Double Standards

Katharine Seelye, a reporter on the Obama-care health overhaul beat for the New York Times, filed Monday from a town hall in Spartanburg, S.C., that featured conservative Republican Sen. Jim DeMint among supportive constituents who oppose Obama-care in ways Seelye finds unseemly blunt, misleading, and anti-Obama.In "Fighting Health Care Overhaul, and Proud of It," Seelye looked askance at DeMint'…

It’s not just liberal policy and charismatic personalities that the liberal media find alluring about the Kennedy clan, but also its decidedly upper-crust fashion sense. In Sunday’s Washington Post, fashion reporter Robin Givhan waxed eloquent about the “look of rich tradition” the patrician Kennedy clan brought to their oft-publicly photographed wardrobe. Yet four years ago, Givhan derided as “…

On the August 30 Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace seemed to pick up on Clay Waters' NewsBusters item, earlier posted at TimesWatch, pointing out the blatant double standard between the New York Times obituary for conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms and that of liberal Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy.Near the end of Sunday's show, Wallace read from the first paragraph from each obituary…

Savannah Guthrie is apparently very smart.  Guthrie was a member of the prestigious Order of the Coif (which has nothing to do with promoting good scalp health, nor with seventeenth-century headwear) while earning a J.D. from Georgetown Law, highlight her ability to learn dull and boring things very quickly.Lost among the dusty tomes of Georgetown, however, was the fact that Ronald Reagan was a…

News of Sen. Ted Kennedy's death late Tuesday night didn't make the Wednesday print edition of the New York Times, but a 6,000-word obituary by John Broder was posted on nytimes.com this morning: "Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies." Broder's obituary left room for the lowlights of Kennedy's career, including Mary Jo Kopechne's death at Chappaquiddick and Kennedy's ruthless personal attack on…

Latest dispatch from the "dissent is patriotic" front: if you oppose Pres. Obama in his health care initiative, you're "undermining the country."None less than the great Howard Dean said so on this evening's Rachel Maddow show.  Alison Stewart was filling in for the eponymous host.

A well-known newspaper had this to say about writer Nat Hentoff upon his departure from the Villiage Voice at the end of 2008 after a 50-year run:Across his 83 years, his three dozen books and his countless newspaper columns and magazine articles, Mr. Hentoff has championed free speech and opposed censorship of any kind, whether by liberals or conservatives. Few have more assiduously and…

With President Obama and congressional liberals facing loud protests over their big government health care plan, journalists are casting the anti-ObamaCare forces as “ugly,” “unruly,” “nasty” mobs, with reporters presenting the most odious images (like pictures of Obama drawn as Hitler) as somehow representative. But when President George W. Bush faced left-wing protests, the media scrubbed their…

The Washington Post editorial page threw itself today into quite an odd political position.The Post seems to think that Bob McDonnell, the GOP candidate for Virginia governor, should be more vocal about his opposition to abortion.  His opponent, Creigh Deeds, recently attempted to make a campaign issue out of his (somewhat newfound) support for abortion rights – a strategy that the Post called “…

The White House's perpetual campaign site, er, home page, currently has rotating messages at the top left. Two of them relate to health care (yellow underlines are mine): The administration would be well-advised to hold back on the blather about "blatant falsehoods" and "misinformation" until their guy in charge stops disseminating them himself.Take Obama's claim that the surgeon's fee for a…

Citizens opposed to Obama's health-care overhaul are not only white, irritable, and angry, as the New York Times has confirmed in two front-page stories -- they're ignorant as well.That's the new wrinkle reporter David Stout brings to the debate, in his web-only report Wednesday afternoon on congressional town hall meetings across the country dominated by health-care concerns, "For Lawmakers,…

Remember when the children of public figures were off-limits in the day-to-day hand-to-hand combat of political warfare? It's a rule that didn't just applied to the underage children of politicians, but the adult children. Witness the 2008 suspension of MSNBC's David Shuster for suggesting then-presidential contender Hillary Clinton's 28-year-old daughter Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out"…