Cable Television

Jon Stewart Mocks NY Times Coverage of Rubio, Leaves Key Points on the Cutting Room Floor
By Tom Blumer | June 11, 2015 | 11:50 PM EDT

If you're Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, you know you have to do the occasional segment going after the establishment press or left-wing groups to maintain appearances.

The James O'Keefe-ACORN saga in 2009 was one such instance. If Stewart hadn't dealt with it, his pretense of being supposedly fair to both left and right would have been blown out of the water. The incredibly petty New York Times reports on Marco Rubio's traffic tickets and finances fit the media version of the "We'd better do something with this or else" template. The video which follows the jump shows that Stewart only had a pair of strong moments, while missing at least a couple of key opportunities to make important points with humor.

AP Keeps Mosby's Name Out of Headline in Story Entirely About Her
By Tom Blumer | June 10, 2015 | 12:26 PM EDT

Readers can be excused if they believe that the Associated Press might be more interested in protecting what little is left of Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby's credibility and reputation than they are in reporting the news.

Look at the vague headline about enhanced police presence in the area where Freddie Gray was arrested that Mosby herself requested at the AP story by Juliet Linderman:

Press Fails to Note That Weak First-Quarter Economies Have Been a Democrat Phenomenon
By Tom Blumer | June 8, 2015 | 11:13 AM EDT

The business press has gotten really excited about the possibility — some of them are even treating it as a probability — that the first-quarter's recently reported annualized economic contraction of 0.7 percent will go positive if it gets revised for so-called "residual seasonality."

"Residual seasonality" is "the manifestation of seasonal patterns in data that have already been seasonally adjusted." (Supposedly, the way to fix this is add more "seasoning.") On April 22, CNBC's Steve Liesman contended that it's been a chronic 30-year problem. As far as I can tell, no one in the press has followed up on that claim. If they had, they would have found that it has not been a 30-year "problem," and that it's a "problem" remarkably unique to the presence of Democratic Party presidential administrations and policies:

Covering Hillary's Voting Demagoguery, Press Ignores Ohio's 28 Days of Early Voting
By Tom Blumer | June 6, 2015 | 9:17 PM EDT

Hillary's Clinton has called for what a Washington Post headline describes as a "sweeping expansion of voter access." While falsely accusing Republicans of preventing young people and minorities from voting, Mrs. Clinton is really pushing for widespread opportunities for fraud combined with a heavy dose of incumbent protection.

From reading the establishment press's coverage of Mrs. Clinton's "ambitious agenda" (that's what the New York Times called it), you would think that Ohio has one of the nation's most restrictive early-voting arrangments. It's not so, and Ohio Governor John Kasich justifiably rebutted that perception after Mrs. Clinton's speech.

Salon Writer: Megyn Kelly a ‘Ruthlessly Compelling Presence,’ But Usually Too ‘Right-Wing and Authoritarian’
By Tom Johnson | June 4, 2015 | 12:22 AM EDT

It seems improbable that the left might have too high an opinion of a Fox News personality, but it’s happened with Megyn Kelly, argued Jack Mirkinson in a Wednesday article.

Mirkinson noted that liberals have enjoyed several “extremely fun episodes in which [Kelly] made mincemeat out of (usually male) right-wing pundits,” but claimed that those instances have “helped obscure the fact that, far from being some objective oasis in a conservative desert, [The Kelly File] is usually just as right-wing and authoritarian as anything else on Fox News,” which in general he considers “a crude propaganda machine” peopled by “braindead hacks.”

Lefty Bloggers: Supreme Court Case Against Obamacare ‘Idiotic,’ ‘Preposterous,’ a ‘Con,’ and an ‘Ideological Farce’
By Tom Johnson | May 27, 2015 | 11:03 AM EDT

Tuesday’s New York Times piece on how the problematic phrase “established by the state” got into and stayed in the Affordable Care Act provoked a great many blasts from lefty bloggers at the plaintiffs’ case in King v. Burwell. Two especially heated posts came from MSNBC’s Steve Benen and Esquire’s Charles Pierce.

Benen, a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the show’s blog, claimed that almost no one believes there’s any merit to the plaintiffs’ case: “There are effectively two competing factions: those who acknowledge that the litigation is hopelessly insane, and those who know the case is hopelessly insane but pretend otherwise for the sake of appearances...The case [conservatives are] pushing…is based entirely on a lie.” Meanwhile, Pierce charged that the "preposterous" case emerged from a conservative “alternate universe” sustained by “wingnut welfare."

