Bias by Omission

The Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) had a field day Thursday in the wake of the deportation of a Mexican woman, Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, from Phoenix, Arizona. “An undocumented woman at the center of an immigration uproar has now been deported after 21 years living in the U.S., she was arrested yesterday and shipped back to Mexico today,” announced anchor Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News…

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation, went off on John McCain in an ill-advised, unhinged Wednesday morning tweet, declaring the decorated Navy veteran and former Vietnam prisoner of war an "armchair warrior." As best can be determined, vandenHeuvel is upset that the Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential candidate has previously stated that if Russia did indeed meddle in the…

Late Thursday evening, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a stay on President Donald Trump’s travel ban executive order effectively keeping it from taking effect. Every network in the Big Three (ABC, CBS, and NBC) led their evening news programs with the development, but ABC came off as exceptionally hyped. “Good evening, and we begin with that breaking news here tonight,” announced anchor…

In a hilarious case of irony, The 11th Hour host and serial liar Brian Williams teed up guest Charlie Sykes on Tuesday to lambaste conservative media (like the one you’re reading) for being why no one trusts mainstream media in the age of Trump and alternative facts. 

People will believe silly things when it fits their ideological preconceptions. Even when they have been debunked and are contradicted by first-hand information and news reports. A handful of mostly left-leaning publications repeated a British tabloid’s wild claim that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch started a “fascism forever club” in high school. This bizarre smear of Gorsuch was debunked by…

New York Times Scott Shane pushed back against Donald Trump’s claim that the media was not adequately covering Islamic terrorism on Wednesday’s front page: “Terror News Underplayed? Many Say No.” But Shane, the paper’s intelligence report, does not have much credibility on that issue given that his reporting has taken great pains to downplay the terror threat from radical Islam. Less than two…

At the Associated Press, George P. Shultz, James A. Baker III and six other formerly despised Republicans and business leaders have suddenly become "GOP senior statesman." What accounts for this instant transformation? The group is pushing what it calls a "Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends.” In a Tuesday evening Wall Street Journal op-ed, Shultz and Baker advocated "a gradually increasing…

Given its usual tendencies, I suppose we should be grateful that the Associated Press deigned to fact-check federal judge James Robart at all. The AP's Eric Tucker reported on Monday that the Western Washington District Court judge's claim — that no arrests of foreign nationals have occurred since 9/11 from the seven countries which had been subject to President Trump's temporary travel ban…

New York Times Kate Zernike made Monday’s front page praising the newly energized anti-Trump left with a back-handed compliment to a protest movement on the other side of the political spectrum: “Tea Party Reveals a Right Way For the Left to Make Its Stand.” That's not exactly what she was writing between 2009-2011, when she took every opportunity to smear the movement as old, white and possibly…

The Media Research Center’s Rich Noyes appeared on Fox Business Network’s Risk and Reward on Tuesday and called the media out for playing games with terrorist attacks. “So they have to stop trying to play games with this and definitional games and deal with this,” he explained to host Liz MacDonald, “You know, put all 78 together, and you got yourself a major terrorist threat that has been going…

A recent item at The Onion, the online humor site which is now rarely genuinely funny, claimed that "Fearful Americans (Are) Stockpiling Facts Before (the) Federal Government Comes To Take Them Away." Naturally, it was occurring because Americans are "alarmed at the prospect of unconstitutional overreach by the Trump administration." Ha-ha-ha — as if "constitutional overreach" didn't occur at a…

As Curtis Houck demonstrated at NewsBusters on Wednesday, the historic step of including four outside-the-DC Beltway journalists at White House press conferences via Skype is not sitting well "with many establishment media types." The aggrieved folks at CNN are particularly upset.

UPDATE, Feb. 7: On Feb. 5, Jake Tapper tweeted that "if you're concerned about things being 'incomplete' maybe consider adding into your post Manchin on same show response to rule." I attempted to find that video, and could not. If it was so important, and in the interest of balance, one would hope it would be part of the CNN video at the web link cited below — and it's not. As Nicholas…

On Wednesday, an early Associated Press report following the confirmations of two of Donald Trump's cabinet nominees employed extraordinarily strident and bitter language, portraying Republican Senate Committee which approved those nominations as de facto bullies who were "unilaterally" imposing their will. An evening revision updating that afternoon report expanded that portrayal to include…