Magazines

Press Ignoring Blatant Conflicts of Interest Exposed in CBS Benghazi Coverage
By Tom Blumer | September 30, 2015 | 11:59 PM EDT

Apparently, the establishment press is waiting for its marching orders on how to handle what an Investor's Business Daily editorial has already called a "scandal."

This one's a joint effort involving Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, a recently deceased former CIA operative named Tyler Drumheller who worked with Blumenthal — and CBS News. As Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard reported Tuesday afternoon (i.e., now approaching two overnight news cycles ago), "Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who was working directly with Blumenthal as a member of Clinton’s spy network, was concurrently working as a consultant to CBS News and its venerable news program 60 Minutes." IBD's question, reacting to Hemingway's report: "Who is more corrupt, Clinton or the mainstream media?"

WashPost's Ignatius Relies on Hillary Clinton Defender With Undisclosed Connections
By Tom Blumer | August 30, 2015 | 9:49 PM EDT

One of the odder pieces appearing during the past week in connection with the Hillary Clinton email and private server scandal was David Ignatius's attempt to deny that it's a scandal at all in Thursday's Washington Post.

Ignatius devoted four of his first five paragraphs to relaying the allegedly expert assessments of Jeffrey Smith, who Ignatius described as "a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he often represents defendants suspected of misusing classified information." Sounds like an arms-length guy, doesn't he? He's not. He has been a security adviser to Hillary Clinton's previous presidential campaign, defended John Kerry against criticism of the Massachusetts senator's national security negligence in 2004, and served on Bill Clinton's presidential transition team in late 1992 and early 1993.

Kudos: MSNBC Actually Promotes Free Speech Advocate Critical of Campus Censorship
By Ken Shepherd | August 12, 2015 | 6:30 PM EDT

MSNBC's Saturday mornings might be dominated by professor Melissa Harris-Perry and her exceedingly esoteric left-wing academic nuttiness, but weekday anchor Craig Melvin today offered viewers a breath of fresh air when it comes to the issue of political correctness run amok at America's colleges and universities.

Real Time.com Headline: 'Koch Says U.S. Can Bomb Its Way to $100,000 Salaries'
By Tom Blumer | August 4, 2015 | 2:26 PM EDT

I noted on Sunday how former Associated Press reporter Philip Elliott, writing for Time Magazine's Time.com website, joined the Scott Walker pile-on brigade criticizing the Wisconsin Governor's reasonable — arguably to a fault — position that he doesn't personally know whether Barack Obama is a Christian.

A separate post by Elliott, which covered a weekend retreat hosted by Charles Koch, originally carried a headline so obviously outrageous that it should never have gotten past him (though, to be fair, he may not have been responsible for creating it) or Time's editors (if they exist) for more than a few minutes after it appeared. Readers will see that headline after the jump (HT Mary Katharine Ham at Hot Air):

Kristol: Odds 'Better Than 50/50' Big Dem Jumps in Against 'Extraordinarily Weak' Hillary
By Mark Finkelstein | July 27, 2015 | 8:51 PM EDT

Is Hillary hearing donkey hoofbeats? On his Weekly Standard podcast today, Bill Kristol put the odds at "better than 50/50" that one or more of Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden or John Kerry would jump into the race against a Hillary Clinton whom he described as "extraordinarily weak."

Kristol made an undeniable point, to wit, that "if someone came down and gave you the poll numbers on Hillary Clinton, from the last two, three, four public polls, you would look at that and say, whoah: this is a very weak and very vulnerable frontrunner."

TIME Writer Explains 'Why We Still Need Fetal Tissue Research'
By Ken Shepherd | July 21, 2015 | 5:14 PM EDT

Shocking revelations about Planned Parenthood's sale of unborn-baby organs for medical research "doesn’t mean that research on fetal tissue is wrong Or that it should be stopped," TIME magazine's Alice Park lectured today in her piece, "Why We Still Need Fetal Tissue Research."

