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.”
War on Terrorism
CNN Split; Political Analysts Praise Obama Speech as Foreign Panelists Pan His ‘Self-Congratulation’
By Curtis Houck | December 7, 2015 | 2:38 AM EST 
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 7, 2015 | 1:31 AM EST
Appearing as a guest on Saturday's CNN Newsroom with Poppy Harlow, CNN's Fareed Zakaria complained that Americans are willing to "invade two countries, spend hundreds of billions of dollars" to fight terrorism from "some threatening 'other'" who "looks, feels, sounds different," but "we won't ask for gun registration, we won't ask for background checks, we won't ask for simple, common sense stuff" in response to thousands of gun deaths.
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 Mark Finkelstein | December 6, 2015 | 9:18 PM EST
Maybe you're a liberal, reluctant to accept Charles Krauthammer's conclusion that President Obama's speech on terror tonight was a "complete failure." Fine. But there's no getting around Richard Engel, whom no one would accuse of conservatism. Speaking with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, the bleak assessment of NBC's chief foreign correspondent was that President Obama laid out "the same strategy that hasn't been working for last several years."
After a point-by-point takedown of Obama's weak tea, Engel concluded "the course of treatment that he laid out for this sick patient with cancer with no immediate cure does not seem like an incredibly strong prescription." Ouch.
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 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.”
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 Clay Waters | December 6, 2015 | 11:18 AM EST
The front page of Saturday's New York Times, next to the paper's already infamous front-page gun-control editorial, claimed that "Shootings in California Reshape the Campaigns." The language used by reporters Michael Barbaro and Trip Gabriel, was quite revealing. See how the Republican presidential candidates "angrily demanded...[rode a] rising tide of bellicosity... seethed with disgust for Democrats...Their language was almost apocalyptic..." Meanwhile they missed the "nuance" of Democratic gun-control proposals. And the paper's religion reporter Laurie Goodstein seemed to fear "Islamophobia" more than Islamic terrorism, though FBI stats show that anti-Semitic attacks are far more common.
By Curtis Houck | December 5, 2015 | 11:03 PM EST
On Saturday, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC continued to prove why the liberal media loves congratulating itself for their so-called accomplishments as the morning and evening newscasts spent nearly four minutes (without teases) cheering the “historic” decision by The New York Times to publish a “dramatic” front-page editorial chiding gun rights advocates and pushing for massive gun control/confiscation.
After Islamic Terror, NYT Changes Subject, Takes Moral Preening on Guns to Front With Rare Page 1 Editorial
By Clay Waters | December 5, 2015 | 9:27 AM EST After the massacre by radical Islamists who killed 14 and wounded 21 more in San Bernardino, Calif., the New York Times took its tasteless grandstanding on gun control literally to the front, in a rare front-page editorial, "The Gun Epidemic" calling for bans on civilian ownership for certain types of rifles and ammunition. After joining the New York Daily News' anti-prayer brigade, the publicity stunt of an editorial briefly bowed to reality to admit that yes, there have been mass murders in countries with stringent gun control laws. Their rebuttal is a perfect encapsulation of liberal wishful thinking: "But at least those countries are trying."