2012 Presidential

Pictures Tell the Story: NBC Overhyped Anti-Trump Protest As 'Hundreds'
By Tom Blumer | September 16, 2015 | 10:09 AM EDT

The number of protesters present at GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's speech yesterday on board the USS Iowa is in dispute. Those who are claiming that there were "hundreds" of protesters are, from all appearances, greatly exaggerating their numbers.

The Associated Press has been known in the past to overestimate leftist protesters' turnout at such events. AP reporter Steve Peoples was shown to have vastly underestimated the number of supporters at Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan's speech in Oxford three years ago. Despite the clear potential for bias-driven error, Peoples reported that "Dozens of protesters gathered in the parking lot adjacent to the battleship." Several photos taken at the scene support the AP's estimate. NBC News, on the other hand, somehow turned it into a "few hundred."

WashPost Blogger Wants Maddow to be CEO of GOP Debates
By Tim Graham | September 12, 2015 | 10:23 AM EDT

Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple and his website handlers tried this clickbait headline on Friday: “We nominate Rachel Maddow for CEO, Republican presidential debates.”

Why? Wemple is impressed that Maddow is now trashing CNN like she trashed Fox for how they selected the tiers of Republican debaters, specifically CNN now adding in Carly Fiorina (and Chris Christie) for an eleven-candidate debate. The feminist doesn’t like the woman added?

Politifact: Harry Reid's '30 Percent of Women Served' Planned Parenthood Claim Is a 'Pants on Fire' Lie
By Tom Blumer | August 5, 2015 | 10:21 PM EDT

Call the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" people.

Politifact, the alleged fact-checking site which has for years almost invariably insisted on calling obvious truths stated by Republicans and conservatives "Half True" at best and often worse, while taking flat-out lies by leftists and pretending they contain some element of truth, has issued a "Pants on Fire" rating on Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's outrageously false claim last week that Planned Parenthood is "the only health care that a significant number of women get," specifically contending that this is the case for 30 percent of women.

AP Buries Judge's IRS Contempt Threat in Final Graphs of Story on Congressional Hearing
By Tom Blumer | July 31, 2015 | 11:11 PM EDT

On Thursday, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three networks and the two leading Spanish-language networks ignored the latest developments in the now 813 day-old IRS targeting scandal. As usual, only Fox News covered a congressional hearing on, in Fox's words, "the lack of accountability following the IRS targeting of tea party and other groups" as well as a federal judge's threat "to hold (IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and Justice Department attorneys in contempt of court for failing to produce status reports and Lois Lerner e-mails."

Not that this excuses the non-coverage, but if these outfits were relying as subscribers on the Associated Press to make sure that the contempt threat made by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan got the visibility it deserved so they would be aware of it and use it, the wire service's Stephen Ohlemacher let them down — and, I would argue, deliberately so.

Absurd CNN Email: (Annualized) 2.3 Percent Is 'Solid' GDP Growth
By Tom Blumer | July 30, 2015 | 5:45 PM EDT

The bar-lowering in the business press continues.

In the wake of today's disappointing news from the government on U.S. economic growth, an email from CNNMoney.com failed to properly describe reported second-quarter growth, and falsely characterized today's results as "solid":

Jay Sekulow Sets the Record Straight on Obama's Laughable Denial of IRS Targeting
By Tom Blumer | July 22, 2015 | 11:18 PM EDT

Earlier today, Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three morning network news shows on NBC, ABC, and CBS failed to cover President Barack Obama's denial that the Internal Revenue Service ever went after Tea Party and other conservative groups in his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Specifically Obama said that "it turned out no ... the truth of the matter is there was not some big conspiracy there ... the real scandal around the I.R.S. right now is that it has been so poorly funded."

Following the lead of the Associated Press, whose Josh Lederman completely ignored Obama load of IRS-related horse manure, the same crowd which spent years screaming about how "Bush Lied" about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — he didn't lie, period; even the left has to agree, thanks to the New York Times, that it's no longer arguable — has remained notoriously silent about Obama's claim.

