Congress

USA Today's "breaking news" email ("Ex-Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. sentenced to 30 months") opened with the following opening sentence: "The nine-term Democrat from Illinois and son of the former civil rights leader had pleaded guilty in February to using $750,000 in campaign money to pay for living expenses, clothes and luxury items." So it seemed like it would be a waste of time to click through…

CBS This Morning and NBC's Today couldn't be bothered to give Jesse Jackson, Jr.'s political affiliation as they devoted just 35 seconds of air time on Wednesday to his upcoming sentencing. Both morning newscasts merely identified the onetime Democratic politician as a former congressman. The same morning, ABC's Good Morning America completely ignored the story about Jackson, who pled guilty…

Politico reports “the White House, congressional Democrats and their allies are plotting an August recess offensive” to promote President Obama’s plan against “climate change.” Obama’s Organizing for America website (BarackObama.com) now lists 111 House members and 24 Senators their fans should tweet “Stop denying the science for climate change.” Politico left MSNBC out of this campaign.…

Appearing as a guest on Friday's PoliticsNation, Washington Post political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson declared that President Obama had "framed it very nicely" when he asserted that Republicans "want to shut down the government so that they can deny 30 million people health care." Henderson:

Though many of us have known a fundamental truth about Obamacare for several years, the fact that Harry Reid admitted to the truth is important. How important? So important that despite plenty of bloggers and other new media outlets taking note of it, the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post (the latest stories here and here are from before Reid made his admission on Friday…

One has to sift through the biased blather to get to it, but Mary Clare Jalonick's August 1 coverage at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, of the House's plans to rein in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, still popularly called "food stamps," contains an important admission which most of the establishment press has avoided as the program's costs and enrollment…

The Washington Post’s August 9 front-page story about the brutal murder of Vanessa Pham is missing a critical detail.  The young woman's alleged murderer is an illegal immigrant; a fact that is omitted entirely from Justin Jouvenal's story, even as Jouvenal mentioned Julio Miguel Blanco Garcia has a prior criminal record. It's not like Jouvenal was unaware of Garcia's being in the country…

The Washington Post’s Josh Hicks can’t be living under a rock, so his piece of the IRS’ postponement of their August furlough day is probably just fluff to fill space on the website.  His August 8 story had no mention of the fact that the agency is under a congressional microscope from its past activities of targeting both conservative and progressive groups.  This, along with the analysis done…

There’s nothing liberal media members love more than a Republican who attacks other Republicans in front of the TV cameras. That probably explains the media’s rediscovered fascination with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the 2008 GOP presidential nominee. ABC’s Jeff Zeleny interviewed McCain last Friday for the ABC News / Yahoo News online series The Fine Print, and he used the veteran senator as a…

It's not just conservatives who think it's a horrible idea for NBC to run a Hillary Clinton miniseries before the 2016 election. Network anchor Chuck Todd worries about the perception of bias, even as he insists that there's a tall wall of separation between his network's news  and entertainment divisions. Reported the Washington Post's Aaron Blake in an August 8 Post Politics entry:

On Tuesday's PoliticsNation on MSNBC, after host Al Sharpton complained that House Speaker John Boehner's refusal to condemn birtherism feeds an inability to compromise with President Obama, Washington Post political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson agreed with Sharpton and asserted that Speaker Boehner "has not tried very hard to get the more raucous members of his caucus in check," and referred to…

If there was a daily prize for "Propaganda Tool of the Day," Politico would have won it both yesterday and today. Yesterday, as Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters noted, the web site changed the title of an embarrassing report by Kyle Cheney on low attendance at an Organizing For America event from "Poor attendance at Obamacare event in Virginia" (number of volunteers who showed up: one) to "…

Wouldn’t it be great if Congress reinstated earmarks and started legislating from behind closed doors? That was the argument pushed by political reporter Zeke Miller in a Tuesday article on TIME.com’s Swampland page entitled “The Bipartisan Call to Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Room.” Miller presented  a thoroughly one-sided view of the subject, refusing to acknowledge the considerable downside…

Well, the Washington Post is back to their usual tricks in distorting the facts about guns and background checks.  On page A2 of today's print edition, staff writer Philip Rucker gave readers a story, which read pretty much like a press release for a left-wing pro-gun control group, calling itself Third Way.  Rucker harped on the misleading “gun show loophole” and how, according to Third Way,…