This week, NewsBusters is presenting the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Pantsuit Patrol Award,” for boosting Hillary Clinton. Winning this category was Mark Halperin, a veteran of ABC News and Time magazine, who gushed over Hillary: “The two words she needs are ‘fun’ and ‘new.’ And part of why yesterday was so successful is she looks like she’s having fun and she’s doing, for her, new stuff. We’ve never seen her get a burrito before. Fun and new.”
Time
By Tom Blumer | December 15, 2015 | 3:00 PM EST
The year isn't even over, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Time's 2015 Person of the Year, has begun to act against the primary reason why the magazine chose her.
To refresh from a NewsBusters post last week, Time's Nancy Gibbs cited three reasons for the choice. The clearly most important one, from their perspective, was Merkel's virtually unilateral decision that Germany "would welcome refugees as casualties of radical Islamist savagery, not carriers of it" without apparent restriction. Now Merkel has, as described by a writer at Time Inc. sister publication Fortune, "backpedaled" from that stance.
By Ken Shepherd | December 10, 2015 | 5:04 PM EST
Today liberal Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) announced he is issuing an executive order to forbid gun sales in the Nutmeg State to any individual who happens to ping the federal no-fly list. Time magazine's John Samburn dutifully reported the development but without giving any consideration to the reaction from critics who charge it infringes on the Second Amendment rights of innocent Americans by a deprivation of their due process rights.
By Tom Blumer | December 9, 2015 | 11:58 AM EST
In an announcement which deservedly carries far less weight than it has in the past, Time Magazine (1997 circulation, 4.2 million; current circuation, 3.3 million) has named German chancellor Angela Merkel its 2015 Person of the Year.
The stated reason for her selection: "Not once or twice but three times this year there has been reason to wonder whether Europe could continue to exist, not culturally or geographically but as a historic experiment in ambitious statecraft." Time believes that Merkel saved the day each time. It seems highly unlikely that she would have risen to the top of the pack without the third item the magazine's Nancy Gibbs cited, namely Merkel's open-borders acceptance of migrants erroneously described as "refugees" dozens of times in its various supporting articles.
By Scott Whitlock | October 28, 2015 | 5:06 PM EDT
The November 2 issue of Time magazine investigated the “dodgy claims” of a female presidential candidate. Of course, the subject was Republican Carly Fiorina and not Democrat Hillary Clinton. In a cover story entitled “Carly Fiorina’s Convenient Truths," writer Philip Elliott openly attacked, “Dodgy claims are becoming a Fiorina hallmark.”
By Jeffrey Meyer | October 22, 2015 | 10:47 AM EDT
During CBS This Morning’s daily “Headlines” segment on Thursday, co-host Norah O’Donnell eagerly touted a piece by Time magazine which “reports on Congressman Paul Ryan accused of hypocrisy.” The CBS reporter mentioned no names who accused Ryan of “hypocrisy” when she promoted the article and instead noted that “Ryan said if he were to serve as House Speaker he would not give up spending time with his family. Critics say Ryan has opposed measures to help families.”
By Melissa Mullins | October 20, 2015 | 5:41 PM EDT
After restaurateur Danny Meyer decided to stop tipping at his restaurants last week, the question of whether or not tipping should be banned has been pushed to the forefront in the mainstream media. So, should restaurants ban tipping? Apparently economics journalist Stephen J. Dubner thinks so, citing everything from economics to racism as to why tipping should be done away with all together. Time magazine published his commentary under the headline, "Tipping Was Always a Bad Idea."
By Matthew Balan | October 10, 2015 | 10:10 AM EDT
Jennifer Latson paid tribute to communist thug Che Guevara on the anniversary of his death in a gushing Friday item on Time magazine's website. Latson marveled how the Argentinian radical "might have considered the United States his worst enemy, but he faced an even greater threat to his revolutionary ambitions: asthma." The writer later touted that "asthma didn't keep him from embracing the rowdiness of youth," and that "it didn't prevent him from following a rugged revolutionary road to Cuba."
By Scott Whitlock | September 28, 2015 | 4:10 PM EDT
A snide Time magazine chided the organization behind the Planned Parenthood sting videos, insisting that “fury often matters more than facts.” In the October 5 issue, Alex Altman profiled David Daleiden and lectured, “In the midst of a political storm, fury can often matter more than the facts. An activist with an agenda can shape policies that affect millions.”
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):
By Julia A. Seymour | July 29, 2015 | 11:09 AM EDT
Fear often trumps facts in media coverage. The past several years of worries about dying colonies of bees was certainly no exception, but The Washington Post recently supplied some much-needed sting to the honeybee situation.
News media scare stories about bee deaths and the label that came to describe the occurrence -- Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) -- saturated the news. Magazines, broadcast networks and left-wing websites blamed bee deaths on a host of factors, including cell phones, pesticides, mites and fungi. Oh, and global warming, of course.
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."