Media Bias Debate

By midday Friday, the liberal media’s primal instinct to defend Hillary Clinton and attack NBC’s Today co-host Matt Lauer dragged on past the 36 hours mark in smearing Lauer for simply asking her about the e-mail scandal on Wednesday night was on full display with Wednesday’s CNN Tonight excoriating Lauer’s questioning as an “embarrassment to journalism.”

The New York Times offered a second day of slamming Matt Lauer in the front section, both the top staff editorial headlined “A Debate Disaster Waiting to Happen” and a snide James Poniewozik review headlined “In Battle of Candidates, Lauer Is the Loser.” It’s quite clear that if Hillary Clinton had actually won this side-by-side interview, the media elites would not be brutalizing Lauer. Their…

When covering the biases inherent to Univision's television news coverage, it is very important to look beyond the stories themselves.  A recent report from The Wall Street Journal reminds us of the critical need to take the occasional dive into the underlying business environment at Univision, and to note the points at which it intersects with its news coverage.

On Wednesday, Michael Tomasky, apropos of a challenge the media face in covering Donald Trump, mused that “‘objective’ news reporting -- and this is a real crisis with no easy answers -- is ill-positioned to call a lie a lie.” On Thursday, Tomasky urged the media to upgrade their position by taking certain “drastic measures” that “Trump has forced…upon us” as a consequence of his lying “literally…

Matt Lauer's supposedly overly rough treatment of Hillary Clinton Wednesday night at the Commander-in-Chief Forum in White Plains, New York has become such a big thing that the low-information voter fast-food providers at Inside Edition felt the need to cover it. Lauer did interrupt Mrs. Clinton seven times — relatively politely — and allowed Former Air Force & Navy flight officer Lt. John…

Media Research Center research director Rich Noyes appeared early Thursday night on the Fox Business Network (FBN) program Risk and Reward to analyze the liberal media’s crusade against one of their own in NBC’s Today co-host Matt Lauer for grilling both presidential candidates the night before at a veterans forum and predicted that pressure will be on his colleague Lester Holt to go easy on…

On Thursday's Legal View, two CNN journalists played up Hillary Clinton's first press conference in many months. Ashleigh Banfield trumpeted how "Republicans can no longer say, 270-some-odd days since Hillary held a news conference. There is some real strategy to this." Nia-Malika Henderson touted that the presser was a "really smart shift for her....she's able to drive the narrative — drive the…

"Firsts" — first man on the moon, first black president, first state to legalize something which was previously a crime, etc. — are supposed to be a big deal, right? Tuesday evening, the Houston Chronicle reported a first in the entire history of organized labor in the U.S., and the national press is ignoring it. That's likely because it's really bad news for Big Labor. The jury verdict in a…

On Thursday’s NBC Today, correspondent Ron Allen promoted President Obama blasting Donald Trump in the wake of NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum: “It didn't take much for President Obama to weigh in. At a closing news conference he was asked about those comments that Donald Trump made about our generals being reduced to rubble and about Vladimir Putin being a better leader than President Obama.”

With so-called neutral media critics throwing temper tantrums late Wednesday and early Thursday about NBC’s Today co-host Matt Lauer harshly questioning both presidential  candidates (including Hillary Clinton) at the Commander in Chief Forum, Fox News Channel’s Bill Hemmer and Howard Kurtz appeared to have had enough as they fired back at the desperate criticism on America’s Newsroom.

Just as predicted, MSNBC did its best to draw attention away from the grilling Hillary Clinton received about her e-mail scandal on Wednesday night at their Commander in Chief Forum in their analysis on The Last Word by spinning her portion as a “very strong performance” and spent little time rehashing it in favor of trashing Trump discussing his intelligence briefings. 

Complaints from liberal pundits about media bias against Hillary Clinton have snowballed during the past few days. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had the most high-profile effort, which contrasted “the impression that [Donald Trump is] being graded on a curve” with “the presumption that anything [Hillary] does must be corrupt,” and some of the others have taken aim at Krugman’s newspaper…

On Tuesday's All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, guest host Joy-Ann Reid devoted a segment to fretting that the dominant media have been too aggressive in covering a small number of Hillary Clinton scandals as opposed to many scandals coming from Donald Trump. Slate columnist and recurring guest Michelle Goldberg complained that, when the media cover Clinton scandals, "it's a couple of things that…

Looking at the history of NBC’s Today co-host Matt Lauer leading into Wednesday night’s MSNBC/NBC Commander in Chief Forum, one would conclude that he’d be anything but netural compared to some of his colleagues for impartial questioning both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but he brought the heat early on in Clinton’s portion about her e-mail scandal that left Clinton on the defensive.