Joseph Schaeffer documented many major media outlets' connections to abortion giant Planned Parenthood in a Wednesday item for Crisis, an online Catholic magazine. Schaeffer, a former managing editor for the Washington Times National Weekly, spotlighted how Planned Parenthood's "surprisingly close ties to major media corporations can help explain why leading disseminators of the news in the U.S. have shown so little interest in the [fetal organ harvesting] controversy."
USA Today
By Sarah Stites | August 6, 2015 | 2:16 PM EDT
Political analyst Kirsten Powers has some news for the Democratic Party: “It’s a baby!”
Powers is well known for her political spectrum-spanning views. She’s for same-sex marriage, but supportive of religious freedom. She’s a liberal, but also a Fox News fixture. However, in her recent USA Today column, Powers was simply a woman horrified by “the grotesque human rights abuses against unborn children by Planned Parenthood.”
“Democrats like to talk about the importance of being on the ‘right side of history,’” she wrote. But, in light of their reaction to the footage released by the Center for Medical Progress, Powers declared that they “have eschewed all concern for historical or moral rightness.”
By Dylan Gwinn | August 5, 2015 | 11:43 AM EDT
If USA Today has 99 problems, having too many issues to report that are of crucial interest to readers would clearly not be one of them.
On Tuesday, USA Today Sports ran a piece documenting the odyssey of transgender male athlete Keelin Godsey, an 11-time All American and National Champion in women’s hammerthrow.
By Tim Graham | July 27, 2015 | 7:11 AM EDT
The liberal media is on high alert for “transphobia,” especially when it comes to Bruce Jenner. No one is allowed to joke he’s still a male with male body parts. That’s doubly true for anyone in the entertainment industry, so you can imagine the reaction when rapper Eminem did a rap about tucking the bulge.
“Eminem’s freestyle rap slurs Caitlyn Jenner” was the USA Today headline. McPaper has become a blue-ribbon champion in political correctness. Kelly Lawler began on Friday:
Press Loved O'Malley's 'Climate Change Plan' in June, Ignores His Linking It to the Rise of ISIS Now
By Tom Blumer | July 21, 2015 | 11:16 AM EDT In June, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley unveiled a "climate change plan." The press loved it. Glowing articles appeared in many place, including the Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill and the Huffington Post, whose Kate Sheppard wrote that the former Maryland Governor had "Just Set An Extremely High Bar ... For 2016 Democratic Contenders."
Well, if they're so wired into climate change, why are they ignoring O'Malley's claim yesterday, in an interview with Bloomberg News, that climate change, aka the sanitized term for global warming, is largely responsibe for the rise of ISIS? Answer: Embarrassing comments by leftists are ignored until a Republican or conservative criticizes them. Then the story can be admitted into the news as a "so-and-so attacks" item.
By Tom Blumer | July 20, 2015 | 6:54 PM EDT
The company officially known as the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. has filed for bankruptcy for the second time in five years. This time around, the storied "A&P" name may completely disappear.
Coverage at USA Today by Nathan Bomey notes that "About 93% (of its workers) are represented by one of 12 different unions, and many of them have bumping rights that the company has described as a big barrier to reducing costs." Coverage at two of the three major business wire services, the Associated Press and Reuters, failed to mention the word "union" at all.
By Tim Graham | July 14, 2015 | 7:53 PM EDT
The ink isn’t dry on any Iran deal, and the Congress hasn’t seen the terms, but USA Today is already off to the spit-and-polish stand for Obama. The headline was “First take: Obama's winning streak continues with Iran deal.”
Reporter Ray Locker gushed:
"Derided as a lame duck after his Democratic Party suffered losses in last November's midterm elections, President Obama has carved out a series of accomplishments that show he remains consequential despite the fervent desires of his adversaries."
By Tom Blumer | July 12, 2015 | 11:07 PM EDT
Aamer Madhani at USA Today took the easy way out on Friday in covering the sharp increases in murders in many U.S. cities during the first half of this year.
He quoted Milwaukee's police chief bemoaning "absurdly weak" gun laws. He noted that "the increased violence is disproportionately impacting poor and predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods." He found a university prof to allege that there's a lack of resources to "fund a proactive law enforcement." What rubbish. The fact is that the "broken windows" approach to law enforcement, the "proactive law enforcement" initiative pioneered in New York City under Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s which made New York one of the safest cities in America, is being systematically discredited by the left and abandoned by many police departments, with all too predictable results.
By Brent Baker | July 10, 2015 | 2:09 AM EDT
Reviewing Reagan: The Life, by historian H.W. Brands, USA Today White House reporter Gregory Korte recited tired anti-Reagan cliches favored by liberals as he complained about “some notable omissions” in the book. In his piece which appeared in the “Life” section of Thursday’s newspaper, Korte regretted that “Brands makes no mention of Reagan’s 1980 ‘states rights’ speech in Philadelphia, Miss.” and, Korte rued, “Also missing: Any mention of the apocryphal ‘welfare queens,’ the epidemic in homelessness during his presidency, or hot-microphone threats to start bombing Russia in five minutes.”
By Tom Blumer | June 29, 2015 | 3:12 PM EDT
The world's financial markets had a terrible Monday. The debt crisis in Greece (population: 11 million) has been dominating the headlines and the press's attention, while serious deterioration in China (population: 1.36 billion) is getting short shrift.
It isn't just that the mainland Chinese stock market has broken the bear-market decline threshold of 20 percent in less than three weeks, dropping 21.5 percent from its June 12 peak. Its underlying economy, to the extent that such things can be ascertained in an information-controlled and news-manipulated society, appears to be in serious trouble. Associated Press reporter Ken Sweet, in a Friday Q&A writeup, emulated the worst tendencies of politicians. He posed a question about China's economy, "answered" it with a complete dodge, and pretended that its economy hasn't started slowing yet (bolds are mine throughout this post):
By Tom Blumer | June 13, 2015 | 1:18 PM EDT
In late September 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released "A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States, 2000-2013."
To say the least, the report's issuance, timed six weeks before the midterm elections, and its topic ("a specific type of shooting situation law enforcement and the public may face") were curious. Given the press's inclination to sensationalize and politicize any report on gun violence, its findings were especially vulnerable to misinterpretation. When that quite predictably happened, the FBI and the study's authors appear to have done nothing to correct errant media reports. It also appears that they would have remained silent about those media distortions if longtime gun rights advocate John Lott Jr. hadn't called them out in a professional criminal justice journal.
By Tim Graham | June 9, 2015 | 10:10 PM EDT
While network correspondents like ABC’s Terry Moran singled out “an amazing admission from President Obama” that there is still no "complete strategy" to defeat or degrade ISIS, USA Today’s front page on Tuesday carried an upbeat headline in all caps: “OBAMA VOWS TO BOLSTER IRAQIS.”
The brief ten-paragraph front-pager by Kim Hjelmgaard and Jim Michaels never included a quote from Obama saying there still wasn’t a strategy. It only referred to pledges to improve training: