In 1992, late-night TV host Arsenio Hall made a bad joke comparing the Pat Buchanan for President campaign to black-and-white Nazi footage. In 2016, the target is Ted Cruz. Alex Nazarayan, a writer for the shell of a publication branded as Newsweek, caused a Twitter frenzy when he compared Cruz to the Nazis, as captured by John Nolte at Breitbart:
"Ted Cruz has a strong ground game in Iowa," Nazaryan tweeted over a picture of Nazis marching with their Swastika flag.
Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's New Day on CNN, Candy Carson -- wife of GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson -- complained about the tendency for the media to "attack people with untruths," asserting that "some of the media is unethical," when she was asked about the scrutiny her husband has received during the campaign.
First week of the new year and typically perceptive analysis from Rush Limbaugh about a new survey on anger that's all the rage in media.
The polling, commissioned by Esquire magazine and NBC News and conducted by SurveyMonkey, resulted in a slew of headlines about whites and Republicans as the angriest of Americans.
After having spent seven and a half minutes on Tuesday trumpeting President Obama’s executive actions on gun control, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley eventually turned his newscast to the 2016 election and invoked Ronald Reagan in lecturing Republicans that “he wouldn't recognize the melee just four weeks before Iowa.”
On Monday, the Institute for Supply Management's Manufacturing Index for December came in showing contraction for the second consecutive month, and with a slightly worse reading (48.2 percent, versus 48.6 percent in November; any reading below 50 percent signifiies contraction). These two results followed readings which just slipped over the expansion bar (50.2 and 50.1 percent, respectively) in September and October.
The average of the past four months' readings is 49.3. In a situation that was not as troubling in late February 2007, David Leonhardt at the New York Times declared that "For Manufacturing, a Recession Has Arrived." But after yesterday's ISM report, as readers here would sadly expect, no Times reporter bothered to elaborate on the latest in an awful string of ISM manufacturing reports, instead posting wire service dispatches from Reuters and the Associated Press which appear not to have made the Old Gray Lady's print edition.
Network news outlets conduct their own polls. They also bury the poll results when they don’t like them. On PBS on January 1, liberal pundit Mark Shields brought some very bad news for the Left. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found 73 percent say they want the next president to take a different approach from President Obama's.
So NBC, both the creator of the poll and a relentless cheerleader of Obama, chose not to air that bombshell. Instead, they buried it deep in an article on the Meet the Press website. “This will become a high hurdle for the Democrats at some stage of the 2016 election," Democratic pollster Fred Yang declared in that piece.
Tuesday’s editions of ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News aired nowhere near the exhaustive coverage of President Obama’s executive actions on gun control that the CBS Evening News did, but they were not short on fawning language for Obama’s “rallying cry...after years of anger and frustration” in what ABC hyped as “[t]he showdown after the President breaks down.”
On behalf of a grateful nation, I thank Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver for saying exactly what so many have been thinking when it comes to millennials and their toughness.
The left often downplays or overlooks differences among Republicans. For instance, plenty of liberals assumed that John McCain chose Sarah Palin mostly in an effort to attract disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters, rather than for the likelier reason that McCain needed to reassure his party’s righty base. Similarly, Penn State's Sophia McClennen lumps Fox News with Donald Trump, whose conservative credentials are more than dubious. The main thing they have in common is her contempt.
“Trump literally embodie[s] everything that Fox News stands for — you know, like making things up and refusing to be questioned, rampant bigotry, misogyny and class warfare,” wrote McClennen in a Tuesday piece for Salon. “Oh, also, favoring cult-like populism over rational democracy; an attitude of bluster, bias and bullying; and a rhetoric of patriotism veiling a politics of elitism.”
24 hours after heralding President Obama revealing specifics on his executive actions concerning gun control, the CBS Evening News offered a full-court press for the President on Tuesday following the announcement that saw the President shed tears that anchor Scott Pelley deemed were “more powerful than words” as “the most powerful man in the world” took “action to stop” gun violence.
Looking for some comic relief after President Obama's teary announcement of new executive orders on gun control, and Chris Matthews' fawning interview of Hillary Clinton? You've come to the right place.
On this evening's O'Reilly Factor, Dem strategist Nomiki Konst claimed that forcing law-abiding Americans to register their guns would stop the "majority" of mass shootings. You're killing me, Nomiki—you should excuse the expression.
Somewhere in the midst of 20 or so airline stewardesses, dentists, math teachers, chicken enthusiasts, and estheticians (whatever the heck that is) fighting it out to see who was going to dress to impress and win the “First Rose” from Bachelor Ben Higgins, ABC’s The Bachelor actually put together a decent show.
Offering his thoughts on Tuesday’s With All Due Respect concerning President Obama announcing his executive actions on gun control, Bloomberg TV/MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin declared that he was “touched by” the President’s tears and was “proud of his ability to show” his emotions on something that’s “a national crisis that needs to be addressed.”
MSNBC knows who listens to NPR. For years, they’ve advertised their programming on the NPR website. But in a new listing of “What Mattered in Media 2015,” NPR TV critic Eric Deggans dissed the Lean Forward Network. It was a big story when Brian Williams “got sent back to the minors."
In his much-hyped exclusive sit-down interview with Hillary Clinton, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews treated the former secretary of state to a softball chat that was heavily dominated by Donald Trump.
The toughest portion of the interview was when Matthews pressed Clinton to explain the difference between your garden-variety Democrat and self-avowed socialists like Bernie Sanders. All in all, however, it was a neatly-wrapped late Christmas present for the Democratic frontrunner.