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CNN media critic Howard Kurtz on Sunday pushed back against a Fox News pundit who slammed the "deafening silence of too much of the media" over coverage of a Philadelphia doctor accused of killing seven babies and one woman while performing late-term abortions.

In a USA Today column last week, Fox News political analyst Kirsten Powers pointed to former Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell as evidence that Planned Parenthood has been wrong to claim that it's "highly unusual" that infants survive late-term abortions.

Powers said that there was a double standard because conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh had received front page coverage after he called Sandra Fluke a "slut" over her advocacy of contraception coverage for students, but Gosnell had not gotten the same attention.

"You don't have to oppose abortion rights to find late-term abortion abhorrent or to find the Gosnell trial eminently newsworthy," the Fox News pundit wrote. "The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace."

In his "Media Monitor" segment on Sunday, Kurtz agreed that the Gosnell case had not gotten enough national coverage, but suggested that conservatives had oversimplified the argument to attack the "liberal media."

"Some conservatives are saying this amounts to blackout by the so-called liberal media, but it's more complicated that that," he explained. "First, the Gosnell case has drawn some coverage since the FBI first raided that clinic back in 2010, in such outlets as Time, NPR, the AP, The New York Times, Slate and The Daily Beast. Now since Gosnell's trial began, CNN has done a half dozen segments, including one by Jake Tapper back on March 21 and Fox News did a story that same day."

"MSNBC, like Fox, has done a few stories," Kurtz continued. "CBS and ABC carried evening news segments back in January, but there hasn't been nearly enough on the trial. Almost nothing in The Washington Post, not enough in The New York Times. Perhaps the mainstream press is less attuned to a story that cast a shadow on abortion, but the conservative media didn't do much either."

"And it's not like even the staunchest pro-choice advocate would defend what Gosnell is alleged to have done. This is a gruesome case that journalists on both sides of the abortion question have told me is hard to stomach."

The Philly Post's Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote last week that the media should cover the Gosnell case, but it was wrong to use it as a tool to fight against abortion rights.

"Powers is a liberal and an evangelical Christian; she criticizes the right on women’s rights, the left on abortion," he observed. "Powers’s aim is to draw attention to the fact that the Gosnell murder charges should make us consider whether there’s really a difference between killing a baby inside the womb, or outside, as he so horrifically did. But this is misleading."

"The moral to be drawn from the Gosnell trial is not that current abortion laws are screwed up. Indeed, Gosnell broke them, which is why he’s on trial. Rather, it’s that as individual states increasingly restrict abortion rights, more and more illegal clinics, like Gosnell’s may crop up."

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For the second night in a row, old Bill-O couldn't manage to keep his temper in check with a Fox Democrat who dared counter his lies on whether President Obama put forth any specific proposals to reduce the deficit. This time it was Kirsten Powers' turn in the box, who actually bothered to bring material printed straight from the White House's web site to read to O'Reilly, but as she told him during the segment, he just responded by moving the goal posts on what would satisfy him.

Bill O’Reilly to Kirsten Powers: ‘You Can’t Give Me One Specific on Obama’s Proposed Spending Cuts’:

The Daily Beast columnist said it’s “completely untrue” that Obama hasn’t proposed any cuts, citing Medicare as an example. In the president’s fiscal year 2013 budget, Powers said there’s $400 billion in cuts to federal health care spending.

O’Reilly began grilling Powers on how those health care cuts will manifest themselves and asked her to name one specific drug company the administration wants to negotiate prices with.

“Hold on,” Powers interjected. “This is what you do, you change the discussion. […] I’m giving you specifics. What you said last night was the president did not propose anything. The president proposed this to the Republicans.”

After charging that the other is in fact “100 percent wrong,” O’Reilly reasoned, “We’ll let the folks decide.”

Laughing, Powers retorted, “You are wrong about this and now you’re playing a game […] because we can’t name a drug company, I mean come on.”

“Listen Powers, you say you’re going to negotiate with drug companies to bring down spending on drugs and you don’t have one company mentioned,” O’Reilly argued. “[…] This is where you and I will never agree.”

