ABCNews.com

AP Avoids Reporting Dems' Convention Money Problems, Fails to Mention McCaskill's Fellow Non-Attendees
By Tom Blumer | June 26, 2012 | 10:50 PM EDT

Despite several updates to the story first reported by Bloomberg last night that the Democratic National Convention's "move" of its "celebration" originally scheduled to take place at Charlotte Motor Speedway is really a cancellation likely driven by money problems, the Associated Press has not updated its virtual relay of the DNC's related press release published late last night.

Additionally, in its brief story on Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill's decision not to attending the convention, the AP made no reference to the nine other prominent Democratic Party politicians who have decided they'd be better off not being seen in the same convention venue with their party's incumbent presidential candidate.

Obama 'Major Address' Panned by Fans in the Press; AP Barely Musters Eight Paragraphs, But Debuts New Halo
By Tom Blumer | June 14, 2012 | 11:31 PM EDT

If you're starting to lose Jonathan Alter, reporters at Politico, and other left-leaning outlets, you're starting to get into trouble. Double that if you can't even get Julie Pace at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, to muster more than eight paragraphs relating to a 53-minute speech pre-positioned as a "major address."

Hunter Walker has compiled several less than complimentary tweets at Politicker, including the following:

ABC Shills for Poor Eric Holder: 'Demonized' and 'Victimized' By the GOP
By Scott Whitlock | June 14, 2012 | 11:17 AM EDT

According to ABC News' Matt Negrin, Republicans are "victimizing" and "demonizing" Attorney General Eric Holder. The ABC network has almost completely ignored the growing Fast and Furious scandal, but an online article written by Mr. Negrin put the blame on the GOP. (Negrin mocks the concept of media bias on his Facebook page. See screen cap below.)

In fact, it seems Negrin's ABCNews.com article was so biased, the network altered the headline. The original title spewed, "Demonizing Attorney General Eric Holder, GOP Is Fast and Furious." The altered headline reads: "Against Attorney General Eric Holder, GOP Is Fast and Furious." (The first version can still be found in the hyper link.) In his piece, Negrin whined, "There's little question that Republicans want to use the demonization of Holder as a political issue."

ABC Reporter Mocks Global Warming 'Denialists,' Calls for More Alarmist Advocacy
By Scott Whitlock | April 23, 2012 | 12:32 PM EDT

ABC reporter and global warming enthusiast Bill Blakemore on Sunday condescendingly dismissed climate change skeptics as "denialists." In a piece on ABCNews.com, he called for yet more advocacy on the part of journalists.

After noting that confidence in the science of climate change has varied from year to year, Blakemore huffed that these beliefs "don't seem to be responding all that much, [Professor Jon Krosnick] says, to whatever the global warming denialist campaigns may have been doing."

ABC News.com Still Claims Neo-Nazis in Sanford
By D. S. Hube | April 10, 2012 | 11:45 AM EDT

Following up on P.J. Gladnick's NewsBusters story about reports of non-existent neo-Nazi "patrols" in Sanford, Fla. in response to potential racial violence there, ABC News.com's Candace Smith apparently hasn't gotten the memo that there are no such patrols going on. As Gladnick reported two days ago, Professor William Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog did the legwork that reporters like Smith are supposed to do. Get this -- he e-mailed  the Sanford Police Department and simply asked them if there were indeed neo-Nazis patrolling the streets of Sanford. "No confirmed reports" was the reply. Jacobson then -- get this -- followed up by asking the police if they just weren't yet aware of any patrols: There was "no indication" of any such patrols, the Sanford police responded.

Yet ABC News.com reports today (my emphasis):

ABC's Bill Blakemore: 'America’s Prestige Damaged by Its Climate Denialism'
By Noel Sheppard | April 2, 2012 | 10:29 AM EDT

One of ABC's chief global warming alarmists Bill Blakemore was at it again Sunday.

At the network's Nature and Environment website, Blakemore actually wrote, "America’s Prestige Damaged by Its Climate Denialism":

Jobs Lost in Best Buy HQ Layoffs, Store Closures: Several Thousand, Not 400
By Tom Blumer | March 30, 2012 | 1:43 PM EDT

From what I can tell, no one in the establishment press yesterday attempted to quantify the total employment impact of yesterday's announcement by Best Buy that it will reduce its headquarters headcount by 400 and close 50 stores. One thing is certain: It's not just 400, as the headlines and verbiage in certain media reports might lead readers to believe -- and it's not excusable to say that the company itself didn't name a specific number of employees affected by the store closures.

An estimate of how many jobs will really be lost is after the jump, followed by a few misleading media examples. Note that the media review is based on reports from Thursday; today, we began learning which stores will be closing. They include five in the Twin Cities area where the company is headquartered.

