Bias by Omission

This is for the "false memories" and "he's an untouchable 'brand' crowds defending Brian Williams, who this afternoon announced that he has "decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days." At the 2-minute mark of the 2007 interview with a collegiate reporter following the jump, watch Williams speak of his alleged brushes with danger, including how he "looked down the…

At USA Today Friday afternoon, two of its reporters came down on the side of Brian Williams in the controversy over what even the often media-enabling Associated Press has called his "fake Iraq story." Roger Yu tried to portray Williams as a victim of a "synergistic stretch" who is now having to defend himself against the "firestorm on the Internet and social media," while Marisol Bello, who…

A New York Times military correspondent filed a useful story on the problem of military veterans being stereotyped as violent and troubled on movies and TV. But what about when the Times was guilty of doing the same thing on its Sunday front page, smearing veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan as killers on "a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak"?

If Brian Williams or any of the executives at NBC thought that the controversy over his "fake Iraq story" might start to die down, developments this evening have proven that they were sadly mistaken. The quoted words in the previous sentence are from a headline at an Associated Press story by David Bauder, the wire service's TV writer. The fact that the nation's self-described "essential global…

Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Barack Obama took the step of comparing terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists to Christianity being the justification for the Crusades, slavery, and Jim Crow laws in America. The “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC all ignored the President’s critique of Christianity during the Thursday evening newscasts with only ABC’s World News…

As Curtis Houck at NewsBusters reported last night, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams is in serious trouble after he, in Houck's words, "admitted to not being aboard a helicopter that was shot and had to be rescued following RPG fire during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003." Williams's apology, also carried at Houck's post, only refers to the "mistake" he made "on this broadcast last…

Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh believes that because the center-right media and blogosphere pushed back against the vaccine vendetta campaign against Republicans and conservatives, the establishment press is sharply backing away from trying to capitalize on it, especially because both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been shown to have played to the anti-vaxxer crowd during the 2008…

Yesterday, in a column at his organization's web site, the head of the nation's leading polling organization called the government's official unemployment rate, currently at 5.6 percent, a "big lie." Rest assured that if Gallup Inc. Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton had written this column during a Republican or conservative administration, his words would have been picked up by the Associated Press…

On Friday, the government reported that the nation's economy, as measured in its real gross domestic product, grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent during last year's final quarter, sharply trailing analysts' consensus predictions ranging from 3.0 percent to 3.6 percent. As is the case after the first version of every GDP report, economy watchers have been trying to estimate the effect other…

The Catholic League's Bill Donohue blasted the L.A. Times in a Tuesday press release for hyping the recent protest of a dozen left-wing protesters objecting to Pope Francis's decision to canonize 18th-century missionary Juinipero Serra. By contrast, the liberal newspaper failed to cover the thousands of pro-lifers who marched in Los Angeles on January 17, 2015.

Following the unveiling of President Obama’s 2016 budget proposal, two of the three major broadcast networks made time to mention the story during their Monday evening newscasts, but only in the form of short news briefs.  ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir dedicated 16 seconds of airtime to the subject and while it brought up how much of the President’s proposal centers around tax…

During a live interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie on Sunday, President Obama told her how, at the White House, “[w]e make beer – The first president since George Washington to make some booze in the White House.”  While it may be true that beer was brewed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the President’s statement about former President George Washington also making beer there was far from accurate…

According to the Israeli publication Haaretz and many other news outlets, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry won't meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because it's "inappropriate." Specifically, "The White House cited the proximity of the Israeli election to Netanyahu's visit, and the desire to refrain from interfering in the election." Certain blatant falsehoods…