Appearing as a guest in the final segment of Wednesday's MTP Daily on MSNBC, Ron Fournier of the National Journal slammed the previous night's GOP presidential debate as "disgusting" as he claimed to see "dog whistling" and "fearmongering" from the candidates.
Middle East
By Brad Wilmouth | December 16, 2015 | 7:42 PM EST
Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's MSNBC Live, Linda Sarsour of the Arab-American Association of New York received no pushback from host Jose Diaz-Balart over her inflammatory assertion that some of the Republican presidential candidates "think they can mass murder civilians across the world" to defeat the ISIS threat.
She also absurdly claimed that the U.S. killed 650,000 civilians in Iraq, even though most estimates place the total number of Iraqis killed by the U.S. military much lower.
By Matthew Balan | December 16, 2015 | 1:26 PM EST
CNN's Chris Cuomo made a gaffe regarding the religious faith of ISIS and other similar groups on Wednesday's New Day. When Senator Lindsey Graham accused Donald Trump of "playing into ISIL's hands," Cuomo replied, "Sixty percent of your party agrees with him. They think all jihadis are Muslim." Since jihad is a concept from the Islamic faith, a jihadi, by definition, would indeed be a Muslim waging a religious-based war for Islam.
By Mark Finkelstein | December 16, 2015 | 8:42 AM EST
When tagging items at NewsBusters, one of our Media Bias sub-categories is "Sudden Respect." The notion is that to win the affection of the MSM, all a Republican or conservative needs to do is turn against members or positions of his party. A great illustration of the phenomenon comes from today's Morning Joe. During last night's undercard debate, Lindsey Graham repeatedly ripped fellow Republicans for their rhetoric on Muslims, at one point even apologizing to Muslims for Donald Trump's comments.
And that of course caused what Rush might call a GrahamGasm by the Morning Joe crew. Mike Barnicle called Graham "fantastic," Nicolle Wallace said "I adore Lindsey Graham." Most amazing was Mika Brzezinski, who beyond praising him as "incredible" actually declared, sounding like she was choking up, "I feel a connection with Lindsey Graham," causing Joe Scarborough to claim [we presume facetiously] that Mika said "where has he been all my life?" Not to be outdone, Joe called on President Obama to award Graham the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Barnicle summed up the panel's sentiment by saying "thank God for Lindsey Graham."
By Curtis Houck | December 15, 2015 | 8:04 PM EST
Just after the undercard Republican presidential debate began on Tuesday night, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC offered previews of the impending “freewheeling and fiery slugfest” debate and contrasted that with plenty of laudatory rhetoric for “grown up” Hillary Clinton as she spoke in Minnesota about ISIS and “slamm[ed] Republicans for fearmongering.”
By Tom Blumer | December 15, 2015 | 3:00 PM EST
The year isn't even over, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Time's 2015 Person of the Year, has begun to act against the primary reason why the magazine chose her.
To refresh from a NewsBusters post last week, Time's Nancy Gibbs cited three reasons for the choice. The clearly most important one, from their perspective, was Merkel's virtually unilateral decision that Germany "would welcome refugees as casualties of radical Islamist savagery, not carriers of it" without apparent restriction. Now Merkel has, as described by a writer at Time Inc. sister publication Fortune, "backpedaled" from that stance.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 15, 2015 | 2:12 PM EST
As the Reverend Franklin Graham appeared on Tuesday's CNN Newsroom to promote a national call to prayer, host Carol Costello raised charges that "heated rhetoric about Muslims" is "causing mosques to come under attack," and, after asking her guest if he thought Islam was "compatible with American values," fretted over his answer when he responded, "I don't think so." The CNN host followed up: "See, some people say that rhetoric like that is hurting them."
After the Reverend Graham took issue with the treatment of women and others within the Muslim faith, Costello suggested that Catholicism might be just as culpable as she responded: "I could say that about my own faith within Catholicism, right? I could."
By Brad Wilmouth | December 14, 2015 | 11:35 PM EST
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.
By Curtis Houck | December 14, 2015 | 9:20 PM EST
The “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC all prominently touted on Monday night President Barack Obama’s visit to the Pentagon to discuss the fight against ISIS, but skimped on reporting any criticism of the administration’s strategy but instead lamenting that he’s had to try once “again to reassure an anxious nation” despite polls showing Americans are concerned about the growing threat of terrorism.
By Curtis Houck | December 14, 2015 | 7:47 PM EST
On her eponymous CNN show on Thursday night, Christiane Amanpour verbally harassed former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair over his involvement in the Iraq War and specifically whether he and former U.S. President George W. Bush “feel pain” and “a sense of responsibility” for the war having supposedly caused recent Islamic terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
By Curtis Houck | December 13, 2015 | 3:49 PM EST
Reporting on Sunday’s This Week about foreign reaction to Donald Trump’s candidacy and proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S., ABC News chief foreign correspondent Terry Moran compared Trump to U.K. Independence Party (U.K.I.P.) leader Nigel Farage despite his firm denouncement of Trump. Moran cheered new leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as providing “sharp relief” to Trump as he publicly “greeted a plane load Syrian refugees” on Friday.
By Mark Finkelstein | December 13, 2015 | 1:32 PM EST
Ain't that reassuring? . . . On today's Meet the Press, John Kerry told Chuck Todd that "for the most part" we know who's entering our country. Kerry's statement came after he boasted about the Obama admin's "huge process" for vetting visa applicants. Not huge enough to catch Tafsheen Malik. Knowing for "the most part" who is entering the US is dangerously insufficient, given the hundreds of thousands of "refugees" and other immigrants from Muslim lands that President Obama wants to admit.
Also troubling was Kerry's response to Todd's question, whether, given that Malik had posted her radical views online before being admitted, we will begin searching the social media of would-be immigrants,. Kerry said we are looking into "whether there are means and whether we should," examine social media. If Kerry can't give an emphatic "yes" to both questions, how can we continue to admit people who might be out to kill us?