Online Media

As it turns out, mainstream media outlets that lauded President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech as "downright Reaganesque" might be on to something. While ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC exalted the commander-in-chief, at least one observer charged the Democratic president with crafting a speech that was "tantamount to plagiarism." In a column on the U.S. News site, presidential…

"[F]or all the surface civility [of the State of the Union], Obama wants to pick a fight, or at least draw a stark contrast, between his jobs-centric philosophy and the GOP’s determination to cut government first and ask questions later." That's how Politico's Glenn Thrush and Carrie Budoff Brown described the main difference between the president and his Republican congressional opposition…

In his January 26 article "MSNBC's Sarah Palin Sickness," Hollywood Reporter's Paul Bond tackled the left-lurching network's obsession with the former Alaska governor. "MSNBC’S dependence on Palin was best displayed with the recent shootings in Tucson that left six people dead and Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically wounded. MSNBC was crucial in driving the narrative that the killer…

Just because the site was founded by an alleged plagiarist doesn't mean it's totally devoid of ethical clout. Though you do have to wonder: from where does the Huffington Post recruit its bloggers? The site reportedly informed one of its unpaid contributors last week that he was being let go. The offense: he had used his press credentials as a HuffPo blogger to get labor union demonstrators…

Yeah. You can't make this stuff up. From a January 24 entry in the San Francisco Chronicle's City Insider blog:  

A recently-released analysis by the Pew Research Center reveals some interesting facts about the online conversation regarding the Tucson massacre. Most notably, it lends statistical weight to the claim that the left accused its ideological opponents of fostering a "climate of hate" to a far greater degree than did the right. Though that may not be altogether surprising, the Pew study also…

The folks in the establishment press are looking for any sign of upward movement in the housing market, especially in new home construction, that they can portray positively as the beginning of a general recovery. That desperate search explains the content of the following e-mail alert from CNN which arrived in my inbox this morning:

"[W]hether you think a ban on police-style assault weapons such as the one Jared Lee Loughner used in Tuscon is good policy or not, it is curious to see that Republicans are not even bothering to make legitimate arguments against such proposals," Newsweek's Ben Adler scoffed in a January 18 The Gaggle blog post: There is simply no precedent to support the claim that laws preventing…

Especially on Martin Luther King Day, it seems worth asking whether or not the assassinated civil rights leaders would have cared more about: Whether a talk radio host told his audience, in reference to the No Child Left Behind Act causing many school districts, including the Toledo Public Schools (TPS), to believe they must "teach to the test" to avoid serious sanctions: "teaching little…

For an atheist, Sally Quinn sure loves to preach with righteous indignation. At least, that is, when the subject is Sarah Palin. On Sunday, January 16, Quinn published a 26-paragraph "On Faith" piece entitled "To Sarah Palin: It's not all about you." [h/t e-mail tipster Brian Hastoglis] In the middle of her piece, Quinn sought to examine why so many people detest Sarah Palin, writing…

Noel Sheppard posted the news about J. Eric Fuller's arrest at NewsBusters earlier this evening: According to the website of ABC-TV affiliate KGUN, J. Eric Fuller was arrested and charged with threats, intimidation, and disorderly conduct. Demonstrating impressive prescience, John Hayward at Human Events predicted on Friday that Fuller would attempt to capitalize on his being among the…

"The Second Amendment that guarantees the right to bear arms is part of America’s founding fabric. So is senseless violence brought about by guns also American?" asked Newsweek's Daniel Stone in a January 13 post at the magazine's website. Stone noted that his question was inspired by a similar query posed recently by a Russian journalist Andrei Sitov to White House press secretary Robert…

Here's a little something I stumbled across today while looking through my Google Calendar settings. I subscribe to Google's "US Holidays" calendar, which adds to my personal calendar tags for U.S. federal holidays as well as some major non-federal religious or cultural holidays like Easter and Groundhog Day respectively.

For someone who deals in illicit information, Julian Assange sure gets touchy when people share information against his will. Last month the Times of London revealed that the Wikileaks proprietor was furious at a reporter for the UK Guardian who had published details of a police report concerning sexual assault allegations against Assange. His objection: they were private communications and…