Friday's NBC Nightly News set aside just 34 seconds of air time to the Republican National Committee suspending its planned February 2016 debate with NBC. The evening newscast surrounded this coverage with over two minutes of reporting on other 2016 presidential campaign developments, focusing on the spat between Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. By contrast, ABC's World News Tonight and CBS Evening News devoted full reports to the RNC's suspension of the NBC debate, which was going to be co-hosted by Telemundo.
Ben Carson
By Curtis Houck | October 30, 2015 | 11:18 AM EDT
Making his now semi-frequent appearance on a primetime MSNBC show, lefty blogger Charles Pierce was on Thursday’s All In to trash the 2016 Republican presidential candidates as merely “a bunch of unruly, nasty children” during Wednesday’s CNBC debate and suggested that “the next one” should take place “in a sandbox.”
Daily Beast Pundit: On ‘Virtually Any’ Political Topic, What Ben Carson Says ‘Has No Basis in Real-World Fact’
By Tom Johnson | October 28, 2015 | 11:31 AM EDT Though Michael Tomasky is not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, he has a (liberal) layman’s curiosity about the workings of the human brain and mind which causes him to wonder how Ben Carson can be a “brilliant” surgeon but “an across-the-board nincompoop” when it comes to politics.
In a Monday column, Tomasky wrote, “Usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity…[h]e or she might be right wing or left wing…but [he or she] won’t be an idiot…But Carson is a political idiot…From science to foreign policy to the Constitution to virtually any political or historical or policy topic on which he chooses to speak, he says something that has no basis in real-world fact.”
By Mark Finkelstein | October 27, 2015 | 7:51 PM EDT
David Corn claims that there are "serious issues" about Ben Carson's Seventh Day Adventism faith. Great point, David. After all, for twenty years, Carson sat in the pews of a preacher who spewed "God damn America" hatred, a pastor that Carson chose to officiate his marriage and baptize his children.
Oh, wait: that wasn't Carson. It was Barack Obama, who chose Jeremiah "Chickens Coming Home to Roost" Wright as his personal pastor and faith guide. Never mind. On this evening's Hardball, Corn--an MSNBC analyst and head of the DC office of Mother Jones--claimed that Carson's religion needs to be investigated because it professes an end time. Guess what, David? All the Abrahamic religions do: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It's not a question of if, only when. So take your religious bigotry elsewhere, Corn.
By Matthew Balan | October 27, 2015 | 4:54 PM EDT
On Tuesday's New Day, CNN's Chris Cuomo bizarrely zeroed in on presidential contender Ben Carson's religious beliefs as a possible factor that could hurt his chances among the Republican base: "Is it fair criticism to look at Dr. Carson's faith being Seventh Day Adventist, in terms of how it may oppose evangelicals? There is a belief within the strictest tenets of Seventh Day Adventist belief that evangelicals will be going to hell. There are other extreme propositions in that faith, and in many."
By Matthew Balan | October 27, 2015 | 3:13 PM EDT
Chris Hayes made an inadvertent admission about the morality of abortion on his All In program on MSNBC on Monday. Hayes contended that in the case of Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, "It's very hard to get through an interview in which he doesn't compare something either to the Third Reich and Hitler or abortion, right? — the sort of, like, touchstones of human evil." The liberal host later claimed that he "meant slavery, clearly," after someone pointed out the line to him on Twitter.
By Tom Johnson | October 27, 2015 | 10:44 AM EDT
It’s a tall order for a black politician to become popular with “the de facto largest white identity organization in the United States,” but DeVega argues that Carson has pulled it off by “betray[ing] the Black Freedom Struggle and assault[ing] the truth in all its forms.” (As you probably assumed, “white identity organization” is DeVega’s description of the Republican party.)
In a Salon article, DeVega attacked Carson for his recent remarks likening abortion to slavery: “Ben Carson and the other conservatives who want to limit women’s reproductive rights and control over their own bodies have more in common with the whites who ran the slave labor rape and charnel camps of the American South than they do with Abolitionists such as John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Sojourner Truth, or William Lloyd Garrison.” (Italics in original.)
By Rich Noyes | October 22, 2015 | 9:59 AM EDT
On Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden ended his flirtation with a bid for the 2016 Democratic nomination, but only after an extended period in which the broadcast networks gave his non-candidacy more airtime than that of any declared Republican or Democratic candidate other than frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. From August 1, when the networks began covering the possibility of a Biden candidacy, through October 20, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news broadcasts devoted 98 minutes of airtime to the possibility of a Biden-for-President campaign.
By Mark Finkelstein | October 22, 2015 | 8:24 AM EDT
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were among the first in the media, going back months, to take Donald Trump seriously. In contrast, Bill Kristol had repeatedly declared that we had reached "peak Trump," only to find The Donald confoundingly continuing to climb in the polls.
Things boiled over on today's Morning Joe. Despite a fresh poll showing Trump with an astounding 48% of GOP voters in Massachusetts, Kristol blithely declared that Trump "is not going to be the nominee." That elicited sarcastic laughter from Scarborough, who shot back "we can show you clip after clip after clip after clip of your incorrect predictions about Donald Trump and his imminent collapse." Later, Kristol seized on a new poll from Iowa showing Ben Carson having overtaken Trump. Claiming that "you guys have been overestimating Trump and underestimating Carson," Kristol said he was "just trying to be helpful." An exasperated Scarborough exploded: "you're out of your mind. You're not trying to be helpful. You're trying to cover your a--. It won't work with us."
By Tim Graham | October 21, 2015 | 9:09 PM EDT
Roger Simon is “chief political columnist” at Politico, which means that the “chief” opinion there truly and deeply resides in the land of Democratic hackdom. This is the gentle soul who landed in our Best of Notable Quotables 2013 for writing “Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved? Answer: America.”
In the latest installment of sour Simon, Ben Carson is an utterly clueless wolf who’s lost chunks of his brain.
By Scott Whitlock | October 21, 2015 | 4:38 PM EDT
What’s going on here? Good Morning America, somehow, aired a shockingly positive portrayal of Ben Carson on Wednesday, promoting the Republican as “amazing” and having a “resume like no other candidate.” This is quite a change from ABC’s previous attacks on Carson.
By Tom Johnson | October 20, 2015 | 9:54 PM EDT
Daily Kos writer Denise Oliver-Velez has two plans related to New York state’s primary election next April: vote for Democrats, and give Ben Carson the finger. Carson won’t see it, but that’s not the point -- it’s a therapeutic gesture.
In a Sunday screed, Oliver-Velez, an adjunct professor of anthropology and women’s studies at SUNY New Paltz, charged that Carson “has become the antithesis of the civil rights struggle, directly attacking the gains we have made and are fighting to hold onto…He is not the first black man or woman used by those whose foot is on our necks to co-sign their ideology and practices, and he won't be the last. Nor is he the first to profit from it.”