By Jack Coleman | December 13, 2015 | 8:08 PM EST

Look no further than the front page of the New York Daily News for the desperate state of newspapers today. Whereas the motto of broadsheet rival New York Times is "All The News That's Fit to Print," the motto of the Daily News has become "Hell, Whatever Sells Papers." 

It's gotten to the point that CNN media critic Brian Stelter on today's Reliable Sources asked Daily News editor-in-chief Jim Rich, "Is there such a thing as too far for the Daily News?"


 

By Curtis Houck | December 13, 2015 | 5:54 PM EST

On Sunday, ABC’s Good Morning America served as the latest example of shameless corporate synergy by touting in its lead 2016 report how actor Tony Goldwyn from the network’s lead drama Scandal spent Saturday giving Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton “a big boost” by campaigning for her Iowa.

By Tom Blumer | December 12, 2015 | 10:47 AM EST

The callousness towards human life at Planned Parenthood is such that it believes that the remains of preborn babies killed during abortions are just like any other "medical waste," and that sending them to landfills — or, perhaps even incinerators — is therefore "humane."

That's what one must conclude from reading an Associated Press report Friday evening which strived mightily to play defense for the beleaguered group. The wire service's headline only described State Attorney General Mike DeWine as an "official." The opening sentence from Andrew Welsh-Huggins only conceded that DeWine "criticized" the practices at Ohio's Planned Parenthood's locations, when his press release clearly contends that it has been violating state regulations (bolds are mine):

By Tom Blumer | December 11, 2015 | 5:37 PM EST

For a change, Martin Crutsinger's coverage at the Associated Press of the federal government's November Monthly Treasury Statement wasn't completely full of rose-colored baloney.

Crutsinger managed to note how auto-pilot entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are bankrupting the country (not in those words, of course). That said, he somehow thought that highlighting a rare and small increase in year-over-year defense spending was worthwhile, while ignoring several other larger percentage increases in other areas. Most importantly, he failed to note that the national debt has increased by far more than Uncle Sam's reported deficits. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

By Tom Blumer | December 9, 2015 | 11:58 AM EST

In an announcement which deservedly carries far less weight than it has in the past, Time Magazine (1997 circulation, 4.2 million; current circuation, 3.3 million) has named German chancellor Angela Merkel its 2015 Person of the Year.

The stated reason for her selection: "Not once or twice but three times this year there has been reason to wonder whether Europe could continue to exist, not culturally or geographically but as a historic experiment in ambitious statecraft." Time believes that Merkel saved the day each time. It seems highly unlikely that she would have risen to the top of the pack without the third item the magazine's Nancy Gibbs cited, namely Merkel's open-borders acceptance of migrants erroneously described as "refugees" dozens of times in its various supporting articles.

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 6, 2015 | 6:07 PM EST

As shown early this morning, the press's redefinition of the term "mass shooting" has turned into a nearly omnipresent meme virtually overnight in the wake of Wednesday's Islamic terrorist massacre in San Bernardino, California. Under the new, demonstrably indefensible definition which not only breaks with past practice but also pretends it never existed, there have been 355 "mass shootings" so far this year in the U.S. As consistently defined for many previous years, the actual number is 4.

Just two months ago, the incurably left-biased "fact checker" site Politifact, in evaluating a "mass shooting" total of 294 claimed by Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, asserted that she "used an overly broad definition of what most people would consider a mass shooting."

By Tom Blumer | December 6, 2015 | 1:06 AM EST

At the Washington Post's Wonkblog on Wednesday, Christopher Ingraham claimed that the San Bernardino massacre, which we now know was an act of Islamic terrorism, was the "355th" mass shooting "this year." A Google search on "355th mass shooting this year" (not in quotes) indicates that the stat has become a media meme, repeated at places like the Today Show, PBS, NPR, NBCnews.com, and too many others to mention.

In a New York Times op-ed on Thursday — one which predictably appears not to have made the paper's print edition — Mark Follman, national affairs editor at Mother Jones, of all places, wrote that Ingraham and others in the media, including the Times itself are wrong — by a factor of 89. As consistently defined until very recently, there have been four mass shootings in the U.S. year, and 73 since 1982.

By Curtis Houck | December 2, 2015 | 8:12 PM EST

Since he’s been off of network TV for over a decade, disgraced former CBS News anchor Dan Rather took to Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday to call for the pass of gun control legislation to combat the claim that the U.S. is being “terrorized daily by gun violence” akin to how the U.S. “spend[s] trillions to defend ourselves” from “foreign terrorists.”

By Curtis Houck | November 30, 2015 | 9:56 PM EST

Seeking to boost President Barack Obama and backers of the Paris climate change summit, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted on Monday night over 15 minutes of airtime across six segments touting the summit, a Discovery Channel documentary on climate change, a hashtag campaign, and climate scientists in the Arctic Circle -- to name a few examples. CBS anchor Scott Pelley: "President Obama warned that the world is fast approaching the hour when it will be too late to save the planet from climate change."

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 Curtis Houck | November 29, 2015 | 6:29 PM EST

Speaking as part of a panel about presidential books during Sunday’s Face the Nation, author Doris Kearns Goodwin couldn’t help but devote a few moments of her time to heaping praise on the “ambitious” man who she first worked for in politics in then-President Lyndon B. Johnson from the 1960's.