Headline atop the page two “Voices” column in Tuesday's USA Today by Trevor Hughes, the Denver-based correspondent for the newspaper: “How I came to decide to buy a gun.” “After months of soul-searching, I’ve decided to buy a handgun,” Hughes began, later making an obvious point so many journalists would prefer to avoid: “You don’t see terror attacks in this country on areas where there’s lots of armed men and women. Instead, it’s those soft targets that get hit.”
CyberAlerts
This page holds posts for distribution via the Media Research Center’s CyberAlert daily e-mail compilation of liberal media bias in national media coverage of politics and policy. Join the 175,000 subscribers by signing up here.


On Monday's CNN Tonight, John McWhorter rebuked left-wing activists for suppressing free speech on many college campuses. McWhorter contended that they are "proposing that racism, and that which offends me, is the same sort of thing...and, therefore, they feel like they're in the right to shut down any kind of discussion." McWhorter later underlined that "you [can] get to the point that you can define just about anything a white person does or says as a micro-aggression."
On Tuesday, NBC’s Today devoted two full reports to President Obama appearing on Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The first report came late in the 7 a.m. ET hour, with co-host Carson Daly proclaiming: “President Obama and Jerry Seinfeld take a little spin on the South Lawn in a 1963 Corvette before they sit down for a candid conversation about life in the White House....[which] focuses more on the ‘lighter side of the presidency’...an opportunity to ‘pull back the curtain.’”
We began detailing the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015” yesterday with the awards for the gooiest Obamagasms of the year. Today, we have the perennial “Damn Those Conservatives Award,” our annual look at the nasty rhetoric that liberal journalists fling at conservatives. (Thanks to our 39 judges who patiently reviewed dozens of quotes to select the very worst of the worst.)
Seeking to join in on the Star Wars: The Force Awakens hype, MSNBC’s Hardball kicked off Monday’s show with a spoof of the famous franchise’s opening credits that told of a “period of civil war within the Republican party” and “President Obama, Hillary Clinton, & the Republican establishment appear to have formed a coalition rejecting [Donald] Trump’s appeal to the DARK SIDE.”

New York Times White House reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis is sending Barack Obama into 2016 in style, with three successive stories focusing on various flattering angles of the president, who is shedding the lame duck stereotype and laying down accomplishments -- at least according to Davis -- although the poor president can’t enjoy a holiday getaway without world events intruding. On Monday she penned “Relishing a Respite in Hawaii, but Reality Is Never Far Away,” which portrayed as a burden the president’s visit with families of the victims of the San Bernardino attacks

On Monday morning, NPR Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep aired some of his end-of-year interview with President Obama (also recorded on video). Obama drew ten minutes of air time, and Inskeep only aired five of his own questions in that time span, about one every two minutes. Often, he explained Obama’s viewpoint on the world in between the quotes. Compare that to the recent Inskeep interview with Ted Cruz. In 7 minutes and 19 seconds, Inskeep challenged Cruz at least 12 times.

CNN's New Day on Monday actually spotlighted Hillary Clinton's false claim on Saturday that ISIS is "showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists." Chris Cuomo asserted that "it's very hard to translate it any other way...we can't find the videos." When liberal pundit Errol Louis speculated that Clinton's campaign would "migrate towards some kind of clarification," Cuomo replied, "How could you clarify it? How is it anything but wrong?"
Both of the media-centered programs on CNN and FNC covered on Sunday the move by the New York Times from Friday to delete a line from an article about President Obama not fully realizing “the anxiety” of Americans following terror attacks due to his lack of exposure to cable news. Other than NPR TV critic Eric Geggans rushing to Obama’s defense on CNN’s Reliable Sources, the other panelists both denounced the Times for what they described as “outrageous,” “perplexing,” and “potentially damning.”
Talking to NPR’s Steve Inskeep on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, fill-in anchor Luke Russert congratulated the Morning Edition host for teeing up the President to slam Republican critics as racist in a recent interview. A clip played of Inskeep asking the President: “Do you feel over seven years that you’ve come to understand why it is that some ordinary people in America believe or fear that you are trying to change the country in some way that they cannot accept?”
Liberal historian and former Johnson administration staffer Doris Kearns Goodwin was on Sunday’s Meet the Press panel and to the shock of no one, sang the praises of Hillary Clinton by proclaiming how she projected an “amazing...internal confidence” in the debate and has become “a better candidate now than she was six months ago” and from 2008.

Last week, the Media Research Center announced our “Best Notable Quotables of 2015.” Over the next few days, we’ll present the most outrageous of this year’s Notable Quotables as a way to review the worst media bias of 2015. Today, the winner and top runners-up of our “Obamagasm Award,” for journalists who get thrills and tingles when they think about Barack Obama.
