Cable Television

Bill O'Reilly's opening talking points on his show tonight went after President Obama's claim that the intelligence community underestimated and did not adequately communicate the dangers of ISIS/ISIL in Iraq and Syria with both barrels. As documented in several NewsBusters posts in the 48-plus hours since Obama's Sunday night "60 Minutes" interview, O'Reilly's no-holds-barred analysis…

During the third quarter, Fox News, which has been routinely walloping its cable-news competition for years, was "the most-watched (network during) primetime across all of cable in more than a decade — even besting USA and ESPN." So says the Hollywood Reporter, which also gets the award for the most delicious (or is it really the most truthful?) typo of the day:

The story of alleged Moore, Oklahoma murderer Alton Nolen, who reportedly beheaded co-worker Colleen Hufford, is fading from the headlines. Barring further developments, I don't expect it to be a news topic on any of the Big Three networks' morning or evening news shows tomorrow. That's because it has already disappeared from prominence at the Associated Press. At 10:20 this morning, the latest…

When White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest made his first Fox News appearance in that role, he may have thought that having Shepard Smith interview him would make the exercise a relative cakewalk. It didn't happen. Even though Smith, as Matt Sheffield observed last year at NewsBusters, is "not known as any sort of conservative," he was clearly critical of Earnest's breezy claims about the…

Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-S.D.) appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday morning to discuss a variety of topics including the impending vote on Scottish independence.   At the end of the segment, co-host Joe Kernen joked that when he goes to Scotland to play golf he will wear a kilt to “mark my ball” to which Heitkamp crudely asked “which one?” 

"Person on the street" interviews are among the more discouraging presentations one can find on news shows these days. All too often, we see low-information people who think they're so smart show us how disturbingly ignorant they actually are. That they are disheartening doesn't mean they aren't sometimes entertaining. Fox News's Jesse Watters had one such segment on Monday. He interviewed eight…

In recent days, the State Department has tried to paint Fox News's Bill O'Reilly as a sexist monster because he characterized Jen Psaki as "out of her depth." O'Reilly's criticism has a great deal to do with how Ms. Psaki often appears to be, well, out of her depth. The other member of the non-dynamic duo then pounced. Marie Harf claimed that O'Reilly used "sexist, personally offensive language…

On August 22 — a Friday, of course — the Obama administration's Department of Health and Human Services issued a brand-new version of the Obamacare contraception mandate supposedly "accommodating" organizations with religious belief-based objections to providing such coverage. The new version is a facile variant of the subterfuge the Obama administration failed to slide by the Court in the…

CNBC's Dan Mangan, last seen at NewsBusters claiming that the American people want politicians to just "shut up about Obamacare," is out with a column today reacting to the Kaiser Family Foundation's latest Affordable Care Act-related polling effort. Sarah Ferris at the Hill also reviewed the poll, and has two primary messages for readers. First, "support for ObamaCare continues to fall." Second…

This morning, Catherine Herridge at Fox News, in the first two minutes of a video seen here, reported that "detailed and specific intelligence about the rise of ISIS was included in the PDB, or the President’s Daily Brief, for at least a year." Fox is being careful, as some of what is being reported would indicate that the time involved is "far more than a year" — possibly even "three years…

When last seen in coverage at NewsBusters, Anjem Choudary was sparring with Sean Hannity while claiming that ISIS atrocities are a Western "falsehood" and that Islamic Sharia law will be implemented "in the whole world one day." Before getting to his latest stunt on CNN's Reliable Sources program with host Brian Stelter, it's important to provide some context, simply because Choudary, described…

On Wednesday night, Megyn Kelly, perhaps the best host on the air today at adapting and responding to new information, did a double-take when Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry told her that President Obama would be traveling to Rhode Island on Friday for a Democratic Party fundraiser. Having been so informed, she then made those plans the first topic of discussion with each of her…

Don Lemon at CNN isn't interested in being told what an "automatic" rifle is. He's decided what it is, and the truth doesn't matter. Even after recognizing after the fact that the person correcting him was right, he has no remorse for his demonstrated ignorance. On Wednesday, as Charles C. W. Cooke noted at National Review's The Corner blog the next day, Lemon claimed that “most people can go…