Despite media denials that “specific weather events” can be linked to overall climate patterns, that is exactly what several major news outlets have done in the wake of deadly floods in Texas.
MSNBC, Huffington Post, The Dallas Morning News and other media have suggested global warming played a role in the torrential rain and consequent, deadly flooding in Texas during Memorial Day weekend. A year earlier many were blaming Texas’ drought on global warming.
Right now, the White House press corps is in a shouting match with the Obama Administration over the White House's refusal to allow media photographers to take pictures of various presidential events. While the left-leaning journalists are tossing around words like "propaganda" to describe the official photos which are being released, the recent trip President Obama took to South Africa for the funeral of Nelson Mandela illustrates that the media elite really isn't interested in news so much as it is in preserving its institutional power.
Perhaps the most-discussed news item out of the Mandela funeral trip was a picture that was taken of Obama, British prime minister David Cameron, and Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt taking a “selfie” -- a self-portrait usually shot with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone -- a moment that was caught by Roberto Schmidt, a photographer for the French Press Agency. Now, Schmidt says that the overwhelming interest in the shot makes him “ashamed of mankind.”
It didn't take long for liberal members of the press to spew venom at Ann Romney after she stated during an interview on last weekend's edition of “Fox News Sunday” that she's “happy to blame the media” as one of the reasons her husband, GOP former Mass. Governor Mitt Romney, lost the 2012 presidential election.
The fast and furious insults have ranged from a declaration by Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post that she “is suffering a serious case of sour grapes” and “needs to move on” to a sarcastic Tweet about her from David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix as “still blaming media” even though he “lost count of stories she and Mitt refused to participate in.”
It's not every day you read an article in a major newspaper stating unequivocally that media radically misreported a current event that made national headlines, especially one with a racial component.
However, that's exactly what happened Wednesday when the Christian Science Monitor published an article written by the assistant editor of the Jena Times about how press outlets "got most of the basics wrong" concerning the beating of a white student by six black students in Jena, Louisiana.
In fact, the author, Craig Franklin, was by no means shy with his criticism of just how poorly media behaved (emphasis added, h/t Glenn Reynolds):