Events

AP's Linderman Portrays Baltimore Mayor Not Running For Reelection as a Victim
By Tom Blumer | September 13, 2015 | 11:01 PM EDT

Paraphrasing the title of a song Linda Ronstadt made famous, the tune the Associated Press's Juliet Linderman sang Saturday morning in the wake of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's decision to not to seek reelection was: "Poor, Poor, Pitiful She."

That's right. Rawlings-Blake is a victim who is being "dogged by critics who questioned whether she was fit to lead." Linderman made that portrayal possible by ignoring, as the press has for months, two important things enough Baltimore residents to matter surely remember. The first is that the Mayor admitted to making a conscious decision to allow rioting to occur on the night of Saturday, April 25. The second, publicly exposed by a sheriff from another Maryland county who came to Baltimore hoping to help preserve order, is that she ordered police to stand down, giving rioters free rein to pillage and plunder on Monday, April 27.

NY Times 9/11/2015 Front Page: No Mention of 2001 Terrorist Attacks; Obama’s Iran Deal ‘Victory’ Leads
By Tom Blumer | September 11, 2015 | 9:00 PM EDT

"Never forget"? Sometimes one wonders if they even remember — or want to.

Both the New York and National versions of the New York Times print edition contain no mention of the anniversary of the terrorist attacks 14 years ago in New York and Washington which brought down the World Trade Center buildings, seriously damaged the Pentagon, and killed almost 3,000 people in four different locations: the two WTC buildings, the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

NY Times Pretends Baltimore Had Only One Night of 'Looting and Arson'
By Tom Blumer | September 10, 2015 | 1:16 AM EDT

The folks at the New York Times must believe not only that their reporters are entitled to inject their opinions into hard-news stories, but that they can also inject their own "facts." Oh, and they can change those facts at will over time to fit the circumstances.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg's Wednesday story about the city's $6.4 million settlement with the family of Freddie Gray appearing in Thursday's print edition is a perfect case in point. Stolberg recast events following Gray's death to claim that there was only one night of rioting, when there were clearly two — even though contemporaneous coverage at the Times itself identified two separate nights of riots.

Press Fawns Over Minn. 'Black Lives Matter' Rally, Ignores 20K 'All Lives Matter' March
By Tom Blumer | August 31, 2015 | 3:00 PM EDT

On Saturday, "more than 20,000" people — perhaps as many as 25,000 to 30,000, according to some police — marched through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama at a Glenn Beck-led "Restoring Unity" rally chanting "All Lives Matter." The event has been described as possibly "the largest march in Birmingham since the civil rights marches of 1963."

Searches at Google News and at the Associated Press's main national and "Big Story" sites indicate that no establishment press outlet gave the rally national coverage. The AP only managed to push out terse three-paragraph and seven-paragraph local stories. Meanwhile, a Reuters story on the less than peaceful march by the "Black Lives Matter" crowd attended by an estimated 325 (compared to an expected 900) in Minneapolis was carried at Yahoo News and the New York Times (at least).

Word Non-Association at AP: 'Hillary' and 'Crime'
By Tom Blumer | August 15, 2015 | 10:49 AM EDT

All you need to know about the Associated Press's interest in accurately reporting current developments in the investigations into 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email server is this: A search at its national site on "Hillary crime" (not in quotes) returns nothing.

Ken Thomas's coverage of the former Secretary of State's "forceful defense" last night in "a speech before influential Iowa Democrats" is all too typical: Mrs. Clinton gets to say that all of this is "partisan games" involving "playing politics." All I see is substance-free whining. "My opponents don't like me" is not a defense. Several paragraphs from Ken's calamity follow the jump:

Jon Stewart's Lowest Moment: Hiroshima Makes Truman a War Criminal
By Tom Blumer | August 6, 2015 | 1:16 AM EDT

How absolutely serendipitous it is that alleged comedian and actual White House propagandist Jon Stewart’s last broadcast of The Daily Show is today, August 6, the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan.

You see, Stewart, whose influence is especially nefarious when he is revising and distorting history for his relatively young audience, committed his most outrageous such act when, in a 2009 interview with Cliff May, he agreed that U.S. President Harry S. Truman should be considered a "war criminal" for approving that horrific but necessary bombing mission.