“Because I use facts?” chastised Powers.

h/t Media Matters

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Fresh off of the heels of the media complaining about their lack of access to President Obama and his golf outing with Tiger Woods and with Chris Wallace complaining that his was the only Sunday show where the new White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough refused to make an appearance last week, the panel on their Saturday joke of a media watchdog show, Fox News Watch, decided to continue on with the carping with a good portion of the jeering done by one of their faux Democrats, Kirsten Powers.

It appears that this is just a rerun of the what the viewers were treated to on the same show last week, where, as News Corpse took note of, we were hearing some very similar complaints out of the same culprits:

Fox earned a ninth place showing by having been called on for questions fourteen times. That is only two fewer nods than CNN and the New York Times received. And if Fox can be described as having been shunned, then the Washington Post, USA Today, and NPR were victims of blatant and deliberate neglect since they came in even lower than Fox at tenth, eleventh, and thirteenth.

Nevertheless, Fox seems to be the only news outlet that is complaining about their treatment by the President. They devoted a segment of their Fox News Watch program to whining that they aren’t getting enough attention, poor things. Host Jon Scott started the bitch session by crying “Why does the president not like to call on us?” Jumping in without being recognized was Fox’s fake Democrat Kirsten Powers who shot back “Because he doesn’t want to be embarrassed. When Ed Henry asks questions to Jay Carney, inevitably Jay Carney ends up looking stupid because he doesn’t know how to answer the question. He’s used to pushing people around.” And she’s supposed to be the voice of the left on Fox’s fair and balanced roster.

With friends like Kirsten Powers who needs enemas? And that is a perfect illustration of why Obama ought to start shunning Fox News. It has never been a credible journalistic operation. It is an unabashed agent of the Republican Party whose only purpose is to bash the President and support the right-wing agenda.

Meanwhile, over at Dan Abrams' rag, Mediaite, Fox and Politico, or as Charlie Pierce calls Politico, The Tiger Beat on the Potomac, were being treated as though they actually have any legitimate complaints about lack of access to the White House and that somehow preventing them from acting like journalists, if that's what either of those organizations actually decided to do one of these days.

Fox’s Kirsten Powers To Panel: Chris Wallace ‘Should Be Proud’ Obama Won’t Go On His Show:

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After the outrage we saw from members on both sides of the aisle the evening House Speaker John Boehner cancelled the vote on hurricane Sandy relief and the subsequent displays by Gov. Chris Christie and Rep. Peter King, among others, leave it to Bill Kristol who has never seen a dime of military spending he didn't love, to come to the defense of John Boehner.

Sadly, as Media Matters noted, he wasn't alone. And his fellow guest on Bret Baier's Special Report, Charles Krauthammer was right there with him as well. The excuse given by Kristol and Krauthammer here was primarily based on concerns that the bill was larded up with some pork that the House didn't have sufficient time to look at, even though the Senate had passed their bill a week before they were asking for this vote to be taken in the House. If that was a real concern, apparently it doesn't matter much now, since Boehner caved to the political pressure and is going to have the House vote "to shore up the National Flood Insurance Program on Friday and will vote on another $51 billion Sandy spending package on Jan. 15."

Whatever the excuses, it seems they were more than happy to give cover to Boehner and the House Republicans for being incapable of being responsible and caring about doing the job of actually governing this country, rather than continued political brinksmanship we've seen from the House and John Boehner and his cohorts taking their vacation time around the holidays, instead of tending to the needs of those suffering in the aftermath of that storm.

Here's more from the Media Matters post on Kristol:

Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol: "I Think The Speaker Was Entirely Right To Pull The Bill." During an appearance on Fox News' Special Report, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said, "I think the Speaker was entirely right to pull the bill." He added: "$60 billion is about one-tenth of this year's federal domestic discretionary nondefense spending. This is not like, gee, a couple hundred million dollars for some really important, urgent thing." [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 1/2/13]

Kristol never seems to have those same concerns about our military industrial complex. That's the only jobs program that Republicans seem to support and I've never heard Kristol express any concern over what the waste there is contributing to our budget deficit. Unlimited funds for the Pentagon. Hurricane victims, well you can wait. And don't dare include any pork in that spending because lord knows we can't have that as long as it's going for people who just had their homes destroyed in a storm and to help their state's infrastructure recover.

