Latest Blogs

It’s typical of MSNBC weekend anchor Alex Witt to invite guests on her show who only reinforce her opinions, and that is exactly what happened on Sunday’s Weekends with Alex Witt. For a discussion of Democratic efforts to increase the minimum wage, Witt brought on frequent contributor Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden’s former chief economist.  But that’s not all he is. Witt added…

John Podesta, founder of left-wing Center for American Progress, to be presidential counsel.

Alan Gross, political prisoner. Those were four words missing from Emma Margolin's December 10 MSNBC.com story hailing the handshake between President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro earlier today at Nelson Mandela's memorial service in Soweto, South Africa. Gross, a State Department contractor, has been languishing in a Cuban prison for five years. There was a reference to "genocide"…

Congratulations to New York Times writers Lizette Alvarez and Jennifer Preston. They managed to write an upbeat article about the "vastly improved' Obamacare website without mentioning not one but two huge elephants in the room. The writers bubble over with excitement over the fact that in the first week of December, 112,000 people "selected plans" at the HealthCare.gov website. Left unsaid…

On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, new host Brian Stelter turned to President Obama the press critic. At the end of his cakewalk “Hardball” interview last week, Obama called out the media for being divisive. “The American people are good and they are decent. And yes, we get very divided partly because our politics and our media specifically tries to divide them and splinter them.”…

On Monday, Terry Mattingly of GetReligion blog revealed a glaring error made by Time magazine in its online poll of readers about who should be their Person of the Year. The magazine had to issue the following correction regarding its one-sentence description of Pope Francis: "An earlier version of this post suggested that Pope Francis rejected some church dogma. He does not." Whoever made…

Tuesday's CBS This Morning swooned over President Obama's appearance at Nelson Mandela's memorial, hailing his "remarkable" speech as "the rhetorical and even emotional high point of this day." Correspondent Bill Whitaker was particularly star-struck with the President's performance. "The crowd here sees him as a kind of hero. He has said that Nelson Mandela is a hero of his, but people here…

Monday evening at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Hope Yen, with the help of lead AP pollster Jennifer Agiesta and three other reporters, tagged 20 percent of Americans as "rich." To do so, she reinvented what it is to be "rich" or "affluent." It apparently has nothing to do with how it is normally defined, i.e., based on current net worth (assets owned minus debts owed…

Last December, my colleague Matt Vespa took on Washington Post EcoLOGIC columnist Brian Palmer for his attack on Christmas tree farms. One year later and Palmer is still a grinch, this time lecturing readers about the virtues of eschewing incandescent Christmas lights for LED bulbs.  But not only did Palmer preach the merits of energy -- and money-saving -- LED bulbs, he also crunched the…

View journalist Barbara Walters on Tuesday used Nelson Mandela’s funeral as a way to push for normalization of relations with Cuba. Absolutely struck by the fact that Barack Obama shook hands with President Raul Castro, Walters lectured, “The significance is that maybe this may change our relations with Cuba after 50 years, because it seems a little ridiculous to me that we recognize China and…

Reporting from South Africa on Tuesday's NBC Today about the memorial ceremony for Nelson Mandela, Nightly News anchor Brian Williams noted how the "dignitary section has some criminals, some thieves, some kings, some presidents" and that "Several have been life-long sworn enemies." He then proclaimed that President Obama's "handshake with [Cuban leader] Raul Castro was one of the better…

As NewsBusters has been reporting, NBC Tonight Show host Jay Leno has been very critical of the current White House resident in recent months. Possibly his harshest joke yet came Monday when he said, "I tell you, this winter storm has left thousands without electricity. It's as if President Obama had taken over the power companies" (video follows with commentary):

An indignant Chris Matthews on Monday took internet attacks on the late Nelson Mandela, allegedly from conservative commenters, and slammed the right for a lack of respect towards the South African leader: “Don’t they know that it’s not nice to make fun of a person so recently deceased, much less the world’s most honored champion of human freedom?” Yet, how did the journalists at MSNBC and…