Media Bias Debate

It is with heavy heart that I report the following: Two great CBS television dramas, NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles, went the way of Law and Order last night (hat tip to NewsBusters reader Chris Reising).  If you’re a fan and have not seen last night’s episode, be warned that this blog contains plot spoilers. [audio clip available here]Now is the time of year when the network dramas are running the “…

Longtime readers of Associated Press dispatches have long since learned that many of the most important facts of a story -- especially facts that put the government, bureaucrats, and leftists in a bad light -- are often found in its final paragraphs. This is a way for the wire service to boast that it really did report all important facts while usually ensuring that harried broadcasters and other…

Former "Crossfire" host Bill Press apparently cannot distinguish between news and opinion. He is furious that his application for press credentials with the congressional press corps was denied due to content on his website urging readers to tell Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., to vote for health care legislation in the Senate. He cites numerous examples of CPC members that host opinion content, but…

A breaking dispatch from the Associated Press sure makes it look like Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl (picture at top right is from his Wikipedia entry) is engaging in extortion directed at the institutions of higher education that happen to be within the city's borders. The ostensible reason for the stickup is to shore up the city's foundering pension system. It will be interesting to see how…

In a Monday interview on MediaBistro.com’s weekly video series Media Beat, disgraced former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather shared his concerns over the credibility of internet journalism: “The difficulty with some of the things on the internet...is transparency and accountability about who’s responsible for what’s on.”TVNewser.com columnist Gail Shister sparked the discussion by asking Rather…

Tackling "The Myth That Democrats Are Soft on Crime," Newsweek's Ben Adler took to the magazine's The Gaggle blog to critique New York Times columnist Ross Douthat for his latest column. Adler praised Douthat for saying that conservatives need to "take ownership of prison reform" to "correct the system they helped build" but took strong exception to his suggestion that, even so, Democrats "still…

Perhaps there is something obstructing the view overlooking Rockefeller Plaza, where MSNBC broadcasts "Countdown" nightly because the show's host, Keith Olbermann fails to see the existence of a news media with a liberal bias. On MSNBC's Dec. 14 broadcast of "Countdown," Olbermann came to the defense of NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" executive producer and noted left-winger Dick…

Liberals are so incensed at Connecticut Senator Joe Liberman's refusal to vote for ObamaCare, that they have taken to attacking his wife, who works for a prominent breast cancer organization. Their ad hominem assaults and wild speculation about the Senator's supposedly evil motives reveal their hypocrisy when it comes to political centrists, and their desperation concerning health care…

World News anchor Charles Gibson appeared on Monday’s edition of The View to tout his own objectivity and to swear, "I'm very fond of John McCain. I carry no water for Obama." Speaking of the 2008 election, he marveled, "It was an amazing moment to say to the country that we have elected and African American as the 44th president of the United States.... It was just an amazing moment for the- for…

If there's a Ground Zero for America's foreclosure mess outside of much of California and metro Las Vegas, it's probably Cleveland, the Northeast Ohio city known in most of the rest of the state as the Mistake on the Lake. The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Mark Gillespie got out from behind his desk, committed some good old-fashioned journalism, and went looking for the mistakes that exacerbated the…

Let no one say the New York Times is blind to media bias. It's uncovered it at the (conservative) New York Post and (conservative) Fox News -- although admissions of the paper's own clear liberal tilt are few and far between.David Carr's Monday media column, “Tilting Rightward At Journal,” found a conservative slant at yet another Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlet, The Wall Street Journal. The…

Managing Editor's Note: The following is a reprint of Michael Moriarty's original December 14 post to Big Hollywood. Moriarty, you may recall, played a prosecutor in the first few seasons of the long-running NBC drama "Law and Order."Well, I think I’ve been fairly calm and forgiving of "Law and Order" for about fifteen years. Living outside of the U.S. has certainly helped in more ways than one.…

In a Washington Post opinion piece published on December 6, longtime expansionary entitlement program apologists Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich ripped into the 1996 welfare reform law and its alleged effect on the poor during the struggling economy of the past two years. In the course of their rant, Edelman and Ehrenreich told readers something that the rest of the press has largely…

In “sharing my do's and don'ts” as a journalist, Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten found good fodder in the presumption journalists are out to help liberals and Democrats while hurting conservatives and Republicans. “When deliberately slanting stories in support of liberal causes, always cover your tracks by quoting the other side,” he advised. “Example: 'President Obama wants…