Media Bias Debate

Appearing on Wednesday's NBC Today, former CIA Director Michael Hayden went after the network for hyping the so-called "torture report" released by Senate Democrats on Tuesday. After Hayden denounced the partisan report as something that "reads like a prosecutorial screed rather than an historical document," co-host Savannah Guthrie pressed him on what he disagreed with. Hayden replied: "Well, I…

It's more than fair to wonder why the Associated Press waited until 9:41 p.m. ET Tuesday evening to recognize the existence of Lena Dunham's most recent problems with the truth. The AP's first recognition of the days-old story came roughly two hours after Dunham's first detailed response to convincing allegations that the account in her most recent book of being raped in college by someone named…

On NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, moderator Chuck Todd fretted that after the show he would be inundated with complaints about his news coverage, but not from conservatives: "I'm going to get a ton of emails today, 'Gosh darn you, Meet the Press, great news on the economy, and you haven't done anything giving President Obama praise.'"

Friday's Employment Situation Summary contained one strong element: In November, the economy added 321,000 seasonally adjusted payroll jobs. That's not insignificant, but that news, especially in the report's full context, certainly didn't justify the level of elation seen in much of the press. Predictably, the Associated Press found a specious reason to characterize the government's report as…

Michael Tomasky is not content to argue, in the wake of Mary Landrieu's defeat, that Democrats should write off the South as politically unfriendly territory.  In his Daily Beast item of today, Tomasky goes to great lengths to trash the region in the ugliest of terms. "Reactionary, prejudice-infested, fetid, reject[ing] nearly everything that’s good about this country, just one big nuclear waste…

Just before Thanksgiving, Our Walmart and the United Food and Commerical Workers went into high gear in their effort to draw attention to their advocacy of $15-per-hour minimum wage at the nation's largest retailer. Just after the holiday, I pointed to a column by the Manhattan Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who quickly discovered that many Kroger employees represented by the UFCW earn far…

In the Rolling Stone-University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape saga, National Review's Jonah Goldberg's journalistic instincts expressed in his December 1 Los Angeles Times column ("Rolling Stone rape story sends shock waves -- and stretches credulity") obviously ran circles around Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist Diana Crandall's. On December 3, shortly before the story imploded, Crandall…

The headline at Saturday's Assocated Press story at Yahoo News dealing with the implosion of Rolling Stone's November 19 story about an alleged — and, for all appearances, completely fictional — fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia focuses, as so many other establishment press stories have, on the supposedly "chilling effect" ... (it) could have on sexual-assault victims reporting…

Facts?  We don't need no steenkin' facts. Liberals aren't going to let mere facts get in the way of a good story. In a Politico magazine article on the UVA rape accusation debacle, in which the accuser's allegations have unraveled, Julia Horowitz, an assistant managing editor at the college paper The Daily Cavalier, claimed "to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake."

Next time you're assembling a criminal defense team, remember to forget Melissa Harris-Perry. On her MSNBC show today, MH-P commented on the news that authorities are considering charges against Michael Brown's stepfather Louis Head, who on the night the grand jury declined to indict, jumped on a car and implored the crowd "burn this mother------ down! Burn this b--ch down!" Numerous buildings…

In the runup to the Black Friday shopping weekend, the Associated Press's Matt Stroud hysterically claimed that "more gun sales are effectively beating the system" of background checks. Tim Graham at NewsBusters caught how Stroud described the situation as "a 'perfect storm,' like the disastrous ship-sinking movie." Stroud's report gave readers the clear impression that there are no potential…

The straw man argument is a fundamentally dishonest fallback tactic employed by someone whose side is losing a debate: Make up a position the other side has never taken, and then shoot it down. The leftist fever swamp known as Vox, perhaps reacting to the utter implosion of Rolling Stone's University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape story and the potential impact it might have on keeping…

When the now-retracted article by the Rolling Stone magazine was published on November 19 about a brutal gang rape of a first-year student at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia, the major broadcast networks rushed to the story and devoted multiple segments to both the article and reaction on the school’s campus. In doing so, they failed (unlike other outlets) to…