Double Standards

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the "everybody knows" conventional wisdom in the establishment press which never went away, even as some contrary evidence appeared, was that Donald Trump's campaign, away from his rallies, was a haphazard operation which was doing very little to identify, target and persuade voters. At the New Republic in mid-June, Jeet Heer confidently summed up the media…

Since Sunday evening, ABC, CBS and NBC (along with a host of other establishment media outlets) have been engaged in a feeding frenzy over Donald Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, with reporters relentlessly employing phrases such as “white nationalist,” “white supremacist,” “extremist,” “racist” and “anti-Semitic” to solidify the image of Bannon as a dangerous pick for a top White House…

Media Research Center founder and president Brent Bozell joined the Fox Business Network (FBN) on Wednesday afternoon’s Cavuto: Coast to Coast alongside FBN’s Connell McShane and Heat Street’s Jillian Melchior and admitted that he’s “just loving” the liberal media’s latest meltdown over President-elect Donald Trump leaving the press behind on Tuesday to sneak out for dinner.

At a press conference in Greece on Tuesday, President Barack Obama claimed that when he came into office, "the economy was contracting faster than it did during the Great Depression, but we were able to intervene, apply lessons learned and stabilize and then begin growth again." Naturally, Elena Becatoros and Josh Lederman at the Associated Press and Gardiner Harris at the New York Times, all of…

Remember those concerned New York Times stories about the dictatorial dangers of refusing to accept election results? Apparently they only applied to Donald Trump. In Sunday’s edition, New York Times reporters hypocritically hailed anti-Trump demonstrators in “Protesters Take Anti-Trump Message to His Doorstep, and Plan Next Steps."

Following Donald Trump becoming the president-elect in a stunning upset, CNN’s Brian Stelter was desperate to find a reason for Hillary Clinton’s loss on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources.” He went so far as to wonder if the media was being too balanced during the election. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway seemingly fed up with Stelter’s antics chided, “I guess what maybe you need to realize is that…

The Associated Press and reporter Josh Lederman are feeling sorry for outgoing President Barack Obama. Shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, in advance of Obama's last foreign tour, the AP's headline at Lederman's dispatch read: "On last foreign tour, Obama must find a way to explain Trump." Lederman wrote that our poor, put-upon president "must pivot and reassure the U.S. and other…

In their respective articles alleging that the mainstream media facilitated the election of Donald Trump, Brian Beutler of The New Republic and Eric Alterman of The Nation overlapped somewhat. For example, each claimed that the Hillary e-mail story was wildly overcovered, with Beutler citing it as the shining example of how the media “failed abysmally” regarding the “framing and contextualizing…

Imagine if a business establishment told those who voted for Hillary Clinton that "you have no place here" and demanded their resignations. There would be wall-to-wall press coverage, calls for a boycott, street protests at company headquarters, and years of payback in the form of "diversity" and "sensitivity" training. There will almost certainly be none of that at Chicago-based Grubhub, whose…

During the first half of their extended post-election coverage Wednesday evening, NBC Nightly News seemed to be setting the ground work for four years of a President Donald Trump all while stoking the left’s anxieties. “There were gasps around the world. Headlines, ‘Trumpocalypse’ and ‘Disunited States’” hyped NBC’s Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel as he delved into the ridiculous, “But…

Conservatives are unwilling to let Hillary be Hillary where transparency is concerned, and “it drives them crazy,” believes Kevin Drum. In a post last Wednesday, Drum argued that whenever the right has “forced…openness on Clinton in an effort to destroy her,” it’s “done nothing except paint a portrait of a pretty normal politician,” a failure that’s left those conservatives with “bizarre levels”…

If you believe the Obama administration, the Hillary Clinton campaign and their apparatchiks in the press — and as we've learned during the past several weeks, all three work assiduously to sing from the same hymnal — the economy we've seen during the presidency of Barack Obama has been one of slow but still acceptable recovery and (yes, this word has been frequently used) "durable" expansion.

Saturday’s New York Times anti-Trump roundup included an ironic compliment to the Trump campaign, which has freed journalists to label (Republican) politicians as liars and racists. Times editorial board member Brent Staples perversely celebrated “The Election That Obliterated Euphemisms.” The text box: “Donald Trump made it impossible to avoid the word ‘racist.’” Staples certainly didn’t.

The Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal involves no wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton, contends Matthew Yglesias. So whose behavior has been scandalous? The media’s. “Emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit,” wrote Yglesias in a Michael Kinsley-esque Friday piece. “The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US…