'Hardball' Host Chris Matthews Treats 'Theocrat' Santorum to Surprisingly Civil Interview
By Ken Shepherd | July 6, 2015 | 9:00 PM EDT

Back in the 2012 Republican presidential primary race, Chris Matthews slammed former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) as a "theocrat" and a "Cro-Magnon" man. On tonight's Hardball program, however, the MSNBC host was actually cordial and low-key. In fact, at no point did he rudely interrupt Santorum mid-sentence or badger his guest by trying to talk him into a corner with a gotcha question. 

That said, as you can see from the agenda of questions transcribed below, Matthews by no means abandoned his liberal conventional wisdom nor his left-wing bias. What's more, for his part, Santorum gently but firmly pushed back against some of Matthew's talking points about immigration and the liberal media's fascination with the Confederate flag issue

Stephanie 'Space to Destroy' Rawlings-Blake to Head U.S. Mayors' Group, Safe From Concerns About Media Scrutiny
By Tom Blumer | June 22, 2015 | 11:01 PM EDT

The left's "screw up, move up" principle for career advancement appears to be at play again. Of course, the press is playing up the move-up, and ignoring the screw-ups.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, whose statements and strategies inarguably led to more property destruction and civil disorder than would have occurred if someone more responsible had been in charge during that city's April riots, has been named the next national president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. This means that the person who on the first night of rioting in that city publicly admitted that she "gave those who wished to destroy space to do that," and who a couple of nights later, according to a Maryland county sheriff, "gave an order for police to stand down as riots broke out," will now presume to speak for the Democrat-dominated group.

Lefty Blogger: Right-Wing ‘Malevolent Force[s]’ Have Chipped Away at ‘Decency of Everyday Folks’
By Tom Johnson | June 13, 2015 | 12:10 PM EDT

America no longer has a two-party system, argued Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman in a Friday post. That’s because the Republican party is essentially “defunct,” having been sucked into a “vortex of stupid” (i.e., taken over by right-wingers).

“The architects of this vortex,” wrote Longman, “are as varied as Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Regent University jurisprudence, neoconservative foreign policy, the mighty right-wing media wurlitzer, the campaign finance laws, the lack of any accountability for anything ever, the things defending torture does to the human spirit and the brain, the folks who will pay any price to keep science from interfering with their bottom line, what happens when you have to lower your standards to make Ed Meese and Sarah Palin acceptable.”

NYT's Backfiring Rubio Blunder Just the Latest of Times' Fizzled Anti-GOP Hit Jobs
By Clay Waters | June 6, 2015 | 10:01 PM EDT

The New York Times, after taking online hits over its not-a-parody nytimes.com news flash Friday morning about 17 traffic tickets earned by Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette over an 18-year period, doubled down by reprinting the blog post in Saturday's print edition under the headline: "Plenty of Notice for Rubios on the Road." Seemingly every election cycle, the Times embarrasses itself with a partisan pro-Dem hit job that backfires in its face.

AP's Will Weissert: Perry's Reference to God-Given Rights Is 'A Nod to the Tea Party'
By Tom Blumer | June 5, 2015 | 11:50 PM EDT

On Thursday, the Associated Press's Will Weissert demonstrated that the ignorance of our nation's founding documents exhibited by Meredith Shiner at Yahoo Politics in March is not isolated to her.

Readers may recall that Shiner, reacting to Ted Cruz's presidential announcement speech, tweeted: "Bizarre to talk about how rights are God-made and not man-made in your speech announcing a POTUS bid? When Constitution was man-made?" In covering Rick Perry's presidential announcement, Weissert showed similar ignorance.

Bob Schieffer: ‘Whole Political World Was Struck’ by Obama’s Candidacy
By Jeffrey Meyer | May 31, 2015 | 2:26 PM EDT

Retiring Face the Nation moderator Bob Schieffer sat down with FNC's Howard Kurtz on Sunday’s MediaBuzz and did his best to excuse the media’s soft treatment of President Obama in the 2008 campaign. Schieffer conceded the media “were not skeptical enough” before he argued the media have no role in shaping political campaigns: "My feeling is, it is the role of the other -- of the opponents to make the campaign. I think as journalists, basically, what we do is we watch the campaign and we report what the two sides are doing. I think it is the politicians who make the campaign."