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I expect the talking heads over at Fox to be attacking President Obama during these negotiations on the upcoming "fiscal cliff" or as some have called it, the "fiscal curb," but how bad are things for John Boehner and the House Republicans when even Bill Kristol and Laura Ingraham can't manage to come to your defense? We had an agreement among the panel on Fox News Sunday this week, and they all believe that Republicans refusing to negotiate with President Obama is just going to lead to them getting a worse deal later.

Which is good news as far as a lot progressives are concerned, since Republicans think a good deal is destroying our social safety nets and sadly there are too many Democrats happy to help them chip away at them with this talk of a "grand bargain." It seems a lot of us should be grateful that John Boehner is really bad at his job.

And of course there was no mention of just who is responsible for that debt that has been run up since President Obama has been in office. As we've noted here before on too many occasions to count, most of that deficit was due to Bush's policies.

You're not going to hear anyone say that over at Fox though. Quite the opposite as we saw with how Wallace opened the segment.

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Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol on Sunday suggested that Republican senators should confirm United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice if she is nominated as secretary of state because she is more likely to support going to war than Sen. John Kerry (D-MA).

The conservative columnist told Fox News host Chris Wallace that Rice had made a mistake by not being more clear that the September attacks in Benghazi were terrorism but Kerry had a history of opposing military intervention.

"I rather think [President Barack Obama] will appoint Susan Rice and I think -- I'm not a huge fan of hers -- but I think she's likely to be confirmed by the Senate," Kristol explained. "And an awful lot of people might decide, you know, given the range of alternative appointments, maybe she's not -- John Kerry, in my opinion, might be a worse secretary of state. Maybe one just goes ahead and lets him have the secretary of state he wants."

"I think Susan Rice has been a little more interventionist than John Kerry," he pointed out. "John Kerry was a guy who loved the Assad regime in Syria. John Kerry has been against our intervening in every war we've intervened in, the first Gulf War. In Iraq, he was for it before he was against it."

But Fox News political analyst Kirsten Powers, who describes herself as a liberal and has accused Obama of sexism for defending Rice, blasted the president over the possible appointment.

"That kind of arrogance -- which is what I think it would be -- could be he undoing," she declared. "If she is put under oath and forced to go through and answer all these questions, I think it's going to put the administration in a really bad position."

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This clip from this morning echoes many of Kirsten Powers comments in her op-ed at the Fox News site. The rightwing twitter-verse may applaud Ms Powers for speaking truth to power, or whatever, but viewed from the opposite political perspective, one wonders why Fox News employs this token "Democrat" if she's just going to come off as a less shrill, less hysterical version of Ann Coulter? Don't appearances such as this one just blow her cover?

Team Obama’s unseemly groveling to violent extremists has been cloaked in a newfound concern on the left for respecting religious sensibilities. Tuesday, a liberal professor argued in USA Today that the maker of the Mohammed film should be arrested.

President Obama said in the Rose Garden: "We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others" and Clinton asserted that, "The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough endorsed efforts to create "a world where the dignity of all people—and all faiths—is respected."

Apparently our foreign policy is now being run by Dr. Phil. Someone needs to explain to the White House that our Constitution protects freedom of religion from government interference, not the protection from people who say mean, critical or offensive things about one's religion.

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From this Saturday's joke of a media "watchdog" show over at Faux News, the panel members of Fox News Watch spent one of their segments again perpetuating the myth of the so-called "liberal media" and complaining that those "elitists" haven't shown hatchet-man Dinesh D'Souza enough respect. And we got treated to the false equivalency of them comparing D'Souza to the way Michael Moore has been treated by the media and the awards he's won, as opposed to them generally ignoring D'Souza.

