Judiciary

The final installment of ABC’s ratings disaster When We Rise quietly ended Friday night with a victory and a warning. In the episode titled “Night IV,” the stabilization of the AIDS outbreak led to the charge for gay marriage. The success of California’s Proposition 8 – the state constitutional amendment that banned same sex marriage – lit a fire under the gay activists in San Francisco and led…

Univision nunca desperdicia una oportunidad para recordarnos que tiene una agenda más allá de la inmigración. La cobertura brindada a un fallo jurídico reciente nos comprueba que el aborto también ocupa un sitial prominente entre las políticas públicas preferidas de Univision.

Univision never wastes an opportunity to remind us that it has an agenda beyond immigration. The network's coverage of a recent court ruling proves that abortion is also high on Univision's list of pet issues.

CNN's New Day on Thursday devoted its first segment to fretting over President Donald Trump reversing the Obama administration directive giving transgender students the right to use whatever restrooms they wish as the Trump move was labeled "controversial" and one that was "denying students rights" and "tearing at the social fabric of the country." No one seemed concerned that girls and women…

Former Fort Worth, Texas, police officer Brian Franklin is finally free. But he is still fighting to clear his name. "I've been vindicated," he told me in an interview last week, "but not yet exonerated." Franklin served 21 years in prison -- a harrowing 7,700 days -- of a life sentence after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in 1995.

Thursday’s White House press briefing was a tense affair as fireworks sparked between press secretary Sean Spicer and SiriusXM’s Jared Rizzi, who complained about the topics covered in Trump’s tweets and inadvertently (or not) gave credence to the idea of not having press secretary speak on the President’s behalf.  At one point, Spicer lashed out at Rizzi for essentially arguing that Spicer’s…

Of the three networks on Thursday, only CBS This Morning bothered to explain that there is nothing unusual about a president fighting with the judiciary. Reporter Jan Crawford highlighted the long history of Democrats, including Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama attacking judges. ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today skipped this point.

People will believe silly things when it fits their ideological preconceptions. Even when they have been debunked and are contradicted by first-hand information and news reports. A handful of mostly left-leaning publications repeated a British tabloid’s wild claim that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch started a “fascism forever club” in high school. This bizarre smear of Gorsuch was debunked by…

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell perpetuated a glaring lie that not a single Republican Senator met with Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland (when at least 16 met with him) in order to predict that the GOP should not underestimate the opposition aimed at Trump pick Neil Gorsuch.

An MRC analysis of labels used on ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news shows during the 24 hours after each of the past six Supreme Court nominations demonstrates the pattern. GOP nominees John Roberts, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch were labeled by reporters as “conservative” a total of 36 times, while Democratic nominees Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Merrick Garland were called “liberal…

The media’s relentless beating of the two-week-old Donald Trump administration could hardly be seen as beneficial to him, but PBS’s Tavis Smiley tried to argue that on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “What troubles me, Chuck, is that we -- too many of us that is -- rushed to normalize a racist, sexist, classist campaign that he ran to win this office,” Smiley whined as he smeared the president…

Did Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch found a “Fascism Forever” club when he was in high school or is he simply the latest victim of fake news? The New York Post, The Daily Mail, U.S. News and World Report, Vice News and Keith Olbermann, on Thursday, all ran with the story that when he was at Georgetown Prep, Gorsuch founded and led a pro-fascism club. However, the National Review’s Ed Whelan…

Appearing on Thursday’s NBC Today, political analyst Mark Halperin worried that Republican President Donald Trump was behaving like...well, a Republican. Talking about the coming fight in the Senate to confirm Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, Halperin lamented: “...right now Donald Trump is governing as a Republican president, not as an independent. And if he does a scorecard of his first few…

On Wednesday’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews engaged in a fascinating debate with Stanford University’s Lanhee Chen on Supreme Court appointments and the Biden rule. But above all, Matthews lied that Obama appointee Merrick Garland “never got a conversation with a Republican” when Garland met with at least 16 Republican Senators.