New Jersey Senator Cory Booker is a telegenic, likable, and media-celebrated candidate. He's also struggling to garner a bare majority in the polls in a race she should be running away with. That said, the liberal media this year have largely failed to cover either Booker's campaign or the federal investigation into shady dealings under Booker's watch when he was Newark mayor. Enter Olivia Nuzzi, who explains for Daily Beast readers, "The Ugly Truth About Cory Booker, New Jersey's Golden Boy."
Cory Booker
By Laura Flint | August 1, 2014 | 9:55 AM EDT
Although Alex Wagner has donned new glasses for her news show Now, the liberal journalist seems unable to look beyond MSNBC’s favorite response to any Republican: bringing up race. On the July 31 edition, Wagner played a clip of Ari Melber’s July 30 interview with Senators Rand Paul and Cory Booker on their new drug law reform initiative the REDEEM Act – the Record Expungement Designed to ENhance Employment Act – and then asked the co-host of The Cycle why Paul and Booker were so “reticent to take up” the issue of “racial disparities inherent in our criminal justice system” and “plumb further depths of it.”
Even though the Senators were pushing a bipartisan bill on the traditionally liberal cause of criminal justice reform, Melber and Wagner were unable to resist weaseling race into the discussion, seemingly unhappy that both politicians were unwilling to play the race game. [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]
By Tom Blumer | July 30, 2014 | 10:46 PM EDT
Oh, how the pathetic progs have fallen.
Earlier today, the Hollywood Reporter told readers that MSNBC had a horrible July rating period. For the four weeks ended July 27, the self-described "lean forward" network saw "its total day average among the news demo of adults 25-54" drop by "33 percent from July 2013," causing it come in "below HLN by 16,000 viewers for No. 4 status":
By Ken Shepherd | July 30, 2014 | 6:08 PM EDT
This afternoon on MSNBC's The Cycle co-host Ari Melber conducted a live interview with liberal Democratic Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) and libertarian-conservative Republican Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) about their bipartisan Redeem Act proposal -- Redeem standing for Record Expungement Designed to ENhance EMployment.
Unfortunately for viewers, Melber insisted on playing the Lean Forward's favorite hand, flopping out the race card twice: by suggesting Sen. Paul once opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the second by pressing Sen. Booker to accept the left-wing premise that the nation's drug laws were intentionally racist by design [LISTEN to MP3 audio here; video follows page break].
Same WashPost That Praised Cory Booker, Despite His Phony Stories, Slams Black Republican Tim Scott As a 'Con Artist'
By Tim Graham | May 8, 2014 | 7:59 AM EDT
There are two black U.S. Senators, Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina. The Washington Post demonstrated a blatant partisan tilt toward the former by cooing over Booker’s brilliance and national profile last year.
The Post omitted Booker flat-out making things up, inventing a drug-dealer called “T-Bone” to tell inner-city stories. But on Thursday, the Post profiled Tim Scott and suggested his tendency to hang out in South Carolina without telling people he’s their Senator could make him look like a “con artist.”
By Tom Blumer | January 15, 2014 | 12:58 PM EST
Before anyone seeks to level a criticism for picking on someone's mistake, let's imagine what the press, which is so desperate to pin anything on Ted Cruz that one of its members recently tried to hold him responsible for others' comments on his Facebook page, would do to him if he made the error recently elected New Jersey Senator Cory Booker made two days ago on Twitter — and has yet to correct.
