By Tom Blumer | August 31, 2012 | 6:39 PM EDT

This afternoon, NB's Kyle Drennen did a great job of runnng down the pathetic contention by establishment press "fact-checkers" that vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan somehow lied or misled viewers during his speech Wednesday night concerning the closure of the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin and what presidential candidate Barack Obama said at the plant in 2008.

No, WaPoNew York Times, and the Associated Press (called out by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air), the plant didn't close before Obama was elected; it closed in April 2009. But since we're on the topic of lies about auto plant shutdowns, let's look at one from late April and early May 2009 told by President Barack Obama himself with the assistance of his car czars and other apparatchiks. I blogged about this in mid-May 2009. My full post, which also appeared at NewsBusters, includes noting non-existent national press coverage (only the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Stephen Koff and other local reporters in the towns affected raised their voices). 

By Ken Shepherd | August 16, 2012 | 3:45 PM EDT

As we at NewsBusters have documented repeatedly, MSNBC has done its level best to hype voter ID laws as a "voter suppression" attempt by the GOP to "disenfranchise" voters who traditionally fall into the Democratic column. Today's MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts was no exception.

Roberts informed viewers of ruling by a judge on the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court yesterday -- read the PDF of it here --  that refused to grant a temporary injunction to block the state's new photo ID law. To discuss the ruling and the decision by opponents of the law to appeal, Roberts interviewed Penda Hair of the liberal Advancement Project, a group opposed to new voter ID laws. However, Roberts both failed to bring on anyone who would defend the law nor did he press Hair with any tough questions. Additionally, Roberts let Hair get away with a misleading argument about early voting in the neighboring state of Ohio.

By Ken Shepherd | August 9, 2012 | 6:00 PM EDT

A small business owner in a crucial swing state has found herself losing business from loyal customers due to her ad being featured in a Mitt Romney campaign ad. It seems her customers believe she is a Romney backer, but in fact she prefers to keep politics out of her business. And so this business owner demanded that the Romney camp either pull the ad or blur her deli's name from the frames that it's in. The campaign, she says, ignored her pleas.

You didn't hear about that story? Well, you certainly would if it actually happened, but, you see, this is the case of deli owner Debra Krause-McDonnell whose complaint is with President Obama's reelection campaign, reported Jane Prendergast in today's Cincinnati Enquirer:

By Tom Blumer | July 26, 2012 | 8:25 AM EDT

On May 2, Matt Sheffield at NewsBusters ran down a list of national media outlets which failed to report the Occupy movement connections of the five men arrested by the FBI for plotting to blow up a suburban Cleveland bridge, despite the fact that the Cleveland Plain Dealer began noting those relationships from the get-go.

Matt wrote that the Associated Press recognized the connections, but watered it all down by "letting an Occupy Cleveland spokesman's claim the men 'weren't affiliated with or representing the group' go unchallenged." Yesterday, after one of the five arrested entered a guilty plea to avoid a probable life sentence, an unbylined AP report waited until the final of 13 paragraphs to even mention Occupy, and then proceeded to engage in the same dishonest downplaying -- even though evidence revealed a few days after Matt's post proved an undeniable, high-level relationship (bolds are mine; HT Instapundit):

By Brent Bozell | July 10, 2012 | 10:33 PM EDT

Barack Obama has trouble telling the truth.

This is the man who admitted his memoir "Dreams of My Father" was semi-fictional. “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people, I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” Translation: On some pages, I’m taking poetic license with the facts to burnish my image.

By Clay Waters | July 6, 2012 | 5:01 PM EDT

New York Times reporter Mark Landler spun for the president in Ohio in Friday's "Obama, Hitting Road in Rust Belt, Offers Tough Talk on Jobs and Trade."

Landler, whose reporting on Obama is getting more gushy as the election nears, shone his journalistic flashlight on any slivers of good economic news he could find and suggested they would benefit Obama in the Midwest.

