Media Bias Debate

Closing out the Wednesday edition of Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell remarked how the presidential candidacy of Republican Senator Ted Cruz (Tex) would have been sunk and declared “a non-starter” under so-called normal circumstances due to so many of Cruz’s Senate colleagues having a disdain for him.

Republicans have the upper hand in Congress and in a clear majority of state governments. To Alterman, that state of affairs is a “mystery,” since GOPers typically hold “extreme” and “silly” views “that are not only beyond the boundaries of the beliefs of the vast majority of Americans, but also contrary to the laws of physics, economics, and, of course, common sense.” In the December 7 issue of…

Taking its cues from Monday’s New York Times, Wednesday’s CBS This Morning offered a similarly fawning profile of some young girls in California who are “scouting for change” as they try to force the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to admit them as members as they preferred the BSA over the Girl Scouts. 

Following in the footsteps of Monday’s CBS This Morning, the CBS Evening News featured on Tuesday a segment sounding the alarm on opposition to the U.S. accepting Syrian refugees with the comparison that those Syrians who have settled in the U.S. are facing “another brewing problem” in those opposed to their settlement (after having survived the horrors of the Assad regime). 

Thanks to some fabulous work by American Commitment’s Phil Kerpen digging through on Tuesday e-mails from Clinton State Department staffer Philippe Reines, he found that suspended CNN global affairs correspondent Elise Labott had communicated with Reines on multiple occasions to the point of taking marching orders over what she tweeted.

As we head into the Christmas shopping season, yours truly regrets to inform readers that the relative frequency of late-November media mentions of the "Christmas shopping season" is at the lowest level in all of the years I have been tracking it — probably meaning that it's at an all-time low, period. This is Year 11 of an effort which began in 2005. Each year has involved Google News searches…

There are plenty of problems with the government's "no-fly list," and especially the plans by some congressmen and senators to abuse it. That said, it appears, almost three years later, to have gotten one name right. In late 2012 and early 2013, leftists like Chris Hayes at MSNBC, Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum at Mother Jones were upset that Saadiq Long, a U.S. Air Force veteran who was living…

Call it the triumph of the "new normal." At Reuters today, after today's first revision of third-quarter gross domestic product showed that the economy grew by an annualized 2.1 percent, up from the late-October estimate of 1.5 percent, reporter Lucia Mutikani and Editor Paul Simao demonstrated that they have completely given in to the artificially lowered expectations of past seven miserable…

There was yet another sighting of the U-word ("unexpectedly") in connection with disappointing economic news today. Bloomberg News, which most frequently employs the word, told readers that "Consumer confidence unexpectedly declined in November to the lowest level in more than a year as Americans grew less enthusiastic about the labor-market outlook." Expectations were that confidence would…

On Tuesday’s CBS This Morning, co-host Charlie Rose teed up liberal Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos to provide a free advertisement for his newspaper, calling it “the new paper of record” and a “bright light that helps shine light on all of our institutions in this country and the political process.”

Amidst all the news about gas prices and weather forecasts for this Thanksgiving week, Monday’s morning and evening newscasts on ABC and NBC found no time to mention that Washington Post reporter and U.S. citizen Jason Rezaian had been sentenced by Iran’s Revolutionary Court to an unspecified prison term after being detained in July 2014.

The New York Times earned its keep as a foot soldier for the Obama administration as White House correspondent Michael D. Shear offered a piece in Monday’s paper lamenting that many of the President’s foreign trips have been “hijacked” by breaking news stories with the Paris terror attacks “spawn[ing] another distraction” from Obama’s agenda. 

New York Daily News covers on November 18 ("NRA'S SICK JIHAD" — noted at the time by NB's Kristine Marsh) and today ("NOWHERE TO HIDE, JIHADI WAYNE") have accused the NRA of placing the right to purchase guns ahead of public safety from terrorist attacks. The paper's bogus claim is based on the NRA's opposition to legislation prohibiting anyone on the government's "terror watch list" from…

Gosh, this gets tiresome. Once again, with one noteworthy exception, the business press's virtually blind acceptance of seasonally adjusted economic data, and its accompanying refusal to look at the underlying raw data, led it to paint a deceptive picture of an important element of the economy. This time, it was existing home sales for October. The seasonally adjusted annual rate for October…