Campaigns & Elections

On Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer twisted the meaning of a recent Washington Post poll on the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts: “Three-fourths of those voters...said they wanted Brown to work with Democrats to get Republican ideas into legislation....the vote for Brown was not so much a vote for or against policy or party, as it was a vote against the process itself.”…

It's curious to see people in the mainstream media try to make sense of the Tea Party movement. The New York Times, which once called the Tea Parties a psychological phenomenon rather than a political movement, has now changed its tune. In the wake of the stunning upset by Scott Brown in the Jan. 19 Massachusetts special election to fill the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy's death, the Times is…

Is the luster finally wearing off the love affair between the White House press corps and President Barack Obama? It is, if CBS White House correspondent Chip Reid's analysis of President Barack Obama's latest Wall Street proposals is anything to go by. Reid appeared on the Fox Business Network's Jan. 25 "Imus in the Morning" program and offered an update on the president's financial and…

Building on Brad Wilmouth's critique at NewsBusters of Keith Olbermann's disgraceful treatment of Scott Brown's U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts, Johnny Dollar (HT Taxman Blog) measured the coverage of the victory/concession speeches of Brown and his opponent Martha (or is it Marcia?) Coakley. Imagine my non-surprise when I saw the results (graph follows the jump): During Tuesday night's…

Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos on Monday did not go easy on his friend and former colleague James Carville. Discussing the Massachusetts Senate election, he quoted Carville’s words from his 2009 book 40 More Years: "Republicans have no hope of making serious inroads into democratic advantages in 2010 or likely 2012 or 2014 and so on. It's time to call T.O.D., time of death, on…

I don't know why I'm relaying this to readers. After all, according to former White House Communications Director Anita "Mao Inspires Me" Dunn, it's not coming from a real news organization. Her successor, Dan Pfeiffer, agrees. So does David Axelrod. But on the off chance that what follows might actually mean something, here is an excerpt from a lengthy piece of investigative journalism from Fox…

Margery Eagan, a liberal columnist for the Boston Herald, ripped MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Sunday’s Reliable Sources on CNN over his “homophobic, racist, reactionary” label of Senator-elect Scott Brown on the night of the Massachusetts special election: “This is crazy...it’s sick.”Eagan appeared during the lead segment of the CNN program with Jonathan Martin of Politico and conservative CNN…

It's amazing how Bernard Condon and Tim Paradis of the Associated Press managed to hang the same label on totally opposite political positions in their report on the situation in the stock market late this afternoon.According to the AP pair, Scott Brown's U.S. Senate win in Massachusetts was due to a "wave of populism," at the same time as President Obama is supposedly planning to use "populist…

In a Page C1 column in Friday's Washington Post about the National Enquirer's plans to apply for a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair and love child, Howard Kurtz delivers a completely inexcusable pass to his fellow alleged journalists in the establishment media (bold is mine, internal link is in original): When the Enquirer first reported in 2007 that…

If you're totally reliant upon print media, some of the major newspapers that is, you might not have noticed the news about former Democratic Senator and 2008 presidential candidate John Edwards' admission that he was indeed the father of his campaign mistress's daughter. That story couldn't so much as garner a single front-page story from any of the nation's top five major newspapers - USA…

As the nation's leading newspaper and a beneficiary of the American tradition of free expression, the New York Times would of course celebrate a First Amendment victory at the Supreme Court, right? Well, not exactly. Friday's lead slot was dominated by the Supreme Court's expected but still momentous decision rejecting limits on corporate campaign spending in elections.But the subhead to Adam…

A publicly-traded corporation, The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO) publishes a daily newspaper which includes daily editorials aimed at influencing public opinion inside the corridors of Congress, White House, and regulatory agencies, and ultimately over voter preferences at the polls. What's more, the Post Company's newspaper has demonstrated its willingness to devote virtually limitless…

On Friday's Good Morning America, Claire Shipman gushed over Elizabeth Edwards as a “smart, passionate, sometimes fierce woman with many different sides to her personality.” She lauded the wife of John Edwards as a complex “heroine” who is “increasingly hard to define.” At the same time, Shipman downplayed the negative portrayal of Mrs. Edwards in a new campaign book. Recounting the story of the…

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Americans were treated to a number of populist sermons on the "special interests" who would oppose "reform" at any cost to maintain the "status quo" from which they "profit financially or politically." The drug companies, the energy companies, the Wall Street bankers, and the health insurers were the corporate enemies of a just and harmonious America, or so…