Cable Television

The Associated Press works very hard to ensure that its subscribing outlets and low-information voters who rely solely on its work — knowingly or unknowingly — never learn about Hillary Clinton's smart-aleck, sarcastic, condescending, reality-avoiding behavior. Tuesday night, four AP reporters (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) — Jack Gillum and Stephen Braun in…

Did Rush Limbaugh force Fox News, in the wake of the Donald Trump/Megyn Kelly dust-up, to back down and welcome Trump back on its network?  That's what New York Times reporter Nick Confessore suggested on today's Morning Joe. Asked by Mika Brzezinski who was the most powerful person in the media today, Confessore responded: "I think Fox or Rush Limbaugh [whose last name Confessore pronounced "…

CNN has hired a conservative commentator.  Me.

How absolutely serendipitous it is that alleged comedian and actual White House propagandist Jon Stewart’s last broadcast of The Daily Show is today, August 6, the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. You see, Stewart, whose influence is especially nefarious when he is revising and distorting history for his relatively young audience, committed his most outrageous such act…

Though it's not as blatant as the speech which got noticed at Fox News and many center-right outlets (and, of course, nowhere else) eight years ago, it's clear that Hillary Clinton once again altered her diction and style several days ago to (in her mind, one would surmise) "adapt" them to her Southern audience. This time, Mrs. Clinton was being interviewed by South Carolina Democratic Party…

Call the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" people. Politifact, the alleged fact-checking site which has for years almost invariably insisted on calling obvious truths stated by Republicans and conservatives "Half True" at best and often worse, while taking flat-out lies by leftists and pretending they contain some element of truth, has issued a "Pants on Fire" rating on Senate Minority Leader Harry…

Arthur Chu, best known as one of the all-time biggest money-winners on Jeopardy!, is also a writer who frequently contributes to Salon. In a Thursday article, Chu saluted departing Daily Show host Jon Stewart for, among other things, keeping him sane during his college days. Unfortunately, recalled Chu, back then America as a whole had lost its mind. Meanwhile, in the August issue of Vanity Fair…

David Roberts has penned a tale of two media, dealing first with how a profusion of conservative outlets has pulled the Republican party to the right -- the subject of a recent Harvard study -- then pivoting to analyze the mainstream media’s belated (and still incomplete) awakening to the GOP’s “radicalism.” “One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left,” wrote Roberts in a…

On his Tuesday night show, with the help of Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News described how the "Black Lives Matter" movement sustains itself. The rest of the press wants readers, listeners and viewers to presume that it is a self-sustaining, grass-roots movement. It isn't. O'Reilly also noted that megastars Jay-Z and Beyoncé, numbers 28 and 29, respectively, on…

Veteran journalist John Harwood, according to his Twitter home page, covers "Washington and national politics for CNBC and the New York Times." Saturday morning, despite all of his experience, Harwood tweeted a question (HT Twitchy) so naive that a freshman journalism student would have been embarrassed to ask it:

I'm virtually certain that he wouldn't dream of it, but the Associated Press's Josh Lederman seriously needs to consider correcting two extremely embarrassing paragraphs he wrote in his coverage of President Obama's appearance on Jon Stewart's Daily Show earlier this week. At the 15:03 mark of the Comedy Central video following the jump, Obama treated Stewart as if he's a legitimate journalist,…

One year ago, a British newspaper published a list of President Obama’s ten favorite television shows (the top three, in reverse order: Breaking Bad, The Wire, and M*A*S*H). Not on the list was The Daily Show, on which Obama guested yet again this past Tuesday, but Penn State's Sophia McClennen thinks that if Obama had been more of a TDS fan, he long ago would have realized how irrational his…

The press's favorite abortion questions usually have nothing to do with the 700,000-plus terminations of preborn babies' lives which take place each year in the U.S. (Note: The real figure is likely quite higher, because reporting is voluntary.) Especially when the person interviewed is a Republican or conservative, abortion questions focus heavily on the fewer than 1% of all abortions which are…

Earlier today, Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three morning network news shows on NBC, ABC, and CBS failed to cover President Barack Obama's denial that the Internal Revenue Service ever went after Tea Party and other conservative groups in his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Specifically Obama said that "it turned out no ... the truth of the matter is there was…