CBS This Morning stood out as the sole Big Three network morning newscast on Tuesday to cover a University of Missouri academic shouting down a reporter, briefly physically attacking him, and then calling people over to "get this reporter out of here...I need some muscle over here." Norah O'Donnell spotlighted Melissa Click, "an assistant professor of mass media," who along with "students, were telling the media...to back off." ABC's Good Morning America and NBC's Today didn't mention Click.
Bias by Omission
By Seton Motley | November 9, 2015 | 1:04 PM EST
The political definition of Cronyism is: government policy that favors one or more specific beneficiaries - at the expense of everyone else. To wit: $80 billion of the 2009 “Stimulus” was wasted on “green energy” companies - 80% of whom were Barack Obama donors. Amongst the parade of horribles contained therein: the government took money from energy companies - to fund competitors to their energy companies.
Sadly, a $3.5-trillion-a-year federal government budget is filled to the rafters with nigh-endless Cronyism. There’s so much to undo - one must triage and prioritize. And while we work to reduce and eliminate, we most certainly should not create a whole new Cronyism - that will dwarf all the others combined.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) late last week gave us a quintessential example of aiming at the tiny - while they have for years championed the huge. Behold:
By Curtis Houck | November 6, 2015 | 8:40 PM EST
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.
By Bill Donohue | November 5, 2015 | 11:54 AM EST
The media are pushing Spotlight, the movie that opens on Friday about the Boston Globe team that exposed priestly sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese prior to 2002. But there is little interest in this issue when non-Catholics are implicated in such crimes. As recent cases show, many courts around the nation evince disparate treatment as well.
By Curtis Houck | November 5, 2015 | 1:17 AM EST
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.”
By Curtis Houck | November 4, 2015 | 8:55 PM EST
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.
By Tom Blumer | November 3, 2015 | 5:37 PM EST
As is so often the case with such stories, one can tell how favorable or disappointing a government report on the economy was by whether a story about it is still present at the Associated Press's "Top Business News" page several hours after its release.
Today's news from the Census Bureau on September's factory orders and shipments, released at 10 a.m., was extremely disappointing. Thus, it is utterly unsurprising that Martin Crutsinger's AP story covering that report was not at the "Top Business News" page a mere six hours after its release (it likely came off even earlier, as I didn't check the page until just after 4 p.m.). The AP economics writer's coverage, though bit of an improvement over prior months' efforts, still left important gaping holes.
By Tom Blumer | November 2, 2015 | 10:49 PM EST
On June 30, the Washington Post announced that it would be "compiling a database of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty in 2015." The Post has been "tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, and whether the person was armed."
The paper's work thus far has been a revealing exercise which should be getting far more attention than it is. I believe would be getting the needed attention if the revelations were different. You see, the analysis of fatal shootings thus far shows that, in layman's terms, the overwhelming majority of them were wholly justified (HT to an Investor's Business Daily editorial).
By Tom Blumer | October 31, 2015 | 11:58 PM EDT
A Friday evening story at the New York Times covered the Obama administration's decision to "try to block the release of a handful of emails between President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton."
In it, reporters Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt demonstrated that President Obama undoubtedly did not tell the truth in his interview with CBS News's Steve Kroft in a 60 Minutes episode which aired on October 11.
By Tom Blumer | October 31, 2015 | 10:47 PM EDT
On Thursday, the government reported that the nation's economy turned in yet another quarter of poor economic performance, estimating that its gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 1.5 percent in the third quarter.
The business press almost universally downplayed the news, and told readers that the fourth quarter will be better. No one talked about how much the tepid growth of the past six-plus years since the recession officially ended has been sacrificed in the name of misguided and dangerous Keynesian stimulus. As is so often the case, an editorial at Investor's Business Daily did that, performing a job the press has consistently refused to do.
By Tom Blumer | October 31, 2015 | 9:17 PM EDT
Many of the state cooperative health insurers, or "co-ops," set up under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, have gotten into serious financial trouble quite quickly. Almost half have cracked up completely. Specifically, as noted at Forbes.com on Thursday morning, "[O]f the 24 Obamacare co-ops funded with federal tax dollars, one (Vermont’s) never got approval to sell coverage, a second (CoOportunity) has already been wound down, and nine more will terminate at the end of this year."
Perhaps the most expensive such blowup to date has occurred in New York. An unbylined Associated Press blurb about how New York's co-op will be forced to close its doors in just a month, seen after the jump, is a perfect example demonstrating why the general public may never learn about Obamacare co-ops' track record of miserable failure:
By Tom Blumer | October 30, 2015 | 11:22 PM EDT
Here's what should be an easy question: With data which has already been seasonally adjusted, what's more important — a) the fact that an index is a) up by 3 percent in the past year or b) the fact that it has fallen 5 percent in the past four months?
The correct answer is obviously b) — unless you're a writer for the Associated Press whose mission is to convince readers that the housing market, despite clear evidence to the contrary, is just fine. Therefore, the AP's Josh Boak chose a):