On Saturday afternoon, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams released a statement announcing that he will be removing himself from NBC’s evening newscast “for the next several days” following the news that Williams lied about being in a helicopter that was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) over Iraq in March 2003. Later that night, all three of the major broadcast networks devoted briefs to Williams’s leave of absence in what were the first network evening news reports about him since the story was broken by Stars and Stripes on Wednesday.
Jim Axelrod
By Tim Graham | December 26, 2014 | 1:01 PM EST
NBC Nightly News offered two stories on Christmas in their December 25 newscast, including a show-ender about “what Christmas means to me.”
Somehow, this perfectly pleasant three-minute segment included lot of talk about family time and presents, and even someone saying “Happy Hanukkah,” but included no one uttering the name “Jesus.” No one defined Christmas as about Christ, NBC?
By Curtis Houck | November 22, 2014 | 12:29 AM EST
The evening following President Barack Obama’s announcement of his executive action on illegal immigration, major broadcast networks CBS and NBC sought to carry water for the President on Friday night as he made a trip to a Las Vegas high school to promote his move that would allow millions of illegal immigrants to stay in the United States.
Between two reports total from the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, the President’s speech was hailed as having “campaign-style fervor” that featured “[a] combative President Obama, chastising congressional Republicans for inaction” on immigration.
By Matthew Balan | October 19, 2014 | 10:40 AM EDT
CBS, USA Today, and the Associated Press all sang from the same sheet of music on Saturday, as they covered the end of the Catholic bishops' Extraordinary Synod on the Family. On CBS Evening News, Jim Axelrod played up a supposed "deep split over the direction Pope Francis wants to take the Church," after the Church's leaders rejected controversial language about homosexuals and divorced Catholics in an earlier draft report. Axelrod also underlined that the bishops "considered language in [the] document...that would welcome gays."
By Curtis Houck | October 16, 2014 | 10:54 PM EDT
CBS and NBC continued on Thursday night to harp on the so-called refusal of Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott to initially debate his opponent, Democrat and former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, on Wednesday because of Crist’s usage of a fan that broke the rules of the debate.
After each of the “big three” (ABC, CBS, and NBC) mentioned it on their morning newscasts, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News aired new segments and included NBC’s Brian Williams stating that what transpired on Wednesday night “may say more about the broken state of our politics these days than we'd like to admit.”
By Rich Noyes | September 8, 2014 | 4:50 PM EDT
As President Obama’s approval ratings have tumbled in 2014, polling news has practically vanished from the Big Three evening newscasts — in stunning contrast to how those same newscasts relentlessly emphasized polls showing bad news for George W. Bush during the same phase of his presidency.
CBS's Axelrod Praises Twitter's Ferguson Protests; Omits How Featured Protester Hoped Rioters/Looters 'Keep at It'
By Ken Shepherd | August 14, 2014 | 9:40 PM EDT Smartphones and social media are enabling African-Americans all over the country to join in on peaceful, digital protests of the fatal shooting of unarmed Ferguson, Mo., teenager Michael Brown, CBS's Jim Axelrod reported on the August 14 Evening News. Axelrod turned to one such Twitter user, "Andre Fields... a 27-year-old political aide" from New York. But while Axelrod presented Fields as measured and interested in "both sides" of the story being heard, a look at this Twitter stream reveals some disturbing tweets.
"If rioting and looting is what it's gonna take for them to get their voices recognized then I say keep at it," Fields (@_JustDreTho) tweeted at 10:31 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, August 12. Hours earlier, Fields tweeted a quote from the late Martin Luther King Jr., "Riots are the language of the unheard." Of course the whole conceit of Axelrod's story is that the previously unheard and marginalized ARE being heard, and seen, through the peaceful and ubiquitous means of social media [see the segment's transcript, screen capture, embedded tweets and video below page break]
By Laura Flint | June 14, 2014 | 8:55 AM EDT
From time to time, we at NewsBusters like to highlight things the media actually do right, and so, on this Flag Day, we tip our hats to the CBS Evening News, which two days ago closed its newscasts with a story on the 200th anniversary of Francis Scott Key's writing of the “Star-Spangled Banner."
Reporter Jim Axelrod narrated a fitting tribute to the “flag and song together, forming the fabric of a nation's identity.” Particularly moving was how R&B singer Brian McKnight, who has performed the anthem at sporting events, spoke about how you cannot properly perform the song publicly unless you appreciate all that it -- and by extension Old Glory -- represents over all these years. [See video below page break]
By Tim Graham | October 11, 2013 | 2:17 PM EDT
Now that the Nobel Peace Prize winner has been announced, it’s a good time to notice which Nobelist doesn’t tend to get mentioned any more. With all the talk of war in Syria, after leading from behind in Libya, and approving the takedown of Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama’s Peace Prize is almost never mentioned on TV.
Is that embarrassment for Obama? It can’t be disaste for Obama. It might be embarrassment for the Nobel bureaucrats for the attempt at pre-emptive accolades. But a survey of ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS newscasts since the 2012 election shows only one news report – from Chuck Todd in June – acknowledged Obama won the Peace Prize, and one wisecrack from PBS NewsHour analyst David Brooks on September 13:
By Ken Shepherd | August 20, 2013 | 3:42 PM EDT
When the president's hometown paper the Chicago Tribune turns on ObamaCare, you know it's getting real. "This is a paper that endorsed him twice [for president]" and for which former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod used to work, NewsBusters senior editor and Rich Noyes told Fox Business Network's Stuart Varney on his August 20 FBN program Varney & Co.
On top of that, Noyes reminded Varney's audience, the Tribune "was very instrumental in clearing the path for Barack Obama to win his Senate seat in 2004 [by] taking out [Republican challenger] Jack Ryan with an expose of his divorce records." As such, the paper souring on ObamaCare is newsworthy, and the liberal media's lack of interest is also accordingly also notable, Noyes argued. [watch the full segment below the page break]
By Tim Graham | June 15, 2013 | 10:16 PM EDT
For many years, the networks have done a sloppy job of comparing "conservatives" around the globe. As the Berlin Wall fell, the "conservatives" became the communists who wanted to keep their grip on power and not give way to democracy. That's hardly comparable to American conservatives.
On Saturday night, CBS News was doing this sloppy dance on the elections in Iran. From London, reporter Elizabeth Palmer declared all the candidates to succeed Ahmadinejad were the Islamist equivalent of the American Tea Party movement:
By Scott Whitlock | May 22, 2013 | 1:04 PM EDT
All three networks on Wednesday played a promotional video of Anthony Weiner, hyping the mayoral run of the "comeback kid." On Good Morning America, former Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos showed an extended clip of the campaign video. [See video below. MP3 audio here.] But Stephanopoulos (who in his previous career defended Bill Clinton's against sexual scandals) didn't get into much detail over the Weiner's failings. Reporter Jon Karl simply explained that the ex-Congressman tweeted out "lewd pictures" of himself.
CBS This Morning and NBC's Today both, briefly, featured blurred pictures of the aforementioned photos. But the Today segment included a network graphic that speculated, "Comeback kid?" Journalist Maria Schiavocampo offered more details than ABC. She described Weiner's fall as a "sexting scandal," but parroted, "but now he says he's ready to put the controversy behind him and get back into politics."