Double Standards

It took the Associated Press barely 2-1/2 hours to bury the bad news in the Census Bureau's 10 a.m. release on February wholesale sales and inventories. As of 12:32 Eastern Time, Martin Crutsinger's 10:21 a.m. time-stamped story was not present at the AP's Top 10 Business stories page (saved at my host for future reference), making it quite likely that the news won't get much prominence at the…

When it comes to false media narratives, the typical right-winger should be more concerned with the plank in his own eye than with the speck in the eye of a liberal. That, minus the allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, was the essential argument from Heather Digby Parton in a Wednesday column. Parton sees Rolling Stone’s debunked, retracted University of Virginia rape story as one component of…

After NBC’s Today touted the latest hire for Hillary Clinton’s expected presidential campaign, Monday’s NBC Nightly News also gushed over the move while blasting Republican Jeb Bush for creating an “embarrassing situation” by identifying as a Hispanic on a voter registration form. Peter Alexander reported Clinton has hired “a former aide to First Lady Michelle Obama” in Kristina Schake, who, he…

On the front page of the New York Times sat "Religion Laws Quickly Fall Into Retreat," a label-heavy (14 "conservative" labels) 1,500-word story on Indiana's controversial religious freedom law. The Times' coverage has also been consistently slanted with both that labeling bias and scare quotes surrounding the term "religious freedom."

NBC became the first network to move on from the scandal involving Democratic Senator Robert Menendez (N.J.) on Thursday as NBC Nightly News made zero mention of the story and that entered a plea of not guilty in a Newark, New Jersey federal courtroom. As fellow networks ABC and CBS, ABC’s World News Tonight aired a one-minute-and-25-second segment on Menendez while the CBS Evening News devoted a…

If it's Thursday, it must be...yet another front-page New York Times story on the issue that is going to tear the Republican Party apart and doom prospects in 2016 (the actual issue changes every week, of course). On cue with the ginned-up controversy over Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, came reporter Jennifer Steinhauer's story, under a liberally stacked deck of headlines: "Rights…

In his remarks dedicating the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on Monday, President Obama imagined how a child would see the replica of the U.S. Senate there and imagine the dialogue as “elevated” and “purposeful.....before she’s old enough to be cynical.” He lamented that party lines or philosophies become “barriers to cooperation or respect.” On Wednesday, the Washington Free Beacon noted Fox…

After several slanted stories seemingly designed to cripple the nascent Scott Walker for president campaign before it has even been launched, the New York Times descended into utter silliness in its latest snipe at the Wisconsin Governor: He's allergic to dog dander. That was the actual subject of a front-page Times story on Wednesday by political reporter Jason Horowitz.

In a commentary masquerading as a news brief, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley took multiple shots at Indiana and its Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) on Tuesday by complaining about the bill’s length and indirectly using the First Amendment to support opponents of the law: “We may have found the reason for all this confusion.” He complained it contains “eleven paragraphs, 62 lines,…

On March 18, Associated Press Religion Writer Rachel Zoll covered the decision by the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) "recognizing gay marriage as Christian in the church constitution after decades of debate over same-sex relationships." A search at the AP's national site indicates that the wire service hasn't done a story on the U.S. congregation since then. This means that it has ignored a…

The press won't roast New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for this, but it should — at a very high temperature. Today, Mr. Self-Righteous, who in the past has suggested that anyone who is pro-life, against same-sex marriage, or for the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment as written and adjudicated should leave his state, banned all "non-essential" state travel to Indiana, home of a recently enacted…

So Harry Reid knew he was lying about Mitt Romney not paying taxes for ten years when he made the claim in 2012 from the lawsuit-free zone known as the floor of the U.S. Senate, but didn't care. That's what one must conclude from Reid's response to CNN's Dana Bash about that statement. Asked on the network's New Day program if he regrets what he said, Reid responded: "Romney didn't win, did he…

On Sunday on CNN's State of the Union, Dana Bash, while interviewing Texas Senator and GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz, attempted to compare his alleged lack of experience to that of Barack Obama when he declared his candidacy in 2007. It did not go well for her. It's a mystery why Bash might have thought that Cruz wouldn't have an answer for her faux concerns, but he did, and he hit her…

New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin hit the New Hampshire hustings for his condescending Page 1 story, "Bush and Walker Point G.O.P. to Contrary Paths." Martin made it clear where those paths lead: Either up to the sunny moderate climes of colorful diversity with Jeb Bush, or down a dispiritingly white conservative lockstep path with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. In Martin's condescending take…