Media Bias Debate

Uncle Sam's Monthly Treasury Statement for November came out yesterday. The results: Tax collections through two months of the fiscal year are up 4.4% over fiscal 2010; spending is down 5.5%, but only because about $31 billion in checks which would ordinarily have gone out on October 1 (a Saturday) were sent on September 30; and the deficit of $235 billion is $55 billion less than last year.…

In the December 19 edition of Time magazine, humor columnist Joel Stein pleased the liberals in his "Year of the Meltdown" review of 2011 by comparing Fox News-owning mogul Rupert Murdoch to murderous despots: "Throughout the year, leaders who for decades had ruthlessly wielded absolute power melted down: Zine al Abedine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Rupert Murdoch." Since it wasn'…

On Wednesday, the Politico ran a story about the International Association of Machinists Union at Boeing agreeing to approve a contract extension, the result of which ultimately led to the National Labor Relations Board dropping its controversial decision to prevent the company from beginning to operate a mostly-constructed plant in South Carolina. Though it deserves separate commentary, that…

A pathetic, obsequious act  on the part of an establishment press member was exposed as utterly foolish mere days after its appearance. On Wednesday (for Thursday's print edition), New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote glowingly of "Joining a Dinner in a Muslim Brotherhood Home." He swallowed a lot more than food while he was there, as the following excerpts indicate (bolds are mine…

On Wednesday, as Terry Baynes at Reuters reported, "A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld the convictions of five leaders of an Islamic charity on charges of funneling money and supplies to Hamas, designated a "terrorist" group following a 1995 executive order by President Bill Clinton. ..." The organization involved was the Holy Land Foundation based in Texas. The five involved received…

Yesterday, Anne Gearan at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, wrote what she called a "Fact Check" piece about a political promise. Really. Two Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, are both promising to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem if they should become the nation's next president. There's literally no way to "…

"You know, we have a saying in the military: You don't receive flak unless you're over the target," retired Army colonel Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) told NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell in an interview earlier this week. "I think that too often on the Republican side of the House" that conservatives have been gun-shy about "taking the flak" from the liberal media for their conservatism. "When…

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has been tracking views of press performance since 1985. In September 2011, Pew found that negative opinions about the performance of news organizations now match or surpass all-time highs. In the poll, 66 percent of those surveyed stated news stories often are inaccurate and 77 percent think that news organizations tend to favor one side…

Awwww. Don Berwick is unhappy. In a speech at the annual conference of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement excerpted at the Boston Globe's White Coat Notes blog, the man whom Congress would not confirm as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator seventeen months after President Obama gave him a recess appointment lashed out at his critics, especially their use of…

Over at PJ Media's Tatler section, Roger Simon caught Alana Semuels at the Los Angeles Times in what has to be a lead candidate for the NOn-Eric Holder howler of the day. In running down the degree of religious seriousness of a few more recent presidents in an article portraying GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's heavy involvement with Mormonism, Semuels wrote (bold is mine):

Former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D) will testify to a House panel today regarding the MF Global scandal that he "simply do[es] not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date," reports Associated Press's Marcy Gordon. Gordon eventually got around to mentioning Corzine's party affiliation, in paragraph 11 out of her 12-paragraph story:

Wednesday afternoon, Matthew Balan at NewsBusters noted that two of the three network morning shows failed to mention disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's Democratic Party affiliation. Not that it's an excuse, but what was probably their primary raw material, namely three Tuesday reports from the Associated Press, completely failed to tag Blago as a Democrat, specifically the…

In a report appearing earlier today, Karl Ritter at the Associated Press wanted U.S. readers to know that the "radical right" in Europe is turning into a really big problem. Why, these people have the nerve to object to the fact that "Muslim immigrants are colonizing Europe with the tacit approval of left-wing political elites." "Colonization" seems to be an inaccurate word; substitute "taking…

Disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.) was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison today. The Chicago Tribune devoted four reporters to cover this one story. Despite this, there were zero references to Blagojevich's Democratic party affiliation in the 49-paragraph "breaking news" item, "Judge gives Blagojevich 14 years: 'When governor goes bad, fabric of Illinois is torn.'"