Barack Obama

CNN gave a prime exhibition of lazy journalism on Friday's The Situation Room when it touted Obama's "victory lap" because of "new ObamaCare enrollment numbers" without fact-checking to see if his optimism is warranted. "President Obama is taking something of a victory lap I guess you could say," reported host Brianna Keilar. "At a meeting with House Democrats he praised his party for…

While all three broadcast networks provided some amount of coverage to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai releasing 65 dangerous Taliban insurgents from prison on Thursday despite explicit U.S. objections, none of the reporting suggested President Obama's handling of the war in Afghanistan was to blame for the "tattered U.S. relations" with Karzai's government. [Listen to the audio or watch the…

There was some huffing at the Huffington Post on Wednesday over House Republicans’ reluctance to pass a clean debt limit increase. Contributing writer Mitchell Bard was glad that the increase was passed, but he was incensed that the vast majority of GOP congressmen (201 of 229) voted against it. He took out his frustrations in a post titled, “Lesson From the House Debt Ceiling Vote: The GOP Is…

It wouldn’t be MSNBC if one of the cable hosts didn’t smear a conservative as racist. On Wednesday, Ed Schultz hinted that Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, might be “race baiting” by placing ads warning about the impact of unionization. Schultz was talking to Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen over possible unionization of a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. …

Following President Obama's joint press conference with French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday, NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd appeared on MSNBC to dismiss a question Obama received about the latest ObamaCare mandate delay: "Republicans are trying to paint a picture of, 'There they go again. He's changing the law'....I have a feeling this one is gonna fade a little bit.…

More than a week after conducting an interview with president Barack Obama, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claimed on Monday night he finds it “troubling” that the questions he asked had not been brought up before because “many in the media are protecting” the Democratic occupant of the White House. “What the heck is the national press doing?” he asked in the opening segment of that night's…

Arguing that "she is not the right person for this moment," former Democratic congressional candidate-turned-cable host Krystal Ball laid out her case in a February 11 post at MSNBC.com for why Hillary Clinton should NOT run for president in 2016. Oddly enough, part of the reason is "we are in a moment of existential crisis as a country." Given who is currently in the Oval Office, you'd think…

"How much do state dinners cost? They ain't cheap" teased a headline on CBSNews.com this morning. But wait, as they say in the infomercials, there's more. In his February 11 story, longtime CBS Radio White House correspondent Mark Knoller reported not only the pretty penny the U.S. taxpayer foots for state dinners in the Obama era, but how the Obama State Department -- first under Clinton and…

Between Monday's network evening newscasts and Tuesday's morning shows, NBC, ABC and CBS failed to provide a single full report on President Obama unilaterally issuing another ObamaCare mandate delay for businesses. In addition, only a single sentence on Tuesday's CBS This Morning described the controversial move as the President "rewriting the law." On Tuesday's NBC Today, Natalie Morales…

As I noted Monday night (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, displayed rare candor when he opened his 8:28 p.m. report on the latest unilateral changes to Obamacare by describing their motivation as "Angling to avoid political peril." I wrote last night that "I’ll be surprised if it (the "political" characterization)…

On Monday evening’s news casts, none of the networks recognized the controversy of President Obama possibly acting outside the Constitution to delay ObamaCare’s employer mandate. The President granted a one-year delay for businesses with 50 to 99 employees to provide them with health insurance. It was the second time he had delayed the mandate and thus changed a law passed by Congress, but…

How deep in the tank for Obama is The Washington Post? On the front of Monday’s Style section was article headlined “The ring of truth: Aiming to inspire, Obama candidly share his story with at-risk young men from inner-city Chicago. Can he make a difference?” Bizarrely, the Post put “The ring of truth” over an article where Obama relates to students by referring to his memoir “Dreams From…

The opening of Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar's 8:28 p.m. report on President Obama's latest round of extra-legal, extra-constitutional manuevers relating to the Affordable Care Act — scratch that, it really isn't the Affordable Care Act as written any more; it really is "Obamacare," defined as "whatever Obama and his administration have done to the ACA as originally written" — is a keeper. That's why…

A heated discussion between Fox News's Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera on Friday exemplifies two important points. The first and most obvious is that the kind of discussion seen in the video segment which follows would rarely happen on Fox's cable competitors — yet it's Fox which the establishment press usually describes as biased to the right, while giving CNN and occassionally even MSNBC a…