Appearing on CNBC's Power Lunch at 1 p.m. ET Friday, the business network's chief Washington correspondent John Harwood touted President Obama's proposal to tax 529 college savings accounts: "If you want to change the distribution of income in this country, you've got to take from some to give to the other, and that's precisely what the President wants to do. Middle class families...have stagnated for a long time...while people at the top have done much better. So the administration is trying an across-the-board attempt to change that....redistribution Obama-style."
Higher Education
By Kyle Drennen | January 22, 2015 | 12:56 PM EST
Introducing a segment on Thursday's NBC Today about parents saving for college, co-host Matt Lauer and the show's financial editor Jean Chatzky spent a scant twenty-four seconds on President Obama's recently announced proposal to hike taxes on college savings accounts. Lauer noted: "Talk to me a little bit about what President Obama was referring to when he gave the State of the Union address and he talked about proposing changes to 529 accounts."
ABC, NBC Cheer Obama’s Liberal Proposals in SOTU Previews; ‘Going to Play a Little Robin Hood’ With Tax Hikes
By Curtis Houck | January 19, 2015 | 9:58 PM EST Ahead of President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, the networks offered previews of his speech during their Monday evening newscasts with ABC and NBC working particularly hard to paint a rosy picture for Obama with rising poll numbers and having “redefined” the “model of how to sell the State of the Union.”
Author of Bogus ’1 in 3 Men Would Commit Rape’ Study Still Buys the False '1 in 5' College Assault Stat
By Tom Blumer | January 16, 2015 | 8:09 PM EST On Tuesday, I posted (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) on a bogus "study" out of North Dakota University contending that "almost one in 3 college men would commit rape 'if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences.'" Media exposure from favorable and unfavorable outlets continues to grow.
In that post, I noted that the study disqualified itself from credibility by uncriticially relaying the thoroughly discredited "1 in 5" statistic, namely (quoting the study's opening) "Federal data estimate that about one in five women becomes the victim of sexual assault while in college," and took that as a clear indication that the trio of academics involved "are not dispassionate researchers, but instead are agenda-driven individuals who are not interested in facts, but are instead looking to reach desired conclusions." In an exchange with the Washington Examiner's Ashe Schow, study leader Sarah Edwards confirmed my assessment, and ratified the idea that any media outlet which takes their work seriously is deliberately spreading disinformation (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Bogus '1 in 3 Men Would Commit Rape' Study Discredits Itself in Opening Sentence, Goes Downhill From There
By Tom Blumer | January 13, 2015 | 3:17 PM EST The feminist-leftist fever swamp is apparently thrilled to have learned of a North Dakota University "study" purporting to show that almost one in 3 college men would commit rape "if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences."
I'll get to the study's specifics shortly, but first want to note that the work, published in December, automatically discredited itself in its body's opening paragraph:
By Matthew Balan | January 9, 2015 | 9:03 PM EST
Friday's NBC Nightly News enthusiastically promoted President Obama's proposal to provide "free" community college education, to the tune of $60 billion over ten years. Brian Williams hyped the "ambitious offer that could help so many families." Chris Jansing asserted that the President's plan is a "a goal everyone can agree on," but also underlined that the multi-billion dollar program is going to be a "tough sell to Congress."
By Scott Whitlock | January 9, 2015 | 12:30 PM EST
All three networks on Friday hyped Barack Obama's call for "free community college," but CBS, NBC and ABC offered very little in the way of skepticism about the cost or feasability of such a proposal.
By Tom Blumer | December 31, 2014 | 11:04 AM EST
If CNN is searching for reasons why its ratings are at an all-time low, it doesn't need to look any further than one entry in its group of "11 extraordinary people of 2014" published on December 5.
Aside from the inanity of publishing such an annual list almost four weeks before year's end — as if no extraordinary people or extraordinary acts ever take place in December — the network's fourth selection was patently offensive, and had no substantive basis for being considered "extraordinary."
By Matthew Balan | December 15, 2014 | 4:54 PM EST
On CNN's Reliable Sources on Sunday, University of Virginia student Alex Pinkleton revealed how Rolling Stone's Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who wrote the disputed Rolling Stone story on alleged rape at the college, acted more like an "advocate" than a reporter as she interviewed people for the article. Pinkleton, a friend of the woman who made the rape accusation, asserted that Erdely "did have an agenda, and part of that agenda was showing how monstrous fraternities themselves as an institution are, and blaming the administration for a lot of the sexual assaults."
By Tom Blumer | December 15, 2014 | 2:33 PM EST
One of the more amusing aspects of observing today's left-biased establishment media environment is seeing agenda-driven journalists directly or indirectly convey a clearly inflated sense of their outlets' self-importance.
A recent example of this came Friday from Jacob Silverman at Politico Magazine. In his writeup on conservative firebrand Charles Johnson, Silverman employed the comparative version of a word - "fringy" - rarely used in the political realm. Silverman described Breitbart and The Blaze as "even fringier" than ... well, let's try to figure that one out.
By Tom Blumer | December 11, 2014 | 1:09 PM EST
Two recent items in the Washington Post support my contention that the establishment press is currently doing more than anyone besides Lena Dunham and "Jackie," both of whom have been irrefutably exposed as rape story fabulists, to cause victims of sexual assault to be reluctant to come forward (Note: That's not to say that the two women haven't been victims of sexual assault, "only" that the stories they are currently promulgating cannot possibly be true).
As Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted this morning, the Post provided feminist character witnesses supporting Dunham (including one who still "completely believe(s) her") and made pathetic excuses for the "Girls" star, including that she has a "demanding job." Meanwhile — and to be clear, this is appropriate work which Rolling Stone should have done in the first place — the Post has been thoroughly vetting the story of alleged University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape victim "Jackie."
By Tom Blumer | December 10, 2014 | 11:58 AM EST
Yesterday at 4:11 p.m. ET, Eugene Volokh at the Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog sharply criticized Time.com's Eliza Berman for not being "quite fair" — i.e., being quite unfair, given the author's penchant for understatement — to Breitbart.com's John Nolte, the reporter who investigated the veracity of Lena Dunham's detailed claims about and descriptions of her alleged Oberlin College rapist.
Volokh's critique was based on language in Berman's original writeup which Time pulled at some point after Volokh's post without any notice that it had done so. Berman, as Volokh noted, "casually dismiss(ed) an investigation ... that actually succeeded in getting a publisher to correct a statement," and in the process betrayed fundamental tenets of journalism as it's supposed to be practiced.