World News Tonight

If the reports are true, Barack Obama has gone from Democrat presidential candidate to an out and out media star.According to the New York Times, when the junior senator from Illinois goes to Iraq in the coming weeks, all three network broadcast news anchors will go there to interview him. This goes in stark contrast to what happened when John McCain visited Iraq last March. I guess it's good to…

Hitting full panic mode on Tuesday night, ABC anchor Charles Gibson teased World News: “Markets are gyrating, inflation is rising, banks are closing. Consumer pessimism is at an all-time high.” Actually, only one bank. Gibson explained “we are going to devote a large part of our broadcast tonight to the economy because the news each day seems unrelentingly bad.” It certainly is on television news…

Three weeks ago when a Newsweek poll put Democrat Barack Obama 15 points ahead of Republican John McCain, the ABC and CBS evening newscasts highlighted the out of sync finding. But when a new Newsweek survey released Friday placed Obama a mere three points in front of McCain, neither ABC's World News nor the CBS Evening News mentioned it on Friday or Saturday night. “A startling new poll,” fill-…

Proving the old saw that a “gaffe” is when a politician stumbles into the truth, ABC's World News, which has showcased Americans whining about the inability to afford “joy rides” or breakfast, on Thursday night led with former Senator Phil Gramm's observation that “this is a mental recession”and “we've sort of become a nation of whiners.” In relaying the comments from the economic adviser to the…

Overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the Senate and House agreed to a new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) the President will happily sign, with the Senate -- including 21 Democrats -- voting for it Wednesday by 69 to 29, yet NBC and ABC painted it as “controversial” based on how the bill blocks lawsuits against telecommunications companies which cooperated with the President after…

Forget the basics of supply and demand, just find someone to blame. As Congress takes new aim at speculators for the high price of gasoline, some media reports seem to be following suit. But as The Biz Flog explains this week, there is considerable debate over whether speculators should be blamed for the high cost of oil. June 23, the same day Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce…

If Speaker Newt Gingrich's Republican majority had faced a 9 percent approval rating at any point in the 1996 presidential election year, the media would have not let anyone forget it. So given that and the media's frequently reminding Americans of President Bush's low approval numbers, why are the broadcast media ignoring the latest Rasmussen poll on the approval rating for Congress under the…

After leading Tuesday's Special Report with how “last year the administration reported satisfactory progress on only about eight of 18 benchmarks” while this year, in a report disclosed Tuesday, the administration determined “there has been satisfactory progress on 15 of the 18,” FNC's Brit Hume doubted “word of this progress is going to get through” to the public as he predicted:I suspect that…

Applying the same invidious approach to campaign spending as journalists so often do to society where they equate outcome with fairness and consider income disparities to be an injustice which must be dealt with by forced redistribution of wealth via the tax code, on Friday night ABC anchor Charles Gibson fretted that Barack Obama's fundraising advantage over John McCain violates “basic fairness…

Getting in some last shots at President Bush as his trip to Europe came to an end in London, CBS and ABC on Sunday night focused stories on Bush's unpopularity on the continent where “they're glad he's on his way out” and it's “an understatement to say that Mr. Bush is unpopular.” CBS correspondent Bill Plante asserted “much of Europe thinks of Mr. Bush as a cowboy who has ridden roughshod over…