Tamara Keith
On Monday night's PBS NewsHour, anchor Judy Woodruff and her "Politics Monday" panelists were still obsessing over how President Trump responded to the widow of LaDavid Johnson, who was killed in Niger. Woodruff and her guests suggested to the audience that this controversy with a grieving relative was completely unprecedented, that no politician would ever suggest a grieving relative was not telling the truth. But in a March 2016 presidential debate, Mrs. Clinton explicitly said Patricia Smith, the mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith, was lying. “I can’t imagine the grief she has about losing her son,” Clinton said. “But she’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong!”
While the panelists on Thursday’s Hardball were pondering the icy relationship between President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, frequent guest and Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus suggested that it’s because Trump is.....sexist!
Monday's PBS NewsHour spotlighted the low trust in the news media, according to the results of their latest poll. Only 30 percent of those surveyed by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist trust the press "a good deal" or "a great amount." The Trump administration scored seven points better in the same poll. Guest Stuart Rothenberg bemoaned the "horrible trend" towards distrust of the media over the past several decades.
On Sunday’s Reliable Sources CNN’s Brian Stelter brought up a serious issue for journalists,Hillary Clinton's major lack of press conferences. He brought on NPR’s White House Correspondent Tamara Keith to discuss the importance of pressers. “So with a press conference, you can pull out more information, or you can -- or it will be more clear that the candidate simply isn't answering,” she explained. But Stelter was more interested with Clinton’s health conspiracies than say a real issue, such as the e-mail scandal.
The most obvious sign of liberal media favoritism is that liberal candidates can avoid press conferences for months at a time and they don’t complain. On CNN, David Gregory argued Hillary Clinton would just "take the hit" for avoiding them, and avoiding tough questions about her private email server and the Clinton Foundation.
But when Hillary briefly met the press on Monday, it was eight softballs, nothing on scandals, nothing on policy, just horse-race questions and gush about her "historic" race.
The weight of Hillary Clinton’s history-making campaign reduces some women to tears, according to a “question” from NPR White House reporter Tamera Keith on Monday. As though she were doing PR for the Democrat, Keith gushed, “Secretary, last night when you took stage in Sacramento, there was a woman standing next to me who was absolutely sobbing. And she said, you know, ‘It's time. It's past time.’”
One could offer credit to the PBS NewsHour for mostly avoiding the unsubstantiated National Enquirer story claiming Ted Cruz had five secret mistresses. The closest the NewsHour came to it came on Friday was anchor Judy Woodruff saying "Cruz accused Trump of being behind tabloid accusations of extramarital affairs. It was the latest in the escalating war of words over women this week between the two candidates."
But their question for the GOP was "How low can it go?" The verdict: it's one big mud-wrestling mess.
They were feeling Hillary Clinton's pain on Thursday's Morning Edition before the House special committee on Benghazi heard her testimony. Congressional correspondent Tamara Keith claimed Hillary's "what difference does it make" comment -- highly praised by the media at the time -- has been taken out of context by Clinton critics.
Back in 2013, NPR said Hillary suffered "not a scratch" and was now "fireproof" after Republicans tried to tangle with her in that previous Benghazi hearing.
It would appear that Hillary Clinton's act is wearing thin even among the people at that liberal bastion known as NPR.
Tuesday afternoon, the headline at an NPR story about Mrs. Clinton's sudden decision to publicly announce her opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline project indicated that her announcement was deliberately timed to coincide with Pope Francis's visit to the United States (HT Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media):
During Hillary Clinton’s first national interview on CNN Tuesday, the Democratic presidential candidate was pressed about her use of a private e-mail server during her time as Secretary of State, but both PBS and NPR ignored the topic during their post-interview coverage on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
Monday March 31 is the deadline for individuals to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act without facing a penalty and on Monday March 31 the folks at NPR’s “Morning Edition” did their best to spin the so-called success of ObamaCare in New Hampshire.
NPR reporter Tamara Keith hyped how despite polls in New Hampshire showing ObamaCare’s unpopularity, “Enrollments in the state have greatly exceeded expectations.” The story then went on to promote the story of Lisa Kerrigan who at 25 was “The ideal target for a sophisticated campaign in New Hampshire aimed at getting people to sign up for coverage.”
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Taxpayer-subsidized NPR has a headline problem that won’t go away. As biased as much of its reporting is, NPR’s headline writers often appear to think that there is not enough bias. Sometimes they even write headlines that aren’t supported anywhere in the corresponding report. Even though there has been a history of headline problems at NPR recently, it appears that the headlines go out without being first checked by someone else.
On July 30, NPR congressional reporter Tamara Keith did a fair piece on Internal Revenue Service targeting of political groups (see Newsbusters post on it). That piece initially appeared only online with the headline, “Report: IRS Scrutiny Worse For Conservatives." In what looks to be an updated on-air version of the same story the next day , an NPR headline writer changed the initially accurate headline to one unsupported by the piece: “House Republicans Work To Keep IRS Scandal In The Spotlight.”