Here’s something I bet you never imagined someone saying on MSNBC: “This [administration] is the most hostile to the media that has been in United States history.”
Yet there was syndicated columnist and former CNN correspondent Bob Franken saying so on Saturday’s MSNBC Live (video follows with transcript and commentary):
NB reader Gary Hall reports "It's not unusual to see a fake wrap front page at the LAT's - that's a full page ad that you peel off an throw away. Sometimes it's a half page that's wrapped around." (Washington Post readers often have a sticker advertisement pasted on the front page.)
But Wednesday's Los Angeles Times is dominated by an ad for the Disney cartoon movie "Frozen." This is the first time Gary remembers seeing this kind of promotion. (Visual here.)
The Washington Times and one of its former reporters, Audrey Hudson, sued the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday, accusing federal agents of illegally seizing the newspaper’s reporting materials during the execution of a search warrant in an unrelated case.
In a motion filed in federal court, the plaintiffs asked a judge to force the federal agency to return all reporting files and documents it seized from Hudson’s home office during a raid in early August.
"Look, folks, we love the filibuster when Democrats use it against Republicans, but really hate it when Republicans use it against Democrats."
If the New York Times editorial board were completely honest, that's exactly what they'd admit in print to their readers. Instead the Gray Lady keeps shifting her point of view on the parliamentary maneuver depending on whose ox is gored. On January 1, 1995, the Times gave the incoming Republican majority a new year's resolution: substantially trim back the filibuster to fall in line with the proposal of liberal Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin (emphases mine):
Armed with evidence compiled by NewsBusters senior editor and Media Research Center director of research Rich Noyes, MRC president Brent Bozell sent letters to members of the boards of directors of two prominent newspapers in Utah, demanding that they offer their readers fair and balanced coverage of U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R). You may recall that both the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News savaged the Tea Party conservative senator for his attempt to defund ObamaCare.
"Your paper can no longer claim that Sen. Lee’s strategy was out of proportion or radical," Bozell wrote Ellis Ivory, chairman of the board of directors for the Deseret News Publishing Company. "Already the nation is seeing ObamaCare for the disaster that it is" with "more than 3.5 million... losing existing health insurance plans as a result of ObamaCare," the MRC founder noted, adding:
Earlier today the Washington Post announced that it had hired National Review's Washington Editor Robert Costa. This marks perhaps the first time in decades that a top-tier "mainstream" news outlet has hired away a reporter from a right-leaning publication.
By contrast, left-leaning political magazines like the Nation, Mother Jones, or the New Republic have frequently been places where publications like the Post or the New York Times turn to for their reporter farm teams. Elite national media outlets have even taken somewhat frequently to hiring former Democratic political aides as their reporters as we've chronicled for years in our "Revolving Door" series.
Over the years, we’ve written a lot about long, slow ratings collapse of broadcast news. But ABC, CBS, and NBC aren’t the only ones experiencing this decline. As reported by David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun, the ratings for PBS NewsHour show are almost in a freefall, even compared to their commercial competitors.
By its own count, NewsHour had 2.5 million viewers in 2005. This year the show is at 1.3 million. That’s an astonishing drop, nearly 50 percent, unmatched by any of the commercial broadcast evening news shows.
Bill Moyers, the former LBJ press secretary who has made a career of producing partisan Democratic television shows at taxpayers’ expense, announced Wednesday that his latest program, Moyers & Company will end in early 2014.
While Moyers has never openly admitted to his obvious partisanship, his announcement of the show’s cancellation reeks of left-wing identity politics masquerading as news:
The Tea Party has been blamed for many things by outrage-seeking liberals. Until today, no one apparently thought to blame the political movement for the failure of the US Postal Service to boost its revenues.
In a fund-raising email sent to its subscribers, the far-left political magazine The Nation, claimed it needed more money because the Tea Party was causing postal rates to go up.
Pepsi and pop stars don’t mix, according to one food police group.
The D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) ran a full page “open letter” in Variety, telling pop singer Katy Perry to stop her work with Pepsi, on account of her influencing young fans. CSPI warned Perry that, “Soda companies are using you and other celebrities.” The letter then bashed her for not caring about her fans. ‘‘Drink Pepsi and you can be cool like Katy Perry’ is the takeaway message for your young fans. ‘Live for now’ – and worry about the health consequences later.” The letter ended by urging her not to “exploit that popularity by marketing a product that causes disease in your fans.”
CBS This Morning brought on New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson on Friday with all the honors, with Charlie Rose lauding her for leading her paper to four Pulitzer Prizes this year as “the first female” in the top job, and asking her how she’d put an “Abramson imprint” on the paper. But the interesting part came later.
Abramson agreed with her reporter David Sanger that the Obama administration is worse than the much-criticized Bush administration when it comes to cracking down on reporters seeking interviews with government sources. It was almost funny, as three different CBS hosts asked the question, like they could not accept the answer:
"With magazines, with movies, it’s always weird when things are targeted for young people yet they’re driven by people that are like 40 years too old. It can’t be like this 70 year old Jewish man that doesn’t leave his desk all day, telling me what the clubs want to hear."
So oddly said Miley Cyrus in an interview with Hunger TV Wednesday: