Media Bias Debate

In his first interview with President Barack Obama since taking over as NBC Nightly News anchor, Lester Holt gave the President a friendly platform on Monday to promote criminal justice reform and his decision to send a small group of U.S. troops into Syria. Holt served up a fawning question to the President if he viewed it as “your defining moment” considering the fact that he’s the first…

On Monday’s NBC Today, MSNBC political analyst Nicolle Wallace explained the Republican Party’s long-term distrust of the press: “At the core is a massive generational distrust with the mainstream media and it bubbled over in the debate last week.”

In the wake of the CNBC debate debacle, Joe Scarborough went on an epic rant on liberal media bias on today's Morning Joe. He summed things up this way, in challenging the panel: "you can't do it and nobody here can do it: name the single Republican that has hosted a Sunday show, that has been an anchor of a news network for the big three networks over the past 50 years: you can not do it." …

In the week when a new James Bond film is coming out, it’s fitting that two lefty writers are both shaken and stirred by recent Republican blasts at media bias. In a Sunday article for Salon, Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson charged that “since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have fought the fair examination of their ideas. They embrace a worldview in which a few wealthy…

A Friday evening story at the New York Times covered the Obama administration's decision to "try to block the release of a handful of emails between President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton." In it, reporters Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt demonstrated that President Obama undoubtedly did not tell the truth in his interview with CBS News's Steve Kroft in a 60…

On Thursday, the government reported that the nation's economy turned in yet another quarter of poor economic performance, estimating that its gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 1.5 percent in the third quarter. The business press almost universally downplayed the news, and told readers that the fourth quarter will be better. No one talked about how much the tepid growth of the…

Many of the state cooperative health insurers, or "co-ops," set up under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, have gotten into serious financial trouble quite quickly. Almost half have cracked up completely. Specifically, as noted at Forbes.com on Thursday morning, "[O]f the 24 Obamacare co-ops funded with federal tax dollars, one (Vermont’s) never got approval to sell…

Politico Magazine runs a long article by Alex Thompson today with the provocative headline: "Could America Elect a Mentally Ill President? Yes. In fact, we probably already did." The story discusses the possible mental issues, and documented consumption of drugs used to treat mental illness, of numerous politicians, including several presidents, among them JFK, LBJ and Nixon. But here's the—…

Here's what should be an easy question: With data which has already been seasonally adjusted, what's more important — a) the fact that an index is a) up by 3 percent in the past year or b) the fact that it has fallen 5 percent in the past four months? The correct answer is obviously b) — unless you're a writer for the Associated Press whose mission is to convince readers that the housing market…

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. And people who ridicule the level of others' speech patterns should check theirs first. CNBC didn't do that. Instead, on Thursday, as I noted in a previous NewsBusters post, it childishly rushed out a grade-level evaluation of the Republican presidential candidates' speech patterns during the first three debates, including the Wednesday train wreck…

On Friday evening, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC all ignored the latest dump of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from the State Department that included the retroactive classification of 268 e-mails that now makes for one out of every 16 e-mails that have been “released” to the public since her private e-mail server scandal was unearthed in March.

In a letter to NBC News president Andrew Lack on Friday, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus informed the network “that pending further discussion between the Republican National Committee (RNC) and our presidential campaigns, we are suspending the partnership with NBC News for the Republican primary debate at the University of Houston on February 26, 2016.”

While much of the media ruled that Jeb Bush did not have a satisfactory debate performance on Wednesday, the sentiment stretched even into the late-night comedy shows as ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel panned the “embarrassing” Bush on Thursday for attacking Rubio on an issue “that literally no one outside of Florida cares about” concerning his Senate attendance record.

The government's Personal Income and Outlays report for September bore more evidence of a slowing economy. Consumer spending rose by only 0.1 percent, trailing expectations of 0.2 percent. That's troubling news, given that the optimists believe that strong consumer spending will supposedly drive stronger fourth-quarter economic growth. Lucia Mutikani's coverage at Reuters made a common error in…