Double Standards

Appearing exclusively on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd repeatedly pressed Speaker Paul Ryan to denounce conservative radio talk show hosts Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin over their criticism of the recently-passed omnibus bill and Todd demanded to know how he’ll work with President Obama to “lay the groundwork” to end political polarization. Todd asked, of the talk show hosts, whether their…

On Friday, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC covered the new scandal brewing inside the Democratic presidential campaign with the data breach involving the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns (plus the Sanders camp suing the Democratic National Committee), but it was the CBS Evening News that sought to downplay the story by not covering the “brewing” “family feud.” 

They have an excuse for everything, don't they? This morning, Anne D'Innocenzio at the Associated Press actually told readers that this year's relatively warm Christmas season weather is what's hurting Christmas shopping season sales. It couldn't possibly be the "slowdown reality" USA Today cited in headlining Friday's second straight steep stock market drop, could it, Anne? Most other Americans…

Chiming in with his latest ramble against conservatives, CNN political commentator and former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein took to the airwaves of Wednesday’s AC360 to denounce the GOP candidates for “their bellicosity” in Tuesday’s debate that featured “a recklessness that was astonishing.”

Many of the lefty writers who analyzed Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate at the Venetian suggested that had the event been promoted as if it were a Vegas show, the marquee might have read “Fright Night,” or perhaps “Be Afraid…Be Very Afraid,” given how much the candidates hyped the threat of jihadist terrorism.

The early Wednesday morning edition of ABC’s Nightline provided the first look at the network reaction to Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate and featured correspondent David Wright ripping it as a “bloody” affair with help from liberal comedians and scolding Chris Christie for remarks about Los Angeles mothers placing their children on school buses only to have classes canceled due to…

The year isn't even over, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Time's 2015 Person of the Year, has begun to act against the primary reason why the magazine chose her. To refresh from a NewsBusters post last week, Time's Nancy Gibbs cited three reasons for the choice. The clearly most important one, from their perspective, was Merkel's virtually unilateral decision that Germany "would welcome…

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…