Double Standards

Filling in for Bob Schieffer on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, host Harry Smith helped finish the sentences of ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, while grilling New York Republican Congressman Peter King during a discussion on recent national security decisions by the Obama administration. Smith began by asking Romero about the Obama administration’s decision to reinstate military…

After burying the story on page A18 Friday, the New York Times finally put the Nancy Pelosi-C.I.A. controversy on the front page Saturday. Yet congressional reporter Carl Hulse made excuses for House Speaker Pelosi, who accused the CIA of deliberately misleading her in 2002 about waterboarding. Hulse glossed over the multiple contradictory accounts Pelosi has delivered of what she knew about…

President Obama delivered the commencement address at Notre Dame on Sunday, amid protests that the nation's preeminent Catholic college shouldn't be honoring a pro-choice president who even supports the gruesome procedure of partial-birth abortion.Monday's front-page New York Times story, "At Notre Dame, Obama Calls for Civil Tone in Abortion Debate," by Peter Baker and Susan Saulny, began by…

Those who believe that Politico is a hangout for former establishment media journalists who want to recreate a combination of the New York Times and Washington Post on the web -- complete with the insufferable biases of those two publications -- can look to the disparate treatment of two challenges to party congressional leaders as affirmative evidence. In a search on "Cindy Sheehan" at Politico…

(UPDATE: See circulation chart below.)In early March (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Toledo Blade Columbus Bureau reporter Jim Provance named the party of Ohio's Republican State Auditor Mary Taylor, who sharply criticized Democratic Governor Ted Strickland's serious lateness with the state's financial statements -- so late that they couldn't possibly be audited until after the Ohio…

As Geoffrey Dickens reported earlier, Chris Matthews attacked Goveror Sarah Palin for hiring a ghostwriter for her upcoming book deal. In like fashion, Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune's The Swamp Blog has also gotten into Laugh-at-Palin's-book mode and you can bet that this will be the scoff du jour among the left-media. But, the thing that proves the Old Media's hypocrisy and partisanship is…

Once upon a time, the press was virtually obsessed with the “with us or against us” foreign policy stance of the Bush presidency.  Pundits swung from rhetorical chandeliers, screaming that such a dichotomous approach would alienate the rest of the world - that our “arrogance,” as they called it, would thin our list of allies dramatically.But that doesn’t seem to apply to the media when the matter…

Leo Penn, the father of famous actor Sean Penn, was hauled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the 1950s and harassed, spied upon and ultimately blacklisted for his political views (he attended a pro-union meeting called to support other black- listees.) He refused to accuse others, and lost his livelihood for a period of time, but went on to direct many TV shows including…

Here’s a shocking statement about the behavior of the White House Press Corps at the Correspondent’s Dinner: “What I saw the other night was like a bunch of teenage girls waiting for a Bay City Rollers concert, ready to scream at their the top of their lungs.”The content of this statement is not nearly so shocking, however, as who said it – a member of the media, one Joe Scarborough of MSNBC. …

"Joy Behar has called homeschoolers demented" and "is an ongoing, non-stop anti-Catholic bigot... yet it's Elisabeth Hasselbeck" that the media label controversial, laments Media Research Center President Brent Bozell. [audio available for download here]The NewsBusters publisher appeared on the May 8 "Fox & Friends" to address how the media consider Hasselbeck "controversial" for teaching her…

Rush Limbaugh has no problem following black conservatives. But you’d never know it, were you to read the Black Entertainment Television website. Posted by the amorphous BET.com Staff, the following kneecapping was posted today: Rush Limbaugh has a problem with leading Black Republicans. In recent weeks, he’s blasted his own party’s chairman, calling Michael Steele “gutless” and too weak to…

The Associated Press's obituary on Jack Kemp continued two troubling trends found in recent AP death notices.In July of last year, covering Tony Snow's passing (saved here; covered at NewsBusters here), AP reporters found seemingly everything negative they could think of to write about the former White House press secretary and 2008 Media Research Center Buckley Award winner (examples -- "good…

Imagine that former Vice President Dick Cheney was set to be honored next month at a Catholic university's commencement ceremony and news came down that another person to be honored at the same ceremony with a different award declined the honor, stating that she felt it inappropriate for the university to honor a man who believes in and furthered the use of torture by condoning waterboarding of…

Nothing in American politics is quite so intriguing as the Central Intelligence Agency. There is a certain mystique surrounding this agency, almost wholly because it has proven to be quite good at keeping secrets. Thus, whenever the actions of the CIA are widely reported in the media, the story typically becomes a fixation for many news outlets - and any former agent who is able to shed light…