Campaigns & Elections

Weeks after NBC granted Hillary Clinton the favor of appearing on Saturday Night Live, playing a bartender to the actress who impersonates her on the comedy show, the same leftist activists who adored that routine are trying to prevent Donald Trump from hosting the show on November 7. A group called "The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda" has written a letter to NBC objecting to the booking.…

Friday's NBC Nightly News set aside just 34 seconds of air time to the Republican National Committee suspending its planned February 2016 debate with NBC. The evening newscast surrounded this coverage with over two minutes of reporting on other 2016 presidential campaign developments, focusing on the spat between Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. By contrast, ABC's World News Tonight and CBS Evening News…

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. And people who ridicule the level of others' speech patterns should check theirs first. CNBC didn't do that. Instead, on Thursday, as I noted in a previous NewsBusters post, it childishly rushed out a grade-level evaluation of the Republican presidential candidates' speech patterns during the first three debates, including the Wednesday train wreck…

The New York magazine writer-at-large and former New York Times columnist and theater critic says Jeb's problems included not only Dubya’s war in Iraq and pre-9/11 “national-security failures” but also the supposedly unsavory, extreme-right types that 41 and 43 attracted to the GOP, thereby contributing to its ruin.

On Friday evening, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC all ignored the latest dump of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from the State Department that included the retroactive classification of 268 e-mails that now makes for one out of every 16 e-mails that have been “released” to the public since her private e-mail server scandal was unearthed in March.

Seemingly out of shame, CNBC has initially downplayed the breaking news that the Republican National Committee is punishing parent company NBC for Wednesday’s biased presidential debate. While MSNBC and CNN offered extensive commentary and analysis, CNBC allowed just a minute and eight seconds since the story broke around noon. 

In a letter to NBC News president Andrew Lack on Friday, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus informed the network “that pending further discussion between the Republican National Committee (RNC) and our presidential campaigns, we are suspending the partnership with NBC News for the Republican primary debate at the University of Houston on February 26, 2016.”

While much of the media ruled that Jeb Bush did not have a satisfactory debate performance on Wednesday, the sentiment stretched even into the late-night comedy shows as ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel panned the “embarrassing” Bush on Thursday for attacking Rubio on an issue “that literally no one outside of Florida cares about” concerning his Senate attendance record.

CNN’s senior media correspondent, Brian Stelter, during Thursday’s AC360, lamented how Republican presidential candidates have often attacked the liberal media “to deflect tough, unwelcome questions,” arguing their conservative supporters have caused “more polarization” in the electorate by not trusting the media.

Friday's Morning Joe featured a discussion by the roundtable on the subject of the debates and the fairness needed for them. While Newsbusters previously discussed Morning Joe's discussion on the bias of moderators, Morning Joe also discussed their surprise and support of Dr. Ben Carson, who has come out leading the change to reform these debates.

The journalists at CBS This Morning fawned over liberal comedian John Oliver, Friday. Co-host Gayle King enthused that “I love watching your take on politics.” Co-host Norah O’Donnell offered him a softball on American politics: “You’re a Brit. What do you think about this process we have?” 

Making his now semi-frequent appearance on a primetime MSNBC show, lefty blogger Charles Pierce was on Thursday’s All In to trash the 2016 Republican presidential candidates as merely “a bunch of unruly, nasty children” during Wednesday’s CNBC debate and suggested that “the next one” should take place “in a sandbox.”

On Friday, NBC’s Today tried to spin Republicans objecting to CNBC’s disastrous debate moderators as a problem for the GOP. Co-host Matt Lauer declared: “Grand old problems. Republican candidates reportedly planning to meet about changing how future debates are organized...”

When this NewsBuster began preparing today's item, the focus was going to be on Joe Scarborough's statement on today's Morning Joe that "90% of the people in our business vote for Democrats and Democratic primaries." Not that it was something we didn't already know [though query whether even 10% of MSMers are Republicans], but refreshing to hear it so starkly stated. But preparing the video clip…