Media Bias Debate

“Cocooning” in the sense of staying at home rather than going out is not a political term, but Jeet Heer suggests that conservatives are prone to a sort of ideological cocooning, eschewing non-conservative media to the point that it can be hard for them to “engage with reality at all.” In a Wednesday article, Heer argued, “Distrusting the mainstream media as too liberal and putting their trust…

On Wednesday afternoon, the Clinton Foundation group Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) admitted that it had made “minor errors” in its tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in both 2012 and 2013 and thus added another layer to the Clinton Foundation scandal. When it came to major broadcast networks covering this on Wednesday night, however, ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC…

Can you imagine the liberal outrage if a Republican called a prominent African-American Dem candidate "Chauncey Gardiner," the simple soul from the Peter Sellers film Being There? The cries of racism might well cost such a hapless Republican his job.  But don't expect James Carville to pay any price. On today's With All Due Respect, Carville said that a frustrated Bush "can't believe that…

On Wednesday’s MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts, Ayman Mohyeldin presented a video of his interviews with two college kids from Jerusalem, one an Israeli, the other a Palestinian. After playing the video, Thomas Roberts and Mohyeldin continued to discuss the video. Mohyeldin lectured, “To try to understand this current cycle of violence, one of the reasons Palestinians will always say is the…

Tuesday’s CBS Evening News provided viewers with a rare look at an issue that’s often been ignored by the media in its coverage of ISIS gaining ground in the Middle East: Christians facing persecution. Fill-in anchor Charlie Rose set the scene by stating the obvious that “Iraq today is a fractured nation” with “[m]uch of the north” now “controlled by ISIS.” Rose then tossed to foreign…

As part of their 2016 coverage on Tuesday night, both ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News took shots at Dr. Ben Carson for his “hardline conservative” stances on issues like abortion when other “issues” like “political experience” will be one that “he will have to address” as the campaign moves along. 

As is so often the case with such stories, one can tell how favorable or disappointing a government report on the economy was by whether a story about it is still present at the Associated Press's "Top Business News" page several hours after its release. Today's news from the Census Bureau on September's factory orders and shipments, released at 10 a.m., was extremely disappointing. Thus, it is…

A liberal New York Times writer told a liberal MSNBC host that the problem with conservatives is they exist in their own ideological echo chamber. Without a sense of irony, All In host Chris Hayes on Monday night wondered, “What do you make of this sort of inward turning that we’re sort of seeing effectuated in the Republican field?” Op-ed columnist Paul Krugman complained, “Well, this has been…

On Tuesday, all three network morning shows happily touted President Obama attacking Republicans at a Democratic fundraiser Monday night over GOP presidential candidates objecting to CNBC’s biased debate. At the top of NBC’s Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: “The Republican candidates, briefly unified, splinter again over their debate demands as President Obama takes a swipe, mocking…

Truth, the cinematic attempt to make heroes out of the agenda-driven journalists who produced and broadcast the fraudulent 2004 CBS News story about George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, went into wide distribution this past weekend, with utterly disastrous box-office results. Readers, in between moments savoring the film's apparent descent into oblivion — though it will almost…

Appearing on the Monday edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, New York magzine writer-at-large Frank Rich denounced the letter written by numerous Republican presidential campaigns to media organizations concerning the format of future debates as “fascistic” and written by “scared little children” but “seem[s] to have been drafted by Stalin.”

On June 30, the Washington Post announced that it would be "compiling a database of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty in 2015." The Post has been "tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, and whether the person was armed." The paper's work thus far has been a…

Those who hope that Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin get to moderate a Republican presidential debate include Hannity himself, Ted Cruz, and Walsh. As they (almost) used to put it on Sesame Street, one of these persons is not like the others. Walsh, who recently joined The Nation after more than a decade and a half at Salon, argued in a Friday article that such a debate would benefit…