Media Bias Debate

The wire services and other establishment press members appear to be getting more selective in what they will allow into their headlines, particularly omitting items which might hurt Dear Leader. Take the coverage of yesterday's Employment Situation Summary from the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics. The news was a combination of bad and mediocre (though expectations-beating): The…

National Review editor Rich Lowry has been granted space for a column in the liberal Politico newspaper/website, and he's not mincing words. On Wednesday, his headline was "The media's terrible trip." "During his overseas trip, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, traveled to some of our closest allies accompanied by some of his most merciless enemies — the media. If…

General Motors didn't have a very good second quarter, as the Associated Press's Tom Krisher duly noted on Thursday. What Krisher didn't note, and what almost no one in the establishment press ever notes, is the fact that the company doesn't have to pay any income taxes on its U.S. profits until it uses up losses carried forward from before its 2009 bankruptcy filing accompanied by at least $…

Yesterday on Fox News's Special Report, senior national correspondent John Roberts did a segment on the controversy surrounding gay marriage.  A version of his report also appears on the Fox News Web site.  In it, Roberts interviewed a gay marriage proponent saying that young Republicans "overwhelmingly support the freedom to marry." And then: Roberts:  It isn't just young Republicans who are…

"Even at the Olympics, athletes in the sport of shooting face questions about gun violence." That's the digital edition headline for Washington Post reporter Katherine Boyle's August 1 story about the "stigma" that American Olympic shooters face for participating in a sport that "requires a machine that, when used maliciously, can kill people." But as Boyle herself makes clear in her story,…

Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, has said that we are “inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’” How this unremarkable statement, which never mentions homosexuals, can be labeled anti-gay is astounding. But according to the editorial board of the New York Times, it can be. After quoting Cathy,…

The Associated Press's opening four-paragraph unbylined take (also saved here) on the Conference Board's July consumer confidence report comes off to yours truly as a desperate attempt to play "Happy Days Are Here Again" with selective reporting. Start with the item's headline: "US consumers more confident in the economy in July" Uh, no. Given that a value of 90 is what the AP acknowledges in…

Sunday on ABC, as Rush Limbaugh noted on his show yesterday, Obama campaign senior adviser and former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney a "schoolyard bully." Just a couple of hours later (the time stamp is noon on Sunday), what little is left of Newsweek published "Mitt Romney's Wimp Factor." Zheesh -- So which is it?

Imagine that Fox News had run a spoof video of someone seeming to line up a leading Democrat for a high-powered rifle shot. Need we state the obvious? MSNBC and the rest of the MSM would have interrupted all normal broadcasting for at least the rest of the day to condemn the outrage. But if a liberal late-night TV show runs a clip of Sarah Palin seeming to take such a shot at Dick Cheney? …

Last night (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) I critiqued a short Associated Press item posted earlier Monday by reporter John Hanna which seemed quite alarmed at the notion that "Conservatives in Republicans are turning against moderates in their own party." Hanna expanded his report on Monday. Its apparently final version, time-stamped at 5:16 p.m. at the AP's national site, goes further into…

Gosh, I think John Hanna and the Associated Press need to do something about their use of eliminationist language and violent imagery. Look at how AP headlined Hanna's late morning report on the rise of conservatism in several midwestern and southern states at the likely expense of moderate incumbents (shown in full because of its brevity and for fair use and discussion purposes).

"There is absolutely no way Barack Obama can win reelection running on his record and the news media know this," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Fox News's Eric Bolling at the top of today's Your World with Neil Cavuto. Newsweek's current edition, featuring the headline, "The Wimp Factor: Is he [Mitt Romney] just too insecure to be president?" is just the latest example of the media's…

The day before two of the U.S. Congress's most liberal, anti-gun legislators introduced a bill to severely restrict the online sales of ammunition, an American Olympic athlete who uses hundreds if not thousands of rounds a day in practice won a gold medal at the London games. One of the astounding stories to come out of this year's Summer Olympics is the amazing success of American shooter…

In his column at the Los Angeles Times today (HT to a NewsBusters tipster), Michael Hiltzik engages in predictable whining about discussions on how to bring the federal deficit under control seem "increasingly to be driven by the wealthy." In the instance he cites, one could substitute "big bank and big company CEOs," who seem to have recently decided that President Obama's Simpson Bowles debt…