By Matthew Balan | December 7, 2015 | 4:45 PM EST

On Sunday, The Daily Beast's Christopher Dickey furiously tried to connect the Second Amendment to the protection of slavery before the Civil War. Dickey touted how Charles Dickens and "several British visitors to American shores...discerned... [that] people who owned slaves...wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile." He also wildly claimed that "the Second Amendment...was essentially written to protect the interests of Southerners" to crush slave revolts.

By Tom Blumer | December 7, 2015 | 2:04 AM EST

At the Associated Press Sunday evening, White House Correspondent Julie Pace's coverage of President Obama's Oval Office address was predictably weak.

One could cite at least a half-dozen problems with Pace's story, but two of them were particularly disingenuous.

By Tom Blumer | December 3, 2015 | 11:44 PM EST

Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer of California today cited how her home state's "important gun safety laws" demonstrate that “Sensible gun laws work, we’ve proven it in California, and we're not going to give up." She apparently means that she and others who won't respect the Second Amendment are "not going to give up" on passing or imposing similar legislation or mandates nationally.

Ms. Boxer apparently failed to notice that San Bernardino, the site of yesterday's massacre of 14 at a San Bernardino County holiday party — with 21 others injured, many critically — is in her home state. A Republican or conservative making a similar observation almost immediateely after an event demonstrating an obviously contradictory point as Boxer did would be an object of relentless establishment press criticism and ridicule. But Boxer is a gun-grabbing leftist, so she'll likely get a near-complete pass. Video follows the jump.

By Mark Finkelstein | December 3, 2015 | 9:36 PM EST

Rudy Giuliani has said that if you can't figure out that what happened in San Bernardino was an act of terror, "you're a moron." But from Chris Hayes, to the FBI, to a representative of the Muslim community, to a Mother Jones reporter, to President Obama himself, one thing emerged from Hayes' MSNBC show tonight: they're all terribly confused and cautious about what possibly could have been the "motive" of the San Bernardino shooters.

Check out the video montage. It would be comical but for the heinous circumstances—and the unwillingness of the country's political, media and religious leaders to call out radical Islamic terrorism when they see it.

By Curtis Houck | December 1, 2015 | 11:53 PM EST

For viewers of the “big three” networks on Monday and Tuesday, coverage of the latest Hillary Clinton e-mail dump was all but non-existent as ABC has censored it from both their morning and evening newscasts while CBS and NBC have only given abbreviated nods in their morning shows. All told, the three news cycles combined for a measly one-minute-and-45-seconds of airtime with one minute and 24 seconds coming from a segment on the Clinton campaign on Tuesday’s Today.

By Curtis Houck | December 1, 2015 | 9:45 PM EST

On Tuesday night, ABC and CBS refused to acknowledge a pair of points in its respective stories concerning news that additional U.S. special forces will be stationed inside Iraq to fight ISIS and will engage in combat roles. Along with not mentioning that the move represented the latest example of backpedaling by President Obama on a pledge to not put U.S. troops on the ground, the two networks skipped the admission by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that ISIS is not “contained” in a rebuke to the President’s recent claims.

By Matthew Balan | December 1, 2015 | 1:18 PM EST

On Monday's AC360, CNN's Randi Kaye played up how the hidden camera videos from the Center for Medical Progress triggered "anger-filled rhetoric" from the Republican presidential candidates in the months before the Colorado shootings. Kaye touted that CMP's David Daleiden "told CNN that...he did get creative with the video — admitting that it was edited — a critical detail that seemed to be lost on all the GOP candidates." This, of course, ignores the hours of footage that does show Planned Parenthood officials "bargaining, negotiating, pricing, and arranging the sales of body parts," according to her network's own reporting.

By Curtis Houck | December 1, 2015 | 1:52 AM EST

On Monday night, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News omitted from their coverage out of Chicago the arrest of an African-American teen for allegedly making threats on social media against white male students at the University of Chicago in retaliation for the shooting death of Laquan McDonald. Somewhat miraculously, ABC’s World News Tonight and correspondent Alex Perez did find time to allude to this arrest in its report.

By Tom Blumer | November 30, 2015 | 7:46 PM EST

From time to time over the past nine years, I have written about "globaloney," a shorthand term for the pseudo-science behind “climate change,” and “globalarmism” to describe the enviro-hysteria over "global warming" and the misguided public-policy prescriptions arising from that hysteria. Since the Paris climate talks have just begun, the press hysteria has reached a fever pitch.

At the Associated Press on Sunday, Seth Borenstein, swept up in that hysteria, wrote up a perfect example of "news" coverage embodying the essence of each term. We should be forever grateful that longtime skeptic Christopher Monckton, at the Watts Up With That blog, picked Borenstein apart, utterly destroying the AP reporter's work, piece by piece.

By Tom Blumer | November 30, 2015 | 12:23 PM EST

In predictably disingenuous fashion, the Associated Press claimed in a November 18 story that "Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has shined new light on the breakdown of a potentially history-altering round of 2008 peace talks." Abbas acknowledged that Israel offered Palestinians 93.5 percent of the West Bank and other significant concessions.

The "light" isn't "new" at all. The wire service had the news almost seven years ago, and, according to former AP reporters, refused to publish it. An AP reporter who "discovered the Israeli peace offer in early 2009, got it confirmed on the record and brought it" to the AP in Jerusalem has substantiated the assertion that it "suppressed a world-changing story for no acceptable reason." It is perhaps the most damming validation yet that prudent people should never trust establishment press reports out of the Middle East — particularly in regards to Israel — because of their "pattern ... of accepting the Palestinian narrative as truth and branding the Israelis as oppressors."

By Matthew Balan | November 30, 2015 | 11:40 AM EST

Eric Bradner touted in a Sunday article on CNN.com that the "Republican presidential contenders condemned" the man who murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, but "largely stood by their fierce criticism of the organization." Bradner played up that "Ben Carson...was the only Republican candidate to call on anti-abortion activists to alter their approach" in the wake of the deadly shooting.

By Tom Blumer | November 29, 2015 | 10:03 PM EST

As yours truly noted in several posts at my home blog on Wednesday and at NewsBusters on Friday and Saturday, the torrent of pre-Thanksgiving "getaway day" economic data was largely disappointing.

That didn't stop the Associated Press's Chris Rugaber from pushing the "All is well" meme late Wednesday afternoon, declaring, contrary to what anyone's eyes could see, that "the fundamentals of the U.S. economy remain solid," that "Consumers appear relatively confident in the economy," and that "Americans are unleashing pent-up demand for big-ticket items such as homes and cars."