half century ago were so compelling that they warranted a 5000-word, front-page story on the bullying incident. And when Romney stated that he couldn’t remember the details of the incident, his claim was widely heckled by the national media. This is the same national media, of course, that had no problem believing that Barack Obama couldn’t recall any radical, racist sermons delivered by Reverend Jeremiah Wright whose church he was a member of, and had been for 20 years.

The dog and bullying quips against Obama, on the other hand, have largely been made in jest with tongues planted firmly in cheeks. They haven’t been alluded to in order to justify bad behavior. They’ve been referenced to draw attention to the media’s silly and selective outrage over meaningless personal accounts. It’s totally appropriate and fair for conservatives to expose media bias this way. It’s also quite an effective way of using humor to point out partisan inconsistencies and omissions.

Context is important, and when the media fails to display the proper context, it’s up to media critics to do it for them.