Washington Post staffer Hank Stuever started off with a fair point in his review of the new HBO documentary "Hot Coffee." But before his June 27 Style section front-pager was concluded, the Post TV critic was bashing conservatives and free marketeers for advocating tort reform.
Hank Stuever
By Ken Shepherd | April 6, 2011 | 10:59 AM EDT
On the surface, TLC's "Extreme Couponing" -- premiering tonight at 9:30 p.m. EDT -- may look to you and me like an innocently voyeuristic look into the lives of fellow Americans who take penny-pinching to the extreme, saving at times hundreds of dollars on grocery store runs.
But that's why we're not TV critics for a liberal metropolitan newspaper.
Washington Post's Hank Stuever worked in a healthy share of left-wing grousing about capitalism and insisted that the coupon-clippers highlighted by the program were insufferably selfish souls.
"Little piggies go to market, and clean up on Aisle 5," the article's online headline snarked.
WaPo TV Critic Thinks the Matthews One-Hour Valentine to Bill Clinton Will Cause 'Apoplexy' on the Right
By Tim Graham | February 21, 2011 | 7:45 AM EST Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever reported "Valentine's Day was a week ago, but MSNBC's Chris Matthews has belatedly gifted a particular former president with a mash note - strike that, a one-hour special called 'President of the World: The Bill Clinton Phenomenon,'" which airs tonight, somehow equating Clinton with Washington and Lincoln. Stuever explained:
Matthews, aided by the likes of Terry McAuliffe, Mary Steenburgen and various biographers, remarks again and again how smart Clinton is, how generous, how famous, how friendly, how productive. Perhaps this special is some sort of MSNBC covert-op to cause paralytic apoplexy over there on the right? The kind of people who still keep the Starr Report at the ready?... The not-very-sub subtext of "President of the World" is a nostalgic grieving for the glory of the Clinton years.
By Tim Graham | January 16, 2011 | 11:27 PM EST
Washington Post reporter and TV critic Hank Stuever helpfully provided a book-cover blurb for Sean Bugg, editor of the DC gay news magazine Metro Weekly. Bugg's new book is titled Boy Does World: Fifteen Years of Bad Behaviors, Bad Attitudes, and Happy Endings. The January 6 Metro Weekly featured this Stuever blurb, with a hurrah for gay "equality" of respect:
Sean was fearlessly funny in a fearful era clouded by AIDS, and Boy Does World is a wonderful chance to enjoy a retro romp into that past. It’s also an affirming look at some happy endings – the hard-won, worth-fighting-for future of gay equality and domestic bliss.”
But that's not all the blurb Stuever offered. On his website, Bugg uses this Stuever line, too:
By Ken Shepherd | December 1, 2010 | 3:14 PM EST
I'll admit it, like millions of other Americans, I'm a sucker for cheesy occupation-based reality shows. I love History Channel's Pawn Stars and American Pickers, as well as A&E's Billy the Exterminator and Dog the Bounty Hunter. I watch them because they're entertaining and full of colorful characters, not in the expectation of some insightful commentary on America's real or imagined economic and social woes.
But for some reason, Washington Post Style section contributor Hank Stuever is disappointed that A&E's new reality show "Storage Wars," which debuts tonight, doesn't explore those issues to his satisfaction:
By Tim Graham | November 10, 2010 | 8:41 AM EST
The Washington Post is getting out ahead of the pack in hating the new Sarah Palin reality show on TLC, “Sarah Palin's Alaska.” It isn't really about whether the show is entertaining. TV critic Hank Stuever tore into the Republican VP nominee with relish from the first sentence at the top of Wednesday's Style section:
Who is this woman, this fruit bat in fleece and Gore-Tex, clenching the side of the rock face above a glacier, screaming "Tahhd! Tahhd!" at her husband, piercing the tranquility of the Alaskan paradise?
Isn't this the kind of person whom forest rangers usually despise? The one whose loud command to heed the bears actually startles the bears? The hapless camper whom taxpayers have to rescue at great expense after she loses her Verizon signal and gets hopelessly disoriented?
By Tim Graham | May 28, 2010 | 8:29 AM EDT
Washington Post writer Hank Stuever has strong opinions about the new HBO movie on Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in Friday's paper: "Dennis Quaid is truly awful in the role of President Bill Clinton, the other half of The Special Relationship's special relationship. It's so bad that I insist everyone inside the Beltway watch it at least twice."
It must be hard to play Bill Clinton when everyone is so familiar with him, and so many media liberals still consider him a hero, despite the well, itty-bitty flaws. But Stuever really, really hates Quaid's work:
There are museum animatronics doing better presidential imitations than Quaid. If I had been in director Richard Loncraine's shoes, a couple of days into filming, I would have gone on eBay and purchased one of those cardboard, life-size Bill Clinton cutouts and had Quaid carry that around in front of him while the cameras continued to roll and I frantically waited for "Saturday Night Live's" Darrell Hammond to return my phone calls.
Stuever's review suggests HBO did not cut the scene of Bill telling Hillary he had carnal knowledge of an intern (or maybe the reviewer's copy still had it, but regular viewers won't see it):
By Tim Graham | April 19, 2010 | 7:34 AM EDT
Today marks the 15th anniversary of the horrific Oklahoma City bombing, and The Washington Post's Hank Stuever promoted MSNBC on the front page of the Style section -- because Rachel Maddow "has been having 1990s flashbacks with the anti-government vitriol that most recently accompanied the health-care reform debate."
Stuever offered a preview of the left-wing propaganda to be unveiled tonight in the Maddow hour:
"Nine years after his execution, we are left worrying that Timothy McVeigh's voice from the grave echoes in the new rising tide of American anti-government extremism," Maddow says at the outset of her MSNBC special Monday night called "The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist."
By Colleen Raezler | July 10, 2009 | 10:12 AM EDT 
For Hank Stuever of the Washington Post, Sacha Baron Cohen's latest movie, "Bruno," is a reflection of America's "giant case of sex phobia."
Cohen's movie tells the tale of Bruno, a gay Austrian fashionista who embarks on a quest for fame (to become "the most famous Austrian since Hitler"). Its depictions of gay sex and a gay man flamboyantly flaunting his sexuality caused worry among gay activists about an increase of homophobia, despite a statement from Universal Pictures that the film aimed to "shed light on the absurdity of many kinds of intolerance and ignorance, including homophobia."
Stuever offered Post readers an inside look on July 9 at what it felt like to be a gay man watching "Bruno" and concluded that the movie didn't teach anything "other than sex is basically a total gross out."
He outlined his argument: