Double Standards

After filing a gooey piece on Hillary Clinton, Monday’s NBC Nightly News also gave airtime to the Republican field, but only in the context of attacking 2016 candidate Carly Fiorina over campaign debt she recently finished paying off from her failed 2010 Senate campaign (despite the fact that she’s far from the first to have debt).

Items found at the Associated Press, the New York Times and the Washington Post, in reporting that President Obama plans to visit Roseburg, Oregon later this week, have all failed to report that community leaders have said that his visit is not welcome. The 4:10 p.m. PT (7:10 PM ET) entry at a running timeline at AP announced that "Barack Obama will travel to Oregon this week to visit privately…

Poor Gary Legum at Salon.com. How dare supporters of the right to keep and bear arms as clearly defined in the Constitution's Second Amendment push back against the gun control movement's cynical exploitation of Thursday's Roseburg, Oregon massacre? Legum is outraged that "The right tells us (again) to ignore the elephant in the room." He must mean the fact that the area in question at Umpqua…

One of the more tiresome criticisms the establishment press still levels at New Media from time to time is that they, unlike those awful bloggers, make sure their facts are right before they go to print or post a story online. A story published at the New York Times on Wednesday about Donald Trump's wife Melania shows what obvious rubbish that claim often is. The Old Gray Lady had to issue six…

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni quailed in horror at the prospect of concealed firearms being permitted in college classrooms at the University of Texas: "Guns, Campuses and Madness." Bruni, a former White House correspondent for the Times, at least found a novel angle to attack gun rights after the killings on a college campus in Oregon, by bizarrely suggesting conservatives want to…

Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro presides over a country which is falling apart thanks to the socialist policies of his government and that of his predecessor Hugo Chavez. The Economist describes the period since Chavez took over in 1998 as that of "authoritarian misrule" characterized by "by shortages of everything from poultry to pharmaceuticals, by inflation approaching 200% and by rampant…

In their coverage of government and other economic reports, the business press routinely tells readers that the figures they are relaying are "seasonally adjusted." That is, raw results are smoothed out to supposedly "remove normal, recurring variations" in data. There's one notable exception: The government's monthly employment report.

Although it was very disappointing, the September Employment Situation Summary, which told us that the economy added only 142,000 seasonally adjusted jobs as hundreds of thousands of Americans withdrew from the labor force, was not the worst economy-related news of the day. That dubious honor belongs to the Census Bureau's Factory Orders report. At least the employment report showed more people…

Liberal websites were thrilled with new Daily Show host Trevor Noah for comparing Donald Trump to a series of African dictators, including Uganda’s notorious Idi Amin, alleged to be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths during his reign in the 1970s. "What I'm trying to say is Donald Trump is presidential. He just happens to be running on the wrong continent," said Noah, a native of South…

Religious double standards on the front of Thursday's New York Times: "The Pope, the Clerk and Culture Wars Revisited." During his U.S. tour, the Times celebrated Pope Francis's liberal tone on economic, environmental, and immigration issues. But when he reaffirmed his belief in religious freedom (and the Church's opposition to gay marriage) by secretly meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky county…

ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel took time out of his opening monologue on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live to grumble over the news that Pope Francis secretly met with Kentucky clerk Kim Davis last week during his visit to the U.S. and quip that it would have been better if he met with Kim Kardashian or murderous North Korea dictator Kim Jong-un instead.  

During his segment on the Wednesday edition of MSNBC’s All In attacking Speaker of the House candidate Kevin McCarthy for his comments about Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi Committee, host Chris Hayes made quite the choice of liberal pundits in none other than failed Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who compared McCarthy and the panel to the “witch-hunt” against Planned…

Apparently, the establishment press is waiting for its marching orders on how to handle what an Investor's Business Daily editorial has already called a "scandal." This one's a joint effort involving Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, a recently deceased former CIA operative named Tyler Drumheller who worked with Blumenthal — and CBS News. As Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard reported…

On Wednesday night, the CBS Evening News punted on the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s State Department e-mails released hours earlier while their competitors at ABC and NBC did cover them, but only through the veil of defending Clinton against Speaker of the House candidate Kevin McCarthy’s comments on the Benghazi Committee that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell touted as “an unlikely political lifeline…