As ISIS Slaughters Continue, Pelosi Cites Social Media 'Advances'
By Tom Blumer | May 26, 2015 | 1:56 PM EDT

I think it's a safe assumption that I need to inform the vast majority of readers here that former Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Patrick Murphy has a new weekend show on MSNBC.

On that show on Sunday, Murphy interviewed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. In the "Who was more out of touch?" contest between the two, it was a draw. Murphy asserted that the war against ISIS had "mixed results" during the past week, virtually equating the fall of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria, the latter of which he did not mention, with the special forces operation which killed ISIS's "money man" in Syria. Pelosi, aka San Fran Nan, somehow took comfort in how "we" are making "advances" against ISIS — in social media.

Krauthammer to Megyn Kelly: President Obama Is 'Not Serious,' While ISIS Is 'Al Qaeda on Steroids'
By Tom Blumer | May 25, 2015 | 11:12 PM EDT

In a Thursday interview recorded for Megyn Kelly's Fox News show that evening, Charles Krauthammer provided stunning evidence rarely mentioned even on Fox — and almost never in the establishment press — relating to how unserious the administration's and the Pentagon's "strategy" has been in containing, let alone defeating, ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Krauthammer began discussing the inadequacy of the American military effort at the 1:58 mark of the video which follows the jump, charging that President Obama is only "pretending to be doing something," and discussed the long-term consequences if the situation doesn't turn around.

NYT's Horowitz: Hillary Should Stop 'Playing the Freak' in 'Carnival Atmosphere' and Continue to Avoid the Press
By Tom Blumer | May 23, 2015 | 4:55 PM EDT

Jason Horowitz at the New York Times thinks that Hillary Clinton shouldn't bother dealing with the press.

In describing Hillary Clinton's campaign effort in Iowa, Horowitz wondered how, in "a carnival atmosphere," Hillary Clinton "gains politically from playing the freak" by deigning to take questions from the press, thus clearly suggesting that she would be better off if she didn't bother, and that he has her back if she continues on that route. But at the end of his report, Horowitz allowed Fox News's senior correspondent Ed Henry to essentially confirm something I suspected when it occurred, namely that Mrs. Clinton's condescending remarks to Henry about taking questions from the press caused her campaign to decide, likely contrary to her plans, to take some questions.

As Press Ignores Soldiers Who Fought and Won at Ramadi, Debbie Lee Speaks Out
By Tom Blumer | May 20, 2015 | 11:57 PM EDT

Web and news searches at Google, as well as a search at the Associated Press's national site, indicate that there is very little interest in the establishment press in getting the reactions of current and former U.S. soldiers who defeated enemy forces in Ramadi during last decade's Iraq War to the loss of that city to Islamic State forces.

Sadly, that's not surprising. As usual, Fox News is doing work the rest of the press refuses to do. This morning, Debbie Lee, whose son Marc Alan Lee, the first Navy SEAL killed in the Iraq War, died at Ramadi, appeared on Fox & Friends. Video, plus an excerpt from a rare exception to the establishment press's indifference at the Daily Beast, follow the jump.

MSNBC Mocks Cop Dragged by Fleeing Suspect
By Tom Blumer | May 18, 2015 | 2:39 PM EDT

The folks at MSNBC exhibited a sick sense of "humor" on Friday.

As Gateway Pundit's Kristinn Taylor reported Friday afternoon, the network posted "a video to MSNBC’s Facebook page that mocks police over a criminal dragging a police officer by a car as he attempted to flee ..." The post asked the following question, which was also tweeted: "Does it count as a police chase if you take the cop along for the ride?"

AP's Crutsinger Acknowledges Likely Q1/15 Contraction; Rugaber Ignores
By Tom Blumer | May 5, 2015 | 8:55 PM EDT

It appears that someone might need to schedule an intervention with the Associated Press's economics writers.

In his dispatch published a half-hour after the government's March release on international trade at 8:30 this morning, the wire service's Martin Crutsinger quoted a normally upbeat economist who was singing the blues about the result's effect on previously reported first-quarter economic growth. Now, he said, the economy "undoubtedly contracted slightly in the first quarter" by an estimated 0.3 percent. But about an hour later, the AP's Christopher Rugaber ignored this assessment — and that of many others — in his writeup covering the 10 a.m. release of the Institute for Supply Management's Non-Manufacuring Index. Don't these guys talk to each other?