Double Standards

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson purchased the Las Vegas Review Journal newspaper last month, and the New York Times is obsessed. The paper put a conspiratorial Sunday front-page spotlight on Adelson (who is, not coincidentally, a major Republican donor) and his legal clashes with a Nevada judge: “Mogul’s Purchase of Las Vegas Newspaper Is Seen as Power Play." Also suspect: A free paper Adelson…

A time-honored tactic in political TV ads is to use contrasting degrees of photographic exposure, one bright and snappy for your candidate and a darker hue, sometimes even going to old-fashioned black-and-white, for your opponent. On December 29, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Max Ehrenfreund cited a conveniently timed "study" which looked at 2008 ads produced by and on behalf of GOP…

The Wall Street Journal ran a blockbuster story Tuesday afternoon ("U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress") about how the Obama administration's National Security Agency's "targeting of Israeli leaders swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers." In other words, the NSA spied on Congress. As talk-show host and commentator Erick Erickson drily observed: "Congress began…

Donald Trump called out Hillary Clinton for hypocrisy in accusing the GOP of being anti-woman, yet relying on serial philanderer Bill Clinton’s help while running for president. But you wouldn’t have learned that until deep into the front-page story in Wednesday’s New York Times. Political reporter Amy Chozick spent the first several paragraphs piling up shallow evidence of the former friendship…

Maybe it can be chalked up to a tendency toward reflection at year's end and not the emergence of a refreshing pattern. This past Sunday on Meet the Press, one of the last people you'd expect to point out that "it's not always policemen" killing black people -- filmmaker Spike Lee -- said just that in plugging his new movie, Chi-Raq, about the endless violence that plagues Chicago.  

This week, the Associated Press wrapped up a year of largely pathetic business reporting with three items exemplifying the wire service's habits of data-twisting, sloppiness, and convenient omissions. A deceptive AP post-Christmas story pretended that Christmas-season "spending" was twice as high as anyone else has predicted. A report on pending home sales omitted a concerned comment from a…

Closing out 2015 on the Thursday morning newscasts, NBC’s Today churned one of its most fawning pieces on President Obama as NBC News correspondent Ron Allen reviewed Obama’s top photos by White House photographer Pete Souza while hushed, soft piano music played in the background. 

Liberals and "progressives," who are supposedly big on dealing with "root causes," are apparently not interested in the root cause of their now-acknowledged problem of sexual harassment and abuse in their ranks. At Acculturated.com, Carrie Lukas, managing director of the Independent Women’s Forum, contended that "liberals treat women worse" than do others in positions of power on the ideological…

Establishment press pundits often wring their hands over how supposedly far to the right the Republican Party and conservatives in general have moved since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, that flaming moderate, to the point of claiming that Reagan would never be accepted by today's "wingnuts." They seem to actually believe this amusing nonsense. In a classic example demonstrating where the real…

With the year winding down and the news cycle slowing (aside from the weather), Wednesday’s CBS This Morning found it proper to reserve 59 seconds for fawning over Hillary Clinton receiving a question on Tuesday from a young boy about equal pay. Spinning it in the on-screen headline as some “pay perspective” from Clinton, fill-in co-host Margaret Brennan started the brief by making clear that the…

Just one week after CNN's Don Lemon shut down a guest who dared to raise the issue, there is now an agreement across the ideological spectrum that if Hillary Clinton is going to use her husband Bill as a campaign surrogate and go after her opponents' real or imagined sexism, then, as the headline at liberal Ruth Marcus's Monday evening Washington Post column says, "Bill Clinton's sordid sexual…

A week after he cut the mic of conservative guest Kurt Schlichter for bringing up Bill Clinton’s history of sexual misconduct, CNN host Don Lemon found himself trying to shut down another guest during Monday’s CNN Tonight when conservative radio host and CNN GOP debate co-moderator Hugh Hewitt argued that Donald Trump should use his Twitter account to educate millennials on the former President’s…

During his latest phone-in interview Tuesday morning, Donald Trump appeared on NBC’s Today where co-host Savannah Guthrie attempted to convince Trump that former President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs (and specifically what occurred with Monica Lewinsky) were merely “alleged” and thus might not be fair to bring up in a campaign involving Hillary Clinton.

On Monday, the major network evening newscasts all alluded to Donald Trump criticizing Bill and Hillary Clinton by bringing up Clinton’s numerous bouts of sexual misconduct from the 1990's, but chose not to remind viewers of what those scandals actually were and instead deflected away from that by touting the Clintons going for a walk over the weekend with daughter Chelsea and granddaughter…