Online Media

On Wednesday evening in Europe (12:31 p.m. Eastern Time), in what it was already describing as "the world's deadliest known outbreak of E. coli," the Associated Press reported that "No cause for the outbreak has yet been found," while farmers on the continent were petitioning the EU for hundreds of million of dollars in compensation. By midday European time (6:27 a.m. ET) on Friday, June 10,…

How tone-deaf do you have to be to a) compare Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) to Martin Luther King, Jr. b) say the women who got Weiner's lewd photos were "hardly traumatized" and c) call on Weiner's wife Huma Abedin to call a press conference to belittle the media for attacking her hubby? You might want to ask Daily Beast contributor Lee Siegel, who did just that (emphases mine) in a June 10…

Whether it's deliberate obfuscation or just plain laziness is up for debate, but the media have a penchant for misleading news consumers with the meme that Blue Dog Democrats are politically "conservative." While the Blue Dog caucus is decidedly more moderate than Democrats as a whole -- you could individual members are "conservative for a Democrat" -- they rarely if ever qualify as…

Early Tuesday morning, David Shepardson and Christina Rogers at the Detroit News ("GM's Akerson pushing for higher gas taxes") reported that General/Multi-Government Motors CEO Dan Akerson "wants the federal gas tax boosted as much as $1 a gallon to nudge consumers toward more fuel-efficient cars." Later in the interview, Akerson was much more emphatic about what he would like to see done…

The mainstream media have largely ignored or casually dismissed businessman and radio host Herman Cain's bid for the 2012 Republican nomination. Not so Time's Alex Altman, who has a generally decent piece today on the magazine's Swampland blog:  

On Friday, Cass Sunstein, the White House's 56 year-old Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (pictured at right), attempted to disavow a 42-page paper he wrote called "Lives, Life-Years, and Willingness to Pay," which recommended that the government reduce resources directed at benefitting the elderly in favor of increasing what goes to young people, because young…

"I am fairly certain that when Paul Ryan first decided to publicly share his admiration of Ayn Rand, he could not have imagined it would lead to him speed-walking to his SUV to avoid a young Catholic trying to give him a Bible and telling him to pay more attention to the Gospel of Luke," Time's Amy Sullivan snarked in a June 3 Swampland blog post.  

Last time it was your refrigerator's ice maker, and we wondered what the media would come with next. They have outdone themselves. The latest climate culprit: Internet search engines. The Vancouver Sun calculated in an article last week that each search engine submission emits a minuscule one to 10 grams of carbon dioxide via a small amount of electricity usage. Add up the hundreds of…

For those too young to remember, invoking a "long, hot summer" was a favorite pastime of the establishment press and so-called "civil rights leaders" after the race riots of the 1960s (example here). The message: Get that federal money flowing to us, or there will be violence in the streets. At CBS News, reporter Bill Whitaker wrapped his coverage of the teen unemployment situation as follows…

Old and new media clashed on CNN's "Reliable Sources" Sunday. After CBS News Congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes blamed Andrew Breitbart for her network's slow response to the ongoing Weinergate scandal, Gawker staff writer Maureen O'Connor said, "I think even if that's the case, it was very quickly that you could have looked into this story and verified it for yourself" (video follows…

Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln "are peas in the same pod," at least in the eyes of Salon.com technology reporter Andrew Leonard. And just how exactly?

There's nothing more intolerable to the Left than "intolerance" (read traditional religious conviction on sex and marriage). In a June 1 post at Salon.com's War Room blog, Williams cheered  Miley Cyrus's rude response via Twitter last Thursday to a fan who was chagrined at the pop star's glee at folks "hating on Urban Outfitters" for a donation a company executive had made years ago to social…

This just in, by way of St. Petersburg Times fact-checking website Politifact: when considering irrelevant and misleading employment statistics, Texas has not, in fact, created more jobs in the past five years than the rest of the country combined. Sure, when considering the relevant numbers - the ones that most honest observers would use - the claim, made by the Texas Public Policy…

Andrew Sullivan's vendetta against Sarah Palin reached a new milestone on Friday after he insinuated that the former Alaska governor was somehow akin to Adolf Hitler. Sullivan referenced Leni Riefenstahl's infamous pro-Nazi movie after quoting a former Palin spokeswoman on what he labeled "the upcoming propaganda movie, 'Triumph Of The Will' 'The Undefeated.'" The writer, who is a top…