Fareed Zakaria surprisingly pressed President Obama – a man he endorsed in 2008 – on his CNN program on Sunday. Zakaria raised how critics point out that "the White House takes pains to avoid using the term 'Islamic terrorists,'" and that "others say that you downplay the importance of terrorism." The President actually had to answer substantive questions on foreign policy – something he didn't have to do in his recent interviews with YouTube personalities.
Afghanistan
By Curtis Houck | January 30, 2015 | 12:57 AM EST
On Thursday night, the major broadcast networks declined to cover reports that one of the five Taliban detainees swapped for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in May 2014 has been seeking to rejoin the terrorism ranks by contacting Taliban members back in Afghanistan.
The news, which was broken by CNN Thursday afternoon, came following reports on Wednesday from Fox News and NBC News that the Army could be pressing desertion charges against Bergdahl for leaving his post prior to his capture in 2009. Since those stories arose, the Pentagon has denied those allegations.
By Curtis Houck | January 28, 2015 | 11:07 PM EST
During the daily White House press briefing on Wednesday, Deputy Spokesman Eric Schultz had an exchange with ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl where he declined to label the Taliban as a terrorist organization, instead insisting it's “an armed insurgency.”
In an admission that surely would be covered if it were uttered by a spokesman for a Republican president, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC all failed to cover this story during their Wednesday evening newscasts.
By Curtis Houck | January 21, 2015 | 7:07 AM EST
While NBC News was up to its usual business in praising and defending President Obama both before and after his State of the Union speech, chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel emerged as a rare voice that instead took to the liberal network’s airwaves to condemn the President’s rhetoric on foreign policy as both unrealistic and, in many cases, simply not true.
After being asked by anchor Brian Williams for his thoughts, Engel began dissecting the President’s perceived world outlook: “Well, it sounded like the President was outlining a world that he wishes we were all living in but which is very different than the world that you just described with terror raids taking place across Europe, ISIS very much on the move.”
By Tom Blumer | January 11, 2015 | 10:02 AM EST
The ability of tiny numbers of far-left fringe group demonstrators to get undue press attention virtually any time they want continues to be intensely annoying.
In mid-2007, Barack Obama made closing the prison at Guantanmo Bay a core promise of his 2008 campaign. That was 7-1/2 years ago. Obama has been in office six years. Gitmo is still open. So naturally, the aggrieved professional protesters at Code Pink organized a demonstration against Gitmo remaining active on yesterday's 13th anniversary of the prison's opening — at former Vice President Dick Cheney's house. They got far more ink and bandwidth than they deserved from the press, including Reuters — i.e., far more than nothing.
By Matthew Balan | January 9, 2015 | 2:10 PM EST
Nic Robertson refreshingly pointed out on Thursday's CNN Tonight that the recent terrorist attack in Paris was part of a wider "world war all in the name of Islam." While many leftists pointed the finger at the American presence in the Middle East or the Abu Ghraib controversy, Robertson put the shootings in the wider context of recent Islamist massacres across the globe.
By Tom Blumer | January 3, 2015 | 10:48 AM EST
Christopher Hedges has been gone from the New York Times for almost ten years. He has since admitted to being a socialist, been exposed as a serial plagiarist in work he has done since leaving the Times in 2005, and authored "the first issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal, a newspaper associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park."
Hedges is the subject of this post because, even aside from the plagiarism, he has called into permanent question the quality, accuracy and objectivity of his entire 15-year body of work as a foreign correspondent for the Times. At an obscure web site called Truthdig on December 15, Hedges called ISIS "the new Israel".
By Tom Blumer | December 30, 2014 | 4:03 PM EST
At the Associated Press on Christmas Day, reporter Josh Lederman carried out what might as well be his official administration stenographer duties with special aplomb.
Three paragraphs will illustrate how Lederman glossed over realities relating to the 13-year war in Afghanistan and went all gooey over Barack and Michelle Obama's vacation:
Lefty Blogger: No Surprise That GOP’s Now the ‘Torture Party,’ Since Right-Wingers Are ‘Punitive’ and ‘Tribalistic’
By Tom Johnson | December 17, 2014 | 11:57 AM EST “What the average person is seeing right now,” declares the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman, “is an entire party mobilizing to defend the use of torture, whether they will call it by that name or not. And that looks to be having an effect on public opinion.”
By Matthew Balan | December 16, 2014 | 4:48 PM EST
Former Islamist Maajid Nawas warned Westerners on Monday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN about the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Sydney, Australia. Nawas underlined that it was a "mistake" to label perpetrator Man Haron Monis a "lone wolf," as it "doesn't necessary describe the phenomenon correctly....what we're really dealing with here is fundamental inspiration. People are inspired by the ideas; the leaders; the symbols; and the narratives – the iconography behind this ideology."
By Tom Blumer | December 16, 2014 | 1:51 PM EST
Today, the world has learned that terrorists with the Taliban, the group of Islamic fundamentalist jihadists who have rained terror on Afghanistan and Pakistan for nearly two decades, "attacked a school in Peshawar, killing 141 people, 132 of them children." The death toll will almost certainly rise as some of the 114 children the BBC has reported are injured fail to survive.
But don't ask Muslims to condemn this cowardly attack on innocents. If you do, you'll upset Max Fisher at Vox, who just yesterday (HT Twitchy), in exquisite timing, insisted that it's "bigoted and Islamophobic" to expect anything of the sort:
By Tom Blumer | December 10, 2014 | 6:42 PM EST
Nearly six years into Barack Obama's presidency, it's still George W. Bush's fault.
Early Wednesday morning, Julie Pace at the Associated Press proved yet again why it is more than appropriate to characterize the wire service where she works as the Administration's Press. The headline at Pace's story tells us that poor President Barack Obama still has to confront the "Bush legacy," and is still stuck with his wars and "big chunks of Bush's national security apparatus." Cry me a river, Julie. One of Pace's more important omissions is the fact that the enhanced interrogations program Senate Democrats are decrying was a creation of none other than Bill Clinton.