Campaigns & Elections

In a news brief on Monday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams managed to twist a positive development for Mitt Romney, the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, into a negative: "Giuliani, who had been out spreading the word for Newt Gingrich up until right now. And so for months he'd been saying bad things about Romney like this on Morning Joe." In the sound bite that followed from the…

Appearing on Tuesday's NBC Today, political director Chuck Todd warned Mitt Romney against picking Marco Rubio as a vice presidential running mate with a negative comparison to Sarah Palin: "The drawbacks – inexperience. Do you want to pick somebody who basically has the same amount of time in statewide office that a person who was on the ticket last time by the name of Sarah Palin had?"…

As NewsBusters reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews last Thursday actually asked his guests if voters and pundits are going to be reluctant to dump Barack Obama this November because he's the first black president. Media analyst Bernie Goldberg took issue with this on Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor Monday saying, "It's because he's a liberal, and like many liberals, he's obsessed with race" (…

Come November, there's no way Mika Brzezinski will be pulling the lever for Mitt Romney.  But the MSNBC co-host had some sincere praise for the Republican standard-bearer this morning. Expressing frustration with Rudy Giuliani--the latest in a string of Republicans to have offered only a  tepid endorsement of Romney--Brzezinski said that when she meets with Mitt and Ann, she comes away "…

An unhinged Chris Matthews on Monday excoriated Republican primary voters as racist, deriding them as the "Grand Wizard crowd." Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele fought back,  slamming "this Grand Wizard nonsense." "Don't go there with me," he warned. [See video below. MP3 audio here.] After Steele informed the Hardball anchor that subjects such as climate change…

You "can't blame" President Barack Obama for high gas prices. "Desperate" Republicans are hoping for the scandal-free Obama to have a scandal. When a conservative woman denounces absurd gender politics it's simply "a ventriloquist act" for "patriarchal ideas." Those were the gems which stumbled out of the mouths, respectively, of conservative columnist S.E. Cupp, Democratic strategist Krystal…

On Monday's CBS This Morning, correspondent Erin Moriarty and legal analyst Jack Ford wrote off the campaign finance case against former Democratic V.P. candidate John Edwards. Moriarty and Ford agreed that "even if [Edwards is] convicted, it will be overturned on appeal; that he'll never spend a day in prison." The network did devote 12 minutes total to the upcoming Edwards trial on Sunday and…

During a report for the April 18 edition of NBC's Rock Center, correspondent Ted Koppel was right at home with French socialist campaign workers: "...it is the Socialist campaign directed by these three young men, Vincent, Arthur and Guillaume, that has the distinctly American flavor." Guillaume declared: "We've been pushing this, you know, let's do what Obama did for two years." At the same…

In the campaign to ensure that anyone with a proposal to actually do something about the federal government's out-of-control spending gets demonized, while incumbent Barack Obama and his party go scot-free for proposing nothing beyond the autopilot, budget-free situation of the past three years, Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, went after Republican…

Just 49 percent of homeowners in America now believe their home is worth more than they paid for it. Rasmussen Reports has asked that question for years, and it has never before fallen below the 50 percent mark. This represents a sea change in personal finances that challenges core assumptions about the way our economy works.

It has become clear what the Obama campaign's strategy for trying to win states like Michigan and Ohio is and will continue to be. In three steps, it's as follows: 1) Pretend that the states' Republican governors, John Kasich in Ohio and Rick Snyder in Michigan, who both succeeded free-spending Democrats who presided over stagnant economies, have had nothing to do with their increased…

Karl at Hot Air and others recording their objections at Twitter caught Politifact being two-faced in deciding who gets the "Truth-O-Meter" text. As Karl notes: "PolitiFact rated the story about the Romneys transporting the family dog on the roof of their car as 'Mostly True.' And PolitiFact rated the story about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee frying squirrels in a popcorn poppersimply '…

As NewsBusters reported earlier, David Chaney, a now fired secret service agent involved in HookerGate, boasted on his Facebook page in 2008 as having ogled former Alaska governor Sarah Palin while guarding her. On MSNBC's Martin Bashir Show Friday, the host scolded Chaney for "making Sarah Palin relevant" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In the 2008 campaign, "[t]he media were awestruck, embarrassingly so," over Barack Obama and failed to vet him thoroughly, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted on last night's edition of Hannity. "In the primaries in 2008, we counted 29 different times when the networks either called him a rising star, an emerging star, a rock star, or a superstar. Twenty-nine different times," but they…