Media Bias Debate

Last week, The Washington Post published a story profiling the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the head of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment Myron Ebell, and the Cooler Heads Coalition. Cooler Heads is an ad-hoc coalition chaired by Ebell that counters unscientific claims from global warming alarmists and energy-rationing schemes that imperil America’s affordable energy sources and…

The October 2017 issue of The Atlantic was devoted to “The Trump Presidency – A Damage Report,” part of which has already been covered at Newsbusters. Editor Jeffrey Goldberg introduced the issue’s theme in his opening Editor’s Note, “The Autocratic Element,” while one of his contributors also blamed the liberal press for (in Bob Woodward’s phrase) “binge-drinking the anti-Trump Kool-Aid.”

According to New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, the Democratic party is far saner than the Republican party. One reason for that, Chait suggested this past Sunday, is that Democrats benefit from powerful forces that help keep them rational -- forces that include CBS News and The Washington Post. “The fact is that the Democratic Party is fundamentally accountable to the mainstream news media. And…

Hillary Clinton has been making the rounds with the liberal media in recent days to promote her latest memoir, What Happened, in which she casts blame on nearly everything under the sun for her embarrassing defeat by Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Clinton appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 where she was treated to a softball interview with Cooper himself.

Promoting her new book about covering Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, on Tuesday’s NBC Today, correspondent Katy Tur told co-host Matt Lauer that the then-presidential candidate’s public criticism of her reporting was “jarring” and “scary.” Lauer shared her fear as he recalled the “intense feeling” he got at Trump rallies when the Republican nominee would attack the liberal media. 

On Sunday, CBS News ran two high-profile interviews with two very influential political movers and shakers, the Jane Pauley interview with Hillary Clinton during Sunday Morning and Charlie Rose’s interview with Steve Bannon on 60 Minutes. And the two interviews couldn’t be any more different. Pauley’s was mournful as she tried to connect with Clinton over her loss to Trump, while in the other,…

Monday on The View, the two most liberal hosts made a claim so absurd it begged the question: What world are they living in? The audacious claim came during a discussion on media bias and President Trump. While libertarian host Jedediah Bila pointed out conservatives’ complaints about left-wing media bias in general, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar brought it directly to Trump, arguing that the…

CNN’s Brian Stelter continued his role as an unabashed liberal media cheerleader on Tuesday, promoting a pathetic statement from a media trade group claiming The Blaze host and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch incited violence against journalists in an April video denouncing media bias. While the group Digital Content Next decried Loesch’s phrase “[w]e’re coming for you” as a trigger for violence, a…

Many years ago, Rush Limbaugh started calling the MSM “state-run media.” Sarah Jones indicated on Wednesday that Rush’s description might better fit righty outlets whose agendas dovetail with President Trump’s. Jones also suggested that conservatives are taking the mainstream media for a ride: “It has become an article of faith on the right that non-right media is malicious propaganda, even as…

As Hillary Clinton prepares to promote her new book on her election loss in 2016, simply titled What Happened, the rest of us prepare to hear every excuse about how her allegedly inevitable juggernaut landed in a ditch. The most implausible villain in this scenario is the liberal media, that somehow they were disloyal to the Clintons and “played by the Republicans.” Hillary die-hards are…

Writer Eric Alterman presents the relationship between President Trump and journalists as if it were a plot from a horror movie, and the audience knows what’s going to happen before the victim does. In Alterman’s view, the “racist, sexist, Islamophobic psychopath” Trump threatens the mainstream media, but reporters and editors are oblivious to the danger “not only to their livelihoods, but to…

Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson was agitated by the media’s recent ridiculousness when it came to falsely describing violent protestors as peaceful, ESPN’s Robert Lee Fiasco, and the criticism of wanting fair reporting during Thursday night’s edition of his show. So to break it all down he called on The Hill’s media reporter Joe Concha, who wasted no time in scolding the media for their off-the…

New York Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg dominated the front page of Business Day Thursday, showing his paranoia toward Trump and his media-loathing fans in “Target Practice – Trump’s latest attack on journalism has a particularly ugly edge.” His colleague, columnist Nicholas Kristof, warned that "Trump will get people hurt" with his rhetorical attacks on his enemies in the press.

A few days before Steve Bannon left the Trump White House, President Trump noted that Bannon had not signed on until “very late" in the 2016 campaign. Still, much like a ballplayer acquired just prior to the trading deadline who puts his team over the top, Bannon made a crucial contribution to Trump’s win, suggests New York’s Jonathan Chait. Bannon realized well before he joined the Trump…