Media Bias Debate

On Friday afternoon, it became known that as many as 30,000 emails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner that were thought to be lost had been recovered. When it came to reporting this story, however, English-language networks ABC and NBC plus Spanish-language networks Telemundo and Univision have punted on this story and offered no coverage through their Monday evening newscasts. The…

As of 5:30 p.m. ET today, a search on "Koningstein" at the Associated Press's national web site returned no results. That's an indication that the wire service's globaloney-believing pseudo-science reporters are still trying to figure out how to respond to a November 18 article in the IEEE Spectrum by Ross Koningstein & David Fork, a pair of Google engineers tasked by the company in 2007 to…

As is the case with so many executive changes in both the public and the private sector, there is vagueness in the circumstances surrounding the end of Chuck Hagel's stint as Obama administration Secretary of Defense. While it's not unusual for an exec to be asked to resign to avoid being formally fired, which was apparently the case with Hagel, the higher-ups involved are usually smart enough…

Demonstrating that serving as the Palace Guard for Dear Leader is a 24-7-365 enterprise, Zachary A. Goldfarb, policy editor at The Washington Post, somehow felt the need on Sunday morning to critique the Saturday Night Live opening skit which appeared the previous evening. Twelve hours after the skit was first broadcast, Goldfarb, whose whose full archive going back to August indicates that he…

You'd think Joe Scarborough would have learned by now to avoid inflammatory statements about the Trayvon Martin case. Back when that case first broke, Scarborough immediately branded George Zimmerman a "murderer," an accusation for which he later declined to apologize because he was not currently in office. But there was Scarborough at it again this morning.  On today's Morning Joe, he sought to…

How long it would have taken from the time of its exposure for the press to have prominently reported on an email sent from the the Bush 43 White House to its Justice Department asking, "Any way we can fix the New York Times?" We can be confident that it would have taken less than a New York minute, and that saturation coverage would have continued for days. Well, one revelation in a series of…

On Monday, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, ordered the National Guard into Ferguson, Missouri and declared a state of emergency in anticipation of a grand jury's decision about whether to criminally charge police officer Darren Wilson in the August death of Michael Brown. If only Nixon had called in the Guard, as virtually every governor of all political persuations did in response to…

Even if you like your Obamacare insurance plan, Health and Human Services may move you by default into a different one — often with a different network of providers. In such situations, you wouldn't get to keep your doctors and other providers unless you acted. That's what HHS's Center for Medicare and Medicaid Service has indicated in a 300-page proposal dumped yesterday so it would get minimal…

At CNN on Thursday night, Anderson Cooper asked former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who is now a contributor at the network, to square President Barack Obama's Thursday night immigration announcement with past presidential statements that he didn't have the power to do what he had just done. As seen in the video after the jump, Carney acknowledged his former boss's compete flip-flop (…

Old habits die hard at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press — especially when those old habits help Dear Leader's regime look better, or less awful, than it deserves. It's been eight days, but it's still worth a look. On November 13, the government released its Monthly Treasury Statement for October, showing that Uncle Sam ran a $122 billion deficit. In his coverage of that…

A June 4 story at Willamette Week summarized the already serious problems pioneering longtime Oregon-based homosexual activist and ardent Barack Obama supporter Terry Bean was already facing before the Democratic Party "Kingmaker" was arrested Wednesday and "charged with two felony counts of having sex with a minor last year." Even before his arrest, the accusations made by Bean's former…

Brett M. Decker is a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors and "consulting director at the White House Writers Group." Early this evening, he effectively did double duty for the paper, both as a columnist and a journalist. Decker appears to be the first person to report visibly in a national publication that "influential gay rights advocate and top Obama donor" Terry Bean was arrested on…

On Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News — a broadcast that has yet to mention the infamous comments of ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber — anchor Brian Williams conceded his profession “might be guilty” of bias in its coverage, but his admission had nothing to do with liberals and conservatives. Instead, Nightly News devoted nearly two minutes (1 minute, 56 seconds) to a study showing media bias in…

Boy, it's a good thing that the unemployment benefits Congress continued to extend during most of the first five-plus years of Barack Obama's presidency didn't hurt the economy much. A study commissioned by the Cleveland branch of the Federal Reserve concluded that extended benefits "only account for a fraction of the actual increase in the unemployment rate." The allegedly minimal impact of…