Double Standards

Imagine a Republican or conservative governor boasting of his or her use of "the coercive power of government" to accomplish center-right policy goals. The political and media backlash would be furious — and justified. Such statist rhetoric is becoming ever more commonplace on the left, and is rising to ever higher political levels. The establishment press is mostly ignoring this development,…

Reporting on Sunday’s This Week about foreign reaction to Donald Trump’s candidacy and proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S., ABC News chief foreign correspondent Terry Moran compared Trump to U.K. Independence Party (U.K.I.P.) leader Nigel Farage despite his firm denouncement of Trump. Moran cheered new leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as providing “sharp relief” to…

For a change, Martin Crutsinger's coverage at the Associated Press of the federal government's November Monthly Treasury Statement wasn't completely full of rose-colored baloney. Crutsinger managed to note how auto-pilot entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are bankrupting the country (not in those words, of course). That said, he somehow thought that highlighting a rare and…

In his Thursday front-page New York Times profile of "gruff" Sen. Ted Cruz, Matt Flegenheimer took pains to portray the Texas senator and Republican candidate as an unlikeable, socially awkward “bomb-thrower” ideologue (“appraised as grating and pompous as a matter of bipartisan consensus”) in “Cruz the Gruff Taking a Turn At Being Nice.” The online headline was no less hostile: "After Making…

Acting as though the latest news the war against ISIS, new developments in the Hillary Clinton scandal or any other story barely existed, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted a whopping 24 minutes and three seconds of their Tuesday evening newscasts to obsessing over Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States. Not surprisingly, NBC Nightly News led the way…

In what certainly won’t be the latest case of irony in the liberal media, Tuesday’s CBS Evening News immediately pivoted from a full report on surging gun sales in the United States following mass shootings to a piece prominently touting Australia’s massive gun control and confiscation initiatives carried out in the 1990's.

At the Washington Post's Wonkblog on Wednesday, Christopher Ingraham claimed that the San Bernardino massacre, which we now know was an act of Islamic terrorism, was the "355th" mass shooting "this year." A Google search on "355th mass shooting this year" (not in quotes) indicates that the stat has become a media meme, repeated at places like the Today Show, PBS, NPR, NBCnews.com, and too many…

Yes, it's fair to report Ben Carson's problems in pronouncing "Hamas," as a reflection of his lack of foreign policy fluency. But despite being billed as an MSNBC political "correspondent," on today's Morning Joe Hunt mocked Carson in a manner more befitting a late-night comedian trolling for laughs from a liberal crowd. After rolling a clip of Ben Carson addressing the Republican Jewish…

Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer of California today cited how her home state's "important gun safety laws" demonstrate that “Sensible gun laws work, we’ve proven it in California, and we're not going to give up." She apparently means that she and others who won't respect the Second Amendment are "not going to give up" on passing or imposing similar legislation or mandates nationally. Ms.…

In a thorough takedown of the left and the liberal media over their double standard in selectively assigning blame after mass shootings, the Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly dismantled on Monday night the arguments of abortion activists who have rushed to blame conservatives and the pro-life movement for supposedly causing the deadly shooting Friday at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado.

In predictably disingenuous fashion, the Associated Press claimed in a November 18 story that "Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has shined new light on the breakdown of a potentially history-altering round of 2008 peace talks." Abbas acknowledged that Israel offered Palestinians 93.5 percent of the West Bank and other significant concessions. The "light" isn't "new" at all. The wire service…

Colorful New York Times political reporter Jason Horowitz let his left-wing ideological flags fly with three stories on consecutive days --a "venemous" Donld Trump rally, a cyptically hostile Carly Fiorina profile, and a chiding of Bernie Sanders for being insufficiently fiery on gay rights in the 1990s. Horowitz held Fiorina's childhood continent-hopping against her candidacy: "That family…

When last month Ben Carson suggested that people confronted by a shooter should rush him en masse, ABC ran a story criticizing him, claiming that Carson "appears to be second-guessing" the victims of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. But on ABC's Good Morning America today, in the wake of the mass shooting in Colorado Springs, guess what an expert suggested? "If you can…

Ever since the White House changed hands almost seven years ago, press reports on the U.S. economy have annoyingly overaccentuated whatever positives reporters might find (or think they have found), while ignoring glaring negatives and omitting key items. One example of such biased reporting came from the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger on Wednesday. In covering the Census Bureau's October…