Media Bias Debate

It's amazing how any reporter can cover the deepening economic crisis in Venezuela without saying a word about how the country got there. But Associated Press reporter Hannah Dreier was up to the task. In a bizarre, sickening November 20 report on how its people are having to get "creative" in the face of chronic shortages of basic goods to get by, she acted as if those shortages — and the over…

An Associated Press story late this afternoon has New York Senator Chuck Schumer saying the darnedest things, with only a tiny bit of pushback from reporter Charles Babington. In the wake of a midterm election rout which saw Republicans win at least eight Senate seats, increase their House majority, and take gubernatorial races in at least three deep blue states (MD, MA, and IL), Schumer now…

The media's coverage of the chaos that resulted after police officer Darren Wilson was not indicted for any crimes after shooting black 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last August has drawn a tremendous demand for reporters and journalists to do a better job in such situations. That call for people in the mainstream media to be more “fair and balanced” in their work led Dylan Byers…

It looks like the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, is choosing to become an active participant in the covering for the failure by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to carry out his most basic duty as the state's chief executive in a timely fashion. The AP's unbylined three-paragraph report published at 2:12 PM ET this afternoon acts as if the Guard had a meaningful presence in…

The New York Times continued its annoying, Winston Smith-like habit of rewriting history in virtually real time yesterday. Helene Cooper's original Monday afternoon report on Chuck Hagel's sacking as Secretary of Defense is no longer available at the Times. However, since I anticipated that the paper would conduct a comprehensive cleanup yesterday when I posted on the paper's original coverage,…

While it is indeed nice that the Associated Press did a fact check on President Obama's Thursday night immigration address — an item P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters covered on Saturday — it would have been even nicer if the wire service better described as the Administration's Press had fact-checked Julie Pace's and Josh Lederman's awful Friday evening backgrounder on the speech. The AP pair couldn…

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…