Appearing exclusively on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd repeatedly pressed Speaker Paul Ryan to denounce conservative radio talk show hosts Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin over their criticism of the recently-passed omnibus bill and Todd demanded to know how he’ll work with President Obama to “lay the groundwork” to end political polarization. Todd asked, of the talk show hosts, whether their “rhetoric is inappropriate” or “[o]ut of line?”
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.
Commenting on how The New York Times removed a phrase from a Friday article explaining how President Obama told a group of columnists that he hadn’t consumed enough cable news to fully understand the anxieties of Americans over terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Fox News Sunday panelist Brit Hume lambasted the President for his “snark” and frame of mind that makes him “impatient with the American people.”
Hours after praising socialist Senator Bernie Sanders prior to ABC’s Democratic presidential debate on Saturday night, ABC News political analyst Cokie Roberts completely reversed course on Sunday’s This Week and brushed off Sanders as unelectable and having shot at the nomination even if he wins both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary in February 2016.
After airing an hour of coverage following the last Saturday night Democratic presidential debate on November 14, MSNBC skipped out on airing any post-debate analysis after Saturday’s third Democratic debate on ABC and instead played yet another episode of its weekend jail series Lockup.
In the final set of questions of Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate prior to the closing statements, ABC’s co-moderator Martha Raddatz served up a massive softball to frontrunner Hillary Clinton concerning how former President Bill Clinton would function as a member of the First Family if Hillary is elected president.
In one of the more awkward and bizarre happenings you’ll see in a debate, Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate on ABC restarted without frontrunner Hillary Clinton following a commercial break and continued for over a minute until she returned to the stage.
Showing that they’ve learned next to nothing from the George Stephanopoulos/Clinton Foundation scandal, ABC allowed its chief anchor in Stephanopoulos to anchor its pre-game coverage of Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate. Not surprisingly, the former Clinton White House official teamed with DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile to gush over how Hillary Clinton has “found her footing during the fall” and has been “battle tested” following e-mail server and Clinton Foundation scandals that rocked her candidacy earlier in the year.
The lead story in Saturday's New York Times heaped praise upon the passage of a package of spending increases: “Avoiding Rancor, Congress Passes A Fiscal Package -- $1.8 Trillion Measure – Spending Rise and New Tax Breaks Suggest End of Austerity." This big-spending budget earned Ryan some strange new respect, with reporter David Herszenhorn praising his “deftness in pacifying rebellious conservatives.” A copy editor gave Ryan a pat on the back in a text box: “A successful effort by Republicans to show that they can govern effectively.”
On Friday, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC covered the new scandal brewing inside the Democratic presidential campaign with the data breach involving the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns (plus the Sanders camp suing the Democratic National Committee), but it was the CBS Evening News that sought to downplay the story by not covering the “brewing” “family feud.”
The major broadcast networks on Friday morning and evening showed no interest in reporting to viewers that The New York Times had scrubbed from an article on its website that contained a quote from President Obama telling columnists that he did not watch enough news coverage of the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks to truly grasp the anxiety of the American people.

Appearing as a guest before MSNBC's live coverage of President Barack Obama's Friday press conference, during a discussion of Donald Trump's history of promoting birtherism against the President, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews recalled his accusation that Trump is "playing to racists" and playing to a view that President Obama is "not one of us, he's black."
In a focus group with American Muslims on CBS This Morning, participants told political strategist Frank Luntz that Republicans discussing terrorism was so offensive that their children could not be exposed to GOP debates. One woman warned: “I actually did a call out to Muslim parents across the country to not watch the Republican debate in front of their children because I knew that, that – subjecting our children to hear the hateful stereotyping and the lumping of Muslims with terrorism in front of our children is actually something that psychologically impacts them.”
