Cable Television

If you're Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, you know you have to do the occasional segment going after the establishment press or left-wing groups to maintain appearances. The James O'Keefe-ACORN saga in 2009 was one such instance. If Stewart hadn't dealt with it, his pretense of being supposedly fair to both left and right would have been blown out of the water. The incredibly petty New York Times…

Readers can be excused if they believe that the Associated Press might be more interested in protecting what little is left of Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby's credibility and reputation than they are in reporting the news. Look at the vague headline about enhanced police presence in the area where Freddie Gray was arrested that Mosby herself requested at the AP story by Juliet Linderman:

The business press has gotten really excited about the possibility — some of them are even treating it as a probability — that the first-quarter's recently reported annualized economic contraction of 0.7 percent will go positive if it gets revised for so-called "residual seasonality." "Residual seasonality" is "the manifestation of seasonal patterns in data that have already been seasonally…

Hillary's Clinton has called for what a Washington Post headline describes as a "sweeping expansion of voter access." While falsely accusing Republicans of preventing young people and minorities from voting, Mrs. Clinton is really pushing for widespread opportunities for fraud combined with a heavy dose of incumbent protection. From reading the establishment press's coverage of Mrs. Clinton's "…

It seems improbable that the left might have too high an opinion of a Fox News personality, but it’s happened with Megyn Kelly, argued Jack Mirkinson in a Wednesday article. Mirkinson noted that liberals have enjoyed several “extremely fun episodes in which [Kelly] made mincemeat out of (usually male) right-wing pundits,” but claimed that those instances have “helped obscure the fact that, far…

Tuesday’s New York Times piece on how the problematic phrase “established by the state” got into and stayed in the Affordable Care Act provoked a great many blasts from lefty bloggers at the plaintiffs’ case in King v. Burwell. Two especially heated posts came from MSNBC’s Steve Benen and Esquire’s Charles Pierce. Benen, a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the show’s…

I think it's a safe assumption that I need to inform the vast majority of readers here that former Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Patrick Murphy has a new weekend show on MSNBC. On that show on Sunday, Murphy interviewed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. In the "Who was more out of touch?" contest between the two, it was a draw. Murphy asserted that the war against ISIS had "mixed…

In a Thursday interview recorded for Megyn Kelly's Fox News show that evening, Charles Krauthammer provided stunning evidence rarely mentioned even on Fox — and almost never in the establishment press — relating to how unserious the administration's and the Pentagon's "strategy" has been in containing, let alone defeating, ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Krauthammer began discussing the inadequacy of…

Jason Horowitz at the New York Times thinks that Hillary Clinton shouldn't bother dealing with the press. In describing Hillary Clinton's campaign effort in Iowa, Horowitz wondered how, in "a carnival atmosphere," Hillary Clinton "gains politically from playing the freak" by deigning to take questions from the press, thus clearly suggesting that she would be better off if she didn't bother, and…

Web and news searches at Google, as well as a search at the Associated Press's national site, indicate that there is very little interest in the establishment press in getting the reactions of current and former U.S. soldiers who defeated enemy forces in Ramadi during last decade's Iraq War to the loss of that city to Islamic State forces. Sadly, that's not surprising. As usual, Fox News is…

The folks at MSNBC exhibited a sick sense of "humor" on Friday. As Gateway Pundit's Kristinn Taylor reported Friday afternoon, the network posted "a video to MSNBC’s Facebook page that mocks police over a criminal dragging a police officer by a car as he attempted to flee ..." The post asked the following question, which was also tweeted: "Does it count as a police chase if you take the cop…

It appears that someone might need to schedule an intervention with the Associated Press's economics writers. In his dispatch published a half-hour after the government's March release on international trade at 8:30 this morning, the wire service's Martin Crutsinger quoted a normally upbeat economist who was singing the blues about the result's effect on previously reported first-quarter…

As I demonstrated last week, MSNBC and CNN, the two also-rans in the cable news race, survive in large part because about half of their revenues are, once contracts are signed with cable and other providers, guaranteed for several years. This insulates them from much of the financial impact of declining viewership. MSNBC's far-leftism is particulary painful to watch — so painful that it's hard…

Rush Limbaugh posted an interesting pair of questions at his web site yesterday: "How can CNN still be on the air with no audience? How can MSNBC have been on the air with no audience? In the old days, they're gone, kaput. Something else is tried. But they stay. And they double down on what they're doing that's losing audience." A large part of the answer, as I noted on March 30, is that those…