Media Bias Debate

Once again the folks at NBC News have "curated some of the notable speeches" from a night at the GOP convention. As I noted here and here, NBC left out some compelling speeches by minority politicians who started out in life as Democrats. This time, among the speeches that didn't make the cut was that of Tom Stemberg, the founder of Staples. Staples is one of the wildest success stories of Bain…

Over the past several years, even as the circulation and influence of traditional media has declined, there has been an explosion in the numbers of journalists producing sois-disant "fact-checking" pieces. As the god that failed (the media) has become tarnished, a new one ("fact-checking") has been set up. Unfortunately, as our friends at IBD note today, such attempts to hold politicians…

Gas prices have risen to a nationwide average of $3.80 per gallon, per gasbuddy.com early this afternoon, and an Ohio average of over $3.90. Is Asjylyn Loder at Bloomberg worried about the effects on drivers' pocketbooks and travel plans over Labor Day? Don't be silly. Loder is worried about its impact on Dear Leader's presidential reelection prospects, and avoids the implications of the ten-…

First, the bad news from a media coverage standpoint. All three major wire services covering today's report from the Department of Labor on initial unemployment claims characterized the seasonally adjusted result of 374,000 as "unchanged" from last week, but failed to note the 98%-plus probability based on the last 75 weeks of history (only one exception during that time) that the number will…

Ezra Klein, the "former" head of the Journolist news coordination conspiracy (given the evidence of coordination seen during the Republican convention, it's hard to believe it hasn't continued in some form), rolled out a graphic yesterday at the Washington Post which he touted as "the one graph you need to see before watching" the Republican convention. To show would be to give it more…

This afternoon, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell got his hands on excerpts of the remarks that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was preparing to give this evening. Bound and determined to find racism where it doesn't exist, O'Donnell did not disappoint. Taking to the air on Martin Bashir's eponymous program, O'Donnell laid out his case that McConnell's crack that the president "has been…

Today, per Nasdaq.com, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 4.49 points to 13107.48, the S&P 500 went up 1.19 points to 1410.49, and the NASDAQ gained 4.05 points to close at 3081.19.  The average of the three gains is less than 0.1%. That didn't stop the disseminators of CNN Money's email at the close of business from interpreting the result as being due to "signs of stronger U.S.…

Jim Pinkerton of Fox News Watch says the MSM has a problem: groups like NewsBusters are paying attention and "nailing them" when they let their liberal bias show. Pinkerton made his comment in an interview with NewsBusters at the RNC today.  The subject was a story NewsBusters broke this morning regarding Yahoo's Washington bureau chief David Chalian, who was caught on a hot mike saying that…

Notorious PBS liberal Gwen Ifill took to Twitter to defend David Chalian, the former Yahoo Washington bureau chief who was fired for claiming that Mitt and Ann Romney are "happy to have a party with black people drowning," claiming that he was unjustly fired. Her defense was markedly over-the-top: "One mistake does not change this. @DavidChalian is God's gift to political journalism. #…

As you may be well aware, MSNBC did not air Democrat-turned-Republican Artur Davis's speech last night. Shortly before 10 p.m. Eastern, anchor Rachel Maddow seemed to offer the network's rationale: Davis was a low-profile Democrat who is just bitter because he was "absolutely destroyed" in his primary race for Alabama governor in 2010. Yet in the very next breath, Maddow seemed positively…

On August 27, PolitiFact, the once promising but now largely co-opted "fact check" site run by the Tampa Bay Times, finally got around to evaluating Obama campaign spokesperson Stephanie Cutter's August 22 lie that "over the past, you know, 27 months we've created ... more jobs than in the Bush recovery, in the Reagan recovery." Apparently, the evaluators lost their matches as they only gave…

Most Americans don't watch the coverage of party nominating conventions, and everyone in the media knows it. So as a public service,  "NBC Politics team has curated some of the notable speeches from the first night of the Republican National Convention in Tampa," according to a late night August 28 post on NBCNews.com website. While NBC has the resources to embed videos of EVERY speech from…

In one of the more disgraceful reports emanating from the Associated Press this year, the self-decribed Essential Global News Network's Jack Gillum breathlessly told readers in a report tagged "exclusive" on Friday that Mitt Romney's presidential campaign is employing "secretive data-mining" to "sift through Americans' personal information" so they can "identify new and likely wealthy donors."…

The Associated Press's Anne D'Innocenzio is clearly mystified and possibly even upset that consumer confidence as reported by the Conference Board on Wednesday fell sharply to its lowest level since November of last year. Get a load of the second paragraph's first sentence in the version D'Innocenzio posted late yesterday morning shortly after the report's release, followed by asinine…