On Friday night’s The Kelly File on the Fox News Channel, host Megyn Kelly took up the shoe-throwing incident with Hillary Clinton. “That was former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, dodging a shoe that was hurled at her during a keynote speech on Thursday. But this is not, of course, the first time that a political figure sadly has been targeted with flying footwear.”
She then showed the two shoes thrown at President Bush in Iraq, and brought on MRC president Brent Bozell to explain the disparity in media coverage. “And our next guest says the media's reaction to these two incidents could not be more different.” (Video below)
George W. Bush
MRC President Brent Bozell Discusses Disparity of Network Shoe-Throwing Coverage on 'The Kelly File'
By NB Staff | April 12, 2014 | 12:01 PM EDT 
By Kyle Drennen | April 11, 2014 | 12:55 PM EDT
On Friday, all three network morning shows fretted over a woman throwing a shoe at Hillary Clinton during a speaking event in Las Vegas. NBC Today co-host Tamron Hall was particularly melodramatic: "I mean, but how scary is that?...Had it hit her, that would have been awful. It would have been awful." Weatherman Al Roker added: "Jeez, that's frightening." Hall declared: "It's hard for me to watch, actually." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
The shoe was on the other foot in 2008, when an Iraqi journalist threw two shoes at then-President George W. Bush during a Baghdad press conference. At that time, ABC and CBS referred to the shoe-thrower as a "celebrity" and "folk hero" who "thrilled the Arab world." In 2009, then-MSNBC host David Shuster actually cheered the release of the footwear assailant from prison. Tamron Hall happened to be on the show at the time and observed that people would have been "more outraged" if someone threw a shoe at President Obama.
By Paul Bremmer | April 10, 2014 | 5:18 PM EDT
More than five years after the end of his term, George W. Bush still finds himself the target of attacks from the liberals at MSNBC. On Wednesday’s All In with Chris Hayes, the network found a new way to smear the former president – by criticizing his paintings. Fill-in host Ari Melber actually brought on an art critic, Jerry Saltz from New York magazine, to dissect some of President Bush’s paintings, now displayed in an exhibit at the George W. Bush Presidential Center. But Melber offered his own commentary as well. Remarking on the fact that Bush has painted several self-portraits and portraits of world leaders, Melber griped about what the ex-president has not painted:
“These are not pictures of people at Abu Ghraib or Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. He's positioning himself, as you said, either at the most personal or at the diplomatic level with foreign leaders. We're not seeing any sort of focus on other worst parts of his legacy.”
By Geoffrey Dickens | April 9, 2014 | 9:57 AM EDT
David Letterman shocked the late night talk show world, last week, when he announced he was going to retire in 2015. But over the last few years Letterman had been losing the ratings war to his less liberal competitor Jay Leno. While Leno tried to be more even-handed in his jokes against Republicans and Democrats, Letterman took a decidedly leftist turn. A recent study of Letterman’s 2012 campaign jokes found he took more shots at Mitt Romney (44) than Barack Obama (9).
In the 2000’s Letterman throttled Republicans like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, questioning if they had any “humanity.” He also conducted his own personal war on GOP women as he called Michele Bachmann a “whacko” and depicted Sarah Palin and her daughter in “slutty” terms. But when it came to Obama, Letterman was positively awe-struck when the President came on his show, as he gushed “how satisfying it is to watch you work.”
By Jeffrey Meyer | March 30, 2014 | 2:36 PM EDT
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius did his best to shill for President Obama following the president’s interview with CBS anchorman Scott Pelley.
Speaking with moderator Bob Schieffer on Sunday, Ignatius opined, “It's crucial for statesmen to try to see the world as their adversaries see it” while urging President Obama to see the world through Vladimir Putin’s eyes. [See video below.]
By Randy Hall | March 26, 2014 | 11:00 PM EDT
According to a new report released on Wednesday by the Pew Research Center, the liberal MSNBC channel's prime-time audience fell 24 percent to 619,500 during the last calendar year, more than the Cable News Network -- which dropped 13 percent to a viewership of 543,000 – and the Fox News Channel, which lost 6 percent but still easily held onto first place with 1.75 million viewers.
