On the PBS NewsHour on Monday, political analyst Amy Walter spoke just like the “mainstream” media as a whole, seeing all the peril for Hillary Clinton in how she’s too centrist – both on domestic and foreign policy.
As they discussed an analysis by Dan Balz of The Washington Post about how Hillary is going to be affected by Obama’s Iran deal, Walter announced the media line: She's not only too Wall Street-friendly, she's too hawkish.
On Thursday, USA Today reported Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was "defiant" on the right of the Koch brothers to spend money on political ads. Reporter Susan Page suggested the amount of Koch spending was inappropriate, just too large.
McConnell shot back at USA Today ownership: "How many people have to sit down and shut up in order to make the process work? My view is that in a free country with free speech, everybody ought to be as free to express themselves as Gannett."
In an interview with USA Today published on its website Tuesday, former Obama administration Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tried to distance herself from the numerous comments by ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber, but still found a way to sound like Gruber when explaining why Americans oppose the health care law.
Speaking with USA Today’s Susan Page, Sebelius remarked that “[a] lot of Americans have no idea what insurance is about” and “the financial literacy of a lot of people” can be characterized as “very low.”
On Monday night, ABC and NBC offered segments on Monica Lewinsky’s first public comments in years that came during a conference in Philadelphia for millennials by Forbes and explained how she was the first victim of cyberbullying during her affair with then-President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.
During the segment that aired on NBC Nightly News, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell declared that the “timing” of Lewinsky speaking out now (in hopes of becoming an advocate against cyberbullying) “couldn’t be worse for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Susan Page, USA Today Washington Bureau Chief, appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and had a surprisingly blunt take on how the public views the federal government. Speaking to moderator Bob Schieffer, Page maintained that “the Ebola virus and the threat from ISIS are feeding into a sense that a lot of Americans have that the world is not only a dangerous place but that the government is not competent to handle them.”
After introducing his political panel on the July 7 edition of MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown, host Chuck Todd chose to mock Brent Bozell, Media Research Center President and NewsBusters publisher, after realizing he had three titans of the mainstream media on his program at the same time.
Todd described the panel, consisting of The New York Times’ Carolyn Ryan, Dan Balz of The Washington Post, and Susan Page of USA Today as “really a nightmare scenario for Brent Bozell. This is like the mainstream media all in one place, the Times, the Post, USA Today, NBC. Oh my God! Heads are exploding!” [MP3 audio here; video below]
On Tuesday night’s PBS NewsHour, a panel of journalists were exploring how Democratic candidates for the Senate were going to struggle with Obama’s new crackdown on coal plants. PBS anchor Gwen Ifill even said, “why then does the White House rub salt into the wound on this issue? Why make it so hard for Democrats especially?”
Washington Post reporter Reid Wilson replied that Obama wants it for his legacy as his term winds down, and reminded Ifill that he said his time would be when the planet starts to heal: [See video below.]
On her Friday 12 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show, host Andrea Mitchell joined fellow media liberals Stephen Colbert and Chris Matthews in labeling the VA scandal the first real scandal of the Obama administration: "...this is the biggest political problem that the President has faced. This is far more serious than a lot of so-called scandals that have popped up from time to time in the last couple of months." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
USA Today's Susan Page affirmed: "I totally agree with you, this is much more perilous for the President politically. Benghazi, they can dismiss that as a partisan battle. The Affordable Care Act, they can argue, 'This is actually going to work pretty well, just give us a little more time.'"
"Democrats hoping improvements in the economy's course and the Affordable Care Act's implementation would level the playing field for the fall elections should brace themselves," USA Today's Susan Page and Kendall Breitman warned the president's party in their May 5 front-page story, "Poll shows biggest advantage for Republicans in 2 decades." So naturally the Big Three broadcast networks completely ignored the story this morning, preferring instead to fawn over President Obama, Joel McHale, and the White House Correspondents Association Dinner held on Saturday.
The USA Today-Pew Research Center poll conducted April 23-27, found strong frustration by respondents with President Obama and Democrats, with 65 percent of Americans "want[ing] the president elected in 2016 to pursue different policies and programs than the Obama administration." What's more, "registered voters are inclined to support the Republican candidate over the Democrat in their congressional district by 47%-43%. Yes, "[t]hat edge may seem small," Page and Breitman conceded, but (emphasis mine):
It’s election season and MNSBC’s manufactured GOP “war on women” narrative is in full-swing across the network. Appearing on “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on Wednesday March 19, the MSNBC host and her entire panel desperately attempted to create a controversy surrounding comments made by two Texas Republicans on the issue of equal pay for women.
Mitchell began the segment by proclaiming that “Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott is making some news. He's getting attention for opposing equal pay legislation for women. And in fact, has reiterated, according to reports today, that he would not sign any legislation that would make it easier for women to sue for equal pay. When two of the state's Republican women leaders then tried to fix the problem, well some argue they made it worse.”
Shameless shilling for the Demcratic Party's presumptive presidential 2016 nominee appears to have reached an all-time peak.
A USA Today email I received this afternoon (email web link here) breathlessly delivered the following "Breaking" news story readers will see after the jump. Keep in mind that this is not a normal, garden-variety news story. No, this one's "breaking," meaning that we apparently must drop everything and read it because of its immediate importance to anyone who tries to follow the news:
On Thursday night’s edition, the PBS NewsHour held a discussion about President Obama’s prospects for making 2014 more successful than 2013. Of course, the panelists defined success as the president enacting more of his left-of-center agenda.
Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal posed a “really interesting strategic choice” that he thought the White House had to make: