On Monday's New Day, CNN's Alisyn Camerota badgered Senator Rand Paul over President Obama's call for Congress to ban terror suspects from buying firearms: "That's one that seems as though it should be easy to fix. Why not close the loophole that allows suspects on the FBI's no-fly list to buy guns?" When Senator Paul cited how Ted Kennedy was on the no-fly list, Camerota shot back, "Look, I mean, I hear you, but fix the watch list. That's an issue of fixing the watch list...not to, somehow, let terrorists get their hands on guns."
Liberals & Democrats
By Kyle Drennen | December 7, 2015 | 1:30 PM EST
Moments before President Obama’s Sunday night address to the nation about the San Bernardino terrorist attack, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt hoped the speech might be “a defining moment for his presidency.” By Monday morning, reaction from hosts and analysts on the Today show made it clear the presidential remarks were not impressive.
CNN Split; Political Analysts Praise Obama Speech as Foreign Panelists Pan His ‘Self-Congratulation’
By Curtis Houck | December 7, 2015 | 2:38 AM EST Following President Obama’s Sunday night address, the always large post-event panel on CNN had plenty to say, but it was quite the disconnect as many of their political commentators hailed the “straightforward” speech by the President while two of their foreign policy analysts panned the President’s “self-congratulation” and having “his head...in the clouds if he thinks this current strategy is going to succeed.”
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 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 Curtis Houck | December 6, 2015 | 9:35 PM EST
While NBC’s Lester Holt was wondering before President Obama’s speech Sunday night if it would “be a defining moment for this presidency,” his counterparts on ABC and PBS picked up where he left off afterward by enthusiastically praising how “struck” they were by “a stern and direct” Obama “laying out" what Obama called "a strong and smart strategy” to deal with terrorism.
By Curtis Houck | December 6, 2015 | 8:02 PM EST
Seconds before President Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office on Sunday night, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt gave viewers a quick preview with Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd and wondered to Todd if the speech will mark “a defining moment for this presidency.”
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 Curtis Houck | December 6, 2015 | 4:48 PM EST
Center for American Progress (CAP) President Neera Tanden joined CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning as part of the panel and encouraged President Obama to use part of his Oval Office speech later in the day to denounce Republicans for their “continual language....to target Muslims” which she argued the GOP’s so-called Islamophobia “is exactly what ISIS wants.”
By Curtis Houck | December 6, 2015 | 2:39 PM EST
Three of the four Sunday network morning news shows commented on Saturday’s New York Times front-page editorial calling for massive gun control, but it was The Federalist’s Ben Domenech and The Washington Post’s George Will that provided the most succinct takedowns of the liberal paper and the disconnect it exhibited in opinion between the liberal media and President Obama versus the American people.
Salon Pundit: Americans With ‘Violent Desires’ Might Get ‘Inspiration’ to Attack From ‘A Republican Presidential Debate’
By Tom Johnson | December 6, 2015 | 12:17 PM EST In a column posted last Monday, two days before the San Bernardino massacre, Heather Digby Parton warned of Americans with “violent desires” who might find “inspiration” to stage mass-casualty attacks not in jihadist propaganda, but in rhetoric used during “a Republican presidential debate.”
Parton linked the fatal shootings at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs to remarks by GOP presidential candidates and declared that those politicians “should have paused before they…exploited [the Planned Parenthood sting videos] for political gain. After all, gory illustrations of dismemberment and mutilation are the propaganda stock in trade of our most hated enemies. They are considered the gold standard for terrorist recruitment. You would think mainstream American politicians would think twice about going down that road…But they don’t.”
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.