As if that weren't bad enough, the “Lean Forward” network's revenue in 2013 lost 2 percent to total only $475 million. During the same period, CNN's income grew 2 percent to reach $1.11 billion, and the revenue for Fox News increased 5 percent to a tidy sum of $1.89 billion.
By Kyle Drennen | March 26, 2014 | 3:41 PM EDT
Introducing a story on Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer touted the Washington Post publishing the resignation letter of Massachusetts kindergarten teacher Suzi Sluyter, who decided to quit her job after being "frustrated by what she says is too much emphasis on test scores and testing instead of the kids themselves." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
In the report that followed – amid clips of Sluyter reciting her letter on camera – correspondent Ron Mott declared: "A sobering assessment about standardized tests, how children are damaged by what she calls a broken system more focused on scoring them." He soon found who to blame: "When President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law in 2002, supporters applauded the sweeping reform for holding schools and teachers accountable for student performance. But it wasn't long before complaints surfaced."
By Matthew Balan | March 24, 2014 | 4:18 PM EDT
On Monday's New Day, CNN's John King refreshingly spotlighted one of President Obama's key campaign promises from 2008 about foreign policy during a discussion about how to respond to Russia's aggression in Crimea. King wondered if "a President who came to office saying he could unite the world and would have better international diplomacy than George W. Bush – at least on this one, doesn't have any good options."
The anchor was responding to a comment from Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News, who noted how "the White House doesn't really want to give a whole lot of military assistance here, and they don't think that...most of Europe is going to go along with significant sanctions." [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
By Kyle Drennen | March 19, 2014 | 4:30 PM EDT
Appearing on NBC's Late Night on Tuesday – aired early Wednesday morning – New Yorker editor and former Washington Post Moscow correspondent David Remnick defended Barack Obama's poor handling of the Ukrainian crisis by bashing George W. Bush: "I think President Obama was elected not to get into more wars....his predecessor, President Bush, foolishly, at the very best, got into a war in Iraq that was a disaster." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Remnick continued: "And by the way, it gives [Russian President Vladimir] Putin some justification [to invade Ukraine]. He says, 'Don't lecture me. Don't lecture me about invasion,' and so on. No matter how justified or not that may be, that's a point he goes out and makes in front of his own people."
By Paul Bremmer | March 19, 2014 | 12:05 PM EDT
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went on PBS’s Charlie Rose show Monday night and defended President Obama’s soft foreign policy approach to the crisis in Ukraine.
Of that approach, which so far has consisted of sanctions against 11 Russian and Ukrainian officials, Friedman said:
By Matthew Balan | March 19, 2014 | 12:30 AM EDT
On Tuesday, all three broadcast network evening newscasts devoted full reports to President Obama honoring 24 members of the military – only three still living – with the Medal of Honor. CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley trumpeted how the President "righted a historic wrong. He presented the nation's highest military award to 24 Americans, after a review determined that they had been passed over because they were Hispanic or African-American or Jewish." [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
However, during the fifth year of former President George W. Bush's presidency, the Big Three channels furiously covered the allegations against several U.S. Marines, who were accused of killing civilians in Iraq in November 2005. Between May 17 and June 7, 2006 – a three week period – ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted three and a half hours of air time to the accusations of misconduct. These same networks aired only 52 minutes of reporting on 20 military heroes from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq during a five-year period between September 2001 and June 2006.
CBS's Bill Plante Laments Obama's Strict Grip on Media, Mourns for When 'The News Was What We Said It Was'
By Tim Graham | March 13, 2014 | 11:10 PM EDT
Longtime CBS reporter Bill Plante gave an interview to Steve Johnson at his hometown Chicago Tribune and discussed how we face a “state-run media” in recent years. It began under Bush, he suggested.
“He was neither as stupid or as disconnected as people thought, not at all. If he saw somebody leaking he didn't like it,” Plante said. “And this president doesn't like it any more than that.” He said it’s “just a lot harder” to get information now from squabbling camps inside the White House staff. So Plante made waves last year when he said Obama was undercutting the First Amendment and defining what the news was: