Following news on Wednesday that the Obama administration will send 450 additional U.S. troops back to Iraq to help train the Iraqi military against ISIS, ABC’s World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News chose to exclude any criticism of the Obama administration’s ISIS policy while NBC Nightly News made multiple critical points about the administration as Richard Engel declared: “It’s hard to see how a few hundred non-combat troops are going to make much of a difference.”
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
By Curtis Houck | June 9, 2015 | 8:51 PM EDT
On Tuesday night, the news that the ISIS had seized the Libyan city of Sirte received zero coverage on the evening newscasts of ABC and NBC while CBS devoted an entire segment to ISIS’s new gains, but neglected to mention or lay blame for the instability at the feet of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration. While NBC offered no coverage on ISIS all together, ABC had a full report about the ongoing war, but only to highlight the troves of military equipment, weapons, and vehicles that was given to the Iraqi army by the U.S. that have fallen into the hands of ISIS.
O’Reilly Excoriates Obama; ‘We Have a Leader Who Doesn’t Want to Lead’; ‘Lacks the Will to Defeat’ ISIS
By Curtis Houck | June 9, 2015 | 7:12 AM EDT Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly took aim at President Obama during his “Talking Points Memo” on Monday’s O’Reilly Factor and ruled that the United States has “a leader who doesn’t want to lead” in addition to “lack[ing] the will to defeat” ISIS. The Fox News Channel host first set the scene by playing a clip of Obama telling reporters on Monday at the G-7 Summit that the U.S. still does not “have a complete strategy” for defeating ISIS and how that was strikingly similar to his assessment of the U.S. fight against ISIS in August 2014.
By Curtis Houck | June 8, 2015 | 9:22 PM EDT
Following President Obama’s comments at the G-7 summit on Monday about the United States still having “no complete strategy” for fighting ISIS, NBC Nightly News went to work in spinning for the President by touting his reasoning and neglecting to mention that he uttered similar remarks back on August 28, 2014. In contrast, ABC's World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News noted the similarity in Obama’s remarks on Monday and in August with multiple doses of criticism for the commander-in-chief.
By Curtis Houck | May 18, 2015 | 8:54 PM EDT
CBS and NBC continued their refusal on Monday evening to criticize the Obama administration’s handing of Iraq and so-called policy on ISIS as the Islamic terror group seized control of Ramadi over the weekend. While those two networks continued to spin for the White House, ABC bucked the trend from the network morning newscasts by providing a blunt critique of the Obama administration for “painting far too rosy a picture of how this war is going for far too long.”
By Curtis Houck | May 7, 2015 | 11:28 PM EDT
During a segment on the Thursday edition of the Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly cited a new analysis from the Media Research Center that detailed the massive amount of coverage the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted in the month of April to numerous “allegations of police misconduct” compared to the time spent reporting on the terror group ISIS.
Robert Reich Blames ‘Press' for 'Making’ ISIS Into ‘a Big Deal’; Causing ‘More People’ to Join Ranks
By Curtis Houck | March 27, 2015 | 3:33 PM EDT While on Thursday’s edition of The Nightly Show on Comedy Central, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich expressed concern that the media has been covering the terrorist group ISIS too heavily and in turn has been causing the group’s ranks to swell. After being asked by host Larry Wilmore to explain why “all these westerners [are] joining ISIS,” Reich dismissed that premise by declaring that “there are not that many trying to join ISIS” considering: “Out of 600 million Europeans and Americans you’ve got, what, 400, 800 trying to join ISIS? This is not a big deal.”
By Curtis Houck | February 24, 2015 | 9:31 PM EST
Early Tuesday morning, the terrorist group ISIS entered a village in northeastern Syrian and kidnapped droves of Christians with estimates ranging from 70 to as many as 150 people. For viewers that tuned into English-language network NBC and Spanish-language networks Telemundo and Univision for their Tuesday evening newscasts, however, they were left completely in the dark on this story as it received not a single mention.
By Curtis Houck | February 19, 2015 | 9:59 PM EST
In covering President Obama’s refusal to refer to terrorism as Islamic extremism, CBS and NBC devoted portions of their reports on Thursday night to comments Rudy Giuliani made the day before with NBC reserving a majority of their airtime to attacking the former New York City Mayor for having “set off a war of words” and taking presidential criticism “to another level.” Andrea Mitchell declared he set off “a firestorm” over telling an audience that “I do not believe that the President loves America” and suggested that Giuliani went too far.
By Curtis Houck | January 21, 2015 | 7:07 AM EST
While NBC News was up to its usual business in praising and defending President Obama both before and after his State of the Union speech, chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel emerged as a rare voice that instead took to the liberal network’s airwaves to condemn the President’s rhetoric on foreign policy as both unrealistic and, in many cases, simply not true.
After being asked by anchor Brian Williams for his thoughts, Engel began dissecting the President’s perceived world outlook: “Well, it sounded like the President was outlining a world that he wishes we were all living in but which is very different than the world that you just described with terror raids taking place across Europe, ISIS very much on the move.”
By NB Staff | October 8, 2014 | 10:59 PM EDT
Graham pointed out that when the former Secretary of Defense gave his first interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes, neither one of the other two major broadcast networks (ABC or NBC) covered it and the result was the same with O’Reilly’s interview.
Speaking on how “especially upsetting again” it was that none of the networks joined O’Reilly in asking Panetta about the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 attack in Benghazi. On what Panetta said about Benghazi, Graham thought that “Panetta's answers on that were really weak.”
By Curtis Houck | October 8, 2014 | 9:40 PM EDT
On Wednesday night, the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley made no mention of the results from the latest CBS News poll that gave President Obama and Democrats poor marks ahead of the November 4 midterm elections on issues ranging from the economy to ISIS to terrorism to who voters are most likely to vote for.
Regarding the midterm elections, Republicans find themselves ahead of Democrats on both a generic ballot and specific issues. Republicans have a six point lead against Democrats overall (49 percent to 43 percent with those leaning left or right, 46 percent to 40 percent without) and a five point lead who voters would like most to see takeover the Senate (47 percent to 42 percent). Independents sided with the GOP by a full 30 points over Democrats (57 percent to 27 percent).