New York Times

Catching up on a topic that eluded us over the weekend, it is worth noting that on Friday, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan decided to tackle the question of whether the newspaper is favoring the Obama Administration’s effort to build support for a war against Syria. After talking to several top Times editors who inevitably aver that they are  treating the anti-Syria PR effort…

The AFL-CIO has just lost 40,000 of its most militant members, and it's not news at the Associated Press's national site (there is a regional AP story at the Seattle Times) or at the New York Times. It is getting virtually no other establishment press coverage (results at the link are primarily center-right blogs and similar outlets). The departing members are those in the International…

Back to school is an exciting time of year – new classmates, new subjects, new books, new gender and a new court-invented right to use the boys or girls room, depending on how you currently “identify.” Welcome to the brave new world of “the next civil-rights struggle.” From a California law decreeing that any student has the right to use any gender-specific restroom and play on any gender-…

Monday morning, 22-term Democratic Congressman Charlie Rangel of New York, as reported by Tal Kopan at the Politico, said that President Barack Obama's drawing of a "red line" on Syria is "embarrassing," and that he is against "putting our kids in harm’s way to solve an international problem." Rangel is the third most-senior House member of either party. If a senior Republican congressperson…

At the New York Times's "Dot Earth" blog, Andrew Revkin reports that "the science on a connection between hurricanes and global warming is going in the opposite direction" — as in, the evidence that the connection between human-caused global warming (overgenerously assuming that there is any) and hurricane intensity or frequency of "heavy precipitations events," as shown in a "snapshot" of a…

It's been a decade since the U.S. and its coalition of nations invaded Iraq and sent Saddam Hussein scurrying to an underground bunker. As time passed and no weapons of mass destruction were found, the media accused President George W. Bush of relying on “bad intelligence” that led to a “disastrous fallout" in that violence-drenched nation. Ten years later, Dylan Byers -- media reporter for…

Well, if you can't say anything good about how your guy's foreign policy is going, you can at least try to trash one of his predecessors so your guy doesn't look so bad. That would appear to be the idea behind David E. Sanger's attempt at the New York Times today to falsely inform readers that the two towering leaders of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, angrily disagreed over…

Memo to the Corrections Department at the Los Angeles Times: The following sentence is utterly unhistorical. “Since Democrats led the passage of civil rights legislation that marchers pushed for in 1963, Republicans have struggled to recover with black voters”. Civil rights legislation of the 1960s was favored more by Republicans than by Democrats, so how did Democrats “lead the passage”?…

At Slate, Mark Lynas tells the story of activist-orchestrated media deception — although one sometimes wonders whether the press even minds being deceived in these instances, and in certain cases whether some journalists are in on the scam. The deception involves activists who are against any form of biotechnology advances laying waste to a field of genetically modified "golden rice" in the…

Anthony Mason played up President Obama's $89 restaurant tip on Monday's CBS This Morning, underlining that "when it comes to tips, President Obama is tops." However, the network has yet to cover a Monday story from the New York Times that pointed out the "uncomfortable reality for the White House: the administration has named no more women to high-level executive branch posts than the Clinton…

A chart accompanying a writeup by Robert Pear at the New York Times on how Americans' real incomes have fallen and barely begun to recover is interesting in its selection of comparison points. Pear himself tried to pretend that what President Obama wants to do to try to make college more affordable is somehow relevant to reigniting economic growth. Really.

In March, the Associated Press ran a 470-word "Big Story" item about the case of of Elaine Huguenin, an Albuquerque wedding photographer "who declined to shoot the commitment ceremony of a lesbian couple." The couple filed an anti-discrimination claim with the state's Human Rights Commission, which found that Huguenin, who runs her business with her husband, had violated state law. New Mexico…

The New York Times is quick to forget the past when it doesn’t promote their agenda. In Nov. 2009, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was involved in the “ClimateGate” scandal, but that didn’t stop the paper from hyping leaked information from an upcoming IPCC report on Aug. 20. However, the BBC reported that the IPCC has said those leaks were “misleading.”…

Readers are strongly advised to remove all fluids, flammables, and sharp objects from their computers' proximity as the following is likely to cause uncontrollable fits of laughter! You've been warned! In the Yale College Writing Center's guide to what's considered a "scholarly source," the New York Times and Washington Post are depicted as having developed "a national or even worldwide…