Media Bias Debate

Facts are such inconvenient things. Especially financial facts and figures. On Tuesday, Rebecca Shabad at the Hill composed a 34-paragraph report entitled "Washington is ready to spend." Really? When have Congress or the White House not been ready to spend? Oh, I get it. She really means that they're getting ready to spend more. How much more? Readers will search in vain for anything beyond a…

This shouldn't be a trick question, but to the nation's establishment press business reporters it apparently is: What is the current length of the U.S. economy's expansion? The answer, after yesterday's reported 0.7 percent annualized contraction in U.S. Gross Domestic Product, is obviously zero. But that's not what Bloomberg News and reporter Sho Chandra, who has used her full first name of…

CNBC Washington correspondent Richard Harwood and the co-hosts of CNBC’s Squawk Box briefly discussed during Friday’s show the age difference between Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio that included Harwood knocking Rubio for “look[ing] like a schoolboy” compared to Clinton.

Willie Geist wondered out loud what would happen to a Republican candidate who had written that women fantasize about being raped--and Joe Scarborough questioned whether he would he still be in the race. But when it's a candidate for the Dem presidential nomination who had written those words, well, that's a different story. On today's Morning Joe, when Scarborough raised the matter of Bernie…

Continuing the media narrative that climate change is the cause of flooding in Texas, NBC Nightly News did its part on Thursday night in not only accomplishing that but also linking climate change to the drought in California and a “weather whiplash” that’s being seen across the country. Anchor Lester Holt began by observing “[t]he relentless rain, while enormously destructive, seemed to have…

Old stereotypes die hard — especially the ones which have long been false. The June 1 cover of The New Yorker Magazine depicts the Republican Party's current crop of declared and undeclared 2016 presidential candidates as an all-white-boys affair, showing seven of them in different locker-room postures, with Hillary Clinton peeping in through a window. How is this possible, you ask? Where are…

As noted in my previous related post, one of the authors of a late-2014 study which made the nonsensical claim that “a single conversation (can) change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage,” causing "a cascade of opinion change," issued a retraction last week, because the data supporting it was faked. Since it was published in Science Magazine — and because it conveniently…

The latest network blackout concerning one of the Clinton scandals came to an end on NBC Thursday as a segment on Today by correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned an AP story from two days before exposing what appears to be a shell company run by former President Bill Clinton. ABC and CBS continued their streaks of ignoring it with all three having yet to utter a word about an International…

"Science" has a problem — or more accurately stated, those who produce and publish "scienitific" studies — have a problem. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, one of the leading weekly peer-reviewed general medical journals, caused quite a stir last week when he said that "much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." That may be an underestimate. One of the more…

On Wednesday night, the major broadcast networks ignored a series of new regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the agency claims will better explain regulations in the Clean Water Act, but are seen by many as a power grab by the Obama administration to further control America’s waterways. While the story received zero mention on ABC, CBS, or NBC (but full stories…

This has to be the month's top entry in the "Just when you think you've seen it all" category — and it will be more than a little interesting to see how the nation's press handles it. As the Associated Press reported a week ago, the City Council in Los Angeles, by a vote of 14-1, ordered the drafting of a law mandating a citywide minimum wage of $15 per hour by 2020, noting that "the support of…

Following Rick Santorum’s announcement Wednesday that he will mount a bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, CBS and NBC largely punted on news of a seventh Republican candidate entering the field with a combined 37 seconds of airtime on their Wednesday evening newscasts. Over on the Spanish-language networks, however, the coverage was even less as there was zero mention of Santorum…

The Associated Press and Stephen Braun did all they could to cover for the Clintons yesterday. First, the wire service attached the most boring headline imaginable to Braun's story about Bill Clinton's shell company shenanigans: "Bill Clinton company shows complexity of family finances." The message to subscribers, particularly the broadcast networks: "This is boring and time-consuming. Don't…

Associated Press reporter Sarah El Deeb and Abu Bilal al-Homsi, the person she now describes as a "Syrian fighter," have had a long acquaintance. Sarah's and Abu's long-term relationship culminated in a Tuesday afternoon story which AP condensed into 140 characters on Twitter as follows: "Marriage, honeymoons and welfare: @AP exclusive shows Islamic State membership has its privileges." A great…