Labeling

At the Associated Press, George P. Shultz, James A. Baker III and six other formerly despised Republicans and business leaders have suddenly become "GOP senior statesman." What accounts for this instant transformation? The group is pushing what it calls a "Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends.” In a Tuesday evening Wall Street Journal op-ed, Shultz and Baker advocated "a gradually increasing…

Given its usual tendencies, I suppose we should be grateful that the Associated Press deigned to fact-check federal judge James Robart at all. The AP's Eric Tucker reported on Monday that the Western Washington District Court judge's claim — that no arrests of foreign nationals have occurred since 9/11 from the seven countries which had been subject to President Trump's temporary travel ban…

At the Media Research Center, the unhinged infamy of Nina Burleigh, who now toils at Newsweek as its national politics correspondent, goes back to years before NewsBusters began. Burleigh's most recent childish move is something one might expect from an unsupervised freshman writer at a high school newspaper. She has created a "Trump Warning System." It includes four icons, three of which are…

The Media Research Center’s Rich Noyes appeared on Fox Business Network’s Risk and Reward on Tuesday and called the media out for playing games with terrorist attacks. “So they have to stop trying to play games with this and definitional games and deal with this,” he explained to host Liz MacDonald, “You know, put all 78 together, and you got yourself a major terrorist threat that has been going…

A recent item at The Onion, the online humor site which is now rarely genuinely funny, claimed that "Fearful Americans (Are) Stockpiling Facts Before (the) Federal Government Comes To Take Them Away." Naturally, it was occurring because Americans are "alarmed at the prospect of unconstitutional overreach by the Trump administration." Ha-ha-ha — as if "constitutional overreach" didn't occur at a…

MSNBC took its fear mongering smears of the Donald Trump administration to a dark new low Monday afternoon when reporter Kate Tur suggested the president’s war with the media would start racking up actual casualties. During an interview with Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican, Tur suggested Trump would take a page from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s playbook and start targeting…

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…

With CNN’s recent boasting of increased sales of George Orwell’s 1984 in response to President Donald Trump, and with their accusations of the administration gaslighting the country, it’s quite hypocritical of them to have a panelist on that appears the be practicing his own doublespeak. During Sunday’s Inside Politics, Washington Post writer Ed O’Keefe hammered the president and Republicans for…

As Curtis Houck demonstrated at NewsBusters on Wednesday, the historic step of including four outside-the-DC Beltway journalists at White House press conferences via Skype is not sitting well "with many establishment media types." The aggrieved folks at CNN are particularly upset.

UPDATE, Feb. 7: On Feb. 5, Jake Tapper tweeted that "if you're concerned about things being 'incomplete' maybe consider adding into your post Manchin on same show response to rule." I attempted to find that video, and could not. If it was so important, and in the interest of balance, one would hope it would be part of the CNN video at the web link cited below — and it's not. As Nicholas…

On Wednesday, an early Associated Press report following the confirmations of two of Donald Trump's cabinet nominees employed extraordinarily strident and bitter language, portraying Republican Senate Committee which approved those nominations as de facto bullies who were "unilaterally" imposing their will. An evening revision updating that afternoon report expanded that portrayal to include…

On Thursday afternoon, CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper aired footage damaging to the Environmental Protection Agency while fearing the effect of easing regulations on the coal industry. “A big victory for the coal industry today. Moments ago, the U.S. Senate voted to repeal an Obama-era regulation the industry calls burdensome,” noted Tapper leading into an in-person report by CNN government…