Bill Maher granted an interview with the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which mostly discussed his aversion to taping his HBO show Real Time instead of doing the show live – perhaps because that decision would mock the show’s title. But the jaw-dropping part came late in the article. Maher suggested the networks are “committing journalistic treason,” and Variety’s Brian Steinberg apparently failed to follow up.
Journalistic Issues
Salon Writer: Conservatives Who Routinely ‘Peddle False Narratives’ Shouldn’t Gloat Over Rolling Stone 'Debacle'
By Tom Johnson | April 8, 2015 | 3:08 PM EDT When it comes to false media narratives, the typical right-winger should be more concerned with the plank in his own eye than with the speck in the eye of a liberal. That, minus the allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, was the essential argument from Heather Digby Parton in a Wednesday column.
Parton sees Rolling Stone’s debunked, retracted University of Virginia rape story as one component of the right’s “new meme about liberal lies and false narratives.” This meme, she suggested, is wildly overblown (for example, even though “hands up, don’t shoot” was discredited, “young black males being unfairly targeted by police” still is a major problem) as well as hypocritical (e.g., Fox News has “peddle[d] false narratives” about matters such as the Benghazi attack and made a ton of money doing so).
Vox’s Ezra Klein: Comedy Central Hosts Noah, Wilmore Well-Suited For Era of Race-Conscious ‘Post-Obama Liberalism’
By Tom Johnson | April 2, 2015 | 2:08 PM EDT Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah are first-rate comedians, but beyond that, argues Klein, Comedy Central’s choice of two black hosts to succeed Stephen Colbert and (eventually) Jon Stewart was an extremely smart business move.
Noah and Wilmore have a “particular skill for limning America's complicated, and often infuriating, racial politics,” writes Klein, “and their takeover is a recognition of one of the lessons of Obama's presidency: American politics isn't moving past race. It's moving into it. And so, too, is the news business…[I]n the Obama years, attitudes toward politics have begun driving attitudes toward race. The result is that racial controversies are a bigger part of American politics right now than they were before Obama's election.”
Lefty Blogger Charles Pierce: It’s Extreme ‘Journalistic Malpractice’ Not to Report That the GOP Is ‘Demented’
By Tom Johnson | March 31, 2015 | 10:02 PM EDT Is the Republican party a political organization or “a terrarium of retrograde fauna”? Both, suggests Esquire’s Pierce, and if too few of the American people understand that, it’s in large part a result of, in his words, “the worst episode of journalistic malpractice that I can recall.”
What set Pierce off was a remark from a former Democratic congressional staffer, quoted in the newspaper The Hill, that "Elizabeth Warren is the mirror image of Ted Cruz, and if we aren't careful, she'll drive the Democrats into the same ditch Cruz is trying to drive the Republicans." Pierce says even though the Warren-Cruz comparison is “stupid and wrong...it is quintessential Washington political journalism.”
By P.J. Gladnick | March 26, 2015 | 1:45 PM EDT
A report by Jeryl Bier of the Weekly Standard reveals the shocking information that federal agencies have paid Politico nearly a million dollars in subscription fees since 2011 including nearly $432,000 just last year alone. An even barely skeptical mind would have to suspect that such fees were a payoff for either favorable coverage or to simply avoid reporting uncomfortable facts about those agencies.
By Tim Graham | March 18, 2015 | 2:35 PM EDT
In "The Big Story" at AP on Wednesday afternoon, Ted Bridis announced the latest news from The Most Transparent Administration In History: “The Obama administration set a new record again for more often than ever censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.”
Strangely, the AP headline is “US sets new record for denying, censoring government files.”
By Seton Motley | March 16, 2015 | 9:26 AM EDT
As we know - America’s media is for the most part decidedly Leftist, often befuddled and rarely right. So when they wade into an intricate issue like President Barack Obama’s Net Neutrality Internet power grab - we can only expect even more Leftism, befuddlement and wrongness.
On February 26, the Obama Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) pretended to be Congress and rewrote law. To suddenly start regulating the Internet under the 1934 Telecommunications Act - under rules written to regulate the landline telephone.
By Vanessa Viera | February 3, 2015 | 5:57 PM EST
When Univision highlighted Bush’s speech in its nightly news broadcast, true to form, it focused solely on immigration. On top of that, out of all the content on immigration discussed by the former Governor, Univision’s sole focus was that Bush “suggested that undocumented immigrants be invited to leave the United States”.
By Gerardo Abascal | January 20, 2015 | 2:01 PM EST
The nation’s second most widely viewed Spanish-language newscast, Noticiero Telemundo, recently presented an entirely slanted report about the projected economic impact of the executive action by President Obama that lifts the threat of deportation that faced millions of immigrants who live in the United States without authorization.
NY Times Follows Liberal Masses Mocking Fox News' Charlie Hebdo Coverage; Own Cowardly Coverage Continues
By Clay Waters | January 13, 2015 | 1:33 PM EST The New York Times, perhaps stung by conservative criticism of its timid coverage of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, went along with the liberal masses in mocking Fox News, based on a tweet by Rupert Murdoch and an exaggerated claim by a Fox News analyst. The unconfined glee came through in a sniping article by Stephen Castle and Robert Mackey.
By Randy Hall | January 9, 2015 | 5:17 PM EST
Two days after 12 people who worked at the controversial Charlie Hebdo -- “a weekly, French satirical newsmagazine” -- were shot and killed by four gunmen -- Vox website content editor Max Fisher tried to assert the publication's importance by pointing to the “Love Is Stronger Than Hate” cartoon cover of the November 2011 edition.
The cover depicts Charlie Hebdo -- the magazine portrayed by a generic male staffer with a pencil behind his ear -- kissing a generic Muslim man, with the smoldering ashes of the office in the background.
New York Times Editorial Criticizes Others for 'Absurd' Charlie Hebdo Sentiments It Tweeted Yesterday
By Clay Waters | January 8, 2015 | 11:07 AM EST The New York Times ran a lead editorial Thursday in support of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine in Paris where twelve people were massacred, evidently by radical Muslims angry at its satirical images of the Prophet Muhammad. But the Times' defense of free expression looks like hypocrisy, given the paper's pathetic past in condemning previous cartoonists for drawing Muhammad: