Column: Pretending the Media 'Works Almost Entirely' for the Right

July 14th, 2023 5:46 AM

In the Trump era -- and in the media, it's still the Trump era -- there is no need to strain a mental muscle to prove journalists have a liberal bias. We find it everywhere. But there are still leftists who channel the spirit of Eric “What Liberal Media?” Alterman and claim our media culture has been "shaped and defined by the political right, and it works almost entirely to their advantage…

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ABC’s Dowd: Dems Much Closer to the Rest of the Country than GOP

March 3rd, 2019 12:44 PM
In a This Week discussion about the prospects for different Democratic 2020 candidates on Sunday, ABC’s faux Republicans Matthew Dowd proclaimed that the Democratic Party was much closer to what the rest of the country believed than the Republican Party was. On top of that, Newsweek and Daily Beast writer Michael Tomasky suggested that a candidate with low name ID like Washington Governor Jay…

‘Disgrace’ and Scandal: Justice Kennedy Under Fire from Daily Beast

Culture
July 2nd, 2018 2:55 PM
Once a hero for Democrats and the left, Anthony Kennedy now is being reviled as a defective pawn of the liberal cause. On July 2, The Daily Beast published an article under the headline, “Anthony Kennedy, You Are a Total Disgrace to America.”

Tomasky in NYRB on Trump, ‘The Worst of the Worst,’ Inciting Violence

February 6th, 2018 3:13 PM
The New York Review of Books February 22 issue prominently displayed journalist Michael Tomasky’s blessing of two virulently anti-Trump books, Michael Wolff’s infamous Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, and the anti-conservative jeremiad Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republican by David Frum. The NYRB’s cover teaser read “Fire in the White House.” The review's title was “…

Daily Beast Pundit: Hillary’s Loss Was an American Tragedy

July 14th, 2017 5:06 PM
You don’t have to have been president of the United States to qualify for the “Miss Me Yet?” meme, suggested Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky on Thursday. Tomasky contended that it’s “a tragedy” that Donald Trump became POTUS instead of Hillary Clinton and opined that Clinton would have been a “good” president, though he thinks Republicans might have prevented her from being “great” by…

Liberal Pundit Blasts Trump’s ‘Ridiculous Whining’ About Media Bias

October 19th, 2016 4:58 PM
There is a conspiracy against Donald Trump, believes The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, but it’s inanimate: a “conspiracy of facts,” not a “conspiracy of liberals” in the media. The facts, Tomasky claimed in a Tuesday column, “simply do not damn [Hillary] Clinton in the way that [Trump] and his supporters believe they should. Take the new story, about the FBI and State and the alleged ‘quid pro…

Ex-Newsweek Pundit: Hillary Most Lied-About Pol of Past 25 Years

October 6th, 2016 12:51 AM
As a rule, liberals think that most criticism of Hillary Clinton is invalid. Michael Tomasky has dared to put a number on “most.” In a Tuesday column, Tomasky wrote, “I’d say that around 80 percent of what you’ve read about [Hillary] over the years is simply false. It didn’t happen the way it was presented, or a lot of the time it didn’t happen at all. And she has long since even stopped trying…

Liberal Columnist: Trump’s Lies Demand ‘Drastic Measures’ From Media

September 8th, 2016 11:16 PM
On Wednesday, Michael Tomasky, apropos of a challenge the media face in covering Donald Trump, mused that “‘objective’ news reporting -- and this is a real crisis with no easy answers -- is ill-positioned to call a lie a lie.” On Thursday, Tomasky urged the media to upgrade their position by taking certain “drastic measures” that “Trump has forced…upon us” as a consequence of his lying “literally…

Lefty Pundits Explore Why the Media Have It In For Hillary

September 7th, 2016 11:41 PM
Complaints from liberal pundits about media bias against Hillary Clinton have snowballed during the past few days. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had the most high-profile effort, which contrasted “the impression that [Donald Trump is] being graded on a curve” with “the presumption that anything [Hillary] does must be corrupt,” and some of the others have taken aim at Krugman’s newspaper…

NYT Devotes Sunday Review to Dem Takeover, Overthrow of 'Far-Right'

September 4th, 2016 7:59 PM
The New York Times is spending its Labor Day holiday plotting the Democratic takeover of Congress and the overthrow of "far-right conservatives." The Sunday Review devoted its entire front page and two inside pages (three out of the section’s ten pages) for “Getting America Back In Gear,” consisting of two essays by two liberals devoted to strategizing how Democrats can take over the House of…

Daily Beast Pundit Ponders ‘The Impossibility of a Leftist Trump’

August 4th, 2016 9:05 PM
According to Tomasky, Democrats shouldn’t feel lucky that they haven’t dealt with a loose-cannon celebrity candidate à la Donald Trump. Rather, they should be proud that their party wouldn’t come close to nominating anyone like that in the first place. “I feel for conservative pundits and thinkers to some extent, I really do,” wrote Tomasky in a Monday column. “I’ve wondered many times what I…

Daily Beast Columnist: Dubya Can Redeem Himself By Trashing Trump

July 13th, 2016 11:02 AM
In an Internet meme from President Obama’s first term, George W. Bush asked America, “Miss Me Yet?” Even though The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky is a liberal, he does miss Dubya, after a fashion. In a Monday column, Tomasky called Bush “one of the worst presidents” ever but conceded that when he was POTUS, the Republican party was a mere “war-starting, economy-wrecking” outfit, while today’s GOP…

Daily Beast Pundit: ‘Evil,’ ‘Repulsive’ NRA May Soon Taste Defeat

June 22nd, 2016 9:21 PM
With developments including the Democratic sit-in on the House floor and Sen. Chris Murphy’s yeah-he-went-there allegation that “Republicans have decided to sell weapons to ISIS,” it’s been a busy and highly theatrical week among anti-gun forces. Michael Tomasky thinks the tide on gun issues is turning in favor of liberals, but expects they won’t win decisively until there’s “a tragedy” -- a…

NYT Sunday Tackles Scare-Mongering Trump, 'Race-Baiting' Reagan

June 20th, 2016 5:02 PM
The New York Times took a witheringly anti-Trump, anti-Bush, anti-Reagan stand on the front page of the Sunday Review. Veteran liberal journalist Michael Tomasky contributed, “No More Fear – Has political scaremongering lost its magic?” By “scaremongering,” Tomasky is talking about the Republican Party’s traditional tough stand against terrorism. Contributor Kevin Baker went further, falsely…