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.
Bias by Omission
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):
Moderators at CNBC, Which 'Graded' Debaters' Speech Patterns, Scored At or Below Every GOP Candidate
By Tom Blumer | October 30, 2015 | 9:34 PM EDT People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. And people who ridicule the level of others' speech patterns should check theirs first.
CNBC didn't do that. Instead, on Thursday, as I noted in a previous NewsBusters post, it childishly rushed out a grade-level evaluation of the Republican presidential candidates' speech patterns during the first three debates, including the Wednesday train wreck it rudely hosted, and created a graphic with the title, "Are you smarter than a GOP candidate?" Payback is sweet (bolds are mine):
By Curtis Houck | October 30, 2015 | 8:17 PM EDT
On Friday evening, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC all ignored the latest dump of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from the State Department that included the retroactive classification of 268 e-mails that now makes for one out of every 16 e-mails that have been “released” to the public since her private e-mail server scandal was unearthed in March.
By Tom Blumer | October 30, 2015 | 2:12 PM EDT
The government's Personal Income and Outlays report for September bore more evidence of a slowing economy. Consumer spending rose by only 0.1 percent, trailing expectations of 0.2 percent. That's troubling news, given that the optimists believe that strong consumer spending will supposedly drive stronger fourth-quarter economic growth.
Lucia Mutikani's coverage at Reuters made a common error in explaining the importance of consumer spending, made a significant technical error in describing the report's contents, and ignored a very disturbing item present in the government report's detail (related items are tagged [1], [2] and [3], respectively, in the excerpt following the jump; bolds are mine):