The hosts of the three network morning shows on Tuesday grilled Paul Ryan, questioning the Republican's facts and citing Joe Biden as a policy expert. Former Democratic operative turned journalist George Stephanopoulos highlighted a quote from the Vice President touting the last four years.
Good Morning America's Stephanopoulos interrogated, "When [Biden] says Osama bin Laden is dead, General Motors is alive, you say?" Using remarkably similar language, CBS This Morning anchor Charlie Rose pressed Ryan on Obama's first term, parroting, "...Vice President Biden has come back and said, as you know, General Motors is alive and Osama Bin Laden is dead."
2012 Convention Watch
By Scott Whitlock | September 4, 2012 | 11:35 AM EDT
By Scott Whitlock | September 3, 2012 | 3:45 PM EDT
Of the three morning shows, only ABC's Good Morning America on Monday highlighted two drunken delegates at the Democratic National Convention, one of whom was forced to leave North Carolina. Fill-in host Lara Spencer touted the story, asserting that "things are already off to a shaky start."
Reporter Cecilia Vega explained, "Two California Democratic delegates partied into the wee hours of Sunday morning. In the lobby of their Charlotte hotel, one was so drunk he apparently passed out and was taken to the hospital." She added that the unidentified delegate was "belligerent" and threatened with arrest for impersonating a congressman. ABC reported the story in the 7am and 8am hour. CBS This Morning and NBC's Today, however, skipped it.
By Ryan Robertson | August 31, 2012 | 4:50 PM EDT
File this under unsurprising but notable, because it’s the type of story that mainstream media outlets will largely ignore in an attempt to protect an undeserving administration from anything that could hurt its re-election chances.
According to a Washington Times report by Jim McElhatton, the U.S. Department of Labor allegedly paid a public relations company at least half a million dollars of their allotted stimulus money to produce over 100 commercials that publicized a new “green jobs” initiative back in 2009.
By Kyle Drennen | August 31, 2012 | 4:00 PM EDT
Immediately after Paul Ryan concluded his acceptance speech for the Republican Party's vice presidential nomination on Wednesday, the media sought ways to tear down the Wisconsin Congressman's indictment of the failures of the Obama administration. In particular, networks and newspapers attempted to knock down Ryan's accurate claim that President Obama promised to keep open a GM plant that closed in 2009.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and PolitiFact quickly labeled Ryan's criticism as "false," claiming Obama made no such promise and that the plant closed before he took office. But as The Examiner's Conn Carroll detailed on Thursday, that supposed "fact check" was false:
By Scott Whitlock | August 31, 2012 | 11:41 AM EDT
The network morning shows on Friday slammed conservative actor Clint Eastwood's "bizarre," "rambling" endorsement of Mitt Romney at the Republican National Convention. Good Morning America, CBS This Morning and NBC's Today dissected the speech in 11 out of 12 segments about the convention.
GMA guest host Amy Robach mocked, "The good, the bad and the ugly." She hyperbolically added, "Did Clint Eastwood derail Romney's big night with a bizarre warm up speech?" CBS This Morning co-anchor Norah O'Donnell spit out a similar critique: "It was the 'no good, the bad and the ugly.'" CBS obsessed over Eastwood the most, in five out of five segments on the GOP's convention. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]
By Ken Shepherd | August 31, 2012 | 11:07 AM EDT
Once again the folks at NBC News have "curated some of the notable speeches" from a night at the GOP convention. As I noted here and here, NBC left out some compelling speeches by minority politicians who started out in life as Democrats. This time, among the speeches that didn't make the cut was that of Tom Stemberg, the founder of Staples. Staples is one of the wildest success stories of Bain Capital, the much-maligned private equity firm that Mitt Romney co-founded.
In his brief speech, Stemberg praised Romney's tenure at Bain and blasted the Obama/Democratic Senate's handling of the economy:
By Matt Hadro | August 30, 2012 | 11:49 PM EDT
CNN's Piers Morgan fell on his face Thursday trying to fact-check Paul Ryan's RNC speech from the previous night. He was proven wrong not only by CNN's own report, but also by his guest Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
Challenging Ryan's point that a GM plant closed under Obama after he said it would stay open for years if it cooperated with the government, Morgan said the plant "closed down under George Bush, in December of that year," in agreement with the Obama campaign.
By Matt Hadro | August 30, 2012 | 7:50 PM EDT
Piers Morgan said on Thursday that the Todd Akin controversy supports "the argument that the Republican Party is anti-women," playing into the Democratic playbook.
"I suppose the problem is what it does is it lends again succor to the argument that the Republican Party is anti-women," he stated after bringing up Akin's remarks in an interview with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his wife Cindy.
WaPo Furthers Liberal Media’s ‘Racist’ Narrative at RNC: ‘Republican Party is White, Aging, & Dying Off’
By Ryan Robertson | August 30, 2012 | 4:39 PM EDT The liberal media can’t seem to help themselves. While counter-arguments are occasionally acknowledged, most journalists of the progressive persuasion are not interested in fair and balanced coverage of politics. Facts and figures are seemingly subjective in the whole scheme of things. Severely limited studies and polls seem to provide them with all the information they need. Oh, and almost everything is racist.
The Washington Post has been one of most reliable offenders, as far as daily publications are concerned. For example, Rosalind Helderman, Jon Cohen and Aaron Blake collaborated on a report that was published today suggesting the “Republican Party base is white, aging and dying off.” This is according to an “extensive analysis" by David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
By Kyle Drennen | August 30, 2012 | 4:25 PM EDT
In an interview with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer worried that the Republican National Convention was not appealing to a broad audience: "When you talk about the conservatives and we talk about the gender gap and how important women are...do you think this convention is reaching out to the people who are going to decide this election, independents, moderates and women?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Earlier in the show, Lauer hyped the same concern while talking to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, wondering if Paul Ryan's "staunchly conservative views on topics like abortion" created a "fear" among Republicans that female voters would be turned off.
By Rich Noyes | August 30, 2012 | 1:48 PM EDT
CBS News has talked quite about their latest poll released Tuesday, especially how Mitt Romney is trailing Barack Obama by 10 points among women voters -- bad news for the Republican, of course. But unstated in the network's on-air coverage is the rest of the story: that Barack Obama trails Mitt Romney among men voters by 9 points, by a 49 to 40 margin.
How come no discussion of how poorly Obama is doing with men? Is it because the Democrats have cooked up a "war on women" theme for this campaign, and talking about the male vote doesn't do anything to further that partisan objective?
By Ken Shepherd | August 30, 2012 | 11:42 AM EDT
Once again, the NBC Politics team at NBCNews.com cobbled together what they consider the most "notable" of the speeches from last night's Republican convention. Once again, a dynamic Democrat-turned-Republican speaker was left out of the "curated" selection: Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, a woman of Hispanic ethnic heritage.
Yesterday I noted how the website omitted video of Artur Davis's speech. In her speech Wednesday night, Martinez noted that although she grew up a Democrat, the daughter of Democrats, her values were always conservative. She shared with convention goers the story of how she came to the realization that the Republican Party, not the Democrats, best shared the values that her hard-working, business-owning parents instilled in her. You can watch Martinez's speech at Breitbart TV here.