The election of a new Speaker of the House had the New York Times firing up its reliably crooked labeling machine. On Thursday, reporter and repeat offender David Herszenhorn lamented that "Many Republicans, including members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus who had hounded Mr. Boehner from the speakership, accused him and other party leaders of betraying them with a late-hour deal that was negotiated in secret." Veteran congressional reporter Carl Hulse interviewed former Speaker John Boehner and took his side against his allegedly irresponsible opponents: "Mr. Boehner...eventually became the power structure, only to be forced out by hard-line conservatives he deems 'knuckleheads' for their inability to recognize that compromise is sometimes necessary in politically divided government."

The surprise withdrawal of Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the race for Speaker gave the New York Times an excuse to issue a series of front-page stories larded up with hostile "hard-line" and "hard-right" labels mocking the apparent chaos surrounding congressional Republicans, being held "hostage" by the party's conservative wing.

Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh believes that because the center-right media and blogosphere pushed back against the vaccine vendetta campaign against Republicans and conservatives, the establishment press is sharply backing away from trying to capitalize on it, especially because both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been shown to have played to the anti-vaxxer crowd during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign.

Additionally, the New York Times, which smelled blood and ran a hit piece ("Measles Outbreak Proves Delicate Issue to G.O.P. Field") on Page A1 in its Tuesday print edition, had to issue a major three-point correction to it the very next day. That correction to the story by reporters Jeremy Peters and Richard Pérez-Peña, and Rush's reaction to it, follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post; paragraph breaks added by me):

After years of virtually always failing to file a print news report on the March for Life, the New York Times this year ran a full half-sentence on the rally of tens of thousands in Washington, in a Jeremy Peters' report that used the march's existence solely to embarrass the Republican Party over its mishandling of an abortion bill.
 

Reporters Carl Hulse and Robert Pear teamed up in the New York Times to lament the decline of cooperation in Congress -- a hypocritical stretch in particular for Hulse, whose reporting invariably has a partisan Democratic tone. The slant was clear in this survey of wisdom from four retiring congressmen, two Democrats and two Republicans. While dubious talk of compromise emanated from the mouths of fiery liberals Rep. Henry Waxman and Sen. Tom Harkin, painting themselves in flattering fashion, the Republicans were quoted as having to fend off extremists on their right flank.