Political Groups

On Friday in a Facebook hangout, in a statement noted Saturday afternoon by Tim Graham at NewsBusters, MSNBC's Chuck Todd described himself as "stubbornly neutral." Sunday, Mr. "Stubbornly Neutral" attacked the NRA on "Meet the Press" for having the nerve to oppose President Obama's Surgeon General nominee, a man who is obsessed with gun control.

Elizabeth Williamson's coverage at the Wall Street Journal of the latest WSJ/NBC News poll has a very strange omission. It contains a graph showing "right track/wrong track" polling percentages heading each midterm election going back to 1990. But Williamson, while addressing why the American people feel as they do right now in larger historical context, never commented on the graph's specific…

Did Chuck Todd just do it again?  His comment a couple of weeks ago that Dem Alison Lundergan Grimes "disqualified herself" for refusing to say whether she voted for Barack Obama was quickly made into an ad by the McConnell campaign.  On today's Morning Joe, Todd made a highly quotable claim about another race. Todd described the campaign for a congressional seat in a district located in Staten…

With the midterm elections two weeks away from Tuesday, the major broadcast networks on Monday night ignored gaffes from Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado and Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis as both seek to make up deficits against their Republican opponents Cory Gardner and Greg Abbott, respectively.

On Monday night, ABC and NBC offered segments on Monica Lewinsky’s first public comments in years that came during a conference in Philadelphia for millennials by Forbes and explained how she was the first victim of cyberbullying during her affair with then-President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.  During the segment that aired on NBC Nightly News, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell declared that the “…

The story filed by Politico's Jennifer Epstein after President Barack Obama's campaign appearance in Upper Marlboro, Maryland yesterday seemed evenhanded enough. Unlike Josh Lederman at the Associated Press, who, as I noted yesterday, failed to report that it happened at all, Epstein even got around to describing how many of those in attendance left the event early: "... once the president…

Tart-tongued Tina Brown is at it again. On today's Morning Joe, seeking to explain why Republicans are doing surprisingly well with women voters this year, Brown said: "they had their rabies shots."

To the relief of sex offenders throughout the state, Arizona Democratic gubernatorial candidate Fred DuVal, during a Tuesday forum at Redemption Church in Gilbert, said that, in the words of an unbylined Washington Free Beacon story, "he is opposed to mandating parental consent for a girl as young as 14 years old to get an abortion." This is a non-story in the establishment press, which made it…

One would think, based on comparing dispatches from Reuters and the Associated Press, that President Barack Obama must have spoken at two different events in Upper Marlboro, Maryland today. The two dispatches are so radically different in tone and content that they it doesn't seem possible that they both could be from the same event. But they are. Jeff Mason at Reuters (saved here for future…

Non-political junkies might not have noticed, but Reince Priebus got in a real zinger against Debbie Wasserman Schultz today. In a joint appearance on Fox News Sunday, DNC Chair DWS claimed that the key question for voters will be "who has my back?" Shot back RNC Chairman Priebus: "the President hasn't had anybody's back: not even your back."  That was a reference to the Politico story, "…

On October 8, Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press wrote that "(President Barack) Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis." In a NewsBusters post later that day, I pegged Obama's true inheritance at roughly $245 billion as of when he was first sworn into office, and at about $600 billion if projected over the full fiscal year. The actual deficit for fiscal…

In an all too typical unskeptical report, Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, allowed President Barack Obama to claim, in Kuhnhenn's words, that "health and security experts continue to tell him that the screening measures already in place for travelers are more effective" than "restricting travel to the U.S. from the three Ebola-stricken West African nations."…

The web page for MSNBC's The Cycle has the chutzpah to describe co-host Abby Huntsman as a "conservative."  Whatever happened to truth in advertising? On today's episode, Huntsman again demonstrated why the conservative tag doesn't fit.  As a guest offered up a laughably lame analogy in arguing against a travel ban on people from Ebola-affected countries, Huntsman was quick to weigh in with an…

CBS and NBC continued on Thursday night to harp on the so-called refusal of Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott to initially debate his opponent, Democrat and former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, on Wednesday because of Crist’s usage of a fan that broke the rules of the debate. After each of the “big three” (ABC, CBS, and NBC) mentioned it on their morning newscasts, the CBS Evening News …