Newsweek Writer: Blame John Edwards's Affair on Magic of Hotel Bar
By Ken Shepherd | July 15, 2015 | 2:54 PM EDT

Seeking to hook his readers early in his piece, "The Magic of New York Hotel Bars," Newsweek senior writer Alexander Nazaryan opened his July 15 feature by noting the genesis of the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair was in one such bar. 

Mika Schools New Yorker Editor Who Bragged of Condescending to Trump
By Mark Finkelstein | June 22, 2015 | 9:37 AM EDT

The screencap shows New Yorker editor David Remnick, on today's Morning Joe, raising his hand to proudly plead guilty to condescending to Donald Trump, whom he had just called a "comical blowhard" in regretting that he was "conceivably a player" in the presidential race.

Mika Brzezinski is no fan of The Donald on the issues, so give her extra credit for sticking up for his relevance to the race.  Schooling Remnick, she said that Trump has the guts, which many lack, to "liquefy" the likes of George Stephanopoulos and others with one line. Mika was alluding to Joe Scarborough's statement to that effect from last week.

Net Neutrality Hits the Web, The Media Misses -- Badly
By Seton Motley | June 15, 2015 | 10:29 AM EDT

As we’ve often discussed, the Tech Media is just as hopelessly Leftist and lost as the broader Jurassic Press.  They are both echo chambers - talking points and terrible ideas bounce with great rapidity around their tiny little worlds.  They are the Bubble Boys (and Girls) of news.

When a Tech Media story crosses over to the broader Jurassic Press - their ridiculous Leftist repetitiveness is truly comical.  And highly disquieting.

On Friday, President Barack Obama’s huge Internet Network Neutrality power grab officially went into effect.  A crossover story - with predictable, pathetic Press results.

Foreign Affairs Writers: Stop Saying 'ISIS Is on the Rise' and Giving Their Wins Significance
By Tom Blumer | June 4, 2015 | 12:26 AM EDT

Foreign Affairs is "a multiplatform media organization with a print magazine, a website, a mobile site, various apps and social media feeds, an event business, and more." It is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an influential organization which has caught flak for decades, predominantly from the right, for undermining and misrepresenting U.S. interests.

One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize that CFR has significant influence on Washington politicians and the press. Thus, it's fair to say that contentions in a column in its flagship magazine by Bridget Moreng and Nathaniel Barr that recognizing the ISIS victory at Ramadi last month as significant is "dangerous," and that any kind of statement indicating that ISIS is on the rise feeds "directly into the group's narrative," are very disturbing (HT Patrick Poole at PJ Media):

New Yorker June 1 Cover Shows Excludes Black, Female GOP Candidates
By Tom Blumer | May 28, 2015 | 8:31 PM EDT

Old stereotypes die hard — especially the ones which have long been false.

The June 1 cover of The New Yorker Magazine depicts the Republican Party's current crop of declared and undeclared 2016 presidential candidates as an all-white-boys affair, showing seven of them in different locker-room postures, with Hillary Clinton peeping in through a window. How is this possible, you ask? Where are Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina? Obviously, presenting a segregated, chauvinistic image of the GOP is more important than dealing with reality (HT Patterico):

Paper on ‘Changing Minds’ on Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Retracted (Part 2 of 2): Press Retraction Efforts Largely Unacceptable
By Tom Blumer | May 28, 2015 | 5:16 PM EDT

As noted in my previous related post, one of the authors of a late-2014 study which made the nonsensical claim that “a single conversation (can) change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage,” causing "a cascade of opinion change," issued a retraction last week, because the data supporting it was faked. Since it was published in Science Magazine — and because it conveniently fit a leftism-advancing agenda — numerous press outlets ran stories on the study's results.

Now they're all having to run retractions and corrections. Besides the obvious problem that the lies have gotten a long head start, let's look at how the seven original publishers identified by Retraction Watch, as well as the Associated Press, have handled the matter. All too often the answer has been: "Not very well."