Media Bias Debate

Looking for updates on the Connecticut state budget mess earlier this afternoon, I searched the Associated Press's national site on the last name of Democratic Nutmeg State Governor Dannel Malloy, and found nothing recent (graphic saved here for future reference). But there were two stories originating from the state which the wire service, the nation's de facto news gatekeeper, deemed worthy…

I had to do a double take when I looked over this afternoon's dispatch out of St. Paul, Minnesota from Patrick Condon of the Associated Press. Readers unfamiliar with the Gopher State budget impasse to this point would fail to learn from the AP report that the dispute is all about raising taxes. Democratic Governor Mark Dayton wants tax increases on "the wealthy" (which really means high…

Eliot Spitzer used his last day at CNN to take a shot at cable news and decry the debt ceiling debate as a "new low for American politics" – although he himself was embroiled in an ugly scandal as governor of New York only three years ago. And he made sure to include a lengthy Constitutional conversation with two of his favorite guests, liberals Fareed Zakaria and Simon Schama. Schama, a…

Wednesday afternoon, BigJournalism.com editor-in-chief Dana Loesch reported that Arizona Senator John Kyl had been on the receiving end of what I would call "mis-tweetment" at the hands of someone irresponsibly chirping away at Reuters. The Reuters tweet stated that "Republicans have agreed to $150 billion to $200 billion in increased tax revenues as part of budget talks," and claimed Senator…

CNN foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria – who has recently had off-the-record conversations with President Obama on foreign issues – noted the president's "restraint" in his dealing with the "Arab Spring" and the conflict in Libya Wednesday. Zakaria previously gave a thumbs-up for Obama's Mideast speech in May and later defended the president's plan for removing American troops from…

The latest edition of the New York Times’s Sunday magazine gave conservatives a rare opportunity to repurpose Times Executive Editor Bill Keller as a pinata, though the paper’s intent may have been to make its conservative critics look irrational. Readers responded bluntly to Keller’s trashing of Sarah Palin in his column for the June 19 issue, in which he claimed “most journalists would recoil…

On Friday, at its Political Hotsheet, Corbett B. Daly at CBS News, who joined the network in late May after leaving Reuters, appeared to virtually celebrate what he believes was the latest of Mitt Romney's flip-flops. Though it's clear that Mr. Romney has flip-flopped in the past on a number of matters, it's hard to see how Daly or any of the other flip-flop scorekeepers has a case -- at…

ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper appeared on the June 27 edition of Dennis Miller's radio show and conceded to a media blackout of Barack Obama's Medal of Honor gaffe. (The President confused a living recipient with the deceased Jared Monti who died in combat.) Tapper admitted that the President made "a big uncomfortable mistake." He added, "And I don't think that that got the same…

Yesterday, Tim Graham at NewsBusters did an excellent job of addressing a key aspect of a report submitted by Associated Press reporter Errin Haines, who is African-American, of the presidential campaign of Herman Cain, who is also African-American. Haines questioned "voters' ability to look past his skin color and perceive him as a serious candidate." Herman Cain attended the We The People…

Maybe we ought to nickname him Rip Van Geier. In his coverage of this weekend's We The People Convention in Columbus, Ohio early Saturday morning, Columbus Dispatch reporter Ben Geier found it "surprising" that many attendees would "go after the Republican Party and House Speaker John Boehner" in expressing their opinions relating to developments in Washington. It's as if he's totally unaware…

Weekend coverage emanating from Minnesota via Reuters and the Associated Press is doing its level best to run interference for Democratic Governor Mark Dayton, who has chosen to shut down the government rather than sign a budget which does not include tax increases.

Conservative Congressman Joe Walsh of Illinois twice called out the media for protecting President Obama on Thursday night's In the Arena, and told host Eliot Spitzer to his face that "you're doing a much better job of making [Obama's] case than he did." Before the interview began, CNN excoriated the verbal war on Capitol Hill that ensued after Obama's criticism of Republicans in his press…

Yesterday mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger -- captured last month with $800,000 in his possession -- was granted the right to retain taxpayer-funded counsel by a U.S. Magistrate judge Marianne Bowler, who "appointed high-profile Boston criminal-defense lawyer J.W. Carney Jr. as Bulger's public defender," Wall Street Journal's Jennifer Levitz reported in today's paper. Bulger, you may recall, is…

You don’t have to believe in karma to find the irony in the fact that the Web giant Google is finding itself in the cross hairs of the same pressure groups that it funded back when it was pushing heavily for “network neutrality.” The latest cause célèbre among this crowd is “search neutrality,” the idea that somehow the government needs to get into the business of Internet search engines.