Media Bias Debate

The mainstream media seem to have boiled down the president's reaction to the Gulf spill to two caricatures: either he has failed to satiate public appetites by feigning outrage, or he is succeeding by acting angry. Whereas journalists rightly expected President Bush to do something about Katrina--and excoriated him when he supposedly didn't do enough--the media seem content listening to Obama…

As other media outlets have given Helen Thomas the kid glove treatment in light of her "trailblazing" career, media consumers may be forgiven for assuming that Helen Thomas's anti-Israel, arguably anti-Semitic comments were an aberration in an otherwise unblemished career of assertive but fair journalism.To his credit, Washington Post's media reporter Howard Kurtz made note of other incidents,…

For over seven minutes this morning, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” panel expounded on the racial overtones of Matt Drudge’s Tuesday morning headline and other criticisms of the Obama administration.It started when Time magazine’s senior political analyst Mark Halperin brought up the Drudge Report headline, “Obama Goes Street: Seeking ‘Ass to Kick’,” and alleged that it spun Obama’s comments to NBC’s Matt…

It's hard to imagine a scenario where one would be sympathetic toward former "dean of the White House press corps" Helen Thomas following her videotaped remarks that Israeli Jews "should get the hell out of Palestine" and go back to Germany or Poland. However, in a June 7 column on Salon.com, Anna Clark wrote that Thomas deserved leeway, since some talk radio personalities say "controversial,…

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, George Mason University economics professor Daniel Klein today notes that "self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics." It therefore shouldn't be terribly surprising that so many journalists do a poor job of economic and business reporting, because, as the Media Research Center has frequently and consistently documented…

An emerging defense of Helen Thomas's "Jews go home" comment is that either what she said really was not that bad, or that others occasionally say worse things without the same level of reproach.Richard Greener, writing at the Huffington Post on Monday, was so close to making a good point. He noted that a number of other public figures have said things that could reasonably be interpreted as more…

What is going on within the White House Correspondents' Association? While some can argue they allowed embattled former Hearst Newspapers' columnist Helen Thomas to hold a coveted position in the White House briefing room for far too long after she made some remarks to be considered anti-Semitic, there's some other bizarre stories surfacing. Former Bush administration Deputy Chief of Staff Karl…

Sexism is a selective phenomenon for much of the media. It seems even satirical or light-hearted content, when produced by conservatives, has the amazing ability to acquire the label while even the most vitriolic and derogatory liberal writings can avoid it.RightWingNews, the popular conservative blog, surely knew it would garner some disdain from the left in publishing its 2010 edition of the "…

(UPDATE: It will be really interesting seeing how the press handles Helen's retirement announcement.) It isn't particularly surprising that the establishment press is for the most part attempting to give Helen Thomas's hateful remarks and her dubious apology a very light once-over -- if they're covering her outrageous statements (that citizens of the Jewish state of Israel should “get the…

The Associated Press's Mark Sherman didn't try very hard to mask his true feelings on a couple of matters on which Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was working on during the late 1990s. The dictionary from which Sherman is working must have interesting definitions of "unsentimental" and "compassionate." See for yourself in the first four paragraphs of the AP writer's report on what is…

The amateur liberal blogosphere is dead, according to a prominent lefty blogger. Chris Bowers made his proclamation Thursday, on the heels of the New York Times's acquisition of FiveThirtyEight, a prominent liberal polling site run by Nate Silver.Silver, pictured right, was the latest in a string of moves from the liberal blogosphere to traditional media outlets. The Washington Post has, with…

The Associated Press's Karl Ritter clearly doesn't recognize how close to parody his report ("Rightist group jolts Sweden's tolerant self-image") on the mini-rise of the right-leaning Sweden Democrats Party is (I'll use "SD" as an abbreviation in this post). Ritter is not afraid to label the SD, but won't label others. He begins by telling us that the SD is "far-right" because it is "preaching…

The revolving door of political journalism underscores the brazen liberalism of today's newsrooms -- 15 former journalists now populate the Obama administration. And though taking a job in such a far left administration demonstrates journalists' overwhelming liberal politics, ABC News's deputy political director Teddy Davis has managed to raise the bar.Davis announced yesterday his intention to…

Former USA Today editor Kenneth Paulson attacked what he called "The myth of 'media bias'" in an article on Thursday. He just described the claims of media bias as untrue, without offering any evidence or considering any criticism: Despite the perception of news media bias, the truth is that most traditional news organizations — primarily newspapers, their Web sites and local TV and radio —…