Cable Television

Let's imagine a white Congressman saying that when he served in Vietnam, he was never moved at the sight of a dead U.S. soldier unless he was white. His career would be over, and deservedly so, within about five minutes of his statement. If he was a conservative or a Republican, even if he resigned instantly and was roundly and unanimously condemned by his colleagues, the press would remind us of…

In the midst of properly blasting the New York Times for its disgraceful editorial attacking the NYPD, Fox Business News's Davd Asman has raised an important question which goes to the paper's fundamental integrity. Specifically, did the Times acquiesce to active efforts by Mayor Bill de Blasio's office encouraging them to go on the attack, effectively serving as his mouthpiece? The question…

If CNN is searching for reasons why its ratings are at an all-time low, it doesn't need to look any further than one entry in its group of "11 extraordinary people of 2014" published on December 5. Aside from the inanity of publishing such an annual list almost four weeks before year's end — as if no extraordinary people or extraordinary acts ever take place in December — the network's fourth…

As I noted almost two weeks ago, hundreds of protesters in Manhattan repeatedly shouted "What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!" during that city's version of the so-called "Justice For All" marches which took place in several locations around the nation on December 13. The New York Times failed to report the protesters' rants in its original coverage of the marches. The fact that…

Elias Isquith criticizes the “shallowness of Stewart’s politics” and “his tendency to fall prey to the trap of blaming 'both sides.'" Isquith declares that “if liberals want to see more of the kind of direct action that’s characterized the Occupy Wall Street and #blacklivesmatter movements…they’re going to have to embrace a political vision that has grown beyond the idiosyncratic limitations of…

Leslie Savan writes that “as a character, and not merely a critic, of the right, [Stephen] Colbert held a unique key to the riddle of modern conservatism: How do they keep getting away with it? Why have so many conservatives turned into such small-minded haters and deniers of science, of reality?”

Those who rail at Fox News for allegedly being a haven of unbridled, uninterrupted conservatism usually and conveniently fail to remember that Shepard Smith is there. Smith's take yesterday on the potential pitfalls of a thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations, particularly on the commercial front, was nothing short of astonishing. His primary fear, expressed in an interview with Gerri Willis of the Fox…

Penn State’s Sophia McClennen praises Colbert for “remind[ing] us that you could care about your nation and simultaneously find American exceptionalism disturbing” and comments that conservatives have “controlled the idea of patriotism for so long that it is easy to forget that there is no logical reason to think that Rachel Maddow loves her country any less than Glenn Beck.”

Has John Heilemann ever gotten this riled up over the commies ruling Cuba? If so, I missed it. But on his Bloomberg TV show tonight, Heilemann got on his populist high horse to blast the British monarchy on the occasion of the visit to the US of Prince William and Princess Kate, mocking them as "undereducated" and calling for the British monarchy to be "done away with tomorrow." In Heilemann's…

A week ago, New Orleans Saints tight end Benjamin Watson put up a Facebook post reacting to events in Ferguson, Missouri. It has generated an astonishing 825,000 likes and 458,000 shares as of 1 PM ET today. As will be seen later, CNN's print report on Watson's post by Steve Almasy treated the player's references to sin, Jesus Christ, and the Gospel as if they were potentially toxic.…

The establishment press's performance in Ferguson has certainly been disgraceful, especially its role in turning one local death into a national obsession. One element of that buildup involves Shawn Parcells, one of two men hired by the family of Michael Brown, the 18 year-old man who was killed in an altercation with Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in early August, to look into his death…

How long it would have taken from the time of its exposure for the press to have prominently reported on an email sent from the the Bush 43 White House to its Justice Department asking, "Any way we can fix the New York Times?" We can be confident that it would have taken less than a New York minute, and that saturation coverage would have continued for days. Well, one revelation in a series of…

At CNN on Thursday night, Anderson Cooper asked former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who is now a contributor at the network, to square President Barack Obama's Thursday night immigration announcement with past presidential statements that he didn't have the power to do what he had just done. As seen in the video after the jump, Carney acknowledged his former boss's compete flip-flop (…

Two cheers — and two cheers only — for the National Journal's Ron Fournier. On Fox News's Special Report with Bret Baier last night, the former Associated Press Washington Bureau chief observed that the Jonathan Gruber videos about how the Affordable Care Act was dishonestly written and promoted, as well as President Barack Obama's reaction to those revelations, demonstrate that he (Obama) "has…