ABC's Good Morning America on Thursday ignored a new report indicating that Hillary Clinton's favors for donors to her family's foundation go back to her days as a U.S. Senator. CBS This Morning allowed 42 seconds on the Clinton Foundation scandal in general, but didn't specifically mention the new allegations. "Former President Bill Clinton is defending his family's charity and rejecting charges that some contributors are looking for political favors."
Bill Clinton
By Tom Blumer | June 8, 2015 | 11:13 AM EDT
The business press has gotten really excited about the possibility — some of them are even treating it as a probability — that the first-quarter's recently reported annualized economic contraction of 0.7 percent will go positive if it gets revised for so-called "residual seasonality."
"Residual seasonality" is "the manifestation of seasonal patterns in data that have already been seasonally adjusted." (Supposedly, the way to fix this is add more "seasoning.") On April 22, CNBC's Steve Liesman contended that it's been a chronic 30-year problem. As far as I can tell, no one in the press has followed up on that claim. If they had, they would have found that it has not been a 30-year "problem," and that it's a "problem" remarkably unique to the presence of Democratic Party presidential administrations and policies:
Mark Halperin Comically Accuses Those Outraged by NY Times Rubios' Speeding Tickets Story of Double Standard
By Tom Blumer | June 7, 2015 | 11:57 PM EDT In a contest for the most consistent media fool of the year, Bloomberg's Mark Halperin would be an early favorite to take the top prize for 2015.
This year, Halperin has already had at least three instances of outrageous hackery. As will be seen, for sheer hypocrisy, his most recent is arguably his worst.
By Tom Johnson | June 7, 2015 | 5:20 PM EDT
Never mind the vast right-wing conspiracy, suggests Michael Tomasky in the June 25 New York Review of Books. What Hillary Clinton needs to concern herself with are 1) a possible vast mainstream-media conspiracy and 2) her and her husband’s propensity for shadiness and avarice.
In a nearly 3,800-word article that’s ostensibly a review of Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash but in classic NYRB fashion is more about issues related to the book in question, Tomasky delves into topics including Clinton Foundation fundraising practices; the Clintons’ whopping income from speechmaking; and how they should clean up their act regarding both so that they don’t impede Hillary’s presidential campaign.
Tomasky also analyzes, and largely endorses, the idea stated in early May by Politico’s Dylan Byers that “the national media have never been more primed to take down Hillary Clinton (and, by the same token, elevate a Republican candidate).” Tomasky specifies one extremely prominent northeastern liberal newspaper that’s “worth keeping an eye on” given its putative record of anti-Clinton reporting.
By Curtis Houck | June 4, 2015 | 12:21 AM EDT
On Wednesday evening, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC marked five days since any of networks last covered a Clinton scandal while they combined to ignore news that a Democratic member of Congress has called for an independent review of Clinton’s e-mails, a House committee hearing covered her e-mail scandal, and a report that Bill Clinton took in $26 million from a Swedish group that was lobbying the State Department on Iran sanctions.
By Mark Finkelstein | June 3, 2015 | 9:05 AM EDT
Mika Brzezinski apparently thinks that when it comes to discussing Bill and Hillary Clinton— those paragons of integrity—certain subjects should be taboo.
On today's Morning Joe, Mika took umbrage that about-to-announce Bobby Jindal dared mention that Bill had lied about Monica Lewinsky. Mika was miffed that Jindal thought it was "blasé" to bring up Monica. She later called the Louisiana governor "jabby" for having done so.
By Rich Noyes | June 2, 2015 | 8:57 AM EDT
This week, with George Stephanopoulos under fire for his donations to the Clinton Foundation, the BBC's Katty Kay declares it impossible to find "a partisan bent" in any of his work at ABC News. And, USA Today's Susan Page cannot fathom why the scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton would duck questions, because "she can handle any question you throw at her....She does it very well."
By Curtis Houck | May 28, 2015 | 4:32 PM EDT
The latest network blackout concerning one of the Clinton scandals came to an end on NBC Thursday as a segment on Today by correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned an AP story from two days before exposing what appears to be a shell company run by former President Bill Clinton. ABC and CBS continued their streaks of ignoring it with all three having yet to utter a word about an International Business Times article explaining how Clinton Foundation donors received weapons deals with the State Department while Hillary Clinton was overseeing the agency.
By Tom Blumer | May 27, 2015 | 3:57 PM EDT
The Associated Press and Stephen Braun did all they could to cover for the Clintons yesterday.
First, the wire service attached the most boring headline imaginable to Braun's story about Bill Clinton's shell company shenanigans: "Bill Clinton company shows complexity of family finances." The message to subscribers, particularly the broadcast networks: "This is boring and time-consuming. Don't waste your time reading this, let alone using it." As Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters noted early this afternoon, "All three networks on Wednesday ignored the latest questions to hit the Clintons and their foundation." So if there was a strategy, it worked. Braun's story was seemingly designed to induce a MEGO (my eyes glaze over) reaction:
By Scott Whitlock | May 27, 2015 | 12:24 PM EDT
All three networks on Wednesday morning ignored the latest questions to hit the Clintons and their foundation. The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that "newly released financial files on Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton's growing fortune omit a company with no apparent employees or assets that the former president has legally used to provide consulting and other services."
By Matthew Balan | May 26, 2015 | 3:39 PM EDT
On Tuesday's New Day, CNN's John King touted Bill and Hillary Clinton's participation in a Memorial Day parade in Chappaqua, New York. King played up how "we don't see them together in public all that often," and gushed over how it was apparently "smart on her part" for not taking "any questions about politics."
By Matthew Balan | May 22, 2015 | 5:43 PM EDT
Friday's New Day on CNN played up that the Hillary Clinton e-mails revealed by the New York Times "dispute the narrative that has been around for two years that she was trying to cover something up" about the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, as Alisyn Camerota put it. The CNN anchor also wondered, "Isn't this the opposite of what the GOP has been saying about her – that she...tried to keep it secret?"