War on Terrorism

Vox writer Max Fisher argues that Obama “has veered so far into downplaying Islamist extremism that he appears at times to refuse to acknowledge its existence at all, or has referred to it as violent extremism. While he has correctly identified economic and political factors that give rise to extremism, he has appeared to downplay or outright deny an awkward but important fact: religion plays an…

In covering President Obama’s refusal to refer to terrorism as Islamic extremism, CBS and NBC devoted portions of their reports on Thursday night to comments Rudy Giuliani made the day before with NBC reserving a majority of their airtime to attacking the former New York City Mayor for having “set off a war of words” and taking presidential criticism “to another level.” Andrea Mitchell declared…

Anderson Cooper spotlighted The Atlantic's Graeme Wood's thorough article on ISIS on his Wednesday program. Cooper wondered, "President Obama...said we're at war with people who have perverted Islam. The question, though, is: is that really true?" The anchor asked Wood about Mr. Obama's statement, and he gave a blunt reply: "Well, you know, he doesn't really have the authority to say that. I don'…

While all three network morning shows on Thursday covered President Obama defending his refusal to label terrorism as Islamic extremism during a Wednesday speech, only CBS This Morning actually pushed back on the President's argument.

While his fellow network news colleagues all but ignored any criticism of President Obama’s speech on Wednesday afternoon and his avoidance of using the term Islamic extremism, NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel ripped the current U.S. strategy for defeating ISIS during NBC Nightly News. “ISIS is spreading like a virus and months of U.S.-led air strikes don't seem to be containing…

In their Wednesday night coverage of President Obama’s speech on “violent extremism,” CBS and NBC did the best they could to ignore the criticism surrounding the President’s speech in addition to his conscious and repeated inability to refer to the beliefs of terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda as Islamic extremism.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf’s statement that “we cannot win this war” against ISIS by “killing them” and suggestion that “we need...to go after the root causes” like “lack of opportunity for jobs” was even too ridiculous for a liberal like Chris Matthews to swallow. Yet this latest embarrassing moment for Barack Obama’s administration has yet to be reported on any of the Big Three (…

Latest dispatch from President Obama's Department of Terrible Deeds in the Name of Christ . . . Morning Joe invited the State Department spox Marie Harf on today to give her a chance to clarify what she said to Chris Matthews about the US being unable to "kill our way" out of the ISIS problem and the need to focus on the "root causes" of terrorism. After brushing off the suggestion by General…

There are still 10 months to go in 2015, but Mike Barnicle is a strong frontrunner for Clumsiest Comment of the Year. In a Morning Joe segment today on ISIS outrages, and shortly after mentioning the atrocity in which ISIS burned dozens of people to death in Iraq, Barnicle said that the complexity of dealing with ISIS makes "you want to set your hair on fire."

In a rundown of the deteriorating situation in Libya in its February 23 issue, New Yorker Magazine's Jon Lee Anderson quoted "a senior (Obama) Administration official" (the capital "A" is Anderson's) who, incredibly, claimed that the country's descent into virtual chaos resulted from "the politicization" of the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and…

Of all the broadcast network coverage Monday evening and Tuesday morning of ISIS terrorists beheading twenty-one Christians in Libya, only one reference was made on NBC's Today to President Obama's failed policy in Libya providing an opening to the Islamic extremists.

On Monday night, the panelists on the Fox News Channel (FNC) show Special Report excoriated the Obama administration for saying in a statement that the Coptic Christian men from Egyptian beheaded by ISIS in a video along the Libyan coast were “Egyptian citizens” and labeling Islamic State fights as merely “ISIL-affiliated terrorists” instead of further identifying them as Muslims or Islamic…

While reporting on the aftermath of the weekend terrorist attacks in Copenhagen, ABC and CBS neglected to mention in their Monday evening reports that the man believed to have carried out the attack that killed two had pledged his allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, just prior to the first attack at a free speech event. Even though ABC’s Terry Moran referred to the attack as…

If once is an MSNBC aberration, is twice is a trend? Earlier today we reported on Ed Schultz getting surprisingly angry over the Obama administration's weakness in confronting ISIS, calling the situation a "religious war." Just two hours later, Chris Matthews sounded a similar alarm, saying "if I were ISIS I wouldn't be afraid . . . the American people are getting humiliated . . . it sounds like…