It appears Jeff Zucker wasn't interested in creating a more fair and balanced Reliable Sources now that former host Howard Kurtz has left CNN for Fox News.
Quite the contrary, TVNewser reported Friday that the first host of the program will be the perilously liberal Daily Beast contributor John Avlon.
Predictions of the demise of Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio are a dime a dozen. That liberal wish has been a repeated incantation. But it’s more amusing when the demise talk comes from .... “Newsweek.”
Come again? Who’s yesterday’s news? John Avlon of the Daily Beast asserts Rush Limbaugh “Bleeds Millions From His Carriers as Toxic Talk Slumps.” Ahem, nobody’s bought Rush’s show for a dollar, like someone bought Newsweek. Avlon finds some guy whose newsletter has a Facebook page with nine Likes to insult Limbaugh’s audience as “all wearing Depends” – when he graduated college in 1968.
CNN's own legal analyst scoffed at CNN's notion that 75 Republicans supporting legal gay marriage is a "big turning point" for the party. Anchor Ashleigh Banfield did her best to drum up the matter on Tuesday, for the network that has repeatedly shown a bias favoring gay marriage.
"Next, a big turning point in the Republican party. 70 high profile Republicans just signed a brief supporting gay marriage," Banfield touted. "I really disagree with the premise that this is a lot of people," responded CNN's legal analyst Jeff Toobin.
It’s the Republicans who are in a bind. They’re beholden to the will of the evil genius Grover Norquist. They’re scared to death of The Club for Growth. That's the trite liberal media narrative that CBSNews.com's Brian Montopoli furthered earlier this morning in a piece in which he forecast that the Republicans, and only Republicans, are in for a bruising in the coming weeks should a "fiscal cliff" deal not be finalized. But in doing so, Montopoli conveniently forgets that Democrats have their pressure groups that hold their feet to the fire against any significant spending cuts and/or entitlement reform.
Perhaps Montopoli doesn't watch his own network's evening newscasts. On the Tuesday Evening News, correspondent Nancy Cordes noted that Democrats and President Obama are digging in their heels against any proposed deal which addresses entitlement spending. In fact, forty-two Democratic members of the House have signed on to a bill that explicitly prohibits cuts to the welfare state.
CNN contributor John Avlon dumped on Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) early Wednesday morning, when he quipped that she was re-elected on "a bad night for wing-nuts."
"And I mean, look, it was a bad night for wing-nuts last night, but Michele Bachmann is straight through in a redrawn district that was drawn to be more conservative," Avlon said after CNN projected that Bachmann would win re-election.
In a move out of the liberal playbook, CNN hammered Mitt Romney on Thursday for appearing out of touch because his horse is competing in the "elitist" Olympic event of dressage.
"He's back here in the United States, preparing to pick a vice president, and possibly trying to avoid charges that a sport involving horse ballet might not make him the most relatable candidate for the average voter," hyped anchor Carol Costello.
CNN used Friday's tragic shooting to force the gun control debate back into headlines this past weekend, and multiple network anchors made a blatant liberal push for further gun regulation.
The advocacy began just hours after the atrocity, despite both President Obama and Mitt Romney abstaining from politicking on the day of the massacre. "America has got to do something about its gun laws. Now is the time," CNN's Piers Morgan tweeted hours after the shooting.
Brent Baker told me I only found half the story in Newsweek’s coverage of Dick Cheney’s heart transplant. Posted in the middle of the Kent Sepkowitz hit piece was Monday’s edition of their daily NewsBeast in-house video. In the first seconds, the “highlight” was Newsweek/Daily Beast assignment editor Allison Yarrow saying of Cheney: “But can you imagine being that organ donor?...I would never do it. I’d say ‘give me my heart back.’”
Welcome to the latest edition of Compassionate Liberals Show Their True Colors. Openly gay Newsweek senior writer Ramin Setoodeh added, “I would never give my heart to Dick Cheney. It would freeze over.” Yarrow offered: “He may be one of the most evil people in the world.” (Video below)
CNN's Erin Burnett on Monday did a segment correctly castigating Congress for not passing a budget in over 1000 days.
The only problem was that while she did this, pictures of House Republicans were shown on the screen despite the blame resting solely with Senate Democrats (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Dismissing Missouri's GOP Primary as nothing more than a "beauty contest," CNN contributor John Avlon used an image of Republican candidates in ball gowns and tiaras to make his point. The segment aired on Monday's OutFront around 7:15 p.m.
"I just want to give people time to soak in that beautiful graphic," Avlon mused as the picture of Republicans as beauty queens appeared in the background of the set. One can only wonder if CNN would have done the same to then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008.
CNN analyst John Avlon may have worked a while back for Rudy Giuliani, but on Saturday morning, he sounded like an Obama White House spinner. On the show Your Bottom Line, host Christine Romans asked if the economy will hurt or help Obama.
Avlon tried to compare Obama in 2012 with Ronald Reagan in 1984. This is dicey because the unemployment rate had plunged 3.6 percentage points from its cyclical peak of 10.8 percent that had been reached two years earlier (November 1982). That coincided with the bottom of the deepest recession since World War II (and liberal media types always skip over how badly the economy did under Jimmy Carter). Obama's only down a point and a half from his 10.0 percent high.
During Thursday's Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN contributor John Avlon flagged candidate Newt Gingrich for an "excessive celebration" penalty. Gingrich, he claimed, was letting his recent success in the polls get to his head.
Gingrich's bragging from his "Newt-centric universe," Avlon lectured, could turn off potential voters as "the more Newt starts to shoot from the lip, the more he runs the risk of reminding people why they fell out of love with him in the first place."