Media Bias Debate

On his MSNBC show tonight, trying to explain away a poll showing Fox News to—once again—be the most trusted national news network, Hayes argued that it was unfair since Fox was the only conservative outlet, pitted against MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.  Hayes analogized the poll to one in which Mike Huckabee was placed against Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, John Kerry and Al…

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos thinks the flap over Hillary Clinton’s private e-mails is a “nothing-burger.” Charles Pierce of Esquire, who may be on a meatless diet for Lent, says it’s simply “nothing.” That left each to blast the media for its supposedly egregious coverage of what DKos is calling “eGhazi.”

The University of Notre Dame won an important victory at the Supreme Court Monday morning when the Court acted in its case involving Obamacare's contraception mandate. Its "GVR" order (grant, vacate, remand) granted Notre Dame a "writ of certorari," vacated a lower court ruling against the school which would have forced it comply or face severe penalties, and remanded the case back to that lower…

On Tuesday, none of the major English or Spanish-language networks devoted any news coverage during their evening newscasts to the decision by the Obama administration to not follow through with a proposed ban on ammunition that is often used in AR-15s. The move by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) comes after an overwhelming response from gun owners, gun rights…

Following in the footsteps of Tuesday’s CBS This Morning, the CBS Evening News worked to paint the 47 Republican Senators who signed a letter to Iranian leaders in a negative light and portraying their actions as meddling in the Obama administration’s negotiations while making no mention of the moves that Democrats made to thumb their noses at Republican administrations.

Imagine if a Republican congressperson called Illinois' senior senator Dick Durbin "Dick Turban" in not one tweet, but two (Durbin has been given the nickname by several center-right pundits and commentators; but as far as I can tell, no national Republican politician has used it). Does anyone think it would take the establishment press over 15 hours (and counting) to report it? Late Monday…

A review of the "Big Story" archive at the Associated Press's national site on Jesse Jackson's name returns quite a few instances where the wire service has treated the "Reverend's" self-injection into stories considered nationally important as noteworthy. In addition to the predictable plethora of stories relating to Ferguson, Missouri and "police-communities tension," Jackson's name has…

Late Monday morning, reacting to a news Quinnipiac University poll about network trustworthiness, the Washington Post's Hunter Schwarz, at the paper's "The Fix" blog, pointed to Fox News's dominance and declared: "For millions of Americans, Fox News is the mainstream media." Perhaps more surprising than Fox's dominance, but clearly supporting the statement Schwarz made, is the collective poor…

The Indianapolis Star reported on Monday that it had obtained emails from an employee at the Indianapolis VA hospital who mocked returning combat veterans who were facing mental health issues and committed suicide. On Monday night, both the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley and NBC Nightly News failed to cover this story.

Did Campbell Brown just give away a dirty little secret: that conservatives are blacklisted in the entertainment business?     On today's With All Due Respect, Brown and John Heilemann were kicking around the results of a poll as to whom Americans prefer to replace Jon Stewart as Daily Show host.   Tina Fey came in first, with Dennis Miller a close second.  Said Brown: "I can't imagine Dennis…

It has been eleven months since the firestorm over Mozilla co-founder and just-promoted CEO Brendan Eich ended in his resignation. Eich's "offense" had nothing to do with how he planned to run the business. What led to his departure shortly after he was named CEO was that six years earlier he had given $1,000 to those who supported the California Proposition 8 ballot measure prohibiting same-sex…

Monday night, a Cincinnati-area same-sex "marriage" activist posted on Facebook and tweeted that he had been abducted and was in the trunk of his car. A short time later, police found 20 year-old Adam Hoover and determined that he had (very clumsily) faked his abduction, and would be charged with the crime of "making false claims." In the meantime, news of Hoover's abduction and then its false…

Stocks took a beating yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 279 points. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ each declined by over one percent. The subject line of a USA Today email I received shortly after the closing bell crystallized the establishment press "wisdom": "Dow plunges nearly 280 points as strong jobs data raises Fed rate hike fears." The problem is that even though the…

One mantra that the left and most of the establishment press continually recites — and it's not surprising, given that so many people in both groups are forced to be members themselves — is that right to work laws are "anti-union." They cling to that position despite that fact that the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation accurately insists that it "is neither 'anti-union' nor 'pro-…