Campaigns & Elections

On Thursday, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen suggested in a videoconference call, as translated into plain English by the Wall Street Journal, that "there could be benefits to allowing the central bank to buy stocks as a way to boost the economy in a downturn."

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU, is one of America’s best-known left-wing media critics. Last weekend on his PressThink site, he delved into “the precepts and maxims I have used to understand press behavior during this long and startling campaign season.” Rosen’s main point is that even though Donald Trump “is not a normal candidate and can’t be covered like one,” generally the media…

Official crime data released by the FBI earlier this week reveal that nearly 11 percent more Americans were murdered in the U.S. in 2015 than in 2014. Leon Neyfakh at Slate.com is only secondarily interested in what the just-released stats say about the direction of public safety in the nation. What's far more important to him is making sure his readers know that "the FBI’s numbers do not prove…

Avengers director Whedon was given air time on MSNBC on Friday to bash “nightmarish” Republicans as trying to stop people from voting and Donald Trump as a “scary monster.” The filmmaker, who has started a Super Pac to defeat the businessman, attacked, “I think he's a threat to our country. I think he is a threat to our idea of democracy. I think he's a scary monster and I am not shy about that…

On Monday, we noted the latest Rasmussen Reports survey found that 46 percent of those surveyed felt the debate moderators would assist Hillary Clinton – something that happened with liberal Lester Holt in Monday’s debate. On Friday, Rasmussen has a new survey of 1,000 likely voters demonstrating a major distrust in media-elite “fact checking” of the candidates:

Amidst a mind-numbingly naive discussion about the Clintons on ABC’s The View Friday, the panel inadvertently got extremely close to the truth. After Trump threatened to bring up Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, the panel decided to talk about whether or not Hillary Clinton should be called out on that issue. While Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin eagerly defended Hillary for “trashing” the women…

Amidst the media’s wall-to-wall coverage on Friday morning of Donald Trump’s late-night tweetstorm about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, MSNBC host Tamron Hall bemoaned the idea that this is a collective degrading of political decorum because it’s a “substantive” because it concerns whether Trump can win over women voters.

Joking and laughing with reporters, Hillary Clinton on Thursday only gently had to deal with Donald Trump threatening to bring up Bill Clinton’s sexual infidelities. In a friendly atmosphere, the journalists wondered more about how the Democrat will respond and very little about the actual issue it raises about how Mrs. Clinton treats other women. 

On Friday’s NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer excitedly proclaimed: “Anticipation already running high for tomorrow’s season premiere of Saturday Night Live when the show announced that Alec Baldwin will be playing Donald Trump.” Fellow co-host Savannah Guthrie chimed in: “That put the anticipation into the stratosphere.” She then wondered: “We think there will be laughs, but will it actually have an…

Following the first presidential debate on Monday, Donald Trump has turned his sights onto former President Bill Clinton in an effort to rout Hillary Clinton. At a rally in New Hampshire Thursday Trump reminded the public that Bill was impeached in 1998 for lying in a sworn deposition. But Bloomberg’s John Heilemann on With All Due Respect pooh-poohed the attack saying, “I believe it is much more…

Wednesday evening, Seattle TV station KING 5 erroneously broke what it thought was troubling news about Arcan Cetin, who has been arrested and charged with the murder of five people at the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Washington last Friday. The station reported that Cetin is not a U.S. citizen, but is instead "considered a permanent resident or green card holder," and that despite this status,…

With Election Day just 40 days way, 11 states have already opened their polls to those residents wishing to cast their ballot early. “And absentee ballots are being mailed now in 28 states and Washington, D.C.,” reported CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, “Early access to the polls in Iowa was not lost on the Clinton campaign today.” And neither was it lost on CBS and their reporter Nancy…

After stumping for Hillary Clinton with some of his fellow cast members from the former NBC show The West Wing, actor Bradley Whitford joined the Thursday edition of MSNBC’s Hardball to assure viewers that Hillary Clinton’s “motivation for her entire professional life has been to speak out for children, for women's rights, civil rights, rights for people in all communities.”

A recent report on Univision’s principal national evening newscast leaves little doubt that the network's high-profile efforts to boost Latino voter registration and turnout are solely aimed to benefit Hillary Clinton.