While even MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell worried on Thursday about the “headwinds facing Hillary Clinton” amid the ongoing e-mail and Clinton Foundation scandals, USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page reassured her liberal journalist colleague: “You know, it's certainly true she has had a load of trouble in the national press, but you look at her appearance yesterday in South Carolina and she seemed pretty relaxed.”
USA Today
By Curtis Houck | May 20, 2015 | 8:23 PM EDT
On Wednesday, a federal grand jury indicted liberal activist and Florida postal worker Douglas Hughes on a total of six felony and misdemeanor charges in relation to his April 15 landing of gyropcopter on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol that, if convicted, could result in up to a nine-and-half-year prison sentence. When it came to the major broadcast networks covering this story on their Wednesday night newscasts, CBS and NBC neglected to devote even a second to this story.
By Dylan Gwinn | May 15, 2015 | 10:59 AM EDT
“Dad, what’s ‘humor?’
“Well, it was a way of talking about things – mixing truth with absurdity or irony – that helped us navigate uncomfortable issues. It made people smile and laugh. They even allowed it in the media sometimes. But that was all long ago, before the Rise of the Perpetually Offended.”
If you think that conversation is far-fetched, get a load of USA Today’s Ted Berg. Berg got sniffy about an exchange on Washington, DC’s 106.7 The Fan between the hosts and Washington Redskins General Manager Scot McCloughan, who jokingly discussed what position Washington Nationals slugger Bryce Harper might play if he played in the NFL.
By Brent Baker | May 12, 2015 | 7:50 AM EDT
Liberal media bias lives beyond the borders of the United States. As Michael Wolff noted in a front page article for Monday’s USA Today: “Many popular media notions of what a restless electorate is against (bankers, corporate power, tax dodgers, economic austerity) and what it is for (fundamental change, leveling the powerful, taxing the rich and big social program promises) came a cropper in the British election last week.”
By Tim Graham | April 13, 2015 | 12:07 PM EDT
The National Rifle Association annual meeting in Nashville drew nasty coverage from Anita Wadhwani, who reports for the Tennessean and for USA Today. On Saturday, the local paper reported “At NRA, little love for media turnout.” The NRA’s not used to fair and balanced coverage.
Wadwhani dramatically underscored their hostility on Monday with a story headlined “Big conventions, like NRA, can draw sex trafficking.” Commenters quickly jumped on the argument that the Tennessean wasn’t using that crooks-from-outside-town tactic for the home games of the Titans or the Country Music Association Awards.
USA Today Columnist Goes Where GMA Would Not: With Air 62 Pct. Cleaner, Look at Obama Himself As Possible Cause For Malia's Asthma
By Tom Blumer | April 12, 2015 | 8:41 PM EDT A Wednesday "Good Morning America" piece gave President Barack Obama an open mic to claim that, in ABC's words, "climate change became a personal issue for him when his older daughter Malia, now 16, was rushed to the emergency room with an asthma attack when she was just a toddler."
Somehow, ABC managed to avoid another possible contributor — besides the obvious possibility that Malia developed asthma independent of external influences — namely the President's 30-year smoking habit. He is said to have quit once and for all in 2011. USA Today columnist James S. Robbins wasn't impressed with the President's "reasoning," and with good cause, as he articulated in a Thursday evening column. He even managed to get a "there's been no warming for a long time" observation past USA Today's editors (links are in original; bolds are mine):
By Kristine Marsh | April 7, 2015 | 11:22 AM EDT
One would think the editorial boards of the nations’ top newspapers – journalism’s brightest and best – wouldn't lightly throw around inflammatory language, slurs and insults.
But it appears that an Indiana law protecting the religious freedom of businesses and individuals is so beyond the pale it had the journalistic high-priests at many of America’s top 20 papers sputtering “bigot,” “homophobia” and “anti-gay.”
By Tom Blumer | April 5, 2015 | 11:19 PM EDT
Earlier this evening, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued its report on Rolling Stone Magazine's November "A Rape on Campus" story. The report follows up on the magazine's request of Columbia to conduct an independent review of how the disastrously false 9,000-word story made it through to publication.
USA Today is reporting that for all the harsh criticism the piece's author and the others at the magazine received, and despite the fact that RS has now formally and fully retracted the story, no one is losing their job or suffering any other visible consequences. In fact, the magazine considers the whole affair "an isolated and unusual episode" (bolds are mine):
By Tim Graham | March 29, 2015 | 8:12 AM EDT
Nancy Armour was a sports writer for Associated Press for years before coming a sports columnist for USA Today. Or a sports censor. Armour believes anyone holding a conservative view based on some ancient holy text that homosexuality is a sin should be punished and exiled in some say. It's a "lunatic fringe," she writes.
When Indiana’s governor signed a law creating a religious-freedom exception for gay marriages, giving the right to refuse to participate or endorse it, Armour wrote “NCAA's next moves should be out of Indiana.” Everyone should evacuate the Hate State immediately!
By Tom Blumer | March 23, 2015 | 3:57 PM EDT
The press's reluctance to let go of a popular but debunked meme — in this case, the nonexistent "epidemic" of college campus sexual assaults — is sometimes inadvertently humorous, though still intensely annoying.
Take how John Bacon and Marisol Bello at USA Today characterized the news that "Police in Charlottesville were unable to verify that an alleged sexual assault detailed in a controversial Rolling Stone magazine article ever took place at the University of Virginia":
USA Today: 'Hundreds of Thousands' Could Be Disenfranchised By Supremes Allowing Wisconsin ID Law to Stand
By Tom Blumer | March 23, 2015 | 12:57 PM EDT Today the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Associated Press's Scott Bauer reported, "turned away a challenge to Wisconsin's voter identification law," meaning that "the state is free to impose the voter ID requirement in future elections." Bauer then focused on the impact of the state's off-year primary elections on April 7.
Bauer's relatively tolerable (for him) report tagged the law as "a political flashpoint since Republican legislators passed it in 2011 and Gov. Scott Walker signed it into law." Meanwhile, demonstrating that he will accept leftists' claims at face value even when they can't possibly make any sense, Richard Wolf at USA Today relayed a ridiculous claim made by the law's opponents (bolds are mine):
Starbucks, USA Today Claim Their 'Race Together' Intentions 'Are Pure,' But Their Race Knowledge Test Isn't
By Tom Blumer | March 21, 2015 | 11:49 PM EDT The Associated Press's most recent story on the controversial Starbucks USA Today "Race Together" campaign came out Wednesday evening.
In that story, AP Food Industry Writer Candice Choi quoted Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz at his company's annual shareholders' meeting predicting that "Some in the media will criticize Starbucks for having a political agenda," but that "Our intentions are pure." Perhaps they are, but I suspect that certain materials company and USA Today have produced in connection with the campaign won't pass any readers' "pure intentions" test. Take USA Today's "How Much of What You Know About Race Is True?" test. Full contents follow the jump.