Higher Education

Republicans in Congress need to hold tobacco company-style hearings, hauling in the presidents of various universities and asking them to justify their multimillion-dollar salaries.

After all three network evening newscasts ignored President Obama dropping his controversial plan to tax 529 college savings accounts on Tuesday, only Wednesday's CBS This Morning noticed the development, giving it a mere seventeen seconds. Neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America covered the White House reversal.

In a reversal of a key proposal from his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama moved on Tuesday to drop the plan to tax 529 college-savings accounts after outcry from members of both parties and a direct appeal on Air Force One from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). When it came to the networks covering this backtracking by the President on this deeply unpopular idea…

Appearing on CNBC's Power Lunch at 1 p.m. ET Friday, the business network's chief Washington correspondent John Harwood touted President Obama's proposal to tax 529 college savings accounts: "If you want to change the distribution of income in this country, you've got to take from some to give to the other, and that's precisely what the President wants to do. Middle class families...have…

Introducing a segment on Thursday's NBC Today about parents saving for college, co-host Matt Lauer and the show's financial editor Jean Chatzky spent a scant twenty-four seconds on President Obama's recently announced proposal to hike taxes on college savings accounts. Lauer noted: "Talk to me a little bit about what President Obama was referring to when he gave the State of the Union address and…

Ahead of President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, the networks offered previews of his speech during their Monday evening newscasts with ABC and NBC working particularly hard to paint a rosy picture for Obama with rising poll numbers and having “redefined” the “model of how to sell the State of the Union.”

On Tuesday, I posted (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) on a bogus "study" out of North Dakota University contending that "almost one in 3 college men would commit rape 'if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences.'" Media exposure from favorable and unfavorable outlets continues to grow. In that post, I noted that the study disqualified itself from credibility by uncriticially…

The feminist-leftist fever swamp is apparently thrilled to have learned of a North Dakota University "study" purporting to show that almost one in 3 college men would commit rape "if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences." I'll get to the study's specifics shortly, but first want to note that the work, published in December, automatically discredited itself in its body's…

Friday's NBC Nightly News enthusiastically promoted President Obama's proposal to provide "free" community college education, to the tune of $60 billion over ten years. Brian Williams hyped the "ambitious offer that could help so many families." Chris Jansing asserted that the President's plan is a "a goal everyone can agree on," but also underlined that the multi-billion dollar program is going…

All three networks on Friday hyped Barack Obama's call for "free community college," but CBS, NBC and ABC offered very little in the way of skepticism about the cost or feasability of such a proposal.

If CNN is searching for reasons why its ratings are at an all-time low, it doesn't need to look any further than one entry in its group of "11 extraordinary people of 2014" published on December 5. Aside from the inanity of publishing such an annual list almost four weeks before year's end — as if no extraordinary people or extraordinary acts ever take place in December — the network's fourth…

On CNN's Reliable Sources on Sunday, University of Virginia student Alex Pinkleton revealed how Rolling Stone's Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who wrote the disputed Rolling Stone story on alleged rape at the college, acted more like an "advocate" than a reporter as she interviewed people for the article. Pinkleton, a friend of the woman who made the rape accusation, asserted that Erdely "did have an…

One of the more amusing aspects of observing today's left-biased establishment media environment is seeing agenda-driven journalists directly or indirectly convey a clearly inflated sense of their outlets' self-importance. A recent example of this came Friday from Jacob Silverman at Politico Magazine. In his writeup on conservative firebrand Charles Johnson, Silverman employed the comparative…

Two recent items in the Washington Post support my contention that the establishment press is currently doing more than anyone besides Lena Dunham and "Jackie," both of whom have been irrefutably exposed as rape story fabulists, to cause victims of sexual assault to be reluctant to come forward (Note: That's not to say that the two women haven't been victims of sexual assault, "only" that the…