This week, NewsBusters is presenting the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Pantsuit Patrol Award,” for boosting Hillary Clinton. Winning this category was Mark Halperin, a veteran of ABC News and Time magazine, who gushed over Hillary: “The two words she needs are ‘fun’ and ‘new.’ And part of why yesterday was so successful is she looks like she’s having fun and she’s doing, for her, new stuff. We’ve never seen her get a burrito before. Fun and new.”
Hillary Clinton
By Curtis Houck | December 23, 2015 | 2:01 AM EST
Just over two weeks after the major network evening newscasts spent 24 minutes obsessing on December 8 over Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S., the three programs returned on Tuesday night to devote ten and a half minutes to Trump’s declaration that Hillary Clinton was “schlonged” in 2008 by losing to then-Senator Barack Obama.
By NB Staff | December 23, 2015 | 12:01 AM EST
The Media Research Center’s Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham made his latest appearance on the Fox News Channel (FNC) program The O’Reilly Factor Tuesday night for what was quite the lively segment with fill-in host Eric Bolling and ETWN correspondent Lauren Ashburn as Graham and Bolling spared with Ashburn over the media’s obsession with Donald Trump and double standard when it comes to exposing lies by Hillary Clinton.
By Curtis Houck | December 22, 2015 | 6:13 PM EST
The lead segment in the 3:00 p.m. Eastern hour of Tuesday’s CNN Newsroom featured quite the display of verbal fireworks as conservative writer Kurt Schlichter angered fill-in host Don Lemon when he invoked the Clinton sex scandals of the 1990's with former President Clinton turning “his intern into a humidor” while discussing vulgar comments made by Donald Trump.
By Curtis Houck | December 22, 2015 | 7:50 AM EST
Seeking to join in on the Star Wars: The Force Awakens hype, MSNBC’s Hardball kicked off Monday’s show with a spoof of the famous franchise’s opening credits that told of a “period of civil war within the Republican party” and “President Obama, Hillary Clinton, & the Republican establishment appear to have formed a coalition rejecting [Donald] Trump’s appeal to the DARK SIDE.”
By Mark Finkelstein | December 21, 2015 | 9:15 PM EST
Spine of Steele! Where has this feisty Michael Steele been? In this NewsBuster's view, the former RNC chairman has too often been the voice of the mushy Republican middle.
But on MSNBC's All In this evening, Steele forcefully advanced the GOP cause. For starters, Steele shocked guest host Alex Wagner when he said Donald Trump would beat Hillary Clinton in a debate. Steele then took on Howard Dean, mocking the former DNC chairman when he claimed Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz "know nothing" about foreign policy. For good measure, Michael accused Dean of "shilling for Hillary." Say it, Steele!
By Matthew Balan | December 21, 2015 | 5:08 PM EST
CNN's New Day on Monday actually spotlighted Hillary Clinton's false claim on Saturday that ISIS is "showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists." Chris Cuomo asserted that "it's very hard to translate it any other way...we can't find the videos." When liberal pundit Errol Louis speculated that Clinton's campaign would "migrate towards some kind of clarification," Cuomo replied, "How could you clarify it? How is it anything but wrong?"
By Brad Wilmouth | December 21, 2015 | 3:08 PM EST
Appearing as a guest on CNN's Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield to report on South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham's departure from the GOP presidential race, CNN's Kate Bolduan oddly claimed that the low-polling candidate's debate performances were "really widely, you know, seen as winners," inspiring agreement from host Banfield.
By Curtis Houck | December 21, 2015 | 1:06 PM EST
Liberal historian and former Johnson administration staffer Doris Kearns Goodwin was on Sunday’s Meet the Press panel and to the shock of no one, sang the praises of Hillary Clinton by proclaiming how she projected an “amazing...internal confidence” in the debate and has become “a better candidate now than she was six months ago” and from 2008.
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."
Writer Rebecca Traister: Obama and Hillary Represent ‘The Death Throes of Exclusive White Male Power In the United States’
By Tom Johnson | December 20, 2015 | 12:16 PM EST The current election campaign pits the forces of backlash (“the old and angry”) against the forces of frontlash (“the new and different”), and November’s vote will be “a referendum on the existence and civic participation of Americans who are not white men,” contended Traister in a Wednesday piece for New York magazine.
Traister posited that “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…represent an altered power structure and changed calculations about who in this country may lead,” but warned, “While the resistance may be symptomatic of death throes, a rage at the dying of the white male light, it nonetheless presents a very real threat…Imagine Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio in office with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court seats to fill. Voting: restricted. Immigration: halted. Abortion: banned. Equal pay: unprotected. Same-sex marriage: overturned.”
By Curtis Houck | December 19, 2015 | 10:54 PM EST
In the final set of questions of Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate prior to the closing statements, ABC’s co-moderator Martha Raddatz served up a massive softball to frontrunner Hillary Clinton concerning how former President Bill Clinton would function as a member of the First Family if Hillary is elected president.