Booker was apparently taken aback when he read a USA Today story about how U.S. students' performance compares to those in Finland. One segment of Oliver Thomas's writeup noted that "in Finland, the child poverty rate is about 5%. In the U.S., the rate is almost five times as high." That prompted an outraged Booker — a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School, and a Rhodes scholar — to tweet the following (HT Twitchy):
By Tim Graham | October 17, 2013 | 11:00 PM EDT
The New York Times is always selling its favorite Democrats, like this gooey introduction from Kate Zernike on Thursday’s front page: “Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark easily won New Jersey’s special Senate election on Wednesday, finally rising to an office that measures up to his national profile.“
Who is it, precisely, who has built this expansive national profile? The politician, surely, but he’s had a lot of help from the national profile-builders of the major media. Zernike’s already measuring him for vice-president in 2016:
By Matthew Sheffield | October 16, 2013 | 5:27 PM EDT
Electoral politics is frequently more a contest of biographies than it is of the issues, particularly if there is no incumbent involved. Of course, having an inspiring biography is only worth as much as the media allow it to be.
Not only is Republican Senate candidate Steve Lonegan at a disadvantage in this regard—the press very rarely tells of his inspiring story of overcoming blindness and a modest economic background—he is also harmed by the fact that the Democrat he is running against in the special election that’s being held today, Cory Booker, has a long record of fabricating his own biographical details.
By P.J. Gladnick | September 7, 2013 | 8:20 PM EDT
Imagine a radio station that does an interview and a video of it goes viral on the Web. Of course, you would expect such a station to feature that video on its website, probably its front page. Well, radio station 1010 WINS in New York City had such a video but instead of featuring it, they completely ignored it despite the fact that the video was highlighted on such websites as the Drudge Report, the Daily Caller, and many others. As of this writing you won't find that video, which was originally posted on YouTube by tvnewsnj anywhere on the WINS website.
The interview with the woman, Donna Jackson, of the Newark Non-Violence Coalition is a damning indictment of the level of violence in Newark, Mayor Cory Booker who was accused of being MIA while campaigning for senator, and of the news media whom Jackson accused of suppressing any bad news about Booker. The only way one even knows that WINS conducted this interview is the microphone which identifies it as 1010 WINS. Read the highlights of the dramatic interview and you will understand why this video went viral all over the Web with the notable exception of the WINS website:
By Tim Graham | August 28, 2013 | 11:37 AM EDT
The national media’s love affair with New Jersey’s Cory Booker continued in The Washington Post on Tuesday. On the front of the Style section was the headline “A perfect senator for ‘This Town’? Newark’s Cory Booker isn’t lacking in ideas, energy or self-promotion.””
Who needs self-promotion when you’ve got national media valentine-writers? This Jason Horowitz profile continued on the back page of Style with the headline “Booker seems to be a man made for D.C.” It was illustrated by pictures with captions that called Booker “POPULAR” and “CAGEY.” The Post can’t wait for Booker to thump the Tea Party opponent for the Democrats:
By Paul Bremmer | August 20, 2013 | 2:46 PM EDT
On MSNBC’s Weekends with Alex Witt on Sunday, Ms. Witt brought on New Jersey Republican Steve Lonegan, the businessman and former small town mayor who is running against Democrat Cory Booker for the open U.S. Senate seat in the Garden State. The liberal media consensus around the country is that Booker is practically a shoo-in to win the election, and Witt was more than happy to beat Lonegan over the head with that narrative.
The host began with what seemed like a sympathetic question: “How tired are you of everybody saying this is a race that is Cory Booker's to lose?” Lonegan responded confidently that Booker was going to lose the race. To which Witt shot back, “Okay, based on what?”
By Andrew Lautz | August 14, 2013 | 3:44 PM EDT
The New York Times’s Raymond Hernandez delivered New Jersey primary election results with a spin Tuesday night, offering a mushy profile of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, the state’s landslide winner in the Democratic primary for United States Senate. The report’s lead lauded Booker as a “charismatic and media-savvy star in the Democratic Party,” noting the mayor’s efforts to “remake a notoriously troubled city.”
Hernandez celebrated Booker as a nonpartisan figure arguing for a “pragmatic brand of politics, favoring practical solutions over ideology.” And what about Booker’s Republican opponent, former Bogota Mayor Steven Lonegan? Well, Lonegan merited a mere paragraph in the Times’s New Jersey election coverage [picture after the jump, courtesy of Chang W. Lee, New York Times]: