To accompany ABC's tough interview of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Friday's Nightline quoted New Jersey Democrats slamming him as a vengeful "bully."
World News anchor Diane Sawyer noted that "critics remember the lure of Christie's brash personal style" before airing clips of Democrats pounding him. Sawyer pressed Christie repeatedly over New Jersey's bridge closure scandal, but she barely mentioned Benghazi in an October 2012 interview with President Obama, a month before the election.
Chris Christie
By Matt Hadro | March 28, 2014 | 2:54 PM EDT
By Randy Hall | March 13, 2014 | 8:11 PM EDT
During a brief visit to Washington, D.C., Deborah Turness – the president of NBC News – is slated to discuss the fate of the network's Sunday morning program with host David Gregory and executive producer Rob Yarin regarding possible changes to the format of Meet the Press, which recently saw its ratings tumble to their lowest point since the third quarter of 1992.
According to Dylan Byers, a columnist at the Politico website, the gathering is “part of Turness's ongoing effort” to improve the long-running news and interview show, which ended 2013 behind both ABC's This Week and CBS's Face the Nation.
By Cal Thomas | March 12, 2014 | 3:21 PM EDT
OXON HILL, Md. -- The first "people" I recognized on arriving at last week's Conservative Political Action Committee gathering just outside Washington were two "stormtroopers" and a Wookiee from the 1977 film "Star Wars."
Some of the speeches also expressed sentiments from the past, though not as cleverly as those in costume: Obama is a bad president, even a bad man. America looks weak before the world. Government is too big and taxes too high. "The Force" seemed to have left the building, or perhaps it never arrived.
By Ken Shepherd | March 10, 2014 | 5:27 PM EDT
When Obama IRS official Lois Lerner yet again pleaded the Fifth Amendment last Wednesday rather than answer challenging questions during a congressional hearing, the liberal media stifled yawns. To the extent the March 5 hearing was covered, media attention turned to the post-hearing fireworks between ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) rather than the substance of the questions Ms. Lerner refused to answer on the record under oath.
Fast forward to Monday afternoon with MSNBC.com lamenting how "Christie aides double[d] down on Fifth Amendment" in a state investigative probe of the Bridgegate scandal. Here's how staff writer Aliyah Frumin reported the story [emphasis mine; see screen capture below page break]
By Kyle Drennen | March 10, 2014 | 10:20 AM EDT
On Sunday's NBC Meet the Press, host David Gregory wondered if New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's 2016 presidential chances were "done" following the Bridgegate scandal. In response, National Journal's Ron Fournier cited Christie's Friday CPAC address: "Ironically, he might have done himself some good with the Republican primary audience because he now can beat up on the media." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Gregory joked: "Thank God the media's still here because what else would they talk about CPAC if we weren't here to kick around?" Fournier replied: "It's all we're good for sometimes."
By Randy Hall | March 8, 2014 | 9:15 PM EST
Newsweek, the weekly magazine with a penchant for controversial covers, reappeared in retail outlets across the country on Friday after more than a year as a subscription-only digital periodical. According to the Daily Beast, the publication's online partner, “a historic title is back from the dead."
As has often happened in the past, the new magazine's cover story has generated a controversy, this time by identifying Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto as the elusive founder of the crypto-currency Bitcoin, causing reporters from many other news outlets to swarm outside his home in Temple City, Calif.
By Clay Waters | March 8, 2014 | 5:23 PM EST
The New York Times covered the latest annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with its usual mix of suspicion, overloaded labeling bias, and anti-GOP doomsaying. The paper's skeptical coverage of the three-day conservative confab, held this year at National Harbor on the Potomac, opened with two stories in Friday's edition, one on the organizers's attempts to put "a less strident face on the convention and the party."
Reporter Jonathan Martin's rundown of the speech by Republican star Sen. Marco Rubio, still in the mix for the 2016 presidential race, contained nine "conservative" labels, which actually makes it a model of restraint for the Times compared to last year's label-heavy reporting. Yet the question remains: Just how many "conservative" labels do you need, when the conference has the actual word "conservative" in the title?
By Paul Bremmer | February 25, 2014 | 5:21 PM EST
Is Joe Scarborough turning on MSNBC? On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, the host mocked the “total obsession” of “the media on the left” in their coverage of Chris Christie’s bridge scandal since early January.
Naturally, however, he failed to directly call out his own network for being at the forefront of the effort to destroy Christie.
By Jack Coleman | February 23, 2014 | 6:39 AM EST
You know that MSNBC has leaned too far forward into abject hackery masquerading as journalism when it gets slammed by Bill Maher, otherwise one of its most fervent defenders.
On his HBO show Friday night, Maher used the occasion of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow appearing as one of his guests to tell Maddow that her network's obsession with the Bridgegate scandal has become too much even for him. Maddow, not surprisingly, defended the coverage and, equally unsurprising, made a dishonest analogy in the process. (Video after the jump)
By Randy Hall | February 20, 2014 | 10:10 PM EST
One way the MSNBC cable channel can tell it's in trouble is when liberal comedian Bill Maher -- host of the Friday night HBO program Real Time who almost got his own show on the "Lean Forward" network -- posts a tweet accusing you of “turning into Fox News” and stating that the channel has “stopped leaning forward” since “Bridgegate has become your Benghazi.”
“I'm no good at being noble,” the self-proclaimed “passionate flaming liberal” continued in his rant entitled “MSNBC-YA,” but “it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little lanes of traffic don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
By Paul Bremmer | February 20, 2014 | 5:43 PM EST
If there was any doubt that MSNBC is a mouthpiece for liberal activism, Chris Hayes should have erased it on Wednesday’s edition of his program All In. Hayes was discussing MSNBC’s favorite current topic – the Chris Christie “Bridgegate” saga – with Dan Cantor, national director of the ultra-liberal Working Families Party.
Near the end of the discussion, Cantor optimistically declared his belief that Christie will be defeated in the end, thanks in part to Cantor’s own organization:
Rove Rips Former Ohio Gov. Strickland, Whose Admin Invaded Joe the Plumber's Privacy, for Criticizing Christie
By Tom Blumer | February 17, 2014 | 10:27 AM EST Democrat and former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, who has been "shadowing" Chris Christie while taking every possible opportunity to accuse New Jersey's GOP Governor of either "lying" or of being "the most inept, incompetent chief executive imaginable," tried his schtick yesterday morning on Chris Wallace's Fox News show.
Unfortunately for Ted, establishment Republican and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove was there to do what the press should have been doing, namely calling out his blatant hypocrisy. But the clever Strickland managed to get in the last word. Viewers not familiar with the details of how Strickland's Buckeye State government went after Joe the Plumber after his preelection encounter with Barack Obama in October 2008 will likely believe that the argument ended in a standoff. That situation needs to be remedied.