Bias by Omission

As one would expect, there is plenty to criticize in Stephen Ohlemacher's Monday evening coverage of Donald Trump's achievement of an Electoral College majority earlier in the day. This post will concentrate on Ohlemacher's questionable counting of "protesters." A separate post looks at a very revealing failure in the wire service story's photo collection, in a graphic showing how the…

Andrew Ross Sorkin is considered a financial guru - a savant of all things business.  So how is he so very, very wrong about government teat specialist Elon Musk?: “Donald Trump: Please think about calling Elon Musk….Mr. Musk…(is) the real-life Tony Stark behind Tesla, the electric car company; SolarCity, the solar power provider; and SpaceX, the rocket company….” Actually, Elon Musk isn’t the…

None of the Big Three networks' Monday evening newscasts, nor ABC and NBC's morning shows on Tuesday, covered how President Obama set a one-day record for pardons and commutations on Monday. ABC's GMA on Tuesday apparently thought Merriam-Webster's 2016 'Word of the Year' more important, as it devoted 45 seconds of air time to that story. The same morning, NBC's Today also didn't cover the…

News travels slowly into the Kansas City metropolitan area — or at least into the newsroom at the Kansas City Star. On Friday, the paper's Dave Helling produced a 950-word writeup on Monday's Electoral College voting. With all of the widely published news about Republican electors receiving death threats, all Helling had to report was a rumor: "One spouse of a Missouri elector claimed to know of…

CNN's Chris Cuomo contended on Monday's New Day that Trump's pick for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is "one of the most controversial choices the President-elect has made for his Cabinet." Cuomo labeled Friedman "hardliner" or "hardline" during a segment with former Ambassador Martin Indyk. He also pointed out the "very controversial territory" of the would-be diplomat supporting moving…

New York Times reporter Liam Stack took a Pew Research Center study about religion and educational attainment around the world, and warped it into a story summarized by this mocking headline: “Christians in U.S. Are Less Educated Than Religious Minorities, Report Says.” The report, which lacks the anti-Christian animus of the headline, showed that worldwide, Jews and Christians were the most…

On December 5, the New York Times published an op-ed column by Republican Texas Elector Christopher Suprun entitled "Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump." The Times celebrated Suprun's "courageous stand" in a December 6 editorial. In that op-ed, Suprun claimed that "Fifteen years ago, as a firefighter, I was part of the response to the Sept. 11 attacks against our nation." The…

On Thursday, Newsweek's Lucy Westcott forwarded possible excuses for Yasmin Seweid's fake account about anti-Muslim men attacking her on New York City's subway. Westcott spotlighted an activist who played up that young Muslim women, like Seweid, are "children of either immigrant parents or U.S.-born Muslims, and parents have high expectations of them, putting [them under] tremendous pressure."…

Late Thursday afternoon, freelance journalist and editor Sebastian Jones dropped a friendly reminder for Twitter users how the media’s neglecting to recount the disturbing past of Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald and instead praising him ad nauseam for his investigative reporting looking into President-elect Donald Trump’s finances and connections to foreign governments. 

Top of the news: Our architecture critic weeps over Aleppo? Indeed, the front of Thursday’s New York Times featured critic a “Critics Notebook” from Michael Kimmelman, “Aleppo’s Faces Beckon to Us, To Little Avail.” Staggeringly, Kimmelman managed to lament the tragedy in Aleppo on the front page of a major newspaper, without a single mention of President Barack Obama, the sitting president for…

A Thursday op-ed on CNN.com outlined a proposal to "not only...end a Trump administration, but also to eradicate democracy's ugliest anachronism -- the Electoral College." Scott Piro hoped against hope that a group of Trump electors would switch their vote to Hillary Clinton, in order to gain "the bipartisan support needed to legislate it [the Electoral College] out of existence." Piro contended…

Tuesday on CNBC, Microsoft co-founder and multibillionaire Bill Gates recounted a conversation he had with Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago. He had fairly nice things to say about both the conversation and the potential of the incoming Trump administration. Naturally, neither the Associated Press nor the New York Times found these elements of the CNBC interview to be newsworthy.

CNN's Dana Bash paid tribute to retiring Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski on Wednesday's New Day, touting that "it's the end of the Obama and the Mikulski eras; and the trail-blazing senator walked out the door — dropping important pearls of wisdom." Bash played up how the longtime Maryland politician is "retiring disappointed. Her old Senate colleague [Hillary Clinton] failed to become the…

On Tuesday, NBC’s Today featured a nearly two-minute long report on former Republican Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock being arraigned on corruption charges in federal court. However, the morning show completely ignored the 10-year prison sentence handed down against former Democratic Pennsylvania Congressman Chaka Fattah for racketeering.