On Monday's Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN National Correspondent Jason Carroll delivered a heavily one-sided report highlighting charges by the Council on American-Islamic Relations that GOP presidential candidates -- specifically naming Ben Carson, Chris Christie and Donald Trump -- have been partly to blame for inspiring a recent spate of attacks against Muslims in the U.S.
Crime
By Erik Soderstrom | December 14, 2015 | 4:03 AM EST
After a ridiculous episode in which Peter Griffin shoots Cleveland Brown, Jr, the son of his black friend and next door neighbor, and nearly burns down their home, Brown, Sr. shows Family Guy viewers how to get the media to disappear and stop covering a shooting. At the end of the episode, Peter Griffin takes responsibility for the shooting, telling the angry mob that Cleveland, Jr. didn’t do anything wrong.
By Tom Blumer | December 13, 2015 | 11:24 PM EST
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Thursday that Joshua Williams "was sentenced ... to eight years in prison for starting a fire at a QuikTrip in Berkeley (a St. Louis suburb) after an officer-involved shooting there." The Dispatch apparently didn't think it important to tell readers that the crime spree which occurred after that shooting took place despite the fact that the suspect had pulled a gun on that officer.
I noted in a NewsBusters post a year ago that Williams' arrest on charges of "1st degree arson, 2nd degree burglary and misdemeanor theft," and his confession "to setting fires at the store in a videotaped interview" constituted a major establishment press embarrassment. You see, until then, outfits like the New York Times, MSNBC and others had, in the words of Ryan Lovelace at National Review, "depicted him as a hero of the summer protests" in Ferguson, Missouri.
By Michael McKinney | December 8, 2015 | 10:29 AM EST
On Monday on Twitter, National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke called out the hypocrisy of the New York Times, as he posted a contrast, a Times flip-flop: a 2014 Editorial Board write-up on how the “Terror Watch Lists Run Amok” and a 2015 Editorial Board write-up on why Republicans are showing “Tough Talk and a Cowardly Vote on Terrorism” by refusing to let the terror watch lists run amok.
By Michael McKinney | December 7, 2015 | 1:46 PM EST
On the December 5th airing of Saturday Night Live, fake-news anchor Michael Che called out the Republican Senate for scheduling action to defund Planned Parenthood, despite the recent shooting in San Bernardino. The reality of the Senate activity however is that the bill, known as the Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act, was scheduled for Thursday, December 4, back on November 18.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 7, 2015 | 1:31 AM EST
Appearing as a guest on Saturday's CNN Newsroom with Poppy Harlow, CNN's Fareed Zakaria complained that Americans are willing to "invade two countries, spend hundreds of billions of dollars" to fight terrorism from "some threatening 'other'" who "looks, feels, sounds different," but "we won't ask for gun registration, we won't ask for background checks, we won't ask for simple, common sense stuff" in response to thousands of gun deaths.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 6, 2015 | 11:25 PM EST
Appearing as a panel member on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, PBS host Gwen Ifill made a negative characterization of GOP presidential candidates' reactions to recent terrorist attacks as she declared that, "For Republicans, it's going to be a variation of what we've seen so far, which is, 'How can we be more alarmist than the last guy?'"
She then moved to take jabs at GOPers Chris Christie and Donald Trump as she suggested that the discussion was moving away from, "What can you really do about it?"
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 Brad Wilmouth | December 5, 2015 | 11:49 PM EST
On Friday's CNN Newsroom, CNN host Carol Costello gave gun control activist Andy Parker his latest forum to aim over the top vitriol at opponents of gun control as he asserted that two Republican congressmen were behaving in a "treasonous" manner and are "aiding and abetting terrorists" by blocking new gun laws.
Costello only mildly pushed back against Parker's incendiary statements, which again highlighted her double standard in being more contentious toward guests with a more conservative view, but soft on those with a liberal view on the issue, as demonstrated previously on Thursday's show.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 5, 2015 | 4:30 PM EST
On Friday's New Day, when co-host Alisyn Camerota brought up Hillary Clinton being asked a question about her husband's history of forcible rape and other sexual assaults, CNN's John King whitewashed the accusations against former President Bill Clinton as he only vaguely recounted the behavior, and even ended up lamenting that the question must have been a "sad trip" and "not a pleasant trip down memory lane" for Hillary Clinton.
King downplayed the forcible rape accusation by Juanita Broaddrick merely as "conduct he (Bill Clinton) said never happened," after referring to Paula Jones's charge that included indecent exposure merely as "pressuring her."
After Islamic Terror, NYT Changes Subject, Takes Moral Preening on Guns to Front With Rare Page 1 Editorial
By Clay Waters | December 5, 2015 | 9:27 AM EST After the massacre by radical Islamists who killed 14 and wounded 21 more in San Bernardino, Calif., the New York Times took its tasteless grandstanding on gun control literally to the front, in a rare front-page editorial, "The Gun Epidemic" calling for bans on civilian ownership for certain types of rifles and ammunition. After joining the New York Daily News' anti-prayer brigade, the publicity stunt of an editorial briefly bowed to reality to admit that yes, there have been mass murders in countries with stringent gun control laws. Their rebuttal is a perfect encapsulation of liberal wishful thinking: "But at least those countries are trying."