Kroft Cues Up Obama to Agree Palin 'Has Less Experience than You
CBS's 60 Minutes led Sunday night with a taped interview with the Democratic ticket and in the piece Steve Kroft, who couldn't resist labeling Sarah Palin as a “conservative” while never tagging Joe Biden, presumed as fact that Palin “has less experience” than Obama and cued up Obama to agree with his own campaign's rhetoric about how Palin undermines McCain's experience argument: Does the fact…
CBS & NBC Label Palin 'Conservative,' Didn't Tag Biden as Liberal
Last Saturday night, in multiple stories on all three broadcast network evening shows about Barack Obama's VP pick, Senator Joe Biden was never described as a liberal. Friday night, however, CBS and NBC accurately tagged John McCain's selection, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, as “reliably conservative” or a “solid conservative” -- and that's not counting references to how she will shore up support…
CBS and NBC Spike Big GDP Jump, ABC Gives It 13 Seconds
The second quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was revised upward Thursday by the Commerce Department from the initially estimated 1.9 percent to a robust 3.3 percent, but neither the CBS Evening News nor NBC Nightly News mentioned the good news, while on ABC's World News anchor Charles Gibson, at Invesco Field, allocated 13 seconds to what he considered “surprisingly strong” economic news:Other…
Brian Williams to Michelle Obama: 'What Makes You Angriest' at GOP
"NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams conducted an embarrassingly fawning interview with Michelle Obama on Wednesday's program regarding the subject of nasty Republicans and just how exciting the Democratic campaign is. At one point, he sympathetically questioned the politician's wife, "What of the attacks has busted through to you? What makes you angriest at John McCain, the Republicans? What…
Nets Ignore Pro-life Protests in Denver
While the national media fret over whether or not there will be unity in the Democratic Party and gush over Monday night’s speeches by Senator Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama, pro-lifers are out in Denver, Colorado, protesting and working hard to get their message across. Of course, it would be easier to get their message out if the national media paid attention to their protests. None of…
NBC Uses Biden to Pursue 'Emblematic' McCain Homes Topic
NBC's Brian Williams and Andrea Mitchell on Friday night used their presumption, that Senator Joe Biden is Barack Obama's VP choice, to showcase, for a second straight night, the Obama campaign's attack on John McCain over his inability to say how many homes he owns. In setting up the lead Nightly News story on VP speculation, Williams highlighted how “the Obama camp is telling the McCain…
Bozell Column: Bracing for the Goo
When Sen. John Kerry arrived in Boston for the last Democratic convention, the TV news stars thought they’d died and gone to political heaven. Dan Rather said Kerry’s speech drove the crowd in Boston into “a three-thousand-gallon attack about every three minutes,” and Newsweek’s Jon Meacham was comparing Kerry to Abraham Lincoln on MSNBC. If media liberals can get that excited over Kerry,…
Nets Pounce on McCain's 'Housing Crisis,' But Not So Fast with Kerry's
Four years ago when Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry made his “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” remark, the CBS Evening News instead ran a soundbite of Kerry promising “we're going to build an army of truth-tellers” as it took the newscast six months (!) to finally air the vote for/voted against clip and the NBC Nightly News didn't play it for nine…
Media Call Obama's 'Economic Disaster' Exaggeration a 'Sharpened Attac
Perhaps it's the pied piper effect, but when Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama speaks, the media follow right along in lockstep. The word "disaster" can invoke images of the aftermath of hurricanes, tornados or tsunamis. But, on the campaign trail where there are political points to be scored - it's one quarter of a slight economic contraction followed up by two quarters of…
Margin of Victory: How the Liberal Media Made Barack Obama the Democra
The Media Research Center has just released a comprehensive study of the broadcast networks coverage of Barack Obama since he arrived on the national stage just four years ago. The bottom line: TV reporters adored Obama, and the celebratory coverage of the “rock star” candidate provided him with a huge advantage and almost certainly the margin of victory in the extremely close Democratic race.…
NBC Beijing Olympic Air Conditioned Outdoor Set: Not So Green
Do as we say, not as we do - the new theme for NBC's coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics? Quite possibly. WTHR, the NBC affiliate for Indianapolis, reported from Beijing and described the set used for the network's two highest-rated news broadcasts - "Nightly News" and "Today" - as air conditioned, even though it is outdoors. "The set is outside, but air conditioning vents make the weather…
Nets Tout Warren's Wider Agenda; CBS: Conservatives 'Went Nuts
John McCain finally received some positive coverage Friday night from the broadcast networks as Barack Obama's vacation ended -- a couple of sentences on ABC and CBS about how he raised $27 million in July, the most ever. Then those newscasts, and NBC's, ran full stories trumpeting evangelist Rick Warren's Saturday “Civil Forum on the Presidency” featuring McCain and Obama, with CBS and NBC…
CBS's Expert: Obama's Site 'Clean,' McCain's 'Cluttered' w/ 'Chaos
For the fourth straight weekday as Barack Obama vacations, he received better coverage on the broadcast network evening shows than the non-vacationing John McCain. Without fresh video of Obama, the CBS Evening News came up with a new way to tout Obama's campaign as they compared the Web sites of the two candidates and declared Obama's far superior. Reporter Daniel Sieberg asserted “McCain's Web…
CBS Scolds McCain: 'Respect Takes a Backseat to Ridicule
For the third weekday as Barack Obama vacations in Hawaii, John McCain on the campaign trail received more hostile coverage from the broadcast network evening newscasts -- to the extent they bothered to cover the presidential campaign. In a full story on CBS, Dean Reynolds recalled how McCain promised “to conduct a respectful campaign,” but citing McCain's celebrity ad, charged “now it frequently…
