Double Standards

Howard Kurtz, the Fox News analyst and the host of its "Media Buzz" program, made a few pertinent observations in a column about Victor Paul Alvarez's astonishingly crass attempt at humor at Boston.com earlier this week. That said, Kurtz should have criticized the web site and its parent, the Boston Globe, for its completely unsatisfactory explanation for the one "correction" it made to Alvarez's…

At the conclusion of a story on Wednesday’s CBS Evening News on the drop in gas prices and how Americans feel about the economy, CBS News senior business correspondent Anthony Mason felt that it was important to inform viewers that President Obama’s approval rating has improved six points from October in the latest CBS News poll. “All this has also helped lift President Obama's job approval…

Victor Paul Alvarez's LinkedIn profile says that he's an "Associate Editor - Boston.com at The Boston Globe," with previous stints at East Bay Newspapers and the Baltimore Sun. He was a copy boy at the Sun in 1994 while he was also a student at Towson University, which would likely make him a bit over 40 years old now. It is beyond comprehension that someone with Alvarez's decades of experience…

The latest report out of Venezuela by the Associated Press's Hannah Dreier has a time stamp of 1:15 p.m. today. This means that the wire service has had plenty of time to report, and has chosen not to report, a powerful pastoral letter issued yesterday by that country's Catholic bishops (original in Spanish; full Google Translation) denouncing that country's descent into a system they described…

Well, they're nothing if not consistent. When the Obama administration lost a court ruling against its ban on Gulf of Mexico drilling after the BP oil spill, it simply issued another ban. When it lost at the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case, it just issued a new rule which hardly differed from the one the Court nullified. Now, when it becomes clear that the administration won't get the…

It's not enough to read the transcript.  You really need to view the video to appreciate the depths of Christopher Dickey's world-weary, dismissive, preening political correctness. Asked on today's Morning Joe to comment on Muslim preachers inciting violence from their pulpits, Dickey of The Daily Beast sniffed that the problem is "exaggerated," claimed that the number of violent Muslims is "…

Thus far, the nation's de facto news gatekeepers at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, have utterly failed to address the growing worldwide controversy over the absence of U.S. representation above the ambassador level at Sunday's solidarity march in Paris in the wake of Wednesday's Charlie Hebdo massacre. Crowd estimates for the Paris march range from "hundreds of thousands"…

"We think Texas was right to reject the Confederate plates, but that North Carolina should have issued the abortion rights plates.  How can this be?  Are we merely siding with liberals in both cases?  No." Methinks the two professors who wrote those lines in a New York Times op-ed appearing today doth protest too much. Their column opines on a case before the Supreme Court deciding the…

The list of unhinged statements and rants coming from left-leaning journalists in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris is getting miles long. Among them all, one especially sticks out. In one of the earliest retreats to twisted, gutless characterizations of the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who is also ABC's global affairs anchor, called them "activists." Greg…

In a news brief on Thursday, NBC Nightly News reported that one of Californi’s two Democratic Senators, Barbara Boxer, would not seek reelection in 2016 and instead retire following “a decade in the House” and her first election to the Senate in 1992. When it came to labeling where she stood politically, however, NBC shied away from labeling her a liberal or progressive.  Instead, anchor Brian…

After a massacre that killed at least 12 at the offices of the satirical Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo, the New York Times issued this tweet: "The weekly #CharlieHebdo has long tested limits with its satire..." So the Times is the self-proclaimed arbiter of satire, at least when it comes to mocking one particular religion, Islam?

Let's imagine a white Congressman saying that when he served in Vietnam, he was never moved at the sight of a dead U.S. soldier unless he was white. His career would be over, and deservedly so, within about five minutes of his statement. If he was a conservative or a Republican, even if he resigned instantly and was roundly and unanimously condemned by his colleagues, the press would remind us of…

While there were six governors sworn into office on Monday, it was liberal Democrat Jerry Brown taking the oath of office for a record fourth term in California that caught the fawning eye of NBC Nightly News and anchor Brian Williams who, in turn, spent a news brief gushing over how his first stint in office was during the Ford administration and that he had improved the state’s finances.…

In the interest of getting all supposedly relevant information out there for the public to see, the New York Times amassed an extraordinary array of journalistic resources — three reporters, three who "contributed reporting," and two others who "contributed research" — to what they must have thought was an important, underappreciated element of the saga which ended with the brutal ambush murders…