Bias by Omission

On Monday morning New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, facing an outcry from her paper's liberal readership, fretted over its coverage of the investigation into Hillary Clinton sending private emails containing classified material. The print edition sent a similar message to Republicans who might dare to use the issue against Clinton on the road to the White House: Ease off. Reporters…

Based on how they handled it today, it's pretty obvious that the Associated Press's Ken Sweet and his wire service's headline writers want the lowest possible number of users of their reporting — consumers and subscribing print and broadcast outlets — to know about the mainland Chinese stock market's historically deep 8.5 percent Monday dive. It took four paragraphs for Sweet to get to the…

2016 GOP presidential candidate and former Texas Governor Rick Perry is fighting a legal battle against an out-of-control Lone Star State county. That county's prosecutor has sued Perry, claiming that a) he committed an illegal act of "coercion" by threatening to veto legislation funding a "public integrity" office headed by Travis County's Rosemary Lehmberg, who was convicted of drunk driving in…

In a speech at a Republican Lincoln Day dinner in West Virginia earlier this week, Murray Energy Corp. founder and CEO Robert Murray decried the Obama administration's determination to, as described at the financial news site SNL.com (to be clear, no relation to Saturday Night Live), "bypass the states and their utility commissions, the U.S. Congress and the Constitution in favor of putting the U…

I'm virtually certain that he wouldn't dream of it, but the Associated Press's Josh Lederman seriously needs to consider correcting two extremely embarrassing paragraphs he wrote in his coverage of President Obama's appearance on Jon Stewart's Daily Show earlier this week. At the 15:03 mark of the Comedy Central video following the jump, Obama treated Stewart as if he's a legitimate journalist,…

The press — especially the Associated Press — wants everyone to know that the email controversy "swirling" around her is partisan and distracting. Why anyone would worry about its national security or legal implications is almost completely lost on them. That's their story, and they've been sticking to it for months. The latest installment from the AP came tonight from Lisa Lerner, Eric Tucker…

News broke on Hillary Clinton's email controversy Thursday night, and Michael Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo led with this sentence in their initial report on nytimes.com: "Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account she used as secretary of state,…

While English-networks ABC and NBC combined with Spanish-language networks MundoFox, Telemundo, and Univision on Thursday night to skip testimony from Secretary of State John Kerry in a Senate hearing on the Iran deal, CBS covered it in a news brief, but only summarized it and ignored false statements by Kerry as he faced criticism from both sides of the aisle. In contrast, the FNC's Special…

For the second night in a row, MSNBC host Chris Matthews ignored the new Quinnipiac University poll showing Hillary Clinton trailing in key swing states to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as well as Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

The press's favorite abortion questions usually have nothing to do with the 700,000-plus terminations of preborn babies' lives which take place each year in the U.S. (Note: The real figure is likely quite higher, because reporting is voluntary.) Especially when the person interviewed is a Republican or conservative, abortion questions focus heavily on the fewer than 1% of all abortions which are…

Earlier today, Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three morning network news shows on NBC, ABC, and CBS failed to cover President Barack Obama's denial that the Internal Revenue Service ever went after Tea Party and other conservative groups in his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Specifically Obama said that "it turned out no ... the truth of the matter is there was…

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes managed to write a 1,500-word story on David Daleiden, who runs the pro-life group that conducted damning undercover interviews with Planned Parenthood executives about harvesting baby organs, without once mentioning the actual contents of the vide.Calmes warned: "Democrats said they were counting on Republicans to overreach with their attacks -- inciting a…

On Wednesday night, major broadcast networks CBS and NBC showed no interest in shedding light on the findings of new Quinnipiac poll that found Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s honest and trustworthy ratings are continuing to fall and she trails three possible GOP opponents in three battleground states. While the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News focused exclusively on…