Campaigns & Elections

In the second half of his second hour today, Rush Limbaugh followed up on a phone call from a "Victor in Atlanta." Vince is concerned that many Americans like him, even though they want a different president, are "zapped out of enthusiasm." Rush took Vince's call as an opportunity to look at the Sandra Fluke controversy of the past week and use its results as an indicator that enthusiasm for…

"Fox News again buries the [monthly] jobs numbers," Politico media critic Dylan Byers groused this morning in a 10:23 a.m.-stamped post. Those numbers "appear in the lead or left-hand column atop the websites of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and MSNBC, as of 10 a.m.," Byers noted. But as email tipster James Harper pointed out to us, Fox News did later…

In an interview with Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson aired on Friday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer pushed the oil company executive to reject a plan by Newt Gingrich to lower the price of gas: "Newt Gingrich is promising Americans that he can deliver gasoline at $2.50 a gallon. Is he being truthful with the American public, in your opinion?" Tillerson responded: "Well, I haven't seen his…

Filling in for co-host Matt Lauer on Friday's NBC Today, CNBC's Carl Quintanilla seemed to suggest the media was helping the Obama administration shape public perception of the economy: "...we're in a situation where we're sort of managing expectations, especially for the White House." Quintanilla followed that admission by asking CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer about the upcoming jobs report…

Once again, MSNBC has continued to prop up Rev. Al Sharpton’s racist conspiracies that state legislatures led by the GOP are deliberately suppressing minority voters through new voter ID laws. On Friday’s episode of Jansing & Co., radio host and MSNBC substitute host Michael Smerconish led a left-wing attack on the GOP.  The panelists including Pennsylvania AFL-CIO chief Richard…

Did MSNBC ever vet Al Sharpton? Seriously. Much of the talk about HBO's Game Change docu-drama is focusing on the vetting of Sarah Palin or lack thereof by the McCain campaign. Is there any minimum standard of knowledge required to have one's own show on the Lean Forward network? Take Sharpton's mind-boggling misstatement on Morning Joe today.  The Reverend Al asserted that in Alabama, "it's…

"There's only one person who's trying to insert the reproductive rights debate into this campaign," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted in the "Media Mash" segment  of the March 8 edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity. It's Barack Obama who made this a live issue when he moved to push religious institutions to provide contraception, even if it violates their religious conscience to do so…

Mark Halperin says Mitt Romney's campaign has the worst relationship with the media of any major candidate he's covered.  But, according to the man from Time, it has nothing to do with the fact that Romney is the front-runner to take on the MSM's Chosen One.  No, Halperin assures us, "it's not a partisan thing."  The fault lies entirely with the Romney campaign itself, which reportedly has kept…

Joe Scarborough doesn't just take his Obama-landslide talk to NBC. He also spewed some of it on the Tavis Smiley show on PBS on Monday night. "This past month has been – and I was saying it this morning on the [MSNBC] show – this has been the worst month for the Republican Party since August of 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned, and I mean that." To which Smiley replied: "Wow, wow, wow, wow."…

Mitt Romney won more than twice as many delegates on Super Tuesday as Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. The Non-Fox Media's take-away is that Romney suffered a major setback Tuesday night. No matter what happens, Barack Obama's boosters in the NFM portray it as a debilitating blow to Romney. On Nov. 7, The New York Times' headline will be: "Romney ekes out narrow electoral victory, leaving race…

Earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted the press's ridiculously forgiving coverage of today's reported increase in unemployment claims while concentrating primarily on RTT News's assertion that the unemployment rate should continue to come down as long as weekly claims stay below 400,000. Three years ago, Christopher Rugaber's threshold at the Associated Press, also known to…

NewsBusters fan and PoliticalDerby.com blogger Steve Feinstein picked up on an interesting, albeit subtle, thread of bias in a Chuck Todd "First Read" blog post yesterday wherein the MSNBC Daily Rundown host hailed the 2008 Democratic primary as a "clash of political titans" in Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama:

On Thursday's NBC Today, correspondent Peter Alexander excitedly promoted an upcoming Obama campaign ad disguised as a documentary: "Next week the Obama campaign will release this 17-minute documentary about the President's first term in office. And Today was given an exclusive first look."

In a heated exchange Thursday between CNN’s Zoraida Sambolin and Samuel Wurzelbacher, also known as “Joe the Plumber,” Sambolin dug up comments he made about “gay people” in 2009, causing Wurzelbacher to quip that "this is TMZ. This isn't CNN, is what you're saying." Sambolin also questioned his qualifications to run for office, and mislabeled his liberal opponent as a "conservative Democrat…