Media Bias Debate

Both President Obama and leading Republican candidate Mitt Romney got into hot water for supposedly making insensitive comments about the economy this week. But CNN's response offers a textbook case of media bias, as the supposedly-objective news network virtually ignored Obama's gaffe while trumpeting Romney's comment. President Obama poked fun at the ineffectiveness of his own stimulus…

Thursday morning, initial weekly unemployment claims as reported by Uncle Sam's Department of Labor came in at a seasonally adjusted 414,000. It was 16,000 lower than the previous week's upwardly revised (as usual) number, but certainly no indicator in and of itself of meaningful improvement. The housing industry data really wasn't any better. True, the seasonally adjusted figures from the…

The Associated Press is blatantly proving it’s going to make Campaign 2012 a long, biased slog for Republicans. Just take their news coverage of jokes. On Thursday, Democratic objections to Mitt Romney were front and center in an article titled "Democrats criticize Romney for ‘unemployed’ joke." But on Tuesday, President Obama’s lame joke about no "shovel-ready" jobs was relegated to paragraph…

Update (11:55 a.m. EDT): MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts just mentioned the 62% spike in Pelosi's net worth, attributing it mostly to her husband's real estate dealings. As my colleague Noel Sheppard noted today, the media have largely ignored the fact that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has seen an astonishing 62 percent spike in her net worth over last year. Yet in a June 16…

Although he admitted during the interview to being an admirer of Chris Christie "from afar," CNN's Piers Morgan put the heat on the New Jersey governor early and often during Tuesday night's hour-long interview. To begin the interview, Morgan pulled up a brutal critique of the governor by a political opponent. Morgan quoted the Democratic president of the state senate who described Christie'…

With Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) holding a hearing on the radicalization of Muslim inmates in U.S. prisons, MSNBC's Thomas Roberts this morning set out to discredit the premise of the proceedings by interviewing Minnesota Democrat and practicing Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison. Ellison, Roberts reminded viewers of MSNBC's 11 a.m. Eastern hour of live news coverage, provided tearful testimony at a…

 Catching up on an item from Saturday’s The Early Show, CBS correspondent Jan Crawford used the word "spectacle" to describe various media organizations "ripping through" the recently released emails from Sarah Palin’s time as governor of Alaska, noting that some media organizations were "enlisting people you don’t even know" to help examine the mountain of documents and "find something…

As has been the case virtually from the beginning, the Associated Press's Scott Bauer has been clearly unhappy with 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, commonly known even to the Wisconsin Supreme Court as the "Budget Repair Bill." Today, the court ruled that the law as enacted by the Badger State's legislature and signed by Governor Scott Walker can go into effect on July 1. Looking back at what's…

Impressed by Rep. Michele Bachmann's performance in the CNN debate last night, MSNBC's Martin Bashir today twice cheekily declared her the "thinking person's Sarah Palin." [Video embedded below page break]

Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart has had his share of tussles with the media. He’s certainly known for that among liberal journalists who, in the words of the New York Times “hold their noses at the mere mention of his name.” That mistrust has been borne out in the media’s general lack of interest in the stories pushed out by such Breitbart franchises as Big Government or Big Hollywood…

Many people, including yours truly, believe that one of the primary reasons for the Politico's existence is to carry negative stories about Democrats and leftists which the rest of the establishment press then mostly chooses to ignore ("Why should we cover that? It's at the Politico already"). President Obama's more than half-empty campaign fundraising stop in Miami Monday is a case in point…

If the big media in 2008 had dedicated the resources they are now squandering on Sarah Palin's emails from when she was governor of Alaska and probed Barack Obama's background and associations, she might now be vice president of the United States and Obama might still be a junior Illinois senator. Regardless of what you think of Palin, the vultures attacking her 24,000 pages of emails may…

To say that the statistics concerning new business formation during the past few years haven't been very good would be a major understatement. USA Today's Scott Patterson deserves some credit for even looking at the topic. It is tailor-made for neglect by the rest of the establishment press. When government policies lean towards lower taxation and regulation, policies left-leaning journalists…

Yesterday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted a reluctance on the part of Associated Press reporters to describe the farm involved in "the world's deadliest known outbreak of E. coli" as "organic." The wire service issued two additional reports this morning, both of which failed to use the "O-word." The case for the use of the word in these reports is as strong, if not stronger, than it…