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The London Daily Mail reported this week that “CNN caused a firestorm when it included a war monument in Brest, a city in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, in an article on the 'world's ugliest monuments' published last month.” This isn’t Ted Turner’s CNN, where a reporter would be disciplined for saying the word “foreign” in a sentence. The online article from a travel-piece contributor…

The three Associated Press reports I've seen on the UAW's failure to win the right to represent hourly workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee — the first two were covered in NewsBusters posts here and here; the wire service's 3:52 p.m. report is here — all mention in one way or another what UAW President Bob King is now calling "unprecedented outside interference" in the…

“Being born gay is one of the great blessings of my life,” Anderson Cooper proclaimed to a crowd of nearly 6,000 at University of Texas in Arlington on Monday night, according to The Advocate. Cooper acknowledged different viewpoints on homosexuality, but suggested the "arc of history" was going to take the respectability out of opposition to homosexuality. In the discussion over NFL draft…

It is a sign of the unseriousness of the mainstream media that the NBC program "Meet the Press" will be hosting a climate debate Sunday featuring a person who plays a scientist on TV. Yes, tomorrow it is "Bill Nye the Science Guy" versus Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Kyra Phillips heralded Facebook's recent decision to add more than 50 gender categories on Friday's CNN Newsroom. Phillips brought on Rich Ferraro of GLAAD to boost the LGBT activist group's role in the social media website's left-wing change, and tossed softball questions at her guest: "Rich, you actually worked on this project with Facebook. So, whose idea was it, and why did it become an…

Following revisions to initial stories at the Associated Press, aka the Adminstration's Press, can be a revealing if sometimes tedious exercise. A case in point is how reporters Tom Krisher and Erik Schelzig, who are both more than likely represented by the News Media Guild in their jobs at the wire service, changed the tone of their second report following the rejection by employees at…

The White House Correspondents Association certainly doesn't have any "edgy" anti-Obama comics lined up to zing the president like Stephen Colbert whacked Bush in 2006. For this year's correspondents' dinner (celebrated on Twitter as "Nerd prom"), they picked Joel McHale, star of NBC's perpetually ratings-saggy sitcom "Community" and the E! channel talk show "The Soup." In the Los Angeles…

Michael W. Chapman of our sister site CNSNews.com reports on cost estimates for the hand-sewn gown Michelle Obama wore at Tuesday’s state dinner for the prime minister of France. Think five figures. If Ann Romney were First Lady now, would that escape the media’s politicized scrutiny? (In 2012, she was slammed for wearing a $990 shirt on "CBS This Morning." Wednesday’s Washington Post merely…

In 1991, the Afrocentric rapper Sister Souljah released a single and video, "The Final Solution: Slavery's Back in Effect," which portrayed an America of the near future in which slavery for black persons had indeed been reinstituted. But what if slavery -- for persons of all colors -- never went away in the U.S., and what if it's more or less inevitable under our economic system? Daily Kos…

Late news out of Chattanooga, Tennessee Friday night was that workers at that area's Volkswagen plant rejected representation by the United Auto Workers union. The opening paragraph at the 11:17 p.m. story filed by Tom Krisher and Erik Schelzig at the Associated Press, both of whom are more than likely members of the News Media Guild, calls the result "devastating." Later paragraphs imply…

While in Russia for the Olympics, NBC morning weatherman Al Roker sent several hostile tweets at ultraliberal New York mayor Bill de Blasio for keeping the city's schools open during the winter storm. The most acidulous tweet said: "I knew this am @NYCMayorsOffice @NYCSchools would close schools. Talk about a bad prediction. Long range DiBlasio forecast: 1 term." That raised from eyebrows in…

On Friday night’s World News, ABC’s Cecilia Vega gave a sympathetic portrayal of a polygamist family featured on TLC’s Sister Wives. Although Vega gave voice to critics of the Brown family, she spent most of her report interviewing the family and allowing them to defend their way of living. “They maintain theirs is a healthy lifestyle,” Vega reported. She allowed the family to distance…

Can MSNBC's Rachel Maddow go a single day without descending into laughable hackdom? Any previous doubts about this were erased by her show last night. Mere seconds after she was introduced by colleague Chris Hayes, and after Maddow offered a chirpy "happy snow day" to viewers (this during one of the most brutal winters in memory), Maddow began her show with this -- "The administration of…

ABC, CBS, and NBC's morning and evening newscasts have so far punted on reporting the strong critique of the Obama administration's "disturbing retreat from democratic practices" with regard to the freedom of the press, according to Reporters Without Borders. The U.S. fell 13 places in the international group's annual "World Press Freedom Index" for the federal government's "increased efforts…