Double Standards

If there was ever drop-dead obvious proof that it's more than fair to call the Associated Press the Administration's Press, it's in the opening phrase of the first sentence of the wire service's Monday morning report on the House's select committee on Benghazi: "Republicans hoping to ride their Benghazi investigation to a November election sweep ..." As far as reporters Donna Cassata and…

In a Monday evening report at the Associated Press, reporters Bill Barrow and Christina A. Cassidy did their best to try to minimize the impact of a politically disastrous dodge on the part of Georgia Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Michelle Nunn. In a weekend interview with NBC, Nunn refused to say whether she would have voted for or against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, saying that "it’…

In July 2013, the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber finally noticed the meteoric rise in the number of temporary help service and other non-payroll personnel working at U.S. employers — a trend which at the time was about 2-1/2 years old. Rugaber noted that "temps and to a much larger universe of freelancers, contract workers and consultants ... number nearly 17 million people who have…

Liberal pundit and Obama-chronicler Jonathan Alter received a "Sacred Cat" award last Friday from the Milwaukee Press Club, and while in Brew City, Alter complained that "one of...the limitations of journalism is that straightforward descriptions of reality are seen as being biased." To Alter, one somehow-disputed reality is that Obama's a flexible dealmaker and Republicans are rigid…

Last night (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I pointed to the track record of Dean Baquet, who has ascended to the hallowed perch of executive editor at the New York Times, and observed that "someone who has clearly been a troubling and disruptive presence is now in charge." Two incidents spanning seven years support my contention. The first occurred in 2006 at the Los Angeles Times, where…

Appearing as a guest on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative publication the Weekly Standard, mocked liberals’ outrage over the firing of Jill Abramson as editor of The New York Times.  Speaking on Sunday, May 18, Kristol remarked that liberals should be angry at one person, Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times: “Who is the they…

A search at 11:00 p.m. ET tonight at the Associated Press's national web site on "Serco," the company with a five-year, $1.25 billion contract to process paper Obamacare enrollment applications, returned no results. That's absolutely pathetic, given that St. Louis TV station KMOV, based on multiple accounts from several current and former employees and contractors, has reported that the company…

Did you catch the story about those conservative Republican male chauvinist pig politicians in Florida who think that it was a waste of time to pass a bill which would make it a crime for a guy to secretly administer an abortion-inducing drug to a spouse or partner he impregnated? How utterly outrageous ... Wait a minute ... It was Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman…

On All Things Considered on April 4, liberal NPR pundit E. J. Dionne complained that “we've created this whole system of dark money and now we're supposed to be grateful that a lot of rich people can give money under the table and over the table. And the last thing is, a lot of people using the words oligarchy and I think that's an appropriate word.” On All Things Considered on April 30, NPR…

CNN's Morgan Spurlock followed in the footsteps of Christiane Amanpour on Sunday's Inside Man by giving faithful Christians much more harsh treatment than practicing Muslims. Spurlock denounced a pro-traditional marriage sermon by the pastor of a mega-church: "Being somebody who has a lot of friends and family who are homosexuals, it's hard to believe that there's only one way. And it's part of…

File this under "Epic Fails: Layers of Editors." National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru submitted a requested column to the Washington Post’s Outlook section. After several rounds of mutually agreed-upon edits, the geniuses at WaPo made a final change without consulting Ponnuru. That change inserted erroneous information into what had been an otherwise clean column. The Post then published two…

Tonight, the Associated Press treated a story about a suit to overturn tiny-population Alaska's ban on same-sex "marriage" as national news — even giving it a"Big Story" promotion. Meanwhile, it kept Planned Parenthood's decision to abandon its legal effort to obtain state funding in more-populated Kansas out of its national site, thus treating it as a local story. Same-sex "marriage" and…

On Monday, May 12, FNC's Fox and Friends exposed Democratic hypocrisy in accusing Republicans of trying to raise money off the deaths of Americans from the Benghazi attack, when Democrats themselves have a history of linking fundraising to deadly events. Referring to Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy explaining this hypocrisy on the previous day's Fox News Sunday, FNC co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck…

While I was aware that a fever-swamp Democrat in Wisconsin was planning to pass out Ku Klux Klan hoods at some kind of Wisconsin Republican gathering, I had no idea until this morning that the Associated Press actually considered it a national story back on May 1. It was really even more than a national story at the self-described "essential global news network." It was so vital that the nation…