North Korea
As television shows begin to return back to their regularly scheduled programming following their winter break, so has Chuck Lorre resumed his political rants when it comes to shows he’s created and produces. This is even when the show’s episode has nothing to do with politics.
For a year that featured Joy Behar’s anti-Christian tirade on The View, faux conservatives making fools of themselves on cable news, Jim Acosta’s nuttiness, and Samantha Bee’s ugly use of the c-word against First Daughter Ivanka Trump, 2018 provided an inordinate amount of content for the NewsBusters staff. Following the precedent set in 2016 and 2017, the following post gives you, the readers, a look at the top ten posts of 2018 based on traffic.
Over the summer, the broadcast networks continued to pound Donald Trump and his team with the most hostile coverage of a President in TV news history — 92 percent negative, vs. just eight percent positive. Nearly two-thirds of evening news coverage of the Trump presidency focused on five main topics: the Russia investigation; immigration policy; the Kavanaugh nomination; North Korea diplomacy; and U.S. relations with Russia, while bright spots such as the booming economy accounted for less than one percent of total coverage.
CNN founder Ted Turner doesn’t think much of conservatives, but he’s got a blind spot to the atrocities in North Korea. On September 19, 2005, Turner appeared on CNN’s Situation Room and talked about his visit to the despotic country. He seemed to excuse the regime, saying, “I saw a lot of people over there. They were thin and they were riding bicycles instead of cars, but... I didn’t see any brutality.”
The journalists at CBS This Morning on Friday fawned over the woman who negotiated Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, the same person who worked for the Clinton State Department. Asking Wendy Sherman no tough questions, the hosts instead wondered how Sherman’s skills could be used in the everyday lives of Americans.
If you were watching one of the Friday morning cable or broadcast networks, chances were you didn’t hear about news late Thursday into Friday that the North Koreans handed over what purported to be remains of U.S. soldiers who went Missing In Action (MIA) during the Korean War. A NewsBusters analysis found that 16 times more coverage was dedicated to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s unverified allegation that then-candidate Trump knew in advance about the infamous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting.
One might expect Jerry Seinfeld's latest edition of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, "2018: Freshly Brewed," on Netflix to get political, since comedians just can't seem to help themselves right now in jumping on the Trump bashing train, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the focus on funny instead of on politics. In fact, when guests tried to get political, Seinfeld quickly shut them down, or - shock - they talked about liberal intolerance!
As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo returned to the United States after another trip to North Korea to discuss denuclearization, that totalitarian regime denounced the meeting as “regrettable” and claimed the U.S. had a “gangster” mindset. Of course, this allowed the liberal media to shout victory and ‘we told you so’ quips as they proceeded to mock the White House.
On June 19, Atlantic magazine writer Uri Friedman stated that although he didn't think the Singapore Summit accomplished much last week, he now believes that the "results are actually of considerable consequence."
Remember how many members of the mainstream media derided the video that President Donald Trump gave to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un? They wrote it off as something like a mere elevator pitch video for selling timeshares. Well, that was the first impression of CNN host Michael Smerconish...until he watched it a second time and came to realize that it could be a very effective video.
It would be hard to make this up. On two very different subjects, the liberal media has emerged from the last couple of weeks with not just egg on its face. In fact, it seems like they took an entire carton of Grade A Large and smashed them one by one over themselves. Can you say "cult"?
On Tuesday night's Rachel Maddow Show, the MSNBC host's usual elongated lecture contained a few seconds of easily identifiable falsehood. In attempting to underline just how badly Trump negotiated with the North Koreans, she claimed the communists "gave up nothing. They promised nothing." This at the very least left out three American hostages released.