Campaigns & Elections

Last Thursday's Wall Street Journal editorial "Why Not Paul Ryan?" made the case for his selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in this statement: "Romney can win a big election over big issues. He'll lose a small one." After Ryan's serious proposal to restructure Medicare -- which virtually everyone knows must be reformed -- the response from Democrats was an unserious TV ad,…

Late this this afternoon, the Associated Press made a correction to Christopher Rugaber's August 10 story on July's federal budget results. His original claim, noted on August 11 by yours truly at NewsBusters and at BizzyBlog, was that Barack Obama's promise to cut the deficit in half was something "he pledged to do during his 2008 campaign." As noted in my original post and its mirror, the…

Rep. Paul Ryan's 100 percent rating by the pro-life National Right to Life Committee and his support of the "Protect Life Act" are evidence of the Wisconsin Republican's extremism on abortion and as such, should hurt the appeal of the Romney/Ryan ticket with women voters, MSNBC's Alex Wagner argued on the August 14 edition of her noon Eastern Now with Alex Wagner program. Of course the 100…

ABC’s Martha Raddatz is perhaps the freshest face of the Old Media veterans chosen as a moderator by the Commission on the Presidential Debates. After five years at National Public Radio, Raddatz has handled a variety of serious Washington beats for ABC since 1999. She's married to journalist Tom Gjelten, who's worked for NPR for 30 years. Raddatz has also been married to Obama's FCC chairman…

Leading off Monday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams struck a patronizing tone as he noted "things get rough for the new guy on the trail" Paul Ryan, with "incoming fire on his own record and a not so warm welcome to the big leagues during his appearance today at the Iowa state fair." In the report that followed, correspondent Peter Alexander seized on protestors showing up at a Ryan…

Instead of fact-checking President Obama's dishonest attack on Paul Ryan for blocking a farm bill, CNN simply reported it three times on Tuesday morning. Correspondent Brianna Keilar actually repeated the false attack in her own words. "[T]hey [the House] failed to pass a bill for drought relief, which as you know is huge right now because of all of the farmers, all of the cattle ranchers…

It was widely reported back in June that the producers of the HBO series “Game of Thrones” deliberately used a gruesome image of former president George W. Bush’s head impaled on a stake during the drama’s season one finale. The backlash was so great that DVD shipments were halted, digital copies were edited, and an apology was issued via press release. Now the author of the books, George R.R…

CBS This Morning on Tuesday played up how Mitt Romney's campaign had to conduct "a little more damage control" after the GOP presidential candidate held an event at a popular Miami establishment owned by a convict. Correspondent Jan Crawford highlighted how "Romney held an event yesterday at a well-known restaurant in Miami whose owner - get this - pleaded guilty to cocaine distribution in 1999…

"Since when does serving up junk food give someone a license to preach?" carped Petula Dvorak as she opened her August 14 piece, "Now featuring filet o' fracas."* Gee, I dunno, Petula, maybe 1791, when the First Amendment -- you know, that pesky little document that guarantees freedom of speech and religion among other things -- was ratified. "We've got the Papa John's pizza guys weighing in…

Former Democratic operative turned TV host George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday immediately set to work on the job of parroting Democratic talking points about the new Republican presidential ticket. The network anchor teased the program by hyping, "Mitt Romney and his new running mate under attack from the White House. President Obama says they will end Medicare as we know it." [See video below.…

When CNN isn't reading liberal talking points about the Romney-Ryan ticket, it's resorting to using conservative friendly fire against the Ryan budget, like Piers Morgan did on Monday. Morgan baited Newt Gingrich by asking "it is a radical form of social engineering, isn't it?" after he played a clip of Gingrich ripping the Ryan budget as "radical change" – a statement Gingrich later…

AP couldn’t let Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio hand out juice at a campaign event in Miami without connecting them to cocaine. What? David Fischer’s story was headlined “Host for Romney event is a convicted drug dealer.” It began: “Mitt Romney held a campaign event Monday evening at a Miami juice shop owned by a convicted cocaine trafficker.” In 1995, cocaine trafficker Jorge Cabrera gained…

In an interview with former House speaker Newt Gingrich on Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer worried about vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's commitment to conservative principles: "I've heard Paul Ryan described as a true conservative....Do you honestly think he is someone who will work and reach across the aisle to Democrats or will he be an immovable object on key social issues…

Matthew Yglesias has been posting at Slate.com, supposedly a paragon of online establishment press journalism, as a business and economics correspondent since November of last year. His background is unmistakably leftist: ThinkProgress, the Atlantic, TPM Media, and the American Prospect. On Saturday, a Yglesias found a blog post which was apparently too good to check at The Richmonder, a…