Campaigns & Elections

Call it "Politico Protection." Clay Waters at NewsBusters has already exposed the passive-aggressive anti-Semitism in Maureen Dowd's Sunday rant ("Neocons Slither Back") at the New York Times. So did Politico's Dylan Byers, who nonetheless thought that the Obama campaign's tweet supporting Dowd's column via its "Truth Team" (and, by inference,their  endorsement of her "neocon puppet master"…

Since September 2, NewsBusters has been showcasing the most egregious bias the Media Research Center has uncovered over the years — four quotes for each of the 25 years of the MRC, 100 quotes total — all leading up to our big 25th Anniversary Gala next week. Click here for blog posts recounting the worst of 1988 through 2003. Today, the worst bias of 2004: CBS’s Morley Safer eulogized Ronald…

In a campaign season which is on track to go down as the worst ever for cooked polling, one from CBS News and the New York Times has outdone everyone to this point. Clearly, they didn't like what a properly weighted result would have told them, which is that Mitt Romney is in a deadlock with Barack Obama if one uses Gallup's party affiliation numbers from before Democratic National Convention…

Former Romney spokesperson Richard Grenell called out the media on Monday for not focusing hard enough on President Obama's foreign policy record. "The media needs to start looking at policies, not just lip service from this President," he told CNN's Carol Costello. "You know, there has been criticism that Romney spoke out too early in the Middle East after 15 hours of a developing violence…

An executive producer at Good Morning America was forced to defend ABC's skimpy convention coverage, huffing that the network stressed quality over quantity. The Associated Press on Monday picked up a report by the Media Research Center pointing out that ABC had the least amount of convention coverage, less than half than that of CBS. When pressed on it by the AP's David Bauder, Good Morning…

Like their colleagues on NBC's Today show, Monday's CBS This Morning forwarded a recent Politico report about supposed "turmoil inside the Romney campaign," which was stuffed with unnamed sources. Norah O'Donnell spotlighted "this finger-pointing that's going on...and whether or not they mismanaged the messaging in terms of Romney's big convention speech." John Dickerson hyped that "what's…

In a stunning display of group-think on Sunday's NBC Meet the Press, a panel of journalists all concluded that no American president could have possibly prevented the ongoing crisis in Middle East or responded to it any better than Barack Obama. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] The hand-wringing began with The Atlantic's Jeff Goldberg absolving the President of any…

"The public is waiting for Mitt Romney to say, 'I've had enough of you folks,'"  NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Fox Business Network's Stuart Varney this morning. The Media Research Center founder and president noted that unlike President Obama, Romney actually entertained questions from the media after his September 11 statement, where he was subjected to six different iterations of…

All this week during the 11 a.m. Eastern MSNBC Live program, "we're going to look at the ballot battles that could decide the race for the White House," MSNBC's Richard Lui noted today as he set up a segment with two liberal opponents of voter ID laws -- "wired into the concerns of minority voters" -- Ohio State Senator Nina Turner (D) and Common Cause staff counsel Stephen Spaulding.…

Clint Eastwood appeared on Monday's Good Morning America to promote his new movie, but still had to deal with media fallout from his "controversial" "chair stunt" at the Republican National Convention. Fill-in co-host Josh Elliott teased the segment by lecturing, "We'll have much more about that controversial speech." After talking to Eastwood about his soon-to-be released baseball film,…

Pushing the narrative of Mitt Romney losing the presidential election on Monday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie seized on an article in Politico that "details squabbling among Romney advisers, a lot of blind quotes, anonymous quotes." She turned to political director Chuck Todd and wondered: "Is this a fairly ominous sign for the campaign, that they're already blaming each other…

On September 10, in a writeup which should qualify them for immediate entry into the Journalistm Hall of Shame, the Associated Press's Julie Pace and three other assisting reporters, acting as virtual stenographers for the Obama administration and water-carriers for his reelection campaign, declared that "It will be a rare day on the campaign when terrorism, or national security for that matter…

Late last week, the campaign team for Wendy Long (R-NY) filed a press release accusing Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) of filing false tax returns in 2010.  Long is currently running against Gillibrand for her U.S. Senate seat. Citing what they refer to as an "impossible transaction", Long's team asserted that Gillibrand's tax return had mischaracterized the sale of 80 shares of Sears…

This past week, Kossacks weighed in on the GOP presidential nominee's Libya/Egypt comments, reflected on the madness and/or fanatical religiosity of conservatives, and lauded a currently showless lefty cable-TV host. As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.