Nonny already went through D'Souza's god-awful movie for us here, so just go read the post if you haven't already -- Doing the Right Wing Limbo – How Low Can They Go?. And judging from his terrible interview with Piers Morgan, which was featured in Nonny's post, and with Bill Maher and Cenk Uygur who both just took him apart, I think the best thing D'Souza could do for himself is to avoid doing any more interviews -- unless of course they're at Fox where he's just going to get softballs lobbed at him.

I hate to break it to the hacks at Fox, but D'Souza is being treated with disdain by the media because he deserves to be, not because of some supposed bias against conservatives. Once again rather than having an iota of concern for the truth, the talking heads at Fox are playing the poor, aggrieved victim-card for D'Souza, who supposedly just can't get a break from those liberal snobs who just want to keep him down. Break out the waaammmbulance. There are a whole lot more talented and truthful people out there all over the country who would love to have the money behind them that D'Souza's had to fund his hit pieces on President Obama. Sadly most of them will never be receiving the national attention or the money that D'Souza has been for cranking out his garbage to poison our public and political discourse.

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During his Talking Points Memo segment Thursday evening, Bill O'Reilly once again decided to attack President Obama, and demonize those living in poverty, the working poor and in need of government assistance as a bunch of lazy moochers who think they're "entitled" to government assistance and don't want to work.

And of course it's all President Obama's fault, because the economy crashing under the Bush administration never happened. Republican obstruction on job creation for the last few years never happened. The housing market and the banks crashing and collapsing the economy never happened. Republicans pushing for trickle-down economics, a race to the bottom on wages and union busting never happened. Republicans doing everything in their power to make income disparity worse never happened. Nope, everything that is wrong in the world just started in the last few years after President Obama was elected to office.

And be afraid of the dirty Socialists in Europe because Obama wants to make us just like them and raise Bill-O's taxes. The horror! Following his rant, O'Reilly brought in a couple of hapless Fox Democrats, Kirsten Powers and Leslie Marshall, who argued against a few of his points, but otherwise did a pretty terrible job pushing back at his nonsense, which is what they're paid to do.

Actual liberals who would tell him what a terrible selfish person he is to be doing a segment like this and demonizing the poor to scare the old white bigots who watch his show are never allowed on the air at Fox, or at least not more than once.

About the only thing I was actually glad to hear Powers remind him of, is that a whole lot of those receiving that government assistance are the working poor. They've got jobs. What she didn't point out of course is it means we're subsidizing their skinflint employers, like Walmart who don't want to pay them a living wage or pay for benefits. You won't hear anyone say that on Fox either.

Transcript of Bill-O's opening rant below the fold.

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A conservative Fox News contributor insisted on Monday that President Barack Obama had a "disdain" for women that he learned from his "Marxist" father and "communist" mentor.

Fox News contributor Sandy Rios, who is vice president of the conservative political action committee Family-PAC Federal, told host Sean Hannity that Obama did not disagree with CNN contributor Hilary Rosen's assertion that Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life."

"His father was a Marxist, his mentor was Marxist," Rios explained. "The Marxist theory on women is that they should work just like men. There's a total dripping disdain for women who stay at home and take care of their children. ... This is not an accident. This is what they believe. They hold people like Ann Romney and others of us that have stayed home with our children in complete disregard and disdain."

"That is not what Barack Obama believes," Democratic Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers disagreed. "You don't know what you are talking about. You're making up stuff."

"Frank Marshall Davis was a communist, that was his mentor," Rios replied. "His father was a Marxist."

As Slate's David Weigel noted last year, "Obama's past and philosophy makes it very clear that he only read up seriously on socialism and Marxism when he got to Columbia."

"There is no evidence that Obama ever read his father's economic papers; if he did, it's unclear how dense tracts about the problems of post-colonial Kenya would have influenced his thinking about American urban/class politics and economics."

And contrary to Rios' claims, Obama has spoken out against Rosen's remarks, saying it was "the wrong thing to say."

"It’s not something that I subscribe to," the president told WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio last week.

(h/t: The Political Carnival, Media Matters)