NPR’s Steve Inskeep continued his media tour on Monday promoting his fawning sit-down interview with President by appearing with CNN Tonight host Don Lemon and, when asked about the President attacking the media for supposedly overhyping threats posed by ISIS, Inskeep stood up for the President by suggesting that it was “not a very outlandish idea that he's putting out there.”
Barack Obama
By Brad Wilmouth | December 22, 2015 | 3:56 PM EST
As MSNBC's Chris Matthews appeared on Tuesday's Andrea Mitchell Reports to promote his special on Donald Trump's life, substitute MSNBC host Luke Russert wondered why the "divisions that had ravaged the country" did not go away after President Barack Obama's election because "everybody thought that we were now coming into a post-racial society, that 'hope and change' was going to carry the day."
A bit later, he brought up segregationist Alabama Democratic governor and former presidential candidate George Wallace as he wondered whether Trump was more like Wallace or Ross Perot.
By Kyle Drennen | December 22, 2015 | 1:38 PM EST
On Tuesday, NBC’s Today devoted two full reports to President Obama appearing on Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The first report came late in the 7 a.m. ET hour, with co-host Carson Daly proclaiming: “President Obama and Jerry Seinfeld take a little spin on the South Lawn in a 1963 Corvette before they sit down for a candid conversation about life in the White House....[which] focuses more on the ‘lighter side of the presidency’...an opportunity to ‘pull back the curtain.’”
By Clay Waters | December 21, 2015 | 8:54 PM EST
New York Times White House reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis is sending Barack Obama into 2016 in style, with three successive stories focusing on various flattering angles of the president, who is shedding the lame duck stereotype and laying down accomplishments -- at least according to Davis -- although the poor president can’t enjoy a holiday getaway without world events intruding. On Monday she penned “Relishing a Respite in Hawaii, but Reality Is Never Far Away,” which portrayed as a burden the president’s visit with families of the victims of the San Bernardino attacks
By Tom Johnson | December 21, 2015 | 8:48 PM EST
Though Steve Benen, who's also the primary blogger for the MSNBC program's website, is a true-blue liberal, he thinks highly of the foreign-policy chops of some recent Republicans. In a Thursday post, Benen wrote that GOPers such as Richard Lugar and Brent Scowcroft were “learned” and “approached international affairs with [a] degree of maturity.”
That was then; this is now. Benen touched on, among other things, Ted Cruz’s pledge to “carpet bomb” ISIS and Marco Rubio’s remark that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was “not a mistake” to build a case that today’s Republican party “approaches foreign policy…with all the maturity of a Saturday-morning cartoon…The national GOP candidates are speaking to (and for) a party that has no patience for substantive details, historical lessons, nuance, or diplomacy.”
By NB Staff | December 21, 2015 | 6:16 PM EST
"Let's pretend that Marco Rubio were a Democrat." Members of that party would, "in a New York second," slam the Washington Post for the "bigotry and racism" in today's front-page hit piece, "Rubio's aloofness on stump unnerves GOP activists," the Media Research Center's (MRC) Brent Bozell noted in his appearance on the Dec. 21 edition of Fox News Channel's Your World w/ Neil Cavuto.
By Curtis Houck | December 21, 2015 | 4:43 PM EST
Both of the media-centered programs on CNN and FNC covered on Sunday the move by the New York Times from Friday to delete a line from an article about President Obama not fully realizing “the anxiety” of Americans following terror attacks due to his lack of exposure to cable news. Other than NPR TV critic Eric Geggans rushing to Obama’s defense on CNN’s Reliable Sources, the other panelists both denounced the Times for what they described as “outrageous,” “perplexing,” and “potentially damning.”
By Kyle Drennen | December 21, 2015 | 4:24 PM EST
Talking to NPR’s Steve Inskeep on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, fill-in anchor Luke Russert congratulated the Morning Edition host for teeing up the President to slam Republican critics as racist in a recent interview. A clip played of Inskeep asking the President: “Do you feel over seven years that you’ve come to understand why it is that some ordinary people in America believe or fear that you are trying to change the country in some way that they cannot accept?”
By Rich Noyes | December 21, 2015 | 9:11 AM EST
Last week, the Media Research Center announced our “Best Notable Quotables of 2015.” Over the next few days, we’ll present the most outrageous of this year’s Notable Quotables as a way to review the worst media bias of 2015. Today, the winner and top runners-up of our “Obamagasm Award,” for journalists who get thrills and tingles when they think about Barack Obama.
Leading Far-Left PR Firm Closes Over Sex Harassment and Assault Allegations; Press Coverage Is Minimal
By Tom Blumer | December 21, 2015 | 12:52 AM EST A leftist flack who has been waging his own personal war on women for at least a decade has been exposed. As a result, his far-left public relations firm, a leader in the field, has closed.
FitzGibbon Media shut down on Thursday. That's because Trevor FitzGibbon, the firm's founder and owner, who also was "a communications director for (now-President Barack) Obama’s 2008 campaign," has been accused by several now-former employees of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Though the defunct firm's client list reads like a Who's Who of "progressive" and radical causes, and despite how sensational charges such as these are usually considered ready-made clickbait in the press, the FitzGibbon shutdown has received minimal press exposure. The obvious comparative point, raised at TruthRevolt on Friday: "Just imagine if this were a GOP PR firm."
By Curtis Houck | December 20, 2015 | 7:00 PM EST
Appearing exclusively on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd repeatedly pressed Speaker Paul Ryan to denounce conservative radio talk show hosts Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin over their criticism of the recently-passed omnibus bill and Todd demanded to know how he’ll work with President Obama to “lay the groundwork” to end political polarization. Todd asked, of the talk show hosts, whether their “rhetoric is inappropriate” or “[o]ut of line?”
By Curtis Houck | December 20, 2015 | 3:49 PM EST
Commenting on how The New York Times removed a phrase from a Friday article explaining how President Obama told a group of columnists that he hadn’t consumed enough cable news to fully understand the anxieties of Americans over terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Fox News Sunday panelist Brit Hume lambasted the President for his “snark” and frame of mind that makes him “impatient with the American people.”