Media Bias Debate

Late Thursday afternoon, freelance journalist and editor Sebastian Jones dropped a friendly reminder for Twitter users how the media’s neglecting to recount the disturbing past of Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald and instead praising him ad nauseam for his investigative reporting looking into President-elect Donald Trump’s finances and connections to foreign governments. 

Following Facebook’s announcement that it would start monitoring and flagging fake news stories on the social media platform, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell issued the following statement:

WASHINGTON — Over the weekend some pathetic wretch — obviously a casualty of the Nov. 8 election — writing under the pen name Paul Farhi filed a column in the Washington Post lamenting that after an extensive search of the newspapers of this great country, he could hardly find any pro-Trump columnists. 

Yes, folks, you read that headline right. Near the tail end of Wednesday’s Hardball, rapper Pharrell Williams lauded MSNBC host Chris Matthews for being someone Williams has “been watching...for years” because of “the way that you keep people straight” and slice through spin. 

Pot: Kettle. In Friday’s Washington Post, media columnist Margaret Sullivan told those with “news fatigue” that “this is no time to tune out,” yet Sullivan soon displayed how clueless journalists are about their own leftward bias which leads so many to distrust the media and want to tune out. Presuming President-elect Trump’s personnel choices are “upsetting,” she cited how Trump “has nominated…

With all the headlines about “fake news,” the liberal media elite don’t have a perfect track record, either. Reporter Jayson Blair concocted stories for the New York Times back in 2003, while Stephen Glass fabricated numerous pieces for The New Republic in the late 1990s. The most notorious scam of this sort was the 1980 front-page Washington Post article by reporter Janet Cooke headlined “Jimmy’…

The escalation against conservatives continued on Thursday in an online Washington Post column by Sarah Pulliam Bailey that sought to connect the distrust in the mainstream media on the right to the rise of fake news that’s made for “dangerous” consequences like the false story that’s become known as Pizzagate. 

For years I've wondered if former NBC news anchor Brian Williams is an aspiring stand-up comic. What he said last night on The 11th Hour sealed it -- this guy can make people laugh, albeit not always intentionally. Williams's repeated episodes of fictional story telling fobbed off as news, often accompanied by exaggerations of his journalistic heroics, led to his downfall from NBC in 2015. He was…

Washington Post local columnist Petula Dvorak waded into the ginned-up fake news debate in her Tuesday column as she compared the false and unsubstantiated Pizzagate story to the “doctored” and “gotcha” videos that spawned the Planned Parenthood scandal and Sarah Palin causing then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords to be shot in 2011 (even though the first case was real and the second was thoroughly…

They never learn. The grand journalism pooh-bahs at CNN were humiliated this election cycle when WikiLeaks revealed that former CNN contributor and interim DNC chair Donna Brazile had shared a question with the Hillary Clinton campaign in advance of a March Democratic primary town hall debate. According to CNN, "activist anchor" Roland Martin and his production team at CNN's debate partner and…

Megyn Kelly is a journalist, but she’s also a sort of actress, suggested Isaac Chotiner in a Monday review of her new book, Settle for More. To Chotiner, Kelly’s a conservative who plays a nonpartisan on TV. She has “done her best to cloud her real agenda.” And it’s worked: she has “wide-ranging respect and admiration among a press corps generally (and rightly) suspicious and dismissive of Fox…

The Washington Examiner’s T. Becket Adams exposed on Tuesday morning in a series of tweets the very problem that besets a liberal media obsessed with placing legitimate conservative sites into the sphere of the fake news when a number of journalists chided Speaker of the House Paul Ryan for comments at CPAC 2014 regarding school lunches thanks to a dishonest hatchet job by Time magazine.

In another case of a journalist completely lacking self awareness, NBC Today anchor Savannah Guthrie admitted to The Hollywood Reporter that she tried “really hard” to stay unbiased in her job. But not before slamming viewers who didn’t share her own opinions as “biased.” “I try really hard to stay neutral,” she said. “But often that's not what you're finding on social media. You're finding…

CNN’s Brian Stelter took his anti-Donald Trump bias to new heights Sunday during his show Reliable Sources, where he argued that the media had to start referring to the president-elect as an authoritarian. “I talk to international correspondents who say to you, ‘This is exactly what authoritarians do. This is what strongmen do. This is what happens in authoritarian regimes,’” he claimed, “I think…