Bias by Omission

NBC's failure to cover the Democratic congressman who compared Republicans to Nazis on the House floor trickled down to MSNBC yesterday, as anchor Lawrence O'Donnell neglected the story in favor of smearing House Speaker John Boehner and syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh. After spending more than six minutes railing against House Republicans for repealing Obama's health care overhaul in a…

"My comprehension of the English language can't adequately describe the barbaric nature of Dr. [Kermit] Gosnell." That's how a horrified District Attorney Seth Williams (D) described the abortionist arrested yesterday for murdering newborn babies in his squalid Philadelphia clinic. It appears Gosnell's clinic had been ignored by medical regulators for years as the abortionist performed…

The folks in the establishment press are looking for any sign of upward movement in the housing market, especially in new home construction, that they can portray positively as the beginning of a general recovery. That desperate search explains the content of the following e-mail alert from CNN which arrived in my inbox this morning:

Carrying his sermonizing from his MSNBC morning show to Politico, Joe Scarborough railed against inflammatory political rhetoric in his latest Politico column – but hit conservative talk while ignoring leftist vitriol. Calling them out by name, as he did recently on his show "Morning Joe," Scarborough pleaded with conservatives that if they can't be civil out of righteousness, they could at…

Especially on Martin Luther King Day, it seems worth asking whether or not the assassinated civil rights leaders would have cared more about: Whether a talk radio host told his audience, in reference to the No Child Left Behind Act causing many school districts, including the Toledo Public Schools (TPS), to believe they must "teach to the test" to avoid serious sanctions: "teaching little…

Yesterday (covered here at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), in his report on the arrest of Eric Fuller at an ABC "This Week" taping in Tucson, Arizona, the Associated Press's Bob Christie either failed to perform a basic web search that would have revealed Fuller's Friday "Democracy Now!" rant, or failed to report what he found. This evening's AP report from Christie and Amanda Lee Myers at least…

Let's see if this lasts. I'm guessing it will. Here's the opening paragraph of the Associated Press's 8:16 p.m. ET report on the arrest of Eric Fuller: One of the Arizona shooting victims was arrested Saturday and then taken for a psychiatric evaluation after authorities said he took a picture of a tea party leader at televised town hall meeting and yelled: "you're dead." The rest of Bob…

Two paragraphs don't seem to belong together in Martin Crutsinger's Associated Press dispatch on the government's Monthly Treasury Statement for December. But there they are. Here's the first paragraph of interest in Martin's missive ("Federal budget deficit narrows to $80B in December"): Government spending during this period totaled $902.6 billion, an increase of 3.1 percent over the same…

(See the Update within the post.) It's not too difficult to determine where the sympathy of the Associated Press's Christopher Wills resides in the aftermath of the Democrat-controlled legislature's passage in Illinois of steep, "temporary" four-year income and corporate tax increases. Wills cited neighboring states as "gleefully plot(ting)" to take business away from Illinois, claimed that…

Man, it is getting really deep around here -- and no, I'm not talking about the snow, though there is no shortage of it here in Southwestern Ohio. What's really deep is the claim by current Government/General Motors Chairman and CEO Daniel Akerson that because of the company's government-engineered, unsecured bondholder-shortchanging trip through bankruptcy, "we lost roughly a year in terms…

Oh c'mon, this is too easy. Here's a paragraph from former Congressman Paul Kanjorski's op-ed in the New York Times, published online yesterday, in the print edition today ("Why Politicians Need to Stay Out in the Open"): We all lose an element of freedom when security considerations distance public officials from the people. Therefore, it is incumbent on all Americans to create an…

Managing Editor's Note: Media Research Center President Brent Bozell issued the following statement after a thorough, two-day review of how the media have covered the tragic shooting in Arizona. Implicating a conservative tie to this heinous act of violence or to Jared Lee Loughner, who is no conservative, is nothing short of a naked campaign to criminalize conservative thought. Sadly,…

"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" must be the motto at Reuters, or at least of the wire service's Richard Cowan, three other contributors, and Editor Jackie Frank. Cowan's late Sunday afternoon dispatch (HT to an e-mailer) is caricature-driven collection of cliches, half-truth, outright myths, and totally predictable oversights. There's the racial slurs before the heath…

Okay, who slipped truth serum into Evan Thomas's coffee? On Friday, Newsweek's "Editor at Large" (according to his bio here) appeared on "Inside Washington" (link to entire show is here; transcript not yet available). After being cued up with a softball from host Gordon Peterson about how supposedly great Friday's news about the drop in the national unemployment rate was (uh, not exactly,…