Online Media

In New York City, police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were killed Saturday afternoon by a man who indicated online that his motivation was to seek revenge for the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner on Staten Island. At the Daily Beast, M.L. Nestel didn't find it particularly difficult to find people who thought that the officers deserved to die, and almost…

In discussing a statewide ban on hydraulic fracturing announced Wednesday, the New York Daily News carried comments made by Howard Zucker, the state's Health Commissioner, about fracking's impact on public health. Zucker asked two rhetorical questions: "Would I live in a community with (fracking) based on the facts I have now?" and “Would I let my child play in a school field nearby or my family…

The establishment press is virtually giddy over New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's cowardly, self-serving decision to ban fracking in New York. It's cowardly because Cuomo is publicly pretending that he's only deferring to his environmental and health commissioners, when everyone with an ounce of sense knows that he's getting the recommendations he wanted. It's self-serving because it enhances his…

In response to the total implosion of Rolling Stone's preposterous story about a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia, the media have reverted to their Soviet-style reporting. They're not even saying: We're choosing not to talk about UVA because it's a side show. It's more like: UVA? That's a school? Not only did the UVA gang rape turn out to be a hoax, but then President Obama's…

Those who rail at Fox News for allegedly being a haven of unbridled, uninterrupted conservatism usually and conveniently fail to remember that Shepard Smith is there. Smith's take yesterday on the potential pitfalls of a thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations, particularly on the commercial front, was nothing short of astonishing. His primary fear, expressed in an interview with Gerri Willis of the Fox…

Earlier tonight, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters observed that the Tuesday evening network news shows failed to report on an opinion issued today by a federal judge in Western Pennsylvania in connection with President Obama's illegal immigration-related executive actions last month. Several blogs and center-right outlets noted Judge Arthur Schwab's 38-page "Memorandum Opinion" this afternoon. Not…

In a December 9 article at Politico Magazine, Erica Peterson went after Louisville's "urban heat island" problem, where "a city’s center experiences significantly hotter temperatures than its less-developed surroundings." In doing so, Peterson rolled out some very questionable statistics. But it's her contention that "As pollution and stagnant air bake in the sun" in the city's heat island, "air…

Today, the world has learned that terrorists with the Taliban, the group of Islamic fundamentalist jihadists who have rained terror on Afghanistan and Pakistan for nearly two decades, "attacked a school in Peshawar, killing 141 people, 132 of them children." The death toll will almost certainly rise as some of the 114 children the BBC has reported are injured fail to survive. But don't ask…

One of the more amusing aspects of observing today's left-biased establishment media environment is seeing agenda-driven journalists directly or indirectly convey a clearly inflated sense of their outlets' self-importance. A recent example of this came Friday from Jacob Silverman at Politico Magazine. In his writeup on conservative firebrand Charles Johnson, Silverman employed the comparative…

It's a good thing that establishment press publications like the New York Times have those layers of editors and fact-checkers. They're able to prevent embarrassing things like misstatements of commonly known facts, misidentifications of key parties involved in recent events, and misspellings those sloppy bloggers and new media types routinely publish. Oh, wait a minute. All three types of…

Here's a small window into a journalist's mindset. In a report on how lower gas prices are affecting the companies operating retail gas stations, Associated Press reporter John Fahey revealed his apparent believes that there are millions of us walking around, perhaps including him, obsessed with getting back at gas station owners for charging us so much at fill-up time for years:

Dictionary.com defines "glib" as "readily fluent, often thoughtlessly, superficially, or insincerely so." Jonathan Gruber's apology at his Tuesday congressional hearing included that word. The word, especially the "superficial" element of its definition, applies to how the establishment press covered the hearing. With only rare exceptions, it excluded any mention of what has accurately been…

Two recent items in the Washington Post support my contention that the establishment press is currently doing more than anyone besides Lena Dunham and "Jackie," both of whom have been irrefutably exposed as rape story fabulists, to cause victims of sexual assault to be reluctant to come forward (Note: That's not to say that the two women haven't been victims of sexual assault, "only" that the…

Nearly six years into Barack Obama's presidency, it's still George W. Bush's fault. Early Wednesday morning, Julie Pace at the Associated Press proved yet again why it is more than appropriate to characterize the wire service where she works as the Administration's Press. The headline at Pace's story tells us that poor President Barack Obama still has to confront the "Bush legacy," and is still…