By Tim Graham | July 6, 2012 | 3:33 PM EDT

Neil Munro at The Daily Caller is pointing out that Barack Obama has a truth-telling problem when it comes to being outspent on his previous campaigns. Someone should alert Politifact and its users in the press corps.

“I got outspent when I ran [the] first time for Senate,” the president claimed in his campaign speech Thursday in Maumee, Ohio. Munro found "Obama was misleading." Yeah, that's one word you could use.

By Tim Graham | July 5, 2012 | 11:34 PM EDT

As Obama prepared to tour northern Ohio cities by bus on Thursday, NPR's Morning Edition was trying to take apart the Republican challenger to liberal Senator Sherrod Brown. First, correspondent David Welna dismissed 34-year-old GOP state treasurer Josh Mandel as someone "who could easily be mistaken for a teenager."

Then he added that "independent" (read: liberal media elite) fact-checkers think he's throwing false allegations at his liberal opponent, like he was the "deciding vote" for ObamaCare:

By Tom Blumer | May 6, 2012 | 10:28 AM EDT

The last national press reports on the five men arrested Monday for plotting to blow up a Cleveland-area bridge reassured everyone that none involved were in responsible roles in the Occupy movement. On Thursday, the Associated Press's Thomas J. Sheeran wrote that Occupy Cleveland spokespersons "said the men were associated with the group but didn't represent Occupy Cleveland or its non-violent philosophy." An earlier AP report paraphrased a claim that they "had been associated with the anticorporate Occupy Cleveland movement but don't share its nonviolent views." Reuters carried this quote: "They were in no way representing or acting on behalf of Occupy Cleveland."

Well, last night, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Michael Sangiacomo reported that at least one of the five was once in a sufficiently responsible position within the Occupy group to represent it while signing a lease for space the group used. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the wire services just noted and others will do with what follows:

By Tom Blumer | April 11, 2012 | 12:51 PM EDT

On March 1, 2011, 14 year-old Makayla Norman of Dayton died of neglect at the hands of adults (her mother and three others) who were responsible for her care and safety. Makayla weighed 28 pounds when she died, and was found "covered in bedsores, living in filth and starved to the point the she looked more like a skeleton than a teenager." On Friday, her mother pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and endangering children. The cases of the three other adults go to trial on April 16.

In January, an investigative report by Cox Newspapers Dayton-area staff writers Josh Sweigart and Doug Page identified several parties who could and should have prevented the neglect in the first place, or detected it while in progress: "the home care agency responsible for feeding her"; "an extensive bureaucracy where officials say fraud is a massive and growing problem"; her case manager (among those indicted), who "worked for CareStar of Ohio"; and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Bizarrely, two months later, while barely mentioning any of the aforementioned parties in their report, Mary McCarty and Margo Kissell at the Dayton Daily News, using questionable methods and verbiage (to be noted later), decided that one other element in Makayla's life should be nominated to receive part of the blame -- homeschooling:

By Ken Shepherd | February 28, 2012 | 4:27 PM EST

Sure, there is really "no way, theoretically or otherwise" that yesterday's school shooting in Chardon, Ohio, could have been prevented, self-confessed Second Amendment opponent MSNBC's Alex Wagner noted in a closing commentary on her eponymous program this afternoon. She then immediately delving into a gripe that America's fruited plain is riddled with incredibly lax gun laws thanks to that most evil of evil bogeymen, the "gun lobby" :

By Tom Blumer | November 23, 2011 | 6:54 PM EST

I admit that I haven't kept up with trends in establishment press local crime coverage. But an item at Toledo-area blogger Maggie Thurber's place about a robbery-related story in Monday's Toledo Blade caught my attention. I hope the perspective Maggie saw on display is an outlier. I'm concerned that it may not be.

You see, someone robbing a convenience store in the Glass City was killed during the attempt, and the "Blade Staff" in the unbylined story called him a victim -- twice: