Latest Blogs

As a network, ESPN continues to propagate the bizarre idea that it’s non-ideological to celebrate the drafting of gay NFL draftee Michael Sam. ESPN ombudsman Robert Lipsyte – a former New York Times columnist – unsurprisingly gave the network “high marks” for its promotional Sam coverage in a column posted Friday. “I think ESPN’s point of view here is nonideological, unless you believe…

You really have to watch Brian Schweitzer in action to get just how much of a blowhard he is.  By the end of his appearance on today's Morning Joe, even Mika Brzezinski seemed mortified by the antics of her fellow Democrat.  And Bill Kristol's expression of utter disdain for the former Montana governor was worth the price of admission alone. In the course of his appearance, Schweitzer--…

As of June 2, 2014, it's been 200 days since Nightline, the once-vaunted news program, covered ObamaCare. In the 28 and a half weeks since November 14, 2013, the show has continued its descent into tabloid oblivion, focusing on topics such as celebrities, weight loss and pop culture. As a consequence, the program has skipped the myriad of problems associated with ObamaCare.   When the White…

On Friday, Daniel Halper of The Weekly Standard reported on a video of a potential Democratic opponent of New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, the Latino Republican star the networks aerobically ignore (for example, her 2012 Republican convention speech). Candidate Alan Webber, the Democrat with the largest campaign treasury, told supporters "So I’m asking you for your help, we need to make…

Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi reported on Jay Carney stepping down as White House spokesman and how exhausting the job is. It's "Washington's ultimate burnout job." Farhi found some of that was just dodging: Yahoo News reported last June that Carney had responded to questions at the daily briefings with some variation of “I don’t know” nearly 2,000 times since his first briefing in…

Susan Rice, former U.N. Ambassador and current National Security Advisor for President Obama, sat down with CNN’s Candy Crowley and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, June 1 to discuss a variety of foreign policy topics, yet Stephanopoulos refused to ask his guest about the latest surrounding the Benghazi investigation.  Rice appeared on both This Week and State of the Union to talk about…

So-called reform conservatives such as David Frum, Michael Gerson, and Ramesh Ponnuru often get relatively favorable attention from liberal journalists -- relative, that is, to Tea Party types, which in turn reinforces the Tea Party's belief that the reformers aren't really conservatives.   Two lefty pundits recently examined the state of reform conservatism. Washington Post columnist E.J.…

Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard dismantled liberal PBS host Tavis Smiley on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.  Appearing as a guest on Sunday, June 1, Kristol left Smiley speechless surrounding how to solve the VA scandal when he asked his fellow panelist: “If they got a generous voucher to use to purchase the health insurance they need or the…

On Saturday, May 31, both the CBS Evening News and ABC World News with David Muir failed to report that President Obama may have violated U.S. law by failing to notify Congress prior to the release of five terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for a U.S. soldier held captive by the Taliban.  While CBS and ABC ignored the controversy in their coverage of the release of Sergeant Bowe…

The United States negotiated the release of five Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the Taliban freeing an American sergeant from captivity yet President Obama may have violated U.S. law by failing to notify Congress of his actions.  Despite the potential legal problems with releasing prisoners without notifying Congress, NBC Nightly News was the only evening news program on…

Even critic Alessandra Stanley at The New York Times criticized NBC anchor Brian Williams for his servile interview with massive-leaker Edward Snowden in Russia. “I miss Barbara Walters already,” she wrote, as if Barbara was the epitome of hardball interviews. “Brian Williams of NBC News did a good job of letting Edward J. Snowden say what he wanted to say. Someone a little nosier would…

President Obama's West Point speech was panned by consensus as hard to follow, which was even acknowledged in media-elite salons like Washington Week on PBS. But on Wednesday's edition of The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, some journalists were trashing Bush instead. After Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation credited Obama for "always looking out for a younger generation" that's more peaceful,…

Reaction wasn’t very good to the redesign of the Boston Globe’s Boston.com site. Acknowledging that with some humor, the site created a video with cute kids reading aloud actual complaints they received. I saw the “Boston.com Beta Release Complaint Department” video highlighted last week on JimRomenesko.com. It’s at least mildly amusing with a few lines sure to prompt a chuckle or two.

An item which appears to be overlooked in the Department of Veterans Affairs scandal is the press's and presumably the public's blind acceptance of the department's goal to reduce its average wait times to 14 days as supposedly "aggressive." My reaction is that the goal doesn't seem "aggressive" at all, or even borderline acceptable, based on both personal experience and some admittedly…