Crime

Melissa Harris-Perry proudly portrays her MSNBC show as "Nerdland."  But has it devolved from a cozy academic coffee klatsch for lefties into something else? To discuss the issue of relations between police and black Americans, with the backdrop of Ferguson and a shooting this week in St. Louis, Harris-Perry had as a member of her panel Mychal Denzel Smith. On the one hand, Denzel Smith would…

In a Thursday column for The Daily Beast, former CNN contributor Roland Martin attacked the supposed "cowardly bullies" at the National Rifle Association for opposing President Obama's surgeon general nominee. Martin's op-ed follows in the footsteps of MSNBC's Krystal Ball and NBC's Anne Thompson, who politicized the Ebola crisis nearly a week earlier when they bemoaned that due to "Senate…

It's disconcerting, and occasionally infuriating, to watch facts originally reported in some national stories disappear or get sanitized in later versions. What the Associated Press has been doing to its more recent reports on the September 25 beheading of Colleen Hufford in Moore, Oklahoma has moved firmly into the infuriating stage. Several examples after the jump will demonstrate this.

On Tuesday's The Kelly File on Fox News Channel, Maureen Faulkner, the widow of murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, berated the graduating students at Goddard College in Vermont for honoring her husband's killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal, as their commencement speaker: "I am just absolutely outraged that they would have such a hate-filled murderer on as a commencement speaker...he…

Imus would call it a "tension convention." There was palpable friction among members of the Morning Joe team today on the question of whether Secret Service Director Julia Pierson was an affirmative action hire. By the end, the almost unfailingly affable Willie Geist was smirking in frustration at Mika Brzezinski. When Brzezinski first broached the sensitive-for-liberals subject, she suggested…

On Sunday, Trip Gabriel at the New York Times had the thankless task of concocting a report which would somehow make Ohio Democrats feel positive about winning at least one statewide office in November instead of getting skunked, which appears pretty likely at this point. That's because the campaign of the Dems' gubernatorial candidate, affectionately known as the Wreck That Is Edward FitzGerald…

On Monday's Fox News's Hannity, Islamist cleric Anjem Choudary accused the Western media and Blackwater of framing ISIS for the atrocities that the terrorist group has freely admitted to. When host Sean Hannity raised the beheading of British aid worker David Haines, Choudary contended that "the information that we received...is very biased....I don't take my news from Fox News or the BBC. If you…

A number of center-right and New Media outlets have noted Politico Magazine's disingenuousness in the opening photograph in its "Race and the Modern GOP" article. At the item's top is the iconic "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" photo showing onetime segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace "try(ing) to block the entry of two black students" into the University of Alabama. The aforementioned…

In an interview with Ben Affleck on Monday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer observed that the actor's new murder mystery thriller Gone Girl was "a little hostile to the institution of the media." Affleck agreed but reassured Lauer: "Yeah, it's not media broadly. It's not you guys or The New York Times or even the news. It's about that stripe of media that's the sort of the cable, 24-hour, 'Who…

The reporter who broke the Rotherham sex abuse scandal, Andrew Norfolk of the Times (UK), first had to get over his misgivings that the awful facts would "be a dream story for the far right" in England.

Democratic State Representative Christina Ayala has been arrested and charged with 19 felony charges of voter fraud. Eight of the counts are for fraudulent voting. Other Ayala family members are under investigation, and criminal charges have been recommended but not made against one of them. The press is letting Connecticut's Secretary of State claim that the Ayala prosecution proves that the…

As I noted Sunday evening, Fox News's Megyn Kelly, on her Friday show, characterized the beheading of Colleen Hufford at the hands of Alton Nolen, if true, as "the first American beheading on American soil reportedly in the name of jihad." It turns out that someone allegedly tried to beat Nolen out for that distinction, and failed. Take a look at what the Oklahoman's Nolan Clay described as a "…

Score one for Joe Scarborough.  The Morning Joe host today unleashed a tirade against the FBI for treating as a case of "workplace violence" the beheading by a fanatical Muslim convert of a fellow worker in Oklahoma.  Scarborough lashed out at the FBI's political correctness in claiming that there was "no indication" that the suspect, Alton Nolen, was copying the recent ISIS beheadings. Said…

The story of alleged Moore, Oklahoma murderer Alton Nolen, who reportedly beheaded co-worker Colleen Hufford, is fading from the headlines. Barring further developments, I don't expect it to be a news topic on any of the Big Three networks' morning or evening news shows tomorrow. That's because it has already disappeared from prominence at the Associated Press. At 10:20 this morning, the latest…