Did ABC News Purposely Use Unnecessary Chyron to Cover Up Zimmerman's Head Bruise?
By P.J. Gladnick | March 30, 2012 | 9:04 AM EDT

Get that totally unnecessary chyron out of there, ABC News!

Why is your "ABC NEWS EXCLUSIVE" chyron covering up the back of George Zimmerman's head in the police surveillance video of him arriving at the police station soon after Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, Florida? There is a big controversy out there as to whether Zimmerman actually did suffer certain injuries including a bruise to the back of his head during the fight with Martin. You would think ABC News would allow an unobstructed view of the back of Zimmerman's head. Instead the head was covered for much of the time by a completely redundant chyron since there was already an unobtrusive ABC News label in the lower right of the screen.

A suspicious mind might even think that ABC News was trying to cover something up with that annoying chyron. And one such person is Bob Owens, a Pajamas Media contributor, who makes just such an accusation in his personal blog:

On Solyndra and Obama's 2011 SOTU Avoidance, Politico's Samuelsohn Misses the Big Kahuna: By That Time, Everyone Knew
By Tom Blumer | March 18, 2012 | 4:45 PM EDT

On Friday, Darren Samuelsohn at the Politico (HT Hot Air), the place where it seems that inconvenient stories go so the Associated Press, the New York Times and the rest of the establishment press can claim they have an excuse not to cover them (respective proofs as of about 3:30 p.m. in the current instance are here and here), covering -- or I should say attempting to cover -- the latest of the White House's ritual Friday document dumps, reported that a White House communications official rejected an apparent proposal to seat Solyndra executives at the President's January 2011 State of the Union address, and that others within the White House already knew that Solyndra was in deep trouble before then.

And he almost got to the real meat of the story, but not quite. In this instance, not quite isn't anywhere near good enough (bolds are mine throughout this post), nor is the "nothing new here, you really don't need to read this" headline:

ABC's Farnham: 2008 Was Last Time U.S. 'Saw' $4-a-Gallon Gas
By Tom Blumer | February 14, 2012 | 9:53 AM EST

Everybody, including yours truly, makes mistakes. But a major news organization should be able to catch whoppers like the ones readers will see shortly, or at least fix them in short order if they get posted.

A Google search on the title of an ABC report on gas prices ("Bumpy Ride Ahead: Gas Prices May Soon Hit $4 a Gallon") at about 8:10 a.m. ET indicates that the story went up at about 6 p.m. last night, so the pathetic verbiage readers will see after the jump has gone unrepaired for 15 hours, and counting:

Obama's New 'Truth Teams' and Related Web Sites Aren't News at AP, NYT
By Tom Blumer | February 14, 2012 | 1:08 AM EST

One web site devoted to "fighting the smears" (i.e., pretending that what is true really isn't) apparently isn't enough for Barack Obama's reelection campaign. There are now three, plus so-called "truth teams" of activists whose mission it will be to serve as rapid-response purveyors of what will likely heaping helpings of fabricated refutations.

This news is now officially 24 hours old; its first appearance, at least per Google News, came via the Washington Post and appeared at the web site of the Minneapolis Star Tribune shortly after midnight Monday morning. To no one's surprise, a search of the Associated Press's national site on "Obama truth" (not in quotes) returns nothing relevant, as does an advanced search at the New York Times on "Obama truth team" (also not in quotes). Here are key paragraphs from David Nakamura's story as it appeared at the Washington Post:

Justice Ginsburg to Egyptians: 'I would not look to the U.S. Constitution'; AP, NYT Ignore
By Tom Blumer | February 4, 2012 | 10:35 AM EST

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on a trip underwritten by the U.S. State Department (aren't justices expected to keep their distances from the government to protect their perceived impartiality?), was in Egypt on Wednesday at a Cairo University law school seminar. While there, according to the Associated Press's Mark Sherman, she told students that (in Sherman's words) "she was inspired by last year's protests that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak's regime" and to speak to them (in her words) "during this exceptional transitional period to a real democratic state." The news that Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist parties now control about 75% of the seats in the country's parliament seems not to have registered with Ginsburg or Sherman -- or, for that matter, the State Department.

Sherman's AP story failed to note what Ms. Ginsburg said about the U.S. Constitution in an Egyptian TV interview, as did virtually all of the rest of the establishment press. ABC's Ariane de Vogue is currently the most notable exception, but as readers will see, she clearly buried the lede. Here are key paragraphs from her report (the related video is at Hot Air; the relevant portion begins at the 9:28 mark; bolds are mine):