Andrew Romano

LOL Spin at Yahoo News: 'How Hillary Clinton Won the 2014 Midterms'
By Tim Graham | November 5, 2014 | 8:40 AM EST

One might be able to excuse Democratic spin before the election returns came in. But former Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano offered a real beaut the morning after, titled “How Hillary Clinton won the 2014 midterms.”

Many of the candidates that the Clintons backed in this cycle went down to defeat. While Romano isn’t denying 2014 was a good year for Republicans, he could not wait to start shaking the pom-poms for how Hillary’s path is greased for the White House. This is the article that liberals will want to read after they put their handkerchiefs down.

Newsweek Writer Blames Lack of 'Centralized Curriculum' for Americans Failing Citizenship Test
By Alex Fitzsimmons | June 7, 2011 | 1:20 PM EDT

Appearing on MSNBC today, Newsweek senior writer Andrew Romano attributed the findings of his magazine's study showing Americans don't understand basic facts about U.S. history to the country's lack of a top-down federal government-imposed curriculum.

When daytime anchor Thomas Roberts asked Romano to explain the significance of the survey, the Daily Beast scribe indicted federalism: "Another reason why we don’t do well is because we don’t have a kind of centralized curriculum in our schools. Everyone in different states kind of learns different things. And that definitely contributes to it as well."

Newsweek Writer Claims Income Inequality to Blame for Americans Failing Citizenship Test
By Kyle Drennen | March 22, 2011 | 11:40 AM EDT

Appearing on Tuesday's CBS Early Show, Newsweek senior writer Andrew Romano touted a survey in the magazine's latest issue showing that 38% of Americans failed the U.S. citizenship test and claimed to know the cause: "One of the big ones is income inequality in the United States. We're one of the most in-equal societies in the developed world."

Romano argued to co-host Erica Hill: "When people don't have a lot of money, there's a difficulty getting a good education, there's a lack of opportunity and a lack of knowledge. That's one of the reasons why we don't do as well as northern European countries, sometimes on these surveys." Hill observed: "So it's really a question of access." Romano replied: "It is. It's a big problem."

Newsweek's Andrew Romano Falsely Claims Tea Partiers Want to 'Repeal' the 14th Amendment
By Ken Shepherd | November 8, 2010 | 2:03 PM EST

In an interview with Gov. Rick Perry published today, Newsweek's Andrew Romano falsely claimed that "Many Tea Partiers want to repeal the 14th Amendment, which provides for birthright citizenship." Romano then asked the recently-reelected Texas Republican, "Do you agree with them?"

Perry answered that while he believed a constitutional prohibition on birthright citizenship was "probably not" needed, he didn't address the fundamental error in Romano's premise.

While there have been suggestions by some conservatives at looking at amending the Fourteenth Amendment to ensure that children of illegal immigrants do not automatically gain American citizenship, the notion that Tea Party activists favor a full repeal of the post-Civil War amendment is a faulty liberal media meme.

Newsweek to American Guys: We Can Learn Some Lessons from Europe on How to Be a Man
By Ken Shepherd | September 21, 2010 | 1:07 PM EDT

"To survive in a hostile world, guys need to embrace girly jobs and dirty diapers," argued the Newsweek writers Andrew Romano and Tony Dokoupil in the subheadline of their September 20 article "Men's Lib."

The writers set out to explain "[w]hy it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home."

If American men want to be competitive in a global economy, they argued, they need to suck it up and get comfortable with the idea of working traditionally "girly jobs" and/or being stay at home dads:

It’s possible to imagine protectionist trade and immigration policies boosting blue-collar employment at the margins. But the U.S. can’t stop globalization. If male morale—and the American economy—are ever going to recover, the truth is that the next generation of Homer Simpsons will have to stop searching for outsourced manufacturing jobs and start working toward teaching, nursing, or social-service positions instead.

Fair enough. But Romano and Dokoupil also cast their gaze across the Atlantic, arguing America needs public policies that emulate European countries on paid parental leave, particularly paid paternal leave (emphasis mine):

Newsweek Mocks Reagan Enthusiasts As Idolatrous Conservatives with Shallow Command of History
By Ken Shepherd | July 9, 2010 | 4:18 PM EDT

With just a few word changes, Andrew Romano's lead paragraph for his latest Newsweek item would make perfect sense:

Grown men don’t tend to worship other grown men—unless, of course, they happen to be professional journalists, in which case no bow is too deep, and no praise too fawning, for the 44th president of the United States: Saint Barack Obama.

Only in his version, it's "professional Republicans" and the object of veneration is "the 40th president of the United States: Saint Ronald Reagan."

While Romano mostly gives props to the late president himself for his political and policy successes while in the Oval Office, he takes glee in mocking conservatives who yearn for a modern-day Reagan, insisting that:

Newsweek's Romano: Twitter Made Me Sound Like a Michelle Bachmann Hater
By Ken Shepherd | May 18, 2010 | 5:28 PM EDT

Newsweek's Andrew Romano isn't really anti-Michelle Bachmann, he argues that he just sounds like one on Twitter.