Blogger Charles Pierce: Motivation For Chattanooga Shootings ‘Doesn't Matter…Beside the Point’
By Tom Johnson | July 17, 2015 | 1:34 PM EDT

Whether or not Chattanooga shooter Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was a jihadist, opined Esquire’s Pierce in a Friday blog post, the key to Thursday’s murders is that he had a quintessentially American trait: he was gun-crazy.

“He had a grudge. The basis of that grudge, whether it was rooted in a bloody-minded version of religion or an anger at the country's policies across the seas, is beside the point,” wrote Pierce. “Abdulazeez was angry at someone or something. He had a problem he could not solve and, being an American, he reached for that most American of solutions. He reached for a gun.”

Baltimore Sun Reporter, in Covering City's Request for Riot 'Disaster' Assistance, 'Forgets' That Mayor Condoned Looting, Held Back Police
By Tom Blumer | May 31, 2015 | 8:06 PM EDT

In case you missed it, the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have requested disaster relief assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to recover costs incurred during that city's April riots. You read that right.

Yvonne Wenger at the Baltimore Sun predictably buried the lede in her May 26 story's third paragraph, giving uninitiated readers the impression that applying for FEMA assistance after a riot is something that is routinely done. (Perhaps, given the quality of today's journalists, she really believes that herself.) More critically, she forgot to remind readers that the city arguably deserves no help at all from any outside source, because the vast majority of the rioting's damage would have been prevented if Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had done her job.

Inadvertent Truth? Short-Lived AP Headline: 'Obama Pledges Help to Riot'
By Tom Blumer | April 27, 2015 | 8:17 PM EDT

The headline is already gone from the Associated Press's national site, but it's still present elsewhere.

In the context of events in Ferguson and elsewhere since August of last year, one could argue that it contains more truth than the wire service and the headline's accidental creators will ever admit.

Harris-Perry Guest: Don't Execute Tsarnaev—Could Become Spox for Reconciling with Islam
By Mark Finkelstein | April 25, 2015 | 1:18 PM EDT

Of all the rotten reasons not to execute Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, we'll give the booby prize to the one offered by Paul Raushenbush, a HuffPo religion editor and ordained American Baptist minister. On today's Melissa Harris-Perry show, Raushenbush imagined that in twenty years, Tsarnaev might become "a spokesperson for reconciling Islam with America. We don't know what this life is going to lead to." Anything's possible, but surely Tsarnaev's sentence should not be based on this sort of idle speculation.  

What made Raushenbush's argument particularly galling was his statement that "the idea of ending any life for any reason is for me just not something I want done in my name."  I Googled, and sure enough Raushenbush supports abortion rights. You don't want "any life" ended in your name?  You don't know what a life that is ended might lead to, Rev. Raushenbush?

Liberal Professor: Low GOP Turnout in Selma ‘Was Horrid Optics Bordering On the Politically Incompetent’
By Tom Johnson | March 9, 2015 | 1:15 PM EDT

For the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack, this past weekend’s commemoration yielded a “fairly astonishing” juxtaposition of President Obama’s “largeness of spirit” and Republican apathy, or worse. In a Washington Monthly blog post, Pollack argued that the low GOP turnout for “an event sacred to African-Americans sent an unavoidable message: These are not our people...Such discomfort with a widening circle of ‘others’ still works for many in the congressional GOP, especially in non-presidential years. On a national level, it is increasingly out of step with a changing society.”

Lefty Blogger: CPAC Like 'Untethered Zoo Animals' That Ruin GOP Candidates
By Tom Johnson | March 2, 2015 | 11:12 AM EST

The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman argues that Republican base voters routinely wind up hurting the party’s center-right presidential nominee because he feels he has to throw them one or more bones: “Poppy [George H. W. Bush] didn’t really need to promise no new taxes, but it was a broken promise that cost him dearly. [John] McCain overcompensated for his weakness with the base by giving us Sarah Palin. And, in his contorted efforts to speak to a base that had become completely unmoored from terrestrial reality, [Mitt] Romney set the land-speed record for lying by a human being.”