Christine Romans
For much of Thursday, a number of CNN and MSNBC hosts predictably reacted to the quick enaction of new gun restrictions in New Zealand by lamenting the fact that U.S. political leaders are not so willing to restrict the rights of its citizens to own guns, and mostly had guests who bolstered their left-leaning views.
On Wednesday's Early Start show, CNN hosts Dave Briggs and Christine Romans appeared amused at a Wall Street Journal editorial attacking conservatives like FNC's Sean Hannity for having success in lobbying President Donald Trump. In the first of four similar briefs that ran during the two-hour morning show, co-host Romans recalled Hannity's recent criticism of the bipartisan deal on border security: "Fox News host and frequent presidential advisor Sean Hannity again blasting the border compromise deal."
The Right Scoop professed surprise that CNN morning anchor Christine Romans reported on the latest unemployment figures without the usual agony over the Trump administration.The jobs number was "weaker than expected," they said. But Romans suggested the expectations were too high at this "very low" unemployment rate:
On Tuesday, two of Brett Kavanaugh’s high school classmates, each named by accuser Christine Blasey Ford as witnesses to the 1982 assault she alleges, issued public statements flatly denying that they saw anything even resembling Ford’s story. Yet on Wednesday, CNN viewers barely heard a peep about these denials, even as the Kavanaugh story dominated their on-air coverage. From 4:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Eastern, CNN spent 3 hours and 23 minutes talking about the Kavanaugh controversy, but only a paltry eight minutes of that time was devoted to these confirmations of Kavanaugh’s unequivocal denial.
As the dominant media have been fixated for the past week on the Trump administration stepping up prosecutions against non-citizens who cross illegally into the U.S., resulting in parents being separated from children during detention as required by law, CNN and MSNBC both repeatedly conflated asylum seekers who legally got through the proper procedure with those who cross the border illegally first before pursuing asylum after being apprehended. When DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen earlier this week called out the misreporting and insisted that legal asylum seekers are normally not detained or separated from their children, except in unusual circumstances, the liberal networks scoffed at her admonishment and then pivoted to complaining that the legal process of applying for asylum at ports of entry takes too long.
On Friday, after its early morning anchors promised "details throughout the day here on CNN" regarding a federal agent being attacked in Chicago, CNN dropped all interest in the story after spending only 21 seconds on the tragic event. By contrast, FNC repeatedly updated viewers on the ATF agent who was shot in the face while trying to help local police fight against gang activity.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals clearly had enough of PETA’s monkey business, when it ruled against the animal activists on April 23.
As the dominant news media inform viewers of controversial police shooting cases in which there is debate about whether the officers acted lawfully, there has been a blatant double standard in spending substantially more time on victims who are black, even though blacks only make up a little more than one out of four suspects who are killed by police, with whites outnumbering blacks in the count by 2:1.
After Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant on Monday signed a groundbreaking new law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, the victory for the pro-life movement has received surprisingly little attention. FNC's Special Report with Bret Baier and the PBS NewsHour each ran briefs on Monday evening, and, on Tuesday, CBS This Morning ran one brief after CNN's Early Start show ran three briefs during the early morning hours between 4:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. ET.
CNN on Tuesday freaked out over the Trump White House hiring Joseph diGenova, repeatedly dismissing the lawyer as a “conspiracy theorist.” In contrast, CNN in 2013 hired Van Jones as a host, a man who resigned from the Obama White House amidst connections to the 9/11 truther movement.
On Wednesday evening, the CBS Evening News and the NBC Nightly News both seized on a few instances of school teachers -- a tiny number out of more than three million teachers nationally -- who accidentally fired guns in schools as the networks tried to undermine the push for training some teachers to carry guns. CNN's Early Start earlier in the day also hyped one of the California story as anchors Dave Briggs and Christine Romans also marveled over a gun control group placing 7,000 shoes on the Capitol Lawn to commemorate gun-related child deaths.
During Monday's edition of New Day, CNN's Chief Business Correspondent Christine Romans gleefully reported that several companies have severed their ties with the National Rifle Association in the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida earlier this month.