Double Standards

Kate Zernike, whose reporting on the Tea Party for the New York Times is often hostile, on Wednesday devoted a full story to an outside poll, from the Pew Research Center, claiming falling support for the Tea Party “may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year." (“Support for Tea Party Falls In Strongholds, Polls Show.”) Yet the Times has ignored recent…

Saturday's Fox News Watch gave attention to a recent study released by the Media Research Center - parent organization to NewsBusters - documenting that the broadcast network morning newscasts gave more friendly treatment to Democratic presidential candidates in 2007 as compared to the GOP presidential field in 2011. As he introduced the segment, host Jon Scott noted that, not only were…

Imagine if it were discovered that free-market think tanks were caught vetting scripts of Fox News programs, intervening to prevent free-market sceptics from receiving air time, and consulted with the network about how it should alter its programing in a free-market direction. The howls of outrage would be loud, long and unrelenting from other news networks, the wire services, and leading U.S.…

It seems that everyone in Washington believes that there is zero chance of any kind of economic calamity befalling this nation until January 2013, even though the government is on track to stay on self-destructive autopilot until then. I do not understand how or why anyone can be that confident. Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, almost gleefully…

On November 15 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I compared how two of the leading wire services, Reuters and the Associated Press, covered the announcement by Geron Corp. of its decision to halt the first government-approved clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells. Reuters fairly noted that "teams working with adult stem cells -- a less ambitious area -- are making good progress." While…

On Monday, Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters noted how former New York Times op-ed writer (and before that, theater critic) Frank Rich, who now plies whatever his trade is at New York Magazine, criticized MSNBC's Chris Matthews for writing a "man-crush of a biography" about John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated 48 years ago today. Monday evening, Allahpundit at Hot Air identified a particularly…

Give John Nolte a gold star. In a Friday post at BigJournalism.com entitled "Panicked AP Attempts to Memory-Hole Democrats’ #Occupy Endorsements," Nolte latched onto the beginnings of the establishment press's desperate attempt to distance President Obama and the Democratic Party from the rapidly devolving Occupy movement. The disingenously headlined item Nolte caught, apparently from an…

CBS's Erica Hill urged "conservative activist" Grover Norquist to influence the members of Congress who have signed his no tax hikes pledge to consider raising taxes during an interview on Monday's Early Show: "There's still not a lot getting done in Washington, even with some of the compromise. So why not push those people to maybe do a little bit more?" Hill pressed the idea of compromise…

On the eve of Saturday’s Massachusetts state swim championship at M.I.T, the front of the New York Times sports page that morning was dominated by reporter Karen Crouse’s “Boys Swimming on Girls Teams Find Success, Then Draw Jeers." The prospect of boys and girls competing on the same team and in the same contests has suddenly become controversial at the Times. But why now?

Oops, he supposedly did it again. Herman Cain, the GOP presidential candidate who has experience as a rocket scientist on his resume, made another allegedly "stupid" remark. Why, if you buy the press's accounts of his statements, it's hard to believe the guy can dress himself in the morning without hanging his pants over his head and putting his socks on his hands. Here's what Cain said that…

Tea Party beat reporter Kate Zernike was back on the reporting scene in a Thursday afternoon “Caucus” post, “A Tea Party ‘Hearing’ in the Senate That Wasn’t.” Zernike surely used up her monthly quota of sarcastic quote marks in this snarky post mocking the unofficial hearings (sorry, “hearings”) held by congressmen who support the Tea Party. By contrast, Times reporter Scott Shane was quite…

Media silence greeted video of an Occupy Wall Street protester vowing to burn New York City to the ground and toss Molotov cocktails into a Macy's department store, yet there was "non-stop media coverage" of the alleged, but never proven, use of the N-word at one Tea Party rally, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted last night on Fox News Channel's Hannity. "Look at the violence you're…

New York Times political reporters Jeff Zeleny (pictured) and Jim Rutenberg teamed up on Tuesday for a preview of the possible presidential head-to-head matchup Obama vs. Mitt Romney: “As the Primary Campaign Grinds On, Romney’s Team Prepares for Obama.” But they felt the need to put a metaphorical finger on the scale with a negative description of the GOP.

Say, Al Sharpton: if Herman Cain lacks "intelligence" for colloquially referring to "Cuban" as a language, how about Barack Obama . . . who did precisely the same thing when it came to "Austrian"? On his MSNBC show tonight, Sharpton mocked Cain for asking in an aside while munching on a Cuban delicacy during a campaign stop: "how do you say 'delicious' in Cuban?" Does Sharpton not know that…