Double Standards

Not that he legitimately deserves our pity, but imagine the difficulty of being Ben Feller at the Associated Press yesterday. You've just attended a suddenly announced joint press conference with President Barack Obama and former president Bill Clinton to announce the latter's support for the former's tax- and spending-related legislative proposals worked out with Republicans. You witness the…

The latest meme among the legions of lefty Fox-haters is that FNC "distorted" or "skewed" the ObamaCare debate by instructing employees to call the "public option" the "government option" or some variation of that. The horror! Of course none of the Fox-haters uttered a word of criticism when National Public Radio officially instructed employees to drop the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" labels…

In the wake of November's election results there was much discussion in the press over whether or not the newly strengthened Republican Party would be willing to compromise with Democrats. However, since Monday's announcement of a deal on extending current tax rates, many in the media have been critical of President Obama for giving in to the GOP. Before the votes had even been cast in the…

Most Americans are probably unaware that Jews were the victims of more than eight times as many anti-religion hate crimes last year as were Muslims. And the reason is simple: anti-Muslim crimes receive far more media attention. Case in point: the media has been all but silent on a slew of anti-Semitic acts of vandalism at Indiana University, coinciding with the beginning of the celebration of…

There are many areas where the establishment press's terminology preferences are significantly out of sync with everyday usage by the general public. To name just two examples, the ever so PC press routinely replaces publicly favored and more informative terms such as "illegal immigrants" and "Muslim terrorists" with "undocumented workers" and "militants." And of course, we can't forget the…

A few weeks ago, just before GM's initial public offering went to the market (at the Washington Examiner; at BizzyBlog), I noted that Multi-Government/General Motors had spent the past several months shipping more cars than its dealers were selling, to the point where dealer stocks represented an unusually high number of days of dealers' sales. GM's December 1 press release made that trend…

Which is crazier: believing President Obama was not born in the United States or is actually a Muslim, or believing in total state control of the economy? If you answered the latter, you are probably not a journalist. The mainstream press went absolutely nuts over an August Pew poll showing that 18 percent of Americans believed that Obama was a Muslim. There was also considerable media…

It's time to play "imagine if a conservative had said it." For today's edition, we present Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.: If they [Republicans] think it's okay to raise taxes for the embattled middle class because they're gonna pout if we don't give more money to millionaires, it really is time for people to take up pitchforks. Phrased differently, McCaskill essentially claimed that if…

At the Associated Press late Sunday afternoon, reporter Paul Wiseman, who may have the most inappropriate last name in the history of business journalism, engaged in a brazen "It's really not that bad" excuse-making exercise on behalf of the economy Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Ben Bernanke have created. In the process, he joined a Reuters reporter in questioning the validity of…

The unemployment rate jumped to a seasonally adjusted 9.8% in November and only 39,000 seasonally adjusted jobs were added during the month, according to the Employment Situation Report released yesterday by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Although she at least recognized the report's negativity, Lucia Mutikani at Reuters seemed bent on downplaying its impact, even finding an "expert…

After watching a montage of mainstream media journalists defending the TSA's invasive pat-down procedures as practically essential to preventing airline terrorism, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell argued it'd be a far different story if those procedures had happened under the Bush administration. "Imagine the same reporters reporting that story if George Bush had instigated these [TSA pat-…

Here's something about which the environmentalists and car czars planted inside the Obama administration can't be pleased: as a percentage of their U.S. sales, Multi-Government/General Motors and Chrysler are selling more "light trucks," consisting of pickups, SUVS, and "crossover" vehicles than any other major manufacturer. Further, the companies are clearly emphasizing light trucks at the…

On Tuesday's Parker-Spitzer on CNN, ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer ironically worried that too many of his fellow former politicians, who are also contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, are on Fox News: "Never before in our history...has one media outlet with one coherent ideology had almost a monopoly on...half of the presidential nominees and controlled one political party…

The New York Times has taken an admirable stand on the potentially-criminal release of diplomatic cables by the online "whistleblowers" at WikiLeaks. Said one Times reporter: "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here." Oh, wait. That wasn't in…