Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough discussed Bernie Sanders and how strange it is the crowds he draws, and young people in particular. Brzezinski would highlight the numbers Sanders' campaign has brought in compared to President Obama. Brzezinski and Scarborough would address the rise of Sanders and the strong young voter base he has. The discussion would lack at the desire for non-mainstream ideas and how outsider candidates like Trump and Sanders have articulated themselves in the primaries.
Higher Education
By Matthew Balan | October 1, 2015 | 4:51 PM EDT
On Thursday, Brian Williams predictably raised the gun control issue as he anchored MSNBC's breaking news coverage of a mass shooting in Oregon. Williams asked Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, "Can I ask you about your gun laws – concealed carry, that kind of thing?" The Democrat pushed back in explaining the state laws: "It's a complicated area. But that's my understanding – not that it's particularly relevant right at the moment."
By Matt Philbin | September 8, 2015 | 11:01 AM EDT
Example #547,282 why a modern liberal arts BA has all the inherent honor and usefulness of a fake phone number scrawled on a cocktail napkin: Michael Todd Landis writing on George Mason University’s History News Network proscribing language we are allowed to use when talking about the Civil War.
Landis, Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University, doesn’t really have much to say, and certainly nothing new. Mostly, his brief post reads like the work of an average faculty lounge lizard making sure his left-wing credentials are in order for the new school year.
By Tom Blumer | August 17, 2015 | 6:32 PM EDT
Several commenters at my econ-related posts during the past several months here at NewsBusters and my home blog have noted how Washington's mix of high deficits, over-regulation, and quantitative easing never seem to get any kind of blame for the economy in establishment press coverage.
One could hardly find a better example of that deliberate avoidance than Josh Boak's writeup today at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, on how "Home ownership ... is increasingly on hold for younger Americans." While he identified several symptoms which could easily be traced to Obama administration and Federal Reserve policies, Boak never tagged anyone who might be responsible, instead acting as if all these adverse conditions just sort of happened and ... oh well, here we are.
By Kyle Drennen | August 13, 2015 | 2:23 PM EDT
On her MSNBC show on Wednesday, host Andrea Mitchell brought on Heather McGhee, president of the left-wing group Demos, to “sort all this out” when came to the debate over student loan debt in the 2016 race: “...student debt 101. The presidential candidates are put to the test on what to do about the rising cost of college.”
UCLA Professor: Republican Party Likely to Remain ‘Fundamentally Unhinged’ Until Hillary’s Re-Elected
By Tom Johnson | June 29, 2015 | 9:10 PM EDT It’s likely that most NewsBusters readers are familiar with the grimly humorous saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” Last Friday, UCLA professor of public policy Mark Kleiman opined in so many words that the Republican party’s beatings in presidential elections will continue until its mental health improves.
In a Friday Washington Monthly post, Kleiman mocked conservatives for their allegedly fanciful belief that their “frivolous” arguments in King v. Burwell would carry the day and predicted that Republicans probably have a few more years of delusion and defeat ahead of them: “It’s possible that a convincing [Hillary] Clinton win and a Democratic recapture of the Senate in 2016 will shock the GOP back to reality. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Feeding right-wing fury is a profitable venture financially, and it works well enough electorally in off-years to keep the hustle going. My guess is that it will take a Clinton re-election landslide in 2020 to do the job.”
Dear NY Times: Who Has Been in Charge All This Time? After 8 Years of 'Financial Downturn,' Far More Americans Delay Major Life Events
By Tom Blumer | June 26, 2015 | 8:40 PM EDT There may no better illustration of how much harm the economy has inflicted on the American people during the Obama era than a March 2015 Harris survey commissioned by American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. The AICPA's Thursday press release reported that "a majority of American adults (51 percent) have delayed at least one important life decision in the last year due to financial reasons ... an increase of 20 percentage points from a similar survey conducted in 2007."
Covering the survey's results, Ann Carrns at the New York Times, in an item carried at CNBC (also found at the Times's web site), waited seven paragraphs to note a particularly damning statistic about a situation Obamacare advocates like to claim has already been solved.
By Sarah Stites | June 22, 2015 | 4:20 PM EDT
A comedian and a college student walk into a bar … but what follows had to be censored, since it wasn’t politically correct.
By Brad Wilmouth | June 17, 2015 | 4:22 PM EDT
On Tuesday and Wednesday, CNN's New Day aired pre-recorded segments in which co-anchor Chris Cuomo spoke with six New Hampshire voters about the presidential race.
Although the group was supposedly balanced by including two Republicans, two Democrats, and two independents, four of the six participants -- including one of the Republicans -- seemed more aligned with Democrats in their interests and thinking.
One of the Republicans actually seemed to talk up socialist Bernie Sanders's plan for the government to offer free college education while the other Republican voiced support for same-sex marriage.
Lefty Blogger Josh Marshall: Scott Walker Frightened By ‘Things Like Empirical Thinking and New Ideas’
By Tom Johnson | June 14, 2015 | 12:33 PM EDT The Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature may soon weaken protections for tenured professors in the state’s university system. Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall believes that Gov. Scott Walker’s enthusiastic support for tenure reform is “driven in part by right-wing ideology and in part by the palpable animus Walker himself holds to people who managed to get an education.”
Marshall asserted that Walker sees tenure reform as an attack on the philosophical strain of liberalism that undergirds “empirical thinking and new ideas,” especially in the scientific realm, and opined that as regards the system’s flagship university in Madison, the effect of the reforms would be “pretty much like just lighting [the campus] on fire.”
By Tom Blumer | June 5, 2015 | 11:50 PM EDT
On Thursday, the Associated Press's Will Weissert demonstrated that the ignorance of our nation's founding documents exhibited by Meredith Shiner at Yahoo Politics in March is not isolated to her.
Readers may recall that Shiner, reacting to Ted Cruz's presidential announcement speech, tweeted: "Bizarre to talk about how rights are God-made and not man-made in your speech announcing a POTUS bid? When Constitution was man-made?" In covering Rick Perry's presidential announcement, Weissert showed similar ignorance.
Paper on ‘Changing Minds’ on Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Retracted (Part 2 of 2): Press Retraction Efforts Largely Unacceptable
By Tom Blumer | May 28, 2015 | 5:16 PM EDT As noted in my previous related post, one of the authors of a late-2014 study which made the nonsensical claim that “a single conversation (can) change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage,” causing "a cascade of opinion change," issued a retraction last week, because the data supporting it was faked. Since it was published in Science Magazine — and because it conveniently fit a leftism-advancing agenda — numerous press outlets ran stories on the study's results.
Now they're all having to run retractions and corrections. Besides the obvious problem that the lies have gotten a long head start, let's look at how the seven original publishers identified by Retraction Watch, as well as the Associated Press, have handled the matter. All too often the answer has been: "Not very well."