In a May 17 "Web Exclusive," entitled "Tweet the Press," the Newsweek staffer explained to readers how an editor assigned him to write a "Twitter profile" of the Minnesota Republican:

My editor had just stepped into my office to discuss a new assignment. The NEWSWEEK brass is interested in Twitter, he told me, but they're looking for an original way to cover it—which is where you come in.... "I'm thinking you should write a 'Twitter profile' of Michele Bachmann," he said, referring to the outspoken, ultraconservative Republican congresswoman from Minnesota who has accused Barack Obama of being "anti-American" and asked her supporters to "slit their wrists" and be "blood brothers" to defeat health-care reform. "Fly up there, follow her around, tweet as you go. Then we'll publish an annotated version of your Twitter feed in the magazine. Could be kind of fun."

Later in his piece, Romano noted the drawbacks and advantages of live-tweeting a politician's stump speeches, concluding that the format made him sound like "knee jerk Bachmann hater." He denied that, of course, arguing that Twitter made him more of a "color commentator" that was looking for "bite-sized" vignettes that could go "viral" (emphasis mine):

Newsweek Offers Offensive Explanation For Why Media Ignored Nashville Flood
By Noel Sheppard | May 7, 2010 | 12:06 PM EDT

NewsBusters on Wednesday shared a truly heartbreaking video with its readers dealing with the Nashville flood that so many people in the nation hadn't heard about due to the media's focus on the Gulf oil spill and Faisal Shahzad.

News outlets are beginning to try to explain to their patrons why such a devastating event got so over-shadowed.

On Thursday, Newsweek's Andrew Romano offered his view on why this disaster was a tad swept under the rug.

Unfortunately, I think many people not only aren't going to buy his explanation, but will likely find it quite offensive:

Newsweek Hysterically Accuses Media of Helping Tea Party in Indiana
By Candance Moore | May 5, 2010 | 10:33 PM EDT

On Wednesday, Newsweek's Andrew Romano celebrated news out of Indiana that "establishment" Republican Dan Coats fended off two conservative opponents in the Senate primary.

Romano's obvious delight came through loud and clear starting with the headline, "The Tea Party is Now Irrelevant in Indiana." You see, one loss in a Senate primary was enough to declare the movement DOA - and Romano was anxious for the rest of the media to play along.

The real headline in Indiana was that 52 percent of Republicans went in favor of Tea Party challengers, but two of them in the mix was enough to split the vote, and Coats squeaked by at 39 percent.

A few media sources, including Politico, reported that Coats limped out of the primary "bruised" by anti-incumbency. Romano, however, insisted that 39 percent was a clear victory. Why the stark difference in coverage? According to Romano, some in the media were glorifying Tea Parties to apparently advance some selfish narrative.

Try not to cough from the smell of irony as you watch a Newsweek writer complain about dishonest narratives being perpetrated by the media:

Justice Stevens a Conservative?
By Jason Aslinger | April 12, 2010 | 10:02 PM EDT

Retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is actually a conservative according to Newsweek columnist Andrew Romano, who apparently hasn't read any Supreme Court decisions in the last 20 years or so.

Romano rejects the notion that Stevens is a liberal, going so far as to chastise his fellow members of the media who frequently get suckered by "whichever shorthand, cheat-sheet label gets repeated most frequently." Romano further writes that the current coverage is "myopic" and that the lowly uniformed "laypeople are being given little choice but to remember the hunched, bow-tied Stevens, 89, as really, really liberal—Dennis Kucinich in robes."

So what is Romano's proof for this theory?

Newsweek's Romano: Obama 'Too Reasonable' to Pass Health Care
By Lachlan Markay | March 3, 2010 | 6:49 PM EST
Why can't President Obama get a health care bill through Congress? Nope, it has nothing to do with the fact that a clear majority of the country doesn't want the federal government overhauling seventeen percent of the economy. The problem is he is just too darn reasonable.

So posits Newsweek's Andrew Romano, who notes that Obama could have gone wholesale-government-takeover on health care and a number of other legislative proposals during the past year. He opted for mandates and regulations rather than single-payer and hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful stimulus spending instead of a trillion plus.

"Obama has chosen to support what he believes to be the best possible proposal instead of what he believes to be the best imaginable proposal," Romano states. Reasonableness in this context is simply a moderation in the president's march towards statism. He COULD be sprinting towards socialized medicine. Instead, his movement towards government control is more of a leisurely stroll. Unfortunately for the president the American people have rejected that approach as well.
Young Newsweek Reporter Touts How Under-30 Crowd Finds the Obamas 'The Swooniest Couple Around'
By Tim Graham | February 18, 2009 | 8:51 AM EST

Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano, a specialist in the youth vote (because he's Princeton '04), attempts to describe how he found the under-30 generation adores the marital bliss of the Obamas in this week's magazine. The article is headlined "Our Model Marriage: The Obamas have the kind of relationship millennials aspire to." Romano described how his contemporaries were much wilder in their enthusiasm for the Obamas than they were for rapper Kanye West, and how they have become for young voters "the swooniest couple around."

Kanye West is a tough act to follow -- unless you are a middle-aged couple slow dancing to tuba music. It's unlikely that anyone watching last month's Youth Inaugural Ball on TV noticed much difference between how the crowd of millennials welcomed the Louis Vuitton don and how they reacted, a few minutes later, when Barack and Michelle Obama took the stage. But if you were actually in the audience -- like me, and my eardrums -- the change was impossible to ignore. The young people screamed. The young people sighed. Several young people even began to weep. "I hope my husband looks at me like that someday," said one girl. When the song stopped, Obama leaned into the mike. "That's what's called 'old school'," he cracked. The new-school crowd responded like a bunch of banshees.