The Wednesday editions of ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News each provided their own wrap-ups of the Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate from the night before, but the theme was predictably similar as both networks spun the event as illustrating “fierce opposition” and “dramatic divisions” within the GOP on apparently every issue.
Jeb Bush
By Curtis Houck | November 11, 2015 | 8:39 PM EST
Filling in for Scott Pelley on Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, Charlie Rose provided a wrap-up of Tuesday’s Fox Business Networks Republican presidential debate and seemed exasperated when he wondered to Face the Nation anchor John Dickerson “why” did the GOP candidates level “a lot of attacks on Hillary Clinton.”
By Curtis Houck | November 10, 2015 | 8:46 PM EST
Offering analysis of the first Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate on the 8:00 p.m. Eastern edition of CNN’s AC360, CNN political commentator and Jeb Bush supporter Ana Navarro lamented that Senator Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and his “passionate voice” was excluded from the undercard event.
By Rich Noyes | November 9, 2015 | 9:16 AM EST
During the past three months, the big broadcast networks have essentially stopped covering most of the GOP presidential candidates, a lack of national news attention that presumably affects the national poll ratings used to determine which candidates are included in televised debates. Instead of covering the top 10 Republican candidates, or the entire current field of 15 candidates, the networks have now essentially pared down the field to five candidates: Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina.
By Brad Wilmouth | November 8, 2015 | 5:02 PM EST
On Friday's Real Time on HBO, host Bill Maher aimed venom at a number of conservative public figures as he referred to Uncle Ben's rice in a racially tinged joke about Dr. Ben Carson, and asserted that it is President Reagan's fault that many middle aged white Americans have personal problems that lead them to drunkenness, heroin addiction, and early death, as the HBO host tagged them "Trump voters."
By Mark Finkelstein | November 4, 2015 | 6:41 PM EST
Can you imagine the liberal outrage if a Republican called a prominent African-American Dem candidate "Chauncey Gardiner," the simple soul from the Peter Sellers film Being There? The cries of racism might well cost such a hapless Republican his job.
But don't expect James Carville to pay any price. On today's With All Due Respect, Carville said that a frustrated Bush "can't believe that Chauncey Gardiner [laughs] and Trump and all these people are running ahead of him." Given that Carson and Trump are the two front-runners, and that Carson, while brilliant, is soft-spoken, there would seem little doubt that Carville meant his Chauncey crack for Carson.
By Matthew Balan | November 4, 2015 | 5:01 PM EST
On Wednesday's New Day, Jamie Gangel broke CNN's routine of hounding Republican/conservative guests with a mostly non-confrontational interview of Jeb Bush. Gangel only mildly pressed the GOP presidential candidate on the issue of his recent move to target competitor Marco Rubio: "You went after him [Rubio] for missing votes. But he hit back, and some people think he got the better of the moment. Was it a mistake to attack him on that?" She later labeled Bush "a decent man...a hard-working man...[and] a fixer as governor with a great reputation."
By Scott Whitlock | November 3, 2015 | 12:58 PM EST
It was Republican bashing all around on CBS This Morning, Tuesday. Bloomberg journalist and author John Heilemann appeared on the show and knocked the “xenophobic” Donald Trump and the “roundly mocked” Jeb Bush. Heilemann allowed that “There are people who really like the way he [Trump] talks about China, the way he talks about immigration, the kind of nationalist, some would say xenophobic” rhetoric.
By Jeffrey Meyer | November 1, 2015 | 11:59 AM EST
During a panel discussion on NBC’s Meet the Press about the state of Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, liberal New York Times columnist David Brooks used a crude analogy to explain how Bush should turn around his struggling candidacy.
By Matthew Balan | October 30, 2015 | 10:13 PM EDT
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.
By Tom Johnson | October 30, 2015 | 9:21 PM EDT
The New York magazine writer-at-large and former New York Times columnist and theater critic says Jeb's problems included not only Dubya’s war in Iraq and pre-9/11 “national-security failures” but also the supposedly unsavory, extreme-right types that 41 and 43 attracted to the GOP, thereby contributing to its ruin.
By Curtis Houck | October 30, 2015 | 2:36 PM EDT
While much of the media ruled that Jeb Bush did not have a satisfactory debate performance on Wednesday, the sentiment stretched even into the late-night comedy shows as ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel panned the “embarrassing” Bush on Thursday for attacking Rubio on an issue “that literally no one outside of Florida cares about” concerning his Senate attendance record.