Media Bias Debate

Starting on Monday night, a series of town hall meetings in Ferguson, Missouri began taking place in light of the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in conjunction with the Department of Justice (DOJ) that will be closed to the media. When it came to the major broadcast networks reporting this censoring of the press, none of them chose to cover it. According to an article posted on MSNBC’s…

Politico's Kenneth Vogel and Byron Tau filed a long Friday article moaning about how influential opposition research has become in the conduct of this year's political campaigns. My takeaway is that they really don't like it this time around — not because the money involved has increased, and not because supposedly lax campaign-finance laws have accommodated this increase. No, they're really…

On Sunday's Reliable Sources, CNN's Brian Stelter touted a disgraced former representative as a non-partisan pundit and as an expert on media bias: "Now, I could bring in two partisan commentators now to argue about the media, but I'd rather from someone who's been in the glare of the news media – someone who's all too familiar with what happens when you go from darling to bad boy – then, maybe,…

In an interview with Ken Burns on Sunday's web-based Meet the Press feature Press Pass, moderator Chuck Todd asked the historian and film-maker about his PBS documentary on the Roosevelts: "It's amazing what the press didn't cover....I mean, and if they had, obviously it could have changed history." Burns responded: It could. But I think we focus too much – we presume that because there was a…

It turns out the politician who called colleague Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) "chubby" and admonished her not to lose too much weight is none other than the late Sen. Daniel Inouye. So naturally when covering the story, MSNBC.com's Michele Richinick made sure to soften the blow against the late Hawaiian Democrat by tagging him as a longtime "advocate of women."

On Sunday, CBS's "60 Minutes" will broadcast Scott Pelley's recent interview of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. In CBS's promotional tease, which was broadcast on Friday, in response to Pelley's question about whether he was confident that the U.S. troop withdrawal "was the right thing to do" at the time it was done, Panetta said, "No, I wasn't." That's big news. How big? So big that,…

The real problem with Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke's "jobs plan," the detailed version of which appears to be no longer available at her campaign's web site, isn't its plagiarized material. It's the content. The presence of certain obviously wrong facts and patently pathetic assertions indicates that Ms. Burke, a successful entrepreneur who one would think should have…

On Friday morning, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski joined the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein in calling for equal news coverage if Christie is officially exonerated in numerous investigations into his involvement of the scandal known as Bridgegate to the non-stop coverage when it broke in January. During a discussion with their panel on Friday’s Morning Joe, they discussed news that a…

On Wednesday night, it was reported that two Marine Corps veterans are walking from northern North Carolina to Washington D.C. and the White House to demand that President Obama take action to ensure the release of Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi from a Mexican prison. However, none of the major broadcast networks have stepped up and covered the actions of the these veterans. One of the two…

An enormous development in the Bridgegate scandal broke late Thursday afternoon when federal officials reported that they have cleared New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) of any wrong-doing relating to the closure of lanes on the George Washington Bridge in September 2013.  When it came to the major broadcast networks covering this huge development, ABC and CBS punted on the story and refused…

On Thursday morning, CBS continued to ignore key results of the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, which show President Obama’s approval rating at 40 percent and his foreign policy approval rating at only 34 percent.  In contrast, the front-page New York Times article by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Dalia Sussman included dire statistics about the President’s low domestic approval rating: “The…

The Census Bureau reported earlier today that seasonally adjusted housing starts and homebuilding permits fell by 14.4 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively, in August. The detail wasn't any better, as the two categories within each statistic — single-family and multiple-dwelling homes — also fell. You can tell that the news wasn't seen as good at the Associated Press, because Josh Boak's…

On Thursday, September 18, a strange thing happened: ABC actually covered President Obama’s plummeting poll numbers. No, not ABC News, but the daytime ABC program The View which spent nearly four minutes discussing his falling poll numbers. Moderator Whoopi Goldberg proclaimed that President Obama “might be afraid…the latest approval ratings seemed to have sunk lower than George Bush's levels. …