Filling in for Scott Pelley on Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, Charlie Rose provided a wrap-up of Tuesday’s Fox Business Networks Republican presidential debate and seemed exasperated when he wondered to Face the Nation anchor John Dickerson “why” did the GOP candidates level “a lot of attacks on Hillary Clinton.”
Without a hint of irony, the most superficial network news show in ABC’s Nightline mocked Tuesday’s Fox Business Network Republican debate on their early Wednesday morning installment as nothing more than a “reality show” along the lines of The Bachelor and Survivor “where the stakes couldn’t be higher.”
Following his lambasting of the liberal media and the CNBC moderators during the last Republican debate on October 28, Republican Senator Ted Cruz took his latest swipe at the “mainstream media” in Tuesday’s Fox Business Network event for their coverage of illegal immigration and maligning those opposing amnesty. Cruz started his takedown by first pointing out that “when the mainstream media covers immigration, it doesn't often see it as an economic issue.”
Just prior to Tuesday’s main Republican presidential debate on the Fox Business Network, Kelly File host Meygn Kelly panned the moderators from October 28's CNBC debate and predicted that she’s “hoping that we are going to hear what we thought we are going to hear in the last debate, which is, you know, a robust, substantive exchange over one of the most important topics to the voters which is the economy.”
Offering analysis of the first Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate on the 8:00 p.m. Eastern edition of CNN’s AC360, CNN political commentator and Jeb Bush supporter Ana Navarro lamented that Senator Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and his “passionate voice” was excluded from the undercard event.
Speaking with host Chris Hayes on the Monday edition of MSNBC’s All In, Democratic Congressman and 2016 Senate candidate Alan Grayson (Fl.) made a crude joke in comparing Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz to Miley Cyrus as he’s “twerking every right-winger in sight.”
Discussing on Monday’s Anderson Cooper 360 the resignation of the president at the University of Missouri, CNN sports anchor Rachel Nichols compared the Missouri football team’s promise that it wouldn’t practice until the school’s president resigned over an alleged string of racial incidents at the school to the late Jackie Robinson taking a stand for integration in the 1950s.
On Friday night, two of the three major broadcast networks saw no interest in telling their viewers that the Supreme Court of the United States had decided to accept another major case on the future of ObamaCare as the high court will hear arguments pertaining to the law’s contraception mandate. Surprisingly, NBC Nightly News not only covered it, but offered a full, one-minute-and-21-second report from Justice correspondent Pete Williams.
As this writer documented in this space earlier on Friday, the interview of the day took place over on CNN during Friday’s New Day with tempers flaring between co-host Alisyn Camerota and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson. In addition to Carson hitting back at the liberal Camerota over her previous history at Fox News, there were other examples of sparks flying as Camerota hounded him over his biography, whether the media actually vetted President Barack Obama when he ran for the Oval Office, and what the proper role of journalism should be.
In the middle of an extremely tense and combative interview on the Friday edition of CNN’s New Day, 2016 Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson shot back at co-host Alisyn Camerota for her questioning based off of a video from the far-left site Mother Jones and remarked to her that he couldn’t believe “you used to work on Fox and you’ve turned into this” liberal anchor.
Thursday’s CBS Evening News led with the severe weather threatening those in the Midwest, but in addition to looking at the storm track and damage thus far, the storms were hyped as a consequence of global warming. Anchor Scott Pelley ruled in an opening tease that “[t]ornadoes in Texas” struck “on the same day that a new study blames climate change for a surge in severe storms and wildfires.”
Wrapping up his interview with 2016 Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz on Thursday’s edition of The Lead on CNN, host Jake Tapper asked Cruz about the upcoming National Religious Liberties Conference he’s attending in Iowa this weekend and if Cruz is “endorsing conservative intolerance” since it's organized by an activist pastor named Kevin Swanson.
The day after voters in Houston, Texas defeated a measure dubbed by many to be “the bathroom bill” aimed at “protecting” gay and transgender people from discrimination, Wednesday’s CBS Evening News lit into those who overwhelmingly opposed the measure by touting fears of Houston businesses being boycotted and even the 2017 Super Bowl being moved out of the city due to this measure’s failure to pass.
After heavily promoting on Tuesday the Ohio ballot initiative to legalize marijuana before the polls closed, NBC Nightly News offered an about-face of sorts on Wednesday and refused to acknowledge the fact that measure was soundly defeated. Hailing it as “high stakes” in the Buckeye State, anchor Lester Holt hyped in a tease on Tuesday’s newscast: “Legalized pot on the ballot tonight in the biggest swing state of all. Is it a tipping point for the nation? A big money fight with a famous singer caught in the middle.”
With his continued rise in the 2016 Republican presidential polls, the liberal media has circled back to attacking Marco Rubio over his personal finances with the latest attack pieces coming on Wednesday’s editions of the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News as both minimized the fact that Rubio was exonerated by a Florida ethics commission back in 2012.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Clinton Foundation group Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) admitted that it had made “minor errors” in its tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in both 2012 and 2013 and thus added another layer to the Clinton Foundation scandal. When it came to major broadcast networks covering this on Wednesday night, however, ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News both ignored the new revelation.
Tuesday’s CBS Evening News provided viewers with a rare look at an issue that’s often been ignored by the media in its coverage of ISIS gaining ground in the Middle East: Christians facing persecution. Fill-in anchor Charlie Rose set the scene by stating the obvious that “Iraq today is a fractured nation” with “[m]uch of the north” now “controlled by ISIS.” Rose then tossed to foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata to report on “a town where people fear their way of life is disappearing.”
In what was already a big night for conservatives on Tuesday with election wins in Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, and Virginia to name a few, voters in Houston, Texas overwhelmingly rejected a pro-transgender measure dubbed “the bathroom ordinance.” Not surprisingly, that did not sit well with The New York Times as it lamented the loss for the “equal rights ordinance.”
As part of their 2016 coverage on Tuesday night, both ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News took shots at Dr. Ben Carson for his “hardline conservative” stances on issues like abortion when other “issues” like “political experience” will be one that “he will have to address” as the campaign moves along.
One day after he pitched a softball to President Obama by asking him if criminal justice reform was “your defining moment” as the country’s first African-American President, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt returned with part two on Tuesday’s newscast by touting Obama’s “pointed jabs” and “candid assessment” of the 2016 Republican field.

