Media Bias Debate

Posted today on the Chicago Tribune's Clout Street blog is the story "GOP attacks Obama bus, but Bush did same," written by Rick Pearson. It begins:

CNN's Jessica Yellin used a recent CNN poll Tuesday to give credence to the White House spin that President Obama is the victim of a bad economy he inherited from Bush. What Yellin failed to report was another CNN poll showing that Americans almost two-to-one disapprove of Obama's handling of the economy. Yellin, on Tuesday's The Situation Room, touted a July 25 CNN poll showing that 57…

At first blush, it might seem hard to imagine how one can contend that a press report describing an industry sector as operating "at depressed levels" and at volumes that are one-half of what "economists consider to be healthy" isn't telling the whole truth. But that's exactly how I would describe Tuesday's writeup by the Associated Press's Derek Kravitz after July's Census Bureau release on…

CNN's own poll recently showed that voters 60-to-one believe the economy is the most pressing issue facing the United States, as opposed to policies toward gays and lesbians. CNN's Anderson Cooper apparently thought the views of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann toward gays and lesbians important enough to merit the lead segment on his Monday show. "We begin tonight 'Keeping…

A daring Czech anti-Communist freedom who escaped to West Berlin in 1953 and later served in the U.S. Army died on August 13 "of an undisclosed illness in a war veterans residence in Cleveland." When it came to noting his passing, the Washington Post ran a slightly-edited version of an AP story by Karl Janicek that Post editors headlined "Czech who fought communism still controversial."* By…

She never mentioned colleague Michelle Goldberg by name, but it's hard to think that former Democratic strategist and Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers didn't have her in mind when she penned her August 15 Daily Beast column, "Stop Attacking Evangelicals!" You may recall that on August 14, Goldberg laid out her Michele Bachmann-is-a-theocrat conspiracy theory.

I can hardly believe that the President of the United States, whose team is apparently deeply concerned about their guy's declining popularity and news stories which kept Republicans in the headlines this weekend, is going on a "Me Too" bus tour of Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois this week. The only plausible reason for this is to attempt to blunt the generally positive GOP vibe coming out of…

Sunday, Alexa Olesen at the Associated Press wrote an item headlined "One-child policy a surprising boon for China girls." My immediate comeback: "43-60 million Chinese girls aborted because they were of the 'wrong' gender or would have violated the one-child policy were not available for comment." While nowhere near as odious as Nick Kristof's "Mao Tse-tung wasn't all that bad; look what he…

“I think there's a lot of time on radio and television and on the Web that actually is conservative points of view. There's not a lot of time for the left,” long-time CNN executive David Bohrman, the new President of Current TV, the channel co-founded by Al Gore which is Keith Olbermann’s new home, laughably claimed late Sunday morning in a live interview on CNN’s Reliable Sources.   Bohrman…

Tuesday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), yours truly noted an email from the Associated Press's Images Group which encouraged subscribing outlets to use its "iconic images and videos" to promote the 85th birthday of Fidel Castro, the "Legendary Cuban revolutionary and longtime leader." Today, writing what may be the wire service's last calendar-driven excuse to heap praise on him while he is…

Chris Hayes told New York magazine recently he doesn't intend to have any "hacky partisans" on his weekend MSNBC show that debuts September 17. But the NewsBusters archive reveals a trove of evidence demonstrating that the Washington editor of the left-wing Nation magazine could only live up to that standard if he banned himself from his own show:

Editor's Note: Mr. Bozell will be on Fox News's "Your World with Neil Cavuto" around 4:45 p.m. EDT today to discuss the Wisconsin recall results and may also give his thoughts on last night's Republican presidential debate. "These [Wisconsin] protests were supposed to be the rebirth of the Left going into the 2012 campaign" and yet when the "unions threw everything they had" they came up…

The next time I plan to escape reality for an extended time, I won't go to the trouble of forwarding the phones to voicemail and swearing off the Internet and TV for a few days. I'll just take whatever the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger must be consuming. Crutsinger's 11:45 report this morning claims that "The better-than-expected retail sales report is the second strong signal on the…

Tina Brown got in hot water this week for an unflattering Newsweek cover photo of Tea Party Republican Michele Bachmann but those who've followed the current Daily Beast and Newsweek editor's career, ever since she brought her version of tabloid journalism over from England to Vanity Fair in 1984, can tell you this is just par for the course. In fact that wasn't the first time the former…