Double Standards

On Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency committed an act which would have likely become instant national news if a private entity had done the same thing. On Friday, John Merline at Investors' Business Daily succinctly noted that the EPA "dumped a million gallons of mine waste into Animas River in Colorado, turning it into what looked like Tang, forcing the sheriff's office to…

The Associated Press has demonstrated a double standard in covering developments in various states in the wake of the gruesome Planned Parenthood videos posted by the Center for Medical Progress. Bad news for Planned Parenthood gets only local coverage. Exculpatory news, even if artificially concocted, gets national exposure. In Florida, a statewide review of the state’s 16 Planned Parenthood…

On Friday, in his desire to help his employer outdo Politifact as the last place to go for accurate fact-checking, the Associated Press's Josh Lederman "fact-checked" Jeb Bush's belief that the U.S. economy can grow annually at an average rate of 4 percent. As seen in my Friday NewsBusters post, when the AP reporter "fact-checked" assertions that really are facts, specifically Bush's claim that…

How absolutely serendipitous it is that alleged comedian and actual White House propagandist Jon Stewart’s last broadcast of The Daily Show is today, August 6, the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. You see, Stewart, whose influence is especially nefarious when he is revising and distorting history for his relatively young audience, committed his most outrageous such act…

Though it's not as blatant as the speech which got noticed at Fox News and many center-right outlets (and, of course, nowhere else) eight years ago, it's clear that Hillary Clinton once again altered her diction and style several days ago to (in her mind, one would surmise) "adapt" them to her Southern audience. This time, Mrs. Clinton was being interviewed by South Carolina Democratic Party…

Strange new respect? Two days after the New York Times labeled real estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a racist on its front page based on thin evidence, the Times is suddenly treating one of his Twitter pronouncements as newsworthy, with Ashley Parker devoting an entire story to Trump's tweet. Perhaps because he's attacking his fellow GOP candidates as "puppets" of…

One of the more outrageous chapters during presidential campaign season so far, the press harassment of 2016 GOP candidate and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in February over his statement that he "doesn't know" whether President Barack Obama is a Christian, is back. Nobody in the press seems interested in asking Obama himself how he can still profess to be a Christian and support homosexual…

The New York Times Magazine cover story by political correspondent Jim Rutenberg, "A Dream Undone -- Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act," is a 10-part, 10,000-word doorstop (issued with the baleful threat "The first in a series") comparing current attempts to stop voter fraud as a return to Jim Crow, with particular focus on North Carolina. Rutenberg also relayed more…

These economics reporters at the Associated Press have become experts at deadpan humor. Earlier today, I noted how the wire service's Christopher Rugaber told readers, in the wake of a government report showing the lowest wage and benefit increases on record, that "the job market is not yet back to full health." No kidding, Chris. On top of that, the AP's Martin Crutsinger reacted to yesterday's…

Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press and the "expert" he quoted in his writeup on the government's awful Employment Cost Index report seemed to be taking their cues from Steven Wright's deadpan comedy act. The problem, of course, is that they were writing and saying isn't funny at all. Rugaber, with his "expert" help, assembled an impressive array of understatements and misstatements in…

Joe Scarborough chose to couch his criticism in exculpatory explanation, claiming that reporters "try to be as fair as possible" and that their bias is "unintended."  But Scarborough's bottom line was still this: that media bias is at its worst when it comes to the issue of abortion. Speaking on today's Morning Joe, Scarborough took his critique a significant step further, asserting that if a…

For the second time in a week, Fox News Channel (FNC) host Bill O’Reilly turned to statistics from the “very accurate” Media Research Center to form the basis of a segment of The O’Reilly Factor concerning the major broadcast network coverage of the Planned Parenthood scandal with Thursday’s mention comparing it with the droves of coverage given to the shooting death of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe…

The bar-lowering in the business press continues. In the wake of today's disappointing news from the government on U.S. economic growth, an email from CNNMoney.com failed to properly describe reported second-quarter growth, and falsely characterized today's results as "solid":

During an appearance on Wednesday’s edition of The Kelly File on the Fox News Channel (FNC), Media Research Center Brent Bozell and host Megyn Kelly eviscerated the media for their double standard in rushing to cover unsubstantiated rape allegations surrounding 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump but not, among others, the Bill Clinton-Juanita Brodderick case.